Enabling Teams: When Bottom-Up Beats Top-Down

Analyse the options. Build the plan. Communicate the decision. But for Timur, Release Train Engineer at Mercedes-Benz.io, one of the most valuable lessons in organisational change came from doing the opposite.

Timur Irgac

Release Train Engineer|MB.ioneer since September 2023

Fun fact:

At home, Timur practices radical bottom-up leadership daily - his baby decides, he aligns.

When involving people changes the outcome

The ART was evolving. Products with closely related goals were moving towards a more unified approach, and with that came discussions about roadmaps, collaboration models and team setup.

As often happens, leadership began exploring possible options. From the outside, one direction appeared particularly compelling. Similar models had worked elsewhere, the rationale seemed sound, and alignment looked achievable.

But before moving forward, a simple question emerged: What if the teams experienced the situation differently?

“Informing means something has already been decided,” Timur explains. “You can ask for feedback, but the ship has already sailed — and unless something groundbreaking comes back, nothing will change”

True involvement, however, requires a different mindset.

“Involving means the answer is still open.”

Rather than presenting a solution, leadership decided to share the challenge itself.

Seeing the problem from a different perspective

The teams were given the same scenarios leadership had been discussing. “Same context, same objective. The expectation wasn’t agreement — it was understanding.” What happened next surprised the leadership group.

Not a single team selected the option leadership had favoured.

While leadership looked at the challenge from a strategic perspective, teams examined it through the reality of their daily collaboration. The concerns they raised were not immediately visible from the outside but became obvious once viewed from inside the delivery organisation.

“It made sense rationally when viewed from the outside,” Timur recalls. “But from the teams’ perspective, the impact on collaboration would have created problems.”

The discussion that followed wasn’t about proving who was right but about understanding what each perspective could contribute.

When ownership becomes commitment

The teams ultimately proposed a different way forward: “Not a different goal, not a rejection of the vision - simply a different path to reach it. Leadership listened, and the proposal was adopted.”

Looking back, Timur believes the most important outcome wasn’t the decision itself. It was the commitment that followed.

People weren’t being asked to support someone else’s solution. They were helping build their own.

“Waiting for perfect consensus is rarely realistic,” he says. “At some point you need to move forward, learn and adapt.”

Because the teams had participated in shaping the decision, moving forward became easier: ownership already existed.

What enablement actually means

For Timur, this experience changed the way he thinks about enablement.

Many organisations focus on communication once a decision is made. Far fewer focus on creating the conditions that allow people to influence the decision before it happens.

That requires trust on both sides: Teams need trust to speak honestly, and Leadership needs to have the willingness to hear something unexpected.

“One side needs the courage to speak,” Timur says. “The other side needs to be open enough to listen.”

When that happens, bottom-up decision-making stops being a theory or a slide in a presentation – it becomes a practical way to make better decisions.