← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
From Tasks to Outcomes, An Agile Cultural Transformation Story | Chrissy Fleming
00:15:53
Chrissy Fleming: From Tasks to Outcomes, An Agile Cultural Transformation Story Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: . Chrissy shares...
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- [00:02]
A
Hi there. Pasco Duarte here, your host. I wanted to share a story with you. You know how sometimes Agile just feels like following another checklist when like processes and frameworks feel more important than what we are trying to achieve and sometimes even like handcuffs. I was talking to a customer of the Global Agile Summit and he used a term that kind of stuck in my he said, I have Agile fatigue. And I've heard that a lot from people since then. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be this way. So we started thinking and at the Global Agile Summit, which is happening this May, we're bringing together practitioners who've actually done that, who've broken free from this, you know, install the framework kind of mindset. We want to focus the summit on real life, first person stories of Agile all succeeding that inspire you to action. We're talking real experiences, practical solutions, and of course, amazing insights from leaders like Gojko Adsic, who will be one of the keynote speakers, and Jurgen Apelo, who will be one of the keynote speakers as well. If you're ready to leave the Agile fatigue behind, just join us in Dalit. The early birth tickets are now available@the globalagilesummit.com and mark your calendar. We will have workshops on May 18th, that's a Sunday. And then the conference itself will happen on May 19th and 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. So let's make Agile exciting again. And remember, go to agile globalagilesummit.com that is, and get your early birth ticket. Now, it will only be available until early March, so grab it now. And now onto the episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to our Wednesday the Change Leadership episode, this week with Chrissy Fleming. Hey, Chrissy, welcome back.
- [02:15]
B
Hey Vasco, thanks so much. I love Wednesdays.
- [02:18]
A
There you go.
- [02:19]
B
Why not? Happy Wednesday, everybody.
- [02:21]
A
Happy Wednesday, everybody. Just pick your day, whatever the day is, just love your day. All right, so let's dive into change. Change leadership, as I like to call it. And of course we want to go through one of those change processes that you were involved with and then walk through the step like from beginning to end, learn about how it went. And then also we ask you to highlight for us the tools, the tips, the tricks and the techniques you learned back then that you still apply today.
- [02:52]
B
Can't wait. All right, so I was working at vts, which is a company that does commercial real estate software. And I had the great pleasure of getting to take the team from just being kind of task oriented teams. We had a very large tech team at this point I was director of product still very, very much focused on our processes as well. And we were trying to get the team more outcome oriented and really thinking about what are we trying to get to, not just what's the next task or what has the next customer wanted. I often find in sales led organization can be very task or just next customer oriented and it can get very hard to see the big picture and pull out from that. So I will have to give a shout out. I had an amazing partner in the head of engineering there at the time. His name is Bala Pichandi. If you're out there, Bala, hi. I miss you. We partnered together to change the culture of our whole tech team. And it started first with using okrs and getting just the conversations going about what are the objectives we're really trying to achieve and what are the key results that we expect to see. And for those of you who are implementing OKRs for the first time, it's always messy at first. You always do it wrong the first time. We sure did. But it creates the conversation. What's more important is creating the conversation around what are we really trying to do and how will we know that we're getting there. If you're having that conversation, it doesn't matter if you're using okay or just goals or whatnot. Have those conversations with the team. The other thing that we did was we wanted to have the team feel like something was different. And so we started with demo day. So we always did demos at the end of Sprints for the company to come see and we wanted to make it more celebratory. We were telling teams to take risks, so we had to make it feel safer for them to demo what they were doing. I have a musical background, so I always bring music to these things. This was still when we were all in the office together. So demo day was a party. I we brought snacks. I also am a big believer in feeding your team, so I brought candy and snacks. I had the remix of Elvis singing. A little less conversation, a little more action. At the beginning of our demo days, everybody would get pumped up. I would emcee and we really made it an event and we started inviting our executive team to demo days. They hadn't come in a really long time. We were like, this is a party. This is about celebrating that we've got two more weeks of work that we're really proud of and that we're learning from and we really enjoyed that. So that was the start, that was just the beginning of getting people to Feel like something had changed. But then we had to really do a whole taxonomy reorganization, reorganize teams. There was a structure of that. And what we did was we split teams into houses. This was when Game of Thrones was still really big, y'all. So not Harry Potter houses.
- [06:05]
A
Yeah, the serious ones.
- [06:09]
B
But each. Each house might have, you know, one to three or four teams under it, but we. We set goals for each house. We'd have these discussions as a house. What are our goals, what every team had to think about. Where do I fit as part of this house? And where does this house fit in the. In the overall conversation? So we would have the team saying, well, we think we should own this and not own that. So there was a lot of swapping of ownership that the teams were deeply involved in. It didn't come top down. It was them telling us, we think we should own this, we shouldn't own that part of the code. Every house developed our own animal mascot mottos. We had Latin mottos. I had a friend of mine who is a classics professor translate everything into Latin. I still remember my house that I was in charge of was trust earned unceasingly. Because we were about calculating, calculating every transaction. We had goals, and every team set their own. What we called your boundaries and your bridges. So we would negotiate what is the end of this house and the beginning of the other. And I think a lot of times when you have trouble building together as a team across teams, it's because it's not clear where your borders are and where you depend on each other, really laying that out as a whole company all at once, but also making it fun and giving the teams ownership of their direction. It led to some really outstanding results of how the team saw their place in what we were trying to build towards.
