We’re advised to pay attention to interactions at work. It is believed that untapped performance potential lies in altering how people interact with each other, advocating investing in developing more productive workplace interactions. Various research, and philosophies, articulate this sentiment in different ways, and from different angles. There are references to the importance of improving interactions in: Lean with its laser focus on cross-functional collaboration, value stream mapping to reduce handoffs, and dependencies, and Gemba-walks that attempt to optimize for solving creation problems where they exist. Beyond budgeting that targets decentralized decision making, empowered teams, and dynamic forecasts. Team Topologies with its teams types, and team interactions. The Agile Manifesto…
Case Study – Enhancing Team Collaboration Through a Peer Feedback Process
The Challenge: Addressing Shallow Communication in a Newly Re-Missioned Team In 2019, I worked with a feature team that was about to re-mission, and that would receive expanded responsibilities. The re-missioning necessitated a wider range of skills which resulted in the addition of three new team members. Initial Team Structure and Challenges Prior to the re-missioning, the team consisted of seven members, an Engineering Manager (EM), and a Product Manager (PM). Despite having worked together for over a year, communication within the team remained somewhat superficial and some critical conversations were not taking place. During one-on-one meetings between the EM and team members, topics surfaced that would have been more…
Case Study – Overwhelmed Engineering Managers: Causes and Solutions
The Challenge: Role Complexity and Overwhelm Following a reorganization at one of my clients, various formal and informal leadership roles were consolidated into a new position—the Engineering Manager. This role encompassed a wide range of responsibilities, from recruitment and career development to handling expenses, internal mobility, product and value creation, collaboration and processes, and technology. The large scale of the organization, along with technical interdependencies between teams, exacerbated the situation. Within two years, no two Engineering Managers were executing the role in the same manner. As a result, certain aspects were inevitably neglected, affecting team performance, value creation, or quality. The Study: A Comprehensive Analysis Instead of running a…
Coaching controversial topics
Controversial topics are topics that elicit strong emotions, have little or no effort invested into resolution, and unequal participation. Whether you’re a coach or manager, recognizing controversial topics is crucial because dealing with controversial topics is expensive, difficult, and painful to all involved parties. But because controversial topics are an inherent aspect of working in large product and tech companies, where diverse teams and multiple layers of leadership coexist, you need to learn to navigate them and how to enable groups to make controversial topics non-controversial. Why do controversial topics exist? For starters, people have different backgrounds, values, and ideologies which leads to different preferences. In addition, hierarchical structures within…
How to intervene when things get messy
A while back, I coached two management teams that were exploring their contexts. The first management team looked at their organizational setup from the point of view of Team Topologies. The other management team was mapping their departments stakeholders, their needs, and how they best ought to collaborate with them. As both teams made progress in visualizing their context, their visualizations got messier and messier to the point that they became overwhelming. “I think I’m doing something wrong, because it can’t be supposed to look this way” was one comment. Messy Team Topologies (when compared to the book). Whether you’re a coach, manager, or facilitator you might feel the urge…
Grassroots movements at work – How management interventions affect agency
The best way to kill a grassroots movement at your company is to assign an owner, sponsor, or steering group for it. Below is a story about ACME, a fictitious software company, and how it responded to a grassroots movement. In the story, I discuss things to be aware of when new grassroots movements form both as a member of the movement and as upper management. I share pitfalls and summarize takeaways so that you can be more mindful of how to let the energy of grassroots movements flourish in your organization. Grassroots movements have agency. What is agency? Agency is power of action. It’s the ability…
Coaching teams that do not want to be coached
Anyone doing Agile Coaching long enough will inevitably find themself in a situation coaching teams that: do not want to be coached. should not be coached. cannot be coached. do not respond well Your coaching. The differences between these situations are significant. Yet it is difficult for many coaches to understand what situation they are in. One reason for that is the similarities in how these situations display themselves: You’re being challenged directly There’s poor meeting attendance The team has an inability to generate actions despite meeting, or to act on actions The teams proposed solutions have no bearing towards their problems or goals There are interpersonal conflict in teams…
