Where juniors are a superpower

When a team’s ways of working actively support the inclusion of its least experienced members, everyone benefits.

Open teams — teams that work in ways that let even the least experienced members move important work forward.*

It takes intent to make work accessible. The pressures of busy work environments make the habit of doing just enough to tick boxes more appealing and far more common.

But this behaviour has another effect: it creates and fosters silos. Knowledge and abilities which are limited to those who do them most often.

When a junior joins a team who are focused on personal completion of a task list, they can be seen as a distraction and frustration. Feelings are mixed about the new member’s ability to support the team, and their need to be trained and looked after.

But open teams confidently and authentically welcome new startes. There’s no need to manage the mixture of feelings that are more commonly evoked.

Automation

When a junior joins a new team, they’re often handed the type of tasks that should have been automated. Work that requires limited training and likely has to be repeated regularly isn’t a great fit for a human.

Happily, juniors are perfect for spotting and highlighting this type of work.

I’ve seen juniors take the lead several times on the prioritisation, planning and automation of what began as their own todo list.

Everything left after these automation planning efforts — thus requiring human input to get it done — can and should be considered as potential work of juniors. All of it.

Mindset

That statement isn’t always well received. People panic.

If all the work of a team should be considered for potential to hand to a junior, they assume it means that more experienced team members would be seen as less valuable and so dispensable.

That’s not exactly what I’m suggesting. I’m simply saying that it should all be considered.

Coming at the question of ‘what should juniors be doing?’ from the direction of slow-elimination rather than slow-addition allows greater potential to be explored and evaluated.

If every task a team is responsible for goes through a gradual review which asks ‘why can a junior not complete this?’ it surfaces all sorts of tribal knowledge, potential for automation and hidden risks.

All the things in the most fragile layers of delivery are revealed. Tribal Ops.

Reasons, reasons and more reasons

There are a few standard reasons I hear for gatekeeping responsibilities instead of sharing them with junior team members, but two come up most often.

Trust. Access is often restricted for junior team members initially. As trust grows in them, in their approach and their abilities, more access is granted. They’re not seen as trusted.

Ability. Where a task is complicated, those with tribal knowledge own that work. Less experienced team members become capable only after absorbing it through osmosis. They’re not seen as able.

Neither of these reasons is based on the possible, only on the present.

Unlike the trust of individuals, the level of trust a junior is granted by a team or an organisation is a choice made in its systems. Yet ensuring people are trustworthy should be part of their recruitment. Processes and systems should further mitigate the need to build trust in their abilities.

Assigning complicated tasks to junior team members works just fine where good documentation and solid systems exist.

Juniors are shielded from complicated work not through their own weaknesses, but because of the fragility of the existing ways of working.

Limitations

The genuine limiting factor for junior team members is task complexity.

Work that requires knowledge to enable relevant logic and decision making, and where choices need to be made based on personal experience.

In these situations, juniors are best to play a learning role. Asking questions and helping with alignment between other experienced individuals.

Where to start

So given the opportunity to open up large amounts of a team’s responsibilities to its junior members, with the overarching benefit of making all work easier to progress for everyone, where should they start?

In a team that’s willing to accept that only complex work needs to be limited to those with more experience, the best place to start is by flagging the work that could be made available.

Look first for tasks that feel closed to juniors because of habit, not necessity. Work that depends on proximity, memory, or the judgement of one experienced person. Anywhere the phrase “it’ll be quicker if I do it” tends to appear.

Invite juniors to help uncover these patterns. Have them map the work, note the blockers, and suggest where documentation or automation could open things up. Treat their fresh perspective as diagnostic — not of them, but of the team’s systems.

Over time, as these constraints are surfaced and reduced, you’ll see two shifts: more work becomes accessible to everybody, and juniors gain real ownership earlier. That’s the starting line for an open team.

Building your open team

Open teams don’t happen by accident. They’re intentional.

They build systems and habits that make it easy for everyone to learn, contribute and succeed. The more this becomes part of daily work, the less effort it takes to maintain.

The teams that do this well don’t wait for juniors to “earn” trust or prove themselves ready. They create environments where trust is built in — through clear documentation, transparent decision making, and thoughtful automation. The need to rely on memory and proximity disappears.

Senior people become more valuable, not less. Their time and attention shift from gatekeeping and firefighting to improving systems, mentoring, and solving the genuinely complex work.

The juniors grow quickly, because they’re working in a space that expects their success and is ready to support it.

The result is a team that scales effortlessly. When new people join, the system holds. When experienced people move on, strength remains.

The strongest teams don’t protect juniors from the real work. They make the real work safe for everyone to do.

The real test of a team is whether its juniors can make progress without barriers.

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*I’m aware of a semi-clash with the concept of open organisations, so this name may change.

Header image by Camylla Battani / Unsplash