Company culture is often associated with having a ping pong table in your office, after-work drinks on a Friday, or a framed value statement on your wall. But organizational culture is so much more than that, and it is the driving force behind innovation, growth, and sustainability. In this article, we will explore different types of organizational culture that exist and the signs of a toxic one, plus how you can work towards a culture that is more aligned with your goals.
The pandemic definitely changed the way we are working and the way we are doing things together. In particular, if we think about all the rituals and behaviours which were established before the pandemic hit, when people were still in offices and they had an effective playbook in place, and now being forced to work together remotely, it’s very unlikely that those same established rituals and processes will work effectively.
Another thing which is different is that the stress levels of people working remotely tends to be very high, especially if people were not used to this before. The reason being that when you work remotely you are always looking at a screen, you are moving less, so your body has less chance to destress, to re-oxygenate. For many of us, working remotely has turned into a series of back-to-back meetings where you don’t even have time between meetings to walk out of a meeting room and to chat to colleagues in the corridor, or just to give your brain a few minutes to disconnect from the topic. This definitely increases stress levels.
What is really difficult is the level of awareness in terms of some cultures to understand the context switching. When we used to work in physical offices or when meeting clients in different places, our subconscious
was used to the switch of context and the environment around us. We also learnt to adapt our behaviour and attitude accordingly depending on the specific client or employee. This is something that is very difficult to do when working remotely as we physically stay in the same place; we are likely dressed in the same way; we are looking at the same screen all day. So switching context when working remotely creates a significant amount of stress as we tend to think a lot more consciously rather than subconsciously about how we should behave.
So in order to work more effectively remotely, leaders in principle need to continue doing what they have always been doing which is focusing on creating an environment which enables their teams and their people to work more effectively together and to deliver customer value. This in principle didn’t change, however in practice it did as we can’t use all the techniques and tools we used when we were working physically together in an office. We also lost the possibility to just walk around and observe what is going on.
There are some techniques we can use even today with digital tools, however, the feeling and the way people react to those types of observations is completely different from the one they had when you just walk around the office and have a chit-chat here and there. Ultimately it boils down to the fact that we need to create a higher level of autonomy. When people work remotely and they cannot physically collaborate with one another, they need to be in a position in which they can deliver value and be satisfied with the work they do without too much help. If people need a lot of help to complete their work they end up feeling frustrated - sitting alone in front of their screen and struggling to find answers to their problem. This likely creates that feeling of incompetence, that feeling of being inadequate and definitely increases the level of stress.
I tend to agree with what Geoff said in the previous video that the companies that invested preemptively in creating a higher level of autonomy and nurturing self-organization when they still had the possibility to do so in a physical environment, definitely had a head start when the pandemic hit. However, it’s not impossible to help people increase their level of trust and self-confidence when working remotely by supporting them in terms of mentorship, coaching and even providing them with the opportunity to upskill.
There are many new skills that we need to learn when working remotely and it’s not as easy as before - you cannot simply send people to workshops or tell them to read a book. As they still need to find the time to do this, we need to be more supportive and empathetic about the new way of working and help them become self-confident to deliver value and ultimately gain satisfaction from the work that they do. It’s also important that they engage with the outcome and the ownership of what they are doing.
In order to help people reduce their level of stress, we can look at ways to give them back that human touch that they might have lost by interacting with people only through a camera. The other issue is that if we keep on planning meetings back-to-back nobody will have the chance to even stand up from their chair, so one thing that I’ve seen being quite effective is to do what they call “speed up meetings”. Don’t do long meetings anymore - try to keep meetings short and make sure there is at least 10-15 minutes between meetings so people have the opportunity to stand up, move around a bit, or perhaps get a breath of fresh air.
In order to help people cope better with the situation and for you as leaders to understand how everyone is doing, you should consider having informal conversations. The informal conversations we used to have around the water cooler aren't as easy to have in a remote environment. As leaders we should consider having half an hour meetings with the team every week or every 2nd week to just talk about something other than work. Take your mobile phone and go for a walk outside - have a relaxing conversation. Check how people are doing; how their family is; what their interests are beyond work. Give them back that human touch we had in a physical environment.
