Listen and you will become a servant leader.

Listen Up!

The agile reformation is about making work more sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  I have spent a good majority of my time as a scrum master and coach in my career.  I have learned plenty of things about myself and others.  My educational background is in speech communication and journalism.  I even enjoyed performing in Community Theater.  It made me the kind of person who was comfortable in a room speaking to others.  Unfortunately, the training did not give me the most important skill necessary for servant leadership; listening.  Without the ability to listen to others, you are an empty suit reciting words.

Often, we are distracted when we are attempting to listen to others.  Phones, tablets, and television screens fight for our attention.  It is up to each of us in a leadership role to eliminate these distractions, turn off the devices, and give someone our full attention.  It is not easy.  Leaders are afraid of missing a call from the boss or not receiving an important e-mail.  Great leaders set those fears aside because they are aware the people speaking to them are giving up their time and experience to talk to them.  The exchange of information is always helpful. 

People's communication with you is sharing crucial information about what is happening in the organization.  Individuals are often closer to the problems you cannot see so they have insight into how to fix them or they need feedback before implementing those improvements.  Another reason people speak to you is they want to share their hopes, dreams, and aspirations.  People, especially those in large organizations, want someone to listen. 

The book Co-Active Coaching discusses three levels of listening.  The first level is casual listening we do each day in our social circles.  It acts as a way to get through the day quickly but it is not listening.  The more advanced levels of listening go beyond the superficial and focus on the content of what was said. More profound listening focuses on the subtext of what people are saying.  The more advanced forms of listening allow you to understand body language and what people are NOT saying.  All of this information comes together to create an accurate picture of what the person is thinking, feeling, and meaning. 

It is the listening where you are attempting to understand and empathize with the person speaking where you can find value in the most challenging situations.  If you listen in this fashion without judgment, you will be able to understand what people need in order to succeed rationally.  You will also be in a position to provide it.

Listening is a principle component of servant leadership.  It establishes trust and builds credibility with the people you serve.  The skill allows you to better problem solve.  We do not talk about listening as much as we should be as the economy continues to shift toward service and creativity. I feel that it is changing.  I have been working in technology and agile for over twenty years.  Only recently I have learned how to listen to the people around me.  I wish I had learned that skill sooner. 

Until next time. 

Be a Kind Scrum Master

The lonely life of a great scrum master.

It is hard to talk about being an agile coach or scrum master.  It is both an art and science.  The science understands computer programming and technical systems.  The art is listening to others and coaching them to address their challenges.  The profession is easy to learn, and it is a hard one to master.   Many of the aspects of being a good coach or scrum master appear to be touchy-feely skills and that is because the difference between a good and great scrum master and coach are those skills.

When I became a scrum master, I thought I understood the skills, and I would become a raging success.  My first few sprints squashed those delusions.  Teams have conflict, they confront deadline pressure, and individuals inside the group have messy emotional lives.  It is up to a scrum master to deal with all of these issues and more.  In the words of Kim Scott, “It is management and it is your job.”

It is a job that requires listening and empathy.  It means not only talking about agile but living the values of agile daily.  It is about courageousness when you are tired or scared.  It is about being focused when you are in your worst moments.  You respect others and their different perspectives when you want to tell them to take a flying leap — openness to the secrets and vulnerability of others and to try out new ideas.  Finally, a good coach or scrum master must show commitment to the shipping product and the people doing the work.  The values are hard to do which makes them more necessary to the performance of each team.

The business world has plenty of damaged, neurotic, and mean people.  These individuals were not born that way; the dysfunctional cultures of many businesses created them. Companies promote the mean because they appear to get work done.  Years of unrealistic deadline pressure, lean budgets, and lack of advancement opportunities created the neurotic.  For the agile community, this is what we face.

To counter the sickness which resides in the corporate office, the agile coach or scrum master walks a lonely road.  It is choosing to be kind over being snarky.  When they see exploitation, a coach needs to point it out.  Finally, it is doing the right thing when other people are not watching.  It was not easy which is why so few people are good at it.

If you are looking for an opportunity to create “healthy ownership” in an organization, a scrum master or agile coach needs to practice the values of scrum, they need to listen, to show empathy, practice kindness and do the right thing.  I continue to walk this path and I hope you join me.

Until next time.

Grateful for the Agile Coaching Summit in Chicago

Left to Right: Ben, Me, and Mara.

A big challenge for any scrum master or coach is the feeling that you are alone in the organization you are leading change.  Cultural inertia, fixed mindsets, and the pressure to deliver have a way of draining a person of enthusiasm and devotion to the agile reformation.  Professionals like us need an opportunity to recharge our batteries and spend time among like-minded individuals.  The Agile Coaching Summit at the Guaranteed Rate headquarters in Chicago was one of those opportunities.

