A make or break of agile success is going to hinge on the organization's ability to evolve some of its operating principles. This post touches on the subject of shifting the traditional supervisory/middle management layer of the company.
Agile is a new way to work; it promises better employee engagement, stronger operational performance, and higher customer satisfaction ratings. In fact, McKinsey & Co has measured 10 - 50% improvements in all of these categories contributing to an average of 20%-30% improvement in financial performance across mature agile enterprise companies.
Great! Sign Me Up, you say!
Love the enthusiasm, but we should talk about some of the fundamental ramifications of evolving to a high performing agile enterprise. Out of a handful of consequential impacts of going agile let's pick one at random for this post: structural hierarchy. "A hierarchical organization is an organizational structure where every entity in the organization, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity. This arrangement is a form of a hierarchy" (1) Bizfluent.com does a good job summarizing the Pluses and Minuses of an hierarchical structure:
Advantages
Clear Chain of Command
Clear Paths of Advancement
Specialization (of skill sets)
Disadvantages
Poor Flexibility
Communication Barriers
Organizational Disunity
How does agile work in an hierarchical structure? It doesn't. It's flat. The agile Manifesto has it baked into its principles "#11: The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." You may ask, but who's the boss of the team? Essentially, there isn't one individual tasked with controlling how work gets done. Teams, or "squads" are largely self-governing, and guided by aligning the organization's objectives with users/customers' needs and satisfaction to produce valuable deliverables. It does it by removing those disadvantages of a hierarchy, while still providing much of the advantages.
This brings us back to the title of the blog: culture change. Agile does not wipe out a supervisory level of a company, but it significantly reshapes it. People with manager titles undertake a mindset and skillset shift in agile. Their role in dictating the work of the teams, controlling the communications of the teams, and seeing themselves as, "the bosses" must transform to a servant leadership (more about servant leadership in a future post.) These roles in agile now serve to remove impediments, connect the work to the strategy, provide work skills, and ensure they are providing the needed staffing and budgets; always helping, no longer 'bossing'.
Traditional managers who don't do well in the agile enterprise:
Those who feel their title denotes their superior value in the org
Those who require all work done by their team be 'run past them before it goes out'
Those who control or filter communications between their team and other groups
Those who escalate issues (particularly to HR) rather than rally to the conflict and work with their team to support and resolve directly
Those who do not accept (or admit) mistakes by their team because they're scared they'll look bad to their boss or their peers
Those who don't understand the power of servant leadership: their responsibility to constantly encourage, coach and support their team in every way possible
This culture shift may seem daunting! However I have seen numerous organizations moving through the change challenges of a hierarchical organization and getting to a new level of invigorated success. Let's talk about what this might mean in your company.
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