Human-Centric and Transformational Leadership for Agile Teams | Sara Caldwell

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches

Episode: Human-Centric and Transformational Leadership for Agile Teams | Sara Caldwell
Host: Vasco Duarte
Release Date: December 10, 2024

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Introduction

In this episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte welcomes Sara Caldwell, an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach, to discuss the vital role of human-centric and transformational leadership within Agile teams. The conversation delves into personal inspirations, impactful leadership strategies, and a compelling team story that underscores the importance of understanding user needs in product development.

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Inspirational Reads

Sara Caldwell opens the discussion by sharing three books that have significantly influenced her career as a Scrum Master:

1. Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan (00:47)

   • "You can't blow up bureaucracy with bureaucracy."
   • This book emphasizes the importance of appreciating system dynamics rather than attempting to overhaul organizational structures entirely. Sara highlights the need to be people positive and complexity conscious, concepts that encourage leaders to nurture and understand their teams deeply.

2. Leadership is Language by David Marquet (02:29)

   • Sara admires Marquet’s intent-based leadership approach, which advocates for empowering team members by shifting the decision-making process closer to those who perform the work. This method fosters a more engaged and proactive team environment.

3. Radical Candor by Kim Scott (03:30)

   • Focusing on direct communication, Sara appreciates how this book provides actionable strategies for becoming a better servant leader. It underscores the importance of creating a culture where honest feedback is encouraged, leading to improved team dynamics and personal growth.

Sara's recommendations not only provide theoretical insights but also offer practical tools that Scrum Masters can apply to enhance their leadership and team management skills.

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Team Tuesday: A Transformative Team Story

Context and Challenge (04:10)

Sara recounts her experience working with a managed healthcare company aiming to transition patient care managers from handwritten notes to a digital platform. The initial team comprised about four engineers, which later expanded into three separate teams. Their primary goal was to develop an iPad application to securely capture and store patient information, mitigating the risks associated with handling sensitive data on paper.

Issues Faced (04:10 - 07:47)

Despite the technical solution, the adoption of the new tool was significantly lower than anticipated. Feedback from care managers was minimal, with responses suggesting that users merely needed to learn how to use the device better. Sara identified a critical disconnect: the engineering team had little to no interaction with the actual users—the care managers. This lack of understanding led to the development of a product that didn’t align with the users' needs and capabilities.

Turning the Tide (07:47 - 09:48)

To bridge this gap, Sara initiated a "ride-along" program where passionate engineers spent a day shadowing care managers. This hands-on approach provided engineers with firsthand insights into the users' daily challenges and workflows. For instance, an engineer named Gemma spent time with a care manager named Carol, leading to transformative discussions during design and refinement sessions.

Notable Quote:
"When I was on a ride along with Carol, these conversations would come up, and now suddenly those care managers were in our refinement sessions." — Sara Caldwell [07:49]

This integration of user experiences into the development process not only enhanced the product’s usability but also fostered a deeper sense of empathy and collaboration within the engineering teams.

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Key Insights and Lessons

1. User-Centric Development:

   • Understanding the end-users is crucial. Engineers designing solutions without direct user interaction risk creating products that fail to meet actual needs. Sara emphasizes that "We aren’t our users," highlighting the necessity for teams to engage directly with users to inform their designs.

2. Transformational Leadership:

   • Leaders should create systems that encourage curiosity and empathy. By facilitating opportunities like ride-alongs, leaders can break down silos and promote a more collaborative and informed development environment.

3. Systemic Solutions Over Individual Blame:

   • Sara advocates for the belief that "there are no bad people, only bad systems." This perspective shifts the focus from blaming individuals for failures to identifying and addressing systemic issues that hinder effective collaboration and product success.

4. Cost of Understanding:

   • Investing time in understanding users can lead to greater efficiency in the long run. Sara points out the "opportunity cost of just spending a day with your user" is outweighed by the benefits of reduced documentation, fewer meetings, and minimized coordination waste.

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Conclusion

Sara Caldwell’s insights shed light on the profound impact that human-centric and transformational leadership can have on Agile teams. By prioritizing user engagement and fostering an environment of empathy and collaboration, Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches can drive their teams toward more effective and meaningful product development.

