Archives for July 2022

Agile Has Stickiness: An Interview With Agilist and Leadership Coach Marsha Acker

In a recent interview with Yves Hanoulle, I talked about ‘Agile has stickiness’.

Yves was a wonderful host. We talked about the following:

My two degrees in engineering
How when I want to do something, I just do it…
My passion for growing leadership in others
At what age I started talking about leadership to my daughter
What I learned about doing harm to others
How difficult the world is for a 13 year old to navigate
How I plan whitespace and how I use it
How I think online working has an impact on diversity
The stickiness of agile

We also talked about these books:

The Art & Science of Facilitation

Agile software development in the large

Synchronicity the inner path of leadership

Cultivating Transformations

Watch the full episode here:

Remote Employees Are Falling Behind. Here’s How to Help Them.

One of the biggest challenges right now facing remote work is remote employees feeling isolated and disconnected from other human beings, outside of those they live with. When a feeling of ‘being on my own’ sets in it can manifest in lots of ways.

Interpersonal work relationships become more stressed, it becomes harder to give people feedback and harder for someone to receive feedback. Small points of disagreement that might normally be handled with ease become bigger and derailing for a team. The language people use can shift from ‘we’ to ‘us versus them’, making conversation more divisive.

How Can We Help Remote Employees Feel Like They Are Part of the Team

One of the best ways around this is to create more space for connection and relationship building. Relationships are the lifeline to fostering trust and psychological safety and when those qualities are strong the less disconnected we will feel and the easier it will be to navigate differing points of view and conflict.

Schedule One-On-Ones With Your Remote Employees

Schedule individual time with people on your team and go beyond the surface level conversation of ‘How are you?’ Ask questions with genuine curiosity and be ready to just listen, without the need to solve or fix anything and be real and vulnerable yourself.

What’s difficult right now?
What do you miss most?
What’s one thing that would make it better?

Normalize the New Normal

Working remotely can be very productive, many people have done it for years but what’s different is that this is a pandemic and for those with kids or multi-generational households there are lots more people in their work space each day who also need their attention. Make it okay that other people might walk through your video during a meeting or that more frequent breaks might be needed during the day to check on others.

Help Your Remote Employees Set Boundaries

The line of work and home does not exist anymore, it all blurs into one. Failure to define and agree on boundaries can leave people feeling frustrated and worn down. Help your team members define boundaries for themselves and then communicate those with other team members. Questions to consider:

What are my working hours?
What are my non-working hours?
How often will I take breaks? How can I schedule those into my calendar?
How do I want to handle emails that come in after working hours?
How can I close out my work space at the end of the day? (i.e. put the computer in the closet, change where I sit, etc.)

How To Create More Connection in a Team Setting

When getting together as a team, even remotely, use these following tips to create connection/

Make it a Ground Rule for Team Meetings to Have Video On

People may push back on this. Make space to hear their objections and concerns and ask if they would be willing to give it a try for a small period of time. Most people find it so very helpful for everyone to be on video that they wonder why they didn’t try it earlier.

Create Space for Connection

At the beginning of each meeting have a check-in question and ask everyone to respond. It can be about the meeting topic or something more personal. This warms people up to the meeting, gets everyone’s voice in the conversation and gives the team an opportunity to learn something about each other.

Example questions include:

My state of mind as I come to our call today is…
One thing I want to celebrate is…
What’s one question you have about our topic today?

Your Turn

How have you been able to help remote employees feel like they are (still) part of the team? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

How to Develop this Most Important Interpersonal Skill of Listening

One of our most basic human needs is the need to be heard and seen. Yet we live in a world where there is more transmitting than receiving.

Social media, email, video chats, etc. all exist to help you get your message and opinion heard.

We often think we are listening when in fact we are busy…

Making the conversation about ‘me’
Sifting and sorting for ideas that resonate for me
Making connections with things that are also true for me
Discarding things I don’t like
Gathering evidence to refute, persuade or cajole the other into seeing my perspective
Loading up my response and anxiously awaiting the moment I can respond
Making up stories about the other person, that may or may not be true
Drifting away, thinking about the past or worrying about the future

These are natural ways our brains function in a conversation, while it serves a purpose, it’s not really listening. So how do we develop this interpersonal skill of listening?

The Absence of Listening

Listening is foundational to communication and relationships with others.

You have likely experienced the absence of being heard in some way that led to feeling:

Disconnected
Mis-understood
Anxious
Fearful
Frustrated
Apathetic
Angry

We may not intend to have this impact on others, the absence of listening creates a loss of connection and understanding. It’s a void that can raise the stakes in a relationship. When the stakes go up, conflict and breakdown emerge.

That can look like anything from avoiding talking with someone, or having the same conversation over and over again, or a full blown argument with raised voices. The roots of conflict can often be traced back to someone feeling misunderstood or not heard.

Three Ways to Build the Muscles and Interpersonal Skill of Listening

Skillful listening is one of the most impactful skills in navigating interpersonal relationships.

It’s the doorway to genuinely seeing and hearing what’s said and not said. It influences the questions you ask and the outcome of conversations. Just like muscles that you work at the gym, the “listening muscle” strengthens with practice. Here are three attributes to concentrate on:

1 Focus of Attention

Be here now. It’s natural for our mind to wander. When it does, use a phrase like ‘be here now’ to gently bring your mind back to focus on the conversation that you are having right in this very moment.

Focus on the other. Bring the person(s) in front of you into focus and soften your focus on other things. Remove your devices or other distractions from your view, which signals to you and the other person that they are important.

2 Quality and Depth

Come with Empathy and Compassion. Empathy opens up the ability for us to imagine what it might be like in someone else’s shoes. Compassion enables us to be helpful to the other. When you start a conversation from a place of empathy and compassion, rather than a place of apathy, sympathy, irritation, punishment, or desire to prove someone wrong, it changes the quality of your presence and listening and the impact you have on others.

