Lead an Agile Team With Context and Control - Mike Cohn
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Mar 20, 2025
Discover how great leadership in agile teams relies on providing context rather than strict control. Learn from a fast food experience illustrating the importance of understanding the 'why' behind tasks. Explore how defining wildly important goals can inspire teams and enhance performance. Hear about the significance of empathizing with users and how this intrinsic motivation drives exceptional results. It's all about guiding the purpose and understanding strengths and weaknesses to empower creativity!
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question_answer ANECDOTE
The Burger Analogy
Mike Cohn's manager, Jim, taught him the importance of consistency by explaining why burgers should have specific toppings.
This helped Mike understand the customer's perspective and remember the topping amounts even 40 years later.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Leading Through Context
Define the context for your team, including the wildly important goal, user empathy, and competitive landscape.
This helps them understand the 'why' behind their work and make better decisions.
insights INSIGHT
Agile Leadership
Leading agile teams requires new skills and adaptability, as these teams thrive on creativity and freedom.
Self-organizing teams resist rules and perform better with context rather than control.
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You can only get so far by attempting to manage the performance of people through control. It is far better to lead or manage people by defining the context of their work. I was fortunate to learn this lesson early on when I worked in...a fast food restaurant. My manager, Jim, trained me that each burger was to be dressed with:
2 leaves of lettuce
2 tomatoes
3 slices of onion
3 pickles
defining the wildly important goal (WIG) the team is working toward
helping people deeply understand and empathize with users
guiding a team in defining its igniting purpose, an intrinsic motivation that inspires exceptional performance
understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitive products
He didn’t drill this into my head. He didn’t inspect my burgers. He didn’t pop-quiz me. Instead, he explained the context, the reason why our burgers should be dressed exactly that way. He told me to imagine a customer who orders a burger with extra pickles and a cook who loves pickles and puts five on each burger by default. When asked for extra pickles, that cook puts on seven. That’s too many for the customer who, on a return visit, asks for “light pickles.” That burger is made by a different cook who would normally put on three pickles and so puts just one on when asked for light pickles. My boss gave me a vision of hapless customers alternately ordering extra or light pickles and never getting what they want due to the preferences of the cooks. I remember the context he defined 40+ years later. How long would pimply-faced me have remembered these amounts if my boss had merely presented them as rules? My manager defined the context of my customer—a hungry person seeking consistency. And that was enough. Leading through context can involve of mix of things such as:
Leading an agile team—whether as a manager, executive, Scrum Master, product owner, team lead or other leader—is different. It requires new skills. A self-organizing team resists rules and thrives on creativity and freedom. Leading such a team by providing context can also cause it to excel,
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