Hybrid work, in essence, refers to a flexible model of working that allows employees to work from various locations. At its best, it is a supportive model that empowers teams to choose the working arrangement that is most suitable to them. At its worst, it’s a rigid form of pseudo-flexibility that’s more hassle than it’s worth.
The definition of hybrid work, ultimately, is going to depend on the individual organization. For many companies, it means working from home some days in the week, and working in the office the other days. For us, at agile42, it means working remotely most of the time with occasional onsite days, which are carefully planned and facilitated. On our onsite days, we do not simply proceed with our day-to-day work. We use these opportunities to workshop problems, share knowledge, plan and execute new innovations, or test hypotheses. Importantly, we also use this time to connect socially.
Need help adjusting to a hybrid setup? Contact us for coaching, mentoring, facilitation, and consulting services.
It’s about people, not place
In our line of work, we have helped hundreds of companies to create meaningful change, including configuring their remote work arrangements. We have noticed that many people are starting by asking the question, “Where should people work?” This seems like an obvious question to ask, when dealing with hybrid working scenarios, but we would argue that a better question is “How can we humanize our workplaces to better unleash our people’s potential?”
It is helpful to shift your focus to the people that work for and with you, and to be curious and open-minded about how best you can support them. This is a far more beneficial approach than trying to work out a rigid schedule dictating where and when people must work.
While some companies, agile42 included, have been offering hybrid or remote working arrangements for as long as they’ve been around, for the vast majority of businesses this is unchartered territory. If this is all relatively new to you and you’re feeling unsure, you’re not alone! agile42 has coached and trained hundreds of businesses through this transition. It comes with a unique set of challenges, but once companies get themselves properly set up for hybrid work, the response – from managers, HR, employees, their families, and even their pets – has been overwhelmingly positive. Reach out to our team if you want to chat about how we can help you.
Hybrid work vs remote work
Many people use the terms remote and hybrid interchangeably, but they are in fact quite different. Remote work takes place in a location other than a centralized office, such as home, coffee shops, casual workspaces or hubs, or wherever the person happens to be. On the other hand, hybrid work refers to any of a broad range of configurations, in which remote work takes place some of the time but onsite work is also included.
Benefits of hybrid work
83% of workers prefer a hybrid work model, according to the Accenture Future of Work Study 2021. The same report found that hybrid workforce models are embraced by 63% of high-revenue growth companies.
Hybrid working arrangements have a huge range of benefits. These include:
Cost saving, both for the company and individuals
An increase in efficiency
Higher levels of productivity
A better work-life balance
Improved physical and mental health
A reduced carbon footprint
A wider talent pool
42 tips for hybrid work from personal experience
1. Choose the right reasons to meet in person
One of the complaints we hear most about hybrid work arrangements is that people feel their time is being wasted. “Hybrid workers complain that they go to the office only to log on to Zoom or Teams only to spend the rest of the day with their headphones on,” explains Regina Martins, director of agile42 South Africa. There is very little benefit to this sort of arrangement, and it’s usually a sign of a leadership team that values control over effectiveness and output.
A great alternative is to plan onsite days in which all hands are on deck, and the team has a clear goal to achieve. “Sprint change days are perfect days to be in the office”, suggests agile42 coach Birge Kahraman. If you use Scrum, hosting your big Scrum Events such as Retrospectives and Sprint Planning events in-person is a great use of time together.
“Hybrid introduces the challenges of meeting with people physically and remotely at the same time”, according to Agile coach Giuseppe De Simone. “This may confuse the rules of engagement and make some not feel included. This is why it is extremely important to make rules of engagement explicit and agreed upon by everyone”, he says. In particular, it’s important to focus on rules that ensure everyone has the space and time to share their perspectives equally. This means that we need to have good facilitators that can communicate these rules and make sure that feels safe and included.
“It is also very important to implement a safety protocol that can be ritualized with some gestures so that everyone feels safe to interrupt the conversation and express their need for better rules or more respect for those already in place”, explains De Simone.
“Open cameras are good for non-verbal communication”, shares coach Birge Kahraman. It’s a great idea to agree to have cameras-on meetings regularly. But make sure you’re cognisant of how this can affect people too. “It may drain your energy pretty quickly”, continues Kahraman. “Don’t forget to take regular breaks between meetings in order to prevent Zoom Fatigue”.
The importance of breaks is not new: even in traditional office settings it’s crucial to enjoy frequent breaks. For many people, though, it’s much easier to neglect breaks when working remotely. In an office setting, the cadence of the day makes for a natural rhythm, with periods of focus intermingled with breaks. Walking between meetings, stepping out for coffee, or even making small-talk as you pass a colleague’s desk provide your brain with pauses that are extremely beneficial.
In a home office or remote setup, you have to be much more deliberate about it. Even when people do take breaks, sometimes this means switching to different tabs or rushing around to attend to a family responsibility or housework. While these sorts of disruptions and distractions are inevitable, try to avoid thinking of them as breaks.
Director of agile42 South Africa, Regina Martins, shared her style of taking breaks, which we think is a great way to ensure you actually allow your mind some downtime. “I’ve created a ritual for taking regular breaks around coffee”, she explains. “ it is a whole-body experience with specific anchors: visual (I’ve set up a coffee station with colorful cups, a milk frother and different types of coffees); auditory (the sound of coffee dripping into the cup); olfactory (the smell of the coffee makes me happy) and gustatory. I love coffee!”
“I find our 15 minute daily calls invaluable”, shares Amy Bridge, agile42 operations manager. “It’s great to connect as a team as well as iron out any issues or questions”.
Our social media marketer, Emily Stapylton-Smith, agrees: “I regularly check in with my colleague that I work closely with. These catch-ups can help us to understand each other’s priorities and how we can best support each other. They don’t have to last long, but they are a great way to keep us aligned to our goals and working together.”
It’s a sentiment also shared by Sofia Svanbäck, agile42 Business Relationship Manager, who says “I have found the daily syncs with my team very helpful, and very needed so that you do not feel as alone while in the home office”.
6. Remember that we’re all human
“What always delights me are team members’ pets or children crashing meetings and giving us an unpredictable, fun, off-topic moment”, shares Agile and Design Thinking coach Dennis Büscher. “Have coffee talks, make jokes and smile when having online meetings and video calls”, he continues, “and create space and time to also talk about the best series you recently watched on Netflix or the hangover you had after the wedding on Saturday”. It’s more important than ever to humanize the workplace, and to find joy in seeing one another as people with rich and interesting personal lives.
7. Create an environment for asynchronous communication
“Not everything is urgent”, explains Ebru Yalçınkaya, coach for agile42 Turkey. “Try to create an environment for asynchronous communication, especially for things that don’t need an immediate reply”. If you can replace a meeting with an email, do so. This is especially important when you’re working across multiple time zones.
8. Prioritize connections with colleagues
“When working remotely, we miss out on those quick catch-ups over coffee and other lighthearted conversations that happen when we are in the office together”, explains agile42 social media marketer Emily Stapylton-Smith. “Setting aside some time on a Friday to discuss our weekend plans is a great way to ensure we don’t lose this, or it could be posting a picture of your pet on your Slack channel. These moments matter and can help us feel more connected with one another”.
There are many advantages to working remotely, and many people find it much easier to focus in that environment. However, there are times when onsite collaboration can be an advantage. Coach Lothar Fischmann explains, “I’ve experienced that people talk more to each other when everybody is in the same room, both when coaching clients and internally at agile42. For me this means that meeting onsite is pretty important in all areas where we rely on collaboration, especially when it’s about solving complex problems or interpersonal relations”. This is something we’ve observed many times. As Fischmann notes, “the feedback is always more or less the same: we wouldn’t be able to create so much progress in such a short time as a team, if we were working remotely!”
Of course, collaboration is entirely possible when working remotely, but if you’re looking for a good time to schedule onsite days, look for opportunities to solve problems as a team. Don’t use onsite days to carry on with day-to-day work.
10. Set up the best possible workspace
“Home offices are not real offices and for many people that is a challenge,” explains agile42 CEO Marion Eickmann. But the solution to this is not always to force people into an office. It takes a measured, thoughtful approach from leadership, in which you listen to your teams and come up with solutions that will empower them to do their best work. For some, that may mean having a workspace such as an office available. For others, it could mean flexible working hours to accommodate childcare and other personal responsibilities.
Leadership should provide as much support and infrastructure as possible. Supply teams with the tools they need for productivity, as well as the equipment they need to do their jobs. If the company is saving costs on office space, consider investing some of that in good quality chairs, headphones, desks, screens, or any other equipment that can make home offices more accommodating.
11. Unplug after hours
Another challenge we hear about a lot is that remote workers have difficulty putting boundaries between work and their personal lives. This can have serious consequences, like burnout. “If I leave my PC switched on and logged in, it makes me think that I need to continue working”, shares Ebru Yalçınkaya. “After the office hours and weekends, I sometimes simply turn everything off, pack my laptop away and close it totally, so I understand it is my time to relax”.
“Move!” suggests coach Martin von Weissenberg, “Get out of your chair as often as possible”.
Developer Santiago Gomez agrees: “For me it is very important to get up from my seat and stretch and walk or look through the window to rest my eyes. Going to the kitchen and drinking a glass of water also helps; if I have the bottle on my desk I tend not to stand up too often”.
13. Structure your day and create rituals
Suzanne Daly, Team Assistant at agile42, believes that structure is key. “While working from home, structure your day like you would in the office”, she suggests. “Start at the same time, take frequent breaks (including a lunch break) and finish at the usual time. Personally I find the Pomodoro method works well, particularly while working from home”.
Coach Ninja Granzow agrees: “build habits to structure the day”, she says, “go for a walk in the morning, have lunch, and find an activity to close the workday”.
14. Think about how collocation will improve productivity
“The winners in hybrid working will be those who really think about how – and when – collocation will improve productivity”, muses Peter Hundermark, mentor at agile42, “Just saying ‘you need to be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that’s our new rule’ is not going to cut it.”
“The main purposes of collocation”, he explains, “are (1) to build and maintain human connection and (2) synchronous collaboration where having the whole human system in the room is important. When planning the collocated part of hybrid working, you should be working to achieve these purposes in each aspect, including who is there, when they are there, and how you use the space”.
When you’re working with colleagues who are scattered, having some transparency and visibility around your calendars is important. But this doesn’t mean that any gap in your schedule is up for grabs. A simple trick to avoid finding yourself overbooked in back-to-back meetings, without any real productivity time, is to use your calendars to reserve time for yourself. This could be as simple as setting your working hours, or you could book an entire day every week as a day for focus without disruption. Regina Martins, director of agile42 South Africa, says, “I find it useful to create space in my calendar for lunch. I book it out as a daily recurring appointment called Sit in the sun and smell the roses. This makes sure people don’t book meetings during that time. And I actually try to sit in the sun. I don’t have any roses at the moment because it’s winter in South Africa, but the sentiment applies. It’s also a bit of an inside joke with my fellow coaches”.
16. Do something innovative when you have all hands on deck
At agile42, we host monthly Coach Camps. These began as a knowledge exchange specifically for our coaches, but have transformed into all-hands days of innovation, workshopping, knowledge sharing, and getting to know one another. We do this every month virtually, and once a year we come together in person from all over the world. “Our Coach Camps are completely enlivening”, shares digital marketer Lauren Edwards, “It’s a huge injection of passion and energy: we drop our day-to-day tasks for a day or two and just dedicate ourselves completely to collaboration and innovation. I only see most of my colleagues about once a year in person, and I am so grateful that this is how we use that time together”.
Sofia Svanbäck, agile42 Business Relationship Manager, agrees: “I have also appreciated that we meet with the whole company at our internal Coach Camps – they bring us together as a group”.
Need help planning or facilitating collaboration days? Get in touch, we can help!
17. Make sure everyone is remote (or onsite) but not a mix
“Having some people together in a room and others joining remotely creates a big disconnect”, shares Berlin-based coach Simon Sablowski. Sablowski has years of experience with facilitation, and some of the key principles behind facilitation shed light on why this is the case:
Help people move through a process together
Include all participants and ensure equal participation
Never take sides and always maintain neutrality
These simply don’t work in a hybrid setup, says Sablowski: “Usually one of two things happens: Either the discussion takes place in the room and individuals joining remotely are disengaged and at best listening to the conversation, or the people joining remotely compensate for not being present in the room by trying to dominate the conversation. A hybrid setup hinders people from moving through a process or reaching their goal together. Equal participation is almost impossible. It takes a lot of willingness, discipline and practice to make it work. Facilitators struggle with maintaining neutrality because it’s more natural to take sides with those that are not included in the conversations as much as others. Therefore, we should stick to the principle: If one participant joins remotely, all join remotely”.
18. Accept that people’s home lives might mingle with work more
It can be frustrating when distractions from people’s daily lives creep into work. In an office setting, everyone is dealing with the same circumstances. But in remote or hybrid setups, there may be someone with a screaming child, another person with a cat in front of the camera, someone dealing with a neighbor’s drilling, and yet another person with connectivity issues. “Keep calm if there is some family noise or background noise in Zoom meetings”, suggests Sofia Svanbäck, agile42 Business Relationship Manager, “because they are a part of our new normal when it comes to remote work”.
“One tip I would give is clear ownership of tasks”, advises Team Assistant Suzanne Daly, “Our team regularly reviews our workflow and decides who will take care of what tasks. This ensures each member of the team knows their role and responsibilities. It also ensures that I know that the tasks assigned to other team members are taken care of and I don’t have to worry about them. For vacation, we then decide who will take care of tasks for those who are away so they can relax while they are out of office and know the tasks are taken care of during that time”.
20. Build relationships
“No real teamwork is possible without building true human relationships”, cautions coach Giuseppe De Simone, “Having a group of people truly working elbow to elbow requires meeting in person from time to time, just to build those connections”. And while the occasional offsite holiday-style meetup is great, it’s not enough. This form of in-person meetup creates an artificial environment, says De Simone, “Working on real stuff, collaborating and maybe even fighting… This will help create the relationships that will allow every individual to recognize that face behind the camera not as a stranger, but someone they had a shared experience with”.
21. Ensure trust exists among your team
Trust occurs when team members are able to be vulnerable with one another and are willing to admit their mistakes, weaknesses or needs for help. Without a certain comfort level among team members, a foundation of trust is impossible. This is even more important when working remotely. It’s very easy for people to become isolated, to avoid asking for help, and to let problems build up until they become unmanageable.
Need help building trust and fostering a safe-to-fail culture? Our OrgScan tool is the perfect starting point to help you understand the status quo, and then make meaningful changes.
22. Focus on outcomes not hours
If you’ve installed time-tracking software on your team’s PCs, you’re definitely doing it wrong. Time and again, we see managers and leadership teams counting the hours worked, as if this means anything. It simply doesn’t, in the modern workplace. Focusing on the number of hours spent at a desk has proven negative effects, like presenteeism (working while sick or otherwise impaired) or the so-called “quiet quitting” (employees doing the bare minimum to meet the requirements of their roles). In our years of consulting, training, and coaching, we have seen immense improvements in productivity, work-life balance, and job satisfaction when the focus is on outcomes instead.
Some industries have billable hours, like legal firms and consultancies, and in this instance time-tracking is necessary. However, outside of this, there is no good reason to focus on how many hours your employees are putting in.
23. Lean on your company culture
Hybrid and remote working arrangements are a sure-fire way to expose problems with your organizational culture. The problems created by a bad company culture are exacerbated when you’re not all in the same room.
This is a great time to adapt, and to introduce Agile frameworks that can carry you through with great success. For instance, leaders who are adaptable and have experience with various leadership styles will notice that they don’t really need to make drastic changes when switching to remote. Leaders who previously got by on control, on the other hand, will notice things falling apart fairly quickly.
In a culture of trust, autonomy, and respect, where teams feel safe and confident to make decisions, remote workers can truy thrive. If the culture is such that the team is afraid to make decisions and take initiative, on the other hand, there is likely to be a lot of confusion and delays.
Want to measure and improve your organizational culture? That’s what our Organizational Scan™ is for.
24. Have frequent retrospectives
“Frequent retrospectives (especially initially) can help to ensure everyone in the team agrees with the workflow, and more importantly their personal workload”, says agile42 Team Assistant Suzanne Daly. Retros are always important to make sure everyone’s on track, but in a remote or hybrid setup, they are more important than ever. They give everyone a chance to share the issues they are struggling with.
Hybrid and remote work offers many opportunities to reduce waste, and you should take advantage of these. If you’re part of leadership, consider whether you can save costs on office rental, perhaps by renting a room once a week or once a month instead of every day.
Consider the way you schedule meetings, too. It might be tempting to meet more often when colleagues are not in the same room, especially if there is a lack of trust or structure in the team. But this shouldn’t be necessary and can cause a lot of wasted time.
Commuting can also be attached to waste. If you’re commuting less often, you are saving plenty of time and money.
26. Adapt your leadership style
Agile leadership is the ability to be flexible, use different approaches, and adapt to the context and the people involved. Because of this dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are inherently positive or negative in and of themselves. Rather, there are leadership behaviors which are more or less appropriate within the context.
As an example, some leaders might try to make sudden changes to their leadership style when teams aren’t onsite. They may begin to be more directive, hoping to hang onto a sense of control. For teams who are used to having more autonomy, this can be highly frustrating. On the other hand, leaders may suddenly be less involved, and let teams get on with their work without interference. For teams who are accustomed to being told what to do, and when, this can be a very stressful change.
When leaders understand their teams and use leadership behaviors that align with the needs of their teams, this is known as coherent leadership.
27. Support one another
A Stanford study showed that workers are 13% more productive, on average, when working from home. This is attributed to a lack of commute and distractions. However, it comes at a cost, and loneliness is a very real challenge for many people. It’s much harder to recognize when people are struggling when they’re not in the same room, so it helps to make a point of checking in with one another regularly.
STAGES OF WORKING FROM HOME – Yay I get to work from home – It would be nice to talk to people – I hope that pigeon sits in the window today
In a hybrid work environment, there are different priorities and your budget should shift accordingly. Invest in making it easy for your teams. Listen to your team’s needs, and then invest in the tools, infrastructure, and resources that will meet those needs. The tools should work for you; you shouldn’t work for the tools.
There are many benefits to hybrid working, so remember to take advantage of them. “I am grateful every day for how much time I get to spend with my elderly dog, and how I can use the time I used to spend commuting for exercise instead”, shares Digital Marketer Lauren Edwards. “It’s been important to make sure I log off at the end of the day and enjoy the improved work-life balance hybrid work offers me”.
30. Let go of control
Many leaders have struggled to adjust to hybrid working arrangements. In most cases, this is a result of leaders being accustomed to control over their teams. Hybrid is a great chance to work on letting go of control, managing flow rather than people, and encouraging teams to self-organize. If you need help with this process, agile42’s coaches have decades of experience and can coach, mentor, or train your leaders and teams. Contact us to find out what we can do for your teams.
31. Bring new people on board onsite
“Onboarding is easier face-to-face”, explains CEO Marion Eickmann. When you bring on new team members, try to do so in-person. It helps new team members to settle in and meet their colleagues, in a low-pressure way. If this isn’t possible, try to set up “coffee chats” to meet new colleagues, or arrange an in-person day for the near future.
32. Nurture talent
The popularity of hybrid and remote setups has put us in a unique position. Many barriers have fallen away, giving companies access to top talent like never before. Location is no longer as much of a barrier, so the pool of candidates has expanded. More accessible workplaces also reduce barriers for those with health issues and disabilities, resulting in more diverse and more inclusive workplaces. This makes it possible to find and accommodate the best possible talent for the role.
