Fredrik Ha Carleson: Why You Should Focus on Collaboration Rather Than Roles

In this talk, Frederick Ha Carlson discusses the importance of collaboration over rigid role definitions within agile teams. He shares personal experiences from his 25 years in the software industry, particularly surrounding the management and leadership challenges in newly formed teams. The speaker emphasizes the need for clarity in roles and responsibilities as teams transition into agile frameworks like Scrum and SAFe. He argues that accountability and responsibility have superseded traditional roles in Scrum, making it essential for team members to communicate expectations and support each other effectively. Carlson also highlights how different leadership styles may be necessary depending on the context of the team's dynamics, illustrating this with examples and analogies.

[Music] ladies and Gentlemen please welcome our next speaker Frederick ha Carlson presenting the topic why you should focus on collaboration rather than roles hi welcome thank you thank you so much um nice to be here um so this would be a talk about you know more about collaboration than which role that you actually had so imagine you know you have a new fantastic job you're about to

become a a a manager at a brand new section you have a few teams in place already you have lots of money so you can actually hire more people you have no Legacy code so you can actually start from scratch you're working with scrum um you're scaling up with safe everything is just perfect it's like in The Lego Movie Everything is awesome and and you really have

happy and en joy and going to work every day and and then suddenly you know one day the team they walk up to you and they say Frederick we're very confused we we we we don't understand roles and suddenly you realize that H my instruction manual it's it's not really complete it's not just like building a Lego thing that you can have it piece by piece and

you turn the paper there are still some things missing so how do you continue from this how do you make sure that every team member not only understands what they're supposed to do but also let ready to to learn and adapt so then everybody turned to me looking at me as as a leader and saying hey Frederick you need to help us now what should we do

you need to clear up our job disc destion and roles and this is usually you know this is not a fictive scenario this is usually what happens at many works you know when they have a restructuring or having some new teams Etc this is usually one of the first things that happens and that's what we're going to talk to about today but perhaps before we move on

um let's talk a little bit me so you might be wondering who I am um I have been in the software industry for the last 25 years or so a little bit more um I've been a manager or a leader for more than a decade um but in my heart I feel like a a a dungeon master um and and a programmer I like to code still

and I still do it um and I belong to the commodora 64 generation anyone here remember yeah not so many alive anymore uh anyway that's where I learned to program and that's where my interest from computers um uh was born I used to do a lot of roleplaying because I belong to that generation and and that actually woke my interest for agility because believe it or not

being a dungeon master or game master is very similar to being a scrum master or a coach for a software team it's more or less the same skills I've been a project manager as well I've been business analyst I've had many roles I had the opportunity to to work with lots of different Frameworks and and uh methods I've been actually have had successful waterfall projects I've been

working with Resturant unified process I worked with Prince too and adile Frameworks of course and I've been lucky enough to be able to scale up with both safe and and less um as well and I work for the United Nation I worked for a private company I worked in a startup company um and the governmental sector so I've been lucky to try few different things and get

some different um perspectives um as well now in in my spare time what I like to do is to write some article I think it's a great way for me to collect my forks and try to understand what I'm talking about you know have a very messy brain um and then I do some presentations like this one so back to the story so the teams they came

to me and said all right we do not understand scrum we do not understand safe um and and and you know what are our roles and a little bit you know like a scrum nerd I was thinking to myself hm but we don't have any roles in the scrum in scrum anymore not since the scrum guide 2020 at least because in in the scrum guide 2020 they

talk about you know accountability and responsibility in in instead and that's very confusing at least if you're sweet because if you translate accountability and responsibility it BEC the same word it means exactly the same thing in Swedish I don't know if you have ever tried you know to have a racy you know responsible accountable consulted informed chart that's very confusing in Swedish you know it just doesn't

work but even in English this is kind of hard to to understand it's like socks mixing in in a dryer you know you never get the right side of it um so I've been given this some some fork and and and the best example I could you know come up with and this is of course a completely fictive um um um was you know imagine you know

