Developing your company's purpose is one of the most critical steps in building a meaningful and successful business. Gone are the days when work was solely about trading time for money. Today, employees seek a deeper sense of purpose, often valuing it more than financial compensation. In this blog, we explore the significance of company purpose, why it matters, and how to develop your company's purpose to inspire your team and create a basis for sound future decision-making.

When I started my career, the philosophy was that work was a transactional exchange where you performed a role in exchange for money. The assumption was that you always wanted more money and therefore would happily modify your performance and behaviour to achieve this.  Yet, as a consultant, I worked with teams that completely defied that notion. They worked for something else.

This concept fascinated me and drove me to understand what motivates people. My employer noticed this and moved into a management position. While I found this incredibly exciting, I struggled to find good role models to learn from. The system of work in which I had grown up was a leftover from the last century, devoid of good examples for a hungry mind. Thankfully, my timing was good, and work was about to undergo a seismic shift.

Fast-forward 22 years, and we have a very different world of work. It turns out that why we work (purpose) is extremely important to people—at times, more important than money.

There are a lot of different reasons for this, but the two major trends I see are:

  1. Societal shifts: People used to obtain most of their meaning and purpose outside the workplace, largely from community groups, churches, and neighbourhoods. These are now in obvious decline, and people’s need for purpose has turned to the workplace.
  2. Advances in behaviour science - we now understand a lot more about what motivates people, and what provides purpose and meaning.

 

Societal Shifts

Humans have an inherent biological need for social connection. Traditionally and instinctively, we have developed a sense of meaning and purpose through social groups. However, attendance in social groups is declining.

In Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, he illustrated the decline in civic participation, from community groups to religious organisations, and its link to the breakdown of social capital. Younger generations, such as millennials and Gen Z, are significantly less likely to join local groups, further accelerating this decline.

Church attendance has steadily declined since the early 2000s, a trend confirmed by multiple surveys from reputable research institutions. In the United States, less than 50% of the public now attend church regularly - for the first time, it has dropped below 50%.

We used to find meaning and purpose in society. With that in the decline, we seek to fulfil this basic human need at work.

Behavioural Science

Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor's book Primed to Perform is a compelling reward on the topic of human motivation. They categorise work into two types:

  1. Tactical performance is "how effectively your organisation sticks to its strategy." Good tactical performance (rules, checklists, and standard operating procedures) is essential for certain types of work.
  2. Adaptive performance is “how well your organisation diverges from its strategy." It’ shows up as creativity, problem-solving, resilience and innovation.

Over the last century, we have excelled in tactical performance. But as our world becomes increasingly Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear and Incomprehensible, adaptive performance is critical.

Six factors impact adaptive performance - three positive and three negative:

  • Play - when you are motivated by the work itself.
  • Purpose - you work because you value the work’s impact
  • Potential - you grow and learn from the work
  • Emotional pressure - you work because some external force threatens your identity.
  • Financial Pressure - you work to gain a reward or avoid a punishment.
  • Inertia - you dont know why you work. You go to work because you did yesterday.

It turns out that why you work affects how well you work. Purpose really matters. For a deeper dive into this see this webinar we did with Neel Doshi.

Finally, the Better Up Meaning and Purpose Report highlights a compelling and confronting statistic : 90% of people surveyed said they would sacrifice up to 23% of their future lifetime earnings for work that is more meaningful.

That is twenty-three per cent of their earnings for the rest of their lives to have meaningful work.  

If businesses haven’t clicked yet, purpose and meaning are very important.

What is Purpose?

We’ve discussed the importance of Purpose and will shortly dive into how to develop yours. But first, we need to clarify what exactly purpose is.

The purpose is the underlying reason why your company exists. It’s the broader impact your organisation aims to achieve in the world. It ignites people with the energy, passion, and motivation to get out of bed each morning.

Examples:

  • Amazon: “To be Earth's most customer-centric company.”
  • CVS Health: Helping people on their path to better health.
  • eBay: “To empower people and create economic opportunity for all.”
  • Apple’s Purpose: “To empower creative exploration and self-expression.”

A good purpose statement leaves freedom and scope on the how. As a founder, you want your people to think about new and innovative ways to achieve the company's purpose. If any of our team approached me with a new idea, I would first apply the purpose filter—“Does it help us achieve our purpose?” It needs to make sense commercially, too, but purpose comes first.

How to Develop your Company's Purpose

The work required to develop your company's purpose is significantly more challenging than you might first think. It took me over six months in my second company, Clarus, as my first attempts felt cheesy and too lofty.

What I (eventually) learned was to let go of the need to “get right.” Remember, perfect is the enemy of good.

Start with your underlying beliefs and passions. Why are you putting all this effort into a business? What is the rallying cry that will inspire others? Why should anyone care? Ponder these questions and then write down your top five ideas. Now go share them with others. Don't just read them out; tell a story about the problem this business solves and why it is important. Watch how they respond. Are they motivated by it, or are they ambivalent?

If you are an existing business looking for your purpose, try this. One of the best techniques I’ve used came at Clarus. One of the team members, Robbie May asked, “What would the world look like if Clarus disappeared tomorrow? What is the hole we would leave in the business landscape? THAT is our purpose.” I found that an excellent way of thinking about it. As a team, we could answer this immediately.

If you are a new business, your purpose will likely come from

  1. Market research -  what unmet needs or problems does your proposed business solve? Look at what your competitors are doing and understand what needs are not being addressed by their products or services.
  2. A strong understanding of your customers' needs -  it is very hard to develop a purpose statement if you dont know your customer's needs. The best way to understand these is NOT surveys and polls. Get out from behind your laptop and talk to them. You will be surprised by how much you will learn.

Start with these, understand how your business can solve a particular problem and develop a starting purpose you can then iterate on.

Example: Developing our Company Purpose at Radically

When Dan and I started Radically, we knew the problem we wanted to solve. Companies told us they needed help to modernise how they delivered work. Many of them had tried agile but failed to make any meaningful impact.

At the time, the only option was one of the Big Four consulting firms, and it was clear that firms engaged them reluctantly. Dan and I were both tired of seeing people roll their eyes and complain about these companies, and we felt we could do a much better job. In short, we wanted to show that consulting doesn't have to suck.

We also wanted to be an upstart that would challenge the status quo but had clear business acumen and the credibility to work with executives. We wanted to be alternative but corporate.

This was our starting purpose:

We help leaders transform their organisations to achieve radically better outcomes.

We started with clients who already knew us, trusted us, and worked incredibly hard to meet our purpose and started earning a good reputation. After our first year, we realised our purpose statement needed to be narrower. We pivoted to

We help businesses adapt to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world.

This worked well for us for many years, but as the company grew we knew we needed a purpose statement from our people. At a company offsite, we discussed who we are and what we believe in. Out of that came our refined purpose statement of today:

We design and build future-ready businesses by bringing together high performance and humanity.

This purpose statement now clearly defines who we are, why we exist and what we do. We passionately believe that a future-ready firm needs to be at the intersection of high performance and humanity.

Notice it also suggests what we aren’t and don't do. We dont high-performance at any cost. We dont believe in armies of soulless consultants in suits, largely made up of graduates straight out of university, billing every minute possible.

Don't get hung up trying to get it perfect. Start with what you have and iterate over time.

Summary

Humans are hardwired to come together in social groups to achieve something bigger than ourselves. Tapping into this is both ethically and commercially astute. A strong purpose drives good decision-making, aligns stakeholders, and inspires employees by providing meaning and direction.

This approach is the future of business. It creates places where people want to work and inspires belief, promise, and hope.

In my next post, I will discuss the challenges of running a purpose-driven firm. It is hard and requires a lot of new leadership skills!

If you are interested in discussing anything here (or any other lessons), please contact me over LinkedIn.

 

 

Does this scenario sound familiar? Your company has embraced agile and teams now enjoy greater focus and clearer collaboration. Yet the anticipated business benefits have not materialized. Delivery is slow, expensive and a source of frustration.

Although agile has markedly improved organisations, the full benefits are unattainable unless the entire work system is aligned with agile principles.

With over 20 years of experience in helping organisations achieve high performance and adaptability, I've gained valuable insights into agile system design. In this article, I will share some of these insights and discuss one of the most effective frameworks for optimizing organizations for peak performance: value streams.

Organisational Design

For the past century, reductionism has been the prevailing method of organizational design. In this model, the work of the organization is progressively broken down and assigned to functional units. Centralized management then coordinates these functions, aiming to ensure that the right people perform the right work at the right time. This approach has historically been reasonably effective, contributing to the development of many goods and services we now consider essential.

However, over the past three decades, as the world has grown increasingly fast & complex, the limitations of the reductionist approach have become painfully apparent. It presents several challenges:

  1. Frequent hand-offs between teams or business units that hinder rapid end-to-end delivery.
  2. Ambiguities in team roles and interactions, leading to internal friction and confusion.
  3. An inability for the organization to swiftly adapt to external market changes as work is stuck in progress.

 

Slow delivery

 

Consider a traditional organisation design where individuals are grouped based on their skills into specific functions, such as Sales, Marketing, Product, and R&D. When a customer makes a purchase or request, the responsibility for fulfilling this request flows across these various functions. Each participant handles their segment of the request before handing it off to the next function, like a relay race. If errors occur, the work must be returned to a previous stage for corrections.

Coordination of these efforts typically falls to a manager, whose task is to orchestrate these activities efficiently—a nearly impossible job. Often, when work arrives at a function, that group is already engaged with other tasks, forcing the new work to wait. This leads to significant delays.

Furthermore, since each group focuses only on their specific part of the process, they may lose sight of the overall customer outcome. This can lead to misdirected efforts and costly mistakes.

While a functional structure makes sense from an internal efficiency standpoint (let's group everyone who does similar work together), it creates significant waste and fails to streamline the delivery of value to the customer. And in a hyper-competitive world that just doesn't cut it.

Agile Emerges as a Team-Level Solution

Agile provided major improvements at a team level via cross-functional teams. To eliminate hand-offs between functions, teams were cross-functional and worked collaboratively to deliver a shared customer outcome.

Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, took inspiration from The New New Product Development Game.

"Under the rugby approach, the product development process emerges from the constant interaction of a hand-picked, multidisciplinary team whose members work together from start to finish. Rather than moving in defined, highly structured stages, the process is born out of the team members’ interplay (see Exhibit 1).

In the rugby approach to product development, a specially selected, multidisciplinary team collaborates continuously from the project's inception to its completion. The development process evolves through the dynamic interplay among team members, rather than progressing through rigid, predefined stages. This method emphasises the fluid and collaborative nature of the team's interactions (refer to Exhibit 1)."

The New New Product Development Game

Exhibit 1 - Sequential (A) vs. overlapping (B and C) phases of development

 

In a cross-functional scenario, a team would be made up of individuals from Sales, Marketing, Product, and R&D, all collaborating as a single unit with a clear focus on meeting the customer's needs. Progress!

 

Collaboration

 

 

However, complications arise when the work requires multiple teams. Handoffs lead to work accumulating in queues, awaiting the next person, team or business unit.

This delay is glaringly obvious in the production of physical goods, where work visibly stacks up. Consider a production line where goods must go through several stages to be completed. Queues immediately highlight where the bottlenecks are and we can identify areas to investigate.

Yet in knowledge work, the queues are largely invisible. Work sits in a queue, waiting for a team or business unit to pick up once they get what they are currently doing completed. Consider all the items sitting in your email inbox, pending your action to move forward!

In many organizations, only 5-10% of the total time required to deliver a piece of work is the time spent actively working on it (adding value). The rest, a staggering 90-95%, is spent waiting. This is known as process efficiency and understanding this can fundamentally change how you view organisation design.

 

Process efficiency

The traditional functional organisation design results in significant waste. The value-add work is only 5 days yet elapsed time is 23 days. This is surprisingly common.

 

Value Streams

Agile revolutionized more than just software development, quickly gaining traction with other business units such as legal, finance, and marketing.

Value Streams extend the agile philosophy into organizational design by organizing multiple teams around a clear, customer-oriented mission, aiming to minimize hand-offs and establish clear team scope and interactions. By aligning cross-functional teams towards a unified goal, value streams reduce unnecessary hand-offs and have become an essential element of contemporary organizational design.

Value Stream model

In a Value Stream-based model, the design is optimized to reduce hand-offs and wait times, with clearly defined team scopes and interactions.

 

When structuring teams, Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais offers valuable guidance. It outlines four distinct team topologies:

  1. Stream-aligned team: aligned to a flow of work from (usually) a segment of the business domain
  2. Enabling team: helps a Stream-aligned team to overcome obstacles. Also detects missing capabilities.
  3. Complicated Subsystem team: where significant mathematics/calculation/technical expertise is needed.
  4. Platform team: a grouping of other team types that provide a compelling internal product to accelerate delivery by Stream-aligned teams

 

Leveraging Value Streams

While value streams are a highly beneficial concept, adopting a value stream-based operating model represents a significant undertaking. It alters the fundamental ways in which people work, disrupting roles, accountabilities, reporting structures, and performance metrics. Managing this transition requires strong change management.

Such transformations are inherently risky. Each organization possesses a unique blend of people, processes, culture, mindset, governance, management, and leadership. Successfully implementing a value stream model involves thorough consideration, meticulous planning, and careful adaptation.

We have achieved considerable success using a strategy that involves co-creation with stakeholders and pilots.

Co-creating a Value Stream Operating Model

Co-creation involves collaborative workshops where we design the operating model together. Our approach is grounded in the belief that while Radically provides deep expertise, no one understands the intricacies of your business as well as you do.

Our clients consistently tell us that this collaborative approach is a breath of fresh air. Many have had negative experiences with traditional consulting firms that isolate themselves in a conference room for weeks before unveiling their model in a grand reveal. Experiencing change imposed upon you can be unpleasant. Participating in the process of change is far more empowering.

Naturally, no model is flawless. This type of work is fraught with complexities and many "unknown unknowns." This is where conducting pilot projects proves invaluable, allowing for iterative testing and refinement.

 

Pilots

The field of Complex Adaptive Systems has significantly influenced our understanding of organizational design. Such systems, characterized by "unknown unknowns," defy straightforward planning and implementation. Instead, effective solutions tend to emerge organically through active engagement and practical experimentation.

The purpose of a pilot is to implement a crucial piece of work using agile, uncovering likely "unknown unknowns" before scaling further. Typically, a pilot focuses on a specific segment of the business, such as a single value stream, a strategic initiative, or a major project. At Radically, we establish these pilots based on the principles, desired culture, leadership style, and operational methods we aim to promote.

We assemble a cross-functional team drawn from different business units. Their role is to

  1. Guide the change.
  2. Observe the emerging patterns and interactions.
  3. Use the insights gained from these observations to refine and enhance the operating model design.

In this approach, we work in short cycles, continuously reviewing and adjusting our progress. During these iterations, we identify any aspects that may need modification to successfully scale the model, such as reporting structures, incentive schemes, key performance indicators, mindsets, skills, and communication methods. Over several months, this iterative process yields critical insights—insights that only become apparent through actual implementation. We then determine solutions for these issues before scaling further.

By leveraging co-creation and pilot projects, we collaboratively design and test a model that truly works. When the people doing the work participate in the model design, it not only enables smoother change but also makes acceptance and adaptation of the model substantially easier.

Co-creation

Summary

Adopting a value stream-based operating model can significantly reduce waste and increase adaptability across many organizations. When combined with agile ways of working, human leadership, and a strong emphasis on value, companies can greatly enhance both performance and customer satisfaction, while also improving organizational culture and the workplace experience for their employees.

