#119 - Becoming a Professional Agile Leader - Ron Eringa

[00:00:49] Episode Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, my friends and my listeners. Welcome back to the Tech Lead Journal podcast, the show where you can learn about technical leadership and excellence from my conversations with great thought leaders in the tech industry. If this is your first time listening to Tech Lead Journal, please subscribe and follow the show on your podcast app and on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. And to support my journey creating this podcast, subscribe as a patron at techleadjournal.dev/patron.

My guest for today’s episode is Ron Eringa. Ron is a leadership developer and one of the co-authors of “The Professional Agile Leader”. And if you still remember in the previous episode 98, I had the conversation with Kurt Bittner, also one of the co-authors to discuss some parts of the book. This is a kind of continuation from that previous episode. And in this episode, Ron and I discussed on how one can become a professional agile leader. Ron started by sharing his view of why agile transformations usually fail, and he gave advice on how companies should adopt agile in a more effective way. Ron then described the characteristics of a professional agile leader, including how to apply situational leadership by understanding the four different leadership styles, which are combative, compliant, competitive, and catalytic leadership.

Ron also explained how leaders can build high-performing teams by being aware of the two domains the teams are operating in, which are the visible and invisible domains, and by also understanding the interconnection between organization structure and its culture. Towards the end, Ron shared his utopia view of how organizations would look like if they already become fully agile, and he also shared some patterns for effective leadership.

I really enjoyed my conversation with Ron. And I especially like our discussion about how to build high-performing team that is truly self managing and self organizing, and the importance of being aware of the invisible domains within the organization, and take action on how to resolve some of those which hinder high-performance and agility. And if you also find this episode useful, please help share it with your friends and colleagues, so they can also benefit from listening to this episode. Don’t forget to give this podcast a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, because it will help me a lot to make this podcast easily discovered by other listeners. Before we continue the conversation with Ron, let’s hear some words from our sponsors.

[00:04:08] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today, I have someone with me, a guest who is a leadership developer. Sounds really strange, right? What is a leadership developer? He’s actually one of the co-authors of a book titled “Professional Agile Leader”. Actually, I have a previous guest before, Kurt Bittner, in episode 98, who is also one of the co-authors. Today, I’m going to talk with Ron specifically on the continuation on how we can become a better leader in the sense of Agile world. How to become a professional Agile leader? So we’ll be covering topic that we haven’t had a chance to discuss with Kurt before. So Ron, really looking forward for this episode. Looking forward to learn from you as well.

Ron Eringa: Thank you for having me.

[00:04:50] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: So, first of all, I would like to start always with my guest to share maybe your career highlights, turning points, maybe that you can share with the listeners here, so that we all can learn from your journey.

Ron Eringa: Yeah, so basically, what it comes down to, I started working in my professional career around 2000, when I became a software engineer back in the days working for Phillips. And I’ve been working as a software engineer for merely like six years. But I always knew probably that wouldn’t be the job that I would end up in, because I was always more like of a people person.

At some point in 2006, I think it was, I became a Scrum Master. I’ve heard about Scrum and we were working in a research environment and we could experiment a lot with Scrum and, back in the days, nobody knew about Scrum yet. So it was like applying it in the basement of the building that we were sitting and people were asking all about that sticky notes on the wall and stuff like that. Like, what is this stuff you’re doing over there? So that’s basically 2006. I’ve been a Scrum Master for about eight years, until like 2014, I think it is. And well, the good news is that I had a team that actually was doing quite well. So they were maturing and doing great things. And then at some point, other teams start asking you what are you doing? And before you know it, you’re coaching like more than one team and helping the organization advance as well. Basically, what I found there, there was this overarching topic that I always ended up doing, which was like helping HR and leaders to put up an environment where self-organization could happen. That’s basically how I also, in the end, got to think about what’s my role? Well, leadership developer, what that means is that we’re helping organizations to create an environment where teams can self-organize, and that’s basically what it comes down to.

Around 2014, after being a Scrum Master for eight years, I decided to take this to the next level and help other organizations to do this as well. So became self-employed, started working for a consultancy firm at some point as well, and actually ever since, I have been helping organizations to put their leadership in place around the Scrum teams. I think it was also 2014 when I joined Scrum.org. Back then teaching the Professional Scrum Master training. Later also started teaching the PSPO. I think around 2017, 2018, when I started thinking about developing the professional Agile leadership class together with Scrum.Org.

I think the turning point is the collaboration with Scrum.Org, where I really started thinking about professional Scrum. How to apply that? And what it means to actually deploy leadership around the Scrum team over there? And I think that’s basically, if I look now at what I do, we help organizations. We have two companies. One training company, but also one consultancy firm. Basically, what we aim at is to create organizations where people love to work, to help them put self-organization in place, but also develop the leadership around the teams. And that’s basically what we’re currently doing.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for sharing your story. I can see why you mention yourself as a leadership coach. You have been doing this for quite some time. Probably around more than 20 years, I guess?

Ron Eringa: Yeah, correct.

[00:07:47] Why Agile Transformations Fail

Henry Suryawirawan: You mentioned that you are also part of Scrum.org, right? Or you have been practicing Scrum all along as well. So, these days, this term is not new, it’s been a while.

