Category: leadership

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Discipline vs. Process

In many organization when they decide to do an agile transformation it is typically to do either a process swap or ‘agile’ or scrum for waterfall.  Usually this is done with the noble goal of producing ‘business agility’.  The transformation should not be about the business, it should be about the people.

This misrepresentation is part of the common fallacy that causes many organizations to fail in their efforts or to get outcomes that do not measure up to their original business objectives.  This false objective causes organizations to focus their efforts on the wrong things.  The transformation should not be about the business, it should be about the people.  In the end, businesses are not agile, they can only employ people that embrace and exhibit agility.  These false objectives stem from some common misconception that process and discipline are the same thing and that discipline and agility are at odds with each other.

Webster’s dictionary defines these notions as follows:

Discipline:

  1. Control gained by enforcing obedience or order
  2. Orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior; self-control
  3. Training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character
  4. A rule or system of rules governing conduct or activity

Process:

    1. A natural phenomenon marked by gradual changes that lead toward a result: process of growth
    2. A continuing natural or biological activity or function such life processes as breathing
    3. A series of actions or operations conducing to an end; especially : a continuous operation or treatment especially in manufacture

Agility:

    1. The quality or state of being agile : nimbleness, dexterity

Clearly business cannot be nimble.  It is a collection of people and processes, nothing more.  However, the people can exhibit agility and cause the direction of the business and the activities of the business to exhibit the dexterity we associate with people.  To achieve that, we must concentrate on the discipline of the people, not the processes that control the business.

Agile is about people and unleashing their creativity and passions to drive outcomes.  Processes deliver consistent outcomes, agility drives unexpected outcomes that are directed to the objectives that are desired.  Discipline allows agility to learn in a consistent fashion that creates incremental and sometimes extraordinary increases on outcomes.

For a long time in IT we have sought to gain efficiency improvements in a very consistent way.  This approach fueled IT growth for a long time, but produced minor year over year gains but never really unleashed the significant efficiencies that can be delivered by the discipline associated with minor adjustments to how outcomes are achieved usually individual creativity and passion.

The connection between agile and discipline is very strong and the very best agile teams consistently use very disciplined approaches to their work so when outcomes deviate, they can trace the deviation, good or bad, to the trigger and can maintain very high confidence in how those outcomes were achieved, and repeat them or improve them.

Ultimately discipline, not process, is what allows agility, in people and in turn, businesses.  Your focus on doing the right things right is what will enable and unleash your agility.

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People vs. Resources

Human Resource Management may be the greatest misnomer in the history of all management activities.

This statement is not intended as a slight to the professionals who serve organizations by helping to acquire and keep talent, but it is a tacit recognition that we are all human. We are all part of the larger community and we all have basic needs and deserve to basic treatment as people.  We are not disposable, nor unfeeling. We all seek and need encouragement!

It is common now for many agilists to talk about the people not resources.

Recently a blog was printed here:

The Difference between Groups and Teams

By Jason Wick – March 1, 2018

Over the course of my career, I’ve contributed to teams across a variety of contexts. But not until the last year or two did I begin to understand what a team is and how this is distinctly different from a group. My realization was that most of the work I’d done had been as part of a group. The difference was not purely semantics; it was one of mission.

Currently I lead a cross-functional product team composed of several roles. Wherever personnel exist with multiple roles from different departments and management lines, there’s a risk of conflicting goals unintentionally working against each other.

There are several questions to explore here: What are the goals of the software engineers? What are the testers’ goals? Do these two lists present any unhealthy conflicts, or do they support a set of shared objectives?

As a simplified example, let’s say I primarily measure my testers’ value by tracking the number of defects they report. If that’s the case, I should be aware of the possibility that they may focus their energy on nitpicking in order to inflate their bug count rather than target their testing efforts with the customer experience in mind.

How does this relate to the differentiation between a group and a team? To first define them clearly in my own words, a group is a number of individuals working together to get something done, while a team is a set of people who share the same purpose. The team values its purpose above any specific goals related to roles.

If testers are logging a lot of defects to inflate their bug count and justify their value to their manager, we’re off base. If testers happen to log a lot of defects while serving a shared team goal of deploying defect-free software to its customers, we’re on the right track. But it also means the work of people in development and continuous integration must serve that same shared goal. In order to be a team, they all must approach their work with deploying defect-free software in mind.

