Part 1 of the Diagnosis Manager series contemplating common management ailments suffered by teams. No teams or managers were harmed in the writing of this blog post.
I have been thinking quite a lot recently about how managers can become impediments to progress, not to mention improvement. The discussion about this is increasing exponentially by the day in Agile and Lean circles, if not others. I am a manager of a development team and have 8 people that I value and whom I want to see do great things while being happy doing them. So, the concept that I might unknowingly be getting in the way of that is troubling and very nearly led to some sort of crisis of purpose for me. I started some conversations in the community and did a good bit of reflection – though still not nearly enough. What I noticed as I started writing down my initial thoughts on managers as impediments is that those thoughts came back to one or two root concepts.
