Betterfly

As technology leaders, there is a responsibility to ensure the opportunity and reliability of the technological services that support the business. This often leads to adopting various standards and frameworks to facilitate minimally adequate levels of control.

On the other hand, as team leaders, there is a need to attract and retain talented, reliable, committed, and empowered team players to achieve notable results and discoveries.

Have any of the great discoveries or results of the past originated from correctly following pre-established guidelines? Practically not, right? In fact, discoveries occur precisely when we are willing to do things in new ways and when we are willing to explore and experiment.

Among a series of factors that can be identified about high-performing people, there are certain irrefutable factors of attraction and satisfaction of this profile, such as:

● Providing spaces for research, learning, and growth through experimentation and navigating uncertainty.

● Providing progressively increasing challenges that allow the collaborator to practice the acquired skills while exploring new skills or new levels of their skills.

 A playbook is the declaration of the mindset, personality, and identity of the team, through collective, open, and honest messages 

Playbook

For us, a playbook is a compilation of the team's agreements on principles, standards, responsibilities, and limits of each member, where a step-by-step route or format to achieve and safeguard them is not provided. The use of a playbook provides spaces of freedom and autonomy to specialists and high-performing teams, which allows them to seek their best ways to achieve and safeguard the agreements. The playbook is also an instrument for deploying trust, a key ingredient for retaining team players.

Another utility of a playbook is the declaration of the mindset, personality, and identity of the team, through collective, open, and honest messages.

Example of application: In a playbook, you express that each team leader must monitor the operational health of their solutions to guarantee the resilience metrics, but you do not establish how they should do it so that each leader conceives and generates their own formulas to observe and control their metrics, their own alert criteria, and their own incident management protocols, all according to the maturity of their solutions, the maturity of their teams, the criticality of each process, their own historical failure rates, and each transactional volume.

And what about the efficiency that standardization provides?

Allowing your teams to generate their own ideas and formulas does not mean that everyone has to invent everything. In the same way as in everyday life, while you safeguard spaces to share experiences and techniques, and while within the principles you incentivize documentation as a tool for alignment and legacy, you will observe a spontaneous standardization of practices, as well as a natural evolution derived from healthy competition, from the healthy appetite of talented professionals to do things better and better. In other words, it is possible to incentivize standardization through the work culture.

The Dangers of Over-Protocolization

When we strictly pigeonhole ourselves into established protocols, we become robotic. When you over-protocolize the day-to-day work of your teams, you are not allowing them to discover their best way to achieve the objectives and comply with the principles and standards; you are imposing an average behavior, which may be ideal for some teams and realities, but not so much for others. By pre-establishing how each movement in your team should occur, you are wasting the innovative and creative reasoning capacity of your team, the basic ingredients for continuous evolution.

Control What Is Necessary and Protect the Spaces Of Creativity

Your team needs tangible and enjoyable degrees of freedom, it needs to feel that it thinks and creates, that it generates value from its ideas, not only from its execution capacity. Your team adds more value when it can reason, create, and evolve, do not skimp on providing those spaces whenever doing so does not really endanger the responsibility of the role they play together, and you will see how your team's performance improves.