Month: February 2018

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How We Deal With Change

A group of graduate students did a very bizarre experiment. They took lab rats and put them in a tank of water and placed the tank in a totally dark room. They went into the adjoining room and monitored them with video equipment. The rats swam for almost six hours before giving up and drowning. The students then took another set of lab rats and put them in a tank of water and placed that tank in a room where there was a small lamp. Their hypothesis was that the light would give the rats hope and they would survive longer. As it turns out, the rats swam almost 17 hours. Much longer than the rats in total darkness. Something about the light enabled them to survive longer.

The above experiment illustrates we always have a choice on how to deal with change and demonstrates what happens when we choose to find hope in situations that may initially appear hopeless. Change is the only constant. As we deal with the recent organizational changes there may be a tendency to give up on hope rather than seek out the new opportunities it offers. The Agile Transformation activities, another change opportunity, is about enabling us to respond to, instead of reacting to, change. The distinction is captured by Steven Covey in the First Habit:

HABIT 1 : BE PROACTIVE
Your life doesn’t just “happen.” Whether you know it or not, it is carefully designed by you. The choices, after all, are yours. You choose happiness. You choose sadness. You choose decisiveness. You choose ambivalence. You choose success. You choose failure. You choose courage. You choose fear. Just remember that every moment, every situation, provides a new choice. And in doing so, it gives you a perfect opportunity to do things differently to produce more positive results.

Habit 1: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. You can’t keep blaming everything on your parents or grandparents. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they choose their behavior. Reactive people, on the other hand, are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and performance, and they blame the weather. All of these external forces act as stimuli that we respond to. Between the stimulus and the response is your greatest power–you have the freedom to choose your response. One of the most important things you choose is what you say. Your language is a good indicator of how you see yourself. A proactive person uses proactive language–I can, I will, I prefer, etc. A reactive person uses reactive language–I can’t, I have to, if only. Reactive people believe they are not responsible for what they say and do–they have no choice.

Instead of reacting to or worrying about conditions over which they have little or no control, proactive people focus their time and energy on things they can control. The problems, challenges, and opportunities we face fall into two areas–Circle of Concern and Circle of Influence.

Proactive people focus their efforts on their Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about: health, children, problems at work. Reactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern–things over which they have little or no control: the national debt, terrorism, the weather. Gaining an awareness of the areas in which we expend our energies in is a giant step in becoming proactive.

Is the Sun coming up or going down?

 

 

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What is Servant Leadership?

Last weekend we saw the NFL coaching staff on the sidelines dressed in camouflage and other clothing that celebrated the military, in recognition of the sacrifices made by Veterans as well as to celebrate Veteran’s Day.

With the Veteran’s Day in mind, the focus this week is on servant leadership … there is no greater demonstration of servant leadership than the service to one’s own country.

What is servant leadership?

Skip Prichard notes that a Servant Leader is one who:

    • Values diverse opinions: A servant leader values everyone’s contributions and regularly seeks out opinions.  If you must parrot back the leader’s opinion, you are not in a servant-led organization
    • Cultivates a culture of trust: People don’t meet at the water cooler to gossip. Pocket vetoes are rejected.
    • Develops other leaders: It means teaching others to lead, providing opportunities for growth and demonstrating by example.  That means the leader is not always leading, but instead giving up power and deputizing others to lead.
    • Helps people with life issues: It’s important to offer opportunities for personal development beyond the job.
    • Encourages: The hallmark of a servant leader is encouragement.  And a true servant leader says, “Let’s go do it,” not, “You go do it.”
    • Sells instead of tells: A servant leader is the opposite of a dictator. It’s a style all about persuading, not commanding.
    • Thinks you, not me: There’s a selfless quality about a servant leader.  Someone who is thinking only, “How does this benefit me?” is disqualified.
    • Thinks long-term: A servant leader is thinking about the next generation, the next leader, the next opportunity. That means a tradeoff between what’s important today versus tomorrow, and making choices to benefit the future.
    • Acts with humility: The leader doesn’t wear a title as a way to show who’s in charge, doesn’t think he’s better than everyone else, and acts in a way to care for others.  She may, in fact, pick up the trash or clean up a table.  Setting an example of service, the servant leader understands that it is not about the leader, but about others.

In summary, servant leadership is about putting the needs of others first and helping people develop and perform to their highest potential. In the Agile world we look to the role of Scrum Master to be a beacon of servant leadership. The Scrum Master puts the team needs first and has the responsibility for protecting the team from external noise that may distract from the planned activities for value delivery while also fostering their growth and development.

