As leaders in growing businesses we know that empowered and autonomous teams are happier, more productive and deliver better results. But the reality is building genuinely empowered teams is much harder than simply just hiring smart people and getting out of the way.
In this talk Roan looks at the challenge of balancing team autonomy with company alignment and suggest a practical framework and strategies for building happy, high-performing teams.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Hi, everybody. I'm Ron Lavery. I'm one of the cofounders and the chief products officer of FreeAgent. We are a tech company based in Edinburgh, we've been around since two thousand and seven. And since that time, we've grown from the three co founders to over two hundred and somebody staff.
So we've seen a lot of scaling, we've seen a lot of growth, and we've had a lot of challenges in that time. And I think we've learned quite a few things and what it takes to build high performing and happy teams. And I say the scary truth here because I think this is something that as leaders in organisations, we worry about, and it's not easy.
There's a lot that can go wrong. So what I want to do is I want to share with you some of the things that I've learned over the past thirty years or so, and give you some practical tips and tools and guidance that you can take back and implement in your own organisations.
As we're going go through this presentation, you'll see some couple of icons in the bottom left hand corner of some of the slides. If you see the search icon, there is going be some keywords. If you Google for those, you will find more articles, resources, books in some cases that dig into topics in more detail.
And you see the star icon, that is going be a key takeaway for reference later on, it's usually going be a visual or graphic of some sort. Alright, so I want to start off by talking about this idea of happiness and what it means to be happy, you know, at least in a work context.
And you may be familiar with this model, it comes from the Dan Pimp boot drive. And in that book, Dan says that aside from extrinsic motivators, things like salary or status recognition, there are three main intrinsic motivators that define whether or not we are happy at work.
And they are autonomy, so our desire to be self directed mastery, the urge to get better at skills, and purpose, the desire to do something that is meaning and is important. Now I know that over the course of Turing events this year, there's going be talks that cover both the mastery and the purpose aspects here.
The one I am going to focus on is autonomy. And I am going to talk about this one because I think that out of the three is probably the most contentious and often the most controversial. You know, it is not uncommon for people to complain that they feel like they don't have enough autonomy in the work.
And I know leaders often struggle to know how much autonomy to give to individuals and teams in their organisation. And this can create conflict and can create tension. I was chatting with somebody a while ago and they said that it had gotten so bad that autonomy had become weaponised within the workplace.
And there's definitely an element of truth to that. And I think that one of the reasons is because it's a very subjective thing, know, it's not a black and white issue, it's not a binary thing. You know, we never really ever have zero autonomy or full autonomy, unless you want to go and, you know, be a hermit living off in the woods.
It's always, always somewhere in between and it's this complexity and nuance that I think sometimes often leads to issues in conflict. But just for a second, if we wanted to take this kind of a damping idea and take a very reductionist view of this, which is less autonomy bad, more autonomy good, and we just take that to its logical conclusion, I think you end up with some of these statements like this, which is, as a leader in an organisation, all we need to do is hire smart people and get out of the way.
And this is one of these like tech valley sound bites or cliches, you know, things like, know, go big or go home or move faster, break things, where at best they're maybe naively optimistic, but worse, they can actually be downright harmful and and dangerous.
Now I I don't think this is quite as bad as as move fast and break things, which is all fun and games until the things you're breaking are the fundamental systems of democracy. But still, I think if you just take this statement at face value, you can end up really doing quite a lot of harm in your organisation and you're not setting people off for success.
But before we talk about the right way to do this, I want to start off by taking the complete in our counter position, the counter argument, which is the style of leadership and management, which you would quite often call maybe top down or command and control.
Where you have a small leadership team who are effectively making all of the decisions, are sending everything that happens across the organisation, and then they are just cascading those decisions down through layers of management until you get to the teams that are actually doing the work.
And then, you know, maybe they have got some questions or maybe they have got some feedback based on the work they are doing, They come back up to the chain to the leadership and make subsequent decisions and so on and so on. And you create these feedback loops of decision making.
And this is something that Mark Logan talked about during a talk a couple of years ago, which was really good. And why this type of leadership and management doesn't really work, especially as organisations get bigger and as they grow and as they scale.
But before we completely discuss this, I think it's worthwhile at least acknowledging some of the benefits and the pros of this particular type of management. And one thing is that it's actually quite a good way of directly turning strategy into action. Because the leadership team, you know, they've formulated the strategy for the business, if they're making all decisions, then it's quite easy for them to say, okay, well, is our strategy, this is exactly what needs to be done.
