Agile 2. Adrian Lander
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organizations—ones that have fewer managers and therefore fewer levels of hierarchy. Google famously tried that approach in 2002, but it did not last long. According to an article in Fast Company, “Folks were coming to Larry Page with questions about expense reports and interpersonal conflicts.”9
Perhaps the preference for self-organization is cultural. One of the members of the Agile 2 team claimed that the Agile community's beliefs about leadership and team behavior reflect a Silicon Valley perspective. Another pointed out that Silicon Valley culture tends to value, in his words, “innovation, freedom, entrepreneurship, collaboration, shared ownership, and anarchism.” Those values seem fairly well-aligned with Agile values and attitudes as they are typically expressed.
Does this make Agile incompatible with some human cultures? We are not sure; but to us, the conclusion must be that people need to be able to be selective about Agile ideas and apply them in their own way, rather than using a one-size-fits-all set of practices.
There is an inherent belief in Western society that democracy is a fair process; and yet, democracy can lead to “tyranny of the majority,” whereby the majority vote to subjugate a particular minority. Democracy is not inherently fair. German sociologist Robert Michels proposed the “iron law of oligarchy,” which posited that any democratic system will inevitably devolve into an elite oligarchy.10 Thus, the assumption that even a completely egalitarian team operates in a fair manner cannot be assumed to be true.
Another problem is that in any self-governed system, leaders emerge; informal authority develops. And so even though there are no appointed leaders, there are still leaders. No one appointed Genghis Khan to lead the many tribes of Mongolia to create the Mongolian empire: he appointed himself, through the influence and power that he developed. No one appointed Augustus to lead the Roman empire.
In any group, leaders usually emerge, irrespective of any governance structure. In the United States, Donald Trump was not even a politician but managed to develop enough influence to get elected to be a US president. Influence is leadership, and influence creates its own kind of de facto authority, and it is not always good leadership. Adolf Hitler became a world leader not through peaceful ascent through the ranks but through party politics and the popularity and therefore informal influence that he developed through his speeches, writing, and acts of intimidation, with disastrous results. Leaders can, with effort, undermine any governance structure. Russia has a Constitution, but its leader seems able to do whatever he chooses. Rules of behavior do not ensure that a team will behave well or that there will not be a lot of unfairness going on.
A study published in the Journal of Business and Psychology has shown that in-person teams tend to choose leaders who are confident, magnetic, smart-seeming, and extroverted; but in the study, remote teams chose leaders who “were doers, who tended towards planning, connecting teammates with help and resources, keeping an eye on upcoming tasks and, most importantly, getting things done. These leaders were goal-focused, productive, dependable and helpful.”11
The implication is that in-person teams do not necessarily choose good leaders but instead choose leaders who “look good”—who look like leaders but might actually be poor ones. This indicates that one should not trust or rely on emergent leadership—at least not for in-person teams.
Self-organization also assumes that a team will eventually learn to avoid or resolve conflict. However, conflict can easily tear a team apart. Organizational psychologist Marta Wilson writes about the dangers of conflict if it is allowed to persist.
“Once disagreement takes on a life of its own, the chance that resolution will arise simply out of the group dynamic decreases, and a real conflict begins to gain a foothold.” 12
Having leaders available to help teams to resolve conflicts is essential.13 Such teams are therefore not entirely self-organizing, but are mostly self-organizing.
Conflict is a natural result of differing opinions being discussed. It is an outcome of group creativity.14 This means that if a team avoids conflict, it might be doing so by stifling discussion of important topics. It is therefore important to view a moderate level of conflict as natural and valuable, as long as people behave respectfully. Avoiding conflict is not a good strategy, but since conflict can lead to team disruption, having external leaders available who can help to stabilize things is important.
Leadership is a critically important issue, because if you have good leadership, the methodology that your teams use will matter less; things will likely go well. Conversely, if you have bad leadership, things will not go well—no matter what methodology your teams use.
This means that the questions of leadership and authority cannot be bypassed. We cannot remove leaders from the equation. Leadership and authority—formal or informal—will always exist in any collection of people, and we must take it into account and not wish it away.
Dimensions, Modes, Forms, and Directions of Leadership
Leadership is influence: a person is a leader if they have influence over others. This includes influence of any kind.
You might have influence over a friend, but you don't have actual authority over them. Your influence might lie in their respect for your ideas or your enthusiasm, which is catching. Whatever the source, that kind of influence does not come from having explicit authority.
Thought leaders usually have no direct authority over others. People read Deepak Chopra's books because they respect what he says. In that way, he influences them; he leads them. His readers have agency. They do not follow Chopra on command, but they do follow him—willingly—because they believe that he has insight. People often follow others because they feel those others have insight. One can follow someone even without fully understanding the other, if one trusts the insight and judgment of the other.
What about the Path-Goal leadership model? In those terms, we might say that Chopra's leadership style is both achievement oriented and supportive. It is achievement oriented, because he describes ideas for people to embrace, thereby challenging them; and his style is also supportive, because his advice pertains to their well-being, rather than to achieving Chopra's own objectives.
Chopra is a thought leader. On a team, there are often people who develop influence through thought leadership. They might have a great deal of experience or they might have deep knowledge about a topic or they might have shown that they are very smart or think things through well.
Others on a team might develop influence through their force of personality: they are persuasive, or they project an air of authority. They look, sound, or act “like a leader.”
It is also not uncommon for cliques to emerge among groups of people, including work teams. A clique can be a source of power: if one attains influence within a clique, the clique can exert collective influence over the entire group, through the force of its numbers. If the clique has a leader—which is often the case—then that leader, in effect, can control the entire group, becoming, in effect, a directive leader.
This clique control pattern is described by Leader Member Exchange (LMX) theory,15 which is primarily a descriptive theory rather than an explanation of why people behave that way. LMX theory observes that “in-groups” or cliques naturally form, and therefore intentional intervention is needed to prevent them or dismantle them. Doing so requires either authority or explicit preventions such as group voting, but even with