How Do Agile Leaders Support Self-Organizing Teams - Mike Cohn

How Do Agile Leaders Support Self-Organizing Teams

This week, I want to talk about the leader’s role regarding self-organizing teams.
Influence, Don’t Command
I got introduced to agile principles and practices back in the 1990s before people had formalized the term agile. I was leading software teams then, and just like now, I read every book I could get my hands on about how to be better at my job.
One I enjoyed was Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions. The authors, Peter DeGrace and Leslie Stahl, had read the original paper on Scrum by Takeuchi and Nonaka in the Harvard Business Review.
So DeGrace and Stahl wrote about how in an agile approach like Scrum, leaders are still exerting control over teams. But here’s the key as they saw it: much of that control is “subtle and indirect.” In fact, it’s so subtle and indirect that influence may be a more accurate term than control.
Agile leaders influence teams by the goals they pick, but they also influence teams in other ways, including via the team composition itself.
Suppose you’ve got a software team and their goal is to finish an app and then hand it over to an ops group that will install it. So your team isn’t charged with deploying the software, just getting it ready for deployment.
Now imagine you decide to put a DevOps engineer on that team. That team will behave differently with an Ops person in the mix. I have no idea if they’ll behave better or worse (it’s going to depend on a lot of things) but I know they will do things differently. So team constitution is one way to influence.
Leaders also have a tremendous influence on teams just by how they answer questions such as:

• How big of a problem do we give the team?
• How clearly have we defined the problem?

And that’s not a bad thing. Leaders are there to lead. When a manager exerts influence, someone might think, “Oh no, they’re moving toward command and control.” But I disagree. Agile leaders have not only the right, but also the responsibility to exert their influence to help teams thrive. But that influence should be, as DeGrace and Stahl wrote, subtle and indirect.
Recognizing the subtle ways they can bring out the best in teams will help leaders (and their organizations) succeed with agile.

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