Welcome to the Testing Peers! In this episode from the Testing Peers, Chris, David, Simon and Russell discuss what empowerment means to them and how they go about empowering their teams. We also go off on our usually slight tangent and talk a little about teams as a whole.

“In technology, it’s about the people–getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment, and helping to find a way to innovate.”

~Marissa Mayer, Yahoo

To me empowerment is key concept to understand to build high functioning happy teams. I believe it’s rare to have a high functioning team that is not happy. How do you make teams happy? Well doing away with command and control cultures and building empowering cultures it’s a great start. To see what I mean, take a look at Charlene Li TED talk on Efficient leadership in the digital era

As Testing Peers, we want our teams to be empowered, engaged and happy, and we want the same for ourselves. We’re happy to admit we’re not perfect at it, we’re constantly learning as we meet new challenges and experiences. We all need the psychological safety an empowered environment can give. If you’ve not heard of Googles work on teams I’d recommend you take a look at Project Aristotle.

I’ll not give away any spoilers to the podcast but we’d love to hear your empowerment successes and failures and we’ll probably touch on the subject again in the future.

Let us know your thoughts on this or anything else you wish to share with us, either contact us on Twitter (@TestingPeers) or email us at contactus@testingpeers.com