Stop carrying all those bricks

Stop carrying all those bricks

by Dirk Depré - January 4, 2022

You are not a puppeteer. You don’t make things happen because … it doesn’t work like that. You have to set the stage and let people pull their own strings. And while people are jumping from one foot to the next, you are there to guide, serve and lead them. Yes, leadership is so much more than just coaching or … unfortunately, like some are still doing, acting like the puppeteer.

Nobody ever promised that things were going to be easy when you become a leader. Yet, we live in an era where we all step up and become leaders. Throughout my professional career, I automatically got into leadership. Nevertheless, throughout that whole process nobody actually ever asked me if I was up for the challenge. Sure, we love all the cool things of taking care of those in your charge: zipping a coffee together, empowering people so they naturally and organically take initiative, create amazing things build on those super-engaged people in your teams, deploying a strategy which resonates with everybody in your team, delivering goals together and celebrating successes. But are you ready to stand up when shit starts hitting the fan: what if people are not performing, what if people are not engaged and become laid back, when you don’t reach the goals… What do you? Do you go back to the old ways of leadership of command and control? Or will you actually lead them?

In order to be able to actually lead them, you have to question yourself first before you question their behaviour. This is where ‘leading-by-example’ kicks in: maybe the team is doing what you are doing yourself, but you are not aware of it. I like to make the comparison with raising kids. Often it is said that our children are mirrors, reflecting images of what happens around them. For sure, I’ve been confronted with my little daughter using the same phrase I’ve been using when stating she mustn’t do this or that… awkward! But kids don’t only copy from adults, they are also brilliant in learning from their own mistakes. They learn faster because we’re there to let them make mistakes within the boundaries where we feel it’s safe to make mistakes. It’s a natural behaviour as parent. Yes, as a parent, you are by nature a leader. The question is whether you’re willing to become more conscious about your leadership role when you are about to take your leadership skills into an office environment?

The scariest thing is to let go of your, false feeling of, control and believe that people actually care for the same thing you care; simply put, it’s about believing in people, just like you would believe in your own kids. There is soo much that you need to take into consideration when you’re leading: create a safe environment, express the purpose, help people grow, become high performing as a team, don’t forget about the people when you’re improving a process, … And through this all you have to be very conscious about your leadership style. In March 1958, HBR published an article written by Professor Robert Tannerbaum and Professor Warren H. Schmidt: “How to choose a leadership pattern?”. The subtitle of the article gave the subject away: ‘Should a manager be democratic or autocratic – or something in between?’. Today, when facing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, we aim to provide vision, understanding, clarity and agility. As a leader you’re sometimes in between mental states: “I know, so I decide” versus “The people might have brighter ideas and I should rely on them to help make the best possible decision”. And so you might end up with leaders avoiding their responsibility to take a decision. What Tannerbaum and Schmidt provided, is a framework which will help a leader to decide what style to apply. What type of leadership are you going to use in a specific situation? In their framework, “the continuum of leadership behaviour”, each type of action is related to the degree of authority used by the boss and to the amount of freedom available to the subordinates in reaching decisions, states the article.

• // Tells // The manager makes the decision and announces it: no opportunity is provided to subordinates to participate in the decision making process. There is no freedom whatsoever for the subordinates, it’s all about the use of authority by the manager.

• // Sells // The manger “sells” the decision: it’s about persuading the subordinates to accept it in order to reduce resistance.

• // Suggests // The manager present ideas, invites questions: providing the opportunity for subordinates to get a fuller explanation and in the end explore more fully the implications of the decision.

• // Consults // The manager presents a tentative decision subject to change: subordinates have influence on the decision by expressing their reasons for their reactions on the proposed tentative solution. However, the manager will decide in the end.

• // Joins // The manager presents the problem, gets suggestions, and then makes the decisions: the boss has no solution yet, but is providing the subordinates to suggest solutions first. The purpose is to capitalise on the knowledge and experience of those who are in the ‘firing line’. The manager however selects the solution that he or she regards as most promising.

