Agile Managers

I had the distinct pleasure of attending a local meetup group as part of the Agile RTP group called How Agile Killed Managers presented by Katy Sherman last month. Katy did a wonderful job of giving a thought provoking talk on the role of managers in an agile organization. Her talk was so engaging, that the room erupted into a slew of questions, comments, and thoughts in a very open matter. What a rush! I have not been to a meetup with that sort of post-presentation engagement in quite some time.

Katy asked everyone at the meetup to take a homework assignment and reflect on the role of managers in an agile organization. This was in blog backlog for some time (over one month now), but I have finally gotten around to sharing my thoughts.

Agile has not “killed” managers, they are just feeling left behind

With many agile adoptions, manager feel like they have been left behind. Any organization that wants to go agile either because they want more flexibly, speed to market, or even just because an executive leaders said to will likely start, at least in some fashion, with trying to figure out who fits where. Scrum, the most popular agile framework, prescribes only three roles: product owner, scrum master, and developer. Outside of the agile team, or scrum team, there are many stakeholders. Yet, a manager may feel like he does not have the same command and control and the authority that comes with it.

The old model of management . . .

. . . went something like this. 

1) Information comes up, decisions come down. The manager is the person in the middle who transfers that information from on high to the mindless, replaceable, cogs-in-the-machine doing the work. This is a regrettable and dysfunctional aftereffect of scientific management championed by Frederick Winslow Taylor as a hallmark of factory work in the industrialized era. 

2) The goal at work is to be like my boss. Emulate their managerial style and I will be promoted, get more pay, and a bigger title, and that is my motivation. I can do that making myself look as good as possible, often at the expense of others.

Now, in an agile organization we new versions of management.

Teams are self-organized and decide how they want to do the work, managers have their sense of security in their role as the “one who tells the workers what to do and how to do it.”

So the conversation with managers needs to change from how can you manage the team, to how can you serve the team. Certainly with a new approach, there is still plenty for managers to do. Pete Deemer has a great article about the role of the manager scrum, in what is termed Management 2.0.

There is also a movement out there championed by Jurgen Appelo to move beyond Management 3.0. He wrote a whole book on it. He was part of a gathering in January of 2012 in Stoos, Switzerland. The idea was to discuss ways of accelerating change in management. Essentially, Management 3.0 advocates that in the new world of work we do not need managers of people. Let people manage themselves, and managers should focus on the broad system. 

While I agree with the sentiment, I am not sure this approach is completely realistic. In fact, a large portion of the agile community has reacted with unease and feels like Appelo is proposing to get rid of all managers. This is just not going to happen in any real way, particularly in large companies with layer upon layer of managerial oversight.

A more practical approach

So, those of us in the trenches, operating in a real environment, leading agile transformations day in and day out, we need a more practical approach. There are many metaphors to describe the challenges many agile transformation agents face when scaling agile up from the team level. Two of my favorites are the managerial permafrost, referring to the frozen layer that you cannot seem to penetrate. Another is the idea of an air sandwich – executives want to be agile, they are sponsoring moves toward agility (probably because they think others are doing it and they need to keep a competitive advantage), so team members are trained by consultants or sent to a course, and these organizations expect agile to emerge by some manifest destiny. The air sandwich is the managers in the middle, who did not go to training, who do no understand why agility matters, and see their command and control authority threatened.

The future of managers

So what does the future of management look like? We must make a shift, and coach and mentor managers to bring value to the organization and people in it a different way. We have to work to shift the mindset from working for pay or title to working for purpose (finding meaning in work). As Dan Pink discusses in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, when you remove money from the conversation and from the equation, people will find motivation through autonomy, master and purpose. Find his TED Talk here and see also the RSA Animated version of this talk.

So, managers need to shift from managing information flow up and down, to leading people. They need to also find a way to coach and mentor teams to new levels of collaboration and performance. There is still certainly a need for human resources concerns (people are not resources, so let’s call it people and development concerns). Managers have to learn to look above and beyond the teams across the organization. They need to have a systems thinking view of how to improve the people and processes. And they need to place the accountability on the teams for performance and delivery.

Managers provide . . .

Managers should provide trust, motivation, resources, protection, context, and vision. They need to get the right players on the team. Hire, fire, train. They need to focus on succession, growth, and skill development (enlargement, enrichment). Managers should be principally concerned with team design (rewards, recognition) and refocus from reporting & status to servant leadership of teams & technical excellence. The primary concern of the manager should be building internal capacity of the teams to tackle the tough problems that the company faces and that meet the tough demands of customers.

This is the challenge of any agilist wrestling with the challenges of managers in the new world of work. 

See this and more of my posts at iterationsofjason.com