Erfoglreiche Agile Führung – was ManagerInnen brauchen um im agilen Umfeld in Führung zu gehen

Sich selbst-organisierende Teams, wie sie Scrum mit sich bringt, stellen für viele Führungskräfte schwieriges Neuland da. Wie schaffe ich als LinienmanagerIn optimale Rahmenbedingungen für hochperformante Teams? Wie behalte ich Überblick und Steuerung eines Projektportfolios ohne wie gewohnt involviert zu sein? Wie gehe ich mit der Sandwich Position zwischen (oft wenig agilen) Stakeholdern und Chefs und meinen agilen Teams um? Viele Führungskräfte sind mit Scrum überfordert und werden eher zum Impediment denn zum Enabler. Wie aber macht man es richtig?

In interaktiver Form möchten wir diese Fragen zur Diskussion stellen und diese Diskussion unter anderem durch folgende Erfahrungswerte anreichern:

• Eine Studie, in der wir 58 Scrum-PraktikerInnen aus 5 verschiedenen Organisationen zu „Erfolgsfaktoren von Führung im agilen Umfeld“ interviewt haben
• Ein Kompetenzmodell, das diese Faktoren in einen größeren Unternehmenszusammenhang einbettet
• Berichte, wie sich diese Kompetenzen im Einzelfall bewährt haben (Case Studies)
• Eine vielfalt an persönlichen Erfahrungen, die wir als Linienmanager, Berater und nicht zuletzt als Herausgeber der Plattform für Agiles Management www.p-a-m.org gemacht haben

Thomas Spielhofer (https://www.xing.com/profile/Thomas_Spielhofer?sc_o=mxb_p) und Siegfried Kaltenecker (http://www.loop-beratung.at/index.php?id=174) freuen sich auf eine spannungsvollen Abend”

Siehe auch: Event auf Xing

Q: Is leadership still privilege of line management?  There are some hints towards leadership as a team sport but it is not fully explored. Isn´t there more interplay between coaching employees and receiving feedback from them, aligning and developing yourself by helping others, getting fresh impulses for your vision?

A: We may not have emphasized this enough, but the reason in the leadership leadership self-development learning cycles (page 77) that we emphasize reflect and learn is to use all the feedback you can get to develop yourself as a leader.  In the on-the-job development teaching model developed by Toyota of North America that we discuss on pages 118 to 119 an important part of the process is getting feedback and input from the people you are developing.  Toyota more than most emphasizes developing the team members–the hourly people on the floor.  The role of team leader is an hourly position and an intermediate step to line management for those who have the motivation and interest.  The team leader is ideally one out of five team members but probably closer to one to seven in reality.  Still one out of seven hourly employees who has gone through intensive development to become a team leader and is being developed by the group leader to hopefully grow into a group leader role (first level of line management) is very unusual outside Toyota in my experience.  So it goes all the way to the floor.

Q: What are the risks or downsides of lean leadership? What could be a potential pitfall to lead in a lean way? How do lean leaders cope with conflicts fostered by fear as much as denial? Does “Toyota Way” necessarily mean there is no disagreement let alone resistance at all?

A: In the final chapter we cite a bunch of leadership models of other management thinkers that have a lot in common with the lean leadership model.  The basic assumptions of our model:  leaders must be committed to self development,  leaders must develop their own competency to develop others,  leaders must be exceptional problem solvers, leaders must deeply understand the work that they lead by going to the gemba, leaders must build winning teams, are not all that unusual in defining any exceptional leader.  So I would rephrase your question as:  Are there risks and downsides to having a business that depends on developing excellent leaders, as opposed to merely okay leaders that do just enough?  I think there are much more risks and downsides to running an organization with mediocre leaders.  I do not think there are excellent lean leaders and excellent leaders of a different ilk.  I think we are defining excellent leadership and arguing it is something that needs to be explicitly cultivated in a disciplined way over long periods of time.  We are arguing that growing leaders from within is generally preferred since outside leaders with “portable management skills” will not have the culture in their DNA.  Some would say that is inbreeding and to get fresh ideas and renew the organization you need a revolving door of super leaders who come from the outside.  There are cases when that may be necessary, if the current leadership is getting stale and not exploring broadly the market and business models and not reflecting enough on themselves and the organization, but that is a need or a turnaround when the organization is failing rather than a recipe for success.

Q: How does it work in other areas than the automotive industry?  Are the case studies of lean leadership outside of Toyota? What about the broader context of economic turbulence? Is the Toyota Way to be applied anytime anywhere? Does it guarantee infinite success?

