In a recent Agile Uprising podcast episode, I spoke with Michael Dougherty and Pete Oliver-Krueger about their new book “Shift from Product to People.”
Our conversation highlighted an important truth: managers aren’t “going away” because dev teams are striving to be more self-organizing. Instead, today managers need to evolve. And just like the teams-in-transition they serve, they too will have their own fears, aspirations, and growth journeys.
Through my experiences coaching individuals, teams, and organizations, I’ve observed that continuous improvement succeeds when we recognize that today’s work environments aren’t assembly lines with defined, repeatable processes focused solely on products and productivity. Many managers are under pressure to deliver predictable results, but trying to achieve this through output measures is misguided.
Cultivating Growth
The most effective managers I’ve worked with approach their role more like master gardeners than factory supervisors.1 They understand that true predictability comes not from pushing harder for productivity, but from creating conditions where people and teams can flourish consistently. This means carefully tending to the environment – ensuring psychological safety (the soil), providing learning opportunities (nutrients), offering support (water and sunlight), and knowing when to step in (pruning) and step back (allowing growth).
Just as a garden can’t be forced to grow faster, sustainable team performance and predictability don’t come from pushing harder or adding more pressure. Instead, they emerge naturally from thoughtfully creating and maintaining an environment that nurtures continuous learning and development.
The Wisdom of Fallow Fields
Traditional farmers have long understood a paradox that today’s managers often struggle with: leaving a field fallow – deliberately uncultivated – ultimately leads to better, more predictable harvests. This ancient practice of allowing soil to rest and regenerate holds a powerful lesson for today’s organizations.
When individuals or teams operate at 100% utilization, like over-farmed soil, they become depleted. Innovation withers, quality suffers, and ironically, predictability decreases. Just as farmers use cover crops during fallow periods to enrich their soil, effective managers create deliberate slack time for learning, exploration, and rejuvenation. This investment in team “soil quality” consistently yields better long-term results than pushing for maximum productivity every [insert your time measure here… day, sprint, program increment, etc].
The best managers I know have learned to resist the urge to optimize every moment for output. Instead, they plan for and protect these fallow periods, recognizing them as essential to sustainable performance rather than viewing them as waste or inefficiency.
Building Trust and Emotional Intelligence
Next, consider trust – the foundation of healthy and effective organizations. Building it requires everyone, especially managers, to create fertile ground for honest dialogue and experimentation. In “The Fear and Vulnerability Retrospective,” I share some techniques for creating these spaces. This vulnerability, combined with emotional intelligence (a fascinating topic I explored with Phil Johnson), helps create the conditions where both growth and predictability can take root. After all, teams are most predictable when they feel safe enough to be honest about their challenges and capabilities.
Just as soil needs time to absorb nutrients, teams need space to process feedback and integrate learning. Rushing this process yields as poor results as over-fertilizing a garden.
Reimagining Management for Today
The evolution from traditional management to today’s leadership isn’t about eliminating management – it’s about reimagining the role from controller to cultivator. “Trust, Ownership, and Vision” examines how environments where teams thrive emerge through careful tending and patient nurturing. Like any skilled gardener, this means understanding that predictable harvests come from consistent care, not constant pressure.
The most successful managers have learned to embrace the natural rhythms of team productivity, including the essential fallow periods that enable sustained performance. And along the way, they have learned to embody essential virtues themselves.
Moving Beyond Having All the Answers
Another challenging shift is moving from being the expert with all the answers to being a curious observer and enabler of growth. “The Art of Asking Powerful Questions” explores techniques for asking questions that, like well-timed fertilizer, unlock potential and foster development. When managers create space for teams to find their own answers, they build the capability for sustained, predictable performance.
This often means resisting the urge to fill every moment with directed activity, instead allowing time for reflection and organic problem-solving. (And we’re not talking about spreading manure…)
Fear and Change
An aspect that deserves deeper exploration is the fear many managers experience during this evolution of their role. There’s often an unstated anxiety about becoming irrelevant or losing control over predictability. This fear can manifest in subtle ways – over-controlling the environment, resisting natural change cycles, or becoming cynical about new approaches.
The pressure to show constant progress often leads managers to eliminate slack time, ironically making their teams less predictable and more fragile. Learning to trust in the power of change requires courage and conviction. Teams, systems, and organizations won’t transform unless there is a corresponding transformation in leadership – from “Reactive” (Where most leaders operate from, characterized by external validation, control, and resistance to change) to “Creative” (A more evolved state where leaders author their own identity and purpose, enabling authentic conversations and true accountability) and beyond, to Integral Leadership (an even more advanced stage where leaders can hold complexity and paradox, embracing diversity and finding unity in differences.) More on this topic in Beyond Frameworks: Leadership Evolution and Agile Transformations.
Navigating Uncertainty
This integration becomes particularly crucial when helping teams navigate uncertainty. The traditional management playbook offers little guidance for the organic, often unpredictable nature of knowledge work. Here’s the paradox: greater predictability comes from accepting and working with uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it. As one manager I recently worked with noted, “The hardest part wasn’t learning new techniques; it was learning to trust that better results come from nurturing the system rather than controlling every detail.”
Just as a garden needs varying conditions to develop resilience, teams need exposure to different challenges – and recovery time between them – to build their capabilities.
Creating a Learning Environment
Like a garden that evolves through seasons, modern organizations require creating deliberately developmental environments. Just as different plants need different conditions to thrive, teams and individuals need customized support, space and appreciation to grow. The predictability managers seek emerges from this kind of careful cultivation.
What’s interesting from our podcast conversation is how this aligns with Dougherty and Oliver-Krueger’s observations about creating environments where learning is normalized and expected. When organizations provide rich conditions for growth and development, including dedicated time for learning and experimentation, both managers and teams can evolve together, establishing natural rhythms that lead to more predictable outcomes. Combined with a “safe to fail” environment, people have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. (Read more in Black Box Thinking)
The Path Forward
Looking ahead, organizations need both leadership and management – but reimagined for today’s challenges. Success comes from building environments where continuous learning is part of the culture, and where fallow periods are recognized as essential rather than wasteful. Like skilled gardeners, today’s managers create spaces where teams naturally grow, experiment, and establish sustainable, predictable patterns of delivery.
The role of management isn’t disappearing – it’s evolving from controlling to cultivating. And managers, like everyone else, deserve support and understanding as they build new capabilities for today’s world. By making learning visible, protecting slack time as an investment, and doing “no” better to limit WIP, we create organizations capable of sustained, predictable improvement.
Leadership Coaching
Ready to explore your evolution as a cultivator of growth and predictable performance? I offer confidential coaching sessions for folks navigating this journey. These conversations provide a unique space to process challenges, develop new perspectives, and find your authentic leadership approach to cultivating team success.
Schedule a free 30-minute introductory session. We’ll explore how we might work together to help you develop your cultivation skills for today’s workplace.
- Other metaphors I considered include Beekeeper – Emphasizes creating conditions vs direct control; Natural tie to self-organizing systems; Strong pollination/cross-pollination metaphors; Less intuitive connection to predictability; Fewer people understand beekeeping practices, and Shepherd – Good emphasis on guidance vs control; Clear safety/protection aspects; Rich historical/cultural resonance; Could imply hierarchical relationship; May feel paternalistic; Fewer direct parallels to modern knowledge work. Gardener is good enough for now. [↩]