Also, you know, they can be relatively confident that the right decisions have been made, because you know, they are the ones that are making them, in theory at least. And then finally, this last point is really important. Because that leadership team has a bird's eye view of the whole company, they can say, okay, we know what our strategy is.
This team needs to do this over here. This team over here will need to do this and this team here will need to support them. So it's easier for that leadership team to create alignment, both with the company strategy as a whole, but also alignment across different parts of the organisations.
But as Mark said in his talk, there were significant downsides to this particular style of management. The first is that as that organisation grows, these feedback loops take longer and longer, so decision making slows down, everything starts to take longer, organisation can now grind to a halt.
Also, is a possibility that information is getting lost in translation as it comes down these layers of management or goes back up. So what ends up arriving in the team may actually be quite different from what the leadership intended. Crucially in this model, you are really losing any sort of insight or feedback from the teams because they are simply being told what to do.
So they are probably closer to the customer, they are definitely kind of closer to the work, but the leadership team in this little isolated bubble isn't really getting the benefit of any of that, so they are not really making informed decisions. And then finally, crucial to what we are talking about just now, really demoting for the teams because in this particular format they just don't really have any autonomy at all.
They are just being told what to do. So demotivating for the teams, probably really demotivating for management as well because they are just acting as go betweens. You know, theoretically speaking the leadership are happy but again, everything is slowing down, if things are taking too long, then they are not going to be particularly happy either.
So this isn't a style management that we would typically recommend. However, what it does do is it highlights that there is a little bit of a tension and a balance between creating alignment across your organisation while still allowing teams to have full autonomy.
And you can see this really clearly illustrated in this quadrant here, whereas down in the bottom left hand quadrant, have the worst possible scenario, right? So this is where teams, groups of people have very little autonomy, but there is no structure or fabric which is pointing them in the same direction, there is no sense of alignment here.
So this would be like the worst case scenario. Probably more likely, which is an example we saw on the previous slide, is this one here, where again the teams are very, little autonomy, but now there is some mechanisms, are some structures in place which are making sure that people are aligned with that company strategy and with each other.
But still not ideal. Then moving up into the top left and here we have the kind of happy careless quadrant where now teams are being afforded a higher level of autonomy so they are making more decisions and deciding what to do. But again, there is none of that structure or fabric in place which is aligning them and keeping them aligned with the strategy and with each other.
And obviously where we want to end up is this kind of like place up here where we do have highly autonomous teams, but there is enough of that process and frameworks there to make sure everybody is aligned and all moving the company forward in the same direction.
So this is obviously where we want to get to. So how are we going to do that? What I going do is I am going to take you through this well kind of like process here, and it starts off by understanding where we are today.
So what is the current situation? And I am going to talk about this in regards to a concept of operational maturity of the teams in your organisation. I will talk more about that in a second. I am then going to introduce you to a series of principles and processes and tools that is going to take you from the current situation of where you are today to this kind of a better situation of happy and high performing empowered autonomous teams.
Now what are those teams going to look like? They are going to be kind of effective at decision making, they going have a healthy team culture, you know, what is their psychological safety, are going be good at collaborating both internally and with other parts of the organisation, good at stakeholder management, they going to follow best practices, they will usually succeed, typically succeed at their goals and they will be learning and improving all the time.
So this is also where we want to get to. But it starts with understanding where we are today and the current situation for the different teams in your company. And I talked about this idea of operational maturity. Now, here is how that concept applies to product teams or teams that are kind of like building parts working on project, digital products.
If you are talking about sales teams or marketing teams or other sorts of teams, it is going to be adapted a little bit, it won be exactly the same, but I think the principles still hold. So on the left hand side you can see a team which has the lowest level of operational maturity.
Now in the product sense we would call this maybe just a strictly delivery team, probably just of engineers that are being told very, very explicitly what to build. So somebody is coming along saying you have to build pretty much this exact feature, so they are being handed work, there is very, very little autonomy for them in this model at all.
But then we have slightly up the scale to like a feature team, where now this team is probably kind of like cross functional. So they have designers, engineers, product managers, they are maybe starting to do more interaction with users, is a better kind of research in there.
Essentially they are still being told what to build, they are still being told to kind of deliver features. So they have not a huge amount of autonomy, they probably don have much control of their roadmap. Then you move up into the true product teams, so again, a cross functional team, but instead of delivering solutions, they now own problems and it's up to them to define the solutions for that problem.
