Trust

Many of us have tried to create a better workplace for everyone and to optimize the organization for success. Having the appropriate functional sets of role and responsibilities and providing people with autonomy and accountability, are very important to people and their general happiness in their jobs. However, if you don't trust your people and feel you need to either micro-manage or devalue their contribution, you should not be runnng a company. Management needs to provide strategic direction and benchmarks for measuring success. After that, it should be up to your trusted employees to execute the plan making them both accountable and responsible. Additionally, don't just set the demands and check in with them 3 minutes before delivery date: there should be more transparency and visibility into progress based on an acceptable level of bi-directional conversation. One thing that Scrum does is define the roles of the Product Owner, Scrum Master and Scrum Team whereby the Product owner gets to say *what* should be done, and the team gets to decide *how* it should be done. Th Scrum Master ensures that the team follows the process and helps to take down barrier, impediments and to solve issues as they arise. It would be nice to see companies adopt this approach from a business management perspective.