Seeking empowerment

I’ve been on a journey from consulting actuary to leader of change and transformation at Hymans Robertson. We provide services to organisations and individuals across pensions, investments, and insurance. As one small part of giving back to all those who’ve shared their expertise and wisdom in recent years, I wanted to share what I’ve learned along the way through a series of articles. This is my third blog in this series, the previous one is here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:linkedInArticle:7166097953923809280/.

Empowerment sounds like a good thing for our teams. For a bit of history, it’s a word whose use really started to rise after around 1980 and peaked at a high level around the turn of the millennium. If you look up a dictionary definition you might find something like: the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. For a team what’s not to like? Who would prefer the opposite, having less confidence and less control??

What it really means to me, not in dictionary language, is teams being able to crack on and do what they believe as professionals is right and valuable. Obviously, you need some controls as in any environment, but it works best if most of that can come through respecting professionals and giving them space and supportive structures and resources to do their work.?

There’s some psychological theory that backs this up as a good way to get the best from people - https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ is well worth a look for those who’ve not seen it. Daniel Pink boils it down to three things:

-??????? Autonomy – feels like being in control.

-??????? Mastery – as a team “becoming stronger and more confident”.

-??????? Purpose – that’s as much about the framework that a team is working in, and linking it to genuine value to individuals or society.?

So, what’s the challenge? Well, some people don’t buy into the theory, they have more of a “factory” mindset of organisations and try to build cultures around short term and more extrinsic incentives – more carrot and stick. In a professional services environment, that would be tying pay to the number of chargeable hours or even more closely to the “units” of work done – whatever they might be.?

It’s not to say that carrots and sticks have no merits and cannot work as a way of motivating and organising people. But if that’s all you’ve got as a culture it’s pretty limited. I’m sure it’s not what would get the best out of me!? So I might be biased in my judgement. Steve Jobs’ quote resonates: “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”? What do you think??

A trickier challenge is that work often crosses team boundaries.? That seems part and parcel of multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) working in a business of any scale. In other words, teams these days are rarely completely self-sufficient and you need the help of other specialists to get jobs done. Back when I started work, IT provisioned an environment for me as a student actuary – not even my own laptop at the start.? Within our team we had a few applications, a lot of spreadsheets and word templates, and with those tools we could do pretty much anything we needed for our clients.

Fast forward to today. Yes, Hymans has grown, and our digital maturity has grown a lot. With that growth we’ve got broader and deeper skills and specialisms. For one of our MDTs to “crack on”, its rare they won’t need data, specialist insight, or capabilities from someone else – maybe it’s a Responsible Investment expert, maybe its someone to help select a new Software as a Service that we need to ensure is secure, ethical etc, maybe it’s some deep modelling expertise relating to our Economic Scenario Service.? What it means though is you need more support from others to simply crack on.

Having spent some time with our various leadership teams, I am fully on board with the fact there’s no perfect solution to this. Disappointingly to me as a consultant, no amount of drawing boxes and lines on PowerPoint can “solve” this. And I have tried, and learned from others who’ve been able to point out where the world is more complex than I might have imagined it.

It’s about behaviours and mechanisms for collaborating, about prioritising work, about a culture with a growth mindset of learning new skills and professionals who want to develop breadth as well as depth. They can all help, but also accepting if our teams aren’t islands, and we need to create the environment to help them crack on.? Saying they are empowered by themselves won’t cut it. They aren’t islands and imagining that they are won’t help us deliver our complex and fast moving work. APIs or not.

And that’s not to say well thought through team structures don’t help. We’ve learned a lot from https://teamtopologies.com/ although the practical application of these things is never quite as simple as the theory – although the theory definitely helps. But that will have to be a topic for another day.

My personal experience and learning in the past couple of years is realising it is the job of leadership to try and get the structures and ways of working to be as effective as they can. That’s what empowers teams. To do that I’ve had to take the time to listen out for the real reasons that teams might struggle to crack on.? With that diagnosis work, we’ve led teams to change, for the better.