All right, hi everyone. Thanks, Denise. It’s been a great few days, thanks to everyone for being here. What I want to do is go back for a second to Ahmad’s opening talk for North America because he described four key agile domains that act as some of the core muscles of agile we need to develop to create business success. One of these domains is leadership. As Denise said, we’ve heard the topic of leadership come up every day, sometimes multiple times a day, especially as it relates to empowering people. If we truly believe that people are the most agile part of any organization, then investing in people and unlocking people’s potential becomes one of the first and foremost priorities of leadership. While leaders need to do this for their people, my question is: who’s doing this for the leaders?
So today, we’re going to talk and put a magnifying glass on the agile domain of leadership. I imply this in the title of this session, “How to Fortify an Agile Transformation and Get to Value Faster,” but to ensure we’re starting on the same page, I want you to know the title could have been, “What Do Coins, Stranger Things, and Bowling Have in Common?” My objective for our time together is for you to see how these three seemingly random topics relate to each other, to leadership, and to agile. I also want to leave you with three coaching hacks at the end, so that even in the absence of an official coach, you can try these on yourself or your team if any of them resonate.
The Coin
Let me tell you a story. There was once a Roman general who had to lead his troops into battle against an army ten times their size. His men were filled with doubt, and he knew he needed to boost their spirits to prepare them for battle. So he had the troops stop at a temple along their way so they could pray for victory. At the temple, just before they began to pray, the general held up a coin and said the following: “I am going to ask the gods to help us crush our enemy. If this coin lands on heads, we will win. If it lands on tails, we’ll go down in defeat.” Then he asked everyone to pray with all their heart that destiny would be on their side. After the prayer, the general tossed the coin, and to everyone’s relief, it landed on heads. Everyone was ecstatic, and they went into battle feeling confident. They attacked the enemy with vigor, and just as they prayed for, the troop was victorious despite the fact that they were outnumbered.
The soldiers shared with the general how relieved they were that the gods were on their side, because no one else could have changed their fate, who else but the gods? Then with a wink, the general said, “Really?” He showed them that the coin he had tossed actually had heads on both sides. Great leaders not only lead by example, they believe in their mission. But it doesn’t end there. One of the crowning achievements of leadership is to get others to believe in the mission as well. They need to give their teams hope. We often call this vision, and it’s part of the job. When people believe in something, we all know they can accomplish amazing things. That’s how we get to that discretionary effort we don’t often get to.
What might be getting in the way of leaders having this “power of the coin” kind of influence and impact on their teams to unlock people, which is so critical to adapting agile ways of working, as we’ve been discussing across these days? This question isn’t just rhetorical—what’s getting in the way?
Current Data on Leadership
There’s a lot of current data disclosing the discontent companies feel about how leaders are leading their companies into the future. I want to share a few sobering stats. They were taken from a Brandon Hall study a few years ago, and they hint at the fact that companies may not always be focused on the optimal areas that empower leaders so that leaders can empower their teams. While these aren’t necessarily specific to agile leaders, they still very much relate.
Let’s look at just a few right now. Fifty-eight percent of organizations in the study said their top priority is closing leadership skill gaps, but 43% said their top priority is closing gaps at all leader levels. Yet only 5% had fully implemented development at all levels, and of that, 18% of organizations said their leaders were very effective at meeting business goals—18% only—and only 19% said they were very effective at developing leaders. More money is being spent on leadership development than likely any other area of corporate training, yet 71% of organizations don’t feel their leaders are able to lead their organization into the future. The question is, on what is leadership development money being spent? Some call it the “one and done” events: off-sites, webinars, conferences, executive retreats. I like to call these “so what?” events, because without proper follow-up, leaders go back to their desks and keep doing what they always did to get what they always got. Why? Usually, what they always got was success, but then variables start changing, and what you did, what you always got, may not work anymore.
Then we layer on things like pioneering business agility, setting a clear market vision, aligning to current and future customers, developing emergent strategies, all things in that leadership domain. What are we doing to help leaders build their agile muscles and develop the behaviors required of them to do all this, given that leadership is such an essential part of this agile domain? Can we afford not to be providing this? How do we get leaders, then, from “so what?” to “now what?”
