This week I had the distinct honor of attending a Certified Agile Leader (CAL) class taught by Bob Galen in house with a client. I wanted to write a quick post with some reflections on the course.
Here is my position piece from the pre-work Bob asked for:
The CAL class for me offers an opportunity to better understand what it takes to be an Agile leader in an organizational context. Having a great deal of formal leadership training during my time in the military, it was great to see some tie in to how the Agile world views leadership. I have been a leader of military organizations of up to 450, and there are many challenges in leading a team that is responsible for that many people. And certainly in the military the stakes are much higher than in many private sector industries. For me, what I hope to get out of the class is: 1) some experiences and techniques for leaders to engender trust and self-organizing teams 2) the dynamics of shared and situational leadership, and how to know when to use different leadership styles, and 3) how leaders can use story-telling as means of developing a shared understanding of culture and direction (vision) for the organization.
As far as takeaways from the class proper, there are a few things that come to mind:
- I love the 95% rule. Bob talks about this in his book, The 3 Pillars of Agile Testing book, and I think it is a great aspirational goal as a leader to strive for letting your employees develop a solution, try it, and learn — 95% of the time. Reserve only 5% to tell them what to do.
- I put this in the course survey as well, but I love the idea of leadership storytelling. The slide showing Stephen Denning’s book makes me want to read it again. In fact, I attended part of a session at TriAgile last week about the importance of Storytelling for Agile Coaches and leaders. I think many executive leaders would do well to leverage the power of story and ritual to nurture their organizational culture.
- I liked the way one section started the trust thread with “start with why” by Simon Sinek. It is such a great book, and the Ted talk is awesome. So often we get caught as leaders just explaining the endstate, but we never explain why. All military orders contain a task, purpose, endstate, and commanders intent — so if all else fails, you have enough idea of intent to improvise and create a solution.
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Is probably my favorite leadership fable (followed closely by The Phoenix Project). I would recommend this for any executive struggling to lead a senior team. It is too bad we did not have more time to dig into that one. I think we spent some time on it, but maybe everyone should just read the book! 🙂
Finally, what struck me personally the most. One thing does immediately come to mind: in Good to Great idea of getting the right people the bus. I am sort of struggling with one of my clients on this concept. They have so many people that are just laggards or active resisters inside agile teams (developers), and I scratch my head sometimes as to why they were hired in the first place. I know a big thing for some companies and leaders is hire slow and fire fast, but what to do with an organization with an organization adopting change and so many people resisting it? Many people in the change management community will say that 10% attrition with sweeping organizational change is normal, and I think this is something that I need to have more conversations with my client about.
Until the Next Iteration . . .
Jason