I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. –Winston Churchill, May 13, 1940, House of Commons.

Gentlemen managers, bosses, leaders, entrepreneurs, employers, you who are “in positions of responsibility”, I could not find a better formula.

Indeed, based on this very well-known formula, I often promise leaders who reach out to me “tears and sweat”. To those who know neither tears nor sweat, I indicate that there is a problem. To the question what is an agile leader? what is an agile manager? We could answer: it’s the end of a belief that wants the leader, manager, to be served by their teams. They must serve their teams. The end of the belief that management is a hard science, it’s a soft science.

How does this materialize?

You should stop believing that managing your teams can be reduced to managing an Excel spreadsheet, to a table of numbers. Counting, adding, subtracting, adding numbers is illusory. You don’t replace two with two, you don’t replace one name with another name, an activity of 100 divided by 4 doesn’t give 4x25. All of this is lying to yourself. Moreover, nobody is fooled. But it’s so comfortable, so simple.

Let’s stop this illusion, this lie.

Your material is human. It is therefore complex. It cannot be reduced to algorithms. It is in constant evolution with its environment. It will never be stable. Your role is to be at its service, and not the other way around. Your objective is probably to ensure its best performance, productivity, for this, like a plate spinning act, you will never stop taking care of them, hence the blood and tears.

One cannot envision replacing 10 French people with 30 offshore people. These numbers don’t add up (so I can’t tell you why it doesn’t work). You cannot transform one expert paid 2000 into two juniors paid 500 (I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’m saying it’s different). These figures are not real figures. The indicators you should be handling are intangible, unfortunately for all of us, this requires effort.

An agile leader, an agile manager, doesn’t really have a comfort zone (hence the blood and tears).

Paths Forward

Does 25% of your activity dedicated to conversation with your teams seem too much? yet it seems essential to me for maintaining this bond.

If you feel you are not useful, really, admit it and find another way to contribute to the emancipation of your activity. It’s not necessarily easy to admit but it will be very gratifying.

In your everyday work, go to the field (the gemba of Lean), it’s they who know how to answer many questions. We note today as Marc Halevy rightly pointed out at a recent congress I was able to attend: the worker is there since and for longer than their little boss, who themselves are there since and for longer than their boss, who themselves are there since and for longer than their employer, who themselves are there since and for longer than their shareholder. For the sustainability of the company, decisions made by the base are often the right ones if the base wishes for the emancipation of the company.

The base, the doer, the operator, must therefore wish for the emancipation of the company. Yes, that too is your job.

And this job is fascinating: constantly ensuring the well-being of the system, hence the tears and sweat at the beginning, the joy, the pleasure afterwards.