In a previous post, I described a great approach to get people to get to know each other a little bit more thanks to a fantastic one-on-one format. Try it, you will see yourself, it is really fantastic!
Another approach to get people to know each other is to use Appreciative Inquiry.
I used nearly the same three questions in different contexts: during the Wednesday breakfast for new employees in a fast-growing company, and also as an ice-breaker for meetings where people don’t know each other.
The mechanics are simple and highly effective. You ask people to form pairs. Their goal is to interview each other, asking three questions:
Tell a story that you consider being a success,
Without being humble, describe the talents and skills you used to make it a success,
Describe your three concrete wishes for the future of the company.
You give them a limited time, like 15 minutes, to do the two interviews. You probably need to remind them that the time is ticking and be flexible with the timing. As you walk around in the room, people ask you clarification questions, such as “Is it limited to professional life?” (The answer is: “No, of course, you can share non-professional experiences.“)
People usually enjoy that session and ask for more time to interview others in the room. You don’t need to give them that time. Just mention that they will have breaks, lunch, and dinner or, in short, other opportunities when they can interview each other.
If you are ready to invest a little bit more time, you can add value to the exercise by asking each pair to present briefly the talents and wishes of each other. It is really powerful when each writes talents and wishes on sticky notes (one per sticky note) so at the end of the presentation, you have one sheet of flip-chart representing the talents of the group and another with all the wishes of the group.
By starting the conversation there the room is full of energy, confidence, and optimism, and you are ready to have a productive meeting.
After one meeting I facilitated, I received a thank you note from one of the participants explaining that he enjoyed the meeting and the activities because “it created the kind of positive energy that gets things done.”
We are back to the mindset conversation I cover in the first chapter of Changing Your Team From The Inside. Shifting our mindset is essential to be able to interact effectively with others. Helping them to shift their mindset is key to effective collaboration.
Try it and let me know how it goes! I will use it again next week, in a distributed setting this time as we cannot be face to face.
Being a People-First company is adopting the posture of a servant leader, as described by Robert K. Greenleaf in his book Servant Leadership.
If you want staff to give excellent service to customers, then as a leader, you need to give excellent service to the staff.
Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Boeing and Ford, turned over those two American icon companies by having People First in the first place of his principles.
When the company is successful, there could be a problem with that approach. What really matters to the employee? What is really an excellent service?
Patty McCord, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, explains in her book Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, that most companies have it all wrong when it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams. The question is not about the perks or the bonus plans, the question is more about high performance and profitability.
What happens with success is that companies tend to become self-centered. It is all about them, and everything else revolves around them. They become arrogant and complacent.
It is not about being Customer-First in place of being People-First. It is about changing the perspective and restoring the position of the customer at the center of the preoccupation of all the people in the company.
It is not Customer-First, It is Customer-Centered.
A compelling narrative that reads more like a thriller than a business book.
I could not have said it better! I posted a while back a quote from the book which gives an idea of the toxic starting point:
Ford’s executives no longer spent their days plotting one another’s demise or defending their turf. Instead, they spent their time working together to ensure the company’s continued success. They offered one another help and sought help when they needed it themselves
In his first days with the company, Mulally designed a plan and stick to it for the next years. He also defined ten rules and called the attention of all his executives to the rules. The rules where displayed on the wall of their main meeting room:
People first
Everyone is included
Compelling vision
Clear performance goals
One plan
Facts and data
Propose a plan, “find-a-way” attitude
Respect, listen, help, and appreciate each other
Have fun… enjoy the journey and each other
I strongly believe that a lot of those rules could be applied in a lot of companies.
When I first saw Geof Ellingham’s work on Human-Centric Agility Coaching, I was skeptical.
Why do we need yet another model? And why “human-centric” when the Agile Manifesto already states that we value people and interactions over processes and tools?
In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, Geof Ellingham — business agility champion, leadership coach, and psychotherapeutic counselor — joins me to explore these questions in depth.
His answer to the “human-centric” question is both simple and uncomfortable:
We haven’t really lived up to that value.
Why “human-centric” matters
Geof describes how much of the agile world still centers on:
processes and tools
speed, cost, and business outcomes
“doing agile” rather than improving how people work together
His interest, and his outcome as a coach, is different: improving what happens within the group of people doing the work. Internal communication, collaboration, and the team’s ability to be at its best.
A model that came from research, not ambition
The Human-Centric Agility Coaching model did not start as “let’s create another framework”.
It emerged from research Geof conducted while completing a Master’s in coaching. His goal was to understand what happens moment by moment inside agile coaches as they work.
Not what coaches should do. What is actually going on internally.
From deep interviews with coaches, two paradoxes consistently surfaced.
Paradox 1: the expert paradox
Agile coaches are hired as experts. Clients expect answers, solutions, and certainty.
And yet coaching, especially professional coaching, rests on a different stance:
clients are whole
they have the capacity to solve their problems
the coach is there to walk alongside, not take control
Geof describes the tension viscerally: the pull to step in as an expert when you see an opportunity for improvement, and the pull to step back to protect ownership and learning.
We explore how existing coaching models don’t always capture how embodied and difficult that shift can be.
Paradox 2: the ideology paradox
The second paradox is more systemic.
Ideology can be a shortcut to change. It can rally people, create momentum, and align language and behavior. “Agile” can become a shared identity.
But if ideology takes root too strongly, it can freeze an organization into a new rigidity:
a new set of rules
a new orthodoxy
a new “agile machine”
And that directly contradicts one of the deepest intentions of agility: staying adaptive.
Meeting people where they are, without doing harm
Geof also introduces the idea of developmental “columns” in his model. Without turning it into a diagnostic tool, the model offers a way for coaches to reflect on:
how clients see their organization
what kind of language will resonate
and what the next reachable step might be
A key part of our conversation is the risk of harm:
models can easily become boxes
boxes become judgments
judgments become contempt
We explore the tension between using a model privately as reflective practice and sharing it openly with clients, and why transparency matters.
Using teams’ language instead of imposing a model
One practical takeaway from Geof is that even if you use a model internally, working with teams is often more effective when you start from their own metaphors.
Instead of explaining stages, you can ask:
“When you think about your team, it’s like what?”
“When you say that, what do you mean?”
This helps people understand each other’s models of the world without forcing a framework onto them.
An invitation to iterate
Geof closes with an important stance: the model is not finished.
It is shared under Creative Commons and meant to evolve through collaboration. He explicitly invites people to treat it with skepticism, curiosity, and a willingness to iterate.
If you want to connect with Geof, LinkedIn is the easiest channel. You can also email him at geof.ellingham@gmail.com.
A final thought
This episode is a reminder that agility is not a set of ceremonies or a process upgrade.
It is about people. And the work of coaching is not just about change in the organization — it is also about the internal stance and responsibility of the coach.
Here is the transcript of the episode:
Alexis:
Geof, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?
Geof:
I can. I’ve had a very varied background. So I started life after school as a programmer, then went off to do a music degree, I became an elementary school teacher for five years. And then went back into IT again and started working for one of the big five consultancies, spent time as a consultant, had children and decided to move into a more flexible role where I could be closer to home. So I worked as a head of IT within local government for about 10 years. And then, I guess about five, seven years ago, I started training as a coach, initially as a professional coach.
Geof:
But I trained in agile way back in the 1990s. In my work in local government, I’ve been starting to really bring those agile practices back in, because we’re starting to deliver digital services and so on and so I started to bring the two things together. So I started off separately as someone involved in agile and someone who was a coach and bringing them together as an agile coach is something I’ve only been doing for the last five years or so. Then most recently, I got really interested in what drives people to be the way that they are, the people that they are, and I did some more training.
Geof:
I’m now practicing as a psychotherapeutic counselor, so that I’m kind of interested in the full spectrum of human experience, and especially internal experience and how that plays out when people are in a group setting or an organizational setting. So that’s a that’s a long story. But it’s… There are lots of different bits to my story and I tried to bring them all together in the work that I do now.
Alexis:
Wow, this is really impressive. I think about all what you said. My mind was stuck with being an elementary school teacher. Because I was thinking, “Oh, that’s some time I feel that I should have those skills to be able to capture the attention of a few people in the room that are not necessarily highly motivated to engage in the conversation.”
Geof:
Yeah, they weren’t chosen to be there.
Alexis:
Yeah.
Geof:
I love teaching. As I said, I did that for five years as a full time teacher and then three years as a part time teacher, after that, I was a music specialist and my degree was in music. So I did these big shows with kids, I took these big whole school singing assemblies, all that kind of stuff and it was very intense. And I just decided that there was no way I was going to be able to keep that intensity up for another 40 years. So either I had to leave behind this career that I really loved, and do something different, or I could watch myself fade over the years as that intensity dropped. I just decided I’d go out while I still loved it. But I do still look back on those years very fondly and I’ve enjoyed going in and doing work with my kids when they were a little younger in their schools and stuff like that.
