Jun 30, 2025
‘Empowered teams’ is a key principle of Agile (‘Decisions when they’re needed, at the right level’) and for good reason: the team who are living and breathing the problem-space day to day have more detailed information on which to base their decisions than those who are one or more layers removed.
However, it can be hard to make it a reality to move decision-making down to the knowledge, especially when it’s counter to the organisation’s culture of accountability rules.
Often people in senior roles have a broader range of concerns they are working to balance. And often it’s pretty scary for everyone: not just the person needing to release some control (and power) to their team, but also to team members who haven’t had to take that sort of responsibility before.
I wanted to share some techniques I’ve used, to get all levels within an organisation more comfortable with decisions being taken by team members who have the right skills and knowledge to make informed decisions, but are less senior in the organisational hierarchy.
They broadly fall into three categories: making sure that everyone has a common understanding of what needs to be taken into account when making the decision; having parameters for decision making (which may extend as everyone gets more comfortable); and transparent and ongoing communication about decisions being made.
Everyone understanding the basis on which decisions are made
- Value-based and quantitative success metrics (OKRs, KPIs) are a crucial enabler of delegating decision-making: without this it’s hard for seniors to get comfortable with assessing whether work is achieving outcomes and whether it’s worth the investment
- Track progress against outcomes, not outputs for product delivery (Book: Outcomes over Output)
Agreed boundaries within which teams make decisions
- Agreed rules for delegated decision making by the team, and outside of this needs escalating (this could be financial; KPI based – e.g. a change that expects to reduce traffic but increase completion rates)
- Agree tolerances for KPIs – if experiments generate results outside of this, this needs escalating
- Introduce the Phased Delivery Model (discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live) for critiquing and asking for permission for a little bit of road at a time
- Service Standards and governance around this increases everyone’s comfort that things are being done in the right way by the team
Openness about the decisions being taken
- Teams projecting forwards (2 week horizon) the things they will be making decisions about, and what they will take into account to make that decision via Roadmaps, A3 status reports and Show&Tells. If seniors want to, they can ask to be involved / ratify any decisions but over time decisions should be delegated to the right level in the organisation.
- A pro-forma for seniors of proposals for future work and planned decisions, where the team has already considered all the aspects that a senior would take into account (e.g. financial, commercial, impact on outcomes etc.) and made a recommendation based on this. This builds trust and over time seniors get more comfortable delegating decisions down
- Build a culture of working in the open through Show&Tells, weeknotes, blogging (seniors too)
- Critical to having empowered teams is working in the open and regularly providing stakeholders with an opportunity to engage with the team’s work.
I’m keen to hear reflections, and also of any other tools and techniques that people have used.
A note: in my experience moving decision-making down in organisations where this isn’t already the culture is a process rather than a switch: it’s about building trust and increasingly moving decision-making to the knowledge.
And two things I always remember when experimenting:
- Develop some hypotheses and measures, otherwise you aren’t learning, you are just doing: you won’t know whether the thing you are trying is actually getting you closer to your goal.
- Keep trying different things – especially if the first experiment didn’t work: it probably doesn’t mean your goal is a bad idea; it does mean that approach didn’t work. But even if it did work, in a month’s time you might be able to go further.
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