Designing such an operating model involves numerous collaborative design workshops, effective communication, active listening, and thoughtful discussions, all underpinned by careful change management. Strong executive sponsorship and support are crucial; without this model being a priority among the top executive concerns, successful implementation is unlikely. Transitioning to a new operating model is a substantial and disruptive endeavour, but the benefits make it a worthwhile investment.

 

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to learn more, we can run a one-day deep dive Designing Value Streams workshop for you. Just drop me a line and we can discuss.

 

You know how when you see someone smile, you smile too? Or when you see someone crying, you feel their sadness? It is caused by an incredible phenomenon called mirror neurons. This article unpacks how to leverage mirror neurons to develop high-performing teams.

Mirror neurons came into the public sphere through the book Mirroring People, The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others, by Marco Iacoboni.

Richard Saavedra, a University of New Hampshire researcher, described the power of mood to spread and “infect” others as “one of the most robust phenomena I have ever seen, and it’s all unconscious.”

 

matches mirror neurons

 

What are Mirror Neurons?

Mirror neurons are specialized cells in our brains that play a crucial role in our ability to empathize and understand the actions, intentions, and emotions of others. Interestingly, these neurons respond to emotional experiences. When we feel emotions like joy, fear, anger, or sorrow, our mirror neurons activate. This response is mirrored when we witness others experiencing these emotions.

For instance, if we see someone feeling sad, our mirror neurons trigger a similar feeling within us, fostering a sense of empathy. This process is automatic and instinctive, allowing us to understand and share the emotional states of others without consciously thinking about it.

 

Intentions: the hidden side of communication 

People communicate on two different levels. One is the basic mechanics of communication we know - the content of the message, the voice tone, the body language and the context in which we are communicating.

But we also communicate by reading subtle nuances in the facial expressions of who we are communicating with. According to the research, this is our brain trying to interpret the other party’s intentions. Intentions add a “4th dimension” to communication by triggering the exact same areas of the brain in the receiver as if they were experiencing the emotions themselves.

For example, I see you clearly upset and crying and I comfort you. As you communicate with me I see the pain I, your eyes and other facial expressions. My mirror neurons trigger the exact same areas of my brain, as if I were the one upset.  Through this mechanism, I can empathise with you.  The fascinating point is that I am not just observing you; I am part of the same experience.

 

two minds

 

Why do we do this?

One theory is that for one human to understand another’s emotions, we must have experienced that emotion. In other words, the brain is attempting to build emotional literacy in a just-in-time way. Another theory is that this also allows us to learn about our own emotions by experiencing others emotions as if they were ours.

As a species, we have evolved by working closely in groups with the emotions each of us experience impacting the emotions of all of those around us. We are essentially a collective social-emotional network. Our group setting impacts our emotional growth.

 

How to leverage mirror neurons for your teams

Two techniques you can use to apply this knowledge with your teams are self-awareness and curiosity.

Self-Awareness

Being mindful of how your behaviour impacts others is a critical skill for effective groups.

When you understand your own emotions, reactions and biases, you're less likely to misinterpret the behaviours of others. This leads to more empathetic interactions and healthier teams.

Self-awareness also helps encourage an understanding of the diversity of human experiences and perspectives and enables us to see beyond our viewpoint and appreciate the feelings and motivations of others.

When team members are self-aware, they tend to be more open and authentic, which fosters trust. High levels of trust in a group create a psychologically safe environment where members feel comfortable taking risks, making mistakes, and being creative. This is a vital aspect of a high-performing team.

 

Curiosity

Curiosity is another brilliant skill that helps build the ability to understand others' intentions. Curiosity serves as the bridge that connects diverse thoughts and perspectives. It encourages us to delve beyond the surface level of conversations.

When we approach interactions with genuine curiosity, we open ourselves to truly hearing and understanding what others are expressing, beyond just their words. This deep level of engagement is crucial for meaningful communication, as it allows for a fuller comprehension of the context, emotions, and nuances that shape each individual's messages.

Curiosity encourages us to ask insightful questions, seek clarification, and explore the motivations and feelings behind what is being communicated. This not only enhances our understanding but also conveys to others that their thoughts and experiences are valued and respected, fostering a sense of connection and trust.

 

Conclusion

The remarkable power of mirror neurons reveals a profound truth about human interaction and emotional connectivity; we are all highly connected. By understanding and harnessing this, we can significantly enhance the performance and cohesion of our teams.

Self-awareness and curiosity emerge as pivotal tools in this endeavour, empowering us to create environments where empathy, understanding, and genuine connection thrive.

Self-awareness allows team members to be cognizant of their own emotions and how these influence others, leading to more empathetic and constructive interactions. It cultivates a culture of trust and psychological safety, essential for high-performing teams.

Curiosity drives us to explore and understand the intentions and emotions behind our colleagues' actions and words, fostering deeper connections and more effective communication.

Together, these skills enable teams to leverage the power of mirror neurons effectively. They create a dynamic where team members are not just working alongside each other but are emotionally attuned and deeply connected.

As we continue to explore and understand the intricacies of human emotions and how they shape our interactions, the insights gained from the phenomenon of mirror neurons offer a valuable pathway to building stronger, more resilient, and more effective teams.

Behaviours are values in action. If you want to change your organisation, then live the values you seek. Let the contagious nature of mirror neurons do some of the heavy lifting to spread these behaviours, building upward spirals of behaviour.

 

upward spiral

 

The phrase "one bad apple spoils the barrel" implies the undesirable behaviour of one person can spread to others, impacting the performance of an entire team. Many have experienced this phenomenon, feeling like their team is falling well short of its potential. But is there any evidence supporting this phenonium? A fascinating study has shown that indeed, a single, toxic team member can create group-wide dysfunction and breakdown.

 

Bad Apple

The Toxic Blend: How One Rotten Apple Spoils the Barrel

We have all worked in teams where there is that one “difficult” person.  They often display a lack of respect for their colleagues, disregard for team goals, and have an unwillingness to take responsibility for their actions. They may engage in gossip, create conflicts, and foster a hostile work environment.

They seem to consume a disproportionate amount of time and energy. Conversations with them feel “heavy” and they tend to sap your energy. There are many common examples - The Brilliant Jerk, The Controller, The Slacker, The Anti-Establishment Person, The Career Politician, The Passive-Aggressive.

 

The Impact of Toxicity on Team Dynamics

Often teams don’t have any choice but to do their best and simply tolerate the difficult person, citing personality eccentricities, often with a roll of the eyes.  The impact can be severe, ranging from reduced morale, increased stress, burnout, turnover, low levels of creativity and problem solving, along with reduced productivity.

 

The negative influence of a toxic team member can spread like wildfire, causing dysfunction in the entire group.
- Simon Sinek

 

rolling eyes

The Toxic Team Member: A Catalyst for Chaos

Will Felps, Associate Professor of Organization & Personnel Management at Rotterdam School of Management, published a fascinating paper titled How, When, And Why Bad Apples Spoil The Barrel: Negative Group Members And Dysfunctional Groups.  The paper discusses how, when, and why the behaviours of one negative group member can have a powerful, detrimental influence on an entire team.  In other words, how one bad apple can rot the barrel.

Felps conducted a social experiment. He took groups of four college students and arranged them into teams. Each team had to compete against the other to solve some management problems. Unbeknown to them, Felps planted an actor in each team, designed to feign one of the three personality types Felps suspected caused major issues:

 

  1. The Depressive Pessimist - will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed.
  2. The Jerk - will say that other people's ideas are not adequate but will offer no alternatives himself. They'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert - me."
  3. The Slacker - will say "whatever", and "I really don't care."

 

The existing research assumed that groups had the ability to overcome bad apples and the power of the group would override the bad apple forcing them to change their behaviour. However, Felps findings proved otherwise.