Writer James Hunter explains how to become or hone your Servant Leadership approach in a book titled: The Servant Leadership Training Course.  In his book he states:

  • Servant leadership is a business philosophy that emphasizes the act of the leader, such as a manager or supervisor, focusing on the growth and development of their employees and ensuring their success. In doing so, the leader succeeds when their employees do. In a business team, servant leadership can not only help employees achieve and grow, but it can also benefit their leaders and the company as a whole.

He describes Leaders such as Ghandi, Dr. King, Mother Teresa and others. As you read the information below see if you agree that these people served others, and also led them. Then ask yourself if you do.
Hunter breaks Servant Leadership into three critical areas: Skill, Influence, Character

Leadership is the skill of influencing people to enthusiastically work towards goals identified as the common good, with character that inspires confidence!

    • Skill: A skill is something that can be learned or an acquired ability.
    • Influence: the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.
    • Character: Moral maturity. Your ability to do the ‘right thing, even when no one is looking’.

The United States Marine Corps defines leadership as:

    • The qualities of moral character, that enable a person to inspire and influence a group of people successfully.

If you are interested in learning more about how to become a better servant leader, or you think you are ready to help, please let us know!

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Thanksgiving and Agile

Thanksgiving is celebrated this week.

The origins of the holiday provide us a great way to view the important work we do every day for delivery of additional value to our customers; internal and external, and how the agile mindset of continuous improvement and learning facilitates that.

The story goes:

In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, carrying 102 passengers—an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the New World. After a treacherous and uncomfortable crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are now commonly known, began the work of establishing a village at Plymouth.

Throughout that first brutal winter, most of the colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy and outbreaks of contagious disease. Only half of the Mayflower’s original passengers and crew lived to see their first New England spring. In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from an Abenaki Indian who greeted them in English. Several days later, he returned with another Native American, Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. He also helped the settlers forge an alliance with the Wampanoag, a local tribe, which would endure for more than 50 years and tragically remains one of the sole examples of harmony between European colonists and Native Americans.

In November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Now remembered as American’s “first Thanksgiving”—although the Pilgrims themselves may not have used the term at the time—the festival lasted for three days. While no record exists of the historic banquet’s exact menu, the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote in his journal that Governor Bradford sent four men on a “fowling” mission in preparation for the event, and that the Wampanoag guests arrived bearing five deer. Historians have suggested that many of the dishes were likely prepared using traditional Native American spices and cooking methods. Because the Pilgrims had no oven and the Mayflower’s sugar supply had dwindled by the fall of 1621, the meal did not feature pies, cakes or other desserts, which have become a hallmark of contemporary celebrations.

The lesson of the pilgrims is shared by farmers and others today.  In order to harvest and get your bounty, you must invest in the time.  ‘You reap what you sow’ is the saying. In that simple wisdom is the thought behind continuous improvement and the agile philosophy of ‘lifelong learning’

Every day we get a chance to take small risks, learn new things and invest in ‘sharpening our saws’.  For this Thanksgiving we offer you the ‘seeds’ you can harvest next year.

Below are several opportunities for you to improve yours skills or learn new ones, many for free.  In today’s competitive marketplace everyone has to control their own personal development plan, you have to seek new opportunities and challenges and you have to embrace change for your own competitive advantage!  Feel free to share your own learning spaces!  Remember when you make anyone on your team better, we all get better, and provide better results!

This post wishes everyone a great and SAFE Thanksgiving and hopefully the seeds for a successful harvest next year!

Enjoy your holiday!

Packt offers FREE technology books:

https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning

EDX offers free courses or you can pay a fee for some certifications:

https://www.edx.org/course

The Khan Academy offers many types of free learning:

https://www.khanacademy.org/

The Microsoft Virtual Academy offer many free trainings:

https://mva.microsoft.com/

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A Leader That Listens

As I mentioned previously I am a big fan of Leadership Development and studying great leaders.  I am also a huge fan of John Maxwell.  Here is an excerpt from a Maxwell book:

Trust is the foundation of leadership. It is the most important thing. Leaders cannot repeatedly break trust with people and continue to influence them. Your people know when you make mistakes. The real question is whether you’re going to fess up. If you do, you can often retain/regain their trust. How does a leader build trust? By consistently exemplifying competence, connection and character. People will forgive occasional mistakes on ability. And they will give you time to connect. But they won’t trust someone who has slips in character.

