Leadership Techniques to Build Trust

The business world is like a merry-go-round, moving at unsafe speeds. Everyone is holding on for deal life, hoping they do not get thrown off and injured terribly. Instead of listening to concerns about the ride's speed, people stare blankly and condescendingly at those who raise the issue, refusing to believe them. No one understands why the ride turns so quickly, but to suggest otherwise seems like madness. I am in the middle of a career transition, which has given me time to reflect on what matters as a professional. 

The business press and popular culture spend plenty of time discussing leadership and vision in the business world. Many organizations need help putting people with leadership skills in the correct roles. Often, we promote people who need help to do the leadership job. The Peter Principle explains why many leadership roles in companies contain mediocre leaders. It is a principle that, when combined with the pressure to deliver revenue and profits to shareholders, further pushes people to extremes in behavior. Employees trapped in a cycle of abuse are forced to endure mistreatment from customers, often finding themselves under the leadership of managers who perpetuate the same behavior.

It paints a picture of incapable people with psychological trauma under unreasonable pressure, inflicting emotional harm on others to provide better customer service. It is a glum and ugly tapestry of alienation. It explains why strikes have increased since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and trends like quiet quitting have impacted offices worldwide. Something is broken in the work culture, hurting businesses, employees, customers, and society. 

In her book, "The Experience Mindset," Tiffani Bova points to three main issues that provide a roadmap to fixing broken work culture. Employees want to support doing their jobs. Short staffing, lack of supplies, and being penny-wise but pound-foolish undermine employee efforts to deliver the goods and services they provide. It is incumbent for organizations to provide that support. Next, employees want to be trained in the skills they need to succeed in their jobs today and in the future. It is a particular problem in technology as skills become obsolete in months instead of years. Finally, there needs to be trust between the people doing the work and the organizations they work for because, as Bova says, "Trust is the bedrock of any business."

The three mileposts of better employee experience are trust, training, and support, which organizations can provide if they treat employees with the same consideration as their customers and shareholders. What it requires is a different leadership style. We need a different approach instead of being feudal or authoritarian toward the people who deliver value to the organization. 

I have discovered a few methods which drive success. The first is the notion of servant leadership. A leader should serve the people who work with them. It requires time and emotional labor because instead of giving orders, you provide guidelines, psychological security, and an environment of trust. It can transform a group of misfits into high performers if done right. 

Next, I am a colossal propoment of L. David Marquet and his intention-based leadership. Marquet is a retired U.S. Navy Captain who commanded a nuclear submarine. Suppose there was a position that fit the autocratic mold of absolute power. In that case, it is responsible for atomic weapons, two hundred lives, and a two-and-a-half billion submarine. Marquet suggests a better way, which he calls intention-based leadership. He asks people to think about their actions and deliberate about what they will accomplish. Mistakes are forecasted instead of avoided, and people have the psychological safety to make decisions even in stressful situations like combat. Finally, intentional-based leadership says that everyone in an organization is a leader, not just those given the official title. It generates a feedback loop of trust, which helps everyone perform their roles better. 

Finally, Kim Scott and her book Radical Candor color my leadership worldview. She says that leaders need to care personally and challenge people directly. She also points out that you cannot be a jerk and be radically candid. Being a jerk is a behavior that can be changed with required effort and a willingness to change. 

Radical Candor, Intention-based leadership, and servant leadership can help build better teams and improve workplace culture. The techniques build trust, help employees develop the skills to be successful at their jobs, and provide the necessary support to do those jobs. It slows down the merry-go-round of the contemporary work culture. I plan to lead the way.

Until next time. 

Fighting the Uncivil Office with Agile

The global economy is a rough place. One of the most challenging aspects of the worldwide economy is working with various people who keep it moving. Over my career, I have been amazed at the number of neurotic, damaged, and plain mean people I have experienced in business. It makes me wonder if the business work actively attracts these individuals or manufactures them over time. As I was recovering from my Thanksgiving gluttony over the weekend, I decided it was a subject worth writing about. 

Christine Porath may be a household name, but in 2018, she gave a TED talk at the University of Nevada. The woman who loves me forwarded the video: "She seems to know what you experience daily." She said. After watching the video, I rushed to the TED site and watched the entire presentation. Porath has something to tell us about the unhealthy environment of global business. 

Her thesis is simple. We do not treat people with enough respect in the office. Minor unkind actions lead to more significant problems in the office. Name-calling, disrespect, and othering build up like infectious pus ruining the organization. Eventually, the infection festers into poor performance and aggression. Incivility is a common disorder in the business world. It is a problem that made 80% of employees lose work time, 66% cut back on work efforts, and more than one in ten quit. The network company Cisco estimated the cost of incivility to its bottom line as twelve million dollars. 

Incivility is another form of waste in the workplace. Any good business person should be able to look at this expense and find ways to reduce it. The challenge is that two factors interfere with our ability to reduce this form of waste. The first is we are stressed and overwhelmed. Businesses are demanding that their employees do more work with fewer people. It means more work and fewer people to do it. Also, as work has become more specialized and intellectually demanding, the number of people who can do it well is decreasing. It creates all kinds of pressure in the technology world and gets vented in moments of rage and incivility. The other factor is that we condition business people to think that being a jerk is a path to leadership. 

Stories abound in the business world of leaders who practice a "mask of command." It is an artificial persona that portrays strength and competence but, in reality, often acts as a shield for being a jerk to others because, in the hypercompetitive world of business, nice people finish last. If you are warm and friendly, you are seen as competent and intelligent, inspiring others. The reason more business people do not do this is they "paid dues" in uncivil and exploitative environments. When they advanced, they went from receiving abuse to dishing it out to subordinates. It feels like a form of generational trauma, but it spreads out from the leadership team like pus poisoning the bloodstream from an infected wound. 