So they do have much more time in this sense. They're now starting to deliver outcomes as opposed to just cranking out features, and they are using data and research to make the right decisions. So a higher level of operational maturity, and they are starting to have an awareness and a context of the wider business beyond just their little Kinloid team.
And then finally we get to the strategic team, is not only delivering on a strategy, they are shaping a strategy that maybe has a wider impact across the whole company, they are being innovative and they have a knowledge and a context that goes beyond even just the business that they are in to the wider industry so they can make even more informed decisions.
So you can see that obviously the scale of operational maturity goes up from kind of left and right here and we want to understand how the current teams we have in our organisation fit in alongside this kind of model here. One of the tools I have used to do this is a self assessment survey.
Now again, this one is more specific for product teams, but you could definitely adapt it for other sorts of teams. It is really simple, is only twenty questions and it is a five point typical Likert scale here. You can see a couple of examples of the questions.
And what happens is everybody within the team would take this particular survey and then you would clear all the results back and you see that they are grouped into these five main areas that essentially tell you how operationally mature the team is. So, you know, do they have a clear strategy and direction?
Do they have the tools and resources to be successful? Do they apply good product thinking to the discovery process? Do they follow good development practises? And do they provide a safe and inclusive environment for everybody in the team? So you can get the results from this back and the team itself can look at this and they can say, okay, we are doing well here and maybe we're not doing so well in this area.
So for example here actually they're doing really well about the team cohesion, but they've still got more work to do that they can improve in ideation and customer focus. Actually they're doing pretty well having a clear strategy and direction, but there is a bit of improvement around the tools and resources and best practises on development.
So they can do that and they can have a self assessment for how they need to improve and put an action plan in place. But as a leader in an organisation, you can look across all the different teams in your organisation and understand which ones in the current situation are operating with a higher level of maturity and which ones perhaps need more support and more guidance.
Obviously the ones that are more operationally mature can really have a much higher degree of autonomy than the ones who are maybe kind of less so at the minute. Which brings us on to how do we get there, how do we take us from this current situation we are in to this better state of happier and higher performing teams.
What we going do is I am going give you three principles for doing that. And the first one is create and communicate clarity at every opportunity, then we are going to empower the teams to own strategy and outcomes aligned with business goals, and then we are going set clear guidelines around communication, decision making and delegation.
So we talk about the first one, create and communicate clarity. So this particular kind of framework comes from the Patrick Lencioni book, The Advantage. It's a brilliant book, highly recommend it. And in that book Patrick says essentially the role of the leadership team in any organisation is to create clarity around these six big questions and then relentlessly communicate and reinforce that clarity with the rest of the organisation.
So questions like why do we exist? How will we succeed? How do we behave? What do we do? What s important now? And who does what? Some of these questions are kind of quite different. So the answers to some of them, maybe your vision or your values, probably don't change very often.
There are probably things that are probably fairly fairly fixed. But some of the other ones might actually change quite frequently. So what is important now, what are the current goals and priorities and issues? Who does what? How are resources allocated in teams and structures?
Even your strategy, you know, which is the fundamental answer to how will we succeed, that may change from, you know, quarter to quarter, year to year. So this isn't just a one time thing that you can do, you have to be continually revisiting this.
And it's a useful thought exercise. If today you were to go back to your organisation, just pick somebody random in your company and get them to answer these questions, how do you think they'd do? Would they answer them in a way that you would hope?
And if they couldn't, then it's on you to create that clarity. It means that you haven't done enough yet to be able to answer those questions and reinforce them by communicating them frequently enough. Which brings us to this next point about how do we go about communicating the answers to these big questions.
And when I talk to companies about say, you know, how do you talk about strategy to the business? Quite often they say this, oh you know we did an all hands meeting like last quarter where we talked about company strategy. You know, is great.
They are a really, useful tool, but if your only mechanism for talking about company strategy is an all hands meeting once a quarter, you are really missing out on so many opportunities to reinforce that clarity. So what I have done here is I have broken it down into a couple of different dimensions.
The first is like the scale of the communications. Are you doing them on a company wide basis? Are you doing them on a team level basis? Or are you doing them on an individual, you know, like a one to one basis with your direct reports?
