Partnership
The most successful progress that I have made in coaching and consulting engagements has occurred when there is a very strong sense of partnership.
When the executive and leadership teams before me have actively viewed me as a partner and actively worked with me as a partner to help them achieve their business goals and objectives.
We worked together and built trust together.
Sometimes, there was a small degree of conflict at the beginning of the engagement because of how differently we view the world.
Our experiences, expertise and views are completely different, and it requires each of us to take the time to understand the other person’s perspective before seeking to be understood.
I don’t impose Agility on others.
Adoption and implementation are all about appetite. Appetite for agility, appetite for change, and appetite for taking the kind of actions and making the kind of hard decisions that foster agility.
It isn’t easy to make those changes or decisions, especially when you are deeply entrenched in a legacy-based environment where things have remained unchanged for the past 100 years.
I need executives to be open, honest, and transparent with me about where they want to go and how much of an appetite for change and true business agility they have.
The sooner that happens, the sooner we can achieve real progress in the environment.
I don’t believe that you can buy agility in a box. An off the shelf cookie cutter for agility that we impose on the organization and do our best to force compliance.
That’s waterfall-style project management and we know what kind of results that produces in complex environments. Instead, we need to focus on what your needs are, what skills and actions are appropriate given your appetite for change and agility, and iterate from there.
A great partnership is when all of my knowledge, skills and expertise in the world of Agility combine with the executive’s knowledge, skills and expertise in the organization to produce the kinds of results where teams, executives and leadership shine.
This kind of partnership almost always results in authentic agility for the organization.
The kind of business agility that is unique to their context and application, forged from the ground up in partnership with executives and leadership teams within the organization.
All of the success I have had in these partnerships is when the executive or leadership team viewed and treated me as an equal. An equal in our commitment to finding the right answers and taking the actions that lead us to increased business agility and continuous improvement in the environment.
If you are treated as a supplier or a salesperson pitching something that holds little value to the organization, chances are we are not going to achieve the results that you want. Chances are, we are going to deliver suboptimal outcomes and put the agile adoption at risk with each new level of complexity that we encounter.
It needs to be partnership driven to succeed.
I put it to you that regardless of who you work with, me or another change agent in the agile community, you need to partner with them effectively to achieve results that matter.
The work is difficult and challenging. The environment is complex and challenging and so we need to have each other’s backs. I have had engagements where my primary client was in trouble, and I needed to actively cover their back and work hard for them to shine.
In other engagements, I’ve been the one in trouble and my primary client has covered my back and provided all the support necessary for the adoption to succeed and for me to shine.
Reciprocity is an incredibly important element of partnership.
You will find that these kinds of partnership-driven relationships prove that we are stronger as a team and able to accomplish a great deal more, despite the challenges in the environment, than we ever could on our own.
So, in closing, I would like to reinforce the importance of working in partnership with your preferred change agent when it comes to something as complex and challenging as adopting and cultivating business agility within your organization.
John Coleman has deep experience and expertise working with executives, #leadership teams and product development teams to achieve increased #businessagility and create environments where creativity and collaboration produce high-performance teams.
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