33. Limit context switching
Context switching, very simply put, is switching between tasks. This is something that is required in most jobs: you have to be able to change between meetings and different kinds of tasks. But many of us have felt the negative effect of too much context switching: when you’re flicking between tabs so much it feels like you’re getting nothing done, or when you’ve jumped from meetings to tasks and back so many times you’re completely exhausted. Our brains simply aren’t capable of this degree of context switching, and this can lead to burnout. “Have regular short breaks”, advised coach Ninja Granzow, “and make sure you balance appointments, interactions, and things to do alone”.
If you’re finding that the budget stretches a little further without paying for daily office space, consider investing this in the people that make up your company. An Organizational Learning Program is a great way to help your teams learn new skills that they can bring to the table.
35. Make use of freed up time
Many people have found that spending less time in an office has brought them greater work-life balance, and opened up a great deal of free time. Our advice is to use this time doing things you love, or spending time with the people that matter to you. Don’t be tempted to work longer hours or get stuck in front of your screen, Log off on time, and do things that bring you joy outside of work.
36. Give feedback
In person, it’s fairly common to walk over to someone to handover a project or submit a piece of work. This means we’re more likely to get regular, consistent feedback. When communication switches to virtual platforms, it can be easy to lose this. If using platforms like Trello, handovers and submissions can begin to happen almost wordlessly, with only automated notifications. Try to schedule regular feedback sessions and make time to give and receive feedback. Sprint Reviews fill this role well if using Scrum.
37. Communicate well
“Clear and consistent communication with team members is so important”, says Team Assistant Suzanne Daly. “Having multiple ways to communicate is useful so your Team always feels accessible. But make sure you have working agreements on how to use certain forms of communication, so that information is not lost”.
These days, it isn’t uncommon for teams to be working from various countries. If your business has a global footprint it’s a huge advantage to have a presence across time zones. However, it can make collaboration difficult. Try to ensure that team members overlap, at least by a few hours, where possible. In most cases, even an hour or two is enough to make sure there is frequent communication.
39. Meet in person occasionally even if your work is fully remote
“Over the pandemic this was not possible”, says Office Manager Suzanne Daly, “but meeting in person even infrequently is good for team members. It’s a chance to socialise and talk about non-work things”
40. Make mentorship accessible
One thing that comes more naturally in an office setting is mentorship. It can be much more challenging for younger, less experienced team members to reach out for help if they have to do so through digital communication. Acknowledge this, and try to set something up that works for your teams. Perhaps you could do monthly or weekly workshops or knowledge sharing sessions, or you could set up a formal mentorship programme.
“Music!” says Regina Martins, director of agile42 South Africa. “I work well with music… so I do!”
And it’s not just about music. Choose to make your workspace work for you! On your remote days you have the chance to make your workspace whatever you want it to be. Maybe you like the temperature set low, or loud music, or maybe you prefer absolute silence. It’s a unique chance to set up the space that works for you, without having to consider colleagues.
If you’re just adjusting to a hybrid setup, or even fully remote, it’s a good time to take stock and improve. Ask yourself if there are redundancies, waste, too many meetings, or other factors curbing productivity and causing fatigue. And if there are, take the chance to do something about it.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, trends like “The Great Resignation” have kicked off a long overdue conversation about hybrid and remote work, and how to do this well. For example, some hybrid workers complain that they go to the office to log on to Zoom or Teams only to spend the rest of the day with their headphones on because the rest of their team is at home. A lot of people feel disconnected from their teams and that they are missing out on the human element of work. agile42’s coaches recently discussed this in the Humanizing Hybrid Work webinar.
Watch now |Humanizing Hybrid Work
At agile42, we’ve worked in hybrid and remote setups for over 15 years, and we specialize in helping to build more effective and resilient teams. In this panel discussion, our Agile coaches, Regina Martins, Debbie Hishin, and Daniel Lynn offer a different perspective by focusing on the human element of hybrid work and by using the four Agile values as an anchor point for this discussion. Watch as they unpack the complexities of this conversation, delving into the pros and cons of various working arrangements, and share the innovative solutions they’ve come up with to make things go more smoothly.
According to coach and director of agile42 South Africa, Regina Martins, goal-setting has helped her and her teammates communicate effectively. In fact, goal setting can be used for organizational change. They are very explicit about their goals and co-created them to make sure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same things. Being face-to-face is not a prerequisite for being more effective. Virtual interactions and the value obtained from these interactions can be as effective as those that take place in person if you’re aligned on agreements and goals.
2. Be intentional about hybrid working
We discovered through this discussion that people have many different definitions of hybrid work. For some people, it means going to the office some days, and for others, it means that some people are together while others are at home. While there are varying instances and definitions of hybrid work, our coaches agreed that we should be intentional about it. Collaboration that requires lots of creativity and constructive conflict benefits from being in one room. So, things like design, strategy, and goal-setting could be good opportunities for people to meet in person. Another option is to hold your Scrum events (excluding the Daily Scrum) in person. Make sure that your in-person days are centered around building connections rather than going about your day-to-day tasks.
3. Human connection is key
What a lot of people seem to lack in hybrid setups is human interaction and connection. There are many ways to overcome this, such as team-building activities or using tools that encourage collaborations, such as a virtual whiteboard or Miro. Agile coach, Debbie Hishin, also shared that a camera-on policy is a good idea to make sure we are picking up on non-verbal communication. Some other ideas could be to use a team notice board or a kudos channel. As a leader, make some time to check in with colleagues and see how they are feeling.
Just because there is no office doesn’t mean there can’t be any office banter. Get creative with ways to connect. Debbie Hishin suggests trying a GIF Friday where you can only reply with GIFs!
Lastly, when you do meet in-person, make sure these sessions are geared towards human connection. So that we can build trust and make sure relationships are intact for when we work remotely.
4. Always come back to your why – understanding people’s needs
Many companies are asking employees to return to the office which has been met with mixed responses. If you are unsure about new policies or what will work in the long term, it always comes back to your “why”. Ultimately it should be about meeting the needs of our employees. Are these needs being met in the office or at home? Just like companies need to think about why clients would buy something, they should also think about why their employees would buy into working from home or at the office. What are the selling points for people, and then try to work around that.
Leaders in remote and dispersed environments need to understand these needs and make sure they are creating a safe environment for people to perform their best. This is where Agile leadership can make a meaningful impact.
US-based coach, Daniel Lynn, shares that empathy is very important in remote settings, and this means understanding people’s boundaries. Zoom fatigue is a very real thing, so make sure you are regularly taking breaks. Often, to make up for the lack of face-to-face connection, people get bombarded with meetings. In this case, it’s important that people feel empowered to say no and have boundaries.
It’s also the case that not everyone wants to participate in work events after hours, and that’s okay too. Just because we are working in hybrid settings doesn’t mean we should over-commit or feel that we have to prove anything.
When I was a kid, maybe eight years old, something magical happened to me. It was a sunny day. My parents had put a sliding door in our dining room, which lit up the space in gold every summer afternoon. That particular day, the room held my dad and a couple of his students from the high school where he taught Latin. They were limned in bright solar rays, excitedly talking about fighting goblins, looting gold, and casting spells while drinking Coca-Cola and rolling dice, having a grand old time.
Dad was the sponsor for his school’s wargaming club (later renamed to the ‘conflict simulation group’ at the behest of anxious administrators). Occasionally, his students would come to our house to play Dungeons and Dragons on the weekend. There was no satanic panic about the world’s most popular roleplaying game in our home. While my mother and my sister didn’t understand it (and still don’t), my father had caught the bug. He was happy to set up a space to play for the kids who could pay the toll to get across the Delaware River and drive the ten miles to our place.
I tottered in amongst the older kids, big as Hill Giants to me, and tugged at my dad’s sleeve. He looked down through his brown, plastic-framed Coke bottle glasses at me with a smile that was so rarely displayed to kids my age. I asked what was going on.
“We’re playing a game,” he told me.
I could tell he was anxious to get back to it, but I followed up with the obvious question: “Can I play?”
Dad laughed and told me no, I couldn’t. It was a bummer for sure, and he must have seen it in my face because he followed up quickly:
“Come back when you’re older.”
“How old?” I asked. I probably tried to hide my excitement and failed (something I still do poorly).
“I’d say twelve. Twelve?” He looked up at the other kids. I don’t think they were paying any attention, but I was. Because, even for a kid who struggled to pay attention to anything, this I would remember. Because this looked like so much fun.
Neither dad nor I knew that he’d be setting me up for not just the hobby that would define how I spent a large swathe of my recreational time moving forward, but also my experience with Scrum.
I could tell you all about my time growing up in the hobby of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs for short) – but this is not a gaming article. Instead, I’m writing about business. I’m supposed to write about goals. And, and, and… numbers. About making hard decisions and leading teams. We’re talking about planning for success and delivering products and value week after week.
And… figh… fighting goblins?
Well, as a life-long gamer, I can tell you that you will be amazed at how much Dungeons and Dragons can prepare you for business. Even more remarkably, how being the Emcee of a D&D game – a Dungeon Master – will prepare you for being a Scrum Master.
Stay with me. I think you’re going to be very surprised.
The Basics of D&D
Before we get too far into the overlaps of Scrum Mastering and Dungeon Mastering, let me bring you in on what D&D (and any TTRPG in general) is, in case you’re in the dark.
D&D is a storytelling game where you and a group of friends take on the roles of adventurers in an elaborate fantasy world of swords and sorcery. These adventurers go on quests like defeating mad wizards or carrying out elaborate heists against tyrannical nobles. Players describe what those adventurers do in the world. A roll of the die determines anything that could be left up to chance (usually using a twenty-sided die or D20). One of the player’s jobs – the Dungeon Master (or DM) – is to set the stage and describe the world to the other players. The DM also takes on the roles of the supporting cast in the story, arbitrates (or throws out) rules where needed, and ensures everyone has a good time.
If it sounds like the DM has a challenging job, you are correct! I speak from experience here – I have been a DM for over thirty years across dozens of different campaigns and rules systems (D&D may be the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game, but it’s not the only one).
If it sounds like there are some similarities between the Scrum Master and the Dungeon Master, you are also correct. The similarities don’t stop at just the DM, though, so before we get too far into the similarities of DMs and Scrum Masters, let’s get down to some D&D brass tacks first. I promise not to get too nerdy on you.
Let’s talk about how a game of D&D looks through the prism of Agile (which I’ll refer to as Scrum World). Of course, D&D and Scrum World aren’t precisely one-to-one, so there are some things to map out for the sake of clarity:
The Scrum Team maps to what in D&D is called a “Party”.
A Party typically comprises one DM and three to six Player Characters (PCs). The goal of the Party is usually to complete a story. The story can vary in length, but any given story will at least take several sessions, with an average session lasting two to four hours.
In this analogy, the DM is a Scrum Master (and, if I’m being honest, a Product Owner between sessions). The PCs are Developers.
The story is the product. The product’s Definition of Done is that everyone felt included, the story resolved to their satisfaction, and that everyone had a good time. To Quote master storyteller Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself): “It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.”
So, how are the roles similar? Let us enumerate the ways.
The DM’s Job is to Continually Deliver Value Every Session
At Agile’s core is the principle of continuing to deliver a quality, functional product at the end of every sprint. The DM’s job is no different. If the DM fails, the PCs leave. The party gets together every week to play D&D because they want to tell a story that engages and excites them. If the DM can’t do that, those PCs can do other things with those two to four hours per week, especially when those players are Busy Adults With Many Things To Do. They can get together to play a board game or watch a movie without the pretense of also having to pretend to be a Druid if they’re not feeling it. So the DM has to deliver.
The DM’s product, the story, develops like any Scrum team’s product: action by action and scene by scene over several sessions, just like products are assembled over a series of Sprints. Software code is developed line by line; cars are engineered component by component; devices are tooled part by part. And as each Sprint rolls out, the output should get better and develop into something closer to that big beautiful idea everyone was dreaming of at the outset. As the collective project grows, it gets better, and the DM or Scrum Master makes those little subtle nudges that bring out the best of the project. This brings us to…
A Good DM Identifies the Strengths and Weaknesses of Their Players
The DM has to learn a lot about each PC around the table to put them in the right places at the appropriate times. For example, they know that bringing a Wizard to a knife fight is a bad idea (at least at a low level), in the same way that sending a Fighter to a diplomatic assembly of Archmages is a classic faux pas.
To be fair, a DM has an advantage that a Scrum Master doesn’t: narrative control. DMs can mold a story around the players that come to their table. But, more often than not, a Scrum Master already has the right people around them if an HR department has done their due diligence. But not all team members will be the same, and those little differences matter. Find out who your Rogues and Bards are (and let them be POs, those interpersonal skills are excellent for stakeholders). Identify Wizards and Sorcerers early (and give them caffeine judiciously). Use each person’s skills and talents and let them shine where they’ll do the most good.
A Surprising Amount of the DMs Job Is Tracking Metrics and KPIs
Ask any game fan about its nuts and bolts, and you’ll quickly discover that many numbers are spinning around. Look at pro baseball. All you have to do is flip over a baseball card – stats galore. You can argue about whether or not some of those stats indicate anything, but metrics count to stakeholders, and they hold you accountable to them. To the stakeholders of those pro sports teams, those stats are all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and if they dip too far, it’s back to the minors for those players or even farewell from the franchise entirely.
In D&D, it’s different, of course. PCs have a Character Sheet that lists all the things they can do in an even more concrete and non-debatable sense. Most relevant details are listed on that sheet, from how strong or fast they are to how well they take hits to how many spells they can learn and cast in a day.
Fail to keep your party’s KPIs up to snuff, and your PCs could find themselves tapped out of many encounters. Worse still, they could be overpowered more permanently at the end of some nasty critter’s claws. Well, on paper at least (if a character dies, they can always roll up another one or pay a cleric to resurrect them, c’est la vie). But, players are encouraged by an excellent DM to make sure that they keep their PCs moving toward their goals in a way that keeps the story enjoyable for everyone, and that means knowing how to set realistic goals based on capability.
A good DM must know what a PC party can realistically handle in any given situation and set tasks accordingly. They best track that by the Party’s KPIs, which for a PC could be anything from their Armor Class, Damage Per Round, or the number of Spell Slots they have. Scrum World examples will vary, of course, based on the given Devs outputs. But, it maps in more similar ways than you’d think. Speaking of challenges…
A Wise DM Encourages Innovative Solutions (and Gets Failures Out of the Way Early)
A good DM also knows that they often have to put their players in positions where they might just fail. Failure is a part of the game, and it’s why dice are involved.
Any time there’s a chance something could go wrong, the DM calls for PCs to roll a die. The die result checks against a difficulty set by the DM. An easy D&D task is usually a 10, while something nearly impossible is a 30, with most tasks falling somewhere in the middle. And sometimes, even a high-level character rolls a one and botches at something in which they’re skilled.
It just happens. It’s going to happen to your developers in Scrum World, too. As both an experienced DM and a newly-minted Scrum Master, I’ve found that the earlier you can get that kind of thing out of the way, the better.
Case in point: a player in one of my parties had designed their PC as a healer. He chose to play a Cleric, a role traditionally suited to this (not always the case in fifth edition D&D, but that’s a whole other blog article for an entirely different place). When the first battle came around, he decided on the first round to surprise everyone. He waded into the fight and hit the bad guys with his staff. The Party took a beating with their healer tangled up in the melee. They survived though, albeit with more dings and scratches than they signed on for.
To their credit, no one in the Party got upset, but I held an impromptu Retrospective after the session. The big question was: why did the Cleric go in running? The answer was that he simply wanted to be helpful in the moment. The Cleric happened to roll high on his initiative, meaning he went first. No one was hurt yet, and he didn’t want to waste a turn, not thinking about holding his action instead of rushing in.
From that point forward, he knew waiting for the team to move in before committing to any actions was an option, making for a better strategy as a support member of the party. If things went well next time, sure: he could clobber some opponents. But, if he was going to shine as a healer, he might want to hold back no matter how good his initiative rolls were to see if a teammate needed support before going on the offensive.
There is a school of thought among PCs in D&D Parties that staying in your lane is best. You should Know Your Role (in all capital letters) and never leave it. A Rogue should stick only to situations where they pick locks and can benefit from providing sneak attacks. A Warlock should always be in the back and cast Eldritch Blast on repeat into infinity. A Wizard should cast Magic Missile until they’re out of spell slots and then hide under a wagon until the fighting is over.
It sounds reasonable. Players pick these roles because they want to be good at certain things. And those epic, level twenty powers sound cool. Who doesn’t want to max out a class and be the Thiefiest Thief to ever Thief?
I have a secret for you. Lean in close. I will lay some expert DM knowledge on you from my thirty-plus years of experience.
You’re never going to make it to level twenty. I have no intention of letting it go that far. Not in my campaign, at least.
Every D&D game I have ever run has either fallen apart or come to a close well before getting to that stupidly high-level threshold. The highest I’ve ever gotten as of this writing was a tenth-level Party. That campaign had single-class adventurers fighting tooth and nail with low saving throws against conditions that, if they multiclassed, would not have been problematic at all.
Anyone used to working with Scrum will tell you about cross-functionality. Building it into a team is at the crux of agility. A good DM learns this quickly and encourages this in their party. A Barbarian that can clobber a sentry or sneak around them after putting a couple of levels into the Rogue class will be able to hold onto their rages for better use later. A Fighter who can cast a couple of Mage cantrips can get an edge in their encounters without risking their neck quite as often. And the saving throws get nothing but better.
Scrum World Developers similarly get better when a Scrum Master pushes them to develop accordingly, setting them up for success with the right coaching techniques and skills. In Scrum World, technology and science advance too quickly to let team members focus on a single discipline. Overspecialization can set Devs and their Scrum teams up for obsolescence or single points of failure. Coaching new skills and pushing teams to adopt new technologies and methods will keep your team cross-functional in a fast-changing world.
The Best DMs Know Planning is Good, But Being Prepared is Better
As a DM, I have had an entire story fall apart after a player with a lucky roll took out my villain in a single hit. There was supposed to be a whole arc with that villain as a recurring character. He would keep the party on their toes week after week as a nefarious player in the shadows. Instead, a single die roll ended the whole thing thirty minutes into the first session. Everyone went home, and I was intensely frustrated. I had a plan I worked on for hours, but I wasn’t prepared for a player to pick out the ridiculously overpowered weapon used to kill my bad guy.
There is a difference between having a plan and being prepared. With a plan, you have already committed to a specific course of action. You put things in place, worked out fine details, and estimated the functions of all the moving parts. There are processes and documentation you probably reviewed. You counted on those things to work out exactly as planned and with little deviation.
An experienced DM knows better. PCs – who are ideally the DMs friends and sometimes their family – are only there to have fun. They do not give a damn about any of the DM’s plans. They have their own ideas about how fun happens during the session and it may have nothing to do with a DM’s plan. All a DM can do is know the PCs and prepare based on what they know about the Party. DMs need to have a lot of options available to them, know where they all are, and to only dive into the specifics once they are needed.
PC (and Devs, for that matter) will not be little copies of the DM and will not act the exact way you want. Nor should they. PCs and Devs are human, unique. They bring something to your Party or Scrum team through different ways and means. It’s not something to be beaten out of them or micromanaged. Humans, shared stories, and volatile industries fiercely resist being wrangled in such a fashion.
To approach complicated and uncertain situations with agility, a good DM or Scrum Master should prepare to optimally use their PC’s and Dev’s unique approaches and methodologies. Then, find the right coaching approach to engage them. When a Scrum Master or a DM can engage their Party or a Scrum team, it’s amazing what they can do.
