Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
We've Moved
We've Moved
Walking Their Talk, Sustainability, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sustainability

I saw this wonderfully courageous and informative post by Sabine Canditt the other day where she wrote about Sustainable Scrum. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sustainable-scrum-responsible-choice-sabine-canditt-x0gef

After just completing a The Week program facilitated by the amazing Ann-Marie Kong, it touched my heart.

That said, I wanted to highlight one comment reaction/interaction between Sabine and Erich Bühler 

Erich said—

Thank you for bringing this approach into the world! Scrum does provide an iterative approach for teams to create value, but its scope is limited to the product level and struggles with dynamics across the whole organization for several reasons.
Without updating the underlying business and financial model at a strategic level, Scrum alone cannot transform organization-wide sustainability.

Sustainability
Short-takes, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sandy’s Take
Sandy’s Take
Short-takes, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
Coaching, ACGW, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

I talk a lot about the first step in coaching any client (individual, system, team, etc.) is to build a relationship, gain empathy and understanding, and then gain an idea of where/how to help initially. So, do NOT start to coach until you’ve done some relationship-building. 

But what does a coaching relationship, or a professional relationship in general, look like? What are aspects of that? Here are a few things that come to my mind—

  • Making + taking the time.

  • Explaining what you do—what is Agile Coaching.

  • Building some empathy; walking in their shoes; understanding where they are coming from.

  • Meeting them where they are.

  • Listening; reflective listening; building metaphors together.

  • Connecting with their language, not yours.

Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships
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Mad Scientist Inclusion

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Mad Scientist Inclusion

In my last post, I talked about the importance of diversity when building agile teams. But diversity in and of itself, won’t get the job done. In fact, in many ways’ inclusion is the activation counterpart of diversity. So, I wanted to explore inclusion a bit more in our agile contexts.

All voices matter!

As many of you know, I’m in the middle of a coaching certification program called ORSC (Organization Relationship Systems Coaching). In ORSC they teach about Meta-Skills, which are essentially an aspect of your mindset in how you enter systems (organizations, groups, teams).

One of the meta-skills is something called Deep Democracy. In simple terms, it means that all voices matter, and all voices need to / deserve to be heard. And as an ORSC coach, one of my prime directives is to facilitate so that all of the voices come out of the system.

And you might think this only relates to people who are present. But it doesn’t.

For example, we’re having a team meeting about making a decision about a feature’s dynamics. And Sue is out sick. We might want to ask the team, what do you think Sue’s reaction to this would be? We might also ask the team, what do you think the customer’s reaction to this feature will be? In this example, we’re going so far as to try and be inclusive of the “missing voices” in the system.

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Mad Scientist Diversity

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Mad Scientist Diversity

We were having a discussion in my Moose Herd the other day about aspects of diversity in constructing your agile organizations and teams. And there were three key themes that came out of the discussions that I’d like to share.

Teams are where the magic happens

I mentioned the work of the team is the value proposition. Leaders need to serve the teams and that includes how they recruit, hire, and onboard folks into the culture.

The true magic of agile teams is NOT in the organizational structure, or the leadership experience level, or in the detail of your project plans, or whether they’re practicing Scrum or Kanban.

Instead, it’s pulling together an empowered, cross-functional team that—

  • Has a focused mission or goal;

  • Have matured their agile mindset;

  • Have intentionally formed and established itself as a team;

  • Has a diversity of skills & experience to deliver on their mission;

  • Is strongly connected to the customer;

  • Has the organizational trust to meet their commitments.

Then create the cultural ecosystem where they are supported, trusted, challenged, mentored, and encouraged to succeed.

If you get the balance right between leadership and team accountability, then magic can happen.

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Exploring Resilience

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Exploring Resilience

This is something that’s been running around my brain for quite a while now. The notion of resilience.

  • What is it?

  • Why is it important?

  • And, how do we build muscle around it?

