martin proulx
Articles de martin :
- Inner silence: To be truly effective at listening to what others are saying and how they are feeling, it is critical to block the voice inside your head – yes that’s right, that voice that rambles all the time saying things such as: I wonder what we’ll eat for dinner tonight?… Damn, I forgot to make reservation for dinner… I hope the kids did well on their math test today… I’m bored… I think I want a coffee right now. I heard the term monkey brain to describe this constant action of jumping around from one thought to the next. To be an effective coach, you will need your monkey brain to calm down so you can find inner peace.
- Stop all judgment: When you coach people, it is easy and unproductive to become judgmental. Comments such as: Wow, that’s a weird comment… I wonder why he’s saying this… There must be some secret meaning to that sentence… I don’t think I’l be able to help her on this topic… I feel insecure… This won’t help be effective at all. Simply listen to what is being said for what it is being said. Judgments will sidetrack your listening abilities and will make you a very poor coach.
- Stay focused: Now that you stopped all judgements and are able to keep the inner voice quiet, you need to remain focused for more than 6 seconds. Yes, just like meditation, this sounds like an impossible task at first but with practice, you will develop your focusing-muscle and the task will get easier with time allowing you to be more present to what the other person is expressing.
- Be present: Be in the moment – right there and then. Listen to what is being said, notice how the person is acting and give her your full attention and make the space secure for the conversation.
- Don’t aim for personal performance: Aiming for an academy award when you are coaching simply doesn’t work. You are not there to impress anyone. Ironically, the more you will try to impress the other person, the less effective you will be. She will will quickly notice that the focus is on you and not her which will make it pretty much impossible to actually support her development.
- Ask open ended questions and wait for the answers: Remember, you are not telling a story, you are there to listen. If you need clarification or want to encourage discussion, simply ask a short question. Trust yourself that the other person will understand your questions and if they don’t, they will quickly let you know. Once you have asked your question, wait for the answer.
- Trust your intuition: If you feel that you need to ask a certain question, then go ahead and ask it. If you believe it is better to wait, then wait. I believe what we call intuition is simply our brain and senses’ abilities to decipher subtle messages from the other person and give us clues as how to interact with them.
- Keep silent: After asking a question, never speak first. Maintain the silence until the other person breaks it. I am a very strong believer in keeping silent. Silence opens up a secure space for conversations and gives all the space to the other person.
- Pay attention to the non-verbal: Words are a great way to communicate but non-verbal clues are usually very useful to understand where the person stands – Are they at a rational level? Intuition level? Emotional level? This information will be very useful to adapt your coaching style.
- Dig deep: It is much easier to stay at the rational level in a discussion. It often leads to contextual information and detailed explanations. To make a real difference, you need to get to the underlying emotions – What are the person’s fears? Intentions? Motivations? Ask feeling-related questions, not logical or rational questions such as: “How do you feel about this event?” instead of “What do you think about this?”.
- Rephrasing: When rephrasing, use the same key words as the other person. The words are usually very meaningful to the other person and will open up relevant information for you.
- No context: Do not focus too much on the context. It is usually good to understand what triggered the actions or where the event took place, but the information usually has very little impact on the person you are coaching.
- Customer-Centric: Exceeds the notion of the business project sponsor to include the corporate strategies and organizational goals. The product owner and team members need to fully understand and be aware of the impact of the solution and its architecture on the overall corporate goals.
- Collaborative and Cooperative: This is not just cooperation between IT and the business, but also within IT departments across the various sections of the organizations, including teams that are not co located.
- Constant Feedback: Though lengthy planning is often eliminated from Agile projects, due to organizational constraints it should not (and possibly cannot) be completely removed. This doesn’t mean to overly invest time and efforts but “just good enough” planning should allow projects to get started. As such, constant feedback isn’t limited to the communication between the IT and Business units but similarly with all support departments and various stakeholders.
