Team leadership in Agile development

Many organizations new to Agile development struggle with implementing effective leadership at a team level.  This is partly because it can be hard to find good practices. Most Agile approaches focus heavily on how the work is done.  They do not look in the same depth at how a team is led.  Scrum, for instance, has no mention of line management. There has been a deliberate decision to avoid distraction into an area which has many different opinions, but this doesn’t help someone who is trying to address the problem.

In the New New Product Development Game, Takeuchi and Nonaka view the team as having a far broader set of skills and remit than just development.  In their model, this would presumably include all management functions, probably excepting budget and high level strategy.  However, this is a much broader view than the usual development-focused understanding of an Agile team.

Self management in Scrum

Scrum refers to “team self-management” .  There is a fairly clear implication, if perhaps not explicitly stated, that there is no management function within the team.  The team solves all problems as a collective.  There is also no direct mention of any external management role.  Presumably the intent is that the team can escalate issues externally, although this is not discussed.

However, management functions clearly do exist. The team needs support from outside for activities they cannot themselves perform. These can be seen as “external services” as I describe in the “Management as a Service” approach.

Scrum supplies two specific roles for “management” functions.  The first is the Product Owner who offers strategic and business guidance.  The other is the Scrum Master who offers coaching in particular around processes and Agile good practices.

Beyond these two roles the team itself does not have a leader.  Success for this approach depends strongly on circumstances.  The team needs the skills to be able to function effectively without a leader.  That suggests a team with a fairly high level of experience.  In my own knowledge of teams with mixed skills and experience this has rarely (although not never) been the best approach.  With no leadership the team can often fragment or be unable to find a sense of direction.

Line management services

A problem with the team having no leader is that there are some “management services” which are typically performed by a leader.  We might call these “line management services”.  Typically these include administrative activities (absence, sickness), personal development support, performance management and reward.  These are all activities which are hard to share among peers.

In some organizations these are picked up externally to the team by “engineering managers”.  Engineering managers are generally full time managers operating across multiple teams.  This traditional hierarchy risks disrupting the key areas of team autonomy. External control on the team will reduce team autonomy and empowerment. 

My personal preference is to focus on a “team lead” role within the team.  This does modify the team dynamics away from the Scrum idea of “no hierarchies”.  However, it recognises the range of skills and experience in a typical team and boosts the autonomy of the team.  Most critically, it puts management services close to the team. The team lead is highly familiar with the individuals and all aspects of their day to day work.  This makes them better placed to support the team than a more remote manager.

Good practices

An important factor to make this work is to be clear on what a team lead’s role is.  This is part of the more general need to understand what “Management as a service” means, what services a team needs and how these are delivered.  Without this clarity, the team lead role will become impossible.  There will be clashes with people providing other services.  There may also be overloading on the team lead.An example of how services might split between roles is below. Like all Plays, this is a suggestion, not a definitive answer.

Engineering Manager

• Strategic guidanceResource accessCulture and environment

Product Owner

• Market guidance

Team Lead

• Mentoring and reviewCoaching and development

Agile Coach

• Agile good practices