Recognize How Managers Can Help Agile Teams

In other chapters, I highlighted traps. I’m not highlighting traps here because it’s difficult enough being a manager. Instead, I’m suggesting three things managers can do to help agile teams:

• Encourage collaborative work.
• Help the team consider “how little” instead of “how much.”
• Optimize up wherever possible.

These kinds of ideas help a manager continue to create an agile environment. Unless the entire organization is already steeped in the agile mindset, managers have an ongoing responsibility to support teams in their agile approaches.

How Managers Can Encourage Collaborative Work

Agile is not just a project approach, but a cultural shift. One major shift is to teamwork from individual work. An agile culture creates the ability for the manager to flow work through the team. And the manager can provide team-based recognition and rewards.

Encourage your manager to manage the project portfolio, and flow just one project through a team. Encourage your manager to consider eliminating individual bonuses and work toward some form of team-based rewards.

How Managers Can Encourage “How Little” Thinking

In more traditional organizations, managers are accustomed to directing work. Sometimes they are accustomed to controlling what people do and how. Instead of saying, “Don’t do that,” consider asking the manager this question: “How little controlling or directing is it possible for you to do?”

Many managers are concerned with the effect of bad decisions and nonworking deliverables. You, as a servant leader, can help build trust first with your manager by helping the team deliver visible value, as often as possible. When managers see the team deliver value on a regular and sustained basis, they often start to think about other “how little” possibilities. Build trust with your manager by delivering value on a regular basis.

How Managers Can Help Optimize Up

Sometimes team members pull their hair out. They don’t have the opportunity to solve problems where the problems are. Instead, the problem goes up the hierarchy, over to another function, and down where the people can solve the problem. Then the solution traverses the hierarchy again.

One way managers can help the team succeed is to help everyone think “up” a level. If you can help a manager think in a “lean” way, starting with ​The Two Pillars of Lean​, the manager will think about how to optimize the work for more value. Seeing the whole, eliminating waste, delivering as fast as possible—those ideas resonate with managers. You can help your manager see the whole by discussing how to optimize what the team delivers, not each individual person. Then, discuss what the department or product line delivers, not the teams.