Overcoming the Fear of the Incapable Team

Trust the team, and be amazed

The self-organizing team — the powerful force behind any great software endeavor. Agile puts people, human beings, at the core. Harnessing the force of your people and the exponential multiplier of this force that your teams create is your job as a manager or rather, a leader. Leadership is about enabling the change in your organization to let this force flourish both to deliver the product right and deliver the right product.

Traditional management doctrine treats people as interchangeable parts almost akin to a widget that you can plug and play to get a known job done. This was fine for a manufacturing plant where the process was repeatable and the product replicable. It is not fine for a complex domain such as software product development where no two products are the same. You rarely have the same team members. You never have the same scope. The technology is always evolving and changing. As such, every software effort is custom and not predictable. You need a skilled workforce that can adjust real-time on the unpredictable terrain rather than follow a map.

The problem is that traditional management thinking gets in the way of serving the self-organizing team. Most of our training and experience has taught us that employees must be managed and that they are not capable…