The end of agile (IX)

(To listen to the soundtrack of this post click here)

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
— Aretha Franklin

Rock and pop have always had great female voices. My favorites range from the soul of Aretha Franklin to the avant-garde Björk, by way of the Wilson sisters (Heart) and the punk attitude of Hayley Williams (Paramore) and Shirley Manson (Garbage). From my youth I’d single out the wonderful Cyndi Lauper and Pat Benatar. And of course Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. And a list like this can’t leave out two great singers who left us very young: Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse.

They are strong, wonderful voices that have no trouble telling it like it is, frankly but without spite, with respect and firmness, which happen to be two of the values I consider essential for leading a high-performance team.

This is the ninth part of this series and I’m now entering the current stage of my professional life. I’ve been working for a little over ten years at Previred, my current professional home. Rather than carry on in the autobiographical vein, I want to finish this series with a few articles focused on the pillars we have been building to support our work in the organization. Of course I’ll tell some anecdotes or biographical details I consider relevant, but that doesn’t mean I’ll keep to a linear chronological sequence as I have so far.

Reforms

All that I want
Is to wake up fine
Tell me that I’m alright
— Paramore

As stated in the principles of the agile manifesto: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”.

That is what I have devoted myself to all these years, ever since I got Esteban Segura’s invitation to join him in setting up Previred’s new business division in August 2008. As I told you at the end of the previous chapter, it was an almost chance encounter that put us in touch and allowed me to join this project.

Two thousand eight was the year the pension reform of Michelle Bachelet’s first government was enacted. The reform called for a series of regulatory changes that required coordination between the public and private social security institutions.

Those reforms introduced the solidarity pillar, set up services to speed up attention to future members through the ChileAtiende offices (the government’s citizen service centers), and would bring in a series of state contributions to encourage pension savings among young people and women. The social security industry needed to build technological muscle that could respond quickly to the challenges the reform posed. That is how Previred was tasked with carrying out a series of projects, and to do so it was decided to create a unit specialized in providing these services.

On September 8, 2008, Esteban and I were sitting in a meeting room, starting to model the new division. A few days later we would be joined by Vania Orloff, who during those first weeks also very generously trained us in how the Chilean social security system works.

The three of us would set up our unit with complete independence, a bold decision by the general manager at the time, Rosita Ackermann, who fully trusted our judgment and abilities. Esteban was in charge of overall direction and the commercial side, Vania of everything operational, and I of technology. My personal challenge was to put together the entire technology team, from infrastructure to development.

Value Driven Development

“I drove all night to get to you
Is that alright”
— Cyndi Lauper

How do you manage to develop a framework that supports value-oriented development?

In our experience, over these years of work, we have developed a framework resting on three essential pillars:

1. Establishing a culture.

2. Improving practices and techniques.

3. Measuring performance.

The focus of this post is on the first pillar, which has to do with cultural change. How do you build, or sustain, a culture? And why does culture matter?

Software, or any service, doesn’t appear spontaneously; it’s people who build it. Some people believe you can split yourself in two and separate your feelings, everything that makes you a person, from the professional side. And it isn’t so. We bring all of ourselves to work, and that is what we have to acknowledge, especially those of us in leadership.

As I put it near the end of my first book:

Software is developed by people for people. People make mistakes, estimate badly, are optimistic, are ignorant, are intelligent, are brilliant, are deficient. People are the key factor.

And because I believe that, I learned to care about the environment in which people’s work takes place: the culture.

Culture

There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic
To human behavior
But yet so, yet so irresistible
And there's no map
— Björk

When we started our new business unit we weren’t starting in a vacuum; there were already some launched projects that we had to start running. [We got support from the organization, but we quickly started moving in a different way, given the freedom we had. We even hired the services of a different datacenter from the one the organization used for its services.]{style=“letter-spacing: 0.01rem;”}

I started selecting engineers to put together the development team. I tried to bring in people I had worked with, but the conditions weren’t right. I did have the good fortune of finding a very smart young man, with a big heart and a great attitude, Felipe Bello. Along with him came another young man eager to contribute, Nicolás Vergara. Together the three of us started building our first services.

