Do You Enjoy Coming To Work?

Many years ago, some Industrial Logic coaches and I helped numerous people in a large American company learn the art of being agile. It wasn't an easy road, yet they were quite eager to learn and together we produced some amazing outcomes. After about four years of helping people in this company (across two of the three major divisions), the company got acquired by a private equity firm. The new firm spent 1 billion on outsourcing and insisted that all work be done Waterfall-style. Four years later, the company woke up with a very bad Waterfall hangover and decided they needed to get back to being agile. But at that point they were swayed by the latest agile scaling framework, a process that installed many roles and rituals but which didn't lead to stunning outcomes.

After several months of working within the large agile scaling framework, a woman we'd worked with at this company said to her colleague, "I miss the days when Industrial Logic was here and I actually enjoyed coming to work."

I heard that quote and it made me smile. It also made me a bit sad. What happened to the days when becoming agile helped people re-discover joy at work?

In the early days of the agile movement, before it was even called a "movement", before the CSM certification, before all the glossy agile brochures and before the latest industry-wide obsession with large scale agile transformation frameworks, it wasn't unusual for agile adopters to say they loved coming to work.

Early agile methods, like Extreme Programming, cut out senseless process bureaucracy and enabled whole, cross-functional teams to collaborate closely in open workspaces, work at a sustainable pace, trust and respect one another and produce quality products and/or services.

Richard Sheridan, an early Extreme Programming adopter, and founder of Menlo Innovations, made "joy" the focus of his company and wrote about this in his wonderful book, Joy, Inc.

Diana Larsen, in her keynote speech at Agile2014 in Orlando, said "I want you to love your work." Her talk was called Best Job Ever. Diana gets it. We are meant to love our work.

I love being and becoming ever more agile (defined as "characterized by a ready ability to move with quick easy grace") in everything I do. I've been at this work for 20 years. I also love helping others become agile and that's one reason why I created an international company of brilliant agile coaches who earn their living by helping others learn to become genuinely agile.

Agile is meant to inspire us, to help us achieve great outcomes, to help us love coming to work. If that isn't happening where you work, you've got work to do. What small steps can you take to love work more? What can you do to remove obstacles to your happiness at work? Pay attention to this because you are meant to enjoy coming to work.