Agile Teams and Someone To Hold Accountable
Q: What do you do when you are working in an “Agile” environment, yet the senior leadership keeps asking for a “single neck to choke” for the accountability of a “self-managed team” delivering on their commitments?
A: Agile as a belief is not anti-organizational or against hierarchy, nor is it anti-accountability. Rather, self-directed teams are empowered to work within an organizational structure or hierarchy.
Self-managed or self-directed teams still have a leader and/or a chain-of-command. The premise is the idea that those closest to the work are best-suited to prioritize, optimize, and determine how to get to the desired outcome without a manager dictating directions.
A self-directed, self-managed team is what happens when there is a clear set of expectations, an understanding of the desired outcome, and the empowerment to gather/align/allocate the right resources to get to the objective(s) together.
However, the visibility and accountability of the work is always available for scrutiny at any time inside or outside of the team, without punitive retribution.
There simply does not need to be a ‘single neck to choke’ because learning about what’s working & what’s not working isn’t about making someone right or wrong. It is about continuous improvement, not perfection, but it is not devoid of failure along the way.
