The winner takes it all or sharing is caring

In todays complex world, we very often think „I can take it all.., cause I am the boss/head of, I have to take it all, that what is expected of me and my role“.

Is that so?

The key to success is shared responsibility.

The last days I was confronted with health issues, and after a long time I did not feel bad for being away. Due to the experiences I made sharing responsibility on different levels of my work and daily life, I was quite sure someone can take over and nothing will get burnt as long as I am away. Fortunately this applied to both office and home.

Coming back to shared responsibility especially leadership responsibilities in my organisation...whereas one year ago, I thought why do we need line management and all that hierarchies when talking about agile, I now see it from a different view.

As long as the organizational and operational system of a company live collaborativly together this can work very well also in "agile ways".

How we were able to define shared leadership in regards of agile teams.

On one side we have the "typical" line manager as supporting out of and on the system, and on the other we have the scrum master or agile coach inside the system, both working with people leadership and referring to the employees as the heart beat of an organization. Where as the line manager focuses on the personal development of the employee, the agile coach focuses more on the team maturity supporting the "how".

Another important leadership role in an agile team is the product owner, who has content leadership which means, that he drives the maturity of the products and the "what & why" towards the agile team.

All together we strive for collaboration between us and we support and empower the agile teams and people in our organization.

Even between agile coaching roles such as scrum master, release train engineers (see SAFe for details here) and others, shared responsibilities do not only help to deputize each other but understand issues from different perspectives and collaborate better to find solutions to improve on end to end delivery.

And last but not least and taking the major part in personal life is shared responsibility at home, which can be parents, children, grandparents or whomsoever involved in family life.

I think this needs less elaboration because most of you know what I mean, but as this is THE KEY TO SUCESS for me personally I did not want to leave it out here.

What experiences did you make?