As a DM, I must sometimes work hard to get in my players’ heads since I love bringing my favorite hobby to new players (new PCs haven’t learned how to be cynical PCs yet). Finding out how they approach the gaming table can be challenging. Do they like to fight, or do they like puzzles? Do they live for drama, or do they just want to help everyone around the table? Is the thrill of adventure something they live for? Or is it an excuse to cook for everyone around the table and see friends? Once I find what motivates them, I find the best way to run a game for that group… and then I can plan.
This Sounds Hard
It is hard—both the DM job and being a Scrum Master. Taking on either role takes serious determination and a lot of practice. But agile42 is here for you. The Scrum Master part, not the DM part! The good news is that everything here works in reverse, too. If you want to be a good DM, being a good Scrum Master is a great place to start! Book an appointment to speak with us at agile42 North America today to learn more about our coaching and training services. And, of course, go to DNDBeyond to learn more about Dungeons and Dragons, the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game.
Organizational culture is so much more than a value statement on your website; it’s the sum of the experiences and beliefs of the people involved. It can be measured through living manifestations, such as rituals, stories of success and failure, habits, and unwritten rules. It is your experience as an employee, and it dictates how you feel about your company and your work. A bad company culture can affect the whole organization and get in the way of sustainable change, growth, and innovation.
Organizational culture can’t be designed or changed, but it can be measured and influenced. Find out how in our Webinar on Shaping Company Culture.
According to a 2022 survey conducted by FlexJobs, toxic company culture is the number one reason people are leaving their jobs. Organizational culture can encompass many different things, so it can be hard to pinpoint where your company is going wrong. In fact, the 2022 State of Agile Coaching Report by Scrum Alliance states that changing an organization’s culture was reported as one of the top challenges.
While it can be hard to put your finger on your organization’s culture, here are some tell-tale signs that you may have problems in this area. Plus, how to resolve them.
Five red flags that indicate you have a toxic culture
Teams aren’t trusted to make decisions
Leaders have a fixed leadership style
The team lacks purpose and direction
The team seems scared to fail
People feel burned out
Let’s dive a little deeper into each of these signs of a bad company culture.
Red flag 1: Teams aren’t trusted to make decisions
Many companies advocate for transparency and trust, but these concepts are often embraced in theory without being encouraged in practice. Management teams that don’t allow for autonomy and decision-making can leave people feeling stifled. As a result, the quality of work will suffer and teams may have negative feelings about management styles or a particular manager.
A lack of trust can also lead to a culture of hierarchy. Hiereachal corporate culture is based on clearly defined levels, which depend on rules and a top-down level of control. In today’s fast-paced, unpredictable workplace, we need new ways of working. Hierarchical management is not suited to a fast-changing environment that requires fast decision-making.
Faster delivery requires more agile ways of working. This means that people closer to the problems need to be trusted to make decisions and make them quickly. People should be able to self-organize, which requires the support of their work environment and leaders. This approach not only helps organizations thrive, but it helps employees feel trusted, which in turn helps them feel more positive about their organization and more connected to their teams.
How to spot it: A common sign of this problem is frequent bottlenecks or team members’ appearing reluctant to take ownership of projects.
How to fix it:Educate the team and leaders about what self-organization is and give people the trust and support they need to do a great job.
Agile leadership requires us to make sense of a situation before we respond, so that our behaviors are coherent with the group of people we are leading and their specific context. So, leaders need to understand the existing context and culture. If leaders fail to do this, it can leave the team feeling frustrated and distrustful.
Even if a specific leadership behavior seems appropriate for a situation, it needs to fit the cultural expectations of the people involved. If it does not, it will very likely cause a negative emotional response and potentially increase motivational debt. In some cases, the impact can be so severe that people decide to leave. This could be seen during the “Great Resignation.” This is a great example of what can happen at the extremes of incoherent leadership.
Coherent leadership is so important, especially as people are more aware of their needs, wants, and expectations in the workplace. Companies can no longer get away with toxic work cultures that don’t value their employees’ happiness. This means that leaders have an important role in cultivating supportive environments.
How to spot it: You will notice that teams are unsure of how to organize around tasks, what the next steps are, or what is expected of them.
How to fix it: Implement and understand Agile leadership. These leaders focus on managing the environment rather than managing people.
To feel driven and motivated in the workplace, we need to be working towards bigger goals. It is crucial that companies communicate these goals and are transparent about them.
Employees should complete their daily tasks and know what is expected of them, but they also should be aware of the bigger picture. This requires communication around strategic goals. The company’s vision needs to filter across the company, not just at the top level. Not only is this exciting for employees, but it also helps them to feel engaged, and more likely to collaborate and work strategically.
How to spot it: Team members are absorbed in their day-to-day tasks and, as a result, no innovation or improvement takes place.
How to fix it: Leaders can help their teams by setting a clear vision, explaining where to go and why, and making sure to continuously give and receive feedback.
Red Flag 4: The team seems scared to fail
Change is scary, and failing is scary, but it is necessary. There can be a lot of money and ego attached to certain projects, which can failing even scarier. Organizations with a healthy company culture try to create “safe to fail” environments. It is not enough to say to people, “You can fail.” Agile leaders know that effective change in a complex environment can only work with an evolutionary approach. They focus on leveraging the potential of the present and the natural predispositions that already exist in a team or an organization, instead of pushing towards an unrealistic ideal state.
It is like parenting. If we want our kids to learn about collaboration, we don’t describe what good collaboration looks like and create a plan for it. Instead, we might encourage them to apply to a football or basketball team or to join a music band. Through these experiences, they will build collaboration “muscles” and learn what collaboration feels like.
Organizations should encourage people to voice their opinions and take on experimental new projects. A side effect of that will almost certainly be failure. If your organization is not encouraging these types of behaviors, then you can’t change, grow, or learn in the process.
How to spot it: There are very fixed and defined roles within an organization, which do not allow for experimentation to take place.
How to fix it: Allow skilled teams to self-organize and decide how to approach the situation through experimentation. An Agile mindset and approach can help teams achieve this.
If there is a sense of burnout within the team or leadership, it could mean that individual values aren’t aligned with those of your company. This can leave people feeling drained.
One of the biggest causes of this kind of problem is when people are expected to work at an unsustainable pace to meet certain goals or deadlines. While this may get results in the short term, it has far-reaching negative consequences in the long term. Sooner or later, fatigue and anxiety will filter in. Plus, this will negatively affect both the quality of work and work-life balance, which has a massive impact on how people feel about their workplace.
How to spot it: A common sign of burnout is when teams are constantly starting work but not always finishing it. Middle management, teams, and individuals are 100% busy, but delivery is slowing down.
How to fix it: Learn to identify and eliminate impediments to the flow of work in order to keep queued work manageable and alleviate pressure on teams.
The Next Steps to Improving Your Company Culture
There are many ways that companies can improve their culture. But before organizations embark on this journey, they need to know exactly where they are going wrong and what people are saying about their company culture. In our decades of working with organizations, we’ve seen countless hours wasted by not getting to the root of the problem.
Our Organizational Scan™ tool is a scientific, data-based way to measure company culture and take action based on facts, rather than assumptions.
It gives an accurate, real-time view of your organizational culture, leadership style, decision-making capabilities, and employee happiness. This empowers you and your organization to make positive, sustainable changes.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about what it means to be an Agile coach. Agile coaching companies have difficulties explaining the value they will bring to their customers, and the role is often treated like a multi-team Scrum Master. In this webinar, our hosts, Martin von Weissenberg and Magnus Kollberg, take a hard and in-depth look at the Agile coaching profession. They clear up some of these misconceptions so that you can find a clear and understandable explanation of what an agile coach is, what an agile coach does (and doesn’t do), and the value they can bring to organizations. They also give guidance on how to become one, sharing the relevant credentials and competencies you may need, as well as challenges you may face and how to overcome them. Lastly, they answer our audience’s most pressing questions.
In the final webinar of our webinar series on the Scrum Events, we discuss the Retrospective. The Scrum Guide defines the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective as “to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness”. That sounds simple, but it’s actually one of the more complex Scrum Events. Watch as our coaches, Pascal Papathemelis and Ebru Yalcinkaya, take a closer look at Retros. They start by walking through the basics, like the basic structure of this event and what the Scrum Guide says about it. Then, while interacting with the audience and drawing on their experiences and challenges, they dive deeper, covering useful formats, common pitfalls, and some tips for making this event truly enlightening and productive for your teams.
In the fast-changing environment of our modern world, building and maintaining a thriving organization is a huge challenge, no matter if the company is big or small. It’s always been necessary for managers and leaders to understand the business itself very well, but today there are new challenges too. Organizations need to be adaptable, innovative, and engaging for people. In order to be successful in the new environment, a leader not only needs to learn a lot, but unlearn a lot too. There are new and different behaviors, skills and tools needed to nurture successful teams and organizations. This is where Agile leadership can make a meaningful impact.
The term “Agile leadership” is made up of two key terms: agile and leadership.
Agile is an adjective, not a verb. It is not something you do, implement, or deploy: it is rather something you are. It is a property of a system, whether an individual, a team, or an entire organization. There’s a reason the word is exemplified by an athlete: being agile is about flexibility, and the ability to respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances.
The Oxford dictionary defines leadership as “the action of leading a group of people or an organization”. From this perspective, leadership is not something connected to a formal role, and nor is it something people are either born with or not. All of us can be leaders and followers in different contexts. Leadership is simply an ability to build.
Agile leadership is the ability to be flexible, use different approaches, and adapt to the context and the people involved. Because of this dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are inherently positive or negative in and of themselves. Rather, there are leadership behaviors which are more or less appropriate within the context.
Agile leadership is about the ability to make sense of the circumstances and adopt behaviors which are coherent with what the group of people you are leading in a specific context feels comfortable with. Incoherent behaviors are those that are not helpful within a specific situation and might be perceived negatively in the given cultural context. For this reason, Agile leadership is useful for any organization hoping to succeed in today’s climate, not only Agile organizations.
Coherent vs Incoherent Leadership
Like a sportsman needs to master many techniques to be really flexible, a true Agile leader has to master multiple leadership styles to be able to adopt the one that fits the specific context. That is quite a challenge, since we all feel more comfortable to adopt one or two specific leadership approaches and generally find others harder. If you do not practice the ones you are less comfortable with, the risk to propose an incoherent leadership is very high, which can be more harmful than you think.
In my coaching, I have observed the following pattern many times: People in a given organization are used to being told what to do. They have learned to be comfortable with it, because they are rewarded to follow directives. One day the manager comes and says, “Now we are Agile, so you are self-organized and empowered to do what you think is most appropriate”. People stare at each other wondering what this might mean, thinking “just tell us what to do and we will do it”.
This is an example of incoherent leadership. The resulting frustration and dissatisfaction are known as Motivational Debt. Even if a specific leadership behavior seems appropriate to a situation, it needs to fit the cultural expectations of the people involved. If it does not, it will very likely cause a negative emotional response and potentially increase motivational debt. In some cases, the impact can be so severe that people decide to leave. The “Great Resignation” all companies witnessed between 2020 and 2022 is a great example of what can happen in the extremes of incoherent leadership.
So, while it is true that Agile organizations are built upon autonomous and self-managed teams, this shift cannot be pushed onto people overnight. Individuals and teams need to be gently guided over time into becoming more autonomous and Agile, by adapting the leadership and the environment iteratively and incrementally, in the service of making people the best version of themselves.
Agile leadership principles
In the last 15 years, I have had the chance to talk to a lot of leaders involved in efforts to create more agile organizations. Many of these leaders shared a sense of frustration for the many “don’ts” they were prescribed – and too few “do’s”.
These leaders were constantly hearing things like, “Don’t assign tasks to people!”;”Don’t tell the team how to do something!”; or “Don’t take decisions the team can take on their own!”.
The most common consequences of this frustration and uncertainty are two and both potentially harmful: the leader backs off and starts not to do anything or the leader keeps doing the same things as before exactly in the same way as before.
How do we address this then? How does effective leadership work in a 21st century organization?
Individuals and organizations are not machines, but living organisms who need to learn and adapt. This means that we cannot always have pre-programmed rules to follow. Pre-programmed rules and predefined processes work well in a stable environment where we are able to predict all possible scenarios and prepare in advance to handle them. But what about the scenarios or disruptive changes we cannot predict?
In such a context, it is more effective to learn and rely on principles instead of rules. First we need to incorporate those principles into our decision-making and leadership styles. Then, when new circumstances unfold, we can define appropriate practices, aligned with those principles, to make use of.
A good analogy for this is parenting. When kids are small, we can give them specific rules to follow, which work well in the safe space they live inside the family: “Don’t put your fingers into the plug! Sit well! First, finish your homework and then you can use your mobile phone!” However, if we want them to grow up and be equipped to face the unexpected events of adult life, we need to stop giving them rules and start teaching them principles (e.g. “Be honest”). Only then will they be able to apply themselves in different situations.
So what are useful Agile leadership principles to incorporate?
1. Manage the environment, not the people
Research and empirical evidence tell us that we can’t change people: we can hardly change the person we see in the mirror every morning. But we can change the environment and people’s experiences so that the behaviors and the results we expect come to life naturally.
Every organization has a vision and sets goals and metrics to monitor on the way to that company vision. Those goals are achieved (or not) through the results that every single person in the organization accomplishes. Some of them are exciting, like bringing an innovative product to the market, and some of them are just necessary, like filling in tax returns. But all results come from actions and behaviors. And going one step deeper, actions come from decisions, which in turn are informed by beliefs: we decide based on what we think is right or best in the moment.
Our brains are connecting machines, which create wired patterns through which we interpret the reality around us and decide what is right or wrong. These patterns are created through the experiences we have lived all our lives. Existing patterns cannot be broken: the power of one to one conversations is therefore overrated. But new patterns can be created through novel experiences.
Traditional leaders tend to focus on managing people’s actions. This approach addresses just the tip of the iceberg, and it only works well in a very stable environment. In such a state, the rate of change is so slow that we can afford to have only a few people (the managers) in control of decision making and the rest of the workforce simply executing.
When the rate of change is high, the reaction from hierarchical management is too slow and can create bottlenecks. Here, decision-making power must be distributed and given to those closer to the problem. To avoid the risk that everyone takes their own direction, this distributed decision-making power needs to be coherently funneled towards the company goals and vision.
Organizational culture is so much more than a value statement on your website: it’s the sum of the experiences and beliefs of the people involved. The organizational culture can be measured through its living manifestations, such as rituals, stories of success and failure, habits, and unwritten rules.
Today, an effective leader does not create superficial compliance to company values, but leverages approaches such as mentorship and coaching to create new experiences, which will then result in new stories, new rituals and new behaviors.
Agile leadership focuses at the bottom of the pyramid to manage the environment and create those experiences for people to build coherent beliefs, which will in turn determine coherent decisions.
2. Build autonomy and trust
Modern-day organizations benefit from decentralized decision making. To be more resilient and equipped to face unexpected circumstances, they must be built upon autonomous and self-managed teams.
But as we said above, the shift from a fully hierarchical chain of command to autonomy cannot be pushed onto people overnight. Individuals and teams need to be respectfully guided over time to become more autonomous and agile, by adapting to the leadership and the environment iteratively and incrementally.
An Agile leader carefully selects those leadership behaviors that can act as a bridge in the gentle transition towards higher levels of autonomy with minimum disruption and resistance.
This process of transition and discovery will be shaped by bringing diverse perspectives together, for instance by asking people to share stories of success and failure. Some questions you could ask include:
Do they associate stories of success and failure with the same leadership approach or with different ones?
What behaviors from the leader do they associate with success or failure?
Is the group uncomfortable with higher autonomy at a given moment or do they favor it?
A transition towards a higher level of autonomy while building trust (instead of harming it) is based on adopting iteratively and incrementally more of the behaviors that are associated with the desired state and less of the ones that are not.
At the same time, it is necessary to build the teams’ skills to sustain high levels of autonomy, for instance the ability to navigate conflicts, collective decision making, and the ability to give each other constructive feedback.
3. Model the behaviors you want to see
As Agile leaders shape the environment to create the experiences which support the right culture and make higher levels of autonomy accepted and affordable by the team, they realize they are themselves part of that environment.
This means that they need to own and model the culture they want to see around in the organization, to avoid an incoherent clash between what they preach and the leadership they demonstrate. Such a clash can undermine people’s trust and willingness to take on more responsibility.
If Agile leaders are serious about improving their organization, they should be even more serious about improving themselves.
4. Lead based on the context
The ability to make sense of the circumstances in a given situation and adapt your approach to fit the context is a key characteristic of good leadership. As expressed by Dave Snowden in the Cynefin framework, different circumstances can be organized into different domains. The domains, in turn, are characterized by different approaches to decision making, acting and leading.
Situations in ordered domains show causality, meaning there is a clear relationship between cause and effect. This means that we can plan and act, based on the characteristics of the situation and the context in which it is happening. In some cases, the appropriate action is self-evident: it is sufficient and effective just to tell people what to do or establish guidelines and checklists to follow.Other cases require analysis. In these situations, expertise plays a very important role: the leader will ask experts to analyze the situation, and provide possible solutions. Establishing expert peer review can improve the quality of what is decided and executed.
In unordered domains, the lack of causality makes planning and the direct reuse of existing approaches very difficult, if not impossible. When the situation is complex, the relationship between cause and effect can only be discovered in retrospect and therefore actions might have unintended consequences. In those cases, expertise is not of much help, and it is necessary to run multiple parallel probes (some of which will fail). These allow the identification of repeating patterns and show us how to affect the system and address the problem. The leader’s ability to involve cognitively diverse people will affect the quality of the experiments and the decided actions.
In a chaotic situation (such as an emergency), the leader’s ability to act promptly is what will make a difference. Waiting and trying to analyze the situation is useless when volatility and uncertainty are very high.
Understanding the context and the situation allows leaders to act effectively in a given cultural context. For example, in a hierarchical organization people will expect the leader to appoint experts and make the final decision in a complicated situation, while in a more collaborative organization, the group will feel comfortable to appoint experts and options on how to move forward will be vetted and discussed by the group. Agile leaders are aware of the context and the situation and how to appropriately shift their behaviors and modulate the actual course of actions.
5. Incorporate agility into change
All changes, even with the best intentions, can create motivational debt by introducing gaps between expectation and reality. People are complex and there is only so much change each of us can handle at a time. However, many organizations try to take a “fail-safe” approach to change. An example of this could be buying a big model from a consulting agency, marketing the concept internally, and setting milestones. There’s so much money, ego and expectations attached to the change project that it will simply not be allowed to fail.
Agile leaders, on the other hand, know that effective change in a complex environment can only work with an evolutionary approach. Here, the focus is on leveraging the potential of the present and the natural predispositions that already exist in a team or an organization, instead of pushing towards an unrealistic ideal state.
Again, it is like parenting. If we want our kids to learn collaboration, we don’t describe what good collaboration looks like and create a plan towards it. Instead, we might encourage them to apply to a football or basketball team or to join a music band. Through these experiences, they will build collaboration muscles and learn what collaboration feels like.
In order to reduce the risk and side effects of change within organizations and deal with unpredictability, effective leaders know to instill change through diverse experiments with small continuous adaptations. This removes the burden and risk of maintaining different co-existing systems of work (i.e. the old way of working, and the new one) for long periods of time: small changes are easily understood, quickly piloted and rapidly integrated, minimizing the uncertainty, confusion and loss of effectiveness inherent in change.