Fighting incivility in the office is challenging because it requires changing behaviors and processes instead of shuffling a few numbers around in a spreadsheet or creating an Instagram-worthy office. It means looking at people and understanding what motivates them and how to treat them with respect and dignity. It is not wearing a mask but caring about people personally and holding them accountable. As Kim Scott likes to say, there is a big difference between being a jerk and showing radical candor in the office. 

Uncivil behavior in the office should not be the price paid for a professional career. We should be able to live our lives and experience our careers with a positive measure of respect and dignity. Unfortunately, we do not understand that lesson until it is too late. I dedicate my career to making the office less ugly and uncivil. I hope that others will join me in this mission.

Until next time. 

In Praise of Duct Tapers and Problem Solvers

The world of business is shifting and complicated. Billions of dollars are sloshing around the global economy, and currents of this activity impact each of us on the planet. It is hard to make sense of all the motion and activity, so the business press attempts to make sense of it with strange trend articles. Fobes magazine had an article about the five tribes of employees you find in the office and their possible leadership potential. I enjoy these articles as social exercises, but they left out a crucial component, and I feel compelled to discuss it. 

Ryan Hogg in Forbes reported that the good folks at Slack have identified five prominent workplace personalities. He then describes their unique characteristics and possible ability to lead business organizations. These subgroups are detectives, networkers, road warriors, problem solvers, and expressionists. I am including a link to the article here if you want the full details. 

What struck me about the article was the perky and upbeat nature of how Hogg describes these tribes of workers. Detectives are data-oriented, organized, and outcome-oriented, while road warriors are 'feisty' and have a different vision of success than typical employees. It is easy to be glum and write about work with a sense of futility and toil, so I am grateful for Hogg to take a different approach. 

Working in a contemporary office has gotten a bad reputation. As corporations have grown, we need to do a better job developing leaders, and profit-seeking is the central focus of our activities to the detriment of everything else. It is a toxic perfume of alienation and exploitation. It explains television shows like The Office and The IT Crowd have become cultural touchpoints in the UK and the United States. Our work lives contain plenty of farce and pathos. 

According to Hogg, people like me are problem-solvers. We adapt to technology quickly and like using new ideas to solve old problems. Slack's head of customer success said, "I expect to set the problem solver to be an integral part of an organization because they're going to be the people that adopt artificial intelligence much faster and find ways to make their jobs easier." 

Hogg ignored the definitive book about office subculture seven years ago, David Greber's "Bulls#it Jobs." In his book, Graeber uses his experience as an anthropologist to explain the five tribes of people who undermine organizations—he labels these groups flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. Graeber's book is an unflattering look at corporate life and the "profound psychological violence" that accompanies it. 

Graeber and Hogg's overlap is the description of problem solvers and duct tapers; both live in an ambiguous realm of decisions requiring judgment and creativity. Duct tapers and problem solvers spend lots of effort fighting corporate red tape, fixing problems before they happen, and keeping the promises of others. They are project managers, scrum masters, and middle management types who support the organization. They also make many enemies because they spend most of their time challenging existing power structures and proposing new ways to do things. It requires technical and people skills with uncertain payoffs. 

I am proud to say that I have been a duct taper for the last twenty years of my career. Along the way, I have earned a few emotional scars and developed a reputation for frankness and delivery. Executives only understand the necessity of problem solvers and duct tapers once they need them. When a deadline is in jeopardy or an existential threat crops up in an organization, these people become saviors. Otherwise, they quit and join other organizations because even the best duct tapers and problem solvers know when to run for cover when an organization is about to blow up. 

So, if you want to ensure the survival of your organization, pay attention to this tribe of employees known as duct tapers and problem solvers. These people know your organization better than you do, from its seedy underbelly to the glamorous product launches. They also have a symbolic roll of duct tape to keep the organization from flying apart. It would help if you had more of them in your organization. 

Until next time. 

 

The Benefits of a Good Backlog.

My career is an adventure. Each week, I face new challenges as I attempt to help organizations deliver working solutions for the last ten years. I have experienced the Good, Bad, and Ugly of the technology business. I have never been a significant player, but in my small way, I have attempted to make life in the cubicles of your local office park a better place to work. Last month, I concentrated on creating a quality product backlog, and today, I want to summarize my thoughts on the subject. 

A product backlog is nothing more than a fancy list of work to accomplish. It should focus on delivering value to customers. Finally, it should obey the principles of Roman Pitchler's DEEP model. If these simple requirements are satisfied, your project and organization will be more successful than many attempting an agile transformation. 

The business exists to provide goods or services to customers. If done correctly, it is a mutually beneficial relationship where the customer gets what they want while the business makes a profit. It is up to the business to minimize waste and keep the customer happy. I am always amazed at how often this idea gets lost during a project. 

Inefficiencies and dysfunction reveal themselves during projects, and many of those issues are not engineering issues but are instead the products of human frailty. Ego and insecurity stalk the cubicles of many business organizations. High-paid executives throw their authority around to justify their existence. People will claim credit for work they did not do. Finally, pressured for time and short-staffed, people are expected to create complicated software solutions. It is no wonder that burnout is so rampant in the industry. 

I consider a healthy product backlog to be vital to success. Prioritization pr
events the highest-paid person in the room from overriding the organization's goals. By pointing out the importance of work to the organization and customers, questions of ego and authority fall away. If priorities are out of line with market demand, then the organization can pivot because the product owner and leadership team have an emergent backlog. We are empowered by estimation to make informed predictions about when work will be finished. Instead of an entire file cabinet of requirements that no one reads or refers to, the level of detail is sufficient to create working solutions. 

A simple structure of Bugs, User Stories, and tasks obeying the same workflow reduces conflict within a team and the larger organization. I wasted ten hours of billable time getting a development team to accept a product backlog item as a defect instead of a change request for one client. Because they were not paid to fix defects, the team treated everything as a change request, wasting time and avoiding the need to mitigate their poor code quality. A more straightforward backlog structure and clear expectations would have saved everyone involved time and money. 

