Leadership and Teams
Michael Winslow and I have had several conversations about the impact that team sports has had on our perspective around leadership. The thing is sometimes people aren’t always into “sportsing” so sometimes our references don’t always land. Everyone of course has their own jam and I have a couple of other spaces where the importance of teamwork is relevant. .
First and most importantly, the #1 predictor of team effectiveness is psychological safety based on the research done by Google on Project Aristotle. Some other great research in this space can be found in Amy Edmundson’s 2018 book titled “The Fearless Leader.” When we think about how a team works some key components of psychological safety play out in significant roles. Active listening, trust, respect, communication, collaborative problem solving, inclusivity, authenticity, risk taking and mistakes generate learning, and tolerance.
Gaming
I remember talking to a friend about some leadership training and rightly so they scoffed at some of the mandatory training they had experienced. The results never really got people to work together more effectively. (Bad leadership training and the following support and measurements is a whole other article) They did say that there is real teamwork in the video game space. People you might not even know, in different locations around the world come together in self-forming teams to have fun and solve problems. Research has shown the benefits of playing video games and they include problem solving together, specifically building a collective intelligence, building good relationships, improved communication skills all while achieving a common goal together. This also sounds like the outcomes we want with successful team at work.
Improv
This one is near and dear to my heart. Disclaimer, I am in an improv class at Westside Improv with the awesome @jeff Ash in Wheaton, Illinois. For more information about improv I highly recommend Kelly Leondard’s work including his podcast and book “Yes, and.” Learning improv is a methodical and intentional process of exercises and experiences that start off with acclimating people to a new mindset that is growth orientated, celebrates mistakes as learning opportunities, adaptability and resilience. There is actual science involved in how our brains work, specifically to help us to regulate our active prefrontal cortex that likes to edit everything we do. This unlocks creativity and allows us to really be our authentic selves. Active listening and the “I’ve got your back” motto creates an environment that results in a cohesive team set up for success and a psychologically safe space. There is a reason over 50 years of improv ensambles have fueled some of the most successful creative minds in entertainment generation after generation.
Sports
I know there are a lot of curmudgeonly folks who lament the participation trophies but let's unpack what is going on when a kid plays a sport. First and foremost, kids benefit from playing as a team together. They learn how to trust, respect, communicate and work together effectively to play a game. And to be frank, there is a hell of a lot more failure in sports than winning. Someone who gets a hit in baseball 30% of the time is considered a legend. Playing together as a cohesive team is a key ingredient to success. These are lifelong skills. The winning comes eventually and a great example is how the Chicago Bulls finally started winning championships when the star player became a team player, trusting and supporting each other.
One final note, an interesting thing I heard Kelly Leonard describe on a podcast the other day was around the differences of group flow vs group think. The flow is that collaboration and collective group intelligence applied to problem solving. Whether it is in the office, on the field, gaming console or a stage. Group think is dangerous and where everyone is a clone in behavior and ideas.
I hope this helps inspire you to think a little bit differently and help you in your leadership journey.
AI for Leaders
Series: Skills for the Modern Leader
“The task of organizational leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.” - Peter Drucker
AI is a skill that can significantly help the modern leader, both with their teams and across their organziation. And it is not the AI (Artificial Intelligence) that you are thinking of. It is actually Appreciative Inquiry. Dr David Copperrider and Suresh Srivastva were the original researchers on this subject back in the 1980s. AI helps an organization rewire problem solving. Instead of focusing on the problem AI helps an organization use the science of positive psychology and identified strengths to facilitate change.
What can you do as a leader to make an impact right now using Appreciative Inquiry? First, ditch the problem statement. Instead try the 5 D Cycle as a guide.
The 5 D Cycle
Define - determine the “affirmative” topic vs stating a problem to solve. “How do we create an amazing ticketing process” might be something an airline company explores instead of “how do we reduce ticketing misprints”
Discover - or appreciating, “What has worked for us before? What are our successes, wins, positive experiences?” A technique people can use is called an appreciative interview.
Dream - Envision the outcome. “AI asks participants to consciously envision a preferred future that is grounded in past successes but imaginatively and creatively unrestrained.”
Design - Co-create as an organziation what is next. Take what the group envisioned and begin to build steps to move forward. Who can work on this? What talents do we have?
Destiny - This is the how, moving forward to make the dream and design a reality. Set up small experiments and trials. What do we do first to get moving forward? How can we reinforce the culture with follow ups using appreciative inquiry?
Why is this relevant to you as a leader?
Focusing on strengths and a 5:1 positive to critical feedback ratio have a significant impact on how your brain works. The positivity opens up more “out of the box” thinking while negative feedback or focusing on weaknesses has the opposite affect.
