Are microaggressions killing your agility?

Connecting an agile mindset to micro-affirmations through trust, psychological safety and unconditional positive regard.

“Teams facing microaggressions are too afraid to collaborate” AI generated art

Recently I attended two training sessions on diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DE&I) training. As the father of two young daughters, this is a topic that I am becoming ever more conscious of, and as an agile coach it sparked a clear connection between organizational agility and how we act with one another.

Agility is built upon psychological safety

Based on the Powers’ definition, an agile mindset is predicated on the belief in people, that as humans we are interdependent on each other, and as such must collaborate together in order to achieve shared goals. The Heart of Agile places collaboration at the top of their model, for without it all attempts to deliver, reflect and improve will be diminished or lost.

The connection between an agile mindset and unconditional positive regard

Collaboration is built upon trust, and Lencioni tells us that the first of five dysfunctions of a team is the absence of trust. This occurs when team members are unwilling to be open and vulnerable with each other: to ask for help; to state their needs or preferences; or to admit that they were wrong. The Scrum values of respect, openness, and courage all relate to this.

Trust is established when there are psychologically safe environments. In 1999, predating the agile manifesto for software development by two years, Professor Amy C. Edmondson defines psychological safety as:

The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Modern Agile’s grounding principle is that safety has to be a prerequisite, essential if teams and organizations are to delivery value continuously, and to experiment and learn rapidly. The latter connects back with the agile mindset, and the belief in complexity, that for adaptive problems the end solution is not predictable at the outset. The Principle of Equivalence builds a bridge between the people belief and the complexity belief:

Involve people in making and evolving decisions that affect them, so that you increase engagement and accountability, and make use of the distributed intelligence toward achieving and evolving your objectives.

Living into the belief in people and the Principle of Equivalence requires expressing empathy, support, and acceptance to someone, regardless of what they say or do. This is unconditional positive regard, pioneered by the humanistic psychologist Carl R. Rogers (we should be in no danger of confusing this founding father of modern psychology with the author of this article).

Microaggressions

So, are microaggressions inhibiting the growth of unconditional positive regard in your organization, in your team, or from within yourself?

Merriam-Webster defines a microaggression as:

a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority)

Microaggressions affect the everyday work environment, by making it hostile, and less validating. Here are a few examples, of microaggressions within the context of an agile organization, based on this helpful example sheet from Imperial College London.

1. Myth of meritocracy. “Software development is so accessible, anyone can succeed if they try hard enough”. The message being that if we have a level playing field, then if women/LGBTQ+/BAME/Disabled people cannot make it, then that's their personal failing.
2. Gender. “Jane, could you set up our meetings for this Sprint, and can you run the retrospective?” asks the Product Owner to the one female development team member. The message being that women should take on the nurturing and housekeeping roles.
3. LGBTQ+. “Look, can you pair up with Ron for the next Sprint. I know he’s gay, and I think us being that close for two weeks might give him the wrong idea of me”. The message being that homosexuals are over sexualized.
4. Religion. “We’re all working hard to make the next release, and is Amit really going to take off the last day of the Sprint to have a water balloon party?”. That there is a dominant culture that everyone should assimilate too.

None of these messages have a place in modern culture. They demonstrate a clear lack of unconditional positive regard, and prevent psychological safety from growing. Without psychological safety, there is no trust. Without trust, there is no basis for constructive conflict around ideas, no commitment, no accountability, and no focus on results. The people belief is not fulfilled, and therefore teams and organizations are unequipped to respond to the adaptiveness of complex environments. Proactivity towards relentless improvement is diminished. In the long run, such organizations will fail — or at least deserve too.

Micro-affirmations

Unsurprisingly, the pathway to an agile minded culture starts with how we treat each other. And leaders go first. For an agile organization, establishing a strong programme of diversity, equity, and inclusivity training is a must. Something that we can all start doing is practising micro-affirmations (also known as micro-moves). The Employer’s Council describes these as:

including nods, facial expressions, choices of words, and tones of voice that convey inclusion, caring, and listening.

Professor Mary Rowe of MIT hypothesized that micro-affirmations provide the answer to overcoming unconscious bias. This is supported by research that evidences their importance and power in facilitating engagement, initiating change, and enabling us all to make a personal contribution to inclusivity.

So to conclude, here are a few micro-affirmations to try:

1. Recognize the achievements of others. “That was some incredible test refactoring, hitting that 95% coverage felt like a pipe dream just such a short time ago”.
2. Give credit to another person’s ideas. “It was Jane’s idea to slice this backlog item by user personas, and it really helped us minimize the work we needed to do”.
3. Ask for an opinion. “Hey Ron, I’d like to get your opinion on how we could configure this new API”.
4. Take a genuine, professional interest in someone’s personal life. “Amit, how was Holi? What was it like”?