 Welcome everyone to discover your leadership agility by Sam Bote. We are glad that Sam could join us today. We would like to thank Jail for sponsoring this session. Without any further delay, what do you say? Thank you, Gunjan. Namaste and lovely to see you again. I'm very fortunate that this is my third time that I'm speaking at Agile India, and it is an absolute pleasure to share another story with you. So thank you for having me. It is great to be here, and I hope things are going well for you today. My name is Sam Botele, and I am from Sydney, Australia. And it is fantastic to be coming in through India from my lounge room upstairs. As you can see, I've put some beautiful posters on the wall. And today's topic is going to be Discover Your Leadership Agility. So there's going to be a bit of self-reflection in today. In terms of why this session is important, the leader and the role of the leader in Agile is becoming more and more clear. The leader can either help teams and some of the behaviors that I'm going to share with you today will help teams delivering their work. Unfortunately, there are other behaviors of the leader which hinder teams and make it difficult for teams to do work. So that's why this leadership piece is important. And I'm going to be going through 10 behaviors and patterns for leaders. And we're going to have some fun with it. I'm going to be putting myself up against the clock. I'm going to be up against the clock, and I'm going to have just two minutes on each topic. So two minutes per topic. I'll tell you a bit more about how that's going to work. But before we do that, I'm going to share a video because some people don't really understand what an Agile leader is. What is this Agile leader? So I asked my team, I lead a team of Agile coaches and I asked them to tell me what is an Agile leader. So just give me five seconds. I'm going to present my screen and show you the video. A quick snapshot from some of my team on what is an Agile leader. So this is what I'd like you to do. First bit of information, please. If you can grab a piece of paper, hopefully you are set somewhere or if not a piece of paper, a post-it note or something to write on. I'm going to go through 10 topics and 10 topics. So can you on a piece of paper write down the numbers 1 to 10? Write down the numbers 1 to 10. And what we're going to do is as we go through each one, I'm going to get you to pause and self-reflect. You can see I've got these three icons. Now the lowest level, if you give yourself the lowest score, it's this one. You are building an understanding. You're building an understanding. So that would be your kind of entry level. So I'm just learning. So you can give yourself that score or you can give yourself the middle one, which is this, a working experience. In other words, I'm doing it. I think I'm doing that. Yeah, I've got some examples where I do that. And finally, this one, which is extensive experience. So you can give yourself the highest score. So all you have to do is to have numbers 1 to 10, and then you are going to write yourself in the lowest, lowest, in the middle, or highest in terms of your self-reflection on your experience. So that is the challenge that I would love you to do. Please, as we go through, can you self-assess yourself? So I'm going to set up a two-minute timer. And I'm going to balance it carefully on here. Let me just get it at the right height. So I'm going to balance it carefully on here so you can see it. And then I'm going to give you the explanation of each one. Now the other thing I'm going to give you is a present. And the present I'm going to give you is a workbook. Now I'm not going to get you to look at it now, but there is a workbook with activities that you're going to be able to do beyond today. So the other thing to make a note of is when you do find a topic that you are intrigued by, why don't you have a look at Sam's workbook? It's a 16-page workbook with lots of great examples. And here is what it will look like when you go find that. So discover your leadership agility. There's a lot more you can do beyond today. So let's start with the first topic. I'm going to give myself two minutes. And here we go. So the first topic is awareness and perception. Now as a leader, often we get squeezed. We get squeezed. And I want to give you an analogy of an orange. When I squeeze an orange, the only thing that can come out is orange juice. But when you are squeezed, when you are squeezed, you can choose what comes out. And as a leader, what you need to think about is, how can I slow down how I react to stress? So think about a situation at work when you get stressed or squeezed. It could be an email, it could be a meeting. When you get squeezed, what happens is we react and we jump and we say things that we might regret. So you need to slow down your thinking and create this gap, a little gap between the thing that's happened and how you react. So how can you better control what comes out of your mouth? Because as a leader, everything you say and everything you do is seen by the team. So how can you do that? That is our first topic, which is awareness and perception. What I'd like you to do now is think about that. How good are you at creating that gap? How good are you at creating the space? So put right down topic number one. It's awareness and perception. You can see it behind me. Topic one, how do you rate yourself? Are you good at controlling yourself? In which case you might say, I'm really good at that. I've got extensive experience. Score yourself on the top end. If you're doing something, sometimes you do that, give yourself a middle score. Or if you're hopeless at it or you're just learning and you can't control what comes out, then give yourself a low score. That is our first topic, awareness and perception. Let's go to our second topic. Our second topic is called you as a leader. So you