  • Character Communicates — a person’s character quickly communicates many things to others. Here are the most important ones:
    • Character Communicates Consistency — leaders without inner strength can’t be counted on day after day because their ability to perform changes constantly.
    • Character Communicates Potential — weak character is limiting. Who do you think has the greater potential to achieve great dreams: someone who is honest, disciplined, and hardworking or someone who is deceitful, impulsive and lazy?
    • Character Communicates Respect — When you don’t have character within, you can’t earn respect without. How do leaders earn respect? By making sound decisions, by admitting their mistakes, and by putting what’s best for their followers and the organization ahead of their personal agendas.

No leader can break trust with his people and expect to keep influencing them. Trust is the foundation of leadership. Violate the Law of Solid Ground, and you diminish your influence as a leader.

Interesting, but so what? This is an Agile Blog!

Yes, it is primarily about Agile, but as anyone who has ever had direct interaction with me will tell you, Agile and Leadership are inextricably linked together and in fact the greatest technologists in the world cannot be successful for long in an enterprise/organization that does not practice solid Leadership Principles.  As soon as more than one person is required to do work, and another person is setting direction, leadership is required.  If you want to work alone, per Maxwell, ‘you will never achieve great things!’ If you are willing to work with others, your potential just increased exponentially!

Back to the world of Agile.  One of the challenges I face often is the ability to help someone in the ‘C-Suites’ or SVP/AVP level direct organization change/agile transformation. In case you are not aware, telling these folks they are: ‘wrong’, ‘misguided’, ‘going in the wrong direction’ or heaven forbid the worst of all ‘a bad leadership’ or ‘in need of leadership development’ is akin to telling a farmer that chickens have teeth! It is a hard sell! So how does a guy who studies leadership do this very thing?

A brief history of a coach we will call “Phil”!

Phil is a coach who understands agile.  He is well qualified to help any team.  He is articulate, driven, passionate, honest and forthright.  He has character, and incidentally, might be one!  Phil has a flaw I have observed in other coaches that often gets rolled into this common ‘agilism’ (full disclosure, I used to be ‘Phil’!). “Meet people where they are, not where you want them to be’. Phil is tolerant of learning or failure, but intolerant of leaders without character.  He can’t meet them where they are, instead he will try to force them where they should be.

Again, how does this relate to agile?  Patience #grasshopper, we will get there!

Phil expects that when a company invests in coaching, that they understand the coaches are there to help them get better. They are there to help! Their advice should be taken more often than ‘heard’. You see Phil understands that if they listen, he can get them where they want to go, faster!  He forgets that people must go through their change processes individually, and that just because someone has a title does not mean they have character as defined above.  Phil’s expectations don’t match his customers, he has not taken the time to connect with them.  To understand their character, what drives them, what makes them laugh, what scares them!

#Grasshopper sees the light.

Connection to agile transformation achieved.  Much of the transformation in organizations, be it agile or digital or any change really, is about leaders leading. Sadly, it is my observation, that much of what is designated as organizational leadership today is NOT leadership, but instead management.

One last quick digression, for clarity:

  • Leadership is the ability to introduce and achieve change.
  • Management is about processes & efficiency

This week was a great week!  I served my client and my fellow coach, Phil.  This week we moved a ‘leader’ into leader mode.  Before telling you about the tactic I used, I want to share a bit about the background and the success.

Background:  In the last quarter of 2016, myself and several other coaches were brought on board a large enterprise client to ‘help them get agile’!  Note a couple of things, 1) The coaches has never met and were not a ‘team 2) The obscure definition of what success was is NOT a misprint 3) How could this ever go wrong?

Phil and I were 2 of the coaches brought on board.  Additionally, we were not designated as the ‘leaders’ of the transformation we were assigned to work with an organizational leader.  Add to that, this leader also was not aware of/clear on the vision, and if he was, he could not articulate it!  The perfect storm for Phil!

A month was spent trying to ‘get through’ to this leader before I got on site.  The frustration with the leader and his team was palpable. Phil and other were very frustrated and it should in their body language, their attitude and their demeanor.  Frankly, I expected that Phil would quit, or be removed.  Luckily he wasn’t!  He really is a great coach, and has great potential to develop into a marvelous enterprise transformation expert/leader.

