You Have a Vision For Your Team - Agile Leadership Gap

You Have a Vision For Your Team - Agile Leadership Gap What is the Agile Leadership Gap? How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] ⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠ https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

• 0:15Speaker 00

  It's been a hot minute since I had the opportunity to talk about the Agile 12-step program. What I discovered last week when I was speaking at conferences is that this topic came up yet again. It feels like there are a lot of leaders who are struggling to really pull together all the pieces when it comes to what the 12-step program is and how it impacts them. I mean, let's just cut to the chase. Leaders want to have everything successfully working on the ground. They're not as concerned about what happens between the ground and where they are, which led me to do a bunch of sessions on the connectivity between leadership and the people on the ground working. And what I found was each

• 0:56Speaker 00

  time I did those sessions where we tried to tie leadership in, I had a very clear path, a very clear map. I used the Agile landscape as my guide, and it was just really easy to see how things transitioned through. However, I also discovered right away that not everyone, and I don't want to say was on board, but not everyone was aware of how the impact worked or what it did. So I think the question, the question becomes, sometimes we have a vision for what we see for our team, and they have no idea what we mean or what we're trying to do. And when I say that, I'm going to give you two examples. The first example's going to happen at a product level. There are lots of times where a product owner

• 1:41Speaker 00

  or a product manager gets an idea for something really revolutionary, and in their mind, they've seen it a million times. They've seen it in their dreams, they've seen it in their sleep, they've seen it in other organizations, they can vision it, they can, they could draw it on a piece of paper if they had to. But the problem is, there's a gap between the connectivity of the person who sees the vision and the person who is trying to interpret the vision. It's almost the story from Joseph and Dakota, Many Colors. One vision is, hey, crystal clear, crystal clean, let's go. And the other vision is, eh, I don't know, let's see where we are. And those two just aren't connecting, or one person sees a rope swing a certain way and another sees it a different way. You've

• 2:25Speaker 00

  seen that meme before, I'm sure. The point I'm trying to get to is we need to have some type of connectivity between those, or else the product is never, ever, the product is never, ever going to map to exactly what the vision wants of the person unless the person who had the vision is heavily involved in building the product, which is a disconnect. But we need to find a way, we need to find a means, we need to find a technique where we could see it through at the product level so that the people we're building a product for can know that we're focused on outcome and not just output. They were trying to focus on happy customers with as little output as possible. So this is just another revolutionary thing that we should be doing, but the problem is we're not spending enough time in ideation, initiation, and discovery

• 3:09Speaker 00

  to, to make that connection at the product level. Let's switch gears for a second, talk about the leadership level. At the leadership level, it could be even worse. At the leadership level, sometimes a leader has this strategic vision for what they're trying to do, but they're unable to tie it to the vision of how the customer sees or will use the end product. So what ends up happening is you have another gap. You've got a place where you have people who are excited about a product or service that they envision, but a leader who has a vision that the company and the organization is going in a completely different direction, and that product or service may never get funded or built. So how do we close that gap? And I think a big part of it is just simply understanding

• 3:54Speaker 00

  how leaders think and where that leadership gap, it might exist. Now, I put together a cool one-page diagram called the Agile Leadership Gap, and I just launched it on Agile Dad under the document section. And my hope is that you'll grab that document and take a look. But just in case you don't have a chance right away to take a look, I thought I'd just give you a couple of ideas about what's in this document. And it's, it's a one pager, it's slick. And what I can tell you is it's, it's been very well received so far. Uh, it starts off with signs, you have a leadership gap, and it gives you some ideas like teams are agile but leaders demand fixed scope, or uh, success is uh, equal to delivery.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Uh, and, and it's not focused on outcomes or adoption. Or leaders attend your sprint reviews, but they never engage. Our work is overloaded, no whiplin, it's too many plates spinning in the air. These are just some examples. We also talk about where the gap shows up, what great agile leaders do, leadership shifts that help close the gap, what to measure instead of just velocity or points. And I made two quotes here, and I want to read these two quotes to you because I think these two quotes kind of sealed the deal for me about what direction I'm trying to go with this episode. Agile doesn't fail because of teams. Agile fails because leadership behavior doesn't adapt or change, which is really interesting.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  The second one is agile isn't as much about a team transformation as it should be about a leadership evolution. That is important. If the leaders don't evolve and figure out how to produce things and how to how to clarify what they want, it's going to lead us to a point where agile will fail. And there's nothing that the team can do at the bottom to fix it. You often hear things like, we installed agile, but kept managing like we're a waterfall and nothing worked. Or we're doing agile, we're doing the Jira agile. Anytime you're tying it back to a tool or a specific, a specific book method, if you will, you're not going to get the full approach and the full benefit

• 6:02Speaker 00

  of what you should or could be doing with regard to agile. So my whole point here is while we're talking about agile leadership, let's get in there and let's identify where those gaps exist, what those gaps are and how we can make them right. What I can tell you is sometimes it's not about execution as much as about the team and a product owner's having a clear vision of exactly what we're trying to build. That's going to do it for this episode, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you have a topic you want us to discuss, learn more at agiledad.com. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Bye now.