Agile 2. Adrian Lander
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“The Agile world, ever suspicious of management, proceeds as if it can manage without the involvement of IT leaders.” 2
A manager is, by definition, a leader who has authority. Authority at the top is unavoidable. An organization has owners or shareholders and a board or a government-appointed leader who has oversight. The question is, is authority needed at other levels?
The Agile Manifesto is silent about the role of managers. Typically, in most organizations, a manager has direct staff, and those people are the manager's team. The Agile Manifesto's principle “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” seems to advocate that teams do best when self-organized, which implies that managers play no direct role. The Agile community has struggled over the years to figure out how to integrate managers into Agile ways of working.
While the Agile Manifesto was written in the context of software development, the ideas have been applied elsewhere, and the culture of the Agile community strongly reflects the self-organization ethos, regardless of the domain of application.
Yet if successful Internet companies can be a guide, managers and team leads are still very much present at the most successful companies. For example, at Google most development teams have team leads. According to the book Software Engineering at Google,
“Whereas every engineering team generally has a leader, they acquire those leaders in different ways. This is certainly true at Google; sometimes an experienced manager comes in to run a team, and sometimes an individual contributor is promoted into a leadership position (usually of a smaller team).” 3
The challenge with collective leadership is that authority is sometimes needed, and while a team can collectively have authority, authority requires accountability, and it is difficult to hold a whole team accountable.
The Agile community is right to have anxiety about authority. Traditional organizations use authority way too much. The traditional Theory X model of a manager who dictates how work should be done and expects everyone to follow orders might work fine in some situations, but most of the time that approach works very poorly, particularly when judgment and creativity are important components of the work. We will discuss Theory X and other leadership models in the “Theory X, Theory Y, and Mission Command” section later in this chapter.
Even when work is repetitive and uncreative, allowing people some control over how they do the work leverages their experience with the tasks and also gives them an important feeling of personal control, which boosts morale.
Authority is needed, but it should be used sparingly. Having authority does not mean that you use it. In fact, people often conflate two ideas: (1) autonomy that has been granted and (2) no one having authority. These are not the same. Authority may be needed to cover many situations, but the best use of authority is often to give others a reasonable degree of autonomy.
Often the use of authority, especially in the form of micromanagement, is not needed. If you dictate what people should do and how they do it, you fail to leverage their ideas and their experience, and you make them feel disempowered. No one wants to be just an order taker.
On the other hand, a leader sometimes needs to make a final decision. A great example of this is Elon Musk's decision to have Tesla develop its own battery technology in-house. An article in Teslarati chronicles this, and Elon Musk's role in that development. According to the article,
“Musk's subordinates have reportedly argued against the idea of developing proprietary battery cells, but the CEO has been adamant about his goal.”4
The CEO (Musk) made the final decision, and today Tesla's battery technology is changing the industry.
Musk could have been wrong, though. There is no way to ensure that the person or group with the best judgment about a particular issue will get to make the decision about it. Quibi was supposed to revolutionize Hollywood by bringing movies to mobile devices, but the instincts and vision of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman—two highly credible industry insiders—proved wrong.5
There is no fail-safe approach. Leadership should try to make sure that those who have the most experience, depth of knowledge, insight, and vision about an issue are all able to consider and discuss it openly in a manner that encourages everyone to contribute to the discussion, and that those who have the most invested in any sense will have the final say—informed by everyone else's thoughts.
The Path-Goal Leadership Model
As we said, having authority does not mean that you always use it. A leadership model known as Path-Goal Theory6 posits four leadership styles.
Directive
Achievement oriented
Participative
Supportive
A directive leader is one who issues commands and expects others to follow. An achievement-oriented leader is hands-off but sets objectives for team members. A participative leader is collaborative and engages in group decision-making. A supportive leader is more focused on the well-being of the members than on the business objective.
Few people fit these patterns perfectly, of course. This is just a model, but it is useful. We introduce the terms here to illustrate different styles of leadership and to set the stage with the idea that there are many forms of leadership. Please bear that in mind when reading the following sections. We will consider forms of leadership in more detail later in the chapter.
We also want to state that no one form of leadership is better than the others. They each have their place, depending on the situation, and sometimes more than one style is needed.
Collective Governance Does Not Solve the Problem
People have tried to figure out if organizations can be structured in a way that authority can be bypassed. Perhaps if there are governance rules, then everyone can be equal, and the system will become collectively governed. Everyone has a vote, in a sense. The most well-known approach for that is the holacracy model.
Does it work? It can, if you hire just the right people. But no one has shown that the model is easily repeatable. And it is not clear that it actually works that well. Medium tried it and abandoned it. According to Jennifer Reingold, writing in Forbes about Medium's experience,
“The sheer number of rules and regulations, combined with the potential for politics to seep in in different forms, makes holacracy, in my view, a questionable replacement for the classic management system, as flawed as the latter may be.” 7
What about giving up on governance altogether and just letting people self-organize? Let leaders emerge—whoever they may be.
It seems that a lack of structure actually leads to hidden power structures that are as stifling—or more so—as formal structures can be. An article in Wired relates the story of Jo Freeman, a 1960s women's liberation movement icon. She complains that “If anything, the lack of structure made the situation worse.” That is, the hidden power of male-dominated systems was more oppressive than entrenched but explicit power structures.8
Perhaps authority structures are needed, but