We know that teams and individuals who take ownership of their work outperform—often by 50 percent—those who don’t. And in agile, team ownership is a key principle. However, leaders often struggle with letting their teams own their work. Leaders are afraid that if they trust, their teams will fail. So leaders must create a culture of trust and help their teams take ownership. But what if the team builds the wrong product? Teams must align with the strategy and purpose of the business as well as with value to the customer. Finally, the organization must deal honestly with ambiguity. Pollyanna Pixton provides you with the tools to create a culture of trust by dealing with fear of collaboration, helping teams take ownership, aligning with the business by using decision filters based on a business values, and helping teams show real progress while not committing until all risks are within an acceptable range.
Pollyanna Pixton
International leadership expert, Pollyanna Pixton developed the models for collaboration and collaborative leadership through her thirty-eight years of working inside and consulting with many organizations. She helps companies create workplaces where talent and innovation are unleashed—making them more productive, efficient, and profitable. Pollyanna is a founding partner of Accelinnova, president of Evolutionary Systems, and director of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership. She writes and speaks on topics of creating cultures of trust, leading collaboration, and business ethics. Her models are found in her book, Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility. Pollyanna co-founded the Agile Leadership Network and has chaired Leadership Summits in the US and England. Contact her at [email protected].
Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back. Third is empowering teams to make decisions by helping them understand and internalize the project and product’s purpose and value. The number four idea is that you can only fix processes, not people. Invest your energy toward the correct target. Idea five is to match people’s roles to their passion. Her final free idea is that integrity does matter—and matters most. Explore with Pollyanna why each of these ideas is important and how you can adopt them on your agile team.
In our personal and business lives, many of us know leaders who successfully foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do the top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores with you the ways that the best leaders create “safety nets” that allow people to discover and try new possibilities, help people fail early, and correct faster. Removing fear and engendering trust make the team and organization more creative and productive as they spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo. Pollyanna shares the tools you, as a leader, need to develop open environments based on trust—the first step in collaboration across the enterprise. Learn to step forward and do the right thing without breaking trust. Find out what to do when there is broken trust in the team, foster trust through team measurements, protect team boundaries, build team confidence without taking away their ownership, and create transparency.