5 Tenets for change - People, People, People, People, People
I know the title of the article seems odd but people are the heart of everything and anything good or bad about a company including implementing a new process or company wide change but we don’t always lead with people in a change process.
I’ve been through a lot of change plans over my time and particularly implementing agile practices into wider teams or the company as a whole. I first embarked on leading an agile change around 2006/2007 that seemed never ending and always changing over many years. Then again with a different company in 2015/16 and finally with another company in 2019/20.
The context and practices applied we’re more or less the same in all these cases apart from naturally evolving agile dogma which in truth didn’t veer too much from the original premise. I’ve noticed the same implementation problems occur; at the heart of everything were people problems that slowed, derailed or drove the cadence and success of the change plan.
Well that’s obvious I hear you say since people are at the heart of most change and engendering their willingness to take it on and make it work or not as is often the case, is imperative. However, how many people managing a change plan actually have people down as the most important part of the puzzle? Are people's needs and complexities number #1 on the list to manage? Now most change managers or teams would say of course they put people complexities at the top, but they don’t and we don’t because the plan is to implement an agile rollout or other type of process and the first port of call is usually the technical details.
Such as, what agile approach will we use? How will the teams be created? How many people are in a team? What tech. functions should be in the team? Is the product owner part of the team? Should we have a physical board for stand-ups? Should boards be replicated in Jira/other? What are the roles of a Scrum master? How do we do a proper agile planning session? How do we ensure everyone is trained up etc.? The list gets larger the more you talk about it and the more people chime in.
So you can see how quickly we can fall into the what we will do and how we will implement it versus focusing on how “people will deal with this change, resulting in them being the problem or the solution” that make or break the effort. We rarely start with the biological computers that will manage and take on the change in good faith! For example, an individual will say we have problems because we’re not asking the proper questions at the daily stand-up. But why are the questions not asked properly? Lots of reasons; not interested, rushing, afraid of accountability, don’t think they matter, afraid of conflict etc. You see it’s not the questions, it's the people's mindsets at work helping or hindering. People have the power to help or derail in an instant in what they say or don’t say, act or don’t act so they need help bringing it all together which is so much more than reading the process and following implementation orders. No, we prefer to start with should we be Scrum, Kanban or something else and dive right in there. Well, hands up, I’ve been guilty of that too.
An implementation expert must not only know the process but understand how people think, how they feel and give them that space - trusted, respected, fun, learning, no blame etc. to make it work. Dealing with conflict, knowing how to be assertive, speaking up when uncomfortable, humble and open to not knowing, I could go on and on listing these skills and traits that need to be used every day to help people make the change work.
5 Tenets for change - Put people needs first
I’ve reflected on past implementations and come up with 5 common denominators that impact a companies or teams success in managing a change process and why “People work” is important to help manage this.
Beliefs and Values
Your colleagues have been working a certain way for years, all their life basically and so believe in particular approaches for the best results. They also believe that some things are true and make their decisions on those beliefs every second of the day. So we come along and say, hold on, this new agile approach or new change is the one for us now. Everyone agrees on the approach because its coming down from the top or majority want to roll with it, albeit some reluctantly and we assume everything will be cool. But can it be cool since everyone has their own ways of working with beliefs and values on how things are done. You have to really understand this point; Telling someone that this new way will work when they have done it successfully in a different way for years is very tough for some people to accept. All it takes is one or two not on board to make life hell for everyone else. Round table heart-to-heart and below the surface discussions need to kick-off before the implementation finer points are discussed and agreed upon. This will help no end with no compliance or complying under duress and slowly derailing the process.