At the end of the day what we need to do as leaders still remains the same. We need to engage people, we need to help them deliver the value they want to deliver and we need to be able to do that at a sustainable pace. We have to pay particular attention to the work/life balance of our employees to make sure they keep on delivering value, they remain engaged and ultimately help us in becoming successful.
Watch the recording of Andrea's webinar on "Leading Remotely".
*Click here to read Part 1 blog post*
One thing that has been really noticable for me since the start of the pandemic just over a year ago, and the different responses organisations have taken, is that the organisations that previously invested a lot more in their individuals, their teams, and their autonomy, have really responded and coped much better. They had less disruption than the organisations that had effectively paid lip service to the agile values & principles. Those organisations have tended to resort a lot more towards micro-management, status updates and check-in meetings.
Essentially leadership hasn’t really changed especially if we work in a complex domain as complex work requires greater autonomy and autonomy still requires competence, confidence and conditions for success. So the job of a leader is to help their team get to greater competence, develop confidence and to create the conditions where they can be autonomous.
I’m going to talk about a few areas of many that great leaders can focus on in order to make remote leadership more effective.
The first one is “isolation”. Now it might sound strange for me to even mention this, as it is obvious that while we’re all working more remotely and we’re not in the office seeing each other day-to-day we are bound to feel more isolated. I think it’s a really important thing to be aware of as we are missing out on a lot of things that we would consider to be our innate human needs.
We are social animals and by being forced apart from our colleagues we are missing out on the small talk, on the connection, the collaborative problem solving and the informal chats that would normally make up a large part of our day. When we miss out on some of those innate human needs that we yearn for as social animals, we are generally going to be struggling as human beings to be our best.
So as leaders we need to be aware of that and regularly check in with people to make sure that their needs are being met. Notice that I said “checking in” on people. It is very, very different to “checking up” on people. We don’t need to check up on them, because as leaders we know that people want to be successful, we know that given the choice between being productive or unproductive, people would choose to be productive.
The second aspect is something that has been talked about quite a lot and that is “burn-out” or “overwhelm”. One interesting thing that I’ve observed is that the social cost of giving somebody else a task is significantly reduced if we’re not physically present with them. What I mean by that is it’s a lot easier for me to send somebody an email and ask them to do something than it is for me to look them in the eye and ask them to do something for me. As we are more remote, we are relying more on electronic means of communication. What we are seeing is a lot of people asking for a lot more things from others, leading to those people becoming overwhelmed.
The other important aspect when it comes to burn-out is the fact that we are spending a lot of our time on screens and in particular on conference calls, which it’s well documented on is more draining than in-person meetings for various reasons. When we’re spending our time on more draining mediums we’re going to make more mistakes; we’re going to take more shortcuts; innovation will be reduced; motivation will be reduced.
What can we do about it? Well, from my experience, a lot of the time we’re spending on these calls is around status updates and dependency management and usually that comes from being spread across multiple parallel pieces of work. The more pieces of work I am on at the same time, the more dependencies I have, therefore the more coordination I need to do. So one thing I can do as a leader, is help my people reduce the amount of things they are working on in parallel. Help people feel confident to prioritise, to focus, to say “no” or “not yet”. Or “yes” if: I can do that if you take this other piece of work off my hands.
Giving people the confidence and power to prioritise their workload and to focus, will reduce the amount of burn-out, or reduce the amount of fatigue and feeling of overwhelm. It has a secondary benefit of increasing our chances of getting things done, achieving a sense of completion which is so energising and motivating that it will give us more energy to get more stuff done. Focusing on less stuff, allows us to get more stuff done. That’s going to be a win-win for everyone.
The third area I would like to focus on is “suspicion”. Now this is an interesting one for me. Generally speaking, if we don’t see people, then we think less favourably of them. We start doubting their intentions. We start doubting their perceptions of us; we start doubting their interpretations; we start getting very suspicious about what they are doing and why they're doing it.