The most crucial part of having a clear product backlog is that it is a public and transparent way to communicate how work moves through the organization. If someone wants to add work, they have to go through the product owner, and they can see the story move from creation to development to production. The organization sees how work flows through the system, and the organization can use the theory of constraints to help make necessary improvements to the system. Just like there are no secrets at a crap game, a good product backlog does not have any secrets. 

Each week is a new adventure, but with a proper backlog, most surprises are not career-threatening. 

Until next time. 

Postulates for Backlog Prioritization

Today, I am continuing my discussion of backlog management. A good backlog follows Roman Pitchler’s DEEP model. Sticking with three simple building blocks inside your backlog will streamline work, and placing all work that drives value in the backlog will make you more successful than half of the other product owners currently working. This week, I want to discuss something that many organizations struggle with – prioritization.  

As a software developer and agile professional, I spend plenty of time around entrepreneurs and business executives. Many of these individuals are insulated from the hard knocks of life by the success in their careers. Because business leaders are accustomed to getting everything they want every time, they need help when asked to set priorities. People unaccustomed to hearing no are notoriously tricky to work with. 

The cold reality in the global economy is limited time, people, and money to get things done. Bosses who create a climate of terror destroy their organizations. Therefore, priority setting is necessary sooner or later. Confronting this reality requires a few postulates for business people to understand. 

The first postulate of prioritization is if you do not set priorities for work, someone else will. When you give a software developer a list of things to do without priorities, they will work on the most straightforward task or the one that interests them personally. It means employees often spend their time on tasks that are optional to the business. It may not be a big problem at first, but it will create situations where a developer will build something, and it will be radically different from what the person paying the bills asked for. 

The following postulate is that when everything is a top priority, nothing is. In business, there are important things and things which are urgent. Rarely do the two overlap, but business leaders want to create a false sense of urgency to get work done. It is a recipe for failure because if items are all urgent and essential, they are just like they should have been prioritized. The easy or enjoyable tasks will go first, generating conflict between the employees and management who commissioned the work. 

Finally, we should prioritize work based on the needs of customers and stakeholders rather than the highest-paid people in the room. I have spoken at length about egoware and other types of waste in organizations. The top priority for any business is the customers who pay for the solutions and products the business manufactures. So, when confronting a situation where a customer conflicts with an Executive Vice President of Application development, you must side with the customer. Improved revenue and better profit margins have a way of silencing critics. 

So, for a backlog to be successful, follow these three postulates of prioritization. First, set priorities; otherwise, others will set them for you. Next, priorities need variation because if everything is a top priority, nothing is. Finally, prioritize based on customer needs instead of management desires. These postulates are the foundation of a successful backlog. A successful backlog is the beginning of a successful agile implementation. 

Until next time. 

A backlog must be DEEP

I am continuing my series of articles about the basics of healthy product ownership. The most fundamental thing in Agile is the product backlog. Borrowing from Dave Todaro and his book “The Epic Guide to Agile,” I said that the basic building blocks of a product backlog are user stories, bugs, and tasks. Today, I want to emphasize the structure of a backlog. 

Roman Pichler writes plenty of great books about Agile. My favorite is “Agile Project Management with Scrum.” Here, Pichler outlines his DEEP model of product backlog management. For a backlog to be robust, it must have the following necessary and sufficient conditions:

• It must be Detailed.
• It must be Estimated.
• It must be Emergent.
• It must be Prioritized.

I have blogged about each of these conditions in other blog posts. Today, I want to review them again and develop some structure you can use to ensure that your backlog is healthy and helping drive value. 

Many businesses actively view a product backlog as a grocery list to fill. It is a mindset geared toward failure. Even the most successful software projects began as small experiments that grew and adapted to market conditions. So, unfinished items are revised based on what the customers want. That is why we say a backlog is emergent and prioritized. A business must determine what is important and do those things first, and if the market determines those priorities need to shift, we must be flexible and intelligent enough to change them. Ego is the enemy of agility. 

One of the most universal features of project management is that once you start doing the work, there is no way to know how long it will take to complete the task. The reality is known as the cone of uncertainty. Estimates can be wildly off by a factor of eight from the low end to the high side of the budget and timeline. The only way to reduce the uncertainty is to do the work, which means that you are adding more detail and information to user stories. It also means that estimates may change as more information becomes available. The code of uncertainty will narrow, but it will take time and patience, which are in short supply in the global economy.

The properties of detail, estimation, emergence, and prioritization combine to make your backlog resemble a leaderboard at the golf event. A golfer rises and falls on the board based on the condition of the course. Halfway through a tournament, a cut takes half of the golfers out of contentions—the ones who make “the cut” then compete for the real money and recognition. Instead of golfers moving up and down a leaderboard, think of the user stories moving up and down the backlog based on the competitive information from your customer base. 

The road to healthy product ownership travels through a detailed, estimated, emergent, and prioritized backlog. A product backlog that meets those conditions will deliver value to the project and generate revenue for the firm, which keeps everyone working for another day. 

Until next time. 

Back to Basics the Building Blocks of a Backlog.

I want to return to basics for the next few weeks and discuss Agile fundamentals. Last week, I outlined my mission statement that the fundamental building block of an agile implementation is a product backlog. Today, I want to discuss the items you put in the backlog. 

I am currently reading Dave Todaro’s book, “The Epic Guide to Agile,” which I am enjoying. Todaro starts with the basics of Agile and Scrum. From this starting point, he covers the pragmatic impacts of applying agility to business. It is from here that he talks about product backlogs. In case you need a refresher, a product backlog is a list of work the team must do to deliver value to the organization. A backlog can cover numerous processes, from marketing to Human Resources, but my examples will focus on software development since I am a technology person. 

A product backlog should contain user stories, bugs, and tasks. A user story is a new functionality or a change in functionality that creates value for the firm. For instance, if you want to tie the corporate website to a Federated social media service, you create user stories for the development team to improve. Another example is when regulations change, you must change how to calculate sales tax in the shopping cart. User stories are uniquely suited to adding features and improving products. If you want to learn more about how to write user stories, you can follow this link, where I talk about how I teach others to write user stories. 

