Management: Accept Feedback to Clear Your Blindspots

I am working with an organization that has many teams that report up through a couple of layers of management. The teams happen to be contracted, though for other organizations I have not seen it make a difference. The management, particularly the higher level of this management, does not seek feedback for the decisions they make or that they are making.

If you are a manager, it is important for you to get feedback on the options you have for the decisions at hand. This will help you know if other options can be considered and to understand the impact of the decisions you are making. The amount and type of feedback you request is important. Without this feedback, you may be making decisions in the blind. When you make them without seeking feedback, you are missing information on whether your choices will have a positive or negative impact on the people doing the work.

Before we dive into an example, let’s look at a long-standing model of people and knowledge about interpersonal awareness. The model displayed below is called the Johari window. It was first presented in a paper in 1955, but was really fleshed out further in a book called Of Human Interaction by Joseph Luft in 1969.

There are things you and others know about you; this is the open area. You know some things about yourself, but others don’t. This is the hidden area. You can choose to disclose what you want. There are areas unknown to both you and others, this is the unknown area and shared discovery is how they become known. The important area for this post is the blind area. This is an area others can see about you; they know the information AND you don’t. The way you discover this is through feedback.

This feedback could be solicited (you ask for it) or unsolicited (you didn’t). I don’t recommend anyone give unsolicited feedback; it’s best to ask if someone is interested in receiving it.

As a manager, you need to be open to receiving and asking for feedback from others (yes including people that report to you) for several reasons:

It models this behavior for others; if you would like people open to receiving feedback from you, then you need to lead by example.
This is a mechanism in how you determine how well you are doing as a manager. Getting regular feedback, both formally and informally, from above, below, and your peers gives you a complete picture.
This is also how you can find out if your decisions will impact others negatively. If these happen to be the people that report to you, it may reflect negatively on your performance. You can choose to learn about these negative impacts as you consider the options for decisions or after you made a decision and hear about it from a different path (like your boss or a customer).

I am going to run through a short example of why it is important to ask for feedback on decisions. This is an extremely simple example.

Imagine you have 20 or so teams that suddenly started going remote due to COVID-19. The week after everyone went remote you held an all-hands meeting of all your staff and contractors (so everyone involved in those 20 or so teams and then some) and you gave them some information about going remote and wanting to help create an environment of helping people work together.

It went well enough and so you decide you want have another at some point. 6 1/2 weeks pass and so you schedule the next one in the 3 days. Now remember, everyone reports to you. Teams scramble to accommodate this decree; it has really disrupted what they now have as work rhythms, something they had not acquired one week into going all remote. At that earlier point in time, it was much less of a disruption.

What may have happened if you had for some feedback on this plan from team members with interest in actually learning the impact? It most likely would have revealed it would interfere with planned work. Does this mean you should abandon the idea of having an all-hands? Not at all. What it does do though is open up considerations of when you could schedule it and how much lead-time would allow teams to fit this into their plans more readily.

This all-hands is a simple example. Is the negative impact unrecoverable? Not at all… But the signals it sends are probably worse. It signals that being present to listen to you as the ‘boss’ is more important than the actual work (which was free to being disrupted). This can lower morale. Given you have some layers of management between you and the teams, it also says it is OK for them to do the same. Hmmm… now this effect is multiplying. Most likely you were blind to these effects.

And depending on context how many other seemingly simple decisions are made without soliciting feedback on them before they are made?

Some will claim well ‘Inspect and Adapt’ that is the agile way… That may be true and I would also say that more important in this circumstance is building the project around a motivated team and supporting them. Sincerely reaching out for feedback on this decision (even if you still end up making the same decision) in itself helps reduce the deflated motivation.

* “The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness”. Proceedings of the western training laboratory in group development, Joseph Luft, Harrington Ingraham, 1955

Leadership in Agile Transformations: A Haiku

In keeping with my thoughts on transformation; I wrote a haiku on good leadership that is needed in Agile transformations.

Farmers cultivate

Burros make furrows in minds

More emerge to join

Can you see what leadership is happening in the above? How has leadership been happening in your organization?

Agile Dialogs Recap

This will be a short recap of the Agile Dialogs unconference held yesterday. We discussed ways of predicting value production with and without estimates. Over the next few days I’ll blog more of what we uncovered, but this will be a simple post on how the unconference was approached.

