Coach Dan's Blog

Happy Monday. As you set your goals for the upcoming week, why not challenge yourself to try one small thing? Leaders who ask questions instead of giving instructions create an enviornment where team members feel empowered and passonate about solving problems. 💡 "What are your ideas about how to solve this?" 💡"If you were me, how would you address this?" 💡"If you could solve this problem right now, what would you do?" Give your team members the space to be creative, and the support to implement their own solutions - and they will thrive! What's stopping you from making a small change today? We all win together.  

The key to unlocking your team's full potential? Balancing the 3 Es - Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Engagement. While many organizations focus solely on efficiency, measuring and optimizing for results, this approach can lead to limited long-term value. By inspecting and balancing the 3 Es, leaders can enable cross-functional teams to achieve their full potential indefinitely. Don't limit your team's success - prioritize effectiveness and engagement alongside efficiency.

One of the most important contributions that leaders can make in any transformation is to model the types of behaviors that we want teams and team members to adopt!  Modeling our target behaviors sends a very clear message that we are invested in not only changing the way we approach work, but also the culture that enables and reinforces those target behaviors.  Making small but thoughtful changes in the way you present yourself to your teams and partners can go a long way in creating the kind of organization we need.  As you’re working with your teams and partners, consider incorporating just one small thing from the following ideas. Pro tip – Don't have time to read this whole document right now?  Check out the “tl;dr” (Typed Long; Didn’t Read) section at the bottom of this post for an executive summary. Emphasize outcomes and put a premium on achieving business results rather than focusing on output.  Agile minded leaders view results in terms of achieving b...

  I ' ve heard a lot of talk about empowerment lately, so I thought I might offer a perspective (and maybe some advice) on the topic.  Let's start with a definition we can all rally around, shall we? "Empowered employees believe they have the tools, resources, autonomy and support they need to act independently and be held accountable for the decisions they make" - Society for Human Resources Management. As much as we'd like, this doesn't just magically happen..... If you show up on a Tuesday and say " OK team, you're empowered ".  I'm sorry to tell you, you will be pretty disappointed in the results. You see, for employees to actually act independently -  to make decisions on behalf of the company - to help them achieve their objectives, people have to feel  safe .  Employees have to feel like they have the ability, but also the backing by their managers and leaders, so if a mistake is made, the don't find themselves under a bus.  Empowe...

 Empowerment begins with your team feeling psychologically safe. This week's blog post is specially crafted for leaders, managers, product managers and product owners.  Don't let that slow you down if you have a different fancy job title, of course, but today I'm speaking directly to the leaders of teams! One of my favorite definitions of empowerment comes from CEQ, Collaborative Equalit y: “Empowerment is defined as …the largest amount of voluntary and discretionary action in support of the company’s goals.  It is people proactively, and habitually, doing the right things at right time; people working out what’s needed and acting without instruction; people looking within the team for support, not looking upwards for answers." Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?  Problem is, it doesn’t just happen!  You have to work every day at creating and maintaining an environment where your teams feel safe to “work out what’s needed and act without instruction.” Here are some...

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Empathy, I think, is one of those things that is easy to define and hard to employ.  You can pretty easily find a consensus  on what the word means - I'll even save you the trouble and Google it... It's the ability to make a connection to a feeling someone else is having about a situation, and being able to experience that same feeling yourself.  It's hearing about a sick child at home, and feeling a little worried, scared, and sad yourself.  It's hearing about a won lottery ticket, and feeling excitement yourself.  As with anything worth doing - it can be harder to do than it sounds.  It IS however, a critical skill to employ if you are truly interested in understanding what someone is trying to communicate to you. Forbes recently published a short article outlining some of the positive business outcomes when comparing companies whose employees reported that their leaders were empathetic vs those who didn't. Innovation . When people reported their leaders ...

Empowered teams self organize around a shared objective, and optimize themselves around achieving it. That all starts with team members who feel empowered, and frankly... that starts with you!  “I want you actively to train your people on how to think for themselves” - Eiji Toyoda "Think more like a gardener, less like a general." - General Stanley McChrystal It's often faster to solve the problem instead of challenging people to stretch and grow. How you interact with your team tells them a lot about how empowered they are to self-organize and optimize. Every interaction is a chance for you to help a person feel empowered. The next time you interact with a team member, challenge them to decide...  Are your team members... ...asking for permission? Instead of "Yes" or "No" ... try: "What would you say if I was asking you for permission to do this?"  "How does this help you to achieve your team's shared objective?"  "How ca...

Schedule your very own Mistakes Meeting! Creating a culture within (and across) a team that encourages people to live and breath the agile values and principles requires trust, and that takes being transparent, having a growth mindset and looking to continuously improve!   One way to encourage an agile team culture is to start treating mistakes like what they are…. opportunities to learn and improve! The following activity is borrowed from http://www.workplacestrategiesformentalhealth.com and can be incorporated into one of your existing team meetings or retrospectives, or can be a stand-alone event.  By making this activity a recurring exercise – you help to build a culture where transparency and growth are reinforced (not to mention coming up with some really good ways to continuously improve the way your team works!) IF you have any questions, or would like any support, don’t hesitate to reach out to a coach or your scrum master. That's what they are there for! Go out...

Oh what a loaded question, right?  So much going on in the last month or so.  So many ways to answer that question! We can think of a leader’s time and energy being split into 4 quadrants:  While leaders have to spend time and energy in all four of these quadrants, “agile leaders” (leaders who truly embrace our shared agile values and principles, and challenge their teams to be Effective, Efficient and Engaged) spend the bulk of their time in “People Developer” and “Process Improver.” Where do you spend your time? So my question to you Managers and Leaders...  where have YOU been spending most of your time lately?   What part of the quadrant have YOU been spending the most of your time over the last few weeks?  Even with all of the craziness, challenges and uncertainty of the last month – are you actively looking to grow your team?  One way to reflect is to ask the following questions to yourself... Did I create an environment where my team member...

One of my favorite responsibilities is facilitating the Agile Leader Onboarding sessions.  In these events - I get to talk to managers and leaders about the agile values and principles, how agile frameworks add value, and about how managing and leading people is very different in an agile environment.  Inevitably we get into great conversations about what needs to be done differently, and what we can start doing now - today - to reinforce a shared agile mindset and help our transformation move forward.  Every session - we end it with a challenge for the participants - try one thing.  Try one different thing with your team members, your partners or peers to help reinforce an agile mindset. About two weeks later - we get the each group back together and ask them "Ok - what did you try?  What did you observe?  What did you learn?"  Then we sit quietly and wait for someone to speak up.  Without fail, I hear stories of managers and leaders who did do t...

  As I was doing some exploring this weekend, I came across a great article that resonated with me on so many levels.  I'm sharing an excerpt of the content here with you along with some thoughts to consider as you continue your agile journey!  The full article can be  found here  if you're interested.   Ownership? When the work is complex, when teams have to grow continuously, and when employees have to find creative solutions every day to really help customers, something special is needed to be successful. When every situation, challenge, and customer is too unique, people need to be empowered to think and decide for themselves. Ownership ensures that they think outside the box to come up with innovative solutions that really help customers. In case of unexpected problems, difficult challenges, or when things go wrong, ownership ensures that teams feel responsible to solve this. They don’t have to wait for others to come up with solutions. When they feel ...