Pitfalls of mixing the Team Lead role

Importance of the Team Lead role

The Team Lead (similar to Scrum Master) is a host-leader role on every Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) team, who  leads and helps the team to be successful. Some older texts call it a servant-leader role, which is also okay.

The “servant leader” term was firstly coined in 1970 by Robert Greenleaf in an essay, “The Servant as Leader.” The main thought behind this concept is to “serve first” and in so doing, become a stronger leader.

Host leadership, another leadership style developed by Mark McKergow and Helen Bailey, recognize the leader neither as a hero nor a servant, but as a “host” who receives, manages and entertains guests.

While giving teams and employees more autonomy has been proven to lead to higher-performing teams, it seems that “host” leadership instead of “servant” leadership, would more effectively support the empowerment and teamwork engrossed in agile.

The Team Lead is also an agile coach, facilitates the team’s progress toward team goals, guides the team through choosing and evolving their Way-of-Working (WoW), coordinates with other teams, protects and communicates, builds a high-performing team, promotes software engineering practices, eliminates impediments, facilitates meetings, and leads team efforts in relentless improvement.

Despite being a very important role, sometimes management thinks that it makes sense for a single Team Lead to take on multiple roles. In this article, I am trying to analyze this tricky situation.

The following examples provide more detail on the negatives and positives of the roles most often mixed with the Team Lead role.

The Team Lead is also a Product Owner

Negatives: There is a massive conflict of interest if the Team Lead is also a Product Owner because the Team Lead and Product Owner roles have incompatible goals. The Team Lead should never be responsible for managing the backlog; that is the Product Owner's core goal. It is a conflict between business needs and self-organizing the team. It is about balancing short-term versus long-term results and improvements.

Positives: A Product Owner, who is also a Team Lead, is more probable to be treated as part of the team and his regular interaction with the team members is expected to be higher.

Recommendation: In this scenario, the Product Owner usually controls everything and the role of the Team Lead is neglected. This team would lack any deep agile understanding and self-organization. If the Team Lead and the product owner are a single individual, the team would not find any reasonable role to connect with, in case they need protection against any undue business pressure. That’s why the Product Owner should never act in the Team Lead role.

The Team Lead is also a Team Member

Negatives: If the Team Lead is also a Team Member, he would be excessively engaged as a Team Member in day-to-day development tasks. Consequently, he may lack the holistic view and systems thinking. He might also lack focus on removing team impediments, agile coaching and host-leadership. Because he is a Team Member as well, he would usually be less willing to improve the team by taking it out from its comfort zone, specifically when the team is having difficulties finishing an iteration on time or with good quality. He would not be able to focus on moving the team to the next level of agile maturity in this scenario.

Positives: If the Team Lead is part of the development team, there is already good mutual trust between the team members and him. The Team Lead usu-ally has a good understanding of Disciplined Agile principles, practices & goals and team’s strengths & weaknesses. He can easily point them out during any retrospective event.

Recommendation: If the Team Lead is also a Team Member, the Team Lead role is expected to be treated as less important and often disappears altogether. The Team Lead would likely to be demoted to the level of a team assistant. The probable mindset in this scenario would be, “he has not much to do anyway, so why not involve him in the development work like other team members?” That’s why be very careful if you want to implement this scenario.

The Team Lead is also an Architecture Owner

Negatives: On small teams, the individual in the role of the Team Lead will frequently also be in the role of the Architecture Owner, presuming he has necessary skills for both the roles. In my humble opinion, it is hard enough to find someone qualified to fill either of these specialized roles, so finding a single expert in both the domains would be a real challenge. Another problem could be the Team Lead getting too much involved in the technical decisions of the team and not focusing enough on agile values and coaching the team.

Positives: There is no conflict of interest scenario between the Team Lead and the Architecture Owner roles, so if you can find a suitable person with both the skills and available bandwidth, it will be optimal utilization of your human capital.

Recommendation: In case such a person is available with the above-mentioned skills and bandwidth, it is okay to have the Team Lead also working as an Architecture Owner. There are no conflicting goals for these two roles anyway.

The Team Lead is also a People Manager

Negatives: If the Team Lead is also a People Manager, such a Team Lead would often be directive and relying on command and control in place of doing mentoring and coaching. His relationship with the team would often lack trust and transparency in this scenario.

Positives: Good managers are leaders as well, and have experience with change management, so they catch on more quickly in the transfor-mation period. Their maturity and people skills would be useful in resolving the team’s impediments and conflicts efficiently.

Recommendation: If the Team Lead is also a People Manager, the role of the Team Lead would usually be treated as less important, but in certain cultures (less process oriented and not directive) this is a good opportunity to quickly initiate Agile transformation. However, the dream job of most People Managers is not to become a Team Lead but to lead the organization, so they fulfill the Team Lead role only temporarily.

Despite the possible positive aspects, teams where the Team Lead is also a People Manager would often lack self-organization, self-confidence, and ownership because this man-ager, not the team, decides, fixes, and arranges. This combination of Team Lead and People Manager roles often creates a lack of trust and makes the team members too reliant on the manager's decisions, instead of taking responsibility themselves. That’s why be very careful if you want to implement this scenario.

The Team Lead works with many teams

Negatives: We all know, multitasking can be counterproductive, so a Team Lead working with a large number of teams lacks time for any of those teams who all are competing to get his attention. Even independent events and problems quite often arise at the same time and create overwhelming situation for the Team Lead. The incapability to facilitate discussions soon enough and thwart conflicts from growing often makes the job fairly difficult.

Positives: The Team Lead learns fast from multiple teams and is much more expe-rienced in solving difficult problems. A general recommendation is to have one Team Lead for two or three teams, at one time. In most environments, more than three would be way too many because such a Team Lead would lack the necessary infor-mation to prevent conflicts and required time to coach those teams to move them to the next level of agile maturity.

Recommendation: If a Team Lead works with more than one team, he gets more experience and is usually much better at system thinking because he understands that every team is different. Based on his experience of different environments, he is more likely to be successful in implementing Disciplined Agile in differ-ent cultures. He is also more likely to apply Disciplined Agile over the entire organization and will not be too attached to any one development team. A Team Lead for two to three teams is a recommended combination. He can try to work with three teams, only if all these teams are very experienced with agile thinking and techniques.

Summary:

If a Team Lead combines multiple roles, he must be good at distinguishing one from the other. He can wear only one hat at a time, so he must choose which role he is in when communicating or acting. Otherwise, he won't be able to do justice with any role, and all these roles will suffer.

We all know, the Disciplined Agile is pragmatic, not purist in its guidance. So, based on the above-mentioned pitfalls, first analyze the Team Lead role in your unique context and then take an informed decision.

Author:

Dr. Sanjay Saxena, CDAC, CDAI, SPC5, PgMP, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSSBB, Reiki Grandmaster

#DisciplinedAgileDelivery #DisciplinedAgileRoles #AgileRoles #DADRoles #DADTeamLead