Paul Stonehouse - Leadership and Teams

Speaker A: Welcome back to another episode of Agile Way podcast where we explore challenges organizations face on their Agile journey. How to become great SCRUM Master, how to change your leadership style, or how to embrace agility at the organizational level. I'm Suzie Shikova, Agile Coach, certified Scrum trainer and author of the great SCRUM Master book and Agile Leader Book, and I am your host for this podcast. I'm passionate about business agility, organizational culture and agile leadership. And that was the reason why I decided to start this podcast to share with you my experiences and stories from my Agile journey. So, hello everyone, Let me welcome Paul here today. He's one of the speakers of Agile Prague Conference. And Paul, what are you currently passionate about in Agile Space?

Speaker B: Currently I'm really passionate about leadership and integration with the team environment. I work a lot with leaders now who are trying to understand that Agile is here to stay agile ways of working. But what does this mean for me? And so really helping the leaders understand that we need to change the leadership mindset along with the team mindset. So I'm really about this integration phase and what I call the confluence of leadership and teams working together.

Speaker A: Now, uh, tell us more about this, like what's the most important, um, to keep in mind when you want to combine those two.

Speaker B: The most important is the idea that I like to use this quote from, uh, it's a Indian or Afghan, uh, uh, poet named Rumi. And the idea is that I used to be wise, I used to be smart, so I tried to change the world. Now I'm wise, so I change myself. So by starting the change internally, it makes the external change that much easier. And I think I bring this into each of my classes and it's sort of that aha, ah moment for a lot of people that I don't need to change the external environment. But let's start with how I perceive the world. And that's going to change how I react in the world as well.

Speaker A: But changing herself is the most difficult one. At least, uh, that's my personal belief and experience as well. So can you tell us some tips on how could people start changing themselves?

Speaker B: One of the big things is don't do it alone. I've recognized, uh, in my role, um, I've been in a couple roles as a, ah, coach, as a transformation leader, as a facilitator. One of the big things I've seen is that individual change agents, they suffer a lot because they try to do it alone. And it's that idea of we can go further together, even though it's faster to go alone. The business world and the KPIs and the numbers of course drive us to go faster. But sometimes we need to slow down and bring more of a coalition. This change for our individual leaders means that they need to also have a small support network. The thing that I've been trying to pivot on is I try to have leaders go through training together and create a small support network so that they can work with each other with a similar language rather than having individual leaders go off to individual training and coming back and then coming back to uh, an environment which doesn't support this new way of working.

Speaker A: Interesting. But uh, again that's as you say, ah, working with a team is very often slower, not necessarily quicker. So it brings a lot of frustration. Plus you need to be good at uh, some communication skills, facilitation skills maybe to keep that team aligned, etc. So um, what about that part of it, how to make that team aligned?

Speaker B: Uh, that's the most difficult problem. Uh, and if I think if anyone could actually solve this, they would probably make a lot of money. Um, I think the, the whole idea is that you start as well where the team is, not necessarily where you want them to be. Um, one of the things I've started to do with uh, the work that I do is I come in and I don't tell the team that they need to be agile, they don't need to work in a certain way. More often I'll come in and I'll start to talk about, you know, what is the mindset, what are different ways of perceiving things but also validating the where they are now and trying to ask where their problems and pivoting the course or the work that I'm doing to fit their needs that they have now. And so you start to get traction if you start to focus more on this ability to change today rather than this long program of trying to be agile which uh, we never arrive at. Um, maybe just one quick example is I was working with one team and they were looking at how to deliver faster and they wanted to go faster and faster and faster. And the irony was what we actually had to slow down the number of things that they did in parallel to actually make them faster. But they did this because they wanted to be faster. And we actually had them decide collectively together, let's reduce the amount of work in process we have together, let's see what happens. And if it doesn't work after one month we can always go back. So this idea of experimentation and giving the safety net to go back to the old way of working really helps them understand that the change can happen in a, uh, safe way. More importantly, we do it more through an experimentation phase. This team that I was working with, they became so productive, they had a backlog of many projects. They increased their productivity in six months by about 70%. They became so fast, they actually started going to the upstream team and the downstream team to see if they can make them faster. They were a nucleus for this entire value stream to start becoming, uh, more effective.