imagine I buy a car it's a good car it's a great car car you know I'm very happy about it and then my son asks can I please borrow it and I said sure you can borrow it but you know be careful and and then he turns the car into modern art into against you know lamp poost you know bastard and and you know and and then

the thing is you um who who who would be paying for this that's me because I own the car I'm accountable for the car even though my son was responsible for driving it so you can think of accountability more as ownership and responsibility is more about um the one doing the the actions such and in the word of scrum you know accountability you know is then owning

the carent possibilities driving it and you know scrum Masters product owners team members they have different accountabilities and responsibilities um for example the scrum Master is accountable for creating an efficient team but this entire team's responsibility to become now let's then go back again to um the story so the teams were asking me to clarifi their roles should I then you know just respond by saying no

no no no we don't have have roles you know I know you were hir as a ux expert but you're actually a developer you know or uh no you know we're not even have roles because you accountability now of course you know that would not be very fruitful to go into some religious scrum discussions of of some kind that would just be kind of useless because we

always play a role um at home we have one role at work we have another role even here we have one role I have one role which is up on the stage here and it takes time to find your world especially if it's a new situation then you need to have some guidance so there I was managing several teams acting as a business owner and I needed

to clarify everyone's role and you know I I could handle this in several different ways as a leader the question was which way would be the best way should I perhaps just point with my entire hand say this is how it is this is what the S Master does this is what the product want to do or should I perhaps do a more image or a picture

of this is where we want to go this is how we want it to be maybe I should build some consensus asking everyone what do you think how how would you like it to be and this question begs the question you know is there a particular leadership style that is best for scrum agile I mean the scrum guide says that the scrum also should be a true

leader but it doesn't Define what the true is and maybe you know if look at you know the values of scrum which is commitment Focus openness respect courage maybe that could tell us something I was thinking about but I said no it's more about how we treat each other and it's great values but it doesn't say anything about leadership style and I met a lot of you

know scrum coaches or scrum Masters and and you know especially you know about two years ago there was this big drive that you know you should own only have this coaching leadership style um all the and ask powerful questions and so on and you know the funny thing is if you look for ads are not that many scrum Master added coaches you know ads in in papers

anymore because everyone seems to be laying them off but uh still 80% of every company runs you know some agile framework um you you seldom see an ad for an agile dictator I've been looking very carefully for that but maybe it's needed at sometimes maybe we need an agile dictator you know someone who can point with the entire hand because is it true does scrum or other

AD Frameworks only work with a specific leadership type so let me just make a very simple you know and or rather a silly example let's you know pretend you are in the building you are the leader and you know suddenly there is a fire in the building and the team they come running to you and say oh help help the the the building is on fire what

should we do where can we go should you done begin to ask powerful question till you had to say how are you feeling what would be the best way to escape the building you think you know probably not you know the best of ideas you know so in a crisis I think that you need some clear leadership you need to be very clear about the direction we're

going and how we should be doing so let's explore some ways I could be handling this this scenario so let me introduce you know to a few personalities or a few leadership styles I could take you know as a leader I could be decisive dog I could be charismatic Monty I could be consensus Carla relational Ray ambitious Alex or Coach Carter there's a lot of text on

this one so I'll just let you read it through for a minute I know myself how hard it is to multitask and listen and read at the same time so in this case perhaps I should be decisive dog you know just point with my hand and tell the team this is what the scrum Master does this is your accountabilities where dictate you know the ownership and and

and accountabilities the upside would be that that would be a fast decision you know it be very quick it would be done and over with you know done checked everything what would be downside well the downside is that it will be based upon the ideas of one person it would be my ideas um and that's not very much de delving into the collective intelligence of of the

team really another issue is that you probably form a culture that whenever there is a problem they just ask the leader and and then leader answers the question you know so it can be kind of U stale the entire approach and there's also a risk that what if I say the wrong thing then no one will you know challenge it because you know it will be well

