hi everybody and welcome to the darn good leadership podcast The show was all about being a strong and effective leader. One that can make positive impacts on your teams and communities. And the next 20 minutes, you're going to get ideas, inspiration, and practical advice. You can take action on to be a darn good leader. I'm your host, Emily Holting. And in today's episode, I'm sharing five lessons learned from a team of agile experts. Now who is this team of agile experts you ask? Well, it's none other than my very own. For those of you who don't know, I'm a VP of agile at a global software company and my team is composed. I have some of the brightest, the boldest and the most bad-ass in-house agile coaches out there. They are efficient, effective, compassionate, and they coach teams and communities that span various business lines, countries and departments. My company's fiscal. Year runs from October 1st to September 30th. So as our years. I was coming to a close last week. I held a retrospective on. The year with my team, we walked away with a list of very powerful takeaways. And I felt compelled and excited to share this out with any individual who's. Who's looking to create positive improvement at their own place of work. Consider this your free agile. Joel consultation as I'm never one to waste any learning opportunity. So without further ado here are five lessons learned from a team of agile experts Let's then number one, the conversation around goals and objectives holds the real value. This is the biggest and dare I say the most valuable takeaway. For your company goals and objectives. It's the conversation around them that matters the most. Now I equate this the same way we think about story pointing for. For scrum teams. So if you've got a team and there is somebody who points the story, Story a three. Someone who points at a five and someone who pointed an 89. The points don't really matter. It's the conversation around why someone thinks. Thinks it's a three versus an 89. And the dialogue. Aligns and calibrates them on the work. Story points just serve as a prompt. For the conversation to get the whole team to understand. What's going to have to go into getting something done. This is the same with goals. It's just leveled up. So goals and objectives now serve as a prompt to get. You're people talking about what matters most. And what needs to happen in order for them to achieve success on those items? As agile coaches, when we have groups that are constantly talking about their goals, the alignment is usually higher. And typically, so was the energy and motivation. Things work better. Relationships are stronger. Just as when, when we have teams or groups that seem to be struggling. Lacking enthusiasm. Having weaker ties. Typically the root cause is because these conversations around the. Goals. Are lacking or non-existent and therefore the alignment is lower. Our mission is to ensure that teams and individu. Individuals are aligned on objectives. That they are habitually discussing their goals that they know what they're supposed to do. And they act in a coordinated. And efficient way. When teams and lines of businesses are aligned. You have organizational agility and then you can move forward. Forward together. So make sure you and your teams are talking. About your goals on a consistent basis. Because it's the conversation that holds the real value. Lesson number two. Practice workplace flexibility. How you work matters more than when and where you work. The 2022 future form report showed that 79% of full-time. Time employees want flexibility in where they work. 94% want flexibility in when they work. The groups we coach have shared this same desire. And over the course of the last year, our team and company has put several. Workplace flexibility items into practice. So let's discuss the flexibility of the, where first. My company has moved from a practice of hiring individuals. Who live within a commuting distance of an office to a practice of hiring the best talent for the job. This is in part because after the pandemic we moved to. A virtual first environment. three years ago, I was only hiring coaches in San Diego. Diego and Barcelona. Cuts a present day and I've hired a coach in Denver, one in Madrid. I've been able to allow another one of my coaches on my team to move. Move to the Canary islands. And this flexibility has allowed me to hire and retain amazing talent. Now for the flexibility of the win. And I did a podcast on asynchronous work, not too long ago. I'll share that in the show notes, but async collaboration is any group work that does not require members to be in a meeting online simultaneously. but it does still require active collaboration. It's when group work happens for different members at their own time. Flexibility of the win and enabling. Labeling more async work leads to better. Work-life balance improve productivity and higher job satisfaction We've been really experimenting and practicing and honing our asynchronous skills over this past year. So I thought I'd give you a couple of examples of things we've done on our team. Team. One of our coaches has implemented core collaboration. hours for one of the groups he coaches. So they put these in place for every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. From 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM. During