Geof:
But being able to being able to hold the attention of people who have not chosen to be with you is a challenge.
Alexis:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m really surprised and the first time when you shared with me, your article about Human-Centric Agility Coaching, I was really surprised about the Human-Centric part. I felt that agile was already something that was putting people first in a way, the Agile Manifesto start with the idea of individuals and interactions that are valued more than processes and tools. So I saw that people were already first, can you tell us a little bit more about the model and maybe the why behind the model?
Geof:
So that said, there may be two parts to that question. So I’ll answer it twice, if that’s okay, more generally, why Human-Centric? Why am I interested in this, when, as you say, “It’s already the first line in the Agile Manifesto values.” And I think the reason is that we haven’t really lived up to that value. I spend a lot of time at conferences and so on and it seems to me that processes and tools remain the driving force for a lot of the economy of the agile community certainly and a lot of the focus that we have on our agile initiatives is on business outcomes or speed or cost.
Geof:
And it seems to me that the focus of agility, in terms of what I’m interested in, I’m interested in what’s going on within the group of people who are engaged in the work, improving their internal communication, the ability for that group of people to achieve more than they could as separate individuals. So my outcome when I’m working with teams is all about the team’s ability to be its best. And I’m not sure that that’s… I know, lots and lots of agile coaches absolutely adhere to that principle. But I think as a community, we haven’t really managed to live up to that. So I see myself as one of the many people out there trying to just come back to that, that basic value, this is what we’re trying to achieve, we’re trying to achieve a situation where with a combination of principles and values and some practices we’ve built up over time, we can create added value in all senses, happiness, outcomes for people on planet, we can be better when we work together in teams in these ways, and I keep it as broad as possible. So that’s the first answer.
Geof:
The second answer is about the model itself. So the model itself does not come out of me wanting to do something, me wanting to create a model, the model comes out of a piece of research. So my intention was to get into the heads of agile coaches and find out what’s really going on when agile coaches are working. We’ve got some great literature around agile coaching, like Lyssa Adkins book, most of it is about kind of what should happen, what do we think coaches ought to do? And we haven’t really got much that looks into what actually happens moment by moment, what’s the internal experience in an agile coach, what’s really going on? And I was really interested in that internal experience, because I know that for me, as an agile coach, there’s a huge amount of internal conversation that’s going on when I’m working with a team. And I know that my internal conversation will be different to other agile coaches and we learn by understanding, our own models of the world. So I set about doing a piece of research as part of a Master’s I was doing in coaching.
Geof:
And my question was just sitting down with coaches for 90 minutes in depth interview and no structure. It was just tell me what is going on for you when you’re working with the team. And the model came out of that research through some paradoxes that emerged there that I guess we’ll talk about. So the model was a consequence of the research rather than something I intended to produce.
Alexis:
Really, really valuable. I was absolutely not aware of that and I really love it. I was thinking why do we want to produce another model, yet we have a model? The perspective that you bring in, what is happening when you interview agile coaches, about what is going on when they work, I think that’s a really interesting angle and you mentioned two paradoxes.
Geof:
Yeah.
Alexis:
Those paradoxes really resonated with me. Can you tell us more about those two?
Geof:
Yeah, sure. So there are two, in the research they did, there are actually some other tensions. But I decided that these were the two that came through most strongly for all of the coaches that I interviewed. So the first I’ve called the expert paradox. An expert paradox is, it’s there in the name of the role agile coach, because our clients hire us to be agile experts.
Geof:
To understand this particular approach to solving problems of organizations and end users, and so on. So, our clients hire us as experts in agile. But we’re coaches and those of us that have done training as professional coaches will have this strong idea in us that as a coach, we’re bringing a lens, a mirror, a set of tools to help people frame their problems, but we’re not bringing solutions, that we come to our clients as whole human beings who possess everything they need to solve their problems and all we’re doing is walking with them along the way. So when you put those two things together, you get a paradox, how can I be at the same time, someone who stands back from my own expertise and walks with my client, and believes in my client’s ability to solve their own problems, and at the same time, bring expertise around how to approach problems, how to make this agile stuff work better.
Geof:
For all of the coaches that I interviewed, this was a really powerful paradox that they felt themselves pulled, almost viscerally in both directions. So when they spotted an opportunity to improve process, that expert really comes to the fore and wants to step in. But there’s a part of them that recognizes that the more they can step back and allow their clients to be whole and complete and in control of their own destiny, the better their overall outcomes.
Geof:
I didn’t think that our existing coaching models really helped us with that tension. Because if you take for example, the Lyssa Adkins as your coach institute model, which is, you may know it’s a kind of it’s a cross drawn on the ground with some segments. And the idea is that you can walk across this model and take up a different stance. So sometimes you’ll be in a coaching stance, sometimes you’ll be in a teaching stance. And that for me doesn’t capture the kind of embodied challenge of moving between those two poles, that they’re so different inhabiting the expert, inhabiting the coach, is so different, that we need to understand more about what we need as agile coaches to enable us to do that for our clients. So that’s the first of the two paradoxes.
Geof:
So the second is, I’ve called the ideology paradox. And this, again, came out from my interviews, this strong tension and it also comes from a piece of academic research into based at Pivotal Labs in the States. The idea here is that agile as an ideology, as a cult, as a kind of magnificence, we are the truth in a way, and we know the answer to how to make the world a better place that I certainly know that I hold within myself, I try to hold it lightly. But I know that it’s there, I know that there’s a sense of, this is something really important and valuable we’re bringing to the world, that this ideology has plays in different ways. So when we’re trying to transform an organization, we’re trying to take an organization on this journey of change towards agility, we are taking an existing culture, an existing model of the world, and we’re looking to change that model, or uproot, in some ways destroy that cultural model and replace it with something new, these new values, these new ideas, and there’s a shortcut to doing that, which is to use ideology.
Geof:
Ideology has always been used as an instrument of change. Because if you can get people believing in this new way, as something that, where we can bring in group thing, we can get this, everybody walking the same walk, talking the same language using the same terminology and we’re all in this together, agile is our way that actually that does help to make that transformation easier. The tension, the problem is that if we use ideology as a way of transforming, then we were still left with an ideology. And if our root value is to continue to be flexible, and continue to iterate on what’s good and to continue to adapt, inspect and adapt at every level of the organization.
Geof:
An ideology is just something else that freezes us and we end up trapped in ways of doing things that are just as hard to get away from the culture that we started with. So ideology is something that pulls us it’s something that’s attractive, believing that agile is somehow special, is a really attractive proposition and our clients find it attractive. But allowing that ideology to take root can freeze an organization in a state that makes you have to continue to be adaptive.
Alexis:
I really love those two paradoxes, I have said that they really resonated with me. I can empathize totally with that idea of you’re coming in an organization, you are the expert, you are asked to really every time improve. I remember one time, I was working with a really small startup. And they were, not a lot, but they knew that there was a lot of traction for what they were providing and so they needed to grow really fast. The people in charge, there were three of them that were managing the company at the beginning. They were telling me, “Okay, Alexis or we will do the thing.” I remember the CTO telling me, “Okay, we will hire a manager for that, manager for that, manager for that, manager for that and then they will hire their teams and so on.”
Alexis:
I said, “I don’t think that can work. Because you still need to deliver a lot of things. So instead of hiring those managers that will then hire their team and so on, probably we should focus on the people that will already do the work.” And the question was, “But how they will be organized?” And I said, “we will adopt an agile way of working. So your goal is to have small teams that will be able to deliver end to end value to your customers.”
Alexis:
And he was asking me but, “What is the target organization? At the end, how will we be organized? How the company will be organized?” I was trying to stay on my stance again, “We will have smaller teams, and they will be organized to deliver value end to end.” And we’re thinking, “Oh, but I understand what you say. But can you draw me the organization in the end?” I said, “No, I can’t because I don’t know, we will design the organization along the way. There is no model, there is no end game. We need to agree on those principles and we will design the organization along the way.” And he was still trying to ask me that, “I’m pretty sure you know but you don’t want to tell me.” I tell him, “I don’t know.”
Alexis:
That was really hard for him to discuss with the expert. And at the same time that the expert is studying that. I don’t know, I don’t know the results. I know we can do it, I know we’ll do it along the way, but I don’t know the end game and the results.
Geof:
Yeah, exactly.
Alexis:
It was really a hard time. If you explain that, that was my expert, thought of… destroyer that I was feeling that was okay. I need to old on that line. Because if I don’t, then I will design everything by myself and it will be totally wrong for the people in the company.
