6. Leaders, Everywhere
One of the hallmarks of an agile organization is a minimum of hierarchy, coupled with autonomy for teams to do whatever it takes to deliver value for customers. Chapter 5 highlighted how this creates tension in the traditional organization’s management hierarchy, as managers feel threatened by having their authority undermined. The case study also illustrated the benefits of helping agile teams to self-organize, which allowed the case study team to apply what they had learned to help quickly solve challenging problems that the traditional management hierarchy hadn’t anticipated and to which it couldn’t respond.
For organizations to achieve enterprise agility, they have to let go of the idea that leadership is a quality that is possessed by a very small group of people, and embrace the idea that nearly everyone is born with leadership capabilities. Circumstances in combination with the right leadership style will determine if these capabilities will emerge. The role of the agile leader, in this new organization, is to help grow the ability of people in the organization to exercise leadership.
Nurturing and Growing an Agile Organization
We gave a glimpse of the team formation process in Chapter 2, focusing on team member self-selection and team self-management. A more complete picture of team formation needs to include stakeholders, because without their support and engagement, agile teams are unable to function effectively when they have to work with other parts of the organization. Stakeholders need to buy into not only team self-management, but also the agile development approach that delivers small increments of working product at frequent intervals to real customers. If they don’t, the agile team will wither from lack of support and start merely “faking” agility.
These stakeholders must have the respect of the rest of the organization as well. They will need to ask others in the organization for help on behalf of the team, and if they cannot “call in favors” to get things done, the agile team will also languish. In addition, agile teams will engage with people throughout the organization who can help to provide information, but they need well-placed, politically influential stakeholders to help clear obstacles and to provide guidance. When agile teams fail, it is often because they lack senior leadership’s support for what they are trying to accomplish.
Agile teams often fail due to a lack of senior leadership’s support.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, team members should not be assigned to teams; they need to choose to be part of a team. That goes for stakeholders, too. If people really don’t buy into the idea of letting teams self-manage, or if they don’t want to work with the other team members, they won’t fully engage. Worse, they may even undermine the team’s work, albeit possibly unintentionally.
During the team-building workshop, it should be acceptable to have a potential team member or stakeholder decide that they don’t want to be a part of the team or the initiative. Establishing this permission can be challenging in organizational cultures that reward “positive attitude.” A skilled facilitator with experience in team self-selection may have to help surface the concerns if they perceive that someone is not fully engaged, and they must create space for team members and stakeholders to disengage if they feel that’s what is best for them.
The third column of Figure 6.2 shows an important way that organizations break down their silos. Instead of having separate NOC and Billing teams, with accompanying coordination challenges, the GSS, Customer Self-Service, and Grid Management teams simply need to have people with Billing and NOC expertise available when they need them. These people temporarily join the teams to provide expertise and skills that the teams lack. They leave the teams when they are no longer needed, either because the need has passed or because they helped the teams to grow their own expertise.
The key to making this work is the phrase “available when they need them.” When agile teams have to file a request and wait for someone to become available to help them, they experience delays that render them ineffective. Agile leaders need to work with teams to anticipate their demands for scarce skills, and then find ways to make the right people available at the right time.
Organizational Silos Impede Agility and Productivity
Traditional organizations build teams around sets of related skills. Such teams are sometimes referred to as “silos” because they tend to stand alone, only loosely connected to other silos. These silos exist because the organization believes that having specialized skills is valuable, and that managing a particular set of specialized skills requires a unique focus, one that is different from managing a different set of skills. Once the organization goes down this path, it will promote employees within these areas of skill specialization.
This siloed organization produces several unhappy results:
It discourages employees from developing broadly cross-functional skills.
It makes forming and growing cross-functional teams almost impossible because a cross-functional team formed of specialists would be too large to be effective.
It results in teams composed of part-time members, which slows down work. Since a cross-functional team of specialists leaves most team members idle at any one time, organizations that try to form teams with specialist members almost always have people belong to multiple teams. The more teams a person is on, the more scheduling conflicts they will experience, resulting in large amounts of idle time spent waiting to work with other team members.
It also results in a promotional reward system that favors narrow, specialized skills over cross-functional, generalist skills.