That is the first mechanism or way you can be thinking about that. And then the rules are like what is the style of communications that you are doing. So along the top we have typical meetings and communications, emails, documentation, Slack, all of that kind of sort of stuff.
And this is where your kind of company wide all hands would fit into that. And these are great. But I would really draw your attention to the bottom row, the processes and frameworks. This is what I call the operating system for your business.
And where I see the biggest opportunity for companies is when they think about those big, big questions and they actually embed the answers to those within the processes and tools and frameworks, the operating system for their company that operationally gets used on a day to day basis.
So when it's in front of people all the time, it isn't just something that they hear about at a meeting once a quarter. This isn't my experience when things really, really start to click and people really, really start to kinda get The one I'm going to draw your attention to is this like one, team strategies.
So I think this is one of the most powerful things that you can do. This brings us over to empower teams to own strategy and outcomes aligned with business goals. Now this is a thing called, as we call it, a free agent, the team strategy card, and every team in our organisation owns one of these.
And just like at a company level, we try and answer those six big questions for the entire company. Every team or every agent tries to answer these five questions for their specific team. So why does a team exist? How does it align with the company's strategy and goals?
And how will they succeed? How do we know if they're successful? And what will we do? And then answers to those questions, their team mission, the business context, their strategic principles, the KPIs, which effectively define the outcomes or tasks we're delivering, and then ultimately the roadmap, that forms part of that team strategy card.
And this is really a key sort of like part of our operating system. And it's really the thing that empowers teams, allows them to have autonomy, while at the same time ensuring there is still alignment with the company goals and strategy and ensuring we can make alignment with those different teams across the organisation.
So this can be a really, really impactful thing that you can do in your organisation. Okay, so the last thing I was going to talk about was setting clear guidelines around communication, decision making, delegation. And you know, back at the start of the presentation, talked about sometimes autonomy can lead to friction and conflict.
I think a lot of the time the reason for that, that subjectivity I talked about, is people being unclear about how decisions are being made and who makes them. And it isn't always a black and white thing. I think a useful framework for thinking about this is the seven levels of delegation.
And what this kind of framework says is that there's effectively these different levels at which decision making can be delegated. And ultimately, that's what autonomy is, is a delegation of decision making. At level one, you have the lowest level of delegation and that's when you're maybe as a leader, making a decision and you're simply telling somebody else what to do.
And the very, very other end of that, have level seven, where you're leaving the decision up to somebody else and you don't even about it. It's completely delegated to them. Now for sure, there's going to be times when decisions are delegated at either one of these extremes.
But more often than not, it's going to be somewhere in the middle. And this is where the confusion can sometimes arise. If you look at the difference between level three, for example, consult, where you want to get input from other people, but then you're going to make that decision that respects other people's opinions.
And number five, where you're offering your opinion but you're leaving the decision up to them. They're quite subtle differences, but the impact of those can actually be quite profound in terms of people's understanding of what's expected from them. So I'm not suggesting that you need to go into every single meeting and say this is a level three delegation decision.
I don't think you need to do that, but at the same time it's worth at least acknowledging that your interpretation of something and somebody else's interpretation may be different. So it's worth about just talking about the expectations when autonomy is being delegated to people.
And I think that when you do that, it can quite often avoid a lot of grief further on down the line. Okay, so where have we got to? So we've created community clarity about what's important to the business and we've communicated that effectively.
We've empowered the teams to own their own strategy aligned with company goals. And then finally, being really, really clear about how decisions are made and how delegation is done. What we should hope to see is that teams that are less operationally mature become more operationally mature and can therefore operate with a much higher degree of autonomy.
So great, job done right. Well, unfortunately not always. There could be situations where a team that was operating with a high degree of autonomy for no fault of its own, and it's really, really stressed to say that, may now have to operate with a lower level of autonomy.
Why might that happen? So it is not the team is doing a bad job, but maybe they have just lost a key team member and who has taken a lot of experience or domain knowledge with them. Or it could just be that there is a big, big change in company strategy And now the previous business context the team was working on has changed and so like, you know, they need more help and support and guidance to get them back up to that position again.
