 I'll get going straight away. So a while ago, there was Yaksarara Fart, you remember him? The Pope and George Bush were on a flight. And yeah, yeah, they were flying somewhere. And suddenly, the plane had a problem. And the pilot came on and said, listen, sorry, you've got to jump, but I've got bad news. There are only two parachutes. So one of you will have to come down with the plane. And George Bush, of course, jumped up and said, I'm the leader of the world. I'm the best, the best, and the best. And I've got to go. I must have a parachute. So he grabbed one, jumped out of the plane. That was it. And the Pope was left with Yaksarara Fart. And Yaksarara Fart said, your Eminence, I'll let you go first. And the Pope said, don't worry, my son. We're both got parachutes. What do you mean? Well, George Bush grabbed my backpack and jumped out. That's not the way to deal with bad apples. So what I'm going to talk about is how we're going to actually identify them, help, and deal with them. So I'm first going to take just 90 seconds to give you a quick rundown about myself. So this is where I was born. That's where I grew up. That's where I grew up, too. I then went to school over here. I played here. I prayed here. And then I rested. I then lived here, which is somewhere down under there. It's very close to Antarctic. And after that, it's got a lot of nice friendly animals, too. This is where I banked. This is where I shopped. This is where I go in the evenings. That's where I go during the weekends. And then I rest. That's where I worked when I started my first job. It was using punch cards. And then did the whole lot of gamut there. And I landed up consulting over there. I was the CIO with Shell. And then worked in all these strange sorts of places and landed up there, where I rested. I then started my own company there called Wisdom, doing, taking companies from that stage to that stage. You know what that is? And then I rested. Came down in 2007, started a company in Australia, built the Agile Academy with SunCorp, and worked for a whole heap of companies in Australia over the last few years, taking companies from there to there. And then I rested. Now, I work a lot with Agile and Lean, working on different areas, including project management, but it's slowly moving up the pipeline into governance, into strategy. And finally, as you can see, it's moving into leadership as well. And then I rested, and that brings me to today. So what I'm going to talk about today is about those difficult people. And I'll define what bad apples mean. What are the causes that there are those problems? And what are the impacts? I'm going to use a lot of work I've done with neuroscience and a lot of work with other areas. I've drawn some research from Harvard and other places. And I've got some great practices that you can use. And when you use them at the end, you will definitely ease the problem with difficult people. Because difficult people sometimes are caused by difficult situations, so I'll talk to that. So if you look at the heart of everything, it's all about roles and relationships. Within a company, that's what we have, roles and relationships. And at the bottom of all this is that one very elusive word called trust. Now, there was a huge aha for me. I think it was around five years ago. Who knows Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and the art of living? Oh, well, quite a number of them. So he's here in Bangalore, and I came down, went for one of his retreats. And it was really an awakening moment for me. Because the thing he said, suddenly out of the blue, he said, the worst thing that you can give somebody you love is your trust. Then you go, what do you mean? What do you mean? Isn't that so important? He says, think about it. Finish the sentence. I trust you to love me, to care for me, not to do this, to do that, to do this. So in the end, what trust really is, if you peel it back, is a box of expectations with a ribbon around it. That's all it is. It's nothing but a box of expectations with a ribbon around it. And if you open that box, there are two sides to it. The first side of that box is the character side. And you open that box and you see things like this. You want respect. You want honesty from the other person. You want integrity. You want authenticity. These are the expectations that you have for someone else. And in return, they have for you. But there's another side. Have you heard of that saying where you go, yeah, he's a great chap, but what's that but? That but is the other aspect. And that aspect is competence. There is trust for competence as well. And we must not forget it. You want people to be accountable. You want them to deliver. You want them to be capable. You want them to be predictable. That means if they say they'll do something, they'll do it. And you want them to be reliable. When you put both these things together, then you trust somebody at work or in your friendships or even in your relationships. So now work that has been done in around the 1950s around the