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Building autonomous teams is an art and thought to be the Holy Grail of an agile enterprise. With that being said, Spotify is one of the best examples of companies, which didnt undergo a transformation, but was founded with an agile mindset from the very beginning. Over the past years the company has continuously improved its processes and organizational structures to accomplish what is has today high performing, autonomous teams. And for a good reason. According to research in the area, people working in autonomous teams tend to be more motivated, productive, creative and innovative (Smart, 2017, The Art of Building Autonomous Teams ).
Organizational culture
One of the fundamental key success factors in reaching autonomy is an explicit organizational culture (Lee, 2017, Autonomous teams make learning your competitive advantage ). While small, family-like enterprises with high levels of trust and empathy among employees are more likely to keep their culture implicit, big organizations should define their culture norms in order to make sure that all employees understand and held accountable for no-compliance. Therefore, an explicit organizational culture helps the company to promote and reinforce behaviors it expects from its employees. And this is exactly what Spotify did when setting clear fundamental values in the companys manuscript Agile a la Spotify . It is important to accentuate that writing down a list of norms and principles as well as communicating them to employees does not mean creating a culture. It is the task of the leadership team to adopt these values, believe into them and act as role models. When hiring people, Spotify does not pay attention only to technical skills, but also to the cultural compatibility of the potential employee (Nobl Academy, 2016). Overall, the hiring is a multistep process with strong emphasis on the cultural fit also involving an interview with the future team-members of the candidate.
Servant leadership
Leadership also played a major role in Spotifys journey towards autonomy. By abolishing the traditional relationship between leaders and teams as one of superior to subordinate, Spotify improved collaboration by adopting a mindset of partnership. According to McKinzeys study on leadership and transformation (2018) leaders operating in a network of autonomous teams focus on guiding and mentoring rather than micromanaging and directing (p.11). This fits well with the fact that members of autonomous teams want to be able to make decisions without too much managerial interference (Hess, 2013, Empowering Autonomous Teams ). As concluded in a research made by Google (2015), creating a sense of psychological safety for the teams improves their effectiveness and motivates the team members to partner, take new roles and bring in individual ideas without being afraid of negative consequences (Rozovsky, 2015, The five keys to a successful Google team ). Drawing the parallel to Spotifys success story, the streaming service adapted a servant leadership approach with minimum managerial interference and a culture of a fail-friendly environment – both of them facilitating autonomy within teams.
Alignment
Under no circumstances is team autonomy to be associated with anarchy or chaos. Therefore, it is crucial to allocate an appropriate level of autonomy. Failing to provide enough autonomy might be interpreted as lack of trust towards team members and curb their creativity and full potential while too much autonomy could lead to negative outcomes and increased stress levels due to pressure to satisfy leadership expectations (Hess, 2013). In order to give an optimal level of autonomy, Spotify fosters alignment without excessive control. The company invests much time aligning on objectives and goals before launching into work (Mankins & Garton, 2017). The deeper the teams understanding of the companys strategy and priorities, the better can it autonomously collaborate in order to find the best solution to the problem communicated by the leadership level. Alignment at Spotify ensures that teams are pushing towards the same goal and all share a common purpose. According to its HR blog, Spotify empathizes that the companys task is to point out the direction it aspires to go towards and where does it want to be, the way it gets there is solely for the teams to decide. Figure three represents how Henrik Kniberg a former agile coach at Spotify graphically represented the relationship between alignment and autonomy. They might seem like two different ends of a scale, as in more autonomy equals less alignment. However, Spotify thinks of it as two different dimensions. Low autonomy and low alignment equal micromanagement culture without a higher purpose. Employees are expected to follow orders without questioning the big picture. In a low autonomy and high alignment situation leaders are good at communicating the problem, at the same time they also prescribe how to proceed.
Figure 3: Spotify’s Alignment & Autonomy diagramm
Source 3: Kniberg, 2013,’Spotify – the unproject culture’
High autonomy and low alignment represent an opposite scenario in which teams can do whatever they want without being given any direction. Spotifys goal is aligned autonomy, where squads collaborate with each other to find the best solution. Besides these two dimensions, there is another one which maximizes the aligned autonomy accountability. As an example, Spotify gives a great deal of freedom in innovating. However, employees and teams will be held accountable for the results and they all have to comply with certain established norms and processes (Mankins & Garton, 2017). By providing a high degree of accountability for the teams and across the organization, the company creates a high degree of trust, which is an essential attribute for high performing teams.
According to Smart (2017) the author of BDD in Action , autonomy relies on three essential factors: competence, shared understanding and trust. At a second glance, all these factors are included into Spotifys autonomy model. Competence is included into Spotifys cultural value of continuous improvement by sharing know-how, organizing workshops and improving the skills of its teams. Spotifys counterpart for shared understanding is its aligned autonomy, which ensure that teams strive for the same goal. Last, but not least is the factor of trust, which manifests at Spotify through its fail-friendly culture, where team members feel comfortable taking risks and making mistakes as well as being accountable for the results they deliver.
Summary
Within the span of the last 13 years Spotify has grown its engineering and R&D team from ten to 1,800 people, therefore crossing all the evolution stages from a startup to a global enterprise. Despite being born as a company with an agile mindset, Spotify dedicated itself to continuous improvement and transformation towards innovating, experimenting and learning faster than its competitors. Facing the challenge of fast-paced expansion, the company decided to restructure its organization design by scaling its teams into squads, chapter, guild and tribes with the purpose of implementing minimum viable bureaucracy and balance between autonomy and high alignment (Kamer, 2018). Throughout the process Spotify came up with its own manuscript of agility internally called Agile a la Spotify , which reflected the companies culture and agile values together with its core concept of building autonomous teams. Nowadays, Spotifys culture is well-known for its high levels of empowerment and trust, collaboration and sense of purpose. Following key success factors were identified during the research for this study paper: Spotifys organizational culture, its servant leadership model and its balance between autonomy, alignment and accountability. Through its explicit culture Spotify supports trust, innovation and experimentation in a fail-friendly environment. By following a servant leadership model, leader focus on guiding and mentoring rather than micromanaging and directing. A local decision-making process increases the productivity of squads and collaboration within the teams. The third key success factor is alignment without excessive control. The basic concept behind it is that alignment enables autonomy, the greater the alignment within the company, the more autonomy it can grant. Following this concept, Spotify invests much time in aligning on objectives and goals. Squads and squad members can find appropriate solutions only when they are aware about the final destination.
Do Spotifys success factors guarantee autonomous teams for any other company trying to copy the model? Experts are in complete agreement rather not! There is a vast number of factors that have to be considered: what is the company producing, which business model does it have, which growth ration is it experiencing, what countries is the company operating in and is autonomy generally compatible with its employees
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