# How open leaderhsip cultivates high-performance teams in product-driven organizations

Leadership models must evolve to address growing complexities of an ever-transforming world in order to operate and function in that particular socio-economic context.
Open leadership is one such evolving yet powerful model for guiding product-driven and platform-driven organizations through complex transformations and fast-paced innovation cycles.
This leadership approach is not confined to hierarchy but focuses on empowering individuals and teams to navigate challenges autonomously.
At its core, open leadership fosters an environment of psychological safety, where individuals feel safe to express ideas, challenge assumptions, and take risks without fear of retribution.
Open leadership emerges as a powerful framework designed to foster collaborative, high-performance teams by emphasizing transparency, adaptability, collaboration, inclusivity, and community.

Open leadership is a dynamic mindset and a set of behaviors that prioritize service to others within teams or organizations.
Open leaders work collaboratively, acting in the best interests of a collective goal.
They promote the principles of transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community, as defined by the Open Organization Definition.
These leaders are not static figures but evolve based on the demands of the team or enterprise, giving agency to and empowering those around them.
By fostering environments built on these foundational pillars, open leaders enable organizations to become agile and resilient, especially in today's fast-paced, outcome-oriented business landscapes.

## Psychological safety: The foundation for high-performance teams
The concept of psychological safety, first introduced by Amy Edmondson, is central to open leadership.
Psychological safety refers to "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
Edmondson describes it as “felt permission for candor,” where team members feel safe to express ideas, ask questions, admit mistakes, and share concerns without fear of reprisal.
When psychological safety is present, teams become high-impact and high-performing.
Without psychological safety, teams face internal friction, limiting creativity and productivity.
This environment is crucial for fostering high-performance teams, as it encourages open dialogue, creative problem-solving, and continuous learning.

In contrast, environments where team members are burdened by fear of making mistakes can lead to stifled creativity, miscommunication, and disengagement.
High-impact teams are those that not only achieve outcomes but also do so efficiently by distributing leadership roles fluidly across different members based on the task at hand.
This aligns with the shift from outcome-driven to output-driven approaches, where the focus is not just on completing tasks, but on the value and results generated by these tasks (more on this in a moment)
In short, psychologically safe environments encourage innovation, as team members feel confident to explore new ideas and challenge the status quo, essential in product-driven and platform-driven organizations.

## Managing cognitive load for optimal performance
Effective open leadership also entails managing the cognitive load placed on team members.
In fact, reducing cognitive load and fostering psychological safety goes hand-in-hand with creating high-performance teams.
Leaders who create psychologically safe environments allow teams to function more effectively by reducing cognitive load—the mental energy required to process information and make decisions.
When cognitive load is reduced, teams can focus on the essential work of generating ideas and driving innovation, ultimately increasing their capacity for high-impact outcomes.

Cognitive load, as defined in cognitive psychology, refers to the amount of working memory resources used during tasks.
In simple terms it refers to the mental effort required to process and retain information.
In technology-driven organizations, especially those undergoing digital transformation, the complexity of tasks can lead to cognitive overload, which in turn reduces team efficiency and decision-making quality.
In high-performance environments, minimizing extraneous cognitive load—unnecessary information or distractions—is essential to help teams focus on the tasks that matter most.

There are three types of cognitive load to consider:

1. Intrinsic cognitive load: This is the natural complexity of a task. Open leaders need to ensure that their teams are well-equipped to handle this by providing clear instructions and necessary resources.
2. Extraneous cognitive load: This results from poorly designed processes or unnecessary distractions. Open decision-making processes—where the rationale behind decisions is shared transparently—reduce extraneous load by clarifying roles, expectations, and workflows.
3. Germane cognitive load: This is the effort that individuals put into learning or problem-solving. Open leaders can promote this by creating environments conducive to continuous learning and personal development, helping team members build the knowledge and skills needed to thrive.

Open leaders minimize extraneous cognitive load by clarifying goals, streamlining processes, and ensuring that teams focus on high-priority tasks.
They also facilitate knowledge sharing, which fosters germane cognitive load, enabling teams to build lasting expertise and capabilities.Additionally, by managing cognitive load effectively, open leaders can help reduce burnout and increase focus, enabling teams to operate at peak efficiency.
This approach is especially relevant in organizations navigating complex transformations, where the ability to balance short-term outputs with long-term outcomes is critical.
Moreover, Agile and Lean methodologies, known for their iterative and incremental approaches, can help reduce extraneous cognitive load by streamlining workflows and simplifying task management.
These methodologies focus on delivering value in small, manageable increments, which allows teams to avoid becoming overwhelmed by large, complex projects.

Design Thinking complements this by encouraging teams to understand problems deeply before jumping into solutions, ensuring the focus remains on solving the right problem in the right way.
Together, these methods allow open leaders to structure their teams for success by reducing cognitive burden and promoting innovation.

## Outcome vs. output: Shifting the focus
A key component of open leadership is the shift from focusing on outputs (e.g., deliverables, features) to focusing on outcomes (e.g., the real impact or results of the work).
In product-driven organizations, this distinction is critical.
High-performance teams don’t simply deliver work; they ensure that their efforts are aligned with strategic goals and that the solutions they create have meaningful impacts on users and the business.
Agile and Lean methodologies help maintain this outcome-focused mindset by encouraging continuous feedback loops with users and stakeholders.
This ensures that teams remain aligned with business priorities and can pivot quickly when necessary, making the organization's efforts more adaptable and responsive.

