We Told Leaders to Step Back. Now We’re Begging Them to Step In.

One of the most significant contradictions in Agile today is something we have created ourselves, yet rarely discuss.

In the early days of Agile and Scrum, the message was loud and clear: “Managers, step back and stop interfering.”

Agile focused heavily on team empowerment, self-management, and breaking away from traditional top-down control. It was a deliberate reaction to rigid, command-and-control management styles that held teams back. And in that effort, we created a strong pushback against managers and leaders.

The idea was that if teams were trusted to own their work, they'd deliver better outcomes. That part still holds true.

Even in 2018 and 2019, I wrote a few posts on managers and received significant pushback from Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. The most considerable criticism was that Scrum is a bottom-up management approach, and Managers should not manage people in Scrum teams.

But here’s what happened next—leaders listened. They stepped back, taking their hands off. They stopped going to Sprint Reviews. They stopped helping teams fix problems. And that messaging was never really corrected.

So now, years later, we’ve created a new problem:

• Leaders did step back (as told),

• But they didn’t step up in the right way.

They became distant or disengaged, thinking their job was not to interfere. But what Agile really needed wasn’t absence—it required a different kind of leadership. We needed servant leadership, systemic support, cultural stewardship, and strategic alignment. What we got instead was silence.

That’s the paradox:

Early Agile told managers to get out of the way. Now, coaches are begging them to get involved.

But many leaders were never shown how to lead in an Agile environment. Early frameworks didn’t provide guidance, and the literature largely overlooked them. We told them what not to do. But we didn’t tell them what to do instead.

And so, we now see:

• Disengaged leaders

• Frustrated coaches

• And teams stuck in systems they can’t change alone.

Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches are often left to deal with organisational dysfunctions that can only be fixed by leadership. But they’re usually met with passivity, vague interest, or surface-level support. Leaders approve Agile, but don’t engage with it. They attend kick-offs, but not retrospectives and reviews. They want transformation, but don’t invest in their leadership shift.

This is the long-standing gap in Agile’s evolution that has been left unaddressed for far too long.

We focused so much on empowering teams that we left leaders behind.

And in the process, we did something worse—we eroded trust.

What would you think if you were told, “Don’t get involved,” and then later criticised for not being involved? Me? I’d think “bloody clowns” and instantly lose trust in those who threw me under the bus.

And that’s what happened. We asked leaders to step away, then blamed them for being missing when things didn’t work out.

· No wonder they’re cautious.

· No wonder they’re dropping agile.

· No wonder they’re not hiring Scrum Masters and Agile coaches.

Please open your eyes and see that we, as an agile market, have failed leaders.

Own it! But help fix it together!

Practiqual™ is something new; it's not agile, but a leadership approach to building complex products, solving complex problems and dealing with a complex business.