I am spending most of my time as of late providing management consulting services to my clients.  Most of them have made, or are making, the transition to Agile and often facing the same set of issues.  While I think there is no replacement for a good Management Consultant/Agile Coach, a close second is reading as much as you can from those who have successfully made the transition to Agile.  With that, I would like to present a select list of my favorites:

         

I was recently asked: “What mentoring techniques have you used to help engineers make the move into management?”  Great question!

While there are many tools that can be used here, I think it’s important to start with some key factors in making this jump:

1. Engineers thrive on building things and the resulting sense of accomplishment when it’s built.
2. To improve yourself, the must be an awareness of the improvement area.

 

Starting with the first point, I’ve seen (and personally experienced) a sense of floundering when engineers are asked to manage others.  Being used to writing code all day they often feel like they aren’t accomplishing anything day after day.  As far as I can tell, there is no way around this and represents the first half of the chasm.  Tool #1, Patience.  We must remind our manager in training that what they are experiencing is perfectly normal and that things take time.  Additionally remind them that the sense of accomplishment will return if they are willing to be patient. In John Baldoni’s book, Lead by Example, an entire lesson (#7) is devoted to this topic alone.  Tool #2, Communicate…then communicate some more.  In the realm of engineering it is common practice to communicate things only once and expect that they are understood, in reality this is rarely the case.  Give people direction, set clear expectations, talk about team goals, discuss the vision of the company…rinse and repeat.  Your team must understand what you expect from them and start including these expectations in their decision making process, this takes time and repetition.  Tool #3, Watch for changes.  As our management in training begins to use the first two tools, have them watch for changes in behavior on the team, however subtle, that may be a result of their leadership.  This tool is the preface to regaining that sense of accomplishment.  As the team begins to respond to our manager in training’s leadership there will be changes to team dynamics.  These changes may be positive or negative depending on the many factors, but awareness of the change is important.  The ability to detect changes in the team based on decisions made by our manager in training represents the second half of the chasm.

On the second point, we need instill in our manager in training (and remind ourselves) that having an awareness of an improvement area is the first step in making changes.  For out manager in training to use the tools above, they must be able to see how certain aspects of their experience, education, personality and management style impacts what they do.  It is the job of the mentor to make them aware of this. (albeit tactfully)  If there is no awareness it is unlikely to be improved upon.

This is far from a complete list but instead represents some of the basics. I hope that it’s helpful and, as always, I welcome your comments.

I glanced at my bookshelf this morning and laughed.  “The Unknown Ideal” how fitting given the news these days.  I think it’s time for our leaders and lawmakers to revisit this book.

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

I have founded or co-founded a number of startups, worked as a consultant for Fortune 100 companies, and been an executive in large corporations.  What I’ve come to hold true is that as a company grows it experiences what Dr. Larry E. Greiner calls “growth phases.”  Dr. Greiner postulated the existence of these phases in a 1972 paper titled “Evolutions and Revolutions as Organizations Grow.” These growth phases are characterized by certain periods of growth ending in a crisis.  The duration of the crisis period can lead to what I call “growth plateaus” resulting in stalled or declining revenues.  The phases and associated crisis are as follows:

Greiner Phase/Crisis	Behavior
P1. Creativity	Creative “start-up” atmosphere.  Everyone can where any hat.  Very agile and reactive to client demands. Co-founders motivated by partial ownership.
C1. Leadership Crisis	Managers need to begin specializing.  New employees not motivated by ownership.  Need for process and controls resisted.  Co-founders still want to do everything.
P2. Direction	Functional organization structure is established.  New employee incentives introduced.  More formalized communications. First step of separating strategic and functional specialists.
C2. Autonomy Crisis	Organizational structure inappropriate.  Lower level employees feel “disconnected” from senior management.  mid-level managers start taking initiative on their own instead of following the process. Senior managers feel that they are losing power.
P3. Delegation	Concept of more autonomous business units.  Senior leadership more vision based.  Profit centers, bonuses and incentive programs used to stimulate motivation.
C3. Control Crisis	Senior management seeks to regain control of autonomous business units.  Possible attempts to centralize control.
P4. Coordination	Autonomous business units merged into groups. ROI becomes an important metric in measuring a units success. Redundant cost centers centralized. (IT, accounting, etc.)
C4. Red Tape Crisis	Programs and process begin to limit business unit’s ability to generate revenue. Innovation is dampened. Organization is now to large for formal programs and rigid systems.
P5. Collaboration	More flexibility in management.  Skilled managers effective at intrapersonal management.  Teams exhibit more self-discipline.  Focus on problem solving.  Rewards are team based instead of individual based.
C5. Internal Growth Crisis	Problem solvers exhausted from intensity of the work.  Effectiveness becomes unsustainable and cyclic.
P6. Extra-Organizational	Use of mergers, holding companies, networks of companies to sustain growth.

 

From the above, can you fit the company you are working for into any of the phases?  Are you in a crisis?  The funny thing is that employees usually seem to know if they are in a growth phase or experiencing a crisis.  Depending on the quality of the management team the crisis may be temporary or may last for years.  If you are stuck in a crisis for years, you will usually see a high volume of management turnover and hear phrases like “This has worked for us before.  It will work for us now!”  Then the revenue begins to slide. If senior management sticks to their guns, this is the beginning of the end.

What does the flipside look like?  Good leaders embrace the ability to change processes and practices if they are no longer working. (Agile Management)  Some, feeling they are only an effective as a Phase 2 manager, may choose to remove themselves from the organization completely.  According to Dr. Greiner, organizations should not attempt to bypass phases or their associated crises. Instead he recommends a few tools to managers to help them move to the next step.

 

1. Know where you are in the development sequence.
2. Recognize the limited range of solutions.
3. Realize that solutions breed new problems.

 

Here are a few good books that discuss Dr. Greiner’s concepts as well as strategies to deal with each crisis.

 

Managing Technology and Innovation: An Introduction

 

Dynamic Strategy-Making: A Real-Time Approach for the 21st Century Leader

 

Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow

I read Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline a number of years ago and loved it.  I recently reread it and realized it is still as relevant today as it was then. (if not more so).  While the five disciplines discussed in this book are extremely useful when managing teams, the one that always seems to shed some light on tough problems is systems thinking.  Watching for a balancing process with a delay, investment in the wrong part of the organization and fixes that cause problems instead of fixing them are but a few of the tools that have been helpful.  Grounded in Systems Theory, there is tons of really good information on the web on Systems Thinking.  If this is the first time you are hearing about it, I highly recommend doing some reading.

In a recent article by an ex-windows project manager, there is a segment which I found funny:

Every once in a while, truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.

I found this funny because it is the epitome of some of the larger projects I have worked on. These are the projects (i.e. companies) that still use waterfall model and still fully expect to estimate a million line project within 5%. Change is still the exception. I was reading recently that 75% of software projects go over budget and over schedule. Why is this acceptable? It's obvious that we have outgrown the use of traditional estimation tools. Why are so many companies reluctant to change and try something new? Why are we ignoring the truth?