Building Agile Culture - Role of Middle Managers- New Roles

This article is the third of the series of 12 articles, answering the ten questions being asked by the middle managers , during any change program and particularly during agile transformation. You can read the earlier articles at the links below

1. Introduction
2. Why is this change?

3. What would be their new roles and responsibilities in the new scenario?

All the conventional management roles have been created in the industrial era with the command & control model of management in mind. All the thinking and planning was done by the manager and the workers were asked to execute those plans. This model had serious consequences in terms of productivity, innovation and workforce relations. The HR department has been fighting a long drawn battle and legal team has entered the fray to manage and ensure cordial relationships at work place.

The emergence of knowledge economy has changed a lot of these assumptions and the workers are no longer mere executors. They are expected to plan and manage their own work as well as complex technology projects , working in small teams. This created further distance and disconnect between the managers and the team members and many team members started questioning the contribution of the manager to the team, apart from administrative support.

It is not that the manager wanted that job per se. There was no other way to progress in the career and make more money. The companies also failed to identify how to get additional value delivered by these seniors a and gave them the responsibility of managing teams. A very few people were able to find the career paths suitable to them and grew. The rest became the ever growing community of middle managers.

When the agile implementations started in the organizations, the role of the manager suddenly came under scrutiny. As the teams were supposed to be managing themselves as well as the delivery responsibility, the typical manager role became redundant. But most of the companies retained these people and the roles as they were not used to holding an entire team accountable for delivery. They were more comfortable with single point of accountability. Thus the managers continued in their current roles and continued to do what they have been doing earlier, which became a major hinderance to the team progress.

The situation warranted a redefinition of roles and responsibilities of these middle management roles. Some companies tried doing that by training them into new roles as scrum master or product owner. But the confusion continued as nobody defined their performance criteria. Worse, the earlier roles of Managers continued to exist, who were still responsible for the performance appraisals of the new teams. Consequently, the teams did not have any accountability to the new roles like scrum master or agile coach. The situation became from bad to worse.

Scrum expects the delivery ownership to be collective responsibility of the scrum team, which does not include any manager. Then what happens to the managers? Some organizations has retrained the existing managers and asked them to play the new roles. But the old ways of command and control continue to exist as the structure did not change. These managers continue to exert their control by asking redundant reports and becoming a decision bottlenecks. It is not uncommon to see scrum teams sending weekly status reports and % completion reports of their work, which are not only difficult to manage but takes away a lot of precious time from the team.

The biggest issue in this whole journey is the governance model. There are a few governance models like SAFe but they ended up adding more layers of control and decision making. While they claim to be useful for scaled implementation of agile methodology, there are other models which counter this argument and claim to help implement scrum at scale, without additional bottlenecks.

In this whole struggle for control ( not empowerment !) middle managers are lost. They try doing whatever best they can, helping the teams and communicating with the customers and stakeholders.

What can be done? A lot of structural agility is required to be incorporated. As defined by Enterprise Agility University curriculum, structural agility is defined as "changing the organizational structures and procedures by running experiments while minimizing the impact on organizational health." This means that organizational health must be protected at all times, while we experiment with the new roles and responsibilities as required for the change. This is about creating a safe work environment where people are not stressed out or the work schedules start impacting their personal lives.

How can this be achieved? The assumption that people need to be managed and controlled must be challenged. When the pandemic started and people had to work from homes, many managers were worried about their ability to control their teams and expected low productivity. Contrary to the popular belies, most of the employees demonstrated exceptional commitment and in fact worked extended hours to meet customer commitments, even when they had a lot of challenges at home. The problem is not the teams, but the mindset of the managers.

The organizations must redefine the role of a manager as a coach and mentor, rather than a person to be held accountable for delivering results. The teams should be held accountable collectively. While the individual performance still matters and should be reviewed and appraised, the same should happen more frequently on a monthly basis. Such reviews would bring out many challenges and issues and the scrum masters and agile coaches would have enough time to work with the team members and resolve them.

A complete revamp of appraisal process is necessary and it should help the organization become more agile, rather than just helping the employee prove that he was productive. This means that we need three levels of performance metrics; activities, outputs and outcomes.

More about this tomorrow, when we will discuss the specific accountabilities of middle managers.

I am Flt.Lt. Sridhar and I help individuals, startups and organizations to become agile. Please feel free to connect with me.