Felipe had a master’s degree in data mining, so during that time he was an important help in putting together a series of proofs of concept for information services we could offer. It was an intense time, because we didn’t have many resources and we had to meet regulatory deadlines.

It was the era of the chaos of expansion. We stayed late. There was a lot of manual operation and we kept creating new services practically every day. But it was hard to find talent.

Mars Need Women

All your life you've never seen
A woman taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven?
Will you ever win?
— Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac started out as one more British blues band, a period in which they racked up big hits. But there’s no denying the radical change when Stevie Nicks joined and Christine McVie moved up front. They became a completely different band, and probably a more successful one. That is the magic power women have when they join any team.

When I was just starting out, beginning to form my team, I ran into a friend who gave me several pieces of advice on how to organize productive teams. One of the things he told me was to bring women onto the team quickly. One reason, he said, is that if you start with an all-male team a harsher culture will form, where roughness is the main norm, and later it will be hard to bring more women onto the team, because the toxicity will drive them away. I took note of the advice, and it was one of the principles I set as essential in shaping my team: the team should reflect diversity, so I would aim to have as many women as possible.

In 2009 one of the first women joined my team at Previred. She came recommended by Felipe, since they had worked together. It was Carolina Rojas. According to Felipe she was an excellent software engineer, but she had a lot of potential as a leader and was looking to grow on the management side. For my part, I needed someone to help me pull off a project that had an immovable deadline and was being carried out by an external vendor.

Whenever Carolina recalls the job interview, she mentions that I asked her whether she knew Java or anything about JBoss, to which she answered no, and that in spite of that I told her she was hired. She must have thought I was nuts, or very absent-minded. What I actually cared about was testing her attitude and ambition, that drive to grow professionally that she showed in the interview. I spotted a lot of potential there, and luckily I wasn’t wrong.

[Years later I wrote about this idea of bringing more women onto teams. It turns out that what happened with Fleetwood Mac was no accident. As I explain in detail in this article, Mars needs women, female participation in high-performance teams matters a great deal.

This chart is taken from that post:

The chart appears in a 2007 study that shows how bringing women onto a team makes it possible to reach high performance.

I focus on this chart because it speaks to one of the important dimensions you have to take care of in order to create a high-performance environment: psychological safety.

Psychological safety

No sir, well I don't wanna be the blame, not anymore.
It's your turn, so take a seat we're settling the final score.
And why do we like to hurt so much?
— Paramore

Psychological safety is very important, but it can’t be everything. If you focus only on psychological safety you’ll lead your team into a comfort zone where they’ll be happy and comfortable, but they won’t give their best. You have to motivate and demand so that they can reach their full potential.

Let me illustrate it with the following drawing:

On the vertical axis we’ve put psychological safety, a very important element that you have to take charge of as a leader. On the horizontal axis, commitment and demand. This gives us four quadrants. The bottom left is the apathy zone. There’s no psychological safety and nobody commits to anything, because while nobody bothers to keep a good climate, there are no challenges either, so things don’t move. You don’t want to be in this quadrant.

The bottom right quadrant is the zone of anxiety, of distress. It’s where we push our team to the extreme and drive them to “burnout”; it’s the zone where you burn out your team. You can achieve great things, but at a very high cost. It’s the zone where many companies start. We went through it many times at the beginning of our journey as a team; I can’t deny that.

Many of the young people I recruited in the early days couldn’t take the pace we were keeping, and we didn’t worry much about psychological safety. It’s very easy to fall into this quadrant, I think most bosses do, but you have to learn that it’s good for no one. In less than a year I suffered Felipe’s departure, for example, which was painful for me personally, but perhaps it was necessary for me to realize I was doing something wrong. A situation like that hits you as a leader, but it can lead you into another typical mistake.

When leaders realize how bad it is to be in the anxiety zone, they take corrective measures. They take a modern leadership course, version 4.0 (or whatever release is in fashion), buy lots of Lego and come away convinced that their mission in life is to manage the happiness of their employees, whom they start calling collaborators. They stop talking about human resources because they discover they work with people.