Groups with a bad apple performed 30 to 40 % worse than groups without a bad apple.  The ability to get along, share work and collaborate significantly dropped in groups with a bad apple.

Poor functioning team

 

The Domino Effect: From Toxicity to Dysfunction

In groups with a bad apple, other team members begin to take on the bad apple's negative behaviour. When the bad apple actor acted out one of the three personalities, the other team members started to act in the same way.  When the actor was a jerk, other team members would begin acting like a jerk. When the actor was a slacker, they began to slack, too. Even worse, they didn’t just act this way to him – they acted this way towards all other team members. The bad behaviour had a ripple-on effect, propagating that type of behaviour throughout the team.

This is an immensely important discovery. One bad apple can cause rot in the entire cart by altering the behaviour of everyone.

Interestingly, there was one exception in the experiment. One group performed well, despite having a bad apple. The difference? This group had a leader with strong skills in diffusing conflict.

 

 

Psychological Safety

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson identified psychological safety as a cornerstone of effective teamwork and organizational success.  Psychological Safety is a vitally important part of our consulting work at Radically.

Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." Project Aristotle, an initiative at Google, sought to uncover the dynamics of successful teams and identified psychological safety as one of the key factors driving high-performing teams. They found psychological safety was more impactful than the next four factors combined.

However, a culture of psychological safety isn't just a leader's job -  it is everyone's responsibility, especially as organisations become more decentralised and self-managed.

 

Restoring Harmony to Rebuild a Dysfunctional Team

So if undesirable behaviour can damage teams, and it can spread, what can we do about it?

There are broadly two key ways to approach this - by developing a group's ability to self-manage this and through people in leadership and management roles supporting this. the combination of both is the most successful approach.

The Power of Teamwork

Humans naturally form social group norms to guide behaviour. Norms take shape and change over time as the group evolves. Often group norms are implied and unstated, detected through the day-to-day interactions with others.

One way to help bring this into focus is to establish a team charter. This preventative action involves a team defining their desired values and behaviours. It can be quickly achieved with little more than a flipchart and some markers, using prompts such as

  • What would make our team powerful?
  • What can we count on from each other?
  • How do we want to be when we are challenged?

A team charter provides a clear statement of expectations - that is, what good looks like.  If behaviour slips off track, the group's role is to call each other out and self-moderate. However, this assumes the group has the capability and experience to do this. enter the leadership role.

The Role of Leadership

A good leader will help a group retain ownership of their behaviour and step in if it becomes unsafe or they see the group struggling with a lack of skills and experience.

A technique I frequently use is to help the group "notice" their behaviour if it differs from what they said was important in their team charter. The way you do this is very important. Avoid assumptions and embrace curiosity: "I am noticing that [observation]. Do you notice that too or am I misreading the situation?" If they agree, I might facilitate a discussion on what happened and what we can learn from this to improve. Note at no point am I taking ownership. The group is accountable for their behaviour. Reveal dont resolve.

Motivational interventions

Felps calls these “motivational interventions” - acts of teammates that attempt to change negative behaviour via influence. His research shows this is an effective way to deal with The Slacker and The Brilliant Jerk, but is less successful with the Depressive Pessimist.  Most people do not have the techniques required to resolve a teammate’s negative moods, and so tend to simply avoid or reject them. This is where a different leadership stance kicks in. Rather than facilitating (which is for a group), a personal coaching stance would probably be a better choice. In other words, connect with them, empathise,  share how you observe their behaviour impacting the group, and help them consider some options to move forward.

 

Honest conversation in a team

Conclusion

In conclusion, the impact of a toxic team member carries profound implications for group dynamics and team performance. The fascinating study by Will Felps has provided valuable insights into the impact of a single toxic team member on an entire group. This research has shown that the negative influence of such an individual can indeed spread like wildfire, leading to reduced morale, increased stress, burnout, turnover, and decreased productivity within the team.

Moreover, Felps' experiment shed light on the domino effect of toxicity, where other team members often begin to adopt the negative behaviour exhibited by the bad apple, causing a ripple effect of dysfunction throughout the group. This discovery underscores the critical importance of addressing toxic behaviour promptly and effectively.

Psychological safety, as highlighted by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, emerges as a vital factor in promoting effective teamwork and organizational success. It is essential for fostering an environment where individuals feel safe to take interpersonal risks, contributing to high-performing teams.

To counter the detrimental impact of toxic team members and restore harmony within a dysfunctional team, there are two key approaches: empowering the group to self-manage behaviour and leveraging leadership to guide and support the team when necessary.

Motivational interventions, as described by Felps, offer a powerful tool for addressing negative behaviors, especially when coupled with a coaching stance that emphasizes empathy and constructive feedback.

In summary, the study by Will Felps and the broader discussion surrounding toxic team members emphasise the importance of fostering positive group dynamics and addressing negativity promptly. By promoting psychological safety, establishing clear expectations, and combining self-management with effective leadership, teams can mitigate the influence of the "bad apple" and work together harmoniously to achieve their goals and reach their full potential.

If you are interested in learning more about Will Felps work, listen to this recording from the “This American Life” show. It’s an absorbing interview with Felps.

Many organizations are striving to become more adaptive a means not just to survive, but to thrive.  The success of an adaptive organization hinges significantly on the capabilities of its people, which often raises the question of how to select people for agile teams.

Those who excel in an adaptive environment exhibit three key characteristics. To begin with, they welcome uncertainty while maintaining their focus. Secondly, they focus on outcomes over process. Thirdly, they prioritise the health of the team. By focusing on the traits that define successful teams, adaptive organizations can enhance how they select people for agile teams.

 

people for agile teams

 

The Characteristics of High-Performing Agile Teams

From decades of working with successful agile teams, we have learned that the highest-performing teams tend to have the following characteristics:

  1. They embrace uncertainty: They exhibit a high degree of flexibility. They focus on goals and are comfortable adapting the path to reach those goals, often starting with minimal information.

 

  1. Outcome orientation: They focus on delivering valuable business outcomes, as opposed to frameworks and processes. This often requires them to “loose the training wheels” of agile frameworks once they have built basic reflexes.

 

  1. Team Collaboration: They actively contribute as team members, fostering cooperation and cohesion within the team. As individuals, they exhibit skills in empathetic listening, collaboration, and valuing team input over individual ideas.

 

Embracing uncertainty

People who tend to thrive in agile teams avoid spending a lot of time comprehending every intricate detail and potential risk, nor do they meticulously plan. Instead, they are comfortable with enough planning to feel confident in their team's ability to start, accepting that more will emerge as they progress and this emergent work can be discussed and prioritised accordingly.  The secret here is choosing what "enough planning" is for the specific context.

Individuals who embrace uncertainty tend to display high levels of curiosity. They use curiosity to foster a mindset of continuous learning and flexible decision-making (a growth mindset). For example, when working with a team on a complex problem, when they speak they tend to ask questions in order to better understand both the problem along with how others are thinking about it. They avoid assumptions and jumping to conclusions.

They also tend to embrace challenges. They see challenges and obstacles as opportunities for learning and growth. They are more likely to take on new and difficult tasks with enthusiasm. they're open to learning from others and seek feedback that enables them to enhance their abilities.

Finally, they are resilient in the face of setbacks and failures. They understand failure is not a permanent state but a stepping stone toward improvement.

When considering how to select people for agile teams, focus on people's curiosity, approach to challenges and setbacks, their attitude to failure and their persistence to overcome challenges.

 

Outcome orientation

Clarity on the business outcomes and goals is critical for an organisation that decentralises decision-making. Yet this is often an area where many teams struggle.

We often see teams that take a narrow view of their work, believing their job is to select product backlog items and turn them into outcomes. This is commonly known as a "Feature Factory" mindset, and only differs from a production line by the fact that it is a team doing the work rather than an individual.

