Team roles

The more experience you get, the more likely it is that you will pick up more and more management tasks. Getting old, I'm trying to avoid this as much as possible by positioning myself as an internal adviser.  But you cannot avoid telling other people what to do. That's one thing managers do. But good managers should be mainly facilitating and motivating, and in good teams that's what they do most of the time.

What does the manager want? He wants his team to do everything that is needed, with a minimum of steering every once in a while. The more you have to steer actual working processes, the less you like it. The best situation you can get in is when all the work is delegated and you can relax and do nothing else than keep people motivated and help them every once in a while.

What does the manager fear? That things go wrong. People can do all sorts of things to screw up their work. Do wrong things, maybe at the wrong time, maybe not communicate enough, whatever. You get the picture. What do you want? Feedback. Reporting, asking before taking crucial decisions, that sort of thing. So, you have to keep yourself informed. If you're lucky, this information comes automatically. If you're unlucky, you have to constantly go and beg for it.

For the managed people, the above gives a certain tension: do I give enough feedback? Or too much? Do I decide too much, or do I ask for guidance too much? Should I try to figure out things myself more, or should I ask for help more? In all the above you can see that team work is - like so many things in software development - an optimization game. Being very pro-active and self-supporting can also mean being low on feedback and using a lot of time figuring out things that others can easily help you with. On the other end of the spectrum is the re-active, help-leeching colleague that seems to suck the energy out of all of his/her team members.

In Agile teams, we like people to be pro-active and self-supporting. The manger's task is rather easy compared to traditional teams. But ... keep monitoring.