Agile 2. Adrian Lander
Читать онлайн книгу.
develop influence; thus, we are back to the power of informal influence and its ability to circumvent any procedural safeguard.
It is important to note that any type of influence is a kind of authority; it is a degree of authority that others give to someone over themselves. They follow the influencer willingly, but they still follow. This is informal authority, and just as formal (explicitly given) authority can be taken away by whoever granted it, informal authority can be taken away by those who follow.
A leader can delegate to others; they thereby lend their authority to those others—whether the authority is formal or informal. A democratic vote is a mechanism by which a group delegates their collective authority to a single member, nominating the person as their leader. That leader then might operate in a directive, achievement-oriented, participative, or supportive manner.
Authority can also be constrained. For example, one might have authority over whether a team can release a product to the users, but one might not have any other kind of authority. As another example, one might have authority over product feature decisions within a team, but no other kind of authority.
Soft Forms of Leadership
We mentioned Deepak Chopra as a thought leader, which is a kind of “soft” leadership—that is, leadership that does not work through making commands. It is not directive. Deepak is not telling anyone what to do; rather, people read his advice and incorporate it into their thinking. In that way, they reflect and learn and ideally grow in their understanding of things. There are some specific modes of soft leadership: coaching, mentoring, teaching, coordinating, facilitating, and inspiring or otherwise motivating.
A coach is someone who helps someone to improve in their work, operating both in an achievement-oriented and participatory style. A mentor is someone who helps another to improve their situation, which might include improving their work. That is supportive leadership. A teacher is someone who trains someone in a specific domain of knowledge. Good teachers not only train but operate as a coach as well, and sometimes a mentor, and so effective training often requires all four of the Path-Goal styles of leadership.
Of course, there is significant overlap in the roles of coach, mentor, and teacher. These are all forms of leadership, because the person being helped looks to the coach, mentor, or teacher for guidance, advice, knowledge, and insight.
Coordinating is a form of leadership in which one takes charge of the dependencies between what many others are doing and tries to optimally reorder them and inject steps to synthesize the various parts. A coordinator needs at least a little authority—either formal or informal—to get others to rearrange their work according to the coordinator's decisions.
A facilitator is someone who leads a group by coordinating the interactions among the group. Facilitators often lead discussions, during which they make sure that everyone gets a chance to be heard and that the discussion stays on point.
The use of facilitation is common in the Agile community. However, it is often assumed that the facilitator does not need to understand the topic being discussed. Yet, it is not clear how someone who does not understand a topic can determine whether the discussion is going off point.
Many in the Agile community also feel that if a facilitator makes a suggestion about the subject matter, they compromise their role as facilitator. But Socratic discussion uses hard questions, and posing such questions requires understanding of the subject.
One of us with expertise in a particular domain once worked for an organization facing serious challenges in that domain. Due to that organization's Agile practice's rigid definition of a neutral facilitator's stance, our expertise was ignored and minimized, to the detriment of the product under development.
If someone has expertise or good ideas, they should be free to share those!
Effective leaders often do manage to facilitate discussions well, even when they inject ideas of their own. What matters is how it is done, whether those in the room feel that the leader is open to challenge, and that the best idea will win, no matter who it comes from.
The need to inspire people is important to be able to truly tap people's full ability. Leaders who threaten people get only the minimum effort required to avoid punishment. If people's motivation derives from a belief in the inherent value of the work, because either it benefits them or it benefits others who they feel are worthy, then people will try their best. Motivation can also come from other needs, such as feeling of fulfillment or an opportunity to be creative. These are all positive sources, while fear of discipline is a negative one.
Applicability and Trade-Offs
A team of people is a group that is organized for a purpose. A team often needs many kinds of leadership. First, each person needs to be their own leader: each person has agency, and they need to take responsibility for their own outcomes, voicing problems, trying to get those problems solved to the best of their ability, and—if it comes to it—deciding whether to remain in the group. Some groups sometimes are not a good fit for a particular individual, and vice versa. That is just the reality.
Besides individual leadership over oneself, a team often needs leadership. For example, it might need coordinating leadership; it might need coaching leadership to help it to grow its abilities; it might need thought leadership about particular domains of knowledge that are mission critical; and it might even need some directive leadership for some issues.
Peter Drucker has said that an organization needs “an inside person, an outside person, and someone to get things done.” In other words, one kind of leader is not enough. That does not mean that one person cannot fill all those roles; but such an individual is unusual.
By an “inside person,” Drucker meant someone who can form relationships of trust with the members of the organization, someone they look up to. For a technology company, that individual might be a visionary CTO, or it might be a visionary product designer. In the case of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs was the CEO, but he was also the chief product designer and was widely seen as a visionary, so he was the inside person. When he returned to Apple, he was greeted as a savior, and many people worked at Apple only because it was led by Steve Jobs.
By an “outside person,” Drucker meant someone to deal with the outside world. Any organization or team exists in a larger ecosystem, and that ecosystem can be leveraged, or it can undermine the organization or team. Managing the relationship with the world outside of the team or organization is essential. To do that, one must have some level of authority to be able to make promises, to negotiate deals, and to invest in resources. One must also be adept at managing expectations and coming across as personable, trustworthy, competent, and visionary to some degree.
The third role described by Drucker was “someone to get things done.” That is the organizer. Within a team, an organizer might not need much or any authority, but the higher one goes in an organization, when a team member in turn oversees other subordinate teams, authority is increasingly important because without it, one cannot make decisions on behalf of one's subordinate teams. An organizer is someone who stays on top of everything, continuously watches for problems, takes action as soon as there is a problem, and orchestrates discussion and timely decision-making.
A recurring theme here is when to use one's authority and when to let subordinates decide. Hold that question in your mind as you read this, and we will address it at the end of this chapter, because it is the most important question about leadership, and it ties everything together.
Socratic Leadership
A Socratic leader casts themself as a fellow learner and asks questions and engages in discussion. The outcome of the Socratic process is getting the team to buy into the ideas they agree to as if they thought of them—and indeed they did, even if the leader felt certain about where the consensus would end up (or not).
A Socratic leader needs to understand the subject matter that is being