- Heterogeneous Environment: There is no magic formula for success, and adaptation is required for a successful adoption.
- Throughout the Software Life Cycle: Agile practices, such as refactoring, applied throughout the life cycle, can extend the useful life of the application.
- Continuous Delivery: Speaks to the need of continuous collaboration between IT and the Business units in the development of a product.
- Adaptive Solutions: Discusses a compromise between a complete top-down architecture and an emerging architecture.
- business strategy
- business deliverables coming from the strategy
- roles and responsibilities at individual and business unit or functional levels
- protocols, or ground rules, for decision making and conflict resolution (see a recent post on this topic)
- business/interpersonal relationships and interdependencies
- Being candid from “wary, closed with hidden agendas” to “candid, open, relaxed, easy to speak your mind” – from “no tolerance for confrontation, conflicts suppressed” to “tensions surfaced, confronted, and resolved”
- Accentuating accountability: putting equal emphasis on cross functional, peer-to-peer accountability, as well as peer-to-leader acountability.
- Identify the decisions that need to be made
- Identify decision subteams
- Assign accountability
- Set objectives and timelines
- Select the decision making mode
- Identify information sources
- Determine the shelf life of the decision
- Waits to be told what to do
- Figures out what needs to be done
- Is a victim of circumstances
- Is responsible for his actions
- Gossips about the motives
- Seeks information to understand
- Whines about the constraints
- Attempts to operate within the constraints
- Complains about his colleagues’ performance
- Holds his colleagues accountable
- Waits for rules to be defined
- Defines the rules of operations
- Reactive
- Proactive
- Self-organized teams can only work with experienced people. Although more experienced individuals may make it easier to self-organize, they can also make it much more difficult due to their old work habits. Overall, the age of the team members or their actual experience doesn’t impact their ability to self-organize. Self-organization has more to do with the people’s willingness to self-organize and the support they get from their manager than it has with age or experience.
- Self-organized teams don’t need a leader. Wrong, self-organized teams still need a leader to move them through the various stages and toward their end goal. This being said, it doesn’t mean that the leader has to be a manager or a person in authority. Quite the contrary. Emerging leadership is a much better way to achieve self-organization but management needs to be patient because self-organization takes time.
- Self-organized teams don’t need managers. Why not? Managers are a key success factor to support self-organization. Once again, this doesn’t mean that the manager is included in the self-organized team or that the manager will be leading the team. As Jurgen puts it – “Agile managers work the system around the team, not the people in the team”.
- Self-organized teams are for everyone. Not necessarily, some people may not be ready for self organization or they may not be willing. Everybody has the capacity to be part of a self-organized team, it is simply a matter of wanting to be part of such a team because it is demanding and requires people to become responsible and accountable.
- Self-organized teams are easy to implement. Really? If it was easy, why wouldn’t everyone adopt self-organization? The fact is that starting at a young age, we keep being told what to do (brush your teeth, go to bed, pick up your clothes, do your homework, show up at the office at 9am, finish the report for your boss, go on vacation in July, retire at 65, etc.) Wanting to be self-organized and taking control of your life is counter-intuitive and difficult. People in self-organized teams often act as victims of circumstances during the early stages (I can’t do this because the system won’t allow me) and then start to notice the opportunity the freedom of choice brings.
- Self-organized teams quickly increase the team’s performance. No, it won’t. The team’s performance will indeed increase and for the long run but self-organization requires time, energy and much efforts to deliver results. If you are interested in quick-wins with minimal investments (time and/or money), I would suggest the Agile magic pill.
- Creating a cooperative has a non-capitalistic connotation: People who initiated the process of selling shares to the employees also wanted to implement a coop as a way to distribute wealth. Unless our implementation of a coop is very different than elsewhere in the world, many people understood a coop to be a non-profit driven initiative and as such, acted accordingly. Having a coop own 25% of the shares led to non-capitalistic behaviors and consequently slowed down growth and profitability.
- Becoming an active shareholder isn’t the norm: Unless you have owned and operated a business in the past, the notion of becoming an active shareholder isn’t easily understood by most people. Many people – still to this day – ask themselves what it means to be a shareholder and how they should act differently. Transforming employees into shareholders is an educational process and unless you invest in training people what it means, the transformation will not give great results.
- Lacking entry criteria brings performance downwards: Since everyone got access to shares without exception, there was no motivation to increase performance – why work harder than the next guy when the results are shared equally. On the other hand, when past performance is used to determine who gets the privilege to own shares, individual and collective performance is increased and as a consequence, the overall performance of the organization goes North.
- Owning shares is a privilege and would be based on past performance;
- Allowing employees to own shares would be done in small increments, and annually (let’s say x% per year);
- Potential shareholders would need to demonstrate their understanding of what it means to be an active shareholder and would need to agree to certain protocols;
- The percentage of available shares would be results-based – the better the organizational results, the more shares would become available.
12 tips to be a better coach
I often hear people saying they are coaching others in an agile context. Coaching is often incorrectly used to mean: consulting, teaching, mentoring and a few other unexpected meanings.
Coaching is very useful to help people get from “point A to point B” and it can be used in various contexts, including coaching for Agile adoption or to help people managers modify their leadership style. Either way, to be powerful, coaching requires a few basic skills and a question from my friend Yves prompted me to describe 12 fundamental elements that I believe are required to be an effective coach. You are more than welcome to share your thoughts.
Are there other tips you would like to share?
Gartner’s Enterprise-Class Agile Development Defined
Gartner’s analysts David Norton and Mike Blechar recently published “Enterprise-Class Agile Development Defined“. Although the content is very light and the findings not revolutionary, the research presents a high level differentiation between enterprise wide Agile adoption and enterprise class Agile adoption.
Enterprise wide Agile adoption
Our definition of EAD differentiates enterprise-class from enterprise-wide. Across the organization (enterprise-wide), organizations might be doing many self-contained/independent agile development projects that are totally unrelated and that meet specific tactical needs. Or, the projects may be first iterations of agile development projects intended to help organizations gain understanding and insight into how the application solution could subsequently be grown into a more complete solution, which will subsequently be integrated into the current application solution portfolio. Most of the agile development projects we see start out without real concern for the longer-term impact on the application ecosystem and broader solution architecture. They generally fail to scale to the needed enterprise-class solution characteristics we identify in this research, even though the project may consist of hundreds of developers and be classified as enterprise-wide.
Enterprise class Agile adoption
Enterprise-class AD includes assessing the impact on the current and future enterprise solution architecture for the organization to make the right business decisions.
One of the key finding presented by the authors is that:
Agile development methods are increasingly being used within organizations as business differentiators, which is raising their profile from tactical project level to a more strategic enterprise level.
And as such, one of their recommendation is that:
Enterprise-class agile development cannot be driven only by the CIO and application development (AD) teams. Strong business commitment is essential. Don’t attempt to drive enterprise agile from an IT perspective, as it will fail.
In their research, the authors have identified seven key elements that collectively, positively impact enterprise wide software development processes. Taken together, these key elements help organizations achieve an enterprise class Agile adoption.
Pyxis Technologies annonce la vente de sa filiale française ut7
Montréal, le 1er juin 2011. ― Pyxis Technologies inc. a annoncé aujourd’hui la vente de sa filiale française ut7. En effet, les employés d’ut7 ont procédé au rachat de 100 % de la société. L’opération de rachat sera en vigueur le 30 juin 2011.
Pyxis Technologies inc. est une entreprise ayant des bureaux à Montréal et à Québec. Elle offre des services de formation, de coaching et de développement Agile. Pyxis Technologies inc. avait ouvert sa filiale ut7 en 2008 à Paris. ut7 est présente à Paris et à Grenoble. Elle propose des services de formation, de coaching et de développement Agile.
