Tag Archives: Teams

Transitioning from a Bossy Boss into a Digital Age Leader [Series Conclusion]

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Now that we are to the end of our 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion about digital management over the last seven posts. This series was born of our frustration with patterns of leadership in digital organizations: overly directing leaders stifle their team while hands-off leaders fail to provide critical direction. Neither culture is leading effectively!

Digital managers have to be two things at once

We felt that our “cultural intuition” is failing us.  That drove us to describe what’s broken and how to fix it.

Digital work and workers operate in a new model where top-down management is neither appropriate nor effective. To point, many digital workers actively resist being given too much direction, rules or structure. No, we are not throwing out management; on the contrary, we believe management is more important than ever, but changes to both work and workers has made it much harder than before.

That’s especially true when Boomers and Millennials try to work together because of differences in leadership experience and expectation. As Brad is always pointing out in his book Liquid Leadership, “what motivates a Millennial will not motivate a Boomer,” or even a Gen Xer.

Millennials may be so uncomfortable having to set limits and enforce decisions that they avoid exerting the very leadership that digital workers need! While GenX and Boomers may be creating and expecting unrealistic deadlines simply because they truly do not understand the depth of the work involved.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? As we’ve pointed out in previous posts, it’s neither! Why? Because unlike Industrial Age Models, there is no one way to get something done in The Information Age.

We desperately need a management model that works for everyone. How does a digital manager know when it’s time to be directing? If you’ve communicated a shared purpose well then you are always at liberty to 1) ask your team if this is aligned and 2) quickly stop any activity that is not aligned.

The trap we see for digital managers who have not communicated the shared goals is that they lack the team authority to take the lead.

We believe that digital leadership requires finding a middle ground using these three guidelines:

  1. Clearly express your intent and trust, don’t force, your team will follow it
  2. Respect your teams’ ability to make good decisions around the intent.
  3. Don’t be shy to exercise your authority when your team needs direction

Digital management is hard: you don’t get the luxury of authority or the comfort of certainty.

If you are used to directing then you have to trust yourself to communicate clearly at an abstract level and then let go of the details. If you are used to being hands-off then you have to get over being specific and assertive when the situation demands it.

Our frustration was that neither Boomer nor Millennial culture is providing effective management. Instead, we realized that elements of both are required. It’s up to the digital manager to learn when each mode is required.

Thank you for following along. It has been an honor.

Setting The Tempo: 12 Tips for Winning at Digital Management [post 6 of 8]

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In this 6th Installation IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

Our advice comes down to very simple concept: Today’s leaders MUST walk the talk.

Drummers Get The GirlsManagement authority in digital work comes from being the owner of the intention. Your team is working towards a shared goal. That is their motivation and it’s required for digital managers to provide a clear goal – this is what we call the intent of your organization.  So a manager’s job comes down to sharing your organization’s intent.

Like the 80’s “management by walking around,” walking the intent means that you spend most of your time helping your team understand the goals, not telling them how to achieve greatness. Managers provide alignment, not direction.

What does digital management look like:

