The connected leader: How to drive impact through team engagement & decision making.

To drive change, it is crucial to keep your team engaged. Transparency and shared ownership are key to creating great engagement. Decision-making should be open and involve as much team input as possible. Think of it as meeting at the garden fence, where different parts of the organisation come together to collaborate on what's next. This approach helps make decisions that add value and take everyone on a journey. Or that’s my starter for ten for this blog piece.

There are lots of frameworks that many experts the world over have come up with over the years. I think they are all useful in different environments. I have used the SAMR framework a great deal as a way of defining the level of organisational engagement for change to happen. The SAMR model (often referred to as a ladder) was created by Dr. Reuben Puentedura in 2009, originally designed to help teachers track how they use technology in their classrooms. The SAMR model allows us to decide if we are looking for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification or Redefinition when we are going after a transformational delivery. I think the same model can be applied to how we seek to build engagement, what is the appetite for each of the SAMR identified areas and how invested does the team feel in taking forward the change.

If we take each of the SAMR fields we can try to estimate the level and type of engagement needed to achieve them:

Substitute: In all likelihood this could be achieved with the lowest level of engagement with business colleagues across the organisation. The risk of failure though is heightened if some engagement isn’t considered, you can’t really substitute a system from under someone without them being bought in to the change.

Augment: To gain value from augmenting we need to be clear on what is in place already that we need to do something is done, what the achievement is that the team are shooting for and how do they want it to be better than it is now. I wonder if the genesis of augmenting something though the business is rarely deciding and more often a new option of how to achieve something being put to them.

Modify: I believe that when the option taken is to modify something then this is often led from our business, people at the centre of a process or way of doing things have decided they need to change what they do or how they do it and want to work with Digital partners to understand the art of the possible.

Redefine: The bravest in many ways as this often requires a fundamental change and full engagement in that change from the beginning toi end. Redefining what we do can be wholesale change to an organisation or department and therefore needs everyone on board from the definition stage to the delivery stage and an iterative state of evaluation being put in place.

I have been talking about the SAMR Framework in this way for so many years it has become second nature for me, one thing I have got better at though is accepting that this is not a hierarchy, we are not trying to make all change be about redefining and that it is ok to substitute if that is all that is required to create value for the organisation, change has to breed value.

Trying to create a framework for the types of decision I think is important as is the analysis and how to do this. In my role at SEGRO I have seen some of the team using TIME Analysis (Tolerate, Invest (or improve), Migrate, Eliminate) when it comes to consideration of systems we have. I think this analysis framework alongside SAMR gives us a great way to ensure we all have the same understanding of what we are trying to do and how we are trying to get there. What I am trying to do now though is also use TIME when thinking about processes not ‘just’ systems which is proving powerful for me.

Creating a great connected leadership function to lead teams where change is heightened, I think has as much to do with empowerment as it does with capability. An empowered team can learn and work together and build new skills as a team. Empowerment is not just authority but also the confidence to act and make the change happen and that comes when teams are truly connected and can see how they can deliver together.

If we are empowered, we need to understand to what level of empowerment are we offering, another learning more recently for me is a conscious decision about decision types. Type one Vs Type two decisions: Type One equals how high should we build this building a decision that is hard to remediate if we get it wrong, so we spend time getting it right and seek consensus and options more widely. Type two decisions are more like the colour of the title bar on the new app, lets gather opinion but make the decision quickly as its easier to change once done than spend a long time deciding what to do, these should be decisions that we have empowered the delivery expert to make.

My recent exposure to decision making in very large department is this gets chipped away at for two reasons, fear of getting it wrong and a need to involve as many people as possible to protect the decision maker. That’s why empowerment is not ‘just’ about authority and is way more about culture.

Peter Stojanovic of Hot Topics fame wrote a wonderful piece recently about how the C-suite is synonymous with the bird’s-eye view. He opened the piece with,

At a strategic level, the horizon scanning ability of such a view normally affords clarity, prediction, and therefore foresight. Leaders are required to ‘see’ far by capturing macro-data, identifying patterns and trends when combined with analyses, geo-political updates and reports, alongside one’s own understanding of the business…. Mistakes can ensue—but it’s fine: mistakes can be learned from.

For me this is how we really do empower a team to be connected by facilitating this attuited and view not just from or by the C-suite bit across an entire team culture if we can.

He goes on to coin a new phrase that I absolutely fell in love with.

To get the ‘why’, leaders need another view: the worms-eye view.

Decisions taken with a worm’s eye view are those that are based on everything around you, not the much talked about helicopter view but the gathering of all the facts from all the people to help you have reassurance that the decisions you are taking are right (for now) and that we can and should feel connected to these decisions.

So, when we create a connected leader then we build a connected team.

To make decisions stick we need to ensure that connectivity is based on mutual understanding of the required investment to get there (SAMR), and we need to know how we go about enacting the activity (TIME). If we know who is empowered and in what way to make the decision and have a way to gather the data from above and below then we should be able to move forward at a new pace, safe in the knowledge that we are all in it together.