The good news is that “now what?” doesn’t have to be rocket science. It’s actually quite simple because what’s needed lives in conversation. If developing agile leadership muscle lives in conversation, what might be needed is a conversation-based structure to achieve it. Here’s the punchline and what I’m so passionate about talking about: embedding leadership coaches within a team can really be an impactful way to approach this.
Example: Leadership Coaching in Action
There’s a client I was working with a few years ago—let’s call her Linda—and she provides a great example. Linda was managing a team within a larger organization that had implemented agile ways of working, and her team was reorganizing into daily and weekly agile ceremonies. When we first met, she told me she’d always had this innate skill with solving complex problems—she solved puzzles, she could see what needed to happen faster than anyone—and she really relied on this skill to direct her team. Now with the changes underway, though, she started sensing there was resistance, hearing chatter like people were frustrated with the quantity of meetings they were being asked to attend. After a few coaching conversations, she decided to request feedback from her directs. She discovered that the majority felt she was unapproachable, not available to coach them, and they felt unheard. She had been solving problems for them, but her leadership style, unbeknownst to her, was showing up as aloof, superior, overly rational, and emotionally distant. Until then, no one had given her this feedback; they were just thinking it. Throwing in a new way of working, there wasn’t a clearing for it or an understanding of why they were doing it.
Linda took the feedback and created new distinctions and follow-up actions that made a really big impact with her team. She was transparent about her learnings, and she made new commitments to each one of them about how she was going to support them going forward. Just that little action, it was literally like a black cloud lifted. Her team was energized with a fresh look at the agile work they were doing. We all know what leaders say and do has this gravitational pull. They can take a great team down, or they can pull a bad team up. One of the biggest “ahas” coaching gave Linda is that despite her ability to solve problems, to have that flipping-a-coin-with-heads-on-both-sides effect on her team, she needed to bring her attention back from the problem to the person managing the problem—herself—and start solving from there.
Change Management and Coaching
Admittedly, not all change initiatives—which often imply an end date—represent agile work, which is adaptive and ongoing. But in part, we’re talking about how you lead through change. There was a study by the Human Capital Institute and the International Coach Federation done a few years ago. They researched the role of coaching in change management initiatives. There was a total of 432 respondents. One question they asked was to think about the most and least successful examples of change management in their organization, and then choose words that characterize those initiatives. The most frequently cited words associated with successful change management were involvement, communication, planning, leadership—no surprise. The most frequently cited words associated with unsuccessful change management: communication, planning, leadership. Three out of the four. Communication, planning, leadership are the keys that determine either success or failure. These are some of the words the Business Agility Institute uses in the Business Agility Domains model about leadership. Words like communication, transparency, leadership, along with empower, delegate, coach, inspire.
Now it’s these words on a common image, the proverbial iceberg. The positive: creating vision, communicating the why, empowering teams, inspiring accountability. Then there’s the negative: holding information, leading with command and control, micromanaging, judging, and so on. Both can be above the line, both can be below the line—things we see, things we don’t. Then there’s that tip of the iceberg we see, which pales in comparison in size to the rest. I’m a huge Stranger Things fan. I like to think of the part under the water as the “Upside Down” and the part we can see as the “Right Side Up.” For those who haven’t seen it, the Upside Down is this alternative dimension existing in parallel to the human world. It’s home to nightmarish creatures. There’s a natural focus on agile leadership above the surface. It focuses on strategy, process agility, enabling a leader and their team to set, communicate, operationalize, and adapt their vision and outcomes to the changing needs of their customers. That’s the part we can see. But the part we can’t see is mindset and perspective, which I call the leader OS. Mindset is that ecology of our emotional state, perspective is the stories we’ve got running. Together they make this background operating system, and it’s going to determine if we’re running efficiently or slowing things down.
