martin proulx
Articles de martin :
- The purpose of a firm is to produce outputs that make money - What is produced is much less of a concern than making money. Key point here is that traditional organizations strictly focus on generating money with little (or no) concern for anything that doesn’t generate money for the shareholders.
- Managers act as controllers of individuals – Traditional organizations need conformity and to get conformity, they need compliance. Having managers control their employees is the preferred method used within those organizations.
- Work is coordinated by hierarchy and bureaucracy – Historically, it was important to get standardization and compliance. As such, traditional organizations have promoted people who were good at ensuring the work of others was being done in accordance to the plans. The hierarchical structure supported by bureaucracy were great ways to ensure standardization, and hence to generate more money. In such organizations, planning, monitoring and reporting were critical activities.
- “The main thing is efficiency” – Since the most important thing the organization were focusing on was to make money, creating efficiencies became a critical activity in the system. Efficiency forces the organizations to look inside as opposed to focusing on the outside (the customers).
- Communicate by directives – The traditional model assumes that people aren’t able to determine the best way to do their work and that they need to be told what to do and how to do it. It also creates a dominating relationship where the one giving the order has more power and authority than the one receiving the order.
- Image by Steve Denning
- The rate of return on assets has fallen by 75% since 1965
- The life expectancy of Fortune 500 firms down to 15 years, and is heading towards 5 years
- Only 1 in 5 workers fully engaged
- New goal for the organization -> delight the customers (from outputs to outcomes)
- New role for managers -> from controller to enabler
- New coordination mechanisms -> dynamic linking
- Shift from value to values -> radical transparency and continuous improvement
- New way to communicate -> conversation (adult-to-adult conversations)
- Image by Steve Denning
Une maison pour les leaders – entrevue avec Rémi Tremblay (2e partie)
Pour faire suite à la publication de la semaine dernière présentant la première partie de l’entrevue avec Rémi Tremblay, je publie aujourd’hui la 2e partie.
Une maison pour les leaders – entrevue avec Rémi Tremblay (1re partie)
À l’automne dernier, j’ai eu l’occasion de me joindre à l’une des cohortes de La Maison des Leaders, une initiative lancée en 2005 par Rémi Tremblay.
À la suite de cette rencontre, je me suis posé plusieurs questions. Puis, dernièrement, j’ai eu le plaisir d’échanger avec Rémi au sujet du leadership et du développement personnel des individus, et ce, dans les bureaux de La Maison des Leaders à Montréal. Nous partageons avec vous le premier segment vidéo d’environ 30 minutes dans lequel les thèmes suivants ont été abordés :
La vague Agile peut avoir un impact sur votre carrière.
Au cours des semaines à venir, nous annoncerons que nous recrutons intensivement. Ce qui est assez traditionnel en soi – plusieurs organisations sont en processus de recrutement –, mais le contexte dans lequel nous le faisons est différent de ce qui se faisait par le passé.
Tout d’abord, nous souhaitons embaucher plus de 20 personnes au cours des prochains mois afin d’aider les organisations à adopter des méthodes innovantes pour accroître de façon importante la performance. Les rôles sont variés. Nous sommes à la recherche de conseillers d’expérience (coach organisationnel Agile, coach d’équipe Agile et Scrum Master), de développeurs de logiciels et de personnel administratif (chef du marketing et des communications et gestionnaire de la marque et directeur de la division des services-conseils). D’autres postes seront ouverts sous peu.
L’énigme des gestionnaires – Où dois-je tracer la ligne?
Pierre se présente pour la réunion de l’équipe avec 5 minutes de retard. Est-ce OK?
Cynthia complète 8 des 9 tâches qu’elle s’est engagée à terminer. Est-ce un problème?
Patrick rate son objectif de ventes de 0,5%. Devrions-nous accepter cela?
En tant que gestionnaires, nous sommes rémunérés pour nous assurer que les gens livrent ce sur quoi ils se sont engagés (entre autres). C’est ce que je définis comme «l’intégrité» – dire ce que nous allons faire et faire ce que l’on a dit. S’assurer que les gens fonctionnent avec intégrité est une tâche difficile!
Revenons à nos 3 questions originales. Qu’auriez-vous fait? Accepter la situation ou faire quelque chose?
To generate great ideas, try self-coaching
Confronted with an issue? Bothered by something? Feeling upset but can’t quite figure out why? Here’s a simple exercise I recently attempted. In this context, I felt frustrated (couldn’t quite figure out why). I had many thoughts in my head but too much negativity to do anything constructive with the ideas.
I decided to try self-coaching. I know it sounds weird – “how can I ask myself powerful questions that will give me the answers I need” – you wonder.
To try self-coaching, I attempted (and slightly modified) an exercise suggested by Mark Levy in his book Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content.
Ready for the solution? Here are the few simple steps.
Dirigeants d’entreprises avant-gardistes
J’ai fréquemment l’opportunité de discuter avec des leaders d’entreprises. Plusieurs d’entre eux sont innovateurs par leurs produits, leurs services ou leurs processus opérationnels et c’est stimulant d’échanger avec eux.
