Learning to be an Agile manager — Part 2: Continue — Create an Agile sub-culture

This is part 2 in a series on lessons I have learnt as a line manager for Agile teams. It takes the form of the “continue-stop-start” approach often used in retrospectives. See Part 1: Release Trains for background.

Very often Agile implementations are initiated from the bottom up, started by development team members. In this case relatively successful in becoming more agile as an organisation was achieved and it is no longer clear how it was initiated.

For Agile to succeed the larger organisation need to support some key principles. An example of this is the organisations attitude towards failure. Does the organisation, or key individuals in it, see failure as a destination or a stepping-stone towards success?

For example if the organisation had “Accountability” as one of its values it could be aligned with Agile through self-organising teams being held accountable for their commitment. The challenge is the interpretation of accountability it can easily become blame. Blame is punitive and focuses on the failure as a destination it instills fear of failure. Accountability focuses on the behavior before and after the failure occurred, the final outcome, it encourages learning and change.

Initially it was difficult to succeed with Agile in this organisational culture and a sub-culture was established. This intentionally created a misalignment of cultures. As the line manager I absorbed a lot of the impact of the misalignment to support an environment of accountability, learning and change. The sub-culture allowed the team to improve and demonstrate the value of agile methods it secured buy-in from the organisation. This allowed for the acceptance of Product Owner and Scrum Master roles, prioritisation on business initiative and feature level, concepts such as MVP and money to spend on Agile consulting help. In turn this resulted in a gradual culture shift towards realignment of the team and orginisational culture, as the Agile flywheel gained some momentum.

Maintaining a sub-culture that is misaligned with the organisation is not sustainable. I am not an organisational behavior expert, but I suspect the organisation will treat the sub-culture as foreign and reject it. It was a risk that was taken in the short term to gain traction; it was successful in the context of this organisation.

Create a team sub-culture to gain traction, but plan to realign with or influence the organisational culture in the short term.

This is part 2 of 6 in a series, See Part 1: Release Trains or Part 3: A disruption in routine, SURPRISE!