Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. We are live for our next episode of our show. I think we're up to episode 108. Today, I'm going to be inviting my friend Glenn Marshall to the stage in a minute. This is part of our X-Scale conversation, and today, we're going to be talking about the values of collaboration and servant leadership.
I'll just give you a little context about this topic. These values are so crucial and so important for any kind of work that we do today, right? Whether you are in an agile environment or not, collaboration and servant leadership form sort of these two foundational pillars, if you will, that hold everything else together in my view. We're going to be talking about those two things and why it sometimes is so hard for companies to embrace these two seemingly simple concepts and behaviors into their culture.
So, without further ado, let me invite Glenn to the stage here. Glenn, we'll start with collaboration, and I'll just give you some more context. I was facilitating a workshop with a bunch of leaders, and we were just talking about collaboration in that workshop, among other things. It was hard in some ways for people to wrap their heads around what that meant. They know what it means literally, that collaboration means I'm going to have to work with other people before I make a decision. However, in this company, it hasn't been that way in the past because one person had the power to make all decisions.
That person, not that they didn't collaborate, it was just that the responsibility lay with them to make the final decision. And so the final decision that was made wasn't always the best decision because it wasn't as collaborative as it could be. So now this organization is moving to a more collaborative model where it's not one person that makes a decision. It's many people that make the decision.
There was a lot of debate and conflict around that. How will that work? How is that going to work here? I thought it would be interesting for us to talk about collaboration first, and then if we have time, servant leadership, because that's another concept. It's like mom and apple pie, collaboration and servant leadership. Everyone says they want to do it, and everyone says they can do it, but it's really hard to do, to put into practice. What are your thoughts?
Glenn: I agree with you, first of all. And I think it goes to traditional corporate organization structure and behavior. Really, what we're talking about here in terms of servant leadership is a radically different approach. CEOs are used to being in charge. Senior managers are used to being in charge. So this is a radical mindset shift. And as coaches, we need to be humble about this and recognize that this is really hard psychologically and perhaps emotionally for people to make this change. It's going to take time, and you need to be patient. It's a journey.
There are dramatic benefits to it, which is why everybody's talking about it, that have been demonstrated again and again. But if you've been used to telling people what to do all your life, and you're a CEO, that's a hard mindset shift to get your head around.
Kumar: Yeah. So one of the things that I wish I had tried in this workshop is to almost stress test or dilemma test collaboration. When people say, "I don't know how this will work in practice," actually give them scenarios where they would have to pick if collaboration is the value that the organization is going towards. They would have to pick from a certain number of choices. What would be an example of the most collaborative behavior to adopt versus maybe something that they might be doing today?
I'll give you an example. Strategic alignment versus departmental autonomy, right? So here's a dilemma: As a CEO, you're implementing a company-wide transformation. Do you mandate a standardized agile framework across all departments to ensure consistency and easier cross-department collaboration, or do you allow each department head to choose and adapt their own agile approach, potentially creating inconsistencies but addressing specific departmental needs? What would you choose? Again, collaboration being sort of the value that you're trying to promote.
Glenn: I would choose the second. And I think it's actually important. Top-down mandated solutions aren't generally well received. They're perceived as, "Oh, here we go, got to do another thing," as opposed to something that you co-created that is respectful of the department and takes into account their unique needs. For example, finance is going to have to be different than, for example, software development. Finance is a more rigorous, rigid department, a tightly regulated discipline, whereas software development, you want to encourage creativity.
So I think it's critical to do that. But I think it's also important to focus on the values of agility and agile, which is collaboration. And even though we may have something slightly different, let's figure out a way to work together. Let's collaborate. But the advantages of co-creation and setting the "what" but leaving the team to determine the "how" is critical. It builds buy-in. It builds ownership. And bluntly, people don't like being told what to do when it's not necessary. Obviously, get out of the building if it's on fire. But other than that, they prefer to go and figure things out for themselves within certain parameters, of course.
Kumar: Right. So if this dilemma was presented to a group of executives—I mean, I don't know, this is anecdotal, of course—I don't know how they would have reacted. I wonder what they would have picked, right? So if these choices were made to a group of executives and they were asked to pick the right one, whatever, one that, again, promotes collaboration over whatever they're doing today, I would hope they would pick what you picked.
Glenn: You got me thinking there. Doing a workshop with exercises is much more powerful than doing one without. So the challenge would be to come up with an exercise that shows the two approaches. And I remember doing this at a coaching getaway. Two teams, one did approach A, one did approach B. And we got together afterwards. Who got more done? How did you feel? One was, in fact, along this line, tightly controlled, had to ask everybody permission for everything. And the other was more, here's the objective, figure out how to do it. Getting executives to actually do this hands-on can be very eye-opening.
