Agile is not about leaders. But if leaders aren’t bought in to at least letting you give it a go, it will be much harder to make the shift to agile.

That’s not to say it’s impossible – and I’ll talk in a moment about some practices you can try if you can’t persuade the leaders above you – but it is a lot easier when they are on board. That’s why I often focus on managers first. You don’t need your manager to be driving the changes, but if your manager isn’t willing for the team to experiment, or if they’re not prepared to give up some of their power and make more decisions collaboratively, you won’t get very far.

What goes wrong when managers aren’t bought into agile

The most common problem I’ve seen when managers aren’t bought in is that they will ignore how the team prioritises. Struggles with focus and prioritisation is a major reason people try agile in the first place, but it’s no good establishing a prioritisation process if you keep getting additional unmanageable priorities added on top.

I’ve shared some suggestions before on what to do if that’s the case for you. If a leader is really pushing additional priorities it’s sometimes helpful to bring them into your process – eg by getting them to join a backlog refinement session. Showing them the volume of things you are juggling and that you have a robust decision-making process can help them be more realistic in what they ask for. Of course, that will only work if they are at least a little bit open to agile.

Sometimes leaders want to be overly involved in decisions and that can also make agile a lot harder, especially when the nature of their role means they are more hands-off. Recently, I was asked to work with a team that were struggling to make enough progress on a long-term project that was important but not time sensitive. The leaders gave me a list of work that they thought the team should do to support the project, and then left me to go “do agile” with the team. It was a good list on the face of it. But the more I talked to the team, the more I realised how much of it was impractical. The leaders just didn’t have the context that the team did about what might work, what had been tried before and what the barriers were.

If those leaders had been more bought into agile, they would have let the team work out how to deliver the project. It was fine for them to set the overall goals, the “what” they wanted the team to achieve. But the “how” should sit with the team. It’s another example of how often leaders just need to let some things go to allow their teams to shift to agile.

Sneaky agile

If you’re convinced it’s not worth talking to the leaders above you about agile, there’s still some scope for you to do things differently. Remember that agile is a spectrum, not a binary on/off state. You might not get as far as you would without your leaders on board. But that doesn’t mean agile has nothing to offer you at all.

Project managers in particular should have a huge amount of space for trying agile tools and mindsets. As a project manager, you are expected to set some norms around how your project group meet, plan and collaborate. Project planning and project kick-offs are great places to start sneaking in some more agile approaches.

Even if you’re not a project manager, you have some options available to you. Start getting really clear on the desired outcomes for your work, run a small experiment, use some collaborative decision making tools or shift up the format for your regular meetings (maybe trying a stand-up). Don’t feel like agile is all or nothing – pick some small things that might help you and give them a go.

Don’t feel you have to use agile jargon either, especially if you think people might feel it is off-putting. For a long time I regularly played what we called “the higher or lower game” with several teams to help them choose their priorities. They didn’t need to know that was really an agile practice called backlog refinement. They just needed to know that it was helpful in their particular circumstances.

Getting your manager on board with agile

If you want to convince your manager that agile is a good idea, start by thinking what they might want to be different with your team’s ways of working. Perhaps they wish the team had more thinking time, or space to work on longer-term projects, or they want to improve communication or reduce duplication. These are all things agile could help with. Start there and suggest trying an agile approach to those as an experiment.

Make it as easy as possible for them. Maybe they’re not averse to trying something like a stand-up, but they don’t have the time to get the team started with them. Could you set it up yourself to demonstrate it’s easier for them?

Recently, I’ve been rolling out of agile for my department. One of the things that’s helped me get buy-in is working with senior leaders on the things that matter to them. Once I’d shown a few leadership teams how backlog refinement could help them make a lot more progress on bigger projects, they were much more open to me using practices like that with their teams on smaller pieces of work. So don’t assume that agile is only helpful for certain people, or that more senior people would never try it. Often the most powerful way to persuade people of agile’s value is to get them to try it themselves.

This is the fourth in a series of blogs about the barriers to agile. Next week, we’ll look at using agile when no one else around you is.

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