Geof:
Yeah. So you’ve led me beautifully into the model and I wonder whether this is a time to kind of bring the model out of the box and start talking about it a little bit. Because I think that particular encounter that you had really is one of the things I was trying to address in the model.
Alexis:
Yeah, please.
Geof:
So the model is organized into columns and the columns are based on work by a whole sequence of academic and practical research is going back to Piaget, who was working in child development 150 years ago. And the terminology I’ve used comes from a guy called Bill Joiner, who writes about leadership agility. But the basic principle idea is that as children, we go through stages of development, and they’re pretty well understood now. Children start off as babies not being able to differentiate themselves from their parents and from the world. And then they learn that they’re separate and you go through these very explicit concrete stages of development. The idea that was put forward by this, all of this chain of researchers, and people will be familiar with things like Laloux and Reinventing Organizations and Spiral Dynamics, there’s a whole bunch of stuff out here. They’re all based on the same principle, which is, “As adults, we also go through these stages of development.”
Geof:
We start off and in turn, in terms of the first column in my model, we start off with what Bill Joiner calls expert, and an expert, it’s all about our skill, our ability to perform a task really well. And we see the world in quite mechanistic ways. So I’ve… The title of the column in the model is machine. So we kind of see the world as a machine and our idea is that if we can just put the things together in a way that we understand it’s kind of all logical, it all fits together and I understand what my purpose is in this machine. I’m really expert at it. When I become a manager, I can tell other people how to be expert. I can teach other people
Geof:
It’s very mechanistic view of the world and many people. So Bill Joiner reckons that something like 35% of people in management roles are still locked into this kind of expert role and the accounts that you had was with someone who had that view of the world, they want to see their organization as a machine, that’s the way that they conceive of how things work. So I’ve got a machine at the moment, it works like this, you’re going to come in, and you’re going to help me build a new machine that works differently. So show me what it looks like, what’s the blueprint, I want to be able to see it then I’ll understand.
Geof:
And if people are in that column, that’s where you have to meet them. So the challenge that many coaches come across is they’re looking to move people into a different way of thinking, and the person they’re talking to just doesn’t yet have the language or the model of how the world works enables them to participate in that conversation. So we have to move people across the columns. So the columns in my model go, start with this machine, the next column is family. So this is what Bill Joiner calls achiever and this is where we start to understand that the groups of people in organizations have these kind of, these complicated power structures going on and these different in groups and out groups and ways of communicating and that people have all kinds of little daily struggles and conflicts that are some sometimes part of the business of the business.
Geof:
Sometimes they’re to do with people’s personal lives, and it all comes together in a big mess. And that organizations aren’t like machines that actually the groups of people within organizations act much more like families where power is contingent, the idea that families have a head of the household and anyone listening who has a family knows that that’s not how power works in organizations. Power is slippery and difficult, and it’s all over the place. And a family doesn’t work like a machine and things are always changing, people are always finding different roles.
Geof:
So the reality is whatever structure you have written down on paper, that’s not really what’s happening in your organization, stuff is moving around. So that’s the next step is to recognize that and to stop being so focused on what people are doing, and start being focused on what people are achieving. So we stopped being interested in the process, and telling people what to do, because that’s what experts do, is they say do it like this, and it’ll work, we start stepping back and saying, “Okay, this is what I want to happen.” And you lot organize yourself and make it happen.
Geof:
So people who are in that second column are able to step back a little bit, if the person that you’ve been speaking to, within that green family kind of column, they would have been able to meet you more easily and be a bit more flexible and say, Okay, I get it, it’s going to be a little bit complicated, it’s going to emerge, and stuff will happen. So that’s the second column. The third column is living system. So this is what Bill Joiner calls catalyst. And at this point, people are able to move a step further and start seeing that their organization isn’t a little bubble, separate from the rest of the world, but the actually is part of a much bigger set of systems.
Geof:
So this is the living system column, we start to see that those power structures that I talked about at family that are kind of flexible and fluid, that actually there are systems at play here. But the team itself is a system, each individual person is a system of thoughts and desires, that groups of systems the different teams interact with each other in systemic ways. And that you can follow, you can understand what’s happening when you start to look at those interactions and start in a systemic way and you can start to see the organization as part of a wider world.
Geof:
People who are able to meet you at that in that column and build your records. There’s only 5% or so of managers who are in that column, people are able to meet you in that column will get agility in a completely different way to the expert, because they will immediately understand that what we’re doing here is working with a system and helping the team to see its own systemic processes to be able to understand what’s happening between you and me and this person over here and to be able to inspect and adapt not just the work that we’re doing but but who we are as a group of people. So they’ll meet you in a different place.
Geof:
Then my fourth column is called wonderland. The idea that almost it’s kind of post agile, really, this is where we’re stepping back from the idea of ideology completely and saying, “All right, we are now about being curious about everything, about getting out of any silos that we might be in being open to experience, we might start really allowing different value systems to compete within the same organization in the same team, where we’re able to deal with things like conflict in a completely different way, we’re able to take the scratchiness and challenge the world and just get interested in and use that as a source of information.”
Geof:
So those are the kind of four columns and one of the first reasons that I wanted this model was as a way of helping us to understand as agile coaches, where we are meeting our clients. So first question is, where am I? So as an agile coach, where do I recognize myself in these columns? And it might be that in some parts of what I do, I’m in one column in some parts of what I do, I’m in another. None of this is black and white. This isn’t about putting people in boxes. But it’s about understanding, what’s my capacity for taking that curious route. There’s a concept called transcended include, which is that every time we move through the levels, we still have all of the capabilities we had in the previous level.
Geof:
So as I move through to living system, and I’m getting to the point where I’m past the kind of this is how agile should work. I’m getting really interested in systems and I’m using systems thinking, and I’m working with teams and that way, I can still step into expert, I can still go back into that first column and inhabit that. But I can do it from a different stance. So I take my curiosity and I’ll step in deliberately, intentionally into that expert teacher role. And I’ll share that with the team I’m working with now say, “Okay, I think that there’s something I know about that that might be able to help you here. Do I have your permission to put a different hat on and to step in?” And I can do that in a way that that allows me to still be me, I don’t have to be a different person. But I can just step into that different role and then I can step back again, or what I’m interested in helping coaches to do with this model is to find the learning edge of their clients and meet them there.
Geof:
So if you understand that your client is sitting in that first expert column, they’re going to be focused on process and machine. So we have to meet them there, we have to show them something that they can get a handle on. But in doing so we want to pull them into this next stage into family, we’re not going to get them into systems thinking straightaway, we’re going to have to take them through and just help them to understand what’s going on within their teams that they might be interested in, isn’t just about their role definitions and how they handoff works one another. It’s about the quality of the communication and relationships between people in those teams and that’s where we need to focus on next energy.
Geof:
So that’s really where the model comes from. It’s taking those paradoxes and recognizing that both of those paradoxes exist because of the need to move between these columns as an agile coach in a way that professional coaches don’t have to, if you’re a professional coach, you typically operate within one column with one client, I’m either here to… I’m here as a skills coach, I’m going to teach you how to do something, I’m here as a transformational coach, I’m going to sit back and work with you and you’re going to tell your story and we’re going to create a new narrative for you however we’re working. With agile coaches, we’re constantly having to move around these different columns. If as an agile coach, we are still ourselves, but they’re very much on the left hand side of that model, we just need to recognize our own limitations in what happens when we meet a client who’s further to the right.
Alexis:
This is exactly that kind of difficult realization. I was looking at, where my client is not necessarily where I am now and I think a that’s an important thing to realize that if you are in the system, you are in a complex system, you are part of it, whatever you want, you are still there. That’s really an interesting first thought on that. The thing that I’m struggling a little bit with is considering the client, considering a team or as being in one column. How do you deal with teams that the individuals in the team, the people in the team are not in the same column? How do you deal with that situation?
Geof:
So the individuals within teams are rarely in the same column, certainly in my experience. Again, for me, what’s helpful about the model is understanding, so where’s the center of gravity of the team? What does that mean for the people who are outliers? So if the center of gravity of the team is in that family column, then you’re probably going to have some experts there who are struggling with the fact that, what they want to do is just do their job. So my job is to sit here and write this code, or my job is to whatever and their understanding of their role is they have something to do in which they have expertise. And yet around them, this team is, is having completely different conversations about trying to collaborate on this and do this, be adaptive in this way, and it just doesn’t make sense.
Geof:
So what we’re going to have to work out is how do we manage that potential discrepancy? Are we going to do some work with the team to help them to get into each other’s models of the world. So some of the work that I’m doing at the moment is with Caitlin Walker, systemic modeling. She’s a British woman who has worked for years with groups and started her work with teenagers who were disenfranchised, disillusioned about school and she realized that when you have a group that’s really heterogeneous, lots of really different kind of things going on in that group and there’s conflict, that giving people the language to understand each other’s model of the world is really important. So if I have a group that’s like that, then I might bring in some of that systemic modeling language, to help the people in the teams to get into when you say this, this is what I’m making up about what you mean, now you tell me what you really mean and I’ll try to understand what your model of the world is and then I’m going to share that with you.
