HR Must Lead the Charge to Transformation

With our guests Pia-Maria Thorén and Shannon Ewan we dive into how HR – with strong support from leadership – need to be at the head of the change to business agility.

Thorén is a thought leader in Agile HR and the author of “Agile People – A Radical Approach for HR and Managers (That Leads to Motivated Employees)”. Ewan is an experienced leader, Agile coach, and currently serves as the Managing Director for the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile).

Says Thorén, “HR has a very crucial role when it comes to changing organizations: they work with the deep structures… like performance management, change management, organizational development. They choose the leadership programs that leaders go to… They have so much influence over the whole organization so that change is not possible if HR is not on board.”

The duo offer tips and insights into how people in HR and all across an organization can unlearn and retrain themselves about how people should be treated and should operate in a business agility context.

 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at the 2019 Business Agility Conference in New York City. Learn more:

• Agile People – A Radical Approach for HR and Managers (That Leads to Motivated Employees) by Pia-Maria Thorén
• Agile HR Manifesto
• ICAgile Business Agility Learning Roadmap

Read the full transcript

LESLIE MORSE: Welcome to another edition of Agile Amped. I’m your host, Leslie Morse, and we’re podcasting from the Business Agility Conference in New York City. I’ve got two guests with me today, Shannon Ewan. She’s an experienced leader, Agile coach, facilitator and trainer. She currently serves as the Managing Director for the International Consortium for Agile, also known as IC Agile. Shannon’s a leader and is passionate about engaging people and empowering them to do their best work. Recently, Shannon’s been working with IC Agile’s thought leader community to bring Agile principles to life in the HR and talent space. With Shannon today, we have Pia-Maria Thorén. She has 25 years of consultant experience with large Swedish and international companies, specifically focusing within HR and leadership. She is the founder of Green Bullet and Agile People and is the author of the book, Agile People: A Radical Approach for HR and Managers, with the tagline, That Leads to Motivated Employees. Pia-Maria and Shannon, thank you so much for joining me today.

SHANNON EWAN: Thanks for having us, Leslie.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah, thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.

LESLIE MORSE: Good, good. This is a important topic, right? If we start thinking about the advancement of business agility and Agile transformations, that are going further and further into aspects of the organization. I think we’ve finally sort of left behind the … this is just sort of the business people and the software groups. We really are to the point where it’s very normal to be having conversations about how Agile penetrates into the other parts of our organizations.

SHANNON EWAN: Absolutely.

LESLIE MORSE: What brought the two of you together to collaborate on this topic? We’ll kind of start there and then learn a little bit more about the two of you.

SHANNON EWAN: Yeah, it’s actually a pretty fun story. I was in Minsk in Belarus for the first time, back in 2014, at an Agile conference. I met Pia-Maria and Jurgen Appelo at breakfast and we were talking about IC Agile and what we did. Pia-Maria told me about her work in Agile HR and how she was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if IC Agile did some work and some thought leadership around that. My interest was immediately piqued. Because to the point that you just made Leslie, I had noticed in my work that we were bumping up against impediments that were more organizational and barriers that we wanted to lower, in terms of being able to incentivize team collaboration, etc. We stayed in touch over the years. When IC Agile launched its business agility initiatives back in 2015-2016, we started talking again. Eventually put a committee together to actually create some learning outcomes around this.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah, I think it was in 2017, that we did that, the learning objectives for the Agile talent track. It was the same autumn that I released my book.

SHANNON EWAN: That’s right. It worked out really. Then I was at, in Sweden for the Agile People Conference, right after the book release. Yeah, it all came together really nicely.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah. Then I did the first training in India, Agile India in March, 2018. Then New York last year, here at the business agility conference as a pre conference workshop.

LESLIE MORSE: That’s cool. When you think about this, and we’ll get into all of the beautiful things around kind of like Agile Talent and Agile HR, in just a second. But who, like as you’re starting to see this become more and more popular within the industry, who are the primary attendees coming to classes like this?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Actually I have a nice mix of HR people and Agile coaches and consultants.

