Who needs managers anyway?
- Richard
- Jan 16, 2020
- 3 min read
Last week there was a trending post on LinkedIn of someone asking if a manager should be part of the scrum team. Reading through the reactions I noticed the general consensus was "Heck no!". Let us put this in perspective.
Most companies have a hierarchical structure where there's some sort of board, then some directors or VPs, a couple of layers of management, some team leads and finally the other employees. Smaller companies might skip a few of these, but the idea is often the same: directors, managers and the workers. Within the workers there is a small group who works within the scrum framework. Either they convinced their manager, or their manager told them to do so. Either way, they are doing the sprints.
When you are in a situation as described above, I can totally see why you wouldn't want your manager to be part of your scrum team. Because the manager and the workers have different goals. The manager doesn't understand scrum. The workers want to be in a safe environment where they can express their innermost struggles and feelings without a manager taking note of that. The manager wants to make deadlines. The workers want to create beautiful products. And so the eternal struggle continues.
But let me ask you this, what is a manager? What should a manager do? In my opinion a manager should protect his or her employees. A manager should do everything to make sure the employees can do their work in a good, healthy and happy environment. A manager should make sure his or her employees have everything they need to do the work assigned to them. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases the vision of the manager is clouded by targets, deadlines and stress laid upon him or her from above. Sometimes it's clouded by personal ambitions of growth, which is even worse. This is what feeds into the idea of a manager and a team having different goals. Maybe this sounds familiar and maybe you can already see where I'm going with this, but bear with me.
A manager should make sure his or her employees have everything they need to do the work assigned to them.
Next question, what is a scrum master? What should a scrum master do? As described in the Scrum Guide, the scrum master is responsible for promoting and supporting scrum. Scrum masters do this by helping everyone understand scrum theory, practice, rules and values. So that's the theory, but what does a scrum master actually do? The role of the scrum master is usually to make sure his team understands scrum, the scrum master facilitates the ceremonies and the scrum master makes sure everybody can do his or her work. This sounds an awful lot like what I just described for a manager, doesn't it?
The scrum master makes sure everybody can do his or her work.
So what makes us accept a scrum master, but not a manager in the scrum team? My guess would be trust. The fact that a manager can fire you makes people afraid and so they won't fully trust their managers with everything going on in their heads. Which makes me think it might be time for companies to reconsider the way they are run. This doesn't sound like a healthy relationship. Everybody knows it, everybody accepts it, because by now it's normal.
In my next blog posts I'll write about how I think a project should be run, followed up by another post of how I think a company could be run.
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