A: There is nothing in the book that I can see that is in any way unique to the automotive industry.  We, particularly with Gary’s deep experience, simply were using case examples from Toyota to illustrate the points. But when we look at excellent companies of any type we see similar characteristics.  In fact I pointed out in the original book, The Toyota Way, in the final chapter that Jim Collin’s description of level V leaders who come from American companies in many different industries could just as well be describing a Toyota leader. I do see some very specific characteristics in Jim Collin’s work that are very different from many other books about great companies and great leaders such as his emphasis on building culture, leaders who are passionate about their business that they are building to last, leaders who are humble, leaders who are always grooming the next generation of leaders, leaders who deeply understand their business, and more.    On the other hand, in the dynamic world we live in nothing whatsoever guarantees infinite success.  In fact, nothing guarantees that the earth will exist for an infinite time let alone any individual organization.  On the other hand the success of Toyota, going back to Sakichi Toyoda’s automatic loom company back in 1926, means the company has survived for 86 years.  The uninterrupted growth of Toyota Motor Company since after world war II with 50 years of profitability, interrupted only by the Great Recession. is a testament to the leadership.  The fact that Toyota expects to sell more cars in 2012 than ever before in its history after four years of recession, negative publicity in the United States over safety and quality, the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history, and the worst flooding in Thailand, its Asia outpost, to me demonstrates its resilience and adaptiveness.

Q: How we can truly recognize culture in all its dimensions and how would existing cultures map, over time, to lean leadership? Where to start when an organization and its management are not lean yet? What exactly is the path that leads us from traditional command-and-control to lean management?

A: I always recommend that an organization look back to the forming of the culture, which generally means look back to the founders.  Look for the common elements that allowed the company to be successful over time.  We know the majority of startup companies go out of business within five years so if the company has gone beyond that there are probably some strong foundational elements in its culture.  So build on those–do not start from scratch.  The Toyota Way is Toyota’s vision and it illustrates the power of a strong culture based on the principles Toyota has identified, and I have talked about from the outside, and that can be useful for holding up a mirror to your culture and defining what you want to be.  Then you simply have to start working hard at moving in your True North direction.  Some companies do this very aggressively from the CEO level across the entire enterprise, as Gary and his colleagues were forced to do in the case of Dana.  Others start with pilot areas and learn and then spread the learning in a more controlled way.  What Toyota calls the model areas should be visited often by senior executives who should be working to develop their own skills.

We have some good examples in The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement (with Jim Franz) and the seven in-depth case studies are from different industries and none are Toyota.  We show the trials and tribulations of trying to move a traditional command and control organization to a lean organization.  In every case some exceptional lean leaders emerged, and in every case it was a struggle to spread it across the organization and sustain it over time.  At some point, if the CEO does not get it, self develop, and become a lean leader (or a level 5 leader), the company will begin to move backward.  It is too hard to maintain the momentum when you are working against the pressures of a CEO who is thinking short-term,  focused on fast achievement of growth and profits, and does not have a passion for building leadership and culture.

Q: Where does the broader context of management, its improvement and renewal fit into lean leadership, as discussed by other authors such as John Kotter, Henry Mintzberg, Stephen Denning, Seth Kahan?

A: There are a lot of bread and butter basics to running a successful organization in today’s rapidly changing world.  We tried to emphasize in our leadership book the connection between a long-term vision, a mid-term business plan, and annual plans through hoshin kanri that achieve business needs and develop people.  But in general the lean movement has focused heavily on operational excellence. Critics who say that operational excellence is not itself a strategy are correct.  There is a lot to understanding the business environment, customer needs, your competition, and creatively evolving your business model and your products and services that cannot be neatly captured in leadership for operational excellence.  What is common between improving operational excellence and forming a business strategy is Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA).  Any effect strategy development process must go through an intensive plan stage with a thorough analysis of the environment, including competition.  Based on the broad analysis a vision for the business must be created.  That will lead to more focused initiatives which must be deployed through the organization to get concrete action to achieve the strategy requiring operational excellence.  That leads to checking the results of what is put in practice and adjusting the business vision. Thus the development of even the basic management disciplines, the business model of the company, and operational excellence all require continuous improvement through PDCA.

Q: How do employees perceive and experience lean leadership?  Clearly not all employees are destined to be lean leaders, and some that are, will not be on an “accelerated” path.  How do lean leaders position themselves relative to employees, and how do they draw on the potential and insights of employees?

A: Our experience is that if leaders emerge and are developed who really get the fundamental concepts of lean leadership–respect for people and continuous improvement to achieve challenging goals–working level employees love it.  Many lean case studies have documented the rising morale as companies mature on their lean journey.  In The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement we have an example from the labs of Henry Ford Health System in which the head of the labs, Richard Zarbo, embarked on his own journey of self discovery to remake himself as a lean leader.  He learned to engage employees and found creative ways to get employees in each work group to come up with process improvements which they share at monthly meetings.  Over five years he was up to thousands of process improvements.  Satisfaction with every aspect of the business, including how coworkers related as friends, went from very mediocre to over 95% satisfaction.  Those who struggle the most are the managers themselves, at any level, who do not understand or want to commit to self development.  If they grew up in a command and control environment and want to continue to lead in that way they will not fit in if the organization culture actually changes and leaves them behind.  Those who do self develop will universally describe what they learned and how they developed as the most important transformation of their careers, and that it has made them better people outside of work.