The next item you should add to a backlog is bugs. A bug comes from a funny story from the early days of computer science. The first computers were monstrous contraptions the size of entire buildings. These devices came before the invention of transistors and microchips, so they were composed of rooms of unreliable vacuum tubes that gave off unhealthy heat levels. According to National Geographic, a moth flew into one of these rooms and landed on a tube. The insect died instantly and shorted out the computer. Since then, anything physical or programatical that breaks a computer is called a bug. 

The product owner of a system needs to track bugs in a system. Thus, log a bug when something is not working as expected in the product backlog. For instance, if we return to our fictional shopping cart and sales tax. We must write up a bug if sales tax is incorrectly calculated. From there, the bug is prioritized like a user story and then worked on by the scrum team. 

We need to remind people not to get hung up on if they are working on bugs or user stories. As a developer and scrum master, I often argued about work. I always wanted to debate if something was a bug or a user story. A wise coach showed me that both product backlog items are working to drive value to the firm and that I should concentrate on the work instead of arguing about what kind of work I am doing. 

The final item in our backlog is called a task. It is an item that the team does which does not deliver direct value to the solution. Training, the configuration of environments, and product spikes all fall under the umbrella of tasks. At first, I disagreed with this approach because I consider spikes a separate entity. My attitude changed when I started working at organizations where twenty different product backlog types existed in instances of Jira with different workflows. Thus, spikes and work that do not add direct value to the product should be treated as tasks to avoid headaches in Jira and simplify managing backlogs. 

A product backlog lists User Stories, Bugs, and tasks. Together, they make up everything a team does to deliver value to the organization. Please avoid focusing on the specific details of each type and accept that all of them must be completed. Next time, I will discuss Roland Pitchler’s DEEP model of organizing a product backlog.

Until next time. 

From the Basics to Healthy Ownership

Agile professionals tell tales about our successes and failures regularly. It is how we learn about what works and what doesn’t in our profession. Agile people also enjoy a good tall tale about the foibles of working in the global economy. After some time, these tall tales become apocryphal stories that we share. I am guilty of this behavior, and I am sure other coaches do it. Today, I want to pull back from the mythology surrounding agile and focus on the basics. 

I am reading Dave Todaro’s book “The Epic Guide to Agile.” What I like about this book is that it concentrates on the basics of agile and scrum. Todaro builds out advanced concepts from the basic foundations grounded in years of experience working with software professionals and business people. It is refreshing to see this writing about agile. 

As a coach and scrum master, the most fundamental building block is the product backlog. It is the bedrock where most Agile efforts begin. It is also where we see the origin of many of the dysfunctions in a business. When reviewing the subject, a product backlog is a prioritized list of work, including user stories, bugs, tasks, and spikes. A product owner creates and prioritizes that list while a development team completes that list. In contrast, a development team completes that list, checking off individual stories.  

Backlogs work on the level of individual teams. When coordinating between multiple units, we create what the people in SAFe call a value stream. Value streams then roll up into portfolios of work. Thus, you can roll work up into larger blocks or break it into its most fundamental levels. We aim to have a clear view of what is being worked on and measure how much value is generated for the firm, not to create busy work at the organization.

To avoid getting lost, Agile professionals need to be able to measure progress and draw maps of where we have been to where we are going. It takes organization and a particular discipline, but if done correctly, you can communicate clearly with both business leaders paying the bills and development teams doing the work. The push-pull between the two groups is what I like to call “healthy ownership.” In a perfect world, leadership trusts the organization to get work done and can trust leadership to look after them. It should be a beneficial and mutually symbiotic relationship. 

Over the next few weeks, I will focus on how to help build healthy ownership in organizations, from setting up backlogs of work to ensuring that middle management does not strangle agility efforts for selfish reasons. I look forward to you joining the conversation. 

Until next time.

A Place for the Manager in the Agile Organization

I am always impressed by my fellow Agile advocates. Some are grumpy cynics who see failure around them and feel responsible for helping clean up the substantial debris cluttering global business over the last fifty years. Others are cheerful warriors attempting to show a better way by living example for others to follow. My approach lands somewhere in the squishy middle as I see behavior that violates my values. I understand intellectually that these violations are occurring because people created those systems to normalize those violations. 

As an agile professional, I have spent the last ten years fighting the uphill battle of changing business culture and performance. A common observation we in the Agile community have when we attempt to bring Agile to organizations is that teams quickly adapt to this new reality. Managers, in particular, are a constraint on how successful agile is in an organization. Today, I want to discuss the manager's role in an organization. 

My coach at CAPCO Financial, Michael Guerrero, ruefully observes that middle management is where agility dies. Executives know the importance of being more agile, and teams embrace the ethics of agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban. Managers are often caught in the middle and do not know how to navigate an organization transitioning to agility. The challenge of finding a place for a manager is becoming a central question in the agile reformation, along with how to scale it to the entire organization. Diana William and Liz Rettig from Project Brilliant gave an excellent presentation at AgileIndy 2023. 

The Scrum Guide and Agile are very good at defining the roles of a scrum master, product owner, and team member. The Agile community is silent about where managers fit into this system. It does not help that we do a poor job selecting and training managers and that those who advance into those roles behave in ways detrimental to the organization. Instead of making middle managers scapegoats for the failure of agile, coaches and scrum masters need to recruit them as partners for success. 

Williams and Rettig suggest four roles for the manager in an agile environment.

Provide Strategic direction –

Managers need to provide clarity and direction to the teams. They explain the 'why' of the decisions made and let the agile teams figure out the 'how' and 'what' of work. In traditional managerial roles, they thrive on ambiguity in an agile environment and must provide clear guardrails for performance and conduct. 

Grow People – 

A manager in an agile environment must grow the people they serve with training and development so that their skills become more 'T' shaped and they can advance within the organization. Even a person content to remain in the same position can learn to be better at their job. Managers of this type are judged by how they grow the people under their care. 

