When we view how most organizations and practitioners undertake a transformation such as Agile, DevOps or Product, we see a number of repeating mistakes being made by these organizations and practitioners. The first mistake involving leadership is two-fold: providing the wrong training and not unlearning their ingrained behaviors.
When undertaking a transformation that requires leadership to think and act in new ways, you first have to help them unlearn their ingrained ways of working. This is where the concept of Active Inertia applies. If we can get leadership to step back and understand why their traditional ways of working will not work in today’s rapidly changing environment, only then will we have any real chance at truly changing their ways of working and gain their support. The second part of this equation is providing the correct learning to leaders, providing Scrum or Kanban training is not what leaders need and worse you are not talking their language.
An example of what leaders really need to learn about in a transformation is organizational alignment. When we talk about organizational alignment we are not talking about Epics, Features, User Stories or OKRs. Yes, all of these are pieces of organizational alignment, but they themselves are not organizational alignment. Instead, we are talking about how an organization’s strategy cascades down to the lowest levels of the organization and then cascades back up. Ask yourself these questions, if you ask members of the organization at the lowest level of the organization to succinctly explain the organization’s strategy, can they? Are you overwhelmed with meetings or emails? Do you hear individuals or teams make comments such as we were told we had to use Scrum, or we had to use this tool? These are all classic signs of misalignment.
These are just a few of the themes we explore in the Leadership Learning Path.
