The Agile Blindside

Esther has an M.A. in Organizational Leadership, is the author of over 100 articles, and co-author of "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great" and "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management". She’s a founder of the AYE Conference, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Agile Alliance. www.estherderby.com.

  Agile   Communications Management   Talent Management  

Agile project management depends on transparency and feedback. Visibility into the product and process is built in with iteration reviews and retrospectives. Task walls and Kanban boards make progress (or lack of it) and bottlenecks obvious. Stand-up meetings seek to raise impediments to management attention. But are managers ready to hear about these problems?

If organizations want to realize the benefits of agile methods, managers need to act on the problems that bubble up from teams, deal with unexpected events on projects and proactively find and fix problems that derail projects. Unfortunately, many managers behave in ways that communicate they aren’t interested in solving problems--and ensure they won’t learn of problems until it’s too late.

“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.”
I suspect that managers who repeat this sentence believe it will encourage people and teams to solve problems on their own. But people don’t approach their managers with problems they know how to fix and can solve (or believe they can solve). The problems they raise are ones they don’t know how to solve, don’t have the organizational influence to solve or need some help to solve.

What really happens when managers talk this way? Team members struggle in isolation or ignore problems, hoping they will go away. Managers …

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