Stop with the Journey Metaphor - Use Your Imagination!

Oh, for goodness sake, please stop talking about everything as a journey. Are there no other metaphors available to us? It would seem that the business world is nothing more than a series of journeys, and all the directions are on nicely linear roadmaps. 

A journey is an "act of travelling from one place to another". It says nothing about the experiences, difficulties, people, customs or opportunities that we encounter on the way. It is bland and boring. A bit like a "roadmap" ... which tells us that everything will be delivered in due course - even when we are fully aware that our requirements and needs change over time (and usually faster than anyone is prepared for)!

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Not only are these two ubiquitous business metaphors lacking in imagination and creativity, but they are also fundamentally misleading and oversimplifications. For example, many of the real journeys we make result in us ending up in exactly the same place we started, which is pretty certainly not the outcome you want from an organisational transformation. 

The equally over-used mountain climbing metaphor for learning suggests that there are numerous obstacles to be overcome until you reach the peak of your learning experience - after which there is no more learning to be done, and it’s all downhill from there.

Here’s a short list of some alternative metaphors you could try:

• A Bucking Bronco Ride
• An Interweb of Events
• A Doctor Who Adventure
• A Chemistry Experiment - Mixing It Up
• A Discovery Process
• Joining the Dots
• A Night on The Tiles

Feel free to use any of these if they catch your fancy - or maybe you could give me some of your personal favourites?

Take Your Time and Avoid These Rookie Management Mistakes

Congratulations on your new promotion. It feels good, doesn’t it? Maybe a little bit scary at the same time, but you’ve got a new team, new responsibilities and probably a new working environment and other senior colleagues who you want to impress. So, you may think you can plough ahead and stamp your mark and your brand on the situation and make an amazing name for yourself.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

But before you jump in with both feet, and with your eyes tightly shut, step back and have a think about the situation. Because the worst thing you can do is to start to try and mould your new team into what you think you want them to be. Here are three easy mistakes to make which may come back to haunt you faster than you may think.

Fixing what isn’t broken

If you’re inheriting a team, especially one that’s been working together for any length of time, they will probably have a way of working together that has been developed over a period of time. They will know each other's strengths and weaknesses better than you, and probably better than your predecessor.

By all means, explain your values and high-level expectations of how you hope you can operate together, but don’t start laying down the law until you’ve got a good idea of the team dynamics, the way they work and how they achieve what’s asked of them. They may be doing great things that you’ve never heard of and it would be a mistake to throw that away simply because you work differently. You need to adapt to them as much as they need to adapt to you. What worked for you in a previous team may well be at odds with how things are done in the new environment and with a different set of individuals.

Don’t upset members of your team by reassigning them or changing their roles in the first few weeks. Make sure you have a full understanding of what each and every team member is currently working on. There are probably good reasons for their current assignments especially if they have a history of self-organisation.

Focusing on yourself not your team

Of course, you want to impress your new colleagues just as they are going to want to impress you, but introducing yourself and your achievements in your previous role(s) should be a gradual process as part of the forming, storming, norming, performing cycle. Spend your first few days or weeks getting to know the individuals in the team if you don’t already. Use one to one meetings and team meetings and listen more than you speak. You need to understand their roles, skills, needs and desires and learn how to harness these for a common good.

Telling your new team how much you’ve achieved in your career and how wonderful you are might impress them, but it’s more likely to come across as arrogance and send the wrong messages from the outset.

Contrary to what you may think, your primary role is to support your team not the other way around. It may be your name in the organisation chart and you may be the one who is held accountable, but the team is not there to make you look good. Their role is to do what is demanded by the needs of the wider organisation or customer. If you happen to look good because of them, that’s a bonus, not a right.

Trying to figure it out without asking

There’s often a tendency to think that you’re the smartest person in the room. That’s why you got the job!

Unless you’ve been promoted from within the team, you’re probably going to have a lot to learn, and probably in a very short time. Sure, you can do it on your own, but talking to and listening to your new colleagues will make the task a lot easier and a lot quicker. The only thing to watch out for is that you don’t get caught up with their in-built bias and to watch out for hidden agendas. One to ones will get you a long way, but use team sessions to get different perspectives.

You should garner as much information from within your team before you start asking people outside, especially from other managers. The people who are closest to the work will have the most honest assessment of what’s going well and what’s going badly - and the picture they paint collectively will be far more valuable than the pictures painted by outsiders and especially other leaders who may be looking through rose-coloured glasses.

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success (Henry Ford)

Conclusion

Teams often get quite excited when they get a new manager or leader. But they will have concerns at the same time and the worst thing you can do is lose their support because you’ve pushed your way in and steamrollered over their hopes and aspirations. This is especially true of mature teams and upsetting or demotivating a team with a proven track record is not going to do anyone any favours. 

If you play things right, you’ll have plenty of time to work with your team to reach even higher levels. Or you bluster your way through and destroy a good team in weeks…it’s your choice!

Degrees of Trust - Building Relationships

There seems to be a lot of talk on the interweb these days regarding Trust. Or more specifically about trust as a necessary precursor to effective leadership. I’m going to focus on business leadership here as there seems to be an almost global mistrust of political leaders regardless of who they are, where in the world they are, or what part of the political spectrum persuasion they fall into.

As is so often the case with popular soundbites on the internet, people write statements about trust to generate likes or dislikes, and more often than not use the medium to simply reiterate other peoples’ thoughts but rarely offer any genuine insight. More concerning is that people often see things as binary conditions. Either there is trust in leadership or there is not. This idea of trust in leadership becomes vaguer if we consider that most people don’t have any genuine relationship with their corporate leaders. How many people have sat down for lunch with their CEO and talked about their worlds outside the workplace? Does anyone in the leadership team (above your departmental leadership team) know your name? How can you trust someone you don’t know?

