Successful agile teams follow a set of essential practices that foster technical excellence, customer-centric development, and efficient delivery processes. Let’s delve into these practices in more detail:
Customer-Centric Approach: Agile teams meticulously analyze customer requirements, leverage user stories, and conduct regular feedback sessions to align development with customer needs. By prioritizing user feedback and embracing customer collaboration, agile teams ensure that the delivered software meets user expectations and delivers business value.
Technical Excellence: High-performing agile teams prioritize continuous learning and innovative technical solutions to ensure the delivery of robust, scalable, and maintainable software. This includes adhering to coding best practices, embracing emerging technologies, and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and mentorship within the team.
Quality-Driven Development: Quality is ingrained in the development process through automated testing, code reviews, and continuous integration to prevent regressions and ensure reliable software. By integrating quality assurance throughout the development lifecycle, agile teams uphold high standards of software quality and reliability.
Streamlined Delivery Pipelines: Agile teams optimize their delivery pipelines using DevOps practices and tools to automate builds, testing, and deployments, enhancing efficiency and reliability. By streamlining the delivery process, teams can accelerate time-to-market, reduce manual errors, and increase the frequency of software releases.
Systems Thinking: High-performance agile teams maintain a systemic view of their ecosystem, considering dependencies, risks, and impacts to adapt swiftly to changes and improve overall performance. This systemic awareness enables teams to anticipate challenges, proactively address potential issues, and optimize the entire development and delivery workflow.
For more detailed insights, you can find my original presentation here. These practices are fundamental for fostering agility and technical excellence within development teams.
Leadership Teams are everywhere, but most teams need support with Team coaching, to be able to leverage the true potential of their team members and the team itself and realize the benefits and generate value for the team’s stakeholders.
In this multi-post series, I will share my personal experiences along with notes from the book “Leadership Team Coaching”, by Prof Peter Hawkins and would love to hear your insights and experiences.
KEY Leadership Team Challenges
In this first post, let us understand the KEY Challenges currently being faced by Leadership Teams :
Managing expectations of all Different Stakeholders
Leadership teams today must be able to respond and ‘win the hearts and minds’ of multiple stakeholders – which include key customers, internal staff, partner organizations and the broader spectrum of regulators, board members and shareholders, with communities and the wider shared ecology. Future generations and millennials have even greater expectations and less respect for titles and roles, and leaders will need to earn their respect with creative inspirational and credible actions.
Leadership teams have to RUN and TRANSFORM the Business in parallel
All leadership teams today have to focus on not just running the business, but also look at transforming the business and the wider system and this is never easy! With parallel work across the three horizons, the leadership teams typically have the below focus areas and tend to struggle on maintaining the right balance.
Immediate – Business as Usual
Innovating for tomorrow
Future foresight requiring radical change
Teams need to increase their Capacity for working through Systemic Conflict
Multiple leadership teams are under pressure from the stakeholder group that they represent (CFO – Investors interests, HR – Employees, Sales – Customers etc..), and this leads to systemic conflicts between the various leaders. But for transformational leadership to succeed, we need these leadership teams to collectively engage the commitment and participation of all major stakeholder groups to change in the context of shared purpose, values, and vision. This conflict resolution requires the teams to expand their collective capacity to manage this systemic conflict.
Human beings learning to live with Multiple memberships and belonging
The leaders in leadership teams are increasingly becoming more interconnected with the broader ecology, and increasingly matrix organizations. Every leader is a member of multiple teams, representing the interests in various capacities (E.g. – Executive team, Board member, Industry committee representative, Working groups etc.). This multi-team belonging is difficult for human beings who traditionally as species have learned to be loyal to a tribe/family group, and therefore it is difficult for us to adapt to this new multiple membership’s world.
The World is becoming more Complex and Interconnected
Team leaders today are living in an interconnected world with an ‘Always ON’ mode with demands across the organization, and ‘work anywhere anytime’ post pandemic scenario. This makes it harder to stand back and reflect and see the bigger picture and the team leaders are now turning to team coaching to provide the protected space and outsider perspective.
