Elastic Leadership: Growing self-organizing teams

Chapter 20. Leadership and the mature team

by Mike Burrows

Roy’s second chapter about the three team phases rings true in my experience as a team member, project leader, and development manager, but still it touches a red button of mine! I’m grateful to Roy for his gracious offer to let me respond.

My red button? I worry about the Agile community’s recent focus on self-management. Don’t get me wrong; self-management’s a good thing, but in its current popular usage it has two problems:

• It fails to satisfactorily capture the powerful concept (borrowed from the study of systems) of self-organization.
• There seems to be a move in the community to minimize the role of leadership.

Self-organization’s at the heart of agile methods; indeed, it’s ...