WLP321 Leadership Visibility and Transparency in Remote Organisations
Pilar talks to returning guest Mark Kilby about the different ways in which leaders can gain visibility in remote organisations, the need for pervasive and transparent communication, as well as the benefits of visualising our work.
Pilar is joined today by Mark Kilby, a remote agile practitioner and co-author of From Chaos To Successfully Distributed Agile Teams. This time he’s back to talk about some of the content he covered in a recent Virtual Agile Meetup.
Senior leaders in organisations are struggling to stay visible. Mark worked with a senior VP of product who was great at communicating information in different ways, and at being accessible for questions.
For example, if there was something the competition was doing that everyone should know about, he’d write a blog post (by the way, he was a very good writer, which helps.). But then, he would also bring the topic to the all hands meeting. He also held Ask Me Anything sessions in smaller groups, at different times to cover different time zones. Sometimes, he’d write a follow up blog post to cover the questions and feedback that had been raised that might be of interest to everyone.
It might feel like a lot of work, but it’s worse if you don’t communicate as diversely- and in this way, you’re likely to get less questions from individuals, which take up more time to address. Most organisations use the online space now to communicate, so this is all relevant to most organisations, regardless of their degree of “remoteness”.
09.10mins
It’s not just to be deliberate about what channels you use, but also about establishing a pattern, so that if people miss the first bit of communication, they know what else is coming.
Pervasive communication versus transparent communication - what’s the difference?
One is about making sure the communication goes out in different channels, whereas transparency ensures that everyone can access and understand the communication. This often involves a mixture of synchronous or asynchronous communication.
Transparency is also about enabling people to access information across the organisations, without having to go up and down the organisational chart to get it. Ways of enabling this are meetings where different teams come together like Ask Me Anythings or Lean Coffees, also Hackathon-type events where people from different teams work together.
Informal channels are also important, starting with a watercooler type channels, but moving onto special interest groups where people can network and learn about each other in a range of ways, including showing/sharing their diverse skills. It’s important in hybrid organisations that networking continues to happen online, not just in the office. Of course you need a community builder to champion this.
Mark Kilby
18.00mins
If the foundations of Agile are transparency, feedback and adaptation and the foundations of remote are choice, focus and balance, merging them together you have a great way of working! If we are thinking of giving remote a really good try, we need to understand whether our organisation has the right culture. Or, will adapting some practices create the right culture?
Mark reminds us of the Agile phrase “Start where you are”. Things to consider, how do you help people collaborate, share their work, work out loud, regardless of how remote they are.
So, what about distributed Agile? Has that taken off yet? Or has the pandemic polarised people even more around the debate of whether you can do Agile remotely? In any case, it looks like people are starting to experiment with practices online vs co-located; synchronously vs asynchronously etc, as long as you understand what you want to achieve. If you can give choice to the people doing the work, they’ll come up with what’s best for them.
25.20mins
Mark has been collaborating with Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria at the Modus Institute on visual management systems in teams. This involves things like a team walking through some steps to understand the state of the work, the story (why) behind the work, how can they visually capture their culture to maintain it, etc. It’s all about optimising collaboration through visual arrangements.
Some of the steps they look at are: the state of the work, triggers, the longer term plan around the work, the story/narrative/why around the work, what’s the culture, what’s the team’s and individual’s identity. It’s important to know what the team’s doing, but also as individuals to know why you are attracted to the work. With more choice available, we need to keep checking in with ourselves.
And if people share what’s important for them, if a new opportunity comes up and the person moves on, it won’t be a shock to anyone. This is another side of “transparency”.
How can we use this framework as managers and teams? It depends on what the team needs. For a new team, you could talk through the elements over some workshops - it’s important to have time in between sessions to digest new information and letting go of uncovered assumptions. For a more mature team, they will already have done some of this work, so the dynamics and pace will be different. Could you even turn it into an asynchronous exercise, for example by tackling one element at a time? In this way, you can experience the day to day, and coming back to the exercise/canvas as things change.
What about when your work clashes with these elements? That’s where the learning takes place!
Check out Mark’s book: From Chaos To Successfully Distributed Agile Teams . You can find Mark over at markkilby.com and modusinstittute.com .
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