The Growth of Virtual working
Post the pandemic we are all now forced to work with remote working, and teams working either virtually or hybrid, and all this change requires for us to learn and enhance our communication skills, but also learn new ways of building and establishing trust. We need to be able to build the informal social circles and/or build those ‘moments of trust’, which can replace the earlier physical interactions, and this is still a work in progress for most leadership teams.
The major leadership challenges lie not in the parts but in the Interconnections
As the world has become interconnected, the main challenge lies not in the people, or in the parts but in the interfaces between people, teams, functions, and different stakeholder needs. This leads us to effectively coaching relationships, which leads to enabling the dialogue, resolving conflicts, or helping teams relate better inter-personally. This means that it is not just sufficient to be ‘customer-focused’ but we need to focus on our customer’s customer – enabling their customers in turn to make a difference for their customers. The leadership teams now need to shift to a virtuous cycle of active collaboration, which is grounded in a shared purpose instead of the vicious cycle of blame.
Restoring Trust
Employees increasingly now expect the companies they work for to be purpose led, delivering social and community change, and not just profits. This requires that we ‘restore trust’ which has been lost or is falling across customers and our stakeholders. Leadership teams struggle with this trust deficit and are learning new ways of restoring this trust.
Increasing the Quality of Engagement
Leadership teams are finding it extremely important to engage effectively with employees and stakeholders, considering that trust is critical in this VUCA world. The key elements requires that leadership teams provide a strategic big picture, have engaging managers, employees who can easily voice their ideas and concerns, and organizations whose values align and finally ‘real teamwork’ to enable teams working on shared purpose.
We will explore more on Leadership Team coaching in my next post , but would be interested to hear more about what are your leadership team challenges ? Do these challenges resonate with your teams ? Do these resonate with you as a Team Leader?
Feel free to reach out to me for your team or individual coaching needs and subscribe to my blog to learn more, as I share my coaching journeys.
OKRs (Objective Key Results) are getting lot of attention recently, but it is never easy to implement and teams attempting face multiple challenges especially with respect to the data. It is a tough journey and takes patience and education and I will be sharing my experiences in Agile India 2021 as a speaker on 20th Nov at 3.55 p.m. IST
The conference schedule is posted here now and my talk details are here. Post conference the slides and video recordings will be posted on the same link.
Let me know if you have similar or different experiences with OKRs or plan to implement OKRs soon. Happy to hear and reach out to me for your coaching needs or subscribe to my blog , and feel free to share your feedback in the comments below..
As a Coach, you will always face challenges working with teams or individuals (read as Coachee’s) and Sponsors. You are always trying best to Break down the Walls, brick by brick. So this post is a starter list for some of the most common barriers to coaching with the Sponsors and the Coachee.
For a SPONSOR, some of the common barriers to Coaching are –
Coaching in any form starts with the basic premise that you have – Permission to Coach the coachee, but if coaching is ‘imposed’ on the Coachee by eager Sponsors, then there is no permission really between the coachee and the coach. The relationship then simply becomes an ORDER = “Thy shall be coach’d or else !!“
On the opposite end, there is simply a lack of Sponsorship for coaching, where the Sponsors see Coaching as only a add-on and not really a strategic investment ! In these scenarios, we find that the the coaching is ineffective or if the money simply runs out and thus fizzles out over a period of time.
Sometimes Coaching is seen as a fancy ‘buzzword’ reserved only for few select high potential (hipots 😐 ) as an ‘accelerated career’ move / higher promotion to take up leadership responsibility or on the flip side for the ‘bottom percentile’, who are often ‘told’ to get coaching as a ‘development’ or ”remedial’ activity, thus falling prey to – are you Rewarded or Punished ? and the majority in the middle are thus not offered any coaching.
For a Coachee, some of the common barriers to Coaching are –
Coachee’s suffer the common syndrome of ‘I don’t have time’ for coaching or the coaching followup actions. The coachee’s other priorities (personal / professional) overpower the coaching conversations / and actions for followup.