A guilt-ridden enlightenment descends on them and they schedule an hour-and-a-half meeting every week to listen to their team’s pains. Since the focus is happiness, everybody relaxes and they fall into the famous comfort zone. This zone is fine; it’s progress, after all. But it has a serious problem: there isn’t much delivery. And that’s because, although they’ve taken an important step in recognizing that they work with people, they don’t treat them as adults, nor do they respect them as professionals. They don’t demand great things of them. They don’t want them to think much; it’s enough that they follow the procedure and have plenty of recognition activities. Going beyond the job description is a big no-no, for team members and bosses alike. It’s the zone where what matters most is motivation, which is a trap, as we’ll see.

The quadrant you want to be in is the top right. Where people are truly committed to their work. To take people to this quadrant you have to demand, set them challenges; that leads them to think more, to experiment, to learn. It’s the zone of adults, of true professionals. There are metrics, there are goals to meet, but goals that make sense to everyone, because in the end they are self-imposed achievements. It’s where people find what they like doing, where they unleash their true potential. As Patty McCord says, it’s not about empowering people; people already have power. What you have to do is set up the conditions for them to release it

.

Recurring conversations

I want to be the one to walk in the sun
— Cyndi Lauper

The second woman to join the team was Natalia Guzmán, as a programmer analyst. She arrived a little after Miguel González, another person who would become one of the most valuable members of my team.

Our initial team was small, and much of what we built was with the support of external vendors. In 2010 the technology team was split; I was fully dedicated to software development with my small team. In infrastructure and QA we had the support of Rubén Valenzuela, who became the area’s third deputy manager.

It was in mid-2010 that the company went through its first restructuring, when Esteban took over as general manager after the departure of Rosita Ackermann, Previred’s original general manager, who had not only founded the company but, in its first ten years, had positioned it as an essential tool for the workings of the pension system. Thousands of employees used the platform to pay their pension contributions. Meanwhile, in those two years the work we did in new business had expanded the service portfolio so much that we were fully integrated into the company. It was at that time that Claudio Sepúlveda arrived to take over the division, which changed its name to Gerencia de Apoyo al Giro (Core Business Support).

I remember Claudio gave each deputy manager a copy of “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt. That is how I learned about this thinker’s theory of constraints. Claudio brought us a different leadership style. His definition of a team also stuck with me: for him a team is “a set of recurring conversations”.

Claudio challenged us to exchange our opinions freely, especially Rubén and me. He suspected that on several fronts we weren’t making progress because we were both far too conciliatory and nice. So he helped us be more frank and direct in resolving our differences. He also guided me on how to lead my team. The group kept growing; several developers came through who stayed with us for years, like Bruno Vera and Ignacio Padilla.

When Claudio arrived we were in the final phase of developing one of our biggest services. A project a year and a half in the making, with the largest budget we had handled up to that point. It was also a big challenge for Carolina, whom we appointed project manager; she ran it brilliantly from the tender to go-live. It was on that project that we had to apply many management techniques at different levels. Because if anything characterized us up to that point, it was that we were never late on a project. Or to put it another way, the production date was not negotiable. And that was something we began to cultivate in our culture: keeping our commitments.

Principles

In those first years some of the principles we hold as a team were cemented. I recently put together a compilation of them, which I’ve been presenting in different places and will now share with you:

• A team is a set of recurring conversations.
• If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan, but don’t change the goal.
• Failing isn’t good; the point is to learn fast, not to fail fast.
• It’s better to be effective than efficient. Still, we like efficiency.
• Deliver, rather than promise.
• Trust is a fundamental value for us. We will always start out trusting, but as they say: “trust, but verify”

Nobody set this in stone at the start of our ten-year journey; we adopted these principles gradually. But culture isn’t everything when it comes to succeeding and thriving. Culture helps you with psychological safety, with forming a team that is committed rather than motivated. But how do you work on the demanding side? How do you improve technically? How do you foster the delivery of value? That’s what we’ll talk about in the next article in this series.

Notes

[1] I suggest watching this video by Patty McCord: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=iBa9EoEbb38

The first part of this series is here.

Part ten of this series is here.