role set theory have also proven that trust is at the heart of things. And what forms trust is your predictability and reliability to meet the expectations. That's what trust is. Yeah? So here come the bad apples. So what are these bad apples? Who are these bad apples? Yeah? So they go from, yeah, he doesn't do his work very well to the toxic character in your team. So let's have a show of hands from all of you who know or have worked with a bad apple. OK, now keep your hands up there. Now you can put them down. Now all of you who think you are a bad apple. Ah, you see, somehow these bad apples have not come for this conference, which is fantastic. Yeah, isn't it lovely? They just have disappeared. They decided, no, I'm not going for the Agile conference. Lovely. So let's talk about the bad apples and see what's there behind that. So let's go back to those expectations, OK? Because that's where it all starts. The strange thing is that there's a corollary to the rule. 80% of behaviors, the Rollset Theory proves, are driven by the expectations of five to eight people that you interact with at your workplace. Your behaviors are driven by their expectations. Your boss, your peer, your colleague, your customer, whoever it is. So you actually adapt to meet these expectations. So let's tear them apart. Let's see what our expectations made of. So you've got competences we talked about and you've got character. Tease competence apart. Competence has got attitude and aptitude. There are two sides to it. And of course, the attitude bit links into character. Now here comes the big thing. People always and often they disguise aptitude problems with attitude and attitude problems with aptitude. It's very hard to say I don't know sometimes. It's much easier to show an attitude. Sometimes you show an attitude, you've got an attitude, and you say I don't know. And as a colleague, as a manager, as a team leader, you've got to figure that out. We've got to figure out, what is it? Is it aptitude or is it just attitude? What is going on here with this person? So let's delve in a little deeper. Let's talk about aptitude first. Now aptitude has got some sides to it. There's the IQ side and there's the EQ side. Now the EQ side, you can say, is very closely linked in with aptitude and attitude, but it's the softer side. Sometimes if you watch Big Bang Theory, you'll know what I mean by IQ and EQ. So Sheldon, you don't want to mess a colleague, I guess. But he's a great guy. So on the aptitude side, we can work with helping people develop, and I'll talk about what are the things you can do in that area. But now let's go to the other side. Let's go to attitude and see what's under there. So there are four key types that in the psychological world have come up with in terms of behavior types. So you've got passive aggressive. You've got hostile aggressive. You've got the perennial pessimist, and you've got the Mr. No at all, or Mrs. No at all. Now let's look at their behaviors under that. Now the behaviors we see and we relate to, without putting any labels on it, yeah you say somebody's backstabbing too faced, he said this to me, and then he said that behind my back, and you know, she's a bully. They form little groups and they recruit people, so you're not part of that group. They're part of that clique. They're stonewalling where the work just isn't done, and yeah, well, well, we're very busy. Not now, we're very busy. And then of course there's the martyr, you know. The victim, everything's on my head. I'm the one, the silence, obfuscation, just confusing the whole issue. There's all sorts of behavioral traits that they use to manipulate, basically. And here we come into the causes underneath. And we must look at personality disorders. 30 to 40% they talk about have some form on some extent of the scale, and they're all working. They're not unemployed, I can tell you that. But personality is a set of enduring behavioral and mental traits that distinguish human beings. Now, I have underlined enduring. We all have fits. We all lose it sometimes. That doesn't make you a bad apple. We have to be very careful not to judge, and not to judge too quick, yeah? So it is about an enduring sort of repetition of the same behavior that you see. Now, personality disorders is when that behavior is outside the societal norms. Look at that word, societal. It's there, it's unwritten. We know what's okay, and we know what's not okay, yeah? And then you have, of course, MBTI, and you've got all these personality tests, but let's not confuse this with personality problems and personality disorders. If you give it to a room with, let's say, 50 people with problems and 50 people without personality disorders, they'll all find a personality type. So don't confuse the same, yeah? Now, the American Psychological Association in the DSM model have grouped this into four clusters of behavioral problems. You've got the odd, which is paranoid schizophrenic. So they're really paranoid that the whole world's out to get them, and it is a problem. It is almost