Running different parallel experiments enables leaders to validate assumptions and hypotheses in a safe-to-fail environment. Through multiple safe-to-fail experiments they recognize repeating emergent patterns that can be replicated to catalyze change in other parts of the organization.
By asking volunteers to help define and run the experiments, they achieve wider acceptance of the change in the organization and increase transparency because everyone can see small things happen and facilitate work in that direction: people hate it when a big change is unexpectedly announced by management and they cannot relate to the rationale and the implications of the change.
Agile leadership styles
Agile leadership is the ability to master multiple leadership styles to be able to adopt the one that fits the specific context, and work with the expectations of the team. We can define six different leadership styles (or behaviors) that can be developed and applied in different contexts and cultures:
Directing
Demanding
Conducting
Envisioning
Coaching
Catalyzing
Because of the dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are positive or negative in themselves. Rather, leadership behaviors that are more or less helpful within a specific situation and might be perceived positively or negatively in a given cultural context.
A question on many Agile leaders’s minds is, “How can we know how well we are doing as leaders?” Most people would tell you that we need to measure the impact that our leadership has, the level of autonomy of our team, the culture, and the level of resilience of our organization. However these are all lagging indicators, which we can evaluate only in retrospect in the future: sometimes leadership is about planting seeds of a tree we will never enjoy the shade of.
However we could look at a few leading indicators to understand whether we are going in the right direction and get feedback. In this way we will be able to improve by leveraging on our strengths and acting on our improvement areas.
Leading indicators for Agile leadership
A first leading metric could be around how we are doing as servant leaders. If we are demonstrating good servant leadership, we are likely to be strengthening people’s skills and building leadership as a diffused organizational capability, so that everyone can be a potential leader. A few questions can help us self-reflect on the different servant leadership virtues and their impact on the people around us:
Do people believe that I am willing to sacrifice my own self-interest for the good of the group?
Do people believe that I want to hear their ideas and will value them?
Do people believe that I understand what is happening in their lives and how it affects them?
Do people come to me when chips are down or when something traumatic has happened in their lives?
Do others believe that I have a strong sense of awareness for what is going on?
Do others follow my requests because they want to as opposed to because they “have to”?
Do others communicate their ideas and vision for the organization when I am around?
Do others have confidence in my ability to anticipate the future and its consequences?
Do others believe that I am preparing the organization to make a positive difference in the world?
Do people believe that I am committed to helping them develop and grow?
Do people feel a strong sense of community in the organization that I lead?
Once you identify your biggest strength and your biggest improvement area, meet with a peer and:
Share a story when you demonstrated the servant leadership virtue you believe represents your biggest strength
Ask for a suggestion about what you could do tomorrow to become one inch better at practicing the virtue you feel you are most struggling with right now
Another useful leading indicator could be about our ability to master multiple leadership behaviors. If we have the agility to adopt the appropriate leadership style in each of the contexts we are dealing with, we can reduce the Motivational Debt and build autonomy and resilience in the organization. A leadership behavior assessment again could help us self-reflect and get the inputs necessary to strengthen our leadership muscles, around the style and the behaviors we feel less comfortable in adopting.
Our leadership behavior assessment is based on SenseMaker® technology developed by Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co. Both the leader and their followers capture and interpret situations in which the leader demonstrated a certain behavior. Multiple perspectives on the same situation help the leader realize how well they master different leadership behaviors and how coherently they apply those to different situations and contexts.
Try agile42’s Leadership Assessment for free or level up with the full-featured assessment.
Servant Leadership
The future of work, especially after the pandemic, seems to be a place where individuals closer to the problem are best-placed to make decisions. Teams are self-managed, which means they decide what to work on, as well as when and how to best achieve the requested outcome.
Leaders that are effective in building such an environment create the conditions for the individuals and teams to perform at their best, and meet what people seem to expect from employers in 2022. This includes a focus on removing impediments, aligning stakeholders, building trusting relationships, coaching, providing feedback, developing people’s skills and building the capabilities of the organization. Ultimately, they cultivate the virtues of servant leadership.
What is servant leadership?
Robert K. Greenleaf first popularized the term “servant leadership” in The Servant as Leader, an essay published in 1970. It is a leadership philosophy and set of practices in which the leader puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. A Servant Leader should be asking themselves, “Do my actions help those I lead grow as persons? Do they, because of my actions, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become leaders?”
These virtues are maybe even more essential now than they were when they were first published in 1970. In the current world, leaders simply can’t be effective without trust from people they are supposed to lead.
Emotional intelligence in Agile leaders
Practicing the virtues of servant leadership helps build good leadership in this fast-changing world. But what other qualities does an effective agile leader have?
Well, if you want to become the kind of leader who masters multiple leadership styles and is able to read the situation and apply a coherent approach to the context, you might want to work on your emotional intelligence.
Daniel Goleman was the first to popularize the idea of emotional intelligence and demonstrate evidence of its impact within organizations. He passionately argued for recognizing the relationship between someone’s emotional state and the actions driven by it, and how those actions in turn impact others and the organization (essentially the people they work with), whether positively or negatively.
Emotional intelligence consists of four fundamental skills:
The phrase “Lean Agile Leadership” is something of a buzzword at the moment, although if you unpack the concept there are a lot of useful principles behind it.
The term “Lean” was coined by James Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos in their book, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production, in 1990.
Later, in 2003, Mary and Tom Poppendieck published the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. In this book they identified seven fundamental principles to take the concept of lean thinking from production, and apply it to software and product development. I believe these principles can be applied to any creative work.
The seven Lean principles are:
Eliminate waste
Build quality in
Amplify learning
Defer commitment
Deliver as fast as possible
Respect people
Optimize the whole
Three dimensions of Lean Agile Leadership
There’s another important thing we can learn from experiences of organizational transformation and Lean management in the manufacturing sector. In my coaching, I have pinpointed three key dimensions worth considering as a leader. For each of these dimensions, I will offer one or two coaching questions to facilitate the reader’s personal reflections.
Visible problems do not exist: they have been solved already. To help leaders move forward, you can ask: “How many clearly visible problems are you still stuck with in your organization?”
The most efficient way becomes the standard, and the standard must be improved every month. Here, we can ask, “How much are you still striving to find one-size-fits-all “best practices” to make you move quickly to the next rigid and comfortable status quo?”, and “What are your managers accountable for?”
Measure organizational capacity for solving impediments to generate trust. Here, it can be helpful to ask, “How seriously is your organization taking the fixing of impediments for teams?” and “To what extent do you think you are living the values you’re preaching?”
Agile Leadership Training
In a post from 2011, consultant and writer Esther Derby explains how insufficient training and mentoring can be damaging for leaders. She says, “Most people in management roles receive little or no training on how to do the job. Many organizations promote people who excelled as individual contributors doing technical work into management roles […] The skills required for management are often vastly different. […] A lot of the management training out there is crap. Few organizations have robust and confidential mentorship programs.”
As we discussed in the chapters above, an effective way to become a better agile leader is to self-assess your servant leadership skills, understand how good you are at mastering multiple leadership styles, and grow your emotional intelligence index through journaling, self-reflection, and feedback.
However a solid education is extremely important, especially if you are starting the journey or want to deepen and practice your Agile leadership skills. In this context the industry standard and most widely recognized program in agile leadership is Certified Agile Leadership Essentials for Team and Organization Leaders, also known as CAL-E+T+O training. This class will help you discover how your natural, cultural dispositions might affect your teams, and learn how to create a safe-to-fail environment that fosters a culture of transparency, inspection, creativity, and adaptation.
Agile leadership is, at its core, the ability to master multiple leadership styles to be able to adopt the one that fits the specific context and the team’s expectations. Because of the dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are inherently positive or negative. It is more helpful to describe leadership behaviors as either more or less helpful within a specific situation. The way the leadership behavior is perceived by those affected is important in a given cultural context.
Being an agile leader does not mean using a coaching leadership style in every circumstance since this can be unhelpful, (or even harmful) in certain situations. An example is a crisis situation, or working with a team of people that expect clear directives. In both of these examples, a leader using a directive or demanding style can be a gold example of servant leadership. This is because they are intentionally adopting that behavior in a specific moment in the service of empowering them to be better and more autonomous.
How do you know which leadership style is most appropriate?
When you think of switching between leadership styles, it may seem like a tough challenge and even a little overwhelming at first. Agile leaders use emotional intelligence and are conscious of their own and other people’s emotions and perspectives. This helps them to adopt the appropriate leadership behavior in different circumstances. They are able to gently and iteratively shift their primary leadership style from directing towards coaching and catalyzing, in order to build agility and autonomy in their team and organization. This is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned, practiced, and mastered.
We can define six different styles (or behaviors) that can be developed and applied in different contexts and cultures.
Directing
The leader acts, and is perceived as, an expert and an authority. It is considered one of the more traditional leadership styles.They are therefore in charge of assigning and controlling work while being held accountable for the results of the group’s work. Discussion or negotiation is not usually welcome when leading in this way. Instead, the leader expects compliance from their followers.
When it works: This style is essential in a crisis or when people expect clear direction When it doesn’t: In the wrong context, for instance, when people expect a certain degree of autonomy, a directing style can be stifling and cause frustration. What holds the group together: The direct relationship with the leader, as well as a shared awareness of the possible consequences of failure
Demanding
The leader is perceived and acts as someone with extremely high standards. They are competitive and focus primarily on performance, leading by example. The followers focus on their targets.
When it works: When followers perceive the work as focused on results, a constant push from the leader can be motivating in the short term. When it doesn’t: When used long-term, this style can cause a high level of stress. What holds the group together: Meeting targets successfully as well as the leader’s conflict-solving skills.
Conducting
The leader coordinates and encourages collaboration, believing that collaboration is essential and increases quality. While the leader is responsible for enabling the collaboration, the followers feel responsible for their individual contribution. They can rely on help from their peers.
When it works: When followers know that they need to deliver the work, but expect the leader to retain the overall responsibility for delivering value, conducting can be effective. When it doesn’t: This style can cause problems when people do not feel comfortable to organize their own work, or when they are not skillful enough to handle disagreements that emerge from cooperation. What holds the group together: Clear roles and group dynamics
Envisioning
The leader motivates people by providing a compelling and challenging vision of the future. They inspire collaboration and a sense of shared responsibility. They have faith in their followers’ abilities. The followers value collaboration and they are motivated by their feeling of being able to learn and achieve more together.
When it works: This style is great for when the team believes that quality work can be achieved only through collaboration and collective agreement. When it doesn’t: Ifthe team does not have sufficient skills in collaborative decision making, this can cause difficulties. What holds the group together: A team identity and a shared purpose
Coaching
This is the approach most commonly associated with agile leadership styles, however it is not always appropriate. The coaching leader supports team members with their personal growth and supports the team to become more effective as a whole by being a servant leader. The team shares responsibility and collaborates to achieve their goals. They are motivated by mastering challenges and learning continuously.
When it works: When the followers perceive the work as being self-directed and expect a high level of autonomy in achieving their goals. When it doesn’t: When the followers do not feel comfortable with autonomy or do not have appropriate skills in giving/receiving constructive peer-to-peer feedback. What holds the group together: A sense of belonging as well as the challenge of reaching their full potential.
Catalyzing
The leader amplifies the success of the team, connects them with the rest of the organization and ensures their contribution to strategy creation. The leader provides both praise and challenges and enables synergies. The followers are self-governing, maximize value delivery and incorporate customer feedback autonomously. They are open-minded, curious and adaptive. They are motivated by their contribution.
When it works: When the followers perceive their work as fully self-managed in terms of both the goal and how to achieve it. When it doesn’t: When people are only focused on their own personal or team success and are unable to see the benefits to collaborate with the larger organization. What holds the group together: A constant search for new challenges.
Want to learn more about Agile leadership styles?
Companies are investing more than ever in leadership development, and highly trained, skilled leaders are indispensable to the modern workforce. agile42 offers a number of training, coaching, mentoring and other services. You could start with the Golden Standard for Agile leaders, namely Certified Agile Leadership Essentials for Team and Organization Leaders (CAL-E+T+O) training, which we do in-person and remotely, or contact us for information about our other services. We also offer an online leadership course which will help you explore the various Agile leadership styles in more details.
Daniel Goleman was the first to popularize the idea of emotional intelligence and demonstrate evidence of its impact within organizations. He passionately argued for recognizing the relationship between someone’s emotional state and the actions driven by it, and how those actions in turn impact others and the organization (essentially the people they work with), whether positively or negatively.
Emotional intelligence consists of four fundamental skills
Self-awareness
Emotional intelligence is the ability to read and understand your own emotions as well as recognize their impact on work performance and relationships. It also includes the ability to realistically evaluate your strengths and limitations.
It is the ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control, consistently display integrity and manage yourself and your responsibilities. It also includes the skill to adjust to changing situations and a readiness to seize opportunities.
Social awareness
It is the ability to sense other people’s emotions, understand their perspective, and take an active interest in their concerns. It is also the ability to read the currents of organizational life, build decision networks, and navigate politics.
Social skill
It is the ability to inspire, influence and develop others, for example the ability to de-escalate conflicts and facilitate resolutions. It includes skills of listening and sending clear, convincing, and well-tuned messages, as well as cultivating and maintaining a web of relationships.
These are all essential qualities for leaders, even though not everyone seems to realize it. Many organizations still use a fundamentally wrong metaphor to describe how work works. We keep thinking of our organizations as machines, where defined inputs are transformed into defined outputs, through defined processes and well designed connections of cogs. Is this the real nature of our organizations? How can such a machine adapt to ever changing circumstances and market needs?
We will have better chances at building agile and flexible organizations, which are more equipped to succeed in the world today, if we start describing them as living organisms. Organizations are networks of people, and human beings are not interchangeable and programmable machines. It is impossible to force things on people, but good things can be achieved by leveraging people’s natural talents and their intrinsic willingness to do a good job.
Effective leadership is more of a social activity than an engineering task.
How do you increase your Emotional Intelligence?
Here are some simple tools I recommend if I am asked for a suggestion by the leaders I coach:
Journaling, self-reflection and peer feedback can be very useful to spot our red flags and understand their impact on work performance and relationships, as well as learn how to keep disruptive emotions under control.
360-degree feedback is, feedback from many peers, leaders, and colleagues, rather than a single manager in a top-down approach, and it can be very helpful. It helps you learn how to sense other people’s emotions and understand their perspective.
The phrase “Lean Agile Leadership” is something of a buzzword at the moment, although if you unpack the concept there are actually a lot of useful principles behind it.
What does “Lean” mean?
The term “Lean” was coined by James Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos in their book, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production, in 1990. They used the word to capture the essence of their in-depth study of the famous Toyota Production System (TPS). Back then, the term and its principles applied primarily to production.
Later, in 2003, Mary and Tom Poppendieck published the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. In this book they identified seven fundamental principles to take the concept of lean thinking from production, and apply it to software and product development. I believe these principles can be applied to any creative work.
Each of the seven principles the Poppendiecks proposed has implications on leadership.
Eliminate waste
Waste is defined as any activity which does not add value to the final customer. The first step towards eliminating waste is simply to see the waste. The leader should know how the value flows in the organization and continuously challenge the current practice to identify waste.
But this is not enough: a lean leader helps the team remove any impediments that they are not able to resolve without support. They systemize solutions in the organizations to prevent the same impediment from coming back again. Finally, as in a famous quote from W.E. Deming, an American statistician who influenced a lot of the thinking behind the TPS, a lean leader realizes that “The greatest waste […] is failure to use the abilities of people […] to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make”.
Build quality in
A lean leader works to build a culture of discipline and excellence, guides others using principles and values instead of complex rules. They teach people not to cut corners, challenge coworkers to high performance and lead by example. You might argue that this is just true leadership – and it is.
Amplify learning
Traditional managers face competition with other managers trying to meet locally optimized goals and look good to the next level up. But this wastes a lot of organizational learning, which could be leveraged by collaborating with peers instead. Building and maintaining a network of peers is essential, as well as continuously challenging one’s own leadership approach in the light of what works and what doesn’t. Amplifying learning also implies:
concretely encouraging safe-to-fail experiments and fast feedback loops
providing and being open to feedback
striving for transparency as the unique way to control the complex system each organization is
Defer commitment
Keep your options open up to the last responsible moment and be capable of living with uncertainty, because that is the reality we are facing. Furthermore, early commitment could mean discarding potentially good options, just not to afford the cost of deferring a decision.
Deliver as fast as possible
The most effective way of addressing a complex problem is to let a diverse team of skilled people self-organize and decide how to approach the situation through experimentation. A team is able to self-organize around a goal if the leader helps define what the goal is, makes it compelling and clarifies what constraints the environment has. If you want to help your team or organization to deliver as fast as possible, set a clear vision, explain clearly where to go and why, align all stakeholders around that vision and get fast feedback. And finally give space to your teams to reflect on what they are doing to find ways to go even faster.
If you’re not a front line engineer, there’s only one reason for you to exist: help your team move faster – Jan Bosch
Who dares to disagree with this? Actually this apparently generic statement hides a deeper meaning. It stands for: give people the environment and support they need to do a great job and trust they will do their best to accomplish their goal. So it’s not simply about saying to a team “Now you’re empowered to do what you want”, but putting them into the conditions to succeed. It’s about staying close to the teams, Managing By Walking Around and Listening, motivating, and assisting on personal development. That might require teaching, mentoring and coaching.
Optimize the whole
Optimizing the whole means having an e2e view of the system, product or organization and consequently selecting the right metrics which can help the system improve. It is about measuring only what adds value (less is more) and whatever you want to measure, measure it one level up.
Three dimensions of Lean Agile Leadership
But what else can we learn from experiences of organizational transformation and Lean management in the manufacturing sector? In my coaching, I have learned three dimensions worth considering as a leader. For each of these dimensions I will offer one or two coaching questions to facilitate the reader’s personal reflections.
Visible problems do not exist: they have been solved already!
A few years ago I attended a seminar on Lean Management and Continuous Improvement organized by an association of entrepreneurs in the manufacturing industry. One more interesting insight I got from the CEO of a consulting company, connected to the Japanese government, in his speech about the Toyota Production System, was his classification of problems into three categories: potential, invisible and visible. It’s important that potential problems to the desired target are identified as well as invisible problems are made visible and improved immediately. Instead, he said, visible problems do not actually exist, because they have been solved already.
How many clearly visible problems are you still stuck with in your organization?
Most efficient way becomes standard: standard must be improved every month!
In a panel I attended about Continuous Improvement, one of the participants described that, once a process has been improved in one department, then the most efficient way becomes a “standard”.
When hearing this word, I got disappointed wondering how the definition of a standard process could fit into a Continuous Improvement approach.
But then he added: the “standard” must be reviewed every month!
And more: the “standard” is visualized and each manager is accountable to improve the “standard” every month!
How much are you still striving to find one-size-fits-all “best practices” to make you move quickly to the next rigid and comfortable status quo?
What are your managers accountable for?
Measure organizational capacity of solving impediments to generate trust
Another enlightening reflection to me was from the italian director of a cans manufacturer with around 1500 employees.
You might wonder how cans may be relevant for high-tech industries, but let me continue.
Well, he was describing their transformation journey to Lean and talked about the importance of impediment handling in his organization to be trustable. They have a graph, clearly visible to everybody, with 2 curves: the accumulated number of raised impediments per month and the accumulated number of fixed impediments per month.
The 2 curves must always be parallel, because he said: “If the curve of fixed impediments goes flattish, all my employees will understand I do not believe in what we’re doing and I’m just cheating them”.
How is your organization serious with fixing impediments from teams?
How much do you think you are living the values you’re preaching?
