The benefits of servant leadership and self-organisation

? from the 12 principles of Agile

Given an environment that supports such behaviour (such as society) a team, like any other system, organises itself to work in optimum way. The evidence that this is the case is plentiful; there are countless examples of self-organisation creating spectacular results every day in pretty much every situation one can think of.

Enabling self-organisation is the most effective way to get the best out of people.?If you have a cross-functional team full of individuals hired to do a particular job, they will?know best how to do that job. In terms of improvement, which managers are trying to make happen when using metrics to measure teams, the fact of the matter is that human beings intrinsically want to improve. We all want to do our best, and given a supportive environment which values what we do, we in turn will care about what we do and give as much as we can to deliver success to ourselves and those around us.

For this reason, self-organising teams will WANT to measure things so that they can use the data to improve. In my experience at least, Scrum teams want to know their velocity at Sprint Planning and are extremely eager to beat it. It is more of a problem for a Scrum Master that teams tend to want to bring in TOO MUCH work to a Sprint rather than too little. There is genuine enthusiasm for improvement because people take pride in their work and the value they are delivering to the organisation. They certainly do not need a manager telling them (even asking them) to improve, and all this will do is create a feeling that the team has been failing rather than celebrating what has been delivered so far. Yes, one might see short term improvement from such an approach but this level of performance will not be sustainable and will damage the fabric of the positive culture that the team was part of.

If teams are provided with a proper business vision, and their input is welcomed, valued and acted upon, they will likely buy in to the vision because they choose too. If things are pushed on people then they will not feel passionate about them. People are passionate about things that they want to be passionate about; this cannot be forced. Give people something to be passionate about, then give them?the environment and tools to succeed. Your teams will achieve great things.

What about people management?

Like self-organisation, teams are self-managing too. Aside from the SM?s leadership, leaders will emerge from the team in the areas that perhaps most require leadership (e.g. technical and practical).

Aside from its own dynamic and culture, a team needs to be able to develop its own process, own it and change it when required as the product evolves. Process and continuous process improvement (kaizen, retrospectives) will emerge as the team adapts to its environment, culture and product requirements.?If a process is pushed upon a team, the team members may accept it but will never truly own it or care about it.?If the process isn?t working, the team will complain rather than fix the process because that?s all the team members?think they?re allowed to do.

Summary

To my mind, self-organisation and self-management are two sides of the same coin; one leads to the other. The effectiveness that an environment promoting this behaviour can muster is limitless. This is particularly true in knowledge management?work such as software development,?which is a creative pursuit and generally attracts?smart, well-educated and motivated people who like to be able to question their boundaries and change the rules if required.

Under which leadership style do?you work best?

roseanne barr margaret sanger paul george eddie long eddie murphy ufc 143 weigh ins micron ceo