Kumar: Yeah, I agree. Actually doing it. Yeah, and by doing it, they're actually collaborating and seeing how the collaborative muscle can be easily built and leveraged, right? Because people naturally work with each other better than they work alone. At least in my opinion, in my opinion, they do.
Glenn: You know what, let me roll this for a second. I think you could go and say, okay, everybody in the room, Bob over here is the boss. We need to get this done. Let's figure out what we can do, craft some kind of a problem. But Bob has to make all the decisions and everything has to go to Bob. And then redo the experiment with Fred. But Fred is constrained to not do the everything-goes-through-me model. Craft something that makes sense, put appropriate parameters around it and see what you get done. Choosing the problem would have to be done carefully, but I absolutely see that as an exercise.
Kumar: I like that. I like that very much. So let's see if you can come up with another exercise for another scenario. This is modeled after a real-life thing. So I'll give you a little context in the organization. One of the organizations that I supported, they're moving from this, what they call—I really don't like the term—the "single throat to choke" model to a collaborative decision-making model.
Kumar: So the "single throat to choke" is this one person that's responsible for whatever it is, a service or a product or a product line or whatever. And everything falls on that person to ensure that it's in good order, the service is as expected, the product is delivering value, all that kind of stuff. And so they're trying to move to a collaborative model. And you can imagine that for that person that was the single throat to choke, losing and ceding control over all decisions can be humbling, right?
So the dilemma is you're structuring the IT organization into a collaborative shared decision-making framework. Do you entrust this critical decision to the experienced product manager, product owner, or whatever, ensuring clear accountability and potentially faster decision-making, but possibly missing out on specialized insights? Or—again, these are extremes, right? So I know what you're going to pick—mandate a collaborative decision-making process, leveraging diverse expertise for a potentially more comprehensive solution? However, you may risk slower decision-making and unclear accountability. These aren't the only options. I just want you to react to them.
Glenn: Just a quick point before I answer. We also need to be humble here. If a person has been the go-to person for everything previously, they're going to feel not just humbled, but there'll probably be some emotional and psychological... damage. I was trying to use a softer word, but yeah, this is more than humbling. This could cause—trauma is a bit of a strong word, but there's a bit of trauma there.
Kumar: I agree with you. Maybe trauma isn't that strong of a word to use in this context because it can be traumatic. Something that you've been doing for 5, 10, 20 years, whatever the time is, and you've built relationships and you have all this experience behind you supporting the products or the services. And now all of a sudden, and you may be very collaborative anyway, right? You may do everything well, you may be seeding control when you need to, but making decisions when you have to, and all of a sudden something comes down the pike and says, okay, we're going to go to a collaborative model. And so the decisions that are made in terms of this product or service or this business line need to be made with three people, right? Someone that represents this, a perspective, an engineering perspective, someone that represents a product perspective, and someone that represents another perspective, maybe four people, who knows? So going to that kind of a model can be very traumatic because you have to learn how to—it's being mandated, right? According to my example here. So how do you reconcile that?
Glenn: Um, first of all, I'm not a big fan of mandates. But if you can present some hard data explaining how our current situation is suboptimal, doesn't, for example, bring in all the perspectives that we need and we've—and this is, this has hurt us—reasonable people will say, you know what, that's a good point. Maybe we should collaborate a bit more.
I think the analogy of a burning building is good. You don't collaborate on getting out of a burning building. You go, get out, get the freaking—get the heck out now. And if you don't, I'll carry you out. No discussion or debate there. And there are situations where you need that type of thing.
The Haudenosaunee that Peter Merrill likes to talk about, it's intensely based on collaboration and it's a very interesting model. But in the case of an attack by a rival tribe, they have the notion of a war chief who will just take over and, you know, like the fire department, just start doing stuff. No time for meetings. We're doing it.
So, again, you kind of want a balance here. I think the leadership as a service issue model is a good example of servant leadership, and we're going to go and do another video on that. But it has the notion of collaboration, but also within a time box. And I think that is the concern that people have. We're going to have endless meetings, endless discussions, and endless debates. But I think leadership as a service is a middle ground that allows collaboration, but within a time box and in an emergency, there's a role that the person can play. So I think it handles the continuum of emergency to take your time, but let's not be ridiculous here.