## Team topologies: Structuring for success
In their book *Team Topologies*, authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais argue that in "product-driven" organizations, teams are aligned with specific product lines or customer-facing services, allowing for more direct impact on business outcomes.
In contrast, platform-driven organizations organize teams around the internal *platforms* that support multiple products or services.

According to Skelton and Pais, key team structures within Team Topologies include:

* Stream-aligned teams: These are end-to-end teams aligned to a specific product or service stream. They are empowered to make decisions and work autonomously, delivering value without being bogged down by excessive dependencies on other teams.
* Enabling teams: These teams support stream-aligned teams by providing expertise, training, and resources to help solve complex problems, thus reducing cognitive load.
* Platform teams: In platform-driven organizations, platform teams develop and maintain internal tools and services that enable product teams to move faster and focus on core product development without having to reinvent shared solutions.

It must be emphasized that "stream-aligned teams" are a central focus of *Team Topologies*.
These teams are structured to work autonomously, delivering value without excessive dependencies on other teams.
Open leadership supports the development of such teams by empowering them to make decisions, fostering collaboration, and minimizing cognitive overload through transparency and clearly defined workflows.
Open leaders need to be adept at guiding teams through these structures, ensuring that psychological safety is maintained, cognitive load is managed, and teams can focus on delivering high-impact work.
Research on team topologies suggests that organizational design plays a crucial role in how effectively open leadership principles are implemented.
The Team Topologies framework provides a model for structuring teams to optimize for flow and reduce dependencies, designing and managing teams that reduce cognitive load and enhance collaboration.

Open leaders can leverage these concepts to build high-performance teams, particularly in product-driven organizations where speed, agility, and innovation are crucial.
In my role at Red Hat as Principal Open Leadership Coach and product owner, for example, I had the first-hand experience of testing the stream-aligned team concept to create the "Open Leadership for Product Teams workshop."
Using practices from the Open Practice Library, in two sprints we were able to lay the groundwork for establishing the mission and objectives of the workshop, create the first iteration of the workshop flow, structure and organize the content, identify the measures of success and be ready for a test-run in the shortest amount of time.
By structuring teams in alignment with these topologies, open leaders can reduce the friction caused by handoffs and dependencies, thereby boosting performance and increasing the speed of innovation.
This approach aligns with the principles of open decision-making—where decisions are made transparently, with input from all relevant stakeholders, and where the rationale behind those decisions is clearly communicated to the team.
This focus on team topologies and thoughtful organizational design enables teams to move more quickly and with greater certainty, even in complex environments.

## Open decision making: Enhancing transparency and trust
Open decision making represents a transformative approach to organizational leadership, particularly within complex and dynamic environments.
And it is a hallmark of open leadership.
Open decision-making refers to the process of sharing not only outcomes of leaders' decisions themselves but also the underlying logic and considerations behind those decisions.
This transparency ensures that team members understand why certain choices are made, even if they were not directly involved in the decision-making process.
By elucidating the rationale, open leaders build trust and alignment, further enhancing the psychological safety within the team.
Moreover, open decision-making reduces cognitive load by minimizing ambiguity.
When people are clear about the factors influencing decisions, they can make better-informed contributions to future initiatives and avoid unnecessary speculation.
This practice is particularly beneficial in product-driven organizations where cross-functional collaboration is key to innovation.

Open decision making, defined by the Open Decision Framework, emphasizes transparency, inclusivity, and customer-centricity.
It involves clearly communicating problems, requirements, and constraints to all stakeholders, fostering a collaborative environment where diverse opinions and feedback are actively sought and integrated into the decision-making process.
By managing relationships and expectations across competing needs, open decision making ensures that decisions are well-informed and aligned with organizational goals and values (Open Decision Framework, n.d.).

We can observe a prime illustration of open decision making in many open source software communities.
In such environments, decisions about software development are often made through collaborative discussions where contributions are valued based on their relative effectiveness and merit rather than the organization's hierarchy.
For instance, the development of the Linux kernel, spearheaded by Linus Torvalds, exemplifies this approach.
Contributions from developers around the world are reviewed through a transparent process where the best ideas, regardless of their origin, are incorporated into the final product.
This meritocratic system not only accelerates innovation but also aligns with the principles of open decision-making by involving a global community in shaping the software's evolution (Open Decision Framework, n.d.).

Implementing open decision-making practices can significantly enhance organizational effectiveness by promoting transparency and engagement.
For leaders, this means facilitating an environment where team members and stakeholders are encouraged to participate in the decision-making process, thereby fostering a sense of ownership and alignment with organizational objectives.
By embracing open decision making, organizations can build stronger, more resilient teams that are better equipped to navigate complex challenges and drive sustained success.

## Toward more resilient teams

Open leadership is not merely a management style but a transformative approach to building high-impact, high-performance teams.
By embedding principles of psychological safety, managing cognitive load, and practicing open decision-making, leaders can create resilient, adaptable teams capable of delivering meaningful outcomes.
In doing so, they shift the focus from simply completing tasks (outputs) to achieving impactful results (outcomes), aligning their organizations with the demands of modern, agile, and innovative environments.

## References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.

Open Decision Framework. (n.d.). What is an open decision? Retrieved from https://github.com/open-organization/open-decision-framework/blob/master/ODF-community.md#what-is-an-open-decision

Skelton, M., & Pais, M. (2019). Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. IT Revolution Press.

Whitehurst, J. (2015). The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. Harvard Business Review Press.