an illness, yeah? There's the dramatic, which is emotional and erratic. There's the anxious and fearful and anxiety levels in today's world are growing due to all sorts of things from food to pollution to noise pollution as well, and sadistic and self-defeating. These are due to past traumas or whatever it is. And they're all working with us, so we have to consider that. Now, let's go one step further on the psychopathic scale. Now, if you look, if we talk about psychopaths, we talk about that last 3%, dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee, but that's just the last 3%. The rest of the 90%, and in the book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, they work in our midst, and they could be sociopaths, and they could be psychopaths, and there's a firm, there's a little line there that differentiates the two, and the main trait there is an absolute lack of empathy, caring for anyone else, but themselves. They're there as well, and I'm sure we've worked with them in one way or the other. I can remember working with a couple, some very extreme as well. I hide, I'm gonna tell you a short story here. I had a guy when I was working in Holland, lovely programmer, came on board, such guy coded for two months, time expires after two months. After two months, your probation is over. So one day after the two months was over, I got a letter, six pages long email, of course, six pages long saying how he felt abused, and this was not the right company, and he was treated badly, et cetera, et cetera, but he wanted 250 euros more, and then it would all be okay. So I called him up and I said, you know, I would have given you the 250 euros. That's not the problem. The issue is the way you've gone about it, and I just don't feel right, so you're gonna have to wait another six months, and then we'll see whether I give you the 250 or not. You know, somewhere you get that spidey feeling at the back of your neck that tells you it's not right. Next day, another five page, and this time abusive, a bit stronger, a bit abusive, calling people and things names. So for the first time, and that time, it was Yahoo's Alta Vista. I went on and Googled him. Google was not even there then, and I found out that he was the head of the neo-Nazi extreme sect in Europe. He'd been taken to the European Court of Justice. He'd been sued by the Jewish community in Europe, and he was running sessions on how to be a werewolf in his garden. So we all come across people like that. So in 2005, the University of Surrey did a test where they interviewed about 1,000 British executives and criminal psychiatric patients, and they found that in three cases, the executives showed these common traits more than the psychiatric patients. The, yeah, yeah. The first one was histrionic. You know, superficial charm, insincere, ego-strength, manipulative, executives were top. Then there was narcissism, narcissistic. Lack of empathy, exploiting grandiose, it's all about them manipulating again. And the last one was compulsive obsessive. Or if you have to work for a boss who is compulsive obsessive, I can tell you, it's very difficult. It's all about perfectionism, rigid, stubborn, and dictatorial. We've all had, how many of you have worked with one or the other at some point in time? Yeah, the hands are going up pretty fast. We all have, and if you haven't, my God, you're lucky. Stay there, yeah? So DSM also has a scale. So let's not jump to conclusions. Let's not be too hard to judge. You've got the low on the five, on the one, and you've got five on the extreme. So there are the really extreme cases where you think, oh my God, this girl or this guy has lost it. But there are others that are subtle. So do we need to be a psychologist to figure all this out? I don't think so. Because we have something more than what psychologists have. We have a gut, yeah? So here we go. Now I really want your participation here, yeah? So come on, hands up. I know the curry is sitting heavy. So let's get some movement going, yeah? So the first one, shouts and abuses a fellow teammate. Do you think that's wrong? Hands up if you think it's wrong. Come on, guys. Yeah, we know that's not on. So what about does not deliver what was agreed to? Is that wrong? OK, OK, if you've got a couple of hands going up, all right. Sexual harassment of a co-worker, yeah. I'll put both my hands up, yeah? We know that's wrong. We know that's wrong. Not acceptable, yeah? Puts up negative comments during a retrospective. Ah, it's a tricky one, is it? That's what retrospectives are for, yeah? But it's a negative comment. So you don't learn from only positive ones. But we knew. We had a couple of hands, but majority. You got a spot on. Comes late every time, yeah? Not acceptable. Not acceptable. Passive aggressive in meetings, yeah? Yeah, it can be difficult. OK, oh, sorry, wrong button. Extremely negative about everything. Any idea, no, it can't be done. Yeah, it can drain an entire group, can't it? And what about the funny, the clown? You've had the clown as well. Always cracking