Ron Eringa: Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: But still, companies are still trying to do Agile transformations within their organizations. Especially for those companies who are probably a bit lagging behind from the traditional world. So in your view, in your professional career, and maybe consulting, do you see any kind of reasons why Agile transformations sometimes fail and people start to become skeptical about Agile these days? Because I think people start to become skeptical if they apply something, but it doesn’t really work fully. So maybe you can explain here why some Agile transformations actually fail?

Ron Eringa: Yeah. It’s kind of interesting, because in the beginning days of me implementing Scrum, you could really see that it was only applied within the IT departments at software teams, and we were quite successful back then in applying that. And at some point, organizations started seeing the benefits of that and wanting to scale that up to the organizational level. And I think basically that’s what we are currently in. I think it was like 10 years ago when organizations started shifting.

What you currently see is that a lot of large corporates try to implement Agile at the organizational level. But I think the way they do it is very transactional. So meaning they are focusing a lot on structure, processes, introducing new tools, new roles, scaling frameworks, all that kind of stuff. But what they fail to really change is their culture. I’ve been following this survey by, I think it was Version One who started with it, now it’s company called Digital.ai. They call it the State of Agile. And what you see in that survey as well is that in the last eight years, more and more companies have started adopting Agile, but for some reason, their team maturity, their capability of self-organizing, doesn’t go up. This is also what the survey reveals, is that people see that practices are being applied, but they see that their organization is not able to adopt a culture that looks like the Agile Manifesto. Everything that’s been said in the Agile Manifesto, individuals and interactions over the process and tools and all that kind of stuff. So there’s a shift in culture when you start working Agile, and I think if the organization doesn’t have a burning platform to actually change their culture, Agile implementations and Agile transformations will kind of get stuck, which I call the glass ceiling. If there’s five levels of maturity, I think they kind of get stuck at level two, level three in their maturity. And I think that is basically what we’re seeing, still nowadays, and that hasn’t changed a lot over the last few years.

[00:10:19] Changing to Agile Culture

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned something that intrigued me. You mentioned like many companies try to do it in a transactional way. Transactional means like they force a certain process, tools, maybe the scaling framework, and all these things. But actually what you’re saying is the underlying important thing is actually the culture. And I can see many Agile certifications or maybe professionals who also just preach. Okay, here are a set of practices that we need to do. These are the roles that we need to have in the team. What would you change differently knowing about this situation? How can we become more focused, starting from the culture? What kind of things that maybe leaders need to do in order to start prioritizing from there rather than the transactional part?

Ron Eringa: Yeah. I think it starts with realization that something really needs to change. There’s many reasons why organizations nowadays start adopting Agile and I think a lot of the reasons are because everybody’s doing it or because the management team wants to change or to save cost, which is, in my opinion, the worst reason to start doing it. I mean, it’s going to cost you in the beginning, because changing culture, a shift towards a more Agile team-based mindset, is a hard change. And I think many organizations that have been around there for maybe more than a hundred years they aren’t built on mechanisms that are based on self-organizing teams. They’re based on this like a hero executive leader that makes all the decisions and then the teams, they implement, they follow, and they do not lead, actually.

And I think what you should start with as a leader when you really want to reap the benefits of Agile in your organization, it starts with a need to change. If you have a large corporate organization with many people working there, they’re going to go along maybe for like a few months or maybe a year, but then they will fall back into old behavior, because there is no real need to change. So I think leaders need to connect the reasons for becoming really Agile. If they really want Agile and if they want to reap the benefits of that, connect that to the problems that they’re having, and help people understand how Agile actually helps you to solve these problems. And basically, it comes down to a switch in culture where leaders are capable of delegating more and more responsibilities towards the teams with the goal of accomplishing faster results, right? Where teams can make faster decisions without the bureaucracy that we see in many of these traditional corporates. And I think that’s basically where it starts to connect, the reason for the change with understanding what it means to change a culture.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Speaking about culture, I’m also a leader myself. Sometimes, it’s really tricky where to start. We know, we understand we need to change. We can see so called the burning platform, you mentioned. The pain points that people are doing. But culture is something that is not easy and straightforward to change. It needs like an organic effort by everyone. First, they need to understand the why, and then they need to understand the need to change and things like that. So what do you think is the best place to start changing this culture? Is it something like you create a town hall meeting telling everyone? Or is this a set of docs or is there any better way to do that?

Ron Eringa: Oh yeah, that’s a very good question, actually. Let me first start by answering a question with the worst place to start with the change. And that is everywhere in your organization. Because I see like large scale Agile transformations, like the whole company, is subject to the change. From my experience in the last at least 12 years with Agile transformations is, I would say, start at that location in your organization where the most complexity resides. Because that’s where the biggest benefits can occur.

If you look at Scrum, for example, Scrum was designed to solve complex problems. It wasn’t designed in simple problems or maybe complicated problems, because we’ve been actually capable of solving these problems already for many years before. Scrum was designed to solve complex problems in a complex space. That’s what we typically do when we start working with organizations. For example, just very recently last week, we started a new change in an organization. We actually explicitly picked the one project that is in the most complex domain inside the organization. They have so many challenges. Like the entire industry is changing all the time and the organization cannot keep up with the change anymore. And I think that’s basically the pockets of excellence within the organization where Agile can become very successful is there where the most complexity is because, well, the frameworks that we’ve been using are designed to solve complexity, and I think that’s basically where you should start. Well, it sounds a little counterintuitive, right? Because I’ve seen many teams start where it’s easiest, but you don’t prove that you’re actually making a big difference by doing that.

