300 Copies sold in 12 months

 

Thanks to all my readers, every day one copy of "The Scrum Master Guidebook" is able to sell. So far in one year of existence of this book, 300 copies have been sold!! Gratitude to all my well-wisher colleagues for making this book famous. Whoever is reading this book, please compose a few words about this book on Amazon. Help me to help the Scrum Masters to perform outstandingly at their career endeavor.

Self-compassion? How to expand?

Any high-performance team includes individuals who are well mature and they can take care of themselves adequately, as well as others.


What is Self-compassion?
It is the capability to change, master, acceptance, and love inward.

Life sometimes can be taxing. Most of us are crazy busy, have demanding activities, or are too exhausted with technology to establish a time for ourselves.

Self Compassion allows us to care for the wholeness of who we are, in every condition, by calling the wholeness of our emotions.

We have to design self-compassion for our own growth, which is more relevant for us.

Self-compassion is significant in enhancing our well-being and quality of development.

The Buddhist understanding of compassion means offering patience, kindness, and nonjudgmental understanding to others as well as oneself.

Let us assess which areas of our life require further attention and self-care. And review our life repeatedly. As our situation evolves, our self-care needs are prone to shift too.
Painful feelings are, by their very nature, temporary. They will weaken over time as long as we don’t prolong or amplify them through resistance or avoidance. The only way to eventually free ourselves from debilitating pain, therefore, is to be with it as it is. The only way out is through. — Kristin Neff

The question which every team member can identify to boost self-compassion.

Below are some points every team member should practice or the coach should educate the team members to work out such exercises.
What are the three greatest strengths and why I am grateful for them?
List of my three greatest challenges and what can I learn from them.
What would I do today if I had all the confidence in the world?
What does success mean to Me?
What I would say to a good friend if he or she was experiencing a difficult or stressful situation. Then, when I find myself in this kind of situation, direct these compassionate responses toward Myself.
In which past conditions in my life I have been an emperor?
What are my favorite confidence-boosting songs that help me to make it through my morning routine on an arduous day?
What makes my heart sing?
What is a new habit I can take up in encouraging me to feel more joy or calm in my way of life?
If I loved myself absolutely, how would I treat myself every day?
Do I remind myself that failing to make something happen is part of being human?
Am I Minimizing people-pleasing? Unless that’s what I really want to do. we do not have any responsibility to please anyone.
Do I have healthy ways to transform my emotions?

Lending a hand not only boosts mental health but may also lead to a longer life. Am I helping others?

Let us Write down at least ten things that make me feel like I am a worthy person.

Let us Document the great things people say about you to read later.

Let us Do one thing today just because it makes you happy

Let us Think about what I am good at, and find an opportunity for it today.
Self-compassion is simply giving the same kindness to ourselves that we would give to others. — Christopher Germer

Most of the time when pressure is high at the project team chances are there we may be stressed out and we may not be at our best at the team level. Team performance starts decaying when more such team members are not in their right mental state.

With the help of a team coach, we have to identify to strengthen our mental strength and be at our best performance.
It’s like a mother, when the baby is crying, she picks up the baby and she holds the baby tenderly in her arms. Your pain, your anxiety is your baby. You have to take care of it. You have to go back to yourself, to recognize the suffering in you, embrace the suffering, and you get a relief. — Thich Nhat Hanh

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Social Loafing: Killer traits for a High-Performance team

I am certain all of us have come across such challenges in a team context, named Social Loafing.

Social loafing is the phenomenon of an individual exerting less effort to accomplish a goal when they function in a group than when working alone.

I am sure during your coaching engagement you might have come across such a condition.
In 1913, Max Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, conducted what many believe was the first recorded social psychology experiment.

He carefully measured how much force people exerted when they pulled a rope alone, and when they pulled it with up to thirteen additional people.

He conducted additional studies in the lab and in the field and summarized all these results together.

His results were mind-boggling.

Applying his findings back to the rope experiment, Ringelmann found that when a person was added to the rope, everyone pulled with less strength.

When two people were on the line, they each pulled with 93 percent of the force of a person working alone.

Three people each pulled with 85 percent of the force, and so on.

By the time eight people joined the rope, they were each pulling with half the force of a single person.

As a result, a team of eight pulled the rope with no more total force than a team of seven.

In a set of simple rope pulling experiments he discovered that, in what is now known as the Ringelmann Effect, people’s efforts quickly diminish as team size increases.

According to Ringelmann (1913), groups fail to reach their full potential because various interpersonal processes detract from the group’s overall proficiency.

Namely, two distinct processes have been identified as potential sources for the reduced productivity of groups: loss of motivation and coordination problems.

How do we come out from this Social loafing problem?

Let us concentrate on a few issues.

The Sucker Effect: When individuals start to feel that others are slacking off, they try not to get stuck “holding the bag” themselves. In the attempt to escape becoming the “sucker,” overall group output goes down. What do we do about this issue?

Let us connect with all the individuals and try to understand why they are slacking? this could be a personality issue, skill issue, communication barriers, etc challenges.

As a coach, we need to single out such individuals and fix such issues.

Missing accountability, Every team member has to hold each other accountable. Once they recognize that they have to contribute, they will less likely miss their own accountability issues. This is generally practiced to explain the bystander effect, or the tendency to be less likely to help a person in need when others are present.

Some time Social loafing happens when the team does not have stretched goals identified for themselves. There should be a clear SMART goal identified for each team member. Every team member should have a clear distinct goal identified for themselves. And at a certain regular interval, we should check how well those goals are happening.

Team size also matters, more team members do not necessarily mean faster work. More team members more social loafing will be noticeable. 

Team agreement, there should be clear team rules and an agreement needs to be written. Team members only write those rules and maintain those. Team members need to modify those rules whenever it is requisite, and they should abide by those rules. An exception could be there, but the majority of the time team should follow those. As a coach, look for these team agreements and guide the team whenever we find the team is not following the written rules.

Peer Review helps most of the time. The team can set the rule of the team agreed that some of their team members will review artifacts produced by other team members and improve those.

Need to enhance Team cohesion. Team cohesion occurs when a group of individuals feels connected and driven to achieve a common goal. They share values, goals, and processes.

One of the best ways to get everyone involved is to make sure that they feel as though the Manager or leader values their contribution. When they believe the benefits they bring to the table are key to the success of the team, they will be more likely to play an active role.

There should be a team performance reward system also there should High performers within the teams should be recognized and rewarded to alleviate this effort.

Head First Or Heart First Individuals?

Why do we desire a harmony of Head First and Heart First Individuals in a high-performance team?

Are you a Head First - Rationally Driven, or Heart First - Emotionally driven Individuals?

How about the same percentage on the team? How effectively these distributions are in place?

Both have their strengths, both have their challenges.

A Head First team member can think more logically and in a circumstance when Emotion takes over those head first individuals can support the emotionally loaded Individual to aid them through logically thinking.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes about the solution,” Einstein once said.

Heart First Individuals, however, are more prone to produce instant decisions based on their intuition and feel happier with that call in the long run. The Heart First individuals expressed themselves as ‘distressed’ and ‘nervous’ when encountered with frequent stress. To “have a heart” indicates higher degrees of caring and empathy.

"One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right if the head is totally wrong. Only through the bringing together of head and heart-intelligence and goodness-shall man rise to a fulfillment of his true nature." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

“People who said their ‘self’ was located in their heart (about half the respondents) were more likely to be female, and ‘heart-locators’ of either sex were more likely to rely on their emotions when making hypothetical moral decisions, such as how to respond to a sadistic prison guard who says he will kill your son and another prisoner unless you kill your own son,” explains Dr. Christian Jarrett of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest.

Head First Individuals placed higher importance on autonomy, and Heart First Individuals valued belonging to social groups.

The Head First Individuals can plunge into analysis paralysis, where they keep weighing facts and collecting ever more intelligence in an endeavor to generate the perfect decision, leading to confusion, anxiety, indecisiveness, and self-criticism, which in turn can impact productivity and performance.

The Heart First Individuals are more creative as they are associated with emotions. They can relate smoothly with others through emotions. Sometimes when emotions are heavily laden, these individuals are slow down by the emotions. That time Head First individuals can protect them!

How to stabilize the same in the team?

I have examined some teams that are frequently dominated by the substantial with heart Individuals and frequently few Head First Individuals will influence the team with their rational analyzing capabilities.

As a whole team, let us watch out and practice to reach an intermediate ground.

If we as a team majority are Head First individual, practice for a week just listening to our Heart first team members; slowing down and asking ourselves how we feel several times a day and then choosing the risk of acting on those feelings. If we are higher of a heart First Individuals, work out for a week tackling that assignment that we don’t feel like working out to build up our willpower and discipline. Show empathy but deliberately set boundaries on how much we can/will support someone who’s battling.

Most of the time before the PI planning, you might have observed which backlog items will go into the PI, though it is logical and rational. But sometimes, these decision making also is driven by intuition, emotions and based on empathy.

" My heart says one thing. My head says another. Very hard to get your heart and head together in life." - Woody Allen

Watch out for such instances and coach the team to balance these traits.

Best Selling Scrum Master Book

 @07th November 2020, If you google search these words, “Best Selling Scrum Master Books”, you will discover “The Scrum Master Guidebook”, specified!! thanks to all my fellow companions to promote and popularize this book to reach this level. Thanks for all your encouragement! Please keep recommending this book to your associate Agilist’s colleagues...It illustrates this book has many wellwishers….

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The Guidebooks

Foster Team Creativity?

Every team would prefer to be the finest in developing many creative solutions.

How can we assure a team to improve creativity skills?

How can to encourage the team members to work out some actions which will empower them to raise creative skills and work out the same to come out with different solutions?

The business has only two basic functions — marketing and innovation. —Peter Drucker

For innovation to thrive, organizations must establish an environment that fosters creativity; bringing together multi-talented groups of people who work in close collaboration together — exchanging knowledge, ideas and shaping the direction of the future. —Linda Naiman

As we all perceive, creativity is about bringing out unique ideas and solutions for a unique problem.

The team ambient plays an absolutely critical role to establish innovative solutions that come from the team.

Leadership style also performs a substantial role.

Organizational culture plays pivotal roles. Can we figure out what is the current state of all those and take actions?

Every team can not remain on prior success. They require to continually remake themselves to remain relevant in today’s business. What should we do as a team?

All the members can investigate how frequently they are contributing to that growth path by offering new propositions and solutions.

Leadership needs to challenge each team member to challenge each other about innovation speed. It has observed that when we have team members who always agree with their bosses blindly, it is not a perfect habitat for innovation. “Yes Sir” team members are not always preferable for the innovating team.

The skills and competency of the team members play a considerable role in innovation. As a team can we find if we are learning, fresh knowledge gain is taking place? Do we have the appropriate set of team members? The collective intelligence serves the team to brainstorm and come out with fresh ways of generating solution for a definite problem.

By considering at the last six-month trend of ideation or fresh ways of working will explain if we have enough innovation is taking place in a team. In the close examination, we can find out where ideations are stuck, why the flow of innovations is not advancing? What actions as a team we can choose to strengthen this idea boosting drive?

Leaders can inspire team members for a bigger purpose. With that drive, it will clear up the motivation issue. Leaders also can throw open challenges to have conversations, debates, constructive criticism, and healthy conflict. In a process, new views and ideas will surface.

The question is how much time, in a day or in a week, we go to such a condition? Most of the time, we are terrified to go out of the prescribed task and boundary. Organizational culture sometimes does not inspire to distort the flow of operation. We all want to perform in safe known boundaries. Maybe for fear of failure & Crtisim or punishment etc.

Innovation challenges among team members will embolden them to crush some of the silos in mind. Such an initiative will motivate the team members to consider variously, come out of the monotony and stretch for something bigger accomplishments. In a process, we will be capable to collaborate and exercise our skills muscle and pick up something new.

“I believe the real difference between success and failure in a corporation can very often be traced to the question of how well the organization brings out the great energies and talents of its people.” Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Former IBM Chief Executive.

Thank God It is a Friday innovation hour!!! Team members can consider Friday is their period for innovation! where they are free for certain hours, do fly like birds, roam like wild animals in the wildlife sanctuaries. No barrier, no boundary and do whatever their passion drives them to do. Come back and demonstrate what different ideas they are bringing.

One of the best problem-solving technique is Design thinking, this approach helped a lot of resolves many complex problems as a team. More discussion, open discussion with visuals helps the structurally to think about a problem. Demonstrate the prototype to fetch more feedback. Run the same model several rounds with new innovative ways. As a leader or team member, we need to explore the power of design thinking to come out with better product and solutions.

“Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.” — George Kneller

The psychological safety and trust is the key driver in a team to experiment something new easily. The free flow open communication helps the team to view where we are heading, why we are not so successful in our approach. What should we try differently? all these approaches enable team members to think differently. These are the factors that otherwise constraints team members to come out with new ideas.

Let us not criticize whenever new ideas come. Let us look for the opportunity to explore and talk about those ideas. As a part of building a better team environment let us ensure all of us are exchanging, challenging each other to create and refine any ideas. It will take time for the team to reach such a state. It needs rehearsal and good trusting and bonding among team members. Sometime there will be team members who do not like to do open discussion. Thye tries to compete and create disturbance in the team setup. As leaders, they need to watch out for such team members.

A learning organization, To improve creativity in a team environment, leaders need to create many platforms where team members are continuously learning by sharing. We need to learn from others when I as team members share some of my new discovery, I feel proud of the organization to acknowledge in special setup. The same is true for every team member. There should be an inspiration for sharing, appreciation for sharing, acknowledgment of learning for failure.

Celebration whenever a mini-milestone has been achieved by the team members. The positive optimistic environment fires more innovation to come. One person who can drive such an event can track such a milestone of achievement, a kind of innovation in charge person. That person can mentor and coach the team members to improve & achieve such innovation milestones.

Look for the opportunity to become better. This is also one of the best techniques to continually refine our intentions, what can we do to make our existing ways of thinking further and better. This approach facilitates the team to challenges in many possible to come out with new approaches and solutions. Challenge each other from different elements to come out with unique proposals.

Watch out for the toxic employees. Find them, counsel them, and coach them to support the team. If they are not able to collaborate, communicate with them. The creativity will not be able to flourish when the team has such toxic employees. Ensure there us fun in the team, and all the team members are able to enjoy that fun-filled ambient. Toxic and negative people destroy the fun and flow of the team. Ensure that within a team, every team members secrete happy hormones! Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins are famously happy hormones that promote positive feelings like happiness, enjoy and fun with better collaboration.

When team members feel good, they will voluntarily contribute. Innovation has to be aroused from inside it can not be commanded. People can go beyond their defined path when they are creative.

As a leader, we have to fire the curiosity among team members. Inspire them to resolve big problems. Influence them to take ownership.

Book Reader comment

 

Why Customer Collaboration is Painful? How can we improve?

James is an Agile Coach. He has picked up his current assignment for Agile Transformation for large product development.

One of his observations was business or customer was no way involved in product solutions development.

They were far from the product development teams.

Team members were tried to invite the business and customers to share their insight with the PO, but the PO was not accessible most of the time.

Business does not find any value to involve themselves with IT on the solution side. They want results!

IT is an expert in building IT solutions and the Business wants to keep themselves aways for all these discussions.

Team members were not able to appreciate what they are developing and how those solutions will be consumed by the end-users. They were struggling to visualize the end-users’ usages of the systems.

Team members discover issues later the course of the development proceeding in feature delivery flow.

In today’s digital era, we have to build the first time right product as often as feasible. When the customer has been involved in co-creating the end solution, it is very much likely we may succeed in this approach.

James had an incredibly challenging assignment as an Agile coach to address this issue. How to enhance customer engagement?

One of the Agile Values says,

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

One of the principles says

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Now, where are the business involvement? How to expand?

After several months of close scrutiny, James discovers there are many impediments in the organization which is not supporting the customer to come to close to the IT organizations.

One of the blockers is Organizational structure.

IT and Business are 2 building blocks.

One invests money to build products, and another builds the products.

As everyone needs capital to exist, IT always seeking funds.

So Businesses, as they are generating revenues, are invariably in upper controls. There is always conflict and wrestling.

In the end, who has money they dominate in the argument! else fund will go somewhere else! Nobody dares to pinpoint such an issue which is slowing down the organization.

There are many people who are playing the interface role. There are many roles created to complete these jobs. All these roles are a very senior role, and their everyday activities involve managing the same. Both of the IT side and the Business side. They are gatekeepers, enablers, and messengers from both sides of the wall in the product development flow!

Those employees are feeding the business organization. The business is pretty comfortable with these jobs. As they are not directly involved and information is also fed to them. They were protecting each other and defending each other roles.

87 percent of organizations agree on traditional experiences no longer satisfy customers. (Source: Accenture)

86 percent of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or inadequate communication for workplace failures (Source: Salesforce)

James had an arduous task to break, these communication barriers, and establish a strong agile team by dismantling these barriers need to find out. He involves a third-party consultant to undertake this assignment.

He & the consultant did a value stream mapping workshop to understand the execution speed. And figure out where most of the time consumed. He had found that as too many layers are involved in between development teams and business stakeholders, the time taking is remarkably significant.

The new team of Change agents has recommended a new lean organization. The layers in between, people/roles in between have been optimized. Team members should be able to access direct customers with minimal layers and communication barriers.

Initially, customer representatives(Business) were not comfortable with these new ways of working. There were many unknown initially. But with an appropriate workshop and hand-holding, they started feeling comfortable. There was a lot of top pressure as the Business people were not enthusiastic to participate in such events. For a substantial period of their career, they were not done with such work. They are more comfortable with domain work. They would love to continue to play the role of end-users of the IT system. They feel lost when we talk about IT jargon.

Earlier model customer representatives are in the upper hand. They were the receiver of the solution. In that model, it was natural to get into conflict and blame mode. Team members used to waste a lot of time in mail exchange, in meeting to demonstrate who is right. As customers used to pay money, they used to dictate the discussion. This creates disappointment, dissatisfaction at the team level. Their KPI was different. By collaborating with the IT product development team, they were not getting many benefits. All these aspects had to alter with the new model.

Leadership was not convinced for long to let their business people involve IT solutions building. After several rounds of benefits realization discussion, these factors are obvious that at a certain % of their involvement to start with and incrementally we can expand based on the demand. The pilot approach demonstrated the issue of discovery at a subsequent period has reduced with this fresh approach. This leadership is again convinced that it is workable and value-added. Once leaders are agreeing, it considers much natural to coach the business team members to collaborate with IT.

The change management team has submitted to optimize some of these roles and direct, in small size connectivity with the development team members. E.g. the Earlier model, many large size flow of requirements were handled by the many business representatives. Now Few large size flow of requirements were managed by a few business representatives. It was comfortable for business people to deal with volumes and sizes. It was easy for the development team members to instantaneously access the business.

New roles and responsibilities for this new structure has been clearly defined. There were autonomy and commitment improved among team members for this new structure. With the help of the agile scrum model team members are able to rapidly minimize the risk and demonstrate the progress.

Various automated tools have been used to establish there is complete transparency of product development flow. Product team members are able to clearly view the bottleneck and eliminate rapidly. Business stakeholders were are having concerns if they have to spend more time with IT or not. But with the right structure and eliminating ambiguity through tools, everything is unusually apparent. Who is going to do what, by when? The frequent synch has have diminished any such issues.

Scrum team members are a coach to accept, support, and welcome the business team members. They were encouraged to inspire the business team member’s participation in the initial days. They handhold the business respectively for initial days. The redundant roles were coming in the middle layers of the development flow e.g proxy roles, interface roles either they have been moved to the business side or in other teams similar business side roles.

Rewards and recognized as a whole team. The complete teams win when they were able to build features at every sprint level. The entire chain of product development is celebrating success and taking the blame for failure. The measurement indicates the improvement team is making, The satisfaction index has progressively raised to substantiate this new model.

It took James and his team to optimize the structure and improved the customer engagement for 6 months to one years with many activities, discussion, workshop and pilot, etc work.

The top leaders’ blessing and good change agents were key in this drive.

There was considerable value, speed improvement has been observed in these unique ways of working.

Social Skill for High Performance Team

Why Social skills are one of the fundamental ingredients to select team members?

As social animals, we adapt our conversations and actions to conform our audiences. To varying degrees, we note our performance and modify it to establish the impressions we seek.

In today’s business every assignment we take up, the fundamental part is a collaboration with individuals as comprehensive as feasible.

How well am I getting along with others? It predominantly depends on our Self.

How is my Self has been developed?

We are all different! But in a group, we are all in the same family! We adjust to the rules and standards of the group, We have a shared goal, Shared Understanding, and Shared Purpose.

A substantial part of our Self again dependent on other individual and their Self. As we operate in a social system.

The structure of our social factors are

The characters we play ( Parent, Teacher, Friend, etc)

The social identities we construct ( Priest, Doctor, Nurse, Engineers, etc)

The correlations we establish with others ( Harvard MBA Grads vs Standford engineers ...etc)

How other Individuals judge us

The surrounding society & Ambient

Everything shapes our self and we influence other’s self. Occasionally we are independent and occasionally we are interdependent.

It is significant for us to choose our team members with all these factors.

Indicators that can give us an orientation about these social skills increase the chance of success.

Team members who are having polish social skills are advantage from others who do not have so mature social skills.

One of the crucial parameters is self-knowledge. Knowing Thyself! How much we know about ourselves? Can we control our behavior? Our emotions at the relevant time?

What is our Self Map? How well our belief system influence our self Map? An excellent team player designs their map respectively. They find out what needs to adjust to adapt to the prevailing context.

These are some questions we can ask ourselves and likewise can figure out from others. All of these factors matter when we work as a team.

We have to be aware of Self-serving bias. What is that?

A self-serving bias is the familiar habit of an individual taking credit for positive events or outcomes, but blaming outside factors for negative events.

e.g I have done a wonderful speech because I have natural to skill and also I have practiced hard. If I have performed inadequately, it is because the system or infrastructure was not good!

Self-serving bias also emerges when we compare ourselves with others. We have to figure out all such factors if team members are having such bias.

Unrealistic optimism, an incident that shows us to be insufficiently in touch with reality. However, establishing that we are in fact making an error when assessing the likelihood of subsequent outcomes is exceedingly difficult. Being too optimistic can contribute to impracticality and overconfidence.

Another area to consider into

Self-efficacy and self-esteem, sound similar but are distinct concepts.

If we believe we can do something, that’s self-efficacy.

If we admire ourselves overall, that’s self-esteem. Both are very much essential ingredients to look into when we select team members.

Self-esteem in some cultures correlates strictly with “what others judge of me and my group.”

For some cultures, self-esteem is more intimate and less relational.

Most individuals are exceptionally motivated to maintain their self-esteem.

Just give it a thought, What happens when our self-esteem is threatened? What do you do?

Cultures also shape the self. Many individuals in individualistic western cultures assume an independent self. Others, often in collectivistic cultures, accept a more interdependent self. This is how our self has unfolded in a community context. Balance Self-esteem in desired in a team context.

Moods also influence our interaction with other team members. Moods pervade our thinking.

When we are in an awful mood, we have more depressing thoughts. Happy people, by contrast, are more trusting, more loving, more responsive.

Good and bad moods trigger memories of incidents associated with those moods. Moods color our judgments of ongoing experiences. Good team members recognize how to modulate their moods so that they can generate the finest atmosphere for synergy.

Another area that influences team members is Social anxiety and Shyness. Social anxiety is an unreasonable fear of being negatively assessed by other individuals.

Individuals are more likely to feel shy when they’re not certain how to respond, don’t know how others will behave, or when attention is on them.

This created an issue at team performance because the individual who is shy will avert situations that most individuals consider “normal.” Some amount of social discomfort is reasonable. We desire to identify team members who maintain the balance.

When you look for a High-performance team, look for all these aspects in team members. Highlight those factors and coach the members to improve on these factors( These are few, there are many such). When all these skills are in balance team members will create a positive team environment and achieve many things together.

Coaching/Mentoring Contract for a High-performance team

Leaders are the coach of the team. Scrum master is coach the team. Senior team members are the mentor for the teams. Once Individual have reached a particular level of maturity, coaching and mentoring by these individual will aid others to become better at whatever we are doing.

We need to coach and mentor where we identify opportunities to ensure we build a strong High-performance team.

How do we start this journey?

Coaching and Mentorship is an agreement where two individuals conform to adhere to a particular way of functioning for an accepted goal & Purpose.

The goal could be to become better whatever we are operating.

The learning has to flow from upstream to downstream( from Mature team members to new/entry-level team members). The awareness has to grow, unknown challenges have to explore and come out with unique ways to resolve for progress.

Both the party will steer for a known and unknown territory together and come out with diverse experiences. Better or bitter whatever it may be.

The purpose could be, both the parties should candidly discuss what could be our short-term goals and capture those.

Few areas can help us to structure and start this journey.

We openly examine and capture the benefits of such type of agreement and we acknowledge if there is any adjustment desired.

This meeting has to be scheduled in the calendar in well advance so that everyone is ready.

As coaches or mentors, we have to establish a space where we allow team members to share their side of the story. As a coach, we suggest many queries to explore their world and motivate team members thought to investigate and explore many options.

As a coach & mentor, we recommend many tools and guidelines to look into and come back with queries, if any.

A) Where are we now?

B) What is our overall goal? Short term and Long term? What we would admire to achieve? Solving the complex question, Improving the performance gap. Enhancing current ways of operating, etc

C) What are our roles and responsibilities? How do we ensure we are aligned for a common goal?

D) What is the support system enabling us? What are the things we should look into growing support from the system?

E) What cost we have to bear to achieve the new heights? Are we ready to pay this price?

F) How do we adhere to each other? what is our boundary?

G) What will be our feedback mechanism? Agreement to share constructive criticism.

H) When we will meet? How many times in a week? When we will demonstrate our progress?

I) A confidential agreement? The platform should be safe to discuss.

J) What behavior is acceptable and not acceptable?

K) How do we know we are irritating each other, hurting each other’s ego? what is the signal to check we have crossed the boundary

L) Celebration time, when should we celebrate? and based on what criteria?

M) Any point we do not choose to discuss? which are too personal and not impacting performance?

N) An agreement to create open, trusting, transparent ambient?

O) An agreement to come out from the contract? When should we choose that we have succeeded with our goal?

As Mentee or coachee, I adhere to these below points

A) As a Coachee, I understand the purpose of our meeting

B) As a Coachee, I understand what I am going to discuss

C) As a Coachee, I am prepared and share all the challenges and progress I am making

D) As a Coachee, we discuss together to measure the progress

E) As a Coachee, I devote my times to demonstrate dedication and commitment

F) As a Coachee, I look for feedback which can help me to experiment, study and reflect

G) As a Coachee, I openly discuss what is working and what is not working and we agree to course correct

H) As a Coachee, we identify the development areas and work upon on those

I) As a Coachee, I comment about the openness, a trust created in our discussion

J) As a Coachee, I share my feedback about my coach/mentor

K) As a Coachee, I ensure I cancel the meeting well ahead and the same action admitted from the Coach/mentor side

L) As a Coachee, I ensure our relationship maintained and we work together to improve the same

When we prepare ourselves with such a structural approach, we can discover how will this procedure is supporting all of us.

We could be a mentor or Mentee, coach, or coachee all of us will get benefit from this structural preparation. We can consistently customize and reform upon this.

Coaching Rotten Apples?

As an Agile coach, it is too part of our exercises to identify the bad apples from the team.

If we have to establish a high-performance agile team, we require to work out this exercise. It is not only reporting manager jobs, you as a coach desire to support the manager to surmount this crisis.

How can we help the bad apples so that other apples also do get rotten!

Else all the coaching efforts will go in vain!

We have to rapidly stop bleeding to recover the team!

As the traditional maxim goes, one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel

It merely takes one “rotten apple” to influence employee engagement across your whole business. If you place one bad apple with other few good apples, it has been discovered over a period of a timeline all apples will be started becoming bad! It is an absolutely genuine fact.

First, identify those bad apples, there is a diverse school of opinion suggesting, there is no bad apple, it is the only circumstance which creates those bad apples, once you alter the condition they will spiral into a Good apple.

As a coach, we need to understand all the circumstances which induce those. It is part of the assessment and we are liable to turn a team into a high-performance team. Also a part of change management activities.

a) Find the individuals who spend most of the time complaining about the system. Whenever they comment, it commences with a complaint. Looks for the evidence if he/she has done anything to alter the situation. Or just grievance!

A recent study organized by the University of Washington Business School examines just how much damage one bad apple can inflict. The study, published in Research in Organizational Behavior, reveals that in the presence of bad apples individuals aren’t as willing to handle problems that arise, don’t communicate with one another, and generally stop functioning as a team—not a great recipe for high performance and productivity.

Let us find if such bad apples are not passing from one team to others

b) Need to coach those Bad apples. Emphasize and try to understand what kind of challenges those individuals are dealing with. Talk to the reporting manager about the strength and weaknesses of those individuals. Need to observe them thoughtfully and ask managers to talk periodically about those individuals. Provide feedback for the progress.

c) Most of the time those individuals are street smart individuals. They know extremely well how to play the game in the system. Dialogue and agreement with such individuals have to be recorded and set the expectation very precisely. Measure the outcome based on their contribution. Need to involve reporting managers in any such arrangement and improvement plan. The goal has to be SMART and evaluate with the right feedback for such individuals.

d) Those individuals have not polished themselves to stay relevant with the modern technology trend. To come out of the inability they will try to distract the attention or discussion in some other way. A coach needs to talk to those individuals structurally. Need to convey what they can contribute in 6 months and a 1-year timeline to upgrade their knowledge gaps. Coach them and update their reporting managers.

e) Those individuals(Bad Apples) due to some reason have forgotten the passion, aspiration to establish something significant. As a result, they are not capable to match the expectations organizations are demanding from them. Some way the innovation speed has diminished a contribution has come down. They have to rekindle the fire within themselves to create something worth it. Need to understand their world and point out the modern way of thinking so that they can become self-driven to rehabilitate their world.

f) Communicate to their Manager, sometimes, the ecosystem push to those team members to move to this Bad apple state. Understand what action Mangers are performing for those team members. Observe the manager’s management style and look for opportunities if we can help those managers to modify some of their styles which is not aligning with Mentoring, supporting, coaching style of leadership.

g) Coach other good apples to help the bad apples in all the desirable ways. There could be a timeline for those bad apples to turn into Good apple. Organizations can assure that there is enough support system in place, by using these approaches a Bad apple can turn into a good apple. All the other team members require to serve those bad apples by coaching, mentoring, and training based on their capacity. The coach and Reporting manager can discuss and measure improvement and progress.

h) Most of the time, bad apples will not walk the talk. These are truly typical symptoms. They will talk loud and tall. But their contribution is absolutely minimal. It takes courage and wisdom to catch hold of such individuals. As a coach, we do not stand for any such confusion. Looks for improvement, contribution, and the impact they are making month on month. Regularly update their reporting manager regarding the action you are taking for those bad apples. How those individuals are performing in their day to day progress.

i) Look for the cues from the team members, who are not taking many activities, watch for the individuals who are having maximum excuses most of the time, Looks for the individuals who are not able to accomplish their activities most of the time and what reason, look for the individuals in the meeting says many different ideas but not able to contributes as the expected level, talk to the team members. These are clues where we can make out who are the bad apples. They are great manipulators so search for those clues and reach the bad apples to diminish the damage rapidly.

I am sure you are also coming across such individuals, Let us all find those and help the organization to be a better place to work for. One day those apples will turn into a good one.

When Fear kills our Creativity?

Creativity is an art of thinking, analyzing, and carrying out ideas in an exceptional manner.

In neuroscience, scientists have discovered substantial evidence that when individuals live in fear, most of their potential creative energy is usually diverted to dealing with this fear.

Dr. Will Schutz, a renowned psychologist, and pioneer of the human potential movement believed that fear is the biggest block to creativity.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love says that “Fear and creativity are conjoined twins. What holds people back from being creative is that in order to murder the fear, they end up killing off the creativity as well.”

An environment which is more encouraging, more optimistic flourish greatly with fresh ideas and solutions. People, where they can freely experiment, express an exchange, can contribute more new ideas.

Creating a better work ambient when we have leaders who protect individuals, who guide, multiply rapidly.

Let us call everything which could be tagged as a failure into an “Experiment”.

Why, to tagged them as a Failure, tagged those individuals as Idiots!

Our brain always designs to escape uncertainty and ambiguity. Brains want to be in a relaxed place. But the outstanding innovation takes place when we embrace the unknown. The people surrounding us require to support us to embrace this uncomfortableness, then fear from the brain will diminish and fresh ideas will come out.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” - Albert Einstein.

Our surrounding people when they criticize, when we fail, our fear increases. Next moment we will be cautious more not to try something fresh. Not to share publicly. Criticism goes inside at a deeper level and comes back very hard whenever we are investigating something fresh and original. The brain loves to embrace negativity. How can we stop criticizing and look for opportunities in misfortune?

Franklin D. Roosevelt reminds us:

“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” - Joseph Chilton Pierce

We recognize that how people being tagged us quickly when we make anything silly. It takes great courage to stand tall when something is ruined. It demands good team support and organizational support to proceed when an organization gets into the fault-finding approach, blame game mode, we surrender our best creative capabilities.

“Fail, fail again, fail better.” Those are the words of Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature when asked what was the secret to being creative.

Leaders need to safeguard employee emotional safety when something does not work well. Team members also require to collaborate to assure each other emotionally.

Creativity is a multifaceted construct, in which different moods influence distinct components of creative thoughts (Kaufmann, 2003)

How well our ambient inspire us to perform better ways of dealing with something? Imagine, all your surrounding team members are full of toxic thought, backbiting, what will be the quality of product innovation! we all desire to work on this to establish a healthy team culture of innovation, when we regularly do fun and ensure we do not hurt anyone emotionally we are moving in the appropriate direction.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

Let us build up our creative element by getting rid of those fears from all possible ways, let us aid each other to develop into creative.

As a coach are you striving for all these by eliminating fear from the system. Coach the leader to assure that they constitute a fear-free ambient for better creativity.

In my book, The Scrum Master Guidebook, I have one chapter on creativity development.

Coaching to promote customer centricity at the team level?

A number of years ago, Deloitte and Touche organized a critical study on the financial merits of being customer-centric. The study found that customer-centric companies were

60% more profitable

2X as likely to exceed return-on-shareholder equity and

Twice as likely to exceed goals for pre-tax returns on assets, sales growth, and market share compared to their less custom-centric counterparts.

86% of customers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. (CEI Survey)

The team should be capable to deliver end to end customer value.

Look for any opportunity to knock out any silos as a coach you discover at the team level.

Team members will explain or indicate incompetence to resolve some of these silos. Take help from the leadership team to get rid of systematic issues to eliminate silos which can weaken customer-centricity and preventing better customer satisfaction.

“Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed at how many companies don’t listen to their customers.”

– Ross Perot, American Business Magnate

Every team members require to understand, compose, and visualize the customer journey map. They require to be trained and communicate about the end to end customer pain point discovery. Look for an opportunity if there anything which is not customer-centered. No half-baked food for end users. Everything should be an end to end consumable perspective.

Look for the process and practices which do not facilitate the fastest customer satisfaction. Looks for technologies and platforms, how effectively those are utilized for full customer satisfaction. Use technology to bridge the gap if there are any, in customer end to end journey map.

“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek

At the team level and organization level, the universal ground rule for customer service was drafted and regularly upgraded the same.

Look for competency at the team level if there are sufficient skill and proficiency available at the team level to comply with the end to end customer demand fulfillment point of view.

Anticipate customer’s needs well forwards so that team can be ready with the contribution.

“The most valuable resource you can give customers is your time. Listen to them to uncover their real needs. Only then can you find a way to solve their problems or meet their expectations. Treat the cause, not just the symptoms.” – Ginger Conlon

Team members should be passionate about the customer-first approach. If there are any inconsistencies, talk about those in a retrospective meeting. Collect the feedback from customers and work on those. A customer-focused approach may use A/B testing to understand what ads resonate most with customers.

Train team members on customer relationships build skill, esp empathy, listening skills with perfect communication skills.

Establish a co-creation and collaboration platform with customers. The end offers will be with the appropriate alignment when we join hands together with the customer.

Have a monitor and analysis system about the customer movement for your offerings and solutions. Use the data analytics to measure how well the customer is hooked for your product and solution.

“If we consistently exceed the expectations of employees, they will consistently exceed the expectations of our customers.” – Shep Hyken

Build a customer experience strategy. Your team members should continuously work on that strategy to make it polished and enhanced.

Reward your team members on better customer service. Make it a culture in your team.

Always accessible to the customer so that you can understand their pain and their world better. You various survey to retrieve their concern and needs. The frequent in-person meet will help to know and connect with them better.

Ensure all the customer touchpoint tools are in place and easy to use. End users should be able to connect at lightning speed, and you need a resilient system to fix any concern.

Frequently collect NPS score and study what is missing

Create innovative thinking to deal with customer issues or any pain point. Reward team members on unique ideas suggested in this regard.

“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell