Making Time to Let Go

Yep, letting go is definitely a great way to increase innovation. As you give more autonomy to your Agile or Lean team, they will almost certainly uncover new ideas for product or process improvement. Letting go is, unfortunately, not that easy for some of us. Sometimes the environment does not seem forgiving enough to promote change and sometimes we, as managers, are not ready to give our teams the level of autonomy needed to really drive change. Such a lack of confidence could have any number of causes.

First, it’s possible that you as a leader simply don’t have the confidence in your team that’s needed to stop looking over their shoulder. There are many reasons you might feel this way, some of them reasonable; some of them, perhaps, imaginary. Let’s save the discussion of the imaginary for another post. Here I’d like to say a couple of things about real concerns, one in particular: technical readiness.

Many managers provide high levels of technical support for their teams. You might be one of these. If so, you might even have been selected for this role because of your technical expertise. In such a situation, worries about your team’s technical capabilities are natural. But, what should you do about it? If the technical manager continues to directly support the team, asked or not, the team might lack the confidence to innovate. Raising the technical competence of your team is a possible answer. You will worry less about a team you know is competent. You will give them more independence. This will give them more confidence to experiment, to try new things, to innovate.

Just how do you go about increasing technical competence for your team without building dependence on you or other leaders? There are many obvious answers and they are all useful: training, job sharing, mentoring, even simply increasing expectations will promote self-enabled learning. We all know this, but many of us take no action because there’s one fear inducing word that often cripples us. Can you guess that word? It’s simply TIME.

Our concerns with on-time delivery, senior perceptions, and time-to-market are ever present, and important. But I think we also seem to forget about learning during the planning phase of our projects. That’s one of the few periods where we can make some attempt to make time work for us. So, if your organization is Agile, why not consider putting some learning stories into the backlog and having a serious talk with the product owner and scrum masters? If your organization is waterfall oriented, it’s the project manager and product manager that you’ll need to have a word with. For me, the one thing we cannot negotiate is whether to change or not; our competitors will eat our lunch if we cannot get off the mark, so it’s critical to push the change.

Is there something else stopping you? I’d like to hear about it.