as a leader. Here in the workbook, there's a great exercise in the workbook which gets you to reflect and look in the mirror. So if you do this activity in the workbook when you get to your homework, these are the some of the things I'm going to get you to think about. What did it feel like when you worked to the best ever leader you've had? How did that feel? Just try and think about those emotions. What did it feel like? What were the memories you have from the worst ever leader you reported to? How did that make you feel? Now think about yourself. What sort of leader are you? How are you showing up right now as a leader? And then maybe after today I'd like you to think about where do you want to go as a leader? Where do you want to become as a leader and what do you want to grow into? What sort of leader do you want to be? So this activity is a self reflection and it's in the workbook with these great things where you can fill them in and you can actually draw pictures. So you can draw some pictures and you can reflect on your own leadership and through the leaders that you've had before. So in terms of the activity for this one please can you give yourself a score again? Number two, you as a leader how do you rate yourself awareness? Would you rate yourself awareness as low? In other words, I've got a bit of thinking to do or is it in the middle? You're quite good in terms of your self awareness or is it something that you think you're really strong at? Give yourself a score on you as a leader and then we'll go to the next topic. Okay, number three. Number three is all about leadership language and I'm very passionate about this one especially when I'm working with India. Everything you say as a leader is interpreted by people in some way and there's language that's kind of controlling. There's controlling language which is like telling people what to do and not using nice language through questions and asking people what to do. If I always say I, if there's a leader I say I this, I that instead of saying we then again it's better to use the we language. I call this green language so the good words are green and the red words are bad. Even if you think about partnerships with other organizations if I look at the word client that's a red word, that's a bad word. A better word for me is colleague. If you're working with another organization colleague is better than client and my absolute favorite worst word are these, or words are these two, onshore and offshore. I think these words are terrible as a leader and that actually whether you're in India or Australia or where you are and if you're a partner organization in a different country we should just say Sydney office and Bangalore office. Sydney office, Chennai office and not onshore, offshore. Offshore, if you're working in this mode and people call you offshore I think they're treating you or making you feel like you're not equal. So the language is important so leadership language I want you now to rate yourself please on leadership language. How do you reckon you shape up? Are you pretty good with the language? Number three, are you good with the language? Do you control it? Do you think about what you say and the impact it has on others? Or so that would be a top score or you can give yourself a middle score or a low score if actually you don't think about that. Okay, leadership language. All right, we onto the next one. Number four, which is about personal responsibility. Personal responsibility. This concept comes from an awesome book by a guy called Chris Avery and I love his book. It's called The Responsibility Process. This is how it works. When you're faced with a challenge or a difficult situation imagine this line, there's an imaginary line. In terms of your behavior you can either go above the line when you've got a challenge you can go above the line and take responsibility or you can go below the line which is where we go to things like blame and denial and justifying our actions. So let's imagine a scenario where you get an email and there's a situation you need to respond. It only takes a second to respond and reply with an above the line response. I've got this. I'll take this forward. I'll deal with it. But to do a below the line response to blame others or to justify your actions can take paragraphs and paragraphs because you're justifying or you're blaming other people. So what I'd like you to think about is when something happens how can you go above the line? How can you take responsibility for a situation and not blame others or justify your own behavior? It's a great concept. Check out the book by Christopher Avery. Reflect on this for yourself now. How do you rate yourself? How do you rate yourself with personal responsibility? Do you blame others? Do you go below the line a lot in which case you'd score yourself lower? This is number four, personal responsibility. Or if you're someone who does this and you really focus on taking responsibility maybe you're going to score yourself as a higher score for this one. That's personal responsibility. All right, next one. Number five is called emotional agility. Emotional agility. If we think about the stress as a leader the things that leaders have to do looking after their staff, looking after stakeholders, looking after budgets it's extremely difficult for a leader not to get emotionally challenged and to get stress and to see those emotions come out. Leaders who have really experienced that controlling their emotions stay calm in the face of adversity and also when they're squeezed they don't show that and let their emotions come out. Now to control your emotions you have to really practice. We all get affected at work and if you think about some people in different companies especially people like CEOs and what they have to go through and you see them on stage and they're pretty calm, yeah? But what are they really