Last time I talked about the importance of self care and how caring for self is what really enables caring for others. Care for self is what recharges our reserves and gives us the energy to do the same for others. Care for others without care for self is draining and unsustainable. This time I'm going to talk about some strategies for practising self care in stressful times. This really applies all the time but is particularly relevant when we are under unusual stress.

This past 12 months have been a very difficult time for many, if not most of us. Pandemics, lockdowns, work insecurity, added to natural disasters and a long overdue reckoning on racial injustice made for a very stressful time. During stressful times, self care is especially important and many people recognised that at the beginning of the pandemic. There was a lot of talk initially about using the lockdowns to reset and invest in self care (Covid baking, sourdough, cooking, exploring your neighbourhood, investing in home exercise equipment, colour coding your bookshelves). Followed a few months later by guilt and shame at not being able to maintain that initial drive long term. Many people found themselves paralysed and unable to even start the simplest of projects. Lots of time but no energy.

Last time we looked at care as a leadership strategy - how care for others is the key to great leadership. Leaders who truly care for the welfare of others and demonstrate that continuously are the ones who can lead their teams and organisations through uncertainty because their people are more willing to follow and try different things. Care builds trust and trust is needed if you want someone to move willingly out of their comfort zone and try something new. Particularly if that change will be an uncomfortable or difficult one.

There was one aspect of care though that I didn't talk about and it's a really important one - always remember that care is not just for others. Care for Self is really important, and, sadly, often overlooked. I have seen many leaders who care very deeply about their people and their organisation. They devote themselves to their organisation and their teams and they work tirelessly to make them better. And they completely neglect themselves.

When you come up with a new idea for a project, whether it's for work, as a side hustle, or just something to do around the house, what's the first thing you do? Usually, you will start to work out what you need to do to get the job done - start putting together a to-do list. For large projects that to-do list won't be for getting the job done, there will be a significant to-do list generated just to get the project started. Sadly, this is where most projects stop. With an ever growing, ever more daunting to-do list. A list that no matter how much you work on it never gets any smaller. Energy drops off. Enthusiasm wanes. Projects stall.

For some projects, even putting together the to-do list to get started is too daunting a job. It's so much easier to carry on with life as usual, forever putting it off and dreaming of how much better things will be once you can get started. I have worked with some people whose ideas have sat idle for decades because they just couldn't get started. In working with people whose ideas are stuck I have found that there is usually a way to get things unstuck and moving again. It's nothing to do with them. They don't need more motivation or drive or skills or willpower. They have plenty of that. What they need is a network.

Here in Australia (and around the world) we have seen crisis after crisis recently. In the last 6 months or so we have seen a horrific fire season that flattened whole towns and vast areas of wilderness. We have seen a global pandemic that has devastated lives around the world. We have seen the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by events overseas, but now shining a long overdue light on the lives of our Indigenous people and their often horrific treatment by law enforcement, and society in general. So far, 2020 has been a year of constant crisis.

It's an old cliche that every crisis is an opportunity in disguise. It usually pops up on awful inspirational posters or the social media posts of people who look insufferably smug. Sadly, it seems that those posters and smug social media folks are right. A crisis provides a shock to the system. It breaks the existing order. It forces a rebuilding and that rebuilding is where the opportunity is, if we can seize it.

One of the biggest changes the Coronavirus has made to the way we interact is that we are now interacting with each other not in the office, but in each other's homes. Their living rooms, kitchens, verandahs and home offices. The thing that strikes me about this is how personal those spaces are compared to our offices, and how comfortable people appear in their own spaces. Seeing this really brings home how much physical space matters in our work lives, and how much the design of our offices really lets us down.

Offices these days pretty much come in two flavours - the sterile cubicle farm and the modern funky. Your cube farm is the classic office layout, all beige or pastel panelling. An off white plywood desk in a tiny individual cubicle or (horror of horrors) a communal "pod". The modern funky office on the other hand is all bright colours, faux industrial chic furniture, exposed plywood, lots of communal spaces and plenty of green. This sort of office space is designed to scream out "Look at us…look how modern and funky we are!" Both of these office layouts are bad and, despite their very different appearances, for essentially the same reason.