the bus decided it so yeah it's stupid but let's do it what if I became you know the authorative charismatic mon painting a Rosy picture of this is where I want to go this is what it should be like this is a dream scenario the problem was that the teams they came to me and they did understand where we wanted to end up but did not know

how to get there so probably this will not solve the issue either but what if the fundamental problems are relational Whispers relational Ray in my ear what if it is because they don't stand each other they can't work together then it doesn't matter how well you define the roles maybe we should have more after Works instead maybe that's the solution now everyone seemed to like scrum um

but it seemed confused about how we should work with it so maybe the problem was that we were in the scrum Fantasy Land maybe I should demand more from the scrum Masters to make force them to make sure that they give a clear picture to all the teams about what the are maybe I should just relentlessly follow up every day says ambitious Alex consensus Carla she she

thinks I should just listen to the team and ask them what they think is the best solution here but the thing is that you know the teams they came to to me to give an answer that meant that they didn't know what to do they you know I having the approach of saying you know don't come to me with problems come with me you know come to

me with Solutions might not be the best way to fix this in in this case because they wanted some help and also if I ask them you know they wanted a solution now sometimes if you ask people it will take forever at least in Sweden we always want consensus and it takes forever it takes you know years it gets consensus but never nothing ever gets moving without

consensus maybe I should hire a trainer but on the other hand everybody knew what scrum was and they had worked with it for many years so so probably that was not a good solution either so which approach should I take so take a minute or two talk with your neighbor say hi and think about which approach would you take for for all right I hope you had

G gave it some some f here now wrong direction well my experience tells me that the type of leadership that you need to have depends on the situation and the context and the culture and also the personalities involved so the type of leadership depends you know and there are a number of factors but I I do believe that situation personalities and context and culture are kind of

important and you know if you for example have a laidback leader and you have a very competent and autonomous team that can take their own decision that works very well but you have a if you have a newly formed team that don't know what to do and need directions that approach might not be the best then you might need some clear leadership in the beginning so depending

on the situation you need different approaches what you see here is a CU rust change curve it's basically you know the phases that we typically go through in in a change and that could be you know a change in the company it could be a change in you know at home it could be change when you're forming a new team when you go from me one method

to another and so on and you can see we usually start you know with some some Shock what's happening and then we deny it you know it will not happen and then we get anger angry you know or we get depressed because it's going to happen anyway you know and then after a while we think about maybe we could experiment a little bit you know maybe this

is not as bad as we think and then lastly you know we do decide this is okay you know and and we rea accept it and accepting you know a new way of working is also significant change and and here we were you know we had new teams and new way of working and uh so know and maybe you know we can connect these leadership sites to

depending up where we are in this Cub Rost change maybe we can have different leadership styles depending up where we are so in the shock denial if you've been there you know what's most important here is to share relevant information information needs to be precise needs to be fact and any irrelevant information would just you know lead to rumors and and gossip all over the organization all

the time creating havoc and you know creating havoc and you probably need to say the same message over and over and over again in different you know Medias on but you need to be decisive and you need to say this is going to happen like not so maybe you know in this you know type you should have you know either U Alex or you should have um

decisive dog you know just going in and saying you know just get over it let's move um it will happen and it could perhaps be nice with charismatic Monty because you know with he's probably a respected person he has a vision and Charisma so people tend to follow him now when you go to frustration anger it's not much you can do as a leader you just have

to stand firm you know and wait for everybody to you know calm down a little bit it doesn't matter so you know it's only important again to say this will happen you know just accept it so we can move on and again you know Matic Monty might be good um it might also you know if if is if there's a Revolt you know or if you know

if everybody is trying to do riots on the office or so on you might need decisive dog to just stop it and I'm I'm not saying that consensus Cara might not work but the thing is you want this phase to be as short as possible so if you open up the opportunity again with consensus Carla do you think this was a good idea to do the restructuring