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Montréal, June 1, 2011. ― Pyxis Technologies inc. announced today that it has come to an agreement to sell ut7, its French subsidiary. In fact, the employees proceeded with ut7’s buyout. The buyout will be effective as of June 30, 2011.
Pyxis Technologies inc. has offices in Montréal and Québec City. It offers training, coaching, and Agile software development services. Pyxis Technologies inc. opened the ut7 subsidiary in 2008 in Paris. ut7 provides training, coaching, and Agile software development services.
Tribal Leadership – What level of leadership are you at?
There are many perspectives about what leadership is and how it should be done. Contrary to many recipe books on this topic, Tribal Leadership is a useful tool to assess the stage of your personal leadership style and evaluate the impact and the consequences of each stage. Although the backdrop of the book is that a higher leadership stage is better, the real value for me was as a tool to understand the culture and more importantly the people we deal with as part of Agile transitions.
While the majority of leaders in the work place are at stages 2 and 3, Tribal Leadership shares tools and insights to help individuals and organizations break through to the next evolutionary stages – which are usually much easier for a transition.
To help you get a gist of where you may stand as a leader and possibly help you determine at what level people you work with are, the authors provided on their web site a quick map (below).
As Agile coaches, we must often work with teams and their leaders. Understanding the behaviours of the leaders and their motivation is extremely useful. As such, the book presents a model allowing the transformation of Level 1 leaders to higher levels – granted most people start at level 2 or 3.
The book provides rich insights into human behaviour, group dynamics and individual motivation. Overall, it provides a good framework to understand people’s behaviors and with some clear thinking, can lead into actionable strategies to help support an agile transition.
Tribal Leadership is available in audio book [285 Mb zipped file] and in a traditional book format (Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization).
See Dave Logan’s presentation at TED.
Cracking the Code for Standout Performance (part II)
As Agile team coaches or organizational coaches, we aim to increase the teams’ performance in an attempt to deliver better results. We improve quality, help the team work more efficiently, and have fun while delivering increased business value. Interestingly, many of the observations presented in Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance (this is the second part of the book review) are in line with the Agile values and principles. Here are some of the keys points to remember:
THE LEADERS
The leaders have an important role in developing high performance teams. Their actions and behaviors will be closely observed and people will modify their own behaviors based on those of their leaders. Guttman highlights some of the leader imperatives to achieve high performance.
Develop and drive the horizontal vision
An horizontal organization means moving to an organizaton in which everyone operates according to a clearly defined set of decision-making protocols, where people understand what they are accountable for and then own the results.
For an organization to raise its level of performance every team, on every level, must be a great team. That is to say, it must be aligned in five key areas:
Create the right mindset
Provide the right skills
Such as influencing, active listening, assertion, giving and receiving feedback, conflict management, decision making and leadership.
Keep the game and guard the rules
Everyone is clear about and committed to the business strategy and the operational goals that flow from it; undertsands his or her roles and responsibilities, and adheres to agreed-upon protocols, or ground rules for decisions making and for interpersonal behavior, especially those relating to conflict management.
Here’s how great teams make decisions:
Raise the bar
Keep challenging the status quo, revisit the targets and get the team involved in the process.
Be player centered
Leadership is in large part about power – about how it is exercised, shared, delegated, and used. High performance leaders seek to leverage power, not monopolize – to put it to use to drive up their team’s or organization’s performance. Putting the power in the hands of the teams members provides the right conditions to deliver maximum payoffs.
THE PLAYERS
The road to a great team begins with two nuclear elements of team reality: the leader and the team members. Consequently, team members must show four very obvious characteristics.
Think like a director
Keep their eye on overarching goals and the need to stay on top of their competition.
Put team first, function second
They are team members first and functional representatives second.
Embrace accountability
Slowly move from an individual accountability for their own results toward accountability toward the success of the entire organization.