  1. Pick a tone and repeat, repeat, repeat – You are the Jazz leader setting the tempo and harmony, your consistency allows others to improvise. If you set the stage, you can encourage others to take the lead off your base. Strong management is not about control. Strong management is about support. Support that streamlines productivity.
  2. Encourage cross-communication – Better, make people talk to each other. it’s OK to proxy, but don’t carry opinions for your reports as if they were your own. And don’t be upset if someone goes “above” you in the hierarchy. There is no such thing anymore.
  3. 1-to-1 communication is healthy – do a lot of it. 1) Don’t make decisions that way. 2) Don’t get stuck having 1-to-1 with the same people. 3) a lot of informal/small interactions are OK. Diversity is key. You may have to reply/rehash/proxy a whole 1-to-1 discussion for your team
  4. Learn your Culture – This may be the hardest thing for leaders to do because if they always assumed that culture didn’t matter. In today’s work environments, culture matters more than you could imagine. Just ask Peter Drucker!  Knowing who does what is important. Knowing how each individual communicates and what their strengths and weaknesses are is even more important.
  5. “Yes, AND…” The cornerstone of Improv is about saying yes to ideas, even fragile ones. Then it becomes about testing, experimenting and pushing boundaries. This is where innovation comes from. Saying yes and, instead of no but, ensures things get customized. Yes, you might fail, but fail fast, and move on.
  6. Be forceful on time keeping – make sure debates and discussions have known upfront limitations. Movement is good, uncertainty is frustrating.
  7. Check and adjust – check and don’t change is just as important. The key is to involve your team in the check-ups.  When you decide not to adjust, that’s also a decision to communicate.
  8. Don’t apologize for or delay making top down decisions – not all actions are team discussions. Sometimes, the team process is tiring and hard so the most strident voice wins.  No team always agrees so don’t be afraid to play the role of arbitrator.
  9. Fix personnel issues quickly – allowing people to abuse the system drives away the behaviors that you want. Focus instead on strengths, and become the mediator.  Be very sensitive to stereotypes and even mild no name calling. Focus on the work, the outcomes and how everyone can do better. then hold them accountable to their word.
  10. Ask people to define their own expected results – then keep them accountable. When they miss, have no-blame a post-mortem that focus on improvement. A term called the Feedback Sandwich helps by starting a difficult conversation with something a team member did right, then work your way through the conversation to the “meat” part of the sandwich: what they did that needed help, improvement or an admission that they might NOT be the person best qualified for that task. Let them state this on their own by asking better questions.
  11. Assume failures are from system, not individual – work together to fix the system. Communication and hand off are usually the biggest fails when meeting deadlines. Find solutions from the team. after all, who knows development operations better than the people working in it.
  12. Be careful about highlighting “grenade divers” [1] – All organizations need heroes, but feeding them will erode team performance. Once, they may have saved the day. When it becomes a habit, they might be creating the chaos they are always solving in order to have job security. After all, they seem to be the only one who can solve that problem…every time. In a symphony only a few get the solo. In Jazz, you play both solo and support. That flexibility gives your team strength.

These ideas may push your outside your comfort zone.  Find a peer for support!  You need to to be strong to lead from the back.  

Even without formal hierarchies, manager roles are still needed to drive value and make the hard calls. Before, that translated into make all the decisions. The new challenge is to allow for free falls (post 4) while sharing the responsibility.

If you walk your intent and communicate goals consistently then your team will be able to follow your lead.

Next up: When Two Right Decisions Make Things Wrong

[1] Grenade Diving or “wearing the cape” is a team anti-pattern where certain individuals are compelled to take dramatic actions to rescue an adverse situation.  While they often appear to be team heroes (Brad saved the batch of cookies again!  Who forget to set the timer?), the result always distracts from the people who work hard to avoid emergencies.  We want people to step up when required but it should not become a pattern.

Management free falling! Why The Zappos & Valve Model is Terrifying [Post 4 of 8]

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Forth IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.  — Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computers

Trust, not stability, is the new management contract. Digital workers interpret “strong” management as a lack of trust. Megaphone!

Before we can talk about how to manage digital workers, we have to talk about trusting them to do their jobs. Why? Digital workers largely adopt Millennials’ unwillingness to follow directed leadership.  If we want to succeed in managing them then we need to foster mutual respect that is built on bi-directional trust.

20th Century business models were based on “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” thinking that went along with mass manufacturing control, discipline and predictability. Physical goods were sold to a passive marketplace with minimal feedback from markets and internal workers; consequently, decisions could be made by a few leaders as long as workers did what they were told. All out-of-the-box decision had to go through a leader. The bigger the decision, the higher up that decision needs to go for approval. Like in our symphony analogy, control and discipline is the main ideology.

In 21st Century business, there is no script just as there is no score for a Jazz concert. That does not mean it’s a worker free-for-all! We still need to deliver products. But instead of top-down control, we talk about collaboration, shared mission and team work. This change is critical because digital work as so much situational content that it is impossible to proscribe it’s exact results in advance. Like Jazz, you can create a general framework and guidelines but the exact composition has a degree of improvisation because it must reflect the players’ situation in the moment.

Since you have to trust people to make decisions, you’d better create an environment where they want to make the best decisions for your business!