Geof:
This is my model of the world, when I say this, this is what I mean, and really giving people the language to understand that we have different models of the world and if I’m going to challenge my own model, my biggest challenge to my model is that despite the fact that I said earlier, I don’t like putting people in boxes, I think it’s difficult to use a model like this without putting people in boxes. So if there’s a way of evolving this model in the future, to be less boxy, that’s what I would want to do next. Because as you say, “People don’t inhabit these boxes, teams certainly don’t. But I do think that there is value in understanding, I think these four columns give you a way of understanding where abouts people are in relation to each other and therefore, where the potential tensions might lie, and how you can think about, do you just have to just allow those tensions? Do you find a way of bringing people into the same space? Do you just help people to understand what’s going on for each other? So you have some choices to make.
Geof:
I think the model helps with just understanding where people are and what choices you might have, what levers you might be able to pull.
Alexis:
Yeah, and those columns are even more like scales and that’s how you are somewhere on the scale.
Geof:
Yeah.
Alexis:
I assume that if you are making assumptions about other people, you will probably move yourself on the scale to try to fit what they want or what they need. I can observe that in my team when some people are really hierarchical in their mindset. So they assume things about the boss, that the boss should do certain things. And they expect the boss will do that. But unfortunately for them, the boss is not in the same hierarchical view of the world. So they frustrated about the lack of things that the boss should do. It’s an interesting situation to be in. So I’m trying to meet them somewhere in the middle and it’s an interesting situation to be in, try to say, “Okay, that’s your expectation about the world and you need to realize that the older people expect you to do things.” That’s that’s an interesting tension.
Geof:
Yeah, for sure.
Alexis:
So, if we see that as scales, we can move along those scales to adjust to where the people are. Explaining the model can help them see that the others are not necessarily seeing the world the same way?
Geof:
Yes.
Alexis:
Okay, and you’re really using the model this way with your customers, with the teams you are working with?
Geof:
Yeah, so one of the one of the challenges is, so at the moment, the model is still very much in its kind of early iterations. It’s in its current form for quite a while, but COVID has kind of interrupted a lot of things. So I’ve been using it. I haven’t been using it explicitly with clients, so I haven’t been sharing it and I have mixed feelings about sharing it. And the reason I have mixed feelings is comes back to this question about putting people in boxes and about the idea of assessing people. So at the moment, I’m using it as a way of, as part of my reflective practice. So I will, if I’m working with a team, I will use the model as a way of thinking about, “Okay, so here are my key individuals whereabouts do I think they are? Where would I meet them? What does this help? What does this tell me?” So I use it as part of my reflective practice, but I’m not sharing the model explicitly.
Geof:
Now, there’s a part of my coaching practice that says, if I’m using a model, to think about my clients, then generally speaking, I want to be open and share that model with my clients. Because, there’s danger of doing violence to clients by modeling them without them knowing that’s what I’m doing. So there’s a bit of a tension there. So at the moment, I’m using the model in my reflective practice, but I’m not explicitly using it with teams, and I’m not sure that in its current form, I would advocate using it in that kind of transparent way with teams. I might use some of the language and certainly, I might use some of that some of the underlying language about our views of the world, how do we think that organizations work? But I would probably do it in a more of that systemic modeling way that way of getting people to use their own language about how do they see the world?
Geof:
So if I think that what’s going on in a team is that some people are locked into the machine expert column, and some people are kind of happily living in the family, and maybe even getting into living systems, what I might do is invite people to talk about, “Okay, so when you’re coming into the organization, and you’re in your team, and you’re working with your team, that’s like what?” And see what people come up with and see what metaphors might arise from people and see, it might be that somebody says, “Well, I kind of see the team a bit like, it’s a bit like a watch, there’s this really intricate little cog, that’s me, I’m over here, and then there’s this big hand over here that goes round.”
Geof:
So you might start to hear the metaphors coming out, you might find that machine metaphor come out. And somebody else might say, “No, it’s more like, I feel more like we’re, we’re kind of like pebbles in the ocean,” or whatever it is that comes out. So I think I would, at this point, I would use the model as a way of doing reflective practice. But in my work with teams, I’m more likely to use their own language, and test my reflective thoughts against what comes up in the team’s own words.
Alexis:
Excellent, I thank you for sharing that. I remember when I read the Laloux book about organization, that’s Preventing Organization, I think, I was really excited about trying to explain to different stages of organization. I was ready already to explain that to everybody.
Geof:
Yeah.
Alexis:
And I realized that the first time I started to explain the different levels, I was definitely in an oriental organization really no machine organization. And they were thinking, “Okay, it will not end well,” because I’m trying to explain something that will not really resonate with them and basically, I will tell them, “You are not good. That’s not how you should be, that will not work.” And I was thinking, “Okay, now I need to escape that conversation. This was exactly not the thing to do.
Geof:
Yeah, exactly. And to build on that, not only when we’re doing that, not only if we expose the model, we risk doing harm, but actually if we keep the model to ourselves, but we’ve already made that determination, there’s a risk of harm because there’s a risk that we’re holding that organization in contempt because of the hierarchical view that we have about what a good organization looks like. I think that the one of the things that models can do if we use them well is to recognize some of those internal biases and the contempt that we might be holding, and use the model as a way of providing a warning that Okay, so if I think this organization is a machine orange, what does that mean about the way I’m going to think about the people in this organization and what care do I need to take to ensure that I’m seeing every human being in this organization as a fully competent human being?
Alexis:
Yep. This is a very good point. Our expectations or our biases, and when we start elaborating organization or even worse people, we are blocking our thinking and we are not able to interact with them in an efficient way in a really human way. We are seeing them as problems instead of seeing them as human beings that are fully responsible of who they are, how they are interacting with the world?
Geof:
Yeah, exactly.
Alexis:
I was surprised in organization that are more mechanistic more machines, the people in those organizations, some of them are, let’s say, comfortable with their position and their role. And some of them are suffering in those position and would like to change things. How to come in support of those people, all of them is an interesting challenge.
Geof:
Yeah, absolutely. Because, as I said earlier, one way that organizations do that, is this use of ideology and to some extent the way that we use frameworks, I think falls into this, You see people, almost subverting some of the ideas of agility by saying to someone who’s comfortable in that orange expert column, are actually you can still be like that in this new world. I’m just giving you a new process, I’m just giving you a new machine, it’s okay. And there’s a danger in doing that and there’s comfort in doing that. So there’s a real tension in the way that we approach those people who are very comfortable with the world the way that is. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point.
Alexis:
Yeah, I remember to using Scrum. Yeah, as you said, as an ideology that will enable you to start a transformation, to start to change. With some teams after the first or two or three iterations, they were starting to reconsider the framework itself, they will start to reconsider that they could change things, how they were doing things, because that was not necessarily the best way for them. Which was really interesting and I’ve seen teams using exactly the scrum by the book for months. And you say, “Okay, there’s something broken there.” The probability that it’s still the best way of doing things for you is really low. So instead of using the framework as a starting point, you are stuck with that framework now. That’s your new way of working, that is not necessarily the best way.
Geof:
Yeah, your new machine.
Alexis:
Yeah, exactly. When we send order, and when we see the columns and the tables, and it can feel a little bit like the metrology model that some people are selling and it’s really scary. But when we listen to you explaining the model, it changed everything and now, I’m totally with you on calling it a Human-Centric approach. Because I understand that it’s really what it is, based on what you say, it’s really fascinating. Is there other things that you would like to share today?
Geof:
I think the thing that I would like to share is that this model is very much a first iteration. And I touched on this earlier, this is not how it ends up. This is a first attempt at taking what I learned from this research and putting it onto paper in a way that I think certainly helps me to think about where things set, I know that my personal bias is to work in a bubble for longer than is helpful. So really, what I want to do at this point is invite people to kind of join a conversation with me, if people think there’s value in this model, then to get into a conversation about, “Okay, what next? How do we try out some of these ideas in practice? How do we get some feedback on what happens when we use them? And what might the next version of this model or next iteration look like?” It’s published under Creative Commons, that’s my intention, it’s not mine, my intention is that if there’s value in it, then I’d like the world to do something with it.
Geof:
So I think that’s the thing I would say is don’t treat it as a fixed artifact. Don’t treat it as something that I think is finished, treat it with some skepticism come at it with curiosity and intend to iterate and collaborate. And anyone who would like to collaborate with me on it, please do get in touch because I’m going to be putting together a group of people who are interested and we’ll collectively see what happens next.