We had a good mix of people that were passionate, though no one was at I’d say fully at each end of the spectrum. The big takeaway was that both sides are right in many ways and wrong in many ways. The idea of not using estimates of time, money, and/or story points can be done and is highly context dependent. As with any approach it may nor may not work in your context; it depends, or YMMV. The best you can do is try it as an experiment and see whether it works for you.

What we did at Agile Dialogs was –

register with one side or another along a continuum (how strong we felt on the issue),
post the types of things we estimate,
tell our stories of both our successes and failures on both sides – with and without estimates
explore our objectives for either using or not using objectives and the techniques we use for each side
Explore the assumptions used when using estimates
Explore the assumptions used when not using estimates
Explore what each side could learn from the other
Posted and voted on what could possibly be the next thorny topic we tackle
and retrospect on how the Agile Dialogs unconference could be better

Here’s a few teasers of some of the discoveries… I’ll go more in depth on what was discussed in future posts as well as post some proceedings on the Agile Dialogs site.

When management or customers are asking for estimates, it is more important to understand their need for it; then more valuable alternatives to fulfill that need may be explored. Estimates may prove best for fulfilling that need though, so don’t force fit an alternative technique.
Estimation has become a scapegoat for other dysfunctions within the works system. Removing estimation won’t fix these dysfunctions, but it may help uncover them. Whether at the end of the day, you remain with or without estimation, if these more fundamental dysfunctions can be fixed, then the work climate will improve.
Estimation always exists, but when pursuing a noestimates approach, the nature of the estimation actually changes from cost, time, and/or complexity to value (which is not based on those in most environments).
Focusing on understanding time and money estimates tends to introduce longer feedback loops for actual learning. If it is possible (and that is an IF), then removing them can eliminate waste in the work system to that learning.
Measurement is important in both approaches; when doing estimates we sometimes get lulled into a false sense of security that good measurement exists, when often it doesn’t.
Humans suck at estimation except on conceptually obvious items (obvious equating to the obvious domain in the Cynefin framework); mathematical models (particularly when the underlying assumptions on those models are validated by the team doing the work) can really help produce accurate results in the complicated domain. The complex domain can be assisted greatly by these mathematical models, but the loop through is validating a hypothesis.
Another way to test a hypothesis is to set time or cost box and see if the solution at the end of the box is on track decide whether to spend more, accept as-is, or abandon; think Lean Start-up approach.

I have set-up The #AgileDialogs Daily that curates information from both sides of this thorny topic; other thorny topics will get added as a discussion on them emerges.

What’s This Agile Dialogs Thing Anyway?

If you haven’t caught it, I’m running an unconference called Agile Dialogs; you can find out more about it at http://agiledialogs.org.

So why would I want to take on thorny topics, ones that seem to bring out flamewars? Because the lack of listening to each side as we argue from each other’s sidelines seems an inane way of advancing our craft. If we want organizations to advance their thinking, we in the community need to advance ours and listen to those with differing opinions. It doesn’t mean we need to agree, but we do need to listen, truly listen to what the other side is saying. When we decide to challenge the other side, we need to do it in a manner that isn’t trying to cole them into accepting we are right, but to have them think through why they are taking the position they have chosen. We may reaffirm it, but in the process, we will have had them rethink underlying assumptions.

Dialog is about understanding and elevating assumptions so we can find answers to our questions and perhaps a new better way forward. I know I am a believer in good estimates when they make sense and when they don’t not even bothering with them. But perhaps when I thought they weren’t useful, there was a better way to have made them useful. I certainly welcome learning that in a manner that doesn’t start out with – hey bud you are wrong. That closes down dialog as that is about winning an argument. Save the arguments for a debate, let’s find out what makes each side tick and see what we can learn.

I hope you will join me!

Locking Cadences to Optimize the Whole Scaled System – Not Really…

I had a reminder through some recent comments that people view locking cadences in step as a means for optimizing the whole of the system and not for individual teams (by allowing them to choose the cadences at which they wish to deliver). this is used to justified in the case of when you have a need for a program. I think this is missing the point, so I am going to go through some explanations. I really like how Jurgen Appelo has applied David Snowden’s Cynefin framework to work systems so I am going to illustrate my rationale using some of his work.

