 Welcome everyone to the session, The Agile People Coach, an alternate career path for leaders and HR in the future workplace. We have our speaker with us, Maria, sorry, Pia Maria Thurian, Inspiration Director from Agile People. So welcome, Maria. Thank you so much, Carol. I'm very happy to be here and I'm going to share my screen with you. I will be talking today about the new and future role for HR and managers in the future of work, which I believe is the Agile People Coach. So what is an Agile People Coach? We'll be talking a little bit about that. So what is Agile People? Well, Agile People is a community with people who believe in a better way when it comes to how we run organizations in a complex world. We are all passionate about combining Agile and people to create conditions for a workplace where people feel happy and have what they need to perform in an optimal manner. How we view other people becomes very important here in Agile People. Douglas McGregor wrote this book in the end of the 1950s. It's called The Human Side of the Enterprise. And in this book, he talks about how we view other people, theory X and theory Y. And it's also about how the human mind works. So we can either view people as if they are X that they are lazy, unmotivated, they don't wanna take responsibility, or we can have a basic view of people as if they are Y. And then we believe that people want to be the best they can be. They want to contribute to create value for other people. And if they get the right conditions in our company system, they will also do that. So it all starts with how we view other people and what kind of structure we believe that we need to set them up for success. So how we view people affects how we structure our management processes. And this is important. If we turn to the future of work and look at some trends, we can see that artificial and intelligence and robotics will actually create more work for us in the future, not less. And there won't be a shortage of jobs, but there might be a shortage of skills, the right skills if we don't take the right steps now and unskill, re-skill people to be able to fill those jobs that will be available in the future of work because it's totally different roles. The majority of the workforce will not be employees in the future of works, they will be freelancing instead. And remote work becomes the norm. And it has already started and it's been spirited up by the pandemic of course as well. So in this complex reality that we are facing, we have to move from viewing the organization as a machine that can be controlled and managed to viewing it as a social system. People are not cogs in a machinery because people have feelings, dreams, challenges, thoughts and they cannot be controlled. People are not robots, they are complex adaptive systems that work from intrinsic motivation. And that means that we need to stop to see people as resources and view them as the living organisms as they are, who we need to treat differently to work optimally because everybody's different, we have different needs. I have written three books about these topics of agile HR, agile leadership and human motivation at work. And this is the first book that came out in 2017. The second book is a picture book with 220 illustrations that complement the messages from the first book. And then we also have the third book, the last one came out in September, 2020. And this one is a co-creation between myself and 35 agile people from around the world who have each written one chapter about one of the agile people principles that we work with. What are then the problems with traditional leadership and HR? Well, of course we believe that we can control reality and make a perfect plan when reality looks different. So the problem here is that the world is not predictable anymore and we need feedback regularly from reality to make the right choices along the way. And another problem is that we're focusing on the shareholder value when we should focus first on the customer value and the employee satisfaction. Happy employees serve customers and happy customers. We lay the foundation for profitable organization that can deliver value to the shareholders. But this is a consequence of the value creation happening between employees and customers. So profit is like the air we breathe. We need air to live but we don't need to breathe. So we need profit to survive as a company but that's not the reason why we're on the company. The reason is to create value for some customer. Another problem is that our organizational system is not making it easy for us to perform and be happy in the system. Instead it's limiting us and putting obstacles in the way for great performance and letting people be themselves and perform from their abilities and skills and passions. Think about it, a good system can make a mediocre person fantastic and a bad system can make a high performer perform really bad. About control also a little bit about budgeting and controlling people. The definition here is the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events. And in business terms it means controlling people and controlling the future. And this is the grand illusion that many managers have today that people can and must be managed and that the future is predictable and manageable. But we all know this is not true. So we have a lot of problems with annual budgets. It's a very time consuming process and the assumptions that we do in this process are very quickly outdated. It stimulates unethical behaviors and creates illusions of control but we know we don't have control. And decisions are made too early and often too high in the hierarchy. It guarantees that we have the planned costs but it doesn't guarantee that we have the planned revenues. And it can prevent other value-adding activities that we could engage in if we didn't have this fixed annual budget broken down to department budgets. A consequence of that is that we are setting fixed performance targets on departments and on the people who are responsible for different departments. And we are doing traditional performance ratings as a result to see how well did you achieve the goals that we set in the beginning of the year. And a year is much too long when the organizational reality changes quickly. We need to set much shorter goals. We are also focusing on judging the past when we should really be focusing on improvement for the future and feedback during the year. Also, does the