Tag Archive for: leadership

Agile leadership styles

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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.

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.

Conducting Leadership Style

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.

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

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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.

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.

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:

  • 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.

Recommended for you: Learn the skills to help you develop your emotional intelligence online course on Agile Leadership Foundations 

Lean Agile Leadership

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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.

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. 

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

Deliver value as fast as possible

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 

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?

 

Servant leadership

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The future of work has arrived faster than we could have imagined in our post-pandemic world. One of the defining characteristics of this modern workplace is a shift away from traditional decision-making hierarchies. In today’s workplace, it makes more sense for decisions to be made by those individuals closest to the problem at hand. Teams are self-managed, meaning they decide what to work on, when to work on it, and how to best achieve the requested outcome. This shift comes with new demands on leadership, and effective leaders cultivate the values of servant leadership. 

Expectations on leaders have shifted alongside these changes. The very best leaders are not telling anyone what to do. Instead, they are removing impediments, aligning stakeholders, building trusting relationships, coaching, providing feedback, developing people’s skills and building the capabilities of the organization. They basically create the conditions for individuals and teams to perform at their best.

What is servant leadership? 

Servant leadership 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. Robert K. Greenleaf first popularized the term “servant leadership” in The Servant as Leader, an essay published in 1970. 

The term might sound like an oxymoron the first time you hear it. You may think that the teams are there to serve the leaders, but in fact, organizations can benefit more when things are the other way around. 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?”

Recommended reading: A Complete Guide to Agile Leadership

The principles of servant leaders

According to Greenleaf, servant leaders cultivate 11 key virtues. These virtues are maybe even more essential now than they were in 1970. In the current world, leaders can’t be effective without trust from people they are supposed to lead, and these virtues ultimately build trust.

Awareness

They have a keen sense for what is happening around them. They know what’s going on and will rarely be fooled by appearances.

Calling

They are willing to sacrifice egocentric interests for the benefit of others. They have a natural calling to serve, which cannot be taught.

Community

They believe that an organization needs to function as a community. They instill a sense of community spirit in the workplace.

Conceptualization

They have the ability to conceptualize the world, events and possibilities. They encourage others to dream great dreams and avoid getting bogged down by day-to-day realities and operations.

Empathy

They understand and empathize with others’ circumstances and problems and have well-developed emotional intelligence.

Foresight

They are able to anticipate future events. They are adept at picking up patterns in the environment and seeing what the future will bring. They can anticipate consequences of decisions with great accuracy.

Growth

They believe that all people have something to offer beyond their tangible contributions. They work hard to help people in a number of ways..

Healing

They have appreciation for the emotional health and spirit of others. They are good at facilitating a healing process of relationships, when necessary..

Listening

They are receptive and genuinely interested in the views and input of others.

Persuasiveness

They are able to convince others to do things, rather than relying on formal authority. They never force others to do things.

Stewardship

They show a desire to prepare the organization to contribute to the greater good of society, making a positive difference in the future.

Recommended for you: Learn how to be a servant leader in our online course on Agile Leadership Foundations 

How to build trust as a servant leader

I learned that one of the most effective ways to build trust is to demonstrate that you truly care about people and you are committed to their growth. Most people want to feel they are valued as individuals; that they are heard and not judged. Ultimately, it is about making the workplace more humane and fit for human beings. Servant leadership is necessary to build leadership as a diffused organizational capability, or in other words, to make everyone a potential leader. 

Build trust as servant leader

The challenges of servant leadership

It is really difficult for managers who have learnt all they know in a traditional environment to change their fundamental leadership beliefs. They might be scared to let things go, or insecure because they don’t yet know how to contribute in a new and different way. They might be afraid to become useless or redundant, and they might feel lost since they might never have seen a real example of servant leadership before. A lot of the feedback they receive is what not to do, but there aren’t always great resources to help them find what to do. Finally, managers might be so used to pushing their ideas and instructions on their teams, that they end up pushing and forcing these new ideas too fast, with the unintended consequence of frustration and dissatisfaction of the people involved. 

How to practice a servant leadership approach

By coaching dozens of leaders, I learned that the following behaviors can help leaders understand and practice a servant leadership approach:

  • Listen to your employees’ fears with compassion and offer them support in trying different behavioral patterns, one at a time.
  • Help them visualize the benefits of applying those patterns, for example collecting feedback from people, through storytelling
  • Take action to build mutual trust between management and developers: for instance, encourage leaders to be present where the work happens and practicing MBWAL (Management By Walking Around and Listening) instead of MBSR (Management By Status Report)
  • Encourage peer support and peer feedback among leaders: things are less difficult if done together.

