Self-Organizing Teams: Natural Leaders

There’s been a thought running through my head today, which was planted there by an excellent email to the scrumdevelopment list managed by Yahoo! Groups.

(If you’re not already a member, I’d highly recommend you join. It’s a higher-volume list, but the signal to noise ratio is excellent.)

It’s been bothering me, simply because it touches on one of the Agile concepts I struggle with: self-organizing teams. As Pablo points out in his email, even Ken Schwaber makes reference to the idea that, if you have a high-performing team, their self-organization will minimize the need for traditional project management, and possibly even management if your organization is forward-thinking enough.

The general thought, as I understand it, is this: when given responsibility for the success of a product, a Scrum and, if I may be so bold, an Agile team will self-organize. To paraphrase Pablo from his email, the emergent structures that develop will be optimized for that team. In short, the team will eliminate the need for management in the traditional sense, and its productivity will naturally be higher than in a typical “command-and-control” structure.

In theory, this sounds great. Where I struggle with this concept is with what I think is an overreaching assumption with team composition.

For a team to succeed, there needs to be some natural leadership. In the traditional Scrum role, the Scrum Master is the servant leader: actively discouraged from taking on the leadership role within the team, the “sheepdog” who helps guide the team and, if the need arises, would do nearly anything to help the team.

The Product Owner is responsible for the backlog, for the direction of their product. For the Product Owner to be successful, she must naturally be the voice of the product and, to a large extent, its eventual users. At times, this places the Product Owner at opposition with the team: the Product Owner will eventually press for deadlines and shortcuts and push the team to sacrifice - their time, quality, their architecture - for what the Product Owner feels is in the best interest of her product.

So if the Scrum Master is coach and facilitor, is acting as a true servant leader, and if the Product Owner is motivated by the success of their product, who stands for the team?

I struggle with the idea that the team is responsible for educating and advocating for the technical health of a product alone, and leaves the prioritization of those technical features in the hands of the Product Owner. If you look at high-performing teams outside of the software development world, I think you find a different structure.

Again, I fall back to the disaster relief analogy. In a time of crisis, natural leaders emerge. Individuals who are confident and skilled, but also willful and able to get things done, rise to a role of leadership. These individuals are the people who push the team to do better, find the obstacles and get them removed.

But I don’t see their analogue in the Scrum world as the Scrum Master. This active, forceful leadership is at odds with the servant leadership mentality a successful Scrum Master needs to succeed. After watching our team struggle to have that forceful voice to counter-balance the Product Owner though, I feel that leadership is crucial to a successful, high-performing Agile team.

When faced with misinformed management, willful Product Owners, or decisions that the team feels are just at odds with the success of the product, who on the team speaks up? Without that leader, that strong voice for the team, the only recourse is to allow things to proceed and hope that failure is caught early enough that the team and company can inspect and adapt.

Are these the emergent structures we should be looking for in our Agile teams, and the types of roles that we should be working to foster and cultivate? If so, how can we as Agile coaches and Scrum Masters help grow those leaders from within the team, and should we take on a dual role until those leaders emerge?