Q: How many organizations would have the capacity and appetite to embark on a journey of lean leadership? It feels to us there is an intermediate step that is buried in Toyota’s past that we are not privileged to. Liker & Convis however state that you should be able to reach it in 10 to 30 years. Is that a realistic, let alone attractive option for organizations which face an average life-expectancy of less than 20 years?

A: Toyota grew up, starting with the strong leadership of Sakichi Toyoda, living and evolving the Toyota Way in Japan and then intentionally teaching it as they grew globally.  It is hard to define any real intermediate stage.  We can certainly see individual leaders who excelled and those who failed, often leaving the company.  We can also see cases where the leadership pool was diluted and improvement stagnated.  We discuss it in the chapter on “developing others” when Gary was brought to the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky to become the first American president.  The site was in terrible shape culturally by Toyota standards because of the large number of people who had left because of the big demand from learning from Toyota, as well as rapid growth of the plants.  We describe some of the things Gary and his team did to work to turn around the culture going back to the basics.  Akio Toyoda has described in many interviews, and we quote him a great deal in Toyota Under Fire, how he needed to reinvent Toyota because it was getting stale.  There is never a time that the organization has arrived and will stay really excellent forever without constant reflection, adjustment, and sometimes rebuilding.  I often use the analogy at the individual level of our health.  What is the pathway that will guarantee every person will become healthy for a long and happy life?  What can we do personally to ensure that we will get healthy and stay healthy without adjusting in a disciplined way as we age?  Is there a secret food or a secret exercise that will make you healthy for life.  We know a lot of things that will make you unhealthy and we know a lot to define a vision for leading a healthy lifestyle.  But we have no way of ensuring that every person will buy into the vision or have the discipline to do what it takes every day to live that lifestyle.  Well organizations are not any easier to keep on a healthy, robust path than individuals.  The only benefit an organization has is it can select individuals who already have the potential for disciplined learning and growing, and we can let go people who become serious liabilities to the company.  Individuals have only themselves.  If the vision for the organization is to be short-lived and have make a big splash while it prospers, making as much money as possible, there are many ways to do that without going through the pain and hard work of developing exceptional people and leaders over decades.  But the organization will then fail, or others will come in and lead short-term turnarounds cutting the bad parts, salvaging what is working, and perhaps growing by purchasing other businesses knitting together an organization that makes them profitable until it implodes again.  Not everyone has the passion or vision to be great or to build a great organization.  We are really speaking to those who do have that passion.  For others they can find a way to get by, and perhaps even make themselves personally rich if they get lucky.  So the answer it that for many organizations, maybe most, they will never develop the sustained leadership excellence and culture to be “built to last” in Jim Collins words.  We, and others like Jim Collins,  are providing some insights for those that have the passion and basic competencies to build something truly great for the long term.

What we appreciate

• The book provides missing link to fully understand how a lean organization is built up, nurtured and continuously improved. Simply speaking, you cannot say lean organization without saying lean leadership. Through a balance of theory, practical steps and story telling, Liker & Convis describe the essential ingredients for organizations to prosper in the decade to come. It is an easy read, with concepts that challenges thinking of most contemporary businesses, and once you start thinking of the implications, it even challenges your individual contributions to the world of work.
• Confirmation that the five values that define Toyota Way: spirit of challenge, Kaizen, genchi genbatsu (go and see to deeply understand), teamwork, and respect, do not automatically result in leadership. Trust is an essential, if not the key, element of leadership. Hard cuts, though sometimes inevitable as the Dana case study shows, must be a last resort.
• Liker & Convis offer a clear explanation of Toyota´s leadership development model. Basically, this model consists of 4 levels: (1)commit to self-development, (2) coach and develop others,(3)  support daily kaizen, (4) create vision and align goals. We see the importance of “True North” as overarching vision, which is central to decision making. We see the importance of lean leadership throughout the hierarchy, a need for shared responsibility according to expertise and the concept of leadership as a team sport. Last but not least, we see the importance of first line managers to provide a role model for the behavior they want to see in place.
• The Toyota Way focuses on culture of leadership rather than metrics or processes, and links the cultivation of leadership, as a leader’s primary responsibility. Personally, we were especially impressed by the ways Toyota dealt with its triple crisis (recession, recalls due to technical problems, earthquake & Tsunami). Although facing severe economic problems, the company resisted the temptation to “manage” the crisis by layoffs and used this it as an opportunity to learn and improve instead. In Liker´s words: “The recommended solution to these problems wasn’t fundamental change but increased attention to fundamentals.” This also underscores the interconnection between corporate culture, strategy, and leadership. In other words: attention to culture and leadership is not optional as both have strong impact on the company’s business value and success.
• Acknowledgement that not all individuals are predisposed to leadership and that an enabling environment is not enough.  An emphasis on self-development, a passion to learn and grow in pursuit of mastery. What we appreciated most was the emphatic exclusion of quick fix solutions and the repeated emphasis on ensuring you start with the right people and deliberately grow leaders from there. Progress is discussed in terms of decades, not even years and definitely not in months. This underscores the long-term if not life-long commitment required to grow a lean organization. If there is a recipe for Toyota’s success, according to Liker & Convis “it is a deep, time-consuming, and expensive investment in developing everyone in the organization, and truly believing that your employees are your most precious resource.”
• Valuable reference points and benchmarks of lean leadership presented in a way that encouraged us to think “how would we have behaved in that situation,” which is an enriching exercise even if you are well versed in the values and principles of lean leadership.

