Humble Leadership can give Scrum Masters the courage to change Organisational Culture
Time to live the Scrum Values
Culture is the number one challenge with changing organisations.
Here’s proof, but let’s clarify what we mean by culture.
Ed Schein’s model of organisational culture is a layered visualisation. When we first interact with a team or organisation at the outermost layer, all we can really perceive are physical artefacts, symbols and behaviours. For example, you might see groups of people at meetings every morning where they stand up, chat facing each other, and point at a whiteboard. And what are all these post-its about? Hmm.
If you poke around, ask a few questions about what’s going on, you might learn a little more about the next layer of culture, the organisation’s ‘espoused values’. In other words, what is important around here? Which behaviours are rewarded, and which are discouraged?
So, we have an organisational culture, with values. And as we know, the Scrum Guide describes 5 values: commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect, and it does not pull any punches with their importance.
“Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living these five values.” — SG
Also, for good measure, the Guide places the stewardship of these values squarely on the shoulders of the Scrum Master… um… yay?
“The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. Scrum Masters do this by helping everyone understand Scrum […] values.” — SG
This is a weighty responsibility, given that the general wisdom appears to be that leaders have the biggest influence over an organisation’s culture.
Leaders and Interactions
Michael Sahota believes that an organisation’s culture can change, but that it will ultimately follow that of the leadership team. However, Sahota also notes that the behaviours of leaders can have a profound influence on culture, and specifically related to their interactions with others in the organisation.
In other words, interactions between individuals appear to have influence over cultural values. Well what do you know, we’re back talking about the ‘mushy stuff’ of culture, just like in the agile manifesto.
“The way to change culture is for leaders to change how they interact with people and the organizational system.” (Michael Sahota at Agilitrix).
Humble Leadership
In the excellent book “Humble Leadership”, Peter Schein and Ed Schein define leadership a little more broadly:
“Leadership is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along.” (Schein & Schein)
Man, this sounds to me like my job description. In the Scheins’ view, Humble Leadership is a group process that depends on increasingly personal relationships, and these relationships can increase the level of trust and safety inside an organisation. But why would we want this?
The argument in favour of humble leadership is that it can “maximise the possibility that you will be open and honest with each other and will feel safe in reporting when things are not going well, when you don’t understand each other and, most important, when you need each other’s help.” (Schein & Schein)
To me, these sound just like the kinds of behaviours that support the Scrum Values of courage, openness and respect, but that can also create an environment of psychological safety inside teams. Google believed that was a critical factor in creating high-performing teams.
As it turns out, this isn’t all too different from Michael Sahota’s point: the interactions between individuals is key to influencing culture.
Personisation
At the core of Schein & Schein’s Humble Leadership model is the idea of personisation (that is not a typo, this is different from personalisation). Personisation is “the process of mutually building working relationship with a fellow employee, team-mate, boss, subordinate, or colleague based on trying to see that person as a whole, not just in the role that he or she may occupy at that moment.”
‘Humble Leadership’ contains many examples of how this process can work, and also how it can fail. I found it an excellent read, and a pragmatic description of the kind of behaviours that leaders can adopt in order to create a culture where the scrum values can thrive.
The Scheins’ core idea is that traditional management culture needs to move away from Level 1 transactional, role-based interactions in organisations, and deal with others as whole people. Not like resources. In this kind of environment an ‘us and them’ mentality can develop, and the more traditional autocratic management styles can limit the knowledge of the team to that of it’s manager.
Their premise is that by interacting with the people in their organisations as whole people rather than roles, leaders will be able to move to more level 2 interactions. In this kind of environment, psychological safety is the norm, people will feel confident in reporting interruptions or issues with quality.
Ok, now tell me how we do that!?
In any organisation attempting to change or learn, culture is going to be the number one challenge. Leaders own that culture, and the values espoused within it.
If we consider Scrum Masters as leaders for a moment, then they can certainly have influence over scrum teams, and attempt to make the scrum values part of the culture bubble they inhabit. I’ve suggested five ways that scrum masters can influence the culture of their organisations in this previous post.
Culture is a local phenomenon. […] The most common way for culture to grow is Culture Bubbles. (Michael Sahota)
However, we must also consider the huge influence of the leadership team of the organisation. If a leadership team declare support for scrum, it is critical that they understand the values it espouses, and the different interactions with individuals that it might demand.
“No matter what managers write and say, they demonstrate their true intent by what behaviour they reward and tolerate.” (Schein & Schein, p. 71)
As we said before, Scrum Masters are expected to be the stewards of the Scrum Values inside an organisation. It appears they have a tough job on their hands here. How can a simple Scrum Master hope to influence the senior leadership team of an organisation? Well Schein and Schein have some advice here too:
“It is not enough for board members to understand the program and to bless it, because they will not really understand what is involved personally in some of these transformational changes […] unless they have themselves had a personal learning experience which gave them not just insight but personal enthusiasm for what was going on.” (Schein & Schein, p. 53)
Right so. We need to identify a shared learning experience for the leadership team. Gulp. This experience could be a Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) training course perhaps. Alternatively, maybe we could consider a site visit to another organisation were agile has been successfully adopted. Either way we need to work towards a situation where the leadership team can learn together and develop some insights about what changes are really required.
The experience could even be something a little more related to delivery of value, like participation in a big room planning event. The critical factor is personal involvement.
Otherwise, the leadership team may remain enthusiastic, but confused, and that dangerous cocktail could spread through the organisation.
If leaders really believe in the change that is proposed throughout the organisation, then we are influencing the most important, innermost layer of Schein’s model of culture: basic assumptions or beliefs. When we are operating at this level with the leaders of an organisation, we can dare to dream of real change in its culture.
Time to live the values
This kind of learning experience for a leadership team could be powerful in terms of changing an organisation’s culture. In order to help make it happen, Scrum Masters will need to use respect, courage and commitment to engage with their senior leadership team.
Choosing an engagement strategy will of course be critical to this activity. You will need to navigate the relationships and culture of your organisation to know what to do first, and it may take time and patience before you get there. Context matters, and you need to understand yours before you act.
In addition, for this to work, the senior leadership team will need to show openness and commitment to engage, and it will require focus on their part to demonstrate the required behaviours that can support Scrum adoption.
Also, if we consider this a learning experiment, maybe it will fail! Maybe the leadership team will refuse to engage. Maybe they will politely decline, or perhaps they might not learn anything from the chosen experience. However, we and our organisations will learn a hell of a lot by trying.
Gulp
This might sound like a daunting challenge, and in many ways it is, but if even Scrum Masters lack the courage to personise the leadership team inside their own organisation, and help them to learn the value and the values of an agile or scrum adoption, then they risk ignoring one of their most important responsibilities as set out in the Scrum Guide, and setting a bad example with their own behaviour.
No pressure then! But remember, culture is the number 1 challenge with agile approaches or with changing an organisation, and leaders own that culture. Humble Leadership might just be the way to take on that challenge with the leadership team in your organisation.
In addition, it sounds like a great way for Scrum Masters to live and breathe the Scrum Values. Are you ready?