boss know best? Maybe there are other people in the organization who knows better how I have performed. And it's connected to salary which leads to sandbagging and lower set goals. Also sub-optimizing effects from this exercise breed competition and not the necessary cooperation and collaboration that we need for sustainable performance. We are focusing here on all the wrong things just results, figures and numbers instead of the good behaviors that we need to increase to create successful organizations. Another problem is simply engagement. And this is the state of the global workplace that Gallup does regularly. It proves that many, many people are actually more or less indifferent at work. They are mostly waiting for lunch and very few are passionately engaged. And it's almost more people who are disengaged actively than engaged actively. Another problem is managers who are feeling a lack of psychological safety in our agile transformation programs. They might wonder what happens to me and my role when we go agile, what will become of me when everybody seems to be able to lead themselves and they don't need to be managed anymore because this is a part of self-leadership and increased people agility. This problem needs to be taken very seriously and can potentially ruin the whole change initiative. So the skills that took managers to the position they are in today are often not the skills that are needed to lead in a complex world and reality. So it's totally different skills that are needed for leaders as well. It's more about servant coaching leadership. But how do then managers go from traditional high power and status to servant and transformational leadership? Well, we need to make it possible for leaders to change in the system by changing the environment. And we need to inspire leaders to find that intrinsic motivation to do it and to help them attain an agile mindset. But these are two conflicting goals as it's only the leaders who can change the structures that would make it possible for themselves to have the mindset. So it's a catch 22 dilemma. So where do we go from here? What should we do instead? How shall we handle these problems? What will be leaders role when everyone manages themselves and they don't need to be told what to do or be judged in a nine box grid anymore? Well, we have changes for HR and we have changes for leaders. And we are going to start with the changes that are needed for HR. Instead of focusing on execution, order and control for the future of work, HR needs to focus on adaptability, innovation and speed and on their internal customers. And HR I believe should be part of leading the change because it's all about the people and HR, they are the people, people. If we can give the right conditions to people, they will take care of the rest. So we need to let go of trying to control them and instead work with supporting them. We don't need to do more things. We need to learn to stop how we are hindering people from giving their best efforts to the company by providing the wrong structures. And these structures that I talk about is many times controlled by HR. It's change management, leadership development, talent acquisition, performance management, you name it, all these deep structures that everybody is touched by. So if HR keeps holding on to the old ways of doing things that would keep the hierarchies in place, then we don't have the possibility to change in any part of the company. That's why they need to go first. And instead of using job descriptions to close people into boxes marked with labels, we need to focus on letting people be their best selves at work and start from the person when we create their job. There are a few people who fit a predefined job description perfectly. And often they have other skills that the organization could benefit from that we are missing out on if we are not open to tailor their role to some degree. So in Agile, we talk a lot about T-shaped competency. You need to have both breadth and depth. You can also call them generalized specialists or specialized generalists, which creates a lot of flexibility and adaptability to the organization, both on the individual level, but also on the team level where we have an increased flexibility when everyone can take on each other's tasks and for the whole organization, where we can make competency shifts possible and minimize the risk for bottlenecks in competence. Great tool for HR to use in the new world of work is the employee experience journey mapping where we start from personas and we think about the journey steps in the employee life cycle. What are the goals and needs? What are the touch points with the organization in every step here? What does the organization do? And what are the barriers and enablers that we can put in place to help people to perform and be happy? So we have some from to for a job professional that wants to move from being a charge, to becoming agile people coaches. And I think we don't have time to go through all of them, but I think you will get access to the slides afterwards so then you can read more about this. Agile leadership for the future of work, how does that look like? Well, here we move from managing people, telling them what to do because some people may have a lot of great ideas that we need to take into account. And the enabling performance person is the CEO, the chief enabling officer instead of the chief executive officer. But of course it's not just the CEO who needs to change. Everyone needs to work with a supportive and facilitating leadership that should be all about creating motivation towards common goals. So a good leader can create the conditions for performance and co-worker satisfaction by working on the system so that it's easy to perform and be happy. We say care for the people, but manage the system. How do you build psychological safety then if you're a manager? Well, you need to admit mistakes, you need to show vulnerability, ask a lot of questions. That's how we increase the pace of learning if you're a manager. We need everybody's brain to solve this problem. What do you think? I make mistakes too, okay. So acknowledge your own fallibility if you're a leader. And the gardener metaphor is perfect for agile leadership. And here we see the company as a garden with an overall purpose. We need to take care of the plants in this garden. And they all have different needs. Some like to grow in the shadows, some like more sunshine, some need lots of