So let us start with a team:

Teams are simple to understand, predominantly because of their simple structure with few people; however they are complex in nature because we are dealing with humans. Sometimes we can’t even predict our own behavior, much less a whole team’s. Next, let’s think of where most policies and processes wind up…Good processes (and their accompanying policies), try to add order into systems; this is particularly true of many of the scaling systems out there (SAFe, DAD, to some degree LeSS) where structure and process is imposed on the ‘program’ system in order to achieve more predictability. Unfortunately most of these are quite complicated in nature; some have helped by providing well diagrammed (some even animated) pictures, but there is still no denying the complicated nature of their arrangements to attempt to get predictability.

This is very well intentioned, yet what happens in reality is the following:

The complicated-ordered process thrown on a simple-complex team yields a complicated-complex result. This isn’t achieving what we wanted… and we’re just talking about a single team! And if we expand this to many teams such as we would have in a program, this is the best case we can hope to achieve. It may become complicated and chaotic as the additive results yield less predictable results. So why is this happening?

It’s because we humans create complex social systems. There’s a reason why we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools; the latter can be complicated in nature perhaps and yet they are ordered in nature, while people systems can be either simple or complicated, yet are always at best complex. People aren’t robots, so our behavior is never entirely predictable.

And yet… we try and put systems in place that have unintended consequences, such as imposing cadences on teams to get more order (predictability) out of them. Think about the last time you had something forced on you that you disdained; it probably had you at best working at less than motivated – it sucked the motivation out of you, so you didn’t perform as predictably as desired. And at worst case, you went and found a new job and now the team was thrown into reforming and restorming to get back to renorming and performing.

Each team and its individuals will be different, perhaps some won’t care that much about the ‘normalization’ of cadence. But some will have deep negative impacts that will occur.

So I ask you what ‘system’ are we trying to optimize? The process or the people? Imposing a process to de-optimize how humans perform seems to me have many potential negative longterm effects; besides losing good people or demotivating people, even if this happens to only one team out of ten, it sends a signal that people don’t control their work system at all, that any element can be changed on a whim. Basically apply the pants principle and let teams adopt as simple a process as possible, including the orchestration. As Saint-Exupery said, simplicity is not achieved by deciding on not when there is more to add, but deciding on when there is not more to take away.

Does this mean that locking cadences can’t ever be adopted? Not at all… Facilitate teams to select a good cadence within themselves firstand then collaborate with other teams to find how to best orchestrate delivery. This may result in lockstep cadences or perhaps a creative branching and merging strategy. This could be done during team chartering by holding a futurespective. Regular intra-team retrospectives could help teams identify when changes need to occur. Simply installing a locked cadence at the beginning may result in a sub-optimal approach as it overlooks the people part of the equation.

Skills for a Facilitative Leader

As folks know, I have been noodling on what a style of leadership I’ve deemed as facilitative leadership. Some may be wondering, what skills do I need to be a facilitative leader. I’ve given it some thought; it’s certainly not exhaustive and still may need some tweaking, but here’s some basics I’ve thought of so far…

An ability to engage co-workers in a manner that is both egalitarian and fruitful; co-workers includes peers, subordinates, and superiors – granted non-equal in authority people have to also release that relationship on their side to be wholly effective, suspend it if you were, but you as the facilitative leader should not be holding onto that relationship.
An ability to serve others and help fulfill their agenda over yours as long as it thoughtfully considers others points of view in a non-destructive manner.
An ability to elevate the assumptions of others in a non-threatening manner, whether it be about their agendas, intentions, or ideas.
An ability to humbly inquire on the path or agenda being taken to ensure it is right for the moment.

These four abilities/skills are my current essential feelings as to what is necessary for being a successful facilitative leader. There may be others. What would you add or change?

Everyone Can Be Facilitative Leaders

One may wonder why in my Leadership Quadrant post I mentioned that there is more room for people to be leaders when based on facilitative leadership thinking. This is explained by the two dimensions…

When leadership is based on power, this promotes hierarchical formal power relationships; only so many can report to a leader under this arrangement. An organization may choose a flatter structure, but ultimately decision-making authority rests in appointed or elected people at the top of a pyramid structure. Only people in these positions get to wield authority.

When directing is the preferred mode of operating, there is a limit to how many directors one can have. So even though a Utopian Benevolent Dictatorial Leader wants to help others, there is very little room for others to lead in their viewpoint. They have a sincere belief they know what is best.