Likewise, maybe there is just a new initiative the company is launching, or there could be a whole series of external factors, marketplace dynamics, competitive landscape, all of that kind sort of thing. That may just mean that as a leader, you have to step in, provide a little bit more support and guidance to help bring that context and help create that clarity again before you can move the teams back up to this more higher autonomous state where they're empowered and they can then sort of take them forward themselves,
and then you can take a step back. Okay, so that's pretty much all I kind of had for you. I know this stuff can be really, really tricky, I know it can be daunting, but I hope that was useful to you, and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you very much. Great stuff there from Rowan. Really, really informative, challenging talk. Lots of stuff in there that certainly I know I could get a lot better at. So tons for us to talk to Rowan about. For anyone who has any questions, please fire them in through through the event app or or on Twitter, And we'll we'll put those to Rowan.
But we're gonna bring them back in now for for a bit of a chat. Rowan, thanks for coming back. Thanks for joining us. And thanks for a really, really great talk. So that's a a great start to the day. And I wanted to kick off with there's there's a in your talk, the the autonomy alignment quadrant, really kinda sort of stood out to me.
I'm thinking about when when there's three of you, like at the start of FreeAgent, there were three of you and you were coding in a cafe or or in your garage or whatever the the origin story of choices. And then you've gone from three people to two seventy, think you said, at what stage did did you guys start thinking about these dynamics?
And when do you think is there like with five people, it's too early to worry about it, or no, actually, we need to plan ahead, or this is a ten person issue or twenty or fifty. From your experience, when is this the thing that you need to start thinking about?
Yeah, I think we think about how your organisation changes structurally. And I think that's the point at which some of these things come into play. So when you start to have multiple different teams and maybe those teams are tasked with doing different things, you know, whether that s, know, for my case it was like different parts of the product or different parts of, you know, the app or whatever or it s, you obviously you don have marketing teams or sales teams.
And then potentially you get to the stage where now you re not the one who s directly managing those teams. And so you have kind of like team leads or kind of like other sorts of managers managing that stuff. I think that's the kind of point where it becomes much more important to be really explicit about why these teams exist and kind of what the business expects of them.
And when you do that, then you're able to, like, they're able to have a much higher level of autonomy. And so typically, I think, you know, it's not a it's not a three person business for sure. I think this stuff really starts coming to play when you start getting, I guess, to the sub twenty, thirty, some people mark, and you start to have maybe multiple teams and there's sort of a different level of lane management structure or a different level of sort of like hierarchy in there.
So I think that's when it starts to be useful to think about. Certainly by the time I think you get to fifty people, if you're not doing this stuff, then you're either gonna have to be very, very directive with all of those teams in a way that's gonna feel very top down and top heavy, or you're not gonna have the structures in place to make sure you've got that alignment across the organization.
So I think, yeah, that I think that's the point where something you you start to really, really need to need to benefit from this. Yeah. And the the something that we hear a lot about in in the world of startups is around disruption and agility and the the advantage that startups have over incumbents a lot of the time being being agility, being speed of execution and the ability to change direction quickly, all of that.
It seems like aligned autonomy is pretty central to to that kind of speed and and efficacy. So is is it would you would you agree with that, that aligned autonomy is actually one of the key advantages startups can have when they're going up against the big guns?
Yeah. I I think it is. And this is what Mark talked about in his one, and he introduced that concept of decision making latency, where, you know, I think when you talk about what autonomy is, it's actually allowing people to make decisions about things.
And when you're talking about disrupting an industry or doing anything, making any sort of product or changing anything, it effectively is about decision making and making the right decisions and making them quickly as well. So you have got those kind of in two aspects.
One, you have got to be able to make decisions quickly, and two, you've got to make sure that the right decisions are being made at the same time. And the idea with aligned autonomy is you're getting the best of both worlds. Autonomous teams can make decisions much more quickly because there's not some torturous chain of command that they're going have to go through, And because they're closer to the customer, you get an idea that they can hopefully make the right decisions as well.
Now, key, this thing that's sometimes missing in that is the business context. Where, you know, oftentimes with a product, you know, it's not always just about building the right product for the customer, you have to build the right product for the business as well.
And, you know, ninety percent of the time those things are going to like perfectly align you hope, but that's not always the case. And you sometimes need to understand what's right for the business versus right for the customer. And that can sometimes be like a, again, it's another kind of controversial topic sometimes.
And that's sometimes where like fully autonomous teams need that little bit of context and just to kind of make sure that they are always making the right decisions for both the customer and the business. But ultimately, yeah, that's where you wanna get to the right decision being made as quickly as you can.
And that is not something that typically larger organizations or incumbents are are generally very good at. I'm not I'm not gonna say, like, all all of them by any means, but, yeah, typically, it's not. Yeah. It's I guess it it also goes back to being a kind of a central element of the company's culture.
