A collection of my thoughts and quotes on Agility, not Agile: Thoughts on Agile Leadership
Agility, not Agile
- There are no special people; there are special minds. When interviewing and building a team, don't look for past accomplishments, but instead probe for the mindset that enabled those successes.
Speed up operations to keep the team and company exciting.
- As human beings, we are far too broad to be boxed into labels. You cannot lead a label. You can only lead a whole person.
- The best way to build or grow a successful company is to bring faster innovation and having happier employees.
- You can't hire a team. You build it. You can hire talents but you have to build the "team" which takes effort, patience, and trust.
- Having a flat organization structure (by having very few managers) and open space floor plans leads to open and transparent communication.
- Open space helps with quick customer support.
For example, at Tesla and SpaceX there are no scrum and no formal meetings, and yet they are super agile (they collaborate by swarming, internally called mobbing, and triaging & fixing issues in real time on the ground and NOT having meetings about fixing an issue)
- You do not need a PMO to be agile; all you need is people and teams who want to be agile laser focused on faster innovation and delivery.
- Have bias towards speed and intolerance for waiting (blockers, bottlenecks).
- A strict definition of ready (DOR) , definition of done (DOD) is crucial for flow.
- Utilize test driven development (TDD) to keep quality and product safety standards high.
- Success lies in uncharted territories, that's why you embrace agility. Being agile means following the compass, not a map.
- Understand, people or teams do not want to be helped if they are comfortable with the inefficiencies. Comfort is the real enemy. Your primary job as a Change Agent, therefore, is not trying to convince people that things can improve but to tell an inspiring (and believable) story which shows why a “particular change” is better for them and how it benefits them personally.
- Don't fall in love with your title. People don't see you as your title, they see you as who you are - a human being with both imperfections and strengths. Focus on growing your influence. Titles won't buy you other people's attention. Attention, respect, and influence is earned.
- How to tell if an organization wants to create leaders or just wants functioning drones? Also, how to tell if they are playing offensive or defensive? Look for what's celebrated and what's not! Is "courage" celebrated? Is "innovation" celebrated? Are "employees" celebrated??Or, are they more focused on revenues/profits, competition, customer acquisition, and production output?
People over process. Process over outcomes.
- Labels have the purpose of organizing information about what we do but not who we are. But when someone is reduced to a label (developer, software tester, CEO, program manager, etc.), their personhood is also reduced in the same proportion. As human beings, we are far too broad to be boxed into labels. You cannot lead a label. You can only lead a whole person.
- Self-organization is a collaborative process that happens in a decentralized landscape. It’s also the most misunderstood word in Agile. Should the entire company be “self-organized”? If not, can you truly practice Agile at Scale?
- The future is about teaching kids (and adults) the path to self-awareness. The past was about enforcing discipline by instilling fear. Today we are in the transition phase. Which way will you lead us?
How to look sharp at work??Wear a smile.
- Being agile means "practicing" agile by adopting all of its core values. You can't have a true agile development by cherry-picking some agile values and principles. Agile isn’t a fixed methodology, after all, it’s a thinking-process for making complex decisions with a Zen-like attitude of finding beauty and wholeness in imperfection.
- A scrum master is also the agile coach for the team. An agile coach, on the other hand, may not be a scrum master.
- Many agile teams think of sprints as grinding work. Others think of sprints as a marathon. Agile is neither. Agile is all about prioritization.
- Just as sometimes adding a new plugin can break your site, in large projects, introducing a new process can increase (hidden) friction. If you introduce something new, actively monitor your team for signs of growth or loss of momentum.
- Scrum or Kanban makes it easier to track your progress and helps your team take accountability. Above all, from an organizational perspective, agile is great for transparency and building a stable team that delivers on-time and on-budget. There is both simplicity and beauty in incremental, iterative progress no matter where you apply these principles. For example, my wife and I use a Kanban board in our kitchen to plan for special dinners (Thanksgiving/Christmas/etc.), we use Kanban board to plan our year and travel goals. Not only that, I used the scrum framework to publish my first book.
- Be a curator of authentic relationships. Invest in them. Be proactive. Be a giver. Earn trust. If you do this, not only you'll have an amazing career but you'll also be happier.
- Your ideal career or business idea is probably something you already do. Are you a number cruncher at your day job but love helping your colleagues to get fit? Do you work a 40-hour workweek and travel on weekends? Oftentimes, your calling is hiding in plain sight.
Bypass the authoritocracy. Don't go to interviews looking for validation from others. Instead, develop your talent stack and search for teams that need you.
- A job interview is a two-way communication to probe for cultural and team fit. No matter which side of the table you sit, you should be asking questions that are important to you without fear.
- Your first investment should be in yourself. Learn new skills. The market can go up or down but you’ll never lose your skills. This is more true today than ever before. Diversify your skills.
