My take on self-organisation and leadership

I read John Scumniotales's post on Team Leadership and Self Organization a few weeks back and I've been meaning to comment. There are a few things I don't agree with:

John says:

A team has to have a strong, management supported leader.

In Scrum, the Scrum Master provides servant leadership to the team. In terms of technical leadership I like to build redundancy into a team to avoid single points of failure. I encourage the team to see the role of leader as something that can move from one person to another as the situation changes. Any person in the team is free to demonstrate leadership at any time, e.g. if someone knows more about something than the others and they persuade them to take a particular course of action, then that person is leading. I believe management should visibly and vocally support the whole team and every person in it, and not just the leader.

John says:

The team lead has equal and balanced knowledge, respect and appreciation for all disciplines required to get software built. As such, the team lead can dive into details with team members to help remove impediments regardless of whether it's a development, test, scope, or documentation issue.

I strongly believe that every person in the team should have these attributes. And every person should have the awareness to keep their game up.

John says:

The team lead owns the resources and schedule. The team lead has authority and control to direct and modify project resources. Also, operating within bounds defined by the business, the team lead can alter the schedule.

I don't think any one person should have authority in a self-organising team. I'm a firm believer in participatory decision-making and being driven by consensus (using a gradient of agreement). The team decides collectively how to best utilise its skills and respond to changes in the schedule.

John says:

With authority and control comes accountability. The team lead is held accountable for resource and schedule issues.

You don't want to control people, you want to empower them. The team is accountable for the project, and the team decides how to best utilise their skills and deploy people to get things done, and to deal with changes in the schedule. Each person is held accountable by the team to the commitments they make and the actions they take.

John says:

The team lead can influence and negotiate scope changes with the customer proxy

The team is free to negotiate scope changes with the Product Owner.

Tags: self-organisation, team, leadership, scrum

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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