These techniques can help you recognize your own strengths and how to leverage those strengths at work and in life. Win-win for you and your teams.
Gallup studies show the following remarkable statistics when employees receive strengths based development:
29% increase in profits,
6x increase in engagement
72% lower turnover where employees receive
3x more likely to have higher quality of life
7.8x more productive at work
Change and problem solving can be very complex human endeavors, especially in the work place. Using science based techniques that leverage both an organization’s and employee’s strengths to facilitate growth creates a prosperous and healthy environment for everyone.
Here are some resources to get you started:
https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253937/strengths-articles-videos.aspx
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/positive-psychology
https://organizingengagement.org/models/appreciative-inquiry/
Cooperrider, David; Whitney, Diana D.. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (p. 2). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Improv and Leadership
RewireU Training @ Second City
Second City Works is the corporate education division of Second City, the legendary Improv comedy theater company in Chicago, IL. They offer a learning lab/course titled RewireU. The experience is a 2.5 day course that has four modules: Ensemble, Authenticity, Resilience and Innovation. The course is ~$950.00. My goal was to participate in an immersive experience that helped me explore unlocking creative thinking, reacting to situations in the moment more effectively and ultimately preparing for several large speaking engagements.
Improv for Business
There is significant research connecting the benefits of Improv training principles and to their adaptability to critical leadership business needs. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business has a dedicated program in collaboration with the Second City. The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University has a program focused on communication science to empower scientists and medical professionals to help the public better comprehend complex subjects. Bob Kuhlman, the author of “Getting to Yes, And” says that “organizations are using improv training to foster teamwork, collaboration, positive engagement and mindfulness” in a Knowledge@Warton article. Also the amazing Kelly Leonard wrote a book “Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses No, But Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration.”
Differentiator
Prior to taking this course I had taken a one day workshop at the Washington Improv Theater. It was a fantastic experience and I wanted to experience more. We were exposed to a lot of different improv techniques and learned about the science of communication and correlation to the professional world. The RewireU program provided a multi-day experience and I was eager to try it out. The program accomplished this by focusing on four core topics. Working as an ensemble, authenticity, resilience and innovation. The extended experience over 2 1/2 days gave the attendees more time on specific exercises and additional time to analyze.
Conclusions
My goal was to participate in an immersive experience that helped me explore unlocking creative thinking, reacting to situations in the moment more effectively and ultimately preparing for several large speaking engagements. It was a truly collaborative experience beginning with the creation of an ensemble from strangers in about one business day. This led to a group that was capable of solving problems together, at times non-verbally. The group felt safe in being themselves around each other. Finally, we had fun innovating and doing rapid prototyping trying to solve real problems. The flow of the course is purposeful in helping the trainee to see the path to a culture of innovation.
Following the course I experienced higher levels of engagement with complete strangers at various conferences (external and internal). I spoke in front of 350 people at DevOpsDays Montreal (2019) and over 250 people at an internal DevOps event very comfortably. Within my team we have been focusing on supporting each other, specifically with the language we use during team meetings and demos. We “Yes, and” by supporting work through thoughtful suggestions and encouragement. This has resulted in numerous automation tools and frameworks to help our teams and clients deliver more efficiently.
Not too long after I took this training we were hit with the pandemic. The team mindset and resilience helped us adjust immediately to the remote workplace and variety of challenges that faced each of our teammates. We transitioned with ease, while many others struggled.
I do not believe the RewireU program is still available but there are other terrific programs from The Second City here.
Leadership and Coaching References
I was inspired to post this a few months ago and finally getting to it. Jeff Gallimore, CTO and Innovation Officer at Excella (and also co-founder) recently compiled a great list of Culture Resources. In the past few years my professional direction has acquired a parallel path into the world of Life Coaching. It has been a wonderful compliment and also intesection with my passion for leadership. Rich Litvin, the co-author of “The Prosperous Coach” often says ? For most of human history it wasn't called coaching, it was called leadership.”
Below is a list of the most inspiring and impactful
Leadership
When They Win, You Win - Russ Laraway
Turn the Ship Around - David Marquet
Learning Strategy Design
Learning is not compulsory ... neither is survival. - W Edwards Deming
A culture of learning comes from intention and purpose. When executed well is a part of day-to-day efforts and culture. It is a means to an end to support delivery, innovation, collaboration and professional growth.
This is my design:
Learning is aligned with people and organizational strategy
Career development
Learning in Our Flow
Career Development
Career Coaching
Open ended questions
Where do you see yourself at the apex of your career?
What industry? What size of company?
If you could do anything what would it be?
Strengths based - VIA Character strengths and Stregthfinders
Each person has a career dev plan
Discuss their progress during 1:1s
The engineers are held accountable through the 1:1 conversations and tracking via Trello board.