feeling like inside? So controlling your emotions and you have to use the same technique as I taught you with the squeezing of the orange juice you have to create a gap you have to create a pause between the stimulus, the emotional response and you have to try and then calm down but here's the trick when you get home from work or however you talk to someone you need to let the emotions out you need to talk and let those emotions out and to let the emotions go somewhere and not keep them within you. So it's a really tough thing to control your emotions it's actually a very difficult thing to do. How well do you think you go with dealing with your emotions? How well do you think you go? Give yourself a score. Again this is number five emotional agility give yourself a score either a low score which means you're building an understanding something in the middle with working experience or maybe you do this really well which I would call extensive experience. Okay next one we're going to take the next topic number six which is psychological safety. Now psychological safety has been proven by lots of studies especially ones by Google as being the key thing that tells us about what would be an attribute of a high-performing team. There's lots of stuff online now about psychological safety if you've never heard of it I suggest you research it but what does it mean? It means that as a team member I feel safe to speak my mind I feel safe to tell it like it is and to give ideas and to give suggestions and to put my hand up and it's important that people can do this no idea should be too stupid as a leader the way that you respond to ideas and how inclusive you can be to ideas and letting people speak will have a huge impact on your team so please as a leader think about how you can be open to ideas and how do you create a safe space for others to be themselves and to be fully open and transparent about how they're feeling One tip I've got for you to create psychological safety is to be as human as you can admit that you make mistakes we're all human and build relationships with people beyond work and also admit that you don't have the answers admit that maybe you don't have all the answers as a leader we've been taught to be smart and clever and have all the answers so as a leader how can you create safety for your team it's called psychological safety and please now go to your self reflection topic number six how do you reckon you stack up with psychological safety are you doing a good job at creating safety for your teams which would be the highest score give yourself a tick there or is it working experience or is this still new to you and you are still learning topic number seven I've just now I shall be vulnerable and open and create safety and so I just dropped my phone I've also got a big boot on my right leg because I've got a fractured ankle so that was nearly dangerous but we're okay we're back on track intent based leadership so intent based leadership is topic seven intent based leadership comes from a story by David Marquet and David Marquet has created an awesome book called turn the ship around he was a navy captain on a submarine and he suddenly at the last minute had to go on a different submarine the submarine captain is a technical expert and he had to go on a different ship and he was no longer able to work as he normally did because he wasn't the expert he had to change his leadership style so this is what he did he stopped giving orders he stopped telling people what to do and he got the team to use intent based leadership this is what happens the team would say I intend to sink the ship submarine is going to go down we're going to go down to a lower depth and the captain would then respond with yeah go for it so he got the team to think he created 135 thinking people on the ship rather than just having the captain thinking him giving orders and everyone else just receiving orders so as a leader how can you stop giving orders how can you create the space for others to think and to come up with things for themselves here's a tip if you're on a whiteboard as a leader are you the one always drawing on the whiteboard are you leading too much can you step back and give the space for your team to have the pen give intent give a purpose motivate people and let them make the decisions now let's rate yourself how do you rate yourself on intent based leadership topic seven give yourself a score are you just learning have you got some experience coming or have you got extensive experience intent based leadership and check out the awesome work of David Marquet topic number eight let's talk about trust now trust there are many models for trust and the one that I like is really simple imagine that an egg is set on a wall now this egg is a fresh egg it's not a hard boiled egg and trust is like this egg the hard boiled egg an egg which is a fresh egg as you know can get cracked and it will break trust is as fragile as this egg on a wall now the trust wall is made up of three components it's made up of promises it's made up of expectations and needs and in a relationship with somebody else we all have promises that we make to each other some of those promises are obvious and some of those promises may be implicit and may be not spoken so what promises have you made to another person and what have they made to you what expectations do you have of another person and what expectations do they have of you finally the needs what needs do you have and what needs do they have from you so you've both got these trust walls and if you break a promise or if you don't meet someone's expectation that they think that you've got a brick will come out of the wall and this egg the egg that's set on the wall that's called trust will easily break it doesn't take many bricks to come out of that wall for trust to break and as we all know it's extremely hard to get it back how do you rate yourself on building trust do you understand your relationships in terms of needs, promises and expectations that's topic number eight give yourself a score low, medium, high in terms of your experience give yourself a score how do you feel you go with trust topic number nine topic number nine is called engagement and flow the flow state is a fantastic state to be in if we look at it outside of work I go kayaking on Sydney Harbour and when the waves are tough and the winds up I'm kayaking in Sydney Harbour and my mind is just so focused on the activity I'm in flow I'm in flow I'm not thinking about it I'm just in the moment and teams can achieve this state at work so teams can achieve flow and teams can be in this focused state of flow where they are in the moment they're not noticing time and they're in a real high performing state as a leader your job is to make sure we don't interrupt flow how can we create a condition where flow is not a permanent state but we get it as often as we can try not to put interruptions in the way to stop the team being in the state if they're not in the state of flow the bad news is is that they're in one of these other states and when you have a look at the workbook you can see that the other states are not necessarily words that we want to be in so you can see the different states there so there were things like anxiety boredom know where your teams are at in terms of engagement think about when you've been in a state of flow and how that feels at work and think about as a leader how can you help your teams get into flow it's a great topic engagement and flow that was topic number nine please self-reflect what are you like about getting your teams into a state of flow how many interruptions do your teams have how smooth is their work and their ability to do work give yourself a score low score would be still building experience in the middle it's working experience and at the top end it's extensive experience that was topic number nine last topic for you last topic topic 10 here we go the last topic is called holding space as a leader how many opportunities can you create for your teams to do amazing things creative breakthroughs by giving them time to work together and space together these creative breakthroughs can be amazing I gave my team an opportunity a few years ago where I opened a space the space I opened was what if we put an awesome conference on within our organization what if now my team loved that challenge and they flocked to it I stepped back so as a leader you open a space and then you step back and you see who fills the space which team members are going to fill the space you stay close to them but you hold the tension you let them fail you let them, you know, learn but you don't let them fail too much you stay close enough to help them and support them and this process of letting them do it and letting them own it is so so powerful and I really recommend this to you as a technique open the space for your teams to do great things as a leader your job is to set an inspiring challenge to the team and then step back and let them fill the space and let them come up with the solutions that's our last topic topic 10 it was called holding space please self reflect now and give yourself a score for holding space either building an understanding the lower score working experience or extensive experience but those are our 10 topics I'm intrigued to have some discussion now with you and for you to reflect on some of the lower scores I'd love to hear from some people around what were your lower scores in this but before I do that I'll just kind of do a quick summary being an agile leader for many people in industry is going to take some unlearning leaders behave as they do because it's how they've been brought up it's how they've been taught it's what they were told at school and at management school so I want you to be careful not to criticize the leaders that you have today if they don't exhibit a lot of these characteristics that we really want to see from them in agile but they will get there and your job if you're a scrum master or a coach or BA whatever your job is is to help them and to share some of these concepts with them and within the workbook when you have a look at the workbook you'll see that there are questions so in every page of the workbook that you download there's questions this workbook is something that you can take away and use with your teams this is my gift to you to use it with your teams use it with leaders and talk about these topics so that is Sam's talk on discover your leadership agility you should have in front of you now a score sheet with some high mediums and lows I want to hear from a couple of people please in terms of your views I've also got lots of questions as well but before I answer the questions anybody keen to share what you had as a low score or a high score and then I'll take the questions in the Q&A who feels brave to share how did you self reflect and I think you just put your hand up I can't see the button to bring you in but I think the facilitator does know how to do that alright let me look at the let's say you know where the alright we've got a few people sharing the chat great you're sharing the chat which is awesome guys alright I'm going to go back into the questions now and have a quick look at the questions I've got lots of people sharing the bottom three top three alright let's have a look I'm just looking at the Q&A now would it be helpful if our peers and reporters do this assessment for their manager and shareback of course that's a great idea if you feel that you want feedback on these things from your teams I've actually included in a second thing which is this so if we were in person in India I was going to give you one of these which is the proper answer sheet rather than you having to write on a piece of paper who's coming up to