Successful agile teams start with a clear business goal and break that down into smaller iteration-level goals together. They focus on the iteration goal, not the tasks. They

 

  1. Are clear on “the why” (goal) of the iteration. Why are we doing this work and what is the intended outcome we are seeking to achieve? Test whether everyone can clearly articulate the goal and what success looks like.

 

  1. Co-create “the what” with their stakeholders or product owners. They determine what work needs to be done to achieve the why. If they are working with a product backlog, this means selecting (or creating) work items that align with the goal. Remember the purpose of an iteration is to deliver the goal, not the work items.

 

  1. Take ownership of “the how” by creating and owning their plan to get that iteration of work completed. It is vital that this is their plan. Leaders must give the team the space to create their plan. People take their own commitments more seriously than commitments made for them by others.

 

This helps solve one of the most common failures in knowledge work: the people doing the work dont understand the work.

how-to-select-teams

When seeking people for agile teams, check for outcome orientation. How do they remain focused on goals? How do they achieve this when they are head down in the details?  What are their personal habits and traits they use to remain goal-focused?

Team Collaboration

Successful agile teams understand the nature of the problems they are solving are beyond the ability of individuals and require multiple perspectives to find the best results. They actively contribute as team members, fostering cooperation and cohesion within the team.

This often requires significant shifts in behaviour from individuals. Traditional organisations tend to encourage and reward individual expertise. Agile organisations tend to value skills like curiosity, empathetic listening, mentoring, knowledge sharing and giving others an opportunity to contribute. This requires a significant shift in leadership.

When seeking people for agile teams, look for how they work with others. Do they look around the room to check the levels of participation of others?   Are they comfortable accepting a direction a team wants to go in when they personally disagree with it? How do they approach such situations? Ask for examples!

 

Process for Selecting Team Members

Choosing the right team members can be approached in various ways, each with its own advantages and drawbacks.

Teams choose

Our preferred approach is for teams to choose their team members. They identify the gaps they are looking to fill and the behaviours & values they are seeking. They interview potential new members and have the autonomy to decide.

The risk of this approach is affinity bias and groupthink, where the team tend to look for people like them, whereas diversity tends to result in better teams. A good way to mitigate this in an enterprise setting is to engage with a People and Culture (HR) business partner/advisor. They’re experts in people and can help avoid blind spots.

 

Self-selection

Sandy Mamoli has had success with self-selection and has written a book about it. We’ve used varying levels of self-selection, depending on the context. We’ve learned that culture plays a key role in self-selection.  A colleague of mine who works in the field of team dynamics and human psychology shared an interesting piece of science on the topic recently. He said, “when a new group forms, they always seek a leader to provide the structure necessary to move towards an emergent order.”  This is an important point – psychology suggests the role of the leader in self-selection is enough structure for emergent order to occur.

 

Manager led

In our experience, this is the worst way to form a team. It assumes one person is better placed to make the decision, despite the fact that they won't themselves be involved in executing the work. It can work and we have consistently helped organisations to get this approach to work, but in our experience, the other options are more effective.

No matter the approach, selecting team members based on values, behaviours and diversity is key.

 

Conclusion

Successful agile teams are not solely composed of the most technically skilled individuals but those with the right personality traits and values. The important traits to look for are the ability to handle uncertainty, an outcomes-oriented mindset, and people who focus on team collaboration. These factors are instrumental in building strong and adaptable teams ready to thrive in today's dynamic business environment.

 

Modern leaders face a tough challenge - deliver outstanding results while nurturing a work environment that encourages innovation, collaboration, and growth. As a leader, fostering an environment of psychological safety within your team is paramount to managing this balance.

psychological safety

Understanding Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a concept that encompasses the belief that one can speak up, share ideas, ask questions, or admit to mistakes without fearing negative consequences. It's about creating a workspace where team members feel secure in expressing their thoughts and feelings.

The term was coined by Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, and it has since become a cornerstone of effective teamwork and organizational success. She defines it as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

Project Aristotle, an initiative at Google, sought to uncover the dynamics of successful teams and identified psychological safety as one of the key factors driving high-performing teams.

 

Key Findings of Project Aristotle

Project Aristotle analysed data from hundreds of Google teams to understand the key components that make a successful team. Among the key findings were:

  • Psychological Safety: The most crucial finding was the importance of psychological safety. Teams where members felt safe to take risks and voice their opinions were more likely to be successful. This safety allowed team members to admit to mistakes, ask questions, and share their thoughts without the fear of judgment or reprisal.
  • Dependability: Successful teams were characterized by a sense of dependability. Team members could trust each other to complete their tasks competently and on time.
  • Structure and Clarity: Teams with clearly defined goals, roles, and plans were more effective. When team members knew what was expected of them and how their work contributed to the team's goals, it fostered a sense of purpose.
  • Meaning: Successful teams found a sense of meaning and purpose in their work. They believed that their work had a positive impact and were aligned with the organization's mission.
  • Impact: Teams that felt their work made a difference in the world or in their organization were more motivated and successful. Understanding the significance of their contributions increased team members' engagement.

 

Psychological safety at Google

 

Total Motivation

These findings are well supported by Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor’s work from their outstanding book Primed to Perform. I highly recommend viewing this webinar we ran with Neel during lockdown. It is a game changer.

Neel and Lindsay on psychological safety

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety

The concept of psychological safety involves four stages:

  1. Inclusion: This is the first stage where individuals feel that they are part of the group and that their contributions are valued. Inclusion sets the foundation for psychological safety by creating a sense of belonging.

 

  1. Learner Safety: In this stage, team members feel comfortable asking questions, seeking feedback, and admitting mistakes without fear of ridicule or negative consequences. This is essential for fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

 

  1. Contributor Safety: Contributor safety takes psychological safety a step further by encouraging team members to actively share their ideas, opinions, and concerns. They believe their input is not only welcome but also essential for the team's success.

 

  1. Challenger Safety: The final stage, challenger safety, encourages team members to voice dissenting opinions and engage in constructive debate. Team members are not just comfortable with their ideas being heard; they actively challenge the status quo to improve processes and outcomes.

 

These four stages represent a progression toward a work environment where team members not only feel safe but are also empowered to engage fully, question assumptions, and drive innovation and growth.

 

The Six Benefits of Psychological Safety

 

  1. Elevated engagement stems from a workplace environment that fosters a sense of safety and security. This heightened engagement manifests during team meetings, problem-solving sessions, collaborative project work, and interactions with both customers and colleagues.
  1. Cultivating an inclusive organizational culture: Creating an inclusive workplace has become increasingly critical. Inclusive environments embrace diverse teams and enable all members to thrive, regardless of factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, background, or political affiliations. This fosters a dynamic, collaborative atmosphere where everyone experiences a sense of belonging and unity.
  1. Nurtures creativity and fosters innovation - For creativity and innovative ideas to flourish, it is essential that team members feel comfortable expressing themselves. Consider the countless innovative ideas that may have gone unspoken due to a team member's hesitation to share them in an environment lacking a sense of safety.
  1. Enhanced employee welfare - Mental health plays a significant role in the overall welfare of individuals. When employees enjoy good mental health, they are better equipped to operate at peak performance and mitigate stressors that might otherwise hinder their productivity.
  1. Reduced employee attrition - a recent study found that employees who experience psychological safety in their workplace exhibit reduced inclination to depart. After all, why depart from an organization that treats you with respect, ensuring your sense of security and value? The significant costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and training staff, among other expenses, render high employee turnover an unsustainable model for thriving businesses.
  1. Enhanced team effectiveness: When your workforce comprises deeply engaged, loyal employees, teams thrive. When a culture of inclusivity prevails, coupled with brand advocacy and a wellspring of innovative ideas, teams excel. When you combine these factors with the well-being of your employees, you've assembled a winning formula for elevating team performance.

 

psychological safety

Summary

 

By actively promoting psychological safety and embracing these key findings, you're not only contributing to the well-being of your team members but also paving the way for your organisation's long-term success, as demonstrated by Google's Project Aristotle. Remember, the seeds of psychological safety that you sow today will yield a bountiful harvest of innovation, collaboration, and growth in the future.

