Are you a Leader that Serves?

Last week, I had the fortune to enjoy the benefits of a concierge lounge at a prestigious hotel.  As I was enjoying hors d’oeuvres, I initiated a game I like to play called “observe the people”.  As simple as it sounds, it allows me to discern how people interact with each other and identify any interesting traits. I noticed and talked to people who were travelling for business, those that may be considered leaders in their respective industries.  Most of those in the lounge could be considered a bit privileged in their expectations of both service and amenities of the lounge, not at all unreasonable in the context.

I noticed the host who was checking-in the guests into the lounge at his desk.  He was busy registering people and providing information about the lounge.  He was doing this continually for an hour as I was working on my computer getting some odds and ends done.  As guests were getting drinks and food, I saw that the host had nothing to refresh his palette yet he was the busiest person in the lounge.  With that awareness, I walked over to the host and offered to get him a drink and some food.  He looked at me with surprise and said, “You are the first guest in 5 years who has offered me a drink.” That caught me by surprise.  How could that be?

Have we gotten so invested in our privilege that we forget that part of our responsibility as leaders is to serve those that help us?  If you are reading this and thinking, “Why should I serve those that I lead when they should be serving me?” you may have a learning opportunity to help yourself and your team, group, division or company.  A major part of your job as a leader is to help maintain and improve the health of your employees.  This takes a page from the concept of Servant Leadership.

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” in the 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader”. Greenleaf takes the approach of “the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived.”

While there are various key servant leadership attributes, the ones I find important are an ability to listen; capability to empathize with people; aptitude to heal others (both mentally, physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually; an awareness of your surroundings, ability to persuade and conceptualize, have foresight, be a steward to stakeholders, customers, partners, and employees; a commitment to grow people encouraging innovation, self-initiative, and learning; and a need to build community.

As a leader, your first response should be to greet your employees (aka, those you serve) and then ask if there is anything we can do for them and ask if you can remove any impediments in their way.  Understand that by being that servant leader, you make your employees feel known and important. You should also remove their impediments helping them deliver products and services quicker, which has the benefit of making you money earlier than later. Remember, employees or those that are helping you.  They are the engine to your success. Serve them. Remove their impediments, listen to their needs, and get them a drink. Is it time to get serious and sincere in helping them? 

Top 5 ways to adapt your Agile Enterprise for a better Year ahead!

A New Year is upon us!  What is in store for 2018?  Better yet, what changes might you apply for a better Agile transformation and better business outcomes?  Here are a few to consider.

1) Focus more (much more) on the Agile mindset and the Agile values and principles.  Without this, people aren’t quite sure whey they are implementing the Agile mechanics (practices and tools).  Ask your employees if they know why they are applying the Agile methods and practices.  If they don’t really know, more strongly relate them to the Agile values and principles. 

2) Place Coaches high enough in to make a difference.  Placing them too low in an organization will give them little or no influence to change anything that matters.  Gauge your current placement of Agile Coaches and determine if they have the right access and influence to leadership.

3) Ensure leaders in your organization are educated in Agile.  Provide a combination of the Agile values and principles and Agile concepts, mindset, and practices that will help them support and lead an Agile transformation.  This includes understanding and establishing a high performing Agile workplace.

4) Focus on the employee side of Agile and what it takes to build a high performing team.  This includes establishing psychological safety, demonstrating servant leadership, creating a culture of self-organizing teams and even self-management, introducing continuous peer-to-peer feedback loops, and more. 

5) Become totally customer-value driven. Stop doing Agile for Agile’s sake and focus on the customer benefits.  Bring a customer mindset to Agile.  This means more closely identify with your customers (e.g., personas) and capture and apply more customer feedback along the way. 

I will go so far to say if you don't do anything else this year but these, you will have a stronger Agile enterprise that brings you more aligned with building high value products and services.  Give them a try!

Learn more by reading The Agile Enterprise.   