LESLIE MORSE: Okay.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Is really beneficial because they share so much knowledge between each other in the class. I make sure that they sit in groups, mixed groups, diverse groups, where they can learn from each other. So, the Agile coaches come to learn about HR and how does that play out in HR? HR comes, come to learn about Agile, because they have very little knowledge about basic Agile tools, methods, principles, and so on. It becomes a very nice learning environment.

SHANNON EWAN:  That shared understanding that they’re getting, I think is probably the most important part.

LESLIE MORSE: Anything else about the two of you that might be important for our listeners to kind of understand from a context perspective before we start digging into this?

SHANNON EWAN: Well, I think that we definitely share a passion for education and learning and organizational agility. I think that that first conference, we were both speaking on the main stage and just bringing some new concepts that really were, because we were speaking to more of an IT based audience and really kind of opening eyes around, no, this is actually a much more holistic thing that we’ve got going on here.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah. I think the passion for business agility, we have that in common, right? I’ve never been deep into IT Agile, so to speak, but always saw that this is something that we can apply to every aspect of the business and every aspect of life really. You know, I even plan my wedding with a kanban board!

LESLIE MORSE: I know lots of people that use it for moves. A group that had different colored sticky notes for the family kanban board, like what are the chores that need to recur weekly versus monthly versus all of that and have a morning stand up over breakfast and all of that. It absolutely is penetrating our lives. That’s kind of the perfect sort of angle in that our organizations today wouldn’t exist without the people. If we don’t take care of the people well, then we’re never going to achieve these aspirations that business agility talks about. I think when I was doing coaching work all of the time, one of the early conversations I’d have with leaders is we don’t need to do it yet, but you’re going to need to start talking about HR shifts at some point soon.

Because the moment we start measuring people’s performance and incenting people for career growth, that have things you’re asking for that are out of alignment from Agile values and principles, right, people aren’t gonna know how to show up and they’re going to be stuck in this dichotomy. Because you get performance out of people based on how you measure them.

SHANNON EWAN:  People will respond to incentives. Right?

LESLIE MORSE: Right, exactly. In that instance we’re often victims of the system. To me, I think that is absolutely important to start with, so let’s just start with like, when we say Agile talent, what does that definition mean to the two of you and how do you explain it to others?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: I mean, ideally it’s all about people. It’s really the first value in the Agile Manifesto, is individuals and interactions over processes and tools, which was also our theme for the Agile People Sweden Conference, that we hold in Stockholm each year. I see that as the most important aspect of Agile is about the people. It’s about making them perform and be happy in a common direction, continuously improving, using certain Agile tools and methods and models. But it’s all about the people. That’s really the core of Agile, in my opinion.

LESLIE MORSE: Shannon, what do you want to add?

SHANNON EWAN: Yeah. I would say at IC Agile we talk a lot about achieving sustainable agility through people, not processes, right, and creating learning organizations. In order to do that, you’ve got to have the right infrastructures, incentives, enablers within your organization to really do that. We bandied about a couple of options for the name, because we did want to get away from the term human resources as well because there’s a … Ironically the term human is in there, but it’s kind of dehumanizing to say that, right?

LESLIE MORSE: Oh, it’s resources. Yeah.

SHANNON EWAN: So, we talked about talent and Pia-Maria has used the term Agile people.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

SHANNON EWAN: We really want to bring that forward.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah, Fabiola talks about people operations versus HR and stuff like that.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Many companies nowadays, they say people in culture departments instead of HR departments. They talk more about people experience or employee, coworker experience departments.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Name is important. I think name is …

LESLIE MORSE: Language is so important.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: It is.

LESLIE MORSE: Even thinking about having a conversation here between a group of really strong women, it’s inevitable in this conversation, we’d be like, well guys, what do you think? Just because that’s part of our language, but this is not a table of guys, but the language really does matter. I think … Is that one of the why’s behind going down this Agile talent path, helping people have better language for using stuff? What are some of the other drivers for focusing on this now?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: I think that HR has a very crucial role when it comes to changing organizations. They work with most of the deep structures in organizations like performance management, change management, organizational development. They choose and pick the leadership programs that leaders go to in organizations. They do talent acquisition, workforce planning. They are responsible for culture. They are responsible for the workplace, the infrastructure, I mean the physical workplace as well. They have so much influence over the whole organization. Change becomes impossible, if HR is not onboard.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah, no.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: It’s not even possible to move, if they don’t change the model’s deep structures in the organization, that are limiting people to perform and be happy.

