three stories of dysfunction

This week:

I was confronted by poor leadership behaviour. A group of colleagues were talking when a leader without ceremony jumped in, and then out, leaving the everyone stunned into silence. It was an interesting demonstration of how quickly psychological safety can evaporate. In the moment I didn't have a reaction (in part because I wasn't directly involved), but as I walked away and started to process it I found my whole being trembling. Perhaps as a coach I should have stepped in to find a way to help, and I have done so when I've seen such low level conflict happen between members of a scrum team. It is best to nip these things in the bud so they don't boil over. I've spent much of this week reflecting upon it and wondering when I'm going to see the consequences I've left for my future self to deal with…

I facilitated a meeting for a team in the very early stages of forming. I spoke with one of the senior business stakeholders before the meeting to ask questions to fill in my POWER start and based upon that designed a workshop. The opening question I gave the team was, "What do you want to achieve from this meeting?" The majority of them wanted to achieve something completely different, so I danced in the moment and facilitated a workshop that I had done no planning for. The team achieved so much during the workshop, but not the thing the one business stakeholder had talked about during our initial conversation. I asked the team to rank their mood on the way out the door, and 70% were neutral to unhappy. When I reported how this meeting went back to my own agile adoption team, an 'old school' colleague asked for us to have a debrief so that we could talk about how to set expectations for meetings and how best to run them. I'm not taking this personally. The kind of meeting facilitation that I have learned and developed over the years is so far from what most people in traditional working environments have ever experienced. A sense of failure can be overwhelming when a group of people have got together to talk about one thing, and something completely different was discussed. When hearing that message through a filter of command and control, that can sound like a devastating failure and waste of time. In the agile world, we value the opinions of those who are doing the work and want to empower them to provide the value where they see it. I'm going to meet with my colleague and support her on this journey towards being comfortable with the unexpected. If they can't see the path yet or aren't ready to walk down it, that's ok. This will be an ongoing conversation to have with this individual and many others over the next few weeks, months, and maybe even years…

I was asked about how to handle a colleague who continually derails any conversations around a particular project. When I explored the situation with my coaching hat on, I found that no one was listening to this person and therefore he was exhibiting some crazy dysfunctions. When I suggested talking to him and being explicit about why he was being left out of conversations (some of which were quite reasonable reasons) and finding out what this 'problem person' needed from the rest of the team I was told that that was a broader cultural piece that we're not going to solve here. Culture is about how people behave and treat other people, and absolutely is something that we're going to solve here. In order to change the broader culture, we need to change the smaller culture. At every opportunity we change agents (agile or otherwise) need to be encouraging change of every behaviour that doesn't align to the new world order that we see. When you see dysfunctional behaviour, ask yourself what's going on for that person that is causing them to act out. The answer might just be you…