Kumar: No, I agree with that. I agree with that. And I think that's... stress testing these types of scenarios with a group that is going through this type of change can be very beneficial, whether it's through conversations or exercises. I was talking to someone, and I wish I had thought about this before, is actually having some exercises where using Legos or some form of where you're engaging in some kinesthetic activity. You have one group doing it the old way, one person directing—kind of like our last example, directing everything. And in the other group, you have a collaborative activity where they're building something. And it requires the insights of these different perspectives to come up with the best solution.
And that could be very illustrative of how this model can work and can work well. Of course, we'd want to probably introduce some conflict in there so that it forces people to invoke the war chief if needed, or find who is the right person to make the decision in that collaborative model. Who is closest to the decision? It's deciding who the decider is when they don't have consensus over something. If the time box is up, then the decision has to be made and they have to figure out a way to make that decision, whatever it is.
Glenn: That could work. At least to model it, to stress test it with a group of people, a group of leaders. You could absolutely do leadership as a service. Just to point the... point the person who decides the site, the DRI and form their team and absolutely do something with Lego. And you could say, oh, wait, we've got a product emergency. Our requirements have changed. Now you got to do this. What are you going to do? It would absolutely work. I think that actually would be an extremely useful activity.
Kumar: I agree. Let's shift to servant leadership. I mean, I know we talked about it in our, I think our last episode, we went into servant leadership and leadership as a service as an on-ramp to it. And so for those of you that have watched that or didn't watch that, I don't know what episode number it is, but just go back and take a listen.
And so servant leadership is also something that a lot of companies don't talk about that, oh, we want to be servant leaders, you know, we want to serve our people. And it's, again, the whole mom and apple pie thing, right? It's easy to say, but it's hard to implement, especially in more traditional organizations. And so it's something that I certainly witnessed in, you know, just a few weeks ago in a workshop with leaders, right? It's understanding the concept, but then putting into practice is a little harder, right? Many people may act that way sometimes and they may not be able to at other times. So it's a continuum to your point.
But what do you think about stress testing this as well, you know, with leadership teams to have them almost like model scenarios where they go through a discussion or an exercise to see how they would respond? What are your thoughts?
Glenn: I think it's essential. I recently took a course called Training from the Back of the Room. And the critical thing here is exercises—learner-driven, not trainer-driven. So exercises are extremely powerful. Yeah. And actually, you know, talking about the concept and then applying it. That's how people learn. If you just sit there talking, you're not learning.
Kumar: Here's a dilemma, right? So this is, again, stress testing the idea of servant leadership. As a CFO, you've identified potential financial challenges in the coming year, right? Do you share this information broadly within the organization, promoting transparency, but potentially causing anxiety and turnover? Or do you limit this information to the executive team, maintaining stability, but going against principles of open communication?
Glenn: I think that one's an easy one as well. First of all, the word's going to leak out. People always know when a layoff's coming or something. Yeah. And do you want to have—David Marquette talks about this. Even if you're a really smart guy, you're not as smart as 200 people. So why don't you go and take advantage of all 200 people and say, hey, team, we've got a problem here. These are some challenges. The budget's going to be tight. We absolutely don't want to do layoffs. Please help us figure a way to save money. And you will be amazed at what comes out of that.
Kumar: Well, there's the whole movement of the open book management concept that espouses this method. Open book management is just what it sounds, right? It's completely transparent. You're exposing everything. Again, if it's a publicly traded company, maybe not everything, but certainly everything that the employee can have an impact on—the revenue, sales, so on and so forth. And by doing that, you are entrusting the future of the company to the most important shareholders, which are the employees. And so they have a say in it. They understand the financial burdens or pressures that are on the company and can impact and can make adjustments to how the company's run in ways. What are your thoughts?
Glenn: Two points there. One, a really good idea to make them literal shareholders so they truly have skin in the game. It's not just shareholder quotes. And two, even if you're a public company, you have to be careful Glenn: Two points there. One, a really good idea to make them literal shareholders so they truly have skin in the game. It's not just shareholder quotes. And two, even if you're a public company, you have to be careful about quarterly results, of course, but the public has a sense for how the business is going. You just don't divulge the final totals for the cooling off period or whatever they call it, non-disclosure period rather. You can still get almost all the way there. Just for the final few weeks, maybe a month of a quarter, the final numbers can't be disclosed, of course.
