Agile Leadership Lessons
Agile Leadership Lessons *
I came across an article that was published 6 months ago in CIO magazine. In the “7 Agile Leadership Lessons for the Suits”, the author makes interesting parallels known concepts and Agile leadership. Below are the 7 lessons and a brief summary of what each of them entails.
- Trust the Wisdom of Teams: Software is a result of a team effort, so a manager’s main concern should be nurturing the team.
- Even Self-Organized Teams Require Coaching: it would be naive and irresponsible to imagine that turning teams into self-organized machines means abdication from managerial duties.
- Adapt or Get Out of the Way! The New Manager’s Role: collaborative environments, trust, transparency of information, and building productive and sustainable teams.
- Motivate, Don’t De-Motivate: Appraisals, Bonuses and Compensation: everything you are doing in your HR functions is wrong, because it is supported only by our illusions, not by facts.
- Write Value-Based Vendor Contracts: that clients are tired of vendors who promise low-ball prices and then make their money on change requests.
- Avoid Building Plank Roads: Waterfall was a plank road, said Poppendieck, aimed at solving the process problem by applying project management methods already used in other industries. But its applicability to software development was dramatically overestimated, and the ramifications of this strategic mistake haunt us to this day.
- Who Do You Trust?: We are all guilty of stereotyping when we interact with others. We subconsciously label people.
If anybody gave you the impression that Agile was easy, think again. You may want to do some research and determine if the benefits will exceed the pains for your organization before jumping in.
* Picture by Jean- used under the Creative Commons (CC) agreement. The view expressed in the blog post is the one of the author. The photographer does not endorse in any way the content of this blog post or the work of the author.
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