Want to learn more about leadership? 

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 Standar d 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.

Webinar: Digital Transformation

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June was all about "Digital Transformation". agile42 coach Martin von Weissenberg, alongside our special guest Dave Snowden, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge, discussed the way agile and digitilisation are intertwined, and why it’s misleading to think of digitalisation as a one-time “transformation”

Martin got Part 1 underway with a video interview exploring what is a digital transformation and why it is necessary. Delving also into the organizational implications of a digital transformation.

Whilst agile is an enabler of digitalisation, we can also say digitalisation is an enabler of agility. 

- Martin von Weissenberg

In Part 2, the creator of the Cynefin framework and thought leader within complexity science and knowledge management, Dave Snowden, explained the role Agile plays in the context of a digital transformation & the organizational implications thereof. He also examined the social human impact of such changes.

On the 23rd of June we were treated to a thought-provoking webinar hosted by South African based agile42 coach, Peter Hundermark, along with Dave and Martin. The audience had the opportunity to ask their pressing questions in this Q&A-style panel discussion. Some of the questions covered included:

  • What is digital transformation?
  • Can agile enable digital transformation or the other way around? How do we see the connection/relationship between the two?
  • What is your opinion on digital transformation? Is it about technological risks? About literacy?
  • With many people now predominantly working from home, is this driving digital transformation or is there some sort of link?
  • How can we find the adjacent possible in a transformation based on attractions and systems tendency?

People confuse the adjacent possible with the adjacent, adjacent. They forget the possible. Adjacent possible is an evolutionary landscape. It's not what's next to us. It's also what's the next feasible state for the right energy input.

- Dave Snowden

If you missed out on the live session, we have the recording for you here - please feel free to share around with your network. 

Join our free agile42 Community and gain access to thousands of agilists from all over the world to share experiences, challenges and experiences. Expand your toolbox within this unique learning community of like-minded people, who share a passion for agility, organizational culture, methods like Scrum, and coaching.

Please do get in touch with us should you have any questions. We are here to help.
Stay tuned to our social media platforms for next month's theme!

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Leading Remotely: Webinar

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Our theme for April was Leading Remotely, where we teamed up with our trusted partner, Geoff Watts from Inspect & Adapt, who kicked off the month with a video interview. Geoff is the UK’s leading ORGANIC agility® leadership coach. In his interview, he shares his observations on how organisations have been impacted by COVID-19 and particularly how leadership has been affected by the shift to remote work. He also gives advice about what to focus on to better lead remotely.

In the second part of our "Leading Remotely" theme, ORGANIC agility® leadership coach Andrea Tomasini shares his insights of the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on organisations, addressing why some companies have fared better. He also gives tips on how leaders can increase effectiveness when working remotely whilst finding ways to reduce stress levels amongst employees.

To sum all of this up, we hosted a webinar on the 22 of April, which recapped the month and the general discussions, both on social media and also in our Community. Both Andrea and Geoff shared their thinking live, and the amount of people that joined us was fantastic. 

Since the topic is very broad, we chose to have a poll in the beginning of the session, to see where we should start the conversation. The options were: 

  • Trust
  • Well-being when working/leading remotely
  • Practices

The majority of people wanted us to talk about “Well-being when working/leading remotely” and that became the natural starting point of the discussion. However the conversation did cover all three points, as they do go hand in hand. 

Leading remotely is a big topic, and our audience contributed with both good questions, as well as sharing their own valuable thinking and ideas on how they tackled this situation. The webinar was hosted more as a discussion this time around, and the engagement was great! 

If you missed out on the live session, don’t panic! We have the recording for you here to share around with your network. 

For any questions, you are always welcome to contact us!
Hope to see you again next month, for a new theme and new discussions! 

Leading Remotely: Part 2

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In Part 2 of our "Leading Remotely" theme, ORGANIC agility® leadership coach Andrea Tomasini, shares his insights of the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on organisations, addressing why some companies have fared better. He also gives tips on how leaders can increase effectiveness when working remotely whilst finding ways to reduce stress levels amongst employees.

You can watch the full video interview below:

Did you observe any particular change in organisations when the pandemic hit?

