Lead Without Blame

I interviewed Tricia Broderick recently on the LabVIEW Experiment. I met Tricia a while ago through Llewellyn Falco. I didn't know it at the time, but we are kind of neighbors - she lives not very far from me. She introduced me to Agile Denver, so I started going to some of their meetings. She recently wrote a book with Diane Larsen called Lead Without Blame.

When I interviewed Tricia, I was only halfway through the book. I should have waited until I finished the book because now I've got a lot more to talk to her about. Guess that will have to be interview #2.

Essential Motivators - Basic Agile Tenets

The book starts out by talking about 3 Essential Motivators. This is very much along the lines of Daniel Pink's work on Motivation. It's also very much in line with what I would call basic agile tenets.

• Purpose - People need a clearly identified big-picture goal. They have to be driving toward something meaningful. The team needs to be aligned on that goal.
• Co-Intelligence - This is really about continuous learning and knowledge sharing between team members. It also relates to the mentality of turning what some might consider failures into learning opportunities.
• Autonomy - The agile manifesto talks about self-organizing teams. Part of the key to building autonomy is having regular, effective retrospectives and actually applying what is learned. The key is the team having the ability in a retrospective to say: "This process really isn't working for us. Here is an alternative we'd like to try.", and having the ability to actually try out the alternative.

There were 2 quotes in this section that I thought were quite good.

I've often said something similar about unit testing and refactoring. As soon as you make them a separate line item, it's something that can be vetoed - "We don't have time for that!" It really becomes about following the Boy Scout rule and just instinctively leaving things better than you found them. When it comes to learning, I had not applied that principle as rigorously. I've often broken out training classes or time spent familiarizing myself with some new technology as separate activities. I'm going to stop doing that.

This quote really drives home the importance of all 3.

Resilience Factors

The second part of the book makes clear that while the 3 essential motivators are indeed essential, they are often not enough by themselves.

• Power Dynamics - Power dynamics can cause a breakdown in the flow of information. We need to be aware of power dynamics and do what we can to minimize them.
• Inclusive Collaboration - This is about making sure everyone's voice is heard and everyone feels comfortable speaking up. We have to go out of our way to make sure everyone knows that they belong and we may even have to go out of our way to seek their feedback and input.
• Embracing Conflict - This is about keeping conflict as a positive force. Conflict is positive when it helps to surface the best ideas. It's about focusing on finding the best idea rather than promoting personal agendas or grudges. It's also about giving feedback in constructive ways.
• Collaborative Connection - This is about building trust and reinforcing individual connections within the team. This allows information and knowledge to flow much more freely.

I just wanted to touch a little more on the 2 resilience factors I found the most interesting.

Power Dynamics

I thought the discussion of power dynamics was very interesting. Obviously, formal power is very easy to spot because it's officially recognized. Someone has a title and the ability to fire people. It's worth noting that just having that authority affects their relationship with those around them, even if they never abuse it. The part I found more interesting was the other types of power: informal and dominant.

Informal power often happens when a person is seen as the expert in a particular field. Coworkers tend to defer to them. The more interesting part to me was that informal power can also lead to groupthink. It's not necessarily one person being seen as an expert but rather that no one wants to rock the boat. Everyone wants everyone else to just get along so everyone just goes with the flow.

Dominant power is also very interesting to me because it can be hard to spot. Dominant power comes from being a part of the dominant culture. An example in the book is if you have a distributed team, you might have a majority (the dominant culture) in the Eastern timezone and a handful in the Pacific timezone. When scheduling meetings, those in the Eastern timezone might want to meet at 8AM ET. That means that those in the Pacific timezone would have to get up at 6AM. If you just simply said, "Well let's vote." it is possible that the group would vote for 8AM ET without taking into account the Pacific people. That would be an example of the dominant group exerting their power.

Inclusive Collaboration

I really enjoyed the section on inclusive collaboration. With DEI currently under attack, it is good to see someone stand up for it. My big takeaway from the whole discussion is that it's not enough to just be aware of unconscious bias and make space for people. You have to actively go out of your way to make them feel included.

One thing I learned from my business coach Nate (this is not in the book), was the concept of oops and ouch. I find it works really well. The idea is if you say something and it doesn't come out quite right, you just say "Oops. I didn't mean for that to come out that way." and if someone says something that offends you, you just say "Ouch. When you said X (be specific), that hurt me because (be specific)." It helps a lot with the microaggression stuff because often people commit them unintentionally. Oops and Ouch gives you a framework to talk about those things without everyone getting all upset about it.