What we ask ourselves

Read Dr. Liker’s response to the following questions

• Is leadership still privilege of line management?  There are some hints towards leadership as a team sport but it is not fully explored. Isn´t there more interplay between coaching employees and receiving feedback from them, aligning and developing yourself by helping others, getting fresh impulses for your vision?
• What are the risks or downsides of lean leadership? What could be a potential pitfall to lead in a lean way? How do lean leaders cope with conflicts fostered by fear as much as denial? Does “Toyota Way” necessarily mean there is no disagreement let alone resistance at all?
• How does it work in other areas than the automotive industry?  Are the case studies of lean leadership outside of Toyota? What about the broader context of economic turbulence? Is the Toyota Way to be applied anytime anywhere? Does it guarantee infinite success?
• How we can truly recognize culture in all its dimensions and how would existing cultures map, over time, to lean leadership? Where to start when an organization and its management are not lean yet? What exactly is the path that leads us from traditional command-and-control to lean management?
• Where does the broader context of management, its improvement and renewal fit into lean leadership, as discussed by other authors such as John Kotter, Henry Mintzberg, Stephen Denning, Seth Kahan?
• How do employees perceive and experience lean leadership?  Clearly not all employees are destined to be lean leaders, and some that are, will not be on an “accelerated” path.  How do lean leaders position themselves relative to employees, and how do they draw on the potential and insights of employees?
• How many organizations would have the capacity and appetite to embark on a journey of lean leadership? It feels to us there is an intermediate step that is buried in Toyota’s past that we are not privileged to. Liker & Convis however state that you should be able to reach it in 10 to 30 years. Is that a realistic, let alone attractive option for organizations which face an average life-expectancy of less than 20 years?

What we got out of the book

• A stark reminder that true leadership is an essential yet endless, time-consuming and expensive commitment that regresses the moment you stop injecting energy.
• There are no quick fixes and no recipes.  Even with lean leadership baked into the culture of Toyota, they still have to pay constant attention to its development.
• The true depth of concepts, like Kaizen and gemba walks, that have been watered down through poor interpretation.
• The significant relationship and context required when coaching leaders.
• Respect for people, not as a gentle approach but offering constant challenges to encourage individuals and teams to reach beyond their comfort zone. Respect must not be an excuse for letting things go. As Akio Toyoda puts it in his foreword: “If we do not give people accurate feedback based on real behavior they are not growing and we are not respecting them.”
• A benchmark for what investment in people can be.
• When selecting people, mindset and culture are more important than skill.

Jeffrey K. Liker, Gary L. Convis: The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership. Achieving and Sustaining Excellence Through Leadership Development.New York (McGraw Hill) 2012.

Find out more about Jeffrey K. Liker and The Toyota Way

Find out more about the co-author of this review: Marius de Beer is a software engineer, coach, consultant, mentor and trainer.

Dear Organizers of the Stoos Gathering

I am sorry that I cannot join you. At the same time I am happy about the great response to your initiative. Thank you for the invitation to contribute at least some ideas via email. Here is my 2 cents’ worth:

I am still wondering if a big “revolutionary” or “radical” gesture is helpful in winning over managers. On the one hand, this gesture is perhaps too much of the same in terms of “heroic management”, where you are supposed to be the solution hero for every problem. On the other hand, remembering Maestro Senge´s “People don´t resist change. They resist being changed”, I doubt that a revolutionary approach shows appropriate respect to managers today.
As to the expected outcome of the Stoos Gathering, I would be happy to learn more about:

• • getting in touch with managers and helping them to start their own learning journeys (e.g. by clarifying what´s in it for them in the short-term as well as a long-term perspective);
• • starting with the change from where they are right now, appreciating that there are many things to build on and continue;
• • practical ways of building trust and fostering relationship, while addressing critical aspects of current management practices;.
• • the essential combination of self-confidence and humility on the side of the potential helper (coach/consultant/you name it).

Cannot butI hope that my 2c’s worth make sense!

Good luck to you all,

Sigi

Introduction

Allegedly one core benefit of agile methods is an increase in productivity. That seems intuitive, as we know that improving teamwork pays off in terms of productivity at least over a longer period. Human interaction and collaboration is one focal point of agile methods after all. Agile methods such as Scrum for one incorporate wisdom that is much older than agile methods, such as the positive effects of co-location and thereby induced direct communication. But Scrum furthermore advocates cross-functional teams with direct customer interaction. It also allows the teams to self-organize. All of these points could be contributing factors to high-performing teams. More on how to create high performing teams can, for example, be found at http://p-a-m.org/2011/09/high-performing-teams/. This article now focuses on how well proven the productivity gains are based on studies of real cases.

