Resilience Now!

It is easy to become cynical when you write about business. The professional world contains mediocre people who get by on connections and charm. Global capitalism's daily grind can often destroy people as it makes decisions in amoral and bureaucratic ways. A cynic or nihilist would snidely chuckle at these realities and say that nothing can be changed and we must accept this adverse situation.

I come from a pragmatic point of view. Business is also a tremendous engine for wealth and good. Under the correct management, I have seen businesses transform communities and improve countless people's living standards. One of those people was me, and I dedicated my career to making business more sustainable, satisfying, and sane. It is a mission of mine. Today, I want to continue my series on changing our perspective on business transformation. 

Since the founding of the Chicago School of Economics, a dominant theory has overcome business leadership. The approach is called the shareholder value hypothesis. It says that the only purpose of a business, especially a multinational corporation, is to generate profit and provide it to the shareholders who pay for the business. In its most simple formulation, the demands of customers, employees, the community surrounding the company, and the environment are less critical than shareholders.

It created plenty of wealth but was not shared equally, leading to the migration of manufacturing jobs to countries with lower wages. It also put power in the hands of people who knew accounting and sales. With a few changes in the accounts receivable report, or a budget cut, share prices would improve without a significant improvement in sales or customer satisfaction. It explains why Southwest Airlines neglected its primitive flight scheduling system until it failed and why a company like iHeart Media is canceling its 401k match. None of these things improved the business of helping customers; instead, they saved money to pay more significant dividends or buy back company stock to juice the share price. 

We find ourselves amid an economy in recession and still generating record profits. The COVID-19 pandemic showed the bankruptcy of this approach because as the world slowed down, thanks to people getting sick and dying, the ultra-efficient networks of supply chains sputtered, and the economic principle of supply and demand began to drive up prices. These efficient systems could not handle disruption, and soon businesses are scrambling to find the raw materials they need to keep operating. People who warned that something like this might happen were shunned in plenty of corporate boardrooms because they were right. After all, there is nothing a potential master of the universe wants to hear less than they were wrong.

Consultants see this situation, and it is evident that we need to focus on making businesses more resilient and responsive to customers. Supply chains need to be more redundant so they can handle disruptions. Information Technology systems need less technical debt and better reliability. The decision-making process must focus on what suits customers and revenue so shareholders get paid with real profits instead of Two Olive solutions. Customer delivery will help fix many self-inflicted wounds that business has created over the last thirty years.

Agile plays a role by allowing people to measure more than dollars and cents. It holds a mirror up to the business; their leaders must be wise and humble enough to act on what they see. Resilience is a verb, and the professional class must practice it. It requires discipline and a sense of hard work, but it is possible. 

Until next time. 

Radical Candor is the New Way of Leadership

My mentor at CAPCO Financial says, "Each day, everyone gets up and delivers value." This aphorism provides me with the desire to persevere in my darker moments. As a leader and agile coach, it has become apparent that most of my job is helping others navigate difficult moments. The pressure of working in the global economy is enormous, and everyone cracks under strain. Their ability to deal with daily adversity during work makes people and teams successful. Today, I want to discuss why you should learn the techniques of Kim Scott's popular book "Radical Candor." 

Scott has a simple thesis in her work. For a leader to be successful, they must care personally for the people they serve and challenge them directly to do the best they can. It is not a difficult concept to understand but hard to put into practice. Mistakes cost money, and careers rise and fall based on small details. The demanding needs of customers are exhausting, and business relationships years in the making can disappear overnight. Being a business person requires a certain amount of toughness. The challenge is to exhibit this mental toughness without inflicting it on the people who work with you.  

It is apparent when you challenge people to improve performance or adjust to changing situations. Speaking up is problematic because many people want to be well-liked by others, and telling someone they are failing risks rejection. Scott understands this, so she comes up with strategies that help leaders correct the conduct of the people they serve. In my experience, people want to know if they are doing good work or how to do a better job. To make this approach relevant, you need to care about the people working with you.  

When we talk about caring for people, it means learning about their families, what they enjoy off hours, and listening to what they have to say. I struggled with this skill, and only in retrospect did I realize that not caring personally about the people under my care creates a toxic type of management known as obnoxious aggression. It is when you challenge others but do not care about them. After some time, I had one team member in open rebellion and another dissociated from the work. I was determined to be different in my next leadership role. 

This humility is hard-earned thanks to numerous failures and false starts during my career. Today, I accept my failures and use them as valuable lessons for my next leadership role. Vulnerability is a superpower in today's business world because it helps you connect with other people and proves that when you must be firm, it comes from a place of empathy instead of malice. The world contains plenty of talented jerks, be the radically candid leader. 

