10 Bitter Pills to Swallow About Agile for Leaders
1. Customers don't care if you're agile, waterfall or otherwise.
They care about their experience & that your product helps them. Focus on the quality and frequency of your interactions with customers.
2. It won't solve all of your problems.
Agile isn't a panacea. It'll just expose your problems quicker. The core of Agility is that it builds in feedback loops. It's up to you to learn from them and adjust from there.
3. Telling people, they have psychological safety isn't enough.
You need to demonstrate that people are ok to fail through action, not just words. Celebrate failure, be intentional about creating a safe environment.
Someone approached me the other day for some coaching advice. It seems that they’re in a Coach / Scrum Master role and have a team that, well, isn’t doing very well.
They’re pushing back on the use of agile approaches—seeming to be going through the motions of Scrum. They’re not delivering much in the way of value. And, to use his words, they’re simply not motivated. Which was his question—
How do I motivate this team?
Certainly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this question and it certainly won’t be the last. My first thought though was—you don’t motivate a team; they have to motivate themselves. But, as I answered the question, I thought of the following as a Motivation Continuum for today’s teams—
I saw the following post on LinkedIn from my colleague Maurice “Mo” Hagar –
"Fostering a new mind-set and creating a new culture is no easy feat."
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Creating-an-agile-mind-set-at-PepsiCo?gko=20fae
Good read. I've done Agile coaching since 2005. Back then it was easy: stand up a Scrum team. Today we're doing business agility, at scale, across the enterprise, and that's not so easy. Because it's no longer about "Agile" and local optimization but about the "business"--mindset / culture and outcomes--as it should be.
There are two kinds of Agilists in the world: 1) those who talk mostly about Agile, and 2) those who talk mostly about the business. Don't mishear me; I'm all for all that "Agile" means. But the most important thing I've learned at IBM, my primary client for the past two years? "Show me results or I'll show you the door."
That sounds harsh but it's how the game of business is played—all professional sports, in fact. And many of us Agilists need to up our game. While we're talking Agile, all the execs hear is "blah blah blah." Because they speak one and only one language: $$$. If you can't go there go home.
You can view it and the replies here - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mauricehagar_creating-an-agile-mind-set-at-pepsico-activity-6603998919653421056-1Clb
I have just a couple of responses to Maurice’s comment…
