Agile / Management
I was planning on starting a series on Agile / Management (the slash is deliberate – I’ll explain later) this week, and got a message from a subscriber (I do love you for sending them!!) that’s wildly on point.
No. Bad idea! Why silo improvement? A dedicated team is a terrible idea! No more elite teams that dictate other teams. This just creates politics and a hostile work environment. Let self organization and reorganization handle this. That is what scrum is all about.
‘Elite teams that dictate to other teams’ pretty much sums up many agilists’ view of managers, so let’s use this as a springboard.
I’ll give you the tl;dr. I’m intrigued by the idea of ‘managerless’ organizations, but I doubt their feasibility – and to an extent, their value. I do think that we need to move management into a different kind of lane, and that a combination of host management and manager-as-coach would give us a lot of improvement. I also think we need to decide – as agilists – if we are reformers or revolutionaries.
I have interviewed agilists who say they don’t want to coach teams that haven’t voluntarily chosen to go agile – that management doesn’t have to right to tell the team how to work. That’s a revolutionary view of transformation; and while I think we’re about creating more and more workplace empowerment, I gotta question how that will work.
A good friend worked as a tech leader at a large cutting-edge company. Teams had a free hand: pick a methodology, pick a cadence, pick your tools. At first, it was great – teams were energized and productive. But…as the work got more complex and the work of the teams became more and more interrelated, friction built and built. Aligning work for integrated delivery became more and more of a struggle – until the org pivoted, built a PMO, and decided to standardize on tooling and cadence.
I’m not – by nature – a revolutionary. Bad things happen, and success is rare. I’m a fan of what Taleb calls ‘Lindy’ – having a measure of respect for things that have endured – even when you don’t understand why. And hierarchical organizations have a kind of a long history in human affairs. If perfectly flat organizations could outcompete them – they’d have done it. (Big carveout here for a cyclical theory of organizational ‘ossification’ – again, more later).
And as far as organizational transformations are concerned, the numbers support me; ‘big bang’ transformations fail far more often than they succeed, and in my view do far more damage to organizations and the people who depend on them than can be justified by the few successes they deliver.
So I’m not an agilist who thinks our role is – in a 3 to 18 month engagement – to pull down the superstructure of management that the modern organization seems to have grown, and liberate the people doing the work from the ‘oppressive structures’ (note the scare quotes) that rob them of agency, control, and too often, success.
I see the conflict between control and autonomy somewhat differently. There is a constant tension between two impulses in people: our impulse for fairness and our impulse for hierarchy. Jonathan Haidt’s great book ‘The Righteous Mind’ talks about this:
The Liberty foundation obviously operates in tension with the Authority foundation. We all recognize some kinds of authority as legitimate in some contexts, but we are also wary of those who claim to be leaders unless they have first earned our trust. We’re vigilant for signs that they’ve crossed the line into self-aggrandizement and tyranny.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind (p. 201).
It’s a big book both physically and conceptually, and it’s definitely well worth reading. And in understanding organizations and how to improve them, it offers some strong clues.
One of the things it talks about is what he calls “hive state”
We are like chimps in being primates whose minds were shaped by the relentless competition of individuals with their neighbors. We are descended from a long string of winners in the game of social life. This is why we are Glauconians, usually more concerned about the appearance of virtue than the reality (as in Glaucon’s story about the ring of Gyges). But human nature also has a more recent groupish overlay. We are like bees in being ultrasocial creatures whose minds were shaped by the relentless competition of groups with other groups. We are descended from earlier humans whose groupish minds helped them cohere, cooperate, and outcompete other groups. That doesn’t mean that our ancestors were mindless or unconditional team players; it means they were selective. Under the right conditions, they were able to enter a mind-set of “one for all, all for one” in which they were truly working for the good of the group, and not just for their own advancement within the group.
The Righteous Mind (p. 258).
We want to activate that state in our organizations - and that’s a big part of what I believe the ‘managerless’ advocates are seeking. Can we do it without eliminating management? Should we? To be sure, some folks on the managerless side are passionate about eliminating hierarchy – that’s the outcome they’re seeking. But I believe for the most part what they are seeking is that “working for the good of the group” state.
What if we could get that by just changing management? What if we move managers from “Command and Control” to “In Command and Out of Control”?
In this model, leaders can set context, strategic direction, can invite people to act, decide, or help. But leaders don’t direct action. They support and mentor – they coach – people. What does this look like?
There are two aspects that I think matter; one is the notion of host leadership. I know I keep talking about it.
The shortcomings of existing metaphors of leadership based on the leader-as-hero are becoming increasingly clear. A clear-cut alternative, leader-as-servant (from the works of Robert Greenleaf), also suffers from problems of misinterpretation and lack of apparent relevance.
A host is someone who receives or entertains guests. Host sometimes have to act heroically; stepping forward, planning, inviting, introducing, providing. They also act in service – stepping back, encouraging, giving space, joining in. The host can be seen encompassing aspects of both and the movement between them. Hosting has ancient roots and is found across all cultures. We all know good hosting (and good guesting) at an instinctive gut level, and his carries over into leading groups of all types and sizes – at organisational level (corporate, public, community), at team/group level and even at a personal level…
One of the things I like about this model is that it contains a readily accessible model of followership – being a good guest.
Haidt talks about hives leaders, and followers:
In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership) generates more social capital—the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms. Hivish employees work harder, have more fun, and are less likely to quit or to sue the company. Unlike Homo economicus, they are truly team players.
What can leaders do to create more hivish organizations? The first step is to stop thinking so much about leadership. One group of scholars has used multilevel selection to think about what leadership really is. Robert Hogan, Robert Kaiser, and Mark van Vugt argue that leadership can only be understood as the complement of followership. Focusing on leadership alone is like trying to understand clapping by studying only the left hand. They point out that leadership is not even the more interesting hand; it’s no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow.
The Righteous Mind (pp. 275-276).
What he talks about seems to align perfectly well with host leadership. What does followership look like in the context of servant leadership? Can you articulate it comprehensibly and neatly?
The other model is that of a leader as coach. One failing I see in the typical agile or lean transformation is that we assemble a cadre of external and internal experts and bolt them into the organization. This never lasts.
What I’m imagining now would be a model where a company makes the kinds of change leadership we typically offer as consultants a key part of every manager’s job.
Our role as change agents then becomes helping define an adaptable strategy for change (see “Offramps”) that segments the implementation (see “Sketching an Alternative SAFe Implementation Path”). Then we work with existing managers as a part of that plan to reshape their management model toward ‘host leadership’ and coaching models of management.
I’m calling that ‘Agile / Management’ because I think the slash can signify balance between the two. That balancing is what I think we need to support.