again you know it could go on forever now then you get depressed you realize okay this is going to happen no matter what I say so that is a little bit you know when you need to heal when need to listen to people you when you need relations so that's when you have relational Ray coming in you know to you know say this will be okay don't

worry we'll be fine as we begin to accept this we might want to experiment and that's why I might have Coach Carter because then at that time it's about trying to figure out well my skills how can they be used in a new situation can you please coach me to understand how I can best use my ability so people can or you could have consensus Carla here

you know um we all discuss okay we accepted this we've been depressed but now let's experiment what is the path forward the thing is in at this stage you should not press people this must take some time people should be allowed to take some time here to to understand what it means for them you know and then finally in the acceptance phase you know that's where you

have the momentum we need to drive forward fast and that's where we might need to have ambitious Alexs to push people in the right direction to to make sure that the changes stick uh maybe 15 or 16 years ago I I was in um Cambodia in in in the capital Nang and uh at that time actually only had one paved Road through the entire city and the

Americans had built it and on this road which had two lanes cars were driving in both directions on both sides and there were lot of motor cus as well and there were no green lights or red lights or anything and I was asking my friend how are we going to cross this road it just seemed impossible and so he told me you know do you trust me

I said sure I trust you so he said you know close your eyes and then just walk in a steady slow pattern across the road do not look up because then you will be afraid and then you will stop and the cars will hit you you know but if you move slowly in an steady Pace the cars and the motorcycles will see you and they will kind

of evade you and I survived because I'm here and I was good you know but I was kind of the you know uh m i mean charismatic uh Monty uh approach of leadership style um I doubt anything else would have worked so so of course you know there are no hard rules about which leadership style to use in which situation and I believe that you know our

personality influence which leadership style that comes most natural to us um if you are a goal oriented person who likes to talk a lot and is not afraid of conflicts decisive dog might be natural for you or charismatic Monty for that matter um and each leadership style is of course and as we could see useful in situations so you need to decide which leadership style to use

but not all of them might come natural for you and the choice matters in a crisis situation you might have to take a different leadership style than you would when everything is working perfectly and I've actually seen this in in reality at at the previous work um my my manager who I liked a lot he he got fired because you know um yeah well on the other

side of the Atlant they were not happy with the performance so they said you're fired you have to do something else and then they want to change and they want to change very quickly so they took in a person um who came to the office and you know a tor hle meeting and he gathered everyone and he said that you know um I'm Sarah torpedo it's my

way or the highway I'm not kidding that's what he said you know uh and you know the country manager's name was not Sarah but I'm protecting the innocent here um and he tried to get change through uh but you know sometimes comp you know reality is more complex than it seems and after three months he had no result at all and during this time I actually got

to to learn to know him and it turned out he was a nice guy but he had been told when you come into this world you need to be decisive dog you need to be tough because I could see that's been too much much lacks in the previous organization so you need to be tough and go in and you know make changes but this was not really

natural for him you know and he had done it so hard and so one-sided that it was very hard for him to change because it would not feel you know he he had lost all trust and then should he suddenly be you know relational Ray after having you know been very tough for three months that did not work so the situation was unsustainable so he could not

continue either of course so you need to be a person who acts you know in in in um harmony with your natural you know um Style to be authentic so again which path or which style works best for scrum and I think we have focused too much on I might be making myself very uh enemy with some scrum moners or adile coaches here but I think we

focus so much on on the Democratic or you know coaching style I I don't think that's needed all the time I don't think that's a golden bullet I think it depends on the company and the situation in the company and and where you are and and you can see that some companies are very successful despite having what I would call an agile dictator you know just look

at Elon Musk for example I would say that's an agile dictator I would not like to work under him but you know you cannot say that he's not having success so I believe you know leadership is about successful leadership I should say is about having the right person in the right place at the right time and it might be at in the beginning of a new you

