5 minutes on management

Leading self-organized teams in a Scrum environment is usually handled by ScrumMasters, right?Therefore most managers who want to run Scrum-teams never really get in touch with the dirt and mood of walking Scrum-Teams to the front - facing all the problems of product development endeavors.While implementing Scrum in various organizations over the last ten years I have used more and more sophisticated ideas about the how-to of scrum. We know how to work with teams, we know the details of Meeting and the way we shall create all the necessary artefacts like Backlogs.

But one thing is sill lacking - although we know how to work with the teams, we still lack ideas how to help managers to see the benefits for them in using Scrum. And I believe we Scrum consultants are the root cause of this.The current paradigm of managers and Scrum is: The managers are not used to work directly with their teams and they do not need to have the same skills as their teams. The ideologically framed mind that the boss shall neither be the ScrumMaster nor the Product Owner (which definitely has its merit) has created one very large issue: The experience of managers was separated from the world of their development teams and with this their feelings and their possibility to learn from the real world of Scrum teams.If we change the view on this topic, i.e. if we understand that management is the face of an organization, then we Scrum Consultants and ScrumMasters need to give managers a chance to understand the way the new agile organisation works.However, this will only happen if we allow managers to run their own Scrum-teams as ScrumMasters and as Product Owners.But - whenever I started talking about this idea to managers they were puzzled and confused. Over the last couple of months there were only a few who were prepared to trying this approach and they made a wonderful experience: They strengthened their bonds to their team members.Scrum is about bringing people together and and helping them to contribute to a shared vision. And as Bernd has shown in his recent post: If Marissa Mayer is "Creating teams who work together" why shouldn't we enable managers to run Scrum not only as framework for organizational aspects but also as managers on the floor?