Using “Voice”, and Using “Exit” to change a system
At work, and in society, we use “Voice”, and “Exit” to create change. “Voice” is when you try to change a system from within, “Exit” is when you try to change a system by creating a new system that replaces the old system. People mass-leaving companies, or countries, or currencies, taking their business elsewhere, deleting their Facebook accounts, shifting to other search engines than google, are examples of “Exit”. People demonstrating through walk-outs, changing how they cast their vote, and complaining to the company they are buying products off or working at, are examples of “Voice”. Both ways are important. Both play a part. They can work together–Exit can amplify…
The Spiderwebs outside my daughters window
Earlier this fall, I looked out my daughter’s window and saw what must have been close to 100 spiderwebs. I often gaze out her window as it’s my favorite view in the house–a natural, perfectly groomed forest. But I’d never seen even one spiderweb out there before. Unique viewing conditions The spiderwebs had of course always been there. But under normal circumstances, the air outside is dry. And there’s not a lot of angled sunlight, so I couldn’t see the spiderwebs. The spiderwebs are hidden in plain sight, so to speak. But that morning, thanks to the moist, cool temperature, specific light, and low wind, they became visible to me…
Informed Interventions
I recently held a talk on Agile By Example about the importance of agile coaches making informed interventions when coaching systems and agile, and that many coaches are making dogmatic interventions. I argued, and still do, that more often than not, agile coaches and scrum masters fall short in their intervention process. They intervene when they ought not to, and they skip interventions that could have a significant and positive impact. I want to make some clarifications in this post, mainly to define “Informed interventions” and to offer suggestions on how you can move beyond dogmatic interventions. I also want to repeat here that I think this is not a…
My hideous bushes, the ladybugs, and the daisies
This is blogpost two in a series of posts originating from the ”Re-Wilding Agile” Masterclass that I took with Dave Snowden. In this post, I look at how we too often destroy symbiotic relationships that have emerged over time and through necessity. And how it is our vanity and ideals about “what workplaces should look like” or “how people ought to collaborate” that is the source of this. I start this post with a story about my garden and its ladybug and aphids. I then relate my story to the work we do as coaches and managers with agile and organizations. I share examples of how managers and coaches actively…
Restoring Evolution
When Charles Darwin studied the animals on the Galapagos islands, he found that finches had adapted to their circumstances and developed distinct traits. Some Finches had evolved to eat seeds, some to spear insects, and eat cactus fruit and seeds. They evolved together with their environment over a very long period of time. Their beaks have high utility in their contexts yet if you moved a Ground Finch to an environment where the main source of food were cactus, that finch might starve, or at least struggle with food. Harvard Medical School and Margaret Bowman Re-wilding Agile For the past months, I’ve participated in Dave Snowden’s training “Re-wilding Agile“. It…
The Holistic Observations of Teams Framework: Using Active Observations to Identify Strategic Interventions
We speak a lot about interventions when nudging teams along their team effectiveness journeys. But what are we really aiming for here? Interventions alone and just for the sake of doing something are not enough. We need our interventions to also be strategically placed at the right leverage points. In other words, we need strategic interventions. The first step towards making strategic interventions is to actively observe your team in a holistic and objective way. This requires structure. Without structure, our observations are more prone to bias and thus less helpful. In this post we introduce our Holistic Observations of Teams Framework that we’ve been using when observing teams. We…
Book Club Facilitation Guides
Book clubs can be a great way for people to learn more about a subject or concept–if they are designed with that in mind. Unfortunately, many book clubs are poorly designed and lead to entrenched habitual thinking. “How so”, you might wonder? When book clubs ask what people liked and disliked about a book, or what parts seem relevant or irrelevant for their context, it’s very subjective to biases. We are bombarded with information, there’s a lot going on at our workplace and in our lives, and thus it becomes difficult to fully grasp the concepts described in books, particularly the more abstract they are. And any evaluation people give…
10 Virtual Table Tips That Make Your Remote Meetings More Effective
For the past six months of working from home, I’ve been experimenting with practices that make remote meetings more effective particularly when it comes to balancing speaking time between participants. Those of you who have facilitated, or even just participated, in in-person meetings and workshops know how difficult it can be to ensure that everyone even gets an opportunity to speak, let alone to achieve equal speaking time between the participants.