Chapter 20. Leadership and the mature team
Roy’s second chapter about the three team phases rings true in my experience as a team member, project leader, and development manager, but still it touches a red button of mine! I’m grateful to Roy for his gracious offer to let me respond.
My red button? I worry about the Agile community’s recent focus on self-management. Don’t get me wrong; self-management’s a good thing, but in its current popular usage it has two problems:
- It fails to satisfactorily capture the powerful concept (borrowed from the study of systems) of self-organization.
- There seems to be a move in the community to minimize the role of leadership.
Self-organization’s at the heart of agile methods; indeed, it’s the 11th of the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Definitions vary, but, in this context, it describes the ability of a system (here, the project team) to create ways to increase its effectiveness.
Looking at the team from the outside, we see emergence—new behaviors arising without external intervention. In the Scrum con-text this might happen as a result of team retrospectives (the 12th principle) or through the individual contributions of team members. Either way, it’s important to recognize that some of these new behaviors (or innovations) may be highly nonstandard.
Whether from within or without, leadership takes the team to places it’d otherwise never have reached, perhaps never even have considered. This can be in terms of the team’s internal structures or its external goals, but, in the absence of leadership, it’s a rare thing for a team to take itself out of its comfort zone, to redefine its approach to the outside world, perhaps even to completely reinvent itself.
Here’s the paradox: good leadership encourages emergence, but the leader must also be ready to take the team out of the niche it has carved out for itself. Yes, self-management is needed at every level (without it, the leader only has time for management), but we need the humility to recognize its limits. Now, there’s true maturity!
Roy’s analysis
This note rings true, in that I’ve led teams that were self-organizing, but yet were unaware that there were things they didn’t know, but needed to know:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.
Donald Rumsfeld
Insofar as a team is aware of the things it knows, and even of the things it knows it doesn’t know, a team will always have unknown unknowns; and without some outside catalyst to learning, a team can stay unaware of possible improvements.
I feel that a leader in a self-organizing phase has the primary responsibility to watch out for when a team might believe they’re self-organizing, when, in fact, they’re missing some important skill or knowledge, and to push them into a learning phase to start learning the missing skill.
I once led a team of pros. They all knew what they were doing, but they were operating in a narrow field of software. Main SCM: Configuration Management. The organization didn’t know it, but that team needed to transcend its current abilities and start supporting more than source control and builds. I pushed them into a much larger view of software processes, including automation, testing, cloud activities, monitoring, security, and more.
The team wasn’t aware these were activities that somehow would need to sit in their lap, or that they’d benefit the organization. That also means not everyone’s going to love all these changes, and people might feel that their expertise might be “thrown away” in order to work on things outside their expertise. This is usually an indicator that people are out of their comfort zone. It’s not a happy place, but it’s a passionate place and an important one, and it needs to happen for a team to grow and transcend its current abilities.
MIKE BURROWS (http://twitter.com/asplake) is well known to the Kanban community through his definitive book Kanban from the Inside (Blue Hole Press, 2014) and his blog (http://positiveincline.com). Now a consultant, interim manager, and trainer, he has been a global development manager and IT director, and was for a time responsible for Kanban curriculum development at Lean Kanban University.