Turning the Ship Around Requires Trust

Software development is a grown-up activity. It requires intelligence, focus, and the ability to overcome massive frustration. Despite the hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence, only humans can write scalable software that delivers real-world value. It is why developers, in their idle moments, often lapse into childhood playfulness. The focus and mental energy it takes to write software requires a release, manifested in Nerf gun fights or an activity that business people might consider childish. It creates the illusion that knowledge workers are overgrown children. In truth, knowledge workers are the most adult people in the organization, and it is time for business leaders to treat the professionals who generate profit like adults. 

We can see this behavior within the business community as CEOs demand that workers return to the office. Most of the requests are tone-deaf and focused more on power than the benefit to the business. I have written about this tug-of-war between the workers who produce the wealth and those who oversee them. I will side with the workers in this case because the COVID-19 pandemic proved that remote work is not only possible but profitable. 

Old habits die hard in the business world, and micro-management of employees is the hardest to extinguish. For decades, businesses trained managers to ensure people followed policies and procedures. To ensure employees were productive throughout the day, managers scrutinized them to ensure they weren't wasting company time in a factory or traditional office. Instead of fostering teamwork or innovation, middle managers enforced compliance. It worked briefly but was deficient as the global economy became more competitive. Customers demanded value and innovation, so mindlessly stamping out parts or filling out forms would no longer work. As software and technology began to eat the world, it was evident that some other approach was necessary.

My mission throughout my career has been to ensure that work delivers value to customers and employees. This week Fortune magazine pointed out that old-fashioned management styles hurt productivity and treat workers like children. My experience in the business world confirms this theory. The new approach was the birth of lean manufacturing, Agile, Kanban, and digital transformation. 

Treating employees like children boils down to a lack of trust. Managers do not trust the people doing the work correctly, and employees often feel they cannot trust their leadership to treat them respectfully. It is in this situation of mutual distrust where many of us work. We can do better. 

I am a big fan of L. David Marquet's book "Turn the Ship Around." In the book, he talks about his experience as a United States nuclear submarine captain. When he joined the USS Santa Fe was the place where sailors had their careers go to die. Morale was low, the Navy rated the submarine at the bottom of the fleet, and senior enlisted people were retiring or quitting at an alarming rate. Over a year, Marquet helped transform the crew from people afraid to make mistakes to leaders who chased excellence. It wasn't an easy journey, and it had plenty of false starts, but the Santa Fe began practicing something called "intention-based leadership," and I am a convert. 

With the help of senior enlisted people and buy-in from the crew, Marquet transformed a low-performing submarine into an example of the Pacific fleet by treating its sailors with respect and providing them with a sense of pride and responsibility for their work. Since a nuclear submarine costs an average of two billion dollars and has the firepower to extinguish an entire civilization, it is an impressive accomplishment. 

Changing a global company is a difficult task, but if Marquet can do it on a nuclear submarine, then as  Agile coaches or scrum masters, we can lead change in our organizations. The first step is changing the behavior of managers who would instead treat the people doing the work like children instead of the grown professionals they are.

It is a small ask, but the road to psychological safety and intentional leadership begins with one step. 

Until next time. 

Agile is all about Trust

Since the end of World War Two, increasingly complicated systems have developed to make our lives easier.  Complexity creates many of the biggest challenges we face in the business community.  It creates a cycle of expectations known as the luxury trap when one generation's luxuries become the next generation's essentials.    The rapid technological change makes this trap more dangerous as industries struggle to remain competitive and build increasingly more customer-focused products.  It is challenging to stay on top of these demands.  We need a way to approach rapid change with a healthier perspective.  The good news is that we can create that healthy environment if we develop trust as leaders. 

Yuval Noah Harari points out that a modern economy requires two things for growth.  The first is easy access to credit, and the second is trust that things will improve over time.  The credit will keep flowing while there is confidence in the future.  Trust maintains this cycle.  If you cannot trust others to pay back loans or do good work, then you will not part with your hard-earned money.  When trust breaks down, then economies seize up.  It happened during the 2008 sub-prime loan crisis because the banks were freighted to loan money.  

Simon Sinek has a great video discussing the concept of trust in greater detail.  He talks about how the elite special forces unit SEAL Team Six chooses its members.  To a sailor, the SEAL team member prefers team members they trust over those with an outstanding combat record.  The reason is apparent to me.  When things go wrong, and they go horribly during combat, they want to know that the other members of the team will back them up.  It is a type of trust earned over the years and is why those of us outside the SEAL community see these warriors as clannish and insular.  

In business and life, this is important because people want to work with people they trust, and it is up to business leaders to foster this among their team and others.  You can be the top salesperson in an organization, and if you do not have the trust of others, your sales will eventually evaporate. 

So how do you build trust?  It is not a simple answer because you earn the trust of others over time instead of making significant splashy actions.  It is countless small behaviors that build trust.  It is starting meetings on time.  It is being honest when it is inconvenient and respecting people.  Leaders build trust by doing what they say and saying what they do.  Embracing the grind of the team and acting in good faith with your interactions with others.  Earning trust is the hardest thing a person will do in a leadership role.  