How to measure productivity

But how can we measure productivity gains by agile methods in real life? Unfortunately productivity in software engineering still appears quite difficult to measure even in the 21^st century. One way would be to measure overall business output. But typically the overall output of software companies is determined by more factors than the output of its engineering. We would thus have difficulties isolating the impact of agile methods from other contributing factors. Other known approaches are synthetic benchmarks such as the function point analysis or – more simply – the lines of code (LOC) produced in a certain interval per FTE (Full Time Equivalent). Both have their shortcomings in measuring productivity. Particularly LOC as the older method does not sufficiently regard the complexity of the problem being solved: a hundred lines in programming a critical kernel function are hardly equivalent to hundred lines of standard web interfaces. Nor does it consider the quality of the implementation applied: good, state-of-the-art, object-oriented design might deliberately pursue lower LOC rates. Furthermore, many benchmarks are impeded by their own intention: some create a mirror of more or less comparable companies (or projects within one single organization), for example one using agile methods the other not. Unfortunately, the company or project that is reflected rather poorly in this mirror will be reluctant to have the outcome made public (an obstruction that probably goes for using any benchmarking).

Further complexity in productivity measurement is added by the circumstance that productivity is not an isolated factor. Even if we managed to compare projects where all other factors, such as product quality, are similar at a certain point in time, we would still face a possible trade-off: high short-term output could have been gained by piling up technical debt. In consequence, the outcome of a team should ideally be evaluated over the life cycle of a solution. A short-term solution might produce quicker results at the expense of maintainability; a more sustainable approach will consider the longer term with sufficient focus on product quality. But few researchers have the patience to conduct their studies over a stretch of 5-10 years. We certainly wouldn’t:)

Real-world studies

Yet there are studies to be found that take on the challenge. To start with, Scrum founder Jeff Sutherland tackled the question over years. He has delivered both productivity comparisons of companies as well as guidelines on how to achieve what he calls “hyper-performing teams”. (For instance see his presentation on “systematically achieving hyperproductivity”: http://jeffsutherland.com/PracticalRoadmapGoogle14Dec2009.pdf, or his response to the specific case of a company: http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2008/09/shock-therapy-bootstrapping.html). As far as the productivity comparison is concerned, again one must ask the question of how the data is measured. In the case of the presentation above, Jeff Sutherland uses velocity as a yardstick (he used other methods on other occasions). What does that measurement tell us? Assuming that the companies in this example follow the Scrum methodology, “velocity” tells us how the team rated the complexity of all of their own stories (requirements) implemented during one sprint. The yardstick is story points, an abstract unit, addressing relative and not absolute size, in a way that is not standardized – not even within the same organization. So we compare the subjective rating of two teams in an abstract currency. What does that tell us? It can certainly give us indications to formulate hypotheses of how productivity evolves with agile methods. But can it prove productivity gains of one team over time, or can it reliably measure productivity differences between two teams? We think not.

Other sources provided individual case studies such as by Eric D. Brown (http://ericbrown.com/agile-project-management-product-strategy-a-case-study.htm): “85% of the product features in half the time at less than half the cost.” Studies based on broader data have been conducted by universities and large companies. An overview of such studies has been provided David Rico et al. in “The Business Value of Agile Software Methods” (J.Ross Publishing, 2009). While the book delivers a good overview of studies, we found the conclusions derived to be… well… breathtaking. We learned that agile methods are 18 times as cost-effective as conventional methods. Quite impressive! But what does the figure 18 mean? Taking a closer look at the metrics revealed that Rico et al. focused on LOC per hour and number of defects. We can follow the qualitative arguments provided – that using agile methods leads to more code being produced and the code being of higher quality. But we are hesitant to believe that methods can be measured accordingly in such a one-dimensional way. Beside the fact that the old LOC measurement seems a bit outdated, we are uncertain how this metric is applied in this meta-study: it is unclear to us how the data across many studies with different methodologies had been compared. However, an interesting aspect becomes overt if we crosscheck the studies quoted by Rico et al: many of the studies quoted show significant improvements in productivity when applying agile methods, many of them around 80%. However the researchers measured it, they came to similar conclusions regarding productivity. So if we choose to live with the methodological questions raised above, this is a strong piece of evidence of productivity gains by applying agile methods.

Conclusions

All in all we see a reliable indication that productivity gains are to be expected by implementing agile methods, given they are properly applied in an enabling environment. That goes for increased output before a release due to high-performing teams, as well as for reduced maintenance effort after the release due to better software quality. We also acknowledge that determining the impact of organizational changes on productivity remains haphazard. Finding a quantitative indication in hard currency on what can be expected by introducing agile methods might have to wait for some time to come.

