Happy Holidays From AgileMan

Here's hoping everyone is enjoying a wonderful break right now before launching into another exciting year... I certainly am!

Not All Change Is Good Change

Ever since taking on the Agile Manager role two and a half years ago, I've become much more cognizant of examples of adaptation occurring around me than I ever had been before. I see it lots of places, from online surveys that I receive (and am more inclined to fill out than I had been in the past) to friends imparting insight that they've gleaned from training of one sort or another. I stepped into this whole AgileMan gig several years ago as someone who was traditionally very resistant to change - and wasn't afraid to admit it! - but what I've come to realize since then is that I'm really only opposed to bad change. So what do I mean by that?

I think there are several types of bad change, and looking at a couple of them even briefly as I'll do in this post will undoubtedly shed some light on some of what can make change a more positive experience. One obvious example of the wrong sort that comes to mind is "change for change's sake." This might come in a case where someone (or some group) is unhappy with the way things are but won't spend the time or energy to figure out why. I had one friend, many years ago, who left a job because he didn't think that it was fulfilling enough for him. When I asked him what specifically had been missing, he couldn't actually come up with anything concrete ("It's just a feeling"). The job that he moved to, however, turned out to be even worse than what he'd given up. Before long he became extremely nostalgic about the old job, and subsequently did everything that he could think of to try to get it back. When he failed in that attempt, his misery just intensified. From what I could tell, he had made a change without having any real idea what the driving force behind it was, and ended up quite unhappy as a result.

Another type of bad change is "throw away whatever I don't know and replace it with what I do know", which is really an anti-change for the person driving it. This can often exhibit itself in the form of a management type who either wants to make his mark on an organization or only knows one way to work, for example. Often such an individual will therefore rush to sweep out whatever "the last guy" implemented in order to either avoid having to learn the old system or just to re-shape it into something he's more familiar and comfortable with (or maybe both). While such a change may ultimately prove to be the right move for the organization, it's a poor approach to take for several reasons. For one, you end up throwing out the baby with the bath water, since you have no idea what working processes may get kiboshed in the process. For another, you run the risk of alienating those in the organization who liked or even believed in the old way of doing business, without first giving them a chance to draw attention to the working bits.

A common thread between both of those preceding examples is lack of data. And that's really what's often missing when the wrong kind of change is introduced. There's the data about what's currently going right and what isn't, and there's also gold to be mined as far as what effect any change you introduce is actually having. "Adaptation", as distinct from the more general purpose "change", requires that there be a feedback mechanism in place to provide that data and allow those involved to evaluate and respond to it. There's an old joke about a guy going to a doctor and saying, "Doc, it hurts when I go like this" (waving his arms up and down like a chicken)... to which the medical expert wisely replies, "So don't go like that!" The patient wasn't adapting to the data that he was receiving (pain while doing something silly), but doctors are all about paying attention to data. They listen to what the patient says, to what the patient's medical and family history tells them, and what various test results indicate... and then they respond accordingly. Smart, adaptive patients follow their doctors' directions on matters of health; the rest of the population keeps smoking/drinking/not exercising with no regard to what the effects might be, and then get eulogies that speak of how their lives were cut unfairly short.

As I said at the start of this, I've been seeing bits of adaptation almost everywhere I look now, and I think that's a very good thing.

In The Black

That's right! Thanks to the kindness and generosity of our many readers, the two-pronged publishing project that included More Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Year 2: Easier Said Than Done) and The Complete Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Two Years of Lessons Learned in Going Agile) has now achieved profitability! It took a few months for that milestone to arrive for the first AgileMan book, but less than a week this time around (the difference that not providing a couple dozen comp copies can make!). And I'm not counting the 8 copies that were pre-ordered but not distributed/paid for yet, which means that I'll soon have taken enough in to pay for another (smaller) print-run if there's ever enough demand for it.

Many thanks to all who've purchased either book, and especially to Jamie who bought four copies to give away (once again)!

The Leadership Game

One of the concepts that I first came across when I began reading up on Agile (waaay back toward the end of 2005) was that of servant leadership. There's a nice Wikipedia entry for it here, in case you want to know more about its origins and interpretations.

While I served as Agile Manager for two years, I tried to embody the notion of servant leadership, with admittedly mixed results. In my first tenure as a Feature Lead (in those initial month-long Iterations with the group that I nicknamed the "B-Team" in my books), I tried to drive home the point that, even though I was an Engineering Manager, I wasn't there to tell them what to do. I was there, instead, to help them succeed. My job was to serve their needs in the best way that I could. Similarly, in some of my other roles during that period, I tried hard to reinforce that same message. Not everyone bought into that kooky approach, though, with some still preferring to defer to me at the drop of a hat. As well, some of my fellow management brethren believed that a heavier (or perhaps, just steadier) hand was required on the steering wheel and thus found fault with my style.