Speaker A: It reminds me that little joke right when you see that person cutting the tree and tell me, slow down. I will sharpen your tool and say, I don't have a time, I need to cut the tree. Right. So I think it's a, uh, very common in the organization that they are not willing to slow down because we need to go faster. So this is like one of my least favorite things when I hear it in the organization. Oh my God, again. Now I need to slow them down. And this is so painful for some organizations, but I would like to deep dive into that experimental mindset. So, uh, I'm with you. I was winning most of those changes by saying, let's try it and if it's not going to work, we'll try something else or we try to change it. So what's your trick into helping them to start experimenting?

Speaker B: Start, um, with something small. And I'm not a big fan of the, the quick wins or the low hanging fruit. Uh, I'd rather attack a bigger problem, but with a small chunk. What I find is with the low hanging fruit is that once they get all the low hanging fruit, once the things become more difficult, they go back to their old ways of working. Um, just a very simple example. I was working with a team of leaders yesterday and uh, one of the courses I give is in Merle. And Merle isn't the tool that we use in my organization. And so they had gone back and they started making PowerPoints. And so I started to say that this is a good example of us as leaders spending a little bit of time getting frustrated and going back to our old ways of working because it feels more comfortable despite us having to lose time in the course because now you're showing PowerPoints and we've lost the flow with, uh, the Merle board. I think it's these small opportunities where you see stuff and I then spend time with the leader in the class to say, this is how you do things, this is how it works. And they say, oh, Aha. But more importantly they had a group of leaders there as well who all said oh yeah, I had the same problem but I persevered. So these small things and um, despite them having big problems, I think it's sort of the linking of the problem space but also to our habits and how we see the world is where I'm looking. And so that's the big problem, our mental space and how we see the world and trying to link it to small activities like moving away from PowerPoint into Merle collectively.

Speaker A: And um, you're in azure space for a while I guess. So uh, what was your biggest aha moment on your journey?

Speaker B: The biggest aha moment, uh, beyond not doing it by yourself. The biggest aha is teaching um, education doesn't change anybody. Um, I was one of those people who went out and I, I believed if I could get up on my box and teach people about new ways of working that they would just follow because it just made sense. Because to me it made sense. You know, I, I, I followed the agile ways of working and I tried to do it and I, I just believe that if I told everyone else that they would do it. And so it's this idea of not just having education but the experience and the exposure and the exposure in that safe environment to try stuff is one of the biggest AHAs is that just telling us how to do it doesn't work. But we also have the uh, supporting environment. And so having systems thinking starting where they are, I think that was the big aha is the education space. And as we see in the market now with the certification space and the two day course space, um, telling people what to do isn't working anymore.

Speaker A: Now what would you suggest? People. Because for those classes people are coming maybe when they want to um, extend their understanding etc and then they bring it back and try it back at their organization. They often don't have that power to invite uh, everybody or people around them inside. So what would you suggest instead for them?

Speaker B: Look at where can you leverage or where can you scale the change? I think the biggest thing is sometimes people show up and they try to change the world or they expect the world to change around them. But how do you build a small coalition? Maybe it's that burning platform, maybe it's just causing uh, a group of people to get together. But how do you slowly build momentum and then if you can do this as well in an organization where the, the hierarchy comes in and supports you? That's what I mean, that that's my, my passion Right now is finding this confluence of uh, upper managers and teams where they come together. Maybe just a very quick example as well, that one of the things I've done in the last two or three years is that um, I'll give more of a illustrative example. I, I showed up to you to give a, a training for a team and the manager has said my team needs to be more agile, they need to do this, this way of working. Of course we've heard about sprints and I want my team to do sprints. So the whole team shows up at the meeting space and the manager gives the pitch and says this is Paul, he's an expert, gives the whole thing, says uh, okay, so go ahead and uh, I'll see you afterwards. And he left. I immediately followed him out of the room and said I'm going to actually stop this now unless you stay because this is a uh, team event and unless the leader is engaged with this, the change is going to fail. So would you like to stay and, and do this or would you like me to stop? Because I, I can come back another time. And so that particular leader was a bit shocked that they, they had to be engaged, that they have skin in the game. And so this is one of the things that I do is whenever I try to go out and work in a new way I try to make sure that the, the manager is there and they have skin in the game. I try to meet them before, I meet them afterwards and I think this is leading to more change rather than just having the, the team do it by themselves.

