This describes the fourth of five essential executive onboarding tools: Empowering Authority
- Converging assimilation – New leader assimilation session
- Inspiring direction – Imperative mission and vision
- Enabling resources – Core focus and strategy
- Empowering authority – BRAVE culture
- Credible accountability – Milestone management
As I wrote in the art of delegating, the right level of boundaries and guidelines empowers those to whom you’ve delegated authority to make different choices than you would have made with you being confident that their choices will help achieve your shared objectives in a different way than you had imagined. This is one of the cultural choices you need to make either as part of your imperative workshop or soon thereafter and gets at the difference between nested cultural, strategic, and tactical leadership.
The right level of boundaries and guidelines will vary depending upon your core focus.
Design-focused Authority
In a design-focused organization it’s not so much about empowering others to make different choices than you would have made as freeing them up to think completely differently than you would. These people should have a bias to intelligent failures, constantly trying new things secure in the knowledge that most of them won’t work.
Service-focused Authority
In a service-focused organization, you do want to empower others to make different choices than you would have made because they are closer to the customer than you are and can better adapt your offering to meet customers’ particular needs. Note this is not as open-ended as the empowerment is in a design-focused organization because the rest of the organization has to be able to deliver on the promises made to customers. Hence the term, “bounded authority.”
Like a clear strategy, clear boundaries are empowering. If people are clear on the choices they do not get to make, that helps them understand the choices they do get to make so they can make them faster and with more confidence.
Delivery/Distribution-focused Authority
In a delivery/distribution-focused organization, it’s about empowering teams. By definition, distributing things well involves multiple parties often from different organizations. Any one party trying to solve a problem will most likely come up with a sub-optimal solution. You need the different groups to work together to come up with systemic solutions and avoid complex failures.
Happy to send you a copy of our most current team charter tool if you click on this link. The core of it is:
Description/Scope: Overall summary – A brief summary of the work’s what and why (objectives/goals, context and intent) and potentially key interdependencies and guidelines, so all can see quickly how this work fits with others’ work.
Objectives/Goals/Desired Result: WHAT – Charge the team with delivering SMARTER results – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Bound, Encouraging, Rewarded.
Context and Intent: WHY – Describe customers, collaborators, capabilities, culture, competitors and conditions that led to objectives/goals including the organization’s overall purpose, objective, strategies, positioning, values. Lay out the expected level of predictable complication and unpredictable complexity, expected risks, and ways to mitigate those, as well as the intent behind the objective what should happen after the objective is achieved.
Resources: HOW – Lay out the human, financial, data/technical, and operational resources available including the other teams, groups, and people involved. Be specific (like “25% of Murgatroid’s time for a week)” as opposed to (“someone’s help.”)
Authority/Guidelines: HOW – Clarify what the team can decide on its own, what things the team must recommend to its approving authority, and what decisions have already been made including mandatory executional elements. Lay out the interdependencies. Be clear on the difference between policies (that they must adhere to,) guidelines (that they should adhere to unless they have a good reason not to do so,) and principles (that should underpin all.)
Accountability – HOW KNOW – Clarify RACI: Accountable, Responsible, Consulted, Informed, as well as update and completion timing. This is about how you’re going to track and measure success. In general, tasks get managed/tracked daily, projects weekly, programs monthly, and core processes annually.
Production-focused Authority
Production-focused organizations are the exceptions that prove the rule. Here you do want everyone starting with the same current best thinking. This is about following policies in a standard work environment to minimize or eliminate basic failures while paving the way for continuous improvement.
John Hall
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