Peter Stevens, in this blog article entitled The Elephant in the Agile living room, shared the following—
The agile movement has no positive message to offer company leadership. Because Agile transformation is often not about things executives care about, these transformations are very low on the executive priority list. Until we fix this, agility will not be a high priority. The Personal Agility System brings genuine benefit to executives: Executive Agility. Let’s look at why and how this works to show the potential benefits of embracing agility to the executives themselves.
I recently attended a meetup presentation given by a senior transformation leader of well-known organization that is transforming themselves. They highlighted the challenges executives face: An agile transformation is about giving up responsibility. They have to find a new role, without any clarity about what that new role is. Implicit is a loss of status, power and influence, with a corresponding risk of executive pay cuts.
At another event, another transformation leader of a large, well-known company: “why is your company doing an agile transformation?” “To improve employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction,” they answered. How important are these topics to your executives? Since these are typically not a significant factor in the executive’s bonus, their commitment is somewhere between giving lip-service and none at all.
What does agility offer to leadership personally? Until now, very little. Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and most if not all other agile frameworks all about teams producing stuff. But most managers and executives are not part of a team that produces stuff. They are accountable for teams and their results, but they not part of the teams.
Senior executives are especially vulnerable: they are like likely to be in competition with each other and serve at the whim of their boards. What does an agile transformation offer them? Loss of power, loss of influence, turning them into coaches, and probably a loss of income. Why exactly do they want to go there?
Peter goes on to make a case for leaders to tackle his Personal Agility System (PAS). I want to take a different tack by reacting to some of the leadership quotes.
Not that long ago I encountered a company that was fully invested in Empowered Product Teams (EPT’s). You know, the work that Marty Cagan and SVPG have been evangelizing, training, and consulting on. It’s essentially the culmination of the work that Marty shared in his Empowered book.
Full disclosure, I’ve not studied Marty’s work in excruciating detail. I’ve read it and I largely agree with his perspectives on modern-day product development team dynamics that lead to success. However, I’m not SVPG trained nor an expert in the approaches.
But that being said, the company I ran into illustrated a problem with EPT’s that I want to share so that others might reconsider the model and effectively implement it in the real world.
So, what did the company do? They—
I saw this post the other day from Geoff Watts exploring 20 Polite Ways to Say No and it struck a chord with me. Blog link – https://www.inspectandadapt.com/blog/20-polite-ways-to-say-no
Not that it was a bad article. It isn’t. Or that I disagreed with the many approaches to couch ‘No’ in a kind, soft, dare I say, polite, way. I don’t.
Basically, he provided an option to the ubiquitous “Yes, and…” that I hear so often in the agile community. It’s a “Yes, if…”. Here’s how Geoff explains it--
An alternative to "no" (and you might notice this a few times in the list above) is "Yes, if..."
Responding with "Yes, if..." can appear more positive, collaborative, and less confrontational. That doesn't necessarily make it better though. By opening yourself up to negotiation, there is still a good chance that you will take on more and more (and people may then start playing negotiation games!) so make sure the "if..." is enough.
My Concern
I guess my concern is why not simply say…No? Or, lead with a definitive and clear No, and then explain the rationale behind it?
John Kotter wrote a Harvard Business Review piece in 1995, over 25 years ago, entitled Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. In it, he listed eight failure patterns or errors that often undermine organizational change and transformation efforts.
Now, at the time, agile ways of working were in their infancy and this was ~5-years before the writing of the Agile Manifesto. But when I came across it again, the article made me reflect on how many of these errors are still relevant and active today?
Error #1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency
Error #2: Not Creating a Powerful Enough Guiding Coalition
Error #3: Lacking a Vision
Error #4: Under-communicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten
Error #5: Not Removing Obstacles to the New Vision
Error #6: Not Systemically Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins
Error #7: Declaring Victory Too Soon
Error #8: Not Anchoring Changes in the Corporation’s Culture
I found this Forbes article by John Bremen entitled 2021 In Review: Leadership Lessons from Delta, Omicron, The Great Resignation, and Climate Impact.
In it, he shared ideas around the new focus for leaders. He describes it as being future-focused and defined ten aspects of that emergent posture.
Adopt a new mindset with risk.
Commit to elastic innovation.
Drive purpose AND profit.
Use flexibility as an advantage.
Get real about remote and hybrid work.
Focus on employee wellbeing and organizational resilience.
Lead with empathy, compassion, and transparency.
Understand that treating people fairly doesn’t mean treating them the same.
Stay focused on talent during crisis.
Support ESG and sustainability (environment, social, governance factors).
I have a colleague, agile coach, change agent, and friend who recently shared a story with me. It got me thinking about his situation from multiple perspectives.
But before I get into that, let me share a little context first.
Paul, not his real name, was leading an agile transformation in a company. He didn’t have a lot of positional authority, but he felt he was integrated sufficiently with senior leadership in technology and product to make things work.
He was unexpectedly invited to a meeting with his boss last week and he was fired. It was a complete and utter surprise.
The party line was that his role was being made redundant because they were taking another approach to their agile transformation (another model, framework, philosophy). But the abruptness of the dismissal belied that claim.
Paul felt that, in hindsight, he hadn’t been meeting organizational expectations around the transformation, but at the same time, nobody had had the courage to give him any clear feedback to that effect. Nor any mentoring or coaching to help him better achieve the organization’s goals.
Gustavo Razzetti put the following in a LinkedIn post recently—
Organizations have an accountability crisis.
Research shows that 82% of managers say they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable. 🤔
Rather than holding people accountable, promote a sense of ownership.
Create a culture where people feel they own their work.
Psychological ownership motivates people to go above and beyond – it increases job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, and performance.
Then he went on to attach the following lengthier article to the post.
When writing the EBAC book, my (our) perspective was largely from the position of the “universal” agile coach. One where the approaches, tactics, skills, and strategies were essentially the same no matter your place in the organization.
But there are many aspects of agile coaching where the subtleties of your place significantly influence your approaches. None is probably more varied and nuanced then whether you’re coaching as an internal (employee, full-time, FTE, role-based) coach versus an external (contractor, consultant, full or part-time, outside the organizational hierarchy) coach.
I think the differences are so compelling that I wanted to share the following table with you to sensitize you to some of the differences in perspective and approach.
While there may be differences, I want you to minimize the internal gyrations you go through to do your job. In essence, I still want you to be you as a coach. But, depending on your organizational positioning, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of these subtle and not-so-subtle differences.
