THE AGILE CULTURE: LEADING THROUGH TRUST AND OWNERSHIP (2014)

Foreword

“It’s all about the people . . .”

Change, or any transformation activity, is daunting. As experts tell us, “You don’t change people, you can only change the process.” So how do we, as leaders, motivate and inspire our employees and organizations to change?

Command and control leadership limits creativity, broad thinking, and the ability for us, as leaders, to get the most out of the talent in the organization. The Millennials that we hire today are very social, and they interact and learn through social means in a very virtual and boundaryless hierarchy. Large organizations, by their very own weight, are not nimble. But in today’s social/cloud/mobile world, organizations need to experiment and pivot more rapidly. To compound this dilemma, process tends to govern too tightly, with every exception or edge case being overmanaged. Process becomes a controlling means to an end and not a guideline. Organizational outcomes tend to be measured in vanity metrics. Trust is completely eroded, and creativity is muffled.

Dealing with this requires a shift in our leadership model: a move from command and control to a collaborative model that builds trust and pushes ownership and decision making deeper into the organization, while retaining a good balance of process and policy. The outcomes demonstrate an organization with energy and creativity, surfacing the talent and resilience to innovate and pivot as the business dictates.

I like this book, and the authors, because these ideas have been applied successfully with groups within IBM and within elements of Pitney Bowes. With the help of many employees who piloted the initial workshops, the authors polished many of the early models and refined them to the point where they were able to publish them for this book. Additionally, the authors provide metrics that can help you know whether you are on the right path to building a high-performing, collaborative team and creating a culture of trust.

Now, what do I have to say about the authors and why I admire them for writing this book? Paul Gibson and I worked together from 2007 to 2010 at IBM. He is truly a proper British gentleman. He helped me with the Agile adoption initiative—during which we trained, in 18 months, more than 8,000 employees on Agile approaches—resulting in over 60 percent of projects using Agile. The success of the Agile adoption is directly correlated to his passion and commitment to the IBMers and their wanting to get off the dreaded six-month project death marches. As we rolled out Agile at IBM, it highlighted the need for better communication and collaboration. This is how I met Pollyanna Pixton and Niel Nickolaisen.

The mold was broken when Pollyanna Pixton was born. For a person of short stature, she packs a mean bark but no bite, and a sense of having fun all the time. Her passion is improving leaders and giving them tools to succeed. I met her at an Agile conference and sat through her “Collaborative Leadership” lecture, in which she spoke about moving away from command and control to collaborative leadership. I thought this would dovetail nicely with the work Paul and I were doing at IBM. Pollyanna had cofounded Accelinnova with Niel, so they came as a package deal. Niel, another proper gentleman, but from Utah, created a model to help teams set priorities and backlogs, and that ensured that teams were building value, not just building stuff. When an opportunity presents itself, I fondly goad Pollyanna as she and Niel teach collaborative leadership. I tell the participants that Niel’s content is “hard but straightforward” and Pollyanna’s is the soft, fluffy stuff. If you want to see a short woman, dressed in black, go ballistic, just tell her that she teaches only “soft” stuff.

These three folks are dear friends who have helped me through my own transformation, and I thank them for that. The models illustrated in this book show how leaders can overcome obstacles (people or process) they face to build a culture of trust and high-performing collaborative teams.

I hope you enjoy the book and have the opportunity to apply the concepts. I certainly make every effort to apply them at each company I’m at or to each client I’m working with.

—Sue McKinney, vice president, engineering backup and recovery at Symantec, and former Pitney Bowes and IBM vice president of development