If you are an agile professional, there are plenty of opportunities to interact with others.  Social media features countless user groups for agile professionals.  Two significant conferences begin and end the summer, offering learning credits and a chance to rub shoulders with others.  The Agile Coaching summit in Chicago is different.  The Agile Coaching summit in Chicago is different.  It is more intimate with room for about 150 people.  Skill levels from new scrum masters to hardened coaches leading enterprise change at Fortune 500 companies are present.  What unites all of us is a desire to make a difference at our organizations and our devotion to agile.  It is a great mix, and it is why I attended the inaugural meeting and why I went this year. 

In a change of pace, we had not one but five keynote speakers.  Some were coaching language, others spoke about positivity, another was an improvisation coach talking about coaching conversations; finally, we learned about generational differences in the workplace.  It was upbeat, positive, and informative.  All these speakers spoke about the skills necessary to be successful leaders, listeners, and coaches.  Not a single one was an agile specialist.  The focus on these areas creates an impression that agile coaching is more about coaching others for success than agile.  It was a necessary pallet cleanser for a great conference. 

Saturday opened with coffee and breakfast and quickly moved into in-depth learning sessions.  I was busy learning about a wiki book imitative while others were discussing “agile fakes.”  Later sessions included conversations about how executives undercut agile, and it is always good to learn how to perform Kata experiments to change behavior.  The best part of this gathering is to see old friends and to meet new ones.  People swap war stories about creating organizational change.  We catch up on each other’s children, careers and personal lives.  I even spent time bantering about smart lights and how to set them up in a new house. 

Sunday is usually a laid back affair, but there were great sessions about coaching teams versus one on one coaching.  We had conversations about dealing with difficult team members and discuss product ownership.  It was a great weekend, and I strongly recommend it next year.  Many thanks to Emilio B. Perez and the folks at Guaranteed Rate for a successful summit and I look forward to ACS2000.

Until Next time.

Four Simple things

It can get lonely.

The biggest challenge as an agile professional is leading organizational change.  Often, you are a lonely voice in an ocean of indifference.  People do not like the daily routines and rituals disrupted, and agile professionals are doing it with frequency.  The resistance is a natural response to change.  Humans have a craving for stability in an uncertain business world.  The situation sets the agile professional up for isolation and loneliness.  I want to discuss the support system you need to overcome the adversity.

Being a scrum master or coach is a difficult calling.  It requires tremendous emotional labor, and you are attempting to overcome decades of resistance to change within an organization.  To be successful, you need to have a support system which will help you get through the rough patches.  Here is my formulation of that system.

An Understanding Significant Other

If you have a spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend, they need to be understanding.  You are going to have unannounced late nights being with the team fixing production bugs.  As a servant leader, you will confront difficult emotions, and it will take you time to unwind from them.  It helps to have someone in your life who loves and respects you to listen. Finally, they should be willing to work with the ebb and flow that technology professionals encounter daily.  It is like being married to a police officer or firefighter.  The job always finds a way of intruding into the relationship.

A User group or Network of fellow Agilests

Many organizations do not have a large cohort of agilests.  It is why being a coach can be so isolating. It is why you need a regular group of people to meet with discussing current trends and new techniques.  It can be an online group or frequent meetup.  The purpose is to have a peer group which can provide emotional and professional support.  Often a problem you think is intractable is something someone else has solved.  The user group acts as a repository of information, a social circle of peers, and group therapy.

Support from Senior Leadership

Change does not happen, spontaneously.  Often, it requires outside events to force change or an internal mandate to make change happen.  An agile coach without the support of senior leadership is not going to be successful.  Cultural inertia is a common obstacle to change.  Often when you ask why something is done a particular way the response is, “…because we have always done it that way.” Senior leadership can give you a mandate and authority to improve a process.  Executives provide the nudge necessary when things need to change and when people dig in their heels.  Finally, senior leadership is a source of validation which makes the hard work and sacrifices worthwhile.

Allies in the Organization

As a firm moves along the agile journey, a coach or scrum master is going to gather like-minded people who are allies.  Organizational allies are gold to a coach or scrum master.  The people joining you will spread the message you are sharing. Associates will provide emotional and technical support.  Colleagues will support you during a difficult decision and join you for lunch when times are less stressful.  Cultivation of colleagues will keep the agile transformation going long after you have left the organization.

So to avoid burn out and isolation a coach or scrum master needs; an understanding significant other, a network of fellow agilest, support from senior leadership, and allies in the organization.  Without these things, an agilest will have a lonely run with an organization.

Until next time.

A Scrum Master Demands Interpersonal Skills.

A scrum master must have a
moral compass and great interpersonal skills.

The role of a scrum master is a challenging one.  Any given day you are confronted with new challenges, and you always face the pressure to deliver software.  You are pulled from the top by the demands of business leadership.  From below, you are leading your team and helping them improve.  I have been reviewing plenty of career postings on the internet lately, and I have noticed an interesting trend.  Postings have mentioned in passing the need for interpersonal skills.  I want to argue interpersonal skills are the essential part of being a scrum master.

When you look at a job posting for a scrum master you often see references to project management systems, years of experience and relevant industry experience, usually there is a request for certifications from the various accrediting agencies involved with agile.  The final bullet point is the requirement is a request for excellent interpersonal skills.

Being a good scrum master demands interpersonal skills.  You spend time coaching and educating others about agile and scrum.  A scrum master must be able to say no to others without sounding dismissive.  It requires solid interpersonal skills to have empathy for others.  A scrum master also must speak truth to power and have the integrity to back up those words.  All of this requires interpersonal skills, and a scrum master who does not have them is in trouble.  Earning a scrum master certification is straight forward, being able to do the job requires hard work and a growth mindset.  

You cannot check off boxes and have a scrum master arrive to make your team better.  It is a process of trial and error.  A team will take two steps forward and then fail in an embarrassing fashion.  It is not a traditional career path, but it is infinitely satisfying.  The foundation is excellent interpersonal skills.

Until next time.

Why Companies Resist the "Agile Mindset"

Bad leadership creates a mindset which is not agile.

It is difficult explaining agile to others outside my profession.  The Agile Manifesto outlines four values and twelve principles which govern how people should approach work.  It is up to people like myself to make sure the manifesto and principles are not abused.  To be successful, it is not enough to have talented professionals doing the work and following a successful formula.  Those professionals need to collaborate as a team willing to take risks and innovate.  Scrum masters and agile coaches call this the “Agile Mindset.”

I have been working in the orbit of agile for nearly ten years.  It is a rewarding and challenging line of work.  Plenty of business leaders like the results agile brings to software development teams.  Research from the Standish Group has shown projects done in an agile manner are more successful and have fewer budget overruns.  Business leaders should be falling all over themselves to implement agile based on this knowledge.

In reality, agile faces serious organizational and cultural hurdles. I say this because agile places a strong emphasis on continuous improvement and corporate transparency.  For managers who are incompetent, absent, micromanaging, or power hungry agile is a threat.  Ken Scheweber says agile holds a mirror up to the organization.  Resistance to agile happens when an organization does not like what it sees and attempts to smash the mirror.

I have experienced this resistance first hand.  A manager was reduced to spasms of rage when I said he could not poach a developer for another project until a sprint ended.  A network administrator deliberately denied technical support for continuous integration and continuous builds because they did not want developers, “…touching my servers.”  Finally, I remember someone from governance say they had been doing production rollouts the same way for ten years.  It was puzzling to them why anyone would change a system which was working correctly for them.  I have seen and heard almost every alibi and excuse NOT to be agile.  Why is it happening?

The answer is the fear and uncertainty built into each corporation.  It is not enough to be profitable.  A corporation must be profitable according to the expectations of shareholders if not share prices can fall precipitously.  Years of retirement savings can vanish in an afternoon.  The focus on this shareholder value forces companies to squeeze profit out of anything.  For instance, employees are expensive, so layoffs, “right-sizing” and automation improve profits without doing the messy work of developing the product or increasing sales.  A Keurig machine where employees bring their coffee replaces a coffee pot with free coffee.  Employees are expected to do janitorial work, or empty trash cans less frequently.  Failure to maintain these profit figures or increase them leads to unemployment which is a pathway to financial ruin.

The power-hungry pursue leadership so they can inflict harm on others rather than suffer the everyday indignities of office work.  The absent hope invisibility will protect them from accountability.  The incompetent bluff their way in the organization and pin their failures on others.   The micromanager lacks trust that people can do their job, and it is a threat to their livelihood. Each of these poor leaders is anti-agile.  Poor leadership drives away good employees and slowly choke the organization.  These individuals survive because the pace of business at a large organization makes it easy for these individuals to hide in plain sight.

With lousy leadership, the only people that stick around are bad employees.  It becomes a feedback loop of awfulness.  It is why an agile coach spends plenty of time struggling against the organization, and it can be lonely.  It is sobering because you will face it often in your career.  So be prepared for resistance to the “agile mindset.”  It is not because people do not want to be successful.  Instead, the fear and uncertainty of a modern corporation discourage the mindset from happening.