This got me thinking that because of the richness of our language (a quick search found over a hundred synonyms for trust) we were missing an opportunity to think about trust as more than a simple positive or negative condition. Perhaps we should be thinking more about degrees of trust. I was encouraged by a discussion about the subject with a new connection on LinkedIn and further by a Twitter post from Niels Pflaeging who suggested that we ‘overvalue trust and undervalue confidence in people; the former cannot emerge without the foundation of the latter’ (paraphrased).

It seems quite appropriate on this Valentine’s day to step back and think about how a relationship evolves. Our romantic relationships and our business and social relationships all follow a similar pattern, and all are generally looking for a similar positive outcome. The physical manifestation of that outcome might be different but we do tend to use similar terminology - we speak of “being in bed with our business partners” or how a successful merger or acquisition is likened to a “marriage made in heaven”. 

All our attempts at building relationships start with uncertainty. We start to engage in a courtship ritual in which our dance takes us through awareness, mutual encouragement, confidence, dependability, respect, trust and ultimately end with a mutual commitment which we hope will be sustained over time. I have visualised this below but you could (should!) choose your own model if you feel it's something worth taking further.

Background Photo by Mark Tryapichnikov on Unsplash

Sadly, as we all know, we are vulnerable throughout this engagement and at any stage, one or more parties can destabilise the relationship, regardless of how advanced or well-established. Sometimes this is just a hiccup caused by a misunderstanding, an error of judgement or even a simple mistake and the damage can be fairly easily repaired. If the misdemeanour is intentional or simply doesn’t fit with the wounded party’s moral compass it may take much more effort or it may be beyond fixing.

Relationships need to be worked on, even after they are built on strong foundations. We should never take them for granted. As we move from uncertainty to being able to make commitments we are more likely to be able to meet each other's needs - arguably the ultimate goal in any relationship. 

We also need to stop taking words for granted. It's easy to read a meme on a social media site and share it, but it's far more valuable to think a bit further and decide whether there is any real depth to the phrase and whether it has any value. Like a plan, the plan itself may have little value if conditions change so fast as to make it worthless, but the act of planning gives you insight into far more and leaves you in a better place than where you started.

I'm Not An Agile Coach - And Nor Is My Wife

As human beings, we have been putting labels on objects, ideas, concepts, and even people since the earliest days of language and shared communications. It helps us make sense of the world and for thousands of years, it has served us well, especially for tangible things. Putting things into categories narrows down the universal experience into something more manageable, so we can easily understand how to differentiate between say, a car and an aeroplane without having to go into details. 

It becomes more complicated when we start to talk about intangibles and become involved in the world of adjectives. So we can (mostly) comprehend the world of colours and distinguish between blue and red. We can largely distinguish sounds like a bang and toot. But as soon as we move to the next level we begin to lose some of that shared understanding. Blood red or navy blue become more subjective and relative terms make it even more difficult as we interpret more descriptive terms like loudness or tone. 

As language evolves we start reusing words rather than finding new ones and our understanding becomes even more dependent on context. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the business world, and arguably IT is the worst culprit of all. We have to work even harder to understand what’s being discussed when even the context doesn’t give us much help. Agile and Lean are great examples of how terms not only depend on context but on organisational culture and even the person using them.

As global communication expands exponentially and billions of individuals are trying to carve out a niche for themselves, the labels we use to describe ourselves and the labels organisations bestow on us become less and less useful. The distinctions between someone’s job title, their role, their job description and what they actually do have never been so blurred. And it’s not helping anyone - and recruiters wonder why CVs get longer and longer and the number of people applying for certain jobs gets bigger and bigger whilst the time needed to find the right person expands at a similar rate.

For the last three years, I’ve been on a contract in Prague and the role I applied for was PMO Assistant. Internally, I believe the role was advertised as a Service Excellence Manager. In my day to day activities, I acted as the deputy team lead, communications expert, change manager, agile coach, process improvement specialist, HR admin, initiative leader, reporting expert, facilitator, trainer, train the trainer, event coordinator, proofreader, MS-Teams expert, Miro designer, and whatever else needed doing! I didn’t ever do any substantial PMO work (but I had a lot of fun!)

I'll be the Wingman for you and your team*

I mentioned in that list that I acted as an agile coach. But I don’t want to be an ‘agile coach’. I don’t want or need to be placed in that pigeonhole. The doesn’t accurately describe me, what I do, or how I can genuinely add value to an organisation that might make use of my services and skills. It pitches me as one person in an ever-increasing pool of people called agile coaches who range from highly experienced coaches with a vast understanding of organisations, teams, software development, business management and people to those who have joined a week-long Scrum course and got a certificate. 

The label doesn’t help a recruiter or a hiring manager who won’t necessarily understand the details of why they need an ‘agile coach’ other than to tick some boxes, and the job description that is posted is probably made up from a composite of what they think an agile coach should be doing rather than aligning to the specific context of the need. Once the corporate ‘agile coach’ job description has been word-smithed and stamped with HRs approval, the expectation of what that person needs to do is often set in stone and their room for manoeuvre becomes limited and the value they can add decreases.

We spend far too much time worrying about this kind of label and trying to explain to others what we are and what we aren’t. Over a 40 year career, I’ve developed a lot of general and specialised skills - a veritable jack-of-all-trades and a master of quite a lot of them. Try putting that as your current role on a CV and see how far it’ll get you! But as retirement looms, it’s one less thing that I have to worry about! 

Right now, I’m content to be a Wingman. I’ll help you think about how you and your team can perform better in order to meet their needs, your needs and your stakeholder needs, using all the knowledge, skills and experience I’ve garnered over the years (which all have their own useless and meaningless labels!)

* Photo by Jiroe on Unsplash