We hear about empowered teams all the time:

Pour your heart into making sure every member of your team feels empowered to be their best. Invest in them. Develop them. Then watch them soar. -Howard Schultz, Starbucks former CEO

Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. -Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group Founder & Partner

Leadership is about shaping a vision, aligning people, and empowering them to go beyond their perceived limitations. -A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble former CEO

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others. -Bill Gates, Microsoft co-Founder & former CEO

But what exactly is an ‘empowered’ team? It’s quite the buzzword! 

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Like with most buzzwords, we may have some intuitive sense of what it means — but have you tried describing an empowered team concretely? I did recently, and it was harder than expected. My conviction was definitely stronger than my understanding. 

Team States

In my attempt to remedy that, here’s what I’ve come up with so far: Just as water can exist as a solid, liquid, or gas depending on temperature and pressure, I propose that teams can exist in various Team States. ‘Empowered’ happens to be one of those Team States, with its own set of Inputs, Markers, and Conditions.

* Inputs. To shift a team into an empowered Team State, you need to apply the right heat and pressure — things like assigning ownership over outcomes, scoping purpose-driven efforts, designing strengths-based work, encouraging cross-team collaboration, fostering psychological safety, role modeling desirable behaviors, investing in the team’s professional development, etc.

* Markers. Accountability, initiative, fearless decision-making, seamless collaboration, effective communication, continuous learning, etc. — these are observable behaviors indicating that a team has achieved an empowered Team State.

* Conditions. What enables Inputs to translate to an empowered Team State? How can we be sure observed Markers actually belong to an empowered team? The tricky part is getting the environmental Conditions just right to ensure our Inputs induce, and Markers correspond, to an empowered Team State.

People have written extensively about Inputs and Markers (notably, using different terminology), but Conditions are conspicuously missing from the conversation. This was my big discovery and where I spent the bulk of my efforts diving into this empowered teams concept.

Team Phase Diagram

You may remember seeing a phase diagram for water in high school chemistry or physics illustrating the environmental conditions required for each state of matter. (Though you probably didn’t see this XKCD version!) So what’s the equivalent for Team States? 

Here’s a crack at it. In a nutshell, two variables primarily set the Conditions for a Team State: context and license to operate. The right combination of these means you get an empowered Team State. Get the balance of these wrong, and your empowered Team State evaporates! 

Here is a more detailed illustration, styled as a Team Phase Diagram: Instead of showing the conditions under which water becomes ice or steam, it shows the Conditions under which a team becomes disenfranchised, compliant, chaotic, or of course, empowered. 

Context: The Awareness Factor 

* Has anyone ever asked you to travel somewhere without telling you where you’re going, why you’re going there, or how to get there? Low Context is a lot like that. Team members neither understand the ‘why’ behind their work nor how their collective efforts fit together. In some cases, they’re not even aware of each other’s contributions. 

* High Context means team members understand mission and strategy with extreme clarity. Everyone understands not just their piece of the puzzle, but the whole picture, including impact on users and other stakeholders, productive team dynamics and orchestration, and how individual contributions roll up to collective success. 

***Ideal Condition for empowered Team State: High Context! We want people to deeply understand the what, why, and how behind their efforts.

License to Operate: The Autonomy Factor 

* No License to Operate is like a team in a straightjacket. Whether it's explicitly forbidden or implicitly discouraged (“Remember what happened to Bob when he tried to make that happen?”), proactive measures and autonomous decision-making are rare or nonexistent. 

* Unlimited License to Operate is more like the wild west, with unfettered initiatives and activities and no one to reign them in. Sometimes an unlimited license is explicitly granted, and sometimes it just happens when no one stops the chaos.

***Ideal Condition for empowered Team State: Moderate License to Operate, i.e., autonomy with guardrails. Note, however, as Context increases, so must License to Operate expand to yield an empowered Team State.

So there you have it — the (pseudo)science of team empowerment! I’d love to hear what you think about this model, or about empowered teams generally.

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