Structure, peace of mind and empowerment for Leadership teams

Being the manager, the boss, seems like such a glamorous and enviable position. Having the power, someone else doing the work! Through the years, I have worked in and with several leadership teams in large corporations, and I can tell you it is not for the faint-hearted! Squeezed between different demands and needs, far too short deadlines and too many last-minute crises, most of the managers I know are hard-working with a never-ending to-do list close at hand and a constantly lousy conscience as a company. I often think they are left out to dry without proper care, means, and ability from their managers, who probably have a similar situation to their managers, and so on. I’m afraid there is still not a lot of Care & Growth at higher levels in most organizations!

Even the leaders and managers who really set out to work with Care & Growth and empower their team and subordinates to grow struggle, often due to a lack of time. Their calendars are full, full, full, and they are double—or even triple-booked from when they start their working day until the end. So, what to do?

Agile + Care & Growth = TRUE

Over the last five years at Schuitema, we have explored how Care & Growth and Agile complete each other – and they do! Amongst other things, Care & Growth contribute to the understanding of legitimate leadership, holding people accountable for empowerment and the insight of giving attention to process over outcome. Agile have other excellent contributions, like the team-centric way of working, with strong, autonomous, self-organizing teams and the possibility for caring for and growing each other within the team and between peers.

We have taken the next step in that exploration and created an effective and empowering way for leadership teams to work: Care & Growth by Sprints. The basic idea is simple: Leadership teams are also teams – let them work as teams!

Way of working in a development team

Let’s look at Agile again from a development team’s perspective. They have a prioritized list of work to be done, organized in a backlog, and they plan their work in accordance with a cadence in sprints (typically 1-4 weeks). The team breaks down the work they pull from the backlog and visualizes their sprint scope in a board of some kind for transparency and overview.

They meet often (preferably daily) to check in, celebrate what gets done, and take on tasks together. At the end of each sprint, they summarize and show what they have accomplished to get feedback from their stakeholders and others interested. They also take the time to reflect on how they work and experiment with new ideas to learn and improve continuously. That, I’d say, is roughly how working in an Agile way in a team looks.

The picture below, drawn by Henrik Kniberg, is a popular one to show Agile way of working in a nutshell:

Do you notice something remarkable about it? There is no leadership team—they are not in the picture at all. No wonder many leaders and leadership teams feel a bit confused and unsure about their role in these setups!

Way of working in a leadership team: Care & Growth by Sprints

To succeed, firstly, the leaders need to understand their role in a team-centric way of working, where the teams are much more autonomous and self-organizing, and there is no place for the traditional Command-and-Control management style anymore. The answer to that is Care & Growth. Their job is still Care & Growth, just in a different context and with other standards to clarify and assess against. How can we help them do that in a structured way and help them not be overwhelmed and trapped in constant firefighting?

We experimented with taking the ideas from the development teams’ way of working and adapting them for leadership teams. We kept the basic idea with the backlog, sprint planning, frequent check-ins, celebrating Done and summarising and learning after each sprint and tweaked it to support the leaders’ main job: Care & Growth of their subordinates. This meant a couple of essential aspects to consider:

1. Identify what should go into the backlog.
2. Do the Care & Growth flip.

Identify what should go into the backlog

Items in the backlog must cover both requirements from the company and higher management (around finance, reorganizations, etc.) and from the employees (for example, taking action according to employee survey results), as well as the leadership team’s own learning and development.

Sources for work include:

• Strategy—Every corporation has a strategy. For it to be effective, each leadership team needs to break it down to their level, see what their contribution to the overall strategy is, and work with it in a structured way.
• Employee surveys—It is fine to run employee surveys several times a year, but it is a waste of time and trust if the results are not analyzed and acted upon. It makes a great difference to the employees when they see that what they answer in a survey matters and that action is taken based on the result.
• Objectives and Key Results (OKR:s) is a way to work with setting and breaking down goals. Again – for that investment to be valuable, the leadership team must work with their OKRs:s and follow up on them.
• Yearly wheels—there are usually at least one from Finance, another one from Human Resources (HR), and there might be others. The idea of structuring and visualizing expected actions to be completed by all managers and leaders throughout the organization in a synchronized way is benign, but it can be quite overwhelming and come as nasty “surprises” with short notice if not planned for in the leadership team.
• Scorecard: See what the measured pain points are, turn them into Wanted Positions, and identify empowerment activities accordingly. That helps the leaders escape the feeling of hopelessness and victimhood that can otherwise easily lead to an increase of control “to sort things out.” Remember: control needs to be constantly weeded out in any organization; otherwise, it will slow everything down and eventually take over.
• Care & Growth learning. In parallel with the strategic and operational work, it is also important to continue sharpening the saws and developing as leaders. Here, we suggest an application module journey, where the selected Care & Growth applications are taken on one at a time, ensuring they properly land and become institutionalized before digging into the next (more about how we do that later in the text).

Of course, there might be other sources as well, but the ones above are, in our experience, quite a common set. Is it complex? Yes, of course. It must be! It is about people.

Do the Care & Growth flip

Since we are working with Care & Growth and legitimate leadership, we don’t only want to structure the work, but we also strive for empowerment. To ensure that, we have introduced the Care & Growth flip.

For every item in the backlog, consider whether it is there to provide Care, Means, Ability, or Accountability for the subordinates and phrase it accordingly. That way, it becomes an empowerment action—no more tick-in-the-box activities just to get things off the list!

This Care & Growth flip on the tasks the leadership team needs to do builds Care & Growth into their day-to-day work. In that way, Care & Growth is not something you “also” need to do on top of everything else in your overall agenda. Instead, it is THE WAY to do all of it.

To land this point, I would like to take us back to the core of the matter – the intent. Do you remember Giver’s model? I, the Self, am in the middle of my world, surrounded by the Other (everything and everyone else). In every situation, I have a choice: I can either see what I can get out of the problem, “what’s in it for me”, or I can see what I can give and how I can contribute to the situation. Every time I choose to contribute and give, I grow a bit and take another step on my maturity journey. That means that the world I am in provides me with a gymnasium for my personal growth in every situation. The giving in question is either Generosity or Courage, depending on the situation’s needs.

In legitimate leadership, the corresponding terms for Generosity and Courage are Care & Growth. In the same way, every leadership situation you are in allows you to act as a Giver – providing Care or Means, Ability and Accountability (Growth) – whichever is appropriate in the situation. Hence, Care & Growth is not something you do “nor” your job – it is HOW you do it. As a result, both your subordinate and you will grow.

Does this make a difference, though? The structuring, planning, and flipping… it is still the same work that needs to be done, right? Just with more meetings added? Actually – no. It is not the same for several reasons. A testimonial from one leadership team who have been working like this for a year and a half now says:

The one statement of all the nice ones that makes me most happy is that it brings calm into the day-to-day work. Plus, of course, things get done! It is too common to have too many balls up in the air, spending too much time and energy just not dropping them. Getting things done is a big achievement that leaves more time for important things, like Care and growth.

Let’s look at how to get there!

Implementing Care & Growth by Sprints

To make this process effective, the leadership team is involved. As with any transformation, one must be patient. It is not a quick fix, even if there are little wins early on (like transparency) and then all along the way, with an emerging Team Agreement and a Leadership Standard that evolves sprint by sprint.

We start any Care & Growth journey with a two-day introduction to give everyone the platform of common language and understanding of true empowerment and legitimate leadership. It is also a good idea to run a Leadership Survey for each of the leadership team members early in the process to understand where they are at and what the biggest challenges are.

After that, we start introducing Care & Growth applications one by one. We select the ones with the most benefit for the leadership team and do it in sprints (remember the Care & Growth learning input to the backlog?). We have learnt over time, with the excellent help of feedback from our clients, that we shall stay with an application, for example, Assessing Performance, until it is adequately institutionalized and integrated into the Team Agreement and Leadership Standard. In that way, it becomes the new way something is done, rather than just giving a boost of inspiration that is easily lost when they return to their desks and the day-to-day challenges take over.

Even if improvements can be expected from day 1 of the process, one should allow for at least a 6-month-investment to settle this way of working and make it stick. Contact us at Schuitema and let us help your leadership team thrive with Care & Growth by Sprints.