“I don’t want to distract the team. They don’t need to worry about this.” That’s what my boss – the head of engineering at a rapidly growing startup – told me when I asked him how he would share information from top management about our revised expansion plans. His job, he said, was to protect the engineers from things like this and to let them focus on building the product.
You’re a mid-level manager in a rapidly growing company. Your boss tells you that a new initiative the company has been considering for the last year has finally gotten the go-ahead from the executive team. This initiative is similar to others your company has taken on in the previous few years, but it is different in a few key ways. There’s no playbook for work like this; success will require trying new things and learning from what happens. Your job is to pull together a team that will perform at a high level in challenging circumstances. What do you do?
Managers everywhere struggle to lead teams. These teams don’t produce the desired results, leaving everyone frustrated. A common cause of this problem is managers falling into the trap of thinking that leadership is about them. When this happens, a change in perspective can help them regain effectiveness.
Many managers struggle to give effective feedback. They spend hours carefully crafting their message only to have it fail to land. What they neglect to notice is that feedback is at least as much about the relationship as it is about the message. One of the keys to a strong working relationship – one that enables difficult conversations – is a sense of shared purpose.
Many people are working from home at this point and this will obviously continue for a while. Many organizations had already been working remote. I’ve worked on a number of remote teams and with a number of remote organizations well before the current situation we are in. I’ve done remote work as a coach, trainer, product manager, and team member well before the current situation we are in. Each of those instances I found myself enjoying some aspects of the work and also wishing for aspects to be in person. One of the most challenging things to do remotely is to listen.
I hear these requests all the time. “What are the best agile metrics?”, “How can we measure an agile team?” and “I know we can’t just measure agile. . . but, what should be on an “organizational agility checklist?”
There are so many places you can go with these questions and there are even various companies selling ways to measure agile organizations and agile teams. When someone asks me about agility checklists or agile metrics, I tend to start with a few core themes of elements. I use these themes to have conversations with the people who want the measurements and the people who will be measured (before anyone starts using them).
We have done a huge disservice to leaders and managers, as well as teams. There are plenty of people that will say we don’t need managers and leaders. People can lead themselves. While there is an aspect of this that may be true, there are a lot of steps to get close to that idea.
This article will explore what leaders and managers need to do to succeed as they get started with agile or to help teams move from individuals to a team or even a high-performance team. It builds on Agile Leadership Myth #2: Self-Organizing Teams Don’t Need Any Help.
Self-organizing teams do need help. Self-organizing teams are not instant, automatic, or magically created, despite what is often implied. There is a process to become this type of team, and it is rarely, if ever, a straight line. The help they need differs from more traditional directive assignments and task management.
To unravel this myth, we must look at what self-organizing means, what teams and managers experience, and what you can do to shift your help to a more ROI-friendly approach!
A major challenge we run into when helping organizations shift or improve is leadership misconceptions. Agile leadership myths cause a lot of these misconceptions. We need to help avoid falling into the trap of these common myths because they limit our success. A root cause of many of the myths is that people simply don’t know what else to do.
For example, Myth #1: ‘telling people “you are empowered” actually works.’ Leaders often don’t know what else to do, other than tell teams they are empowered. We see this with Development Teams, Scrum Teams, Delivery Teams, AND Leadership Teams.
A bit of background — there are many agile leadership myths out there. These myths (or assumptions) limit leaders ability to improve, help others, and succeed. Many myths seem to occur at a nonconscious level, meaning they function like many biases. People are not even aware, consciously, that they are happening.
