Chapter 20. Leadership and the mature team
Roy’s second chapter about the three team phases rings true in my experience as a team member, project leader, and development manager, but still it touches a red button of mine! I’m grateful to Roy for his gracious offer to let me respond.
My red button? I worry about the Agile community’s recent focus on self-management. Don’t get me wrong; self-management’s a good thing, but in its current popular usage it has two problems:
- It fails to satisfactorily capture the powerful concept (borrowed from the study of systems) of self-organization.
- There seems to be a move in the community to minimize the role of leadership.
Self-organization’s at the heart of agile methods; indeed, it’s the 11th of the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Definitions vary, but, in this context, it describes the ability of a system (here, the project team) to create ways to increase its effectiveness.
Looking at the team from the outside, we see emergence—new behaviors arising without external intervention. In the Scrum con-text this might happen as a result of team retrospectives (the 12th principle) or through the individual contributions of team members. Either way, it’s important to recognize that some of these new behaviors (or innovations) may be highly nonstandard.