Become comfortable with discomfort
People need to be or become comfortable with the changes required of them and their leader.
Building an outstanding team requires time and energy and is achievable once people agree to work together and pull in the same direction.
Expected behaviors of a self-organized team
Following a recent post on the topic of self-organization, I’m offering a few examples of how people react / should react when a team is self-organized.
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What other behaviours have you noticed?
Agile teams – What people managers can learn from parents
Before I explain what people managers can learn from parents, I feel the need to defuse what some readers may have in mind. I am not suggesting that employees and team members are children or act like babies [although, sometimes ... - sorry, I'm digressing].
The Art of Parenting
If you have children, you should quickly relate to the fact that nothing really prepares us to be good parents. Sure, while growing up we assimilate patterns, behaviours, and skills from our environment – including and often to a large extent from our own parents. At a later stage in our children-free life, some of our friends start to have kids and we observe them – sometimes with curiosity, sometimes out of sheer voyeurism, and sometimes with envy – and that’s when we contemplate the idea of having kids of our own.
Then, one day out of the blue, the kind doctor tells your spouse that she is pregnant – in our case with twins! But that’s an entirely different story 
Then comes the next stage of learning to become a parent, we spent countless hours on amazon.com previewing and ordering books, lot’s of books. Except for a few best sellers, the others titles vary based on our perceived areas of weakness and the bad pattern we noticed from our parents when they raised us.
And one day, a beautiful baby boy is born and/or a pretty baby girl – once again, in our case we got one of each.
Once the sleepless nights are over and the baby is capable of learning, parents slowly transfer increasingly complex tasks to their child: holding the milk-bottle, feeding themselves, walking without holding mommy’s hand, abandoning the diaper, selecting how much ketchup to put on their food, picking their own clothes, walking to school by themselves, deciding what time to go to bed, going to a movie without supervision, and so on up to the point when the child moves out of the house to start their own independent life.
What people managers can learn from parents
It is obvious that parenting is very different from managing people, no doubt about that. On the other hand, their are some similarities.
Nothing prepares people to become good managers. Sure, while growing up in our professional career we assimilate patterns, behaviours, and skills from our environment – including and often to a large extent from our own managers. Granted, some people had the opportunity to learn about management during their school years and that could be an added bonus.
As with parenting, once we decide to get into management we spend countless hours on amazon.com previewing and ordering books, lot’s of books. Except for a few best sellers, the others titles vary based on our perceived areas of weakness and the bad pattern we noticed from our previous managers.
How that applies to Agile teams
Agile management is somewhat similar to the art of parenting with the manager transferring to its team increasingly complex tasks and responsibilities. Helping the team self-organize doesn’t mean to abandon the team to itself without help or some supervision. Along the same lines as parenting, there comes a time when the manager must determine how much responsibility to transfer and what level of support to provide.
Similar to the role of the parent, the agile manager is there to support the team’s development and make it successful and autonomous until one day – maybe – the team is highly performing and can become independent.
The myths of self-organized teams
Many Agile practitioners will push forward the concept of self-organized teams as a first step towards an Agile transition. Unfortunately, self-organization is often mis-understood and many become frustrated with the concept. Below are myths taken from real life situations – including the inner workings of our organization.
Autonomy or self-organization is a strong contributing factor for motivation and motivated individuals lead to improved performance and better results. Attempting to implement self-organized teams without understanding the risks and the energy required isn’t a good idea.
Transforming employees into shareholders may not be a good idea
Logic would tell us that offering shares of your company to your employees (assuming they are offered at a good price) should clearly boost performance and allow the organization to achieve exceptional results. After all, wouldn’t most people work harder, reduce inefficiencies, increase their performance and chase sale leads once they become shareholders?
Turns out logic does not necessarily prevail in this situation and results may not be extra-ordinary.
Let me share with you our not-so-successful experience.
