Author: Shahin Sheidaei

Agile Leadership as an Everywhere Phenomenon: Leadership from the Inside Out with Michael Hamman

Posted on by Shahin Sheidaei

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F53d0P_eg6c&feature=emb_logo” /]

Abstract:

As seasoned Agilists of all stripes are finding, the biggest challenges with agility revolve not so much around its outer aspects—its processes, practices, deliverables, and business outcomes—but around the sensemaking, communication, and relationship intelligence of an organization’s people: its inner aspects. This is where we find the characteristically human problems of resistance, conflict, communication breakdowns, broken promises, people going through the motions with little passion or conviction, deteriorating product quality, managers micro-managing—the world, that is, of mindset and culture—the world of inner agility.

In this session, we will discover what executive coaching, leadership development, and adult development can teach us about the nature of inner agility, why it is so key to the growth of a vibrant and sustained outer agility, and how we can be deliberate about facilitating its growth.

Speaker’s Bio:

Michael Hamman guides organizational leaders toward greater holistic team and enterprise-level agility, primarily by helping them grow their inner capacity for leadership agility in the face of the complexity, volatility, and ambiguity of 21st-century life and business. Among the first to bring Agile coaching into the corporate environment back in 2004, Michael has coached dozens of Fortune 500 companies, leaders and teams toward greater holistic team and enterprise-level agility. He is author of Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out and is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Agile Leadership Institute. He currently lives with his wife, Susanne in Taos, NewMexico.

Thanks for watching the LeanAgileCan Webinar series. We’d also want to thank Michael Hamman for taking the time and talking to us. It was a pleasure having him. I am sharing with you some of the resources mentioned during the session.

Michael’s Book: Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out
Amazon.ca: https://amzn.to/2tUoyQr
Amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2CbyWaU

Agile Leadership Institute: http://agile-leadership-institute.com/evolvagility/

Sign up for the newsletter (http://www.leanagilecan.com), to get updates for the next webinars and when new educational videos are added.

Learn more about the Personal Elevation Program. (https://to.sheidaei.com/2EGQ2Ot)

The informational material (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CL8K4q7Y1v7Xoz4dUAOVJFO5i9Z7KQjcgDkhKGxBb0o/edit?usp=sharing)  presented today before the main session.

An Agile Approach to Change Management with Dave Sharrock

Posted on by Shahin Sheidaei

Business agility is more than the organization’s IT shop adopting an agile delivery method. Business agility depends on three core capabilities: rapid delivery, strategic sensing, and customer rapport. As such it builds resilience to change as a strategic imperative and eventually it allows businesses to build a strategic advantage in driving change.

Investments in “agile” from an IT perspective will not increase business agility. So what does a company need in order to successfully drive change rather than react to it?

Dave will talk about how creating a resilient organization starts with rapid delivery and why many major organizations are turning their attention to less costly on-demand releases. We’ll look at how customer rapport is the new driver of operational efficiency, where not building something is invariably cheaper than optimizing the operational cost of building anything at all.

Is Conflict the Key to a High Performing Team? With Mike Edwards

Posted on by Shahin Sheidaei

Is conflict the key to a high performing team?

What if I told you without conflict your ability to improve through Agile & Lean will be severely limited. What role does conflict play in developing a high-performance team? When you encounter conflict do you shy away or move towards it?

It is natural to feel anxious around conflict and want to escape it. However, high-performance teams embrace conflict for the sake of improving and growing. In this session, we will explore how conflict is a normal and healthy part of any team environment. We will explore what causes conflict, and how to work with the conflict for the sake of landing in a better place. Believe it or not, you’ll even learn to provoke conflict for the sake of your team’s growth.

The Alternative to Leading with Agile Practice Adoption; with Jeff Anderson

Posted on by Shahin Sheidaei

Description:

Agile practices are great, however as a coach and consultant it is becoming increasingly apparent that it is incredibly challenging to coach teams to use many agile practices in a correct way that is sustainable over time.

During this talk I’ll go get vet my experience s over the last two year with a large number of teams and coaches trying to improve their maturity. I have been observing the same teams going through a repetitive boom and bust agile maturity cycle as coaches come and go from teams. I’ve seen it take an incredible amount of effort to get teams to work with relatively simple agile practices with precision and skill. Once a coach leaves a team, I have witnessed back sliding in terms of adoption.

In this session Ill ask how can we help teams to increase their ability to self organize and collaborate without constant input and protection from an agile coach? How can we encourage teams to adopt amazing agile practices with enthusiasm and in a thoughtful way. How can we help team sustain their maturity and not abandon agile once the coach leaves?

Over the last six months I have been experimenting with a “Naked Kanban” approach that fully immerses the entire team, their management, and customers into a flow oriented mindset. This approach emphasizes bringing flow of work, and the lack of flow of work front and center to the entire team, and empowering the team to truly fix their flow. Coaches have been instructed not teach new practices, and in fact to resist introducing new practices even when asked, until teams can demonstrate the impact new practices will have on their flow of work.

The early results are encouraging, teams are adopting slower, but in a far more sustainable way. The collective intelligence of teams are improving. So is collaboration and respect. I’ll go through these results in detail, as well as the challenges still to come, of which many remain.

About Jeff:
My mission in life is to help technology knowledge workers be awesome at what they do. Having been in the market since 1994, I have transitioned my initial passion for agile software engineering to provide advisory services to clients that want to thrive in a world of uncertainty and learning.

Over the last several years I have been running an Agile/Lean transformation service to help clients move from command and control towards feedback and self organization.

Our team has a solid track record coaching teams on foundational agile practices, guiding end to end organizational transformation to embrace a more agile mindset, and focused coaching of product and operations teams on how to embrace design thinking and validated learning.

I admit to an unbridled enthusiasm for any method or practice that bring creativity and joy to the value creation process, and get a kick out of turning leading edge thinking into contextualized, practical tools.

I also love to supercharge complex workshops through a combination of crowd awareness, passion, and above all humour. I’ll often iterate over a vast array of models/workshops in real time to adapt to the crowd’s thinking and evolving goal of the session.

My most important skill is growing the talent around me. I continue to provide passionate, motivated people with a suite of leading edge skills that take their leadership to the next level.

The Simple Coaching Model Testimonials

Posted on by Shahin Sheidaei

Session was very interactive and allowed for discovery ~ Scrum Master – April 2017

Coaching is an on-going process, a great introduction to it, Keep in mind you might need more than one session to get good at it. ~ Agile Coach – April 2017

Fabulously surprised this was an interactive session! Thank you! ~ Scrum Master – April 2017

It was a great presentation. Very practical coaching method that can be put to use immediately. ~ MBA – April 2017

Great questions for simple #coaching model ~ Scrum Master – March 2017

The session was very helpful and fun as well. Thanks! ~ Lead Software Engineer – March 2017

Excellent talk, I really enjoyed not teaching but allowing people to explore on their own. ~ Organizational Designer – January 2017

Most engaging session I’ve participated in for a while! Loved your pacing. Could have made the difference between coaching and managing clear. ~ Team Lead – January 2017

Session was very interactive and allowed for discovery ~ Sofware Engineer – January 2017

Fabulously surprised this was an interactive session! Thank you! ~ Innovation leader – January 2017

Version 2.1 of The Simple Coaching Model, an Update

Posted on by Shahin Sheidaei

I have updated the Simple Coaching Model to have the following changed:

  • More generic naming: The last stage of Coaching has been renamed from to “Feedback” to “Reflect”. This has been done since there might be situations that a feedback is not appropriate. A reflection is a more general term. As an example in cases that you want to coach a person on performance, a reflection on accountability is much better word than feedback.
  • Simpler model: I have moved away from using a gear wheel symbol to a more flow based figure. The gear wheel can be interpreted as ups and downs that needs to fill each other, or adding more complexity,
  • New set of sample Questions: I have added another set of sample questions. The first set can be used when you are coaching a person (as in life coaching or personal coaching. The second set is more toward the performance coaching (as in coaching on a specific subject). 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/145p0KlVtlFHkcmx-JzBXrPVyaE6SlH6h/preview

https://drive.google.com/file/d/145p0KlVtlFHkcmx-JzBXrPVyaE6SlH6h/preview

Introduction to The Simple Coaching Model

Posted on by Shahin Sheidaei

The Simple Coaching Model is developed by Shahin Sheidaei. It’s version 1.0 has been presented to the public on January 2017. The goal of this model is to making coaching-like conversations easier, help people to get better at coaching and ultimately to have a very simple model to rely on for their coaching conversations. The current version of the model is v2.0.

In the short period of introduction, The Simple Coaching Model received great testimonials, such as:

Fabulously surprised this was an interactive session! Thank you! ~ Scrum Master – April 2017

It was a great presentation. Very practical coaching method that can be put to use immediately. ~ MBA – April 2017

The session was very helpful and fun as well. Thanks! ~ Lead Software Engineer – March 2017

Excellent talk, I really enjoyed not teaching but allowing people to explore on their own. ~ Organizational Designer – January 2017

Most engaging session I’ve participated in for a while! Loved your pacing. Could have made the difference between coaching and managing clear. ~ Team Lead – January 2017

Fabulously surprised this was an interactive session! Thank you! ~ Innovation leader – January 2017

The latest version of The Simple Coaching Model can be found below. It is part of the handouts Shahin give to the audience at the “Effective Yet Effortless Coaching” sessions. If you like to learn more about the model, you can reach out to Shahin. He will be glad to have a chat with you.

You can find more about the different versions of The Simple Coaching Model by visiting the Archive page.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8yhq_7aG-apTDZ5ZmlvbjR6WEE/preview

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8yhq_7aG-apTDZ5ZmlvbjR6WEE/preview