Middle Managers &  Leadership Styles (Blogging with AI)

As you can make out from the title, I am targeting two objectives for this blog: Leadership styles depend on context, role and typical followers, do they not? So, let’s look at a comparison of senior managers and middle managers along those dimensions. Senior managers Middle managers Context: Broader market, competitor and company growth perspective […]

Seven Tips for Managers in Agile Transformation

A critical aspect of Agile Transformation is that here we are not just adopting new practices or processes but we are approaching the software development in a totally new way which requires us to think and act differently. This change required in our behavior – the way we interact with each other, the things that […]

CHOW #214 – Role Clarity & Clouded Minds

In this large enterprise IT function, a cross-functional program level team was formed. Purpose of the team was to orchestrate flow of value end-to-end in collaboration with their Scrum teams, portfolio team and other key business stakeholders. Many middle managers were pulled into the team with roles like Program Lead, Chief Scrum Master, Chief Product […]

SPECS – A Practical Approach to ‘Transforming the Middle’

One of the key challenges of major Agile transformation efforts in organizations has been the transformation of the middle layers – sometimes called the ‘frozen middle’. Typically the middle layer of the organization is least ‘touched’ in Agile Transformation initiatives. They learn concepts like servant leadership, collaboration, self-organization, psychological safety, agile culture, etc not quite […]