How to be a People Manager in an Agile Environment

By: Rebecca Holland and Myron Parks

If you’re a people leader who has recently joined an Agile company, or are part of a company adopting Agile practices, you might be feeling a little scared. What do you do when you have direct reports, but you’re not the leader they report to for their project work?

You might be feeling a little obsolete, but your job is not on the line. You have an excellent opportunity to help shape your employee’s goals, coach them to capitalize on their strengths and recognize their weaknesses, and ultimately play a part in shaping their career. That’s pretty powerful, and we both speak from experience when we say the feeling of pride in your team is one of the most satisfying experiences you’re likely to have in the course of your own career.

You’re Agile — now what do you do?

As a manager, you probably know that you don’t have the opportunity to be a practitioner of your craft as you once did. What you’re really in charge of is getting people where they want to go. The incessant emails and spreadsheets and deadlines are just the busywork that gives you a series of micro-goals and ensures you get a paycheque every two weeks. Adjusting to the work of a manager, rather than a practitioner, takes a mindset shift.

As an Agile people manager, you have to change your mindset even further. It’s easy, after completing Agile training (like Scrum), to think, “That’s great. Now what?” Scrum doesn’t teach servant leadership — It teaches tools and processes to run a team and deliver products and services. But adopting a servant leadership mentality and acting on it is essential to enabling this delivery pipeline.

Servant leadership

Servant leaders are typically leaders of others who hire and manage people, and who lead primarily by influence. These are people in an organization that operate on behalf of one or many cross-functional teams. You may be a practice leader, or a squad leader or even a guild leader.

What you do is to provide the north star for your team to move toward the organization’s goals. You provide the vision for the practice in your discipline, and develop the ways of working that allow people to both act on, and contribute to, the company strategy. This may sound lofty and abstract, but there are concrete actions you can take to make this happen within your team, that we’ll talk about in depth later.

Additionally, a servant leader brings focus to their team members, ensuring they are developing professionally and have the capacity and competencies necessary to do their work. Finally, you ensure that your team is successful, and that their contributions are recognized and valued by both the company and the end-users of the product or service that your company provides.

“Servant leaders give up power and deputize others to lead.”

Skip Prichard

Servant leadership is essential for accelerating delivery, because these individuals bring additional capabilities to the problems that the teams and organization are trying to solve. For example, if you want to build a new application to realize some market value, you can depend on members of the team to provide capabilities such as coding, validation, etc., but servant leaders augment those capabilities with their own capabilities. These include resourcing and budget allocations for tools, training and career focus for individuals, and recognition and meaning for members of the team. In this model, teams and servant leaders are the yin and yang of delivery. Both are essential, but their differences make up the whole.

The servant leader prepares cross-functional teams to face the impossible: Creating the conditions for teams to achieve incremental wins along the way to success. As this is happening, you’re also responsible for ensuring the team creates real value for the company or clients (internal or external).

Looking at the end-to-end (E2E) delivery pipeline, servant leaders are most responsible for decisioning. This means developing research questions and tracking metrics that enable you to make decisions based on data, not on your gut. With decisioning, you not only make the best call to support your team and your organization, but you can also answer the “why?” and the “so what?”. In other words, when an executive wants to know if your product or project is ready to launch, you can answer ‘yes’ with confidence, or ‘no’ with real estimates of timelines and explanations of scope.

In addition to having a focus on the teams, servant leaders are also responsible to the organization. They are the people who are entrusted with the resources and capacity (i.e., budget and people) to accomplish the organization’s goals. In order to do this — especially when providing servant leadership across multiple teams and/or delivery pipelines — it’s essential for them to interpret long-term organizational goals for the teams, and then provide the measure of success for those teams. To succeed at such a challenging role, the servant leader will give the teams their decisoning criteria so they, too, can make the right calls, and engage the right leaders to launch their products and projects.

How does this look in the real world? While the team focuses on building, the servant leader’s role is to interpret organizational requirements for the project or product, working across departments and levels within the organization to capture market opportunity at the right time.

Two stories of servant leadership

A servant leadership mentality can have tangible outcomes that lead to real and satisfying success as a people manager. Here’s two examples from our personal experience.

Myron

As the Software Quality Assurance Manager for a mid-size credit union in the United States, I created a self-organizing department over Release, Quality and DevOps functions, and began enterprise agile coaching on the largest program launch in the history of the company.

A servant leader often works cross-functionally and uses their influence to bring the organization together to achieve goals. When I committed to the team, we needed to launch the largest program in the history of the company. The program was significantly over budget, had missed its launch date, and nothing that had been built was ready for the market. Instead of focusing only on the product, I focused on the people. I knew I had to bring the organization together and create a shared understanding of what needed to be done to really turn things around.

I started with two goals: The enterprise goal was to launch this program (before the next ice age), and the divisional goal was to increase production deliveries from once every 45 days to once every 14 days.

Next, I prioritized the product workflow, and aligned cross-functional teams within the program to take responsibility for core pieces of the product, including a features team and a DevOps working group. Working with leaders across the company, I negotiated a focus on the most important features of the product, narrowing the scope and communicating the new focus to all stakeholders. I then worked with the team to create a test strategy that reduced rework and redundancies, and balanced the time spent testing to time spent developing appropriately.