know starting up something new you need might need one leadership style and then when everything is working you might have to change the leader to someone else who has a different kind of personality but it all depends you know again because bringing in decisive dog to a well-functioning creative autonomous team to do micromanaging might be as harmful as bringing in consensus Carla to make a vote on

which exit to take when the fire when the so so I guess you know when when the scrum talks about true leadership we need to think about all of this I think we need to see what kind of leadership sty should we take depending on the situation um I asked you know a generative AI to draw up a picture of a true leader I think it was

two or three years ago I hope AI has become better after that but this is what the true leader looks like it's it's kind of confusing to to me at least anyway so back to my story again so the team members you know they had expectations about who owns what and who's responsible for what and this led to some friction among the team members so we did

share some common ground we all new to the organization almost all of us had experience with added Frameworks previously none of us had worked with previously everybody had many years of you know experience um uh from from the industry but none of us had worked together previously and that's a crucial thing you know because we had very different experiences of scrum and how to work with it

and understandings for example I gu say I had um you know a scrum master from King you know game company that made Candy Crush um and then had another Sr master from from Ericson you know do you think they work in the same way of course they don't it's a very different thing so you come in with different expectations of what is the role of a scrum

master so we had some frictions so we're all newcomers who need a clear guidelines on you know what to do so we fed we needed some clarity in our roles so the problem was not relational because we actually we liked each other and we could work well together so actually away with relational Ray I don't think that was a idea and of course I could paint the

rosy picture of this is where we should be you know like in Henrik kniberg you know you know you should cross a river but you know I don't tell you how to do it you figure it out yourself but the teams had tried to figure it out and I didn't know how to do it so I don't think that was the right either and they all had

you know agile experience many years so having a coach I don't think that was a good idea either you know because we had that knowledge so what the teams needed to do was to determine their own you know expectations of each other in their roles to understand what do I you know what do I expect from you or you you know how should we work together and

as a manager it's quite nice you can say well that's SC Mouse's accountability it's not me as a manager who should create efficient team so you go ahead and and fix it um but I think as a leader you might have to do you know a little bit more about it so what I did you know myself is I said all right let's have ambitious Alex onto

this so I told you know the SR Masters you know what you need to do is you need to have some workshops on you know expectations on each other in the team um go figure out you know what what you need to do and then we follow up on on this to see if we get any progress and see if the team members are more happy then

the scrum MERS because they are leaders as well they took on a little bit more of a different approach so they actually you know made more of a uh Democratic um uh consensus Carla approach to discuss with the teams in in in in the workshops in in so this is a long list of texts you don't need to to read it but but basically it is you

know the outcome of these workshops um uh and these workshops you know we ask the team members you know write down the expectations of the different roles and I would not like to be the product manager I just show this because this is a list of all expectations of the product manager you know that's just crazy and it's the same you know with with a with a

system architect was so many expectations on on the system architect um and of of course you know these values don't exactly match what's in the scrum guide I really don't care because it's most important for the teams themselves to figure out how to together and we also you know so ambitious Alex I you know in order to have psychological safety you know was very popular two or

three years ago um we decided to you know take in a person from from another office you know to talk about psychological safety and what is important for us in our group as we are new um so we came up with a number of of vales here um as well you know when time passed and you know more or less you know we worked on we forgot

about the values and the role descriptions and and and so on or at least I did then you know a year later or so um there was a few members who said we want to form a new team so let's just go back in the beginning because when I came to the company um there were actually three teams already in in place there was one consultant team

there was one team in Stockholm who had all the domain knowledge and there was one team of newly hired people and I could see that was a risk because then they had all the domain knowledge in one team all the technical knowledge in another team so the knowledge of the teams was unevenly spread so at that point I said you know as a new manager I said

you know this doesn't work we need to split the teams so you know split the teams we have the right competences in order to perform our work in all of the teams and that was not the Democratic decision it was just a decision that I I took and that kind of worked because everyone was knew and you know people had not not gotten to know each other

but now a year later you know the team from stockhom they said you know it's kind of boring for us to you know sit distributed in in different teams we want to have one team physically located in Stockholm so this time um you know and we transferred all domain knowledge so I said all right let's see what other teams think so this time I actually let consensus

