
How do I regain managerial control of my “self-organizing” team? - signa11
https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/112596/how-do-i-regain-managerial-control-of-my-self-organizing-team
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mlthoughts2018
I sure hope someone higher up in the management hierarchy learns about the
events that happened. The person who posted the question states that some
managers above him or her are on leave, so people up the food chain might not
hear about it.

Obviously as an outsider I don't know the specifics, but if the team overall
felt their manager was unilaterally instituting bad policies and further felt
intimidated and unable to speak freely about it in front of the manager (as
mentioned in some of the comments further down), then the manager probably
should be fired.

Being a manager means you work _for_ your direct reports, and facilitate their
ability to do their job, while intermediating with other internal stakeholders
in a way that protects your team. Unilaterally walking in and saying, "I know
y'all do great with your preferred Waterfall approach, but fuck you, here's
Scrum" is outrageous. Being a manager does not confer that sort of unilateral
dictator behavior to you.

Separately, the Scrum master probably should also be fired for not first
trying to transition the conversation of that retro meeting into a feedback
meeting, and asking people to think of it more like, "how can we give feedback
to the manager, and how can we customize and tailor fit something in Scrum to
make you guys happy?" ... and then go talk to the manager privately about it
before having meetings with the team that are ostensibly about team policy.

In the best teams I've worked on, we would have team policy meetings and
mutually come up with our working agreement about the behavior, attitude, and
workflows we expected from ourselves and each other, and we would produce
documentation (usually in some version control system, preferably with 'code
review' for the team to weigh in on any proposals for policy changes). Treat
people like grown ups.

If these people are pulling such a mutiny, there is probably good reason.

