The Leadership Vision Podcast
The Leadership Vision Podcast is about helping people better understand who they are as a leader. Our consulting firm has spent 25 years investing in teams so that people are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. Our podcast provides information to help you develop as a leader, build a positive team culture, and grow your organization to match the demands of today’s business landscape. We leverage client experience, research-based leadership models, and reflective conversations to explore personal growth and leadership topics. With over 350,000 downloads from 180+ countries, our podcast shares our expertise in discovering, practicing, and implementing a Strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture.
The Leadership Vision Podcast
Building Positive Team Culture Using Agile Principles with Dennis Stevens
In this episode of the Leadership Vision podcast, we sit down with Dennis Stevens, an enterprise Agile coach and founder of OrgWright with 30 years of experience. We discuss the evolving relevance of Agile principles and practices, particularly in the context of the post-pandemic business world. The conversation explores the difference between superficial Agile practices and fostering true team coherence and adaptability.
Dennis shares insights on creating effective teamwork conditions, reflecting on his experiences and lessons from the Agile community, the military, and transformational leadership. The discussion also addresses the challenges of consistent team alignment, clarity of roles, and the significance of first principles and purposeful rhythm in organizational success. Enjoy!
00:56 Meet Dennis Stevens, Agile Expert
03:52 Defining Agile and Its Core Principles
05:26 Challenges in Agile Transformation
06:45 Creating Conditions for Effective Teamwork
12:23 The Role of Leadership in Agile
17:26 Implementing Purposeful Rhythms
24:44 The Importance of Structure in Team Meetings
25:11 Aligning Personal and Team Goals
25:48 Customizing Team Structures for Success
26:39 The Role of Leadership in Team Success
27:11 Innovative Approaches to Team Building
28:24 Real-World Examples of Team Reorganization
29:32 Balancing Risk and Reward in Leadership Decisions
36:35 Lessons from the Marine Corps
40:24 Applying Agile Principles in Leadership
43:13 Final Thoughts and Takeaways
-
Read the full blog post here!
CONTACT US
- email: connect@leadershipvisionconsulting.com
- Leadership Vision Online
ABOUT
The Leadership Vision Podcast is a weekly show sharing our expertise in discovering, practicing, and implementing a Strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture. Contact us to talk to us about helping your team understand the power of Strengths.
I think the big industrial complex around agile is probably dying. But the things that you do with well-formed teams focus on a business problem collaborating, learning how to make effective commitments, the types of conversations you need to have, building that fabric. That stuff is still super relevant. It's just a little bit more abstracted away because it got lost in the rush for consulting dollars. You can even teach people to operate from their strengths and be better team players, but if you don't, from an organizational design standpoint, create coherence around the way the teams operate, you might not get the results that you want.
Speaker 2:You are listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for the past 25 years so that leaders are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and in this episode of the podcast we sit down with Dennis Stevens, an enterprise agile coach and founder at OrgWrite, who has 30 years of experience helping complex enterprises navigate Agile transformations. Dennis shares his journey with us, detailing his experiences as a change agent and leader in the Agile community.
Speaker 2:We're going to be talking about some of the fundamentals of Agile, which, if you don't know, is a way of working that emphasizes relatively stable teams working closely together to deliver frequent, complete work while adapting and learning continuously. Dennis emphasizes the importance of moving beyond superficial Agile practices to foster true team coherence and adaptability in this post-pandemic business landscape. He also highlights the challenges and shifts within the agile industry, highlighting a real need for creating conditions for effective teamwork and leadership and, as you'll hear, there is a whole bunch of overlap with the work that we're doing here at Leadership Vision to create positive team culture. The agile community and what Dennis is doing Now as you listen here today focus on the key takeaways of strategic empowerment and maybe reflect on some of the ways that you might apply these insights and ideas to create positive culture and achieve your team's goals. Enjoy.
Speaker 3:Dennis, where are you in the world?
Speaker 1:I'm sitting on the intercoastal waterway between Clearwater and Clearwater Beach, Florida. It's the most beautiful beach in America. I can look out in the intercoastal waterway. We had dolphins this morning while I was drinking coffee.
Speaker 3:You're like an advertisement for the travel bureau.
Speaker 4:You're making me jealous.
Speaker 2:They also have sharks, though so I don't know how that impacts your ability to go in the water. Dennis, can you just tell us a little bit about who you are? For someone who has no idea who you are, what's kind of your elevator pitch who you are, what do you do?
Speaker 1:So I'm an experienced executive change agent. For the last 30 years I've been building organizations that help companies implement technology and new processes. The last 15, I had a company called Leading Agile, which is one of the largest agile transformation companies. I was the chief methodologist and co-founder of that. I built some companies prior to that. Sold one. One didn't survive 2008. Got activated for Desert Storm for the Marine Corps. For one, it didn't survive me being out of the country for a year. So this is about my sixth startup and it fits into that ideation learner sort of thing. I want to create new things, so when I see the exciting new opportunity, I kind of get ahead of it. What's interesting to me after 30 plus years of doing this is how much of what I've learned in the past is completely relevant. Oh, you're lucky. The changes that are taking place.
Speaker 1:Before we get too far, can you just define agile for everyone, because I want to make sure that we're starting off like all on the same page here, sure, so it's basically relatively stable teams working pretty close to understanding the problem, delivering frequently relatively complete work, so it can be validated and provide the ability to learn and pivot and adapt as you go. So in practice, what makes something agile is the ability to adapt as you learn.
Speaker 2:You said, relatively stable teams is how this starts. That seems like that could be the hinge point on all of this here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Most of what we did with Agile Transformation, a huge amount of what we did with Agile Transformation, went from project-based organizations where individuals were operating their functional silo as participants in multiple projects at the same time, pulling together relatively cross-functional teams and I was relatively. It's just a consulting thing, because if you don't caveat it a little bit, they'll go we can never absolutely do that.
Speaker 1:So they're relatively persistent and relatively stable and relatively complete. Cross-functional teams that work on solving all aspects problem. It's particularly important in the type of work that people are doing today, because work just isn't very linear we're figuring out how to build it as we figure out what the problem is, as we figure out how to deploy it, and so it has to be really tight cycles on those small teams. So cross-functional teams that are relatively persistent, focused on a shared problem space together.
Speaker 3:Dennis, you mentioned some of the ways that the current marketplace is evolving and how Agile is fitting in. Can you talk more about what it is that you're observing from your experience and how people are doing work now post-pandemic and some of the greater changes in the business landscape?
Speaker 1:What's interesting about the Agile industry as a whole? There was a conference that used to be like the anchor conference of the Ag community. It's called the agile conference. It was in Dallas this year, a less than a thousand attendees. That thing had three or 4,000 attendees in the past.
Speaker 1:In general, the agile industry became about transformation and implementing these practices and tools and methods and, they'll say, ways of thinking or mindsets, and it became about putting a lot of consultants on the ground. We know of a client that had 2,000 coaches and contracted scrum masters on the ground as they drove their global transformation and it didn't produce really dramatic business results for them because they didn't get the changes that were necessary for tech store. Now there have been companies that have had great successes, that have gone in and done the things and understand it. A lot of times people have gone into companies where the conditions for success kind of exist and then the practices really anchor and take off and they'll say, well, we had the right culture, but you can't go make culture be different. And so what do you do? What does it mean to create the conditions that result in a culture where these things are successful?
Speaker 1:And our industry, the industry of the agile transformation industry just wasn't really paying a lot of attention to that and so it caused a lot of harm and cost a lot of money. And then you know, once people start, there's a lot of blog posts like is Agile dead? I think the big industrial complex around Agile is probably dying. But the things that you do with well-formed teams focused on a business problem collaborating, learning how to make effective commitments, the types of conversations you need to have, building that fabric that stuff is still super relevant. It's just a little bit more abstracted away because it got lost in the rush for consulting dollars.
Speaker 3:That, yeah, that you're talking a lot about business needs, the industry itself, the need for the focus on culture. So, right now, where is the adaptation happening, like how? How is the industry then responding to what some of the clients are asking for?
Speaker 1:You know it's in turmoil right now. There have been huge layoffs in a lot of consulting organizations. A lot of organizations have laid off a lot of their agile and scrum people. They're shutting down their transformation offices, so the the method of of doing it is getting shut down. There's a movement of people that I spend time talking with right now that are trying to get back to first principles and getting those first principles understood by leaders and organizations, because you don't need an army of coaches to go form teams well. You don't need an army of coaches to go create good conditions for clarity and balance, capacity demand some of the things that are necessary for these teams to work.
Speaker 1:The other thing is everybody's been through at least one agile transformation. That's in software anywhere. There's no more training on the basics. That needs to happen unless you're brand new to the industry. But most organizations are doing at the foundation backlogs, sprints, trying to do frequent delivery, devops, devsecops some of those terms that come up. Devops and DevSecOps are techniques for building software and testing and validating it, frequently called DevOps because it's about getting the developers and the operations people to work more closely together and then building tools and automation around how they interact. So these things are kind of known and in place.
Speaker 3:Dennis, I have a question, because what we know is that many teams and organizations need to have methodologies and systems in place to help align the work that they're doing. We also know that people hesitate to commit all into one specific system. For example, we've worked with a lot of people who try to integrate EOS, but they want to piecemeal part of it and not integrate a whole system. Are you finding the same, the same challenges? Now?
Speaker 4:people may want to choose specific parts or trying to be agile in a waterfall approach.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and this might, this might be nuanced right, so so pick at it. If it doesn't make sense, there's a. There's the concept of you can do all of the practices and all of the methodology, but if you don't understand what you're actually trying to do, you won't get the benefit. So it's exactly what Linda said. We're going to call it by the new names. We're going to change our calendar to be the new things. We're going to operate the way we always operated, which is, um, not not creating any space for feedback or learning, not building things early on to validate that might disrupt our plan or understanding. So they operate the way they always operated and they don't get the benefit. No amount of running daily standups or automation or tools is going to fix that problem.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's so. Yeah, I completely agree with that. Do you have I've been waiting to ask this question, do you have a current organization that's making a healthy adaptation right now? Like has that's that's recognizing what their, their current organizational needs are, the changing landscape? And like how did, how are they taking some of the best principles and applying it? Like, give an example of someone that that's that's doing it really well.
Speaker 1:I've got a client from 10 or 12 years ago. They're out in Omaha, nebraska. It's a bank. They did a great job when they implemented it, of deeply understanding why they were doing what they were doing and changing the way that they led to that model. So 10 years later, they're still getting tremendous benefit and they're still growing and improving. They're probably ahead of most organizations in what they're doing. But it's because they went after it, after these core principles of what must be in place, and they go back to first principles all the time as they're evaluating what they're doing. It was absolutely leader-led. The CIO was willing to do all the things necessary and had enough influence and power to make the types of changes necessary. That's not always the case, but because he deeply, viscerally understood what was necessary, he fixed it. What he understood is that engaged people, given the right conditions, will operate successfully. You can't force success upon your teams.
Speaker 3:Now that part of engaged people given the right conditions to operate successfully, do you have any additional team dynamics that you've noticed that are going to contribute to that success?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a, there's a. This is like the leader led sort of conflict Sometimes that I run into. People talk about being a servant leader or the leaders have to do better. I believe the leaders have to create the conditions for the teams to operate effectively. Like, what does it mean, as a leader, for me to get people to be coherently aligned with the value that they're supposed to be producing? So they're well-formed teams, aligned with value and there's clarity on what they're supposed to build and how their work results and outcomes.
Speaker 1:I call that just a concept of coherence. Most organizations aren't even thinking about that. They're going. You can go through all the practices of Agile and not do any of that. Right, but if you do that, you probably don't have to do all the practices of Agile. You know it might be, might be painting by the numbers, but this concept of of getting my teams at least working together, well-aligned, knowing what they're responsible for, getting clarity for their work, not making them responsible for dependencies and things that they can't manage, that's a leader creating conditions for their team to operate effectively. Does that one sort of resonate?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it does and it makes me wonder a different question, because you're using the word leader is the leader creating the right condition? Is it the assigned position-based leader, or can it be somebody within the team that's also helping to create the right conditions on the team? Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:That's a great question. I believe that many people on the team can get engaged with discourse and conversation around what those conditions would optimally be Most organizations. The changes that need to be made cannot be made by somebody that doesn't have the rank and the influence to make those changes. I can't change the way that we budget and form teams. If I'm on a team, it doesn't matter how much I understand it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Because that is part of what we're doing when we're working with teams, um, um, we don't bring necessarily a system of operations uh with us. We're working with what they already have in place. But we are looking for, like with the question I asked, we're looking for people of influence within the team that are helping to create the momentum or the traction to go forward, to help create the change, Because oftentimes, you know, we believe, like we're, we're coming in Dennis to help a leader accelerate their vision or their understanding of who their, their people are. But we're also looking for additional influences within the team that are aligned on it as well, knowing that that momentum isn't sustainable without more than one person getting that ball rolling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's interesting. You could go put EOS in an organization and not get any actual beneficial results. In fact, you could add overhead and create conflict in the organization. With it. You could even teach people to operate from their strengths and be better team players. But if you don't, from an organizational design standpoint, create coherence around the way the teams operate, you might not get the results that you want.
Speaker 1:The second one that I talk about is I call it informed awareness, and it's a little bit about EOS talks about this and you'll see it in other areas, but it says everybody have shared insights.
Speaker 1:Is there an intuitive response to the circumstances aligned with what we're trying to do as a company and who we're trying to be? Create a shared understanding of where we're trying to go, and it has a lot to do with how we talk to each other, the information that's available. There's all kinds of things that are going to change in this area in the near term because I believe, because of generative AI and its ability to bring large amounts of information to bear, how can we get people aware of the consequences and the impact of the decisions they're making and the work that they're doing so, we can trust their judgment, because I can't delegate into somebody until I can trust their judgment. So I think that's a really interesting sort of aspect, which is what are the conversations that we have and what's our method of sharing information, what's the method of gathering information so we can focus on shared understanding or informed awareness, intuitive, aligned, intuitive responses.
Speaker 4:How do you get at that? What are some of the questions that you ask or ways that you detect even a readiness to have some of those conversations? Or I have found that in you know, if you're going to have a message shared by all, there's often many different bounces or different ways to expose people to a similar message, so that there is a stickiness to it.
Speaker 1:So the specific method that I've used a number of times and we've had some success in building this is by making the flow of work and requests really visible through the organization. The flow of work and requests really visible through the organization. So there is, we use a thing called a Kanban. A Kanban is a way of tracking work through a set of steps and if we can agree on who makes which decision at each step of that work through the organization, we can start to create that awareness. And then, if we make a bad decision or somebody gets off track, we can look at what did we not do in our process of engagement around the work to communicate that. What should have happened to make that be different this time? And so the third sort of item is just a purposeful rhythm, the rhythm of people meeting and talking about the organization we're talking about. Are we coherently aligned? We're talking about do we have the right information at the right time with the right people?
Speaker 1:Because when you don't have that intentional system in place first off, it's really hard to improve, it's really hard to scale leadership outside of the original sort of founder, you know, the inventor of the work process, and things like that and it becomes overwhelmingly burdensome to the inventor of the process.
Speaker 1:By making it be really explicit how does the workflow, who makes which decisions, when do we make and what information do we need? It allows us to free up and get that shared alignment. So that technique of designing the system of decisions together and then implementing it throughout the organization is really powerful. What the leader's now doing is they're saying I expect you to have this information when you walk in the room and if you don't, I expect it to be the first three questions that you ask me, because you don't know what you need to know to make the decision. Now, that's really powerful if I'm going to hold you accountable for that decision. But it's really very simple. You can do it in a weekend on a whiteboard with some sticky notes and some markers Design the system of engagement between different members of the organization for how you're going to manage the flow of work.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was fun during. Well, not fun, maybe I was going to question the word fun.
Speaker 3:no matter what you were going to say, it was interesting.
Speaker 4:No, it was interesting even when we had more Zoom meetings with teams and their Kanban board was on on the whiteboard behind them. Um, you could almost see the sticky notes moving um, based on some of our, some of our conversations, um, but transparency into how work flows and what the status of work is and what decisions would get made.
Speaker 1:That that visualization, that Kanban brings an incredibly powerful tool for solving the types of problems and trying to get around informed awareness. I need you to go work on this instead of that. Well, but it's going to disrupt these six things and it's going to delay this one and it's going to make this one impossible to do. Those are like consequences of my decision I just made that are very hard to get. In most organizations. It's on the fricking board. You just start moving stickies around. Yeah Right, there's lots of tools that you can do it. You can do it in Miro, you can do it in Lucid, there's all these different tools. You just make it be very shared and you go.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't really want to disrupt that. I don't. What are my other options? And you start and that changes the dynamic because now you're delegating. That's actually delegating and empowering the team. But it's about the system and the work in the system, not about us individually. Like there's nobody to get mad at when I created the conditions for the team to be working on 10 times more things they have capacity to operate on.
Speaker 4:It's not personal. It's not personal. Nathan, I see you're watching your eyes. What question do you have?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just so I'm. We have this whole list of questions. I'm trying to figure out where this fits in, but I keep coming back to, or thinking about, this idea of like Agile's, this framework, that if everybody agrees to it and is like, okay, we understand how this works, let's just do it. You know, there's nothing personal, but yet people are still people and drama exists on teams and individual personalities and different strengths and all of that like feelings getting hurt. How do you, as a leader, kind of deal with that, as you're also trying to implement this system that seems to work?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a huge question, but does that like, how, like in your experience, how have you sort of um help? Those human component dealt with the human component, component in addition to this, uh, great system. Does that, does that make sense? Is that an answerable question?
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and there's a huge difference. This is why it has to go back to first principles huge difference between me walking in with your way of working, documented and training on how to work, and saying here's the underlying principles for how we need to work. I need y'all to be on the same page. I need you to be aware of the consequences of decisions you're making. I need you to be clear on what was valuable and what's not. I'm going to how do I create the conditions so I can hold you accountable to these rules of engagement, not not accountable to producing a result? That's impossible because we've overloaded you or didn't give you what you needed right. So you have to design it with them, which means you have to get management engaged in the process of designing, implementing and evolving that system. It can't be documented by a consultancy and brought in and foist upon your organization.
Speaker 2:Just top down yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's that's. That is what broke in the last five years in the agile transformation community. It became this safe as documented. Train everybody on it, go do it. Every operates this way. Now the people that invented safe are really smart people. They would not, they would tell you that's not what they intended, but they were very willing to take the money for the training and produce the documentation and allow it to happen and and just put it upon the. Put the responsibility upon the leaders and the organizations, and the leaders and the organizations weren't weren't aware of it or capable of it and weren't trained and educated in it.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, yeah. So, Dennis, I'll need a few seconds to connect the dots From what you were saying before, Dennis, about the purposeful rhythm, and then what Nathan was saying about we're still working with human beings. Dennis, do you have some examples of how companies create that purposeful rhythm where there's intentional practices that are scalable, they're repeating that creates the accountability, the decision-making and perhaps more importantly, that adaptability and problem-solving? The reason why I'm asking the question, Dennis, is because humans need the predictability of knowing what's coming next, and some of those rhythms that happen they're unique to organizations and some aren't because they just work unique to organizations and some aren't because they just work. Do you have examples of what some of those purposeful rhythms actually look like within organizations that help people stay aligned and be accountable?
Speaker 1:Yes, if you start to look at those flows of work within a team and we know certain decisions need to get made at certain points in time with certain information we can now sit down with our calendars as a group of people and we can go hey, let's look at our calendars. When are we going to get together and this is Lencioni, first team type stuff, right, when are we going to get together as a team and make these decisions and what do you need to have available to you to prepare for it, so that we don't have to go backwards and go backwards and go backwards? So you design the calendar.
Speaker 1:Now I've got the work flowing, I've got a relatively persistent team, I've got a calendar put down and I just know that if I'm not operating within the decision cycle of my competitor, or faster than the problem space, or faster than my sales group, I just know I'm going to fall behind. So the only rule I've got is, if we have to make these decisions every two weeks, we have to be meeting consistently every two weeks and it is a first team meeting to look at this work that's in this state by this group of teams so we can move it through the system. So again, you make it be very. It's interesting to me that the discipline structure, when co-designed, when co-created, I will say co-conspired, sometimes right there you go.
Speaker 1:The structure creates the freedom of movement. Without the structure and the scaffolding it's just chaotic. So, getting on the calendar, creating those meetings, we're going to review on the first Monday of every month we're going to have a four hour meeting and we're going to review the work for the next 90 days relative to the work that we've completed and what we've learned has potentially changing in our, in our pipeline.
Speaker 3:So it's not going to be our question, though, because you're you're talking about engagement, um and engagement, and you said accountability many times, which I know. It's more than just a buzzword. It's a need that all leaders and teams have of each other, because you're asking the individual to step up into a team goal. Can you talk a little bit more about how it is that people can align some of their personal slash professional goals with the team goals?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm not going to give you a kumbaya answer and say it's always possible. I'm going to start with saying this team has this responsibility. This part of the organization, this group, this organizational unit has this responsibility to deliver this value and this cadence at this level of quality. Who do we have to have in the room to go do that? Are you able to find a way to collaborate together, to operate in this new way? And if you're not, we might have to make a couple of, there's a couple of decisions to make.
Speaker 1:They say if you can't change the people, change the people. That's a great adage. So you might, you might have to change some people. You might have to decide, given the technical expertise of this group of people and the consequences of it not operating the way that everybody else wants it to, I may make a decision to do it differently for this group. I may decide that that's okay to do. That's the best way to get the result that I can't lose this expert. So, again, it has to be sort of custom designed, probably things that y'all are really, really good at. When you're in, when you're in designing the individual teaming structures, you can talk a lot about what's the right way to pull that group together. My, my, my favorite strengths finder story is who should sing tenor in the quartet? The man with the highest voice?
Speaker 2:Say more about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, guys, did you know, dennis?
Speaker 2:had a scholarship to play violin Violin.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I read that. Did you see that in there? Yeah, in our notes, yeah.
Speaker 2:So say more about that, Dennis.
Speaker 3:The tenor yeah.
Speaker 1:I just think we have to put the teams together that can actually do things. And again, as a leader and I agree with leader, led and everybody being leaders but as the person responsible, you've got to put people in positions where they can be successful. You know, you don't, you don't put, you don't put. The five foot four person that wants to play center as center on the basketball team, no matter how much they want to be center on the basketball team, and if you can't have that conversation with them and they're going to be disruptive, then maybe they just can't be on the team at all.
Speaker 1:You know, so so that's, that's like I said. It's not a kumbaya story, that's difficult leadership stuff. That's very, very real.
Speaker 2:So how do you do that then? Cause you can use a tool like strengths or, you know, in sports it's an easy metaphor of you know looking at skills and matching that with positions or whatever. But in you know business and leadership it's a lot more difficult because it takes so much more time and energy and perhaps training, and then you get down the road and you're like this is not the right person. So how do you, as a leader, or again maybe, share some stories that our listeners can say, okay, this is how I can, you know, tap into someone's potential or understand who that right person is for that right role to fit into this model?
Speaker 1:We, this company that we talked about earlier in Omaha we rewrote every single job description. We redesigned the whole system with the team and we had people come and reapply for their jobs. The whole, the whole organization, reapplied for their jobs, kind of explained what the job was. That was risky, right, risky, and they gave great packages to people that left Months and months and months of pay and great references and they were very influential in the community. They helped a lot of these people land. They gave them six months of hire Like they did it very ethically Right but then everybody reapplied for their job. That's like a really powerful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, kidding, way way to do that.
Speaker 1:So the people that were there wanted to be there, yeah, and that created that, created a draw in the community that the most talented people in the community wanted to come work there as well. Now they did overpay and anchor some folks that just couldn't leave Right.
Speaker 3:They were pragmatic about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:You have to stay for a year and we'll pay you some ridiculous amount so that you'll stay for a year, and so they were pragmatic. But that was all just a designed transition. That's one way that we've seen that happen when I'm putting a team together. Oh, another thing that I've seen this guy was out in San Francisco at the time. He's up in Boston now. He's sort of a well-known software developer. He has teams every month Like here's the positions we have to fill this next month. His teams repick their teams every month. They have a day where they get together and they pick their teams, and he's tried it two different ways. He's let themselves select the team they want to be on, and he's done it like a basketball game. I coached some basketball. One of the teams I coached was an 11-year-old team that won the AAU National Championship in basketball.
Speaker 3:Wow, congratulations.
Speaker 1:Well, I had very little to do with it. My daughter's a very talented athlete but when we would do tryouts every year, you go and you run the kids against each other for a little while and you pick the kids that kind of seem to have good judgment and you have them pick sides to play against each other, because the kids know they pick the people that can be successful. So some amount of self-selecting in can be powerful. Again, it's really risky though. It's really risky, but here's, I think, the important to the people who are too busy to pay attention to it. If what you're doing is dealing with the consequences of bad decisions and the bad behavior, you're spending all of your time and energy on things that are actually somewhat avoidable. In a better designed organization, if you were doing these things, the cost would be lower to you than the cost of dealing with the overwhelm. I believe that to be true. We've seen that in a lot of situations. Yeah, good.
Speaker 4:Sorry, as I was listening to you, I was like well, sometimes it's more risky not to right. So you talk about the risk of doing this or having people reapply for their jobs or sign up for a new role, but sometimes you miss the risk of not making that decision or you're just prolonging the timeline to what change or transformation could actually look like.
Speaker 1:We had two clients that were very unionized, that were really really big clients and very activist states, and they literally couldn't lay anybody off.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we tried to put those people on work streams that it wasn't as critical if they were successful. I'm going to tell you a story that I probably shouldn't tell anymore. I haven't told this in You're on a podcast.
Speaker 4:You can change the names to protect the innocent or guilty.
Speaker 1:I had a client still friends with all these people but I had a client back in the late 90s that was trying to launch an online bank and they had a big four consulting firm and they're running this engagement and if they didn't get the bank launched within the compliance constraints by a certain date, they wouldn't be awarded their banking charter and the whole investment would go away. It had like a date they had to hit so it had to happen. They were nowhere close to hitting it, so somebody had worked within a previous job that knew me asked me to come in and take a look at it. So I took a look at it. I said I can fix this. I can get this delivered on time, on schedule. I have a plan. And he said I'll give you a shot. You've got 90 days. So 90 days later I had moved. I went back to the CIO and I said listen, I've got about 120 people too many on this project.
Speaker 3:Who?
Speaker 1:are acting as intermediators. They're in the way they're creating noise, they're trying to be important when they just aren't adding any value. Some of these people are operating on things that probably matter but won't result in not getting your banking charter, and we don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to them. Some of them are just paper movers. Some of them are just keeping track of things. For this big four consultant, I said I'd like to move 120 people off the project.
Speaker 2:And he said you can't.
Speaker 1:You can't because we've got a contract, blah, blah blah. They have a relationship but you do what you need to do to get the project delivered but you can't lay them off. So I had facilities build me 120 cubicles on the fourth floor of this office building and I moved 120 people into this cubicle form on the fourth floor. I probably did this more elegantly today than I did at that point 90 days later the project is way on track.
Speaker 1:It's where things stand. The big problems have gone away, the noise is down and I get called into the office, the CIO's office, along with the partner from the big four firm, and the partner says I told you he's moved all these people. And Mike goes did you move all these people to the fourth floor? I said, yes, I did. You told me to use them in the way that was most effective for the project and that was their most effective use when she'd have paid them to sit not doing anything for the last 90 days. And he goes. That's unacceptable. You can't do that. And the partner, she goes, she goes. See, I told you, can you believe he did that? And he goes. I don't think you can continue that, dennis. And I said I'll tell you what. Then then give the project back to her. And I turned and walked out the door. The door didn't get completely closed before Mike goes, wait a minute.
Speaker 1:So sometimes, sometimes you, you have to design the work that has to happen to get things going and figure out what skills and attitudes you need. I think, if you build him up now, the great coaches and the great leaders. Bill Belichick, besides Tom Brady, was great at using different players and adjusting his offense and defense to the circumstances, like all the time Nick Saban, because he had the best athletes and the best everything, but he played a different game plan every week. He always took advantage of the weaknesses. He wasn't running a system. His system was find their weak spot and just smash them.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, so the leaders that can can do it with everybody. That's super cool. One of the things that you learn is, if you can't do it with everybody, you have to find people that you can do it with.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 4:Man, as I'm listening to your story thanks for bringing that back from the archives, because I'm I'm really hearing your strengths profile, your strengths at play, in particular, with your strategic achiever, as well as your thought process of how to organize and reorganize outside of the box, Because who would have thought to put everyone in a cubicle farm that way?
Speaker 3:Did you?
Speaker 4:feel good about like going back to even how you felt, or did you feel like? No, I solved this in a way that, um, not just met that 90 day objective, but that really was true to who you are and maybe put you on a path to why you're still doing what you're doing today.
Speaker 1:Um, I felt good about solving the problem. I felt badly about people that I liked and respected that ended up on the fourth floor that I may still not have relationships with and I would like to have relationships with. There are several of them have called me since then and gone. I learned a very important lesson that day, right, so several of them have grew from it. Like I said, I would handle it more elegantly today than I did back then as well. That was like a lesson. I probably learned from that as well, but it was did. I feel.
Speaker 1:The first job is mission completion. The second job is get your team home. Right, you've got to get your team home. And the other thing I'll say about leadership sort of my leadership philosophy a little bit is and I know I went through the stuff in the Marine Corps and learned these things in the Marine Corps but anybody who thinks that being a bully or command and control or something like that makes you a good leader in the Marine Corps has never tried to take 12 frightened 18-year-olds with weapons someplace. They don't want to go Right, because leaders have followers. That's right. Your team has to be willing to follow you. They're going to get. Leaders have followers.
Speaker 1:That's right, right. So your team has to be willing to follow you where you're going.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 3:Well, Dennis, that brings up a question that I wanted to ask you a little bit earlier, but I was kind of waiting for the right moment. Um, sometimes those early shaping experiences that we have are still informing us to today. So my question was you know, what has your experience in the Marine Corps, what are some of those key lessons or principles that you still carry through to today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I believe that these things about team coherence, sharing information, enrolling your team and solving the mission those things stay with me Having a cadence, believing that you need the information that your team has in order to make the right decisions. That's an interesting thing. If you look at my, if you look at my strengths finder, look at my strengths, you know I'm seeking information, but it's not always that I have all the information. A lot of times I've learned to build like a network of information and who to trust to make sure I'm getting the right information.
Speaker 1:So so the relational scores may be low there, but I develop a tremendous amount of trust with my teams and my organizations because I engage them in leading the team. That's that purposeful rhythm thing, brian, a little bit right. You're having those meetings and there's a time. This is when you're talking about it, this is when you get to have your input. Now there's a hard decision to make. Here's the hard decision we're going to make. I need you to have my back on it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, cause I'm hearing too. Coherence, not just between what you learned in the Marines to what you've you've sought to do in the agile world, and just even as maybe a trunk, but needs to go back to the fundamentals and some of those pieces. Where are you finding the most, you, dennis? Where are you finding the most? Life right now, meaning, where is the points of coherence that really allow you to shine?
Speaker 1:The feedback that you would get from a lot of people that led transformations and a lot of big four consultants and a lot of really significant people that have made big change, is that they are necessary to make the change.
Speaker 1:It really revolves around them. What's rewarding to me and what I found to be very rewarding over the last 15 years as we scaled leading agile it sounds like a pivot but I'm going to continue. But as we scaled leading agile, it went from me running everything to me running nothing and teams on the ground with people that we developed and the work got better as the organization grew because we learned more and were able to share that more broadly in the organization. That ability to create leaders that are in organizations today and, instead of dismissing their ability to lead into the future, realizing that there's an awful lot of aptitude and appetite for learning how to operate to me that's really rewarding Because I think I've historically not leaned into the people on the ground because I was the smartest one in the room or my team was, and I think that was a bad path.
Speaker 4:Mm-hmm. Well, and it's lessons learned, right, and so you even talk about, you know you'd probably handle it, handle some of the decisions you made or approaches that you had, and it seems like you're a lifelong learner too, so it's almost you're always trying to improve upon the decisions that you're making.
Speaker 2:I kind of mentioned at the very beginning before Brian and Linda hopped on. But one of the things I'm curious about I think our listeners would be too is, you know, if the principles of Agile are something that sound interesting, this kind of like flexibility, iterative, all of that stuff is there, maybe like one piece of low-hanging fruit that someone could go back after they listen to this and like I'm just going to try this one element of agile that might, might help my team today, this week, whatever like what might that to try? What might that be like? What could folks try that might? You know if they're like oh, this is really interesting, I'm going to learn more, but what can I try today to um, does that make sense?
Speaker 3:That's such a Nathan question. It's such a Nathan question, dennis. That's what that's how they.
Speaker 2:He asks that question.
Speaker 1:So helpful. One of the key aspects of agile and agility is this concept of retrospection or reflection. So I'm going to couple that with the concept that organizations produce exactly what they're designed to produce. If you aren't able to delegate into your team the results that you want, or you're not getting the results that you want out of your organization, stop and reflect what would have to be true for that team to do what I'm asking them to do, because it's your responsibility to balance those two things right. It's not theirs, it's your responsibility to balance those two things. So that concept of what I call strategic empowerment, which is discourse and reflection on how I'm going to work with you to be able to have you operate the way that I need you to or the way that you need to, those two things have to balance, and so I would stick with the systems produced what they're designed to produce.
Speaker 1:Organizations produce the results that they're designed to produce, perfectly exactly, and so if you're not getting the results you want, you might need to spend some time looking at what you've created, either from the way people think or talk, or the narratives from the discourse and conversation that you allow around the problem, from the way people think or talk, or the narratives from the discourse and conversation that you allow around the problem, from the opportunities to improve and the inspection of what's expected, you're not meeting one of those other criteria of informed awareness or coherence and the purposeful rhythm.
Speaker 1:One of those things is not in place right and you're not taking the time to think about it in order to create a model. There's a guy named Donald soul who wrote a bunch of stuff for the school of London about commitment-based management, which again sounds harsh in the agile community, but it's not harsh, it's. How do we as a team work together to agree on the things that we can do and go make them happen? Like there's science and studies and things behind all of this work. It's not. It's not inaccessible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that Cause. Look what you said it's, it's there, it's accessible and we can just reach out and grab it. So, dennis, thank you so much for your time. I got to admit when Brian said in the interest of time, I was like, oh my gosh, it's already gone by. So it's always a little surprising when you know you meet someone and then you have an hour long conversation. Just kind of flies by. So thank you so much for your time. Brian, linda, any I don't know final thoughts or anything you want to add?
Speaker 4:Dennis, it's so nice to meet you and to hear what you're doing with organizations and how you're helping I don't know leaders and teams be more healthy, but also more engaged or even figuring out what the issues might be to improve as well as to double down on. So I appreciate your approach.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, dennis, thanks for the opportunity to talk to y'all. It was super nice, super nice to meet y'all.
Speaker 2:A big thank you again to Dennis Stevens for taking the time to chat with us. You know, as I said there at the end, it's so fascinating to me now that we've done so many of these interviews, how we just met Dennis we did a couple emails exchanged but how you can just jump in and chat and learn about, you know, something you didn't really know about and then see where there's some simpatico and some overlap there. So I hope that whatever industry you're in, whatever business you're in, whatever, whatever you do in your job, I hope that you can find people like that who you can learn from, who you can grow from, who you can maybe take pieces of information from them. You can give them some pieces of information and try to build better what it is that you do. So thank you for listening to this interview with Dennis. Thank you again to Dennis and thank you for being a Leadership Vision podcast subscriber and listening.
Speaker 2:We are so excited to be doing this work of building positive team culture and if you found value from this episode or any of our other episodes, we would love it. If you could review us on iTunes or Spotify. If you subscribe on those platforms, that really helps. We also have a free email newsletter. Follow us on all the socials. But, most importantly, if you could pass this information along to someone that you think might benefit from this information, we would really appreciate it. Click the link in the show notes for more information, more resources about building positive team culture and until next week. My name is Nathan Freeberg and, on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.