I get knocked down!

When you become a blogger or post on social media, you offer your wisdom and opinion to others. Giving advice also comes with a particular burden because you must practice what you preach to others. Finally, your guidance has to have a positive practical effect.   If you are not helping others, you are no different than a mentally ill person ranting about lizard people on a soapbox at the corner park. The business world makes me feel crazy occasionally, but this last week was insane. Each blogger, coach, scrum master, and social media poster will face a test and must rely on their advice to struggle through.  

As a coach and blogger, I have repeatedly said that failure is more important than success to determine your ability to grow professionally. Failure is educational, tests your mental toughness, and motivates you to transcend those failures. I have failed plenty of times, and the experiences have made me more intelligent and wiser as a professional. 

The most vital test of a person is how they respond to setbacks and failure. My partner coaches a soccer team on weekends. It means I spend my Saturday morning watching five-year-old girls kick a soccer ball around a small field. It is also a chance to watch personal growth happen in real-time. A young girl over-kicked a ball, tripped, and fell. She was stunned for a moment but realized there was a fight for possession, so she huffed at the indignity of falling, got back up, and got back into the game. Later, she would score a goal. It made me proud of her because she rose above a setback. 

The business world is like those five-year-olds learning to kick a soccer ball. People fail and make mistakes. The ball does not bounce your way, or a teammate will disappoint. Unfortunately, global business is not youth soccer because you often don’t receive a juice box and encouragement from your coach after a game. Many times, you feel alone and empty. Business is ruthless when it comes to failure. 

As a culture, we often trumpet success but greet failure with awkward silence. No one knows what to say when you are on your stomach with turf stains on your face. For me, the obvious answer is to say, “Get back up!” How we respond to adversity is the best measure of success. 

If you excuse me, I have to clean some grass off my jersey and get back into the game.

Until next time. 

Decisions are Better Than Dithering.

One of the most amazing things in my experience in the business world is the people responsible for millions of dollars of business and hundreds of people but incapable of making a decision or setting a priority. It is so common that it has become a cliché in business writing and the popular imagination. Decision-making and prioritization are central to success, so why are many business leaders so bad at it? 

In college, I was eager to graduate because I wanted to work with the mature grown-ups of the business world. I was deeply disappointed by some businesspeople's emotional maturity and self-reflection. In fact, I soon discovered that a contemporary corporation has many of the same characteristics as a high school. You have jocks as part of the sales force and leading important teams because they look the part. I have experienced plenty of mean girls who become awful women in marketing and human resources. Band and theater kids gravitate to customer-facing roles, while the more nerdy contingent makes a living among the technology staff. If he were still alive, John Hughes could make a great movie about the contemporary office. 

Unlike high school, a corporation does not have teachers or administrators to reign in bad behavior and raging hormones. The students are running things, so tribal and personal bias plays a big part in who succeeds and who fails. Leaders prioritize being likable to their peers over getting things done. A popular person is likelier to be promoted than someone despised. It forces ambitious people to be uncontroversial. It means saying yes to everyone they can above them and being pleasant to a fault. It is the behavior known as "kiss up and kick down," which business professor Robert J. Sutton defines as an asshole. 

These individuals do not need to make decisions; they must be cute or charming to their superiors, keep their peers from hating them, and keep the people they serve busy. As time passes, they rise in organizations and act like cholesterol, slowly choking the life out of the organization. When asked to accomplish something, they often take credit for someone else's work or find a helpful scapegoat for failure. Being in an environment like this is why productivity is low and worker engagement is poor. 

The harsh reality is that Collin Powel is correct when he says leadership means you will piss people off. Deciding to do something or setting a priority for work will make enemies. Unfortunately, skillfully getting the job done is not enough; you must be likable. Thus, these ineffectual people wind up in leadership. 

The good news is that agile forces an organization to see itself as it is and confront ugly truths. It is then up to the organization to decide if these ineffectual people should remain in leadership. Nothing is worse than two equal priorities colliding and creating an organizational train wreck. So setting priories is the first skill that all leaders need to perfect. It is simple to do in practice; develop a list of things that need to get done and then number them with no two items having the same number. As items get completed, then review the list and re-prioritize it. It provides you with flexibility and communicates what is getting done. It will still create enemies and cause conflict, but the information's transparency ensures that all controversy will be out in the open instead of getting whispered behind your back. 

You cannot change business people's feckless and immature nature, but you can create incentives where people set priorities. A workplace where work gets completed is better than one mired in dysfunction. Each of us in the agile profession needs to be transparent and clear about priorities and decision-making. Otherwise, we are reliving the worst aspect of high school. 

Until next time. 