42 Expert Tips for Hybrid and Remote Work
/by agile42What is hybrid work?
Hybrid work, in essence, refers to a flexible model of working that allows employees to work from various locations. At its best, it is a supportive model that empowers teams to choose the working arrangement that is most suitable to them. At its worst, it’s a rigid form of pseudo-flexibility that’s more hassle than it’s worth.
The definition of hybrid work, ultimately, is going to depend on the individual organization. For many companies, it means working from home some days in the week, and working in the office the other days. For us, at agile42, it means working remotely most of the time with occasional onsite days, which are carefully planned and facilitated. On our onsite days, we do not simply proceed with our day-to-day work. We use these opportunities to workshop problems, share knowledge, plan and execute new innovations, or test hypotheses. Importantly, we also use this time to connect socially.
Need help adjusting to a hybrid setup? Contact us for coaching, mentoring, facilitation, and consulting services.
It’s about people, not place
In our line of work, we have helped hundreds of companies to create meaningful change, including configuring their remote work arrangements. We have noticed that many people are starting by asking the question, “Where should people work?” This seems like an obvious question to ask, when dealing with hybrid working scenarios, but we would argue that a better question is “How can we humanize our workplaces to better unleash our people’s potential?”
It is helpful to shift your focus to the people that work for and with you, and to be curious and open-minded about how best you can support them. This is a far more beneficial approach than trying to work out a rigid schedule dictating where and when people must work.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Is hybrid work really new?
While some companies, agile42 included, have been offering hybrid or remote working arrangements for as long as they’ve been around, for the vast majority of businesses this is unchartered territory. If this is all relatively new to you and you’re feeling unsure, you’re not alone! agile42 has coached and trained hundreds of businesses through this transition. It comes with a unique set of challenges, but once companies get themselves properly set up for hybrid work, the response – from managers, HR, employees, their families, and even their pets – has been overwhelmingly positive. Reach out to our team if you want to chat about how we can help you.
Hybrid work vs remote work
Many people use the terms remote and hybrid interchangeably, but they are in fact quite different. Remote work takes place in a location other than a centralized office, such as home, coffee shops, casual workspaces or hubs, or wherever the person happens to be. On the other hand, hybrid work refers to any of a broad range of configurations, in which remote work takes place some of the time but onsite work is also included.
Benefits of hybrid work
83% of workers prefer a hybrid work model, according to the Accenture Future of Work Study 2021. The same report found that hybrid workforce models are embraced by 63% of high-revenue growth companies.
Hybrid working arrangements have a huge range of benefits. These include:
42 tips for hybrid work from personal experience
1. Choose the right reasons to meet in person
One of the complaints we hear most about hybrid work arrangements is that people feel their time is being wasted. “Hybrid workers complain that they go to the office only to log on to Zoom or Teams only to spend the rest of the day with their headphones on,” explains Regina Martins, director of agile42 South Africa. There is very little benefit to this sort of arrangement, and it’s usually a sign of a leadership team that values control over effectiveness and output.
A great alternative is to plan onsite days in which all hands are on deck, and the team has a clear goal to achieve. “Sprint change days are perfect days to be in the office”, suggests agile42 coach Birge Kahraman. If you use Scrum, hosting your big Scrum Events such as Retrospectives and Sprint Planning events in-person is a great use of time together.
Photo by RF._.studio on pexels
2. Agree on the rules of engagement
“Hybrid introduces the challenges of meeting with people physically and remotely at the same time”, according to Agile coach Giuseppe De Simone. “This may confuse the rules of engagement and make some not feel included. This is why it is extremely important to make rules of engagement explicit and agreed upon by everyone”, he says. In particular, it’s important to focus on rules that ensure everyone has the space and time to share their perspectives equally. This means that we need to have good facilitators that can communicate these rules and make sure that feels safe and included.
“It is also very important to implement a safety protocol that can be ritualized with some gestures so that everyone feels safe to interrupt the conversation and express their need for better rules or more respect for those already in place”, explains De Simone.
Recommended for you: Watch our Humanizing Hybrid Work Webinar
3. Have cameras on
“Open cameras are good for non-verbal communication”, shares coach Birge Kahraman. It’s a great idea to agree to have cameras-on meetings regularly. But make sure you’re cognisant of how this can affect people too. “It may drain your energy pretty quickly”, continues Kahraman. “Don’t forget to take regular breaks between meetings in order to prevent Zoom Fatigue”.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
4. Take regular breaks and make them meaningful
The importance of breaks is not new: even in traditional office settings it’s crucial to enjoy frequent breaks. For many people, though, it’s much easier to neglect breaks when working remotely. In an office setting, the cadence of the day makes for a natural rhythm, with periods of focus intermingled with breaks. Walking between meetings, stepping out for coffee, or even making small-talk as you pass a colleague’s desk provide your brain with pauses that are extremely beneficial.
In a home office or remote setup, you have to be much more deliberate about it. Even when people do take breaks, sometimes this means switching to different tabs or rushing around to attend to a family responsibility or housework. While these sorts of disruptions and distractions are inevitable, try to avoid thinking of them as breaks.
Director of agile42 South Africa, Regina Martins, shared her style of taking breaks, which we think is a great way to ensure you actually allow your mind some downtime. “I’ve created a ritual for taking regular breaks around coffee”, she explains. “ it is a whole-body experience with specific anchors: visual (I’ve set up a coffee station with colorful cups, a milk frother and different types of coffees); auditory (the sound of coffee dripping into the cup); olfactory (the smell of the coffee makes me happy) and gustatory. I love coffee!”
Photo by Goran Ivos on Unsplash
5. Have daily standups or Scrums
“I find our 15 minute daily calls invaluable”, shares Amy Bridge, agile42 operations manager. “It’s great to connect as a team as well as iron out any issues or questions”.
Our social media marketer, Emily Stapylton-Smith, agrees: “I regularly check in with my colleague that I work closely with. These catch-ups can help us to understand each other’s priorities and how we can best support each other. They don’t have to last long, but they are a great way to keep us aligned to our goals and working together.”
It’s a sentiment also shared by Sofia Svanbäck, agile42 Business Relationship Manager, who says “I have found the daily syncs with my team very helpful, and very needed so that you do not feel as alone while in the home office”.
6. Remember that we’re all human
“What always delights me are team members’ pets or children crashing meetings and giving us an unpredictable, fun, off-topic moment”, shares Agile and Design Thinking coach Dennis Büscher. “Have coffee talks, make jokes and smile when having online meetings and video calls”, he continues, “and create space and time to also talk about the best series you recently watched on Netflix or the hangover you had after the wedding on Saturday”. It’s more important than ever to humanize the workplace, and to find joy in seeing one another as people with rich and interesting personal lives.
7. Create an environment for asynchronous communication
“Not everything is urgent”, explains Ebru Yalçınkaya, coach for agile42 Turkey. “Try to create an environment for asynchronous communication, especially for things that don’t need an immediate reply”. If you can replace a meeting with an email, do so. This is especially important when you’re working across multiple time zones.
8. Prioritize connections with colleagues
“When working remotely, we miss out on those quick catch-ups over coffee and other lighthearted conversations that happen when we are in the office together”, explains agile42 social media marketer Emily Stapylton-Smith. “Setting aside some time on a Friday to discuss our weekend plans is a great way to ensure we don’t lose this, or it could be posting a picture of your pet on your Slack channel. These moments matter and can help us feel more connected with one another”.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels
9. Solve complex problems onsite
There are many advantages to working remotely, and many people find it much easier to focus in that environment. However, there are times when onsite collaboration can be an advantage. Coach Lothar Fischmann explains, “I’ve experienced that people talk more to each other when everybody is in the same room, both when coaching clients and internally at agile42. For me this means that meeting onsite is pretty important in all areas where we rely on collaboration, especially when it’s about solving complex problems or interpersonal relations”. This is something we’ve observed many times. As Fischmann notes, “the feedback is always more or less the same: we wouldn’t be able to create so much progress in such a short time as a team, if we were working remotely!”
Of course, collaboration is entirely possible when working remotely, but if you’re looking for a good time to schedule onsite days, look for opportunities to solve problems as a team. Don’t use onsite days to carry on with day-to-day work.
10. Set up the best possible workspace
“Home offices are not real offices and for many people that is a challenge,” explains agile42 CEO Marion Eickmann. But the solution to this is not always to force people into an office. It takes a measured, thoughtful approach from leadership, in which you listen to your teams and come up with solutions that will empower them to do their best work. For some, that may mean having a workspace such as an office available. For others, it could mean flexible working hours to accommodate childcare and other personal responsibilities.
Leadership should provide as much support and infrastructure as possible. Supply teams with the tools they need for productivity, as well as the equipment they need to do their jobs. If the company is saving costs on office space, consider investing some of that in good quality chairs, headphones, desks, screens, or any other equipment that can make home offices more accommodating.
11. Unplug after hours
Another challenge we hear about a lot is that remote workers have difficulty putting boundaries between work and their personal lives. This can have serious consequences, like burnout. “If I leave my PC switched on and logged in, it makes me think that I need to continue working”, shares Ebru Yalçınkaya. “After the office hours and weekends, I sometimes simply turn everything off, pack my laptop away and close it totally, so I understand it is my time to relax”.
Photo by Elle Hughes on Pexels
12. Move often
“Move!” suggests coach Martin von Weissenberg, “Get out of your chair as often as possible”.
Developer Santiago Gomez agrees: “For me it is very important to get up from my seat and stretch and walk or look through the window to rest my eyes. Going to the kitchen and drinking a glass of water also helps; if I have the bottle on my desk I tend not to stand up too often”.
13. Structure your day and create rituals
Suzanne Daly, Team Assistant at agile42, believes that structure is key. “While working from home, structure your day like you would in the office”, she suggests. “Start at the same time, take frequent breaks (including a lunch break) and finish at the usual time. Personally I find the Pomodoro method works well, particularly while working from home”.
Coach Ninja Granzow agrees: “build habits to structure the day”, she says, “go for a walk in the morning, have lunch, and find an activity to close the workday”.
14. Think about how collocation will improve productivity
“The winners in hybrid working will be those who really think about how – and when – collocation will improve productivity”, muses Peter Hundermark, mentor at agile42, “Just saying ‘you need to be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that’s our new rule’ is not going to cut it.”
“The main purposes of collocation”, he explains, “are (1) to build and maintain human connection and (2) synchronous collaboration where having the whole human system in the room is important. When planning the collocated part of hybrid working, you should be working to achieve these purposes in each aspect, including who is there, when they are there, and how you use the space”.
Photo by Fox on Pexels
15. Use your calendar to block out time
When you’re working with colleagues who are scattered, having some transparency and visibility around your calendars is important. But this doesn’t mean that any gap in your schedule is up for grabs. A simple trick to avoid finding yourself overbooked in back-to-back meetings, without any real productivity time, is to use your calendars to reserve time for yourself. This could be as simple as setting your working hours, or you could book an entire day every week as a day for focus without disruption. Regina Martins, director of agile42 South Africa, says, “I find it useful to create space in my calendar for lunch. I book it out as a daily recurring appointment called Sit in the sun and smell the roses. This makes sure people don’t book meetings during that time. And I actually try to sit in the sun. I don’t have any roses at the moment because it’s winter in South Africa, but the sentiment applies. It’s also a bit of an inside joke with my fellow coaches”.
16. Do something innovative when you have all hands on deck
At agile42, we host monthly Coach Camps. These began as a knowledge exchange specifically for our coaches, but have transformed into all-hands days of innovation, workshopping, knowledge sharing, and getting to know one another. We do this every month virtually, and once a year we come together in person from all over the world. “Our Coach Camps are completely enlivening”, shares digital marketer Lauren Edwards, “It’s a huge injection of passion and energy: we drop our day-to-day tasks for a day or two and just dedicate ourselves completely to collaboration and innovation. I only see most of my colleagues about once a year in person, and I am so grateful that this is how we use that time together”.
Sofia Svanbäck, agile42 Business Relationship Manager, agrees: “I have also appreciated that we meet with the whole company at our internal Coach Camps – they bring us together as a group”.
Need help planning or facilitating collaboration days? Get in touch, we can help!
17. Make sure everyone is remote (or onsite) but not a mix
“Having some people together in a room and others joining remotely creates a big disconnect”, shares Berlin-based coach Simon Sablowski. Sablowski has years of experience with facilitation, and some of the key principles behind facilitation shed light on why this is the case:
These simply don’t work in a hybrid setup, says Sablowski: “Usually one of two things happens: Either the discussion takes place in the room and individuals joining remotely are disengaged and at best listening to the conversation, or the people joining remotely compensate for not being present in the room by trying to dominate the conversation. A hybrid setup hinders people from moving through a process or reaching their goal together. Equal participation is almost impossible. It takes a lot of willingness, discipline and practice to make it work. Facilitators struggle with maintaining neutrality because it’s more natural to take sides with those that are not included in the conversations as much as others. Therefore, we should stick to the principle: If one participant joins remotely, all join remotely”.
18. Accept that people’s home lives might mingle with work more
It can be frustrating when distractions from people’s daily lives creep into work. In an office setting, everyone is dealing with the same circumstances. But in remote or hybrid setups, there may be someone with a screaming child, another person with a cat in front of the camera, someone dealing with a neighbor’s drilling, and yet another person with connectivity issues. “Keep calm if there is some family noise or background noise in Zoom meetings”, suggests Sofia Svanbäck, agile42 Business Relationship Manager, “because they are a part of our new normal when it comes to remote work”.
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels
19. Assign clear ownership of tasks
“One tip I would give is clear ownership of tasks”, advises Team Assistant Suzanne Daly, “Our team regularly reviews our workflow and decides who will take care of what tasks. This ensures each member of the team knows their role and responsibilities. It also ensures that I know that the tasks assigned to other team members are taken care of and I don’t have to worry about them. For vacation, we then decide who will take care of tasks for those who are away so they can relax while they are out of office and know the tasks are taken care of during that time”.
20. Build relationships
“No real teamwork is possible without building true human relationships”, cautions coach Giuseppe De Simone, “Having a group of people truly working elbow to elbow requires meeting in person from time to time, just to build those connections”. And while the occasional offsite holiday-style meetup is great, it’s not enough. This form of in-person meetup creates an artificial environment, says De Simone, “Working on real stuff, collaborating and maybe even fighting… This will help create the relationships that will allow every individual to recognize that face behind the camera not as a stranger, but someone they had a shared experience with”.
21. Ensure trust exists among your team
Trust occurs when team members are able to be vulnerable with one another and are willing to admit their mistakes, weaknesses or needs for help. Without a certain comfort level among team members, a foundation of trust is impossible. This is even more important when working remotely. It’s very easy for people to become isolated, to avoid asking for help, and to let problems build up until they become unmanageable.
Need help building trust and fostering a safe-to-fail culture? Our OrgScan tool is the perfect starting point to help you understand the status quo, and then make meaningful changes.
22. Focus on outcomes not hours
If you’ve installed time-tracking software on your team’s PCs, you’re definitely doing it wrong. Time and again, we see managers and leadership teams counting the hours worked, as if this means anything. It simply doesn’t, in the modern workplace. Focusing on the number of hours spent at a desk has proven negative effects, like presenteeism (working while sick or otherwise impaired) or the so-called “quiet quitting” (employees doing the bare minimum to meet the requirements of their roles). In our years of consulting, training, and coaching, we have seen immense improvements in productivity, work-life balance, and job satisfaction when the focus is on outcomes instead.
Some industries have billable hours, like legal firms and consultancies, and in this instance time-tracking is necessary. However, outside of this, there is no good reason to focus on how many hours your employees are putting in.
23. Lean on your company culture
Hybrid and remote working arrangements are a sure-fire way to expose problems with your organizational culture. The problems created by a bad company culture are exacerbated when you’re not all in the same room.
This is a great time to adapt, and to introduce Agile frameworks that can carry you through with great success. For instance, leaders who are adaptable and have experience with various leadership styles will notice that they don’t really need to make drastic changes when switching to remote. Leaders who previously got by on control, on the other hand, will notice things falling apart fairly quickly.
In a culture of trust, autonomy, and respect, where teams feel safe and confident to make decisions, remote workers can truy thrive. If the culture is such that the team is afraid to make decisions and take initiative, on the other hand, there is likely to be a lot of confusion and delays.
Want to measure and improve your organizational culture? That’s what our Organizational Scan™ is for.
24. Have frequent retrospectives
“Frequent retrospectives (especially initially) can help to ensure everyone in the team agrees with the workflow, and more importantly their personal workload”, says agile42 Team Assistant Suzanne Daly. Retros are always important to make sure everyone’s on track, but in a remote or hybrid setup, they are more important than ever. They give everyone a chance to share the issues they are struggling with.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
25. Reduce waste
Hybrid and remote work offers many opportunities to reduce waste, and you should take advantage of these. If you’re part of leadership, consider whether you can save costs on office rental, perhaps by renting a room once a week or once a month instead of every day.
Consider the way you schedule meetings, too. It might be tempting to meet more often when colleagues are not in the same room, especially if there is a lack of trust or structure in the team. But this shouldn’t be necessary and can cause a lot of wasted time.
Commuting can also be attached to waste. If you’re commuting less often, you are saving plenty of time and money.
26. Adapt your leadership style
Agile leadership is the ability to be flexible, use different approaches, and adapt to the context and the people involved. Because of this dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are inherently positive or negative in and of themselves. Rather, there are leadership behaviors which are more or less appropriate within the context.
As an example, some leaders might try to make sudden changes to their leadership style when teams aren’t onsite. They may begin to be more directive, hoping to hang onto a sense of control. For teams who are used to having more autonomy, this can be highly frustrating. On the other hand, leaders may suddenly be less involved, and let teams get on with their work without interference. For teams who are accustomed to being told what to do, and when, this can be a very stressful change.
When leaders understand their teams and use leadership behaviors that align with the needs of their teams, this is known as coherent leadership.
27. Support one another
A Stanford study showed that workers are 13% more productive, on average, when working from home. This is attributed to a lack of commute and distractions. However, it comes at a cost, and loneliness is a very real challenge for many people. It’s much harder to recognize when people are struggling when they’re not in the same room, so it helps to make a point of checking in with one another regularly.
28. Invest in tools and support structures
In a hybrid work environment, there are different priorities and your budget should shift accordingly. Invest in making it easy for your teams. Listen to your team’s needs, and then invest in the tools, infrastructure, and resources that will meet those needs. The tools should work for you; you shouldn’t work for the tools.
Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash
29. Reap the benefits
There are many benefits to hybrid working, so remember to take advantage of them. “I am grateful every day for how much time I get to spend with my elderly dog, and how I can use the time I used to spend commuting for exercise instead”, shares Digital Marketer Lauren Edwards. “It’s been important to make sure I log off at the end of the day and enjoy the improved work-life balance hybrid work offers me”.
30. Let go of control
Many leaders have struggled to adjust to hybrid working arrangements. In most cases, this is a result of leaders being accustomed to control over their teams. Hybrid is a great chance to work on letting go of control, managing flow rather than people, and encouraging teams to self-organize. If you need help with this process, agile42’s coaches have decades of experience and can coach, mentor, or train your leaders and teams. Contact us to find out what we can do for your teams.
31. Bring new people on board onsite
“Onboarding is easier face-to-face”, explains CEO Marion Eickmann. When you bring on new team members, try to do so in-person. It helps new team members to settle in and meet their colleagues, in a low-pressure way. If this isn’t possible, try to set up “coffee chats” to meet new colleagues, or arrange an in-person day for the near future.