On December 7th, 2011, I was kindly invited to join the Scrum Meeting in Karlsruhe. The topic that day was “leadership in agile organisations”. A great opportunity for this platform to learn more about what Scrum practitioners, coaches and managers in Karlsruhe, a city with a strong agile tradition, expect from agile leadership. At the beginning of the event I was given room for a short presentation regarding the results of our study “successful agile leadership” (http://p-a-m.org/2011/06/exec-summary-of-the-study-on-successful-agile-leadership/). Furthermore, we went through the draft of the agile leadership model that Sigi Kaltenecker and I had developed. This presentation was followed by a vivid discussion by the group. Before the group diverted into smaller groups with informal (but no less vivid) talks, the facilitators gathered a round of structured feedback: each participant was asked 1.) what she/he would take home from this event and 2.) what could be improved in the agile leadership model.

What the participants take with them:

What the participants think we can change/improve:

What I take with me:

• The reverberation of a very warm hosting and an unobtrusive yet very effective event facilitation by Jürgen Hoffmann and Heiko Stapf. Thank you, guys!
• The impression of a very well established Scrum community: a group around 30 people having vivid and sometimes controversial talks, and yet being able to moderate themselves -only very few interventions by the facilitators were made. Talking about team building and talking about scrum masters/facilitators making themselves superfluous by enabling the team to lead a constructive dialogue by their own means -this was an impressive example for me to behold.
• A lot of attention and resonance regarding the topic “agile leadership”
• A list of specific feedback to our agile leadership model for us to chew on over the next months. Thanks to all the participants, this is very valuable for us to further improve the model

On the one hand this concept reflects a deep change in what it means to successfully lead teams and organizations in the 21st century. On the other hand the concept uses soccer as a metaphor for agile team work. First of all, Slide 5 of the presentation at the Scrum Safari in Cape Town summarizes some of the most important differences between ”traditional leadership“ and ”leadership as a team sport”. Whereas the traditional approach builds on a leader who acts as a single point of authority, a privileged decision-maker and a one-way-street communicator, leadership as a team sport takes a very different route. Here, the focus is on a dense network of reciprocal relationships, a goal-oriented combination of diverse perspectives, open communication, team-based decision-making and professional conflict resolution. Performance is not driven by command-and-control anymore – it is driven by mutual understanding and helping. Success is the result of the flexible collaboration of various forces. In other words, everyone is allowed to take the lead whenever this seems to be necessary for the benefit of the whole team. Leadership of this collaboration is therefore neither limited to a formal position (e.g. the team lead) nor to a single person (e.g. one key player). On the contrary, as in soccer every player can set important impulses, make the decisive pass, strike whenever a position seems to be promising and score for the benefit of the whole team. As we all know, a defender can as well get the decisive goal as a midfielder or a forward.

What can we learn from soccer for leading in an agile environment? Perhaps, this is the most important lesson: to win a game, i.e. to be successful as a team depends on the willingness to help each other. This help consists of running to be in the right place at the right time, whether you have the ball or not. For sure, the contribution of each player in terms of passes completed and importance for strategy or tactics is always different. As the network analysis shows (see Slide 6), there are always players who are more active or agile. But one must not forget that this agility does not necessarily mean that the most active ones dominate the whole game. Neither does the coach. Actually, his influence is quite limited. A soccer team is a self-organizing unit following a very specific dynamics. Slide 7 reminds us of the fact that these dynamics is also strongly influenced by the broader organizational context of the soccer club´s management, its fans or the sponsors who spend a lot of money to see “their” team win.

Likewise, in organizations leadership is more about the collective than it is about a single manager or employee. And it is definitely more about the actual relationship of this collective with its customers (“sponsors”) and stakeholders (“fans”). In other words, it is as much about the specific qualities and competences that the team can actually realize as it is about your opportunity to instantly create value for customers and stakeholders.

What we have learned from our interviews with diverse practitioners during the study on “Successful Leadership in an Agile World” mirrors our own experience as managers and consultants who have been involved in different companies. The lesson, in a nutshell: effective cross-cultural, hierarchy-bridging collaboration of different members is a key factor for success. This success factor is also the focus of a current case study which is briefly presented in the second part of the slide show (see Slide 8). In this case, the IT department of a mid-sized media company realized leadership as a team sport by

• mindfully contracting with the CTO, clarifying the idea of a “fresh start”, the problems to be solved, the “most valuable players” to be included and the expected results to be tracked.
• building a core team for driving the “fresh start”. This team consisted of members from different teams, areas of expertise and hierarchy levels (besides the initial idea of a rotating membership which was actually never realized);
• kicking off the “fresh start” by creating and aligning “mission statements” from diverse perspectives, identifying the most important stakeholders and their mutual relationships as well as running a classical retrospective identifying what had gone well so far, what had not gone well and what the team thought they can learn from their experience;
• conducting interviews with the identified customers and stakeholders, distilling their most important needs and pains in order to make sure that the so-called “re-loading of agile principles” delights customers (or at least meets their interests);
• facilitating a large group event with all members of the IT unit, re-creating the missions statements, presenting what the core team had learned from their interviews, openly discussing the results on cross-functional table groups and collectively defining and prioritizing measures for success;
• monitoring these measures and continuously inspecting and adapting them;
• presenting stories of successful change including intense peer consulting on different levels (all ScrumMasters, all Product Owners and almost all line managers in homogenous groups to foster their learning processes according to their specific roles);
• coaching of ScrumMasters and training of Product Owners by external experts;
• agile leadership training of a hierarchy-bridging group of managers;
• regular retrospecting of the “fresh start” change process and its management;
• developing a strong culture of continuous learning and improvement.