- For a change, don't add new things in your life as a new year's resolution. Instead, do more of what's already working for you and stop doing things that are time-waste.
The first servant-leaders in any successful organization are its founders.
- Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.
- Frame your problem statements into actionable tasks and goals that lead to a "solution". Problem statements incite procrastination and resistance whereas solution statements inspire hope and motivation.
- What types of people you attract might give important cues about you. Even at work.
- The goal of going Agile is to hedge risk by doing incremental-iterative development, increasing overall process efficiency, and the quality of the final output.
- A good manager focuses on managing impediments, process, team’s health, protects the boundaries of self-organizing teams, promotes a healthy culture, and helps eliminate waste.
- Some climb mountain peaks to conquer it, some to connect with it. Your inner emotional need shapes how you would interpret your journey and treat others who may be in your path.
- We borrow our desires from others. Mostly unconsciously. Take a hard look at your goals and ask yourself, "Is this something trying to fit the current cultural narratives, or, is this something I?want to explore for myself".
If you can’t measure your ______, you can’t manage your ______.
- Yes, great minds think of great ideas.?But, great teams build great products.?It takes collaboration and teamwork to turn ideas into reality!
- The best leaders are the best storytellers. It's not their charisma, influence, posture, or even their vision. The best leaders know how to tell a compelling story — one which gets a diverse group of people to focus attention on a single point. Nothing unifies humans like a great story that we collectively choose to believe in.
In the future anything that can be done remotely will be done remotely.
- Most people would benefit from having one day a month where you do nothing but think. A day to do a deep dive retrospective on WHAT did you do, WHY did you do it, HOW did you do, WHERE were you wrong, WHAT were your blind spots, WHAT new things did you learn, WHAT are you grateful for, WHO would you like connect with, WHAT inspired you, WHAT can you improve, WHAT would you do differently next time, and so on.
- Focusing on the "why" behind your ideas can help you communicate better (and therefore gain more support from your peers) than focusing on the "what" and "how." Always, lead with the 'why'.
- Small talks are important. Make an effort to do frequent and genuine touch points because it builds relationships. Small conversations basically mean “I care more about you than being productive.
- Agile is not about building the "Right Product" from the get-go. Agile is also not about the "Faster delivery" of a product. Agile is about the speedy discovery of "what's not needed" through iterative development, frequent feedback, and course correction. Waterfall assumes the "Right Product" is known and therefore can be built within the said timeline and budget. Agile on the other hand is agnostic about the product, budget or timeline, and instead focuses on the iterative-incremental progress.
- What separates a leader from a boss is how he manages commitments to others vs. expectations out of him that is both healthy and respectful to everyone.
- One person you help can help thousands others. Let that sink in. Never underestimate how many lives you can impact. Believe in your vision, message, and action.
- The biggest mental health benefit that you can give to your team is to let them work when they want and from wherever they want. Believe in them and focus on the key results. Doing this shows "trust". Trust is key for emotional stability & mental well being.
- Workplace politics is just a fancy way of describing the battle of egos. No one wins in the battle of egos. A leader, therefore, should seek to encourage collaborative behavior among his people by clearly defining common goals, roles & responsibilities, and success criteria.
The XP White Book
The XP White Book can be summarized in two short points:
- Go all in on the things that make you better.
- The practices you choose matter, and they reinforce each other in ways that create virtuous cycles. It's worth spending time to analyze how this works for the things you're doing, and to make sure that you activate the ways that the practices reinforce each other.
How to Collaborate & Communicate Effectively
Collaboration
- We all know, collaboration speeds things up and is mutually beneficial for the employees as well as the organization. When a group of people work together, interact and share ideas, brainstorm, debate, discuss, and challenge each other - they often speed up solutions to complex business or process problems.
- Being able to effectively collaborate with a diverse group of people with differences in views and solutions is therefore a big win.
Communication
- To have clear communication, you need a clear vocabulary. Same word can mean different things to different people. You can say the same thing and can get the exact opposite reactions from two different people.
- Please remember, words can have "denotative meaning" and "connotative meaning". Denotation is the common dictionary meaning of a word while connotation is the emotional and imaginative meaning surrounding a word. While you may mean to say 'X', the listener may interpret it as a 'Y'. To solve this common communication problem, always start with "let's agree on our vocabulary first" and always end with follow-up questions to clarify if your message was interpreted correctly.
- To some, this may seem like over-communication, and that is precisely the point. There is no such thing as "over-communication". The goal is clear and effective communication.
Some Tips
- Get to know the other person and understand their Point of View (POV); create 1x1 touch points
- Keep notes of similarities and differences and work on the differences with mutual respect and understanding
- Share ideas, ask questions, and seek to understand how the other person views "fill in the blank"
- When you feel like no one understands you, work on what you can control:understand them and adapt your communicationchange the audienceconfirm with your audience if they actually understood, but didn't give you the feedback you want