Alexis:
Very cool. I love it. And to contact you, they can contact you through LinkedIn?
Geof:
LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. My email address is geof.ellingham@gmail.com and Geof is G-E-O-F, slightest strange spelling, but LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me.
Alexis:
Perfect. I will put that in reference and I will of course put the article in reference of that recording.
Geof:
Right.
Alexis:
Thank you, Geof for joining the podcast today. That was really amazing to have you. I’ve learned a lot and I bet the people who listen, we’ll learn a lot too. I’m eager to continue to discuss with you after that. Thank you very much.
Geof:
You’re very welcome. I’ve really enjoyed having the conversation. Just to add that every time I have a conversation about the model, I learn new stuff about what might happen next. So these conversations are just so valuable.
Alexis:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to Alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and for more help to increase your impact and satisfaction, drop a comment or an email with your feedback or just to say hello, and until next time to find better ways of changing your team.
Open leadership is often described through principles such as transparency, inclusivity, or collaboration.
But what does the job of an open leader actually look like, day to day?
In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Preethi Thomas, Software Engineering Manager at Red Hat, to explore this question through her own journey and experience.
From individual contributor to manager
Preethi’s career started as a software developer, then moved through quality engineering, before she joined Red Hat as an individual contributor.
Like many experienced engineers, she eventually reached a crossroads:
stay an individual contributor, or
move into a management role
What helped her navigate that decision was reflection, guidance from her manager, and the OPT model used at Red Hat.
Finding the right intersection: the OPT model
The OPT model stands for:
Opportunity
Passion
Talent
Preethi shares how she realized that her passion was centered on people and growing others, that she had the talent to support that, and that she needed to actively look for opportunities to explore management.
Participating in Red Hat’s Aspiring Managers Program gave her the space to experiment, learn, and decide intentionally.
The four axes of leadership
During the conversation, we explore leadership through four complementary axes:
People: attracting, developing, and supporting others
Business: understanding strategy, customers, and the broader context
System: removing obstacles and improving the environment
Execution: delivering outcomes
A key insight Preethi shares is that execution is often a result of the other three. When people, business context, and systems are taken care of, execution follows.
Context and trust as foundations
A recurring theme in the episode is the importance of providing context.
Preethi explains how transparency and communication help people understand the “why” behind decisions, connect their work to the bigger picture, and collaborate more effectively.
Context and trust, together, become the roots of collaboration.
Open organizations in practice
We also explore the five characteristics of open organizations:
transparency
inclusivity
adaptability
collaboration
community
Rather than ranking them, Preethi highlights how they reinforce each other and ultimately build trust.
Inclusivity, in particular, shows up through everyday signals:
who speaks and who doesn’t
how disagreements are handled
whether people feel safe to contribute
Open leadership means noticing these signals and acting when something feels off.
Mentoring: you need a village
One of the strongest threads in the conversation is mentoring.
Preethi shares how having mentors radically accelerated her growth, and why she believes:
“You need a village to help you succeed.”
Mentoring is not transactional or time-boxed for her. It is a long-term relationship where both mentor and mentee learn, reflect, and grow.
She also encourages everyone, regardless of seniority, to both have a mentor and be a mentor. Everyone has something to teach, even if they don’t realize it yet.
Learning, confidence, and short-term wins
Transitioning into management came with its own challenges. Preethi reflects on:
the importance of short-term wins to build confidence
how difficult it can be to recognize relational work (like one-on-ones) as “real work”
why naming and valuing these responsibilities matters
These insights apply well beyond management roles.
Books and resources that shaped the journey
Preethi recommends several books that supported her growth:
The First 90 Days
The Manager’s Path
The Making of a Manager
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Combined with mentoring and reflection, these resources helped her navigate different phases of her leadership journey.
A final thought
Open leadership is not about control or visibility. It is about creating conditions where others can grow, contribute, and scale their impact.
As Preethi beautifully puts it, the job of an open leader is to help others succeed — and in doing so, to build something far greater than individual performance.
Here is the transcript of the episode:
Alexis:
Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
Preethi:
Thank you, Alexis and thank you for inviting me for this opportunity. Like you said, my name is Preethi Thomas. I’m a manager for the Containers team at Red Hat. So a little bit of background about myself. I have a background in computer science, I have a master’s in computer applications from a university in India, and I moved to the US. I worked for a little bit in India, maybe, a few months in India before I moved to the US. So I’ve been here 20 plus years now. I started off as a software developer, remember programming and visual basic C, C++.
Preethi:
I can remember when it probably was because of an opportunity that I moved to quality engineering. So at the time when I moved to quality engineering there was a lot more manual testing and things of that sort going, but then I enjoyed that part of being on the customer side of things, maybe the first customer getting to use a software. So I went back and forth. After I moved to the US, I went back and forth between development and software engineering, or software development and quality engineering or quality assurance for a little bit.
Preethi:
Once I had my kids, I decided quality engineering was more where I could focus a little bit more while managing my kids. I found my passion there. So later on, I think I applied to Red Hat three times before I finally got a job at Red Hat. I got hired at Red Hat and as a quality engineer so I was an individual contributor. So I think that is where my most of my career for worse apart until like maybe a few years into the career I was at the cross roads as in where do I move? Do I stay an individual contributor or move to a leadership role?
Preethi:
I think my manager at the time kind of guided me through my questions. So at Red Hat, we followed the OPT model. I remember listening to a session at QE camp in Brno about the OPT model. And that’s when I really thought about what it is that I’m passionate about and where the opportunities are.
Alexis:
You need to tell us a little bit more about what is the OPT model?
Preethi:
All right. So the OPT model is the intersection of the opportunities, your talent, and the passion. I always have felt that I am passionate about people and growing people or being there for people. And I thought as a parent and my passion, I have the talent to do that. And then the next thing was the opportunity. So finding that opportunity, and I wasn’t sure where I would find that opportunity or how to go about that.
Preethi:
Doing a little bit more research into it, I found there was the training program that Red Hat offers called Aspiring Managers Program or AMP training. So I took that and I decided that I wanted to try it. Two years ago I decided to take it the opportunity or move into management. And then here I am. So far I have to say, I’m enjoying this.
Alexis:
You were an individual contributor, or you were already within Red Hat so within an organization that is an open organization where the individual contributor can really be real leaders and you wanted to go to management. Nice thing I like with Red Hat is that Aspiring Manager training that can give you a lot of tools, insights if you decide to stay an individual contributor to really increase your impact as a leader, as an individual contributor, or can help you decide if you really want to switch to manager.
Alexis:
So you already mentioned that you wanted to go there because you like growing people, helping people be the best of themselves. What were all the aspects that were attracting you to be a manager?
Preethi:
I felt at the time that I was a little bit more focused on just what I am doing. So I liked the thought that just to get a little bit more perspective into the company’s vision, or yes, as an individual contributor, I could do that, but I felt like I would have a little bit more opportunity to learn that and be passionate about what the company is passionate about and be able to help other people who likes to be the individual contributor and help them along as well. And get them to understand that make the connection a little bit better.
Alexis:
I love it. When I try to describe what is the role of leader, I have a four default axis. My first axis is the execution piece. That’s how what you deliver or what your organization delivers. And second axis, it’s the people, it’s how to attract, retain, develop people so they can really be the best of themselves. Usually I’m saying the people part is the first axis by the way, but that’s too bad. I failed on that.
Alexis:
You touch on what we can do for the business. That’s my other axis, the business axis where we think about the strategy, we think about where the industry is going, we think of what our customers really want to achieve and how can we support them with our partners are doing, with all the communities are doing and how we can be involved in that or support that or change the way it works already to think larger than what our team is really doing. And our team can contribute to that or influence the direction where we are going.
Alexis:
And the last axis is the system part. We live in the system, we have to improve that system so that the people can work in the right way. That’s a bad system will beat people each time so that we need to really improve the system. And I think as a leader, you need to consider the four axis to be able to work on that. How do you feel about those four axis, execution, people, business and system?
Preethi:
Yes. I think I completely agree with you on that four axis, because we need all that to have a successful product or a company. I think I would probably call execution as the last piece, at least in my opinion, because once you have a strategy, once you have a business problem that you’re trying to solve, and you have people and you’re taking care of your people and removing obstacles-
Alexis:
The system part, absolutely, removing obstacles is a great summary of it. Yep.
Preethi:
Yes. The system part. And then once you have all those three taken care of, I think the execution comes naturally, or that is, I think I would say execution is a product of the three.
Alexis:
It’s relatively a rare that people have that level of clarity. I had some into your contributors or even manager when I was asking them about their role, they were 100% focused on execution. And when I was asking about all those things, either they were saying it’s a, “That’s a manager problem,” or “That’s my manager’s problem,” it’s not theirs.