32. Nurture talent
The popularity of hybrid and remote setups has put us in a unique position. Many barriers have fallen away, giving companies access to top talent like never before. Location is no longer as much of a barrier, so the pool of candidates has expanded. More accessible workplaces also reduce barriers for those with health issues and disabilities, resulting in more diverse and more inclusive workplaces. This makes it possible to find and accommodate the best possible talent for the role.
33. Limit context switching
Context switching, very simply put, is switching between tasks. This is something that is required in most jobs: you have to be able to change between meetings and different kinds of tasks. But many of us have felt the negative effect of too much context switching: when you’re flicking between tabs so much it feels like you’re getting nothing done, or when you’ve jumped from meetings to tasks and back so many times you’re completely exhausted. Our brains simply aren’t capable of this degree of context switching, and this can lead to burnout. “Have regular short breaks”, advised coach Ninja Granzow, “and make sure you balance appointments, interactions, and things to do alone”.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels
34. Invest in training and development
If you’re finding that the budget stretches a little further without paying for daily office space, consider investing this in the people that make up your company. An Organizational Learning Program is a great way to help your teams learn new skills that they can bring to the table.
35. Make use of freed up time
Many people have found that spending less time in an office has brought them greater work-life balance, and opened up a great deal of free time. Our advice is to use this time doing things you love, or spending time with the people that matter to you. Don’t be tempted to work longer hours or get stuck in front of your screen, Log off on time, and do things that bring you joy outside of work.
36. Give feedback
In person, it’s fairly common to walk over to someone to handover a project or submit a piece of work. This means we’re more likely to get regular, consistent feedback. When communication switches to virtual platforms, it can be easy to lose this. If using platforms like Trello, handovers and submissions can begin to happen almost wordlessly, with only automated notifications. Try to schedule regular feedback sessions and make time to give and receive feedback. Sprint Reviews fill this role well if using Scrum.
37. Communicate well
“Clear and consistent communication with team members is so important”, says Team Assistant Suzanne Daly. “Having multiple ways to communicate is useful so your Team always feels accessible. But make sure you have working agreements on how to use certain forms of communication, so that information is not lost”.
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash
38. Work on a synchronous schedule
These days, it isn’t uncommon for teams to be working from various countries. If your business has a global footprint it’s a huge advantage to have a presence across time zones. However, it can make collaboration difficult. Try to ensure that team members overlap, at least by a few hours, where possible. In most cases, even an hour or two is enough to make sure there is frequent communication.
39. Meet in person occasionally even if your work is fully remote
“Over the pandemic this was not possible”, says Office Manager Suzanne Daly, “but meeting in person even infrequently is good for team members. It’s a chance to socialise and talk about non-work things”
40. Make mentorship accessible
One thing that comes more naturally in an office setting is mentorship. It can be much more challenging for younger, less experienced team members to reach out for help if they have to do so through digital communication. Acknowledge this, and try to set something up that works for your teams. Perhaps you could do monthly or weekly workshops or knowledge sharing sessions, or you could set up a formal mentorship programme.
Photo by nappy on Pexels
41. Make your workspace work for you
“Music!” says Regina Martins, director of agile42 South Africa. “I work well with music… so I do!”
And it’s not just about music. Choose to make your workspace work for you! On your remote days you have the chance to make your workspace whatever you want it to be. Maybe you like the temperature set low, or loud music, or maybe you prefer absolute silence. It’s a unique chance to set up the space that works for you, without having to consider colleagues.
Photo by seyfi durmaz on Pexels
42. Don’t replicate existing bad practices
If you’re just adjusting to a hybrid setup, or even fully remote, it’s a good time to take stock and improve. Ask yourself if there are redundancies, waste, too many meetings, or other factors curbing productivity and causing fatigue. And if there are, take the chance to do something about it.
Panel Discussion | Humanizing Hybrid Work
/by agile42In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, trends like “The Great Resignation” have kicked off a long overdue conversation about hybrid and remote work, and how to do this well. For example, some hybrid workers complain that they go to the office to log on to Zoom or Teams only to spend the rest of the day with their headphones on because the rest of their team is at home. A lot of people feel disconnected from their teams and that they are missing out on the human element of work. agile42’s coaches recently discussed this in the Humanizing Hybrid Work webinar.
Watch now | Humanizing Hybrid Work
At agile42, we’ve worked in hybrid and remote setups for over 15 years, and we specialize in helping to build more effective and resilient teams. In this panel discussion, our Agile coaches, Regina Martins, Debbie Hishin, and Daniel Lynn offer a different perspective by focusing on the human element of hybrid work and by using the four Agile values as an anchor point for this discussion. Watch as they unpack the complexities of this conversation, delving into the pros and cons of various working arrangements, and share the innovative solutions they’ve come up with to make things go more smoothly.
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Five key takeaways from the webinar
1. Make use of goal setting and team agreements
According to coach and director of agile42 South Africa, Regina Martins, goal-setting has helped her and her teammates communicate effectively. In fact, goal setting can be used for organizational change. They are very explicit about their goals and co-created them to make sure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same things. Being face-to-face is not a prerequisite for being more effective. Virtual interactions and the value obtained from these interactions can be as effective as those that take place in person if you’re aligned on agreements and goals.
2. Be intentional about hybrid working
We discovered through this discussion that people have many different definitions of hybrid work. For some people, it means going to the office some days, and for others, it means that some people are together while others are at home. While there are varying instances and definitions of hybrid work, our coaches agreed that we should be intentional about it. Collaboration that requires lots of creativity and constructive conflict benefits from being in one room. So, things like design, strategy, and goal-setting could be good opportunities for people to meet in person. Another option is to hold your Scrum events (excluding the Daily Scrum) in person. Make sure that your in-person days are centered around building connections rather than going about your day-to-day tasks.
3. Human connection is key
What a lot of people seem to lack in hybrid setups is human interaction and connection. There are many ways to overcome this, such as team-building activities or using tools that encourage collaborations, such as a virtual whiteboard or Miro. Agile coach, Debbie Hishin, also shared that a camera-on policy is a good idea to make sure we are picking up on non-verbal communication. Some other ideas could be to use a team notice board or a kudos channel. As a leader, make some time to check in with colleagues and see how they are feeling.
Just because there is no office doesn’t mean there can’t be any office banter. Get creative with ways to connect. Debbie Hishin suggests trying a GIF Friday where you can only reply with GIFs!
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels
Lastly, when you do meet in-person, make sure these sessions are geared towards human connection. So that we can build trust and make sure relationships are intact for when we work remotely.
4. Always come back to your why – understanding people’s needs
Many companies are asking employees to return to the office which has been met with mixed responses. If you are unsure about new policies or what will work in the long term, it always comes back to your “why”. Ultimately it should be about meeting the needs of our employees. Are these needs being met in the office or at home? Just like companies need to think about why clients would buy something, they should also think about why their employees would buy into working from home or at the office. What are the selling points for people, and then try to work around that.
Leaders in remote and dispersed environments need to understand these needs and make sure they are creating a safe environment for people to perform their best. This is where Agile leadership can make a meaningful impact.
Recommended online course: Agile Leadership Foundations
5. Know your boundaries
US-based coach, Daniel Lynn, shares that empathy is very important in remote settings, and this means understanding people’s boundaries. Zoom fatigue is a very real thing, so make sure you are regularly taking breaks. Often, to make up for the lack of face-to-face connection, people get bombarded with meetings. In this case, it’s important that people feel empowered to say no and have boundaries.
It’s also the case that not everyone wants to participate in work events after hours, and that’s okay too. Just because we are working in hybrid settings doesn’t mean we should over-commit or feel that we have to prove anything.
Browse the agile42Agile Certifications
agile42 offers Scrum courses, as well as:
Being a Dungeon Master Prepares You To Be a Scrum Master
/by Burt HopkinsWhen I was a kid, maybe eight years old, something magical happened to me. It was a sunny day. My parents had put a sliding door in our dining room, which lit up the space in gold every summer afternoon. That particular day, the room held my dad and a couple of his students from the high school where he taught Latin. They were limned in bright solar rays, excitedly talking about fighting goblins, looting gold, and casting spells while drinking Coca-Cola and rolling dice, having a grand old time.
Dad was the sponsor for his school’s wargaming club (later renamed to the ‘conflict simulation group’ at the behest of anxious administrators). Occasionally, his students would come to our house to play Dungeons and Dragons on the weekend. There was no satanic panic about the world’s most popular roleplaying game in our home. While my mother and my sister didn’t understand it (and still don’t), my father had caught the bug. He was happy to set up a space to play for the kids who could pay the toll to get across the Delaware River and drive the ten miles to our place.
I tottered in amongst the older kids, big as Hill Giants to me, and tugged at my dad’s sleeve. He looked down through his brown, plastic-framed Coke bottle glasses at me with a smile that was so rarely displayed to kids my age. I asked what was going on.
“We’re playing a game,” he told me.
I could tell he was anxious to get back to it, but I followed up with the obvious question: “Can I play?”
Dad laughed and told me no, I couldn’t. It was a bummer for sure, and he must have seen it in my face because he followed up quickly:
“Come back when you’re older.”
“How old?” I asked. I probably tried to hide my excitement and failed (something I still do poorly).
“I’d say twelve. Twelve?” He looked up at the other kids. I don’t think they were paying any attention, but I was. Because, even for a kid who struggled to pay attention to anything, this I would remember. Because this looked like so much fun.
Neither dad nor I knew that he’d be setting me up for not just the hobby that would define how I spent a large swathe of my recreational time moving forward, but also my experience with Scrum.
Photo by Clint Bustrillos on Unsplash
Ain’t No D&D Party Like an Agile D&D Party
I could tell you all about my time growing up in the hobby of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs for short) – but this is not a gaming article. Instead, I’m writing about business. I’m supposed to write about goals. And, and, and… numbers. About making hard decisions and leading teams. We’re talking about planning for success and delivering products and value week after week.
And… figh… fighting goblins?
Well, as a life-long gamer, I can tell you that you will be amazed at how much Dungeons and Dragons can prepare you for business. Even more remarkably, how being the Emcee of a D&D game – a Dungeon Master – will prepare you for being a Scrum Master.
Stay with me. I think you’re going to be very surprised.
The Basics of D&D
Before we get too far into the overlaps of Scrum Mastering and Dungeon Mastering, let me bring you in on what D&D (and any TTRPG in general) is, in case you’re in the dark.
D&D is a storytelling game where you and a group of friends take on the roles of adventurers in an elaborate fantasy world of swords and sorcery. These adventurers go on quests like defeating mad wizards or carrying out elaborate heists against tyrannical nobles. Players describe what those adventurers do in the world. A roll of the die determines anything that could be left up to chance (usually using a twenty-sided die or D20). One of the player’s jobs – the Dungeon Master (or DM) – is to set the stage and describe the world to the other players. The DM also takes on the roles of the supporting cast in the story, arbitrates (or throws out) rules where needed, and ensures everyone has a good time.
If it sounds like the DM has a challenging job, you are correct! I speak from experience here – I have been a DM for over thirty years across dozens of different campaigns and rules systems (D&D may be the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game, but it’s not the only one).
If it sounds like there are some similarities between the Scrum Master and the Dungeon Master, you are also correct. The similarities don’t stop at just the DM, though, so before we get too far into the similarities of DMs and Scrum Masters, let’s get down to some D&D brass tacks first. I promise not to get too nerdy on you.
Photo by S L on Unsplash
Scrum, Meet Party
Let’s talk about how a game of D&D looks through the prism of Agile (which I’ll refer to as Scrum World). Of course, D&D and Scrum World aren’t precisely one-to-one, so there are some things to map out for the sake of clarity:
Learn more about Scrum basics in our online short course, Scrum Foundations
Scrum Master, Meet Dungeon Master
So, how are the roles similar? Let us enumerate the ways.
The DM’s Job is to Continually Deliver Value Every Session
At Agile’s core is the principle of continuing to deliver a quality, functional product at the end of every sprint. The DM’s job is no different. If the DM fails, the PCs leave. The party gets together every week to play D&D because they want to tell a story that engages and excites them. If the DM can’t do that, those PCs can do other things with those two to four hours per week, especially when those players are Busy Adults With Many Things To Do. They can get together to play a board game or watch a movie without the pretense of also having to pretend to be a Druid if they’re not feeling it. So the DM has to deliver.
The DM’s product, the story, develops like any Scrum team’s product: action by action and scene by scene over several sessions, just like products are assembled over a series of Sprints. Software code is developed line by line; cars are engineered component by component; devices are tooled part by part. And as each Sprint rolls out, the output should get better and develop into something closer to that big beautiful idea everyone was dreaming of at the outset. As the collective project grows, it gets better, and the DM or Scrum Master makes those little subtle nudges that bring out the best of the project. This brings us to…
A Good DM Identifies the Strengths and Weaknesses of Their Players
The DM has to learn a lot about each PC around the table to put them in the right places at the appropriate times. For example, they know that bringing a Wizard to a knife fight is a bad idea (at least at a low level), in the same way that sending a Fighter to a diplomatic assembly of Archmages is a classic faux pas.
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To be fair, a DM has an advantage that a Scrum Master doesn’t: narrative control. DMs can mold a story around the players that come to their table. But, more often than not, a Scrum Master already has the right people around them if an HR department has done their due diligence. But not all team members will be the same, and those little differences matter. Find out who your Rogues and Bards are (and let them be POs, those interpersonal skills are excellent for stakeholders). Identify Wizards and Sorcerers early (and give them caffeine judiciously). Use each person’s skills and talents and let them shine where they’ll do the most good.
A Surprising Amount of the DMs Job Is Tracking Metrics and KPIs
Ask any game fan about its nuts and bolts, and you’ll quickly discover that many numbers are spinning around. Look at pro baseball. All you have to do is flip over a baseball card – stats galore. You can argue about whether or not some of those stats indicate anything, but metrics count to stakeholders, and they hold you accountable to them. To the stakeholders of those pro sports teams, those stats are all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and if they dip too far, it’s back to the minors for those players or even farewell from the franchise entirely.
In D&D, it’s different, of course. PCs have a Character Sheet that lists all the things they can do in an even more concrete and non-debatable sense. Most relevant details are listed on that sheet, from how strong or fast they are to how well they take hits to how many spells they can learn and cast in a day.
Fail to keep your party’s KPIs up to snuff, and your PCs could find themselves tapped out of many encounters. Worse still, they could be overpowered more permanently at the end of some nasty critter’s claws. Well, on paper at least (if a character dies, they can always roll up another one or pay a cleric to resurrect them, c’est la vie). But, players are encouraged by an excellent DM to make sure that they keep their PCs moving toward their goals in a way that keeps the story enjoyable for everyone, and that means knowing how to set realistic goals based on capability.
A good DM must know what a PC party can realistically handle in any given situation and set tasks accordingly. They best track that by the Party’s KPIs, which for a PC could be anything from their Armor Class, Damage Per Round, or the number of Spell Slots they have. Scrum World examples will vary, of course, based on the given Devs outputs. But, it maps in more similar ways than you’d think. Speaking of challenges…
A Wise DM Encourages Innovative Solutions (and Gets Failures Out of the Way Early)
A good DM also knows that they often have to put their players in positions where they might just fail. Failure is a part of the game, and it’s why dice are involved.
Any time there’s a chance something could go wrong, the DM calls for PCs to roll a die. The die result checks against a difficulty set by the DM. An easy D&D task is usually a 10, while something nearly impossible is a 30, with most tasks falling somewhere in the middle. And sometimes, even a high-level character rolls a one and botches at something in which they’re skilled.
It just happens. It’s going to happen to your developers in Scrum World, too. As both an experienced DM and a newly-minted Scrum Master, I’ve found that the earlier you can get that kind of thing out of the way, the better.
Case in point: a player in one of my parties had designed their PC as a healer. He chose to play a Cleric, a role traditionally suited to this (not always the case in fifth edition D&D, but that’s a whole other blog article for an entirely different place). When the first battle came around, he decided on the first round to surprise everyone. He waded into the fight and hit the bad guys with his staff. The Party took a beating with their healer tangled up in the melee. They survived though, albeit with more dings and scratches than they signed on for.
To their credit, no one in the Party got upset, but I held an impromptu Retrospective after the session. The big question was: why did the Cleric go in running? The answer was that he simply wanted to be helpful in the moment. The Cleric happened to roll high on his initiative, meaning he went first. No one was hurt yet, and he didn’t want to waste a turn, not thinking about holding his action instead of rushing in.
From that point forward, he knew waiting for the team to move in before committing to any actions was an option, making for a better strategy as a support member of the party. If things went well next time, sure: he could clobber some opponents. But, if he was going to shine as a healer, he might want to hold back no matter how good his initiative rolls were to see if a teammate needed support before going on the offensive.
Photo by lilartsy on Pexels.
A Smart DM Encourages Multiclassing
There is a school of thought among PCs in D&D Parties that staying in your lane is best. You should Know Your Role (in all capital letters) and never leave it. A Rogue should stick only to situations where they pick locks and can benefit from providing sneak attacks. A Warlock should always be in the back and cast Eldritch Blast on repeat into infinity. A Wizard should cast Magic Missile until they’re out of spell slots and then hide under a wagon until the fighting is over.
It sounds reasonable. Players pick these roles because they want to be good at certain things. And those epic, level twenty powers sound cool. Who doesn’t want to max out a class and be the Thiefiest Thief to ever Thief?
I have a secret for you. Lean in close. I will lay some expert DM knowledge on you from my thirty-plus years of experience.
You’re never going to make it to level twenty. I have no intention of letting it go that far. Not in my campaign, at least.
Every D&D game I have ever run has either fallen apart or come to a close well before getting to that stupidly high-level threshold. The highest I’ve ever gotten as of this writing was a tenth-level Party. That campaign had single-class adventurers fighting tooth and nail with low saving throws against conditions that, if they multiclassed, would not have been problematic at all.
Anyone used to working with Scrum will tell you about cross-functionality. Building it into a team is at the crux of agility. A good DM learns this quickly and encourages this in their party. A Barbarian that can clobber a sentry or sneak around them after putting a couple of levels into the Rogue class will be able to hold onto their rages for better use later. A Fighter who can cast a couple of Mage cantrips can get an edge in their encounters without risking their neck quite as often. And the saving throws get nothing but better.
Scrum World Developers similarly get better when a Scrum Master pushes them to develop accordingly, setting them up for success with the right coaching techniques and skills. In Scrum World, technology and science advance too quickly to let team members focus on a single discipline. Overspecialization can set Devs and their Scrum teams up for obsolescence or single points of failure. Coaching new skills and pushing teams to adopt new technologies and methods will keep your team cross-functional in a fast-changing world.
The Best DMs Know Planning is Good, But Being Prepared is Better
As a DM, I have had an entire story fall apart after a player with a lucky roll took out my villain in a single hit. There was supposed to be a whole arc with that villain as a recurring character. He would keep the party on their toes week after week as a nefarious player in the shadows. Instead, a single die roll ended the whole thing thirty minutes into the first session. Everyone went home, and I was intensely frustrated. I had a plan I worked on for hours, but I wasn’t prepared for a player to pick out the ridiculously overpowered weapon used to kill my bad guy.
There is a difference between having a plan and being prepared. With a plan, you have already committed to a specific course of action. You put things in place, worked out fine details, and estimated the functions of all the moving parts. There are processes and documentation you probably reviewed. You counted on those things to work out exactly as planned and with little deviation.
An experienced DM knows better. PCs – who are ideally the DMs friends and sometimes their family – are only there to have fun. They do not give a damn about any of the DM’s plans. They have their own ideas about how fun happens during the session and it may have nothing to do with a DM’s plan. All a DM can do is know the PCs and prepare based on what they know about the Party. DMs need to have a lot of options available to them, know where they all are, and to only dive into the specifics once they are needed.