Glassdoor’s multiyear study discovered that the “Best Places to Work” from 2009 to 2014 outperformed the S&P 500 by 115.6% while a similar portfolio named Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For,” outperformed the S&P 500 by 84.2%! That is impressive.

What does trust look like? Leading gaming software maker Valve has thrown out the traditional employee handbook and replaced it with a 37 page breakdown of what they expect from an employee. The manual tells people their desk is on wheels so they can just roll over to a new team if they want to change jobs. The trust implied in that type of follow-your-passion enablement is unheard of in most workplaces.

Zappos, recognized 6 years in a row by FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work For®, pays employees $4,500 to quit if not satisfied with the culture. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is advocates for a no management whatsoever model called Holacracy. Like Valve, Zappos counts of their hiring process to find workers who thrive in a self-led model where leadership is fluid and people organize themselves to solve problems and deliver value.

If our undirected Jazz model scares you, Holacracy will terrify you.

However, it’s critical to understand that neither Zappos nor Value are “wild west” work environments. Like a top Jazz ensemble they provide trained performers, concrete structure, appropriate tools and clear expectations. By giving your teams the right tools to know what to do when they are working on their own, you will see a different workforce, striving to make your company better than even you thought possible.

Why does this work? In digital work, we have to give up the idea that the knighted leaders make the best decisions.

It’s not just a question of good decisions, we also need to improve quality and speed of action. Check out Navy Submarine Captain David Marquet’s talk on Greatness, based on his book, Turn The Ship Around! He explains quite well why people should be allowed to think and take responsibility for their work. 

In the end, it’s simply physics. Without trust, all decisions must flow downward and the entire organization is limited by the leadership. Our information economy makes it simply impossible for leaders to sufficiently learn and react. When people are trusted to think for themselves and take control for the products they create there is a psychological shift. They take ownership in their work. That means quality and output go through the roof as they get competitive with creating a wow product.

So, how can you create a company culture that taps into the skills sets of a new digital worker yet engages everyone for the long haul? Let’s dig in and instead of giving you rules or regulations, let’s start with a few principles to create the right environment.

Tune it for our next post: Setting direction – how too much freedom is bad too.

I respectfully disagree – we are totally aligned on your lack of understanding

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Team FacesOccasionally, my journeys into Agile and Lean process force me down to its foundation: cultural fit.  Frankly, there is nothing more central to the success of a team than culture. That’s especially true about Lean because of the humility and honesty required. If your team is not built on a foundation of trust and shared values then it’s impossible keep having the listening and responsive dialog with our customers.

Successful teams have to be honest about taking negative feedback and you cannot do that without trust.

Trust is built on working out differences. Ideally, it would be as simple as “we agree” or “we disagree.” In an ideal world, every team would be that binary.    Remember, that no team always agrees – it’s how we resolve those differences that makes the team successful.  That’s something we know as “diversity” and it’s like annealing of steel to increase its strength.

Unfortunately, there are four  modes of agreement and two are team poison.

  1. Yes: We agree! Let’s get to work!
  2. No: We disagree! Let’s figure out what’s different so that we’re stronger!
  3. Artificial Warfare:  We disagree!  While we are fundamentally aligned, everyone else thinks that the team does not have consensus and ignores the teams decisions.  We also waste a lot of time talking instead of acting.
  4. Artificial Harmony: We agree!  But then we don’t support each other in getting the work done or message alignment.  We never spend time talking about the real issues so we constantly have to redo our actions.

I’ve never seen a team that is as simple as agree/disagree but I’ve been at companies (Surgient) that tried to build a culture to support trust and conflict resolution (based on Lencioni’s excellent 5 dysfunctions book).  However, there’s a major gap between a team that needs to build trust through healthy conflict and one that wraps itself in the dysfunctions of artificial harmony and warfare.

If you find yourself on a team with this problem then you’ll need management by-in to fix it.  I have not seen it be a self-correcting problem.  I’d love to hear if you’ve gotten yourself healthy from a team with these issues.

