Before checking if your team is agile…

_{(Thanks to Don for giving me some fodder for this week’s article)}

I’ve written previously about my three tests for assessing agility: are we delivering value to our stakeholders early and regularly, are we progressively improving quality, and are we helping our customers, team members and key stakeholders to be awesome.

When it comes to values and principles, whichever flavor of agile you subscribe to, they all promote the importance of respect, focus, communication, learning and transparency.

But can a team embrace such values and start to deliver the benefits of increased agility if individuals within that team don’t operate in an agile manner themselves?

Let’s start with a simple example.

While working remotely, one team member sends another an e-mail requesting an update on an activity they are depending upon which had been discussed during the daily coordination meeting. The message is received by the owner of that activity, but they don’t acknowledge the message or respond in a timely manner. The first team member waits a while and then tries to contact the other team member via a persistent chat tool only to find the other team member has turned their notifications off. They are also unable to connect via a phone call. Finally close to the end of the day, the owner provides the needed update to the first team member.

On the surface, this seems to be a fairly minor breakdown in communications which often happens when team members are dispersed and possibly working on more than they can effectively juggle at one time. It might have been prevented by a combination of working agreements for intra-team communications and by the first team member using a more effective means of communication for their initial request.

But if we bring it back to the original benefits and attributes of agility, could we claim that the individuals involved are operating in an agile manner? The first team member wouldn’t perceive that the communication process was valuable and their frustration with the situation demonstrates that they weren’t made to feel awesome. Communication was clearly ineffective and one could also argue that the second team member didn’t show sufficient respect for the first team member’s time.

Scrum highlights inspection and adaptation as two of its three pillars but these are valued in other agile methods as well. But if individual team members aren’t regularly pausing to introspect on what they do and how they are doing it, how effective will their inspection and adaption be at a team level? They might be good at finding fault with others, but can they do so with themselves?

An agile team is a learning team. They build time into their work routines to learn new skills and approaches. But do individual team members invest in their own learning? Do they ensure that a little bit of each day and each week is spent learning something new?

So before you ask “How could we be more agile?“, maybe a better question to ask is “How could I be more agile?“

(If you liked this article, why not pick up my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)

Psychological safety provides the foundation for a team culture of kindness

A recent HBR article showed how kindness could serve as a lever to generate productivity improvements. The authors explain that while receiving kindness can enable us do better work, the act of giving compliments is equally powerful at making us feel better. Some suggestions were provided in the article on how leaders can create a kinder work place but will a few tactics be enough to change culture?

Think about a team with a prevailing toxic culture where team members are actively engaged in one-upmanship with one other. Showing kindness to a fellow team member might be seen as a sign of weakness, or even worse, interpreted as a manipulative ploy to gain an advantage.

Isn’t our reluctance to be kind to someone else based on how this kindness might be perceived just another form of fear in the work place? If so, then once again, psychological safety serves as the fan to blow away the fog of fear.

Along with encouraging team members to not be afraid to speak up when they see something wrong, to try something new without fear of social repercussion or to be vulnerable without embarrassment we should also make it safe for team members to be genuinely kind to one another without fear of ridicule or suspicion.

Kindness kicks in at each of the first three stages of Dr. Timothy R. Clark’s 4 Stages of Psychological Safety model.

Inclusion Safety is giving someone else the respect they deserve as a fellow human being and isn’t kindness one of the basic ingredients to showing respect for one another? Learner Safety is granting someone the permission to engage in the learning process and wouldn’t we show kindness by encouraging them as they are learning and by giving them a helping hand when they need it? Contributor Safety grants them the permission to create value within our team and recognizing this value they have created is a form of kindness.

So what can we do to create a kinder team culture?

Many of the same practices which are used for building psychological safety are applicable.

• Have a conversation with the team about kindness and encourage them to add something related to it in their working agreements such as “We will show kindness to one another without fear”.
• Model kindness yourself. As the authors state in their article “By giving compliments and praising their employees, leaders are likely to motivate team members to copy their behavior and create norms of kindness in teams.“
• Incorporate kindness into your team’s ceremonies. For example, to start a retrospective with the right mindset, ask team members to acknowledge the kindness of a fellow team member over the past sprint.
• Encourage both tangible and intangible acts of kindness. Spot awards which team members can give each other are great, but so is saying “Thank you, I appreciate what you are doing!” or “Can I give you hand with that?“.
• While not the ideal role model for anyone, you could choose to emulate Hannibal Lecter who finds discourtesy “unspeakably ugly” and refuse to tolerate unkind behaviors from the stakeholders you or your team interact with.

Google used to have “Don’t be evil” as their motto. Zappos used the motto “Share Happiness”. Why not adopt “Be kind” for your team?

(If you liked this article, why not pick up my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)

Could nudges help to increase psychological safety?

In one of my earlier articles, I had proposed the use of behavioral nudges to help improve project governance. After reading an HBR article this week in which the authors provided a number of suggestions on how to sustain newly adopted behaviors in the context of the imminent return to in-person office work, I thought that a nudge-based approach might also help with increasing psychological safety.

On the surface, this might seem like a bad idea. After all, if your prevailing culture is toxic, drastic actions might need to be taken to see meaningful improvements. There could be a few “bad apples” at all levels of the organization structure who won’t change and may need to be shown the door. There would also be some benefit in providing education to all staff on the importance of psychological safety and what they can personally do to build it.

But once the dust has settled on these overt tactics, different approaches are needed to sustain the desired types of behavior.

At the risk of necro-quoting, following Gretzky’s “I skate to where the puck is going” approach will work well when hiring if we bring on new staff who are committed to creating safe environments, but what about our existing staff?

Hallway posters are not the solution. “Loose lips sink ships” might have worked during past war times, but we are playing the long game when we want to build psychological safety. And with the strong likelihood that flex-place arrangements will persist well beyond the end of the pandemic, such visual cues won’t translate well to the virtual world.

Rewarding or recognizing behaviors which promote safety helps, but if not designed properly, such carrots could generate unwanted consequences and won’t generally contribute to long-term sustainability

But if we think of Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 model from Thinking, Fast and Slow, a well-designed nudge could shift the cognitive System 2 process required to behave in a different, safer manner to the lower effort, default-driven lazy System 1.

One example of such a nudge might be an add-in for e-mail, persistent chat and instant messaging tools which would analyze content as you type it and offer suggestions on different wording. Such an assistant should be more like the intelligent suggestion capabilities offered in e-mail platforms such as Gmail rather than the reviled Microsoft Clippy assistant which plagued MS Office 2000 users.

Another nudge could be an assistant which would analyze received text content to proactively alert you that it might contain bad news so that you can be better prepared to respond to it.

And yet another would be to use virtual backgrounds in video conferences with key messages highlighted so that while we are speaking with someone, the importance of safety remains front and center.

If developing sustainable psychological safety is a journey, it might keep rolling with a few nudges.

(If you liked this article, why not pick up my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)