The importance of leadership as a team sport is also reflected by the current theoretical discussion on leadership and organizational design. Indeed, leadership as a team sport is not a new concept in the academic field. Katzenbach and Smith´s landmark book on „The Wisdom of Teams. Creating the High-Performing Organization“, first published in 1993,  was one of the first books addressing the concept of „shared leadership“. According to Katzenbach and Smith, leadership is shared when

• everyone takes responsibility for the team´s success as well as for individual growth;
• results are achieved and presented collectively;
• authority is distributed according to expertise;
• communication creates a network of trustful relationships;
• important decision are aligned with each team member;
• processes are reviewed regularly and adapted if needed;
• the quality of collaboration is also on the agenda for regular retrospection.

With his concept of a “leaderful practice“, Joseph A. Raelin even goes beyond Katzenbach and Smith´s ideas. Raelin defines four qualities of contemporary leadership:

1.)     ”concurrent“, i.e. there is not only one person leading at one time but a lot of team members;

2.)     “collective“, i.e. leadership is driven by the informal communication and decision-marking of various experts rather than formal authority;

3.)     ”collaborative“, i.e. it is about intense team work;

4.)     ”compassionate“, i.e. based on individual responsibility for the team´s success and mutual growth.

As Raelin puts it, we need organizations that give everybody the opportunity to lead and set decisive impulses that potentially make a difference – according to the organization´s current situation and the needed expertise. ”The essence of leadership is collaboration and mutuality.”

Requirements engineering appears to be the nemesis of IT projects: “Poorly defined applications have led to persistent miscommunication between business and IT. This contributes to a 66% project failure rate for these applications, costing U.S. businesses at least $30 billion every year (Forrester Research). 60% – 80% of project failures can be attributed directly to poor requirements gathering, analysis, and management (Meta Group).”¹

One of the pillar stones of agile development is that it helps circumvent this risk in software development projects altogether: instead of specifying a huge software monster in depth you just build it piece by piece. Instead of discussing what each side of the negotiation table believes this monster to be, you agree on its essence and start to actually build it step by step. The propinquity of customer and team engenders trust, which opens leeway for both sides to learn and adapt. Suddenly both sides find out that they no longer need a humongous requirements management arsenal: no elaborated artefacts and processes to shepherd the customer’s requirement along the long and unforeseeable process chain until (a year or so later) something emerges like a jack-in-the-box that is supposed to meet the customer’s requests. The customers are delighted, productivity boosts and billion-dollar projects going down the drain become a myth with which to frighten your grandchildren in front of the cosy fireplace of your Colorado skiing hut (built with the millions you made with successful software projects).

Sounds like a fairytale made up by a Scrum evangelist? It might well be. And as with any fairytale it may carry a seed of truth, but there are also many chances to go astray. The following story is not fair at all, yet it actually happened in a multi-national company that had been running Scrum for more than a year at that time. They had their staff trained by a certified Scrum trainer, had been accompanied by a Scrum coach in the transition and then  … then they tried to build an iPhone app:

In a board meeting the CEO announced that the current iPhone application of the company group was “rotten”. The COO pushed that message down the line requesting an immediate re-launch of the iPhone app within a few months. Some details regarding what were considered ‘necessary features’ by the board were passed on through the line. The message soon reached the IT team, where other projects were dropped in favour of the iPhone app re-launch. The allegedly best external company around was hired to design the app; the internal team responsible for the backend was tasked to develop the backend interfaces with top priority. This team worked according to Scrum. Their product owner got his requirements from a representative of ITO (a different organizational entity), who got his requirements from the business units (yet another organizational entity).

The project initially took off well. The initial sprints met their targets. The timeline became more specific and a special marketing event with large media attention was planned, at which selected board members would personally present the new app. This deadline seemed feasible both for the product owner and the vendor. Time passed on. At some point the product owner received more and more input that some new features “definitely had to be implemented to meet the desires of the board”. As the marketing event drew closer, however, it became less and less possible to implement all these features. The management considered shortening the QA activities, even entirely dropping the security review. The situation escalated when the external vendor declared that he would no longer be held liable for the product under these conditions, as the agreed QA prerequisites were no longer met. The vendor believed its reputation was in jeopardy and refused to add any more features. As the ITO and business units’ representatives learned that their previously agreed features would not be delivered for the marketing event, they demanded that “heads should roll”.

What I ask myself: What went wrong here? What could have been done otherwise?

