The podcast by project managers for project managers. How can agile project managers create conditions for self-organizing teams to thrive? In the agile world of a self-organizing team, the trend is to empower the team so the individuals doing the work can make decisions. So, what role do project managers play?  Hear about the three responsibilities of the new agile leader and some important skills to level up in order to lead an agile project.

Table of Contents

03:03 … Humanizing Work03:50 … Empowering Decision-Makers05:21 … Changing the Role of Managers08:20 … Challenges for Project Managers09:32 … Complex Systems11:33 … Defining the PM Role13:58 … Coordinate and Collaborate16:35 … Who Does It Well?18:29 … What’s in a Title?20:33 … The Three Jobs of Agile Management23:49 … Project Manager Skills27:25 … Visualization Skills33:10 … Is Agile Right for Me?36:39 … Contact Peter and Richard38:19 … Closing

PETER GREEN: ... one of the things that has been an underlying theme to these amplifier skills we’ve talked about – coaching, facilitation – is a real trust that the people doing the work can figure out how to solve it if I do the three jobs well.  If I create clarity, if I increase capability, and if I improve the system for them, they will be able to knock this project out.  They don’t need me to manage it...

WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio are Bill Yates and our sound guy, Danny Brewer.  We’re so excited that you’re joining us, and we want to say thank you to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We love hearing from you, and we always appreciate your positive ratings.  You will also earn PDUs for listening to this podcast.  Just listen up at the end, and we’ll give you instructions on how to claim your PDUs from PMI.

Our two guests today are from Colorado and from Arizona, so we’re kind of jumping around the place.  But we’re very excited to have Richard Lawrence and Peter Green from Humanizing Work join us.  Richard’s superpower is bringing together seemingly unrelated fields and ideas to create new possibilities.  Richard draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, design, and political science. He’s a Scrum Alliance certified enterprise coach and a certified scrum trainer.  His book “Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber” was published in 2019.

Our other guest is Richard’s co-worker, Peter Green.  At Adobe Systems, Peter led an agile transformation and he co-developed the certified agile leadership program from the Scrum Alliance.  He’s also a certified scrum trainer, a graduate of the ORSC coaching system, a certified leadership agility and leadership circle coach, and the co-founder of Humanizing Work.  What I found interesting was, with all his other creative activities, Peter is also an in-demand trumpet player and recording engineer.

BILL YATES:  Which will appeal to Andy Crowe, our founder, because he loves to play the trumpet.  Wendy, we are delighted to have Richard and Peter join us.  We’ve had conversations planning for this today with them, and they bring so much knowledge and experience to the table.  Here’s the thing.  Project managers traditionally are taught to direct and control team members.  So what role does management play in the agile world of a self-organizing team?  If my team’s self-organizing, what am I supposed to do; right?  How can they create conditions for self-organizing teams to thrive?  What is the function of managers in this new world, and what does an agile organization need from its management team?  Those are some of the questions that we want to tease out with them today.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, guys.  Thank you so much for joining us.

RICHARD LAWRENCE:  It’s great to be here.

Humanizing Work

WENDY GROUNDS:  We first want to find out a little bit about you.  So can you tell us about Humanizing Work and the company you say strives to help individuals thrive at work?  So tell us a bit about your core philosophy.

RICHARD LAWRENCE:  We believe at Humanizing Work that work can be a good and indeed important part of human thriving.  So we see our work at our company as having two sides.  First, helping organizations structure work so that it fits what’s true about humans.  For example, that we have a need to grow, that we benefit from connections with others, that we particularly thrive when we’re creating things, and that we want our work to have an impact on other people.  And second, helping humans develop the skills they need to do meaningful, complex work in collaboration with others.

Empowering Decision-Makers

WENDY GROUNDS:  Thank you Richard.  Traditionally, managers direct, and they oversee the work that their teams are doing.  They’re the problem solvers and the decision makers and things like that.  That’s what’s become expected of them.  But the trend is to bring the decision maker closer to the team so the individuals doing the work can make decisions.  How does that impact the role of the manager?

PETER GREEN:  Well, I think to answer that question I’d start with why is that trend so really everywhere, omnipresent, right, in the business world.  And what we found is that, kind of relating to what we talked about the purpose of the company, is that the more empowered people are in their work, the more we push decision making to the individual and team level, the better outcomes we get, number one.  But part of that is that people are just more motivated.  They’re more engaged when they feel like, “Hey, I have some input into this decision,” or “I can wholly own this decision.”  We know from research on what leads to high engagement that the more autonomy people feel, the more they’re engaged in the work, and the better outcomes we get because of that.

And so I would start with that, that there’s a demonstrable reason for this, not just while it’s important to have people be more motivated and engaged, that helps with retention. That is just an ethical way to run a business; but that it also leads to better business results when we do that.  We get better, faster decisions, and the engagement leads to good outcomes.  So I would start there, like, why empower people? 

Changing the Role of Managers

Then, if we agree that that’s a good idea, that we should do this more, then that really does start to shift the role of management from what you described as kind of doing the work, or telling people how to do the work, to something else.

And we struggled with this question ourselves as we managed in agile organizations that were really trying to empower the teams to do the work themselves, and as we helped lots and lots of managers try to face the same question.  And originally we did not have great answers for them.  I remember a very early training I was doing with a team, this would probably be in about 2008, and I was training this team in how to do agile things.  They were trying to adopt scrum on this product team.

And I remember this.  One of the managers on that team who was just really smart, really well-intentioned, still really admire this manager who came up to me on a break, I think somewhere towards the end of the second day.  And he said, “I can see how this is going to be really powerful for the team.  I can see how this is going to lead to really good outcomes.  My title is senior engineering manager.  I don’t have any idea what my job is now.”

And at the time I didn’t really have a great answer for Chris, this manager, when he said, “So what do I do?”  And I felt like the answers that I had read about or that I had tried out sort of fell into three categories.  One category of answer was very fuzzy.  “Like, well, Chris, now you’re a servant leader.”  Well, what does that mean?  I kind of like the philosophy, but what does it mean to be a servant leader?  It’s not very tactical, or I can’t put my fingers on it; right?  Like what do I actually do to be a servant leader?

There were some answers that just felt demonstrably wrong to us.  Like, oh, if we empower our teams, then we don’t really need managers anymore.  And we had just seen the opposite be true in really successful organizations that had really effective management.  And so while it is true that there are some organizations that are really interesting case studies of what happens if you don’t have managers – in fact, Richard and I met because he had helped an organization transform to where they had completely removed the management layers. 

That’s what attracted me.  Hey, let me talk to this Richard guy and see what he has going on over there.  But that didn’t seem to be broadly applicable in every situation.  So we thought, well, that’s probably not the only answer, and probably not the answer for most companies.

And then the third kind of answer that we heard was just incomplete.  Like we often heard advice like, well, managers just remove impediments to the team.  We said, well, that’s probably true, but that also feels like a pretty narrow job.

So we started looking for how do we answer that question?  I always think if Chris were to ask me that question today, what would I tell him?  And the very cool thing is that we have kind of evolved in cooperation and collaboration with a ton of different organizations out there, a model for that.  And what we’ve boiled it down to is that managers really have three jobs in an organization if they want to empower their people.

Challenges for Project Managers

BILL YATES:  This is right where we want to head. But I want to step back for a second and kind of take a 35,