Speaker A: Uh, that's a very good idea. Yeah, uh, it's always good to have them in because if the, if you're only saying the other people should change but not me, that it's not really authentic and uh, working in general I would say. So um, if you look into like uh, you know, we look bit on your history then current stage, what you're doing. So what do you think uh, the future is bringing us? What's the future of Agile?

Speaker B: The future of Agile? Well the topic of the day is all about AI and how does that augment us? Uh, this morning I was in a presentation with a group of project managers and they were talking about AI and one of the things I'm seeing is we're almost moving away from, you know in my classes I talk about management 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, we're living in management 4.0 and I love this discovery phase where people are looking at AI, they're Seeing how glossy it is, but at the same time they're very quickly finding out the limitations of AI and so I think this is a wonderful time to start bringing up those conversations of how we can augment people, how we can augment leadership, and how we can bring in more AI, but also still maintaining the humanity.

Speaker A: And tell us more about this. You know, it's new. Everybody is, uh, exploring this topic. So what does it mean, AI for leadership? How it's going to help the organizations, how it's going to help the culture in it, or not? Maybe.

Speaker B: Um, so there was a, there's a very good video done by Henrik Nyberg where he started to talk about his, his AI and uh, I think he called it Einstein.

Speaker A: It's a good video, like every video from Henrik Nieberg, right. I really like.

Speaker B: And he's exploring that space. The thing that I missed in that video was that how is Einstein able to embrace the humanity, the, the emotions, how the person's feeling, how they perceive the world. Also sometimes there's the context specific things, you know, like when I work with different teams, even though I work in one organization, the culture of management in different groups can be very, very different. Some are overly collaborative, you know, very family oriented. No one wants to hurt the other's emotions. Others are very command and control driven. Others are super competitive. I think that this is where the AI and the humans can come together. The AI is going to help analyze and bring more data, bring more insights, but we still need to have humans in the loop because at the end of the day the humans are still going to be delivering the value. It's this idea that we need to make sure that the AI is going to commoditize knowledge, which means that we're people that are working day to day. They have to have a better understanding of the work. And if they have a better understanding, we might actually start to value more and more wisdom in the work that we do as well.

Speaker A: Very nice. I like the wisdom ending. Now, uh, we see you in Prague, uh, at Agile Prague conference this September 1516. And um, I just have my last question. What is the one reason why people should attend your talk at Agile Prague?

Speaker B: I'm going to bring a topic about how I've been bringing agility into a, uh, factory setting. So outside of the IT space. And it's really what we've talked about here, it's how do I start to train and integrate the vertical slice with a more human based approach. So how I brought in leadership and integrated teams to create that confluence, how we've started using the ideas coming from a lean manufacturing setting, but also the agile mindset to start limiting the number of things that we do and some of the key lessons learned from working with teams outside of the IT space, but that are still applicable across the dimension of working in a diverse human environment that has many, many complex problems.

Speaker A: Well, thank you very much and I'm looking forward to see you in September.

Speaker B: Yes, I'm really looking forward to coming back to Prague. I'm very excited. So thank you very much.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Way podcast, host by Zuzi Shakova, author of the Great Scrum Master Book and Agile Reader Book. If you love listening to this podcast, please leave us a review. If there is any topic you are particularly interested in and would like to hear another episode on it, let me know. For more information about me and my Agile classes, Visit our website Sokhova.com Sochoba uh, thank you for listening.