LESLIE MORSE: I’ve never really thought about it. They really do create the container within which an organization can flourish or not.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yes, definitely.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: That’s why HR needs to go first. They have to lead the transformation, I usually say. They’ve been sitting in the back seat for a very long time, but they need to go first because they are the people people. Agile is all about people as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches should ideally report to HR.

It doesn’t make sense when the whole organization becomes Agile. Doesn’t make sense for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches to report to the CIO or CTO, because that’s the technical department, right? Yeah. It’s the people department. It’s the people that we need to change, to change the culture. It’s the behaviors. It’s what they do everyday day. It’s the culture.

LESLIE MORSE: So Shannon, when you think about kind of the larger constituency of IC Agile and the organizations that come to you guys looking for guidance and mentorship, what are some of the business drivers that they’re really looking for around this?

SHANNON EWAN: Yeah, so as we’re working with more and more large corporations and global corporations, I’ve been really impressed that they are identifying this as … Actually our coaches need to exist or we at least need to have that coaching capability within our HR or people departments, because those are the folks who really are changing leadership.

We’re looking at, how do we bring in the right people, how do we recruit for Agile behaviors, et cetera, et cetera. I think we’ve seen enough, there’s been enough traction in the Agile world, in general, where these barriers are becoming obvious. If you don’t start there, at least have a full holistic transformation strategy around how do you bring people in? How do you help them learn and develop? How do you judge their performance as a team, et cetera.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah.

LESLIE MORSE: Who are some of the thought leaders that are really collaborating to outline our industry standards for when we say things like people operations and Agile talent and all of this? What do we really mean?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Who are the thought leaders?

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah, that you guys have been collaborating with.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Fabiola [Eyholzer], here in New York. I think Rina Halstrom is also a thought leader. I think Natal Dank in the UK. Oh, there were several people that I would like to mention. I have some in Stockholm. Matti Klasson at King. People from Spotify. Who else?

SHANNON EWAN: Yeah, we actually, I’ll also, Sally Elatta of Agile Transformation has been really heavily involved in this movement. We worked with Nadia Rivero, who’s with Amex and then also, Stephanie Bisouth from Australia, Rene Trouten, also from that region. There’s a number of folks really stepping in to this movement.

LESLIE MORSE: Actually, I love that it’s such a globally diverse group, as well. You think about just employment law variations across the globe, that are gonna impact approaches and transformation strategies for things like this. So having that well rounded perspective, as we start thinking about how to do this well, I think is really critical. Is that, are you seeing global variations on some of these strategies? Or are, where we are in the process, all the themes are pretty common.

SHANNON EWAN:  Well I think as you were saying that, I’m thinking there is the element of the devil being in the details. I think that actual implementation, there definitely are variations around some of the laws and government structures, etc. My feeling, and I could be off on this, but is that the core principles are the same.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah, values and principles stay the same.

SHANNON EWAN: Yeah.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: I agree totally with you. I’ve been traveling extensively, during the last year. I’ve been to Asia. I’ve been to New Zealand. I’ve been to South Africa. I’ve been to India, New York, Pittsburgh, all of Europe around. What I see is that the content works, that the training content works in every country. The challenges are the same in every country. It’s just very different maturity. For some countries, this is totally new. For some countries, they have come a bit further. As you say, it’s in the details. How do we implement this? How far is it to go for different cultures to be able to accomplish this, to start living the culture and the values and the principles?

LESLIE MORSE: Thinking about that we would want it, not do a big bang approach to HR Agile transformation. We’d want to do it in an incremental and iterative way. What are some of the leading edge places for people to focus on, as they start getting into doing this? We know general Agile transformation is like great in the developer business sectors. It’s a big undertaking, but it’s like we know the patterns of these are the easy ways to get started, to spin up teams and to do all of that.

How do you know where to get started, in the HR piece of it?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: I think awareness, of course, the first step and to unlearn. Unlearn all the traditional ways of doing HR. Which is more limiting and restricting the organization today. Start to remove some of those old traditional structures and then add some new structures, more Agile ways of working, together with heavily trying to change the culture by increasing Agile behaviors.