Signs of artificial agreement syndrome include

  1. Lack of broad participation – discussions are dominated by a few voices
  2. Discussions that always seem to run to the meta topic instead of the actual problem
  3. Issues are not resolved and come up over and over
  4. People are still upset after the meeting because issues have not been resolved
  5. People have different versions of events
  6. Lack of trust for some people to speak for the group
  7. Outcomes of decision making meetings are surprises
  8. Lack of results or missed commitments by the team

Go read “Liquid Leadership” (@bradszollose, http://bit.ly/eaTWa6): gaming=job skillz, teams=privilege & coopetition

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I like slow media that takes time to build and explain a point (aka books) and I have read plenty of business media that I think are important (Starfish & Spider, Peopleware, Coders At Work, Predictably Irrational) and fun to discuss; however, few have been as immediately practical as Brad Szollose’s Liquid Leadership.

On the surface, Liquid Leadership is about helping Boomers work better with Digital Natives (netizens).  Just below that surface, the book hits at the intersection of our brave new digital world and the workplace.  Szollose’s insights are smart, well supported and relevant.  Even better, I found that the deeper I penetrated into this ocean of insight, the more I got from it.

If you want to transform (or save) your company, read this book.

To whet your appetite, I will share the conversational points that have interested my peers at work, wife, friends and mother-in-law.

  • Membership on a team is a privilege: you have to earn it.  Not everyone shows up with trust, enthusiasm, humility and leadership needed.
  • Video games position digital natives for success.  It teaches risk taking, iterative attempts, remote social teaming and digital pacing.
  • Netizens leave organizations with hierarchal management.  Management in 2010 is about team leadership and facilitation.
  • Smart people are motivated by trust and autonomy not as much pay and status.
  • Relationship and social marketing puts to focus back on quality and innovation, not messaging and glossies.  Broadcast (uni-directional) marketing is dead.
  • Using speed of execution to manage risk. Szollose loves Agile (does not call it that) and mirrors the same concepts that I expound about Lean.
  • Being creative in business means working with your competitors.  My #1 project at Dell right now, OpenStack, requires this and it’s the best way to drive customer value.  The customers don’t care about your competitor – they just want good solutions.

PS: If you like reading books like this and are interested in a discussion group in Austin, please comment on this post.

Black Hat Feedback Essential For Cloud Success

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It’s been too long since my “Agile in the Cloud” blog focused on the agile process side of the equation.  Since my theme for 2011 will be “Doing is Doing” (meaning, attending meetings and building powerpoint is NOT doing); it’s vital to embrace processes that are action and delivery focused.  Personally, I tend towards the Lean side (Poppendieck & Ries) of the Agile process spectrum.

Let’s start with something so obvious that most teams don’t bother with it:

The secret to improving your performance is to regularly work to improve your performance.

There is no further magic, no secret sauce, no superhero team member, and no silver process bullet that substitutes for working together to improve.  A team that commits to improving will ultimately transform into a high performing team.  Hmmm…that seems like a desirable result.  So why is it so uncommon?

Unfortunately, many teams skimp on improvement because:

  1. All that talking and listening and improving takes time and attention.
  2. Post mortem or “lessons learned” meetings that never make any difference because they happen after the work is done.  (well, duh).
  3. No one has a methodology that makes the meetings productive.
  4. Lists with more than 3 items on them have too many items to be productive for improvement activities because of reader’s limited attention spans.  Doh!

So #1 and #2 just take some resolve to resolve.  My (atypical) team at Dell spends 1 to 3+ hours every biweekly sprint talking about process improvement (aka retrospective).  That’s nearly half of our planning day and a pretty significant investment; however, it’s the one part of the meeting that no one is willing to shorten.  It just that damn productive, important, and enlightening.