No wonder traditional organizations take a very long time to get a very small amount of work done! And no wonder that cross-functional teams are so difficult to sustain over time; the system is rigged against them.
Cross-Functional Teams Improve Productivity, but Still Need Support
Agile teams solve these problems by forming cross-functional teams and encouraging their team members to further broaden and deepen their skills. This reduces wait time and improves the team’s ability to get work done quickly.
Such cross-functionality has limits because a team must remain fairly small, typically having no more than nine members, to remain effective, and there are only so many things at which a person can be truly skilled. In addition, there will always be deep skills that may require years of training to master, and that will not make sense for a team member to acquire. Examples include skills in the law, in medicine, in engineering, and in other technical areas.
The solution to this problem is illustrated by the third column in Figure 6.2: The people with scarce but important skills must, in a sense, support the agile teams, waiting for opportunities to help the teams with work they need to do. This is comparable to a firefighter who eagerly waits for the moment to resolve a possible crisis, but also helps people to avoid the crisis in the first place by giving fire-prevention advice. This model differs from the traditional model in an important way: In the agile model, specialists wait on agile teams to serve them when they need help, while in the traditional model, agile teams wait on specialists to become available. While specialists are often highly paid, having them be idle sometimes is much more cost-effective than having entire teams wait.
The key to making the agile-specialist model work is that enough specialists need to be available so that agile teams don’t have to wait. This results in an uncomfortable situation for both the specialists and the organization’s management: They have to become comfortable with having highly paid people who are waiting for work to come to them. Choosing the right number of specialists means balancing specialist waiting time against agile team waiting time to reach an optimal balance.
Specialist “Downtime” Can Be Used to Improve Team Effectiveness
Specialists with some kinds of scarce skills can use the time they would otherwise spend waiting by being helpful—that is, by building solutions that can help the teams support themselves:
Software security specialists can build automated tests that can be added to continuous integration automation to catch common flaws early in the delivery process. The same can be done for many other concerns, such as performance, reliability, scalability, and other aspects of product quality.2
2. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss continuous software integration and delivery practices. For an excellent introduction to these concepts and practices, see https://continuousdelivery.com/.
Legal professionals can organize or create educational materials on topics that can help educate agile team members on basic concepts related to protecting intellectual property, including what they need to do, at a minimum, and when they need to seek professional advice.
Operations professionals can create tools to support automated deployment and can provide frameworks for instrumenting applications for supportability.
Human resources professionals can provide educational materials and guidance to help teams become better at recruitment and team building.
In short, people with specialized skills should be working toward helping agile teams to become more self-sufficient, and to know when to ask for help. Organizations transitioning to an agile working model may want to outsource some of these specialized functions, using outside consultants and coaches to provide flexibility in staffing where proprietary knowledge is not required. The key to making this approach successful is that while asset-building is important, it should always be undertaken in service of helping teams to become more self-sufficient.
Specialists Work Primarily as Teachers, Coaches, and Mentors, Not “Doers”
While it’s easiest for a specialist to simply jump in and “do the work,” that doesn’t help the agile team to improve its self-sufficiency. It’s better if the specialist works with team members to improve their skills so that they can do the work in the future. Practices such as pairing up are a great way to accomplish this goal. Teaching and coaching are the most important skills for specialists who support teams. If the specialist has been accustomed to being an individual contributor in the past, they may need help to improve their teaching and coaching skills. Working with the agile team also offers specialists a growth opportunity to improve their own leadership skills, since leadership typically involves teaching, coaching, and mentoring in both direct and indirect ways.
Leadership Journeys: Developing Leaders Everywhere
One of the most important roles of leaders and specialists in the organization is to make sure that teams have enough opportunities to learn the skills they need to be successful.
Teams that operate in a complex domain will find themselves in continuous need of learning new skills, and leaders need to provide an infrastructure that facilitates this learning. In this way, teams can grow and leaders are created everywhere in the organization.
Leadership is an activity, not a role, and the role of leaders is to help other leaders to grow.
Traditional organizations often outsource their training and education activities, but in a knowledge economy, success strongly depends on each employee’s ability to gain new knowledge and skills. Agile leaders should ask themselves how they can incorporate skills in managing intellectual capital into their teams. In a world where more and more skilled people are changing jobs, employers who understand how to manage their intellectual capital effectively have a competitive advantage.4 The catalytic leadership style (described in Chapter 5 and illustrated in Figure 5.1) is more likely to attract leaders who can contribute to a culture of knowledge sharing and creativity.
