Skills are only half the equation

A while back I posted a little piece on Lewin's succinct statement B=f(P,E). That little post grew up to be an article, posted on stickyminds. (It's on the front page this week, after this week you might have to do a search to find it.)

masterful facilitation

I spent last week at the annual International Association of Facilitators conference in Scottsdale. This is one of the conferences I go to for myself (though I did offer a session on Facilitating Learning for Project Teams).

One of the highlights for me was watching Jim Rough give a little demonstration of the method he developed, Dynamic Facilitation. Jim works in a lot of high conflict situations and manages to energize people towards creative solutions even when they start far, far apart.

So Jim gets 70 people into a room and then tells us we're going to talk about the war in Iraq. Just a little potential for volatility.

One guy stood up and stated his point of view.

A big, tall guy leapt to his feet and loudly stated: "I disagree!"

Yikes, I though, this could get exciting.

But Jim did something masterful.

He moved into the big tall guy's field of vision and said quietly "Hold on, talk to me." As the guy moved, Jim moved with him, always in his field of vision, quietly saying, "Talk to me."

The big tall guy's voice settled... and he said his piece to Jim. It shifted from being a direct attack or response to the other guy. There wasn't any escalation.

And then we moved on to another person, bringing another point of view into the room. And it continued that way. People stated opposing views, but with an aim of finding some action we could all support rather than winning a debate or shouting down the other side.

It's fun to see a master at work.

Now I'm off to the Agile Development Conference. More fun.

Relational Skills

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about an article in HBR that talked about the magic that "people people" do. Now the article is excerpted here.

And to go with it, here's a snippet from a post by Dave Hoover, who, I suspect, is a very much a people person:

As I throw myself into a new, technically challenging project at DaimlerChrysler, I see great opportunities for deepening my technical abilities. But I also find myself in the familiar position of Waking Holgar. I believe that I will contribute more to my current project by working to improve the team than with any technical contribution I could make.

You dah man.

The 2nd quarter issue of my newsletter is now available. Yes, it is still 2nd quarter

If you'd like a copy, send me an email with your surface address... it's on paper.

Facilitative Leadership

I've been thinking a lot about the style of leadership that's needed with self-organizing teams, and how it's different from traditional top-down models. I think this captures the contrast:

	Hierarchical Leadership	Facilitative Leadership
Assumes	Top down authority	Many diverse perspectives
Knows	What to do	How to do -- methods, tools
Seeks	The "right" decisions	A decision the group will own
Relies on	Individual ability	Group ability

(I first came across this via the ICA.)

This is how the two styles play out on a team:

A hierarchical leader...

manages conflict

makes decisions

coordinates work and communication

establishes implicit norms for the group.

A facilitative leader...
supports the group to

manage their own conflicts, solve their own problems and make decisions

coordinate their own work and communication

define team values, ground rules and norms

Facilitative leaders help the group be more effective by improving the group's process and participation.

Jerk is not a protected class III

I came across Robert Sutton's article, Nasty People via Johanna's Hiring Technical People blog.

Sutton reiterates the costs of tolerating abusive behavior in the workplace and poses three strategies to keep the workplace a jerk-free zone:

Avoid hiring jerks in the first place. Sutton says, "Indeed, the difference between the ways a person treates the powerless and the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know." To find out how to assess this, see Weed Out the Not-So-Nice in Hiring for a Collaborative Team & Johanna's advice on asking behavior questions and obtaining a range of references.

Fire jerks when the show their true colors. Sutton points out that it's easier to fire an abusive manager when the company policies are on jerk-behavior are explicit...so...

Make it clear and explicit that asshole behavior isn't tolerated within the company.

Of course, jerks aren't always easy to see:

Many of abuisve people can be charming, and often are charming to the people who manage them.

People who are abused tend to start second-guessing their own perceptions They may even believe they brought this behaivor down on themselves, so they don't report the abusive behavior.

If you are a manager and hear reports that someone on your staff is behaving abusively, don't assume that because the person never blows up at you that the abuisve behavior doesn't exist. Investigate, get more data, and let the alleged abuser know that you are paying attention. Consider brining up the issue in a one-on-one meeting, saying "Some people feel that you abuse them. What can you tell me about that?"

Sutton poses this two-part test to assess wether some one is abusive (Feb 2004 issue of HBR):

"After talking to the alleged asshole, do people consistently feel oppressed and belittled by the person, and, especially, do they feel dramatically worse about themselves?

Does the person consistently direct his or her venom at people seen as powerless and rarely, if ever, at people who are powerful?"

Think your manager is abusive? See Is Your Boss a Bully? on stickyminds.com. (I've written about this topic before here and here.)

I'll end by quoting another eminent expert :-)
"Verbal abuse is never acceptable. People who cannot manage themselves should not manage others. No ifs, ands, or buts. No excuses. End of discussion."

The Promise of Feedback

One of the promises of all the agile methods is frequent feedback about the state of the project and the product. With frequent feedback, we can adjust our actions and goals based on the current reality and manage empirically. Sounds good, but the practice isn't always so easy.

A few weeks ago at the Scrum Gathering in Vienna, Tom Ayerst and I had a conversation about this very topic.

Here’s what I’ve observed:

A person can hear and act on feedback when

He feels he can do something about the feedback, he has other options and actions at his disposal. People who only know one way to do things or have a limited repertoire or actions may hear the feedback, but they don’t know what else to do.

He can deal with his own feelings when things don’t go perfectly. Paradoxically, many people who are very bright don’t have much experience handling feelings of failure… so they avoid or block out information that might point up problems to avoid uncomfortable feelings. Other people have such low self-esteem that they can’t tolerate feelings of failure and block out useful, but not happy information about the current state.

He doesn’t believe he’s 100% responsible. This is too big a weight to carry, and can sink people to the point that they cannot bring their intellect to bear on the problem

He doesn’t believe he’s 0% responsible. People who feel that they aren’t in any way responsible for the situation see themselves as victims or blame others. When it’s all someone else’s fault, it’s easy to blame, but hard to take constructive action.

Feedback is information… sometimes it’s not what we want to hear, but it’s crucial if we want to adjust and choose actions that are more effective.

Also see Facing Up to the Truth, a little story about two managers and how they responded to project feedback.