Trust and Ownership is what matters mostly in an Agile Software Development environment.  Let us see how it works.

Software is developed to bring value addition to the business. An individual team member or team will perform best when there is a realization on why they are doing things. This realization will bring confidence to the leader to trust that team or team member.

The responsibility of a leader is to create an environment which will cultivate that ownership within the team. A perfect software development environment is where the team takes the complete ownership and the leader trusting the team.

The team is an individual or a collection of people who does the actual work.  A team with ownership always tries to identify what customer wants and provides the best solution.  For a team ownership can vary from low to high

A Leader is a Team Lead or Manager or Processes who have a control on the subordinate activities. A leadership style can vary from Controlled to Trusted

  • Team Ownership – Low to High
  • Leadership – Controlled to Trusted

In a controlled environment every decision will be taken by the leader and the team simply depends on him to take the decision making. They won’t take any steps unless they are directed to do.  In a trusted environment, a leader has the confidence that all the steps taken by the team are in the best interest of the customer or business. This trust will develop only when team displays evidence of high ownership by proactively addressing all customer / business needs

Let us now consider the various possible environment and its outcome.

As per the above chart there are four outcomes based on the various levels of leadership and team behavior.

  1. Command & Control : when where there is LOW OWNERSHIP and CONTROLLED LEADERSHIP
  2. Conflict : when where there is HIGH OWNERSHIP and CONTROLLED LEADERSHIP
  3. Failure: when there is LOW OWNERSHIP and TRUSTED LEADERSHIP
  4. SUCCESS & INNOVATION : when there is HIGH OWNERSHIP and TRUSTED LEADERSHIP