Scrum depends on leadership.

Leadership is hard.

The global economy is filled with challenges.  The economic cycle of boom and bust.  Trade wars and political uncertainty dominate headlines.  Workers are flexing their muscles to retain the wages and benefits which kept them in the middle s class.  The agile reformation is in the middle of this environment.  We are striving to make business saner, sustainable, and satisfying.  It is hard work.  Often we are struggling with status quo thinking and the demands of the market place.  We test scrum masters and coaches daily.  The principle test is the leadership skills we bring to work each day.

The scrum guide has evolved over the years to discuss the changing role of the scrum master.  We describe scrum masters as servant-leaders with the ability to influence others without having real authority.  I have written numerous times about servant-leadership.  I am a big fan of people like Dwight Eisenhower, Harvey Milk, and Creighton Abrams.  I am also impressed by academic thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Albert Camus.  What all of these people have in common is deep intelligence and the ability to overcome obstacles to accomplish great things.

Leadership is hard.  In the words of General Collin Powel, leadership is pissing people off to get things done.  It is uncomfortable.  Leadership is upsetting comfortable structures to achieve greater success.  It is emotionally taxing and a job that follows you around even when you are outside the office.  It is a skill that must be cultivated and rehearsed regularly. 

The alternative is a catastrophe.  People who are concerned with their advancement at the expense of others are toxic in an organization.  Those people will game measurements to make themselves look more effective than they are.  They will withhold support for others unless they can receive some benefit.  People work with these kinds of leaders not because they want to but because they have to do it.  Organizations succeed or fail based on the leadership skills of their people, and poor leadership will kill and organization.

By now, you realize that I feel strongly about this subject.  I have spent my entire career working with many different people.  Some were inspirational, and others were more interested in their success than others.  I prefer the company of inspirational people.   This week my leadership was challenged twice.  I was helping a professional team release software, and I had to perform agile assessments on other teams.  The common thread through these experiences is that good leadership was obvious to see, and lousy leadership was more deceptive.  Be on the lookout for these corrupt leaders; they will harm your business. 

Until next time.

The Virtues of Agile: Courage

Agile requires courage

Beginning this week and until after New Years the blog with be covering the five virtues of agile development.  This is part 1 of five talking about courage.

As a scrum master and software professional we spend a great deal of time talking about how to “do” agile but we really do not talk about the values that act as the foundations of agile development.  I wanted to take some time at the end of the year to discuss these founding virtues of agile.  I suspect that it is easy for technical professionals to talk about the steps they need to follow rather than the feelings they need to have in order to do the job with a sense of pride.  Speaking from experience, it is very hard for software people to talk about feeling because we use reason, logic, and engineering principles to do our job.  The funny thing is that we feel stress, we have relationship problems when work goes bad, and we feel rage when treated like short order cooks instead of technical professionals.

According to Dictionary.com courage has two definitions; first, the ability to do something that frightens one and finally, strength in the face of pain or grief.  I would like to add that I consider courage to be the ability to do the right thing when no one is looking and the hard thing when everyone is watching.  This means that people on a software development team and within an organization need to be empowered to do the right thing when the situation calls for it.  Often with people worried about promotions and job security, when faced with a difficult choice they freeze and do nothing.   I feel this happens because an atmosphere of fear is created within an organization in order to keep people in line.

Melanie Greenberg in psychology today categorized six traits for courage; they are:

• Feeling Fear Yet Choosing to Act
• Following your Heart
• Persevering in the Face of Adversity
• Standing up for what is Right
• Expanding Your Horizons; Letting Go of the Familiar
• Facing Suffering with Dignity or Faith.

I really cannot think of a better discussion of what it takes to have more courage.

The expansion of courage begins with senior leadership.  It starts with allowing people to make decisions and then coaching them to make better decisions after the fact.  It involves coaching people to take smart calculated risks.  It involves trusting people to make choices.  It means that when a wrong decision is made you find out why it was done and then help correct that person so that they do not make a poor decision again.  It also means that when you are confronted with a choice you make a brave decision because nothing undermines courage among a team than a leader who is cowardly.

As a technology leader, I struggle with courage all the time.  I take inspiration from great leaders like Richard Winters, Colin Powell, Harvey Milk, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Adlai Stevenson.  I also count on the support and help of the people around me to do the best I can.  I am not perfect and falter like everyone else but I try to exhibit courage in my daily life.  I owe it to my agile team, the organization I work for, and the customers who depend on me.

Until next time.