this window is when they'll do more synchronous work together. Collectively. Outside of those windows is when there'll be experimenting with asynchronous work. So allowing for more flexibility of the team of how and when the work gets done. Another coach has implemented continuous retrospec. Respect is using Miro. So rather than spinning up another meeting, they have a mural board that's capturing, what's working. What's not. What can be improved? And they're filling it up and tackling it as it comes. He's also experimenting with having sprint reviews. Using slack channels. Another group on my team has been creating amazing short video content for our entire company. And they're doing this to explain. Plain different programs and competitions we have going on. We've also been. Been utilizing slack workflows that automate some of our processes. So rather than spinning up another meeting, individuals can interact with the workflow or. The video content at a time that suits them best. Myself and another coach and the team also attended the recent slack frontiers conference, where we learned about the book called how the future works. I immediately bought it for my team and we've all read it. It's amazing. I've shared it out with several executives I've worked with and many. Many directors. Who've also thought it was a great read. Basically it offers a blueprint for using flexible. Axle work to unlock the potential of your people. So if you're at a company that is in some sort of hybrid or global model, like I said, go get this. This book, it has a wealth of information and data from recent research and case studies, and it is just magnificent. Additionally, if you have a company that's already aligned and having conversation. On your goals and objectives then Experis. with flexible workplace practices Becomes even more of a win-win for your employees and your company Employees get to do their best work whether that's at home or at the beach or on the go and businesses This is get to retain their top talent with an uptick of productivity Lesson number three. Virtual first, not virtual, always. As I stated earlier, since the pandemic, my company has embraced a virtual first environment where. Where in-person communication now, supplements virtual communication and work. And. Although we are practicing and improving our workplace. Place flexibility. There is still a need to bring people together in person. We found that depending on the team, how distributed they are and the type. Of work. They do. The frequency and the cadence of when you bring teams together is not a one size fits all. It varies on what is needed and also what is fiscally affordable. My kick-ass team of agile coaches on the day to day. Well, we couldn't just meet for lunch or quick working. Session in person, even if we wanted to, we are pretty spread out. And so getting together in person requires planes, trains, passports, and. Intentional planning. But virtual first does not mean virtual always. And we have found for our team that coming together once a year is hugely beneficial. If not. Not critical for the success and longevity of our team. In June, my. My whole team came to San Diego and we had a very intentional agenda with clear outcomes for the week. We also created space for us just to relax, have more casual. Casual conversations and build stronger personal connections. We had lunch together. We hosted. At a breakfast and a happy hour and encourage other local co-workers to come meet up. We rented a Duffy boat where we enjoyed the beautiful water. We took turns, driving the boat. I even bought some very cheesy captain hats for all of us to wear a wide. We were on the boat. And my wonderful team threw me a surprise engagement. Party when we were out in the water. Needless to say this trip was memorable and not only were we productive with our goals, we also created enough connection to help us continue. To kick ass together in the virtual world. Lesson number four, be proactive with leveraging data. One of the agile principle. Principles states that at regular intervals teams should reflect on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust its behavior accordingly. Salami. Let me tell you, this is a lot easier to do with your own team and. And with teams, you may be coaching. If you have data to go off of and leverage, if you don't. Yikes much harder. So one of the major takeaways my team has figured out is that for any recurring. Practice or before we experiment with an idea, roll out a process or implement a new approach. We ask ourselves, how are. We going to measure this thing, what do we hope this thing will accomplish? How will we know if we've achieved success or not? Defining this upfront is key. If this is something new. Getting a baseline prior to starting, it is important. And if it's not new, then tracking how things are trending is also critical. So, let me talk through a couple examples to bring this to life. For. The past couple of years, the agile coaches have run morale checks with their teams. They coach. This gives us a good heartbeat of each team's typical morale levels. And for our overall. Overall department morale levels. So if there's any sort of event that occurs good or bad or. Or a new process. We roll out. We can easily gauge how teams are feeling and perceiving that item. It