Preethi:
Yeah. I think for, especially for people, when you take care of people and create context for people, the why, it makes them understand the bigger picture. As an individual contributor, I think there were times that I was too focused on what I was doing. So I think once I started thinking outside of the box I think it kind of, I made the connection and then that my passion increased.
Alexis:
The open organization it’s said that they have five main characteristics, transparency as a foundation for everything, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community. Do you feel that in your work you experience in a way those characteristics? Is there one in particular that you feel is really really important compared to others or are they all important?
Preethi:
I think each of them has its own… I mean, each of them are important in its own way. A product of all that together is the trust. And without trust, I feel like you lose that. So when you have open communication and transparency, I feel like you are creating a culture of collaboration. So then it becomes easy to gain people’s trust and help them move forward. However, as a leader you create that passion in them by following these open management principles. To me, transparency is extremely important. So I think transparency and communication helps create that context for my people.
Alexis:
Creating context for the team is really important. By being transparent, we can provide the information that everybody needs to make those decisions. What about the inclusivity, welcoming others’ perspectives?
Preethi:
Yes, absolutely. So to have a healthy and collaborative community, you have to be inclusive. As a woman there is different contexts that you see, there is people not being inclusive. So you kind of notice a little when you are a minority group if I say so. Then I think that having a healthy, inclusive community makes it easy for people to grow and collaborate better. So if you have a hostile community, people don’t want to be part of that. So like a meeting, the end result of not being inclusive is you end up having a retention problem. People who are of a diverse opinion may not want to be in that organization when it is not inclusive. Like I said, I think the five aspects, I don’t know what is better than the other.
Alexis:
That’s probably not the right question. It seems that they are all really important.
Preethi:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Alexis:
You’re right. On the inclusivity aspect, I feel that it’s sometimes difficult to realize if the team or the community is inclusive enough. What are the signs we should look at?
Preethi:
Well, I’m not an expert at that, but then again, I’ll try. I don’t think there is a bar as in how much inclusivity is enough. So I think the more inclusive you are, there is always room for improvement. I think a couple of things that you would notice if a community is not inclusive would be fewer contributions from the outside of the project or someone, especially on a company sponsored project. If you have fewer people coming in contributing, then that means there is something not right.
Preethi:
Another way to look at it is be mindful of the platforms that you use in the communication channel, email lists, or even GitHub conversations where you get those hostility to see if there are people being really mean to each other. Okay. It’s okay to have really good discussions and sometimes the discussions getting heated, but then there is also… I think, looking for signs of those… If the results have really heated discussion as people leaving the community, then you’re not doing something right. I think there are, I think, signs that you can watch for, if you are paying attention, it’ll show itself out.
Alexis:
How do you get people in your team paying more attention to those signs and how can you help them to fix those issues?
Preethi:
Really paying attention, and making sure that if there is a conversation that happens, that you noticed and making awareness for that. If one of your associates is you see that something’s happening, sometimes you’re not watching it all the time, or someone raises it to you, that there is this incident that happened and getting to the why behind it, and being able to talk and coach your people on the right behaviors. Or even making sure that they are aware that some of these might have caused someone to feel a certain way or not included in that, I think making sure that you say something when you see something.
Alexis:
I love it.
Preethi:
To me, something that I feel, if I feel something is not right, that doesn’t mean that you feel the same way, but then I have that opportunity to raise it to you saying, “Okay, I felt this. It doesn’t mean that you may have…” But then the next time this happens, you might think, “Oh, this may be something that is going to be offensive to X, Y, and Z.”
Alexis:
Do you feel that it’s the job of the manager in particular, in that context or is it the job of anybody in the team?
Preethi:
I think it’s the job of anybody in the team. A manager may not be watching all the conversations or everything that is happening, especially in the open source community, right? If you have a set of standards, making sure other people in the team are aware of this. A manager cannot be a gatekeeper for the community. We can make sure the expectations are known to the team so that the team can to be inclusive. It’s everyone’s responsibility to be inclusive.
Alexis:
Yeah. Excellent. So, that’s where I can see the power of the team agreements, or the code of conduct in communities so we can raise the awareness of what are the expected behavior from each other. As you said before, when you see something, you say something and you are expected to speak up when there’s something that is not going well.
Alexis:
I know you mentioned, if I recall to encouraging and using mentoring in your team to help people grow in their roles. Can you tell us more about that?
Preethi:
Oh, absolutely. That is something that I’m very passionate about. I think in my journey to be here right now, you need a village to help you succeed. I have a village of mentors, but then I did not have a formal mentor until like maybe four years ago or five years ago. So once I got a mentor, my growth has been exponential. I think it helped me come to terms, to crystallize my goal so what I want. I came in even to the point that as in, even though it was in the back of my mind, it was I found it from within me, but then someone helped me get to that by asking the right question.
Preethi:
The thing about me, I think I’ve read somewhere that you use a mentor for a certain period of time, and then you find other mentors. But then with me, I’ve had excellent relationship with all my mentors and you know that as well. I keep learning from all my mentors. So I don’t want to stop the relationship. I say, “Now okay, this is two months into it. Okay, I’m done. I achieved this goal so let me move on to another mentor.” It’s not that for me, it’s my village of support that I need. Because I’ve personally experienced that relationship and what it can do to grow you in your career, as well as, as a person, I really encourage my team to be mentors and mentees.
Preethi:
Each one, wherever they are in their career I think they have an aspiration to do whatever the next thing is. And everyone has something to teach. That I think, it took a long time for me to realize that, “Okay, there may be something that I can teach others too.” And then I’m like, “Okay, I can be a mentor for someone and I have something to offer as well.” So yes, I think mentor and having a mentor and mentee is super important. And that is something that I think you learn from a mentor as much. And you learn from your mentee as well.
Alexis:
How it works for the people that you nudge or you pushed to become a mentor of others, we always have something to teach to other how to… How it works? Because I guess some people were more reluctant than others to try to be a mentor.
Preethi:
So in my team, I think I’ve mentioned this too, I’m very open and creating that context is really important to me. I’m open and honest about my journey as in how this has helped and how this relationship is super important and how that can help them grow as an individual contributor and however they want to grow their career. I keep repeating or I’m honest about and answering about any questions that they have in those contexts and my experience, I’m always willing to share that my experience that can inspire others.
Preethi:
I think when people hear stories and when they see the value, people do not hesitate. And I always tell them that even now sometimes I feel I don’t have anything to offer to a mentee, but then I have to think of myself and my journey, there may be someone who was looking for something, what I was looking for at the time that I was looking for.
Alexis:
Very good point. I have an experience like, I think last week I had a discussion with a mentee. She started the call asking me question about what I was doing. And I was surprised because usually people start with, they come with their problems and they want to discuss those problems. They don’t necessarily come to ask me questions. So I was not ready for that. I started to discuss that and at some point she stopped and says, “Oh, this is interesting, what you are saying, because it make me think about something I’m working on right now. I didn’t think I was ready to discuss that, but maybe we can discuss that topic.”
Alexis:
Until we discussed her topic and I realized discussing her topic that we were in the discussion designing something that could be a solution to one of the problems I had. So it was really interesting to see, okay, that we went back and forth discussing both our different challenges we were working, perfectly helped each other design solutions for us. I’m always saying it’s a social learning experiment. And we both learned that one call, that was 40 minutes call and it was really the embodiment of everything I’ve seen. Those relationships, those discussions are really special to me. That’s really something that I hope everybody will be able to experience.
Preethi:
Yeah absolutely.
Alexis:
Have you experienced things that are similar to that?
Preethi:
Oh, absolutely. Red Hat has the mentoring program, I have a mentee now and we were talking about something or even last week. As I’m asking her questions I keep thinking, “Okay, this is where I was, and I think this is, while I’m preaching, am I doing this as well?” So maybe there is a room for improvement for me in implementing what I am suggesting, or we are talking about. So what is it that…
Preethi:
I think it kind of instills the qualities a little bit more into your brain too, like inspires you to try them out as well, to come to a solution that works. You’re helping someone, but then at the same time you are learning as you go. You come up with ideas that you can try on yourself as well. Yes. So I think I’m completely with you on that.
Alexis:
Excellent. We covered a lot during that call and I’m really glad that we cover those things about being an open leader, could be an individual contributor or the manager. When you started your journey, what is the one thing you wish you should have known?
Preethi:
I think more recently, the one thing that I would say, or I don’t know if it just ended up being one thing, it probably ended up being multiple things. So, it’s like, I felt like I had the tools to try it out, but then again, I didn’t have like a practical experience. I remember reading this, I came upon this book, First 90 Days when I started my management journey, I think I started reading that around maybe around 60 days into my new job and I was, “Maybe I should have done a little bit more research and read this book before I started.” Because in that book, there was things like, okay, what are your short-term wins and your long-term wins.