When I came on board, I started listening to conversations, trying to understand.  My approach was different.  I didn’t start trying to immediately ‘change things’ or move the needle, instead I tried to understand, accept and identify what kind of character our leader had and how I could connect with him.  It became clear to me that he was put in a position where he was ‘expected to be a leader as an expert’.  He was setup to fail by his leadership!  By his own admission today, he knows less about agile transformations than ‘we, the coaches’ do. An ENORMOUS improvement from where we were just last week.

So what changed.

Before we talk about what changed for the leader, let’s continue Phil’s journey a little.  As I mentioned I expected the relations to continue souring, and to eventually just break.  Something inspired Phil to step back.  Something made him start to pause enough, that it allowed him to stay on the engagement.  Someone took the time to connect with Phil.  That person was me.  You might ask, why was I, as a coach, trying to connect with another coach (if you are not asking what the whole ‘connection thing is’).

Over the years, I have learned, that leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.  I have also learned that managing change is using influence, nothing more, nothing less.  If you want to lead agile change, you must be able to influence people.  To influence people, you must demonstrate character.  You must develop trust.  You must be willing to to be vulnerable.  You must be willing to fail, publicly, admit it, and stand back up, dust off and go back to work.  You see Phil has the answers, but he hasn’t earned the credibility, and a person of influence in the organization has never extended it to him.  Instead of working to earn trust, influence and demonstrate character, Phil tried to demonstrate knowledge. Had he been brought in to do that, and had he been working with a great leader, his problems would never have been surfaced.  That isn’t what happened to Phil and honestly that is NOT the position most agile coaches find themselves in.  Most of us find ourselves in positions with no authority, limited access to real leadership and a soap box a message that ‘leadership’ has asked us to spread. A bad situation, to say the least.

So what changed for the leader?

As with Phil, I tried to build trust through connections.  I tried the leader, but was rebuffed.  I accepted his push back, but remained committed to break through.  I then approached other leaders, and was able to start making connections.  Connections led to trust.  Trust led to frank discussions.  After one particularly frank  discussion, I suggested to a person on the leadership team that they might let the ‘leader’ know that I was available to ‘sound their ideas on’ or even potentially do some ‘private tutoring’ on agile, or just ask one on one questions, since it must be a daunting thing to be expected to ‘be the shell answer man for all agile questions in an enterprise this large’ without extensive background and experience in many transformations and many different companies. This bait was put out to open the door enough to show I could be trusted.  Trust eventually turned to conversations.  Conversations eventually turned to connection.  The connection pipeline was small, and unstable but it was finally there.  Luckily, the year ended before I tried to press too much. Post the New Year I tested the connection and found, as I thought, that it was tenuous.  I reminded my other leadership team member of my offer one day, after a particularly rough meeting where expectations were misaligned, and it appeared that the ‘leader’ may have unintentionally mislead his leader, who is well documented to have a short fuse, and is not a leader who value development of people, but it known to dress down their people, publicly and privately. This put the leader is a position of being vulnerability, and accountability.  Further, he felt that he had been misinformed.  In fairness, most the entire episode was a misunderstanding.

So what happened.

I suggest a couple of things.

  1. I explained (or better, re-explained) my coaching rule. “Blame the coach!”. My philosophy as a coach has always been, I am their tp provide ‘air cover’ for the teams, the leadership, the organization to take risks, test their risk boundaries and find out how they can become empowered within their organizational structure.  This air cover is designed to allow them to build trust among their team, their leadership and their peers.  It works! It is powerful! Teams embrace it, but it takes time. It is also somewhat risky.
  2. I suggested that the leader allow the coaches to go offline, get a tactical plan together, and come back to the group with a plan, or the outline of a plan the next day
  3. I extended my growing influence with the leader, to the coach in his sights for the problem, and suggested that I felt confident he was on the right track!

It was all rosy, but luckily, things worked out.  The next day, several conversations were held that illustrated to the leader that we, the coaches, has been:

  1. Accurate in our assessments of organizational issues that were much bigger than they appeared
  2. That we had been accurate, and ultimately he had been accurate in his reporting
  3. That even in a situation where we could be blamed, without cause, we were willing to shoulder that blame, in order to keep us moving in the right direction
  4. We could be trusted. We had character, we were true to our word by deed and commitment

The transformation of the leader in the last 24 hours is so astonishing that it literally has Phil’s head spinning. Even better, Phil has been able to witness something that opened his eyes wider to the possibility of connection and time.

Today was a good day. We will take this win, and move forward.

Until next time, I’d love to hear your ideas!

If you ever need someone to believe in you, let me know, I’d be happy to!

Thanks