OTT Issue #15: Going in Circles When Going off the Trail? It Might Be Mirror Time

After a long, intense day at a client’s office, you can usually find me in sweatpants in my hotel room indulging in a glass of wine and multiple episodes of?The Office. So the fact that I was still in heels, and still in “coach mode” at 7pm meant things were not going as planned.?

The CMO had grabbed me on my way out the door and asked to take me out for a drink. “Sure, I’d love to!” was really the only possible reply.?

In the way of many over-extended executives, she didn’t beat around the bush. As soon as our drinks were in front of us, she looked me straight in the eye and asked a really good question: “What’s the one thing that will make or break this effort?” (She meant her teams’ effort to transition to Agile ways of working.)

With other clients I might have had to ponder that question.?

For her marketing organization, the answer was immediate.?

I returned her no-nonsense eye contact in kind and answered in one word: “You.”?

I’d only been with this client for one day, but I knew this wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. One of her directors was the one who had brought me in to try and rescue an Agile adoption gone awry; the CMO herself wasn’t totally clear on why I was there. She had attended a grand total of 20 minutes of the nine hours of workshops, coaching sessions, and team meetings I had facilitated that day.?

But everybody else in the 40-person marketing department knew what was up. Agile had been mandated at the start of the year, largely as a way to squeeze more work out of the teams without giving anybody more budget or more people.?

Since then, their off the trail effort had devolved into a death march.?

The promises of getting more done in less time with less stress weren’t even close to being fulfilled. Instead, Agile had become an arms race among the various directors. They were vying among themselves to see who could get their teams to “do Agile” the best, and do it the fastest.?

I’m all for some good old fashioned competition, but in this case the interdependence among literally every team meant that this us-versus-them attitude was preventing anything from getting done.?

For example, just a few hours before my unscheduled CMO happy hour, I had sat in on a “sprint planning” meeting. I use those quotation marks intentionally, because the 90 minute meeting I observed was not a sprint planning in any sense of the word as I understand it.?

Instead, the scrum master for the creative services team had opened the meeting by informing the representatives of the other three teams that her team had finished zero percent of the work from their previous sprint.?

I’ll pause here for the scrum masters reading this to recover from the heart palpitations they’re likely experiencing after reading that. Here’s a guinea pig picture to help calm you down:

Okay, moving on.?

Because of this zero percent progress, the creative team had zero capacity available to do any new work for their peers.?

She illustrated this fact by gesturing toward several dozen index cards, each representing a piece of work, that were all arranged on the very large conference table around which the team representatives were gathered. (To underscore the utter craziness of this meeting, she had arrived 30 minutes early to lay out these cards, having transferred them to the conference room from their usual home on the wall of her team’s corner of the office.)

The “we have no capacity” pronouncement took about 2 minutes. The remaining 88 were spent on the other team representatives arguing, cajoling, deal-making, and all but punching their colleagues in the face to try and get their most critical work shoe-horned into the creative team’s backlog.???

They held up brightly colored index cards of their own, gesticulating forcefully to underscore their criticality. Their goal was to insert these cards into the creative team’s backlog; few made it in.?

Team leads then had to go back to their own teams and do damage control. Many project deadlines slipped. Disgruntled stakeholders had to be informed. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, not to mention open hostility toward the creative team.?

But they, as it turned out, weren’t the villains either. They were all working flat out, but, thanks to a mind boggling workload and the insidious effects of context switching, they just couldn’t get stuff done.

This depressing state of affairs was the most obvious indicator of how bad things had gotten under the Agile arms race that was underway.?

And it was why I told the CMO that she was the linchpin that could make or break the department’s Agile efforts. Only her intervention could interrupt the downward spiral.?

She was taken aback.?

She thought she had done the smart executive thing by delegating the move to Agile to her direct reports. After all, she wasn’t in the trenches day in and day out overseeing the work being done. Surely she wasn’t the best person to drive a process change??

But by completely removing herself from the effort, she had virtually doomed it to failure.?

Agile had no champion, just a handful of leaders who saw themselves competing to be “the best at Agile.” There was no mission statement, no business goals, no outcomes everyone could rally behind.?

Like many leaders before and since, she associated Agile ways of working with what teams and individuals do to get things done. From her perspective, agility had very little relevance to her executive role.?

Of course, this was the point when she needed to bust out some?Taylor Swift karaoke. She was, indeed, the problem. By not only allowing but encouraging the competition among her directors to win the race to doing Agile, she was fostering an environment that was antithetical to Agile ways of working.?

Her version of “stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror” was taking me out for a drink and asking what she no doubt thought was a very Agile leader-y thing to ask. I was tired and maybe not as coach-y as I should have been, so I just put the mirror right in front of her.?

What would you have done? Imagine you had identified a key priority for your leaders, only to watch them decimate productivity and morale while pursuing it. Imagine a paid consultant told you that you were the one thing that could fix the situation.?

Could you make the power move and admit that you messed up? Could you look in the mirror and do the hard work??

Most of us couldn’t. But great leaders won’t avoid the uncomfortable reflection.

- Andrea