Carla you know um take over so the teams themselves had to discuss this and strangely enough you know this became a big discussion because some teams were completely opposite to this idea said no you cannot become a team again and other teams F Well that's okay you can do this and it took a long time to get this through but eventually you know um it it worked

well five minutes okay and now we decided to do this and to split it into five teams way and were other factors as well were some people retiring someone someone on paternity leave maternity leave and and so on so we still had to do some and we had hired lots of new people so we need to do some change the other way so actually you know I

I sat down with the the scr Master discussing a little bit you know how how can we do this who should fit in this team and that team and the funny thing is that now when we discuss this no one mentioned Ro descriptions anymore that was not even on that agenda what we talked about was about personality traits competencies and skills so discussions could be something like

well you know Joe the srum master in in in team one you know he has to be with these people because he has taken a lot of you know ownership for continuous integration and and uh you know be in in in team too uh she has focused a lot on you know uh the relational skills between the teams and is needed in that team in order for

that team to harmonize um and and and and so on so I just realized that all the discussions at this time were actually about and not about Ro descriptions anymore so now we kind of had gotten into what the scrum guide was talking about you know that teams should have accountabilities for certain areas and be able to do something and nobody cared anymore about the RO description

I even think that you know having a role description would have you know kind of box people into a corner and people would not have liked that at all so basically we had you know move past the stage of uncertainty and you know we were trying to figure out you know the strength and weaknesses and the right competences into the right teams so I think you know

my experience is that when teams are new you need to have a little bit of clear guidance and people do want to know where are we going which direction please tell us because we're uncertain and we don't know really how to work with each other and that helps us to you know minimize the storming period as well so no one's role is is very good when things

are new and and it's uncertain but as we start to perform I believe that fixed roles can be negative can negatively affect the teams and for self-managing teams I think it's more useful to have responsibility than to have written job and I believe you know that team members you know become comtable and trust each other you know we learn about each other's strengths and weaknesses and how

to work together you know and that's when we get a really effective team and that has nothing to do with u a job description and as Leaders you know I think you know the leadership side and what we should do is to help the team to continuously improve depending up and where the team is in which phase they are you need to take a little bit different

approach with the teams as well you know and leaders we should you know more make sure that the teams can work together remove you know obstacles and making sure you have as little dependencies and and so on and sometimes you might need an agile dictator I think you might need that because there is no size one one size fits all it all depends upon the people that

you work with and I think you know that Mar Marilyn Monro said that quite well you know wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person that you are and that concludes my talk thank you very much okay so we do have one question from the audience which is do organizations actually need a dedicated Master well I worked with organizations without scrum Masters I work

with teams you know where which have worked very well without the swam Master but I do believe someone in a team because I think as humans we need someone who becomes a leader if we don't have a leader there's an informal leader at all times and it doesn't necessarily have to have the name of scrum moners I think these issues are Eternal I promise you in five

years we will not be working with scrum anymore because there will be something new coming up about the issues and the problems in Team Dynamics will be more or less the same in a way okay thank you and then we have the how should a leader in a scrum framework measure and evaluate the success of their team and their own leadership Effectiveness that's a big um uh

so many ways to do it I I I mean of course you know customer happiness is one thing but also develop a happiness you know um of course if you want metrics I'm still fond of you know measuring cycle times you know to see how efficient are we and and also can the team work without any dependencies or having to stop start working stop start working you

know can they handle their own problems and issues because I think that's the most fun about being a team if you can handle all issues yourself as a team without an a dependency