Vicious and virtuous transformational circles

Picture the situation in which a senior manager feels a team is not working hard enough. They want data about performance and land on story points as an indicator. There are conversations with the team, which regularly delivers what is planned, about 60 story points per sprint. Pressure is put on the team, and they resist and feel aggrieved. Next Sprint, the Squad plans the same number of stories, totalling 300 story points this time. Seeing the more significant number but smelling the coffee, the senior manager still needs to be convinced and demands more pressure! The Squad I was coaching in Buenos Aires was in a vicious circle created mainly by distrust from the London-based senior manager.

It's thirty-four years since Charles Hampden Turner wrote Corporate Culture: From Vicious to Virtuous Circles. A vicious circle is a reciprocal cause-and-effect sequence in which two or more elements intensify and aggravate each other, inexorably worsening the situation. At the same time, a virtuous circle has the opposite effect of improving a situation. It is that a perceived behaviour causes a reaction, which, in turn, creates a positive impact. Nevertheless, the evidence from recent agile transformational activities indicates that these circles still exist, and they are circles that an agile coach must seek to break and nullify.

The ability to shift from a vicious to a virtuous circle is mainly contingent on the leadership mindset and calls for leadership coaching, yet more than coaching is needed.

Unfortunately, many corporate cultures are marred by anti-patterns, such as a lack of trust and formal reporting or control patterns, leading to adverse outcomes. For instance, a culture that overemphasises formality, micro-management and control triggers resistance from Agile Squads, necessitating more formality and reporting. This example highlights the detrimental effects of a leadership mindset prioritising control over agility and trust.

The result is a downward spiral of performance driven by leadership's perceived need to control and orchestrate. The need for control is frequently based on a misunderstanding of Agile's crucial aspects, such as using story points to measure and compare teams.

However, there is a way out of this vicious circle. We can break free by cultivating a modern leadership mindset that embraces authentic leadership. This shift in perspective prioritising can lead to discovering a virtuous circle, even within the same performance management scenario.

If teams are baselined and metrics such as lead time and flow efficiency are used, leaders may appreciate the benefits of the seemingly informal agile approach. Using metrics increases the desire for self-management and continuous improvement, which I call informality, yet that is far from the truth! Consequently, leaders are encouraged to incorporate agile working methods into regular operations. The result is a delivery system which encourages and rewards performance and becomes the norm.

Learning that leadership behaviour is more easily altered by using metrics rather than mentoring and coaching may surprise one. We use the metrics as evidence of improvement or to quantify the impact on delivery from systemic issues or organisational structure. Using a crawl, walk, run model where we pilot in a small way and collect before-and-after metrics, we have convinced traditional leaders to alter their behaviour. The metrics prove the value, creating a desire to learn and enabling our coaches to walk through open doors.

If you would like more information about using metrics in Agile Coaching, contact Beneficial Consulting.