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned about complex, not complicated. Are you referring to Cynefin model? So maybe for people who are not familiar yet, how do you differentiate complex versus complexity?

Ron Eringa: Yeah, that’s a good question. Yeah, and I do reference to the Cynefin model a lot. I tend to use that a lot as well when I explain what complexity is. Basically, the most simple way to explain what complexity means is that when everything is in flux, so requirements are in flux. Like I always tell my new clients, customers think they know what they want until they see what they get, and then they want something completely different.

Since technology is changing faster and faster nowadays, this phenomenon has increased enormously over the last 10 years, I think. And because of that phenomenon, we end up in a complex domain. Like all the requirements keep changing, technology keeps changing, and as a result of that, the knowledge that people need needs to be updated faster and faster. And because of that dynamic, I think we are in the middle of the complex domain and we need solutions to solve those problems in the complex domain. So that’s basically what I mean with that.

Henry Suryawirawan: And also not to mention that the competitors are changing a lot as well. The disruptor, the startups, right? So I think this is also one thing why it becomes more complex.

[00:15:56] Professional Agile Leader

Henry Suryawirawan: You mentioned about this, start from the complex, maybe most complex projects in the company, most complex departments. But you need certain kind of leader, right? So coming to your bread and butter, which is to develop a professional Agile leader. What is the most important pattern do you think for an Agile leader to be successful, heading this transformation or running this Agile practices?

Ron Eringa: Yeah, that’s a good question, actually. Well, I think basically, and this might feel a little counterintuitive, because most of the leaders don’t think about this.

First, understand what your current culture is. I mean, I’ve been working with so many transformations in the past where we started off with a, you know, very idealistic way of implementing Scrum in the organization, and then we bumped into a lot of cultural problems. So if you are not aware of the current culture in your organization, if you can’t measure that, make that explicit, there will be a lot of surprises when you start to change things. So I think the basic pattern is understand your culture, understand also the type of leaders that you have currently deployed and employed, try to predict if those leaders are capable of making the shift towards, like, delegating more towards teams, because we are going to change the organization. We’re going to replace the hero leader kind of basis by self-organizing teams that can make decisions, where leaders shift towards more supporting those teams to do the job themselves.

One of the patterns, for example, that we’ve been using in our leadership class is to, maybe you heard about the book by Jim Collins, “Good to Great,” where he talks about getting the right people on the bus first. And I think basically what he means with that is, what we have seen as well in our transformations is that if you start focusing on the leaders, that should move the transformation forward. For example, the Scrum Masters, the product owners, the tech leads, and the teams that need to help the team move forward and grow more mature and take more responsibility. But if you as managers start to focus on these people in the organization, you will see a shift in the leadership culture in your organization. And at the moment that those leaders inside the teams can actually take more responsibility, of course, you as a leader need to be prepared to let go. And that’s basically what we’ve seen a lot is that there’s always tension between teams wanting more responsibility, teams being able to take more responsibility, and once they are, the ability of the leader to let go of their responsibility once that happens. That’s basically the pattern. We’ve been applying a lot since the last 12 years.

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned this thing, key concept from “Good to Great”, which is to get the right people on the bus in your company or in your team. Maybe tell us a more practical advice. How do you assess these leaders? Whether they are the right people? What kind of characters, behaviors, traits, or things like that maybe?

Ron Eringa: Yeah, so maybe I’ll use an example from my own experiences in the very recent years. During the COVID situation, I started a new assignment there. I became an interim manager for a company that I work with.

Well, the first thing I started looking at, of course, I was responsible for eight to nine teams and do we have the right leaders in the teams? In some of the teams, the answer was definitely yes. There were Scrum Masters, product owners who were really keen to fill in. They are all good. But obviously, there was always like one or two teams that do not have the right leaders yet. So we started thinking about, so, if they don’t have the right leaders, how could we help those teams move forward? We started looking at our recruitment process, for example. If you’re recruiting a new product owner, what’s the type of questions you kind of ask them? And a few of those things is, people need to be humble enough to understand that the team can take over at some point in time. People need also to be hungry to make the next step and move forward, and they also need the emotional intelligence to build up a team, right? And so we’ve been using these kinds of questions in our recruitment process.

So we were hiring a new product owner, and I still remember we asked that new product owner the question, like, tell us about the failures you’ve had in the past. Of course, the reason why we asked that question is we were just testing if he was humble enough to admit that also he makes mistakes and that’s okay because people learn from those mistakes. But we ended up in a conversation where this product owner always mentioned like, yeah, but I do this right and have that certification. So testing the humbleness was something that we’re doing there. And this is just one of the examples that we’ve been using to see do we have the right people. And that I think admitting that you also make mistakes, and that you were actually learning from these mistakes is one of the biggest qualities you could actually look for in a team and in a leadership team.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I really love what you said, humbleness, right? So the admittance that you did some mistakes. It may be catastrophic, it may be small, but at least the humbleness to actually mention about that. And the other thing that I would add probably is about ownership, because you keep mentioning about self-organizing team, right? So the leaders need to be able to also own the things that they’re leading. So that you don’t always need to go back to the leader.

