The Professional Agile Leader: Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations

4. Learning to Let Go

It’s easy to think of an organization as a kind of machine for producing particular results, one whose roles, responsibilities, and processes define a kind of “work engine” that produces desired outputs. The reality is that organizations are complex social networks that reward people for getting things done. Compensation is one form of reward, but rarely the most important. Instead, the most important rewards usually relate to status: recognition, reputation, and influence. Introducing an agile way of working into an organization can change all three of these, often for the worse for the people who benefited from the old system. This is not a particularly new problem, nor was it new when Machiavelli observed:

[T]here is ...