I saw a question on an Agile board the other day. The team is using a SAFe approach, doing quarterly planning, but teams aren’t meeting their commitments and aren’t bringing up issues early enough in the process. Leadership is placing pressure on teams to keep their commitments, but the teams are pushing back that this process was supposed to be more Agile. The question was how to make the teams keep their commitments.
It’s a bad question.
That one word, make, is the problem. It implies we have bad people in a good system, and how do we fix them. The opposite is usually the case, we have people doing their best in a flawed system. As I mention in Congratulations – You Just Solved the Wrong Problem, to find the right solution, we have to start with the right problem. To get a more Agile perspective we need to ask – how can we help teams make and keep commitments. That little change in wording is a big change in mindset that helps create questions like:
- How do we help teams get better at estimating including understanding risk?
- Do people feel like they have to overcommit?
- Why is it taking more time to complete items than teams expected? Are there bottlenecks or process improvement opportunities?
- Why don’t teams feel safe enough to bring up issues to leadership earlier in the process?
Most in management learned about McGregor’s theory X and Y. Theory X being employees are lazy and have to be watched, theory Y believes people are internally motivated, enjoy their job, and want to do their best. The question of bad people focuses on theory X, and creates an us vs them divide between leadership and employees. This leads to blame games on both sides where nothing gets done because “they” are the problem.
But as we think about solving the problem, we don’t want to give up the core goal of leadership – improving performance. As we change approaches, leadership needs to continue challenging the status quo, focusing on improving the process, asking us to do more with less, and finding ways to help us not only believe we can do the impossible, but to achieve it.
So how do we ask for the impossible but still get employees on board? Three tools can help with the process, servant leadership, systems thinking, and coaching.
Servant Leadership
An important first step is to change the way we think about what being a leader means. Servant leadership changes the definition of a leader from one who controls to one who serves. Sinek expands this thought in Leaders Eat Last explaining that through out history, humans have trusted leadership to protect them, to be the first into battle, to explain what needed to be done to survive. Because of that important role, we give them greater benefits in society. But too many see the benefits and forget the responsibility.
When leadership sees their role as serving others, getting them into the right positions and helping them grow to be their best, they start asking better questions about what they need to do to help others reach that potential.
Systems Thinking
While starting with idea of helping others succeed is a good first step, we still need to understand how to help them. Since no one is working in a vacuum, we are all doing our jobs in a larger ecosystem, systems thinking can provide guidance in this area. Systems thinking helps leaders think about the entire system in seeing improvement opportunities. In the Agile example, it means:
- Thinking about the planning process, where goals are coming from and what pressures are being applied early that could lead to poor estimates.
- Thinking about the system where employees are working, bottlenecks and interactions between teams that could be delaying work, and additional work that might be added to the system, taking key resources away from strategic goals.
- Thinking about how new information is handled. Is there a cooperative feeling between management and employees when a problem arises to make sure the team gets the resources it needs, or is the focus more punitive, demanding teams do whatever it takes to get back on track without any additional management support or resources.
When leaders look at the entire system, they get a better picture of the real issues, so they can make changes that will provide meaningful change.
Individual Performance
Beyond system changes, asking for more means elevating individual performance, and coaching is the solution in this area. Too many of us think of coaching as sitting an employee down when something goes wrong to lecture them on what they need to do right. Instead, coaching creates a partnership between individuals. The process involves asking employees what their goals are and how they need to reach them.
Managers are often concerned goals won’t align, or employees won’t know what they need to grow (again coming from a more command and control, Theory X type of perspective). In most cases:
- Employees know where they need to grow. Managers are often surprised at the insight employees already have of their weaknesses if they just ask.
- Employees know why they need to grow. This is the real secret sauce of coaching. As a manager, you may see that an employee lacks confidence and have an assumption or theory of why. But employees have a lifetime of experience with the issues. By asking employees what they think they need to do and listening to them, they provide the insight as to why they are making the mistakes they are (and may have never thought about it). As a leader you get a better understanding of who they are in the process.
- Employees know what they need to do to change. As a general rule, we all know we’re weak in areas, and we even know what we need to do to change. Saying it out loud to another person helps us realize the impact and importance.
- Employees are their best motivators. Studies have found asking employees what they need to do and when, means the goal has more meaning (they set it), and it’s generally more ambitious than if someone else set it.
So if employees know where the need to grow, what they need to do, and can provide their own motivation, what’s your job as a leader.
- Ask the questions – employees have everything inside of them, but your experience will help them get it out where they can see and use the information
- Remove the roadblocks – What employees may not see or be able to control is how their environment is holding them back. As they tell you where they need to grow, you can leverage systems thinking to understand how the environment needs to adjust so it’s not slowing them down.
In some ways, leading in a truly Agile fashion is easier – employees start doing a lot of the heavy lifting on their own. In some ways it’s harder – focusing on employees first means you have to set your ego aside. Either way, it’s definitely better – creating a partnership with employees through servant leadership to focus on their success, understanding the system to remove bottlenecks and roadblocks that will stop them, and coaching employees to find what they need to do to change, creates an environment where everyone thrives. With those changes, leaders become the solution, not the problem.