water, some grow slower, some grow faster, but we cannot scream to the plants to make them grow faster. The only thing we can do is to make sure that every plant has the conditions that they would like to grow in. So the agile leader is the gardener who takes care of the plants, trying at the same time to fulfill the purpose of the whole garden. And we also have a difference between the manager and the agile people coach. So this is the move that the manager needs to make for the future of work. Again, we don't have time to go into detail here. The roles of the agile people coach is a role where you use many different competences and you become more and more T-shaped depending on where you come from. And usually you come from a leader role, a line management role, an HR professional role, or an agile coach role. Here we focus more on people than on process. So this is the difference between the agile coach and the agile people coach. It's more focus on people, relationships, interactions between people and groups of people, interaction between teams, relationship management and communication. So these are the skills that an agile people coach needs to develop. If we look at the difference more in detail between the agile coach and the agile people coach, it's more about working in IT and tech. You may come from there, but now it's about supporting leaders on different levels. So it takes some other skills to do that. And the skills that we have defined for the agile people coach, or except for the common Lisa Adkins framework for agile coaching, we decided that the agile people coach also needs to be able to take more roles. And that's to understand the organization as a system. So emergent strategy and systems thinking, that's the navigator role. And the guide role is you might come from a leader position in some part of the organization or in the business where you have local expertise. For example, you may come from finance or legal or HR or IT, you have a lot of competence around a certain function or a certain part of the business value chain. Then you can take the guide role. But the most important role is the reflective observer where you step outside of the organizational system. You look at the system from outside and then you decide in what role can I make myself most useful when I step in again into the organization. So a leader can emerge from any department within an organization and they have deep leadership skills that have likely been in development for many years. They may come from a specialist role within a certain function or have a proficiency in various leadership frameworks or simply they possess a general broad leadership competence. So they have the ability to make hard decisions when no one else is willing to take on the responsibility or put a stake in the ground. And they are able to explore different strategies and consider a wide variety of factors when making decisions. Could be the competitive landscape, market trends, people's individual passions and competencies and the advantages and disadvantages for the organization as a whole. So seeing consequences in the whole system. The agile master contribute with agile and lean tools, methods, practices and principles. And this is someone who fully understands agile values and principles and has a firm grasp of the mindset of agility. They are not depending on any specific methods or tools but rather based on the values and principles they can successfully choose the tools and methods that might fit the situation at hand. So and if there are no exact tools they are able to either adapt something else or even to create something new from scratch. The HR professional has experience as an HR business partner or manager or a specialist. And they have a solid general understanding of what makes people motivated and are capable of having these hard conversations to inspire people to excel. They are also the only role in the organization who deal with negotiations with unions and have competence around labor law and societal regulations. The guide has deep knowledge about the specific place that you are in right now or about the specific topic that you are working with so they can take you on a journey to understand the process showing you the path through the particular surroundings and often teaching or facilitating by examples, stories and expertise. And the navigator is someone who is comfortable with the complexity and helps the team to step into the explorer mentality framing the issue formulating a hypothesis, designing a safe to fail experiment and learning quickly what is promising and what is not. And then the reflective observer last but not least. This is that space in the middle of things where rather than jumping to conclusions or reacting too quickly and possibly wrongly you can figure out what's going on with the team and how you can best help them in whatever scenario they are in. And the skills here that you need to cultivate to be a great reflective observer is that of self-awareness and self-regulation and in particular that of being able to observe without judging. So depending on the needs of your people you take a different role to support them and let's face it, nobody can be fantastic in all of these roles from the beginning. And this is where your lifelong learning journey begins. You always work on improving yourself and being able to play more and different roles but you have to start somewhere and maybe you start from a leadership role or from being the age of professional in your organization for many years or maybe you have worked as an agile coach or want to develop yourself moving on from there. We cannot do it alone. So to be able to remove limiting structures and change the culture and start collaborating towards a more agile future we need to join forces together. HR cannot do it alone, leaders cannot do it alone. We need everybody to start talking across boundaries of different kinds starting the conversation and nudging the system and the people and moving that common direction together. So when we work with agile we don't follow any recipes. I used to call it an anti-recipe. Agile never prescribes any best solutions or best practice that always work. Best practice is always post-practice today and only mediocre companies use best practice today because you will never be better than your competitors if you follow best practice. So that's where we work with principles as the basis the agile people principles. And you