4. https://hrexecutive.com/one-in-4-workers-plans-to-quit-post-pandemic/.
In organizations that rely on self-organizing teams, professionals often need to embark on a lifelong learning journey in which they continuously learn new skills.5 An analogy that is often used is a tree, where the trunk represents common knowledge that a person needs on this journey, while the branches and leaves represent specialties and unique skills that keep changing over the course of the individual’s career.
5. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-28868-0_10/.
Figure 6.3 highlights some of the skills that are typically required in an agile environment. As it suggests, different roles will require different skills. Not only do organizations need to provide opportunities for their people to get trained in these skills, but leaders also need to provide learning opportunities for employees to practice, master, and become experts in these skills.
Figure 6.3 Examples of skills required in an agile environment.
Figure 6.4 gives an overview of the different learning methods that can be used to support people and teams on their continuous learning journey.
Figure 6.4 Bloom’s taxonomy describes a set of models, named after Benjamin Bloom, who chaired the committee of educators that devised the taxonomy.
Figure 6.4 shows an overview of models used by educators to design learning methods. While most organizations apply the basic learning methods, they focus less on the learning methods that lead to a higher level of skills. Organizations and leaders who stimulate their employees to apply the higher-level learning methods can expect a boost in their teams’ ability to self-organize and learn new skills faster.
Reward Building Teams and Leadership, Not Silos
It can be hard for some managers to let go of the perceived status that comes with directing other people. Senior leaders can subtly shift the organization’s culture by helping the whole organization see that a leader’s influence extends far beyond their direct management chain and formal authority. Leading is different from managing, especially in the potential positive impact that leaders can create.
In this example, Doreen makes a conscious decision to change the way that managers are rewarded to explicitly recognize the value that leaders can create when they help other people to learn and grow. Traditional management always has an aspect of professional growth, but it tends to emphasize the individual contributions of managers, not the amplified but indirect contribution they make by helping others to become more effective.
During this transition, some managers will feel that their authority, and therefore their status, is being undermined. They may feel undervalued. Some may leave. But those who embrace their new responsibilities as teacher, coach, and mentor will find that their ability to influence the results the organization is able to achieve has been multiplied by the force of all the people whom they help.
Many of us live and work in cultures in which the individual is preeminent, yet the truth is that no one—not even the most capable of individuals—can get much done without the help of others. Our ability to influence the world for good relies on our ability to form teams with others to get things done. Agile leaders create the space for agile teams to form, learn, and grow, so that they, in turn, can exhibit leadership. Agile teams need support, but perhaps even more importantly, they need good examples of how real servant leadership works.
Agile teams need good examples of how real servant leadership works.
Promotional Rewards Lock in Organizational Structures
Organizations throughout history have used promotion as one way to reward people for exceptional performance. Promotions usually confer increased status as well as increases in monetary compensation. Promotions also tend to lock an organization into a particular hierarchical structure that is hard to change when the nature of the work changes.
In the case study, Nick is head of the engineering organization, which in the past has meant that all developers report to Nick’s organization. As Reliable Energy has adopted cross-functional teams, many people may have development skills who are not necessarily developers. As people acquire diverse skills, the old organizational structure no longer serves the needs of the organization. This creates conflict within the ranks of all the former managers in the engineering organization.
A more flexible model is to focus teams on delivering a set of outcomes to a group of customers who have common needs. As the customers’ needs change, so, too, may the teams. But the organization in which these teams work is fairly flat; it doesn’t need a lot of layers of management. As teams develop their ability to self-manage, there are fewer opportunities for promotional rewards. This can cause a bit of a crisis in terms of the whole notion of careers and organizational progression.
Without promotional opportunities, organizations have to find other ways to reward and motivate their employees, principally by giving people a greater sense of purpose by defining meaningful goals, increasing the autonomy of people in how they reach those goals, and recognizing mastery and professionalism. Employees need to feel that they are being paid fairly for their contributions, but beyond that most professionals engaged in knowledge work seek intrinsic rewards. For leaders, recognition based on demonstrated achievements in helping teams to improve their performance and effectiveness provides a better way to recognize their contributions.