So you can absolutely do this. The ideas you get from people when you ask, when you're humble, people feel safe. It just is astonishing. So many ideas come from unexpected places. It's not too harsh, but it's really arrogant to think that the CEO knows everything because they don't. And in fact, in a large company, they're making like five-minute decisions, and they're just going by that feel. They don't have time to involve themselves in the details. They're ridiculously overworked. This is the only way to do things that makes for quality decision-making. Now, you need to be accountable, but have the team call you out if there's an issue. And don't crucify people if they make a mistake. Treat it as a learning opportunity. Have guardrails, of course.
I remember something that really stuck with me. People in this one very forward-thinking organization had very large individual spending limits. They could spend a lot of the company's money. But the guidance was, just imagine the CEO is sitting on your shoulder watching you. And so that kept people, thinking about that, kept people grounded. And that's the kind of thinking that we want.
Kumar: Yeah, I think that's a good analogy and a good example of how these values can be manifested day to day. You know, a lot of people have company values. They're up on their wall and people read them and talk about integrity and honesty and civic service and blah blah blah, all these things, right? That people like, "Oh yeah, I want to work for a company like that." But then how do you actually practice and put those—you know, make those values come to life, if you will, when you're at work? And so having conversations like this like, "What would you do if...?" blah, blah, blah, whatever the scenario is. And if the value was honesty and integrity and the idea was being open and transparent about things that are happening, what would you do if? And so it helps people keep top of mind the things that are meant to be the values in the company and helps the company actually start practicing and developing a culture that is underpinned by those values rather than just being a plaque on the wall.
Glenn: Words are just words. It's actions that count. And when there's a conflict between the two, it's actions. I was recently at a company and in fact, I think a number of companies are doing this. They have their security policies. And a critical one is don't open suspicious mail. Look for, you know, they have certain guidelines, but they're very clever about it. They test people. They send out fake emails from the CEO saying, do this right away, don't talk to your manager. And if you click it, click this link, and if you click it, well, this was a test, you know, please don't, please don't help me.
Kumar: Reinforcing that behavior, right? To not do that, right?
Glenn: Yeah, exactly. It should be the same kinds of things around the values in some way, shape, or form.
Kumar: Bingo. So send out a thing. Here, we found this money. Can I take it home or something like that?
Glenn: You could do a similar thing with all the values. So there are tests, but also management and leadership needs to actually walk the talk, and they need to speak to how important these are and perhaps do exercises. You need to do more than just have words on the wall. You need to practice them and figure out a way to embody them and even test for them.
Kumar: Yeah, here's one. I mean, if you're a manager or a new manager of a team, a leader of a team and, you know, newer or established, but you want to adopt more of a servant leadership style to how you lead that team, right? So here's a dilemma. A team member wants to take on a challenging new role that they're not fully prepared for. As their manager, do you give them the opportunity, prioritizing their growth, but potentially impacting team performance? Or do you assign the role to a more experienced team member, ensuring smooth performance, but limiting the individual's growth? I mean, it's a simple one, right? And I know what option you—I hope I know what option you'd pick. But I think this is, these kinds of tests, these dilemmas are important to instill in people what it means to be a servant leader. Like given an opportunity like this, if someone wants to grow, then—Oh, I'll just ask you, what would you pick?
Glenn: It's a simple answer, right? I mean, but maybe not simple. But let's play with this a bit. What if the person, and I've seen this, what if the person is really, really ambitious, but they're just fresh out of school and you know that they're going to fail miserably on this? Yeah. There you might want to try and gently guide them to a more of an intermediate goal. You don't like people to crash and burn.
Kumar: I think that's, sorry to interrupt, but that, I think that's where situational leadership becomes really important, right? So as a leader, you don't have to go full like, "I'm like, sure, go ahead, do it. Then if you fail, then we'll figure it out. You know, we'll help you survive, you know, recover from that." But I think what you do want to do is if the person's new and they're ambitious, they really want to, they want to get ahead, they want to learn, then perhaps it's more of a coaching style of leadership or a mentoring style of leadership where you work with them or you pair them with someone that has more experience. There are many, many ways to go about it and being a servant leader and serving that person's needs and their aspirations without taking away the opportunity for them to learn, grow and, you know, improve their knowledge of the company and knowledge of the work that they do.
Glenn: There's two critical agility practices here. One is slicing and two is, uh, short sprints, if you will, uh, applying that here would eliminate the risk. Uh, give it a shot. Uh, this sounds kind of big and complicated. First thing you do is, is, is, uh, move at a high level design and then carve off a slice and knock yourself out. Um, but we want to be practicing agility here. So let's go and sync up, uh, you know, in a couple of weeks. And I would urge you to go and talk to Fred over here. You know, he's quite experienced. You know, he's willing to help you. But, you know, I appreciate your zeal and desire to learn. So, yeah, absolutely. Go and do that and knock yourself out and we'll talk in two weeks.
