You Cannot Achieve Agility Without This Critical Step

Most companies attempting to embark on an Agile or other digital transformation skip the critical step of having a clear leadership development path for their product, design, and engineering managers. Agile transformation will not succeed without strong leadership at all levels of the organization, but it's the middle layers that are probably most important.

To be clear, by "leadership", I am not talking about authority. And I am also not talking about only the upper reaches of the organization chart. Leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate others regardless of your power over, or reporting relationship to, any of them. Also, for this article, I am using "Agile" as a placeholder for any broad organization transformation project. Agile is just a very common type of transformation these days, and there are aspects of Agile that illustrate particularly well the critical importance of the alignment of technical, process, and leadership strategies.

The Agile Leadership Gap

Usually, it all starts because someone with a very impressive title makes the decision to "go Agile," usually someone who has very little idea what it means. "Going Agile" probably sounds a lot to them like "Going Paleo." Perhaps if we just cut all the carbohydrates out of the product backlog we'll be leaner somehow? I don't know for sure what they think Agile is. But it doesn't really matter, because what happens next is more interesting.

Companies nearly always start with process. This is the route to change management with which they are most comfortable. After all, companies of any reasonable size achieved their scale by reducing as much variation and creativity as possible, and adhering to carefully honed processes. Something as flexible and liberating as Agile would have to first be pre-processed and sanitized by "process experts" in order to make it safe to consume. Once the process has been fully ironed out, it's passed down successive layers of management to be implemented.

Agile fails to "trickle down" though, because it is not in fact a process at all. It's a mindset. On the ground floor, engineers, designers, and product people are then stuck doing the grunt work of trying to implement some distorted version of Agile while simultaneously being told they have to continue working the old way at the same time. Some organizations go so far as to rebrand their own version of Agile, calling it "The Such-and-Such Way". This lukewarm middle ground Agile is the worst of both worlds. I am not a fan of Waterfall, but at least you can build the space shuttle or a nuclear power plant with it.

Three years into this so-called transformation, nothing has really changed. Sure, there are plenty of Scrum teams formed, and there are tons of sticky notes on the walls of every conference room. But software stubbornly refuses to get shipped on time, and when it does ship it still has plenty of bugs and looks terrible. But that's OK, because it's not what the customer asked for anyway.

The saddest part is that many of the individual contributors already know what to do. These are creative people, engineers and designers. They attend conferences, read blog posts, and watch videos in order to improve their skills. Their friends at other companies have already told them what real Agile is supposed to look like. But their managers keep them locked into the sanitized corporate process with an iron grip. And not even because their managers believe in it necessarily, but because they themselves have their directives to stick to the implementation plan at all costs.

When the dust settles and we look around to figure out what went wrong, one consistent theme always emerges. The folks in the middle layers of the organization, the managers, were never aligned on doing the transformation in the first place. Certainly, there is more than one reason for this lack of alignment. A culture of mistrust, poorly aligned incentives and performance review systems, and functional silos pop to mind. But beneath all of these is the simple fact that these managers were not trained and supported in how to properly enable and empower their teams to succeed.

You've Been Promoted

It's quite common for engineers, product managers, and designers to become managers of other people in the first place because they were once high-performing individual contributors themselves. A management role was perhaps seen by their bosses as a reward for that high performance.

Overnight, their role in the organization transformed dramatically, from one that was centered on the completion and delivery of elements of a finished product or service to one that is centered on enabling teams of people. The two responsibilities could hardly be more different.

If you haven’t been a manager before, or you’re new to the role, you probably have an imaginary sense of what being a boss is like. Our popular culture presents an image of a boss as an all powerful being who has the authority to coerce their people into working by either rewarding you with bonuses and perks, or punishing you with being fired. Most people think it’s that simple.

But it’s not like that at all in the real world. Managers need to learn how to inspire and influence people, rather than just give orders. They themselves need to embrace a growth mindset, and to be aware of their own challenges and shortcomings. They need to build empathy with those who report to them, and learn how to coach them to achieve their best performance.

It is already fantastically difficult to transform a traditional organization into a flexible modern Agile one. Even under the best conditions, a change program can still fail. We add in significant further risk by not providing a clear path to leadership for the management team whose charge is to actually implement the transformation on the ground.

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