Treat People Like People Instead of Resources

Treat others like people.

Being a scrum master is hard.  It is not a dirty job like being a trash collector.  It does not have the danger associated with being a firefighter or an electrical lineman.  It lacks the prestige and respect of being a member of the armed forces or the toughness of being a lumberjack.  Scrum masters make the world a little better one sprint at a time. 

Forbes magazine categorized four types of toxic professionals; the power hungry, the absent, the incompetent, and the micromanaging.  I have encountered these individuals throughout my career.  I have spoken about how those individuals can spoil an organization.  Each of these people are awful in their unique way, but I think one trait unites them; they see others as resources instead of people.

I blame this state of affairs on contemporary project training.  A modern corporation is deeply concerned about profit.  A company is so worried about profit they will do everything in their power to make sure each employee is running an efficiently as possible.  A software developer with downtime is wasting money.  It is why people expect them to perform multiple projects.  A business leader able to meet and mentor junior employees does not have enough to do or is not generating revenue.  Being busy is more important than being productive.  The agile community calls this putting outputs above outcomes. 

Treating the individuals doing the work like people requires downtime, training, and mentoring to provide value to customers.  If individuals are resources, they are office supplies which can be used up and discarded when they are no longer useful.  Treating people like resources is exploitive and antithetical to an agile mindset.  

I joined the agile reformation ten years ago because I felt there was a better way to deliver software.  People deserve to work in environments which are satisfying, sustainable and sane.  When you treat people as people instead of resources to be used and discarded this will not happen.  I have a simple vocation, and this is to help businesses manage people like people.  I suppose that is why it is so hard being a scrum master.

Until next time.

Your Job is to Work with Messy Emotions.

You get pulled in lots of directions.

An agile coach or scrum master is pulled in plenty of directions.  Servant leadership is difficult because you need to put the needs of the team ahead of your own.  It takes an emotional toll to do it properly.  It also requires practice and maturity.  Today on the blog, I would like to discuss the emotional work necessary to be successful.

I have spent the last three month at a new client.  It is refreshing, and it has taken me out of my comfort zone.  The experience has also opened my eyes to the emotional labor necessary to excel as a coach.  You must work with the emotions of the people you are coaching; everyone has good days and bad days.  A servant leader has to absorb those emotions and process them in ways which will benefit the team.  If this expectation sounds unreasonable Kim Scott the author of “Radical Candor,” says, “It is called management, and it is your job!”  A leader needs to put in the work emotionally to make the team successful.

The emotional labor expected of a leader comes in many forms.  A leader must listen to understand.  It is not enough to hear the words a leader must understand the context and emotions of those words.  Next, a leader needs not to take the ups and downs of the job personally.  For someone who takes pride in their work and has plenty of emotional investment in doing good work, this is challenging.  People are going to get angry with you and others are going to demand more from you than you can give.  The key is the anger and demands they are creating are usually their problems and not yours as Collin Powel said being responsible means pissing people off.  As a servant leader, this is inevitable.

Finally, to solve problems, you need to set aside your emotions and try to look at situations in a focused and rational way.  Again, emotional control like this is more natural said than done.  If you care about anything you are doing, you are going to have an emotional investment.  To succeed, a coach or scrum master has to set those emotions aside during periods of stress so that they can “work the problem,” instead of being an emotional wreck.

Human beings are emotional and messy.  Having some emotional control or awareness is tremendous work.  The product of that work will be the respect of the teams you serve and grace under pressure when things go wrong.  It will enhance your leadership and improve your standing in the organization.

Until next time.

Leadership and Eating the Elephant

Abrams as servant leader.

When I am not at the office, I relieve stress by pursuing several hobbies.  I am a big movie buff and love debating cinema of all types.  I also collect and play with toy soldiers.  I have been in the hobby for nearly forty years, and I am a member in good standing with the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society.  You pick up military history by process of osmosis when you collect soldiers.  Interestingly, some of the trivia I have picked up along the way have informed my agile practice.

I have written about military history in the past.  I recognized Eisenhower performing the greatest act of project management in history with his preparations for the D-Day invasion.  I also pointed out Richard Armitage’s efforts to save South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians during the fall of Saigon.  Military history has plenty of stories of heroism and cowardice.  People are elevated to their highest ideals or reduced to animalistic squalor. You are changed forever when you experience it.

It is the ultimate nature of warfare which makes it such a bad metaphor for business.  War is wasteful and is never sustainable.  Many of the lessons of war are not relevant in today’s office because the worst thing that could happen is losing your job.  In combat, a person can be maimed or killed.  It is why when I talk about military history in my agile practice I avoid strategy, tactics, or logistics.  I spent most of my time talking about leadership.  It is the leadership of ordinary people in extraordinary situations which inspires me and which I use to encourage others.

One of the most inspiring leaders I know is Creighton Abrams.  He was a tank commander in World War Two and was part of Patton’s Third Army in Europe.  Abrams nicknamed his tank “Thunderball,” and he had the name emblazed on his tank in bold white letters.  Abrams survived the war in spite of the German’s destroying “Thunderball,” seven times.  He was lucky, brave, and he led his troops from the front.  He never asked a soldier to do something he would not do himself and inspired tremendous loyalty.