You don’t do that by changing peoples personalities because that’s impossible. I work with a reasonable intubation profile and I’ve found that changing people’s personalities is not a way, but instead you change the environment. The environment consists of the structures, the office environment, the processes, IT tools, all the methods and models. That’s where you can focus to change people’s behavior. So, there is one formula. Behavior is a function of personality and the environment. We don’t work to try to change the people, but we try to change the environment.

Don’t manage people, manage the system, as we always do in Agile change. But, a lot of about unlearning, stopping to do things that are hindering people to be able to perform and be happy. If you have performing, happy people, they will take care of the rest.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah. Pia-Maria, I’m gonna dig here a little bit, because you gave a fantastic laundry list of all the potential things you could unlearn and start looking for new creative ways.

But more specifically, is it, do we start with the physical work environment or performance achievement or what piece of the HR ecosystem is the right place for people to often … that’s the first rock we want to turn over. Are there some patterns there?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: I would say start with yourselves. Start with the HR team.

LESLIE MORSE: Okay.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Try to do a daily morning meeting, try a retrospective, try to work more together cross functionally, create a kanban board, to try out the new ways of working. That’s where I, you would start with companies. Yeah.

LESLIE MORSE: Okay. Excellent. Shannon, anything you’re hearing from organizations that are adopting this?

SHANNON EWAN: Well, I think that another thing, that I was thinking about, is really the recruiting process or the theme that we’ve got in the track, we’re calling talent acquisition, is really looking at, okay, what, how do we want to change that process?

LESLIE MORSE: Okay.

SHANNON EWAN: How do we, how does our recruiting process and our employee integration or orientation, how does that really influence the culture? How has it influenced by the culture? So, really looking at those things and being clear and open with folks about the change that’s happening.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

SHANNON EWAN: In some organizations, people start to get afraid of, wait a minute, I was hired for this job and now you’re asking me to do this. What do we need to do to help assuage people’s concerns, to get them onboard and understand, because you’d have to do change or change things in the right increments. Right?

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

SHANNON EWAN: So, yeah.

LESLIE MORSE: That’s interesting because I actually feel like from a scope perspective, changing our talent acquisition approaches, is probably actually something that people could get their arms around versus one of the other track themes around organizational design roles and career paths. That feels a lot bigger and gnarlier, but with that creating cognitive dissonance, you hired me to do this and then I’m being asked to do something else.

It’s almost like, are you, if you change that, are you setting people up for an employee experience, that’s like, yeah, yeah, we’re going to hire you in these more Agile ways, but we haven’t done the set of features or on HR refactoring for how our org design work. Really you’re not- what you experienced hiring isn’t what you’re going to experience when you get here. That’s got to be such kind of a chicken and egg sort of thing.

SHANNON EWAN: Definitely, I mean I definitely think of it, and the size of the organization. I think that, to the extent that organizations can also experiment internally, similarly to how we would do with product development or if you look at Lean startup models, the intrepreneurship, as they call it. It’s like, can you have certain parts of organizations that are experimenting with these new processes and then figuring out what will work organization-wide.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: That’s a very good way of doing it, as well. To kind of remove some parts of the organization from the overall structure, so that we don’t do the traditional performance review on this team because they are these guinea pigs, who are trying out new things. We don’t use the old traditional processes exactly here. Right?

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah. What are some of the other themes for people to think about? We kind of talked about talent acquisition, org design roles, career path…

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: T-shaped people.

LESLIE MORSE: T-shaped people, okay.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Specialized, generalized. Specialized generalist or generalized specialist. Removing and limiting job roles.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Competency profiles, titles, stuff like that. It’s really important.

LESLIE MORSE: It’s funny …

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Talking about expectations, instead of you are going to do these tasks.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned T-shaped people, recording this on March 14th, it’s Pi Day. I bring that up specifically because that whole traditional management science says I-shaped people, you’re good in one and only thing. Now, more modern T-shaped people, you might be still deep in quality assurance, but you’ve got transferable skillset. When I work with organizations, I actually talk about pi-shaped people. I have one, I might have one leg that’s really strong in quality assurance. I’m growing another leg about what it means to be an amazing Agile practitioner. But then right, the top line of that pi symbol is actually the curve, so I’m flexible and willing to take on any task my team needs of me so that we can succeed.

