Why, why, WHY do people give credence to the Scrum authors, when they have never actually led any significant effort, let alone built actual products themselves?
And the way they describe Scrum is so different from the original Scrum paper. And by the way, that paper references the development of the IBM PC as a self organizing team, but it was anything but that. It had multiple assigned leaders, and the team was composed of the most experienced and brilliant members that IBM could assemble - not a typical team. And the team was expected to work 80 hours weeks until the job was done. The authors clearly state that the Scrum process was intended for immersive work that was finite in nature.
Leadership is a complex topic. As Peter Drucker said, an organization needs "an outside person, an inside person, and a person to get things done". It is not a matter of "trust the team" and hope for the best. Real leadership has many dimensions, and they cannot be filled by one person.
And expecting people to self organize and the right leaders to emerge is simply naive.
The Agile 2 team could not find a comprehensive taxonomy of leadership, so we created one: https://agile2.net/more-resources/a-leadership-taxonomy/
Of course, management theory has many taxonomies and leadership is considered to be an element of management. But we felt that leadership needed its own taxonomy because not all leaders are managers.
A manager is a leader who has authority. The challenge that a manager has when creating a team - as when they created the IBM PC team - is to assemble the right people, and then consider those _individuals_ and how the team _might_ operate; and decide which kinds of leadership are needed and appoint or suggest that to those _individuals_. And then watch what happens, and be prepared to adjust.
Do not define roles before knowing the individuals. People define roles - not the other way around.
The challenge is that a team generally needs so many different kinds of leadership. It needs organizing leadership - that can emerge from one or more members who are natural organizers, or it might need to be assigned. The team also needs inspirational leadership, to keep people motivated. It needs thought leadership, which can emerge, but often an individual is needed to drive dialectic discussion and make final choices about technical approach (design by committee is not good). One also needs oversight to make sure that inner circles do not emerge. And someone needs to advocate for the team - so that its funding and support continues. These many forms of leadership can come from a mix of people - it is always different.
Leadership has been written about for thousands of years. I am glad the the Scrum authors are figuring it out, gradually, while we all watch. They will get it right eventually.
