This is the sixth article proper in a series introduced with It’s time to reclaim Servant Leadership. We’re looking at how, in the practical context of Lean-Agile transformation, we take Servant Leadership beyond “serve the team” or “unblock all the things and get out of the way”. Each post corresponds to one of the strategies of our white paper 6+1 Essential strategies for successful Lean-Agile transformation. Get your copy now!

As I observe in the white paper, it seems to be a common failure pattern in Lean-Agile transformations that serious leadership engagement happens only as a last resort, when it becomes apparent that the transformation is losing its way. What has been missing is a serious exploration of the dependencies (in both directions) between the transformation and outstanding organisational questions such its purpose, its values and core assumptions, and the leadership behaviours necessary for success. That this needs to be a two-way thing becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the transformation’s success can’t measured just in its own terms, but in terms also of the future success of the organisation. Why would we go to all that effort otherwise?

It’s a big topic, but here are some key areas you might want to pay some attention to.

The basics

What do you deliver, to whom, and why does it matter?

Can every member of your team answer that question with confidence, both for themselves and for the team as a whole?

After the “what, to whom, and why” question come some “how” questions:

1. How does it work (from the team’s perspective, and including the contributions of other teams and services)?

2. How well does it work (from the customer’s perspective first, but other perspectives are important too)

3. How do we sustain it (an organisational question, and a big one)

Cranking it up a little

How confident would you be to answer those questions on behalf of your peers and seniors? How coherent would be the range of answers? Do you discuss these things, or would your answers be arrived at mainly through observation and guesswork?

Assuming you even have one, how well is your agenda for change aligned to the concerns raised by all of the above? How do you ensure follow-through? At what organisational level is it managed? To whom is it visible? If your organisational feedback loops deal mostly with “issues”, I would hazard a guess that visibility, alignment and follow-through are all weak. Did I guess right?

Digging deeper

Taking together all the changes you’d like to make, are there some common themes? Some common objectives &/or underlying strategies? Core assumptions? Values, even?

Take a few of those, and write some sentences (not questions) that would be “more true” were those themes, objectives, strategies, assumptions, or values to be more fully realised or more consistently demonstrated. For example:

• We identify dependencies between work items in good time and sequence them accordingly
• We can afford to make small, frequent, and timely deliveries while still meeting our quality expectations
• We cooperate throughout the delivery process to ensure the smooth transition of completed work into live use

Would you expect consensus on (1) how true (or otherwise) those statements are now and (2) which are the most important? What actions could you agree that take you towards where you want to be on the most important ones? How do those actions compare to your current agenda for change?

Happily, we’ve done some of that work for you. The examples above are taken from the Agendashift values-based delivery assessment, 43 prompts aligned to values of transparency, balance, collaboration, customer focus, flow, and leadership. We have a well-practised path to agreement on what’s important and what should be done, well-enough practised and sufficiently transferrable that the “we” here now extends to a growing community of partners. Watch out in the coming weeks for news on who they are and how to become one. Exciting times 🙂

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This is the fifth article proper in a series introduced with It’s time to reclaim Servant Leadership. We’re looking at how, in the practical context of Lean-Agile transformation, we take Servant Leadership beyond “serve the team” or “unblock all the things and get out of the way”. Each post corresponds to one of the strategies of our white paper 6+1 Essential strategies for successful Lean-Agile transformation. Get your copy now!

In my book Kanban from the Inside I wrote this:

If our knowledge-based organizations can’t generate some excess creativity over what each individual can generate on his or her own, why do they exist at all?[1]

[1] Why do firms exist? Economists still wrestle with that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge-based_theory_of_the_firm

Collaboration (the title of the chapter from which that comes) describes the relationships and behaviours necessary for this “excess creativity” to materialise. One responsibility of the servant-leader is to nurture the conditions that allow this collaboration to take place; Agile processes meanwhile exist in large part to ensure that opportunities for collaboration are never missed for long. “Right conversion, right time” is the goal; “regular conversations of various specific kinds” is the starting point.

Alignment is about ensuring that those individual efforts will combine in ways that (i) reinforce each other rather than cancel each other out, and (ii) take us toward our shared goals.

