Leading not Managing
Autonomous teams that display rigour and discipline do not need to be managed. Teams need to be led in the delivery of their product and services. Leaders exercise leadership by creating and sustaining circles of influence not by using their hierarchical position. Leadership emerges from mastery of a domain allowing the leader to influence colleagues within that domain - their circle of influence.
In A Nutshell
Management is, by its very nature, directive. Management is too often interventionist and controlling in the way that it seeks to influence the delivery by teams and other operational activity. Management assumes that it has access to more information; consequently management believes they are best placed to make decisions involving the teams.
Management is a paternalistic approach to controlling the organisation. Decisions are often delegated upwards to the highest point of accountability. Decision making becomes a constraint on the organisation that is, in turn, unable to respond quickly enough to business challenges as they arise. These behaviours mean that managers are, too often, inhibitors of work and inhibitors of change.
“Too often colleagues escalate decisions to me. I am given three options, do nothing, do the impossible or do the obvious. They wait days or weeks to ask me for a decision that they have already made. But one day I will choose the impossible.”
Autonomous, high performing teams can only be damaged by such interventionist management. There is, therefore, a direct tension between the desire to be a truly agile organisation and the continuation of “management as usual”.
In contrast to Management, Leadership seeks not to intervene directly. Rather, leaders set goals, share information and expect teams to make the decisions about how to achieve those goals. This delegates the decision making down to the lowest point of responsibility. Leaders encourage a collaborative, engaged approach to goal setting too.
Leaders do not rely on their position in the hierarchy. Rather, they lead by exercising positive influence over those around them. Influence emerges from the leader’s mastery of a domain - technical or social - supported by positive traits such as empathy. The nascent leader builds a circle of influence within their domain. Increasing mastery or mastery of other domains allows the leader to expand their circles of influence - to grow their sphere of leadership.
In an organisation that is truly being agile, management is restricted to the necessary legal and administrative functions required by the organisation. Even here, the scope of management may be different. For example, performance should be assessed at the team rather than the individual level. All members of the team contribute to its performance. Less able members of the team are helped to improve their mastery by the rest of the team.
The concept of servant leadership is central to anAgileMind. Servant leaders put the interests of others in the organisation ahead of their own interests. Servant Leaders work continuously to ensure that teams have the fewest possible obstacles to their delivery. Servant Leaders are enablers of work and enablers of change.
Customer Focus
Teams work closely with their customers to deliver the customers’ needs as they relate to the specific product and its services. When the customers’ interests span several of our products we need to ensure that our mutual alignment remains intact. If there is a conflict in the way different products can meet the customers’ needs we must ensure that the conflicts are resolved. Resolution must meet the needs of the customer and be within the capabilities of the teams.
Team Focus
Leaders emerge at all scales in an organisation. Leadership is achieved not by appointment to a position but by gaining influence with our colleagues. As leaders we should seek out leaders as they emerge in the organisation and cultivate their growing sense of influence. Our culture should facilitate anyone in the organisation to become a leader and to grow their circles of influence. Our working practices should permit us to recognise and reward those who demonstrate leadership in the same way that we reward any other desirable capability in those we employ.
The team’s culture will influence how they work, particularly the practices and behaviours they adopt and their adherence to them. Culture works for us to enable success or works against us to hamper success. We promote a team culture that will foster the behaviours that will enable the team to be successful.
Focus on Supporting Team Performance
Stuff like supporting complex decision making, capability can develop, capacity can increase
Focus on Supporting The Individual
Stuff like giving feedback and helping individuals resolve behavioural difficulties
May not be just about performance!
Contextual Focus
Focus on the Organisation’s Culture
(integrity, openness and honesty / blameless)
This is about ensuring that culture becomes and remains important to everyone in the organisation
Focus on Cultural Leadership????
Focus on The Primacy Of Culture????
https://www.anagilemind.org/focus-on-organisational-culture [Rigour and Discipline]
This is about ensuring that culture is [defined], deployed and sustained
Concerned that the content of the linked page is cultural theory not the R&D required to sustain culture…
Focus on Modelling Desired Behaviours
Do as I do not as a I say
Focus on Continuous Learning (Venn diagram)
Leaders nurturing the cultural context within which learning occurs
Focus on Continuous Improvement (Venn diagram)
Leaders nurturing the cultural context within which improving occurs
Focus on Resolving Conflict (inside a team and between teams)
Related Principles
We validate our work and our ways of working by seeking frequent feedback from customers, leaders, and other stakeholders. We respond rapidly and transparently to requests for feedback from others. Frequent feedback gives many opportunities to adjust requirements, priorities, and ways of working to better need stakeholder needs.
High performance is the expected norm for all teams. High performance is encouraged by a culture that emphasises the importance of Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose for everyone in the organisation. High performance is manifested through the rigour and discipline of teams and individuals and through the imperative to improve continuously.
Managers are appointed. Leaders emerge. Leadership is an emergent attribute of ourselves and of the people we work with. Leaders begin to emerge as they acquire, display and share mastery over their assigned roles. The circle of leadership starts small - within a team or other peer group. As depth of mastery and the ability to share it effectively increases opportunities arise to expand the circle of leadership more widely. Leaders choose when they expand their circle of leadership.
We take advantage of every opportunity to learn from events and from experience. We learn as teams and as individuals. A key part of the resilience of the agile mindset is how we react to the failures that we will inevitably experience as we work on complex, adaptive problems. Our resilient response is to treat a failure as an opportunity to learn. We seek the causes of failure and to learn how to avoid those causes in the future.
Related Articles
In this article we look at ways in which leaders can develop people according to their needs. We look at an old Japanese term, Shu-ha-ri, which describes three steps to mastery and we look at the timeless wisdom of Situational Leadership.