Category: Coaching

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Book Review Leadership Coaching

Surrounded By Idiots

Front cover of Surrounded By Idiots

There are fools everywhere, and sometimes you can feel like they are just there, getting in your way, not understanding you, and frankly being dense just for the sake of it.

Surrounded By Idiots is an immensely readable book that takes this opening premise, and gives you the “four colours” of people to help you understand they aren’t idiots, they are just different.

As with any profiling tool, you need to take what you find to be valuable from the book. Don’t just box yourself into one of the colours and use that as a new crutch to justify why things don’t go well for you!

The book has loads of examples to help you understand the Red, Yellow, Green and Blue profiles. From the dominant, pushy Now now now types familiar to every Sales org, to the precise and methodical Blues of your data analytics department, Thomas Erikson guides you through an explanation of the profiles, how they work and what matters to them.

He helps you understand how to connect better across the divide. How do you appeal to someone who shows mostly Green characteristics? How do you meet in the middle, or at least somewhere away from your centre?

He works through the hard stuff, giving feedback, feeling angry and what saps our energy. Knowing all this helps you pull a disparate group together, leaning on strengths and rounding out weaknesses.

The key takeaway is that we are not all the same, and so to get on we have to work together to build our community. By putting in the effort to understand people we can build better and stronger relationships, and have a more fulfilling life with less stress.

A very noble goal, and again, a very engagingly written book. I’m sure you will enjoy it, and you’ll definitely learn something from it!

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Coaching Leadership

Processes

Good process is a great way to scale your impact. Bad processes stifle creativity and stop progress dead.

So when you think it’s time to add a new process, be really honest with yourself why you want to add it, and ask yourself a few key questions.

Firstly, is it actually going to help? Does it solve the problem you are trying to stop, or does it makes things worse? Get some people to throw some rocks at the proposal. Imagine what happens if you follow the process to the letter, as people’s judgement will fade over time, you can’t rely on that.

Assuming it passes these tests, and is likely to lead to better outcomes and good behaviours, ask yourself if it’s worth the cost? If the impact is big, then it might be worth a new process. If it’s small, why are you bothering? Don’t add overhead you don’t need.

Then ask if it’s really worth the cost. If you add an approval step to every release, then you’ll release more slowly. If three people must sign off a slide, then triple whatever the original cost to create was. If it’s your process, then you’ll need to own these costs. Nothing comes for free, it’s never just pure upside.

Finally, ask yourself how you’ll get rid of the process, or update it when the time comes. It’s easier to add than subtract, especially when you create jobs to enforce a process. What’s your way out? How will you know when a process is embedded into culture? How do you know if you are going through the motions for no real benefit?

Good process accelerates change. Bad process stifles it. Do the work to make it good, don’t just launch and forget.

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Coaching Leadership

When to do it!

Scrabble tiles spelling out "Do the work"
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I was out in the garden the other day, cutting back a particularly unruly shrub. Whilst I was there, I saw a few weeds popping up in the flower bed, so I dug those out. Then a minute to clear up a couple of old flower pots. I checked on something on the patio, and swept up a few loose stones.

One big job got me outside, but by having a bit of slack in my plans I was able to pick-up a few other small things that jumped out at me. None of them were big enough to go to the effort of getting setup to enjoy a cold February afternoon, nor were they worth recording and coming back to later.

I’m a big fan of the idea that if it just takes a minute, it’s better to do it in that minute. It’s a great way to build up some momentum, and it really ties into the ideal of leaving something better than you found it.

If you don’t do those small things in the moment, then you are choosing to not do them at all (maybe not an issue if they sit into a non-urgent/non-important bucket). Or you are choosing to schedule them. Record it, track it and monitor progress. If it was just a small job, you’ve put more overhead into doing the admin than just doing the task. Nightmare!

  • See a typo when you are reading a doc – Fix it right away.
  • Email just needs a simple response – Get on it
  • See a bug you know how to fix – Tell the team and drop in the PR
  • And ever on…

Of course, you can take this too far. It’s easy to do the easy things, and miss the hard ones. Don’t just respond to emails if your big task for the day is finishing off an important presentation!

I balance in one of two ways. My preference is to do these small things in and around the important task. Once I’ve sent out that critical email which needs careful drafting, I’ll sweep up a few others at the same time.

The other is to box up a bit of time, and go and do as many of these smaller things as you can in that block. It’s a good way to get back on top of your messages by just slotting in 30 minutes to see how far you can go.

Don’t let the admin win! If it’s quicker to do it than track it, then you should go for it there and then!

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Book Review Coaching Leadership

Team Topologies

Front cover of the Team Topologies book

Team Topologies is a great book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. It gives you methods to organise your technology teams for fast flow, and a simple way to categorise those teams.

It’s a short and punchy book broken into three key sections. We start with Org Charts, Conway’s Law and teams as the unit of development. The second section takes you into the meat of the book, covering team anti-patterns, the four fundamental topologies and how you might choose sensible boundaries. The last section is focused on interactions between the teams, and methods of iterating towards the structure.

The big ideas are really around long lived teams as the unit of software delivery, that there are only really a few types of team, and that we can choose to target high flow and iterate towards it over time.

Flow doesn’t mean efficiency, so a lot of the identified anti-patterns are where an organisation has attempted to be efficient (handing over work, creating queues and specialist groups), targeting least overall effort, rather than soonest delivery of value.

The book highlights a number of times that you must have good engineering practices as a pre-requisite. If you are not able to release software easily and with confidence, or to do so in an automated manner, then you will need to fix that before gaining value from this structure.

It’s also clear through the book that attempting to suddenly move all teams into the model on day 1 is unlikely to work, that iterative and adaptive approach is most likely to be successful, especially via the analysis of cognitive load on teams, and splitting responsibilities where they are overloaded.

I think it’s easy to get excited by the simplicity provided in the book, with four team types and three interaction modes, there’s a lovely easy classification system, and engineers love to put things into buckets or give them a label.

In a mature existing org it’s unlikely that you’ll get a perfect one to one mapping ever, but the taxonomy does give you a chance to start using the same language when describing teams, and an ideal to aim towards.

The case studies and tips scattered through the book bring this to life. Iterations on orgs take years not days, as they need to bed in and become part of the culture. The first thing you try is going to be wrong, so the examples where people have iterated over time are particularly enlightening.

I think that a lot of the core ideas will be familiar to org minded thinkers, but they are pulled together in a compelling way. There’s a lot of value in the approaches outlined, but they require discipline to understand fully, to recognise the foundations that must be in place to be successful and the willingness to iterate as the org continually moves forwards.

Simplicity is hard, don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’ll all be easy once your leadership team has read the book and you’ve rebadged all your teams in team topologies terms.

Be willing to put in the work, and you’ll be rewarded with a shared set of terminology, and a repeatable process for building out teams that deliver the maximum possible value in the shortest time.

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Coaching Leadership

Hammers Everywhere

A hammer on a wooden table
Photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash

We’re still doing work on our house (and will be for a while)! One really interesting thing that I’ve seen is that when we are getting quotes for work, a lot of tradespeople are very sure what a problem might be, before they’ve really looked into the issue.

We can get three quotes, and have three different root cause analyses of what’s going on.

This is happening because of their expertise in a particular area of a trade. If they are used to using nails, every solution is a hammer! If a job feels familiar, then it’s easy to assume it is exactly what it appears on first glance.

Sometimes it’s a preferred job or way of working, and sometimes it’s just the big expensive “fix it all”, rather than the intervention we actually need.

The best people we’ve worked with take their expertise, and then go with an open mind to find the right solution. They might have that initial idea, but they test it against the actual situation. They look at the problem from various angles, get up close, go up a ladder and really understand what’s going on.

By testing a hypothesis quickly and cheaply, we get to the real issue faster. That means the right work is done, things that can wait are put down the list, and we’re spending the right money at the right time.

We’ve fixed “damp” by repairing the drainpipes and cutting back shrubs, and replaced a single valve in our heating to bring it fully back to life on a cold winter’s day.

People that work this way don’t make the most money in a single transaction, but as they ‘ve built trust, we go back to them multiple times, and recommend them to our friends!

So, don’t get blinded by your expertise. Use it to shape your thinking and come to solutions quickly, but make sure they are informed by what’s going on in reality. Don’t just always reach for the hammer!

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

2023 – Top 5

Winner Every Time text on top of teddy bears
Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

It’s time for the annual top 5, and it’s tools and books taking top spot once again:

  1. Radical Candor
  2. Coaching Spectrum
  3. Coaching Tools – Scaling
  4. Tech Debt
  5. All Good

Two new entries from this year’s posts, all about Tech Debt (and good news for followers of this story, I’ve got my new windows coming in the Spring), and All Good, how only positive feedback can be limiting!

A big positive is the continued overall growth of the site, doubling the number of visitors since last year. I’m super happy that people are finding value in this content, and that they keep coming back for more.

Here’s the top 3 from my LinkedIn Wednesday Coaching series:

  1. Is average good enough?
  2. What’s your default style?
  3. What’s another way to look at it?

If these resonate with you, then why not have a go at answering them for yourself? And if you’d like to see more, then join me over there and get involved.

I’ll be sharing some more book reviews in the New Year, and if there’s anything specific you’d like me to cover, just drop me a line at james@jamesosborn.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Can do anything

Lens held up by a person with a road coming into focus
Photo by Zachary Keimig on Unsplash

When we think about all the various ways we can say yes or no to a request, I sometimes find it helpful to think about it in the following way: We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.

It’s easy to say yes to any request, and end up overwhelmed. It’s equally as easy to say no, due to existing commitments, constraints we feel are currently in play, and other limiting factors.

If we open ourselves to doing anything, but not everything, then we can make sure we’re doing the overall most important thing. It cuts away those constraints of what we’re already doing, and it means that we’re also making sure we’re not just saying yes to dump something else on the pile.

When we’re clear we can’t do everything, we can make sure we’re bringing focus, and setting ourselves up to succeed. It balances the “can you just” type conversation, where we try to add more on to the pile, it protects you from “it should be easy”, and “it’ll be quick as well”. You can talk about the big ambitious highly important thing instead, and then set-out some clear trade-offs and decisions to make.

By being open to doing anything we break out of the limits of today. By being clear we can’t do everything, we give focus to be successful in achieving that big important goal.

Give it a go and see how it feels!

Categories
Coaching

Just Starting Out

Books, pencils and blocks stacked on a table
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Last week I was at a career fair, and had a chance to speak to dozens of students who were just about to start out in the wider world. They had loads of great questions about software engineering and what they should be focusing on now to help land that first job. I think that’s a really interesting topic, so I wanted to share some of my thoughts on that here.

First up, you’ve got to want to do it. If the idea of writing code, figuring out problems and designing systems doesn’t excite you, then you might want to look to something else.

Next up, you’ll make sure you know how to display some of those key skills. Most early careers schemes won’t be asking for really deep knowledge of specific technologies, but they will want to see some proof of logical thinking, problem solving and something around actually coding.

Depending on the type of company that might be quite deep computer science type thinking, or it might be focused more on code to solve business problems. Target your learning and prep appropriately!

Beyond the key professional skills, the interpersonal and team skills are just as important. When we build modern software you work in a team. You don’t just sit and code, but you talk to other team members, you work across teams and you might work directly with some of your users. So make sure you are a nailing your group projects and building up experience of team based activities.

Many programmes will use technical skills demonstrations in initial rounds to set a baseline skill level, and then use the team and personal skills to select standout candidates. Don’t leave these as an afterthought!

Finally, in early careers you don’t have loads of experience, so potential is assessed even more actively. Knowing about the company you are applying for, connecting with their mission and being enthusiastic about it are real benefits. Being curious and ready to learn is another great attribute, and is the thing that will nudge you from good to great!

Early careers schemes are popular and attract massive numbers of applicants. It can feel like you need to play the numbers game to win, but if you balance your tech and personal skills, prepare with great examples of times you’ve used them and align your applications to your interests, you can jump to the front of the queue.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Go with the Gut

Person standing thinking in front of a door
Photo by Paola Aguilar on Unsplash

It’s easy to fall into the trap of Analysis Paralysis, endlessly reviewing decisions and never actually doing something.

If you find yourself doing that, then you can break out of the loop by trying to go with your gut.

Don’t spend forever building the decision up, but think about what feels good, and go with that.

It’s best to use this approach for smaller decisions, especially in areas that you are familiar with or that give you an option to undo if really necessary. It’s a topic I’ve written about before, but it’s really useful to remember that there are very few decisions that are truly irreversible.

If it feels a bit overwhelming, break up choices into smaller decisions. One thing that often drives the paralysis is the scope or the implication that you feel of the decision. Don’t get hung up on the colour scheme of your entire house, just paint a room in a colour you like the feeling of. If it looks good, great! If not, it’s a smaller investment to correct than having done the whole building.

When we look to our gut, it’s good to run a few checks before really trusting it. Is this an area that you are confident in? Is it really a familiar space for you to make a decision? Is there a way to make it smaller or easier?

Finally, check your bias. Especially in cases where it’s a decision related to people not things. If you like a particular way of doing things, or are comfortable with an approach, make sure you aren’t layering that bias onto the decision. Challenge this with a quick checklist or a way to score performance. Sometimes you break the paralysis by having the tools in hand to make the decision before you are called to think about it.

So, if you find yourself getting stuck, find some opportunities to make quick decisions and measure the outcome, and use this to hone your approach to make a choice faster.

No decision is still a decision, and don’t let Analysis Paralysis force the non-choice upon you by default!

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Don’t force the Process

Hammer hitting a biscuit and smashing it
Photo by Theo Crazzolara on Unsplash

Requiring a uniformity of process caps the highest potential of your teams.

Process protects us from making mistakes, and can lift every team to a good level. Forcing this is what stops us finding the truly great performances.

We sometime fall to uniformity when we find it hard to measure the outcomes that teams are driving. Measuring adherence to a process is often easy. It’s easy to count the number of widgets that are being created, and it’s easy to see if we’re all doing it in the right way. It’s not always easy to determine if we’re doing the smart things that actually achieve the outsize results.

A classic example of a mistake is to enforce Scrum, or any other particular flavour of agile. The more tightly it’s enforced, the less likely you’ll get a 10/10 team performance.

Instead, go back to the Agile Principles. The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organising teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.

An overly rigid process hinders this adjustment. It doesn’t recognise the unique context of the team, and that’s where the potential is capped.

By all means, if your org needs certain things reported, or activities that must be done for legal reasons then you can require that of the teams. Beyond those must do things, you should instead encourage your teams to experiment and find out what works best for them.

The goals of leadership in this model is to share the things that are working, and also the things that aren’t. Giving access to the tools that can support, and taking away the noise that breaks focus.

It’s imperative that you don’t just allow each team to meander through the path to excellence!

So forcing a process can take you up to good, coaching teams and sharing the best outcomes widely will help you achieve greatness.