Visions - what are they and what to do with them

As you read my blog, I think everyone might be figuring out that I do a lot of reading and I like to highlight the things that I find most interesting. Mostly this writing is to help me synthesize my thoughts and to write down concepts I want to reference again later.  By posting them publicly, and sharing the blog posts openly, my hope is that others will gain something from it. Not only do I read a lot, I also listen to podcasts

One series of podcasts that I listen to is specific to leadership. While there are several very good podcasts, I like listening to Andy Stanley and his podcast,  Andy Stanley's Leadership Podcast. He has a perspective that is not unique but what I find to be very insightful. In a recently episode of his podcast, he talked with the former CEO of Home Depot, Frank Blake. In this episode they get into a deep conversation about visions of companies and what it means to the company and the employees.

A conversation with Frank Blake on Vision.

They did not get into what a vision is or how to create one, but rather, how to make a vision stick. how to get people to understand the vision and to make the vision the rallying call for the company. Andy has an entire book on how to create a vision, live the vision, and celebrate the vision. You can find his book, Making Vision Stick, on Amazon. I have not read the book yet, but if you do, please share your thoughts back here.

Successful Coaching Conversations

Bright Star at Sunset
Photo by Eric ziegler

Coaching is a technique to improve. You can improve in sports from good coaching. You can improve at school from good coaching (or teaching as they like to call it). You can improve at work from good coaching. And coaching can come from anyone. You can be coached by your kids. You can be coached by your peers. You can be coached by your manager or your managers manager. In fact, you can even coach others. Are you a developer? System Tester? BSA? Have you been asked to help others with their +1 skill? Have you helped others with their +1 skill? Then you are coaching.

For me, coaching is one of the most rewarding experiences. And for any person that is a coach or is being coached, there are some things you should keep in mind to ensure you each get the most out of the experience being shared. In this article, they highlight 12 things you should always do, and then some things you should avoid.

12 Secrets for Successful Coaching Conversations

For me, some of the items that struck a chord most include:

• Relax. Lower defenses. Be your curious self.
• Embrace silence. Don’t feel pressure to fill the silence. Wait a bit longer than feels comfortable. Allow coachees to fill the silence.
• Develop next steps. Always identify next steps in behavioral terms. •What will you do? • How will you know you’re taking a next step? • How will colleagues know?

And then things to avoid:

• Fixing and helping. Control your inner fixer. Successful coaches give responsibility and ownership. They don’t take it.
• Interrupting.
• Asking two questions at once (I do this one all the time, note to self, stop doing that)

Software Testing Club - go Join

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Testing, Devops and Continuous delivery are all topics of interest for me as I have transitioned into a a software delivery role. How can we become more effective in how we deliver value to the clients, is a question you will very often hear me ask. So of course, because it is a topic of high interest to me, I have been keeping my eye for interesting content about these topics.

One great site that I found was the Software Testing Club website. In the site you can find a forums and some of the best blog posts about how to do testing well. You really do have to check out the blog posts on this site, they are pretty good.

Some of my favorites are:

• Getting mobile testing right
• Why managers also need to be effective coaches
• Speed up your website loading time with the 6 web design tips

If you are a tester or a developer or someone that interacts with building software, you should check this site on a regular basis. If you are so inclined, at to the community and share your insights about testing.

Enterprise Humility

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Enterprise humility is extremely important. But enterprise humility in many companies is very difficult. Think about it. How many people are truly humble? I know that I can show humility and be humble. But I know that I am not humble or show humility in all situations. I can think of many situations where people have come up to me and pumped me full of stuff that made my head 10x's bigger. While I might not be humble as often as I would want to be, I do embrace humility and the humility that I show has served me well, allowing me to listen to others, respect others, which has turned into others listening to me and respecting me. If individuals struggle with humility, what is the likelihood that enterprise show humility?

As an organization, enterprise humility is about respecting the employees, accepting that your employees will make mistakes and encouraging them to learn from the mistakes. Enterprise humility is about encouraging employees to share, work out loud (#WOL) and try "things" that are risky but within some defined set of rules. If an employee is able to make mistakes, it enables them to push the limits of what is possible. They will learn more. The will grow faster. The company will be more effective and be more successful. While there might be a step backwards when a mistake is made, think about how much faster they will go when things don't go wrong. And if that happens, think about the impact it will have on the company.

Leaders play a huge part in humility in the organization. Leader humility is about enabling others to learn, grow, and be independent. If a leader is humble enough to let others build on their ideas and to step in to fill in gaps they all will grow. Leaders must be open to allowing their employees to make mistakes and if a mistake is made, not put a new process in to ensure that mistake never occurs again.

An organization needs to embrace humility and encourage people to be humble. Humility in the enterprise is important to ensure diversity of thought and the refining of ideas by all employees. Humility is important for innovation. Humility is important for engaged employees. Humility is important for driving business value.

To put it bluntly, an organization that does not embrace humility, is an organization that is not as effective as it could be and has a higher chance of failure.

Rewarded for Good Behavior

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In my last post, I talked about removing an expert from a team to make the team more effective. Obviously, the wrong behavior from an expert can be bad for a team. But not all experts are bad for a team and not all experts exhibit bad behaviors. In addition experts are definitely not bad for organizations as a whole. And that is what this blog post is about - experts rewarded the right way can be invaluable in an organization.

Employees are often rewarded for being the expert at something - Java development, financial analysis, trader, vendor product integration, sales person, etc. The question is, how are these "experts" rewarded. Does the reward influence behaviors and make the individual better, the team better, or the company better? Ideally the reward is influencing to have a positive impact on the individual, the team and the company. But more often than not, the reward is not given as a reward that enhances the team or the company directly and is directed at the individual. In some cases, these rewards could have a negative effect to the team or the company.

Rewards are often given to the expert for some type of heroics. Saving the day when the system blows up or bringing in the big dollars at the end of the quarter, or delivering functionality after spending 20 hours one day implementing or delivering on a major project. It is easy to find reasons to give rewards under these circumstances. But experts are much more valuable to an organization than heroics and rewarding employees and experts for the material things we see everyday.

Experts and employees can provide much more value in an organization by sharing their knowledge and information about their expertise. They are much more valuable when they help others, educate others, and coach others. And experts should be rewarded for these good behaviors. Experts and employees should be rewarded for sharing their knowledge to their team and rewarded even more for sharing their knowledge to other parts of the organization.

Enterprises typically do not have reward systems in place that account for the team sharing or the organization sharing. In addition, there are little to no expectations set by organizations for employees to share. While rewards and expectations are great, there is another issue. Employees are not provided any guidelines on what, how, when, where, and why to share. Employees are also not given any guidelines or expectations on who to share information with. Even if an organization has rewards for this type of behavior, without help, the employees will flounder and in some cases share in ways that are not as effective as possible.

As organizations change and start thinking about how their employees can share information more freely, they will need to not only setup expectations they will need to tell the employees what sharing looks like so the employees can mimic these good behaviors. Lastly, to reinforce these good behaviors, a little reward does not hurt.

Working Out Loud Requires being Vulnerable

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I love listening to Podcasts. I listen to podcasts when I drive to and from work. I listen to podcasts when I am on a long drive - 6+ hours. I listen to a broad spectrum of podcasts: Football (soccer), Finance, Economics, News, Public Radio, Social business, etc. This weeks blog is prompted by a one episode I listened to recently from the podcast Shift, by +Megan Murray and +Euan Semple.

The podcast I am referring to is episode 21, about Vulnerability. As I listened to the podcast the first thing that popped into my head was that Working Out Loud (#WOL) requires you to put yourself out there and to be willing to be vulnerable. When I think of working out loud, I think of people sharing what they are working on, asking questions, asking for input on a project, takling about an issue you are trying to resolve. In each of these situations you are risking that someone will think less of you. You need to be vulnerable to do any of those things.

People are scared of putting themselves out there and working out loud. They are fearful that there will be negative repercussions when they make a mistake out in the open. They are fearful that people will think less of them. They are not willing to risk sharing because there is no benefit or that other people will not find what they are sharing as interesting or informative.

The opposite is true. Working out loud has so many benefits and everyone should be doing it within an organization. People will learn and grow quicker and faster by working out loud. Organizations are more effective when people share and are open with each other. The likelihood of finding a piece of information increases as more and more people work out loud. People learn from each other only when information is shared. People improve and innovate on ideas only when ideas are discussed openly. By working out loud, your chances of getting the best information, in timely manner goes up tremendously. Even if a conversation happened out loud months ago, finding that piece of information increases because it was stored for others to discover, read and learn from.

So be brave, take the challenge, work out loud and be vulnerable.

Working Out Loud can not be Automated

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Not sure how I ended reading an old post by +Bertrand Duperrin but I did.  Maybe something was calling to me.  Maybe it is just purely coincidence that I re-read his blog post. Either way, it has triggered me to write a blog post for the first time in several months. Let's dig in.  

Bertrand Duperrin, posted a blog post back in August of 2012 called Employees don't have time to waste narrating their work. What caught my eye originally was the title. First reaction, huh? You have to be kidding me. Bertand might be just trying to be sensationalistic with his title, I am not sure.  But it did catch my eye and cause me to read his blog post. While the title is interesting, I have to say that the blog post hits a nerve. Bertrand starts his blog post with a concept that I agree with ...

It’s impossible to think about emergent collaboration and self-organized structures without visibility on others’ work. 

This first sentence makes me think of +Change Agents Worldwide (@chagww, #CAWW). Why?  #CAWW is a self organized emergent collaboration organization that is about helping individuals, teams, companies, employees, etc. be more effective.  #CAWW works as a network of individuals that interact, share, and cooperate and collaborate on different topics and ideas, always trying to improve upon ideas that will help organizations be more effective. It is almost like he wrote this sentence with the concept of #CAWW in mind. 

In Bertrand's 3rd paragraph he continues down the same path by stating ....

collaboration, cooperation, problem solving and even innovation requires something to be shared so trigger the dynamic. Moreover, people often don’t realize they can be helped : sometimes we believe we’re doing right while we’re doing wrong, we’re doing right while we could do better, differently.

While the first sentence could be interrupted several ways, this statement does not align with the title at all. Only after you get more than half way through the blog post do you start to see where the title becomes relevant.  I believe this statement best summarizes the rest of the blog ... 

if people’s work’s worth being narrated, people should not always be the narrator. Their time is too precious to ask them to play the role of transponders. 

So now I get it.  People's time are too important to waste on working out loud (#WOL).  Bertrand continues and discusses the idea of having systems do the narrating by automatically creating activities in an activity stream - weekly reports, updates to profiles, etc.    I understand where he is going, but I think this concept misses the importance of working out loud (#WOL).

What do I believe? The idea of working out loud is not about the automated interactions? There is some value, but the biggest value is sharing information in a way a system can never do. Sharing information includes asking questions or putting a thought out that could trigger a thought by someone else. Automatic system updates are too prescribed to cause an emotional reaction by the receiver and bacause of that, the value it just not as high.  

I will say though, I do agree with his concept of having people jump out of their every day work systems to work out loud is not effective. To get people to be most effective, the system to work out loud needs to be integrated into the systems they work in every day.

Automatic system updates are the antithesis of what social networks are about. While an automatic update might provide value, they do not deliver come anywhere close to providing the same amount of value as working out loud.