- [07:57]
A
So the thing that I really like about this story. Okay, so first, you totally accepted the fact that you're working with people, right? Like when you said we needed to make it a party. That's how you get people excited. You don't get people excited with overly strict and boring rules. You get them excited with a little bit of music, and that's the cool part for me. And some fun ways to create identity, because identity coalesces the team, it creates a more. Well, first of all, it creates loyalty, which is very important because we don't know what we need to tackle in the future, but we do know everybody needs to pitch in, and loyalty is an important aspect of creating that. So I really like how you kind of describe the way the change process was going through, but always around people, always about bringing people with you.
- [08:50]
B
Yes. So it's so important. And I love that you brought up fun. And I want to be clear. There is a thin line, especially in the workplace, between fun fun and forced fun. Like a lot of people do not want to do trust fall team activities. They don't want to sit around singing. You have to find what is fun for the people that you're working with. And that might be different depending on the team. So I am a very silly person and I like to make myself ridiculous so that nobody takes themselves too seriously. But I had to really know the team and at that point I did. I had been there for over a year and had worked really closely with the team and my partner in crime. Bala and I both had to really think about what would be fun for folks. And part of it is about letting people run with what engages them. So I told you how we, we picked a, you know, an animal mascot and we picked these Latin mottos and the design team ran off with that and made like crests and banners for every house because that was their way of contributing the fun. I think if we had come to them and said, you have to make this, it wouldn't have been fun. But because they got to come to the conversation and say, how do we get in on this in a way that add ownership? So we really loved letting people own. That was a huge lesson of that. I'd say for me, there were a couple of things I really learned from that and I ground myself in that experience. When I'm going and doing change, which now I do consulting, so I'm in the business of change a lot more often. But one was the difference in ownership. When teams feel like they have a say in their own destiny, when you give them the choice of what problems does it make sense for our team to solve? What areas of the code does it make sense for us to own when that's not dictated to them, but when they can own it? How do you identify what animal really does represent us? You know, what is our motto? What are we going to live by? What are our values? Having those conversations doesn't have to be as touchy feely as people worry about. It's about getting to the human of like, why are we here? And to your point, really getting the team to feel ownership in that way. So that was huge for us. And the other, I think is the importance of working on a larger goal together and being focused and clear about what your mission is. I remember early on asking one of my colleagues, another great engineering leader named Chris Hayslett at Gilt. I said, how do you motivate engineers? And he said, give them meaningful work. It wasn't, you know, I mean, I'll still do root beer floats if I get the chance. But like, but. And bribery is a great thing, but give them meaningful work. He was like, hands down, if they don't have meaningful work, if people don't have meaningful work, they're not going to be motivated. Funny side note, I asked my uncle, who led a team of designers, how do you motivate designers? And he said, give them bacon. It's like the smell of bacon is enough. They'll get working. And I said, what if they're vegetarian? He's like, most vegetarians will still make an exception for bacon. So I know that doesn't work across all religions. You might have to find your religious equivalent of bacon motivation.
- [12:20]
A
And these days there are a lot of people who are vegetarians. So that might become a challenge.
- [12:25]
B
Right. You have to find whatever it is, you know, maybe it's a special scent of coffee, maybe it's something. But it's something he said that I just love it. Whether it's meaningful work and. Or bacon, find what motivates your team and, and really let them run with it and give, you know, put them in the driver's seat. I think that's just been a huge learning for me.
- [12:47]
A
I think these are incredible, important lessons. When you said give, give them meaningful work like that, that aspect, like, of course everybody wants to contribute to something that. But of course, and that's something you mentioned, they need to be part of creating what that meaning is. Right. Like if they are just given a meaning and they don't believe in it and they don't understand why it's there or whatever, it's just like a task. Right. So like that co creation aspect is incredibly important. For sure.
- [13:21]
B
Absolutely. And I want to be clear when we talk about meaning, because I think when we talk about meaningful work, everyone thinks we have to run out and cure cancer. Which don't get me wrong, it is meaningful to do that. Please, whoever's working on that, keep doing it. But teams can find meaning in solving problems and they don't have to be big problems. I once had a team that rallied around a process that I love. Internal teams and platform teams. They're my nerdy hearts delight. We had an internal process and there was a guy in customer service who every time he had to go through this process to Do a gift code for an organization. It was absolutely painful. And fortunately, this was a very nice guy whose name is escaping me right now. But I mapped out the process, and I would just show where it was painful for him. And our team mission was make him not suffer. Right. Make this one person who everybody liked enjoy his life and not, you know, not hate the world. Every time he had to go through the process, that was a meaningful thing to improve. Right. It's a tiny, tiny task. Is it like it's not on a grand scheme? We're not solving the problems of the world, but we solved this guy's problem, and that was meaningful for the team.
- [14:40]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [14:41]
B
I want to be clear that when you're talking about meaning, it doesn't always have to be this grandiose, big vision. Sometimes it's just there is a problem today that we are in a position of not having tomorrow. Wouldn't that be nice? Right. You can really find out, and if.
- [14:57]
A
There'S a person down the corridor that you can go and talk to, that's.
- [15:01]
B
Oh, that's the best.
- [15:02]
A
Much more meaningful, right?
- [15:04]
B
Absolutely. And that's. That's where I put on my. My product owner hat and say, you got to know your customer and you got to really empathize with them, because when you're solving problems for them, it feels meaningful.
- [15:15]
A
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that story, Chrissy.
- [15:18]
B
My pleasure.
- [15:23]
A
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