Chapter 23. Go see, ask why, show respect
The best way to help your team serve their clients better, and to achieve and sustain a culture of continuous improvement, is to start by showing them deep respect.
How can you best show respect? Consider Jim Womack’s excellent advice in his collection of essays Gemba Walks (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2011).
You do this by challenging their thinking about the current work process, asking lots of open, probing questions to uncover the root causes of current impediments. No process is ever perfect, but you can focus on helping the team to discover what its key constraint is at any particular moment, and then devise countermeasures to remedy it.
The key constraint is the area in which an improvement will show the biggest bang for the buck when measured across the entire system, improving the overall flow of the work process, and likely reducing cycle time and waste, with less overburden or absurdity involved.
By engaging your team in problem-solving, you show them that you choose not to attempt to solve the problem alone. You trust them to be best positioned to come up with the most promising improvement ideas, as they’re closest to the work being done and have all the facts in hand. As a team leader, you truly respect your team’s knowledge and their dedication to finding the best answer.
Still, team members can’t quite do it all alone because they’re often too close to the issue to appreciate its full context. They may avoid tough questions about the nature of the work and the reasoning behind certain inefficient practices. By showing mutual respect, better countermeasures can be devised, the team can derive more pride in the quality of their work, and everyone can enjoy a more satisfying journey of professional accomplishment.
To better serve your team, work to understand yourself better, assessing your own strengths and weaknesses. Strive to become aware of your team’s characteristics as well, sensing their professional and emotional development needs. Be ready to adapt your leadership, coaching, and mentoring style to suit the team’s current spot on its journey to professional mastery.
Roy’s analysis
This great note belongs firmly in the learning and self-organization phases. It also emphasizes (indirectly) two important risk aversions:
- Avoiding becoming a bottleneck by getting the team to make decisions about important questions
- Avoiding treating a team in learning/self-organizing mode as if they’re in survival mode
We also encourage team spirit and loyalty by giving people more control over their destiny.
One thing that I failed to mention earlier in the book is that self-organizing teams can only go so far. It sometimes takes a person who’s a bit removed from a situation to clearly see a path ahead and ask the right questions. A code review should be done by someone who didn’t write the code. It’s helpful that some onlooker can make sure the team sees the forest for the trees.
The next step is to ask, “Why am I the only one who may know how to ask the right questions?” At that point, start teaching the team the skill of stepping out of the current box and asking the right questions, which brings the team one level up to a meta thinking state that can awaken when the need arises.
When that happens, the leader is needed less as the “objective outsider who asks smart questions.” The team should eventually grow to be a team of leaders, each of whom can ask important questions that might come from an objective perspective.
What does the leader do? Make sure that the team knows how to ask questions in order to stay on top of their game. Leaders are fallible in believing they know how to ask the right questions. An important leadership skill is to ask, “Am I still asking the right questions?”
At some point, leaders need outside feedback, from true outsiders. That’s why it’s common to have coaches in high levels of management. Good leaders know that they might be blindly asking the wrong questions. The question then becomes, “Am I asking the wrong questions?” The answer has to come from feedback from the outside.
This is the kind of support a leader can give to a self-organizing team, who might think they’re asking the right questions, but aren’t.
Exercises
- Are you and your team asking the right questions?
- How can your team know if they are?
- How can you know if you are?
- Find an outsider you can confer with, whom you trust, to give you feedback on the questions you’re asking yourself daily regarding your team.
HORIA SLUŞANSCHI is a passionate agile coach, serving as the leader of the HP Agile Mentoring Office and the HP Software Engineering Profession. He has written software of various kinds, from firmware for devices, to compilers for supercomputers, and all sorts of business systems in between, for more than 25 years. Horia holds a PhD in Computer Science, is a trained Lean Six Sigma Black Belt practitioner, and holds various other certifications and memberships with professional associations. His calling lies in growing more accomplished leaders, helping teams to achieve amazing results.