Never Let Your Teams Lose Agency

The larger your organization gets and the further away you get from the day to day that your customers receive the less you know about what your customers need or want. No matter how much time you spend with your customers on calls or site visits, your one person or just a few people, while a team of people is engulfed with customer focus to deliver them value.

This is a totally fine and expected state. When you’re a startup or small company everyone has a close relationship to the product, working in it or on it every day they will naturally have a current understanding of their customer. But as you grow, you move up to supervisor, manager, director and onward your experience is less current and less focused.

We’ve all heard that “More heads are better than one” this is always true. Sometimes you need a person to make a decision or break a tie, but that should be the exception. If a group a people figure out an idea more times then not it’s going to be better than what one person would come up with.

When a team controls their own destiny they are more involved and engaged with the product, the customer and the company. They put more of themselves into what they are doing.  When we have more control at the team level we also need to allow the team the freedom to fail in complete safety.

The day a team at your company doesn’t come into a meeting with a ton of new ideas but instead is looking at the business or leadership for direction is a day of dreed and one where everyone in a leadership and management position introspects on.