- About Environment, Products, Size, and People
- Consider Specialization First...
- ...And Generalization Second
- Widen People's Job Titles
- Cultivate Informal Leadership
- Watch Team Boundaries
- The Optimal Team Size Is 5 (Maybe)
- Functional Teams versus Cross-Functional Teams
- Two Design Principles
- Choose Your Organizational Style
- Turn Each Team into a Little Value Unit
- Move Stuff out to Separate Teams
- Move Stuff up to Separate Layers
- How Many Managers Does It Take to Change an Organization?
- Create a Hybrid Organization
- The Anarchy Is Dead, Long Live the Panarchy
- Have No Secrets
- Make Everything Visible
- Connect People
- Aim for Adaptability
- Summary
- Reflection and Action
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Cultivate Informal Leadership
Leaders in a team are sometimes called Leads or Chiefs, like technical leads, project leads, chief programmers, and chief architects. What these people have in common is that they are not the line managers of the others in their teams. Informal leadership is bestowed upon people because of credits earned or commitments made. Or maybe even as a practical joke. It is a responsibility that is completely separate from line management [Testa 2009:53]. When several people take up leadership in different areas, we might call it distributed informal leadership. Informal leadership follows logically from working with generalizing specialists and using wide job titles.
You can actively cultivate informal leadership in your teams by supporting emergent leadership positions, but it is best to refrain from directly assigning such roles yourself. Allow the teams to decide whether they want to appoint Technical Leads, Project Leads, or some other leading role. (Note that many teams tend to flounder when there's no strong leadership inside the team. You may need to push them and help them in solving their own leadership problem.)
None of the roles mentioned would involve a management layer. In fact, that is precisely why informal leadership contributes to the adaptability of an organization. By abstaining from a management layer of Chief Somethings and Lead Whatevers, you make it much easier for the organization to add, move, and delete such responsibilities. Whenever there's a need for a Chief Graphics Designer, she can be appointed on the spot. And when the need fades away, so does the role. Not the person. If the role was a formal job title, the person would have to be kept busy, or she would have been asked to formally change her job, or else she'd have to get fired for lack of work. All these are unpleasant measures that suck productivity out of the organization.
Generalizing specialists, widening job titles, and informal leadership are different but related concepts (see Figure 13.2). Though they tend to reinforce each other, you can introduce one before introducing the others, which might be necessary when gradually changing a bureaucratic organization to a more adaptable one. But please don't ask me what order would be best in such cases. My experience is mainly with organizations in which people were flexible and passionate enough to swallow them all at once.
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Figure 13.2 Different but related concepts.