talk to us Ravi I love the question I'm doing feedback is there anything how to do anything creative in lines of holding space back-to-back sprints yeah great how do we do this creative stuff with back-to-back sprints do you know what as a leader one of the key things you can do is to create space for learning as I said we're about to host in our company an annual agile conference we've also got a learning week coming up before that so in my organization we make time and we create space for teams to learn and it's a huge link to engagement how can you create space maybe you can take some every three months you can take a week we often take a planning week and we do learning and we do planning give the teams a down week so that's a great suggestion give the teams some downtime you can't just keep building building building your teams will not be engaged if all you can do is build build let's see what other questions I've got I feel managers feel uncomfortable to let go of control this session should help managers ease into the new way of leadership yeah great one that's a great question I think it takes time they need to unlearn they really need to unlearn some of these behaviors and like I said it's not their fault it's not their fault we really shouldn't be harsh on some of these leaders it's what they've been brought up with there's a bunch of stuff coming from the Scrum Alliance if any of you are Scrum Alliance members there's some courses coming up there's new certified agile leadership courses if anyone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn I can share more and I'll be delivering some of these courses online early next year um question from Nishi how do I maintain the flow of teams engagement in uncertain times with so many changes coming every day I think you need to protect the teams from from change and interruptions so even yes things keep changing every day but if you're working in Scrum you should have a sprint which you try and protect the team from interruptions in so really important that you try and it's just interruptions what meetings are you creating as a leader that are getting in the way of your teams actually creating the state of flow what else have we got um uh that's another comment on flow from Rohit there's several factors which can derail a team's focus changing requirements how as leaders can we keep them in flow um I think similar to the last point if you know there's going to be unknowns coming in maybe take less work into the sprint so maybe don't take a full sprint of work in and allow some of that time for the other work to come in but as much as you can if you've got a product owner role you've got to try and keep the teams focused um feedback from the team for me we use one sprint yeah so I like that thanks Anand you said you use one sprint in each PI as innovation sprint I love that have an innovation sprint I love that how often do I recommend you reflect on your leadership agility um if you are a real agile leader you should be getting continuous feedback from your teams and whether you're using this assessment or whether you're just asking them for ongoing feedback when you have a one-on-one often the leader meets with the staff member and the leader is giving feedback to the team when did you last stop and ask a team member what feedback have you got for me what feedback have you got for me it's a great thing to do um Shalini what would be the first step towards changing the mind step of the leadership as part of the org change yeah beautiful question so if we're looking at the bigger picture here and the bigger organizational changes that are required if you're really going to go and have an impact this needs to come from the top and if it's a cultural issue it needs to start with the top leaders so in the organization where I'm coaching at the moment we're starting to get this change coming through and we're starting to get leaders thinking differently about how they approach their work are they doing all 10 of these no but am I starting to see a shift in how the organization thinks absolutely so often if you've got one senior leader who you know is operating in this way how can you get that person to help create a movement and to look at the culture that we want in the organization it all often starts just with one person and I encourage you to have the courage live that scrum value of courage to have a go and to get people to feel confident to try things and to speak up how much psychological safety do you have what else have we got question just come in from Ravi it seems like our leadership likes to use agile words but they don't really care for the principles yeah great it's hard to break through agile and complete them to make actual progress how can the scrum master what can they do in that environment to maintain what they know they should be doing I think it's a difficult I don't really understand the question fully Ravi but my view on sometimes people using the language but not actually caring yeah so somebody who uses the language yeah they talk the talk but they don't walk the walk my views on this is that as a scrum master if you are on a scrum master role your job is to be a coach okay so you're a coach and as the coach how can you help those people understand the impact of their actions so I like to get people to pause and think about the impact what is the impact of your behavior it's difficult as scrum master but you've got to get people to slow down what else have we got how do I bring intent based leadership into practice some people think intent based leadership sounds really hard yeah I mean how do you give up control but how about this think about the Navy think about a submarine can you think of a harder environment to give up control what risks do we have in a nuclear submarine the big red button you know boom we fire a nuclear missile doesn't get any bigger than