The Role of Middle Management in an Agile World

When discussing Agile roles, there is much written about the ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Development Team, and Customer.  But there is less written about what the Middle Manager should do in an Agile World.   Note, when I talk about Middle Manager, I am talking about the Line Manager, Functional Manager, Manager, and Director level manager. 

I recently discussed the middle management roles within an Agile context to several different middle managers.  They each had an interesting perspective on what it was like when their teams became Agile. Here are two excepts:  

• The Functional Manager who was also the team's Line Manager noted that they spent much less time on directing the team on what to work on since the work was now coming out of the Product Backlog.  I told him that yes this is big adjustment.  He needed to focus on ensuring that his team members had the right skills, team impediments were removed, the Agile principles were understood, and the team were given the education they needed to become a fully cross-functional team.
• In talking to a Director who now has 3 self-organizing teams, she was telling me that she was having a hard time knowing what to do since she felt she had to get more hands-on.  She needed to help educate the team members around their new roles, and then allowing the teams to self-organize around the work was the right thing to do.  I told her by backing off, she could better provide more strategy level guidance to connect the organization’s strategies to the team or product visions.  She commented that this was very different from the more traditional management role she had been used too.  

Ultimately, it is important to understand that middle management are critical to the success of an effective Agile deployment.  They are the lynchpin between the executive’s vision for Agile and the team's ability to apply Agile as Middle management's willingness to allow Agile can help make it flourish or fail on a team. If they are engaged and buy into Agile, then the change may succeed. Even when executives buy in, if middle management does not do likewise, they can block a team's ability to succeed with Agile.    

If middle management don’t understand their role in the new order or feel threatened by the change, they may become Deceivers or Deniers and block the success toward Agile. Because of this, it is critical that middle managers are educated on Agile at the same time their teams are.

Middle management must adapt their role and learn to gently back away from their functional leadership, act more as a servant leader who trusts their teams, helps them remove roadblocks, and supports the agile principles and practices. They may attend the Sprint Review to see progress of the working functionality and the Daily Stand-up to gain a sense of team progress.   Middle management must also learn how to establish the concept of bounded authority where teams can make their own decisions and commit to their own work. The balance is that managers keep limited responsibilities to provide a vision and support their staff, while allowing teams ownership of their work.  Finally, middle management must be willing to be transparent about what is going on in the organization and be willing to communicate this information to the team. 

Other Roles that may suit Middle Management

Often middle management have less to do in an Agile world. The good news is that they may consider options such as changing their role to Resource Manager, where they manage more people but do not own an organizational functional area. They may consider a Product Owner role if they have been engaged in collecting requirements and interacting with customers. Although this role should no longer be managerial (i.e., not direct reports), a PO helps shape the product by collecting and grooming the requirements and collaborating with the team.   They may also move to another Functional Manager role where there is still a need for this role.  And some will remain their current middle management leadership roles.  If they continue to want to do the more traditional middle management roles, they may consider looking for companies that continue to look for the more traditional roles.  

How Middle Management can evaluate themselves in an Agile World

Here are a few questions  middle managers can ask themselves to see how aligned they are in managing teams in an Agile World.  These questions are based on material from "The Manager's Role in Agile" by Michael Spayd and Lyssa Adkins.  

• Are you allowing for self-organizing teams while still providing servant leadership? 
• Are you removing command and control elements while providing bounded authority?
• Are you supporting the Agile values and principles starting with marshaling a culture toward delivering value?
• Do you remove the language of false certainty, big-up-front planning and requirements, and big batches?
• Do you remove the significant roadblocks that hinder an agile team’s progress?
• Do your teams perceive you as a coach and leader more than as a manager?
• Are you helping the team with supporting their people and equipment needs?
• Are you adapting the performance objectives to support team accomplishments to ensure they are delivering the highest value?
• Do you help the teams when they have external team dependencies in order to get their work done?
• Are you fostering a learning organization?  Do you provide teams the time to get educated (training, coaching, etc.)? 

Who makes the Best ScrumMaster?

