The Challenge: Addressing Shallow Communication in a Newly Re-Missioned Team In 2019, I worked with a feature team that was about to re-mission, and that would receive expanded responsibilities. The re-missioning necessitated a wider range of skills which resulted in the addition of three new team members. Initial Team Structure and Challenges Prior to the re-missioning, the team consisted of seven members, an Engineering Manager (EM), and a Product Manager (PM). Despite having worked together for over a year, communication within the team remained somewhat superficial and some critical conversations were not taking place. During one-on-one meetings between the EM and team members, topics surfaced that would have been more…
EPIQ Feedback Model Workbook
The EPIQ Feedback Model
Feedback is a hot topic, but not everyone agrees about its usefulness. Some praise feedback as something fundamentally important, while others claim that, even with a well-intentioned feedback model, it’s directly harmful to relationships and self-esteem. I’ve spent many years learning about and observing feedback. I’ve seen how feedback can both unify us and divide us. I’ve also come to learn what distinguishes great feedback from mediocre or even harmful feedback. Over the years, I’ve distilled my observations and research into a feedback model, and in this post, I share that model. I call it “The EPIQ Feedback Model”. So join me and explore how Empathy, Position, Intention, and Quality…
The Importance of Peer Feedback in Self-Managing Organizations
I’ve written about how to give effective feedback using the EPIQ Feedback Model. That’s an important part of building a strong feedback culture, but there’s more to it than that. In any organization, but especially in a self-managing organization, we must have strong peer feedback loops in place in order for the organization to build a feedback culture. Why exactly is a strong feedback culture so important in self-managing organizations? Well, self-managing organizations distribute leadership and decision-making. Doing so comes with a lot of benefits. But if people are unable to effectively manage themselves and make decisions, a self-managing organization will inevitably fail. Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters can certainly…
The Four Intentions Feedback Model
Two years ago I worked with a team that struggled with delivering feedback to each other. Team members would try to express something to either raise each others performance levels or to improve working relationships, but somehow something would always seem to go wrong and they ended up triggering each other. This damaged their productivity and morale to an extent that several people left the team. The remaining team members went through feedback training and coaching, and we looked at how the intentions behind feedback are the foundation for constructing constructive feedback. For example, feedback about performance and feedback about working relationships sound very different but the members of this…
Feedback workshop facilitation guide
For the past two years I’ve been facilitating and evolving a hands-on feedback workshop for existing teams that I have run with support teams, dev teams, and lead teams with positive results. I’m now sharing it in the hopes that it helps bring people and teams closer together, and improves the collaboration, all across the world*. Feel free to use it as it is, or change it as you see fit. Also please share your experiences with it! :) * With that said, I don’t think it’s wise to run this workshop if you do not have adequate/significant experience from feedback, self-awareness increasing activities such as Johari Window, and facilitation.
7 Things To Think About When It Comes To Feedback
When I worked as an Agile Coach at Spotify, people were surprised to learn that, contrary to popular belief, Spotify was in fact very hierarchical (6 layers from CEO to developer). It was also true that we valued peer feedback and self-management within each of these layers. Effective feedback and feedback training were crucial factors in making sure we stayed lean despite the hierarchy that had accumulated over the years. In one of the feedback workshops I facilitate, participants are asked to discuss “things to think about when considering giving feedback to someone”. The following 7 points are the ones that come up most frequently in these discussions. I’ve long…
Grassroots movements at work – How management interventions affect agency
The best way to kill a grassroots movement at your company is to assign an owner, sponsor, or steering group for it. Below is a story about ACME, a fictitious software company, and how it responded to a grassroots movement. In the story, I discuss things to be aware of when new grassroots movements form both as a member of the movement and as upper management. I share pitfalls and summarize takeaways so that you can be more mindful of how to let the energy of grassroots movements flourish in your organization. Grassroots movements have agency. What is agency? Agency is power of action. It’s the ability…
Coaching teams that do not want to be coached
Anyone doing Agile Coaching long enough will inevitably find themself in a situation coaching teams that: do not want to be coached. should not be coached. cannot be coached. do not respond well Your coaching. The differences between these situations are significant. Yet it is difficult for many coaches to understand what situation they are in. One reason for that is the similarities in how these situations display themselves: You’re being challenged directly There’s poor meeting attendance The team has an inability to generate actions despite meeting, or to act on actions The teams proposed solutions have no bearing towards their problems or goals There are interpersonal conflict in teams…
The Spiderwebs outside my daughters window
Earlier this fall, I looked out my daughter’s window and saw what must have been close to 100 spiderwebs. I often gaze out her window as it’s my favorite view in the house–a natural, perfectly groomed forest. But I’d never seen even one spiderweb out there before. Unique viewing conditions The spiderwebs had of course always been there. But under normal circumstances, the air outside is dry. And there’s not a lot of angled sunlight, so I couldn’t see the spiderwebs. The spiderwebs are hidden in plain sight, so to speak. But that morning, thanks to the moist, cool temperature, specific light, and low wind, they became visible to me…
Informed Interventions
I recently held a talk on Agile By Example about the importance of agile coaches making informed interventions when coaching systems and agile, and that many coaches are making dogmatic interventions. I argued, and still do, that more often than not, agile coaches and scrum masters fall short in their intervention process. They intervene when they ought not to, and they skip interventions that could have a significant and positive impact. I want to make some clarifications in this post, mainly to define “Informed interventions” and to offer suggestions on how you can move beyond dogmatic interventions. I also want to repeat here that I think this is not a…
My hideous bushes, the ladybugs, and the daisies
This is blogpost two in a series of posts originating from the ”Re-Wilding Agile” Masterclass that I took with Dave Snowden. In this post, I look at how we too often destroy symbiotic relationships that have emerged over time and through necessity. And how it is our vanity and ideals about “what workplaces should look like” or “how people ought to collaborate” that is the source of this. I start this post with a story about my garden and its ladybug and aphids. I then relate my story to the work we do as coaches and managers with agile and organizations. I share examples of how managers and coaches actively…
Restoring Evolution
When Charles Darwin studied the animals on the Galapagos islands, he found that finches had adapted to their circumstances and developed distinct traits. Some Finches had evolved to eat seeds, some to spear insects, and eat cactus fruit and seeds. They evolved together with their environment over a very long period of time. Their beaks have high utility in their contexts yet if you moved a Ground Finch to an environment where the main source of food were cactus, that finch might starve, or at least struggle with food. Harvard Medical School and Margaret Bowman Re-wilding Agile For the past months, I’ve participated in Dave Snowden’s training “Re-wilding Agile“. It…
The Holistic Observations of Teams Framework: Using Active Observations to Identify Strategic Interventions
We speak a lot about interventions when nudging teams along their team effectiveness journeys. But what are we really aiming for here? Interventions alone and just for the sake of doing something are not enough. We need our interventions to also be strategically placed at the right leverage points. In other words, we need strategic interventions. The first step towards making strategic interventions is to actively observe your team in a holistic and objective way. This requires structure. Without structure, our observations are more prone to bias and thus less helpful. In this post we introduce our Holistic Observations of Teams Framework that we’ve been using when observing teams. We…
10 Virtual Table Tips That Make Your Remote Meetings More Effective
For the past six months of working from home, I’ve been experimenting with practices that make remote meetings more effective particularly when it comes to balancing speaking time between participants. Those of you who have facilitated, or even just participated, in in-person meetings and workshops know how difficult it can be to ensure that everyone even gets an opportunity to speak, let alone to achieve equal speaking time between the participants.