Management in an Agile Organisation
The last 10 years of my career I have been involved in the Agile transformation of a large and very dynamic multi-national. I had the opportunity to experience the journey from the first bottom-up initiatives via a supported pilot, to a full-blown top-down Agile transformation. In this article I like to share my personal observations and experiences of this journey and I will especially focus on the role of management.
There is an interesting but complicated relation between an Agile organisation and management. They can’t live with and can’t live without each other. In this serie of blogs I also will share some suggestions how they can “live together” since an Agile organisation without management will not be successful after all.
Challenges faced
Obviously we faced many challenges in this large transformation during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, since this series of blogs is about the role of management in an Agile organisation, let’s focus on challenges related to this topic.
Management has to change as well
The Agile transformation was well prepared in close collaboration with management. Objectives were defined and communicated. Still getting along the management team was the hardest part of this transformation. With hindsight, we did not look enough into what this transformation would mean for management themselves.
Of course we talked about central versus de-central and servant leadership, but the true consequence of this transformation for their own position was not understood and also not embraced.
So when the majority of the people were working in newly formed Agile Release Trains, lead by a coalition of people with new roles the first friction between network organisation roles and typical hierarchical management roles started to surface.
Typical in our organisation managers were considered to be the heros in their own domain. They are supposed to understand all details, explain their teams how to do their work and take full ownership of everything their teams is delivering. However, this way of looking at management is conflicting with servant leadership and autonomous teams that take ownership for their product. The managers of today are all selected based on the vision I just explained, so changing this was not easy. It becomes even more complex when the stakeholders of these managers do not accept different behavior, and these stakeholders were not included in the target audience of the Agile transformation.
Senior Sponsorship
Management and especially senior management need somebody more senior to tell them they are also subject to change. In most organisations you can not expect management to be so mature that they reflect on their own position and change their own roles in the organisation. So a senior sponsor who believes in this changes and is willing to bring this inconvenient message to the organisations’ management layer is very necessary, though hard to find. After talking with many organisations that went trough a full or partial transformation, all the successful ones had such a sponsor of the transformation on a senior level.
Recommendation
Find a senior sponsor that truly believes in the transformation and has a high enough position to accelerate the change of the management layers. The management layer that has to change as well is unable to drive this themselves.
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