Hi friends. I've got a great show for you today. So get ready and welcome to the darn good leadership podcast. This show is all about being a strong and effective leader. One that creates positive impacts on your teams and communities. 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 today we are talking about leading with agility. Now my favorite definition of agility is the ability to perform and respond to things with quick, easy, grace. And today organizations, teams, and individuals need to practice agility if they want to succeed. Growing up. I was a dancer. I was a swimmer. So being quick, graceful and making it look easy was something I had to practice several times a week. However, in my adult life, the first time I was actually introduced to agile practices in the workplace. Was when I was asked to help transform seven development teams from waterfall to scrum. I learned from a wonderful agility coach and soon took on the role of being a scrum master. If you haven't heard that role before. Uh, don't get worried about it. We're not going to talk about that too much today, but it is actually in fact, a role scrum master. And I prided myself on the fact that I knew textbook scrum. I could list all the roles, the ceremonies, the concepts. I thought I was truly mastering it all. And then everything changed. I went to a conference and I heard a man named Josh speak. And my mind was blown. After hearing him talk, I realized I'd only been exposed to a minor part of the puzzle. And Josh opened my eyes to the fact that agility was so much bigger than R and D. Agile practices are life skills for everyone and are necessary for the health and longevity of any company. So after that conference, I read up on all of Josh's material and his work has been a huge source of inspiration for how I began modeling agility and how I coached agility in the workplace. Josh has become one of my professional role models and I kid you not. I truly geek out when he releases any new material. And I am somewhat of a fan girl when I see him in real life now, which I've only seen him twice, but the first time I saw him was that keynote where it blew my mind. The second time Josh was presenting at this conference, I was attending, but instead of it being a keynote, it was a very intimate Q and a workshop. I just knew I had to be there. We got to this Q and a, and I remember my hands sweating and being more nervous than I had ever been. And when I found myself onstage, Mike and hand sitting in front of Josh asking my professional hero question. I tried my best to play. Cool. But honestly, I just felt like a teenager at like a in-sync concert or something. No doubt my, my nerves were palpable and Josh answered every question genuinely by listening. And answering back with amazing insights and advice. So just a quick little story on that for you, but agility is about a way of being, it's an intentional choice and decision. It's a practice. So if you're having a hard time wrapping your head around the concept of agile or your boss or your company's having a hard time with it. Well, my professional hero will hopefully also be your soon as well. Josh has recently published his new book, joy of agility, how to solve problems and succeed sooner. And I just finished reading the book this morning. I enjoyed every single moment of it. The thing I love so much about this book is that it's a compilation of short stories and I mean short, one page, two page stories that are within a theme chapter and these narratives. Help the reader further understand each of the six agile mantras that Josh has outlined in his book. Personally, I love, love, love, love learning through stories. And research has shown that facts are 20 times more likely to be remembered if they are a part of a story. So that's pretty, that's pretty powerful. Part of your job as a leader is to help influence, educate coach and inspire those around you. And using stories to do that is a very simple way and fun way to do those things. Stories create connection, and they invite listeners to learn about something in a way that they are probably better able to relate to than you just talking at them. So in today's show, I'm going to share Josh's six agile mantras, but instead of telling you stories from his book, I'm going to share with you stories that I have that relate to those mantras. So let's jump right in. Agile mantra. Number one from the book. Be quick, but don't hurry. So this mantra is all about succeeding sooner through quickness, under control and avoiding costly mistakes from hurting or rushing. So the story I have around this is actually going to take you back when I was 22 years old and I had just moved to California. And my very best friend came to visit and she never took her return flight home. I was astatic over this. She had graduated, but she had no job and no money. Here I was pretty broke myself and you know, now supporting my best friend, but she was determined not to go back to St. Louis, which was where we were both from. And so I went to work on Monday and she started looking for work herself. When I got home, she was there and she was like, guess what? I found a job. And I was like, holy moly. That was fast. Where did you find this job? And