And for older companies that have come from a different era, maybe that maybe that culture is a bit more rigid or a bit a bit less changeable, I suppose. Something that came up a couple of times in your talk, We mentioned agency essentially there, which was what Mark referred to back in in his TuringFest twenty eighteen talk.
You you're really talking about trust between management and and teams and and vice versa. That seems to be a part of it. And then psychological safety. How do you go about building psychological safety and and trust in in an organization? Yeah. So I I think that's that's a really good point.
And I think that it was something I I I was thinking about talking about a little bit in this talk as well. And trust is another thing that can be really quite an emotive subject like autonomy to kind of talk about. I think one of the reasons for that is because people have different interpretations.
Semantics play quite an important role when we talk about trust. And you know, there's another Patrick Lencioni book, I mentioned The Advantage, the other one that's really good is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And it doesn't explicitly talk about psychological safety, it kind of predates that kind of Google model, but it very much is around how to create organisational health within your company.
And trust forms the absolute kind of, you know, the kind of Maslow's hierarchy needs, that's the kind of bottom most foundational layer. But what's quite important is that there are different levels of trust that you can have somebody else or with a team, you know.
And we talk about the kind of like trust that you're, you know, if you're driving down the street, you trust that the person who's in the lane next to you isn't gonna swear with their car, or isn't gonna drive through a red light or something.
That's the kind of basic level of trust. But then you go a level stage beyond that, you talk about a vulnerability layer of trust, which is like, I'm able to admit my feelings to you, I'm able to be honest about how I'm struggling and stuff like that.
And so one of the ways that you build psychological safety is to make sure that you're having a level of conversation where people are able to feel a little bit more open and honest and vulnerable with one another, effectively as psychological safety is.
And when you can do that, when people feel they can share their views, even if those views contradict somebody else, like they're not holding things back, you can then get to the point of having healthy conflict. And this is something that teens really struggle with in my experience.
And conflict is something that again, people react to quite emotionally, but you can get to a stage where you have a healthy web of comfort, where you can both robustly share your views and kind of go at it a little bit, but you still respect each other, you don't feel threatened, then that's when you get the best decisions being made because it's not just like one person's view.
Everybody can contribute to that, they can all get their viewpoints out there, and you can come to a sort of consensus of that really sort of, is inclusive of everybody s ideas. And so that idea about trust is critical to this idea about making sure you can have these healthy debates and discussions, which can then lead on into, well, you know, focusing on accountability and results and so on.
And the five dysfunctions of a team kind of talks about all of that. So it's yeah. The trust is really important. Yeah. It's it's actually come up in a question that we have in from Zakar Choprau, which is what are the pros and cons you see of working more or less of of more or less autonomous teams now with everybody working remotely?
Yeah. That is that's a that's a really good one, And, you know, you hear me these awful stories about, you know, companies installing something tracking software to make sure their employees aren't, you know, like, slacking off or whatever, you know, and, like, man, if you have to do that, you've you've already screwed up so badly.
All all I can say is that from from our experience, obviously, it's it's been a difficult it's been a really difficult time for for for everybody. We've been we've been very fortunate in what regards, but I I can honestly say it was just never a question for us.
It was like we always implicitly trusted our teams, we know everybody is really smart, really capable, they want to do a good job, that was never an any doubt at all. So there are lots and lots of challenges with, you know, the kind of pandemic situation and, you know, moving to being fully remote from being sort of like partly sort of remote beforehand.
But that was never something that we worried about. I think we have invested quite a lot in our culture of our organisation and building a high level of trust between everybody in the company, not just between the leadership and sort of the teams.
It's not something that we've had to face. But, yeah, you do you do hear some some pretty pretty horror stories. Yeah, for sure. It's another question that come in, which is sort of along those same lines, which is from Mohammed Alisa. It seems that high autonomy is related to high risk.
How do you achieve balance? Is that is that autonomy related to I'm not it's related to different sorts of risks. But as a as a you know, I think I said in my talk, like, if you take a low autonomous approach, it's like, I.
E, you just tell everybody what to do, on one side you can say, well, okay, that's a lower risk because as a leader in our organisation or as a leadership team, I can make sure decisions be made, but you're just not gonna be able to scale that.