Until next time.

Transform at the speed of the Team

Coaching is more than presentations.

Software development is not rocket science; it is a branch of engineering but, it is not rocket science.  I say that because rocker science depends on the laws of chemistry and physics which have not changed since the big bang.  Software development is changing daily.  Javascript libraries are constantly being updated and going in and out of fashion.  Versions of PHP change and open source code is in constant flux.  Finally, software development is dependent on the fickle demands of consumers who use it.  The level of chaos and change are staggering.  It is why software development is such a challenging profession.  As a scrum master and coach, you must understand those challenges and guide development teams through the process.

One of my favorite pieces of journalism is Bloomberg’s weighty essay entitled “What is Code?” It talks about the person in the taupe blazer and the frustrations of software developers.  It also does a great job talking about the headaches the executives who manage software developer face.  The essay captures perfectly how smart people struggle daily to get dumb machines to act intelligently.

The world of software has tremendous power, but that power belongs in a small subset of the world population.  I calculated that less than .05% of the global population of 7.4 billion could maintain software and computer networks.  Many of these individuals work in the quiet recesses of government and business keeping things running.  They go home to families and friends.  They pay bills and try to live their lives as best they can.

Because of the laws of supply and demand, computer professionals receive large compensation, but the compensation comes with a trade-off.  The trade-off is long hours on uncompensated overtime and business leaders expecting them to perform magic.  It creates conditions which lead to poor quality and burn out.  I have experienced this situation as a developer and as a manager.  As a customer, I have stumbled on numerous situations where fatigue, complexity, and unrealistic expectations have combined into a poor product.  The history of the internet contains plenty of companies which had a few pixels and an unhealthy dose of hype.

Technology professionals have lived in that world since the early 1990s, and you can excuse them for being suspicious of new approaches to doing things.  For every Amazon.com there are hundreds of companies like Pets.com.  So bringing ideas like Test Driven Development, S.O.L.I.D. programming and Agile is going to face resistance.  As a scrum master or coach, I recommend you begin slowly introducing concepts letting people test out an idea to get comfortable with them.  It also helps if you understand and recognize the pressures the team faces.  Are they distracted by requests which are urgent but not important?  Do you have a healthy cadre of product owners or is the role being performed by a manager?  Finally, are they working with a brittle technology stack? Answering those questions will determine how fast you can go during your agile transformation.

Software development is not rocket science.  It is a challenging field prone to error and burn-out.  Only by paying attention to individual challenges each software development team faces can they be coached into an agile way of doing things.

It is just like starting over

Listen, Listen, Listen.

The New Year is always busy.  The sloth of the holidays gives way to new resolutions and a means to wipe the slate clean.  I am no different.  I began a new role as a coach and scrum master at a new firm.  Today on the blog, I would like to talk about starting over and beginning a new agile practice.

A scrum master or agile coach lives an intenerate lifestyle moving from client to client.  More than many professionals they are starting over in new environments.  It means a coach needs to embrace responding to change over following a plan. It requires a certain humility and empathy for others.  Some organizations use Azure DevOps to manage the software development lifecycle, and others use tools like Jira.  Any good scrum master should be able to adapt to these different systems.  It might also be helpful to ditch a system entirely to learn the basics of agile. 

I find listening to others is helpful.  To drown out office noise, I often wore noise-canceling headphones and enjoyed a playlist of “New Wave” and “Post-Punk” music.  It made the day go faster, but it created a barrier between myself and others.  I did not understand how big a barrier until I decided to try something different and leave the headphones at home.  I began to hear QA people gossiping about bugs.  I learned about the favorite T.V shows of developers.  It was informative which people took calls via speaker phone and which ones were more discrete.  The office completed work in a particular way, and I gained insight into that process.  The insight is going to help me better coach others. 

Last year, I wrote a despairing article about my failure as a coach.  What came out of that experience was the realization before anyone can coach or guide others you need to empathize with them.  You cannot bully people into improvement.  People need to be shown the way and encourage to make better choices.  Experience and success will create a positive feedback loop of continuous improvement.  Leave the rough justice to managers who can discipline those who will not buy into the agile mindset. 

When starting over, shut-up and listen to others.  Cultivate empathic relations before learning.  Find out how your customers do things before proposing changes.  Finally, have some humility and respond to change.  Ever since Lee Iaccoa took over Chrysler in the early 1980s, professionals have worshiped the cult of leadership.  It is time to take a step back and realize that before you can lead: listen. 

Until next time.