she's like, well, I was taking a walk and there's a seven 11, and they had a sign on the door that said now hiring. And in my head, as she's telling me the story, I'm like seven 11. There's nothing wrong with seven 11. Okay. Work is work in this world and I get that, but she had just graduated from college. And was very smart, very bright. We're not in a recession at this period of time. So there was really no. For her to go work at seven 11 at this moment in time. And it's day one of her, being out here, not having a job. I quickly convinced her that instead of rushing and hurrying into something like starting work at seven 11, let's be quick. Right. Let's be quick about finding a job. And I loved her dedication to wanting to contribute to rent. But we don't need to rush into something this fast. If we're like three months in and she's got no money, that's a different story. And maybe we go back to seven 11, but at this point in time, we're rushing into things folks. She went back out and decided you're right. So within two weeks she had gotten a call back from a place she was really excited to work with. That was actually a wonderful first stepping stone for her career and had amazing benefits. So a week after that, she had an interview and shortly after she was hired, so it all worked out and that's all about her ability to recognize that she needed to be quick, but she didn't need to hurry. Right. Be quick, but no need to hurry. Moving on to agile mantra. Number two. Be balanced and graceful. This mantra is all about resolving imbalances and collaborating harmoniously with others. And making change empowering, but not forced. So back in 2020, when COVID first hit, we had 14. Global R and D teams who are now struggling to work effectively in the virtual world. Or like week two and the COVID everyone's realizing we're not going to go back to work anytime soon. So how is this all going to function? And most of the teams we're used to sitting right next to each other. So within a team, a given team, they were used to my team member sits right next to me. We can easily pull up to a whiteboard and map out diagrams and processes and flows for the software. They were responsible for. And we were a global company. So even before COVID whiteboards with teams were a big deal and there were teams that they had to work with that weren't co located with them. And that was always an issue that came up time and time again in retrospectives. How can we share these whiteboards? With teams that aren't co located. There was very much a need and desire for these virtual white boarding tools. And we had researched these tools before, but we weren't sure if the tool would be widely adopted and if it was the right time and the right. Place to use our money. But now that we were all virtual, we decided, Hey, this is the time. And we had found a tool called Miro that we decided to pilot. We piloted it with R and D and we decided we're going to roll it out fast. The first two weeks we had all this training. And we just expected it was going to be just this amazing wild success within two weeks. And we're going to be adapting it like in no time. And that is not what happened at all. No. Um, So even though they have been talking and complaining about not having a virtual white boarding tools for years, when we rolled this out, Everyone was like, oh, I kind of liked the way I was working before. And I don't know that I want to use a new tool and we have to learn it so fast. And it's kind of complicated. And are we really going to keep using this tool? Are we going to go back to the physical workspace? So I have to learn this tool. We were all a little shocked at first that like, okay guys, I'm confused. You said you wanted this it's here now. Why aren't we using it? But then we realized we were rushing this rollout. So kind of going back to mantra, number one, we were rushing instead of being quick, we are trying to hurry this along. So we needed to kind of pause and allow people time and grace to get exposure to this new tool. I get used to the concept of we're all in this virtual world now. And remind them it was a pilot. It was not required. However, my team frequently demonstrated the tool ourselves and slowly power users emerged from each of the R and D teams. And over the course of that quarter, all of the R and D teams had now adopted the tool. And we're thrilled with their ability to work more effectively in the virtual world. We had now resolved the imbalance of the real world whiteboard. And we had given teams the ability to be empowered with this change instead of being rushed and forced into it. To this day, R and D is one of our biggest adopters of Miro. And it has been a game changer with how global teams now work together. When we became balanced and graceful with the mural rollout was when we found true success. Moving over to agile mantra, number three, be poised to adapt. This mantra is about developing a readiness to revise and respond quickly. And easily to change. So for the past three years, I've been a part of something called connect. And one of my coworkers and myself hosts this event and it is such a great deal of fun. The one thing we've realized over the last three years is that in doing this