 

Interested in diving deeper into this top? Come along to our Psychological Safety in the Workplace.

 

 

Many self-managing teams struggle to reach a truly high-performing state. When an organisation moves to a self-management model, a key service centralised management traditionally played – giving feedback – is often ignored, leaving teams struggling to truly grow.  In this article, we share how to give effective feedback to improve both team and individual performance.

Models for high-performing Teams

There is a clear and obvious pattern across the models for high-performing teams. Dr Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team says the trust and the ability to productively process conflict are critical foundations. Trust is built on being vulnerable, being prepared to ask for help and not being afraid to make mistakes in front of others.

Team model for feedback and performance

In addition to this, Tuckman's model shows the importance of keeping a team together to give them the opportunity to work through the stage he called Storming. This is where differences surface and they learn how to process conflict productively.

The result of this is a set of team norms that guide how the team works. Eventually, when a team stays together long enough to build on these norms, it can increase performance. Productivity often suffers during Storming as they learn how to manage conflict and truly become a team.

Tuckman on performance and effective feedback

Google’s Project Aristotle made another significant contribution. In one of the largest studies of its kind, Google gathered some of their best statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, engineers, and researchers to try to understand what makes a high-performing team. They found Psychological Safety was the single most important factor. An individual’s belief that it is safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of their teammates was the most important factor of all.

Project Aristotle effective high performing teams

It turns out trust matters big time.

“There’s no team without trust” - Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google

While this work is a major step forward in what we need to create high performing teams, the question of how to do it is often left unanswered.

An approach we take at Radically is to help our clients develop a culture of feedback.

How to give effective feedback

Many organisations we work with have no consistent approach, training, or support for their people how on to give effective feedback. We believe this inhibits a critical feedback loop in individual and team development. When feedback is given, it is often clumsy, sugar-coated or worst of all, toxic. When it is received, it is often painful, upsetting and manipulative.

There are better ways! It just requires practice and support.

A useful starting point is Radical Candor – a model developed by Kim Scott during her time at Google. The model is really simple, which is one of the reasons we like it.

Radical Candor how to give effective feedback

The way we use it is to first assess your intent on the Y-axis. Do you care about the person you are giving feedback to? Be honest with yourself. If you are in the bottom two quadrants, then you are better to keep silent and take some time.

Assuming you are on one of the top two quadrants, you now need to decide whether you will “be nice and say nothing”, or whether you will be honest with them.  In my experience, this is where most people come unstuck. They tell themselves “best say nothing” or “I will just avoid working with them next time”. This isn’t helpful.

Kim Scott suggests you start your feedback by showing you care personally. Think about the benefit for the receiver and position it this way. Example – “I know you do a lot of public speaking, and this is an important area of your career, so are you open to some feedback on some suggestions I have?”

In my personal experience, you genuinely need to care about the person and want them to do better. If you don’t, it shows through and feels hollow.

Now share the feedback

The next step is to share the feedback. This introduces the second model we use extensively, again because of its simplicity.  The Situation-Benefit-Impact (SBI) model is a fantastic way of constructing the feedback in a way that focuses on the problem, not the person.

It helps you structure your feedback into

  1. The specific situation - when was it, during what part, who was there, what was going on.
  2. The behaviour you observed. What did the person say or do?
  3. The impact – what was the impact on you from the behaviour. This is the part that is impossible to argue with because the impact is the impact you felt.

SBO for how to give effective feedback

Here is a good example:

Example of positive feedback

Notice how the situation, behaviour and impact are clear and specific. The impact also doesn’t pass judgement. It simply expresses the giver's concerns.

Also notice how the feedback focuses on the problem, not the person. That is the entire objective, and it now gives you an opportunity to work together to address the problem.

Finally, use curiosity. You can’t assume you are right and they are not. There may be many other factors involved.  Here is how:

  1. Adopt a learning mindset, assuming you don’t have all the facts. State the behaviour as an observation.
  2. Engage them in an exploration discussion. For example, “I imagine there are probably a few different factors at play. Perhaps we could uncover what they are together?”
  3. Ask for solutions. The other person may well hold the key to growth. Ask directly, “that do you think needs to happen?” Or, “wow could I support you?”

By shifting our energy away from unhealthy conflict, to solving the problem, trust is built. As per the high-performing team models - it is safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of my teammates.

Don’t forget positive feedback

While feedback on areas to improve is important, just as important is feedback on areas where someone is doing well. But in what proportion?

Research suggests there’s a golden ratio for high-performing teams. The ideal positive-to-negative ratio is 5:1. Meaning, for every piece of feedback about something that to improve, you need to share five positive comments as well.

The research showed

  • high-performing teams has a 5:1 ratio
  • medium-performing teams 2:1 ratio
  • low-performing teams had a 1:3 ratio meaning three times as much negative feedback as positive.

Positive feedback is important! Here is another example.

Example of positive feedback

How to bring effective feedback to life

Now that you know how to give effective feedback, you need to make it a habit. The way we tend to do it is to mentor individuals and teams using both Radical Candor and SBI. At first, it requires time together to work through how they give the feedback effectively, and perhaps even practice together, but like most things, practice makes perfect.

What to watch out for

When we first established Radically, we set out to create a strong feedback culture. Along the way, we learned a lot of important lessons and it is fair to say there are definitely some gotchas to watch out for. Here is what we learned:

  1. There is such a thing as too much feedback! We got to a point where it all became a bit overwhelming and we had to tone it down. Some of us had moments of “for goodness sake – enough with the feedback!” Each organisation needs to find the right balance for them. Inspect & adapt.
  2. It is okay to say no. We always ask if someone is open to feedback and if they say no then you need to respect that. Sometimes people might be having a bad day or going through tough times elsewhere in their life and now is simply not the time.
  3. Culture, upbringing and mental models impact people’s attitude to feedback. For example, many of us Kiwis have been raised in a culture of Ruinous Empathy. We are generally a kind bunch, but we are very indirect. We prefer suggestions, hints and innuendo over directness. Overcoming this can feel very uncomfortable. Other cultures are comfortable being more direct as this is normal. Others still tend to be hierarchical and would never give feedback to a more senior person. These are all challenges to discuss with your people and work through. Find what works for you.
  4. SBI can be weaponised. I have seen SBI manipulated into “when you do this is makes me feel like that” with the implication that you need to stop what you are doing. In one situation many years ago, I had to give feedback to a consultant who had gone to the client site dressed inappropriately. He said, “when I have people tell me what I can and can’t wear it challenges my belief system and makes me feel anxious. The impact on me is that I need to take the rest of the day off.”
  5. Timing is everything. Sometimes, impromptu feedback is best. If the moment is right and the situation has just occurred, that can be the right time. Other times, it is better to stop, wait and think it through. This is all down to your own professional judgement.
  6. Feedback isn’t just a tool or practice – it is a culture. An organisation is a living, Complex Adaptive System where the system influences the behaviour, and the behaviour influences the system. For change to be successful you need to influence both. There is no point in expecting a certain behaviour if your system does not encourage or reward it. This is why we try to focus on a culture of feedback, not just a practice or tool.

Finally, there is also an art to receiving feedback. During our “too much feedback” crescendo, I wrote this guide on how to receive feedback for all the Radically team. I have now published this as the sister article to this.

Do you have experience on how to give effective feedback? How has it worked for you and what challenges did you experience? Please feel free to share in the comments below so we can learn and grow together!

Feedback is a critical part of building an adaptive organisation. While people have talked about how to give effective feedback, little has been said on how to receive feedback.  In the early years of Radically, we tried to build a strong feedback culture, and frankly, we overdid it. We were so passionate about the growth of our people that feedback came too thick and fast, and it all became a bit much. We have now reached a happy balance, and through that journey learned a lot I would like to share our guide on how to receive feedback.

