Patience. Crucial but so Difficult.
If you are in any named agilist role, you already know this. Patience is incredibly important. The skill shows up everywhere; it’s the ability to keep your cool in a tense meeting, slow down a conversation so everyone engages and learns, when you hold back important points that will be received better later, and allow for those awkward silences as a facilitator.
Be Patient With Yourself
It’s also important to have patience with yourself… where you are mentally, where you are in your career, and the progress you’re making or not making on things. A lot of people tend to have very high expectations of themselves. If someone else made your to do list for you of all the things you’re hoping to achieve, learn, and accomplish, you’d poke holes in it and realize it was definitely not realistic. The timeline is too aggressive. You don’t have as much time as you think you do. You’re not going to finish that book this week. And it’s OK. What we need to do instead is prioritize diligently. What’s the one thing you’re working on right now? Put everything else in your own backlog and be patient. You will get to it. Make a plan to get to it, but don’t beat yourself up if you don’t.
The Intuition Connection
What I’ve noticed recently is that there’s a lot of intuition that needs to be coupled with being patient. How long do you hold the silence in a meeting to see if someone will speak? It depends. How many people are in the meeting? Is it in person, can you look at everyone in the eyes? Are there dozens or hundreds of people connected virtually to the meeting? Normally, we don’t even think about these things. Either you have learned how to be a great facilitator or not. Those that have mastered the skill will have both a very calm and deep grasp of how to be patient as well as a quiet confidence in their sense of intuition.
Be Patient With Dependencies
For me, right now, it’s also in just the painful process of job seeking. Most of the time in our careers, even when in-between jobs, we are very reliant on what other people are doing. Patience is so difficult sometimes. How long should you wait before following up with a friend who is helping connect you to a job? They said they’d do something for you but haven’t yet. A few days? Two weeks? There are no written rules here. How well do you know them? How important is this position to you? Do you have a genuine friendship? I tend to land here: “wait about a week then give a friendly nudge in the form of a question.” But it feels like a very long week!
Practice Means Failing and Learning
How do you even practice patience? I guess, like most things, we try and fail until we get it right. The trick is to learn while doing (like the first line of the manifesto says). But you also have to really pay attention. Follow up after the workshop and ask about the pace. Ask the question in a retro about how well you’re facilitating. See how your stakeholders feel about the information you’re giving them. Does the team feel connected to the work? If no, you’ll need to adjust your style. Find ways to slow down, be patient, make sure you’re really connecting when it matters.
Try, fail, seek feedback. It’s the answer to most everything. Right?
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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