Given the range of scales involved I don’t believe that there is one easy answer to alignment, but there are some great models we can learn from:

• As described in Stephen Bungay’s The Art of Action, the concept of commander’s intent, a surprisingly forward-thinking concept developed in the military, initially in 19th century Germany and further developed around the world in the years since. The key insight of this model is that that the “how” of the work can be treated as orthogonal to the “what and why” of the objective, allowing the former to worked out by the those closest in time and space to the action, releasing significant creative potential as a result. Despite its militaristic origins, its lessons for everyday business life are very human, speaking into Servant Leadership concerns such as autonomy, meaningfulness (of the kind all-too-easily destroyed by micro-management) and purpose.
• From the Kanban Method comes the advice to Implement feedback loops, an abstraction of a number of existing Lean and Agile practises and further realised in David’s model of feedback loops in Enterprise Services Planning. At team level and above, and at intervals ranging from daily to multiple weeks, these bring people and information together in a variety of decision-making forums, so that misunderstandings, miscommunications, misfortunes, and other misalignments can be identified and acted upon. In more traditional settings these feedback loops might be described as “control mechanisms”, though the overtones here are unfortunate, and perhaps the intent too! “Keeping things on track at all costs” is not what we’re about here.
• Also from the Kanban Method: Make policies explicit, again good advice abstracted from a wide range of more specific practices (standard work and definitions of done are Lean and Agile examples, respectively). The idea here is that we can improve performance by identifying and keeping open to review and modification the rules, parameters and constraints we will work within, both those that are internally agreed and those that are externally imposed. The benefits go beyond the technical design of processes and their openness to change; they help to reduce the waste of misaligned and unpredictable behaviour, with benefits social as well as economic. A reference to the kind of mutual accountability within teams described in Patrick Lencioni’s superb The five dysfunctions of a team seems very pertinent here too (not to mention his model as a whole).
• Numerous interpersonal models and tools, for example triads (three people sharing a purpose and taking responsibility for the three pairwise relationships involved, perhaps spanning organisational boundaries and looking to create new connections), and Clean Language (in this context as a way to explore other people’s mental models around challenges and objectives, whether personal or corporate).

Culture, alignment, and transformation

Reading the Schein classic Organisational Culture and Leadership, I was struck by the beautifully simple observation that culture is the product of a process, with the strong implication that we shape culture not directly but by beginning to influence that process.

If we’re in the business of transformation – and if we are to be true to Servant Leadershp I think we must be – why not apply the models of alignment to that work? Carefully separating the “how” from the intent. Monitoring, guiding, and sustaining the transformation with the help of feedback loops. Establishing policies (eg of safety) and team accountability around that work. Engaging at a personal level, building networks, etc. Let’s take those as read in what might yet turn out to be Agendashift’s primary principle: “Make the agenda for change explicit“.

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This is the fourth article proper in a series introduced with It’s time to reclaim Servant Leadership. We’re looking at how, in the practical context of Lean-Agile transformation, we take Servant Leadership beyond “serve the team” or “unblock all the things and get out of the way”. Each post corresponds to one of the strategies of our white paper 6+1 Essential strategies for successful Lean-Agile transformation. Get your copy now!

How did your last encounter with an improvement initiative go? If you found the experience underwhelming (or worse), you’re in good company. Quoting from the white paper:

Sadly, the long and noble history of continuous improvement is littered with initiatives that fell by the wayside long before new habits could be formed. The reason cited is often ‘lack of management support’, but this is too glib a description given the size of the problem.

For it to succeed, continuous improvement needs several things:

• The capacity to do improvement work alongside delivery work. The catch-22 here is where there is the direst need of improvement, no-one believes they have the capacity to improve!
• For improvement work to be seen as ‘real work’, prioritised and rewarded in the same way
• The level of management commitment necessary to ensure that changes likely to face significant organisational challenge will get tackled
• A readiness to learn from experiments that don’t go as expected and the stamina to keep on trying
• Feedback loops designed both to keep progress on track and to ensure a pipeline of new ideas, with the required level of organisational visibility

In short, continuous improvement is unlikely to be sustained without careful attention to organisational design, significant management effort, and ongoing leadership. Managers need to make it it a personal priority, providing sponsorship, safety, and commitment. Leaving it to others to get on with in the background dooms it to almost certain failure.

If you’re on the lookout for a big opportunity to test your mettle as a servant-leader, perhaps this is the one. But you don’t need to start from scratch or do it on your own; core to Agendashift are well-tested tools for building rapid agreement on the key issues and outcomes, framing and developing the necessary actions, and ensuring that the follow-through actually happens. We can be with you all the way!

[Get the white paper] [Series start] [Next in series: Applied Servant Leadership: 5. Alignment]

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This is the third article proper in a series introduced with It’s time to reclaim Servant Leadership. We’re looking at how, in the practical context of Lean-Agile transformation, we take Servant Leadership beyond “serve the team” or “unblock all the things and get out of the way”. Each post corresponds to one of the strategies of our white paper 6+1 Essential strategies for successful Lean-Agile transformation. Get your copy now!

