I saw this point on LinkedIn from Leise Passer Jensen and it resonated with me… powerfully.—
No-one could have warned me about this prior to my first leadership job:
𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙥𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧 𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙤𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙢𝙖𝙮 𝙡𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙞𝙩 𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙛.
This is scary:
Contemporary research now shows that…
… everyone is predisposed to abusing power. So that includes you and me.
The most dangerous threat for leaders is …power.
Power corrupts and may change your brain.
Its consequential behavior can harm ourselves and others.
Few people were told this before they accept an appointed leadership role. That can be dangerous for us as leaders as well as for those who are subjected to our leadership.
Power changes the brain!
Anthony Mersino is a good friend and colleague of mine, and he asked the following question:
What are the disadvantages of using agile and Scrum?
And it made me think a bit. Not only about the question but what would be the best way to answer it.
At the risk of offending some, I kept thinking of a car. Putting the pollution aspect to the side for a second, cars are inherently good. They’ve provided transportation to humans for well over a century. They’ve also evolved, becoming safer, more efficient, and more intelligent. They’re even beginning to self-drive, which is an exciting development.
But then I think the primary disadvantages (or problems) are not in the cars themselves, but in the users—us. It’s how we use them that’s the more significant challenge. For example, driving recklessly or under the influence. Not maintaining them safely. Or allowing unlicensed/inexperienced individuals to drive them too soon.
We discussed the latest round of agile role layoffs at Capital One the other day in the Moose Herd. The news was that Capital One had laid off 1100 people, all with agile in the titles/job families. The public reason shared was that they’d sufficiently evolved their agile capabilities to a point where it made no sense to have independent roles. That (everyone) was now agile.
Of course, there was quite a passionate discussion about—
What are the fundamental driving forces behind the move?
Was this a perceived success / evolutionary step or a failure?
Since Capital One was such a bellwether, was this the beginning of a trend in the agile community?
What might happen to all of those people?
I was pretty struck by the turbulence that this one event created in our community, as the Herd reflected.
One of the things we got heated about was the intentions of the organizational leaders, particularly exploring whether they valued agile or not. And whether they valued people or not.
The 2022 Agile Coaching Report sat in my inbox for almost two months until I finally reviewed it in detail a few days ago. Several areas were worthy of a deeper dive, but one particularly struck me. The report's preface reads: "Notably, coaches believe the biggest impact they are making is in shifting an organization towards an agile mindset and culture. Interestingly, they also find this to be the most challenging shift to make and one of the biggest impediments to agility if not achieved." This sentiment isn't surprising to most who have worked in an organization transforming toward more agility. It's an issue Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, leaders, managers, and team members run into often.
It's not surprising this shift is difficult because a transformation of an individual's mindset requires an internal change in their value system, which is not only what they say they value but what they believe they value. Unfortunately, leaders, managers, and stakeholders often say they value the agile transformation or value delivering useful products or services to their customers but underpinning those statements is a desire for more money, more accolades, more acceptance, and more power. There's nothing inherently wrong with some of these underpinning values, but it's essential to understand the true driver of the desire to change. It's important because our job as coaches is to nudge them toward more agile ways of thinking. And to do that, we must understand where the individual's values are rooted.
I saw this post on LinkedIn the other day from Julie Springer
“So… this all sounds great, but are you going to provide this same training to our leaders?”
I’ve heard this question multiple times, and the underlying message is clear.
Teams are being asked to work in new ways, without any confidence that their leaders are going to make changes in the way they lead or approach their work.
It’s unfair to train teams on how they are empowered to self-organize to deliver value if nothing around them is changing.
Start with a vision for the change at the leadership level and get clear on what structures, approaches and behaviors need to be in place to support agile teams, before providing training and inviting them to work differently.
There’s a nice dialogue of comments and reactions to the post that I recommend you read. That being said, I didn’t see a quick point I’d like to make…
This is a conversation/reaction topic between Toby Sinclair and Terry Brown recently on LinkedIn. You can find it here. The net of the discussion was—can a manager coach the people that report to them? And, to be clear, the coaching in this sense was professional coaching.
Here’s Toby’s post—
Managers can’t be coaches
But they can coach. Let me explain.
Line managers face barriers to being a coach. These include:
Power dynamic between manager and direct report
Knowledge is held by the manager but not the team member. e.g. Upcoming reorganization
Confidentiality conflict between manager and other team members.
Unwritten constraints in what can/can’t be discussed in the corporate culture.
Commonly to the direct report, the manager will always be a manager. Not a coach.
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—