Action items align around training, role opportunities and networking(this also includes lab week, hackathons, challenges, gig roles, etc
Learning In Our Flow
Weekly Demos
Anything we are working on within our backlog is fair game
In-progress preferable to solicit feedback before the work is finished.
Every week to encourage accountability to deliver and share something.
Recorded to encourage continued learning
Learning Fridays - clear meetings for Friday afternoons to focus on learning, This can be related to the backlog and/or IDP goals. Engineer free to decide how to use this time.
Generative Culture - safe to express ideas https://cloud.google.com/architecture/devops/devops-culture-westrum-organizational-culture
Psychological safety - focus on supporting and challenging with empathy during meetings.
Supportive team environment - “Yes, and” vs “Yes, but” or “no” don’t shoot down ideas, support ideas, encourage feedback.
No stupid questions
Check egos at the door
Acknowledge and support the whole person. Especially through the pandemic, understand each person’s challenges.
Don’t isolate information - bring side conversations to standup or the team slack channel.
Processes
Alignment of learning to backlog and long term strategy - identify gaps and prioritize
Workflow process
Peer reviews required to complete work
Daily standups foster collaboration and teamwork to achieve our goals
PRs promote collaboration to review work
Architecture Decision Records - Foster collaborative engineering conversations when deciding on new technologies.
Sharing mindset through community
All code should be re-usable - make it accessible to the internal community
Encourage engineers to participate in communities. Employee resource groups, tech groups, conferences, etc. Great opportunity to build relationships.
Participate in internal hackathons, if you don’t have any, build one!
Build a community. What technology or professional experience interests you? Get a group together.
Contribute to being a part of a 10X team, not focusing on being a 10X engineer.
Get involved with mentoring opportunities , either as a mentor or a mentee.
DevOps and Improv
My DevOps journey the past few years has been greatly influenced by the practices used to train Improv artists. I was surprised to learn that there are quite a few similarities between DevOps and Improv. The classes I took at both Washington Improv Theater and The Second City Works have been transformative in my career. I will share my experiences from the classes, podcasts and books I have read around Improv and how what I learned can help us as tech leaders within the DevOps community.
Connecting with Improv
I was first introduced to how improv training might play a role by seeing the talk “Change the Script: Deploy Improv, Not DevOps” at DevOpsDaysDC 2017. Some time passed and I read Alan Alda’s book “If I Understood You Would I Have This Look On My Face?" and found out Improv has helped him train so many scientists and doctors to communicate more effectively. I had to take the plunge. I enrolled in a one day Improv for Business class at the Washington Improv Theater (WIT) facilitated by John Windmueller and loved it. I brought him onsite to work with our shared services group for a 90 minute session. After these sessions I continued to learn and began reading Kelly Leonard’s book "Yes, And" and I felt the need to dig in deeper into Improv. (Chapter 3 - How to Build an Ensemble is one of the best chapters I have read of any leadership book on how to build a team) I checked out some programs online and found RewireU at The Second City in Chicago. I enrolled in a class in September 2019 and I was not disappointed.
Here is what I found
Innovation is heavily intertwined in the fabric of your culture. It cannot be mandated, ordered or dictated. It does not effectively reside in a “center of excellence.” The research backs this up. Google’s project Aristotle determined that the most important factor for successful teams was psychological safety, not who was on the team. Dr. Nicole Forsgren's research in her book "Accelerate" and the annual State of DevOps reports shows that communities of practice, transformative leadership, a generative culture and lean practices are all directly correlated to high or elite performing organizations. The RewireU course demonstrated, and by demonstrate I mean you live it in the class, how innovation is fueled by a supportive team/ensemble, authenticity and resilience. The same way an improv team innovates is not unlike that of an engineering team.
Resilience
I was introduced to the resilience engineering community through J. Paul Reed and through him I met John Allspaw. He presented his talk “How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day” at DevOpsDays DC event in 2019. During his talk John says that resilience is not technology, a job, a process nor a movement (like DevOps). However it is a community and many fields of study. One of the characteristics of resilience John mentions is “sustaining the potential for future adaptive action when conditions change.” We experienced this in the class! We did exercises where we had to pivot hard on the initial instructions or where we had limited information and had to work together to solve difficult problems. We had to work together in non-verbal exercises to solve problems. You can see resilience in action by watching an Improv set at The Second City. They are amazing and sometimes free after the main program. Unexpected comments, plot twists and inevitably a joke falls flat. The ensemble reacts with support and the show is always moving forward. This resilience often turns the failures into the best parts of the show. It is constant adaptation, experimentation and agility. Perhaps failure fuels success?
Sharing and Culture
Resilience is a capability of your organization and it does not grow magically. It requires intentional guidance and support from leadership. It starts with support and safety on your teams. The first day and a half of the RewireU program focuses intently on Improv exercises that help build supportive teams and being your authentic self. Without these characteristics it is difficult to have true resiliency. It is an amazing feeling to experience and unlike any training I have encountered. Google’s project Aristotle determined that the most important factor for successful teams was psychological safety, not who was on the team. When I think of that study I can't help but wander how strong those teams are and how well they work together. A quote that really resonated with me was from Kelly Leonard’s book “Yes, And” where he references a saying from Sheldon Patinkin “Your ensemble is only as good as its ability to compensate for its weakest member.” You begin to think about the power of the whole team, the whole organization.
A story I’d like to share from the early part of the RewireU course directly impacted me about a month later at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. One of the first exercises we had to do was to sit down with someone 1:1 and tell them little bit about your who you are and why you are there. Then at the end of the conversation we were instructed to get up in front of the group and tell the other person’s story. (We also did this later in the course about a specific topic as well) It is a very unique experience telling another person’s story and requires another level of listening knowing that you are going to be responsible for translating their thoughts and words into something you are going to say on their behalf. Fast forward a month and I am in Las Vegas with Michael Winslow and Roshani Lapinski They are leading a diversity workshop at DOES19 Las Vegas sponsored by Comcast and I was going to help with the introduction for the workshop. Michael suggested a last minute change where instead of doing a traditional introduction I ended up telling Michael’s story about how the workshop came together. It was a great experience and I was honored to tell Michael's story. Imagine doing this with your peers and co-workers and how powerful of an experience it could be.
Innovation and Lean practices
Dr. Nicole Forsgren’s book Accelerate is a must read for anyone in technology. Her analysis of years of annual DevOps surveys concludes that practices like lean management and lean product development directly correlate to high performing organizations. Some of those practices include small experiments, small batch sizes, small teams, and quick feedback from customers and production. This also is the backbone of agile software development practices. Here is some context to what innovation and elite performance in organizations looks like. Per Dr. Forsgren in the 2019 State of DevOps report elite performing organizations deploy multiple times per day, require less than one day for lead time to deployments, restore services within one hour and average 15% or less change failure rates.
We ran an exercise towards the end of the RewireU Class where we had to work in small teams (~six people) and we were given specific tasks to complete in three minute intervals. Those tasks included listing world problems to solve, an invention to solve it, a product name, three product features, a product slogan and a product spokesperson. Once we got all that done we then were told to pass our plan and notes to one of the other teams. They had to figure out what we did and act out a commercial for the product. This tested our resilience heavily. We had about one min to share our notes, which were not taken with the intent to share to others. It ended up being an amazing experience and the retrospective brought about many emotions from the class.
First of all people did not feel great about giving up their ideas. This was not surprising. People also found it hard to execute someone else's idea. However, on the positive side feedback included comments that it would have taken weeks or months of endless meetings to make these decisions. We experimented with these ideas quickly in front of audiences just like a product demo. We were made more aware of when we document information how it makes more sense to us than others. This exercise showed how people might feel about using other people's work (code) or executing other people's ideas which can be an obstacle to tackling duplication of efforts across your organization. As leaders we need to acclimate our organization to sharing more effectively.
At the Second City they are an elite organization. They work in small groups. The Improv sets I mentioned that run after the feature shows are used as experiments to build new shows. They are always experimenting, making quick decisions, getting the product in front of the customer(audiences) and taking that feedback to make great shows. It is hard to argue with their results. From Catherine O’Hara to Tina Fey and so many others in between and after. Every decade they churn out star after star.
Improv at Work
My team definitely benefitted from the onsite workshop we did. It helped my team in a couple of ways. First it helped improve our listening skills. Second it helped with our “Yes, And” skills. These two outcomes go hand in hand. A great example is how we do our weekly demos. Over the past year the overriding sentiment in our demo sessions is supporting new ideas. We do not tear down ideas, we encourage engineers to usually expand on their ideas. If there is already a solution out there we help them find it. We have made great strides in expanding and improving our initiatives to move infrastructure to code as a result pushing each other to learn together.
As a leader I have a different perspective now on communication and building supportive teams. Experiencing first hand what its like to come together with complete strangers and do innovative and fun things together in just two and half days is transformative. I hope more than anything this article encourages you to explore, try some classes, read some new books and continue to expand your knowledge in your DevOps and leadership journey.
Are you Curious?
The Science Behind DevOps, Accelerate, Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations - Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble and Gene Kim
Yes, And. How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration - Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton
If I Understood You Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating - Alan Alda
Twitter Follows: @allspaw @jpaulreed @nicolefv @michaelswinslow @KLsecondcity @secondcityworks @mountzcjr
https://witdc.org/classes/
https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/
https://www.secondcityworks.com/services/professional-development