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Looking Ahead

Host Vasco Duarte wraps up the episode by teasing the next installment, which will explore leading change and the lessons learned from participating in change programs. Listeners are encouraged to rate and share the podcast to support the Scrum Master community.

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For more actionable advice and inspiring conversations, stay tuned to the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.

Transcript

[Vasco Duart]

Hi, I'm your host, Vasco Duart. Welcome to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast where we share tips and tricks from Scrum Masters around the world. Every day, we bring you inspiring answers to important questions that all Scrum Masters.

[Host]

Face day after day. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Team Tuesday. This week with us is Sarah Caldwell. Hey, Sarah. Welcome back.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Hi. Happy Tuesday.

[Host]

Absolutely. Happy Tuesday, everybody. And of course, Team Tuesday here on the podcast. Elsewhere it might be Taco Tuesday, but for us it is Team Tuesday. We'll talk about teams in a second. But first, Sarah, share with us what was the book that most inspired you in your career as a Scrum Master?

[Sarah Caldwell]

So for anybody who knows me, they know I'm a big nerd. So this question was incredibly hard for me to narrow it down to one, so I have three, if that's okay. And so one book that I really like about the way that processing our operating system and understanding a little bit more about that system dynamic that we were talking about yesterday is Brave New Work by Aaron Dingen. I think I'm mispronouncing that, but his book is great. It's called Brave New Work and he really talks about how we don't need to install a new operating system and that we need to appreciate some of the system dynamics. So a couple, two favorite quotes from that book are you can't blow up bureaucracy with bureaucracy. And we want to be people positive and complexity conscious.

[Host]

That's. That's a huge, like people positive and complexity conscious. That. Oh my God. That, that for me, that's a huge recommendation for the book. Thank you for that.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Yeah. And it's something to really noodle on and spend some time, you know, I like to oftentimes spend some, some walks really thinking about what that means to me and the organizations that I work with. And the next one, you know, we talked about in the end yesterday related to leadership and how they can fit into this new world where the team is doing the thinking and the doing and to really appreciate that and to help leaders and teams that I coach and teams that I'm working with is I really like Leadership is Language by David Marquet. Often people know him as the submarine guy in the video is where he changed the worst submarine fleet to the best submarine fleet using his leadership approaches. Intent based leadership.

[Host]

David has been a guest on the podcast, so check it out. I'll put the link in the show notes if you want to check those out.

[Sarah Caldwell]

He is. Yeah, he is fantastic. His work is fantastic. And what I love about this book is that it really gives some concrete actions for leaders to do. As opposed to Siri of like, you're not part of the team. Right. Chicken and egg and all these things that are kind of. That are directionally accurate, but not as concrete and tangible as David makes it in the books that he has written. And the last one is Radical Candor by Kim Scott. There's so many relatable antidotes here, especially for somebody like myself who is a direct communicator. And it really has helped me be an overall better leader, servant leader even. You know, she specifically talks a lot about how to be a kick a boss and be a better leader for better humans. But there are so many points that I have taken away and utilized in my Scrum Mastering and Agile Journey.

[Host]