Create an Environment for Success – 

Managers in an agile environment need to learn how to address constraints and impediments. These managers must create solutions to these blockers and create an environment where people want to work. It is more than coffee, pizza, and foosball tables. It includes reducing technical debt outside the team and getting collaborations from other parts of the business. 

Being an Agile Champion – 

Finally, a manager in an agile environment champions the process. They encourage retrospectives, support efforts to build psychological safety, and allow teams to design their work areas. They must be willing to exhibit the same continuous improvement they expect from the development team. Finally, they need to get out of the office and talk with the scrum masters, product owners, and stakeholders to ensure they have what it takes to succeed. 

These are the four roles of a manager in an agile environment, and they will look alien to people accustomed to sitting behind a desk and doing administrative work. It is a much more hands-on role. 

When we portray agile in organizations, we show it like a three-legged stool with the development team, scrum master, and product owner, each playing a supporting role. We intentionally exclude the manager. If we want Agile to succeed, we must change this mindset to include managers. Thus, a manager should envelop the team providing these four services to make each of its legs successful.  

The next five years will be critical for Agile's success, and it is up to us in the profession to ensure managers are not left behind.

Until next time. 

What I Learned at AgileIndy 2023

As a business professional, it helps to spend time with others who you do not work with. It helps provide fresh perspectives and moral support when times are tough. It is also good to hear from others that they share similar struggles in their business situations. It is like cleaning the emotional pallet from the sour aftertaste of daily dysfunction. I took the opportunity to attend the AgileIndy 2023 conference to perform that cleanse. I was a presenter, and I learned a few things. Today, I wanted to share my trip report with everyone. 

I traveled to Indianapolis to present a talk on servant leadership and how to use language to build credibility with team members, stakeholders, and leaders. I had a packed room, and the presentation went well. I look forward to making many connections and seeing if my tips are helpful to people in the field. This journey's best part is meeting old friends and making new ones. The agile community is one big tribe of like-minded people who bicker like family but often unite to make work more sustainable. 

Along with giving a presentation, I got to sit in on some great presentations and discussions about how to make businesses more successful with agile techniques. If there were any big themes at this conference, they were twofold. The first theme was the role of managers in an organization going through an agile change. Teams that self-organize and deliver in rapid iterations create unique challenges for managers who now have to do something else beyond traditional management. The other theme is establishing trust in organizations. I want to discuss each of those themes. 

For many of us in the agile community, implementing agile techniques works well at the team level, and executives occasionally achieve buy-in. Most managers threaten agile methods because they fear the organizational changes that agile demands. Thus, self-organization, empowerment, and transparency often make managers feel redundant and threatened. Many change management efforts fail because middle management strangles it if considered a threat. Fortunately, Diana Williams and Liz Rettig had a great conversation about this forgotten cohort of people who can make or break your agile adoption. I know plenty of folks at Project Brilliant, and I was not disappointed by the advice and suggestions they provided. I am going to devote a future blog post to their advice. 

Mike Cottmeyer from Leading Agile gave the keynote speech about the enormous challenge facing the agile community in 2023: building trust between business leaders and agile teams. We in the agile community demand empowerment for groups doing the work. Still, empowerment does not happen if that team does not create working solutions for the business to sell. It means that for a team to be empowered, the company must trust the team to do the work. Cottmeyer points out there are steps to business agility, and approaches like SAFe and Scrum at scale are about helping the business manage technical debt and dependencies. Dependencies are agile killers in organizations, so it is up to everyone to find ways to mitigate them. The truth will always win between reality and purity, so Agile professionals need to be reality-based. 

I had some great conversations in the green room at the conference. Coaches love to talk shop, and sharing experiences with others is always instructive because our experiences overlap. Finally, I met Dimple Shah and attended her presentation, which covered diversity in organizations and how the drive for diversity is often the same as the desire for organizations to become more agile. In a relaxing manner, she reviewed that people need to both talk the talk of change and walk the walk. By following this simple approach, people create credibility in the organization.

I am fortunate to spend time around so many great people. It is also a blessing to share my knowledge and experience with others and help them. Best of all, I learned a few new things to return to my practice. I hope to present to AgileIndy next year, and I look forward to visiting plenty of old friends and making new ones. 

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. 

Cultural Forces in Your Business Hurting Agility

One of the principal selling points of Agile is the ability to deliver solutions quickly to the market. One of its central guides is Jeff Sutherland's seminal book "The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time." The business community embraces speed but forgets some of the other essential features of Agile, which are transparency, empiricism, continuous learning, and value delivery. Today, I want to look into why this is happening. 

My business career spans over twenty years, and I am amazed at how global corporations resemble feudal societies and how unwilling they are to change. Executives lord over divisions with minimal knowledge of the work necessary to generate profit insulated from understanding and empathy by wealth. The boyars and professionals who plan, budget and design are in the middle. Philosopher Ernest Gellner called these people doctrinal specialists or 'clerisy.' Finally, an organization has unwashed masses of people making products and providing services. It is hieriarchial and fedual. This type of culture is excellent at perpetuating itself but creates a situation where people wallow in inertia, and innovation suffers in the long run. The condition explains why Agile became such an interesting cultural movement in business. People proposed breaking through the inertia and developing new product delivery methods. 

Sadly, we encounter a few problems as we embark on this journey. First, executives lack collaboration incentives, creating political competition in large organizations. For example, a director of network services receives a bonus if the computer network is up for 99.9% of work hours. A sales division gets a bonus if they can increase sales. These incentive structures put the two groups in conflict. New products and sales methods mean website changes and alterations to the company computer network, which creates a risk of lowering the network uptime. In this scenario, it is not in the interest of the director of network services to help the sales division get new products to market. An executive with knowledge and authority needs to step in to break the impasse, but those individuals are hard to find in the corporate world. Thus, professionals check off boxes to match the bonus structure they operate under. 