Last time we started to look at safety and what that could mean for your organisation. We looked at some historic disasters (and there are many more than those BTW, I wasn't short of examples) and how a lack of safety played into those. We also started to look at what we could learn from those disasters about the sorts of safety issues that could be lurking in your organisation. Today we'll continue looking at safety and how we can start to build a culture based on respect and trust. Before I do though, I should show you just how prevalent safety problems are in the workplace, because you may well be thinking "that can't be my organisation". Guess what, it probably is.

In 2018, The Australian Workplace Psychological Safety Survey canvassed 1,176 Australian employees and found that: 

Only 23 per cent of lower income-earning frontline employees felt their workplace was “psychologically safe” to take a risk, compared to 45 per cent of workers on significantly higher incomes.
A “psychologically safe” workplace is characterised by a climate of interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people feel comfortable being themselves to make mistakes or take risks in their work.

So far we have looked at four of the five aspects of agile culture:

• Supportive leadership

• Striving for quality

• Becoming a Learning Organisation

• Enabling people

If an organisation can embrace those four they will truly be an agile organisation. So if all they need are those four, why is there a fifth? The fifth aspect, Enhancing Safety, is in the list because without it none of the others can happen. Without a sense of safety, you won't get supportive leadership, you won't get a focus on quality, you won't get learning and you certainly won't get enabled people. What you will get is what you probably have now - people doing exactly what they are told, not asking questions, not challenging, not pushing boundaries, not setting challenging goals and escalating all decisions upwards. You will get an organisation that is risk averse (that's not a good thing BTW... a lot of organisations brag about being risk averse, what they really mean is that they manage risk carefully; being risk averse means being afraid to take any risks at all, like new products, innovation of any kind, process improvements...), ossified and incapable of change.

Last time we looked at what it means to be a learning organisation. There are obvious benefits to having a learning organisation - better decisions, better products, better processes, better, well, just about everything. There are also some non-obvious benefits that are, in some ways, even more powerful than the obvious stuff - it turns out that learning is extremely motivating for people. Learning organisations tend to have very highly motivated, switched on, dedicated people in them and that gives them a huge advantage. It's not just that these organisations attract those sort of people, but the really amazing thing is that the people already in the organisation become more motivated when the organisation embraces learning.

It turns out that learning - getting better at something - is one of the key things that motivate us. When we talk about motivators in a work context we tend not to think about things like learning. We tend to think more about things like pay and bonuses. Psychologists who work in this field divide up motivators into two types - extrinsic (meaning coming from outside) and intrinsic (coming from inside). Things like pay, bonuses, company cars and the like are extrinsic motivators. Things like learning are intrinsic motivators. Guess which turns out to be more powerful? Yep. Intrinsic motivators win. Extrinsic motivators tend to work in reverse - the lack of pay is a de-motivator, but once you are paid fairly, more pay does not equal more motivation. So, what are intrinsic motivators and how do they work?

Last time, we looked at Striving for Quality and how that means not just ensuring that what you produce isn't simply defect free, but also the right thing, and produced in the right way. To do that, an organisation needs to be able to learn. This is a problem for many organisations. In many organisations, learning is not only not encouraged but is often unofficially discouraged, or worse, it's officially and actively discouraged. I don't mean training budgets getting reduced here. Learning new skills is an important part of organisational learning and people should be given the opportunity to do so, but I'm talking about something different. I'm talking about an organisation learning whether what they are building is the right thing or not. And whether the way they are building it is the right way to build it Or whether the organisational structure they have is the right structure. What I'm really talking about is organisations learning how to become better at everything they do. 

