Why Your Agile Investment Is Failing: The Leadership Misalignment That No Scrum Master Can Fix
You can't hire a Scrum Master to fix your teams if your leadership team is still using Waterfall incentives. The biggest hurdle to Scrum success isn't the team—it's middle and upper management operating on 20th-century models.
Teams are told to be "empowered" while being micromanaged on individual tasks and hours worked. Leaders demand "agility" while requiring six layers of approval for every decision. The cognitive dissonance paralyzes organizations.
This echoes a principle I've documented in Unlocking Integrity-Centered Leadership: the gap between stated values and actual behavior creates organizational dysfunction. When leaders say "empowerment" but practice control, they're engaged in what I call "values misalignment." Teams sense the contradiction and disengage—or worse, perform "Agile theater" while reverting to command-and-control behaviors underground.
The Failure Mode: Empowerment Without Authority
The pattern is consistent: organizations invest in Agile training, hire Scrum Masters, reorganize into squads—then measure success by utilization rates and hours logged. Managers attend stand-ups to assign tasks. Sprint goals are overridden by executive "priority changes." Retrospective actions require approval that never comes.
The result? Demoralized teams, cynical about transformation. High performers leave. Innovation stalls. The Agile investment becomes a sunk cost rather than a competitive advantage.
As I explore in Strategic Honesty, "unable to dance because the stage is crooked" describes leaders who blame teams for failures caused by leadership constraints. The Nepalese proverb captures organizational self-deception perfectly: executives create impossible conditions, then fault teams for not thriving within them.
The Intervention: From Assigning Tasks to Removing Obstacles
The Scrum Guide is explicit: the Scrum Master serves the organization by helping leadership understand Scrum and leading organizational change. This isn't about abdicating responsibility—it's about redirecting leadership energy from controlling work to enabling it.
Jeff Sutherland calls this "Commander's Intent": leaders define the mission and success criteria, then trust teams to determine how to achieve them. Metrics shift from "Utilization" (are people busy?) to "Value Delivered" (are customers better off?).
This parallels a principle from both my books: the shift from "ego-driven leadership" to "Servant Leadership." As I document in Unlocking Integrity-Centered Leadership, servant leaders create what Simon Sinek calls a "Circle of Safety"—environments where people feel valued, safe to experiment, and motivated to collaborate. Command-and-control destroys psychological safety; servant leadership builds it.
Bridging the Gap
This is why "executive presence" matters in senior Agile roles. The work isn't just coaching teams—it's coaching leadership. Helping executives see how their well-intentioned oversight undermines the autonomy they claim to want. Making the business case for trust.
As both Strategic Honesty and Unlocking Integrity-Centered Leadership make clear, sustainable transformation requires integrity at every level. The mantra "Be Good. Do Good. Do Well" applies to leadership: doing good (genuinely empowering teams) is prerequisite for doing well (achieving business results). Organizations can't buy Agile outcomes while selling command-and-control behaviors.
The transformation starts at the top. When leadership aligns incentives with empowerment, teams deliver innovation. When it doesn't, no methodology can save you.
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Gopu Shrestha is a Senior Agile Executive and author of Strategic Honesty: How to be Good and Rich and Unlocking Integrity-Centered Leadership.