The next big problem for agility in the business world is existential. The power imbalances between the people doing the work versus those making the decisions and paying the bills create a risk-averse workforce. Take this workforce and place them in sterile cubical farms while forcing them to attend conference calls with other offices. It establishes soul-crushing alienation among the people who should be leading change. 

Finally, the clerisy of business professionals and managers feel threatened—agile delegates decision-making and authority down to teams, shifting the responsibility toward more coaching roles. It isn't enjoyable for people used to giving orders and expecting compliance. It also does not help that command and control styles of management are rewarded via perverse incentives, with promotions often awarded to leaders who perpetuate those practices. Peer pressure and groupthink are potent social forces in organizations. 

The combination of poorly constructed incentives, corporate power imbalances, and the clerisy of middle management make delivering value increasingly difficult. Agile is not dead, but it struggles against these dysfunctional cultural forces in organizations. The coach and consultant in each of us must recognize these challenges and treat them like modern constraints on productivity. It is easier said than done, but if we can improve business cultures, we will enhance profitability, and profitable companies benefit workers, which is a worthy trade-off. 

Until next time.

It is Always About Resilence

Much of my misspent youth was part of the cultural landscape of the late 1970s and 1980s. Before you get too nostalgic, it was a strange time to grow up because parenting was much more permissive, and the technology we take for granted today was non-existent. One of my favorite memories of that time was when I would visit with a relative, and they would allow me to stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live. Before I fell asleep on the couch for a few magical minutes, I witnessed John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray create comedic gold. Still, my favorite cast member was Gilda Raner, who played the no-nonsense New York Purdo Rican pundant Rosanne Rosannadanna. The character colored my view of New Yorkers for years. During the character's appearance on Saturday Night Live, she often repeated, "It's always something," pointing out that our expectations of the world are always challenging or corrupted. As scrum masters or coaches, we always deal with "something" and should discuss that. 

The current business world is in a weird place. Inflation is starting to fall, profits are substantial, and business leaders are panicking about a possible recession. The strain begins to show as CEOs remove their masks and show off their frustrations to employees. The layoffs in technology and the desire to flatten organizations must be helping. Fear and anxiety are the leading emotions of the contemporary knowledge worker. 

I suspect that the reason why this is happening is that business leaders are more concerned with efficiency rather than resilience. When earning my Master's in Management, I learned many tricks to improve the company's bottom line. I became good at learning how to amortize software licenses and change the brand of toilet paper a company uses to save thousands of dollars over a year. It generated less revenue or helped our customers but made accountants happy. These people get promoted in organizations because they are good with accounting shell games rather than delivering value to customers. 

Since the 1970s, business people have increasingly made the office and factories more efficient, but to accomplish this goal, they have squeezed employees and customers to the breaking point. These systems are so efficient that a hiccup in supply chains or a thunderstorm over Denver can throw an entire business into spasms. 

Engineers and scientists understand that there are limits in nature. A liter of water is not going to fit into a smaller container. Business people raised on "The Power of Positive Thinking" believe otherwise. If you want it badly enough, that liter of water will fit into the smaller bottle and, if appropriately marketed, can sell for more margin. As you can see, this kind of magical thinking is ludicrous, but it permeates business environments. Thus, plenty of skilled people are attempting to make the hallucinations of others a reality. 

When that happens, I keep thinking about Gilda and her phrase, "It's Always Something." We live in a natural world that has limitations. A person can only work so many hours or be productive before they collapse into exhaustion. You cannot manipulate people like a cell in a spreadsheet; they have lives, families, and emotions. It is why I always correct business leadership when they refer to the people doing the work as resources. 

Because people are NOT resources and have limits, making systems super efficient creates the problem of the business needing help to handle surges in business or changes in the marketplace. Edward Demming points out it was a recipe for corporate extinction. Thus, it is up to people like scrum masters and agile coaches to point out that a business should be efficient and resilient to changing market conditions. It will always be something in the industry, but it will be less awful with some resilience.

Until next time. 

It Is Never a Ten Minute Fix

Being a technology professional is filled with ups and downs. It is a well-paid profession, but it comes with plenty of trade-offs. I can cite many examples. I remember getting a tech-support call when celebrating my anniversary dinner with my ex-spouse. One time, I was referred to as the "nerd boy" in the office by the Vice President of marketing. My company fired me a week before Christmas because I made a mistake after working sixteen hours the night before to fix a problem with the credit card billing system. The compensation is excellent, but the job security is harsh, considering that business people think what we do is easy. It explains why software professionals are cranky because each change could introduce a catastrophic failure that can cost people their careers. To save a few hair follicles for business and technology professionals, I am talking about why a quick change is anything but fast. 

I cannot speak for others, but my training in agile has taught me that I should be responsive to change as a technology professional. Plans and the business world transform with frighting regularity, so it makes sense that an intelligent business professional can pivot from their current situation to a different one. What drives technology professionals crazy are what we call ego-ware requests. An ego-ware request is a change made to a system that delivers questionable value but satisfies the ego of the person making the request. For example, a UX designer demanded a text box on a mobile web page move a tenth of a pixel because it created more harmony on the page. Such a minor change took three developers at a rate of $75 an hour three weeks to figure out, which cost the business $18,000. The money did not have any impact on the revenue of the firm. It only achieved one thing: the designer's ego gratification. The now infamous Superbowl meltdown of Elon Musk is also a classic example of ego-ware taken to the extreme. 

Besides the ego-ware request, you often get a "quick change" from colleagues who mean well but do not understand the ramifications of that request on the overall systems. I remember someone asking me to add a field to an HTML web form and make it optional so the call center could use it for notes. The call center supervisor said, "Come on, Ed, it should only take ten minutes." I firmly believe that statement is a sign pointing toward hell. 