Most organisations are afraid of learning. Why? It seems like such an obvious question - is what we are building, what people want? Organisations will say they are interested. They will quote sales figures and user numbers and so on, but dig a little deeper and they shy away. Did that particular feature meet its goals? Don't want to know. Did that project succeed in the market? Don't want to know. Why? Because if it isn't performing, someone in the organisation was wrong. And they might be important. So it's best not to find out. I have asked about whether a particular feature that a team worked on was meeting its user uptake goals and been told "We don't measure that because that way no-one gets fired for telling the product director that they picked the wrong thing to build". Organisations are afraid of learning because they are afraid of failure.

Hi Folks. Back after the new year (and a major unplanned upgrade to the blog that knocked me off air for a few months…so much for keeping up to date with maintenance) I’ll be kicking off with something I talked about at the end of last year - an in-depth look at my views on what an agile culture looks like. If you can cast your minds all the way back to 2018, I posted an overview of 5 things that I feel are the foundations of a good agile culture. To refresh everyone's memories (including mine) after the holiday season, here they are again -

• Supportive leadership

• Strive for quality

• Learning organisation

• Enable people 

• Enhance safety

Today I'll be looking at the first one - supportive leadership. Agile folks talk about this all the time by different names. Servant leadership, supportive leadership, people-focused leadership, and a host of others. We all mean the same thing. The trouble is, when we are asked "well, what exactly does that mean, we generally aren't very good at defining it, and are even worse at giving leaders real, practical guidance on what to do to become a supportive/servant/people focused leader. So here is my attempt.

Vampires are lame. There it is, standing at your front door, cape, fangs, the full works. You have opened the door, it's looking at you, getting hungrier and hungrier. It's starting to drool. You are looking at it from inside. Giving it the finger. Perfectly safe. Why? Because according to the stories, vampires need permission to enter. You are perfectly safe as long as you don't say "please come in". Of course if they catch you out in the open later without a front door to give you protection, you might just regret giving them that finger.

So why am I telling you this? Because coaches have something in common with vampires. Capes? No. Because we descend on organisations and suck them dry? No. It's because we also need permission before we can do what we are there to do. We need permission to coach. But surely, I hear you say, you have permission. After all, you have been hired to coach, therefore you have permission to do so. Sadly, it's not that simple. What we usually have is permission to be there, not permission to coach.

I have had quite a few comments over the years that I have been running this blog along the lines of - "OMG! Wall of text" or "What's the takeout here?" or "Why don't you make this an easy to read list? " or "Can you summarise into a few bullet points? " or just the basic "TL:DR". This worries me a bit. Not just because people aren't reading my stuff, but because I think this points to a much deeper problem. I think this points to the reason people and organisations find it so hard to change.

My posts are always between 800 and 1200 words. That's not exactly a wall of text. If you print it out, it's about a page and a half. The reading time is about 5-10 minutes. Maybe 15 if I really make you think. That's not a large amount of time. But yet many of us feel unable to invest that amount of time to read something. If it's hard to find time to read a short blog post, what about longer format work? An essay? A book? 200 pages? 50,000 words? I know a lot of people who tell me that they barely have time to read tweets these days. What does this say about our capacity to absorb and process new information?

Let’s look again at our team from the last post and take a closer look at the Team Lead. It’s easy to see how Fred got into the situation he was in. The job of Team Lead is very unclear in an Agile world. One of the agile principles is that all team members are equal so what does a team lead do? I usually recommend that teams don’t have a team lead. That forces them to look after themselves rather than relying on a team lead to do it for them.  Most large organisations though insist on having a Team Lead for every team. That’s OK. We can live with it. We just need to work out what an agile team lead does.

I recently coached a team that had a problem. Actually, they thought they had a lot of problems. Their builds were a mess. Their environment was unstable. Their tests were broken. They were finding it very difficult to get any work done. Their once excellent planning was starting to drift away from reality. When we started to look into these problems though, it became clear that all these problems had one single cause – their team lead.