Watch an effective servant-leader, and it’s likely you’ll see someone doing a lot of what looks very much like “serving the team”, not to mention “unblocking all the things”, and even “getting out of the way”. Am I suggesting that these are bad things? Of course not, but don’t confuse the activity with its intent!

It is unfortunate that “serving the team” has come in recent years almost to define Servant Leadership, especially in Agile circles where it has come to be associated with the highly team-focussed role of Scrum Master. The problem here is that seeing service to the team as the pinnacle opens us up to the significant risk of slipping back into serving the process, serving the product, or serving the technology, sitting in our personal comfort zone, resting on our skills, hardly leading at all.

It is much healthier to see service to the team not as the pinnacle but as the platform. To Greenleaf (Servant Leadership’s reference and inspiration), service was a prerequisite, the source of leadership legitimacy, the manifestation of purpose, and the driver of transformation. Through service – to the team, by the team, and by teams in combination – we help the organisation continue to become what it needs to become. Now that’s some serious leadership!

[Get the white paper] [Series start] [Next in series: Applied Servant Leadership: 4. Improvement]

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This is the second article proper in a series introduced with It’s time to reclaim Servant Leadership. We’re looking at how, in the practical context of Lean-Agile transformation, we take Servant Leadership beyond “serve the team” or “unblock all the things and get out of the way”.

Strategy 2 in our white paper 6+1 Essential strategies for successful Lean-Agile transformation is called Needs-first, and it is perhaps the most radical of them all.

Not convinced? What if…

1. Staffed accordingly, the exploration of needs becomes an ongoing activity (as opposed to something done “up front”), an integral part of a delivery process that is designed to align itself continually to the needs of all those it serves
2. Requirements (the currency of old-school product development and project delivery) are routinely rejected if a clear connection to need cannot be established; a new and more humble language describing needs, potential solution options, and desired outcomes replaces the old
3. There is clarity on which needs are and aren’t core to mission; this is revisited from time to time, reaffirming purpose

In your role as servant-leader, are you ready to help make this happen?

[Get the white paper] [Series start] [Next in series: Applied Servant Leadership: 3. Team]

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This is the first article proper in a series introduced with It’s time to reclaim Servant Leadership. We’re looking at how, in the practical context of Lean-Agile transformation, we take Servant Leadership beyond “serve the team” or “unblock all the things and get out of the way”.

Skills are the focus of strategy 1 of our white paper 6+1 Essential strategies for successful Lean-Agile transformation and this is an uncontroversial place to start. Few would dispute that developing people is a key responsibility of the servant-leader. To do it justice though, you will need to look beyond your immediate circle of colleagues and forward in time. If you’re thinking only in terms of transferring your own skills, you’re probably not thinking hard enough. Servant Leadership is about helping the organisation become what it needs to become, not about preserving the recipes of the past.

The skills to be competitive

Do you know what a modern, fast, customer-focussed delivery capability looks like? How much of those skills do you have? Let’s break that down a little:

• Upstream of the first commitment point (the point at which you have decided what to build next): skills of portfolio management and product management, several user-centric skills, service design skills, related business skills and so on
• Between there and the second commitment point (the point at which you are ready to decide exactly what to ship and when): all the skills  (technology-related and otherwise) required to build product/features/services rapidly and with high quality built in
• Downstream of there: the skills of deployment, environment management, capacity management, support, and so on, with high levels of automation
• Inside and around all of that: skills of coordination, organisation/process design (reducing the coordination overhead), strategy, performance management, risk management, improvement, change management, recruitment, facilities etc

What will you do about the gaps? In what timescales?

Remaining competitive into the future

Many of the skills of that last bullet point straddle current operations and future strategy. Does your thinking include future leadership? Who will be the servant-leaders after you’re gone? And here’s a thought: do you include your seniors in that?

Resources

• Request your copy of 6+1 Essential strategies for successful Lean-Agile transformation
• Agendashift training:
  • Our 1-day class, suitable for all: Lasting Lean-Agile transformation
  • Our 2-day class: Values-based-leadership (aka Applied Servant Leadership)

Watch this space for news of 2-day and 3-day leadership training classes organised around the six strategies of the white paper – get in touch if interested in developing this to the needs of your organisation.

[Get the white paper] [Read the series] [Next in series: Applied Servant Leadership 2: Needs]

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