can use experiment with different tools to make the principles come alive of course. So how do we grow culture? Well we start by changing or removing limiting structures mainly from financed annual budgets linked to fixed performance targets and rewards that's where HR comes in as well. And we increase the supporting structures to make it easy to behave according to the agile mindset. These structures could be scrum or Kanban or OKRs or value stream mapping or other agile friendly structures that are not limiting to the extent that the traditional structures are. And then we start showing new behaviors that come from working with new ways new tools and following new principles and values. It's a very gradual change. It's a continuous learning journey. And then we repeat from one. So this is our agile people manifesto that we have created for you. And you can find it on agilepeoplemanifesto.org and you can see a small movie clip of what it looked like when we put it together in 2019. We were 19 persons from 15 different countries from all over the world who made this together. So that's to increase people agility. So with this, I'm just going to give you a last shout out. Start today. Follow the agile people principles and start your personal and organizational learning journey towards greater people and business agility. The sooner you start, the sooner you will reap the benefits from happy performing people working together towards a common vision. We invite you to join the agile people community and to get more information about that, you can visit agilepeople.com. Thank you very much. And now I will just open up for questions and answers. Let's see if we have any questions here. Thank you, Pia Maria. We have three questions. And I think there are a lot of people appreciating the presentation and the session in our chat group. So I will start with the questions. I'll go ahead. So the first question is from an anonymous attendee. Managers generally think of themselves and scrum masters as enforcers because they feel they know the best. If they have seen success in doing that in terms of rewards and growth, how will you make them think otherwise? Yes. How will you make somebody else think otherwise? It's not possible to make people think otherwise. It's only possible to be the change yourself. You cannot change anybody else. What you can do is to change how you are and how you act and what the questions are that you ask to the people around you. This is how you can nudge the people and the system around you. You cannot really change somebody else. And you cannot make people think differently. You can only nudge people to ask questions. And you can work with your innovators within the organization. And you can also talk about things that the managers think is important, like profits, for example, show evidence that this is profitable. Maybe not talk about agile so much because they have tendency to dislike the word agile and agility. Agility is maybe more accepted than the agile world because they think that, yeah, agile, that's something that the teams are doing. It doesn't concern us. Since managers have very, they have been in the past relying on power and status. So these are the drive, the drives, the basic needs that they have. And this is not needed for the future of work. A great deal of managers need to change their roles or be replaced by people who have a different mindset. If we are going to increase business agility. Thank you. Pia Maria, we have another question. So this is also anonymous attendee. Any organization which you know of who has agile people coaches, any case studies around it would be helpful? Yes, of course. We have many organizations with agile people courses. I have people all over the world. To see some of them, you can go to my website, agilepeople.com. These are all agile people coaches that you can see there. How do you encourage openness in teams? One tool that is really great to use, that we use a lot in agile people, is the psychological safety game. And that's a tool to be able to open up and have difficult dialogues about topics that you usually don't talk about in organizations. So you find the psychological safety game on agilepeople.com. If you don't have the direct address, you can register and then it will become visible for you from the games menu on agilepeople.com. But for that you need to register and then you see it under the games menu. That's a great tool to use for creating openness and psychological safety. Wow, that's a great resource. Thank you. I'm also going to head over there and have a look. The next question we have is from Sudarshan Sharma. How do you tackle resistance from senior management who believes in old school principles of people management and don't want to adapt to agile HR? Well, you continue to ask questions, but we don't waste too much energy on senior managers who are not willing to change. They are the laggards, they will not change. You work with the people who are positive. You work with your innovators. You work with your early adopters. You convince them, you support them more than trying to convince old traditional managers who have no intention to change whatsoever because you are wasting your time trying to do that. The next question is from Chitrathana. Listening is an important attribute for a coach. How can traditional managers be trained to listen more than speak, guide rather than be direct? Send them to the Agile People Coach Course in Agile People. That's what we learn there. How to ask questions rather than controlling and micro-managing and giving orders. So it's a totally different leadership style. So it starts with an organization's leadership programs really. That's where it starts. How do you train your leaders to become Agile People Coaches instead of being traditional micro-managing, controlling managers? So I think it's a three-step process. It's awareness about what is happening in the world. How do we as an organization need to change to reap the benefits of what's happening in this world all the time adapting to change and customers change needs? And then it's training and then it's coaching. So it's a three-step process, this one. Awareness, training and coaching. Thank you. The next question we have is from Balaji. Can I assume that the need for Agile People Coach is because of the nature of the future work which current HR cannot handle? Probably, yes. Because the structures that HR is used to working with are very