Leaders who relentlessly provide value to every individual in each interaction achieve success no matter how it’s defined. A direct correlation exists between Leaders who passionately work at providing value and employee respect & appreciation.
Following are my key take-away (para-phrased):
Accountability – Take It On
Everyone has a behavioral comfort zone. Moving beyond this comfort
zone takes motivation, courage, and persistence
Valued leaders are not constrained by a desire for popularity. Instead, they just take it on. They realize respect is earned by helping others to achieve more than they believe possible.
Timing, Not Time
Timing is more important than time in making this happen
No matter what is being done, never waste a learning opportunity
“just-in-time” coaching action is almost always superior to a planned
Employees value coaches being present at precisely the moment of need; effective leaders deliver this regardless of other demands
Do not base your actions on time or time management. Instead, drive your priority management based on commitment
It’s All About Them
Personal gratification for a Leader is achieved by ensuring others reach their full potential and are enormously successful.
Leader make sure they know what motivates each individual they coach. They then use this knowledge to make each required behavior make sense from the individual’s perspective, and show how it ties in to her personal motivations. When done effectively, employees quickly trust their leaders are dedicated to their success.
Leaders eschew the notion of “one size fits all” and tailor their communication style and learning methods/activities for each individual
A Leader’s first objective should always be to remove barriers to listening, comprehension, dialogue, behavioral change, and skill mastery as quickly as possible
Stay With It Until They Get It
It is pretty basic ? the more people there are doing the right activities, the more effective the execution is on what matters.
In today’s world of multi-tasking and conflicting agendas, it’s difficult to develop mastery. Adequate (but not great) performance is often accepted.
Repetitive practice and action is the building block of mastering any concept or task. Unfortunately, personal tolerance for this effort wanes under the burden of our “get it done now” mentality.
Create opportunities to keep working on essential skills, even when dealing with a conflicting emphasis
Clear Expectations
Clear expectations make it easy for employees to self-evaluate and determine if work is being done well
Expectation clarity requires thoughtful determination of each essential behavioral requirement
High-Impact Few
Activity for activity’s sake must not be allowed. The mission is to do a few common (core) things exceptionally well
Ask More Than Tell
Learning is dependent upon critical, reflective thinking. Increasing understanding is best accomplished by determining what, how, and why something is happening.
Self-discovery is a staple of the learning process. Make way for it.
When purposeful questioning is combined with timely, useful suggestions, true guidance/assistance is achieved
Learn From Each Win
Catch people when they are doing something right and make a big deal out of it
Its important to know how each individual prefers to receive recognition
Demonstrate an enthusiasm for success
Unfortunately, many don’t focus on finding success. They seem to dwell on communicating only what either is not being done or what is being done incorrectly
It’s important to address performance issues. However, instead of criticizing, utilize everyday wins to help develop confidence, composure, and concentration
Individuals without the confidence to pursue success is destined for mediocrity
Invite people to enjoy the process, have fun, and celebrate a task well done. Understand doing so, encourages the characteristics in people which will help to achieve results.
The Value Theory: What people value drives their actions.
Value Driven planning is where you plan to do the most valuable things with your resources, and of those valuable things you try to do the most valuable things first if possible.
Target Driven planning is where you have a target or set of targets you try to reach, and you try to do what gets you to your targets.
Target Driven thinking reflects the way we tend to ask people for what we want. For example, “May I have 2 kilos of potatoes please”, “Get me twelve bricks.”, and “I need two tonnes of sand.” What we rarely do is say “This is how my values work or this is what I value, so please do something that will make me happy.”
Similarly when it comes to Agile adoption (or any process for that matter), we see two camps:
Target Driven Camp: Where people use number of practices, adherence to a specific prescriptive process and checklist based verification of the same, certification, maturity levels, and so on to guide and plan their adoption.
Value Driven Camp: Organizations highlight what they value, they use their values to guide them with their adoption process. (Please note that their values itself can evolve.) Ex: We value quick turn-around time, so our customers get what they ask for quickly, is this process change inline with our value?
What do we, as agile Coaches, value? What is our value system?
I value:
Respect and Trust
Transparency and Open communication
This works both ways. As a coach you want to show them that its OK not to know something. You certainly don’t know everything. But you are willing to learn.
Most often I find people introducing all forms of accidental complexity and screwing up their projects. Over the years I’ve learnt some powerful ways to kill a project/organization.
Mediocracy over Innovation and Excellence
Indifference (I don’t care) over Passion and Pride
Sloppiness over Craftsmanship and Self-Discipline
are some of the most common values. And there are many ways to encourage them:
throwing more people at a problem
no visible value system
treating your employees as dispensable resources
punishing failures and ignoring achievements
create more and more specialized roles on a project. (Architects, Designer, Java Developers, Database Developers, UI Developers, DBAs, Manual Testers, Automation Testers, Regression Testers, Performance Testers, Graphics Designers, Web Designers, User Experience Expert, Domain Expert, Business Analyst, Subject Matter expert, System Analyst, Technical Writers, Project Managers, Program Managers, Module Leads, Tech Leads, Configuration Manager, Build Monkey, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Consultants etc)
build all the possible frameworks which might ever be needed before building an application
try to build a very generic solution which is infinitely scale and extensible. (does not matter if you are building a hospital management system, it needs to be generic enough that tomorrow if the business decides to get into hotel management they can use the same).
use the greatest and latest technology buzz words, frameworks and concepts
death by process and meetings
failures and slippages results in more process addition and stronger & strict process adherence and evaluation