So as great leaders we can try to increase the opportunities for people to actually see each other, to get together, but not necessarily in a formal status sharing session. Perhaps informal coffee chats or building in time at the start of meetings to just talk about non-work stuff. Reinforce, re-establish that human connection again that will allow us to start thinking more positively of each other. As well as that, great leaders tend to role model this view of unconditional positive regard, choosing to believe that people are acting with positive intent. They take that action and they role model that to others to encourage others to choose to believe a positive interpretation of the possible interpretations.
So there are many things that will be different while leading remotely, but essentially it’s the same. Essentially what we’re doing as leaders is we’re trying to find anything that is stopping our people, stopping our teams from being and doing their best. And once we’ve identified what those challenges are we can work out a way of solving them together and giving the teams the autonomy, the confidence, the competence and the conditions to be successful.
We hope this video gave you some food for thought during these rapidly changing times. Stay tuned for Part 2 later this month!
Watch the recording of Geoff's webinar on "Leading Remotely".
*Click here to read Part 2 blog post*
What do chickens, defensiveness and collaboration have in common? I think that was a question which certainly peaked our audiences interest. Our latest webinar on “50 Ways to Wreck Collaboration and What to do About it” was a great success. Regina Martins, Mariet Visser and myself, were so pleased to see so many join the session!
As you heard in the last webinar of this series, collaboration is not a team sport - initially! Effective collaboration is key to building strong relationships & navigating the working landscape. Let’s recap what collaboration is. Regina referenced researchers' Vreede, Briggs & Kolfschoten (2008) definition of collaboration as “collaboration is making joint effort towards a goal”. It sounds simple but it is deceptively so. In reality it is not so easy to get right.
Regina explains in her blogpost why she believes collaboration isn't just a learned skill, instead it requires an intimate knowledge of our own defensive behaviours. By being self-aware we can recognise when our behaviour is creating blockers to forming collaborative relationships. During her presentation, she tapped into 50 of these defensive behaviours. Regina ran a poll with the audience on some of these behaviours and it was interesting to learn which of these behaviours were the most common:
I think many of us can certainly relate to these.
As a guest in this webinar, Mariet delved into techniques & tips to improve collaboration. She mentions that collaboration is a skill we constantly need to work at and is something which evolves over time. As our context and the people with whom we work shifts, so does how we collaborate.
Our way of working together is not constant and is heavily influenced by our surroundings. For many of us over the past year, our surroundings have shifted from mostly in-person collaboration settings, to having to collaborate virtually. This has subsequently changed how many of our teams operate. - Mariet Visser
It is important to have a good collaborative environment, but how do we create one? Now more than ever before, Mariet thinks it comes down to being really explicit about how important collaboration is to the organization and to the team. These suggestions could act as a good starting point in creating a sound collaborative environment:
You can read more tips and tricks from the blogpost & video of Mariet published prior to the webinar.
We shared some useful links with you during the live session, and I would like to share them again with you here in this post. Let’s start with our upcoming and past webinars, which you can find here on our website. Feel free to share around the recordings with friends/colleagues who missed the live sessions with us.
We also mentioned our ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification (ICP-ATF) training designed to equip you with the necessary skills to create environments of high collaboration, passionate engagement, and where self-organization thrives. Mariet will be running the next remote training in May - we hope to see you there!
Stay up to date with all things Agile by following us on LinkedIn and subscribing to our monthly newsletter (scroll to bottom of page to sign up). As mentioned during the webinar, we’re launching our free agile42 Community! Join over a thousand agilists from around the world with a huge diversity of experiences, backgrounds and culture. Expand your toolbox within this unique, remote learning community.
If you missed the live session, don't panic! The recording is available online.
Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.
Below you will find the slides. Please also feel free to share around.
We hope you enjoyed the session and that we see you in our upcoming webinars. If you have any questions at all, feel free to contact us at any time!
Decision-making is an essential process in every organization and can be used as a proxy for the level of resilience and agility. There aren't any right or wrong ways to decide and there are trade-offs involved in each approach.
For example, centralized decision-making processes lead to more coherent decisions at the cost of longer information flows and synchronization delays. If decisions are distributed and frequent, the organization might instead be more autonomous and responsive at the cost of process coherence. In both cases the downsides can be partially offset, e.g. by deploying information systems or by increasing the cultural coherence.