Lack of peers, and senior executives (Role Models) – who come out openly and speak about their ‘personal’ coaching and the benefits gained. As coaching is often seen as ‘remedial’, since the Coachee’s are reluctant to appear as vulnerable and acknowledge that they are possibly not fulfilling their full potential. The coachee’s do not wish to appear weak in public, especially in the corporate jungle.
Coachee’s are not aware of the possible benefits of coaching for personal growth of individuals, or the benefits of coaching teams and how coaching can directly impact the enterprise results and business outcomes. This lack of awareness is a primary reason for under investment by Coachee’s or enterprises on their coach-ing *team.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of common barriers, and the list is surely much longer, and would be happy to hear your thoughts. Do you have any stories to share about your coaching barriers?
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Change agents (read Agile / DevOps / Lean coach’s etc.) are always interviewing, observing and empathizing with the teams and individuals. Attachment and Detachment – are part of every change agents personal journey.
Attach-Detach cycle
As part of the transformation journeys, we perform Coaching Kata’s and tend to enter the space of ‘attachment’ and then start to expect our teams to behave in the way we think they should. We get really attached to our teams and sometimes individuals, who look upon us as we start to show them the new ways of thinking.
Sometimes we are able to help them see the new ways and other times we may not succeed, but finally at some point we have to ‘detach’ ourselves from the engagement for various reasons (sustainable model built, benefit-costs ratio achieved etc.)
But this engage-disengage cycle takes a heavy toll on the change agents, who have to be able to maintain a high level of stability, calm composure to the external world, though internally they might be facing anger, frustration or sometimes loss of the relationships built. Therefore, this detachment is never easy and the below quote summarizes it beautifully.
” The root of suffering is attachment “
the buddha
Dilemma – Solution ?
It is always a constant dilemma on how much ‘attachment’ you bring to your coaching engagement (empathizing with the team/individuals), and maintaining your inner peace and scorecard, which honors the inherent change inertia (read – you cannot really change any one!), and then be bold enough to detach with a smile on your face.
” The cessation of suffering is attainable through detachment”
The buddha
The solution is always within us, and each one of us have to learn to detach ourselves. We should let the team/individual chart their journeys at their pace, while we can only enable them and if possible show them the new ways.
So here’s wishing you ‘detachment’ from your ‘attachments’, as part of your coaching and transformation journeys, in the new year.
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As you grow your garden, you need to plant New Seedlings and nurture them till they become stronger and stand on their own.
As an agile coach, do you plant New Seedlings in your team?
Do you show the team new techniques, new ideas and seed their minds?
Do you show them by being hands-on? New process steps? New tools? New ways of doing the old things? New ways of doing new things?
Ask yourself –
What happened when you planted new seedlings, and you nurtured them?
When you helped a team member and showed him a new technique?
When you provided an unexpected improvement in their way of working?
When you helped in finishing their task, without them asking for help?
Did they smile at you ? Did they Thank you? Did they adopt your next suggestion more easily?
Did they start Trusting you?
Conclusion
So to make a dent in your team’s change journey, and do break those brick walls, you need to start planting as many seedlings everyday as you can, with everyone in your team. Some will die, but others will sprout if not immediately then at a later point in time. Some will grow and become stronger! and the ones who become stronger will be your light house for your transformation journey.
So go ahead and plant new seedlings everyday!
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As a change agent, you have a tough task of raising the awareness, educating, training and transforming the minds of the teams and leadership, while still maintaining your sanity. Sometimes they GET IT! And sometimes they act as innocent kids, enjoying their pranks while displaying passive or active resistance to your change efforts.
To me, this situation seems very similar to the dilemmas of the teaching community, who have similar problems everyday with the school kids. But if you watch the teaching community, one of the techniques they use is the Power of Questioning.
Power of Questioning
Power of Questioning includes asking the right questions, which challenges your teams, and promotes a higher order thinking,incubates creativity and helps them to finally develop learning!