As a result, the team launched to production once every eight days, and the platform had the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS) of any in the company, because we adjusted the product based on user feedback constantly. Team satisfaction also skyrocketed, and the product was released in 6 months, where no line-of-sight existed previously.

Rebecca

When I started as the manager of the product copy department at the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, I had the words of Peter Schneider, former President of Disney Feature Animation ringing in my ears: “I knew I had 100 days to change the culture before it changed me.”

My team was a disconnected group that lacked motivating goals beyond the day-to-day tasks of the department. They needed glue that only a leader could provide. With a much smaller team than Schneider, I gave myself a smaller deadline: One month. Thirty days to convince these four people that I would be a success as a new manager. A good listener (and worth listening to), fun and casual, while being authoritative and exacting when the need arose.

It worked. Leaders in other departments began to remark on the changes in my team’s attitude behaviour, and the positivity and togetherness we displayed. Our culture became so strong that in three month’s time when I began the process of hiring five new writers, the one concern the team voiced was to make sure I hired people that ‘fit’, so that we could keep our close knit dynamic intact.

With a strong understanding of my team culture, I was able to onboard the five new writers in just 10 weeks, and rely on the strengths of my team to provide the training and coaching that helped the new writers ramp up quickly. As a servant leader, you don’t have to do everything — you have to create the culture that gives your team the opportunity to do their best work and enjoy the process.

Be the culture you want to see

Your job is not deadlines and spreadsheets, your job is culture. Culture is not just for the HR department to determine. As a manager, make yourself responsible for culture. After all, the experience of being on your team is how your employees will experience the culture of your company. You’ll attract praise from your management, and top talent from within and outside the company if you make your department a fun, engaging and rewarding place to be.

One way to start is to care about your employee’s whole life, not just what you see at work. Now that you have seen your team working in their own apartments and probably wearing the 10-year-old t-shirt they sleep in on a Zoom call, we can all stand to get a bit personal at work. This might be easier when your team is within the Millennial/Gen X age bracket like us, but it’s not impossible, regardless of whether they are your contemporaries, or not. Don’t alienate yourself from them by acting stiff and formal. You’re not acting like a grown up, you’re acting like a kid pretending to be a grown up. It bears repeating that Boomers are people too, and they probably have amazing stories to share that they might never tell their kids, but they’re dying to tell you. A little inappropriateness mixed with a dose of common sense and discretion is some of the strongest glue for making strong teams and fast friendships

Another way to show up for your employees is to support their side projects. In our experience as a marketer/writer and technology professional respectively, we’ve had employees who were songwriters and composers, freelance journalists, fashion designers, and the list goes on! Get to know your people by taking time to celebrate what they do after 5 o’clock.

Tell your team everything. It should make you uncomfortable to keep secrets from your team. If you hire people you trust and respect (and you should), they should be privy to everything you are.

This includes all job functionalities. Train your people to do everything that they’re interested in, and ensure that there’s a good understanding of skills and responsibilities across all your direct reports. That way no matter what happens — from a freak parasailing accident to a job offer from another company that just can’t be refused — you’ll feel confident your people can handle the change, and you’ll be able to confidently recommend backfill for delivery teams.

Lastly, work with your friends and make friends at work. This is traditionally considered a recipe for disaster, but having an ally who will give you an honest look at your leadership skills from your team’s perspective is so valuable. You need someone on your team who can give you a reality check and a pep talk, maybe at the same time. Making this work will come down to your emotional maturity and the strength of your friendship, and those who advise you against it are probably the same people who couldn’t handle it. Hire someone who knows you well enough to stab you in the front, and learn from the experience.

Hiring to fit an Agile environment

Hire people for the job they want to do next.

If you’re mid-level management, chances are your team members are going to transition out of their roles frequently, and will be looking to get promoted. Hire the ones who tell you what they’re going to do next. If they have a clear road map, they’ll be able to tell you exactly what they need from you, making your job as a shepherd a hundred times easier.

Also, hire not just for talent, but for personality. It’s a controversial opinion, but being surrounded by like minds is not a recipe for disaster. Like-minded does not mean people with the same skin tone and gender expression as you. Rather, it’s about someone who gets your synapses firing.

Like-minded also doesn’t mean that they have the same skillset as you. Hiring for a range of hard skills and talents or competencies ensures your team has leaders, teachers, storytellers, counsellors and strategists, even if everyone’s title is actually ‘Marketer’ or ‘Developer’.

Summing it all up

Servant leaders lead by influence, and there is significant value in doing so. Like we said, your job is the culture of an organization, and the impact that culture has on employee experience outweighs salary, benefits and any other perks. In sum, it’s your job to be prepared for change: Growing individuals, teams and organizations is your role, and helping others adapt to positive and negative changes. Your products and the culture that builds them will be better for it

Finally, there are many ways to be a servant leader. We’ve demonstrated what has worked for us, but know that there is more than one path to success. Find your style, build your team and make some cool stuff!