Empower staff to deliver better services Make sure that staff have access to the tools, training and technologies they need. Empower the team to make decisions throughout the design, build and operation of the service. Guidance: Empower staff to deliver better services To promote innovation and create agility within our organizations the teams that makeup our organizations must be empowered. Innovation increasingly flows from the bottom up rather than from the top down, and to benefit from this trend teams must be empowered. Don’t hire good people to tell them what to do, hire good people to have them tell you what to do. The government manages large, highly complex and crucially important services for their users. A top-down command and control approach to service delivery and designs enforces a structure that aligns to the structure itself, rather than to the needs of the users, or based on the expertise of those building the services. Rather than bringing information to authority, bring authority to the information. Those best suited to solve a given problem, are those closest to the problem. By removing decision-making authority from the teams into complex governance structures, the innovative potential of teams is mitigated by legacy governance procedures and processes. To create organizations that can iterate and improve frequently, teams must be empowered to make decisions for themselves. Complex architectures that are responsive to the needs of users, including users within the organization, are emergent and are not derived through the compilation of hypotheses lacking the expertise of those closest to the complex problems needing to be solved. Aligned Behaviours 1. Team members self-organize and self-manage through self-assigning tasks. 2. Team members meet with liberty to openly discuss challenges without fear of blame or reproach. 3. Team members feel safe to challenge the status quo. 4. Our team values learning as part of daily work. 5. Team members can articulate how their work contributes to business outcomes. 6. Our team can choose the tools they use to deliver their service. 7. Our team's management actively removes impediments that prevent the team from focusing on delivering value. 8. Our team has access to environments to experiment with new approaches, tooling, or solutions. 9. Our team feels their feedback is valued. 10. Failures are treated in our team as opportunities to improve and learn. Misaligned Behaviours 1. Work is assigned directly to members of our team from management. 2. Our team is required to get a series of approvals prior to being able to make routine changes to their service. 3. Learning in our team is largely done through week or day long courses periodically throughout the year. 4. Our team is unable, or finds it difficult, to acquire productivity tooling. 5. Our team does not have access to Software as a Service (SaaS) productivity tools as they are blocked by the department. 6. On our team, learning through reading books, blogs, or watching videos, talks, or tutorials is not viewed as work. 7. Our team has restricted access to tools, training and software based on job classification.