Long story short, I made the change. I did some testing and then deployed it to UAT. I was a hero in the afternoon. Three weeks later, I was fired because the change created production problems, preventing customers from making payments. The extra field broke the payment API, and customers were ticked off. The development manager looks at source control and the last production push with my name on it. My boss told me to pack my desk and go home. Stories like this are familiar in the technology business, and it is why developers do not like to make arbitrary changes. 

What looks like a ten-minute fix to the business is a series of events requiring time and attention to detail. The actual code change will take ten minutes. Updating all the unit tests for the application might take four hours. Quality assurance can finish testing in a day if they are not busy. After testing, it will be deployed to a UAT environment so the business can test deployment to production. If anything goes wrong, the entire process starts over again. A ten-minute fix is a whole week's worth of work. It is another reason software engineers get cranky because the change may not be significant, but the implications on the system are. 

To recap, software engineers, are grumpy about system changes because it could first put their careers at risk if something goes wrong. Murphy's Law impacts technology more than any other part of the business, so the risk is higher than most professionals will accept. Second, to avoid those risks, the organization creates test-driven development, quality assurance people, and stage gates to software release. The deliberate friction between the idea and the actual costs, time, money, and the frayed nerves of the IT staff means that if you change a system, you better have a damn good reason. 

Software is one of the few human professions that can not be automated. So the next time you ask a technology person to make a minor change and they tell you to jump into the lake, the software engineer is not being insubordinate; they are responding rationally to something which might threaten their career. It takes real people time to make each technology dream a reality. 

Until next time. 

Mental Heath is a Management Responsibility.

Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor, says in her book that management requires emotional labor. It is just part of the job. When you work as an agile coach, scrum master, or product owner, you spend plenty of time guiding others to accomplish complex goals. It requires listening and helping people navigate emotions and thorny problems. I wish it were easy, but it involves self-knowledge and awareness that I have only developed over the last ten years. Today, we are facing a crisis in the workplace. Mental health issues are becoming more visible in the workplace, and it is up to us as leaders to mitigate the damage. 

Chicago radio station WBBM reported that the newest cohort of workers, Gen Z, is facing problems in the workforce. According to the Mary Cristie Institute, more than half of young professionals require emotional or mental health support. Furthermore, a whopping 53% experience burnout once a week. Beginning your professional career is always stressful, but these survey results are inexcusable. It also reminds me of my struggles in the job market thirty years ago. Entry-level work is not glamorous and often resembles ugly hazing. The low pay and the uncertain career advancement in this portion of the job sector are making matters worse. You grind at a job in the hopes of financial security and satisfaction, and these things are elusive in the entry-level slice of the economy. 

A newly minted college graduate has something that most organization employees lack – enthusiasm. Within a year or two, we crush that enthusiasm out of those people because we partner these employees with poor managers who make a bad situation worse. Forbes magazine and the Harvard Business Review point out that 70% of employees want managers to support staff's mental health better. 

First, employees want to feel like they are part of a team and making a difference in the organization. Next, they want to spend time with their families and friends. Work and business are commercial enterprises, not families, because I have never met a professional laid off from their family. Work allows us to support our families, and we would like to enjoy time with them. So for the staff's mental health, let them take time off to be with the people they love. Please do not make them choose between a client presentation or attending a music recital. Finally, workloads need to be better managed so that people do not feel like the weight of work is crushing them. Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda said, "Happy cows make more milk." Ensuring the staff is respected and mentally healthy will do wonders for the bottom line. 

I can already see a few of my colleagues cynically criticizing mental health in the office. They might argue that new employees lack the mental toughness of previous generations. That argument is hogwash. If anything, this latest generation of employees is more robust. Generation Z has more pressure on them than previous generations, including wages that cannot pay for basic living expenses, large amounts of student debt, and a business environment that treats them like red solo cubs. Reducing the tensions among these people will create benefits that will be unexpected. 

Mental health feels like a touch-feely issue that does not impact the bottom line. Mental heal has everything to do with the bottom line because if your staff is sick or burnt out, your customers will know it. Do not be the company people leave because you don't care for the people who support customers. As a manager, we need to do emotional labor to help our employees succeed, and paying attention to mental health is just another part of the job. 

Until next time. 

When the Going Gets Weird

 One of my favorite literary lines comes from gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. He observed, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" The last three years qualify as weird. COVID-19, insurrections, and an economy behaving like a character from the television series Fleebag qualify as strange from my perspective. As a scrum master and agile coach, how do you deal with all the weird things in the economy and business world? Today, we are going to discuss it. 

CNBC points out COVID-19 created a 'legacy of weirdness' in the economy. The understatement is breathtaking. We have survived a global pandemic and, in the aftermath, had to grapple with fragile supply chains, market concentration, and labor shortages, which generated inflation. The fight to curb inflation forced central banks to raise interest rates, and the increasing rates kicked off a wave of layoffs at large technology firms. It is a strange chain of causes and effects that have impacted everyone in technology. 

I have pointed out that many tech layoffs were executives' fault for not managing their workforce correctly. Those same executives made bad bets which have not paid off, so the technology marketplace is shedding jobs while remaining immensely profitable. The survivors of this process have a hard choice: how do they carry on in a labor environment they do not recognize? 

I keep returning to the agile manifesto for inspiration—first, ship working solutions for your business and customers. Business leaders are looking for revenue and efforts to drive value to customers. Often, we let the perfect get in the way of good enough solutions for our customers. It is up to us to be the person or team which provides that value. Today, more than ever, generating revenue will set you aside from other technical professionals. 

Next, collaborate with your customers. In weird times, clients and customers are looking for reassurance. Meeting customers and getting to know them and their problems will give you a competitive advantage over other organizations. Building trust with clients will eventually lead to more work and an increase in billing. Creating that trust means delivering solutions and accommodating changes with a smile instead of a new contract with more billable hours. It seems contrary to how we see the business world, but sharing risk between the client and your business means that both of you have a vested interest in being successful. I have worked in plenty of situations where that only sometimes happened. 