jokes. That's OK, isn't it? Yeah, but can be a bit, see? Can be a bit disturbing, right? Yeah, a little bit disturbing. But the majority didn't put their hands up, yeah? Uses bad language sometimes. Now, I've got to put my hand up for myself as well. We all do sometimes, OK? And the last one gives a wrong estimate. God forbid. God forbid. Is that allowed? Yeah? Yeah? No, that's not a bad apple. So we do know. We do know. Now, all of us and how many of you know who the bad apple is in your teams? Can I show you? You know who the bad apple is? In one way or the other, you know. It could even be your boss, my gosh. That's the difficult one. I'll come to that later. Yeah, that's the difficult one. Well, we'll come there, yeah? But why don't we do something about it? The biggest complaint in organizational feedback sessions is the lack of holding people accountable. And this absolutely demoralizes an entire team. The worst thing for a high performer is to see a slacker get away with it, or somebody who's not living up to it. It's really demoralizing. So why don't we do it? Ah, now we go back to the Stone Age. This comes from our origins. It's fight of light. If we see something like this, we want to either fight it, yeah, and you sometimes feel like giving them one smack on the back of the head, don't you? Yeah? Or you want to just shut up and go away. And I love the court this morning. I can't remember who said it from the Australian general. The standard you agree to and live up to is the standard you walk past. If you accept that, yeah, that's your standard that you've accepted, yeah? So let's just hold on for a second. Let's go down to the causes, yeah? Because we must understand it a little bit more. So there are three main causes. The first one is substance abuse. Do not underestimate what a big problem that is in the workplace, yeah? Whether it's alcohol or drugs or anything else, it is abuse. And they bring that into the workspace. The second one is grief. Don't underestimate how powerful grief can be. It can take you out a year, sometimes two years. So it's not just for the 10 days of mourning or the 40 days of mourning. It can be longer than that, yeah? And the last one is personality disorders. This is a mental illness. It is a problem. And we really have to be understanding, yeah? And I'll come back to that part of how we deal with that. Now if you look at the root cause of any of those that you saw there, and sometimes the alcohol abuse is due to the mental illness, the mental illness is due to the alcohol abuse, and they're all linked up together and it gets all very confusing. And sometimes grief is thrown in and then you stir the pot and you get a real masala that you can't deal with. So root cause, fight of light, yeah? So the person exhibiting those characteristics has adopted either fight or flight. I'm not talking, I'm not part of this team, I don't want to be part of it. They're exhibiting that. So let's ask the why again. Why are they exhibiting that? And at the heart of all this, it comes back to what the Rig Veda's teachers, what the Bible or the Koran or anything else talks about, the two main things at the heart of human problems which is fear and desire. And they drive behaviors in most areas, unless of course, even if it is a mental illness, it is fear, very much driven with fear. And we must understand that because only then can we care. And whatever we may say, however much we may not like these people and we may not like to work with them, one of the key agile values is caring. We must care for people. If you don't care for people, you're just as bad. And there were only three bad apples in this room, but I can tell you, we don't care, we're all bad apples. So we must care. So now I'd like to just look at the impact. I want five of you all up here, come on, come on. You're all sitting very comfortably, I want five. Come up, come up, come up, five of you all. Can we have one, two, three? Let's give them a hand guys, come on, yeah. One, two, three, four, five and one more and one more. Okay, so you're already there, yeah, we've got, yeah. So I'd like you all to pass the ball around, yeah. Wait a minute, wait a minute. There has to be air time between the ball. You're the IM, yeah. Okay, so you're gonna make sure that they do it well and everything, yeah. Okay, your time starts now. I don't know, I don't know. All these questions, come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, how many times? Okay, okay, yeah, okay, good stuff. Okay, stop, right? So what do you think of that? Can you go faster, guys? Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, well done, well done. So now, now I'm giving you all some little cards. These are your behavioral cards, yeah. So we're gonna see, so just read the card, don't share it with anybody and follow the instructions of the card, right? Just follow the instructions of the card and start the game. Okay, I am pass the ball, start again, start. Okay, we're timing you, we're timing you. Okay, so thanks a lot, guys. So you can actually see, so what was your instruction? Keep dropping the ball. Keep dropping the ball, yours? Oh, yours was blank and you still dropped it. My gosh, that's a real problem here. Okay, so as you can see, I think what's most important, thanks a lot, guys, give them a hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So whatever you say, whatever you say, this sort of a problem and not handling this sort of a problem has serious impacts and that ranges from suboptimal, yeah, your team is not performing, to absolutely catastrophic, yeah? And one of the big things that'll happen is guess what, your good people will leave and the good people will leave first, yeah? So high attrition rates are a symptom of something going wrong in there and you think, oh, it's the culture, it's that, it's this, but let's boil it down. Sometimes it's just managers not taking action when it's needed, yeah? So, now although that may not be in your team, you can't sit there and say, oh, my side of the board doesn't have a hole. If you're in an organization where this is going on, believe me, it will impact you, yeah? And you have to take actions. So, I'm gonna talk very briefly on Agile. So what has this all got to do with Agile? Because till now it was not, yeah, it's pretty general, isn't it? It's there with every team. So I'm gonna give you the, what's it? Maybe one minute zip through, maybe two minutes zip through Agile, just to set the scene because if you ask five people, you get six opinions. So at the heart of Agile, a few core values. So you've got trust, respect, authenticity, fairness, courage, caring. These are human values at the base of it. You then got about eight principles roughly. The first one, cross-functional teams that work on one thing at a time, one project at a time, no doing six projects at the same time. Iterative time boxed and fast short cycles. You've got focusing on delivery and business value, collaborative and self-organizing teams. You've got adaptive and flexible in terms of planning and also doing the work, continuously improving, asking yourself, how can I get better? How can I get better? Focus on simplicity and innovation and the last one is transparency and visual management. You can see a few variations here and there. If you read the books, one will have five, one will have nine, it's wrapped up in here. Now there are practices. That's another level. And I'm not gonna go through all these. There's enough of sessions today to teach you about all these, right from stand-ups to continuous delivery at the other end. And then there's the process. So there's four things. The values, principles, practices and process. Now if you look at the process, right at the top you've got strategy feeding your funnel of projects. And that's a whole subject by itself. I'm talking on that on Saturday in terms of the sixth force and how strategy should be also a job. You've got concept initiate to deliver. You break deliver down, you've got your iterations, starting with iteration zero, one, two, et cetera. You break an iteration down, you've got your planning meeting, your daily stand-ups, work, showcase and retro, per iteration. That's a process. And those of you who say Agile doesn't have a process, wake up, it's very, very rigid. And Agile is very disciplined, yeah? So teams need to follow that. So you've got values, principles, process and practices. And these practices actually are what make the values and principles come alive. At one of the clients that I worked at, we asked a similar question at one of the talks which is, do you know the values of the company? They were up on all the walls everywhere. 98% put up their hands. Then we asked them, how many of you live the values? What percent do you think put up their hands? Give me a rough shout. Sorry, three, you watched my presentation, didn't you? Yes, 3%, well done, well done. 3% said that they followed the values. So the posters don't make the difference and Agile is so focused on practices because it brings the values and principles alive. So, here start the problems. How does an Agile team deal with difficult people? That's the issue for today's subject. Not just difficult people, yeah? And they exist. The reason I took the time to show that is don't think that because we're Agile, those people are not in our teams. All of a sudden, they haven't come for the conference, which they haven't, but they're there. So this is the challenge. The Agile teams are cross-functional teams that are put together. They normally have different bosses, yeah? The PM, the project manager, doesn't want to override the iteration manager. The iteration manager was really a developer, has now suddenly been made an iteration manager and yeah, I don't know about handling people. You know, this people thing is a bit new to me. I'm a great techie or a BA or a dev or whatever, yeah? Then you've got the managers. They're all putting pressure out there. Then you've got the external stakeholders. They want everything yesterday, yeah? So there's a lot of things going