Then you've been with the wrong ones. Here's what my favourite agile coach does first thing in his courses. I've seen him consistently do this over many many times I've seen/participated in his courses:
He runs a self organization exercise!
You laugh now because you imagine it the way you described it.
Well actually the first thing he does is to appoint someone as 'the worst micro manager in the world' and asks them to sort participant's by number of years of experience with agile development. He times this with a stop watch.
When that's done he simply states that he wants participants to self organize standing next to each other sorted from one end to the other by number of years of experience in software development now. He then stands somewhere in the middle of the room himself and just starts repeating over and over "21 years, 21 years, 21 years,..."
Usually it takes a little while for people to 'get' what he's doing but he stoically just repeats his 2 words.
This is timed too of course. It's interesting how much less organized the second round seems when you are in the room watching this. But it's so much faster and gets the point across brilliantly if you ask me.
