Striking the right balance takes skill and patience

Conventional Leadership wisdom states that one shouldn’t care what people think of them. “You can’t please all people”, nor should you try. When leading, one must focus on providing a direction, lead the way there, and manage the team on the journey.

This doesn’t mean a leader should be reckless in how they treat their people. If you treat your team poorly, they will leave, stop following you, or become demotivated and accomplish less. A better way to state the conventional wisdom is that you should care about your team’s general sentiment, but you shouldn’t care how individuals feel about you.

As a leader, your job isn’t to make people like you. Together, we have to get a mission to accomplish. In software development, that’s the delivery of software updates to provide value to the business and the customer.

Agile leaders find themselves in a predicament. Agile leaders, especially one asked to work permanently with a team in a specific capacity, such as a Scrum Master or Release Train Engineer, lead largely with influence. In order to influence others, one must have a relationship in which one has earned a certain level of trust with the other person. Trust is earned slowly and can disappear in an instant.

Agile Coaches, brought in for an engagement, are a bit different. While they tend to lead largely with influence, they are “gifted” authority by the leader who brings him or her in for the engagement. The more authority the leader has, the more authority the coach will have. Though, this will deteriorate if the leader disengages or distances themselves from the coach.

So how can an agile leader build trust without focussing solely on getting everyone to like them? First, it’s important to remember that an agile leader is a Servant Leader, which means they have a vision and they serve to that vision. Agile leaders cannot just become servants to the team. Going down that path blindly is like trying to please everyone and ultimately, you may please no one.

Second, high Emotional Intelligence (EQ), is critical for an Agile Leader. One needs to not only be aware of their own emotions, but also be aware and adept of observing and navigating the emotions of others. As an agile leader, you may have to give bad news or critical feedback. Having high EQ will help in navigating challenging situations like this where people may not like you or like what you have to say, but will respect and trust you for delivering it.

Finally, I’ve found consistency to be key in building trust. Do what you say you will do. Develop strong routines and be a person that people can rely on. If you are a person who gets things done, people will notice and begin to trust with with larger and larger items.

When I started my agile leadership journey, I devoted a lot of my time in trying to get everyone on my team to like me. When I sensed someone didn’t like me, I would go out of my way to try to get them to like me, which ultimately made me less effective in influencing and leading the rest of the team. As an agile leader, your job is not to be liked, but to help the team become the best version of itself it can be. The team may not like you for it, but in the end, they will respect you for it.