Leadership supports rather than drives the work

Description

Leaders seek to engage the collective capability of the organisation's people by actively cultivating the system of work (environment), helping everyone to establish the purpose of the work (the “why”) and removing impediments to performing excellent work and achieving personal satisfaction.

Rationale

L. David Marquet describes the role of leaders so: “In healthy organizations, leaders take responsibility for the system and people take responsibility for their actions. In unhealthy organizations, leaders blame the people and the people blame the system”.

And from Peter Drucker: "The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant."

Agility implies creating an adaptive system by distributing decision-making that takes place where the capability and information are best. In order to achieve that, leadership supports the creation of a system of work that empowers delegated authority and responsibility, co-creating the agile organisation. This creates a sense of ownership and accountability for the products and the process, thus improving commitment and attention to results.

While the previous paragraph also applies in the case of a single agile team, in a scaled environment, the investment and the stakes for a product are usually much higher, hence more pressure to regulate the process in a command-and-control way.

Related Principles

• Create the environment for people to thrive
• Foster a high trust environment
• Maximise engagement
• Cultivate learning between teams
• Catalyst for change
• Create clarity of purpose
• Involve those affected by change
• Create a Learning Organisation
• Provide an impediment removal service
• Are lean practitioners
• Support autonomy with clear boundaries
• Self-managed teams
• Organise around value streams
• Shared context improves decisions
• Minimise unnecessary complexity
• Technical leaders as coaches, mentors and community leaders