Rosalind Brewer on Developing and Leading Agile Teams

Ranked on Forbes’ list of “100 Most Powerful Women in the World,” Rosalind “Roz” Brewer became the chief executive officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) in 2021 after leading several other major companies. Born in Detroit as the youngest of five children, Roz, along with her siblings, was the first generation in her family to attend college. She enjoyed science and math, which led her to study chemistry at Spelman College before moving into business.

After working her way up various corporations, she held leadership positions at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Walmart, and other companies; she was also group president and chief operating officer at Starbucks and CEO of Sam’s Club. As CEO of WBA, she is, as of 2022, one of only two Black women to lead Fortune 500 companies. She is the first Black female CEO of the company and one of the world’s most influential business leaders.

An agile team is a group of people working together toward a singular goal. Agile processes might include the development process of a new product or solution to meet customer needs. Team sizes vary, but usually, agile methodologies rely on at least three people and no more than ten. To prioritize team performance, most team members are full-time workers with the product’s continuous improvement as their sole responsibility. Sometimes, two or three members of larger teams might be part-time contract workers.

Agile frameworks rely on people with different skill sets so everyone can work together as a cohesive development team. This often involves bringing cross-functional teams into the same space to collaborate and brainstorm. Remote teams in frequent contact have become more common. Agile transformation relies on iteration and bringing all groups into an agile mindset of testing, creativity, and collaboration.

In 2001, seventeen software developers and programmers met at the Snowbird resort in Utah to draft the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The agile manifesto—consisting of four core values and twelve principles—proposed a new, simplified roadmap for developing software that prioritized efficiency, versatility, and customer feedback.

Today, stakeholders see great promise in agile practices because they help to automate product development, promote creativity, and foster a team-oriented spirit. High-performing agile teams succeed or fail together; the pressure is not on one individual but the entire group.

As the COO of Starbucks Coffee Company, Roz Brewer oversaw agile teams working toward several projects to meet customer needs. Consider this example of testers, contributors, and baristas working together to address how to make drinks less sugary per customer requests.

• The dilemma: “We were in the dilemma of considering what we should do about the amount of sugar in our drinks,” Roz says. Changing the drink recipes could sacrifice the flavor profile, customer base trust, and brand recognition, but making the shift could make them healthier as part of a forward-thinking initiative.
• The data: “You would naturally go to your product team and say, ‘Hey, reduce sugar by 3 percent.’ You'd give them a number and a target,” Roz says. “But this was about thinking more clearly about the impact on the customer. We started off with the data and analytics team to help us understand how much this is a real problem.”
• The solve: Those learnings kickstarted communication with another team. “Then once we learn more from that team,” Roz says, “we put them together with the product development team to talk about what that would mean in terms of adjusting the flavor profile.” Next, the team brought in the operators to discuss how changes might affect the equipment and sourcing of goods and materials. “It was really interesting for us to put together an agile team … for this problem to solve because it ran the risk of impacting the brand and what we stood for.”

Walgreens CEO Roz Brewer uses an agile team structure to support product management and decision-making. Consider her tips for agile project managers:

1. 1. Challenge the team to solve the most significant problem. Agile teams analyze big problems to develop solutions. “You never give an agile team one of your mundane problems that can be fixed through normal business practices,” Roz says. She suggests these teams take “big swings, and take that position that says, ‘We are looking around the corner and then the next corner, and then the next corner.’”
2. 2. Encourage team spirit. Agile structures require teamwork. “You’re being put in a position to listen to your peer who’s in a different function, so you have to be willing to collaborate,” Roz says. In the retrospective, “When those teams are disbanded, they feel a new sense of connection to people they never would’ve connected with in the past, so it’s exciting to see what can come out of agile teams.”
3. 3. Find team members with different perspectives. Agile teams thrive on diverse ways of thinking. “I’m looking for commonality of lanes, but I am not asking you to give up your lane,” Roz explains. “What really works is when you have someone open-minded enough to accept the views and beliefs of others and be willing to work together with them in a collaborative manner.”
4. 4. Hold your teams accountable. An agile team needs to stay on target to achieve success. “There are times when you’re running large programs, scaling big change initiatives, and you realize that the team is falling behind,” Roz says. Accountability matters: “I think most people know me as a leader; I’m pretty direct. And so when I see performance falling off, I don’t let too much time pass in between, so usually, at maybe the end of a meeting, I might pull you aside and say, ‘Here’s how we can do this better.’”
5. 5. Recognize an agile team needs to challenge leadership. This is a humbling tip for higher-ups: your agile teams will question business practices, which is okay. “Your most creative, most risk-taking employees might be your most difficult employees because they end up pushing me as a leader. They make me feel uncomfortable because they’re asking me to invest in an idea that they have, or they might be bringing me into the fold on a problem that I need to help them solve,” Roz says.
6. 6. Set clear metrics. An agile team must comprise members who understand the pace of the task at hand. As a leader, it’s essential to set clear metrics and expectations. Per Roz, you have to have “a team that believes in the pace of work and understands how important it is to stay on target.”

To climb the corporate ladder, you must first learn the fundamentals of leadership and innovation. Discover Rosalind’s approach to change management and agile teams, plus learn how to lead through crisis when you sign up for the MasterClass Annual Membership.