Empowered teams need guardrails
- Peter Nush
- Sep 17, 2024
- 3 min read
As a reminder, I read this article1 a short while ago, and am sharing my thoughts in individual blog posts.
Here is my 6th: Empowered teams need guidelines & guardrails
As you consider better onboarding for your employees and customers, and sharpen your focus on prioritized outcomes (and the KPI’s to measure them), and empower your teams to pursue them, it is important you also provide guardrails. Like guardrails on a highway, the business (or product) guardrails are designed to help teams not run off the road. Consider the example of someone on a long drive getting drowsy and drifting off the road. Scraping the guardrail is far better than running off the road into a tree, a ditch, or off of a bridge. A similar risk exists for long-standing teams optimizing against a KPI goal. The longer they work on the goal, the longer it takes to make an impactful movement on that goal, the higher the risk the team will become “drowsy” and drift. It might be clear to a leader or outside observer that their efforts have reached a local maxima and it is not possible to achieve the goal they are aiming for, but they are too close to it and continue unproductive efforts. Without the leader establishing guardrails, the team can drift indefinitely. (I realize this isn’t a perfect analogy, but I didn’t come up with anything better while writing this.)
In a personal example, I’ve seen teams chasing 0.05 points of improvement in a KPI for 1,000,000 customers, while ignoring a 0.2 point improvement in an adjacent KPI for 20,000,000+ customers. They were too close to the goal, and had worked on it too long, to recognize it wasn’t the best outcome to be focused on for the business. In the long time they had been focused on that goal, the customer base shifted, and they missed it because they didn’t have a guardrail.
Phrasing this in a more practical way, as product leaders identify the outcomes they want their teams to focus on, they need to also identify the guardrails that accompany those goals. For example, a team can be tasked with improving a KPI by 5% for customer base X as long as it doesn’t take longer than N months to achieve or cost more than Y dollars. The added clarity of the guardrail sets up the team to know when their efforts no longer justifies the goal, and the outcome needs to be revisited.
Note: I am not suggesting these guardrails should replace or eliminate the need for Quarterly Business Reviews, milestones checkpoints, or other check-ins on team activities. Empowered teams shouldn’t mean Ignored teams, but at the same time, a truly empowered team includes the guardrails they should operate within, so they can determine themselves when their efforts might need to be revisited.
Other posts in this series:
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I originally read this article in Apple News+ which doesn’t provide direct links to articles outside of the News app. I tried to find the article on Entrepreneur Magazine’s website, but found 0 search results for the title of the article as well as the author’s name. (Both seem like bad user experience choices to me, by the way.) I ended up finding the article on the website I linked to above as a last resort. ↩︎
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