I think the genesis point for me is when my friend Mary Thorn shared her intent to do a keynote focused on the term Grit or Gritty, at the 2020 Spring AgileDev conference. If you know Mary, she is incredibly gritty. Mary is smart and experienced. But her ability to preserver over diversity and around resistance is what makes her a phenomenal coach.

Here I want to explore it as the term resilience and see where things go…

What is it?

There were two definitions that came from a dictionary search—

1. The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

2. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

I also discovered this definition from the American Psychological Association—

Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.

Why it’s important?

I liken resilience as an extension of our fight or flight reactions. It’s how we recover, how we respond, and how we grow.

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Just saying it…

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Doesn’t make it so ;-) 

I want to use this tweet from Ryan Ripley as an example. But I’m not trying to make an example of him, Prokanban.org, or Daniel Vicanti. I was just inspired when I saw it…

What Ryan is referring to here is the Code of Conduct on the Prokanban.org website.  I want to applaud them for have one, posting it, and being transparent about it. All of that is GOOD.

What struck me though is…

Just saying it, doesn’t make it so.

It’s a very, very, very early beginning, but just that, only a beginning. Now comes the really hard work.

That is, for example—

  • Understanding the nature, depth, and breadth of sexual harassment;

  • Training organizational members about it and giving them the skills and the opportunity to detect it. Then encouraging them and empowering them.

  • Then ultimately taking action on conduct violations. Making the action transparent and immediate.

Wrapping Up

It’s like saying—I’m not a racist or we won’t tolerate racism. These simplistic platitudes undermine the depth, breadth, complexity, and nuance associated with something as complex as racism.

Yes, I applaud Prokanban.org and all others, for example (Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, Scaled Agile, etc.) for taking stands on codes of ethics and codes of conduct.

BUT I hope they all know that this is simply a baby-step, a beginning, in a very long journey of vigilance, hard work, and commitment. And I’m looking forward to all of them (us, and me) to do the “heavy-lifting” as well…

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Showing Up

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Showing Up

I was teaching a CAL class last week in Nashville. During the class, I was sharing how important it is for leaders to “bring it” to work each and every day. I was referring to things like:

  • Attitude

  • Energy

  • Passion

  • Focus

  • and Engagement

Someone challenged me about the notion. They said that they weren’t always upbeat every day. And that sometimes they simply had a bad day.

They also said that their personality wasn’t upbeat naturally, so it was hard for them to be a Happy Harry or a Positive Polly all of the time. I explained that I wasn’t referring to anything as extreme as that. But I did think that people were paying attention (close attention) to their leaders, their behaviors, and their attitudes.

That not “bringing it” for too many days in a row was the sign of a problem of some sort…

But it’s not just about energy and attitude. As I think about it, there are really six areas I want to explore where Culture-Shaping focused leaders make a difference in the culture by how they are Showing Up each and every day.

That’s where we’re going next.

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Minding the Gap

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Minding the Gap

I really like the work Frederic Laloux has contributed around organizational cultures. It provides a series of phases (colors) that reflect the cultural evolutionary paths of corporations (organizations).

Unfortunately, there are a couple of negative things that have evolved around it.

One is the relentless pursuit of “Teal” as a goal in the agile transformation community. I liken it to the enthusiasm around DevOps, Spotify, or SAFe in the pursuit of silver bullet solutions or bandwagons.

Another is the realization that Teal isn’t really a good goal, not is it that well-understood or well-references of a model. As alluded to in this article by Corporate-Rebels.

But the reason I wanted to explore it now is to illustrate a cultural phenomenon I’ve often seen in agile transformational contexts. And the Laloux model works nicely as a communications mechanism to explain cultural divisions, which is where we’re going next.

Minding the Gap

One of the things that I think is most useful about the model is how it can represent various stages in an organization. Let me share a story to make that point.

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Reactive vs. Creative

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Reactive vs. Creative

One of my areas of interest over the last 3-5 years is finding a model or tool that could help leaders with identifying their current leadership tendencies and then guide their evolution towards more agile culturally supportive behaviors.

I didn’t want it to be something that was so constricting or binary that it failed to give them guidance (and hope) for change. I also wanted it to be rooted in solid research and data. Finally, I wanted it to compliment my Certified Agile Leadership class (CAL I) and assist me in my leadership coaching efforts.

I explored two instruments/models that I found useful in meeting my criteria. One is the Leadership Agility assessment by Bill Joiner and the other was the Leadership Circle Profile assessment by TLC.

Neither of them is strictly related to agile software development, methods or business agility, as they are more general-purpose leadership assessment instruments. That being said, they both are incredibly helpful for leaders who are on an agile, Culture-Shaping journey.

While I was trained on both of them, I’ve selected the Leadership Circle Profile (for individual assessments) and the Collective Leadership Assessment (for groups/teams).

Both of them have at their core a set of competencies and tendencies that I wanted to explore in this post. Under the banner of Culture-Shaping, one of the first things that I think is helpful is to understand our personal “leanage” when it comes to our leadership stance. And these assessments really help with that. Please keep in mind that I’m not pushing the instruments, but the thinking behind them right now.

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Some things are more important than “Agile”

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Some things are more important than “Agile”

This article was inspired by this quote I saw when Judge Ruth Bader-Ginsburg passed away…

This quote is from Judge Jeffrey Sutton and shared by Christopher K. Scalia—

During one of my last visits with Justice Scalia, I saw striking evidence of the Scalia-Ginsburg relationship. As I got up to leave his chambers, he pointed to two dozen roses on his table and noted that he needed to take them down to “Ruth” for her birthday. “Wow,” I said, “I doubt I have given a total of twenty-four roses to my wife in thirty years of marriage.” “You ought to try it sometime,” he retorted. Unwilling to give him the last word, I pushed back: “So what good have all these roses done for you? Name one five-four case of any significance where you got Justice Ginsburg’s vote.”

“Some things,” he answered, “are more important than votes.”

RIP your honor.

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Repertoire of Values

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Repertoire of Values

With All Due Respect

First, I want to state something that I didn’t in the first post.

I respect the role, art, craft, and challenges of leadership in agile contexts. I REALLY do! It’s not for the faint of heart and, in a word, it’s HARD!

So, when I provide leadership advice or perspective, I’m not providing it in a trivialized, marginalized, unempathetic, or judgmental fashion. I’m only trying to be helpful. Helpful to those leaders who are struggling with what it takes to lead in agile contexts. It’s those leaders who are my primary persona in everything I’ve written and will write around agile leadership.

Not that I’ve cleared that up…

Values First

Andy Bleach wrote a wonderful article entitled—Embracing Values – Agile’s Toughest Challenge. I’d never read anything from Andy before, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read it. And I thought it would be a nice addition to my thoughts around Leadership and Culture-Shaping.

Here’s the LinkedIn post with comments - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stefanwolpers_embracing-values-agiles-toughest-challenge-activity-6638782881915256832-bAAR

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Beginning

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A Leader's Guide to Culture-Shaping: Beginning

Where does culture come from?

  • Is it a bottom-up thing?

  • A top-down thing?

  • An inside-out thing?

  • Is it organic or intentional?

Depending on who you read, reference, or talk to the answer is…it depends. There’s also an allusion to the point that culture is highly complex and difficult to understand or influence.

But from my perspective, the answer is much clearer and simpler on both counts.

First, I believe that culture is largely dependent on leaders and their leadership. In fact, I believe leaders by far play the most significant role in the culture. Or in what I like to refer to as their responsibility in and for Culture-Shaping.

That if you look at any organization, really look at the culture within, it reflects the behavior of the leadership team in the cultural landscape or ecosystem.

How does that happen?

Well, with their vision, words, actions, expectations, commitments, behaviors, body language, and business goals. With what they choose to amplify as important and with what they choose to not amplify.

And second, I believe that culture is incredibly simple. Since it aligns with the leader’s actions, it simply requires focus and intent if you want to change or reshape your culture. And not in one big change, but via a myriad of small, everyday actions.