An adaptive culture is an important part of enterprise agility. It is a culture that helps people prepare for change and build the ability to lean into uncertainty, rather than fear it. One way to build this is by applying a growth mindset.  People with a growth mindset see failure as a way to identify their current level of competence, thus making them more likely to feel more comfortable in an environment where they can rapidly experiment and learn.

Growth mindset to receive feedback

Helping people develop a growth mindset is an important part of the work we do at Radically and one of the tools we use to help people develop one is feedback.

Many people really struggle to both give and receive feedback. And us Kiwis seem to especially struggle with it. New Zealanders tend to be quite indirect. We tend to prefer subtle suggestions, indirect hints and innuendo. While plenty has been written about how to give feedback, little has been written about how to receive feedback.

In 2019 I wrote this guide on how to receive feedback for the Radically team. I share it here with you today in the hope that it might help you.

How to receive feedback

First off, let me provide some context. I was bought up in conservative, suburban Christchurch. People who were direct were considered somewhat crude and uncultured. Like the rest of NZ, few around me were direct.  When I started my consulting career, and it was now part of my job to give and receive feedback, it is fair to say it did not come naturally. In particular, I had moments when receiving feedback was hard and my response, mostly internally, was emotional.

Over time, I realised that many others are the same. And that is why I wrote this guide. It is for those of you who might at first struggle to receive feedback. Here is how I learned to do it.

Acceptance -  first off, don’t be surprised if your response is emotional. It’s natural to feel knocked if you are not used to receiving feedback. The way I approach this is to notice the emotion, accept it, and then simply let it pass over me. I learned not to fight it. Just observe it, accept it and let it run its course. Breathing deeply helps.

Objectivity - now give yourself time to allow the emotion to fade away into the distance. For me, this sometimes means leaving it overnight and thinking about it the next day with a clear head. Once you do this, you can observe the feedback objectively. Try to imagine being a neutral third-party observer who was listening to the feedback. Could it possibly be true? Is it possible that with the emotion removed, the perspective offered could be valid? Most of the time, you will find it is.

Helpfulness - the next step, while you are in an objective viewpoint, is to ask yourself whether the feedback is actually useful. Does it help you grow and become a better person? If the feedback was indeed correct, by taking it on board, could you take something from it and grow?

Perspective - now take the time to reflect on why the person gave you feedback. There is often little personal benefit for the other person in feedback. So why did they give it to you? The purpose here is to build an appreciation for the fact that someone was courageous enough to tell you the truth for your benefit. Maybe, just maybe, they were trying to help. So start by offering them thanks, even if it is just in your head 😉

Changes - If you were to make changes because of this feedback, what would they be? What might be involved? List out the key things you would do. And finally, double-check by considering how will you know the changes have stuck?

Effort - some changes require a lot of effort. And sometimes you might not have room in your life to make those changes. Be honest with yourself! If it is too much effort right now then that’s fine. Make note of it and consider implementing it later.

Implementation - assuming you decide to do it, then get on with it! Don’t analyse, don’t think too much, just make a decision that you are going to give this a go and do it.

Follow-up - now comes the moment of truth - go close the loop with the person who gave you the feedback. Discuss whether you are going to do something, what your plan is and ask them to be part of the solution by periodically checking whether the change you are making has stuck.

 

Summary

I have used this simple, 8-Step model to help practice receiving feedback and it has greatly helped me. I hope it goes some way to helping you too.

Please feel free to share your comments and any additional suggestions you have below and let's learn to improve NZ’s feedback culture one step at a time!

I recently spoke with a diverse group of small-medium business owners about how to apply agile in business.  The audience was both big and small firms from almost every business sector conceivable, from manufacturing to construction, media, health care, real estate right through to a large freight and logistics firm.

They had all heard about agile but thought it was just for technology companies. To help them understand how to apply agile in business in very practical day-to-day terms, I had to strip out the jargon and show them how they could apply agile at their workplace right away.

We all found the conversation extremely valuable. They were grateful for someone who could make it real for them. I was grateful for the challenge of explaining agile to an everyday business owner, short of time but wanting to understand how they could get started without all the jargon and terminology.  This article attempts to capture that conversation for others to understand how to apply agile in business.

How to apply Agile in business

Agile’s principles, concepts and tools are applicable to a wide variety of settings, but to bring out its true potential it requires pragmatism and continual refinement, based on what is and isn't working. If you are working in a sector where agile might not feel like a clear-cut fit, here is how I suggest you can apply some basic concepts of agile to see how well it might improve how you work.

Start with Visual Management

Visual Management helps you understand how your work works. It is a simple but important core principle of agile. By visualising the work, we can better understand it and therefore improve it.

In layman’s terms, this means mapping out the steps to take a piece of work from idea to completion.  The easiest way to do this is with a whiteboard or wall space and a set of sticky notes. One useful way to getting underway is to simply start with three columns: To Do, Doing and Done. This allows you to get underway easily and get your work on a visual board. You can then break the work down into smaller steps, continually revising your board until it reflects how your work works.

Visual board to apply agile in business

Remember to avoid perfection. The point isn’t to map out exactly what happens each step of the way! That will result in a visual board for every variation of the workflow which defeats the purpose.  We are only after “good enough to get started” at this point. You will almost certainly evolve your board as you go!

Now it is time to populate your board with work. Again – don’t worry about being perfect. The objective here is to create a visualisation of how work works so you can detect patterns and trends. Let the work help learn what a suitable visual board is for your situation.

Visual board to apply agile in business

Now add a Doing and Done column to each workflow stage. The Done column of one stage becomes the To Do column of the next.

Visual board to apply agile in business

Once you have run some work through your board, start considering what sort of data might help you better understand the flow of work.  Some common things organisations track are:

  • How long a work item spends in a particular column (workflow stage). You can measure this by capturing when a piece of work enters a workflow stage and when it exits.
  • How long a piece of work waits in a workflow stage before it is worked on. This is often referred to as “wait time” and when added up across stages can be quite revealing. In many organisations, around 80% of the time taken for a piece of work to go from start to finish is wait time.
  • How many pieces of work are in each workflow stage? This is referred to as work-in-progress, or WIP. Lots of WIP can be an indicator of trying to get too much work done at once, resulting in less being achieved. A common strategy for dealing with this is WIP limits on each workflow stage.
  • Bottlenecks – the Theory of Constraints taught us that the throughput of a system is limited by the throughput of the narrowest bottleneck. WIP is often a lead indicator of bottlenecks and gives us a good indicator of where we might want to investigate further. Addressing bottlenecks improves the flow of work!

For example, in the above graphic, there appears to be a bottleneck in Editorial, given that all the Draft work is complete and waiting. This would be a great place to explore. Queues tend to indicate downstream bottlenecks!

If you are interested in further reading on visual management, I found this article on Value Stream Mapping useful.

The principles of Scrum for Agile business

Scrum is the most popular agile framework in use today and for good reason – it is an extremely powerful yet simple framework. Now that you have a visual management board underway and can visualise how your work works, try these Scrum patterns.

  • Introduce iterations – an iteration is simply a fixed, time-bound length of work, also known as Sprints in Scrum. Your Sprint length is largely determined by how frequently you want to inspect and adapt the work. The most common Sprint cadence is two weeks.
  • Set a goal for the Sprint – in business terms, what will be different at the end of each Sprint? This forms the “north star” for each Sprint. Why is this goal important? Who will benefit and how? Make this clear to the people who will be doing the work.
  • Plan a Sprint of work – get the people involved in doing the work together to break down how they can achieve the Sprint Goal. The outcome is a plan for the Sprint. It doesn’t have to perfect and don’t go to the level of who will do what, but break the work down into chunks of value and only take on what is achievable in the Sprint. Your objective is to have something 100% done that can be used by others. Rather than take on lots of work, take on less and get it 100% completed. You might have to re-negotiate the Sprint Goal in order to achieve this. In Scrum, this is called Sprint Planning.
  • Every day, everyone involved in delivering the work gets together in front of the visual board for 15 minutes to understand the current state of the work and what the most valuable thing is they can collectively do next 24 hours to progress towards the Sprint Goal. This isn’t a problem-solving meeting. It is a meeting to re-align around the plan and adjust the plan as required. In Scrum, this is called a Daily Scrum or stand-up.
  • At the end of the Sprint, hold a meeting to review what was achieved and consider what might be the best thing to do next Sprint. This should typically involve others in the business who need to understand progress or contribute.
  • Hold a continuous improvement meeting for the team who did the work in the last Sprint. Collaborate to understand what went well that we could do more of, and what areas we could improve. This should be an open meeting that discusses everything, including interpersonal relationships and teamwork.
  • Start another Sprint.