much conserving the pyramid. And these processes, succession management, career planning, career ladders, positions, climbing the organizational ladder, et cetera. All these processes, talent management, they are made for more or less keeping the pyramid in place to keeping the current structures in place and making sure that that stays that way. So it's very difficult for HR to rethink and understand that they need to change because this is what they learned in HR University when they learned how to become HR managers. Thank you. The next question is from an anonymous attendee. The issue is with mindset. The moment Agile coaches or anyone else starts moving into Agile People Coach role, senior management or senior architects think of them as people managers and start putting on comments like, Agile doesn't need managers. How to deal with that mindset? Yes. Agile doesn't need formal traditional managers. I agree with that actually. But nobody wants to be managed. Everybody wants a coach. So we need coaches, facilitators, servant leaders, but we don't need formal managers. I agree with that. Okay. Thank you. The next question we have from biology. Do Agile People Coach improve employee experience also? Yes, definitely. That's the actual purpose of Agile People. The Agile People Coach main responsibility is to improve the employee experience through the employee life cycle so that every employee can be happy, performing, being taken seriously, listened to, being seen, being heard. Given the tools they need to be able to perform and be happy. So that's very much in focus for Agile People. Do you see its anonymous attendee? Do you see Scrum Masters moving towards Agile People Coaching or would it be an hindrance for them? No, that's a very natural path to follow from being a Scrum Master or regular Agile Coach really to becoming an Agile People Coach and for that you need more people skills. You may need experience from leading people or from helping and coaching leaders leading people. This is the experience that you may need to develop and more about psychology, relationships, sociology, and understanding human nature and neuroscience and brain, never leadership and things like this. This is the skills that you need to develop and that's what you're learning the Agile People Coach course. The next question we have is how to make a mediocre team, a high-performing team by influencing without authority? Yes. So how does a mediocre team become high-performing? Well, it's also by coaching really. It's by asking the right questions and helping the team using the different Agile People Coach roles. So you can be a mentor, a facilitator, or a coach or whatever guide or navigator or HR professional or leader depending on the needs of the team. So a good coach can then understand what the team needs. How can I nudge them? What questions can I ask? How can I support them? Maybe I can support them in a more mentor-like role or a more teaching role or a more facilitating role depending on what are their challenges. So we need to observe, we need to communicate a lot and understand the needs of the team and then we can guide them towards high performance. That's the goal really for every Agile Coach and also for Agile People Coaches. The next question we have is from Hemalata. When teams are across cultures where one culture is more dominative and hindering self-management of the team, how do we then foster autonomous teams? Dominant cultures hindering self-management of the team. I don't think it's different than the answer from my previous question, really. When you are across cultures, well, some cultures are easier to work with because they are more mature. I usually call it, they have a more mature way of... They have an easier time taking ownership and leading themselves, self-organizing, because there are different levels of self-organizing. You can self-organize, you can self-manage, and you can also self-direct in a very mature team where you also see that you can set your own goals and help to create the strategy and direction for the whole organization. So it's always that you are affected by, of course, company culture. Also, country culture will affect you. The team culture will affect you, but there are usually many, many different cultures in a company, and each team has their own culture. So what you can do is to work from where you are. You start from where you are as a team. And then you move from there continuously improving, continuously learning, continuously running small experiments, failing, succeeding, learning from mistakes. This is how you go about it for any team really. Thank you. I think we'll take the last question because we have three minutes left. There are two questions which I can maybe combine. There are from anonymous attendees. So they're talking about performance assessment. So they're saying that even if somebody is a coach, they're always a feeling that that person is their boss. So how does that change in Agile people's coach? Yes, we don't do. I am not an advocate of performance assessment. You should never judge somebody else. So remove performance reviews or performance ratings and work instead with intrinsic motivation and OKRs and other ways of working with compensation than performance assessment. We should never judge other people. That's my view. And I think one last we can ask is that somebody from a product background can that person become Agile people's coach? Definitely. Yes. Of course. Why not? It's about the skills that you need to develop to become a good Agile people coach. It's people skills, psychology, relationship management, self-awareness, understanding yourself, helping other people to grow, also understanding other people better. So starts with self-awareness. How do we handle non-performance? This is an interesting one. Yes, thank you. That's the last one. I really wanted to answer that one. Well, if there is no performance whatsoever, even if we replant this flower in the organizational system in the garden, we need to understand why. That's the first step. Why is this person not performing? Depending on the answer, we might be able to give them the chance somewhere else in our organization. If there is no place in our organization where this person can perform, then we need to help them out of this system and into some other system somewhere else. Thank you. Thank you so much, Pia Maria, for such an insightful session. So much to learn and so many takeaways. Thank you.