Suggested Leadership Actions

How to support Autonomy

How to undermine Autonomy

Lead by setting direction (aligning with the broader organizational vision and mission)

Leaders concern themselves with details of how the work is performed

Commit to a direction

Change direction frequently

Include all skills on the team necessary to act independently

Withhold expertise from the team that it needs in order to work independently

Do not create real teams; just groups of highly matrixed

individuals

Allow teams to experiment with change to their practices based on their retrospectives

Insist upon predefined processes, regardless of the team’s experience

Allow teams to pull work at a pace they determine for themselves

Dictate the rate at which work is pushed to the teams

Feed requirements through the agreed-upon requirements process

Push requirements directly to the team or to individual team members

Keep high-performing teams intact; move work to people

Frequently break up and reconfigure teams; move people to work

Allow teams to make mistakes and learn from them

Criminalize mistakes and penalize teams for them

How to support Mastery

How to undermine Mastery

Allow time for retrospectives

Discourage retrospectives

Encourage changes to be made each sprint for sake of learning and improvement

Disallow changes, or require a bulky change-approval process

Allow technical staff to explore new technology areas

Restrict technical staff’s work to immediate business needs

Allow time for training and professional development

Demand that all time be allocated to short-term project goals; don’t allow time for training

Support innovation days

Discourage experimentation

Support deliberate practice such as coding katas

Insist on strict task focus; do not allow time for individual improvement

Allow staff members to move into new areas

Require staff members to stay in the area in which they have the most experience

How to support Purpose

How to undermine Purpose

Provide technical staff with regular contact with actual customers

Restrict technical staff from interacting directly with customers

Provide technical staff with frequent contact with internal business staff

“Silo” the technical teams and business staff so that they rarely interact

Regularly communicate the big picture surrounding the team’s work

Communicate the big picture only at infrequent all-company meetings

Ensure communications are grounded in reality

Communicate cliched information that is disconnected from reality

Describe the real-world impact of the team’s work: “Our defibrillator saved xyz lives last year”

Insist that big-picture issues are the domain of leadership, and the team doesn’t have a “need to know”

Emphasize the value of high-quality work to the organization

Discuss only immediate financial benefit to the company and/or short-term delivery goals