on there. And guess what? This is, I think, the first, I've been to about five or six international conferences too, where they are actually talking about bad apples. You know, Agile has developed over the years and we've got that lovely group hug and love you, love you. And nobody wants to talk about the difficult apples. And it's about time we started talking about them and how to deal with them. So there are some Agile misnomers that I want to go through because these are used by the difficult apples. So you better know about them. The first one is wisdom of the crowd is misinterpreted as majority wins. And if we vote you, the manager, or you, the product owner, or you, the technical expert, you shut up its majority wins. That's an absolute misnomer and that's not true. Yeah, there are clear responsibilities even in Agile team. The second one is, oh, we're collaborative. So let's keep talking and analyzing till we tie ourselves up in knots forever because we're collaborative. And let's collaborate and collaborate and collaborate and no decisions are made. The third one is, oh, we're adaptive. So we can't give you a plan, we're Agile. We can't give you a project plan. How many have heard that? Yeah, yeah, we can't give you a project plan. That's rubbish, I'm sorry, that's absolute rubbish. You should be able to give a plan, yeah? Whether you work to it or not, and it's a light plan, it's an easy plan, subject of another day altogether. Next one, we don't need leaders. We are self-organizing teams. There's no boss. Everybody just does their own thing. As teams mature and go into very high levels of high-performing maturity, leaders almost are just in there as part of it. But as you saw with the previous presentation, the minute you introduce one new person into the team and every team, you can go snap back in terms of culture. So you do need leadership, even if it is to set a common shared understanding and vision. Oh yes, we're flexible, so we can't work to a budget. We can't work to an estimate. We can't give you an estimate. We're just very flexible. So we can't do that. And the last one is there's nobody accountable. Who's accountable? The team is accountable. Whose neck can I ring? Oh, the team's neck. And there's nobody. Everyone's ducking and dodging. And these are actually practicing, let's say, what I've come across in my last maybe 12, 13 years working with agile teams and coaching agile teams is this sort of a behavior used sometimes by teams who are dysfunctional. So what can we do about it? What am I doing for time? Good. So you can't just go and cut off someone's head. So I've got a simple little formula that we can all use, irrespective of agile, but then I'll give you the agile practices that go with it. And just remember ICE. So the first thing is we have to identify. The second thing is we have to correct. And the third one is we have to engage. So they identify, and this is so important, and it comes back to the word trust. If you don't set clear expectations, you can't ask people to meet them. And there will be a lack of trust. And how many teams have we seen that just start straight away, go in and start. Don't worry about setting a shared understanding and expectations. And then you feel, oh, well, I don't know what he wants. Do you, has your boss ever asked you in agile terms what your expectation is of him or her? Very rarely, yeah? So drive transparency, it's very important to make those measures, those understandings transparent, using big visual charts and all the other practices. And the last one is check and validate. Be careful, because if you are dealing with one or two bad apples in your team, they are the most intelligent people, yeah? And if you look at both sociopathic or psychopathic scales, or any other form of disorders, they are extremely intelligent. And they will weave stories and they will spin stories that you won't be able to handle and you may take action. So just take the time to check and validate and go see the real thing as lean advisors. Now, that's the difficult one. We can do the first bit. Here is where you have to pull your pants up and show some guts. So you have to call the behavior in time and place in an agile team. And I'll talk about who calls it in an agile team. You have to call it straight away. You can't call it tomorrow. You can't call it next week. You can't call them at the end of the week and list out six things they did last week. That's not the way to do it. Immediately on the spot. Now, in place, you do not want to be little people. Try to avoid sneaky techniques like sarcasm to get your message. Ha ha ha ha, it's Ramu and Ramu is late again. What is that? That is not a message to Ramu, yeah? You have to actually say, Ramu, this is not acceptable and do it in private. First time, immediately, almost always removes the problem if you tackle it straight away in private. Yeah, don't try and embarrass people. That's not your job. Be courageous, be firm, but be kind. Please be kind. As you saw, the causes can be varying. And we have to