Constant learning begins with you.

It is never too late to learn

I have spoken before about how technology changes quickly and that to be successful you need to be a continuous learner.  A software developer has to relearn their profession every eighteen months.  When you lead these individuals, you should foster an environment of constant learning.  The global economy and technology field depends on the forward momentum of learning. 

The world we live in today is radically different from the start of the internet era.  Do it yourself videos are everywhere on YouTube.  Today, anyone with a video camera and an opinion can behave like a network pundit.  In the world of technology, the hacker ethos and open source community have won the debate about how enterprise systems should operate.  It is a world of open source, cloud computing, and mobile devices.  Business leaders are struggling to understand these changes.  

With change happening so quickly, it is easy to see how people can fall behind.  It is why there are so many training conferences, continuing education courses, and ongoing programs in business to keep the skills of professionals up to date.  It is why I continue to dabble in software development even though I spend the majority of my time in a coaching role.  It allows me to understand the challenges and opportunities that developers face each day.  It also gives me a chance to kick off the rust and stretch myself creatively.  

I am working with .NET Core technologies for the past week, and it has been a valuable learning experience.  Instead of XML configuration files, .NET Core uses JSON.  The Bootstrap CSS system is now on version four, and communicating with Restful APIs is like connecting to a database.  I felt like a child learning to program again.  I watched a few training videos on YouTube and made the typical mistakes someone learning does.  I also had the experience of satisfaction of getting something to work correctly hours of tinkering.  

Now when I am making technology decisions, I can make a more informed choice because I have worked with the systems in question.  It is a better approach than sitting passively behind a desk and waiting for a consultant to whisper something in your ear.  It is my experience that the best leaders are the ones who lead from a position of expertise and empathy.  These people understand the day to day struggles of the business and market forces they are facing.  

It is why I attempt to kick off the rust and do some programming.  I learn new things and do some programming.  I know new things, and it provides me with insights into how people I serve work.  To foster an environment of learning, you must be willing to learn new things.  

Until next time. 

Self-Care is no joke

Ike learned a few lessons about self-care.

We live in interesting times.  The economy for working people is a mess.  A pandemic is making it impossible for schools and businesses to operate in a typical fashion.  Finally, the social isolation necessary to fight the disease creates a feeling of anxiety and alienation.  Combine the above with the responsibilities of work and family, and you have a recipe for disillusionment.  I am aware of the privilege I have working from home and providing value to my customers remotely.  It is still challenging to maintain the energy and focus I need to get through the day. Exciting times are exhausting times.  Today on the blog, I would like to take about self-care.  

Servant leadership is difficult.  It ties up your energy and focus because you concentrate your time on others.  A leader can easily ignore their own needs and effectiveness.  Eventually, you fall into a cycle of failure as your body forces you to rest.  Eisenhower was famous for his chain-smoking and bouts of insomnia.  Napoleon struggled with hemorrhoids and gout.  The number of bankers who abused cocaine is too long to mention.  The physical ailments and addictions are a symptom of not taking care of your health. 

We spend time talking about success and accomplishment.  We often do not discuss the price people pay.  A leader is only as good as they are physically able to do the job.  Thus, it is crucial to take care of yourself because people are counting on you to be in the moment when they need you.  I am conscious of the reality that I have the privilege of taking care of myself.  I set my work schedule instead of having someone else do it for me.  I can work from home instead of at a factory, field, or construction site.   Compared with many workers, I have much more control over my day to day activities.  It means taking care of yourself is often a luxury that other people do not possess.  People with this privilege need to avoid squandering this benefit because others count on us to lead when times are tough.  

So here are a few things leaders can do to maintain health and improve their leadership.  The first practice all leaders should indulge in is getting sleep.  The global nature of the economy and the needs of off-shore business units means we need to sleep.  Software teams can be half a world away, and it means disrupted sleep schedules and plenty of early mornings.  I recommend seven to nine hours of sleep nightly.  When that is not possible, take naps so that your body does not do strange things.  According to doctors, a lack of sleep creates behavior patterns similar to drinking alcohol.  A sleep-deprived person has less judgment than a well-rested person, which makes the difference between success and failure.  

As for chemical substances, practice moderation, alcohol, nicotine, speed, and cannabis are legal and easily accessible.  Avoid using them because they can become addictive and act as a crutch during stressful times.  When I worked in advertising, I was staggered by the use of alcohol.  Most of the time, I ignored it, but often enough, someone would be drunk at an inconvenient moment, and disaster would follow.  Nothing is sadder than a middle-aged man slurring his speech during a sales presentation. 

Finally, detach from the office and expect others to do the same. It means not checking your e-mail over the weekend.  Do not bring your power supply home with you, so your laptop runs out of power.  It will prevent you from working long hours at home.  An e-mail in the middle of the night can wait until you get into the office.  We spend a third of our life working.  The other portion we spend sleeping.  Spend the remainder with family, friends, and loved ones.  Setting healthy boundaries is part of being a leader.  Playing with your children and taking a Saturday afternoon nap is a great way to recharge your mental batteries.  

The practice of self-care is not a luxury for leaders.  It is a necessity.  Get some sleep, avoid chemical substances, and detach from the office.  The people you serve will thank you. 

Until next time. 

The Agile Pirate

 

Where the wind and the sea take me.  

As a scrum master or coach, it is important to tell stories.  Stories can be used to explain abstract concepts and reasons for decisions.  These stories are just another tool to spread agile through the firm.  Today, on the blog, I want to talk about a story I often use to explain agility to an organization.  