2. Interpretation of the rules and process
Some agile concepts can be difficult to grasp at first, plus if we’re busy on other stuff and not fully concentrating we’ll miss context. Not to mention some people don’t like reading long documents or books while others like to debate and discuss and be presented to. It's very common that an approach is agreed but we have 5 teams heading off into their pods with different understanding and so different implementations. This very quickly results in “this is the way we do it in our pod” which means we potentially have 5 different implementations in each pod. Of course beliefs and values impact this too so each tenet I mention aggregates the previous positive or negative outcomes to build barricades that will stop change or create the familiar meandering and steep mountain road pass that is difficult to drive but can be ascended. But be super clear here; everyone won’t understand it all the same way from the start so most likely you will have different implementations as you go. Accept this will happen, this is okay and implement a strategy to keep bringing people back together. Learning by doing is more important than expecting to get it right the first time and stopping people in their tracks. All good here as long as you keep bringing it back together and building on learnings to build your agile house; from the foundation, first floor, second etc. as a unit.
3. Routines and Habits
Specifically in three areas 1. Individuals R&H to deliver work 2. Teams current R&H to deliver work and 3. External and Internal business R&H to deliver work.
The world won’t stop for an agile implementation and your customer won’t understand or care why or what approach you are using. Some managers will row in with the new approach and some won’t, same for leadership teams and senior individuals. The current business, teams and people have routines and habits formed to get work done today, right now, so we’re talking about breaking this and in a gradual way over time forming new routines and habits. When the first customer or team delay appears that is associated with this new rollout, people can get cold feet, they revert to what they know and what has given them success in the past. They like the agile way but too much pressure is coming down the line and within their pod. They agree to revert to old ways to solve this issue only but unfortunately find it hard to come back later to the new way. The blame game appears after that. It’s imperative you have this; support from leadership and the person at the top so they don’t give you the excuse to revert to old habits. Plan upfront what happens when setbacks appear. Have those conversations with the team, managers and leaders so everyone is aware what tactics can be deployed to release the pressure and ensure the process won’t derail.
4. Mindset and all or nothing thinking
When technical people read the agile rules, manifesto etc. and reflect on current technology and systems in place to support their work, you can find plenty of “all or nothing thinking”. We don’t have micro services technology in place so this will never work or we’re in virtual teams and we can’t do stand-ups properly. The IT department is too small and we don’t have proper Jira experts to create and manage the process correctly, we don’t have a trained scrum master so until we have that we won’t start, etc. You see where I am going with this and the list can go on and on. The reality is life and work will never be perfect and all change starts with 1% and 2% change and gains, aggregated over time, so “lets get at it” is the only mindset we need to make it work. What can we start with while enacting the agile mindset and keep moving? The key to spotting this thinking is; Introducing agile change advocates who will notice, speak up about mindset challenges and start wider conversations to help keep teams moving. They don’t need to be experts or external people. Better they are members of the team and in tune with Team goals and mindset to make the plan work.
5. Honesty, trust and respect
These also happen to be important values within agile and I guess for good reason because they are a pillar of happy functioning teams. We don’t roll out agile implementation or any other change without addressing this upfront. We don’t hope we end up with honesty, trust and respect (HTR), we have to deliberately place high importance upon it to help the change process from the start. It's easy to revert to old ways when something goes wrong, or if someone slights you or if the business has emergencies or a manager is not supportive. But all this can be managed or ignored if you have your teammates back. If you know how to have objective conversations and respect each member for who they are and what they bring to the team, the change will be far easier. If your team is still forming and storming then you will have to consider how much new change you want to add to this team and if now is the right time. Big changes in any operating practices will always work better if the team is behind each other and the process is implemented with a team view and not an individual approach. Be certain however, that it's impossible to get every individual on the same technical page of understanding with a rule or practice from day one but the team can do this as a unit once they discuss with honesty, trust and respect as they go. But how do you know if the team are building HTR?; Look out for individual concerns in 1:1’s against team and individuals, look out for blame game feedback and look out for attendance at change events and feedback sessions. Is there a role the agile advocate can play here too? Managers and leaders should be as close to the process as they can possibly manage.
If these 5 tenets are addressed equally with all the new rules and processes for the change you will not only start off much better but you will also have a much happier team driving the process with greater probability of success.