Kumar: Yeah, I agree. So one last one. Your team is resistant to a new company policy that you believe is beneficial. You think it's beneficial. The team is resistant to it. As their leader, do you advocate for your team's position to upper management, supporting your team, but potentially being seen as undermining company decisions? Or focus on getting your team to accept and implement the policy, maintaining organizational alignment, but going against your team's wishes?
Glenn: Resistance is a symptom. There's something underneath that. So talk to them and find out what the resistance is. Explain that we're being asked to do this, but I want to go and listen to you folks. I'm sensing some discomfort here. I want to hear about that. Just the single act of listening and just saying, I want to hear. I'm noticing some discomfort. I want to hear. I want to understand what's going on. Please talk to me. That in itself can melt away resistance. Not only that, but it is a manifestation of servant leadership. You're serving them. You're hearing them. You're listening to them. And they now have a voice, right? It's not being muffled. It's not being silenced.
Kumar: So awesome. Well, and if it comes down to—sorry, I just hate going—let's say it's iterative development. Nope, I just love going away, working for six months and delivering work. You might have to have a bit of an uncomfortable conversation, but show the benefits and why this is being mandated. Surely there's some wisdom behind it. But if the team is unwilling, you may need to go and say, we need more time. Or the team may say, look, there's a good reason not to. And as long as you're armed with a really good reason, you can report that to your executives and say, look, we have a bit of flexibility here. Here's why. And I think this is a legitimate concern.
Glenn: Makes sense.
Kumar: So there's plenty of other scenarios that you can come up with for the values that you're trying to move to or the values that already exist within your company but aren't really manifested very well in your organization. And I think this could be a powerful tool to get your leadership teams—and I think it's really important for leadership teams to demonstrate and practice these types of behaviors because they are the role—you are the role models. You leaders are the role models by which everyone else sees what's happening.
If company values mentioned honesty and integrity, and they see that their leader is not honest or does not have any integrity in the actions that he or she takes, then they can be like, this is just, you know, I'm not going to say the word, but this is just BS, right? And I'm just here for the check. I'm not going to engage that much in my work and I'll go home.
So if your organization is engaged in an effort to—I don't want to use the word transformation because it's an ongoing thing. An organization is always transforming into something, right? It's either transforming into something that is not recognizable based on what the vision that the founders had of that company, or it's transforming into something that's more recognizable or it's changing into something more recognizable as a place that you want to be. Right. And so if that's the goal is to help transform it so that or change it so that and continually change it and adapt it so that it's nimble, it's flexible, it espouses the values of the company. And again, collaboration, servant leadership are some of the most important underpinnings of a culture that is successful in organizations.
Then I would say stress test your assumptions with people. Use exercises like the ones we talked about. Have conversations, have people talk about what it means to be a servant leader, what it means to collaborate. And then I think you will have more success implementing these types of changes. Any parting thoughts, Glenn?
Glenn: I would add one small point. Posting a set of values and not living them is actually a serious integrity violation.
Kumar: Yeah, that's true. You have no integrity because you're not practicing any of these things that you say that you are, especially the leadership team.
Glenn: So, yeah, absolutely. I want to be humble, though. These things are, you know... They're not easy. They're not easy. They're absolutely not easy. Particularly if you've been doing it a different way for a long time.
Kumar: Yeah. And it's easy to say, oh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. But, yeah, now let me get back to my real work. Hey, you, come here. Yeah, hey, you take care of this. I needed it yesterday.
Glenn: No, I get it. But I think that as long as people make an honest effort to follow these types of principles and the values, and again, have honest conversations around this. It's all about collaborating all the time about these types of things and finding what the happy medium is. Because it's not as black and white and cut and dried as we made it out to be today.
Kumar: Yeah. And practicing servant leadership means giving people time to do stuff, including how to become a servant leader.
Glenn: Yeah. Apply the values if you work. So some, you know, recognizing that it's a journey.
Kumar: Yeah, I agree. I agree. All right. Well, awesome. I did write a blog article. I'll be releasing this on this topic soon and probably around the same time as this video goes out. So I hope you enjoyed the show and we'll enjoy reading the blog. I'd love your comments on this as well. So with that, unless you have any other thoughts, Glenn, we'll end it here.
Glenn: Nope, I'm good.
Kumar: All right. Thanks for watching, listening. See you all next time. Bye-bye.
Glenn: Bye.
