The hard skills and soft skills of "being agile" and why transformation leaders often get it wrong
Stuart Young shared a video from Trevor Muir with me recently which talked about the flaws in education systems regarding hard skills and soft skills. The video made the point that the skills that industry cherish and retain staff for are things like critical thinking, confidence, collaboaration, and communication, not actually the things we are taught in school like maths, history, geography or geology. Those school subjects encompass the "hard skills" like the ability to do calculus, recall historical dates or facts, or even program a computer.
There is an interesting point from this that directly correltates to my experiences in Agile transformations. Adopting most of the essence of agility is through a bunch of "soft skills" yet time and time again I see practitioners emphasising governance and process change, and asking for checklists of team maturity based on whether they are carrying out the rituals of a certain framework and have a story backlog in place.
The video makes the point that our education system is hung up on "hard skills" teaching, afterall it is something that is easy to measure and examine on; you either know the fact or process, or you don't. These "hard skills" in the agile world are things like understanding PI planning or the scrum framework, using user story format, knowing how to estimate or prioritise, knowing the three questions for a stand-up etc. All of these items are things that are easily measured therefore from an audit or progress reporting perspective they are great.
Ultimately though, the 'essence' of agility and from where people actualy get the real benefits are in the soft skills - the "being agile", rather than "doing agile". Collaboration, creativity, communication, and respect are core elements of any successful transformation, but these are much less easy to measure.
A good transformation leader will be asking questions about how well people are collaborating and how empowered they are to make tomorrow better than yesterday. Sadly I more often hear metrics on "how many teams are now doing scrum?", "how many iterations of backlog are in a playable state?" and "what does our governanace look like?". These aren't necessarily the wrong questions to ask, but wouldn't it be great to have as much emphasis on the softer side of things too?
Or maybe as the video suggests, we simply call these things the "essential skills" to agility instead?
Transformation Manager at Vodafone
5 年Agree with the argument for more focus on those softer skills, the difficulty comes with understanding how to measure those behaviours other than observation. It is far easier to track team metrics than it is to confidently say that a team is 'agile' now because we have seen them collaborating.?
Helping Leaders and Managers lead with confidence and compassion and create a fulfilling career | Leadership Coach | Career Coach | Executive Coach | Transformational Coach
5 年So true Parm!
Certified Scrum Trainer | Learning Consultant | Visual Storyteller | Emcee | Speaker #Product #HumanSkills #VisualStorytelling
5 年Thanks for sharing this Matt. As Vanilla Ice once said people need to 'Stop, collaborate and listen'. Hard skills alone will not accelerate learning, provide fast feedback loops or help in gaining a level of alignment across a team or organisation. Essential skills such as visualisation will allow a working group to generate ideas and solve problems effectively. It all comes down to collaboration.