In “Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach” by Gerald Weinberg, he talks about how anyone can become a leader through helping others. This is at the core of Servant Leadership and when this is done in a participative manner, it becomes facilitative in nature. Leadership derived in this manner happens irrespective of what formal structures are in place. Everyone has expertise and can lend assistance in some area and thus at any time one can be a leader; authority is derived from people’s sustained willingness to follow.

Leaders that then get appointed or elected to some formal authority role (supervisor, manager, etc.) that were already using a facilitative leadership approach gain much more capacity to get things done; people were already willingly giving them authority, the new position just confirms that belief. As long as the individual doesn’t switch too far to other extremes in the dimensions, they should be able to sustain this willingly given authority.

Facilitative Leadership Overview

In my last post I brought up the concept of a facilitative leader; so what do facilitative leaders do and how do the effectively lead?

What facilitative leaders do

I won’t go into exhaustive details here as this itself could be several posts, however it is important to have some idea what makes a facilitative leader distinct and that is the behaviors they exhibit. We’ll discuss this as if the behaviors are in the upper right of the Leadership Quadrant.

So in this space, a facilitative leader exhibits a desire to serve others, much like a servant leader as described by Robert Greenleaf. They also are participatory in nature, thus rather than say define a plan for a group to do work towards a goal, she or he will help the people create the plan so that is theirs. Thus a facilitative leader is one who helps the group collectively solicit and select creative ideas for the work and committing to complete it.

They also help individuals cope with their ever-changing roles and responsibilities as the team organizes and executes the work. They act as outside observers and offer improvements to the group and overall organization at large. They help the group gain clarity in the goal. They lead through influence.

How facilitative leaders effectively lead

As we explored in the last post, in order to be an effective leader, particularly when using influence as your primary mechanism, one must maintain good will with those you are leading.

When your actions are opposite of what you say you will do, they work against each other and your will approaches zero. Since influence is based on will, this reduces your leadership effectiveness.

Here’s a few examples, I say I have an open door policy and will listen and attend to people’s needs. If people bring these to me and I never listen, perhaps always finding ways to dismiss their needs, or I never take action when I say I will, I am undermining my will and thus my ability to influence behaviors, my primary mechanism to lead.

If on the other hand, I state I will observe where people appear to have roadblocks and help them through them, followed by attending stand-ups hearing of impediments outside a team’s control and visibly taking action on them, I gain will to get things done.

Side note: for most of this article, I called people a group, that was to emphasize two aspects – 1) this can be done in a non-team environment, particularly if you are a leader that has authority. And 2) you actually don’t need to have authority to influence folks through will; this generally not true where you are directive in nature, there you needed to have been granted authority in some manner.

Leadership Quadrants & the Facilitative Leader

Its been awhile since I posted…

I’ve been noodling on a many dozen things, but one that is resonating currently with me is leadership styles. there are dozens of books on this topic and so I have decided to ignore them momentarily to give you a simple framework based on two dimensions: participation directing and focus on power others.

To help us visualize this, here is the two dimensions shown on a graph:

Each dimension is a spectrum; these aren’t discrete spaces and people may move on these dimensions based on comfort level, experiences, and a whole host of other factors. If I considered only the X-axis, the right side would those that want to be servant-leaders and the left side would be controlling leaders. These have behaviors; the Y-axis adds in other behaviors. For clarity, let me repeat something that Robert Greenleaf said in his book “The Servant as Leader”;

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

With this is mind, and adding in the degree of participation to directing, which are another form of style, we can see that a mix of behaviors begin appearing in how I execute being a leader. Greenleaf’s book focuses on motives IMHO, but the manifestation/execution also matters a lot. While a Utopian Benevolent Dictatorial Leader wants to help people, how they do it is entirely different. They are going to direct what they think is best and not seek input from others. This may reduce their effectiveness overtime as people gain more awareness in the fact they don’t have say; this is regardless of the leader’s intentions.

I want to emphasize that a Facilitative Leader is one that has the Facilitation Kernel at their core – they are not only serving others, but doing so entirely on behalf of the group with their participation. They treat those they lead as peers. Facilitative leaders lead through sheer will and thus are clear in ensuring their actions and statements match. When they don’t, then most likely they lose power as it is all based on influence.

What’s nice is there exists more room for Facilitative Leaders within an organization than there can be for the other three styles.

I have some more thoughts on what Facilitative Leaders do, but I’ll save that for another post.

Paul Boos' Nimblicious – Making Agility Tasty

My thoughts on Product and portfolio management, Agile and lean approaches, User experience, and Leadership

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