The leadership problem

In product development there is a lot of focus on the value creating units, the teams. As many products are developed in a complex context with a certain degree of uncertainty, teams should apply emergent development practices. Teams also should make decision out of their context rather than developing a product based decisions they didn’t make or where not involved in. Teams already get good support in order to do so by adding roles like Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches. What is often forgotten about, is to also adapt the environment that the team is working in. The consequence is that, once teams reach a certain maturity regarding emergent and self-organized way of working, conflicts with regards to the team’s environment occur. This has several reasons that are usually not rooted in the team but carried out on the back of the team.

What’s the problem?

In simple words, the team’s environment needs to undergo similar changes as what is expected from the team. The team can’t adopt a way of working which is fundamentally different, while the environment around the team maintains the same way of working. In start-ups or smaller businesses this is probably not a huge issue. In organizations of a certain size there will be issues with that approach. As mentioned, teams get support to change their way of working with adding new roles, classic agile roles are Product Owners and Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches or similar.

What I haven’t seen considered seriously is to also support the teams environment, management at all levels, stakeholders and maybe even customers. It might be that I have joined difficult environments, but as I saw many organization over the last decade I assume that the problem of neglecting the teams environment is common. From my experience the cases that teams have an experienced or mature Scrum Master, Agile Coach or Product Owner are also rare. With experience or mature I refer not only to agility, self-organization of a team but also experience in political environments, hierarchical organization structures, human dynamics and relationships. Most supporting roles are able to teach a team to work incrementally and iterative with focus on small changes in order to achieve value or solve problems. There seems also be good coverage when it comes to support a team on their journey to self-organization, but when it comes to talking to management on eye level for example, most organizations seem not set up well. Reasons here might be a wide variety from people not willing to change to regulations that don’t allow self-organization or incremental product development in small batches.

What’s needed?

Let’s assume and organization is willing to adopt together with their teams and regulations allow that. How should management, or preferably leaders change? What skills should they have and apply? Well, that’s a fairly small set of skills if you just name them (which I’ll do just below). If you consider traditional leaders, or better managers, coordinates, dispatchers the change to become a nowadays leader is tremendous. Well, as promised, what I believe a leader should bring to an organization, especially the value crating units (teams):

• they should motivate and inspire in order to create common purpose
• they should coach in order to lead people and teams
• they should support and organize for optimal outcome
• they should enable relationships and networking in order to leverage group wisdom

As mentioned, this sound simple but is difficult to turn to reality for many people. In a transformation journey of a team, you’ll need some patience until you really see the outcome of that leadership styles and as mentioned in the beginning in needs to go hand in hand with the team’s transformation. As I have worked in such environments (only if its just a few times) I can assure you, once you get there it is fun and you’ll achieve great products.

What else?

Usually managers in the past had also other responsibilities, such as budgeting, administrative tasks maybe some operative work and what not. Well, if you are serious about self-organization you won’t face any issues with distributing this to the right people. Actually I believe that it would make everyone’s life easier if this is not tied to a single person but distributed in the whole group (I’m referring to team and leaders together). It is important that these things are done and that they are done right, not so much who does these additional tasks. This needs clear accountability as well but this is another topic than what I wanted to talk about in this post.