Scrum framework for agile in business The iterative, incremental nature of Scrum can help to bring focus, commitment, alignment and collaboration to the forefront of your business.

If you are finding iterations don’t add value to your work, (for example, your work is highly repetitive and pausing to regularly inspect & adapt doesn't make sense) then drop them. There is no recipe!

Remember, Scrum is based on three important inter-connected pillars – transparency, inspection and adaptation. Our ability to inspect and adapt is largely determined by the transparency of the information. If we don’t increase transparency, then our ability to make meaningful decisions and trade-offs are decreased. A great way to increase transparency is keeping your visual board up to date and having open and honest conversations.

As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I know Scrum extremely well and would caution readers about some of the material on the internet from “Scrum experts”. Credible sources of further reading include Scrum.org and Scrum Inc. In addition, the single source of truth on Scrum is the Scrum Guide, written by the creators of Scrum, Dr Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber.

Minimal viable product thinking

One of the most common mistakes businesses make when learning how to apply agile in business is assuming they need to have the product or service they are developing perfect before engaging customers. Usually, the opposite is true – they introduce significant risk by not getting sufficient customer feedback early enough. A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product or service with enough functionality to obtain feedback and validate the idea as early as possible. This can significantly reduce risk and increase customer value.

To achieve this, you need to re-think the purpose behind each iteration. Is it to deliver work or is it to learn about what the customer really wants and de-risk work?

Minimal Viable Product thinking

In the above example, you can see two different approaches. In the first approach, the requestor has specified the solution - give me a painting that looks like this. The people doing the work have delivered that, one high-fidelity piece at a time. The problem with this is what happens if they are wrong? Even if they are using agile techniques, they must still deliver the wrong thing. In the second example the requestor has outlined the problem they are trying to solve and the MVP approach has been applied to reduce risk and integrate customer feedback.  Coiuld you apply a similar mindset to your work?

If you are interested in diving deeper into the MVP-type space, the books Running Lean and The Lean Start-up are both useful reading.

In summary

In this article, I have tried to share how you can apply agile in business. In my twenty years working in this space, I have learned that the best get familiar with agile is to do it. It is tempting to stand on the sidelines, watching the game play out in order to learn the rules before playing, but I can assure you that in the case of agile, more is learned by playing than watching. Just get in there and do it.

The journey to mastery is however long and difficult. The focus on transparency, visualising work and seeking continuous improvement invites you to be always asking questions of your business, evolving and improving it to be the best it can be. This can be tiring, however, don't we all strive to be the best we can be?

Transparency is critical for agility, but often the power of transparency is challenged by long-hold cultural norms. This article shares examples of the power of transparency and how it can be used to create breakthroughs in performance.

Situation

I was helping an organisation adopt agile ways of working across six teams. We had started well. We had a shared vision for the change and everyone felt excited. We held a series of workshops to upskill everyone and had kicked off strongly.

The teams were full of highly skilled people who knew each other well and had worked together for years. They had been granted plenty of autonomy, were all highly committed and knew the area they were working in very well.

As we progressed, I kept getting a feeling that something wasn’t right. I drive home each day feeling something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. I didn’t know the area of the business nearly as well as they did, but my gut feeling was that they should be getting through much more work than they were.

While reflecting on this I suddenly realised what I needed – transparency. Without transparency, I didn’t really know what is going on.

Creating Transparency

I decided to set up a small experiment. The CEO had made it clear that this project was the number one priority of the entire company, therefore all people working on this were dedicated to it full-time. I decided to test this.

Rather than dig into the details of what everyone was working on (micro-management), I asked them to help me create transparency about where their time was being spent. To do this, I set up a simple board where each day (at our Daily Scrum) each person recorded a green tick if they were doing the 7 hours they were supposed to, or a red cross if it was less than this.

What I saw shocked me. Everyone was red crosses!

As we worked through this, we found something significant - most people were only spending one hour a day on the project.

Despite this being the most important project of the organisation, structured to deliver the most important work first in iterations, the teams were actually working on all sorts of other things!

I remained curious and asked lots of questions. One team member shared an email that read something like this:

No transparencyIt turned out this was happening everywhere. There were literally thousands of invisible undercurrents running all the way through the organisation based on whatever work well-meaning managers were trying to get done. They had no transparency of what was actually going on.

Using The Power of Transparency

This organisation had a hierarchical culture, where success was measured by people doing what managers asked them to do. Well-meaning managers were trying to get their accountabilities delivered, but were creating a nightmare of bottlenecks, delays and dependencies across teams.

I bought the discovery to the Product Owner, who was also a senior manager with a lot of influence in the organisation. He too was shocked yet also thrilled with what we had discovered.

We designed an all-hands meeting where we shared the problem. He then empowered all the teams by asking them to say no to any work that wasn’t part of their current Sprint or was a genuine emergency that had been agreed by the Product Owner. All other incoming work to go to the relevant Product Owners to be ordered on their respective Product Backlogs.

The next Sprint productivity went through the roof. Teams were much more focused and happier. They started delivering significantly better-quality outcomes more frequently.

Winning with transparency

Breaking difficult habits

Six weeks later we hit another brick wall.

The Teams were struggling to manage the volume of support work coming through. It was impacting their ability to focus on project work. They raised it as something they needed our help with to resolve.

We asked them to estimate how much of their time was being spent on support work. They calculated 25%. When then asked them to calculate their per-Sprint capacity. As an example, one team had 8 people, each dedicated 7 hours a day over the 10-day Sprint. Therefore, their capacity was 8 x 7 x 10 = 560 hours. If 25% of their time was being spent on support work, then this was approximately 140 hours. Each team then set aside this amount of time for unpredictable incoming support work.

But to ensure we maintained transparency, we tracked how we were using this time. We created a large public whiteboard where we tracked how much of this time was being used, day by day.

What we discovered shocked us again.

After one week (half the Sprint), they had used all of their support allocation! The amount of support work was significantly more than what they had estimated.

Together, we analysed the incoming support work. It turned out that only a fraction of it was genuine support work. The rest was coming from the same managers as before, who were now gaming the system by putting through their work requests as “support work”. We still had the same problem – just in a different format.

Brick wall

Solution: Increasing the Power of Transparency

To resolve this once and for all, we made a decision to make all incoming support work transparent by putting it on the wall. Each day at our Daily Scrum, the teams and Product Owners agreed how much support work versus how much project work they would do each day.

Productivity shot up again.

We then kicked off a broader piece of work to address the root cause of the problem – the portfolio of work the company was trying to get done. We created an organised, structured and transparent portfolio system where all project were prioritised based on the capacity of the available teams. With all the managers involved aligned, everyone could to get their work done and be successful.

Conclusion

Transparency is your friend. It is easy to blame people when we are getting results we don’t expect, but it is usually the system of work that is the root cause. People don’t want to fail.

Leadership is about creating clarity and an environment where people can be successful and high-performing teams can emerge. As leaders, transparency is an important way of achieving this. Without it, it is difficult to know what is truly going on.

I encourage you to consider how your organisation uses the power of transparency. What could you do to improve it?