As teams consider adopting Agile, one of the most important decisions they can make is who will be the ScrumMaster. Because the ScrumMaster is the promoter of Agile values and principals as well as the coach for ensuring the Scrum is being practiced effectively, it is critical that this role be filled with someone who is dedicated to implementing the Agile mindset.

A good ScrumMaster must have the ability to be an effective Servant-Leader. If is important to understand that a servant-leader takes a facilitative approach and does not apply command-and-control. Some key attributes include:

• Building a trusting environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis of healing and problem solving.
• Facilitating getting the work done without coercion, assigning, or dictating the work.
• Ensuring the implementation of healthy Agile Scrum practices and values are followed on the project.
• Removing roadblocks or find the right level of personnel to remove the roadblock.

In the book “Practicing Servant-Leadership" by Larry Spears and Michele Lawrence, they share attributes for servant leadership. Some attributes include: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, and foresight. Anyone who becomes a ScrumMaster should consider taking ScrumMaster training to help them understand their role and the activities they will facilitate. So the question arises, is there a traditional project role that plays the ScrumMaster the best?

Project Manager as ScrumMaster?
The seemingly obvious traditional role to play a ScrumMaster is the Project Manager. However, from my experience, there are pros with having a Project Manager become the ScrumMaster. On the positive side, the Project Manager has experience in being part of the team, so they may already have a trusting relationship with the team. Some Project Managers have built facilitative skills to lead work in a non-directive yet influential manner. And many already have the skills and the insight into an organization to appropriately remove roadblocks. On the negative side, Project Managers typically do not have technical experience into the product and cannot materially participate in technical discussions or provide meaningful technical insight. Also, some Project Managers had success utilizing command-and-control attributes and the more traditional Project Management practices which will not work well (and can be destructive) in an Agile environment. It can also be hard for some Project Managers to eliminate the traditional Project Management mindset of detailed project planning.

Functional Manager as ScrumMaster?
Quite possibly the most problematic role to play the ScrumMaster is someone who is a Functional Manager (aka, line manager, technical manager, etc.). Anyone playing a role where they have successfully directed people must make concerted efforts in removing their command-and-control behavior. On the positive side, they may have some technical experience into the product so can provide meaningful technical insight. They may already have the skills and the insight into appropriately navigating the organization and the ability to remove roadblocks. On the negative side, because they have been a manager of a team, so they may have issues with the team trusting them as a peer since they have been used to being judged by managers. A Functional Manager may have been successfully utilizing command-and-control attributes. However, this will not work well (and can be destructive) in an Agile environment. They must strive to remove their directive attributes and instead build facilitative skills. They must not assign work but instead enable and support team to become self-empowered. These are significant challenges.

Technical Lead as ScrumMaster?
Quite possibly one of the better traditional roles to play the ScrumMaster is someone who is a Technical Lead (QA Lead, Development Lead, etc.). By “lead”, I do not mean a manager or someone who has direct reports, but instead someone who is considered a lead by his peers. This person has a balance of leadership skills while wanting to get the work done. They typically have no interest in directing people. On the positive side, they have technical experience into the product and their specific field (development, QA, technical writing, etc.) so can appropriately aid the work (without direction or coercion and provide meaningful insight). They have experience at being part of the team, so may already have a trusting relationship with the rest of their peers. Because a lead does not have functional management responsibilities, they typically had to build their facilitative skills to lead work in a non-directive yet influential manner. On the negative side, they may not yet have the skills or the insight into an organization to appropriately remove external facing roadblocks.

Ultimately, the best answer to the question of what role best plays the ScrumMaster is not really a particular role, but instead which person best exemplifies the combination of the attributes of servant leadership, understands the Agile values and principles, embraces continuous learning, has a grasp of the technical aspects of the product under development, and can help remove roadblocks. In your organization, are there traditional roles that more often play the ScrumMaster role or best align with the servant leader attributes? If so, what is that role?  If not a role what attributes best exemplify a ScrumMaster in your organization?

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PS - if you liked this article, consider reading "Who makes the Best Product Owner".