J’ai aussi le privilège, moins souvent cependant, d’échanger avec des dirigeants d’entreprises avant-gardistes par leur gestion des employés. Contrairement à la majorité des entreprises qui considèrent leurs employés comme des ressources humaines, les dirigeants avant-gardistes travaillent avec des êtres humains et comptent sur eux pour atteindre le succès.
Si vous croyez que ressources humaines et êtres humains sont la même chose, vous ne vous qualifiez probablement pas comme un dirigeant avant-gardiste. Désolé!
À mon avis, il y a plusieurs facteurs qui distinguent l’approche de gestion des dirigeants avant-gardistes des autres gestionnaires plus traditionnels. Je vous partage certaines de mes observations.
Lire la suite »
Making the entire organization Agile
At the 2011 Agile Conference, I had the opportunity to attend Stephen Denning‘s session yesterday on Making The Entire Organization Agile and I was wow’d.
Before getting into the details of the presentation, I want to highlight that Steve is not an Agilist – and that’s a good thing. He is the author of many award-winning books (including The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century). Although the main topic covered during the presentation really didn’t have anything to do with Agile per se, it was a very powerful backdrop for coaches attempting the make any organization Agile. Steve has also published a short video that explains his concept.
Now, back to the presentation. [Note that Steve was kind enough to make his slides available to everyone.]
Steve’s presentation began with a simple question “Why do managers act the way they do?“, after all “These are highly intelligent, educated people!“, he said. He then followed by asking a powerful question: “Why did management systematically kill all the creative things in organizations?” To support his point, he provided relevant examples such as: knowledge management, lean manufacturing, innovation, marketing, leadership storytelling, and even Agile and Scrum!
See the connection with Agile transitions now?
The core of his presentation (and of his most recent book) is that “Traditional management rests on five interlocking principles”:
Based on an in-depth research from Deloitte (Deloitte’s Center for the Edge: The Shift Index), Steve presented some alarming statistics:
Based on such statistics, he claims that “Management is broken” (and I would agree) and as a consequence “We have to manage differently!” He proposes 5 fundamental shifts that organizations will be required to make.
Image by Steve Denning
Once Steve presented the five big shifts required for organizational survival, he quickly highlighted which of the 5 shifts the Agile approach are actually impacting, and which areas our community still needs to alter in order to make the entire organization Agile.
Steve rightfully pointed out that the Agile community hasn’t done such a great job at “delighting customers” (not just making them satisfied but really delighting them) and in “altering the conversations”. On this point, that fact that many of the sessions at the 2011 Agile Conference were about coaching, mentoring, and collaboration is a good step in this direction.
Image by Steve Denning
The other interesting observation that Steve had with regards to Agile and the big shifts, is the serious conflict Agile initiatives face (since they only address 3 of the 5 shifts). He explained that Agile transformation are executed while 2 of the required shifts (from “making money for the shareholders” to “delighting customers” and from “top-down commands” to “from commands to conversations”) weren’t being addressed. This situation creates an environment where “organizations are at war with themselves“.
Any Agile coach who has attempted a large scale organizational transition can certainly agree with the statement. The 3 shifts (from controller to enabler, from bureaucracy to dynamic linking, and radical transparency) are the realm in which the Agile teams are successful. Unfortunately, they are rapidly confronted to the remaining 2 traditional perspectives.
This is the area I referred to as the Level 5 – Management Level Maturity and where many paradigms need to be altered (such as the role of the Agile manager in a self-organizing team, among other things).
Image by Steve Denning
In the end, it is very interesting to realize that the shifts that are currently taking place within the software development field are not unique and specific. Many (most?) of the various industries are currently going through such fundamental shifts and we can learn from their experience along with continually improving our approaches.
For those with a systemic perspective, Steve provided a simple comparison between traditional management and the suggested radical management.
The presentation was, by far, the best one I attended during this week… so far!
Adapting your leadership style to the maturity level of your self-organizing team
Unless they are adopting Agile for the wrong reasons, people managers find themselves facing an interesting decision – “Am I willing to let go some control in order to take advantage of the benefits associated with Agile?”.
Being human, it is difficult not to resist change unless we know what to expect from the future and clearly understand the implications for us. Once the future becomes clearer, we can start to appreciate the need to change. That’s just the beginning… Change for what?
In his book, Jurgen Appelo presents various levels of decision making and manager involvement in the context of Agile adoption. I took the liberty to build a matrix (see below) to match Jurgen’s various leadership styles to the 7 stances of a self-organized team [a pdf version of this matrix is available for download].
(1) Taken from: Agile self-organized teams – is the team self-organized or not?
(2) Taken from: Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
The matrix presents which leadership style the manager should be using based on the level of maturity of your team. Hope you will find it useful!
Pyxis à la conférence Agile 2011
Comme par le passé, Pyxis sera présent à la conférence Agile 2011 qui se tiendra à Salt Lake City.
