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As organizations adopt Agile, we are all faced with challenges. This is obvious. One of the challenges is redefining some of the traditional roles such as People Manager.
Capital One (one of the leading banks in US) share their experience on their agile adoption journey. They shared their experience on how their People Manager can and must evolve as their teams move towards Agile. The Agile transformation of their organization includes transforming themselves as people leaders and their leadership styles. Mistakes were made and lessons were learnt from those mistakes and documented.
The main challenge faced as people leaders - finding ways to be impactful and meaningful in contributing to the agile organization.
Capital One is an early adopter of Agile and SAFe. They started in the early 2010s.
Capital One created agile teams consisting of 8-9 people consisting of software engineers, a Product Owner (PO), a Scrum master and a Team lead. The team lead leads multiple teams and is responsible for people management and is accountable for the team's delivery. The team lead roles and responsibilities were not well defined in the early days of Agile adoptions and after many evolutions and a long journey, the responsibilities of team leads are as follows:
- People leadership including coaching, performance management, compensation decisions etc.
- Accountable for the team’s deliveries
- Collaboration with other agile roles to remove impediments
- Staffing
- Accountable for platform/application health
- Culture and people engagement
There were 4 key elements that Capital One practiced support the agile team :
- Be a pragmatic agile champion for the team
- Be a talent magnet and build a culture where talent can thrive
- Be a servant first, then a leader
- Empower the teams for success
For further reading : https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/experience-reports/the-evolution-of-people-management-in-agile-organizations/