The agile manifesto states that we should value "Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools." This value is central to developing trust— your team and colleagues want to count on you.  In turn, the group wants someone to be their advocate and protect the team from the impersonal forces outside.  It is a problematic task, but if done correctly will pay huge dividends.  We do not talk about trust and leadership often enough, but a business will become more agile if we do it. 

Until next time. 

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. 

Avoid Heroism and Practice Radical Interdependence.

Anyone who tells you leadership is easy is either a liar or a fool.  Each day leadership is tested by interpersonal disputes, market demands, and gaps in knowledge.  People count on leaders to have emotional balance when everything is going wrong.  It is facing difficult questions when you do not know the answers.  You must be firm one moment and understanding the next.  When things go well, you give credit to others, and during failure, you take responsibility.  Leadership is one of the most challenging skills to cultivate.  It is a duty and calling rather than a heroic struggle.  I want to discuss it.  

Leadership is more than a stance.

We often train a leader at an early age.  Young people become captains of sports teams or members of the student government.  Junior ROTC programs do an excellent job of teaching the skills of leadership and followership.  The early training in leadership is beneficial, but over the last thirty years, I have discovered that it is incomplete.  For the last two hundred years, we have expected leaders to have answers to every challenge and be able to motivate others.  A leader formulated a plan, and the followers executed the project.  Today, in a global and creative economy, this is no longer true. 

A contemporary leader must depend on others with specialized knowledge.  A deep understanding of the law, finance, computer software, logistics, and marketing is impossible for one person to gather in a lifetime.  Today, a plan requires multiple people to formulate and execute.  The contemporary world is too complicated and chaotic to come up with natural solutions.  

It is why I discovered a TED talk from South African food executive Lorna Davis.  She talked about how she bought into the myth of heroic leadership.  She also found heroic leadership did not effect change within her organization.  People applauded her works and went about doing the same things they did before she joined the organization. Heroic leadership failed.  She goes on to mention that a new model of leadership needs to develop, and she called it “radical interdependence.”  A leader should have a goal, and it is up to the team on how to achieve that goal.  It requires listening, empathy, and giving others a chance to excel.  It is anything but heroic.  

I did not realize I was using this approach when I confessed during a meeting I was stumped.  I did not know how to address a quality problem, and I asked, “Anyone have any idea how we are going to fix this?”  Within a day, I had answers, and the leaders at the off-shore office were implementing them without checking for permission.  The off-shore team knew if I disapproved, I would let them know, so they decided to take the initiative.  I am confident our quality issues will clear up.  

Radical interdependence requires trust and allowing others to come up with solutions.  It involves a surrender of control, which many successful people find uncomfortable. It relies on asking questions instead of giving orders.  It is physically and mentally exhausting because you are stretching your emotional intelligence and practical knowledge.  You are learning and growing with the people you are leading.

Leadership is the most challenging skill a person can acquire, and it is impossible to master.  It is clear why the military calls command a burden.  Each day you are tested, and failure can mean the loss of millions of dollars or even lives.  I think Lorna Davis has some useful guidance about leadership.  I am going to ignore the liars and fools.  

Until next time. 

Build Trust and the Rest Will Come.

Easy to say hard to earn. 

Coaching others and working with clients give me plenty of challenges.  It is also one of the most satisfying things I do.  The most important lesson I have learned during this time is the importance of openness and trust.  I want to discuss why these two values are necessary for a successful agile implementation. 

According to the agile manifesto, we should value “Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation.”  It is easy in business to get caught up in contracts and legal mumbo jumbo.  Often something which requires four hours of work and a conference bridge requires weeks of negotiation and a signed piece of paper explaining who is going to pay for the four hours of work.  It is annoying for the people doing the job, but from the perspective of the people paying the bills, it is a necessary process.  The reason for this necessity is a lack of trust.

The absence of trust is a toxic condition in most business environments.  It happens because people make promises in business, which they cannot keep.  It also occurs when people do not pay for the services they have received.  Since technology and software are labor-intensive, everyone is paying attention to the money.  It creates conditions that undermine trust. 

Kim Scott, in her book, “Radical Candor,” talks about successful leaders being able to care personally and communicate honestly.  It seems like a common-sense approach, but it is surprising how many people are will to hide the truth to win favor from others.  Scott refers to this as manipulative insincerity because you are not telling the truth to manipulate the emotions and perceptions of a client.  Once a client discovers manipulation, they will rarely show trust. 

It is why the first job of a scrum master or agile coach is to build trust.  It means turning your camera on so people can see your face during all video conferences because others need to know that you are paying attention and involved in their problems.  You need to over-communicate with clients telling them all of the relevant news, both good and bad, which affect their project.  It is painful at first, but constant communication and telling the truth over time builds trust.  Eventually, instead of a client-vendor relationship, you will have a partnership where both of you are working together to reach a common goal. 

Openness and trust are mandatory for any business relationship.  You earn trust from others by being honest and communicating often.  It is why I want to help spread agile and create environments of trust. 

Until next time.