Our experience
I’ve already stated that Pyxis is an experimental laboratory and like many people, we understand that money by itself is not a good motivator. We also believe that sharing the wealth with the people who contribute toward achieving the business results is not only a good idea, but it is for us a morale obligation.
So at the end of 2007, the founder and then CEO agreed to sell 25% of his shares to the employees with the intend to increase performance and share the resulting wealth – in addition to using it as an employee retention strategy. At the time, almost 100% of the employees created a cooperative to own shares of their company. It is important to specify that our province offers important tax credits to employee-owned cooperative – which was an important driver in creating a cooperative.
The conclusion after more than 3 years of having employee-shareholders is that the intend and the objectives were right but the way to achieve them weren’t done right. Why is that? I asked myself.
Below are my conclusions but before we get into those, I believe it is important to understand the distinction between being an employee and being a shareholder.
What is an Employee?
An employee contributes labor and expertise to an endeavour. Employees perform the discrete activity of economic production. Of the three factors of production, employees usually provide the labor.
Specifically, an employee is any person hired by an employer to do a specific “job”. In most modern economies, the term employee refers to a specific defined relationship between an individual and a corporation, which differs from those of customer, or client. Wikipedia
What is a Shareholder?
A shareholder or stockholder is an individual or institution (including a corporation) that legally owns one or more shares of stock in a public or private corporation. Shareholders own the stock, but not the corporation itself. Wikipedia
Clearly, there is a distinction between the role and contribution of an employee versus that of a shareholder. For one thing, transforming employees (with their behaviors and attitudes) into full-fledged active shareholders doesn’t happen over-night. To be honest, it still didn’t happen after over 3 years for almost 1/3 of the employees. Did we hire people who were not driven by results? Well, maybe for a couple of people but certainly not over 30% of the people. So why is it that results didn’t go through the roof?
After much analysis of the situation and heated debates, I believe there are a few reasons why transforming employees into shareholders didn’t give outstanding results:
Consequently, attempting to transform employees into shareholders overnight was a mistake in our case. If we had to do it again, I would still give employees the opportunity to own shares but it would be done according a different approach:
Based on this experience, I would gladly grant shares to employees who clearly understood the meaning and responsibilities of being an active shareholder and who have demonstrated (and are still demonstrating) outstanding performance. Otherwise, there is no wealth to share…
Don’t tell me you really want to increase your team’s performance – I won’t believe you
I bet you $50 that even if I told you the way to boost your team’s performance without increasing your costs – you wouldn’t do it. The situation is actually worst than that! I’ll add another $50 that I even know what you will tell me once I tell you. You will say “We can’t do that in our organization“.
Ready to find out?
Stop assigning people to projects and let them pick the project they wish to work on – that’s it!
I can hear you - ”We can’t do that in our organization” – there, I just saved $100.
Seriously, it is that simple. Think back to a project you worked on – were you assigned or did you select it yourself? Now do this exercise. Think back to something you enjoy, I mean you truly enjoy - were you assigned or did you pick it yourself?
Have you ever heard of Tom Sawyer withewashing the fence? As Mark Twain once said, “Work is something you are forced to do while leisure is something you choose to do”.
I don’t mean to pretend that work is a hobby but many organizations ignore people’s intrinsic motivation and personal drive when they (i.e. the managers) assign people to projects. No matter what the project is about, there will always be people interested in working on such a project. Ever heard of Crowdsourcing?
In most organizations, it may not be easy to let people select their own project, but it is feasible. Some organizational constraints may need to be modified, project assignment may need to be done differently, some resource planning may be required but all of this is feasible.
As one of the participant highlighted “I used to be bored to death in my normal job until one day, I asked (begged) to be part of a specific project. I’m so glad they granted my wish. I now work 55 hours a week! I am super motivated and nothing is going to make me want to leave that project”. Still think letting people select their project is a bad idea? - Analytical-Mind.
Go ahead, give it a try and see the results for yourself. I have tried this approach on many occasions and the results always impress me.