The pandemic definitely changed the way we are working and the way we are doing things together. In particular, if we think about all the rituals and behaviours which were established before the pandemic hit, when people were still in offices and they had an effective playbook in place, and now being forced to work together remotely, it’s very unlikely that those same established rituals and processes will work effectively. 

Another thing which is different is that the stress levels of people working remotely tends to be very high, especially if people were not used to this before. The reason being that when you work remotely you are always looking at a screen, you are moving less, so your body has less chance to destress, to re-oxygenate. For many of us, working remotely has turned into a series of back-to-back meetings where you don’t even have time between meetings to walk out of a meeting room and to chat to colleagues in the corridor, or just to give your brain a few minutes to disconnect from the topic. This definitely increases stress levels.  

What would you say has become more difficult?

What is really difficult is the level of awareness in terms of some cultures to understand the context switching. When we used to work in physical offices or when meeting clients in different places, our subconscious was used to the switch of context and the environment around us. We also learnt to adapt our behaviour and attitude accordingly depending on the specific client or employee. This is something that is very difficult to do when working remotely as we physically stay in the same place; we are likely dressed in the same way; we are looking at the same screen all day. So switching context when working remotely creates a significant amount of stress as we tend to think a lot more consciously rather than subconsciously about how we should behave.

What can be done to increase effectiveness when working remotely?

So in order to work more effectively remotely, leaders in principle need to continue doing what they have always been doing which is focusing on creating an environment which enables their teams and their people to work more effectively together and to deliver customer value. This in principle didn’t change, however in practice it did as we can’t use all the techniques and tools we used when we were working physically together in an office. We also lost the possibility to just walk around and observe what is going on. 

There are some techniques we can use even today with digital tools, however, the feeling and the way people react to those types of observations is completely different from the one they had when you just walk around the office and have a chit-chat here and there. Ultimately it boils down to the fact that we need to create a higher level of autonomy. When people work remotely and they cannot physically collaborate with one another, they need to be in a position in which they can deliver value and be satisfied with the work they do without too much help. If people need a lot of help to complete their work they end up feeling frustrated - sitting alone in front of their screen and struggling to find answers to their problem. This likely creates that feeling of incompetence, that feeling of being inadequate and definitely increases the level of stress.

Why do you think some companies seemed to have fared better during the pandemic?

I tend to agree with what Geoff said in the previous video that the companies that invested preemptively in creating a higher level of autonomy and nurturing self-organization when they still had the possibility to do so in a physical environment, definitely had a head start when the pandemic hit. However, it’s not impossible to help people increase their level of trust and self-confidence when working remotely by supporting them in terms of mentorship, coaching and even providing them with the opportunity to upskill. 

There are many new skills that we need to learn when working remotely and it’s not as easy as before - you cannot simply send people to workshops or tell them to read a book. As they still need to find the time to do this, we need to be more supportive and empathetic about the new way of working and help them become self-confident to deliver value and ultimately gain satisfaction from the work that they do. It’s also important that they engage with the outcome and the ownership of what they are doing.

You talked about higher levels of stress before - what can be done to reduce it?

In order to help people reduce their level of stress, we can look at ways to give them back that human touch that they might have lost by interacting with people only through a camera. The other issue is that if we keep on planning meetings back-to-back nobody will have the chance to even stand up from their chair, so one thing that I’ve seen being quite effective is to do what they call “speed up meetings”. Don’t do long meetings anymore - try to keep meetings short and make sure there is at least 10-15 minutes between meetings so people have the opportunity to stand up, move around a bit, or perhaps get a breath of fresh air. 

In order to help people cope better with the situation and for you as leaders to understand how everyone is doing, you should consider having informal conversations. The informal conversations we used to have around the water cooler aren't as easy to have in a remote environment. As leaders we should consider having half an hour meetings with the team every week or every 2nd week to just talk about something other than work. Take your mobile phone and go for a walk outside - have a relaxing conversation. Check how people are doing; how their family is; what their interests are beyond work. Give them back that human touch we had in a physical environment.

What didn’t change for leaders then?

At the end of the day what we need to do as leaders still remains the same. We need to engage people, we need to help them deliver the value they want to deliver and we need to be able to do that at a sustainable pace. We have to pay particular attention to the work/life balance of our employees to make sure they keep on delivering value, they remain engaged and ultimately help us in becoming successful. 

Watch the recording of Andrea's webinar on "Leading Remotely".