Preethi:
I think that short-term wins really would have helped me realize, okay or give you that confidence that, okay, you may be on the right path. It’s like for the first three months, I felt like I didn’t know what I’m doing. I was doing it anyway. Just thinking, “Okay, this may be right or maybe, otherwise someone will tell me,” but I think having those tangible things that you can check off that first few months of you are navigating a new job or new role would definitely help you give you that inspiration to go on or the motivation to go on.
Alexis:
It’s interesting because it’s at the same time, the inspiration to go on, it’s the motivation to go on. And it’s really building the confidence that you need to do all of that.
Preethi:
Exactly.
Alexis:
Short term wins are really, really important in that process. So it’s already good one. I think whatever role you’re starting, it’s really an important insight.
Preethi:
One of the biggest thing that I felt when going from individual contributor to a management role was that quantifying your achievements or quantifying what you’re doing. It took me a long time for example, it took me a long time to admit that, to myself, that my one-on-one is part of my job or it is something that I can say, “Okay, this is my responsibility.”
Preethi:
To me, it felt like, “Okay, I’m just having a conversation. I’m not verifying a bug. I’m not writing any code.” It wasn’t quantifying enough for me. Seeing that written down as in, okay, this is part of my job, this is my responsibility, this is a check mark that I can do, was important to me.
Alexis:
Excellent. Is there a question I should have asked you?
Preethi:
I think along with the mentors, my manager, I think the village, the village that helped me grow and still continuing to help me grow has been I think another thing that I’ve picked up over the last two years that has been a little bit more helping me grow more it’s been some of the business books. So I think a couple of a few books that I really enjoyed and helped me find these little nuggets everywhere so I have these post-its from multiple books that is on my desk in my room. So I think a couple of books that I really want to call out are The First 90 Days, I really recommend it to anyone who is starting a new job.
Preethi:
So the two other ones were to help me earlier on in my management path is A Manager’s Path and The Making of a Manager, both are written by people who’ve been in individual contributors in tech space growing into management. And then they’re really honest, really stories about things that didn’t work for them, things that kind of, they figured out on their journey. Those have been really helpful for me.
Preethi:
And then I think I’ve felt like I’ve been going from what I can do as a manager and now I’m getting into how I can help my team. So I think I’m in my journey in that right now. So how can I, as a manager, help my team grow, be there for my team. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it was another great one that I really enjoyed reading. I feel like I’m growing in the books that I find too.
Alexis:
It’s really interesting because that in the book you mentioned, I read a few of them. When you combine the book reading, when you combine that with having several mentors, like you said, I love your expression that you need a village to help you succeed, I think combining that book reading, mentoring, and probably having those kinds of distribution about the insights or the nuggets you find, this can be already powerful in helping you in your journey. Thank you for mentioning those books. I will put that in reference in the blog post that will-
Preethi:
Oh, thank you.
Alexis:
… at Le Podcast. Okay. Anything else you want to share to the audience today, Preethi?
Preethi:
I think one other thing that I would definitely say is I’m really thankful for the Red Hat mentoring program. And I think that really helped me grow and really gave this opportunity to connect with you too. I think, with my personality, I’m an introvert, so I would not have on my own have had that opportunity to reach out to you and talk to you before. So I think that got us to here. So I’m really grateful for the program that I have found me mentors. And I think I’ve really enjoyed this journey so far and shout out to all the people in my village.
Alexis:
Excellent. I hope they will listen to you and appreciate your progress in your journey. I’m pretty sure your mentees will also love that and see the path forward for them, that they will help other people to grow and in this way scale their impact. And I think this is really the job of an open leader, really helping the others to scale their impact. Thank you very much, Preethi, that was really great to have you on Le Podcast.
Preethi:
Thank you so much for this opportunity. I enjoyed this as well.
Alexis:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback or just to say hello. And until next time to find better ways of changing your team.
The 4 axes of a leader emerged from conversations in which I was trying to explain what a manager is not expected to do. The attempts to tell people that they should not split the work items, or distribute the work between the team members were leading to a lot of incomprehension.
With the help of a group of manager, we improved the definition of the aspects a manager should consider, by dividing the role into four axes:
People: Hiring, growing, managing performance, and self-improve,
Business: Understanding the business and the ecosystem the organization evolves in, understanding why we provide solutions, products, features, services and formulate a clear vision,
System: Understanding the system formed by the people, the organization, the processes, and tools, remove the obstacles to great work,
Execution: deliver the work!
I use the four BEPS axes in coaching and mentoring sessions to foster conversation about the current focus the people currently have. BEPS stands for business, execution, people, and system and helps people realize when they don’t invest at all in one or more of the axes.
I also asked them where on each axis the activities they are doing or other people are doing land. It is always interesting to have them describe what other people, especially the ones they admire, are doing.
I started that work with managers and realized working with individual contributors that it would apply exactly in the same way. As an individual contributor, if I am focused solely on execution, I am missing opportunities to increase my impact and satisfaction.
Now it is time for me to prepare Season Two with even more book authors, conference speakers and people who inspire better ways of leading and building a better world. (Yes! You can still send me suggestions!)
The first part of the book is a business fable. If you read I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge, you know that I love the genre. I love it because it helps me identify with the characters and with the story and better imagine what could be the outcome if I were to apply the same concepts and ideas.
The second part provides the lessons from the fable starting with the two leadership motives:
Reward-centered leadership,
Responsibility-centered leadership.
As mentioned by Patrick Lencioni, no leader is purely on one side, but the one that will be predominant will have huge impact on the success of the leader and his team.
Responsibility-centered leadership is preferred to get to success, and struggle is expected along the way.
Lencioni then covers the five omissions of Reward-centered leaders:
Developing the leadership team
Managing subordinates (and making manage theirs)
Having difficult and uncomfortable conversations
Running great team meetings
Communicating constantly and repetitively to employees
The book is a very short read. I believe that the point 3, 4 and 5 are easy to observe symptoms that 1 and 2 are not happening properly.
The Culture Map is an excellent book by Erin Meyer. As my current team evolves in an international context, I had the idea to use the culture map as an icebreaker to start one of our quarterly meetings.
The team is composed of people from France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands. The team has to interact daily with a lot of people from the US, and nearly all countries in the EMEA area.
We used a Miro board and one of the culture map provided in Erin’s book (reproduced below).
I gave a short explanation of the first scale: Communicating. Either you are in a Low-Context culture where the communication is precise, simple, and clear, or you are in a High-Context culture where the communication is sophisticated, nuanced, and layered (you are expected to read between the lines).
Then, I asked one question: Where the US would be?
All the team members connected to the Miro board can see the cursors of the others, and so I asked them to move their cursors to the position they thought the right answer would be.
After some discussion, people started to position the US in comparison with other countries. Of course, we covered the fact that a country cannot be a point on a scale but more a range on the scale. We also covered that all people are different and that the more you know a country, the more you can appreciate the subtle differences of the different regions.
We continued to iterate with the next scales:
Evaluating: How people give direct or indirect negative feedback.
Persuading: How people are trained to begin with the theory or to begin with facts or statements.
Leading: How people are used to an Egalitarian or a Hierarchical model.
Deciding: How people are used to decisions made in a Consensual way or Top-down.
Trusting: How trust could be built either though business related activities or through sharing meals and drinks.
Disagreeing: How people are used to see debates and confrontation as positive for the team, or as negative for the team and inappropriate.
Scheduling: How people see the time as linear (everything is scheduled and you stick to it) or flexible (everything can be approached in a flexible manner.
It was a very good opportunity for the team members to express their preferences, and a good reminder that wherever you are on the scale, you have to accept that others could be at another position because they value that position more. They are no “good” position or “bad” position.
A very good starting point to appreciate the diversity of the strengths of the team.
Ranjith Reddy Varakantam, Principal Agile Coach, wrote what we thought was a pretty epic review of I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge on amazon.in and goodreads.com.
He called it “a lean book” that “conveys new learnings with every chapter.” Ultimately describing it as “Aesop’s Fables in an enterprise setting.”
His words piqued our interest so we reached out to Ranjith to learn more about what he’s up to and how the book helped him. Here’s what he had to say.
—
As a Principle Agile Coach, one of my responsibilities is to ensure that the Developer Group, which consists of around 28 teams, is continuously working on small improvements.
One high priority project that we are working on right now is to create a 100% automated workflow that will allow Operator based Containers to be released with zero manual intervention. This will only succeed if we can get multiple groups to work together to deliver the tooling and functionality.
