Valuing ‘Span of Autonomy’ over ‘Span of Control’
Because Scrum Teams value autonomy over control
I was recently asked a challenging question: if a Scrum Master team was expanding and required line management, what would be an acceptable span of control for that manager?
Management theory states that Span of Control is “the magic number of employees a manager could oversee to achieve optimal effectiveness and efficiency” (McKinsey). Perhaps 7 Scrum Masters would be the optimum number, beyond which a second line manager would be needed?
When I thought about the question, and the embedded use of term ‘span of control’, something didn’t sit right. I felt a movement in the force. This was not the term I was looking for :) Scrum Masters are without rank in an organisation for good reason. Wouldn’t line management change that?
Edgar Schein, professor emeritus at MIT Sloan School of Management, once asked a group of students what it means to be promoted to the rank of manager. “They said without hesitation, ‘It means I can now tell others what to do.’” (Bill Taylor, HBR) This was not what I expected a line manager of Scrum Masters to do. In fact, I expected the opposite.
“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” (Agile Manifesto)
I believe the idea of a span of control is out-dated, and this post is about an alternative. Instead, I believe that servant leaders should strive to create autonomy.
Scrum can help teams uncover better ways to increase autonomy, and better ways for managers to interact with teams to improve alignment.
If organisations seek to create this kind of environment in Scrum Teams, shouldn’t we also look for this from a team of Scrum Masters too? In fact, shouldn’t the Scrum Master team be the first place we would expect to see a shining example of these behaviours?
Autonomy
Best-selling author Dan Pink made his name with a book on the topic of motivation. His premise in ‘Drive — The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’ is that “there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” In ‘Drive’, Pink suggests that “our business operating system — think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses — how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources” is inappropriate, particularly in contexts where creativity is required. (Dan Pink on Motivation, TED)
Pink builds a case for managers to work on creating motivation by fostering autonomy, mastery and purpose. He argues that “traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-direction works better.” (Dan Pink on Motivation, TED)
Henrik Kniberg, working as an agile coach at Spotify, did not under-estimate the importance of autonomy.
“Why is autonomy so important? Well, because it’s motivating, and motivated people build better stuff. Also autonomy makes us fast, by letting decisions happen locally in a squad, instead of via a bunch of managers and committees and stuff. It helps us minimise handoffs and waiting, so we can scale without getting bogged down with dependencies and co-ordination.”
(Henrik Kniberg, Spotify Engineering Culture, Part 1)
Kniberg describes an organisational culture at Spotify where autonomy was prized, and that it worked best with teams that were also highly aligned.
Servant Leadership
In Spotify, the role of management changed dramatically: they became servant leaders, serving their teams first, and leading second.
The term Servant Leadership was coined by renowned American Management researcher Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970. Servant leaders differ from leader-first managers in that they do not try to coerce or control. The best test of a servant leader’s effectiveness was, in his own words:
“Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” (Robert K Greenleaf)
Scrum, Agile and Autonomy
“Agile Methodologists are really about “mushy” stuff — about delivering good products to customers by operating in an environment that does more than talk about “people as our most important asset” but actually “acts” as if people were the most important, and lose the word “asset”. So in the final analysis, the meteoric rise of interest in — and sometimes tremendous criticism of — Agile Methodologies is about the mushy stuff of values and culture.”
(Jim Highsmith, The Agile Manifesto)
Scrum Teams solve complex adaptive problems, and Scrum is an Agile approach. In Scrum, the Scrum Master acts as a servant leader for the scrum team. In addition “Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.” (Scrum Guide)
It sounds to me that a self-organising team would prize a high degree of autonomy.
Span of Autonomy
19th Century tenets of management theory are not necessarily fit for purpose when teams are faced with complex, adaptive problems.
Scrum could actually help organisations to create spans of autonomy rather than spans of control. But what is a span of autonomy?
I believe Span of Autonomy can be defined as:
“The number of people that could benefit from a servant leader supporting their needs, in order to achieve optimal autonomy and alignment” (Paddy : )
Conclusion
Agile approaches like Scrum are about uncovering those better ways. If an organisation is large enough to have a team of Scrum Masters or a Chapter of Agile Coaches, then the way that team is managed can be an example to the rest of the organisation.
If we expect our organisation to improve autonomy in Scrum Teams, then teams of Scrum Masters should be prepared to ‘eat our own dog food’. Rank can change things. Servant Leadership will be a more familiar pattern, and will foster an atmosphere of autonomy in the team of Scrum Masters.
Alignment with the organisation is critical of course, but perhaps inside our Scrum Master teams, we should value a Span of Autonomy over a Span of Control. As a Scrum Master, I’m planning to try to adopt this as a philosophy in a role involving line management. This small experiment is more about checking my own attitude or behaviours than anything else. I might give the last word to Henrik Kniberg on that:
“You are the culture, so model the behaviour you want to see.”
