If you spend a lot of time with a five-year-old, you realise how hungry they are for knowledge, because all the time they seem to be asking “why?” .
As we age, our innate curiosity is eroded by the events of our work lives, and the pressure to complete a task outweighs our motivation to seek out more information. Many times you’ve probably thought, “Let me get this done first so I don’t have to worry about it.” Faced with increasing pressure to deliver, many of us have lost all sense of curiosity.
Job evolution: from task-doer to problem solver
Since the beginning of the last century, we have been asking “What” and “How” rather than “Why” at work. Frederick Winslow Taylor, a pioneer of early management theory and author of The Principles of Scientific Management, put productivity above all other variables. Managers are supposed to be experts in their field, and employees just follow management’s instructions — there’s no need to waste time asking why.
This approach made sense for many jobs in the mass production era of the 19th and 20th centuries. If you need to make 100,000 identical parts, there’s probably a very simple and repeatable way to do it — so management needs professional “doers” to improve efficiency.
Today the problem is more complicated. Now, we need professional problem solvers to find effective solutions. Modern organizations need to move quickly and respond faster to change to make us more competitive in the new global marketplace. With rapid technological innovation and changing customer expectations, nearly half of the COMPANIES in the S&P 500 index are expected to be replaced in just 10 years. The nature of work has also changed dramatically, with more jobs requiring knowledge and brain power rather than manual labor. In this environment, managers are no longer regarded as authoritative experts. But organizations still think that management only tells employees what to do and how to do it. Senior leaders see them in trouble and ask, “How can we change the way we work?” “And” What do we need to do to change?
Notice an important word missing from these questions?
The first step to achieving organizational consistency: Set a common goal
So why do organizations (and especially their managers) care so much about people who ask why? That’s because responding to team members’ innate curiosity leads to better overall results: higher employee engagement, more collaboration, and more innovation.
Simon Sinek, author of several best-selling books, including “Starting with the Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” said it best: “People don’t buy what you make, they buy why you make it. “Customers appreciate products crafted by people who want to solve their problems.
What Simon Sinek says applies not only to the customers of the enterprise, but also to the teams within the enterprise. One of the most important things senior managers can do to achieve organizational consistency is to figure out why the business exists and who it serves, and then get support from the team building the product for the customer.
Ultimately, a successful organization will see everyone, from the CEO down to the floor, united around the company’s mission. That’s when you can take the next step — understand what your team needs to do and how they’re going to do it.
How does organizational consistency empower teams
When you build consistency within the organization based on a shared understanding, whether it’s the main goal for the year or why one task is prioritized over another, you will gain team consistency, and individual employees will experience a significant shift in their relationship to their work. We found that empowered teams had significantly better outcomes.
Empowered teams = increased motivation
Did you know that empowered teams are more focused on their work and motivated to get it done? Did you also know that in the US, there is a report that 85% of employees are not actually working? This is terrible!
The more effort you put into aligning your team with organizational goals, the more people will invest in delivering a successful result. They are no longer simple task-takers, but bring all the knowledge and skills they have accumulated to work.
Organizational consistency = team autonomy
Autonomy is the right to make decisions independently. When people have autonomy, they have ownership of the results of their efforts. If a manager assigns a task to a team, they may follow instructions to carry it out, even if they disagree with the approach. Instead, managers who strive to align their teams with organizational goals pose a problem for the team to solve that is important to the business. Team members are then free to use their collective experience and skills to deliver a solution that is likely to be better. Giving teams this level of autonomy also frees managers to focus on higher-level issues.
Teamwork = more innovation
When teams understand enough of the background information behind a problem, they are better able to come up with new ideas and conduct more productive experiments. When we assign tasks too clearly and tell teams how to get the job done, we stifle creativity and innovation. When we give people the freedom to dream big and take risks, they may even seek out other teams in the organization to work with, thereby expanding the scope of organizational alliances. Encouraging risk-taking and experimentation can inspire the best solutions.
Clear context = better performance
Remember how Frederick Taylor’s management style focused first on efficiency? The important thing to remember about efficiency is that it is not the same as effectiveness. If you do a lot of things quickly and none of them hit the nail on the head, you may be productive, but you’re actually wasting time. When teams understand the purpose behind their work, they can come up with effective and impactful solutions. For example, when the team fully understands the problem, they may realize that instead of blindly repeating all the steps, they can just skip the first three steps and deliver the same result in less time and with less effort. Providing people with clear goals increases their commitment to their work, and the results may exceed your expectations.
How to unleash the power of “why” in Jira Align
Now we know that the “why” is important, but how do we ensure that teams have the environment they need to understand the problem they are solving? Sharing context at the team and organizational level is important, and there are several ways to do this.
Unlock the team’s “why”
A well-known and reliable way to document context for a team is to use the traditional user story, which usually consists of three parts:
The third point is critical to the team if you want engineers to provide the best solution. You can just give them a few specifications to follow, but sharing insight into what users actually need motivates engineers to deliver truly valuable solutions to customers.
Unlock the organization’s “why”
We know that providing the team with business context and customer insight is critical to success, so we built this capability into Jira Align. This feature (literally called the “why” button) allows the team to understand their common work goals.
This feature helps managers express intent and direction in Jira Align. When your team needs to understand the broader goals their work is achieving, they can click the “Why” button and read context information, such as:
The people who really benefit from this are the employees who actually do the work, and they’re usually not in Jira Align, but mostly in Jira. What can we do for them? You can send the information in the why button to Jira. Team members need only use one of Jira’s features to get all the context they need.
More contextual information makes the organization more consistent
Helping people understand why they do what they do enables them to make better decisions, which motivates more teams to be more involved, delivering products that meet customer needs and driving business growth faster. With Jira Align, this context can be easily provided in a repeatable manner to ensure continuous delivery of innovative products.