Agile Leadership: Rebel with a Cause By Steven P. Blais, PMP

Command and control. If you want to be successful in business, you have to control every element of the environment, anticipate risks, have contingency plans ready for all eventualities, closely manage, monitor and motivate your resources, and create and follow a step-by-step plan. To do this successfully, you need command authority to act decisively and react quickly. This is the military model of command and control management. It is the way to win battles and wars. No wonder so many of the successful business books use war as a metaphor for business: Motivate the troops. To really lead in business, you have to get down in the trenches. Attack the causes of low sales. Outflank and destroy the competition. Blow away your customers.

This works well for line management where the end result is well known and clearly defined. There is a target and the only issue is how fast the target is reached and how well the process to achieve the target is carried out.

In projects, however, a command and control management style is not necessarily the best approach. To start with, the target is not always known in advance, especially when the project is a software development project. All that may be known at the start of a project is the problem that the organization needs to solve. And then there are the changes. Not only is the target not known to the project team, it is usually not known by the requester either. The business wants a solution to the problem but does not know what that solution is. The fundamental challenge is this: the developers who are trying to develop an unknown product are depending on direction from users who don’t know what they really want.

Trying to achieve the unknown with detailed project-length planning, exhaustive monitoring, comprehensive control, and precision execution may be about as successful as attempting to eat Jell-O with a fork.

There is, however, a “rebel” movement going on amongst project managers and software developers, to overthrow this command and control management approach. . This rebel movement is known as: Agile Leadership and is particularly suited to Agile Project Management approaches, defined in Wikipedia as “iterative methods of determining requirements for software and for delivering projects in a highly flexible and interactive manner.” In other words, it is the antithesis of the environment suited to a command and control approach. The lack of defined roles on agile teams encourages cross-functionality and teamwork.

As all good rebels should, they are making demands of the establishment,.

We know how to develop software; remove the management shackles of heavy process and free us up so we can do our jobs. The star half back on the football team says “We don’t need plays, coach, just give me the ball and let me run.” As long as he keeps scoring touchdowns and the team wins, it works.
We want to produce good working software, not reams of paper. The rebels say that it takes as long to produce the documentation about what they are doing, as it does to do it.
If we are a project team, let us sit together and work as a team. We don’t need a manager to tell us what to do. We know what to do. Leave us alone and let us do it.
We don’t want to negotiate, we want to collaborate. Let us talk directly to the users and customers and not through intermediaries or documentation.
Trust us.

Will it work? Can a team function successfully without a project management structure to hold them together and keep them focused on the goal? Can they really figure out what to do without a project manager drawing up the plans and keeping the Gantt charts up to date?

The US Revolutionary War, as an example of most revolutions, was made up of small groups of men and women who banded together to meet and beat a disciplined military force operating under the command and control model. Many of these small groups of men and women organized themselves, dividing up the work based on their expertise and successfully executed their projects without a project manager or any other command control. They manufactured the munitions, set up early warning systems, nursed the wounded, and won the battles.

It is difficult for those brought up in a command and control environment to imagine successful battles or projects being executed by a team that can operate by itself. Stories of undisciplined workers and unmotivated teams fill the annals of classic project management along with the hundreds of pages of books devoted to how to motivate and discipline from the “X” and “Y” theories to Herzberg and the PMBOK® Guide.

To believe that it actually works, one has to see it for oneself. And those who have seen it do not have to be convinced. So how can we demonstrate the positive effect of self-organizing teams and thus the key role of an Agile leadership approach in delivering more evolutionary projects?

Part of the answer to this question, as it does with many others, can be seen in the movies. Over and over, we see stories of teams of people who do not follow the prescribed patterns and rules and yet still come out victorious. To return tothe war analogy, The Dirty Dozen was successful by banding together men who had differing expertise where each played their own role making their own decisions. They beat Robert Ryan who represented the command and control establishment and proclaimed this group could not win. He lost. In another movie, The Great Escape, there was another band of men each with their own expertise, each doing their own job to obtain the goal. The establishment in this case was the German military.

But wait, you say, there were managers commanding those teams. But was it really “commanding” they were doing? Lee Marvin and Richard Attenborough respectively did not so much command their teams as provide coordination, collaboration, and leadership. They asked the team what the team wanted to do to overcome problems, and the team kept coming up with the answers. In other words, it was a highly collaborative approach based on mutual trust and respect and leadership.
The key words here are “trust” and “leadership”

Throughout history since the dawn of the species, men and women have banded together in teams to accomplish mutual goals: kill the saber tooth tiger for tomorrow night’s dinner, rebuild the barn after the neighbor’s barn burned down, conquer Mount Everest, reach the North Pole, erect a village, and then a town, and then a city. Without trust, collaboration and leadership, which are at the heart of the Agile approach, they would not have achieved their goals.

The question to all project managers today in the face of this revolution is “Can you trust your team to act successfully on its own without your command and control?” Do you believe the members of your team are capable of doing all that is requested of them to complete the project? If not, why not? Can you imagine the team working together to resolve obstacles, address issues, and forge a successful product without you telling them how? How can you “lead” without “commanding”?

If you want to learn how to manage a project successfully without command and control then join a volunteer organization like Habitat for Humanities. Volunteer to manage a project where there is no paycheck to bring about compliance. Volunteer teams manage themselves and the impetus to be there comes from within. Since they are volunteers if they don’t want to show up or work, they don’t have to. And yet, the projects get done, with the project manager acting as guide and leader.

It might be a frightening thought to let go. After all, in the end, it is you who are responsible for the outcome of the project. It is the fear of that eventuality, not to mention the pressure from upper-level management that drives many project managers to adopt a command and control mode. And the more fear the project manager has the more closely that project manager commands and controls his or her team. Note that the issue is not with the team, but with the project manager’s own fears and his or her own beliefs in the capability of the team. When you have absolute confidence in your team and you tap into their innate knowledge and capability, then unsurfaced assumptions emerge, planning becomes a dynamic and living process and your role as PM becomes one of guide, mentor and leader. This leads to a much more “agile” approach. All revolutions in action start with revolutions in thought.

© 2011 allPM.com

Steven Blais, PMP has over 42 years of information systems experience in technology management, consulting and marketing positions. He specializes in the design and installation of business-oriented accounting systems and databases for commercial and government clients in the distributed environment. Mr. Blais has a reputation for on-time, on-budget delivery of high-quality software products.

Artykuł opublikowany dzięki uprzejmości International Institute for Learning, Inc.

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Agile Leadership: Rebel with a Cause By Steven P. Blais, PMP