have love in our hearts when we deal with people like this. It's so important. And the last thing is, you have to follow up. You have to engage. You have to look after them. You have to find out what's happening. You have to make sure that they're trained, either if it's aptitude, training, coaching, et cetera, and you must follow up. And if you say, well, it's very difficult. Who do you really care for? Do you care for the individual? Do you care for the team? Or do you care for all the other individuals? If you do not take action because you actually care for the person and that person is destroying the team, you are letting everyone else down, including the team. So think about that as well. And it is difficult. It is very difficult. Get support, talk to mentors, talk to other managers once removed, but you have to take action. Don't shirk it and it takes courage and that's why courage is the number one agile value because you have to have that courage in there. Now, who has to have that courage? I'll talk to that in a moment. So any of you read the five dysfunctions of a team? Yeah, it's a fantastic book and it talks about how teams operate and why they don't operate well. Absence of trust due to the lack of invulnerability. Fear of conflict, if you don't have trust, there'll be fear of conflict and there'll be artificial harmony and nice batting everybody on the back. How's it going? Yeah, it's going well, everything's going fine. Ambiguity, so because you don't have conflict, nobody knows actually what they said. They sat for the one hour meeting and at the end of the meeting, nobody knows what the hell was said during that one hour. Did they say yes? Did they say no? Nobody knows, yeah? And then of course there's low standards and finally there's no results. So you have to focus on building the trust. You have to have healthy, respectful confrontation. Please allow this and I'll give you one tip. If there is a meeting and it's a standup, it's retrospective, whatever it is, or a design meeting and people get passionate, that is okay. Please stop them for a second and say, I'm giving you permission to be passionate as long as you're respectful, yeah? And it works wonders because people just carry on and that's where the magic happens. Magic happens in confrontation, not if there's artificial harmony. Clarity of commitment and this is the one that we're talking about today, the accountability and holding others accountable. Accountability yourself is not a problem. We all have that innate ability to deliver and we want to, we're proud, we want to deliver a good job, but how about holding someone else accountable? That's difficult and only then will you get outstanding results and it's not the PM's job and it's not the IM's job and it's not the team leader's job, it's everyone's job, it's every person's job because if you walk past that abuse or that bad behavior, you are accepting that bad behavior, yeah? Another thing is people talk about, oh, I'm managing a team. You never manage a team, you manage individuals in the team and each one is different. There have been presentations this morning and Lisa and the rest which talk about different types of people in different groups and you have to deal with them differently. You can't just deal as an IM or as a PM. How many managers, IM's and PM's in the room here? Can I have a show of hands? Yeah, quite a few. So, you can't have one size fits all and don't put down rules, blanket on the team, bang, because one person is late. Now you're all going to stay late till six o'clock. That may work in the army and do 50 push-ups but I don't know if it works with agile teams or any really high-performing team. So think about it here. Your style will need to defer from person to person and finally I've got three steps to success. If you do not set up your team for success, when these problems occur, you're going to be stuck. Yeah, so set up for success. What does that mean? The first one is, you must have a shared understanding of agile and what it is not. How many times I've walked into a team and you find, yeah, we've been agile for one month, we've been agile for one year and you ask five people in the team, you get different opinions of what it is. So just have a session, have a workshop, two hours at the start, what's agile, put it up, call in a coach, browse the web but agree what is agile for your shared understanding. Right or wrong doesn't matter what practices you do. Agree that. The second one is clarity of roles and responsibilities. Please be clear, what is the IM or Scrum Master's role? What is the PM's role? If you read five books, you'll get five different opinions, maybe six as well, so be careful about that but whatever it is doesn't matter, just agree it. For your team, agree one thing. There's no right and wrong, just pick one and agree it. Yeah? Now, I have run these three practices repeatedly and it's been magic in taking the team to another level. So I'm gonna share it with you. Two are brand new and the last one, of course, is been around