Leadership problems: Agile Teams & Individuals

“If an organization has good leadership, everything else will follow. If an organization has bad leadership, no methodology or set of rules will save you”. (Agile 2)

Ethos of teams

In agile practices and communities, the team is the center point, agile communities swoon over the ethos of the team, and fixate that this is the driving force of happiness and performance, although the manifesto, begins with 'Individuals', it does not begin with Teams. Highly popularized by Agile culture, 'Self-organizing teams' where a team can be self-organizing in some ways of work, but in others are simply not. Agile coaches discourage any kind of individual recognition and in their practice, only a team should be recognized for its success.

Everyone is equal and anyone can do it!

What Agile practitioners fail to recognize is the consideration of people and that they are in fact, individuals with motivations, desires, interests, and of course, demands. In Agile, the theory of advocating that everyone is equal and anyone can work on anything mindset, for me, this transcend to anything but chaos for a startup, a small medium-sized company, or even the larger corporations beginning their transformation journey. If we add in the mix of Technical competence, it' is impossible to say that anyone can work on anything and everyone is equal.

Engineering a nuclear powerplant anyone?

Imagine managing resources and putting your best engineers to work at a nuclear power plant who are in fact qualified for the task at hand, you would think that this is a no-brainer, and is mandatory, yet promoting agile, where everyone is equal and anyone can work on anything mindset, creates numbness in practical implementation, in reality, following this principle if we use the same example, imagine putting someone that is ill-qualified into a nuclear powerplant and getting to solve a rather complex set of problems with the array of other individuals in the group that can guide, may just not be the smartest thing to do, my mind speaks chaos when I think of this hypothetical.

Agile is not one way or other, there are lots of grey areas, of the guideline and should only be used as a guideline, to stimulate rapid yet value-driven software development.

Who are the leaders in an Agile team?

In Agile, leadership in a team is usually designated to the Scrum Master, their role is to keep the peace and to facilitate by removing barriers, shielding, ensuring that practices of scrum are met, coaching removing impediments to the development teams.

Mindset on Servant leadership

The Scrum Master acts as the Team Leader, but what we fail to understand is even though the notion of the Scrum master's role is to be a servant leader for the scrum team, we fail to realize that they have very little authority over anything besides from ensuring the practice of scrum. So out the window, Authority and power, negotiating on the teams' behalf can and usually be done by non-other the other inside person in the team and that's with the Product Owner, where brokering deals might be prevalent in some people where others are not.

The Product Owner provides product leadership

I always like to think of the role as a product owner and the expectations of what this means of being a product leader at the same time; the Product Owner is a person of action that works inside the team and a person of action outside the team, in a large organization with multiple teams and multiple products, you might be the product manager of a lot of different products at the same time, yes, this has happened to me and within navigating large structures, approvals and sign-offs are key yet bargaining and negotiating is a must-have skill set to influence your way with departments, managers and executives.

Fragmented leadership

Sometimes, the roles defined in this organization and the responsibilities required to fulfill them, like accountability or ownership in meeting time, deliverables, and valuable outcomes, can become highly conflicting, managers want one thing, developers want another, the scrum master serves the team, without high visibility in company mandates and the product owner is the one that focuses on the customer, fragmented.

Degrees of Leadership and Authority

Having leaders that are available to help teams resolve conflicts is essential and conflict is a natural process of business, yet leadership requires explicit authority, and whilst respect is mutually equal and equality is the state of mind, decision making is not. The degrees of authority and the importance of influencing, challenging, and delegating are all parts of formal or informal forms of power.

Individual contribution matters as much as the team contribution

I believe that contribution from the team and contribution of individuals is what I like to recognize, although as a Product Owner, often my responsibilities of team development and coaching is not officially what a Product Owner does nor is it my responsibility to chime in a do so, and yet I systematically always fall into this and typically end up coaching them for far greater hiatus on career development, conflict resolution or self-improvement.

People are individuals and the team is the group, it is important to recognize that individual contribution is as important to the team's collective contribution. Recognition and personal accountability, and personal ownership is key to successful team operations, without this, we won't be able to have or achieve 'self-organizing but before this can happen.

Key Takeaways

Product leaders need to partner with organizational members and scrum masters, to ensure that the right people are doing their best work and they remain happy, what I do believe is there is no one-size-fits-all set of values or practices what I want to believe is that leadership no matter to the role, is a directive, with authority, empowerment, praise, critical feedback, and collaboration and that as great as Agile is to implement, there are just a few more key points to add into the manifesto and I hope that the community is open to enhancing its guiding principles to include individual contributions and empowerment with authority.