that yeah this leader turn the ship around David Marquet he did that and he created an amazing culture and actually that ship that crew became an award winning crew in terms of where they went in their ranking you must read the book or check out the video maybe someone can google turn the ship around and put it in the chat for me there's some great stuff online from David Marquet but to create it so the message I've got is if they can do it on a nuclear submarine we can do it in your organization let go the key thing is letting go I'm a leader I've got 20 people working for me I let go and I give the team responsibility I don't want to be the hero I don't want to be in all the decisions empower your team truly let go step back let go of your ego let go of the need to be in the in the in the front let go thank you for sharing the link Dolly let me just see anything else I can comment on please in the chat I've looked at all the Q&A I think let's just see if there's anything else for me to reflect on for you thank you for sharing your ups and downs what else have we got a lot of people saying emotional agility I'll just tell you a story about emotional agility to finish off the bottom three were your lowest scores a lot of people said emotional agility let's talk about emotional agility as the getting close to the end emotional agility now I was lucky enough last year to be an awards dinner so I work for a large bank and we have 50,000 people in the company I'm an awards dinner with the CEO I'm in a room with the big chief and in a company of 50,000 people that's pretty you don't see him that often so I'm at this forum with the CEO and I was thinking about emotional agility because I've been teaching it and this is what I said to him so I put my hand up I've got the mic I've got the big mic on stage hello I'm Sam I'm small Sam hello Mr. CEO and I said this I said when you are in front of the regulator when you are in front of prudential committees you know you're on the big stage and people are criticising you and our organisation organisation has done some bad things so banks in Australia had some troubles we've done some bad things and I said to him how do you control your emotions inside you must be absolutely either seeding or angry or sad and yet you are able as a leader to be composed and to show a professional face to the media a professional face to government a professional face to the regulator how do you do it? and do you know what he said which was quite pleasing for me given that I teach this stuff he talked about creating the gap and it's the gap between the sense or the squeeze and his response so he creates a mental gap and he counts to 3 seconds so for those of you who rated yourself low on emotional agility think about how you can create this space think about how you can create that gap the other tip I've got for you is don't take yourself so seriously often we get emotional about work and we take ourselves too seriously so maybe if you are getting emotional about work try and step back look at the bigger picture be grateful for what you have in your job and your life and chill out and that might help you get less emotional what else have we got in the chat we've got a couple of minutes see what else we've got in the chat all ministers are having excellent agility I don't know whether ministers have got agility or emotional agility in this country have not got agility in general although if you are working with government and you are getting them to be agile well done in practice how effective is asking questions during holding space in a group what about if someone has put a nice one on remote ways of working so if you are working remotely how do you demonstrate your agility I've got one for you which I think you will like use polling questions but I think we might be doing one at the end on feedback for the session use polling questions so every week I have a Skype call like this for 15 minutes with my team and I create an open whiteboard for them to bring ideas what do you want to talk about what are you curious about what do you want to share so first thing is I create this open space and it's for my team to share now most leaders I want to download I'm going to give you a 15 minute download I don't want the download I want the upload create the space a digital whiteboard for the upload what do they want to share what do they want to talk about I then ask two questions two polling questions question one when you think about your well being how are you the answers are okay I'm good I'm okay I'm not so good and the lowest score is I'm really not in a good place it's anonymous I then say to people if anyone's answered in those lower scores please make sure you're talking to someone that could be me or a colleague or someone out of work second question how much are you enjoying your work how much do you love work every week top answer I'm loving it second answer I'm enjoying it third answer it's okay next answer it's not so good last answer get me out of here every week I get this response again if people aren't I don't see whose answer it's anonymous I've got that safety if people answer in the lower bracket please talk to me if you're not getting what you want from work let me know my team know that my goal is that 80% of them say they're loving or enjoying their work as an agile leader it's your job to create the environment for your people to come to work to be their best and to feel like they can love love their work I'm serious love their work that's your job as an agile leader everybody I think we're close to done it's been fantastic to talk to you we'll reach out to me on LinkedIn I shall just pop up as a reminder where am I so here I am Sam Botel from Sydney, Australia go well India enjoy the rest of the conference namaste and let's enjoy Dave Snowden next it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you thank you