event, You have to be in the mindset of revising and adapting very quickly to change. We typically have a week to put together skits and scripts and videos and ways to engage the audience there isn't much you can do in advance. So it requires the ability to respond quickly to direction and just go with the flow. And I envisioned that we feel somewhat like how a host on Saturday night live feels, and that week leading up to their event very much like that. Probably not as stressful, but close to it. And in the first year of the event, we felt pretty prepped and overall good and ready to go. And the event kicked off. And everything's live. And we have this guest speaker who was coming on and during her session, all of her tech failed. We couldn't see her slides. We couldn't hear her sound. She was there on the line. We could see her, but it was just nothing we could do. And literally for 15 minutes we watched the clock tick by. Realizing we had this global company all sitting somewhere at a screen, or maybe they had now become disengaged in burnout doing, watching a cat video or something like that. On the other side of the screen. But we had this global company who was now sitting there for 15 minutes by, we were kind of helplessly waiting for this tech thing to be resolved. You you've all experienced that before. Following the event, we did a retrospective and decided we needed to beef up our if then scenarios. So this would be that if there was ever in the future, a speaker or a tech issue would arise, what are we going to do instead of having dead air for 15 minutes what can we do to re-engage the audience have some activities that we can quickly line up to go. And if you know, we had all these scenarios like, Hey, well, what if. Zoom isn't working. Okay. We'll use slack. What if slack? Isn't working? We'll use the. Chat channel within zoom. The last two years have gone off without a hitch, but we now have our list ready to roll. And next time we have any sort of hiccup or issue happen, we will be poised to adapt. Agile mantra, number four, start minimal and evolve. So this is all about beginning, quickly and easily with something basic. And rapidly improving it on what you've learned. We've all seen processes where they're just over engineered so we knew we wanted to do something different than trying to boil the ocean and we were faced with a challenge about three months ago, where we needed to launch a new engagement strategy. We recognize a need to change our global approach. And so we brought together a cross functional team to determine something simple, something basic and something we could easily pilot over the course of the quarter. We had very minimal amount of hands to help us. And there was a lot of manual work that we had to do within the quarter. We decided to start small with just a segment of our global teams and our global accounts. And that we would also make sure that we had a crisp, short timeframe in place. So something that would be long enough for us to actually learn and to get real data off of, but not too long that we couldn't sustain the manual load. We knew it would require us to inspect how things were going throughout the quarter. And come together at the end of the quarter and the team was committed to this and even sign their names on a virtual mural board. Can you believe that? To show their willingness to experiment, review and revise. So throughout the quarter, we have held weekly check-ins to make sure, Hey, how is this going? We have a slack channel for any ad hoc feedback or help that is needed. We held retrospectives with each of the teams to get their feedback on what's working and what needs to be improved. So we can have that consolidated as input when we come back together at the end of the quarter. In two weeks cross-functional team coming back together and we're going to take all the input and determine what we want to revise and what we will try in the next quarter. So we have started something small, this new engagement strategy. We started very, very small and by doing so we now have a better gauge on how this thing can scale what we need to change. And each quarter we will continue evolving it and improving it. Agile mantra. Number five, drive out fear. This mantra is about making safety, a prerequisite to protect people and pave the way for high performance. So if you didn't know, psychological safety is the number one indicator of high performing teams. So this is really, really important that you drive out fear in the workplace. And several years ago, we were having our R and D teams take their by annual health checks that we always put out. And I was reviewing the results and there are 10 areas that we assess across the organization. And each area is rated red, yellow, or green by all the individuals on every team. So here I am looking at the data and I saw that one of the teams had scored green on every category by every person on the team. Now, although you might go, Emily, that sounds amazing. Like this must be your highest performing team. It struck me as odd. And that's not what came to mind because I had never seen. All greens from everyone on every category ever before and although this team was composed of very strong and skilled individuals, the