I really think the next evolution of it is pi-shaped people. Hopefully that’s not from the amount of pie you eat though.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Even the next one is actually hashtag shaped.

LESLIE MORSE: Oh, lots of different things.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Keeps evolving.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah, absolutely.

SHANNON EWAN: I think along with this and we did mention a career development, and specifically within that, is the learning and development piece as well. I think we, IC Agile, we’ve talked to folks in the L and D capacity in within organizations, a lot of it’s reactionary, We’re trying to do a transformation, what kind of trainings out there, but let’s really think holistically about what does, what’s the organizational learning that we’re trying to create.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

SHANNON EWAN: How do we really plan for this and be more intentional about learning.

LESLIE MORSE: That culture of a growth mindset.

SHANNON EWAN: Yeah.

LESLIE MORSE: So important. Without that the, in my opinion, the 12th Agile principle, at regular intervals we inspect and adapt in order to improve, if that growth mindset isn’t part of the culture that HR and other groups are cultivating, that piece of it’s never going to happen.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: I mean the fifth discipline in Peter Sanjay’s book is really systems thinking. It kind of completes the learning organization very nicely. For the future, it’s cultural fit that matters the most. It’s about growth mindset, just as we talk about. It’s about opening up and thinking that everything is possible.

LESLIE MORSE: I imagine we could rewrite the Agile manifesto and the 12 Agile principles and tweak them to be less software, more HR oriented.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: There actually, there is an Agile HR manifesto.

LESLIE MORSE: Oh, great.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Go to agilehrmanifesto.org.

LESLIE MORSE: Okay.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: You can have a look at it. I was able to co-create a couple of years ago, this page. LESLIE MORSE: That’s good to know. I’m imagining a lot of other people and listening today wouldn’t know that either. When I think about those values and principles, I think about mindset shift. What are some of those key tenants of the mindset shift within HR? We talked about kind of letting go and unlearning stuff, but if we’re going to get a little more practical, what are those shifts you’re looking for?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Well, it’s about not judging other people. It’s about not telling other people what to do. It’s about understanding that we cannot make people perform or make people motivated or make people learn things. People will not learn, if they don’t want to learn. People will not be motivated, if it’s not about intrinsic motivation. They will not perform unless they have good reasons for it. Compelling …

LESLIE MORSE: The power of why.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yes, exactly. The power of why and the passion to achieve something bigger than yourself, doing meaningful work. For leaders in HR in general, it’s about making it possible for people to be the best they can be. Give them the tools they need and remove the impediments that are in their way, to be the best people they can be, to grow to the optimum level of their potential.

SHANNON EWAN: Creating some insulation around failure. I think about the cultures of empowerment and it’s, yes, it’s about empowering people to do the job with the how, the business maybe starts with the why and potentially the what and the teams will take care of the how. Getting them to go beyond, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Because in order to truly learn and grow, it’s like the growth mindset that Leslie was talking about. You have to be willing to put yourself out there to fail, to learn and to move forward. It’s creating that culture where that’s really possible.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: There we come into a psychological safety of course and the importance of having that platform of psychological safety where people feel safe to fail, to make mistakes, to be able to learn from mistakes and their HR leaders need to go first. They have to be vulnerable first. Show that they do mistakes, because then people see that they are human. They are not perfect. Then they feel okay to make the mistakes themselves, so that the whole organization can learn from that. That I think is extremely important part of releasing potential, releasing agility and everything else that is positive.

LESLIE MORSE: That reminds me of a micro mindset shift just around the idea of failure. Which I can’t remember who the quote’s from, but it’s one of my best friend’s favorite quotes. It’s like, failure is an event not a person. Right? That is a little mindset shift is like, you don’t say things like, I’m a failure. It’s, that was a failure.

SHANNON EWAN: That particularly thing failed.

LESLIE MORSE: Failure is not a thing that you embody as a human. Failure is an event that happens. That’s how you can learn from it.

SHANNON EWAN:  Someone should have told Charlie Brown that.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah, no kidding! No kidding.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: In some companies, they have these fuck up boards. They have people and when you have done five fuck ups, we eat cake. We celebrate the learning.