Let me bring this to life with another quick story. There was a traveler, and he spotted a man sitting on a bench, an elderly person. He came up and said, “Hey, I’m new to this city. I really want to know what your city is like.” The elderly person said back to him, “Well, give me a sense of what the people were like where you’re coming from. I’m curious.” The traveler said, “I hated it. It was awful. They were judging, constantly trying to cheat me, I always felt like I had to watch my back.” The elderly man said, “Unfortunately, the people in this city are kind of like the people in that last city you visited.” Then later, another traveler came, asked the same question: “What are the people like in this city?” The elder said, “Well, tell me what they were like in the last city you visited.” The traveler said, “Actually, it was great. They were positive, welcoming, giving, everyone liked communicating with each other, super friendly.” The elder said, “You’re in luck. The people in this city are pretty much the same.” The key is that we take our mindset and perspective everywhere we go. It’s really shocking to see how many people and leaders go from company to company, team to team, hoping for different patterns, but we see a repetitious cycle: the grass is always greener on the other side. Trouble is, we don’t know we’re taking our grass with us. It’s in the Upside Down.
There was a study done by 41,000 companies that said 48% of leaders who underwent coaching increased their work quality, leading to higher engagement and productivity within their teams. Another client summed up a great back-of-the-envelope business case for coaching. He shared that he had to take a hiatus from leadership coaching due to cost cutting. Let’s call this guy Tom. Tom was feeling increasingly pessimistic about choices being made by the c-suite, fueling the fire because his boss was getting laid off, and he adored her. He had about 100 people beneath him, and despite the need to communicate with them, he was wondering why he was even there. He didn’t know why he should stay. Then he thought, “How could I have reframed things if I'd been working with a coach the last six weeks? That’s not even a full day’s work.” Six hours could have impacted those 100 people under him. Let's say each one makes $100k for simplicity. Over six weeks, that’s a $1.5 million in lost productivity that his lack of leadership contributed to. Multiply that across other leaders. Embedded leadership coaches can help leaders surface what’s in that Upside Down, and once revealed, they’re better positioned to provide vision and know when to flip a coin with heads on both sides to empower their teams.
Bowling Bumpers
Now let’s talk about the last piece: bowling. More specifically, bowling bumpers. These are guardrails or structures that children often use when learning how to play the game, because it bops the ball back into the optimal lane to hit the pins. The bowling bumpers help develop muscle and muscle memory that’s a really efficient way to learn. It harnesses what we find in neuroscience: supportive (think dopamine) and repetitive (creating new neural pathways). It’s not just children who lack that muscle memory; we all do. One of my favorite sayings that I hear Tony Robbins say, “You get rewarded in public for what you practice in private.” We’re so good at doing this in helping teams shift as they learn new ways of working. We observe teams and new ceremonies, constantly bopping them back to their lane. But we often forget to do this with leaders. This embedded leadership coaching model can be really impactful, why? Because it lives in conversation.
I’m mindful of our time, so I want to wrap up with my promise: to share a few coaching hacks. How do we bring this all together—coins, Stranger Things, Upside Down, Right Side Up, and bowling? Here are three key takeaways related to agile leadership muscle building, which can apply whether you’re a leader working with a coach or not:
- Have a Coin-Like Wisdom (Daily Reflection): A simple hack is a daily practice of reflection, sometimes called game filming. We see this in sports teams. They go back to the locker room, look at their game, evaluate their actions, see what they may have overlooked. Brendan Bouchard suggests some great questions leaders should ask at the end of each day (really, we all should):
- A situation or task I handled well today was ______.
- Something I realized or learned today was ______.
- I could have made today even better if I ______.
- Something that could have helped me help or inspire others was ______.
- Leader OS (Surfacing the Upside Down): We talked about strategy, but also mindset and perspective. One practice I love is from the Table Group. It's a quick hack to surface the upside down, done with the leader and their team, ideally eight people or less, and it takes about an hour. You sit together and ask:
- What do you think you’re world-class at? What is your genius?
- Where do you need to improve?
- Bowling Bumper (Stakeholder-Centered Coaching): This method, from Marshall Goldsmith, suggests simply asking, “Are you doing what you need to do to be your best self?” and you share your strengths and areas of opportunity with three to five people who have your best interests in mind. Do this on a regular cadence every two or three weeks, and those people hold you accountable for what you're working on. You get feedback to see if you’re showing up in the way needed.
I know I’m flying through all this. There’s so much more I want to share, but time is limited. If you’d like to connect with me, please do so on LinkedIn. I’m happy to share more. You can tell I’m very passionate about this topic, but now I’d like to open it up and create a dialogue. I’ll answer questions, but I really want this to be a conversation. Please feel free to share any insight if you want to jump in.