I have been a big fan of the book "Teach Like a Pirate," from Dave Burgess.  It talks about the off-beat techniques one teacher uses to get high school students to learn.  It includes plenty of useful advice to maintain enthusiasm, deal with challenging students, and set up a learning environment that is accommodating. He uses the term "teach like a pirate" because it is a non-standard way to educate children.  I have taken Burgess's guidance and merged it into my coaching practice.   I have also authored a blog on how it informs my outlook.  

I learned a story in the press about Steve Jobs.  In 1983 the engineering team for Macintosh was struggling.  Jobs then brought the team to an off-site leadership meeting where he gave a pet talk saying, "it is better to be a pirate than to join the navy." After the weekend meeting, the engineers returned to Apple headquarters and raised a modified pirate flag over the office.  It was the traditional skull and crossbones with a twist.  Instead of a conventional eye patch, it has the Apple logo with rainbow stripes.  The flag would fly over the engineering building for Macintosh for over a year.  Jobs would point it out to visitors.  When the company celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2016, Jobs had been dead for five years, but the pirate flag flew again; the buccaneering spirit he inspired in the organization still lingered.  I imagine his approval in the afterlife at this gesture.  

The story has stuck with me ever since I discovered it.  The pirate of Robert Louis Stevenson and contemporary Hollywood is a colorful rebellious creature who lives outside the rules of conventional society.  Pirates are outlaws beholden to no one but themselves.  A pirate is an ultimate survivor willing to fight and die for their shipmates.  It is a lifestyle that often ended at the end of a noose or the point of a sword, but while alive, a pirate was living a way of life that few people could imagine.

I do love the swashbuckling nature of pirates.  I also see it as an inspiration for the teams I serve.  I often joke the development teams are a merry band of pirates attempting to make a living on the high seas.  I encourage people to take calculated risks to innovate and please the customer.  It is not the precise control of a corporate environment.  Instead, it is the collegial environment of skilled professionals working nimbly and collaboratively for swift rewards.  

So here I am, leading an agile transformation and a group of talented people.  I did not expect this out of my career ten years ago, and certainly not when I graduated from college.  It is the life of a pirate, and I will go where the wind and the seas will take me.  

Agile Coaching Requires Walking Away.

The path of the righteous man requires walking away.

I have been focused on plenty of goals in my career.  I have spent time coaching teams and individuals.  Often, I have to work on projects and help the team turn them around.  Other times, I discover the more esoteric points of my job, like putting together training videos.  This week, I found another necessary part of my career.

I have been working with a large project for twenty weeks.  We went from getting nothing done to pushing releases every two weeks.  The developers were fighting with the QA people on the team, and morale was low.  This week, I walked away from the group and let them stand on their own.  It was a difficult thing to do, but if the team was going to grow, I had to walk away.  

Being a coach means that you have to make your role obsolete.  Teams can only improve with outside help for only so long, and then you have to step away.  The team needs to be able to grow and stand on its own.  Ziran Salayi wrote an excellent paper on this subject in 2019. 

Coaching a team is challenging and a profound emotional commitment.  Walking away from the team breaks emotional attachments, but it is necessary to help the team learn to improve without outside intervention.  As a parent, you place training wheels on a bicycle and run alongside to show them how to ride.  Inevitability, those training wheels come off, and the child learns to ride without adult supervision.  Along the way, the rookie bicyclist will take a few spills, but they will develop a sense of independence.  

Letting go and walking away is critical to the success of a team you are coaching. An organization coached correctly will take ownership of your instruction and bring them into new and more powerful directions.  For instance, if you impress on people the importance of quality, when you leave the team, the team should be eager to create their ways of improving software quality.  Leaving a team is like taking off the training wheels.

A good agile coach is like a character from popular culture.  It is the type of character who rides into a dusty town in the west to restore law and order, like Cleavon Little in "Blazing Saddles," or a mysterious woman who opens a chocolate shop in the 2000 film “Chocolat.” I take inspiration from Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield from “Pulp Fiction.”  At the end of the film, Winnfield abandons a life of crime and foils a robbery without firing a shot.  I am never going to be as cool as Samuel L. Jackson, but I do know how to exit.  Walking away from a team is not giving up on them; it is encouraging them to thrive on their own.  Walking away is part of being a coach. 

Until next time. 

It is never about you.

Serve others it isn't about you.

The best part of being part of the agile reformation is the community of supportive professionals who inspire each other.  I can rely on the experience and wisdom of thousands of people who are on a similar journey attempting to make work saner, sustainable, and satisfying.  Currently, I am training at Chicago State University to improve my credentials as a certified agile coach.  It is an excellent experience with people from all over the globe.  Someone from the Philippines has the same challenges I do when leading change.  It is always nice to know that we are all facing similar struggles and challenges. This week, I learned a rather important lesson, which often gets lost as we become more experienced in agile. 

 

One of the critical foundations of agile is the notion of servant leadership.  The best leaders often are those who see themselves as servants helping the people; they lead rather than viewing the people under their authority as people who serve them.  As you gain experience and credibility within the profession, it is easy to let the certifications, recognition, and respect go to your head.  We are scrum masters, and people look to us for advice and guidance.  It is intoxicating.  

The reality is that being an agile coach or scrum master is about service to others.  It is not about us and our journey.  We should remember that success in this profession is when others take the lessons we have learned and apply them to their challenges.  If we are doing our jobs properly, our wisdom will help build success for others.  We should celebrate the achievements of others and the growth of people under our charge.  Unlike other areas of business, being a coach or scrum master means taking the focus away from yourself and directing it at the teams you are working.  

It is nice to learn from others.  The most important lesson is discovering that to be a servant leader, you need to remind yourself it is not about you but the people you are leading.  It is a lesson worth repeating.  

Until next time.