Enterprise Agile Coaching

Sustaining Organizational Change Through Invitational Agile Coaching

Cherie Silas, Michael de la Maza, Alex Kudinov

• Publisher: PublishDrive
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9798985085105
• eBook ISBN: 9798985085112
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

When an Agile coach leaves an organization, the changes developed during their tenure should not roll backward. Compliance is somewhat easy to install and takes hold rather quickly. The challenge with that approach is that when the forcing mechanism (Agile coach) is removed, much of the compliance rolls back to the original position. Sustainable change requires a different strategy. This book introduces the concept of utilizing an Invitational Approach to Enterprise Agile Coaching which can be a crucial catalyst for integrating sustainable change by putting the client in the seat of responsibility.

Promoting Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety

It happens in every profession in every industry. An employee may notice something is about to go wrong with something in the organization – but does not speak up or do anything to stop it. Why not?

There could be many reasons. The person may be too scared to speak up. Maybe every thought or idea they have brought up before got shot down. Perhaps their boss had chided them in the past for “talking about things they know nothing about.”

The person could fear feeling like an idiot – or being called one – if they say something and they are wrong. Or maybe the employee is so fed up and full of contempt for the company that they are secretly elated that something horrible is about to happen.

All those scenarios, and many others, can stem from the lack of a crucial element in the workplace: psychological safety.

This chapter describes what psychological safety is and its extreme importance in the team environment. In this chapter, we will also give a few techniques you can use to build psychological safety with clients in your enterprise coaching practice and describe some communication patterns well-known for destroying it.

What It Is

The concept of “team psychological safety” was first introduced by Harvard organization behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson.⁴² She defines it as: “A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

To elaborate on this, psychological safety is the belief that the environment is safe for taking an interpersonal risk without being seen as negative, disruptive, incompetent, or ignorant. Team members believe they can ask questions, offer suggestions, admit mistakes, and otherwise be vulnerable in front of each other without being disparaged, embarrassed, or punished.

Michael says, “Let’s say you have a team project, yet one team member is unclear on the project’s goal or his exact role in the undertaking. If he is on a team with high levels of psychological safety, he will feel safe enough to ask those questions without fear of being made to feel foolish.

If he’s on a team that lacks psychological safety, he may decide to remain silent, not asking questions. He might believe it is easier to simply play along and hope for the best without a firm understanding, just so he will not be looked at as being ignorant. Here he is more worried about being perceived as ignorant than about messing up the work.”

Michael’s example illustrates how lack of psychological safety can create enormous problems in the team's output. When Google researchers⁴³ set out to discover what makes a team effective at Google, they found the most important factor was not who was on the team, but how a team worked together.

The research, entitled “Project Aristotle,” looked at how team composition and team dynamics affected the effectiveness of the 180 different teams targeted for study. Researchers conducted hundreds of interviews with leaders, reviewed existing survey data from the annual Google employee engagement survey, and ran over 35 statistical models on hundreds of variables to discover what made exceptional teams click.

They boiled it all down to discover the five key dynamics of effective teams. Psychological safety was the foundational element. It precedes dependability, team structure and clarity, meaningful work, and impactful work.

The research also found that employees on teams with higher psychological safety levels:

● Were less likely to leave the company

● Were more likely to be open to diverse ideas from other team members

● Brought in more revenue

● Were rated as effective by executives twice as often as employees on teams with a low-level of psychological safety

What Psychological Safety Looks Like

If you were to ask team members for a list of team attributes that describe psychological safety, it would look something like this:

● Making a mistake is not held against you

● You can bring up tough issues and problems

● No one is rejected for being or thinking differently

● Diverse opinions are embraced

● It is okay and even encouraged to disagree

● Opinions are respected

● Questions are encouraged

● You feel safe to take a risk

● Failure is seen as helpful for learning

● It is easy to ask other team members for help

● No other team member purposely behaves in a way that undermines your efforts

● Your unique skills and talents are both used and valued by working with other team members

How to Build Psychological Safety

It would be great if you could just hand managers and team members the list of what psychological safety looks like and tell them to go for it. But it does not work that way. Building this element with a team is possible through strategic techniques and concerted efforts. Here are several for consideration.

Three Techniques from Edmondson

Edmondson discusses three techniques for building psychological safety in her TEDx talk⁴⁴:

Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Recognize that both uncertainty and interdependence exist. Say something like, “We have never been in this territory before, and we need to have everyone’s input.”

Acknowledge your fallibility. This applies to all team members at all levels, from subordinates to peers and colleagues. Say something like, “I may miss something, and I need to hear from you to make sure I do not.” This creates more safety for speaking.

Model curiosity and ask lots of questions. When people with positional authority ask questions, team members are more likely to speak up and answer.

Two ...

Table of contents

• The Coaching Mindset
• Challenge and Support
• Engaged Neutrality
• Developing a Solid Foundation
• Developing Coaching Values
• Business Development for Everyone
• Selecting the Right Clients
• Coaching Organizational Systems
• The Relationship Agreement: STORMMES© Model
• Impact Mapping Goals
• Designing Well Formed Outcomes
• Engagement Types
• Coaching Culture Change
• Coaching Client Partnership
• Coaching for Sustainability
• Coaching Values and Principles
• Experimentation
• Developing Metrics that Matter
• Promoting a Learning Organization
• Promoting Psychological Safety
• Knowing When the Engagement is Over
• Introduction
• Organization
• System Organization and Structure
• Typology and Taxonomy
• Order, Complexity and Chaos
• Cynefin Framework
• Clear Domain
• Complicated Domain
• Complex, Chaos, and Confused Domains
• Intervention
• Using Cynefin in Projects
• Using Cynefin with COVID-19
• Cynefin References
• Notes