team itself had been experiencing some major issues and escalations. I decided to quickly call the agile coach of that team and ask them more about how the health check was actually done and get into some of the details of, of what transpired. Everything seems to be normal. And tell, I heard that the manager of the team decided he needed to sit in on that retrospective. And although the team members themselves had always had high trust with each other. The addition of their manager created a very different type of environment for the team. He had become very angry and frustrated with the recent problems. And the team was definitely picking up wind of that and they did not want to catch his wrath. So, although his intentions of hearing and observing the feedback from the team himself may have been good. The outcome of him actually being in the room, led to those team members, no longer feeling safe to throw what they actually felt and thought like, okay, I'm just going to put a green down to keep the peace. So we have a team retake the health check with the manager, not in the room. And surprise, surprise. It was not all green. But we did get to the root of what the issues were, which was what we were trying to do. My boss and I met with the manager to explain why it was important for him to remain out of those types of sessions, to help us get to the root of those problems. So as managers and leaders, you need to be aware of the weight of your presence in sessions and conversations, especially ones that need to address some real issues. And you need to have high trust with your team. So stepping out of those sessions, allowing them to talk to a third party. And give anonymous feedback or consolidate the feedback, however they want. Is really vital to the health of your teams. Your priority should always be to help drive out fear. And sometimes that includes not having your involvement. Agile mantra, number six. Be readily resourceful. So this mantra is about solving problems without hesitation. Do this by being quick, clever and creative. Now there was a recent article in CNN and I will link it in the show notes that talks about what to expect and work in 2023. One of my coworkers actually sent it to me not too long ago, as it describes how many companies are now relying on their people's skills rather than their jobs and titles. And that companies are rapidly mobilizing their in-house talent in an agile way. What does this mean? Well, this means that if a company has a strong individual who they know have the ability to be quick, clever and creative, Well, they're likely to plug them into a gap that they have, because it's a lot easier to do that than to hire and find someone new. And many employers want to transition away from being job based to a skill-based organization so they can adapt more quickly to change. And this also helps address talent shortages and provides their workforce with different types of opportunities to develop professionally even at companies that have not formalized a shift to being a skills-based organization, the changes happening anyways, roughly 70% of workers say they're already doing work outside of their job. And that's according to Deloitte. We've talked about professional shape-shifting on this podcast and this aligns to that. The point is. You should start thinking bigger and broader for yourself and for your teams. Have conversations with your boss on skills that have not been leveraged for yourself and other interests that you might have at the company. Also talk to your employees about skills and interests they have beyond their own role. Having these proactive conversations will enable you then to be resourceful and solve problems quickly at your own place of work. Let's recap those six mantras number one. Be quick, but don't hurry. Number two, be balanced and graceful. Number three, be poised to adapt. Number four, start minimal and evolve. Five drive out fear. And six be readily resourceful. Hopefully some of these stories resonated with you and if they did, I highly, highly recommend you go get Josh's book, joy of agility. I hope he inspires you as much as he is inspired me. Because everyone knows agile as this buzzword. But if you can explain the benefits of agility through storytelling, then that's where the light bulbs go off for people. Josh has incredibly rich stories in this book I love the idea of now having this arsenal of stories I can use to help to pick whatever agile mantra a company, a team or individual is struggling with. For me, the magic happens when you can then develop your own stories. For each mantra to then share with your people and your teams and your work environment, especially if you could share it about your actual work to your work. I think that's when things can start to click. And then your company can go from understanding agile in theory. To actually doing agile and practice. Agility is about taking action with quick, easy grace, but the action part is what is needed. So get to action quickly. Get to action easily. Get to action gracefully. Don't stay stuck. Adapt. Don't be resentful. Get resourceful. Be bold. Be bright, be a leader who uses their skills and talents in an agile way. And starts kicking butt. Cheers.