[00:20:37] Importance of Learning

Henry Suryawirawan: The other important thing that you mentioned in the book for the role of leaders is to actually make sure that the teams have enough opportunities to learn the skills, to learn maybe anything that they need to perform their job. Tell us the importance of this learning.

Ron Eringa: Yeah. I think that is one of the most important mechanisms that leaders can use. At least new leaders can use to make sure that new leaders arise in the organization. What I have seen so many organizations do is that they only send their management teams to leadership classes and to educate them on how to take up more responsibility. But what I have seen is that leadership can be everywhere in the organization.

So I think what basically, and this is what we’ve been developing in our consultancy and training company, is we’ve been designing learning journeys for the Agile professionals. So, for example, we’ve been designing learning journeys for Scrum Masters, learning journeys for product owners, learning journeys for managers. So how do you teach yourself the required skills that we need to actually lead instead of manage? For example, good coaching skills or facilitation techniques, or how do you engage large groups to actually come up with better solutions? Stuff like liberating structures or other facilitation techniques, that kind of stuff. And also, it’s helping people understand what we actually mean with culture and measuring the culture.

So as part of these learning journeys, we typically develop the, for example, a culture workshop where we help people speak the same language when we talk about culture, and actually measure the culture in the organization so we could do better predictions about that. And it’s not only sending the managers to these classes, but it’s sending all the leaders inside the teams also to these classes, so they can help their teams grow to a more higher Agile maturity level. It’s all about learning journeys, I think, and offering that to the people.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So when you mentioned about learning journeys, right? I think leaders here, you should try to build some kind of learning journeys for your people. I think it depends on the company’s maturity. Maybe also the HR people process, right? Some companies don’t really have learning journeys. So I think it’s also a good reminder for those leaders out there. Please try to look at the kind of journey that you have for people to learn.

And I think I remember in my episode with Kurt, he mentioned that leadership is not necessarily just a role, right? It actually can be anyone’s to assume the role.

Ron Eringa: Exactly.

Henry Suryawirawan: You mentioned here as well, right? So you should not just cater the training for the actual leaders. The one who has the titles, but also for everyone, for different roles. So thanks for mentioning that.

[00:22:56] 4 Leadership Styles

Henry Suryawirawan: Another thing that you have in the book is actually you kind of like categorize leadership styles into four different things. So I’m quite interested in this. So maybe you can brief us a little bit more about what are these leadership styles?

Ron Eringa: Yeah. So basically, our summary is there’s like a more complex system behind this, but what we’ve done in the book, we kept this very sharp and concise. We define four leadership styles that we have there.

We have the combative leadership style, which is connected to a culture that looks a little bit like an arena where people fight all the time and have to fight for their survival. The combative leadership style is actually very needed in an environment where there’s continuous fighting going on. So, in an unsafe and hostile environment, we demand the leadership style of courage, power, and domination. Basically, that is the combative leadership style.

And the second style we mentioned there is the compliance style, which is typically useful in an environment that can be summarized with something like an institution, right? Large communities like states, corporate environments, they need rules, processes and leaders that are responsible, respectable, but also stable. Of course, the need behind this is stability, keeping large communities work together, let them work together, keeping them safe. That’s basically what the compliant leadership style is all about.

Then the next style that we typically see develop is the competitive style, which is really like a game or a competition which is describing the environment. Competitive environments have lots of opportunities and it also demands that leaders start challenging people to make use of these opportunities to start winning using an evidence-based approach and keep analytical thinking at a high level in the organization. And I think many of the corporate environments that we currently encounter do have a very competitive environment where the competitive leadership styles also pop up.

And, of course, since we already started with combative, compliant, competitive, we needed a fourth term with C. So we call that catalytic, which is leadership style that we as Agile organizations very often need because we are shifting towards this individual thinking that is typically residing in the competitive environment towards a more community kind of way of dealing with things. So we want teams to come up with better solutions, because the brains of multiple people are always smarter than one individual can come up with.

So this is typically what works well in a complex environment. The reason why I think Agile has become so attractive is because people start to understand that if you have a team of individuals suddenly work really as a team, there’s more to gain from working as a team based on that. So this catalytic leadership style that we described is capable of relying on the wisdom of many. That’s what’s working well in a complex environment because the many can come up with better solutions for complex problems. So this is why we need this catalytic leadership style where leaders are open, authentic, and very supportive towards the teams.

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe if I can repeat again, combative, compliant, competitive, and catalytic. I see them as like a spectrum, right? It’s like you start maybe from combative, if you have a very bad culture, moving into catalytic, right?

Ron Eringa: Or maybe you’re in the market where you have to fight through and make some gains. So yeah, that’s typically where it starts.

Henry Suryawirawan: So is this something that all leaders should be able to adapt? So they should change their leadership styles as and when the situation requires them to do so?