Not every job to be done requires a team. There are plenty of times when a group does just fine. But I encourage you to take a hard look at your employees’ goals if what you’re aiming for sounds closer to the definition of team, where a set of individuals share their values and deliver with a unified purpose.

 

The authors recognition of the difference of belonging to a team vs. a group is somewhat a semantic difference, still important though.  As a group member I belong because of an attribute, rather than what I contribute.

Attribute:           Noun: a quality, character, or characteristic ascribed to someone or something has leadership attributes

Contribute:        Verb: to give (something, such as money, goods, or time) to help a person, group, cause, or organization — usually + to or toward

Think about that for a moment, as the member of a group, I cannot give my ‘male’ or ‘female’, my ‘tall’ or my ‘short’.  I can associate that attribute with that group. It requires no active relationship, it is emotionless and statistical.

Conversely, to contribute, I must actively participate.  In fact, I must ‘give’, which means be active and understand how I am providing benefit. 

When we see people as ‘resources’, we do not see them by their contributions, we see them by their attributions.  I am replacing this java developer with that java developer.  I am using this tester instead of that tester. The separation of will from action creates the notion of interchangeability and disassociation of cognitive actions, it takes away our humanity, our spirit, our drive and our passion.

Language is what gives us commonality.  Using it effectively to convey information is key to communication.  It also allows us to convey AND form emotions about the things we are discussing. When we remove the emotion of people by calling them resources it creates the false impression that we are all replaceable/interchangeable, but the reality is that we were all acquired because of our uniqueness, the skills we bring to the table, our passions and fears, our strengths and our weaknesses and our contributions are what make each of us special and integral to the teams we are part of, no matter what our group memberships may be.

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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

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The Law of Process and Agile

If you have read my bio, you know that I have spent many years helping companies with solution development processes, specifically in the last 10+ years in Agile.  In that time, I have learned many hard lessons, and I have learned some of them many times.  I sometimes think I can take short cuts, even though I know it is a bad idea.

You might also know that I am passionate about leadership, and have spent many years building my own leadership skills, and mentoring others.  I am a disciple of the ‘Maxwell’ school of Leadership.  I adhere to the “21 Laws of Leadership” and have in my personal library, most if not all, of Maxwell’s books.  I listen to them regularly, and often will listen to some of them on my regular flights back and forth to customer’s I am consulting with.  I do this because even though I have heard them countless times, I always find something that is relevant to my past week or upcoming week.

One of Maxwell’s most basic rules is that you must follow the Law of Process in leadership development.  You can try to take shortcuts, but as Maxwell says, “Leadership develops daily, not in a day”.  How you might ask does this relate to Agile and an Agile blog.  The answer is simple.  While Leadership develops daily, not in a day, so does agile.  For it to work, you must follow the law of process. You can take short cuts, but eventually they will catch up with you.

My most recent engagement was started without my ‘normal starting process’.  I did not personally do a transformation evaluation.  I did not do a thorough interview with the enterprise leaders.  I didn’t conduct a cultural survey.  I did none of the things I typically do.  I assumed that because I have done it many times, and the opportunity/challenge was so big, and offered me such a great challenge, I was eager to get involved.  I ignored my better judgement, and I went along with the people cheering me on, saying I could make it work.  The story is not written on this engagement, but I am now, daily, questioning why I thought I could take a shortcut.  I ignored my best instincts.  I ignored the Law of Process.  I didn’t educate the leadership group.

In your endeavors as a coach/transformation specialist or whatever title you have, adhere to the Law of Process.  Don’t ignore your instincts.  Stand your ground.  It will serve you well.

Five (5) Things I would recommend you do before starting a new coaching engagement

  1. Cultural Survey
  2. Preliminary Agile Survey
  3. Leadership & Staff Interviews about current processes/challenges/successes
  4. Business Strategy Team/Leaders
  5. Organizational Training/Development Staff

I welcome your ‘checklist’ before you start your new engagements.  I’d love to hear how your setup yourself or your teams for successes.  In future posts, I will share more details about why failing this process can be detrimental.  For now, I will just share my failure.  In Maxwell’s words, Failure is an event, not a person or a team.  Failure is only an issue if you do not learn from it.

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!