Leadership in Agile Organizations: Leaders Protect!
Agile way of working, agile organization, Scrum, squads, Holacracy, whatever it’s called in your organization and whatever the shape it takes: working in a new way requires a new leadership style. In a series of articles, I will take you on a journey through the subject of leadership in agile organizations.
Protection: wanting to fit in
Solomon Asch is famous for his research in which he shows that social pressure can cause a person to say or do things that are clearly incorrect. He referred to this behavior as conformity and it is common in nearly every organization or team.
Your organization starts to work in an agile way. You work in short cycles and continuously ask your customers for feedback, so a committed cross-functional team can incrementally improve the product. It is important to dare to experiment and to keep learning along the way.
On the one hand you end up with the human need for conformity, on the other hand there is the teams’ wish to keep experimenting and learning. It won’t come as a surprise that it is the leaderships’ job to protect new initiatives and employees that have opinions that stand apart from the masses.
As a team leader you need to create a strong foundation in social security. This requires constant investment in each other. Create the right environment to openly give feedback. Use varying tools and practices to bring dissenting opinions and ideas to the surface. Regularly do retrospectives and lead by example: ask for feedback and react appreciatively to alternative views.
Protect: outside influences
At one of our clients a self-organizing team took on an especially challenging assignment. Not because it was hard to deliver value to their customers (patients), but because this was an issue that had been a subject of open and subvert internal struggles for years. It stopped being about the actual issue ages ago, it was now all about positions, right values and interests. The product owner, directors and team leader shield the team (as much as they can) from hostile reactions and help to create greater transparency. This allows the team to focus on what is most important, delivering value to their patients. The team feels protected and can focus on what they do best. They’ve asked their colleagues what it would take to make the project succeed this time around. They only felt safe enough to do so, once they were shielded from continuously having to engage with everyone that has an opinion and when clear boundaries were set by the senior leadership.
Protect: systems and processes
January this year. A scrum team at a foodstuffs manufacturer had come up with a new marketing concept. It tied in well with valentines day, so speed was of the essence. When buying a particular product, customers would receive a special valentines day card.
From an agile perspective the team would have started by looking for possible experiments and testing opportunities to see what is feasible within a short timeframe. Is it possible to completely redevelop the entire packaging to suit our needs? If not, can we find a way to only print special cards, at a supermarket if we have to? Can we just print parts at a copy shop and put them together ourselves? What is the minimum amount of suppliers we should test this with? Will three in the region suffice? Which supplier is open to such a way of working, and who in our organization can get in touch with them?
This shouldn’t be an unrealistic goal, right? Testing a new idea with at least three suppliers per month, easy. Developing the post-card, if needed, by gluing it together seems attainable. A quick experiment to get supplier and consumer feedback to get better as an organization.
So what really happened in this particular case? Well, I’m sorry to say, nothing actually happened. As soon as the subject was discussed one of the team members mentioned: ‘Marketing won’t approve of this, we need to discuss this with them’. The experiment never happened. Internal processes got in the way.
Another example: consider internal systems such as your reward structure. Yearly performance appraisals and individual bonuses do not fit well with an organization that uses self-organizing teams or squads or roles rather than job descriptions. When starting to work in an agile way do not neglect to also change these systems. Get an early start: involve both HR and the employees who will work in the new teams when developing a new reward system. This too, should be done in an agile way. Do small experiments and use them to adjust along the way.
Conclusion
Leaders in agile organizations need to protect their employees and valuable initiatives. It is the role of leadership to create the right circumstances for employees to be able to focus on delivering value for the customer, organization and colleagues without colleagues, management, systems and processes slowing them down.