• // Delegates // The manager defines the limits and requests the group to make a decision: the manager passes to the group the right to make the decision(s), within the boundaries presented to the group.

• // Abdicates // The manager permits the group to make decisions within prescribed limits: the team undertakes the identification and diagnosis of the problem, develops alternative procedures for solving it, and decides on one or more of these alternative solutions. The group experiences an extreme degree of group freedom.

(The leadership continuum gives you a first glimp about changing your way of leading based on the circumstances. In that regard, I also urge you to have a look at Situational Leadership II by Ken Blanchard)

The scrum master is the ultimate servant leader and yet so much more than a coach. Take this perspective: as a scrum master, you are accountable for a team existing out of maximum 9 people. This means that your impact on people’s work-happiness and -experience, is huge. You are taking care for those people in your charge and you better do it right. You promote ‘self-managing’ inside your team and help them to become it (as much as possible). You most likely think you’ve embraced a very team-oriented leadership style with high freedom for the team. As a scrum master you have to stay away from that boss-oriented leadership, with high use of authority by the boss, right?! Well… yes and no! You have to choose a style in the continuum, depending on the circumstances. That is what you need to do, that is what coaching is all about! Coaching is not about firing a question back when people ask you a question, it is so much more. And adapting your style as a leader based on the circumstances is yet another skill you have to master. As a scrum master you are a coach but you are definitely also a leader, so ... don’t forget to lead.

When we gave our 4 year old daughter her first real lego set (yes we did and yes… she was very young), we had to explain one or two things before she gets to build stuff. I think we ended up explaining how to follow the plan in the booklet and order the bricks before building things, and thus we were ‘suggesting’ her how to get started with Lego. To get started, she needed instructions from us. Only when she got the hang of it (which surprisingly she got pretty fast), we provided more freedom in building the thing and thus evolved more into a style of delegating. But imagine if we would always keep telling her what to do, would she be able to do this one day herself? Would she think it was fun? Kids learn from making mistakes and trying again and again. They learn fast by failing forward. The same thing is true for your teams. Sometimes you have to tell your teams how things work, sometimes you can provide the freedom to let them come up with better alternative ideas. That is, in my opinion at least, why we have to get rid of command and control and evolve towards constantly ‘sensing’ what is going on in order to apply the appropriate style.

Scrum is already here for quite some time and is the new norm. Of course, many organisations have residues from old and more traditional ways of working, yet, they have all embraced Agile ways of working because they want to provide their teams the opportunity to become high performing. So, inside organisations, we “do” and sometimes “be” Agile. It means that we have to evolve as Scrum masters ourselves. If we believe that our teams can become self-managing and high-performing, we should be high-performing ourselves and question whether we are still doing the right things for our teams in order to let them grow. Scrum masters have been doing an amazing job so far by helping teams and individuals gaining insights on Agile ways of working. But if the premise is that scrum is the norm nowadays, scrum masters should stop carrying the bricks for the teams and let them find out how to do things better on their own and let them self-manage.

Many of us, are falling for the old familiar trap of being present in every meeting and picking up every administrative task. We could still identify the scrum master ‘meeting jockey’ and ‘administrator’ far too often. Our own success as a scrum master comes down to provide the right amount of freedom in which individuals and teams can learn forward and grow. So, get out of the way of your team’s journey. As long as you get sucked in in every meeting, your team will delegate all admin to you, expect you to schedule and plan new follow ups, do the things they could easily do themselves (like sending out an email or so)… Being a servant leader, means serving first yes, but it doesn’t mean you have to become the personal assistant to the team. And as long as you will continue to do that, you hold your team like a puppet on a string, how well-intended your actions might be. What the leadership continuum offers you, is at least the insight that there is more to it than firing questions back. Sinek stated it so eloquently: “Take care of those in your charge”. I like to add: “lead and stop carrying all the (teams’) bricks”.

Reference:

• Devil’s Advocate for the inspiration

• Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/1973/05/how-to-choose-a-leadership-pattern

• Photo by mali maeder from Pexels

• Photo by M Mahbub A Alahi from Pexels