Performance Reviews Don’t Go Away, but They Do Change Dramatically
In an agile organization, evaluating individual performance doesn’t go away, but rather is based on the perceptions of an employee’s fellow team members rather than the opinion of a manager. In fact, the traditional annual performance review process is so widely and justly criticized that no one should be unhappy to see it retired.8
8. For more on the widespread unhappiness with traditional performance reviews, see www.gallup.com/workplace/249332/harm-good-truth-performance-reviews.aspx.
Instead of relying on infrequent feedback from people who really don’t work with a person, agile organizations are shifting toward frequent (i.e., quarterly or more frequently) feedback from an employee’s fellow team members and other colleagues. One popular approach is the 360-degree feedback session.9 The important aspects of these sessions are that they are frequent, so that they provide feedback close to a specific event, and they include at least several different perspectives, to provide a balanced view of performance.
9. For more information on this technique, see https://evolutionaryleadership.nl/leadership/360-feedback/.
The main goal of 360-degree feedback is to use it as input for personal and team improvement. Psychological safety is a precondition for team members to give honest and constructive feedback. Agile leaders set the preconditions to accomplish this goal.
The following examples demonstrate how the authors have assisted teams with their 360-degree reviews. In both examples, the feedback is collected by a leader in a team whose members have high-trust relationships with each other. Based on this relationship, the team leader facilitates the process and gives feedback, but also receives feedback from fellow team members. Our role is to help these team leaders to facilitate these sessions, learn from each other, and improve their facilitation skills.
Collecting Feedback with a Questionnaire Through an App
To make sure feedback is used for personal improvement in a safe space, it needs to be uncoupled from incentives. Using an app that is accessible to a neutral/nonhierarchical assessor (such as the team leader) and team members only to collect feedback is one way to obtain such feedback in a neutral and anonymous way. Our experiments with this have followed a pattern:
Each feedback round contains self-reflection and gives input to all team members. The difference between self-reflection and team feedback creates interesting insights for personal growth.
In teams with established psychological safety, feedback is collected and shared as a group. In other teams, we start more safely with individual sessions and anonymous input.
The feedback system checks a number of (customizable) criteria, such as being a good team player, personal values, and team diversity.
The result of a fictitious feedback session for an individual is shown in Figure 6.5, with the average for the teams feedback shown as a bar, and the individual’s self-assessment superimposed as a line. Differences between the team’s average and the individual’s self-assessment provide the foundation for discussion with the individual about the differences.
Figure 6.5 An illustration of a 360-degree feedback session. A combination of introspection and peer feedback can expose great opportunities for professional growth.
Collecting Feedback by Playing a “Game”
Another way to facilitate 360-degree feedback in a team is to gamify the feedback process. We developed a card game10 that helps teams to facilitate the feedback process, as illustrated in Figure 6.6:
10. For more information on this game, see https://evolutionaryleadership.nl/leadership/core-qualities/.
Teams that are still developing psychological safety give each other feedback based on qualities.
Teams with an established psychological safety can add distortion/challenges cards to the mix.
The insights from this card game have helped many teams and team members to discover their challenges, discover conflicts, and resolve them. The example in Figure 6.6 illustrates the result of such a feedback session.
Figure 6.6 An example of a 360-feedback session, using our card game with Core Qualities.
Reflections on the Journey
Helping teams to learn and grow requires leaders to work in different ways and requires others who may not think of themselves as leaders to develop their own leadership skills. Traditional managers grow their own agile leadership skills by shifting their focus from managing and overseeing work to coaching teams and supporting them as they learn new ways to work.
Team members who have, in the past, focused on developing specialized technical skills also grow their leadership skills by helping their fellow team members learn and apply those skills in situations where the team will benefit from having more people with those skills. This is the opposite of what they would do if they were in a “siloed” organization that seeks to differentiate itself by the scarce skills that it controls.
Traditional managers also grow their agile leadership skills by letting go of individual performance reviews and helping teams to assess the contributions of their own members using 360-degree feedback techniques. Many, if not most, managers will find this liberating, since it frees the manager from having to assess an individual’s performance when they have little opportunity to directly observe that individual in the performance of their job.