In our latest webinar on November 16th, called “A decision making approach for resilience”, continuing the series on ORGANIC agility topics, we explored Principle #2 and how to use a common and transparent framework for decision-making processes which adapts to each specific context.
Using the Cynefin framework as a guide, we have created a specialized approach to decision-making based on the Cynefin domains, separating out two processes, which are both critical for resilience:
Both parts of the decision-making process are critical for resilience. In order to quickly recover from failure and adapt to changing circumstances, the organization must have the ability to manage the trade-off between speed, risk, and anticipated consequences.
We explored how a situational analysis can be done, through both individual and group sense-making, and we provided an overview of possible decision-making based on context:
Last we discussed how organizational Archetypes can influence the way these decision making patterns are implemented in practice.
If you want to know more, you are welcome to join one of our upcoming trainings ORGANIC agility Foundation valid for Certified Agile Leadership - Essentials, Teams & Organizations
You are also welcome to have a look at our book ORGANIC agility Foundations: Leadership and Organization!
The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.
Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.
Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) We hope to see you in the webinar regarding Principle #3 in January.
From here you can check out post and upcoming webinars! The list is updated frequently.
Have a great week everyone!
agile42 co-founder, Andrea Tomasini, and founder Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, Dave Snowden, will host a keynote at the Remote Manage Agile on November 24th from 9.20am (CET). The topic is ’… the one most responsive to change’. This keynote will be held in English.
agile42 is the Gold Sponsor of the Manage Agile conference taking place from November 23rd to 26th, 2020. In order to ensure every participants safety, the conference will be taking place remotely this year. There is a great line up of speakers split across lectures, workshops and keynotes. It will be a great opportunity for our network to meet like-minded individuals.
As sponsors of this event, we would like to extend a discount to our valued network. Please use the discount code, MA_aha_20%, when signing up to receive a 20% discount off the standard ticket.
The program (only available in German) is attached here. We hope many of the topics will be of interest to you.
Also Simon Sablowski is keeping a workshop on November 24th at 10.50am (CET) covering the topic, "Wechselwirkungen zwischen Führungsverhalten, Kultur und Struktur einer Organisation". This workshop will be held in German.
We look forward to ‘e-meeting’ you at the conference, and to discuss how agile42 can be a partner in bringing Agile Leadership to your organisation.
Last week we shared our Corporate Learning Program with our network in a webinar. It was a great pleasure to welcome Katrin Birrer from JTI (Japan Tobacco International) to the session who shared her insights and experience from collaborating with agile42 on JTI’s Agile Champion program, a learning experience which is being rolled out to 10,000 employees. From agile42’s side, our experts Simon Sablowski and Lothar Fischmann, presented the Corporate Learning Program.
More and more large corporates want and need to embrace agility. Becoming agile starts with achieving a shared understanding of the values, principles, and key practices. The challenge is to provide learning to thousands of employees. Agile is existing in many parts of organisations, but having every person attend a stand-alone training, probably with different providers, comes with some problems. The learning is different, in as many ways as there are providers. It takes time to coordinate the training, along with it potentially being a significant investment.
We’re finding that corporations are seeking solutions that are more cost-effective than sending individuals to training here and there. The Corporate Learning Program, co-created with the client, is more effective, in many ways.
In the webinar last week we got to take part in JTI’s story and their experience of working with us on their program. We both learnt a great deal through co-creating the program, and we're very pleased with the outcome. You can hear more about this from the recording.
Picture: An example of JTI's program
Our Corporate Learning Program offers large-scale learning by:
If this sparks your interest, how should you start?
The first step is to get in touch with us, so that we can gain an understanding of your situation - how big of an organisation you are; what your needs are.
Once we understand the needs, we can start to co-create the Corporate Learning Program to ensure the program is tailor-made for your needs and context.
From the picture below, you can see the next steps that follow when we have a program that is ready for employees to start exploring.
Here you can find the slides from the presentation.
The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.
We hope that you get in touch with us so that we can start to explore your needs!