Ideas are warmly welcome

1: Kathleen Hass, “The Blending of traditional and Agile Project Management”, www.pmworldtoday.net, 2007

What you can find in this article: A management model for mapping high performing teams // Practitioner´s guidelines to enable these kind of team s// The story behind these guidelines

The model was the result of a breakout session in the Agile Leadership Training which took place in Johannesburg on 2011, May 26-27. Facilitated by Michael, this session started with individual brainwriting by all group members aka authors of this article: What do we see as characteristic properties of high performing teams?

In the first round, we brought up our 3 most important ideas and clustered them in order to find out typical patterns. While we were still in the middle of our second round, focusing on missing parts and further links, Chris provided us a quick sketch of a model to help us discover the bigger picture. We tested this picture by mapping our initial ideas according to the basic structure of Chris´ model (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

During both the following debriefing phase within our small group and during the presentation phase together with the other breakout groups, we found out that the outcome of our session was not just a nice picture. On the contrary, we were more and more convinced that this picture could serve as a kind of practitioner´s guidelines for effectively supporting high performing teams. Besides, it adds a manager´s point of view to the well-known concepts discussed in several articles (see, for instance, “The Seven Characteristics of a High Performing Team”)”>)

However, this is what these guidelines highlight, consisting, as shown in HPT Grafik 0911, basically of 4 different areas:

1. 1. Direction
2. 2. Structure
3. 3. Teams
4. 4. Space

What is covered by these areas?

Direction, in terms of strategic focus, is driven by organizational expectations. In other words, all teams need a sense of purpose and a clear cut mission. Direction is about a compelling objective, that has the potential to generate business value. http://www.teambuildingportal.com/articles/team-performance/qualities-high-performance-teams

Structure means creating enabling conditions for team work, such as

• the right staffing,
• an optimal mix of skills,
• a clear system of recognition and team rewards.

In line with J. Richard Hackman´s concept of “Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances”, () , one might add

• the right team size (usually not more than 7 members),
• team norms such as a committed team charter explicitly clarifying mutual expectations,
• mutual commitment on decision authority, and
• regular opportunities for addressing the quality of collaboration within the team (inward looking) as well as the relationships between the team and its performance context (outward looking).

Teams, the third area and kind of heart piece of our model, start their journey to high performance by

• taking ownership,
• doing what they do best,
• holding themselves and one another accountable,
• open communicating, and
• big picture thinking in terms of a clear strategic view (see “Direction”).

For sure, this collection reminds us of the well-known success factors, sponsored by Katzenbach and Smith and Patrick Lencioni´s “Five Dysfunctions of a Team“. However, HPTs typically reflect strong extensions of the basic characteristics of teams. In line with Katzenbach &Smith´ landmark research, this extension is nurtured by intense commitment, a deeper sense of purpose, mutual accountability and a complementary skill set.

Space is to be generally defined as supportive organizational context. As opposed to structure and direction, this context is more about the broad as well as “soft” area of culture rather than “hard fact” skills or techniques.  Although we know that we have to be context specific in order to appropriately identify an organization´s culture, there is a specific collection of cultural elements that have proven to be generally helpful when it comes to supporting HPTs. In our discussion we identified:

• an open climate where it is easy to promote ideas
• the opportunity to experiment in order to encourage innovation
• an atmosphere of trustful communication not only within the teams but between teams and different hierarchy levels as well
• the ability and willingness to address and work on conflicts in a solution-oriented manner
• last but not least, a sense of importance to deliver real business value.

As experience shows, HPTs  are based on a broad range of effective team work and shared leadership. There are, nevertheless, specific ways how line managers on higher hierarchical levels can foster the right space. To create a supportive organizational context, they should think about:

• starting to grant trust: let them do their own thing;
• stopping to micro-manage: macro-manage by creating committed forms of control instead;
• continuing to communicate — not only with the teams but with their customers and stakeholders as well;
• providing the right information system: give the team all the data that members need to competently plan and execute their work within the bigger picture of the company´s strategy (aka “big picture”)
• giving and explicitly asking for feedback on a regular basis: Commit on opportunities where you can gather first-hand data by silent observing.
• allocating dedicated resources in terms of equipment, money,  staff time and physical space: help them to focus on joint performance as well as on sustainable team building.
• Redefining roles and responsibilities, e.g. by creating new job descriptions for Managers 2.0 (link);
• Ensuing consistent attention and support form all management levels, including TOP management´s commitment to Agile transition,
• Creating a reward system based on team performance. rather than on individual performance;
• Providing an educational system: make training and expert coaching available to work teams for any aspects of the work in which members are not already sufficiently knowledgeable or skilled;
• Being a role model for whatever behavior you want to see in place. As experience shows, walking the talk as to your own learning efforts is of specific importance in an agile environment.

The Authors:

• Muhammad Ally, Manager, RMB
• Norman Blunden, Head of Projects, Investec Private Bank
• Michael Groenewald, Head of Retail IT, Allan Grey
• Chris Reyneke, CIO, Momentum EB