Until next time. 

Saying Yes and No a New Way

The seasons are changing, and the chill in the air represents a sense of urgency organizations have to meet their financial and project goals. I am one of those people who accomplishes these goals and helps organizations succeed. Over the years, I have discovered that the most challenging part of the job is not the engineering but the interpersonal and political skills necessary to get work finished at large bureaucratic businesses. This week I want to look at a skill I learned that had become an essential tool for my success in the weird business world of business.  

I feel strongly that a Liberal Arts education is valuable in business and technology. You can teach anyone to write software and perform basic development tasks, but the real skill is communicating with people via the written and spoken word. Putting yourself in another person's shoes and spotting spurious arguments are also valuable business skills. A liberal arts education helps teach these skills, and the business world is better because of people with liberal arts backgrounds. I am biased on this front because I am a liberal arts graduate, and exposure to philosophy, theater, literature, media, and writing traditions has given me a competitive advantage in my career.    

In high school and community college, I took theater courses. Each student learns how to improvise on stage. It was a great experience, and I had plenty of laughs, but I did not realize the presentation and speaking skills I developed in a theater would stay with me for the remainder of my life. As I began meeting facilitation, I remembered a technique I learned in improvisation. Performers know to be unselfish with other performers and internalize the maxim of "…yes and." During a strange situation or when you are stuck on what to say, you look deeply into the eyes of your fellow performers and say "yes and…." At that point, the other performer, if they are paying attention, will pick up the performance and move it in a different direction.  

As a coach, in meetings with people who are reluctant to talk, I often use the "yes and…" technique to elicit more feedback and information. It is a great way to break the tension, and it helps remove the responsibility from one person speaking to the group. It transforms meetings into a more participatory experience because, as the facilitator, you lead them to say what needs to be understood instead of dictating to the group.  

We often have deadlines and other challenges which involve conflict. That conflict can be acknowledged if we use language that is a little less violent. Lately, I have been using an additional phrase: "no, wait…."  For example, I had someone demand that I deliver a user story. I said, "No, wait, I understand this is important, but where does it fit in with the release schedule."  After some thought and waiting, the person making the demand backed down. Another example is saying, "No, wait, do I understand you correctly?" The approach makes the conversation more participatory and helps facilitate a more profound understanding.  

We all have to say yes or no at work. Using theater improvisation techniques makes the process easier and allows people to feel involved in creating value. Feel free to give it a try.  

Until next time. 

Leadership as a Way to Defeat Tragedy

The last week has been particularly brutal if you follow current events.  It is relevant to me because my life partner is a teacher, and I cannot imagine her sacrificing her life to protect children from a shooter.  The news and social media are awash in hot takes and lurid details.  It is overwhelming and tragic.  Amid all of this grief, we need to ask ourselves in the Agile community what lessons we can learn and how we can help others. 

I have been adamant that I would not write about politics on this blog.  There are plenty of people who have opinions on the political left and right.  I will defer to them.  When I talk about politics, it is often in business law and policy—being a professional as long as I have gives you a unique perspective on how a business succeeds and fails.  A lifetime of experience colors your opinions.  A kaleidoscope of people dominates the world of business.  The foremost thing I have observed is that strong servant leadership is a force multiplier in the success of an organization.  Outstanding leadership makes the difference between slogging away at a job and finding purpose and camaraderie at work. 

I pointed out last week that mental health is a serious concern and business environments actively undermine mental health.  Violence in the workplace is a symptom of deep sickness.  It shows a failure of leadership and collective vision.  It should not be this way.  

A school or workplace should never drive a person to violence.  It is up to people like me to help others be heard and understood.  People want to work and learn with others in situations where they can succeed and thrive.  The agile reformation was born because the business world was failing to deliver value to customers.  That failure was impacting the lives of millions of people around the world.  

I do not have easy answers, but I want to make the world less unequal, cruel, and stupid.  I intend to do that in the context of the business world.  First, I try to do my best to be a servant leader each day.  I am an example of behavior, and it is the best teaching tool for small teams.  If you have the back of your team when times are tough they will have your back.  Others will either model the behavior or understand the norms accepted on the team. 

Next, radical candor should allow you to communicate effectively with your team and others.  Care personally about your people and challenge them directly so they can grow and develop.  Not everyone will succeed, but you should allow everyone to try.  

Finally, we need to stop treating people like “resources.”  Each person is a unique individual with hopes, dreams, and families.  Grinding people down like pencils is bad business because it will drive good people away from the organization.  Burning out people will also turn potential customers into vandals against the firm.  In the worst case, they will resort to violence.  

Leadership is complex and a lonely road to travel, but it can make the world better if done correctly.  It gives me a little small comfort as we attempt to make sense of the death of nineteen students and two teachers.  

Be safe and kind to each other; until next time. 

A Few Words About Mental Health and Agile.

The month of May is mental health awareness month.  In many businesses and cultures, discussing mental health is a death sentence for your career.  Business leaders are afraid to trust people who struggle with symptoms of mental illness, and the stigmas associated with being mentally ill stretch back hundreds of years, forcing people to mask and self-medicate their problems.  I speak from experience because I have witnessed too many neurotic, damaged, and plain mean people placed in leadership roles to hurt others.  These are people with the self-awareness of small furry woodland creatures who then inflict harm on the people they are supposed to serve.   

I have written about mental health before on this blog.  My primary thesis is that the pressures of contemporary business combined with poor leadership create a cycle of abuse and illness in industry.  The situation is made worse with alcohol and other drugs to self-medicate.  It is a prescription for a decline in mental health and business success.  As agile coaches or scrum masters, we need to be frank with ourselves and others when we see this cycle perpetuated. 

Many of the worst environments I have worked in have leaders who are not accustomed to hearing no and possess deep wells of rage.  These individuals were also good at something called gaslighting.  I have had serious moments of doubt about my competency and sanity working for these individuals throughout my career.  Each lay-off or termination became a liberation as time and distance taught me that working someplace else was a good career move.  

It is deeply dispiriting to work for an organization that sets you up to fail.  It could be unrealistic deadline pressures or workloads that require more people than the organization is willing to hire.  It could also be giving people responsibility for situations without the requisite authority.  You have not been in technology until you have seen an IT director in the cardiology unit receiving a phone call from the CIO about a software system before they experience an angioplasty.  The organization demoted that person when they returned from the hospital because he did not deliver the software on time.  Ironically, his replacement received more people to do the work and money to get the job done.  

Organizational dysfunction requires people to work together in good faith to attempt to fix those problems.  Do not drive yourself insane for organizations or people who do not care.  If the organization does not care, neither should you, and you should work elsewhere.  As my mentor, Monica Gilroy, says, “do not run yourself ragged for a ragged organization.”

Work should be sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  If it is not, then walk away for your mental health.  Life is too short to wallow in madness. 

Until next time. 

Listen to Individuals and Interactions

Arguments about process and
 tools make us look like these guys

When you are coaching agile, you spend plenty of time in a place Lewis Caroll calls “the shadow.”  The ideal of agile is in tension with the realities of working in a contemporary business.  It is challenging work that forces you to confront your shortcomings.  A coach is faced with doubt daily.  It is also a life filled with insecurity because coaches get fired when things go poorly.  I have spent over twenty years in technology, and eleven of them in the agile world participating in the agile reformation.  Today, I want to look at the agile manifesto and discuss something.

When we discuss the history of the agile manifesto, it has this glamourous sheen.  A bunch of smart people got together to brainstorm, ski, and have a few drinks.  When it was over, we had a guiding document that promised to change the business world.  It was optimistic and promised a better way.  Since that snowy and booze-soaked retreat, the agile community has splintered into several factions around taking agile principles and scaling them up to fortune 500 organizations.  

In addition to scaling frameworks, the agile world has plenty of different software tools to take agility, including Azure Dev Ops, Jira, and Rally.  A manager forbade me from coaching a team because I did not have the proper experience with the correct software.  These fractures in the agile community feel similar to the fractures in the development community, where people bicker like the character tweedle dee and tweedle dum.  

It is natural for people to have biases and strong opinions about their careers.  Passion is necessary if you want to be good at anything.  Unfortunately, these passions create prejudices that act as a toxin in the agile community.  People with Jira experience should not look down on those with Azure Dev Ops experience and so on.  When I am involved in these situations, I go back to the agile manifesto and gather some inspiration.  

Lately, the value of “Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools” has been significant.  Agile did not begin with any software in mind, and vendors attempted to automate the process.  A good coach or scrum master can manage a project with post-it notes, a few whiteboards, and an active email account.  Everything else is extra smoke and mirrors. 

Coaches should ask questions about why work is done and how it is generating value to the firm.  If we get involved in an unproductive discussion about processes and software, we are going to fail.  Each coach, regardless of their background and training, should have some basic skills.  A coach should know how source control works because when a developer talks about branching and merging, they can have an intelligent discussion.  Coaches should understand how to write user stories and show others how to write stories.  A coach needs to listen to others and know what they say and what they mean when they say it.  Finally, a coach needs to be a servant leader pulling their team toward success.  All the other skills are sprinkles on top of a tasty ice-cream sundae.  

As a member of the Agile reformation, we need to listen to “Individuals” and pay attention to “interactions.”  Otherwise, all of our passion for processes and tools will undermine the excellent work we have done for the last twenty years. 

Until next time.

Self-Organization Works If You Let It.

Teams cannot be assembled like Lego bricks.

I spend much of my time working with agile teams.  A big challenge is often these people are thrown together and forced to behave as a “team.”  The self-organizing team is one of the most critical pieces of an agile project, and it is one of the hardest things to create.  I wanted to spend some time discussing why building teams is so difficult.

In most business environments, a team is formed by hiring consultants and putting them together with existing employees.  The team is broken up, and the consultants are laid off or moved to a different project when work is complete.  The approach from an accounting perspective might make sense, but it creates plenty of unnecessary work.  Teams are continually going through Tuckman’s stages of group development and are in the “storming” stage of team maturity.  In a more agile environment, work comes to teams, and then the teams do the job.  The group moves on to a different project when they finish work.

According to the Harvard Business review teams which stick together have a 19% decrease in defects and 30% decrease in budget deviations.  The bottom line is that spinning up units and disbanding them is a foolish use of company money.  So what makes the team self-organizing?  Yvette Francino has an excellent blog on the subject.  In short, teams which self-organize have a few properties:

1. They hold themselves accountable for success and failure.
2. They healthily handle conflict.
3. They have a common goal which they strive to achieve.
4. They have a standard way of working.
5. Finally, they have stable membership.

These traits make an excellent self-organizing team, and it is up to agile coaches and scrum masters to hold them accountable.  Notice that these requirements do not mention test-driven development, SOLID Development, or other technical paradigms.  Most of these skills are soft skills.  It means that a team needs to learn how to work together outside of the technical skills, and this is difficult.  People have egos and subtle hierarchies of expertise and authority.  Add to the mix unrealistic deadline pressure and micromanagement from outside leadership, and you corrupt the five characteristics of self-organization.

So look toward creating more functional teams and allow upper management to understand how they are more successful.

Until next time.

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.

Psychological Safety in a Bipolar Business World

Psychological Safety means treating
 people like humans instead of insects. 

The global economy is a bipolar place.  The wealth and highs of success transform people into demigods.  The lows reduce human beings into squalid grubs struggling to survive.  For the white-collar professional caught in the middle, it feels like being in a bivouac of army ants.  You are being pulled in all directions by the tensions of others and the environment.  It is a stoic existence where we have no choice other than rely on others for our own survival.  It is alienating and undermines many of our desire for meaning.  The agile coach and scrum master must struggle against this reality each day.  In the corporate world, we should treat people as human beings instead of insects foraging for the benefit of an elite. 

The alienation of workers and disengagement it causes is why many consultants and agile experts are starting to discuss something called “psychological safety.”  John Dobbin wrote a great article about the subject on LinkedIn this week.  Pioneered by organizations like Google, psychological safety is behavior which allows people to work together in an environment of mutual respect and innovation.  It mirrors the work of Kim Scott, a former Googler, who wrote the book “Radical Candor.”  Aside from being the product of Google’s “don’t be evil,” days these two ideas come from our primitive reptilian brains.  Conflict with co-workers, a challenging boss, or business conditions create a situation where our fight, flight or freeze reactions to danger are triggered.  The emotional response is helpful during an avalanche or an attacking lion, but can create a toxic sludge in the cubical farms where many of us earn our living.

Unlike a backed-up storm drain, cleaning up the mess from the fight or flight response requires tremendous amounts of emotional labor and a huge dip in productivity.  From personal experience, I have had weeks of anxiety and self-doubt thanks to being ridiculed by a manager in front of product owners.  The episode gave those same product owners license to ignore coaching.  The sludge became more difficult to wade through at the office.

As I have become more experienced as a coach and scrum master, it is clear to me that psychological safety needs to be encouraged.  People need to feel you sincerely care about them and you are willing to hold them accountable. Leadership is more about creating this environment of learning than giving orders and controlling others.  I am still learning about how to do this as a professional but the Harvard Business Review is giving me a good head start. 

As a knowledge worker you should not be strung out like an army ant holding the colony together.  If the office is a toxic sludge of anxiety, it is time to grab a shovel and start the difficult process of creating psychological safety. I we fail we are doomed to live in a bipolar business world.

Until next time.