“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
Agile is hard. As a leader, it challenges your ego. It pushes you to trust the team. It pushes you to work with a diversely skilled team with competing priorities and varying experiences. It pushes you to listen. The alternative is worse though, wrapping yourself in a false sense of security with its silos of certainty and conformity. Looking back at the previous five weeks in the Agile Leadership course, I experienced many lessons. I learned about the lean methodology and situational leadership. I learned about the Cynefin framework and feature teams. I learned about devops and continuous improvement. But as kindergarten as it sounds, the most important lesson I learned was trust.
To understand why trust is important, it is important to note that Agile is heavily people focused. As evidence, two of the Agile’s Manifesto focuses on people: 1.) Individuals and interactions over processes and tools and 2.) Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. To act on these principles, facilitation needs to occur. The facilitator can be anyone. From my experience, it is easiest if you designate an impartial third party. Impartiality comes with it de facto trust. But if the goal is to function as a diverse and self-organizing team who owns the output, each person on the team needs to act as a facilitator. The challenge is that if each person on the team is like me, s/he has something at stake: an agenda to promote and biases which cloud judgement. Knowing this, the team needs to trust that the facilitator is acting with the best interest of the team. Vice versa, the facilitator needs to trust the team when it refuses to adopt his/her position while still feeling invested in the outcome. This is a growth opportunity for me. I imagine I am not alone, but for me to experience ownership in the team’s outcome, it is not enough to have worked on the outcome: I need to feel I impacted the direction of the outcome. These conversations are hard to have. Members of the team can choose to ignore them. They can choose to argue towards alienation and resentment. They can also create a safe space to confront the challenges openly and honestly. That is the role of facilitator.
To reach this goal, I was recommended the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. And perhaps it is outside the scope of the class, but I strongly recommend it for anyone looking to lead within an Agile environment. The book focuses on the concept of a “safe space” where conflict is shared openly and honestly. The book addresses the two risks to safe space: you and your interlocutor. Moreover, it provides techniques to acknowledge your emotions to stay in the space and tools to draw the conversation back to the safe space. From my own experience, I struggle with these conversations. In fact, it is helpful to role play these situations in order to grow. Not to diminish practicing, the tough aspect about practicing is the lack of authenticity. I can roleplay and read, but somewhere deep inside, I know I am just playing a role and it is not real. To feel the quiver of my voice, the shaking of my hands, and perspiration on my forehead when a deeply invested goal is at stake. I am preparing for that field. At the end of day, I need to participate in conflict and stop avoiding it needlessly to grow and learn.
Anyhow, I’ve had the opportunity to work with leaders who strived to work as a facilitator. The most recent happened when my current team joined the Corporate Strategy and Sustainability teams. At every level of engagement, from building the business plan to setting our goals, the leader solicited feedback and sought direction. He came prepared to have a conversation. He had a destination in mind and let us build out the journey. The irony is that we created the work for ourselves that we would be held accountable for the outcome later. However, we felt invested and wanted to add as much as possible. And add as much we did.
As I shared when I started, Agile is hard and participating in high performing teams is an art. In venture capital, they share that they invest in teams and not technology. And I could not agree more. It comes back to those kindergarten concepts that I have been guilty of dismissing as simple: respect, honesty, integrity, responsibility, and trust. Simple because we can all do it. Simple because it is easy to explain. But difficult in the moment to perform when my ego and emotions start to overwhelm. At risk is instead of focusing on we, I focus on me. But I will keep practicing. Because if it is so simple to do, why do we need posters all over reminding us to do it?