Ron Eringa: Well, I think there’s certain situations that demand a different leadership style, so situational leadership is important. So I can imagine that if you are in a hostile environment, using a catalytic leadership style doesn’t work because, well, people need to fight their way through. So I would be the last person to say that every leader needs to adapt the catalytic leadership style. But I think if you are residing in an environment where there’s enough wealth, where there’re opportunities to grow, and where there’s a lot of complexity going on, and a lot of technical challenges, I think the catalytic leadership style works better because it provides for that environment better solutions.

But again, not every situation demands this catalytic leadership style, so we should be aware of that. So I would be the last person to say that everybody now should switch to a catalytic leadership style right away. I think you should look at what does my environment asks for? Especially in those environments where there’s a lot of complexity that demands this catalytic leadership style to work more with community-based, team-based, self-organizing team-based situations.

[00:27:16] High-Performing Team

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned in catalytic, you rely on the wisdom of the teams, right? So these days people refer to the team such as like a high-performing team or self-organizing team. So maybe do you have any kind of advice how we can build high-performing teams? Or in the first place, what is actually a high-performing team? So maybe you can explain from there first.

Ron Eringa: It’s kind of interesting because in the beginning days of Scrum, I remember that Jeff Sutherland started talking about high-performing teams all the time. They need to continuously improve. But, of course, at some point, teams will reach this stable kind of way of dealing with complexity. So what we’ve been using for measuring, if teams are really mature and high performing in this complex environment, a few patterns that you can see in those teams.

First of all, they use very clearly defined, explicit goals, very explicit conversations about how to reach these goals. So, for example, at Scrum.Org, we have this evidence-based management stream where we talk about how do you actually measure that you are accomplishing the goals that you so explicitly defined. So basically, that’s a very important one. Explicit goals and measuring towards those goals.

The other thing is being present. Meaning that understanding why people work together. Why are your team in the first place? Why did people show up at work and join the company? So what are people’s values and what are the values of the company? What’s the reason for people to come out of bed every morning? So, understanding that will help you understand better also how to start operating as a real team. So that’s the presence part.

Then the third thing, ownership. Meaning that, yeah, you can define your goals, but of course, if it’s just a goal that’s some slogan on the wall, it becomes, well, what we typically call management porn. Meaning it’s just a slogan on the wall, but there’s no behavior behind this. So what I would like to see is that if you have defined the goals, I would also like to see the behavior to support those goals. So do people really believe in the goals and are they chasing them? I think that’s basically what it comes down to.

And then the last part is awareness. More explicit conversations, good communication, deliberate conversations like retrospectives where we really are, have the intention to improve the way that we communicate with each other, but also with our stakeholders and with our clients and that kind of stuff. So it’s four things: explicitness, presence, ownership, and awareness. That’s basically what it comes down to.

Henry Suryawirawan: I really love the term just now, management porn. I haven’t heard about it before, but I can see some of these management anti-pattern, so to speak. You just create the values. You maybe create a few sessions about it. You put it as slogan, emails and all that, but the behaviors actually do not actually reflect the kind of goals or values that you are preaching.

Ron Eringa: Yeah, exactly. The first thing I do when I start working with a new client, I look at their slogans and look at their messages that they’re radiating to the outside world, and then I look at the behavior inside the company. And if there’s like a gap between that. Well, I know there’s work to do.

[00:30:05] Visible & Invisible Domains

Henry Suryawirawan: So in your book, apart from these four characteristics, you also mentioned about two domains that the teams are operating, which are the visible and invisible domains. When I read that, I think it’s really a good concept for people to think about whenever they want to build high-performing teams. Maybe can explain it a bit what do you mean by visible and invisible domains?

Ron Eringa: Yeah. So maybe it’s best to explain this with an analogy of an iceberg. If you have like a water level where this iceberg is floating in, right? The visible domain reflects everything that’s tangible, that you can see, that you can observe. So this basically comes down to the categories that we mentioned before. So, for example, explicitly defined goals, you know, the stuff that you put on your wall, the things that you radiate. That’s something that is very visible and the way that you communicate.

However, if you start looking at ownership, for example, and presence, that’s basically the stuff that’s underneath. So what are our drivers? So that’s the stuff under the water level. That’s the biggest part of the iceberg that you might not see, right? We have this analogy of a boat hitting the iceberg like for Titanic. Well, the biggest mistake that they made is that they didn’t see what was going on underneath the water level, which actually led to a big failure. And I think that’s basically what happens in many organizations, because they focused so much on the processes and the structures and the roles in the organization. If they do not understand how that relates to the culture in their organization, and they can’t make that explicit, they’re going to end up in trouble at some point in time, because adopting agility means a shift in your culture. I think you should make that invisible stuff underneath the iceberg aware with people. So I think that’s basically what our jobs as leader is, to work with the invisible domain more. It’s about psychological safety. It’s about dependability. All that kind of stuff.

Henry Suryawirawan: So I can see your point. Leaders try to focus a lot on processes, structure, fixing all these. But actually the underlying, what you call the iceberg, the hidden iceberg, the underlying things that probably are not so visible, right? It’s not something that people can see in concrete. That’s hard. Things like psychological safety, the meaning, the impact that you want to do. Thanks for mentioning that.

[00:32:08] Structure & Culture

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned about structure, right? And initially when we talk, you also mentioned about scaling framework. Why scaling framework doesn’t work in Agile? I thought anything can be scaled by following a certain frameworks and things like that. So tell us more about the concept of this structure and also the culture.

Ron Eringa: Well, just to start with that. I mean, I wouldn’t say that structure isn’t important. It is important. But implementing a structure without understanding the culture leads to failure. That’s what we’ve seen. So basically like a scaling framework, and let’s not mention the pink elephant there. For example, many organizations are using SAFe, right? There’s a lot of structure in there, a lot of processes. If you do not understand how to scale culture, you’re going to end up in trouble, because there’s a lot of structure in there to grab from and to work with.

Very recently, maybe you’ve heard about the Jurgen Appelo’s new framework, unFIX. If you haven’t heard about that, I would really recommend you to look that up. What he is doing, he’s actually saying, like, do not implement a framework in your organization, but implement patterns. Look at the needs for people, and look at what patterns work for you. So what he has done, he has created a library of patterns that many organizations used to scale agility in their organization. So basically, I think what you could do is to compare your organization with some kind of a spaceship, right? Conditions keep changing all the time. The world is changing faster and faster. And I think leaders should be able to rebuild their spaceship as they go through their environment, use the patterns that work, but also cast away the patterns that don’t work. And I think what many organizations are currently doing is they’re blindly implementing this blueprint of a framework of scaling in their organization without the ability to break down the stuff that doesn’t work.

If you look at organizations and look at separate value streams within the organization, some value streams might need a very different structure than the other ones. And I think many organizations are trying to do this one approach for all their value streams or for all their people in their organization, which obviously doesn’t work. Also there, you should look at the parts of your organization and the needs of those parts for your organization, and maybe put different structures in place there. And also align with the organization culture, what those value streams are doing.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. I think these days, people tend to opt for an easy solution, so to speak, right? Something that is already probably publicized or maybe other people have tried, so they just apply the same things, looking for the same results. Which in your case, you mentioned that it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes we don’t need to implement all the certain practices, structure and things like that, but look for the patterns. So I’ll make sure to put that in the show notes. I haven’t heard about that before.

Ron Eringa: Yeah, it’s called unFIX. it’s actually quite recent. Maybe people know Jurgen Appelo from the “Management 3.0” book that he wrote. But he started developing this unFIX framework September last year or so. So it’s quite fresh and recent, but I think there’s a very interesting set of patterns that organizations could use to actually unfix their scaling implementation that they currently have. So that’s the reason why he called this unFIX. Maybe you can provide the links later when we finished this conversation.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, sure. I like the pun, though. It’s like unFIX. Unfix your scaling Agile practices, I guess.

Ron Eringa: It’s never too late to look at your structure and see what works and what doesn’t work. And the stuff that doesn’t work, just cast it away and do something differently. Your organization doesn’t have to be this large oil tanker that moves in one direction. Maybe it’s like a fleet of smaller boats that still need to work together, but use patterns that work and cast away the patterns that don’t work for you.

Henry Suryawirawan: Totally makes sense.

[00:35:41] What Full Agile Looks Like

Henry Suryawirawan: So Ron, you have done this for quite many years, right? So you have helped some organizations successfully transform. In the end, I maybe haven’t experienced it fully. What does an organization look like if they are fully Agile? When all these things work? So tell us what’s the heaven here? The picture where people will have when they’re fully Agile.

Ron Eringa: Yeah. Well, we have the risk here of losing a lot of people because they don’t completely recognize their organization anymore. But I think if we look at nature, how do large networks of people look like that work together? Do they have a leader in nature? So if you look at those patterns in nature, I would compare it with a cell structure. Maybe you’ve heard about the book “Reinventing Organizations” written by Frederic Laloux. He compares it like with, for example, circles. People think that there’s no hierarchy anymore in a fully Agile organization, which I think is a very silly idea because I think we still need hierarchy. Otherwise, we would get anarchy, right? If there would be no leaders anymore, no managers. So I definitely think that there’re still leaders in an Agile organization. My opinion is that there would be leaders everywhere. Some leaders would be more acting at the team level, and some leaders are acting at the organization level to keep the entire organization together.

I think the biggest difference is where the decisions are being made. And I think the decisions are being made in an Agile organization, which is maybe acting at the level five of maturity being the highest level, well, teams make decisions on their own. They are self-organizing, self-managing, as Scrum calls it nowadays. They take the decisions, and the leaders in the highest level over the organization, they take care of the stuff, for example, infrastructure that enables the teams to make those decisions themselves. Or, for example, to provide the organization and the teams with those learning journeys that we talked about, so that those teams can actually become self-organizing and continuously learn about this.

There’s a few organizations by the way, that already use this way of working. Very recently, there’s also a book that I’m currently reading, written by two guys in the Netherlands, they’re called the Corporate Rebels. The book is called “Startup Factory”, where they described Haier. It’s a Chinese company. They sell air conditioning systems and refrigerators and stuff like that. Actually, this is interesting, because this is an 80,000 people company, with like almost 4,000 self-organizing cells that act independently and maybe even competing with each other. But they’re still a company, so there are still hierarchy, there’s still structure in there. And so, there are more and more organizations experimenting with these ways of working. So this is not kind of a fictive thing that only Ron maybe thinks about. It’s already out there. And I think it’s our job to help organizations see the possibilities of how these companies work.

Henry Suryawirawan: So when you mentioned Haier, it’s actually covered as well in the previous episode in 114 with Matt K. Parker. So he wrote a book called “Radical Enterprise”. So Haier is like one of the examples where you can see this kind of self-organizing teams. He even mentioned it’s like microenterprises within the company, where people are self-organizing, maybe even competing with each other. They’re just given the goals and they figure it out together as a team.

Ron Eringa: Exactly.

[00:38:43] Self-Perpetuating Change

Henry Suryawirawan: Another thing that you mentioned in the book. The real success probably is also that the change is self perpetuating, right? So it doesn’t rely on certain leaders to be there. It doesn’t rely on certain things in place. So tell us how we can build something that is self perpetuating? So I always love to mention about last time when I used to work in a consulting. I used to mention that the true success of a consulting is after you leave a project, the things can still continue or even getting better, right? So this self-perpetuating is actually very difficult, because sometimes we rely on certain people, certain charismatic leader to tell us what’s the right way of doing things. So maybe from your journey, is there any tips for creating this?

Ron Eringa: Yeah. It’s funny that you mentioned that because I think that’s basically how we approach our consulting jobs with our clients. So the first thing we start talking about with our clients is what are you going to do to make me superfluous as fast as possible, as a consultant. For example, hiring an Agile coach in your organization. I think that is a dysfunction. The reason why I’m saying that is that, well, Agile coaches, it’s a good idea to get some external knowledge if you don’t have the knowledge yet on how to become Agile. But I think what leaders and managers when they hire these people need to do is immediately have a conversation on what are you going to do as consultants to make sure that we adapt these capabilities so that we can take over. So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been helping managers to start coaching people so that I don’t have to coach them anymore. I’ve been helping Scrum Masters, for example, also to engage with the transformation so that they can become in control of the transformation rather than external coaches who run the transformation.

So I think if you look at it from that perspective, I think the leaders that should take over a transformation should be the managers in the organization. It should be the Scrum Master, it should be the product owners. Question, of course, would be do they have the skills? And if they don’t have the skills, how can external consultants hand over those skills as fast as possible? And I think organizations should be very sharp, and when they hire an external consultant, have that conversation. What are you going to do as an external consultant to help us as a company take over as fast as possible and become self-perpetuating? And I think that’s basically what it comes down to.

Henry Suryawirawan: So one of the common things that I see when you hire external consultants, you have a set of metrics. Maybe these teams have implemented this Agile framework or these teams have completed their sprint or deliver projects, the bugs. But actually you mentioned a good point that we should probably think about upskilling, right? Upskilling the managers, the leaders in the team. So I think that probably is one of the better metrics instead of looking at the implementation level only. Cause that probably is one of the key factors, how we can self-perpetuate these kinds of cultural changes.

Ron Eringa: Yeah. So maybe a metric like how many leaders in your organization are capable of coaching people and that have their coaching degree or something like that. That could be a very interesting metric because that actually is an explicit way to see that you don’t need the external consultants anymore.

[00:41:34] Effective Leadership Patterns

Henry Suryawirawan: Speaking about effective leadership, so in your book you have some patterns for effective leadership. I think there are a number of them, we don’t need to cover all of them. But maybe if you can pick some of the favorites, what would you tell us some of the patterns for effective leadership?

Ron Eringa: That’s an interesting question. So let me start with the first one. As a leader, I’m responsible for helping individuals and teams to grow and take responsibility. We kind of talked about this already, right? How do you hand over responsibility as a leader to the teams and the individuals working in the teams? Well, decisions need to be taken by those who do the work, because that’s where the most knowledge is, right? Also, they might be closer to the actual customer than you as a manager might be. So I think that is why you need authority everywhere, because every opportunity that one of the people in the teams or that a team can actually directly have a conversation with a customer, enables you to make fast decisions. So my power in the organization is determined by my ability to enable others to take responsibility. And that’s basically how power changes from a management perspective. In the past, it was like power of making the decisions and being in control of the budgets and stuff like that. But in the end, if you have self-organizing teams, your power as a leader is more creating new leaders in the organization. Now that’s basically a big shift. So that’s shifting responsibility towards teams.

Let’s think of a second one. Talented teams and individual. We talked about the learning journeys. I think that’s an important one. So I need to provide the people with a goal. I think that’s a very important leadership role. So do people connect to that goal? For example, we have the organizational goals. We have then product goals, as we have defined in the Scrum guide. For example, also the sprint goals, but also how does the organization’s goal connect to the product goal? How does the product goal connect to the sprint goals? And how do those sprint goals and maybe all the other goals connect to people’s individual goals? I think that’s the job of a leader to help people connect their goals towards what the organization has in terms of goals. And that is not easy. It requires a lot of focus and a lot of conversation with each other.

