Tobias had another good post over on his Business Craftsmanship blog. He talks a bit about the concept of citizenship, which from my understanding of what he wrote really boils down to accountability and responsibility. He points out that it seems most of society is looking for other people to fix their problems for them. They are looking for a solution, something they can put in place that someone else provided, often times so that if it doesn’t work out, they can blame that other person.
This is another example of the quick-fix culture in which we live. We seek people to tell us what to do, or how to think. We seek formulas, processes, steps, procedures, anything to make work life easier, and then, inevitably, to have something—or someone—to blame when things don’t work out.
I have to agree with Tobias that the truest form of leadership comes from within. It comes from being accountable and responsible. If you haven’t already read it, I would highly recommend the book QBQ by John Miller. Leadership doesn’t come from someone else telling you what to do or what process to follow. Unfortunately this mentality, this culture, isn’t very prominent in the business world, at least not the American one, and really not the American society at large. I think this fact is why you are seeing a lot of talk around leadership in the agile space.
In order for agile to be fully successful, this sort of leadership, accountability, and responsibility must be in place. However, if the corporate culture that these agile teams are living within ultimately doesn’t support such behavior, it makes it very difficult for those teams to flourish. So I think the abundance of talk about leadership in the agile community you see is really focused around this. It is around educating business leaders about this form of leadership and accountability. It is about trying to cultivate cultures where this type of behavior is supported and even rewarded, allowing agile teams to flourish. I’m sure some of it is still searching for that next silver bullet that was someone else’s idea, but I think most of it is about creating cultures that encourage the citizenship that Tobias talks about.
Read the full post here…