Down in the dumps? Four ideas to tackle agile despondency

This week I’m taking a break from the 5 Challenges of Digital Leaders series to write about agile despondency.
 
Agile fatigue, agile funk, agile complacency. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. Often just as you think your agile journey is about to achieve new heights of effectiveness and performance, delivery starts to go in the opposite direction.
 
The best squads think about delivering for customers, are motivated to solve problems and have a desire to learn and improve over time.

Agile methodologies can help strong performers thrive.

But they don't turn average performers into strong performers.

Just because you’ve re-organised your team into squads doesn’t mean individual performance improves.

The theory is that peer pressure within a squad or a tribe, will help lift individual performance. But I think there’s a real danger that the egalitarian nature of the squad can in fact reduce individual performance over time.

The team chooses the safe options, so all their story points will be completed this sprint. This might mean reducing scope for their sprint, delaying things that are going to be technically hard for future sprints, opting for known solutions over unknown (but potentially better) solutions.
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Stronger performers leave for more challenging environments. And you’re in a slow downward cycle of worsening performance and increasing disappointment. Sigh!
 
What can you do?

One: Take a good look at yourself

Are you contributing to the problem? Are you setting the right tone about what’s important to your business? Are your people leaders showing that their biggest priority is helping their teams be successful? Are you sending the right messages about the importance of the work your teams are delivering?
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You can check out my post about ways to walk the agile talk for ideas to make sure you and your people leaders are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Two: Good news, your team isn’t a democracy, it’s a benign dictatorship.

​This may upset the agile purists out there but I firmly believe a good leader sets challenging goals for their teams (and helps them get to those goals).

Many years ago, I worked for a CEO who had a theory about goal setting – if you give a smart group of people a challenging goal, they will work at a way to get close to achieving it, and their overall output will be considerably more than if you gave them an incremental goal.

This approach has always guided me for the goals I set myself and my teams. (It can be pretty uncomfortable at first but hey that’s how you know you’re being stretched).

Your team is unlikely to meet a really challenging goal if you don’t set it for them in the first place. But good news, you’re the boss and you can do that.

(Setting challenging goals BTW may also mean pulling the plug on a project that’s never going to make it; or having to understand deep technical issues and getting second opinions for how to solve them, or calling on people to step up and help your team solve a problem).

It’s what we leaders do.

In agile you need to use your authority wisely and sparingly.
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And I dispute the agile purists who say by doing so you are interfering with the autonomous nature of your agile teams. What you’re really doing is what good leaders do – helping your teams develop so they can achieve stretching goals. (Leave a comment if you disagree!)
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Three: Invest in your people.

If you ask your teams to try for more stretching goals, then you need to invest in helping them get there. It’s not always money, sometimes, it’s just time, encouragement, praise and recognition.
 
A good place to start is with your people leaders – do you have the right people and are their goals the same as yours? Best case you get to hire excellent people leaders, but often professional leadership training can help lift capability.

Make sure your people leaders are doing the jobs they need to do – having great coaching conversations with their people about performance and personal development on a regular basis. 

Give your teams the tools they need to continually improve. This may mean access to time for training, an agile coach, or a mandate to try something and possibly fail.

Be transparent about what great performance looks like. Celebrate the folks who succeed, the folks who try and the ones who have come damn close. Reward hard work and creative thinking, not just for being a member of a shiny project.

Four: Read the room

Finally, before you jump on the bandwagon of solving your agile despondency, make sure you have all the information.

Are there serious issues (technical, budgetary, resources) that will take a miracle to overcome?

Most people can be nudged into a much more challenging goal if they can see a glimmer of an idea about how it might be solved. Equally, most people know that a challenging goal with no hope of anything else changing is a hiding to nowhere.

If you can genuinely commit to change then your teams will too. But you need to show them how and why it will be different this time.
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Turn up for your teams. Be accessible, be optimistic, listen to what they are telling you and above all let them know you have their backs.
 
Good luck and take care!

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