Agile is not a tool that does performance management. Scrum masters don’t manage people, and team retrospectives can only drive improvement in people who want to improve. When managers defer to Agile to keep their employees performing well, they are either naïve or lazy.

Agile can help managers a great deal—it showcases analytical skills, cooperation, teamwork, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and much more. But teams need to be self-organised, and this requires everyone to be on board.

If they act against that, it’s still managers who have to act on this signal and work things out.

Maybe Agile doesn’t work for this specific group or type of work, or maybe someone has different expectations from the framework than what it is. Maybe they are simply underperforming. It’s up to managers to correct such issues based on input from the Agile team.