The Roles of the Agile Manager (w/ Photos)

Brent Barton and Dhaval Panchal

For photos from the session, go here.

A facilitation exercise for reframing the role of manager in your Agile organization.

In an Agile company, managers are often sidelined and feel threatened that their role is no longer "needed". Through this exercise we try to illuminate various functions that we appreciate our managers perform and highlight shifts in their role that must happen for Agile to thrive and sustain in your organization.

The goal is to turn this into a new form of leadership that can be adopted and sustained in your organization based on your context.

Facilitation Steps:

( What we did at the Open Space event )

(1) Define Individual Contributor (IC), Manager and Executive roles.

(2)Prepare two sets of charts:

"Fine in Agile" , "No longer needed in Agile" , "In conflict with Agile" ( SET )

One set of charts was for Managers to populate with "work/tasks" that they do or should do.

Another set

Of charts was for non-Managers to populate with "work/tasks" that their managers do or should do

In the session, it was observed that there were significantly large number of tasks in "Fine in Agile" ( manager chart ) and "fine in Agile" (non Manager) charts. There was agreement that clearly both managers and non-managers realize that there is much for managers to do even in an Agile organization.

(3) As next step, we asked Manager to review charts prepared by non-managers and vice-versa. Our ask was to identify "shifts" / delta in items that the the two groups observed in each other charts.

(4) A higher level observation that could be made, was this:

* Non-managers moved many items that managers had placed in "fine in agile" category to "no longer needed in Agile" and "in conflict with agile". 

* managers reviewed charts prepared by non-managers and ver very few items were moved to "no longer needed in Agile" and/or "in conflict with Agile"

This was revealing since the folks under scrutiny, Managers in this exercise, had more items that they did or though they should do than what was expected from them.

(5) To dive further in to the details of these items, each manager was paired with one or two non-managers to review these shifts. Insights from these discussions were captured in the following chart.

(6) the session was closed with story and discussion on the executive role and need for them to get coaching in supporting Agility within an organization.

(Again, if you want photos from the session, go here.)