Employees Are People Too: The Balanced Team
The recent Balanced Team Conference started off by making the audience laugh, not with any sort of joke or monologue, but by simply announcing the sponsors. When sponsor after sponsor’s company tagline was yet another riff on “helping companies improve the building of software”, it hit home that we were together in a place with like minded professionals, all of us there to share ideas about how to improve businesses by bringing the humanity back into work. Whereas the corporation and work as we know it have roots in the companies of last century, practical experience gained by living the reality of modern work suggests that many traditional ideas of organizational structure and management don’t work well today. In the current business climate, massive efficiency, productivity, and happiness gains arise from switching to a structure based on autonomous and empowered Balanced Teams.
While there’s no one canonical definition for what a Balanced Team is, the conference had a general theme of sharing ideas regarding creating autonomous teams within organizations that have all the functions needed to research and execute a product goal. Generally speaking, in software these teams comprise a product manager, designer, and developer. In an organization that supports it, this kind of team can take a mandate and run with it without fighting through layers of approval and integration just to get things done.
As speaker Jeff Patton explained, modern corporate structure came out of a time when communication was expensive. When changing the moving parts of an organization takes a massive amount of communication and coordination, companies naturally default to top-heavy up-front planning done by those who have the highest vantage point for the decision. Now that technology has made communication essentially free, the old ways no longer hold — inverting the decision making process by empowering those on the ground level frees organizations to more fluidly adapt to changing market and customer forces. Balanced teams don’t just make for happier employees, they also make for more innovative, adaptable organizations.
In one of the many side conversations, we talked about support versus command models of management. In traditional (command) organizations, influence over the daily operations of the firm increases as one rises through the organization. Rising command managers receive additional planning and tactical responsibilities and are empowered to “deploy their troops” to achieve the goals of their branch of the org chart. Generally speaking, their role is to ensure their subordinates are executing on assigned subtasks in accordance with their vision. Traditional assembly line work epitomizes this type of hierarchy.
In contrast, managers within support organizations have their influence over the day-to-day decrease as they rise. As William Pietri said at the conference, “leadership in a modern organization is the host at a party who makes sure everyone has what they need.” Support managers are there to help their reports by removing blockers, providing guidance and feedback, and helping out with any tricky interpersonal or organizational situations. Support organizations don’t give marching orders, they instead focus on empowering teams to do their best work and grant those on the front lines great influence in the product, culture, and direction of the company. This is the idealized modern, flat, and agile organization, and I believe that this will be the structure of success for the future — you shouldn’t have to ask permission to do your job right.
While the transition will be hard, I believe it’s inevitable — companies that are able to delegate authority to the ground floor will harness the full power and potential of their employees’ skills, ambitions, and education, while those companies that do not will continue squandering human potential. If you take the viewpoint that your employees want to do their best and do what’s right, and you then empower them to work together to deliver real customer value, then there’s no limit to what your company can achieve.
