Confessions of a Challenging Agile Team Member

When teams begin their agile journeys, there are so many behaviors and practices to choose from for improvement. The term “low-hanging fruit” comes to mind and you have a whole tree to pick from. But, what happens after you’ve picked all that low-hanging fruit? Eventually, good agile teams run the drill well enough that they don’t have a strong impetus to push for improvement.

Of course, good teams never stop. What they are left with are three types of improvements:

1. Tiny incremental changes with low impact
2. Big, expensive initiatives with larger impact (but tougher to commit to)
3. Uncomfortable changes that involve people -- their behaviors and emotions

Today, I’d like to talk about #3. In some respects, people can also be low-hanging fruit. The actual effort to improve may be relatively minimal, but the uncomfortableness factor can inhibit our willingness to take on the challenge.

As an agile coach, part of my role is to have the courage to work with people through uncomfortable situations. So, I’d like to think that I’m never the subject of one. Such is not the case. I, too, have been the person holding the team back. While I still feel bad about the negative effects I had on the team during the time in question, it ended up being a huge learning opportunity for me in so many ways.

The thing is, when you’re the agile coach and it’s you, you have to be the one to step up and address the issue. While I waited far longer than I’d hoped to do it, I eventually managed. I generally like to keep these posts short, but this story is not short. It spans a lifetime. I will attempt to condense it as much as possible, but the learnings are compelling enough that I believe you will find it worth the extra reading time.

This story starts when I was a kid. I was tiny, which any male knows is not a good thing when you’re a kid. Furthermore, I was a middle child, subject to the brutality of an older and younger sibling allied against me on a regular basis. This situation made me especially vulnerable to bullies. I attracted them like a magnet. Sometimes, I got the feeling that otherwise non-bully kids would be opportunistic bullies when I was around (more low-hanging fruit).

Fast forward, now I’m an adult and presumably past needing to deal with bullies (of course, most of us know that’s not true). On one of my teams, I encountered a person whose behavior patterns “triggered” me into an emotional state derived from my childhood experiences. That word “triggered” gets used a lot these days. Probably because it is a good way to describe what happens when our normally rational thought processes go out the window in the span of an instant.?

I immediately went into full battle mode. Mostly, a bunker mentality around self-protection. My behaviors were inexplicable to my teammates. My actions were irrational. Well, they made sense to me. I was no longer thinking about the team so much (I tried, but failed), rather I was in full personal defense mode. My actions were motivated by an attempt to recover the self-esteem “that had been stripped from me.” To be clear, the person who was the subject of this stripping had no idea what he was walking into. In fact, I know he thought he was trying to help me -- and indeed he was…in what ended up being a very roundabout way.

There were lots of negative effects on the team. For brevity, I will just name a few. First, I wasn’t really doing my job. I had withdrawn for fear of doing something “wrong” and being further denigrated for it. Second, in an attempt to appear to add some value, I made proposals that were “different” from the line of thinking prevalent on the team. While this is not always a bad thing, my motivations were wrong and my ideas tainted by them. These two things alone had so many knock-on effects, that I won’t even try to enumerate? them. Suffice it to say, that my teammates were asking themselves, “what’s going on with Tom?”

This lasted for months. I’m not proud of the fact that it went on so long, but it just goes to show you that most of us can be triggered into an unproductive state of mind. As I like to say, we all bring a full set of luggage to any situation. Fortunately, during this time, I happened to read a book entitled Thanks for The Feedback that saved me. In it, I learned about emotional triggers that can despoil the efforts of a well-meaning feedback giver.

One such situation is the context of the relationship of the giver to the receiver. This was the bit in the book that blew open my awareness of my situation. How I had been triggered. Why I was reacting the way I was. Sadly, nobody in my organization had been equipped to see what was going on with me and help me through my situation. If they had, maybe the condition could have ended sooner. Eventually, I had the good fortune to be able to recover on my own.

Having come to terms with what I had done and why I had done it, there was nothing left to do but to apologize to the many people I had impacted -- and there were more than a few. There were my teammates of course, but also the other people I had confided in with the expectation that they would help fix the situation that my teammate was causing (transference -- it’s a thing!). I also had to clear out my head and get back to behaving the way I usually do.

Most importantly, I needed to start rebuilding the trust that I had lost. Trust is so important to high performing teams and when it is so completely lost, you don’t get it back so quickly no matter how sincere your apology. In fact, I doubt I could have ever gotten back the full trust of the teammate who was the subject of my ire. We no longer work together, so I’ll never know if it was possible, but part of me would have liked to try.

What can you learn from this? The obvious thing is that team members are people who are subject to a wide variety of emotional challenges that can impede their efforts with the team. As good teammates, we owe it to them to call it out when we see it. This is super uncomfortable and you may not get the welcome response that you’re hoping for. But, if we’re going to be good team members, we need to have the courage, compassion, and empathy to open ourselves up in order to be there for that person.

Recognizing when someone is hurting and seeing that they may be confused about their own motivations might just create a space in which you can be supportive, if not helpful. These situations are tricky and we’re not trained psychologists, but being completely passive could doom the team to be stuck in a detrimental situation. Not everybody gets lucky and figures out their own mess. Thanks to Stone & Heen, I was lucky. Maybe you could be a teammate’s good luck charm! #agile #agileteams #emotions #continuousimprovement