I suspect that such reactions may have stemmed from the fact that some of those same leaders weren't ready themselves to do much more than perhaps pay a bit of lip service to the cause of "leading by serving." Thinking back on it now, I can come up with several different reasons why that might have been so, which would likely vary by individual:

• Sometimes egos are just too large to allow a person to think of himself or herself as "serving others" as a member of management. If you're career-oriented, after all, you probably worked hard to achieve that lofty position, and so why would you lower yourself (back down) to the point where your success could be measured in terms of how much you help others succeed?
• Some people, sadly, have little or no natural ability to influence and thus their leadership style is strictly Command-and-Control because nothing else ever works for them! In that situation, relinquishing some degree of decision-making onto subordinates and then filling your time supporting them in their efforts would be frightening, at best, and incomprehensible, at worst.
• Along the same lines, I think that a few of the managers and executives quite simply don't trust those below them on the org chart. How can you commit yourself to the service of others if you suspect that they're incompetent, unmotivated or just plain lazy? Believing in people often requires a huge leap of faith, and I'm not sure that all of my peers and superiors have been willing to take it.
  

There were other factors at play, as well, I'm sure. But when I conjure up images of some of the "worst offenders" (as measured against this particular leadership bar, that is), those reasons above seem to be the most common.

Something I read recently talked about how important humility is in a great leader, and I think that fits perfectly with servant leadership. Being humble often gets a bad rap... Clark Kent, after all, is described as "mild-mannered" but most of the time that's used as a knock against him. "Why can't you be pushier, like Lane is?" editor Perry White would demand of him. "Nice guys finish last, and don't get the by-line!" I happen to believe that humility's a virtue, because (among other things) it tends to keep your eyes and ears open a lot more than arrogance or even pride ever does. If you accept that you can always do better, for example, then it's more likely that you just might! On other hand, if you're already convinced of your own greatness, there's really nowhere to go (but down).

So if I were building up a new team of leaders today, I'd be looking for at least some healthy amount of humility in each selection. When I took part in the task of finding several new Product Development Leaders (Agile Coaches) for our company earlier this year, I certainly factored that into the search criteria that we used. Anyone exuding a sense of born leadership, for example, was facing an uphill climb, as that attitude seems to suggest that there isn't much to learn in becoming an effective leader (with which, I must most humbly disagree). If a person came across as looking to finally get their chance to wield some power over the folks who were always disagreeing with them, I'm afraid they were similarly at a disadvantage. While some degree of self-confidence is obviously required to lead, we also recognized the need for a healthy dollop of modesty in our candidates, and I think the ones who eventually made the grade all demonstrated it. If all of the current leadership had been screened with an eye toward that attribute, we might have actually fared better in our Agile journey... although that's certainly open to debate. A better Agile Manager would've similarly helped, but we didn't get that, either.

With the U.S. election just barely a month behind us now and a new President-elect in the process of transitioning into power during a frightening economic meltdown, the word "leadership" is getting a lot of play in the media at the moment. I suspect that Barack Obama is the type of man who understands the job in front of him, and gets that the only chance he has of success involves him inspiring great things in others. He comes across as someone who has a vision of how to turn his country around, especially in terms of how to take it into the 21st century (after his predecessor tried hard to send it back to the 19th). Because of the office he's assuming, he'll naturally make many decisions and give lots of orders; but his greatest achievement, if I'm right, will come from empowering not just his cabinet and fellow politicians but also the American people in general. He's smart enough to realize that he can't possibly fix all of his country's problems alone, and so part of his job will be to remove obstacles and thereby enable several million other people to contribute to the solutions. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he ends up providing a model of servant leadership that we all could learn from.

If you're currently in a leadership role (at work or elsewhere), it wouldn't be the worst thing you could do to stop, take a moment, and consider: what am I doing that's actually in the service of those "below" me? If you have a tough time coming up with a very big list, then maybe it's time to shake things up a bit and see what happens!

The Books Are On Their Way!

I just received e-mail notification from Lulu that the initial print-run of More Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Year 2: Easier Said Than Done) and The Complete Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Two Years of Lessons Learned in Going Agile) has been completed and several dozen copies are now winging their way here! It's always a bit tricky guessing exactly when they'll arrive, but I'd say Monday or Tuesday of next week looks promising.

If so, I should be able to get books out to my former co-worker buddies who pre-ordered sometime later next week, which would be excellent (several weeks earlier than I had planned). I still need to figure out how to accomplish that mass distribution (and currency collection), but now that it's starting to seem real, I'll put more thought into it!

Another publishing cycle nears its exciting conclusion...