then gives us access to the teams that need to have additional. Support or trends across the department that we should be more aware of. And it allows us to inspect the teams that have super high morale. To see if there were any best practices to share with others. Another example. Is with zoom. Zoom now allows any hosts to enable polls. Roles during the meeting. So we started launching polls at the end of some of our recurring meetings to ask on a scale of one to five. How valuable was this session for you? And. And do you have any additional ideas to improve? It takes us in two minutes for individuals to fill out. And given that meetings are one of our most expensive tools in our toolkit. Having data on if that meeting is valuable. Allows us to ensure that we are best using people's time or gives us ammo to find ways to reduce or eliminate the session. If it's low value. We're also being super data-driven in slack. If you are an admin of a slack channel that houses more than 50 participants, slack has messaged stats that allows you to view how many people are looking. At your messages, clicking on them, reacting with emojis, to them. It breaks it all down by department. And it gives data on where people are viewing your messages from. This helps us understand if messages are being read. And allows us to inspect what types of messages are actually getting high engagement versus the ones that aren't. Aren't. It tells us how asynchronous or synchronous we may need to be with some of our messages. So it's really good stuff here. And finally we're being more data-driven with, okay. Ours, which is objectives and key results. So each year and quarter. We identify our top priorities as objectives. And then we work through how we will measure success with key results. This is something our company and my team has been laser focused on for the past year and getting more skilled at that, which brings. Me too. Our last lesson. Lesson number five, leverage outside perspectives to help lead change. Agile is all about inspecting, adapting and improving teams. Teams and environments. None of that is possible without change. And change is not possible without. That Effective and thoughtful Change management Over the years we led countless change management activities. Cities, some smaller scoped and some on a much larger scale. What we have found is that for larger scale change, leveraging outside perspectives can help you in your efforts. So, let me give some examples. Of this two years ago, we set off to create a better way of working for R and D teams in a scaled environment. This led us to find a book called competing. With unicorns. Which shared techniques from Google, Facebook, and Spotify on how teams can work better together and ship higher quality products faster. The book was amazing, but as the agile coaches and I started to try to embed some of these ideas and practices into our workplace, we found it wasn't working so well. So we had this hairball HYDRIM idea. What if we got. The author of competing with unicorns, Jonathan Rasmussen, to come talk to our teams and share. His experiences first hand. It was a long shot, but we are persistent and convincing group. So a couple months later, I'm proud to report. We had Jonathan talking with our teams directly and hosting live Q and A's with developers and researchers. It was awesome. People loved it. And they were now willing and excited to experiment with these new ideas and approaches. Jonathan's outside perspective. and expertise then allowed us to piggyback our agile coaching to help teams be more empowered and effective. Another example is now present day. Day. We are working on sharpening our skills as an organization on okay, ours, which is what I just talked about in the last lesson. This effort is. Probably our largest change management to date. So finding some outside perspective to help us navigate how to lead this thing effectively was vital. Insert a company called adaptive eight, who we are now. Now partnering with to help us further drive alignment using okay. Ours. They've done this hundreds of times and have seen various use cases in various environment. So getting their perspective and expertise will help us be set up for success from the top. And then. We'll be enabled to coach this out to the rest of the organization. What I can say is please don't let ego get in the way of leveraging outside perspectives. If you can advance change and you can increase your own team skills and knowledge. Then it's a win-win and a no brainer to do so. So let's recap. The five lessons. I learned from a team of agile experts are lesson number one, the conversation around goals and objectives holds the real value. Lesson number two. Practice workplace flexibility. Lesson number three, virtual first, not virtual. Always lesson number four, be proactive with leveraging data less than number five. Leverage outside perspectives to help lead change. Okay so these are biggest takeaways from But i'd love to hear what yours are as well. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and. and that these five lessons can inspire you on your own leadership journey thank you so much for listening And if you did get any value out of the last 20. Minutes it'd be wonderful if you could leave a rating and review So be bold Bold be bright be a darn good leader see you next time