Thoughts on Senior Digital Leadership — 2 — Individuals, Teams and Relationships in the pursuit of business outcomes
Based on my experience too much senior leadership attention is incorrectly focused on outputs instead of inputs and outcomes; hitting milestones, staying withinbudget / burn-down / velocity tolerances, delivering a product to “time, cost and quality” (quality most often translated to scope). Instead of inputs such as people, behaviours, tools, space, delivery approach and outcomes — what we trying to collectively achieve for our business. I’m not saying outputs are not important — far from it — but I do challenge the excessive senior leadership focus on them.
To make a point, I have a confession to make (old habits die hard). I recently faced a situation where I believed a team did not have the sense of urgency or drive to deliver outcomes we agreed with our business. My reaction was to not allow milestones to move to the right and told the team I was not accepting revised dates. Was this the right approach? Let’s return to this example at the end of this short blog.
When delivering outputs is not going well, senior leaders often tend to focus on the symptom (dates slipping, cost overrun, etc.) and not the root cause. We try to fix these symptoms in the near term by taking tactical action, things like; cutting scope, trading risk and cost, applying more resources, moving to the right, etc. This is natural and may be required to meet business outcomes but is this the tactical space where senior digital leaders should add most value? Or should we focus more elsewhere? Personally I believe far more focus on inputs and outcomes achieves better results (see below).
Taking a kitchen analogy, imagine a head chef standing at the service pass overly focussed on outputs — meals late, wrong sequence, poor presentation, too much / not enough on a plate, great plates too — not all bad. He can try to address problems at the pass but this would have very limited success. Instead good head chefs focus on getting the best ingredients, training her/his team, honing delivery approach, providing additional support to colleagues who are struggling, setting standards, being clear on the outcome needed (e.g. satisfied and returning customers perhaps) — all inputs to making a great meal and achieving the outcome. The head chef also seeks confirmation through feedback on whether the outcome(s) have been achieved and this remains the priority for them and the whole kitchen.
Returning to the digital world……
Inputs
For some time now I’ve been asking my senior leadership team to focus on “individuals, teams and relationships” — it’s become a bit of a mantra. As an example only of what I mean by these things:
Individuals:
- Do we have the right level of people capability working on our products?
- Are individuals aligned with a profession and are they active in developing it within DWP and wider?
- Do we know the strengths, areas for improvement and desires of each individual in a team?
- How engaged are my colleagues in our business?
Teams:
- Co-located and multi-disciplinary?
- Productive?
- Sufficiently stretched but not too far?
- Empowered?
Relationships:
- “Big relationships” across teams and functions? [check out Steve Radcliff’s book on Leadership]
- Collaborative and healthy engagement across individuals, teams, functions, business and beyond?
- Mutual understanding of individual and team drivers and goals?
- Good buzz in the room?
I was recently asked by a senior experienced colleague “why these inputs and not data, tech, enterprise architecture, etc”. A good question. It’s true that individuals, teams and relationships are not the only inputs — there are many to creating business value through digital — but I believe these are the foundation of all that follows. In a digital world where system-thinking is excessively overused we tend to forget about people, teams and how they are interacting too often — so swinging the pendulum in this direction can’t be a bad thing.
Getting the “inputs” to creation of business value correct, takes focussed effort, time, patience and resilience. This isn’t easy stuff and it takes time to get results but it is essential to medium and long term success.
Note: some “inputs” are pre-requisites of each another and care needs to be taken to get the sequencing correct. For example, we know empowered digital teams deliver better outcomes but who would empower a team that does not have sufficient capability? Or not learning / open to new possibilities? Or didn’t measure their performance towards achieving business outcomes?
Outcomes
I don’t want to be, nor am I, a supplier to my business. I am as vested in the success of my business as any other individual in it. My incentives and drivers are the same as those of my colleagues across all disciplines — we share the same business outcomes. Renaming your IT Department to be Digital doesn’t make you part of the business. If you act like a supplier you’ll be treated like one.
I’m happy to say I work for DWP Digital and our behaviours and culture are moving us away from “supplier mode” at pace. Credit goes to our Permanent Secretary (akin to CEO)@robert_devereux who has focussed on telling a joined up business outcome story called One DWP, covering all aspects of work (including Digital), to nearly 80k colleagues. All Directors in our business deliver the same story which binds us closer together. At the macro enterprise level it has worked brilliantly and the publicly available staff engagement scores for DWP are in part a testament to this approach. The organisation as a whole is clear on its macro outcomes.
One of the senior leadership challenges, particularly in digital, is to be clear on outcomes for a team and the overall vision for achieving them. Good teams can then determine the outputs and delivery approach needed to achieve outcomes (if you leave them to get on with it and don’t meddle). I think this is pretty obvious but why does it seem so hard to do in a digital world? Perhaps it is a negative side-effect of overused system-thinking in digital leadership which creates focus on outputs. We break problems down or innovate new concepts, analyse them, design solutions, create outputs. Now with greater focus on user needs. We’ve done this for decades as an industry. So where is the focus on outcomes?
I and my DWP Digital colleagues are on a journey to focus on outcomes over outputs and here are some examples of our work:
- Agree business outcomes for multi-disciplinary teams (not outputs or objectives) to deliver.
- Changing our engagement with each other and our business colleagues to focus on outcomes rather than outputs by milestones.
- Engaging individuals and teams in our business by having a direct connection from their effort to outcome.
- Leaving responsbility for achieving outcomes with teams.
But if I’m brutally honest there is much more for us to learn and do in this space. And we have such fantastic outcomes to achieve, for example, transform the welfare state, or encourage citizens to enrich their lives through work and support those who can’t.
I ain’t moving the dates…
So let’s go back to my decision not to move milestone dates:
- I had made assumptions [correct or not it doesn’t matter] about the team capabilities / drive without engaging with them to learn more.
- I was the Head Chef at the pass not happy with the output and was just saying so.
- I didn’t like that meals were late.
- While food taking longer to arrive matters to our customers, it’s the quality of the food and service that keeps people coming back to the restaurant [outcomes].
- I was in danger of encouraging the team to microwave baked beans. Nothing wrong with microwaved beans [before I get trolled] but not at a fine dining restaurant.
- The team thankfully responded by understanding that it wasn’t actually the plates I was critical of and did question whether everyone else was also worried about the same things as they were (service and quality of food).
Essentially I was too focused on output rather than outcome. Always good to reflect and learn with the support of my colleagues and teams –they are very good at coaching me after all.
Some final thought on outcomes: all sounds great and logical but what happens when there is natural tension between outcomes within or across teams? Or where some individuals / teams prioritises objectives differently? Then what? A pretty typical example:
- Product Team A has a critical business outcome to achieve and wishes to make design/architectural decisions to achieve them.
- Cross-Cutting Function B has a different business outcome to achieve (let’s say join up all services/products based on persona) and disagrees with direction/decisions from Product Team A.
Perhaps the subject of my next blog……