This is quite challenging as it is a complex project that needs people to solve not just hard technical issues but also cultural ones. The interdependencies between multiple teams and the competing priorities raises the table stakes.
Working with this many people and priorities can at times make me feel that some people are “difficult” and don’t seem to be contributing how I’d like them to be. I was feeling this frustration when I picked up the book. Skimming through the first chapter, to my surprise found the main character was in exactly the same position!
“I’ve done my best,” she says. “Maybe this isn’t the job for me. Maybe I should be in a different company. I just wish everyone around me would do more, be better somehow.” These were exactly the same thoughts going through my head. I became riveted to the book. I wanted to find out more.
By the end of the first chapter, the main character realized her folly by talking things through with her wise colleague. The colleague shows her that instead of ‘venting’, she would make more progress if she spent her time ‘inquiring’.
That changed my state of mind and I started to think about what I could do to ensure that gaps were filled and make things crystal clear for people to improve their efficiency.
As I continued to read chapter after chapter, I realized that the challenges that I face or the thoughts that go through my head are common in organizations. The people are not so different from each other and mostly it’s the same kind of situations that we all find ourselves in.
By the end of the story, I realized that I needed to be more attentive and mindful. To be willing to view the situation from a different perspective. With a little bit of work on ourselves, we are actually capable of making a big difference.
After reading this book, I’m now more interested in looking at the problem from various angles without prejudging people. Instead, I try to see what we can do to solve the problem or challenge at hand.
I’ve also found this book to be a handy reference that I can revisit again and again as there are many things that can be picked up. The best part is that each chapter has a clear set of guidelines and additional reading that I can catch up on.
This book has motivated me to look within myself for answers and realized that most often by working a bit on ourselves, we give birth to new powers and greater degrees of effectiveness.
—
Thanks, Ranjith for sharing your story on how the book helped you. From time to time Ranjith publishes articles on Linkedin and Opensource.com. If you’d like to reach out to Ranjith, the best way is via his Linkedin profile.
Editor’s note: This article is written from the perspective of a fictional character, Sandrine, the protagonist of I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge. You can learn more about the book at https://iamincharge.club
This story is a sequel to Confinement, published in April 2020.
Sandrine has now been working at home for seven weeks. So many things have adapted during this time that in some ways it all feels normal to her now, but from time to time she is reminded that this is not the permanent reality. Like when Gaspar, the team’s manager, announced during the virtual hot chocolate that the team would continue to work from home for at least another four weeks.
Sandrine remembers how Mary encouraged her to hop on the first virtual hot chocolate call just a month ago. She laughs to herself as she sees how different her mindset was back then.
During that first call, she heard about some of her colleagues who were struggling with homeschooling their kids. She could feel their frustration but it was difficult for her to relate to as she doesn’t have any kids of her own. However, it did remind her how good she was when tutoring younger kids when she was in high school, and so she offered to teach maths every day for three kids that happened to be in the same class.
Sandrine now has a card on the team board for teaching maths. If it sounds weird to you, it also sounded weird to her when Gaspar suggested putting it on there. She resisted the idea at first, but she was convinced when Gaspar reasoned, “By doing this you’ll be helping Julian and Jenny, and therefore you are helping the team. It is logical that this important work should be on the team board.”
Sandrine remembers her promise to Mary to let her know how the virtual hot chocolate calls were going. She fires up the messaging app on her phone.
Sandrine finishes preparing her virgin mojito just in time for the video call.
She sees Mary joining and is stunned to see her in sunglasses, big earrings, and crazy make-up.
“Umm. Hi Mary. That, that’s an interesting look you have there.”
“I just thought I’d fabulize myself for the meeting daaarling.” Mary responds, before turning off the video filter.
“Hahaha, oh I get it now. Phew, it was just a video filter. For a moment there I thought that isolation had really gotten to you.”
Mary and Sandrine enjoy a good laugh before Mary continues, “You should have seen their faces when I joined the team call with that filter on this week.”
“Good to see you spreading the fun.”
“Well, I believe it’s a shared responsibility. Now, tell me, what have you been learning from your virtual hot chocolate calls?”
“Well there was certainly something there that I didn’t see.”
“Which was?”
“I’m now homeschooling maths to some of the other team members’ kids each day.”
“What?”
“Two of my colleagues were struggling with homeschooling their kids who happened to be in the same class and I offered to help out. My 45 minute investment frees up two other team members giving an hour and a half back to the team. But there’s more to it than that.”
“Go on.”
“Well besides being a good distraction in the day for me, as it reminds me when I tutored maths to some of the younger students in high school, it’s also taken on a life of its own.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the kids started enjoying it so much that they invited some friends, we now have a group of six. And they gave themselves a team name, the VVs.”
“What does that stand for?”
“I don’t know.” Sandrine laughs, “I guess they want to have their secrets. Anyway, it gets even better.”
Mary sips her drink, eyes locked on the screen in a state of disbelief.
“Salman, he’s a designer from another team in our company, well when he heard about this he decided he wanted to join the movement and is now teaching the kids English. They love his style, especially when he dresses up in a costume on Fridays.”
“Way to go! You are doing a great service to all those parents, and the kids too. Your impact is greater than you think you know.”
“All thanks to you for encouraging me to attend something I was just going to blow off. It’s amazing how a little shift in mindset can provoke such a big impact.”
“Indeed. Thanks for sharing that update with me. I’m definitely going to look at my team mocktail meeting a little differently now.”
Sandrine and Mary go on to catch up about other things. At the end of the call, Sandrine reflects on her experiences over the last few weeks.
“Wow, so much has changed and everyone has adapted in so many new and different ways. If it’s possible to change this quickly in reaction to something, I wonder what’s really possible if I take a more proactive approach.”
Ever felt like Sandrine, where a small step made a big impact?
How has your mindset shifted since Sandrine’s last article? What experiment would you like to try next to add some fun to your team or take some pressure off your colleagues?
Read about Sandrine’s biggest transformation in I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge, available on Amazon now.
Emilien Macchi is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. He’s been a contributor to OpenStack since almost its inception as an open-source project.
I had the pleasure of having Emilien on Le Podcast to discuss how learning and sharing were essential ways of growing his career in Software Engineering.
We covered many topics including; peer reviews, pair programming, remote work, and I also asked what he thinks are the most important things to develop as a coder—spoiler alert, it is not just technical skills.
As Emilien is also one of the first people who left a review of our book on Goodreads, I asked him what he thought about the book and how it has helped him. Here’s what he had to say.
Right before reading the book, I was, and still am, working on a refreshed Vision and Mission statement for my team. It has been a long time since we last reflected on this and we wanted to understand who we are now, who we want to be, and what we want to achieve in the future. This is a strategic team effort; which requires patience and team interactions.
At the same time, on the technical side, I’ve been working on the simplification roadmap for our product, OpenStack TripleO, where there is a long-term goal to make management of OpenStack clouds simpler and more consistent across the Red Hat portfolio. It involves a cross-team effort, and very often the biggest challenge isn’t technical but a human one.
So I was looking for a book which would “refresh” things I’ve learned before but in a new way. I was eager to read I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge to learn some new concepts, update my knowledge, and find some inspiration for these challenges.
I’ve known Alexis for a while and I read his first book, Changing Your Team From the Inside, which I really liked and shared with people around me. So for me, it was a natural step to read this new book as I was sure this book would give me the inspiration I was looking for.
I read the book two times.
The first time was just a quick read through as I found that the first part, the story, very intriguing and difficult to put down.
On the second read I tried all the experiments. It was difficult not to rush through this part, as it required more work from me, but when I remembered to be patient I was delighted to realize that the second part was in fact what I was waiting for from the book.
Doing the work for myself gave me access to insights that answered a lot of my questions and gave me new ideas to implement in the work I was currently doing.
It wasn’t all easy going. Some experiments that I tried are still difficult for me in the real world. For example retrospectives. I have a hard time to stimulate the other team members so we can have productive retrospectives. The book gives concrete steps on how to do it with a list of actions but the “do it” is in my opinion the real challenge. The provided links are useful so I just need to spend more time rethinking how we can make people more involved in that exercise.
When I finished the book, I felt that I got another great tool in my library; which I’ll certainly share and re-use for my personal career. The fact that the book is easily written and not that long made me think I could re-read some chapters while experimenting on some exercises again with my team.
I’m very happy to have the book on my desk as something I can reopen from time to time to remind myself about something I learnt before when I need another “refresh”.
The next step is to share this book with my peers. Having this knowledge has helped me, but we could have an even bigger impact if they can also learn some of the described techniques and we start using them within the team when we work together.
Thanks so much Emilien for sharing your story with the book and how it has helped you.
You can learn more about Emilien on his blog: my1.fr/blog And you can follow him on Twitter at: @EmilienMacchi
