Protocolo de Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld

■ Stands or falls together. By being given ownership, enormous peer pressure for boundaryless behavior is engendered in the Team. By creating an environment like a small entrepreneurial company, the Leader helps the Team form into a cohesive, self-managing group.

The Trust-Ownership Model shows us that most Leaders and Teams reside in either Command and Control or Energy and Innovation. The Failure and Conflict quadrants are not stable, and Leaders and Teams cannot stay in them for any length of time. In Failure, where no one cares and no one delivers, the business will eventually cancel the project. Teams in Conflict eventually give up and hand control back to the Leader, losing productivity.

So what is the alternative? In Chapter 3, Building Trust and Owner-ship, we cover how to move from Failure, Conflict, and/or Command and Control into the green—Energy and Innovation.

Why Purpose Matters

We talk about, we think about, we debate about, and we hope for high-performing teams. Teams made up of individuals who are focused, moti-vated, and innovative. But focused on what? Motivated to achieve what?

Innovative in getting to what? Owning what?

As we consider the Trust-Ownership Model, we optimize performance when teams and individuals “own” delivering results. But what results?

Results aligned to purpose. We strongly believe—almost to the point of dogma—that a condition of becoming a high-performing team is to under-stand purpose. Purpose is the “why” and “what” of our work. When we understand purpose and align to it, we match the tens, scores, hundreds, and thousands of decisions we make to the goals of the project, the goals of the product, and the goals of the organization. If the purpose is nebulous or just plain wrong, it is either difficult to feel ownership for the results or we waste our ownership on activities that won’t make a meaningful differ-ence. For us, the word purpose indicates the real needs of the business—

cutting through the opinions and territorialism and focusing on what will generate meaningful business value.

One of the critical tasks for a leader seeking to move organizations, teams, and individuals into the Trust-Ownership green zone of Energy and

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Innovation is to clearly communicate, explain, and make clear the business purpose and goals. The goal of this critical activity is to articulate the purpose so teams can own delivery of the results—so they can filter and manage their activities to deliver work that directly supports purpose. This leadership role is very different from the historical role of leaders—which was often to lock purpose away and direct people to perform various tasks that they thought would deliver the business goals. In the agile, networked, innovative organi-zation, the leader ensures that purpose is well understood so the teams can make decisions that lead to high-performance and desired results.

My team faced an enormous project backlog—new development, legacy enhancements, implementing agile methods, shifting resources into different roles such as business analyst and quality assurance, new software selection, and system implementations. It was difficult for them to fully understand this massive list of projects. Which ones were more impor-tant than others? Which ones required creativity? Which ones could be purchased rather than built, and so on? Without this understanding, they struggled with feeling ownership for the projects and their results. Work-ing the portfolio would keep them busy, but would it keep them engaged and result in meaningful accomplishment? In my leadership role, I knew the best, fastest way to shift into a mode of accomplishment was to help the team understand the “why” of each project. To do this, I first had to get some clarity on the “why” myself. I met with my management team peers, and we defined three high-level organizational objectives. For our online, nonprofit university, these were the objectives:

■ Improve graduation rates—this is our primary measurement of the success of our students.

■ Improve operational excellence—we want to make sure that we become more efficient and provide improved service levels as we grow.

■ Become an employer of choice—we want the university to have an innovative, high-trust culture.

I then met with the various project teams and explained why these objectives mattered to the future of the organization. If we improved grad-uation rates, our continued growth and success would be ensured. If we improved operational excellence, we would grow efficiently and not end up with complex, wasteful processes and practices that frustrated us and reduced our organizational agility. If we were the employer of choice, we

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would always be able to attract and retain the right people, and they would enjoy their work more each day. With this understanding in place, we mapped each and every project in the portfolio to one of these objectives.

Why were we redoing our entire analytics? Because the rebuild would give us information we could use to improve graduation rates. Why was there a project to implement a document management system? To improve operational excellence by automating a manual process that was becoming a bottleneck. We understood the “why” of everything on our backlog—all that work that we still needed to get done.

One of our projects was to outsource the management of our network.

This was a very divisive project. The network administration team felt that this was the first step toward eliminating their jobs. As a result, they felt no ownership for the project and were doing what they could to slow down and discourage moving the project forward. But there was a very good

“why” for this project (at least from my perspective). The team could not support many of the other projects in the portfolio because they spent the majority of their day in tier 1 and tier 2 support of the network—doing basic things like moves, adds, and changes. This type of work would be fine in the absence of all of the other projects that required their skills.

What I had failed to do was explain why this project was important and how it would help us achieve one of the three objectives. So, I recovered my senses and met with the network team. I started by explaining the three objectives and how they mattered to the present and the future of the organization.

“How might this outsourcing project support any of the three objec-tives?” I then asked.

The silence was resounding.

I rephrased my question and tried again. “What are some ways we can achieve these objectives?”

Again nothing.

Because I had the time, I waited it out. Finally, one of the junior administrators ventured a connection.

“If we spend less time on the basic monitoring and management, we can work on the network upgrades we know will solve some of the nagging problems. I suppose that will improve operational excellence.”

I wrote that one on the whiteboard and waited a bit more.

“Sometimes, we are too busy to respond to some of the basic and repetitive jobs like adding a person to the network—while they wait for us, they cannot do their work. Having someone else around to do those things

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would mean they get done faster—which improves operational excellence and also makes this a better place to work.”

With these and a few other ideas, the energy rose and the group was soon discussing how best to manage the outsource relationship. The team completely took over the ownership of the project and kindly asked me to butt out. They now claim it was their idea and has been one of the most successful projects they ever initiated.

Later in the book, we introduce and describe tools we use to identify purpose—the “why” and “what” that help teams develop ownership. We use these tools to both define and infer how the organization creates com-petitive advantage. Thus, any person or team, at any level in the organiza-tion, can align to what generates business value. When this is clear, we start moving into the green of the Trust-Ownership Model.

The Trust-Ownership Model helps us recognize where we are and things we can do to change our results by designing a different operating system. The tools we describe in the other chapters of this book are things we can all use to accelerate the transition.