Every sprint, the team's work is visible. Tracked. Inspected. Improved.
The manager's work? Nowhere to be found.
We spend hours refining stories, estimating effort, reviewing what got done and what didn't. We build entire rituals around making the team's output transparent. But the person with the most influence over whether the team succeeds or fails? Their commitments live in private notebooks and one-to-ones that nobody else sees.
I noticed this gap in my own practice. When something came up in a retro that I needed to fix, or when I told the team I'd sort something out, I started putting those tasks on the board. Not every sprint. Only when I'd made a specific commitment. But the effect was immediate. The team could see I was holding myself to the same system I was asking them to work within.
It changed the dynamic. Accountability stopped being something that flowed in one direction. When my task slipped, they could see it. When I delivered, they could see that too. It levelled things in a way that no amount of "open door policy" talk ever could.
Most Agile implementations have a blind spot here. We track velocity, cycle time, and sprint goals for the people doing the work. We track almost nothing for the people shaping the conditions the work happens in. If you believe in inspect and adapt, that belief shouldn't stop at the management layer.
The question isn't whether your team is improving. It's whether you are, and whether they can see it.