At the beginning of 2019, OP began a journey of change towards a more agile, self-managed operating model that is based on autonomous teams. In Development & Technologies (D&T), this has meant the creation of shared agile principles and practices, in addition to the agile development methods that have been used already for some time. It has also involved further improving our management models and supporting our self-managed teams.
During the journey of change, OP has three strategic priorities: improving employee experience, improving customer experience and operational efficiency. Bringing these priorities into life in a lean, self-managed organisation is in turn supported by the four Principles of Good Leadership that guide both supervisors and specialists who are in charge of managing their own work:
- “I’ll show the way”
- “I’ll make success possible”
- “I’ll encourage learning”
- “I’ll ensure results”
It’s not just people in management positions who should embrace the Principles of Good Leadership. It’s also essential that specialists working in autonomous teams are self-managed, i.e. they manage their own work. This article explains in more detail what the fourth principle, ”I’ll ensure results” means in D&T and as an active way of working, both for supervisors and employees.
Ensuring results requires dialogue and a change in direction, if needed
The fourth Principle of Good Leadership, ensuring results, can be divided into three key elements: working together, encouraging customer value creation and monitoring results and responding to deviations.
“In a self-managed, autonomous operating model, people work genuinely together. The supervisor works with the team and understands the context and even the substance. The supervisor knows their team members and is able to support them in the right way,” says Henri Helakari, Head of Engineering and DevOps, who is also one of the supervisors at D&T.
“We can dump the old-fashioned distant management and the belief that knowledge is power. In a self-managed and autonomous operating model, these have been replaced by the team and the supervisor working together, open communication, continuous feedback, good chemistry between people and interpersonal relations. Motivating work and jointly agreed, meaningful tasks increase the likelihood of good results, too.”
“We’re actively seeking to eliminate things or processes that don’t support customer value creation. This means that, as supervisors, we encourage our team members and organisation to think proactively: are we doing the right things to achieve results in terms of improving customer experience? We keep our focus on developing digital services for our customers,” Henri continues.
As regards monitoring results, Henri suggests bringing OKR thinking (Objectives and Key Results) to the core. This means that the supervisor and team members together set a target, while taking account of the direction defined by the management, and determine target results and success criteria for the target in question. When the whole team joins forces to do this and everybody has the opportunity to participate, the outcome is shared leadership and shared ownership of work. This enables everybody to monitor whether actions have been successful and results achieved.
Responding to deviations means that if the definition of success criteria has failed or if the criteria have been under or overestimated, the team can revise them if needed. Neither is it the intention that the team must achieve its target regardless of what it takes. A target can be revised if needed.
“As supervisors, we’re active in sparring for alternatives to make more progress. This means a continuous dialogue instead of waiting until the end of the quarter to see whether we succeeded in reaching our targets and achieving results, and responding only after that,” Henri says.
An agile team works together, has the courage to experiment, learns from its mistakes and eventually achieves results
Henri’s team member, DevOps Specialist Juha Kreivi, says that the Principles of Good Leadership are reflected in their daily lives in the form of active work. Juha agrees with Henri about the importance and impact of the Principles.
“I completely agree with Henri that the best way to achieve results is specifically to set the targets together. This enables the team to work systematically to implement our plans and to deliver the desired outcome for the customer. The OKR model guides us in focusing on results and measuring our achievements,” Juha explains.
”At the upper level, we’re guided by OP’s vision and strategy to which we link our actions. Together, we reflect on how to deliver results and deal with each matter. We have developed various metrics to carefully monitor the results of our actions and will take corrective action whenever we identify something that needs to be fixed.”
Juha finds that many of the things now on the to do list are unique, something that hasn't been done ever before at OP. This requires experimenting, courage and keeping a critical eye on what we do. In pioneering, mistakes cannot be avoided. We must learn from mistakes and adjust our direction to eventually achieve results and customer value.
“Sometimes, the outcome may be that this doesn’t work at all, but even then we learn something. Tolerating and accepting mistakes is essential in modern management models, too. If the team was innately afraid of making mistakes, this would inevitably lead to the team lacking the courage to experiment anything new,” Juha says.
The Principles of Good Leadership were created to guide a lean organisation in the right direction
Henri has been involved in the development of management practices in the field of software development already before the actual journey of change began. He finds it important that we only have a few principles of good leadership so that taking them in and implementing them in daily work is as simple as possible.
According to Henri, the four Principles of Good Leadership are important especially because the autonomy of teams and their capabilities to do something meaningful are specifically based on a clear direction, framework and ground rules provided by management.
Anna-Mari Valkila, Head of HR, Development & Technologies shares the same views. “The Principles of Good Leadership were defined to meet the requirements and wishes of today’s working life and our self-managed and autonomous operating culture. The key is to support self-management among everyone at OP. The implementation of the Principles of Good Leadership is not only the responsibility of supervisors but of each of us when managing our own work. Shared responsibility for leadership is also reflected in encouraging anyone to give feedback to anyone.”
“Following the introduction of Agile at OP, we have reduced the number of organisational levels. Specialists are also encouraged to assume a leadership role and guide the rest of the team in the right direction. Personally, I’m passionate about the lean approach and modern leadership. The introduction of the Principles of Good Leadership has opened up a lot of discussion about leadership, which helps in advancing Agile more efficiently,” Henri says.