For agile coaches and scrum masters it feels kind of easy to keep ourselves busy with the “transparency” part of scrum. There are many easy wins, like making a backlog visible (to whom is interested), or putting meetings to fulfil the scrum events in attendees agenda’s. And many tools support this kind of transparency, since I am a strong believer that most people like to have some kind of structure, and both chaos (felt as no structure) and bureaucracy (felt as choking) are not that much appreciated. Recent neuroscience research has even found (biological) reasons why we are all looking for that area in between. I will come back to that topic in one of my upcoming posts.
The other two pillars of scrum are “inspect” and “adapt” and I observe that many agilists are struggling to fulfil that need properly. Of course, we have the tool of running retrospectives, where we give our teams time and space to reflect and find out how to solve their own issues. Most of the times we succeed in creating a safe space where the team members are willing to support each other and willing to change things for their own or each other’s benefit.
As soon as a company has grown to be bigger than one team of size, teams will run into finding that more and more issues cannot be solved on team level, and need to the collaboration of others. And soon they will find out that change is not going to happen. So the question is: what is happening?
We as humans have the tendency to protect ourselves and our immediate surroundings. I have already discussed this in a post about cultural awareness. Since we have the tendency to protect ourselves, we kind of automatically switch to a kind of protective mode, where we block ourselves from accepting new insights, new feelings or new information. People who practise coaching professionally, know that those thoughts are most likely to be the trigger points for making a change. This is often called a fixed mindset, since the door for new or other experiences has not been opened. I believe that everyone has the ability to open that door, though often understanding why you have closed that door for yourself is needed first. Putting yourself in the state of wanting to open that door at all, is an important prerequisite, since nobody else can do that for your. This area of being open for new insights is typically called growth mindset.
As indicated, it is a personal choice (both consciously and unconsciously), so we coaches cannot force people to do so. In my agile journey I have found out (nowadays supported by research) that people with an growth mindset are growing in their roles much faster than people who have a fixed mindset. And their learnings are typically forever, so sustainable as well. It requires however much harder work from our side, since we need to find ways to help people getting into this growth mindset state of mind. And this is a kind of work companies need, to enable real change. It is however harder to measure its output, since outcomes coming from that work are typically acting as enablers for the more visible output. Furthermore, it takes a lot more effort from the coaches side to make this happen as well.
I will give an example to make it hopefully a bit clearer. I have once been working with an excellent architect, who had the tendency to speak up quite loud with other people. I observed that the recipient of his messages have been overwhelmed by that, and had the tendency not to share their opinions with him, since he was most probably not going to listen to that. After a few talks with him, where he introspected his own behaviour, he has changed his behaviour (by choice) and he is now much more aware of the impact it made. He was much happier about it for himself as well, since he wants to be open for input from other people, so he can enrich his own thoughts and that results into better architectural decisions based on that.
The hard part about this mindset thing, is that you cannot change it for someone else. One of my favourite statements is: “If I could simply click my fingers and you would then have the agile mindset, I would be very rich and not here (in this job)”. So the only sustainable way forward, is by invitation. And as change agents, we have a big role here. So, how can you recognize that someone is blocking himself from this wannabee growth mindset?
What I do, is simply observing the behaviour of the people I am working with. And preferably have coaching conversations with them as well, since that is always a great opportunity to discover blockers. There is no simple recipe for discovering, since we humans are complex and our behaviours are complex as well. I am however aware of the fact the many limiting beliefs are sitting inside and in conversations they pop up in many ways. Usage of (specific) wording, tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, et cetera, are all hints towards how this person is influenced by himself. If you notice a defensive attitude, something is there. If people are not willing to (actively) accept coaching, something is there.
The first step to change, is making people aware of that there is a need for change. And here transparency plays again a big role, since first of all people have to discover that there is actually a problem to solve. As long as we are not aware of that, we typically are not going to change.
What do you do to help people grow into their jobs?
Did you ever run into a comparable situation? And you want to exchange? Just explore a bit through my website and just contact me.