for years, the social contract. So the first one is what I call the box of trust. Just take a big blank piece of paper and get the cross-functional team in the room. So the bosses, the partners, suppliers, customers, reports, peers, the devs, the PA, and just spend half an hour, each of them writing down what are their expectations of the opposite group in terms of character and competence. Remember the two, write it down. Whiteboard it, put it up on sticky notes and finally group it and you will get one list of expectations that your team would live up to. This is vital and it's not the outcome that's important. It's the process, yeah? So set clear expectations using the box of trust. Now comes the scale of expectations. This has been work done in Harvard that has been really fantastic. So what they call is a scale of expectations. Right from deviance on the extreme left to hypothesis testing on the right. So I'm going to explain that. And this was done by Amy Amundsen and it's been published in the Harvard Business Review. And what she's done is she's put these five up there and said, if you deliberately violate for selfish purpose, it's blame-worthy and just call it as such. It's blame-worthy, you are going to get blamed. Now, on the other hand, it goes better. Well, what if I did something but I didn't know? All right, that's less. What if the process is broken, 90% of the times, if you go back to lean, lean focuses on the process, not the people. Because that's where most of your problems are. Okay, process is not known. Less, lack of clarity. Well, that's your job if you're the manager. Yeah, and then, hey, I wanna try something. That's actually praise-worthy. So now, don't finish with that. Put these up on the wall, discuss it, and then have one more thing there. Put the repercussions underneath. This you are doing with the team. If you have just things that are expectations and you have no repercussions, no consequences, you might as well forget it, yeah? I'm sure most of you have kids or have in some form or the other relative or a person who has a kid that's close to you and you know how kids are, and we were all kids once, yeah? Don't touch the cookies. Don't touch the cookies. Don't touch the cookies. Oh my God, look at him, he's so naughty. Well, what do you think's gonna happen the next time you tell him? There has to be consequences. Now, I'm not saying beat the child, please. Don't record that. I didn't say beat the child, yeah? But you have to have consequences. Otherwise, rules don't make any difference, yeah? So, put it out there. Red card, two strikes and you're out. Dinner for two if you're doing a great job. Buy drinks for the team if you did something and it's not so bad, yeah? Sanctions and rewards. Put them up on the wall, discuss them. And the final one is the social contract. Do this together with the team. Yellow stickies, acceptable behaviors. It takes you not more than an hour. Aren't you willing to invest an hour in your team, in your culture? Put it up on the wall. Group them, put them together and have an agreed list of behaviors. Now, everyone in the team own these behaviors and anyone can hold someone else accountable to meet those behaviors. It's not the PM's job or the IM's job to come in and say, hey, you haven't met number three. Yeah? For example, the negativity. Two solutions for every problem. Do not come with a problem unless you've got two solutions for it. Ooh, that starts getting people to think. Now, you'll stop whinging so much and actually think and talk to others and come with, so you start driving her. Now, have a dumb box on the side. Again, every time you're late, if that's one of your rules, yeah, five bucks in the dumb box. At the end of the week, you'll have enough money to have drinks for the whole team. I can guarantee you that, okay? So, run these three when the team starts. If you've got new people in the team, create a body that will walk them through this, all these three processes. So you must have bodies in there that will walk new people through. So at the heart of it is values, principles, and practices. And they together go in to drive your behaviors and your attitudes. And that's what we call, yeah, your culture. And if you've got a great culture, then you'll have great people working for you. And if you have great people, you will have great results. And that's, sorry, I've just got one or two slides left. So, the latest HBR published an article, and they did a survey on what's the single, what's the number one trait of leaders in the world over. There's only one, and it came out as authenticity, yeah. But we didn't need the HBR to tell us that. We had a saying from thousands of years ago that say exactly the same thing, yeah? Be honorable in actions and words, and sincere in words. And with that, I'd like to end. Thank you very much. So if you have any questions, I'm over here, otherwise just outside, because I think the next one will be starting here soon. And my email's there, so you can email me at any time as well. Thank you.