Is This Company Agile?

Recently Boris Gloger tweeted the question:

Why do you work for a non-agile company? (1) › bor!sgloger - http://t.co/4L3LcTNOAa
— Boris Gloger (@borisgloger) October 3, 2013

This made me think: "If I would switch positions to another company - how could I find out, if it is really agile?".

My first approach to answering this question was to answer the following two questions:

• Which interfaces are there between me and this company?
• How can I see, if it is only the interface looking agile or the whole company beeing agile?

This resulted in the following list of companies interfaces:

• Web Page
• Building
• Job Interview
• Friends working there
• Social Media
• Classical Media (e.g. Newspaper)
• Rating Sites (e.g. WorldBlu, Kununu, glassdoor)
• E-Mail
• Phone call
• Job Advertisement
• Products
• Customers

I tried to figure out, how one could possibly learn about the agility of an organization by observing those interfaces. And failed. The only interfaces, that are likely to give some clue about agility are the two "organic" ones where you meet somebody working in this company:

Job Interview

In 2012 I participated in a Stoos Stampede session, where some guys collected a large set of really nice questions for a job interview. Some other guys even ordered them in a nice way. I think this is a good resource to look at before your next job interview.
Anyway - you should take a round trip through the company and have look in the faces of people. Observe their interactions and just listen to what happens, what does not happen and how people behave.

Friends working there

Probably the best source for information about any company is your network. Look out for friends and people you know, working for this company. You should ask them every question, that you are interested in and will very likely get an honest answer.
However: Even friends and relatives have different receptions of reality and different tastes!

What else?

After looking on the other interfaces for several days and trying to figure out, how agile companies differ from non-agile companies, I realized that this is probably a mission impossible: Being agile is a deeply cultural thing (as you can see e.g. here and here) and you will not be able to assess a companies culture by observing artifacts only.

So - what else?

I then remembered a really good book, I read some months ago: "The Corporate Culture Survival Guide" by Edgar H. Schein. Schein proposes a cultural model in this book, which consists of three levels:

• Artifacts: All the things you can see, hear, taste, ... All of the non-organic interfaces mentioned above are artifacts.
• Espoused Values: This are the values, the organization communicates actively. E.g. "customers first" or "employees first".
• Tacit Assumptions: This is the real hot stuff. Tacit assumptions are things everybody in the organization knows implicitly and which determine the factual behaviour of employees. This is the core of the companies culture.

(I already explained this and other culture models in a former blog post)

Schein additionally proposes a workshop format to assess a companies culture. This consists of seven steps where three steps are actually used to investigate the tacit assumptions, i.e. the real culture of a company:

1. Identify and list artifacts: Look at all artifacts, you can observe. To do this for a company, you are not part of, you can use the interface list above and observe, how the company behaves over this interfaces. Do they react fastly on customers questions? How does the building of the organization look like? What about the design and usability of the website?
2. Identify the organizations espoused values: Try to get all statements about companies values, you can get. A good way to do this is the web site, where you might find a blog or other content about companies values. Another way is to search the web for the companies vision and mission. Especially the latter one will probably contain some espoused values.
3. Compare values with artifacts: Write all identified artifacts on the left side of a whiteboard or sheet of paper and all espoused values on the right side. Look out for conflicts between espoused values on the right and artifacts on the left. If you find a conflict, you have likely found something that points to a deeper lying tacit assumption held within this company.

If you have this list of tacit assumptions, you will probably get a good feeling for the agility or non-agility of a company. If you take this list to your job interview at this company and discuss it with your counterpart, you are very likely to get a good sense for the agility of the company you are interested in.

Do you have any other ideas, how one might be able to find out how agile a company is before one joins the company? Please use the comments section and spread your ideas!

Update 1: Further Readings (Blog posts recommended to me after publishing this, etc.)

• "Perspectives on Rightshifting" - Bob Marshall

Leadership Dojos

I see – and hear of – many organizations having trouble with leadership. Starting with the question „what is leadership?“ reaching to problems in concrete application of leadership skills in daily business. One urgent question is: „How can we make clear to leaders in our organization, what leadership is and what our organizations expectations to leaders are?“. Seminars and trainings are a frequently chosen approach in trying to sharpen the understanding of leadership in a company. But I have my reasons to doubt this tools are working.

A very pragmatic and effective way to deal with problems of alignment and lack of practice in software development and coaching are coding dojos and coaching dojos. I tried both tools and found them to be very useful in making clear what the expectation of the trainer is and recieving valuable practical lessons. Transfering this concept to the topic of leadership could look as follows:

1. Choose a standard – but not so easy – situation from the field of leadership (e.g. a worker is not motivated, there is a conflict between two co-workers, etc.)
2. Try to model the situation as good as possible and prepare a role play. There are three roles: the „leader“, the „challenger“ and the „observer“. Distribute these roles to at least three people („challenger“ and „observer“ might be taken by more than one person)
3. Take a time frame of approximately 30 minutes and a room where the prepared situation would be likely to happen in reality.
4. The „challenger“ will now try to play his prepared role as good as possible and the „leader“ has to try to „solve“ the given problem. The „observer“ is not allowed to speak and just observers the situation and makes notes for a later discussion.
5. After playing the role play for 30 minutes the game is stopped and the observer tells the leader about his observations. At this point expectations of an organization to their leaders can be made clear in a very practical, effective and sustained way (if the observer knows about these expectations).
6. Restart at step 1 based on the feedback oft the observer.

Did you try something like this before? What are your experiences? Do you have further ideas for concrete situations to role play? Feel free to use the comments section for your feedback!

Promote Your Teams

Promote your teams!

Last year I wrote a blog post about self-organization. During the last weeks I talked, read and thought a lot about this topic and my (not so groundbreaking) conclusion so far is, that self-organization describes a great variety of possibilities to organize yourself.

An interesting and fundamental model of levels of self-organization can be found in Hackman's book "Leading Teams". He describes four such levels:

1. Manager-led teams (team executes team tasks)
2. Self-managing teams (team monitores and manages work process)
3. Self-designing teams (team designes itself and the organizational context)
4. Self-governing teams (team sets its own overall direction)

Hackman writes, that well functioning teams are mostly on levels 2 and 3. But even on those two levels you can certainly find more distinct levels of self-organization and team responsibility.

After all I read and saw so far, the effectiveness of a team correlates strongly with its ability to self-organize. The more a team is able to work on level 3, the more effective it can be. But sadly not every team is able and/or willing to take the responsiblities necessary to function well on level 3 without damaging its context or parts of the team.

After this being said - this sounds very much like a classical career path to me. Not for individuals, but for whole teams. If your goal is to develop effective teams in your organization and you believe, that a high level of responsibility and self-organization is necessary to become effective as a team - then why don't you make this explicit by having a team career path? This might be one way, to empower your teams step by step. Of course it must be clear which levels exist, and what preconditions and responsibilities are bound to what level. Additionally you will surely need some expert coaching for your teams to guide them on their way up the team career ladder.

Don't get me wrong - I do not say that you should abolish individual career paths. I just suggest to have an additional career path for teams, too. Furthermore the rewards for climbing up this career ladder must not be financial ones, but just giving a team more freedom and rights in its actions if it has proven to be able and willing to take more responsibility.

What do you think about the idea of team careers? Do you have any experiences with concepts like this?