The Incremental Growth Leadership Model

The Changing Responsibilities of Traditional Leaders

As a leader in an organization making steps to be Agile — it can be a very uncomfortable understanding what your responsibility is when being a line manager for servant leader roles.

I see a lot of transitions where operational line managers — used to Project Reports and RAG statuses — slowly see that team transition into Scrum Masters and lose clarity on what their changing responsibility truly is.

Delivery accountability shifts over to the Product organization, and Project Managers transition to servant leaders — so where does that leave operational line management?

The Agile Leader as a Coach and Mentor

If we look at scrum.org¹, they identify three key focuses for Agile leaders:

The three Agile Leadership focuses as identified by scrum.org

1. Culture: They create and nurture a culture in which experimentation and learning are embraced
2. Goals: They collaborate with employees (at all levels in the organization) to find common values to create a greater goal for the company and the teams
3. Organization: They create an organizational structure that reinforces and rewards the other two dimensions.