Make meetings less awful

To a person one of the biggest complaints among professional people is the number of meetings they attend. Instead of doing the work we should do, we spent our time "talking" about doing the work. I confess it is maddening. Today, I want to discuss the bane of any professional's existence. 

Work today is so complex that it requires specialized labor to get it accomplished. Thus, only some people know all the steps to complete a simple product like a pencil. Imagine the complexity needed to build a product like a banking application. It requires technology professionals, bankers, and attorneys because the regulations surrounding banking are rigorous. The number of people working on the project could be hundreds, and the teams could be anywhere worldwide. The only way to coordinate these people is to have periodic meetings to work out problems and ensure everyone has the same sense of urgency. 

What makes meetings so tedious is that many of them seem unnecessary. A public display of information or a well-written e-mail could reduce the meeting time. Unfortunately, the larger an organization, the more difficult it is to cultivate trust between disparate parts. People ignore e-mails, and the radiation of information creates political strife in organizations. So meetings are a way in low trust organizations to coordinate work. 

Agile uses retrospectives and sprint reviews to build trust by showing how work is progressing and exposing the workers to the people paying for the project. However, it triggered waves of despair from the development community because it was an additional meeting stacked on the current garden variety. When is work supposed to get done? I am sympathetic to this criticism of agile, but my experience for the last fifteen years has shown me that simple, focused meetings with a clear agenda make it possible to get work done. Meetings which exist for the same of having meetings are wasteful.

It is why if you are having a meeting, it should have a clear agenda. A meeting should either yield a decision or feature meaningful discussion. A proper agile retrospective allows the team to choose how the team should work and discuss the best strategy to complete those goals. A daily stand-up meeting is nothing more than the team discussing the day's events and making decisions for the next. Remember that the meeting is wasteful if you are not making a decision or having a meaningful conversation. 

Meetings also act as a means to mediate office politics and covey information up and down the chain of command. Thus, if you are in a forum with these goals, consider it your job to attend these meetings so your subordinates and superiors do not have to. You are a trusted vector of information, so following the session is purposeful and allows others to get work done. Those meeting types are less wasteful because you ate attending them instead of your entire team. 

Poorly run meetings could be better but are the best way to convey information in low-rust corporate environments. Make sure meetings have clear agendas. Productive meetings feature meaningful discussions or firm decisions. Finally, the meeting you are in frees up others to ensure work gets done. 

The corporate world has too many meetings, but following these simple guidelines will make them less awful.

Until next time. 

  

Change is Necessary to Fix Problems.

The banks we patronize today significantly differ from those that existed one hundred fifty years ago. The America of 1873 was still in the middle of a southern reconstruction, with federal troops still occupying the defeated confederacy, and most banks were locally owned and serving local communities. Each banker personally knew each depositor and recorded transactions on paper. Large corporations own banks today and dominate large swaths of geography and customers. Millions of customers conduct billions of transactions daily in the physical world and online. These systems must be accurate to the penny, available twenty-four hours a day, and meet the increasingly demanding needs of customers and regulators.

It requires an army of skilled specialists to keep the system working. It makes working in the postmodern economy difficult because you need to navigate the complicated procedures of control and bureaucracy to make a change, which keeps the global economy spinning. It is not easy, and I will discuss this on the blog today. 

James Beniger wrote a book entitled “The Control Revolution.” He argues that increasing industrialization and an expanding economy demanded that businesses and governments develop better control systems. Trains collided on the tracks, food rotted in warehouses, and money only moved as fast as people could carry it from bank to bank. Something had to change if business and prosperity were going to expand. Fortunately, we have developed innovations like paper checks, just-in-time inventory systems, and the corporate bureaucracy we all experience. These innovations make our global economy possible. 

As a technology professional, these control systems are robust but tend to resist change. So being able to pivot to new technologies of changing customer and regulatory demands feels like swimming against the tide. The number of people and their vest interests means that as an agent of change, you run into a giant wall of inertia. 

I experience systems operating until the effort to sustain them becomes overwhelming. People enjoyed train travel until the trains started to collide. It became paramount to train companies and the government that the death toll had to stop. The combination of telegraph lines, electric track switches, and synchronized clocks helped to end the collisions, and train travel was the dominant means of getting around the country until the end of World War Two. 

As an agile person, point out a problem, show how it costs the organization time, money, and energy, and propose a solution. In an interview promoting his series about work, former President Barak Obama said that leaders are looking for people to solve problems. If a problem is big enough, a good solution will find a receptive audience. It is why coal is used less for energy generation, and wind, solar, and natural gas are replacing it. 

Change is complicated and messy, but it is necessary even with complex systems. Otherwise, we will be forced to accept failure and stagnation, which is never sustainable. 

Until next time.