PC (and Devs, for that matter) will not be little copies of the DM and will not act the exact way you want. Nor should they. PCs and Devs are human, unique. They bring something to your Party or Scrum team through different ways and means. It’s not something to be beaten out of them or micromanaged. Humans, shared stories, and volatile industries fiercely resist being wrangled in such a fashion.
To approach complicated and uncertain situations with agility, a good DM or Scrum Master should prepare to optimally use their PC’s and Dev’s unique approaches and methodologies. Then, find the right coaching approach to engage them. When a Scrum Master or a DM can engage their Party or a Scrum team, it’s amazing what they can do.
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As a DM, I must sometimes work hard to get in my players’ heads since I love bringing my favorite hobby to new players (new PCs haven’t learned how to be cynical PCs yet). Finding out how they approach the gaming table can be challenging. Do they like to fight, or do they like puzzles? Do they live for drama, or do they just want to help everyone around the table? Is the thrill of adventure something they live for? Or is it an excuse to cook for everyone around the table and see friends? Once I find what motivates them, I find the best way to run a game for that group… and then I can plan.
This Sounds Hard
It is hard—both the DM job and being a Scrum Master. Taking on either role takes serious determination and a lot of practice. But agile42 is here for you. The Scrum Master part, not the DM part! The good news is that everything here works in reverse, too. If you want to be a good DM, being a good Scrum Master is a great place to start! Book an appointment to speak with us at agile42 North America today to learn more about our coaching and training services. And, of course, go to DNDBeyond to learn more about Dungeons and Dragons, the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game.
5 Signs of a Toxic Organizational Culture and How to Fix it
/by agile42Organizational culture is so much more than a value statement on your website; it’s the sum of the experiences and beliefs of the people involved. It can be measured through living manifestations, such as rituals, stories of success and failure, habits, and unwritten rules. It is your experience as an employee, and it dictates how you feel about your company and your work. A bad company culture can affect the whole organization and get in the way of sustainable change, growth, and innovation.
Organizational culture can’t be designed or changed, but it can be measured and influenced. Find out how in our Webinar on Shaping Company Culture.
According to a 2022 survey conducted by FlexJobs, toxic company culture is the number one reason people are leaving their jobs. Organizational culture can encompass many different things, so it can be hard to pinpoint where your company is going wrong. In fact, the 2022 State of Agile Coaching Report by Scrum Alliance states that changing an organization’s culture was reported as one of the top challenges.
While it can be hard to put your finger on your organization’s culture, here are some tell-tale signs that you may have problems in this area. Plus, how to resolve them.
Five red flags that indicate you have a toxic culture
Let’s dive a little deeper into each of these signs of a bad company culture.
Red flag 1: Teams aren’t trusted to make decisions
Many companies advocate for transparency and trust, but these concepts are often embraced in theory without being encouraged in practice. Management teams that don’t allow for autonomy and decision-making can leave people feeling stifled. As a result, the quality of work will suffer and teams may have negative feelings about management styles or a particular manager.
A lack of trust can also lead to a culture of hierarchy. Hiereachal corporate culture is based on clearly defined levels, which depend on rules and a top-down level of control. In today’s fast-paced, unpredictable workplace, we need new ways of working. Hierarchical management is not suited to a fast-changing environment that requires fast decision-making.
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Faster delivery requires more agile ways of working. This means that people closer to the problems need to be trusted to make decisions and make them quickly. People should be able to self-organize, which requires the support of their work environment and leaders. This approach not only helps organizations thrive, but it helps employees feel trusted, which in turn helps them feel more positive about their organization and more connected to their teams.
How to spot it: A common sign of this problem is frequent bottlenecks or team members’ appearing reluctant to take ownership of projects.
How to fix it: Educate the team and leaders about what self-organization is and give people the trust and support they need to do a great job.
Recommended eLearning Course: Self-organization
Red flag 2: Leaders have a fixed leadership style
Agile leadership requires us to make sense of a situation before we respond, so that our behaviors are coherent with the group of people we are leading and their specific context. So, leaders need to understand the existing context and culture. If leaders fail to do this, it can leave the team feeling frustrated and distrustful.
Even if a specific leadership behavior seems appropriate for a situation, it needs to fit the cultural expectations of the people involved. If it does not, it will very likely cause a negative emotional response and potentially increase motivational debt. In some cases, the impact can be so severe that people decide to leave. This could be seen during the “Great Resignation.” This is a great example of what can happen at the extremes of incoherent leadership.
Coherent leadership is so important, especially as people are more aware of their needs, wants, and expectations in the workplace. Companies can no longer get away with toxic work cultures that don’t value their employees’ happiness. This means that leaders have an important role in cultivating supportive environments.
How to spot it: You will notice that teams are unsure of how to organize around tasks, what the next steps are, or what is expected of them.
How to fix it: Implement and understand Agile leadership. These leaders focus on managing the environment rather than managing people.
Recommended eLearning Course: Agile Leadership Foundations
Red flag 3: The team lacks purpose and direction
To feel driven and motivated in the workplace, we need to be working towards bigger goals. It is crucial that companies communicate these goals and are transparent about them.
Employees should complete their daily tasks and know what is expected of them, but they also should be aware of the bigger picture. This requires communication around strategic goals. The company’s vision needs to filter across the company, not just at the top level. Not only is this exciting for employees, but it also helps them to feel engaged, and more likely to collaborate and work strategically.
How to spot it: Team members are absorbed in their day-to-day tasks and, as a result, no innovation or improvement takes place.
How to fix it: Leaders can help their teams by setting a clear vision, explaining where to go and why, and making sure to continuously give and receive feedback.
Red Flag 4: The team seems scared to fail
Change is scary, and failing is scary, but it is necessary. There can be a lot of money and ego attached to certain projects, which can failing even scarier. Organizations with a healthy company culture try to create “safe to fail” environments. It is not enough to say to people, “You can fail.” Agile leaders know that effective change in a complex environment can only work with an evolutionary approach. They focus on leveraging the potential of the present and the natural predispositions that already exist in a team or an organization, instead of pushing towards an unrealistic ideal state.
It is like parenting. If we want our kids to learn about collaboration, we don’t describe what good collaboration looks like and create a plan for it. Instead, we might encourage them to apply to a football or basketball team or to join a music band. Through these experiences, they will build collaboration “muscles” and learn what collaboration feels like.
Organizations should encourage people to voice their opinions and take on experimental new projects. A side effect of that will almost certainly be failure. If your organization is not encouraging these types of behaviors, then you can’t change, grow, or learn in the process.
Photo by Christian Joudrey on Unsplash
How to spot it: There are very fixed and defined roles within an organization, which do not allow for experimentation to take place.
How to fix it: Allow skilled teams to self-organize and decide how to approach the situation through experimentation. An Agile mindset and approach can help teams achieve this.
Recommended eLearning Course: Agile Foundations
Red flag 5: People feel burned out
If there is a sense of burnout within the team or leadership, it could mean that individual values aren’t aligned with those of your company. This can leave people feeling drained.
One of the biggest causes of this kind of problem is when people are expected to work at an unsustainable pace to meet certain goals or deadlines. While this may get results in the short term, it has far-reaching negative consequences in the long term. Sooner or later, fatigue and anxiety will filter in. Plus, this will negatively affect both the quality of work and work-life balance, which has a massive impact on how people feel about their workplace.
Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash
How to spot it: A common sign of burnout is when teams are constantly starting work but not always finishing it. Middle management, teams, and individuals are 100% busy, but delivery is slowing down.
How to fix it: Learn to identify and eliminate impediments to the flow of work in order to keep queued work manageable and alleviate pressure on teams.
The Next Steps to Improving Your Company Culture
There are many ways that companies can improve their culture. But before organizations embark on this journey, they need to know exactly where they are going wrong and what people are saying about their company culture. In our decades of working with organizations, we’ve seen countless hours wasted by not getting to the root of the problem.
Our Organizational Scan™ tool is a scientific, data-based way to measure company culture and take action based on facts, rather than assumptions.
It gives an accurate, real-time view of your organizational culture, leadership style, decision-making capabilities, and employee happiness. This empowers you and your organization to make positive, sustainable changes.
Webinar | How to Become an Agile Coach
/by agile42There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about what it means to be an Agile coach. Agile coaching companies have difficulties explaining the value they will bring to their customers, and the role is often treated like a multi-team Scrum Master. In this webinar, our hosts, Martin von Weissenberg and Magnus Kollberg, take a hard and in-depth look at the Agile coaching profession. They clear up some of these misconceptions so that you can find a clear and understandable explanation of what an agile coach is, what an agile coach does (and doesn’t do), and the value they can bring to organizations. They also give guidance on how to become one, sharing the relevant credentials and competencies you may need, as well as challenges you may face and how to overcome them. Lastly, they answer our audience’s most pressing questions.
READ AND WATCHWebinar | The Sprint Retrospective
/by agile42In the final webinar of our webinar series on the Scrum Events, we discuss the Retrospective. The Scrum Guide defines the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective as “to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness”. That sounds simple, but it’s actually one of the more complex Scrum Events. Watch as our coaches, Pascal Papathemelis and Ebru Yalcinkaya, take a closer look at Retros. They start by walking through the basics, like the basic structure of this event and what the Scrum Guide says about it. Then, while interacting with the audience and drawing on their experiences and challenges, they dive deeper, covering useful formats, common pitfalls, and some tips for making this event truly enlightening and productive for your teams.
Read and WatchAgile Leadership in Today’s World
/by Giuseppe De SimoneIn the fast-changing environment of our modern world, building and maintaining a thriving organization is a huge challenge, no matter if the company is big or small. It’s always been necessary for managers and leaders to understand the business itself very well, but today there are new challenges too. Organizations need to be adaptable, innovative, and engaging for people. In order to be successful in the new environment, a leader not only needs to learn a lot, but unlearn a lot too. There are new and different behaviors, skills and tools needed to nurture successful teams and organizations. This is where Agile leadership can make a meaningful impact.
To become an exceptional leader in a volatile and unpredictable world, join our webinar on 29 August: Top Challenges Facing the Modern Leader (and How to Overcome Them)
Contents
What is Agile leadership?
The term “Agile leadership” is made up of two key terms: agile and leadership.
Agile is an adjective, not a verb. It is not something you do, implement, or deploy: it is rather something you are. It is a property of a system, whether an individual, a team, or an entire organization. There’s a reason the word is exemplified by an athlete: being agile is about flexibility, and the ability to respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances.
The Oxford dictionary defines leadership as “the action of leading a group of people or an organization”. From this perspective, leadership is not something connected to a formal role, and nor is it something people are either born with or not. All of us can be leaders and followers in different contexts. Leadership is simply an ability to build.
Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash
Agile leadership is the ability to be flexible, use different approaches, and adapt to the context and the people involved. Because of this dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are inherently positive or negative in and of themselves. Rather, there are leadership behaviors which are more or less appropriate within the context.
Agile leadership is about the ability to make sense of the circumstances and adopt behaviors which are coherent with what the group of people you are leading in a specific context feels comfortable with. Incoherent behaviors are those that are not helpful within a specific situation and might be perceived negatively in the given cultural context. For this reason, Agile leadership is useful for any organization hoping to succeed in today’s climate, not only Agile organizations.
Coherent vs Incoherent Leadership
Like a sportsman needs to master many techniques to be really flexible, a true Agile leader has to master multiple leadership styles to be able to adopt the one that fits the specific context. That is quite a challenge, since we all feel more comfortable to adopt one or two specific leadership approaches and generally find others harder. If you do not practice the ones you are less comfortable with, the risk to propose an incoherent leadership is very high, which can be more harmful than you think.
In my coaching, I have observed the following pattern many times: People in a given organization are used to being told what to do. They have learned to be comfortable with it, because they are rewarded to follow directives. One day the manager comes and says, “Now we are Agile, so you are self-organized and empowered to do what you think is most appropriate”. People stare at each other wondering what this might mean, thinking “just tell us what to do and we will do it”.
This is an example of incoherent leadership. The resulting frustration and dissatisfaction are known as Motivational Debt. Even if a specific leadership behavior seems appropriate to a situation, it needs to fit the cultural expectations of the people involved. If it does not, it will very likely cause a negative emotional response and potentially increase motivational debt. In some cases, the impact can be so severe that people decide to leave. The “Great Resignation” all companies witnessed between 2020 and 2022 is a great example of what can happen in the extremes of incoherent leadership.
So, while it is true that Agile organizations are built upon autonomous and self-managed teams, this shift cannot be pushed onto people overnight. Individuals and teams need to be gently guided over time into becoming more autonomous and Agile, by adapting the leadership and the environment iteratively and incrementally, in the service of making people the best version of themselves.
Agile leadership principles
In the last 15 years, I have had the chance to talk to a lot of leaders involved in efforts to create more agile organizations. Many of these leaders shared a sense of frustration for the many “don’ts” they were prescribed – and too few “do’s”.
These leaders were constantly hearing things like, “Don’t assign tasks to people!”;”Don’t tell the team how to do something!”; or “Don’t take decisions the team can take on their own!”.
The most common consequences of this frustration and uncertainty are two and both potentially harmful: the leader backs off and starts not to do anything or the leader keeps doing the same things as before exactly in the same way as before.
How do we address this then? How does effective leadership work in a 21st century organization?
Photo by Yan Krukov on Pexels
Five Key Principles of Agile Leadership
Individuals and organizations are not machines, but living organisms who need to learn and adapt. This means that we cannot always have pre-programmed rules to follow. Pre-programmed rules and predefined processes work well in a stable environment where we are able to predict all possible scenarios and prepare in advance to handle them. But what about the scenarios or disruptive changes we cannot predict?
In such a context, it is more effective to learn and rely on principles instead of rules. First we need to incorporate those principles into our decision-making and leadership styles. Then, when new circumstances unfold, we can define appropriate practices, aligned with those principles, to make use of.
A good analogy for this is parenting. When kids are small, we can give them specific rules to follow, which work well in the safe space they live inside the family: “Don’t put your fingers into the plug! Sit well! First, finish your homework and then you can use your mobile phone!” However, if we want them to grow up and be equipped to face the unexpected events of adult life, we need to stop giving them rules and start teaching them principles (e.g. “Be honest”). Only then will they be able to apply themselves in different situations.
So what are useful Agile leadership principles to incorporate?
1. Manage the environment, not the people
Research and empirical evidence tell us that we can’t change people: we can hardly change the person we see in the mirror every morning. But we can change the environment and people’s experiences so that the behaviors and the results we expect come to life naturally.
Every organization has a vision and sets goals and metrics to monitor on the way to that company vision. Those goals are achieved (or not) through the results that every single person in the organization accomplishes. Some of them are exciting, like bringing an innovative product to the market, and some of them are just necessary, like filling in tax returns. But all results come from actions and behaviors. And going one step deeper, actions come from decisions, which in turn are informed by beliefs: we decide based on what we think is right or best in the moment.
Our brains are connecting machines, which create wired patterns through which we interpret the reality around us and decide what is right or wrong. These patterns are created through the experiences we have lived all our lives. Existing patterns cannot be broken: the power of one to one conversations is therefore overrated. But new patterns can be created through novel experiences.
Traditional leaders tend to focus on managing people’s actions. This approach addresses just the tip of the iceberg, and it only works well in a very stable environment. In such a state, the rate of change is so slow that we can afford to have only a few people (the managers) in control of decision making and the rest of the workforce simply executing.
When the rate of change is high, the reaction from hierarchical management is too slow and can create bottlenecks. Here, decision-making power must be distributed and given to those closer to the problem. To avoid the risk that everyone takes their own direction, this distributed decision-making power needs to be coherently funneled towards the company goals and vision.
Organizational culture is so much more than a value statement on your website: it’s the sum of the experiences and beliefs of the people involved. The organizational culture can be measured through its living manifestations, such as rituals, stories of success and failure, habits, and unwritten rules.
Today, an effective leader does not create superficial compliance to company values, but leverages approaches such as mentorship and coaching to create new experiences, which will then result in new stories, new rituals and new behaviors.
Agile leadership focuses at the bottom of the pyramid to manage the environment and create those experiences for people to build coherent beliefs, which will in turn determine coherent decisions.
2. Build autonomy and trust
Modern-day organizations benefit from decentralized decision making. To be more resilient and equipped to face unexpected circumstances, they must be built upon autonomous and self-managed teams.
But as we said above, the shift from a fully hierarchical chain of command to autonomy cannot be pushed onto people overnight. Individuals and teams need to be respectfully guided over time to become more autonomous and agile, by adapting to the leadership and the environment iteratively and incrementally.
An Agile leader carefully selects those leadership behaviors that can act as a bridge in the gentle transition towards higher levels of autonomy with minimum disruption and resistance.
This process of transition and discovery will be shaped by bringing diverse perspectives together, for instance by asking people to share stories of success and failure. Some questions you could ask include:
A transition towards a higher level of autonomy while building trust (instead of harming it) is based on adopting iteratively and incrementally more of the behaviors that are associated with the desired state and less of the ones that are not.
At the same time, it is necessary to build the teams’ skills to sustain high levels of autonomy, for instance the ability to navigate conflicts, collective decision making, and the ability to give each other constructive feedback.
3. Model the behaviors you want to see
As Agile leaders shape the environment to create the experiences which support the right culture and make higher levels of autonomy accepted and affordable by the team, they realize they are themselves part of that environment.
This means that they need to own and model the culture they want to see around in the organization, to avoid an incoherent clash between what they preach and the leadership they demonstrate. Such a clash can undermine people’s trust and willingness to take on more responsibility.
If Agile leaders are serious about improving their organization, they should be even more serious about improving themselves.
4. Lead based on the context
The ability to make sense of the circumstances in a given situation and adapt your approach to fit the context is a key characteristic of good leadership. As expressed by Dave Snowden in the Cynefin framework, different circumstances can be organized into different domains. The domains, in turn, are characterized by different approaches to decision making, acting and leading.
Situations in ordered domains show causality, meaning there is a clear relationship between cause and effect. This means that we can plan and act, based on the characteristics of the situation and the context in which it is happening. In some cases, the appropriate action is self-evident: it is sufficient and effective just to tell people what to do or establish guidelines and checklists to follow.Other cases require analysis. In these situations, expertise plays a very important role: the leader will ask experts to analyze the situation, and provide possible solutions. Establishing expert peer review can improve the quality of what is decided and executed.
In unordered domains, the lack of causality makes planning and the direct reuse of existing approaches very difficult, if not impossible. When the situation is complex, the relationship between cause and effect can only be discovered in retrospect and therefore actions might have unintended consequences. In those cases, expertise is not of much help, and it is necessary to run multiple parallel probes (some of which will fail). These allow the identification of repeating patterns and show us how to affect the system and address the problem. The leader’s ability to involve cognitively diverse people will affect the quality of the experiments and the decided actions.
In a chaotic situation (such as an emergency), the leader’s ability to act promptly is what will make a difference. Waiting and trying to analyze the situation is useless when volatility and uncertainty are very high.
Understanding the context and the situation allows leaders to act effectively in a given cultural context. For example, in a hierarchical organization people will expect the leader to appoint experts and make the final decision in a complicated situation, while in a more collaborative organization, the group will feel comfortable to appoint experts and options on how to move forward will be vetted and discussed by the group. Agile leaders are aware of the context and the situation and how to appropriately shift their behaviors and modulate the actual course of actions.