After the war, he continued to move through the ranks commanding tank units in Korea and Europe during the early 1960s.  Where his leadership ultimately expressed itself was his command of the U.S. Forces in Vietnam.  Abram’s took over for fellow West Point classmate William Westmorland after his promotion to Army Chief of Staff in 1968.  Abrams assumed command at a dangerous time.  American forces had defeated the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive.  It was an ugly and brutal victory which turned a majority of public opinion against the war in Southeast Asia.  The Communist Vietnamese were going to keep fighting no matter how many people died in the process.  Morale was low, and the mission of U.S. forces in Vietnam was in question.

Newspaper reports asked Abrams how he was going to preserve the South Vietnamese government, beat the communists, and keep U.S. casualties down.  He responded, “when eating an elephant you do it one bite at a time.”  The quotation would guide him the next four years as he led the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

Unlike his predecessor, Abrams shunned the perks of leadership.  He replaced the ornate wood desk first used by the French provincial governors, with the standard steel desk used in the U.S. embassy.  The mission of U.S. combat forces was simplified, and Abrams implemented the Nixon plan of Vietnamization.  By the time he left Vietnam to become the Army Chief of Staff, U.S. forces had reduced from 576,000 to 24,200 troops.  The big test of Vietnamization and Abrams came in 1972 during the Easter Offensive.  With a fraction of the troops he had four years earlier, he stopped a significant assault on the country.

Abrams was the kind of leader who accepted responsibility for both victory and failure.  The My Lai massacre became public during his tenure.  The Khaki Mafia swindled the army out of millions of dollars.  Finally, the battle of Hamburger Hill further inflamed anti-war sentiment.  Despite these challenges and unreliable allies in the South Vietnamese government, Abrams stood as an example and ate the elephant one bite at a time.  The main battle tank in the U.S. Army was named after him; the M1A1 Abrams.

All of this history relates to agile because we should embrace the servant leadership of Abrams.  Instead of hunkering down in our offices or via conference calls, we should lead with our teams.  Instead of grand gestures of reform, we should pile up a stack of little victories which will lead the organization forward.  We should act as servants to our teams and shun the privileges of rank.  The flaws of our organization should be transparent.  Finally, when confronted with a threatening challenge we will be able to adapt and overcome.

Leading change in an organization is difficult.  The adoption of the agile mindset in business is going to be the most significant change in civilization since the protestant reformation.  I draw inspiration from figures like Abrams.  He inspires me to take plenty of small bites from the elephant which is my career.

Until next time.

The fight against alienation is real

Don't inflict help

Any time a professional person attempts to change an organization they belong they are going to face a backlash.  Socrates would argue that this kind of behavior was the product of ignorance.  The philosopher would say once people knew the difference between objective right and wrong, people would choose right.  It was an optimistic view of human nature and one which is non-existent in the contemporary office.  Business people can be nasty, cruel and brutish as Thomas Hobbes would call them in “The Leviathan.”  A business person can exhibit the manipulative insincerity of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”  Worse of all, professionals can exhibit the traits of the “Ubermensch” running roughshod over the “last men,” as Nietzsche would call them.  Backlash, is natural in human progress and it is up to coaches and scrum masters to address it.

Fear and uncertainty dominate the contemporary office environment.  Lots of factors are to blame for this state of affairs, but the principal factor is the shareholder value postulate of business.  In this postulate, shareholders or investors are the most important constituency in a corporation.  Customers, employees, and communities which also rely on the corporation receive secondary treatment because they are not as important as shareholders.  It is how we have educated a generation of business leaders since the 1970s.

Combine this trend with the deregulatory actions of the conservative movement, and you have a recipe for sterile and exploitive work environments.  It does not matter if you are blue collar, white collar or in service industries you are generating wealth for others with little upside to yourself.   Karl Marx called this the “labor theory of alienation.” It is one of the few things which Marx has written which has held up to scrutiny over the years.

So the agile coach is often in an environment where people are alienated.  People work hard enough not to get fired but not too hard because they will be singled out for extra responsibility with no subsequent increase in pay or authority.  The “company way” keeps a person paid and provides a modicum of security.  It is a miserable and uninspiring way to work.  Thus, the coach or scrum master is fighting on three fronts.  The coach must address the apathy of individual team members.  Next, they are changing the perspective of managers who often benefit from the alienation of the workers they are supposed to serve.  Finally, inertia in the organization acts as an easy alibi to resist organizational change. It is frustrating.  You are hired by organizations to help them change, and they actively oppose the change.

What I have discovered over the last few weeks is organizations want to improve; they do not know how.  Companies need scrum masters and coaches to help them.  They are looking for individuals to offer help rather than inflict it on the organization.  Often a scrum master acts as a therapist or pastor to an organization.  A coach needs to practice non-violent language and help others find solutions rather than dictating those solutions.  It is not easy, but anything worthwhile is going to be difficult.  Backlash is natural and it is up to the agile community to turn it back on itself to effect real change.

Until next time.