The third one, to choose a last pattern that we’ve discussed in the book. It’s the right for people to involve others in creating the goal. What we’ve been used to is that normally the executive leaders, they create the goals, right? And then the goal drips down towards the team. But how about engaging people to actually maybe being open that your organization’s goals might change? So what if the people in your organization can see new opportunities? And, therefore, the goal shifts, because of the input you get from your employees. And not only like a few individuals that act at that executive level in the organization. And, of course, what you need there is having a safe environment, where people can discuss this and make mistakes and learn from that and adapt to that situation as well. I think those are patterns where leaders can really become effective at what they do. But it requires a real shift in thinking from traditional managers.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for mentioning some of these patterns. So you start with shifting responsibility, right? So for leaders not to always make the decisions by yourself, but actually to start shifting, growing the team, letting them decide and be responsible of their own challenges and problems. And then you mentioned a lot of times about goals. Providing the goals, connecting them from the top, from organization to individuals, and also like creating the safe environment. Sometimes I see that managers, leaders, individuals, they are all tied down to just doing the task, doing the features. So they have a goal. Normally it’s from the top, but then it gets translated to tasks. They don’t even have the time to actually think of other maybe means to implement the goal.

Ron Eringa: Right. Exactly.

Henry Suryawirawan: So what do you think a company or organizations should do so that they can invite people to actually start thinking about, maybe different ways of solving a certain problem or different ways of implementing the goals? Because sometimes people are just bogged down into tasks and firefighting sometimes, so they don’t necessarily have this time.

Ron Eringa: Yeah, that’s an interesting question, actually. So, let me first start with why this is so important. We talk about self-organization all the time. The reason why we want self-organization is we need faster decision making, right? That’s basically what it comes down to. However, I think self-organization can become quite dangerous if the organization doesn’t have goals. Because in what direction are people going to run when they don’t have the goals, right? So I think that is why it is so important from a leadership perspective that there needs to be a lot of clarity around the goals of the company. That’s why we need to do this together.

To answer your question, I think what is needed for that is intrinsic motivation. People feeling intrinsically motivated, and that’s why they need to connect their personal goals to the organizational goal, because if they don’t believe in the goals that the organization has set, you’re going to get resistance. And I think that is the reason why it’s so important to dive under the iceberg and be good at the invisible domain. Because in the invisible domain, that’s where the magic happens. That’s where intrinsic motivation starts to happen, and that’s where people start connecting to the bigger picture. If you have that in place, well, I think that’s the best starting point to start working on self-organizing teams. But in the end, the only reason why we’re doing it is faster decision making in this complex domain, and I think that’s how it’s connecting to everything we talked about in the last hour.

Henry Suryawirawan: I still remember Kurt mentioned this thing called decision latency, right? So one of the true measure of a self-organizing team or an agile team is actually how much latency you have to make a decision. So thanks for reminding us again about this speed to make decision. And I think you touched something very important, intrinsic motivation. So, I believe in many companies, not all people will have this intrinsic motivation that is connected to the company, but yeah, how can we facilitate that? I think it’s the most important thing, right? Maybe having psychological safety, explaining the why we do certain things in a company, or what kind of customer problems that we are solving. I think let’s not forget to implement that to all the people inside the company as well, so that they have intrinsic motivation to be self-organized.

[00:47:23] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: Ron, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. So as we are reaching towards the end of our conversation, I have one last question that I always love to ask my guests, which is to share your version of three technical leadership wisdom. So maybe if you just summarize professional Agile leadership, maybe this can become your three technical leadership wisdom as well.

Ron Eringa: That’s an interesting one. So, well, I think I can’t avoid this one. So the first one is don’t start any change before you understand the culture in your organization. Because you’re going to end up in trouble if you don’t. So that’s the first thing.

The second one is the way to change the culture is actually through structure. So don’t forget about the structure. It seems like we are against structure and process. No, you need that, but start with culture first.

And then the last one, I think, well, I’ve been in leadership positions myself and it is not easy to let go of stuff, especially if it’s your child, or your baby, right? If you created it. So I think we, as leaders, need to learn ourselves how to let go and how to delegate decisions and feel comfortable. Let me rephrase it like that. Every decision that you make is a missed opportunity for somebody else to take the decision, and I think that’s basically what might help you let go more when you start leading in this way.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow. I love that mantra, right? Every decision you make is a missed opportunity for someone else to make that decision. So I really love that. Haven’t heard about that. So yeah, I think as a leader myself, sometimes it’s really difficult to let go or maybe delegate, because we have certain ways of doing things, and when we see someone else not doing the same thing, we feel a little bit uncomfortable. So I think, again, the mantra, every decision you make is a missed opportunity for someone else to make that decision. I think it’s a good reminder for all of us leaders.

So Ron, if people want to continue the conversation, if they are interested about your work, maybe is there a place for them to find you online?

Ron Eringa: Yeah. So I think the best location to refer them to is our company, Evolutionary Leadership. So it’s www.EvolutionaryLeadership.nl . We’re a Dutch-based company, but we place our blogs there and we are shifting our focus all towards that website where we share more of the leadership ideas that we are having. And, of course, also to the website of our book, the ProfessionalAgileLeader.com. So if you’re interested in reading our book, that’s where you can find it. And, of course, you can also find that on Amazon, on all the normal book sales channels around the world. So, would love to engage more with people on these subjects. So thank you for inviting me.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I read the book as well, so I think it’s really good. So for leaders out there who want to really understand what does it takes to become an Agile leader, I think there are so many insights inside the book. So thanks again for your time, Ron. Looking forward for seeing more Agile leaders in the world.

Ron Eringa: Cool. Thank you.

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