So as a Change Agent, you should start to ask the right Questions, so that you can gather useful information about the team, about their interactions, their personalities, and help you in bonding better. You can start to listen more, with open questions, and practice active listening.
Different Types of Questions
It helps to develop a broad base of questions and mix up different styles. Below are some examples –
You can ask Rhetorical questions to emphasize a key point, and create a dramatic effect !
Check out some examples from an education project, which you can customize for your team interactions.
But really the most important way is to go with Socratic questioning,which makes the individuals think for themselves, rather than elicit information from you.
Check out additional examples from an education project, which you can customize for your team interactions.
Other times you can use Reflective questions and it can help with having with Question Cards , examples below –
What was easy?
What was hard?
What did I learn?
How will you use this learning in the future?
Check out examples from an education project, which you can customize for your team interactions.
Your Next Steps
Looking at the above examples, you might be wondering that the Sprint Retrospective questions sounds familiar. But in my view, it is simply one of the many forms of questioning that you use at a team level, but the variety and situations are immense for you to experiment and start using this technique in almost every situation. So ask yourself – if you can use the Power of Questioning everyday? Can you learn and pick some of these questions and apply in your Change journeys?
In my experience, as we learn the process of inquiry and questioning, we become better at it. You will start to use the insight from the process of inquiry to develop cues to asking better questions and you will find your sanity.
Conclusion Power of Questioning should be an important arsenal in your tool box, and should be a daily affair, and not just at a certain ceremonial point. It engages your teams and leaders to reflect on their current state and make it easy for you to overcome the passive/active resistance in your change journeys.
So next time you see your kids or your teams displaying resistance to your change efforts, and playing some funny pranks, try the Power of Questioning, and see if you can see through their beliefs, and reflect the mirror!
What are your favorite Questions ? Which questions inspire your team ? Which questions do you use most often?
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This is a common question from many Scrum teams, as they embark on their continuous improvement journey. Multiple teams struggle and then look to the higher powers or just ram through their way. As a Change Agent, to answer this, here is what you can ask them –
Do you allow ‘any’ time currently for Improvements?
You would typically hear the team saying as 0% ! and then a good response is to then START Small, with the emphasis on START.
You could alternatively talk about doing 10% more than what they are currently doing
or simply follow the 1% daily improvement paradigm (aggregation of marginal gains)
or you could ask the team about their Pain Index as discussed earlier, and then review from 10-90% of the sprint
So what has been your advice to your teams?
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Enterprises today struggle with large scaleagile adoption and transformation, without looking at the prevalent technical agility, which is a basic ingredient for building the organizational and business agility blocks.
Wishful Dreams
The dreams of Successful Agile Transformation at SCALE, are sold and bought easily today, with customer success stories , customer quotes and a conference presentation to back it all up. What else do you need? to dream up wishful thinking.
Reality Beckons
But if you dig deeper you realize that even Basic team level agility is a daily struggle for most enterprises. Most enterprises in the agile fluency model are at the 2 or 3 star teams. Rarely the teams go higher and almost all of them struggle!
So go ahead and ask if your engineering team is leaning toward heaven or hell? As the statistics show that we are losing the engineering practices and the decline of extreme programming is evident now and ‘scrum’ and ‘scaling’ has overtaken as the Main menu item driven by the transformation office.
THE FIX
Build up your team's technical agility FIRST.
Technical agility is the ability of your team to undertake technical endeavors, using the core tenets of extreme programming and agile modeling, without impacting the business delivery or compromising on the quality of the solution.
This means that you need to take care of your engineers and their engineering practices. You need to ask if the team is writing the best code, are aware and making use of the modern day engineering practices, which a true software professional would, and are they indeed proud when they sleep at night?
Summary
If the Technical agility is missing in your team, your agile transformation would miss the bus and fall flat on it’s back. You would end up as just another data point which supports this graph, and that would not be what you really need.
So cheer up and let the technical practices bloom first in your transformation, and then the honey bees will surely follow.
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