As the organisation gets bigger, one, you're not gonna be able to be in all of those meetings and all of those decisions, you're just not able to do that effectively. So that's why everything's gonna slow down. And two, you're just not going to be close enough to the actual work that's been done.
So you're not going be making the right decisions. You're not going be as informed as the people who are living this stuff day in day out, doing the research, looking at the data, talking to customers, whatever it is. So there's a different type of risks, but I'm not sure that one is kind of like, you know, how you get a truly sort of top down model is low risk and the fuel autonomous is high risk.
Think it's actually probably the other way around, it's just that you're making trade offs about what the different risks are. And as a result, it's just all about any other risk is about what do you do to mitigate it. And so, and that's the kind of idea about how do you make sure that you are driving this alignment with the overarching strategy.
Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that also plays into the culture that you create, the sort of reinforcement loops that you build, but also the recruitment, which another question just come in from Denise Josal, which is how do you best introduce a framework like this to new hires?
I guess that's very important in the entire rollout of this kind of methodology. Right? Yeah, it is. And I think that's, hopefully that came across where you're talking about reinforcing and communicating clarity. It really works best when it isn't just as something that's done once and then kind of forgot about.
So we do a fairly comprehensive onboarding process for everybody that's new to the business, where they'll get sort of like, they'll get inductions with every single head of a department within FreeAgent. So they introduce to no matter who you are, you'll be you'll spend quite a lot of time being introduced to, you know, the sales team, marketing team, product teams, engineering, kind of like so and so on.
And Ed, our our CEO, will kind of like do an overview of the of the whole strategy. So you'll get to, we will kind of very much in your first kind of like week or so, you'll get kind of like a fire hose of all of that stuff.
But then, hopefully as you go into your operational day to day kind of existence of whatever your job is, these things are embedded in the sort of like things that you will use every sort of like day. So whether it s the cadence around the meetings or OKRs or KPIs or wherever it is, you're constantly, that sort of constantly being reinforced.
So, I mean, it is big challenge and I wouldn't say we always get this right, but as a leader in an organisation you should always try and be thinking, okay, where are the other opportunities for me to reinforce clarity? And if you see people in your organisation who maybe haven't understood how important this priority is or this thing over here, it should be a signal to you that you haven't done enough yet to reinforce that clarity.
So think about all those kind of like different ways. And like you say, you know, there is the meetings, there is the broadcast communications, but then there is this operating system of your company as well, and think about and I think that's probably one of most powerful sort of tools that you have.
And just a a final question to wrap up then. You mentioned in your talk, Patrick Lencioni and the advantage and the five dysfunctions of a team, And you mentioned Daniel Pink's drive. What are so books it's funny. I don't know if you come across this, but I I see this a lot where I talk with startups, and they haven't done any of this kind of reading.
And it always kind of blows my mind, like, all that there's so much great information out there. What would you say are the most useful books that you've that you've come across that have impacted your career? I think those that I mentioned are are definitely ones that I would recommend.
The other one I think is is really good is some good strategy, bad strategy, which is very much related to some of the or kind of some of the stuff I I touched on in that presentation. I think one of the things that that leaders in an organisation actually struggle with quite a lot, but certainly when you start delegating autonomy to teams, is really truly understanding what a strategy is and how you go about kind of like creating a strategy.
And that's something where if you don't have a, like, a really well thought out robust strategy in place, it makes decision making a lot harder. Because ultimately, a strategy is there in order for people to be able to make decisions that we could do this thing or we could do this thing.
And the strategy should ideally tell you that it's clear you should do this thing over here. And so you're not having that debate every single time. And the book good strategy, bad strategy, I think is really good at kind of taking you through that process of understanding how you can form your strategy and what it means to actually use that practice.
I would I would apart from the pageant ones, you wanna know what I would definitely recommend people to go get that one. Super. Super. Alright, Ron. I think we're gonna wrap it up there. So great to have you back with us at at Turing Fest.
Your your twenty eighteen talk is still we're still getting people watching that on, like, a weekly basis. It's still bunch of views each time. So and I'm sure this one's gonna resonate a lot. So great to have you back, and thanks. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again soon.
Good. Thanks, Brian. Alright. So that was Ron Lavery from from FreeAgent. As always, really fascinating guy and great company and great to have them as part of the part of the conference. We're gonna take a quick break now. We're back at three o'clock.
We'll have Andy Jarvis talking to us about the science of persuasion. So very different kind of talk, but fascinating stuff. So we'll take a quick break, we'll see you back then.
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