It is a weird economy; fortunately, odd people like me turned pro and attempted to make the best of a strange situation. There is no way to make yourself completely immune from layoffs. Still, by collaborating with customers and shipping working solutions, you immunize yourself from the worst attentions of corporate hacks who like to destroy careers. You can do it too. 

Until next time. 

Being Woke is Good Business

Nothing entirely focuses on the mind, like unemployment. The fear of losing your job and the threat to the security of your family forces people to pay attention. The current four years have tied people into existential knots. COVID-19, insurrection against a free and fair election, the return of inflation, and business leaders forcing people back into office are enough to rub a person's nerves into a raw nub. I feel it and see similar behaviors in many professionals around me. If that is not enough to worry about, Forbes magazine published an article earlier this month, and I feel compelled to talk about it. 

The term "woke" has become a loaded term in public discourse. For many, it represents a social movement to be respectful to others and the many variations we encounter. To those with a more right-wing perspective, it is a threat to the values of western civilization. Suppose you genuinely want to understand the history and controversy around the debate. In that case, I strongly recommend Lewis Walter and his video about the subject on his YouTube channel "Then and Now."I look at the controversy, and I scratch my head in puzzlement. As Elvis Costello sang over forty years ago, "What so wrong about peace, love, and understanding."

Forbes magazine pointed out that middle managers at corporations are embracing woke culture to advance in their careers and that there needs to be more study on the subject. There should be more research on the subject, but we should be okay with this trend. 

According to Florida General Counsel Ryan Newman, the meaning of woke is "…the  belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." This quotation seems like an accurate definition, so middle managers are trying to combat injustice in the office one cubical at a time. You will know why if you have spent time in the professional world. The diversity of the workforce is changing, and it is becoming a lighter share of brown. More people from Latin America, the Indian Subcontinent, Korea, China, and the Middle East are joining the workforce. Not only are they recent immigrants but first-generation college graduates who overcame tremendous obstacles to become professionals. I feel a deep kinship with them because while I am a white cisgender straight guy, I was also a first-generation college graduate who became a professional person. I have made it my mission to help others avoid the mistakes I have made in my career. 

This kind of diversity is a net benefit for the business. The economy is global, so we need to understand the needs of various people. Can food be sold in Muslim countries because it respects halal dietary restrictions? Green is associated with infidelity and black with darkness in ethnic Chinese communities, so it might be a good idea not to market those car colors in those countries. Finally, software engineers often ignore women because they make up a significant minority. In each of these scenarios having people from a different backgrounds would improve the chance of customer success. It is just smart money to have a diverse workforce. 

Companies realized that sexual harassment could be a huge financial and public relations risk after the confirmation hearing of Justice Clarance Thomas. These early efforts also included training on racial, sexual, religious, and generational categories. Over the last thirty years, this movement has been part of being a working professional. Naturally, managers are learning that treating people with dignity and respect is becoming a growing trend. 

A more diverse workforce means better delivery of customer value. Being able to lead this kind of workforce is not an optional skill, so we should embrace this trend. I have met plenty of mediocre people in business. Along the way, I have also encountered some toxic and intolerant people. Making the office more "woke" will help remove these people from the work environment. If we want a more sustainable, sane, and satisfying work environment, this is a trend we can all get behind. 

Until next time. 

Some Thoughts About the Great Flattening

Returning to work is a powerful emotional experience. My friends and colleagues were glad to see me, and a pile of work awaited me upon my return. The time away gave me a deep feeling of gratitude. Of course, I had to kick some rust off, but it did not take long to gain my bearings and return to the usual flow of work. My body had other plans, and I had to rest as the healing process continued. It was a strange week in business news. The late reports about technology layoffs pointed out that discharges disproportionally targeted managers at companies. News also surfaced that Meta was attempting to “flatten” its organization. I have spoken about management and leadership on this blog, and I need to share more. 

I always disliked the term manager. In my experience, leadership at any level is more significant than official management titles. It implies an act of authority over others which is short of leadership and greater than building customer value. Serving in a management role also includes plenty of responsibility with none of the corresponding authority. It creates awful paradoxes where people are being pushed and pulled in two different directions, first by executives above and then by the people they serve below. It explains why recent surveys of middle managers show that 43% suffer from burnout. 

It also does not help that many executive suites have the characteristics of the VIP room at an exclusive nightclub. Many executives come from similar MBA programs and have yet to spend time working with customers or employees. When this happens, tunnel vision takes over, prioritizing what the executive team wants versus what the customers might be demanding. It is all fun and games when interest rates are low and business is good, but increasing interest rates and venture capitalists looking for the next big thing trigger over-reactions. The recent tech layoff is an example of these over-reactions. 

So with executive leadership looking out for themselves during difficult economic times, middle managers and front-line employees bear the burden. Naturally, those left behind in the aftermath of layoffs must take on the duties of those who are gone. It is a significant problem in the technology industry because work outstrips the number of competent people to complete that work. It explains why Meta is attempting to flatten by forcing its managers to code with their teams. 

To an executive, this seems logical, but it is fraught with peril. First, programming is a creative skill like music or dance. It is rare for a choreographer or conductor to return to the performing company because they often need help to physically perform the skills. Next, asking technology managers to code and perform their typical management duties means they must improve their skills. Requiring a manager to code means less time for meetings, performance appraisals, and transmitting messages from executive leadership. Executives might say those functions are unimportant but will be when raises and vacations are late for line employees. Finally, managers are connective tissue within the organization because much of the work is too specialized for executive leadership. Someone needs to make sure the network engineers keep the network running. A good accountant must keep accounts payable up to date. Human resources people understand the law and can prevent both strikes and lawsuits. Without this specialized knowledge, most modern businesses would collapse like a house of cards. 

I lived through two downturns in my career. It is not pretty. However, the executives who try to flatten organizations often discover that they need the managers and specialists they depend on to run the organization. You should expect sanity to return to corporate offices in twenty-four to thirty-six months. Let's all tough it out in the meantime.

Until next time.