Another View of Lean Leadership

Joe Little from Agile and Business has an excellent post today called "Leaders, Managers, Bosses and Administrators". Actually, he focuses on what leadership means in the Lean and Agile world. He refers to the Poppendieck book, "Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash" (If I had to pick one book to understand Lean as applied to software, this would be the one!). Here's his take on leadership after reading the book:

They [Poppendiecks] raise several excellent points.

1. A team needs leadership. Which is to say, vision. Someone to inspire and someone to help them put their hearts in the game. And keep it there.

2. The project needs decisiveness. If the team has too many leaders, and the leaders squabble about decisions, then the team wastes time. The team needs to know how it will make decisions. There is a trade-off between making the right decisions, and making decisions quickly.

3. Generally, the team needs to learn to make decisions only at the last responsible moment. So, much of the decision-making is about when to make a decision. At what point have you learned enough to make a good/better decision?

4. The project needs business decisions and technical decisions. This is very true. So the team needs business people and needs technical people who are ready and able to make those decisions. And, preferrably, business people who understand technology and technology people who understand business (and the customers).

5. And there are many other types of decisions to be made too. People decisions. Decisions about whose insights to go with on specific areas. Process decisions. Decisions about who is working effectively and who is not. Decisions about how to get the team to communicate better and learn faster.

6. In Scrum, we have ScrumMasters and Product Owners. These roles are endowed with certain leadership aspects. This is different than the leadership of the Chief Engineer, which is a role Toyota uses.

7. Project managers have also provided leadership. (And we have the whole PMP, PMI thing, too.) PMs have also provided managership, bossiness, administration and other things.

8. We know that no bosses are wanted. We want all the best from every person, and a boss will only inhibit that. A boss wants to command others, and thinks he knows all. These are not helpful traits in a learning situation. (So, semantically, we are using "boss" here to represent all the bad things that a boss can be. Of course, few managers or leaders are as bad as a boss, but we all can be that way sometimes.)

Read more in Joe's post.