If you’re committed to taking the time to improve then finding a methodology (#3) is a piece of cake by comparison.  I highly recommend De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats the framework for retrospectives.  Michael Klobe taught me this process and I’ve used it successfully on many teams.  Here are some guidelines to retrospectives (we call them “Hats Meetings”) using De Bono’s hats:

  1. Write everything down.  All our planning meetings are documented.  This is ESSENTIAL because we review our past notes.
  2. Start with “Yellow” hats from all team members.  Yellow hats are accolades, complements, thanks, generally positive news, and anything that the team can celebrate.  Yellow hats get the meeting opened on a positive note.
  3. Go until your team runs out of yellows.
  4. Write down and number the “Black” hats.   Black hats are things that impacted team performance.  Ideally, they are concrete and specific examples of a problem and a cost.  Black hats are NOT solutions or suggestions hidden as complaints.  If you’re frustrated that people are late to meeting then a good hat would be “people being late to meeting is costing us 10 minutes of productivity because we have to restart the meeting 3 times.”  Hats like “The vendor messed up” are not as helpful as “The vendor’s late delivery of the futz dinger caused us to work over the weekend.”  Good black hats are a learned skill and are essential to success.
  5. Do NOT record every detail when writing down a black hat.  You just need to capture the ending understanding of the person who brought up the item (not of the team).  I’ve seen many hats that would have been a huge HR problem if we wrote down the starting idea but the ending hat was perfectly ok.
  6. Go until your team runs out of blacks.  This may take a long time if you’re just starting out!
  7. Come up with a “Green” hat for each Black hat.  Green hats are ways that the team or individuals will solve the problem addressed by the Black hat.  Solutions should be practical and immediate.  The team must discuss the solution (free fall) – it cannot be imposed by one member.  In many cases, solutions will go in steps: “everyone will try to show up on time” would be a good hat for my example above.  If that does not work, then future hats may involve “the late person pays $1/minute late.”  The point is that the team agrees on how they will improve.
  8. Don’t worry about White (data), Blue (new ideas), or Red (frustration, issues beyond your control) hats for now.  They are not critical for retrospective meetings.  Sometimes our team has a black hat that is really red.  If you’re arguing over a hat, then it may be red.  Stop fighting and move on.
  9. At your next meeting, review your past Green hats.  This is where accountability and improvement happen.

Please don’t expect that these meetings will be easy – they are messy and potentially emotional.  Since we’re talking about teams of people, we have to expose and resolve issues.  Investing the time upfront allows for continuous improvement and prevents building up larger issues.

Hats provides a durable structure for getting issues on the table in a productive way.

Screening Recruits for Agile Savvy

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We’re hiring new managers and developers into my team and its important (to me) that we find people who will embrace our Agile processes.

Sadly, many people experience with the fluffy Agile decorations and not its core disciplines; consequently, interviewees will answer “yes, I’ve done Agile” and not really (IMHO) know what they are saying.

So I wanted to craft some questions that will help identify good Agile candidates even if they have no experience (or negative experience) with the process.

  • Explain a time that you did not agree with a design decision that was being made. [Good candidates will tell you that they had a healthy debate about it, made sure they were heard, and then supported the team decision.  Excellent candidates will give you a specific case where they were wrong and the outcome was better their suggestion.]
  • How have you handled the trade-off between shipping quality software and getting a release done on time? [Good candidates will be pragmatic about the need to release but own quality as their responsibility.  Excellent candidates will talk about implementing TDD and automation so that quality can be maintained throughout a release cycle.]
  • How have you made changes to your work habits based on retrospectives? [Good candidates will tell you about items where they had to acknowledge other people’s suggestions and change their behavior.  Excellent candidates will be excited about having ownership in their team’s continuous improvement and can give examples.]
  • Why are sprint reviews important? [Good candidates will say that it’s important for a team to show progress to other groups.  Excellent candidates will tell you that it’s how a team shows that it is meeting its commitments and getting feedback to improve the product.]
  • Is it possible to achieve the objective to be “ship ready” at the end of each sprint? [Good candidates will say that ship ready is a great target but only practical in the last sprints before a release.  Excellent candidates will explain that being ship ready is a core driver for the process that ensures the team is focused on priorities, quality, and breaking work into components.]
  • Tell me about the best performing team that you’ve been part of. What made it a great team? [Good candidates will tell you about having quality people or a very tight focus.  Excellent candidates will tell you have the shared goals of the team and how people gave up individual recognition to accomplish team objectives.]
  • What does it mean to for a team to be transparent? [Good candidates will talk about status reports and documentation.  Excellent candidates will talk about being willing to take risks and fail fast.]

If they can’t pass theses questions then go buy a lifeboat.  You’ll want it for that that waterfall you’re going to be riding down shortly.