Listen for what’s not being said. There are the words we speak and then there is what we are not saying as well. What’s in between the words someone is saying? What are they pointing out without explicitly naming it? What assumptions do you hear being made? What’s the energy and tone in their voice? Where do they pause and where are they excited?

3 Response

Reflect. Reflect what you’re hearing and acknowledge the highs and lows. Being able to mirror back to someone what you hear them saying can be refreshing and clarifying for the other person. This is the moment when people feel an immediate resonance and when they realize that someone is actually listening. You might say things like:

This is really tough for you right now.
You seem very clear in your thinking.
There is a lot happening for you right now.
You are full of energy and excitement about this.

Inquire. Bring a mindset of curiosity and apply it when you practice skillful listening. Ask questions that deepen the conversation and create learning and insights for both the speaker and the listener. Listen to the words and phrases the other person uses and ask questions such as: :

What was that like for you?
What’s important about that?
You said it’s hard – what’s making it hard?
You said excited – what are you most excited about?

Suspend assumptions and solutions. When you notice that you’re starting to make assumptions or are tempted to start offering advice or solutions, pause and place those ideas in a mental parking lot – suspend them for the moment and use the ‘law of three’. If you have the same impulse three times then use that as a signal to ask the person for permission to share. You might say: “I have had a similar experience, would it be helpful to you if I shared what happened for me?”

Be willing to be changed. As you build the muscles of listening, be ready for change. Really listening to someone else can not only have a profound impact on them, but it can change you as well; if you allow it. I have watched someone enter a conversation with a very clear opinion on a certain topic and leave with a completely different one.. This happened because both parties were engaged and practiced ‘skillful listening’. It was through this conversation that not only did their opinions change, but the relationship became more connected because they felt seen and heard.

Over to You: How Do You Listen?

Is listening a skill you want to work on?

Will you be implementing these tips to listen with intent?

9 Ways to Recognize a Sacrificial Leader on Your Leadership Team

In a recent podcast interview with Mike Seavers, he self-identifies as a sacrificial leader. Some questions came to mind when he mentioned sacrificial leadership.

What does a sacrificial leader look and sound like, and how can you recognize a sacrificial leader on your own team? What should you know about sacrificial leadership?

Curious? This article is for you!

The Definition of a Sacrificial Leader

A clear definition of a sacrificial leader comes from Choi & Mai-Dalton, 1998, 1999.

“Self-sacrificial leadership occurs when a leader forfeits one or more professional or personal advantages for the sake of followers, the organization, or a mission. One key aim of self-sacrificial leadership is to encourage follower reciprocity.”

Leader self-sacrifice is a tool which great leaders use to motivate followers.

Following their lead, current charismatic leadership theorists have perceived self-sacrifice in leadership to be a tactic which a leader could employ to influence follower attributions of charisma.

Sacrificial Leadership vs Servant Leadership

Sacrificial leadership and servant leadership are close cousins.

“The servant-leader is a servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first.

One key aim of self-sacrificial leadership is to encourage follower reciprocity. This behavior has the added benefit of potentially moving followers toward an organizational goal; modifying their behavior; or simply persuading them to attribute legitimacy to the leader, thus allowing the leader to gain influence.”

Read the full research paper here.

Recognizing a Sacrificial Leader

There are many leadership styles. In your career you will meet leaders with different skills, different leadership styles and of course, different agendas!

Recognizing a sacrificial leader on your team isn’t always easy. However, a sacrificial leader will often push your organization to new heights and goals!

Here are 9 ways to recognize a sacrificial leader on your leadership team!

Empathy.
What is empathy but the ability to understand and share the feelings of others? Sacrificial leaders have empathy and recognize the feelings their team members have.
Taking Initiative.
Leaders who take initiative are those who get things done. Sitting back and waiting for others to do the work is not sacrificial leadership.
Developing people.
Sacrificial leaders put people above systems and above the company’s needs. The development of each individual is important to a sacrificial leader.
Building community.
The team is everything in sacrificial leadership. Building community is therefore important and of utmost importance.
Empowering followers.
With building community, goes empowering followers. The sacrificial leader empowers his or her team to make changes and to lead.
Serving followers.
As much as servant leaders serve followers, so do sacrificial leaders. Serving followers and team members is an important leadership skill.
Providing leadership.
Sacrificial leaders are true leaders, not just in name but also in action. They provide leadership to their team, their community and their followers.
Sharing the same vision.
Sacrificial leaders share the same vision as their team members do.
Serving their followers.
Last but not least, sacrificial leaders serve their followers, sometimes to their own detriment. They serve followers to the point it might impact their own career choices.

A Sacrificial Leader in Action

Mike Seavers says:

“What’s important to me is the idea of leaders as not in command. This might sound interesting because I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about the military and how it works, but I’m more of the sacrificial leader. Like the leader who is last to eat, because you’re constantly taking care of your team or your people that follow you. That is very core to who I am as a leader.

I’m a VP. I’m probably four or five layers removed from the engineers on the front lines. We took a break over the holidays and we had a pretty bad outage at one point. The system that we had went down and I got the notification. I was well, my team’s going to be working. I’m going to be working. I jumped on the zoom video call and I was just there. “If you are all going to be missing some of your Christmas break, I think it’s important that I’m here too, to support you in any way that I can. And it’s probably nothing I can do, but at least I can, tell you a joke or make you laugh or just be moral support, or if you need anything or you need me to go get somebody for you or, you know, like I’m here.” I tend to do things like that. My team knows that I would never ask my team to do something that I won’t do myself.”