*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*
On October 14, I held a webinar about the first principle of ORGANIC agility. Together with 50+ participants, we explored the importance of culture and various ways of making the culture visible both in theory and practice.
Culture is, briefly, “the way we do things around here”. It is the context of all activities within an organization and sets the norms for what behaviour is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It has a very strong influence on how people behave. And companies that are unaware of their culture, uninterested in what it means, or lacking the right tools, risk ending up with a culture that does not fit their strategy.
Culture also plays a very important role in determining how people react to change. If the culture is incoherent, people will find it difficult to agree on which way to go. They may also react to changes in wildly different ways.
What to do about it? It’s clear that culture is complex and can't be designed. We simply can't draw up an “ideal culture” and then deploy it. What we can do instead is measure what we have, and influence it to create more of a certain type of behaviour, and less of another. By running small safe-to-fail experiments, we can try out different approaches and see what works.
When measuring culture, we can choose from a large number of dimensions, including proactivity/reactivity, subordination, risk appetite, emotionality, masculinity/femininity, conflict resolution, power distance, etc. etc. As it turns out, the two most important dimensions — the ones with the strongest explanatory power — are outwards vs. inwards focus, and flexibility vs. control. They form the basis of the Competing Values Framework.
If you want to measure your culture in your organization, you can have a look at our Organizational Scan here.
A company would start by taking a baseline. A month or two of continuous sampling is typical, in order to even out temporary fluctuations. We then run the survey continuously, following the organisational culture in general but also tracking our pilot/experiment teams specifically. What happens over time? If the experiments are giving positive results, we should see the experiment teams migrate slowly in the desired direction.
Leadership styles are going to be particularly relevant to the change process. Subordinates slowly change their behavior to conform to the leadership style that is visible. Having a conscious approach to storytelling and an awareness of ritualized behavior can also support the change and provide some coherence.
Below you can find the slides from my presentation.
The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.
During the webinar, I referenced an article on organisational culture. I’ve found it valuable because it gives a decent overview of cultural dimensions.
We also mentioned the Cynefin framework by Dave Snowden which underpins the whole ORGANIC agility framework.
On November 16 @ 16:00 CET, my colleague Giuseppe will be continuing the webinar series with Principle #2 on decision making in context. Here is the link to that webinar, and we hope to see you there.
*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*
As many of you might have seen, agile42, along with our long-standing client, Swedbank, wrote a Success Story about our journey together. Ever since we've been keen to host a webinar on this, to tell the story! We had the honour of inviting Cecilia Kåhrström to join the webinar with us, where she, together with agile42Sweden's, Giuseppe De Simone, walked the audience through the work we did together.
The journey has been long: some parts of the work with Swedbank began back in 2014. This webinar and the Success Story, specifically focused on the work with Group IT, which started in 2018. A lot has been done together since then, and we are happy to say that we today can call Cecilia and all Group IT leaders and employees, not clients, but friends.
In the picture below, Cecilia summarized all the activities that supported the achievement of their current level of agility and we are particularly proud of the bubbles on the right. In fact they show the things which Swedbank continued on their own after we left, witnessing the accomplishment of our mission: grow our clients’ capabilities so that they are able to persevere on their path to agility sustainably after we leave.
The discussion between Cecilia and Giuseppe opened up these topics.
A particular focus was given to one of the most important factors in this Success Story: how the leaders understood early on that agility could not be achieved just by buying and deploying a predefined process. It was amazing to observe how fast they got this clear understanding compared to other leaders we've met that are just looking for a pre-packaged solution. Every organization that is interested in becoming sustainably agile needs to make this journey on their own: you should not worry about reinventing the wheel, because the journey is more important than the goal.
The slides from the webinar can be found here. You are welcome to have a look at them, and for any questions you have, you can turn to us.
This webinar broke our record with questions from the audience. We had more questions than we could answer. From the recording you can hear the answers that we managed to get to live.
If you missed the live webinar, the recording is available here! It is also available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel free to share it around with friends and colleagues.
We hope that you enjoyed this Success Story. For any questions, feel free to reach out to us!
*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*