We talk of teams being empowered, but in reality, most teams never reach any level of real empowerment because their focus is on activities over outcomes.
Activities that support the frameworks we implement in the name of Agile become the focus of our day-to-day life. The activity of building and having a backlog of ‘work’ is a metric we typically convey back to leadership on the ‘health’ of a team. So their focus is on creating a deep backlog instead of having a backlog that is filled with strategically aligned outcomes that deliver value.
If a team is truly empowered then they would know how their decisions of what to work align to outcomes that the organization seeks.
Unfortunately, in most organizations, the transparency and alignment of strategy to value is not well known or may not exist at all.
Empowerment is not just Leadership saying, you are empowered, it’s instead about laying a foundation of transparency about what they believe is the most important outcomes that teams can deliver and then providing them the runway to do that through experimentation and empiricism.
A truly empowered organization won’t look anything like the frameworks say it should, because empowerment implies a higher level of independence than the frameworks provide.
With great independence comes great responsibility for everyone involved in ‘Being Agile’.
Empowerment must build trust through the ability to show how you delivered value and that value then being positively leveraged by the organization to sustain and support growth.