N’hésitez pas à venir discuter avec : Dominic, François, François, Jean-François, Martin et Yves.
Urban Turtle est aussi commanditaire de l’événement. Venez rencontrer l’équipe et son invité mystère dans le hall des exposants.
Agile managers do not act like cowboys
Managers are expected to get their teams to deliver on the objectives that are established. Managers are also expected to keep their people happy and motivated. How can one accomplish these two seemingly incompatible expectations?
Let’s first distinguish management from leadership.
Management books often make a distinction between managers and leaders, depicting leadership as if it is more about heroics than management. [...] Managers are then advised to transform themselves to leaders, turning employees into willing followers, instead of herding them like sheep. [...] Separating leadership from management is like comparing women to humans. It doesn’t make sense. [...] Comparing women to men seems more logical to me. - Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
I agree with Jurgen that leadership is one of the ways to accomplish a manager’s role.
Along the same lines, I hear from time to time conversations within Agile circles and read Agile related blog posts promoting soft leadership, leading without authority and laissez-faire [The latter is sometime mistakenly perceived to be self-organization. Self-organization is something else and requires clear boundaries, but that's for another post] as the answer to the management conundrum. Is that really the silver-bullet?
In almost all organizations, the manager’s role is fairly similar.
Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal. [...] Since organizations can be viewed as systems, management can also be defined as human action, including design, to facilitate the production of useful outcomes from a system. This view opens the opportunity to ‘manage’ oneself, a pre-requisite to attempting to manage others. - wikipedia
For a large number of individuals in management responsibility, authority is perceived to be the most effective tool to ensure compliance and to get people to do with is expected. Please bear with me, the analogy isn’t perfect but the image is powerful. For me, authority is similar to carrying a gun [or whatever your preferred weapon happens to be].
It is easy to obtain compliance and get people to do what we tell them to do when we – the managers – are the only people carrying a weapon. It is especially true if the weapon is constantly out of the holster and pointing directly at the team [figuratively speaking, of course]. So authority gets us compliance (for most part) and may allow us to meet our objectives (some of the time) but authority doesn’t bring the best out of people. Authority certainly doesn’t make people happy and motivated.
On the other hand, if we aim to keep people happy and motivated first, we are more likely to adopt a laissez-faire approach.
Lewin often characterized organizational management styles and cultures in terms of leadership climates defined by (1) authoritarian, (2) democratic and (3) laissez-faire work environments. Authoritarian environments are characterized where the leader determines policy with techniques and steps for work tasks dictated by the leader in the division of labor. The leader is not necessarily hostile but is aloof from participation in work and commonly offers personal praise and criticism for the work done. Democratic climates are characterized where policy is determined through collective processes with decisions assisted by the leader. Before accomplishing tasks, perspectives are gained from group discussion and technical advice from a leader. Members are given choices and collectively decide the division of labor. Praise and criticism in such an environment are objective, fact minded and given by a group member without necessarily having participated extensively in the actual work. Laissez-faire Environments give freedom to the group for policy determination without any participation from the leader. The leader remains uninvolved in work decisions unless asked, does not participate in the division of labor, and very infrequently gives praise. - wikipedia
When nobody carries a weapon, such as in the case of laissez-faire leadership style, people are freer to select goals that appeal to them and are more likely to be successful at reaching their objectives. Unfortunately, managing people (as in the wikipedia definition “getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives”) becomes extremely difficult and maybe impossible in a business context (trust me, we have tried that unsuccessfully).
To be an agile manager doesn’t mean to avoid using authority and to strictly rely on our influencing capabilities. It doesn’t mean to let people determine the business orientation that the organization will be taking either. As in many fruitless debates, taking an “either or” perspective doesn’t lead to the best answer. Agile managers need to be able to use authority, but not as their primary tool.
Let me explain.
Agile managers need to take the time to explain the objectives they aim to achieve and get people to follow them (leadership) into attempting to reach the objectives. Just like good diplomats, agile managers should begin with good listening skills, influence, and negotiation when they are faced with people resistance and challenges. Only in extreme cases should we turn to authority to get people to do what we need them to do. Like many things in life, using authority comes at a cost (diminished commitment from the team, reduced motivation) and as such, should be used wisely.
This leads me to my last point. In addition to management skills, people’s tolerance to stress needs to determine if they should be entitled to manage a team. As most psychometric tests can tell, we – humans – tend to operate differently when we are within our comfort zone (low stress) or outside our comfort zone (high stress). While in our comfort zone, we usually take advantage of many of our built-in or acquired skills which doesn’t increase one’s anxiety level. By contrast, stepping too much outside our comfort zone leads to decreased performance and substantially increased anxiety levels. People for who management is within their comfort zone or people who have better abilities to deal with stress are less likely to use authority as their primary tool. As such, agile managers are more likely to wait until the situation is critical before they even think of going “Clint Eastwood” on people.
So next time you are thinking of promoting someone in a management position, do not simply look for their skills. Assess their ability to manage their stress level.