Newsletter (MAY 2025): Leadership as an Enabling Team

Written By Ana Ciobotaru
 
 
 

This edition was curated by Aleix Morgadas



In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations face constant pressure to adapt and transform. Traditional hierarchical structures often prove inadequate in fostering agility and driving meaningful change. To address this challenge, leaders are increasingly exploring innovative approaches to team organization and collaboration. One such approach is leveraging the principles of Team Topologies, specifically the enabling team type and Facilitation mode.

Leadership teams do not see themselves as enabling team types. They often see the potential of enabling teams, but the default approach is to delegate the tasks to other teams, either by assembling new temporary enabling teams or asking a current team to behave as an enabling team to help other teams.

We have seen various types of enabling teams depending on the missing capability identified. Like agile coaches, SREs, testing specialists, you name it. Yet, we consider that leadership teams are in a unique position to behave as enabling teams to drive meaningful change in key strategic areas.

Leadership teams understand the company objectives, the team gaps, and have experience on the field. That positions them as a great candidate to address some missing capabilities by themselves instead of delegating such task, that it could add more delay into the whole flow when they are the bottleneck already.

Knowledge gaps such as fully understanding the business model and unit economics, how initiatives are funded and why, the impact of new product lines, or which is the goal of a merger and acquisition. Areas that are hard to delegate compared to capability gaps like testing, DevOps, and alike.

Of course, leadership teams cannot behave as an enabling team all day for all the missing capabilities. That’s why it makes sense to delegate certain areas while addressing others directly, with the goal of achieving a faster flow of change.

Let’s be more specific on which areas leadership teams can have a bigger impact as an enabling team. Let’s use The Journey to Product Teams infographic by John Cutler.

As leaders, we aim to support our teams in having end-to-end ownership, becoming a Product Team, as outlined in John’s infographic, or a Stream-Aligned Team, as described in Team Topologies terminology.

Often, in smaller organizations, leadership roles take the responsibility to train and upskill the teams while being part of the team themselves. Acting consistently as an enabling team. In these situations, we see some antipatterns of not training the team members, creating a dependency on them, and breaking the fast flow of change as the company grows. That’s why, even in small organizations, it is crucial to understand how enabling teams work to keep a fast flow of change as the company grows. Establishing a healthy knowledge sharing and continuously training culture since the beginning.

Using the Journey to Product Teams infographic, we can see that in small organizations, it is quite sensible that the leadership is part of the teams, and they are training the team members as part of their journey. Without this training, as the company grows, teams may start to lose autonomy and experience a slowdown in velocity. A counterproductive action would be to keep all the decision-making to the leadership, as it can seem like this would speed up the process, but we all know this will slow down everything in the mid-long term.

On the other hand, in bigger organizations, we see leadership teams overloaded on company processes that cannot take the necessary time to address the knowledge gap on key areas, and, instead, delegating to new supporting teams, adding more headcount and overall communication, slowing the flow of change even more because not having the right time to support the people due to leadership being the bottleneck.

Leadership that understands the benefits of a stream-aligned team approach can start funding key enabling team initiatives to train teams on having full ownership of the design, build, test, release, and run phases of a product lifecycle. We have seen how this has been successfully implemented in previous Team Topologies Newsletter articles. Yet, we also found limits to this approach when it comes to empowering teams to have full end-to-end ownership, including Opportunity Selection and Requirements & Planning, to be fully aligned with the company's strategy. Upskilling the team members on the company’s operating model and ways of working is a better-suited job for the leadership team.

Common enabling work by leadership teams:

  • Trainings on the business operating model and tools to improve ways of working and key processes.

  • Trainings on the problem-solution definition, initiative planning, and how to measure success.

  • Share the vision and mission, and how it applies to team-specific domains. Help teams connect the why, the what, and the how.

These activities are common when the organization needs to evolve its operating model and ways of working because they are growing and scaling the business. What worked in the past no longer works. This causes leadership to adapt to the new reality and make changes based on their high-stakes challenges. If during these needed changes, they identify a knowledge gap on teams that could prevent the new approach from succeeding, the leadership team can act as a temporally enabling team to upskill the teams for the new capabilities, or make sure that other people can assist on addressing that capability gap.

It is essential to note that leadership teams can also function as platform teams, as well as enabling teams. When teams have the right skills and capabilities, they can leverage a leadership platform with key self-served artifacts like OKRs, vision and mission, strategy, and more to support their decision-making processes at the team level and keep them aligned with the overall organization. Mature leadership teams and organizations leverage these two team types strategically and as a means to address new missing capabilities (Enabling) and then to consolidate capabilities that can be beneficial to most teams in the organization (Platform). If you want to check some examples of leadership behaving as an Enabling Team, you can check the use case from the Team Topologies Academy course “Effective Enabling Teams”.

What’s coming up next?

We are gathering all Team Topologies events on our Events page and would love to hear your feedback about the ones you have attended or the ones that we have missed


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Ana Ciobotaru
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Newsletter (april 2025): Team Topologies decoded: 5 practitioners, 5 powerful insights from the CNCF platforms workgroup