5. Incorporate agility into change
All changes, even with the best intentions, can create motivational debt by introducing gaps between expectation and reality. People are complex and there is only so much change each of us can handle at a time. However, many organizations try to take a “fail-safe” approach to change. An example of this could be buying a big model from a consulting agency, marketing the concept internally, and setting milestones. There’s so much money, ego and expectations attached to the change project that it will simply not be allowed to fail.
Agile leaders, on the other hand, know that effective change in a complex environment can only work with an evolutionary approach. Here, the focus is on leveraging the potential of the present and the natural predispositions that already exist in a team or an organization, instead of pushing towards an unrealistic ideal state.
Again, it is like parenting. If we want our kids to learn collaboration, we don’t describe what good collaboration looks like and create a plan towards it. Instead, we might encourage them to apply to a football or basketball team or to join a music band. Through these experiences, they will build collaboration muscles and learn what collaboration feels like.
In order to reduce the risk and side effects of change within organizations and deal with unpredictability, effective leaders know to instill change through diverse experiments with small continuous adaptations. This removes the burden and risk of maintaining different co-existing systems of work (i.e. the old way of working, and the new one) for long periods of time: small changes are easily understood, quickly piloted and rapidly integrated, minimizing the uncertainty, confusion and loss of effectiveness inherent in change.
Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash
Running different parallel experiments enables leaders to validate assumptions and hypotheses in a safe-to-fail environment. Through multiple safe-to-fail experiments they recognize repeating emergent patterns that can be replicated to catalyze change in other parts of the organization.
By asking volunteers to help define and run the experiments, they achieve wider acceptance of the change in the organization and increase transparency because everyone can see small things happen and facilitate work in that direction: people hate it when a big change is unexpectedly announced by management and they cannot relate to the rationale and the implications of the change.
Agile leadership styles
Agile leadership is the ability to master multiple leadership styles to be able to adopt the one that fits the specific context, and work with the expectations of the team. We can define six different leadership styles (or behaviors) that can be developed and applied in different contexts and cultures:
Because of the dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are positive or negative in themselves. Rather, leadership behaviors that are more or less helpful within a specific situation and might be perceived positively or negatively in a given cultural context.
Read more: Agile Leadership styles
Agile metrics for leadership
A question on many Agile leaders’s minds is, “How can we know how well we are doing as leaders?” Most people would tell you that we need to measure the impact that our leadership has, the level of autonomy of our team, the culture, and the level of resilience of our organization. However these are all lagging indicators, which we can evaluate only in retrospect in the future: sometimes leadership is about planting seeds of a tree we will never enjoy the shade of.
However we could look at a few leading indicators to understand whether we are going in the right direction and get feedback. In this way we will be able to improve by leveraging on our strengths and acting on our improvement areas.
Leading indicators for Agile leadership
A first leading metric could be around how we are doing as servant leaders. If we are demonstrating good servant leadership, we are likely to be strengthening people’s skills and building leadership as a diffused organizational capability, so that everyone can be a potential leader. A few questions can help us self-reflect on the different servant leadership virtues and their impact on the people around us:
Once you identify your biggest strength and your biggest improvement area, meet with a peer and:
Another useful leading indicator could be about our ability to master multiple leadership behaviors. If we have the agility to adopt the appropriate leadership style in each of the contexts we are dealing with, we can reduce the Motivational Debt and build autonomy and resilience in the organization. A leadership behavior assessment again could help us self-reflect and get the inputs necessary to strengthen our leadership muscles, around the style and the behaviors we feel less comfortable in adopting.
Our leadership behavior assessment is based on SenseMaker® technology developed by Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co. Both the leader and their followers capture and interpret situations in which the leader demonstrated a certain behavior. Multiple perspectives on the same situation help the leader realize how well they master different leadership behaviors and how coherently they apply those to different situations and contexts.
Try agile42’s Leadership Assessment for free or level up with the full-featured assessment.
Servant Leadership
The future of work, especially after the pandemic, seems to be a place where individuals closer to the problem are best-placed to make decisions. Teams are self-managed, which means they decide what to work on, as well as when and how to best achieve the requested outcome.
Leaders that are effective in building such an environment create the conditions for the individuals and teams to perform at their best, and meet what people seem to expect from employers in 2022. This includes a focus on removing impediments, aligning stakeholders, building trusting relationships, coaching, providing feedback, developing people’s skills and building the capabilities of the organization. Ultimately, they cultivate the virtues of servant leadership.
What is servant leadership?
Robert K. Greenleaf first popularized the term “servant leadership” in The Servant as Leader, an essay published in 1970. It is a leadership philosophy and set of practices in which the leader puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. A Servant Leader should be asking themselves, “Do my actions help those I lead grow as persons? Do they, because of my actions, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become leaders?”
Dive deeper into Servant Leadership
The 11 virtues of servant leaders
These virtues are maybe even more essential now than they were when they were first published in 1970. In the current world, leaders simply can’t be effective without trust from people they are supposed to lead.
Emotional intelligence in Agile leaders
Practicing the virtues of servant leadership helps build good leadership in this fast-changing world. But what other qualities does an effective agile leader have?
Well, if you want to become the kind of leader who masters multiple leadership styles and is able to read the situation and apply a coherent approach to the context, you might want to work on your emotional intelligence.
Daniel Goleman was the first to popularize the idea of emotional intelligence and demonstrate evidence of its impact within organizations. He passionately argued for recognizing the relationship between someone’s emotional state and the actions driven by it, and how those actions in turn impact others and the organization (essentially the people they work with), whether positively or negatively.
Emotional intelligence consists of four fundamental skills:
Read more: Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
Lean Agile Leadership
The phrase “Lean Agile Leadership” is something of a buzzword at the moment, although if you unpack the concept there are a lot of useful principles behind it.
The term “Lean” was coined by James Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos in their book, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production, in 1990.
Recommended reading: Lean Agile Leadership in more detail
Seven Lean principles
Later, in 2003, Mary and Tom Poppendieck published the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. In this book they identified seven fundamental principles to take the concept of lean thinking from production, and apply it to software and product development. I believe these principles can be applied to any creative work.
The seven Lean principles are:
Three dimensions of Lean Agile Leadership
There’s another important thing we can learn from experiences of organizational transformation and Lean management in the manufacturing sector. In my coaching, I have pinpointed three key dimensions worth considering as a leader. For each of these dimensions, I will offer one or two coaching questions to facilitate the reader’s personal reflections.
Agile Leadership Training
In a post from 2011, consultant and writer Esther Derby explains how insufficient training and mentoring can be damaging for leaders. She says, “Most people in management roles receive little or no training on how to do the job. Many organizations promote people who excelled as individual contributors doing technical work into management roles […] The skills required for management are often vastly different. […] A lot of the management training out there is crap. Few organizations have robust and confidential mentorship programs.”
As we discussed in the chapters above, an effective way to become a better agile leader is to self-assess your servant leadership skills, understand how good you are at mastering multiple leadership styles, and grow your emotional intelligence index through journaling, self-reflection, and feedback.
However a solid education is extremely important, especially if you are starting the journey or want to deepen and practice your Agile leadership skills. In this context the industry standard and most widely recognized program in agile leadership is Certified Agile Leadership Essentials for Team and Organization Leaders, also known as CAL-E+T+O training. This class will help you discover how your natural, cultural dispositions might affect your teams, and learn how to create a safe-to-fail environment that fosters a culture of transparency, inspection, creativity, and adaptation.
Agile leadership styles
/by Giuseppe De SimoneAgile leadership is, at its core, the ability to master multiple leadership styles to be able to adopt the one that fits the specific context and the team’s expectations. Because of the dependence on context, expectations and relationships, there are no leadership behaviors that are inherently positive or negative. It is more helpful to describe leadership behaviors as either more or less helpful within a specific situation. The way the leadership behavior is perceived by those affected is important in a given cultural context.
Being an agile leader does not mean using a coaching leadership style in every circumstance since this can be unhelpful, (or even harmful) in certain situations. An example is a crisis situation, or working with a team of people that expect clear directives. In both of these examples, a leader using a directive or demanding style can be a gold example of servant leadership. This is because they are intentionally adopting that behavior in a specific moment in the service of empowering them to be better and more autonomous.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
How do you know which leadership style is most appropriate?
When you think of switching between leadership styles, it may seem like a tough challenge and even a little overwhelming at first. Agile leaders use emotional intelligence and are conscious of their own and other people’s emotions and perspectives. This helps them to adopt the appropriate leadership behavior in different circumstances. They are able to gently and iteratively shift their primary leadership style from directing towards coaching and catalyzing, in order to build agility and autonomy in their team and organization. This is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned, practiced, and mastered.
Recommended for you: Master various Agile leadership styles in our online course on Agile Leadership Foundations
Six leadership styles to master
We can define six different styles (or behaviors) that can be developed and applied in different contexts and cultures.
Directing
The leader acts, and is perceived as, an expert and an authority. It is considered one of the more traditional leadership styles.They are therefore in charge of assigning and controlling work while being held accountable for the results of the group’s work. Discussion or negotiation is not usually welcome when leading in this way. Instead, the leader expects compliance from their followers.
When it works: This style is essential in a crisis or when people expect clear direction
When it doesn’t: In the wrong context, for instance, when people expect a certain degree of autonomy, a directing style can be stifling and cause frustration.
What holds the group together: The direct relationship with the leader, as well as a shared awareness of the possible consequences of failure
Demanding
The leader is perceived and acts as someone with extremely high standards. They are competitive and focus primarily on performance, leading by example. The followers focus on their targets.
When it works: When followers perceive the work as focused on results, a constant push from the leader can be motivating in the short term.
When it doesn’t: When used long-term, this style can cause a high level of stress.
What holds the group together: Meeting targets successfully as well as the leader’s conflict-solving skills.
Conducting
The leader coordinates and encourages collaboration, believing that collaboration is essential and increases quality. While the leader is responsible for enabling the collaboration, the followers feel responsible for their individual contribution. They can rely on help from their peers.
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels
When it works: When followers know that they need to deliver the work, but expect the leader to retain the overall responsibility for delivering value, conducting can be effective.
When it doesn’t: This style can cause problems when people do not feel comfortable to organize their own work, or when they are not skillful enough to handle disagreements that emerge from cooperation.
What holds the group together: Clear roles and group dynamics
Envisioning
The leader motivates people by providing a compelling and challenging vision of the future. They inspire collaboration and a sense of shared responsibility. They have faith in their followers’ abilities. The followers value collaboration and they are motivated by their feeling of being able to learn and achieve more together.
When it works: This style is great for when the team believes that quality work can be achieved only through collaboration and collective agreement.
When it doesn’t: If the team does not have sufficient skills in collaborative decision making, this can cause difficulties.
What holds the group together: A team identity and a shared purpose
Coaching
This is the approach most commonly associated with agile leadership styles, however it is not always appropriate. The coaching leader supports team members with their personal growth and supports the team to become more effective as a whole by being a servant leader. The team shares responsibility and collaborates to achieve their goals. They are motivated by mastering challenges and learning continuously.
When it works: When the followers perceive the work as being self-directed and expect a high level of autonomy in achieving their goals.
When it doesn’t: When the followers do not feel comfortable with autonomy or do not have appropriate skills in giving/receiving constructive peer-to-peer feedback.
What holds the group together: A sense of belonging as well as the challenge of reaching their full potential.
Catalyzing
The leader amplifies the success of the team, connects them with the rest of the organization and ensures their contribution to strategy creation. The leader provides both praise and challenges and enables synergies. The followers are self-governing, maximize value delivery and incorporate customer feedback autonomously. They are open-minded, curious and adaptive. They are motivated by their contribution.
Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash
When it works: When the followers perceive their work as fully self-managed in terms of both the goal and how to achieve it.
When it doesn’t: When people are only focused on their own personal or team success and are unable to see the benefits to collaborate with the larger organization.
What holds the group together: A constant search for new challenges.
Want to learn more about Agile leadership styles?
Companies are investing more than ever in leadership development, and highly trained, skilled leaders are indispensable to the modern workforce. agile42 offers a number of training, coaching, mentoring and other services. You could start with the Golden Standard for Agile leaders, namely Certified Agile Leadership Essentials for Team and Organization Leaders (CAL-E+T+O) training, which we do in-person and remotely, or contact us for information about our other services. We also offer an online leadership course which will help you explore the various Agile leadership styles in more details.
Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
/by Giuseppe De SimoneDaniel Goleman was the first to popularize the idea of emotional intelligence and demonstrate evidence of its impact within organizations. He passionately argued for recognizing the relationship between someone’s emotional state and the actions driven by it, and how those actions in turn impact others and the organization (essentially the people they work with), whether positively or negatively.
Emotional intelligence consists of four fundamental skills
Self-awareness
Emotional intelligence is the ability to read and understand your own emotions as well as recognize their impact on work performance and relationships. It also includes the ability to realistically evaluate your strengths and limitations.
Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash
Self-management
It is the ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control, consistently display integrity and manage yourself and your responsibilities. It also includes the skill to adjust to changing situations and a readiness to seize opportunities.
Social awareness
It is the ability to sense other people’s emotions, understand their perspective, and take an active interest in their concerns. It is also the ability to read the currents of organizational life, build decision networks, and navigate politics.
Social skill
It is the ability to inspire, influence and develop others, for example the ability to de-escalate conflicts and facilitate resolutions. It includes skills of listening and sending clear, convincing, and well-tuned messages, as well as cultivating and maintaining a web of relationships.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Emotional Intelligence in leaders
These are all essential qualities for leaders, even though not everyone seems to realize it. Many organizations still use a fundamentally wrong metaphor to describe how work works. We keep thinking of our organizations as machines, where defined inputs are transformed into defined outputs, through defined processes and well designed connections of cogs. Is this the real nature of our organizations? How can such a machine adapt to ever changing circumstances and market needs?
Recommended reading: A Complete Guide to Agile Leadership
We will have better chances at building agile and flexible organizations, which are more equipped to succeed in the world today, if we start describing them as living organisms. Organizations are networks of people, and human beings are not interchangeable and programmable machines. It is impossible to force things on people, but good things can be achieved by leveraging people’s natural talents and their intrinsic willingness to do a good job.
Effective leadership is more of a social activity than an engineering task.
How do you increase your Emotional Intelligence?
Here are some simple tools I recommend if I am asked for a suggestion by the leaders I coach:
Recommended for you: Learn the skills to help you develop your emotional intelligence online course on Agile Leadership Foundations
Lean Agile Leadership
/by Giuseppe De SimoneThe phrase “Lean Agile Leadership” is something of a buzzword at the moment, although if you unpack the concept there are actually a lot of useful principles behind it.
What does “Lean” mean?
The term “Lean” was coined by James Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos in their book, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production, in 1990. They used the word to capture the essence of their in-depth study of the famous Toyota Production System (TPS). Back then, the term and its principles applied primarily to production.
Later, in 2003, Mary and Tom Poppendieck published the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. In this book they identified seven fundamental principles to take the concept of lean thinking from production, and apply it to software and product development. I believe these principles can be applied to any creative work.
Recommended reading: A Complete Guide to Agile Leadership
The seven Lean Principles
Each of the seven principles the Poppendiecks proposed has implications on leadership.
Eliminate waste
Waste is defined as any activity which does not add value to the final customer. The first step towards eliminating waste is simply to see the waste. The leader should know how the value flows in the organization and continuously challenge the current practice to identify waste.
Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash
But this is not enough: a lean leader helps the team remove any impediments that they are not able to resolve without support. They systemize solutions in the organizations to prevent the same impediment from coming back again. Finally, as in a famous quote from W.E. Deming, an American statistician who influenced a lot of the thinking behind the TPS, a lean leader realizes that “The greatest waste […] is failure to use the abilities of people […] to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make”.
Build quality in
A lean leader works to build a culture of discipline and excellence, guides others using principles and values instead of complex rules. They teach people not to cut corners, challenge coworkers to high performance and lead by example. You might argue that this is just true leadership – and it is.
Amplify learning
Traditional managers face competition with other managers trying to meet locally optimized goals and look good to the next level up. But this wastes a lot of organizational learning, which could be leveraged by collaborating with peers instead. Building and maintaining a network of peers is essential, as well as continuously challenging one’s own leadership approach in the light of what works and what doesn’t. Amplifying learning also implies:
Defer commitment
Keep your options open up to the last responsible moment and be capable of living with uncertainty, because that is the reality we are facing. Furthermore, early commitment could mean discarding potentially good options, just not to afford the cost of deferring a decision.
Deliver as fast as possible
The most effective way of addressing a complex problem is to let a diverse team of skilled people self-organize and decide how to approach the situation through experimentation. A team is able to self-organize around a goal if the leader helps define what the goal is, makes it compelling and clarifies what constraints the environment has. If you want to help your team or organization to deliver as fast as possible, set a clear vision, explain clearly where to go and why, align all stakeholders around that vision and get fast feedback. And finally give space to your teams to reflect on what they are doing to find ways to go even faster.
If you’re not a front line engineer, there’s only one reason for you to exist: help your team move faster – Jan Bosch
Photo by Spencer Davis on Pexels
Respect people
Who dares to disagree with this? Actually this apparently generic statement hides a deeper meaning. It stands for: give people the environment and support they need to do a great job and trust they will do their best to accomplish their goal. So it’s not simply about saying to a team “Now you’re empowered to do what you want”, but putting them into the conditions to succeed. It’s about staying close to the teams, Managing By Walking Around and Listening, motivating, and assisting on personal development. That might require teaching, mentoring and coaching.
Optimize the whole
Optimizing the whole means having an e2e view of the system, product or organization and consequently selecting the right metrics which can help the system improve. It is about measuring only what adds value (less is more) and whatever you want to measure, measure it one level up.
Three dimensions of Lean Agile Leadership
But what else can we learn from experiences of organizational transformation and Lean management in the manufacturing sector? In my coaching, I have learned three dimensions worth considering as a leader. For each of these dimensions I will offer one or two coaching questions to facilitate the reader’s personal reflections.
Recommended for you: Dive deeper into Lean Agile leadership in our online course on Agile Leadership Foundations
Photo by Kateryna Babaieva on Pexels
Visible problems do not exist: they have been solved already!
A few years ago I attended a seminar on Lean Management and Continuous Improvement organized by an association of entrepreneurs in the manufacturing industry. One more interesting insight I got from the CEO of a consulting company, connected to the Japanese government, in his speech about the Toyota Production System, was his classification of problems into three categories: potential, invisible and visible. It’s important that potential problems to the desired target are identified as well as invisible problems are made visible and improved immediately. Instead, he said, visible problems do not actually exist, because they have been solved already.
Most efficient way becomes standard: standard must be improved every month!
In a panel I attended about Continuous Improvement, one of the participants described that, once a process has been improved in one department, then the most efficient way becomes a “standard”.
When hearing this word, I got disappointed wondering how the definition of a standard process could fit into a Continuous Improvement approach.
But then he added: the “standard” must be reviewed every month!
And more: the “standard” is visualized and each manager is accountable to improve the “standard” every month!
Measure organizational capacity of solving impediments to generate trust
Another enlightening reflection to me was from the italian director of a cans manufacturer with around 1500 employees.
You might wonder how cans may be relevant for high-tech industries, but let me continue.
Well, he was describing their transformation journey to Lean and talked about the importance of impediment handling in his organization to be trustable. They have a graph, clearly visible to everybody, with 2 curves: the accumulated number of raised impediments per month and the accumulated number of fixed impediments per month.
The 2 curves must always be parallel, because he said: “If the curve of fixed impediments goes flattish, all my employees will understand I do not believe in what we’re doing and I’m just cheating them”.