LESLIE MORSE: That’s great.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: We don’t celebrate the failure, but we celebrate the learning.

LESLIE MORSE: The learning, yeah. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. What else is important for people to know?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: What else can we talk about? The importance of intrinsic motivation maybe?

LESLIE MORSE: Okay.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: It’s really key to making people work and perform and everything else. I mean intrinsic motivation is the key to everything. Very little would be produced unless you had intrinsic motivation.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: It’s about knowing every person in the ecosystem. It’s about, I usually talk about the gardener metaphor when I talk about Agile leadership, which I think is so beautiful. Because the company is a garden, with a lot of different plants and it’s about knowing your plants. It’s about knowing the seeds. How do they want to be treated? Everybody needs different things. Everybody’s motivated by different things. Some plants need more sunshine. Some needs more water. Some needs some special soil. Maybe some plants don’t like exactly where they are planted, so you need to replant them somewhere else in the garden.

It’s the gardener’s task to make sure that the environment is made for growing, so that all the plants can be happy to grow, so that garden fulfills its purpose, which could be to be as beautiful as possible or to be used to produce fruits and vegetables, for example.

LESLIE MORSE: I love that metaphor.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: It is a very good metaphor for Agile leadership. That’s exactly how leaders should act. Creating prerequisites for growing in the company.

LESLIE MORSE: Pia-Maria, you bring up a good phrase there, and it was something I was starting to get curious about, which is the idea of leadership . A lot of this conversation is really, yes, we need to change the way traditional HR may function and work, to create the right container and the right environment and culture. A lot of these ideas are just the right leadership ideas. So Shannon, when you think about the intersection of Agile talent with Agile leadership, do those Venn diagrams sit right on top of each other? Okay …

SHANNON EWAN:  I’m laughing because as we look at all the various tracks, we have those conversations with a lot. We’re like this audience definitely needs to know this, so does this audience. We don’t necessarily want to teach the same thing twice, but yet how do we … actually, Pia-Maria and I were just having a conversation, earlier this week, about the power of bringing those two classes together and what rich conversations you could have with organizational leaders and folks in the HR domain and then even leaders in the HR domain, to really look at those things. You really, I mean they have to work together.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah.

SHANNON EWAN: They really do. If you have leaders that don’t believe in these things no matter what your HR people are saying, you’re not going to get to where you really want to be.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: No.

LESLIE MORSE: Yeah. Obviously, the organizations that have courses accredited around Agile talent is a great place to get started. We’ve mentioned the agilehrmanifesto.org. Did I get that right, Pia-Maria?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yes.

LESLIE MORSE: Okay. What are some of the other places that people, if they’re ready to start learning more about this, resources they can turn to, places they can go.

SHANNON EWAN:  Pia-Maria’s book.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah.

LESLIE MORSE: What was the name of that again?

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Agile People: A Radical Approach for HR and Managers that Leads to Motivating Employees.

LESLIE MORSE: Excellent. Excellent.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah. I wrote it in 2016-2017. It came out in October 2017. I’m translating into Chinese …

LESLIE MORSE: Oh, wow.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: … and to Italian, as we speak. Yeah. These were the two first countries, strangely enough, who asked to translate my book, Italy and China.

LESLIE MORSE: That’s great.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah.

LESLIE MORSE: Other places …

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: You wouldn’t think that it would be these countries first. You know?

LESLIE MORSE: I think that’s awesome.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Yeah.

LESLIE MORSE: Other places? Other good resources?

SHANNON EWAN: If you hadn’t asked, I would’ve been able to tell you.

LESLIE MORSE: That’s all right. That’s what show notes are for, right? We can always capture them later and add them there. Well listen. Shannon and Pia-Maria, thank you so much for spending some time to dig into this topic today with us. I really appreciate it.

SHANNON EWAN:  Thanks, Leslie.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Thank you so much.

SHANNON EWAN:  Have a good Pi Day.

LESLIE MORSE: Yes, absolutely. Happy Pi Day, everybody.

PIA-MARIA THORÉN: Bye, Bye.

LESLIE MORSE: Thanks for listening to this edition of Agile Amped. If you learned something new, please tell a friend, coworker, and most importantly an HR coworker or client about this podcast, you can go online to subscribe and hear more inspiring conversations.