*Click here to read Part 1 blog post* 

 

Leading Remotely: Part 1

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Our theme for the month of April is “Leading Remotely”. We have teamed up with our trusted partner, Geoff Watts from Inspect & Adapt, who kicks off Part 1 with a video interview. Geoff is the UK’s leading ORGANIC agility® leadership coach. In this interview he shares his observations on how organisations have been impacted by COVID-19 and particularly how leadership has been affected by the shift to remote work. He also gives advice about what to focus on to better lead remotely.

If you have a burning topic you would like us to cover, please do get in touch!

You can watch the full interview recording below:

What impact have you been able to observe on organisations when COVID hit?

One thing that has been really noticable for me since the start of the pandemic just over a year ago, and the different responses organisations have taken, is that the organisations that previously invested a lot more in their individuals, their teams, and their autonomy, have really responded and coped much better. They had less disruption than the organisations that had effectively paid lip service to the agile values & principles. Those organisations have tended to resort a lot more towards micro-management, status updates and check-in meetings.

How has leadership been affected by the shift to remote work?

Essentially leadership hasn’t really changed especially if we work in a complex domain as complex work requires greater autonomy and autonomy still requires competence, confidence and conditions for success. So the job of a leader is to help their team get to greater competence, develop confidence and to create the conditions where they can be autonomous.

Can you give any advice about what to focus on to better lead remotely?

I’m going to talk about a few areas of many that great leaders can focus on in order to make remote leadership more effective. 

Isolation

The first one is “isolation”. Now it might sound strange for me to even mention this, as it is obvious that while we’re all working more remotely and we’re not in the office seeing each other day-to-day we are bound to feel more isolated. I think it’s a really important thing to be aware of as we are missing out on a lot of things that we would consider to be our innate human needs. 

We are social animals and by being forced apart from our colleagues we are missing out on the small talk, on the connection, the collaborative problem solving and the informal chats that would normally make up a large part of our day. When we miss out on some of those innate human needs that we yearn for as social animals, we are generally going to be struggling as human beings to be our best. 

So as leaders we need to be aware of that and regularly check in with people to make sure that their needs are being met. Notice that I said “checking in” on people. It is very, very different to “checking up” on people. We don’t need to check up on them, because as leaders we know that people want to be successful, we know that given the choice between being productive or unproductive, people would choose to be productive.

Burn-out

The second aspect is something that has been talked about quite a lot and that is “burn-out” or “overwhelm”. One interesting thing that I’ve observed is that the social cost of giving somebody else a task is significantly reduced if we’re not physically present with them. What I mean by that is it’s a lot easier for me to send somebody an email and ask them to do something than it is for me to look them in the eye and ask them to do something for me. As we are more remote, we are relying more on electronic means of communication. What we are seeing is a lot of people asking for a lot more things from others, leading to those people becoming overwhelmed. 

The other important aspect when it comes to burn-out is the fact that we are spending a lot of our time on screens and in particular on conference calls, which it’s well documented on is more draining than in-person meetings for various reasons. When we’re spending our time on more draining mediums we’re going to make more mistakes; we’re going to take more shortcuts; innovation will be reduced; motivation will be reduced. 

What can we do about it? Well, from my experience, a lot of the time we’re spending on these calls is around status updates and dependency management and usually that comes from being spread across multiple parallel pieces of work. The more pieces of work I am on at the same time, the more dependencies I have, therefore the more coordination I need to do. So one thing I can do as a leader, is help my people reduce the amount of things they are working on in parallel. Help people feel confident to prioritise, to focus, to say “no” or “not yet”. Or “yes” if: I can do that if you take this other piece of work off my hands. 

Giving people the confidence and power to prioritise their workload and to focus, will reduce the amount of burn-out, or reduce the amount of fatigue and feeling of overwhelm. It has a secondary benefit of increasing our chances of getting things done, achieving a sense of completion which is so energising and motivating that it will give us more energy to get more stuff done. Focusing on less stuff, allows us to get more stuff done. That’s going to be a win-win for everyone.

Suspicion

The third area I would like to focus on is “suspicion”. Now this is an interesting one for me. Generally speaking, if we don’t see people, then we think less favourably of them. We start doubting their intentions. We start doubting their perceptions of us; we start doubting their interpretations; we start getting very suspicious about what they are doing and why they're doing it. 

So as great leaders we can try to increase the opportunities for people to actually see each other, to get together, but not necessarily in a formal status sharing session. Perhaps informal coffee chats or building in time at the start of meetings to just talk about non-work stuff. Reinforce, re-establish that human connection again that will allow us to start thinking more positively of each other. As well as that, great leaders tend to role model this view of unconditional positive regard, choosing to believe that people are acting with positive intent. They take that action and they role model that to others to encourage others to choose to believe a positive interpretation of the possible interpretations. 

What is going to be different then, when leading remotely?

So there are many things that will be different while leading remotely, but essentially it’s the same. Essentially what we’re doing as leaders is we’re trying to find anything that is stopping our people, stopping our teams from being and doing their best. And once we’ve identified what those challenges are we can work out a way of solving them together and giving the teams the autonomy, the confidence, the competence and the conditions to be successful.

We hope this video gave you some food for thought during these rapidly changing times. Stay tuned for Part 2 later this month!

Watch the recording of Geoff's webinar on "Leading Remotely".

*Click here to read Part 2 blog post* 

The best way to collaborate effectively: Part 2

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Up next in our “collaboration” series, we have agile42 coach & trainer, Mariet Visser. Mariet is passionate about helping teams & organisations grow & succeed in their Agile journey. Being an ICAgile Authorised Instructor and trainer of our ICP-ATF classes, she is well versed in teaching how best to design meetings/workshops for better collaboration and to enable stronger focus on decisive outcomes. As such, we were keen to hear her take on the new collaborative environment we are finding ourselves in.

You can watch the full interview here:

What can you tell us about collaboration?

It’s a skill we constantly need to work at and is something which evolves over time. As our context and the people with whom we work shifts, so does how we collaborate. Our way of working together is not constant and is heavily influenced by our surroundings. For many of us over the past year, our surroundings have shifted from mostly in-person collaboration settings, to having to collaborate virtually. This has subsequently changed how many of our teams operate.

Do you think collaborating is more difficult now?

Absolutely. I think collaboration heavily relies on trust and our ability to be open & honest with one another; something that can be much more difficult to achieve in a virtual setting. A year ago, most of our collaboration happened in-person, now we need to collaborate virtually and that’s another skill we need to learn and hone. We need to adapt and find new ways in which to collaborate. In my experience it’s really our social relationships that help us to succeed in collaborating, so maintaining them virtually is a challenge. 

How do we create a collaborative environment?

Now more than ever before, I think it comes down to being really explicit about how important collaboration is to the organization and to the team. 

  • By talking about it.
  • By putting structures in place for collaboration.
  • Exploring ways in which we can collaborate.
  • By modelling the behaviour we want to see as leaders.
  • Leading by example.
  • Making it a part of who we are.

We often today see organisations designing their physical spaces for improved collaboration, having huddle spaces, colourful relaxed and less formal spaces for individual or group use etc. We need to be equally conscious about designing our virtual space for improved collaboration. For instance using a tool that enables variance in how we’re able to engage at a communication level, such as Zoom with it’s breakout rooms, offering us the ability to chat as one large group, or split out into smaller groups and/or have pair conversations when necessary.

From a work perspective, it’s important to make use of tools which enable synchronous collaboration between colleagues. For example, Google Suite or Miro are great online visual collaboration platforms which we at agile42 make use of internally as well as with our clients.

Watch the recording of Mariet's webinar on "50 Ways to Wreck Collaboration and What to do About it".

*Click here to read Part 1 blog post* 

An agile leadership mindset

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Executive Agile Coach, Andrea Tomasini, was invited by “The Product Bakery Podcast” to do a podcast on leadership mindset development.

Empirical process control and understanding people are Andrea’s biggest passions. In this episode, Andrea shares his deep experience and best practices on Agile transitions, the challenges one faces and what companies and leaders can do to better manage uncertainty. Understand what agile is really all about and how to develop and implement an agile mindset in your teams and company.

A fool with a tool is still a fool!

– Andrea Tomasini

 

Listen to the full interview here:

Agenda

  • 0:30 – Intro Andrea

  • 08:40 – People over processes & tools

  • 14:45 – ORGANIC agility & understanding people/culture

  • 24:25 – Becoming more agile as a leader

  • 28:31 – Experimenting in safe to fail environments

  • 33:25 – Trust as the basis for change & transformation

  • 42:15 – The 3 focus areas to introduce agility

  • 45:05 – 3 biggest mistakes of leaders

  • 48:25 – Debrief Alex & Christian