The Professional Agile Leader: Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations by Ron Eringa & Kurt Bittner & Laurens Bonnema

Author:Ron Eringa & Kurt Bittner & Laurens Bonnema [Ron Eringa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Published: 2022-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Changing the System to Reward Empowering Others

Traditional organizations reward people for their contributions in a variety of ways: through base compensation, through bonuses, through promotions to higher status positions, through various kinds of public recognition that increase status, and through intrinsic rewards, such as letting them do work that they consider fun or enriching in some way. While monetary rewards are important, status and doing intrinsically enjoyable work tend to be more powerful motivators, and different people tend to respond differently to each of these motivators.

Status tends to be the dominant motivator for people who ultimately seek management and leadership roles. Money is important, but as one goes higher in an organization and a society, even compensation is largely a marker for status.

To grow self-managing teams, someone must give them the power to make their own decisions. Managers who are motivated by status may feel that giving up decision-making authority means that they are losing status in this transfer of power. When they do, they may hold on to decision-making authority and prevent teams from growing in their ability to self-manage.

Giving away power is more natural when a leader experiences an externally imposed transition, such as when a new leader joins an organization from the outside, or when a retired former star athlete makes the transition to coaching. In these cases, the leader has no established role or pattern of behavior and can choose to work in a new way.

Giving away power is more natural when a leader experiences an externally imposed transition

At these times of transition, the leader may more easily recognize that their success depends on the success of the people they lead, and that those people are closer to the real work than the leader. In the words of Alex Ferguson, the legendary coach of Manchester United, “As hard as I worked on my own leadership skills, and as much as I tried to influence every aspect of United’s success on the field, at kickoff on match day things moved beyond my control.”2

2 For more perspective on this, see https://roneringa.com/leadership-lessons-sports-teams/

What leaders in these situations discover is that one can actually gain respect and status by empowering others. Consider the case where a child gains a greater sense of self-worth and purpose when an adult asks them to help them with a task. In showing trust and confidence in the child, the adult gains greater respect and admiration from the child. At some level, we are all still that child, and when an authority figure shows trust in us, we do everything in our power to prove that the trust was warranted. Wise leaders use this to their advantage, so by appearing to give away their own status, they actually increase it.

Leaders have nearly endless opportunities to change the status recognition system in an organization, through public recognition and praise, and through promotions and other forms of extrinsic compensation. People are social creatures, and we are all incredibly sensitive to subtle signals that leaders send about what is valuable and what is not.

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