Overcome This Toxic Management Belief to Unleash Team Autonomy

Let’s be open about this—most of today’s corporations have a transparency problem.

• Managers don’t know a team’s true status.
• Employees cover over the ugly truth to avoid blame.
• Pervasive, blind faith in, “The way things we've always done things.”

The sores (problems) lurking under the surface stay hidden until an infection festers. When the alarms sound at the 11th hour, it’s too late, too expensive, and too widespread to remedy. Companies end up in the ditch like this every day. And teams, stakeholders, and customers suffer the pain.

Think this is rare? Think again.

Why is situational awareness so poor?

The easy answer? Most of us work in a broken system.

• Top-down decision-making dilutes team autonomy.
• Fear of blame from making mistakes hides the truth.
• Employees and managers don’t play in the same sandbox.
• Mass acceptance of the current reality as the permanent reality.
• Rampant deadlines, multitasking, and dependencies obscure progress.

This is an environment that cultivates long-lived, hidden problems.

And many managers ignore (accept) this broken system.

You can’t blame them. Managers today are more disconnected from the ground truth than ever. And the divide between managers and teams has widened with the rise in remote work.

In turn, many managers delegate problem-solving to their people.

They expect teams to figure out solutions to their problems on their own. Managers believe they are empowering their teams. Teams feel managers send them to fend off attack from a lion with a butter knife.

Despite the slim odds, teams try to navigate this chaos, but often fail and feel powerless to change their situation. They end up accepting their plight. It’s easier than braving the headwinds (behaviors and norms) that keep the broken system in place.

Management is out of touch, and the teams throw up their hands in defeat.

The empowerment angle backfires.

Employees often don’t have managers who invest time to help them with the solution.

So, problems remain hidden and unsolved.

The management belief in employees “bringing solutions, not problems” wreaks havoc on transparency. Today’s problems don’t have an easy solution. And when employees aren’t allowed to bring you problems, you won’t see them until it’s too late.

Read about how I overcame this toxic belief and emerged my 5 steps for building a problem-solving culture here: https://medium.com/simply-agile/how-i-overcame-a-toxic-management-belief-to-unleash-team-autonomy-8cfb4c645813?sk=e326241cf7c9f7f132e05e18b100fd1e

Please let me know your thoughts.