Agile principles talk about hiring great people and getting out of their way. They emphasize that self organized teams produce the best results. The problem is, by focusing so much on individuals and teams they also tend to devalue the role of good management and good leadership outside of those teams.
No one person or role knows best
When it comes to the organization and the overall system the individual doesn’t know best; the team doesn’t know best; the customer doesn’t know best; and the managers and leaders outside the team don’t know best either. Every one of them is making a grave mistake if they insist that others blindly trust their judgement, because none of them has or can have the full picture.
It’s a natural tendency for each person and role to think they do know best because it’s easy for each one to spot some of the blind spots of the others. They conclude they must be smarter and wiser since they can see what others apparently can’t. They all need to recognize that they have blind spots. They are not all-seeing and all-knowing. People need humility to truly come together as a team that leverages each other’s strengths and unique perspectives.
None of us is as smart as all of us – Kenneth H. Blanchard
Facilitators for greatness
Agile’s focus on self management should not be taken as an invitation to eliminate other forms of management altogether. Some management practices do have to go. Paternalistic, distrustful management that simply says “We know best” needs to be replaced with servant leaders and coaches who trust and believe that people are doing their best and that people will make great choices when given the right information and support.
Great managers and leaders act as facilitators for greatness. They help people and organizations succeed. They work with others to form and communicate vision and direction, and to create and improve frameworks that help people to work together better and to produce better results.
At the same time, it’s important that they don’t cross the line from process facilitator to process police. Great managers and leaders build systems and frameworks in service to the organization and they don’t want people to blindly conform. They don’t want uniformity for its own sake and they encourage variation where variation makes sense – which is to say where it has a positive effect on the system as a whole. This means staying out of the way when teams and individuals want to do what works best for them as long as it doesn’t negatively impact others. This also means stepping in, not to dictate but to involve and inform, in cases where a person or team’s “need to be me” seems to be missing the bigger picture. Great leaders and managers also encourage experimentation and continuous improvement which necessarily means deviating from current practices.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater
Management and leadership are important. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you should throw out all management and leadership because you’ve seen these things done badly. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your organization should be entirely flat or without specialization either. Different levels and different types of specialization provide different perspectives and each perspective has value in the right context. It’s impossible for everyone to be great at everything. Give them permission to be great in a few areas that they care about and make sure that they can also see how each role contributes to the success of the whole.
Systems and visions matter
I believe that great managers and leaders are critical to the success of great organizations. The best ones see the overall system more clearly – not because they are smarter or better but because their roles give them a broader perspective. This enables them to create the broader systems and frameworks that in large part determine the success of the organization. A software company doesn’t succeed because of a single person or team – it succeeds as a system. All the parts need to work together to achieve the common goal.
Managers and leaders are important because systems and visions are important. Great systems and great visions enable us to do our best work aligned with others around a common vision. They enable us to pursue our natural drive to make a positive difference on things that matter.
A bad system will beat a good person every time
– W. Edwards Deming
Are your leaders and managers building great systems and great visions? If not, what kind of systems are they working in that are preventing this from happening?