Yeah. And that's a great recommendation as well. Right. Like a book that can directly affect how you practice your role as a Scrum Master is a great recommendation. Thank you for sharing those three books. We were hoping for one, but we got three. I guess we can call this a bonus episode already. But of course, Tuesday is also Team Tuesday, and we want to explore a story of a team. Tell us a little bit about the context, like, what was going on, how big was the team, maybe how big was the project, and then walk us through how those small little behaviors kind of developed over time and eventually became a problem for the team.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Yeah, so I was working for a managed healthcare company, and we were hoping to be able to at least. The story we were telling the team is that we were wanting to leverage technology to really shift patient care managers from writing these handwritten notes on paper into an electronic device. And the reason behind that is that, you know, healthcare data is one of the most lucrative data out there. And if we have all these individual pieces of paper with some potential phi on it, our care manager could get into a car accident because they're. They're going from a house to house, and all these papers could be with phi be flown flying all over the highway. Right. And so we wanted to solve that risk. We wanted to secure a patient data, and we brought that problem to a group of engineers. Roughly, I think. I think at the beginning it was probably about four people, but through the project, it grew to about three different teams. And so engineers did what they're really born to do, use technology to solve problems. And so they created an iPad that the care managers could use to capture notes and like, bada boom, bada bing, no more paper. Right? Only, like, you know, only patient information is secured on, like, you know, as look only information is stored on a secured device. But after like the first couple pilots really released, adoption was struggling and the team really just couldn't figure out what was going on. And the feedback that they were receiving was like brushed aside. Like they just need to learn how to use the tool. That's a user problem, they need to read the manual. And that struck me by surprise because. But then like I started thinking about it and realized like the engineers had never met a care manager. Like they didn't know anything about the Persona or the characteristics. They didn't know that these people were not tech savvy people and that the average age was 46, which was way more relevant back in the day, especially as I'm approaching 46. And they didn't appreciate that most care managers didn't have the latest phone, they were actually using flip phones. They didn't really realize that nobody was enabling or encouraging them or exploring to them how to use this tool. They were just giving it to them. The engineers were forced design a product for themselves to solve the problem. But as we know like what we know about user experience and our ux, we know that we aren't our users. So you know, you might be wondering, well, how is this related to like a potential team dynamic or self destructive behavior? And you know, before I answer that, I really want to answer that, you know, I'm a firm believer that there are no bad people, only bad systems. And the system didn't allow for them to have space to like really get curious about who they were designing for. And the team also didn't get curious about who they were designing for. And I think that ultimately was, you know, some self destructive behavior because what they were doing is creating a product in a vacuum, not really appreciate the who they were creating it for and then getting frustrated when the person that they created for it wasn't using it and kind of blaming them. And it ends up kind of being like, you know, a cycle that we go through. But how we got out of that was we got a few passionate team members, a few passionate engineers to do a writer along with the care manager. So like, you know, Gemma, right, so.

[Host]

They were kind of shadowing the care workers.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Exactly. Spending a day with them. And that was just a complete shift in perspective for not only that individual but the team. Because what ended up happening was so, was so neat is that they would come like during our design sessions, our refinement sessions where we'd have some like, you know, kind of at a stalemate about what to do, what decisions. Somebody, you know, the person who went on the ride along would usually say, well, when I was on a ride along with Carol, and these conversations would come up, and now suddenly those care managers were like in our refinement sessions, they were in our sprint planning sessions, they were, they were there with us as we were creating the product.

[Host]

This is so beautiful because this is kind of. I mean, when we talk about product design these days, most people who read and study the aspects that relate to understanding the user would immediately say, hey, you know, just go for a ride along or shadow the user or at least interview the user, show them some paper, prototypes, whatever. Interact with the user in whatever way you can. But this wasn't always the case. In fact, you are a project manager by training. I'm also a project manager by training. One of the things we learned early on with project was that somebody wrote the requirements and somebody else implemented them. That makes it impossible to even get close to understanding who the users are. But when that happens, when the engineers are allowed to interact directly with the users, this huge shift in perspective happens. And the story you just shared is such a beautiful example of how a team was going to self destruct, maybe destroying the product first, but eventually the team as well. And that ride along kind of transformed their perspective and brought the users to the critical planning and design conversations they were going to have while developing the product.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Exactly 100%. Nobody likes to build, spend a lot of their time and energy creating something that nobody uses. And yet sometimes we have systems that enable that and, you know, that, that sort of outcome. And, you know, oftentimes I hear people say, well, we don't have time. We need hands on keyboard. I got to get this story done. I got to get real work done. And the challenge I see with that is the opportunity cost of just spending a day with your user. It can actually create more understanding, less documentation, less meetings. It actually eliminates some coordination costs and waste within the system when we do that. So if any leader out there is curious about this and thinking, I wonder if I can do that, it's definitely worth an experiment. And I know it will pay dividends. You will see that one experience be talked about for months, if not years.

[Host]

Absolutely. It's something that changes the team's perspective for sure. Thank you for sharing that story, Sarah.

[Sarah Caldwell]

Thank you.

[Vasco Duart]

Tuesday is team day here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast, But tomorrow we talk about something that goes beyond the work we do with the teams. We will talk about how to lead change and what our guests have learned from leading and participating in Change programs during their career. See you tomorrow. We really hope you liked our show, and if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes? Share this podcast and let other Scrum Masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring.