Embracing the Painful Report

Whenever you are looking to become more agile physically, you generally need to get off the couch and start working out.  For me, there’s been a few setbacks – a shoulder surgery, back injuries, and more than a little ‘I’m too busy’ sort of excuses to my consistency in working out.  However, now that the physical therapy is releasing me to get more exercise, one thing I can tell you is that parts of me are complaining that have been dormant for quite some time!  When you look to create change, you must endure the uncomfortable feedback that will inevitably come around.

Most large enterprises that have been around for a while have generally been in the game of sheltering their leadership from painful stories for years.  It makes sense, of course.  If you are looking to position yourself and your team for success and promotion, then you are, by default, incented to only bubble up good news, frantically trying to fix things that break ‘in the dark’ (if possible) so that the team is presented in the best possible light.  This is completely rational, but ultimately separates leadership from much of the reality of execution.  The offshoot of this kind of cultural creation is that when change is called for, leaders start trying to work 5 times harder to hide the pain of the change.  Unfortunately, this can be very counterproductive.

When I spend a week just working in the office, come home and drive kids around, then to the dinner table or couch, then nothing in my body physically complains to me.  When I start making the effort to work out, then I get lots of pain from all over the place.  The challenge, of course, is understanding that it is really, really good to be experiencing the soreness of a good work out, but really bad to experience the pain of an injury (setback).  Similarly, leaders embarking on a digital transformation journey need to gear up to hear much more pain in the system than they typically have.  Part of this is not that the organizations have changed their motivation (i.e. they STILL want to protect leaders from negative reports), but true transformation will cause conflict between many teams and leaders, in addition to potential internal strife within the team.  More than likely, the reports from team ‘Y’ will read something like this, “We’re doing great!  However, team X is really not aligned, which is preventing us from being as successful as we would like to be.”  Meanwhile, team ‘X’ will say, “we’re doing smashingly well, but team ‘Y’ is struggling to keep up,” etc.  The truth is likely that the pain to transform is rippling through each team, but the incentive still persists to shelter the team and the leader.

So, how can we enable leaders to express themselves and their teams without recrimination?  Well, there are several aspects that need to be addressed.

1. Senior leadership should expect pain, and learn to differentiate between ‘good pain’ and ‘bad pain.’  ‘Good pain’ would be anything that helps us drive change.  For example, release management may be struggling to understand their new role in a CI/CD world where automation should be driving code changes straight into production as quickly as possible.  This struggle should yield a bunch of interesting ideas around automation, the value that can be provided, etc.  ‘Bad pain’ would represent disruptive conflict that is damaging to morale, and/or leading to interpersonal conflict (injury to the culture – setback).  Leaders need to be ready to turn negative conflict in a more positive direction quickly, and preferably, without punishing indiscriminately.  Certainly, too much in-fighting can and should lead to personnel (hire/fire) considerations, but we should understand that sweeping changes WILL create conflict, and humans have a tendency to over-react or over-rotate, especially as uncertainty is injected into the system.  If we can have some grace for leaders who make mistakes, we will create an environment where people will feel more free to express themselves and bring ideas in addition to conflicts to the fore.
2. Senior leadership should also invite open communication by admitting you are aware that conflict is coming, that we will have run-ins and its ‘OK,’ provided we are respectful and willing to change even as we expect others to do the same.  If you are capable of graciously dealing with conflict, to the point of being open to your own change, allows others to follow.
3. Embrace the ‘retro.’  In true agile fashion, feedback can be surfaced routinely through the use of a properly facilitated ‘retrospective.’  This long-standing agile development team practice can serve us well at the leadership levels.  Take care (as I mentioned above) to keep the retro constructive.  Running a retro with leadership that are helping you to drive your transformation should not be shy about raising challenges to the program, but should be equally bold in proposing solutions and assigning actions to overcome these challenges.
4. Be quick to experiment.  The best way to drive the right change is to simply try numerous approaches to your organizational challenges.  In the same way that product development should be ready to change direction on a dime, so should the organization.  At the org level, we do not want to change so frequently that employees cannot get their bearings before another change hits, but be ready to try something, assess it over a reasonable amount of time, and change again should it not yield the improvement that was hoped for.  Numerous experiments can yield a better result, and it culturally instills little value in immovable silos while getting rid of the ‘that’s not how we work, here’ syndrome.
5. Get to the root.  Often, our initial desire is to react to the symptom without trying to understand the challenge behind the feedback.  Challenge the team to examine what created the conflict or pain.  Ask a bunch of questions that come back to the ‘why.’  When your team has gotten a hold of why the feedback/pain exists, then you can begin to drive solution.
6. Enjoy the moment!  Change is always a wonderful time to learn and grow for everyone in the organization.  Lean into it and enjoy the ride.  Yes, old measurements will lose their meaning, and aspects of the job that you felt made you super valuable may go away, but there is much more new value to create than we can even see.  Lean in.

As you begin your journey to digitally transform, get ready to embrace the negative reports that you must begin to hear.  Take the time to get at the root of the pain rather than react to the symptom, and use this tremendously valuable information to create a better world for your company, your customer, and your teams.