Balancing Top-Down & Bottom-Up: The Agile Leadership Paradox

Top-Down ⏬ or Bottom-Up ⏫ ?

The top-down approach to management is when company-wide decisions are made solely by leadership at the top, while the bottom-up approach gives all teams a voice in these types of decisions.

A company (even a big one) with an Agile Way Of Working encourages a Bottom-Up approach, by implementing what we call a Feedback loop : The learnings we are getting from our incremental deliveries are flowing up the funnel to constantly adjust and impact the priorities and the deicision-making in general. In my experience, it's not that much of a paradox : the combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches will lead to a relevant split in the decision-making : Priorities set by the management (based on learnings, empiricism you know) and ownership given to the teams in the frame of their Product Ownership. 🔁

Open to hear all experience and testimonials from the most extreme or successful situations you encountered on this regard 😊

Credits : Card is from the Paradox Cards from Namahn