The importance of collaboration inside a group or team, a shared leadership as an Agile leadership and the definition of ten skills in this last one, collaborative conversations guided through four questions that repeatedly done and answered result in Strategic Doing are the main ideas of the book “Strategic Doing. Ten Skills for Agile Leadership”, written by Edward Morrison, Scott Hutcheson, Elizabeth Nilsen, Janyce Fadden, and Nancy Franklin.
Starting
with the skills needed for Agile Leadership, they are 10 and the following:
“1. Building a safe space for deep and focused conversations.
2. Using an appreciative question to frame your conversation.
3. Identifying the assets at your disposal, including the hidden ones.
4. Linking and leveraging your assets to create new opportunities.
5. Identifying a big opportunity where you can generate momentum.
6. Rewriting your opportunity as a strategic outcome with measurable characteristics.
7. Defining a small starting project to start moving toward your outcome.
8. Creating a short-term action plan in which everyone takes a small step.
9. Meeting every 30 days to review progress, adjust, and plan for the next 30 days.
10. Nudging, connecting, and promoting to reinforce your new habits of collaboration. (pp.152 and 153) “
With
these skills, we should build and strength the collaboration between all
the team members. “Collaboration involves linking, leveraging, and aligning
resources in ways that enhance one another’s capacity to create a shared outcome,
a mutual benefit. (p.19) “
As we
are not focused on the individual, it is easily comprehensible to talk about shared
leadership. In this context, leadership appears as a characteristic shared
between a group or a team and it “is a way to maximize talent because it allows
us to mix and match the best of individuals’ leadership abilities to meet the
complex challenges we face” (pp.118 and 150). Also referred and cited by the
authors of the book “Strategic Doing. Ten Skills for Agile Leadership”,
Marshall Goldsmith presents 7 guidelines to develop a shared leadership culture:
“1.Give power away to individuals to allow them to strengthen their abilities.
2.Define clear boundaries for the decisions they are empowered to make.
3.Cultivate an organizational culture in which people feel able to take the initiative.
4.Give people the discretion and autonomy they need to complete tasks and deploy their resources.
5.Don’t second guess the decisions of those who have been asked to make them.
6.Managers should consider themselves a resource rather than a supervisor.
7. Set up an agile, iterative processes that allows for regular check-ins to review progress and make adjustments if necessary. “
Additionally,
the idea of having collaborative conversations inside the group or the team is
another aspect underlined by the authors of the book. They believe that through
four questions it is possible to see how the ten skills, presented at the
beginning, are fitting.
In this
sense, the 4 questions, of what they called Strategic Doing and with which we
can start having collaborative conversations, are:
“1.What could we do? What are all the possible opportunities before us – using only the assets that we already have – that might address our concerns? [Skills 3 and 4[1]]
2. What should we do? We can’t do everything; which, out of all the opportunities, should we pursue, and what would success look like? [Skills 5 and 6]
3. What will we do? Where will we start and what are the commitments we are making to each other to begin that project? [Skills 7 and 8]
4. What’s our 30/30? [2] [Skills 9 and 10] (pp.153-154) “
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Strategic Doing is more than find answers to the two questions: Where we are going? (Thinking in the goal to achieve) How we will get there? (Thinking in the plan: resources to be used and actions to be done). If we can have answers for these two questions we have an effective strategy, but this doesn’t mean that we have engagement… In contrast, with Strategic Doing we ask about the goal or goals to be achieved (our destination) with the first and second questions (What could we do? What should we do?) and the plan (our pathway) with the third and fourth questions (What will we do? What’s our 30/30?) regularly and at short intervals (not at long): “we see that strategy emerges from a shared discipline of asking and answering these simple but not easy questions over and over. (pp.155 -156) ”
“we accumulate learning by doing, we refine our strategy. We build trust, and we design what’s next. In the world of collaboration and networks, strategy becomes more like software development. Continuous iteration and improvement moves us forward where we want to go (p.156)”
[1] Skills 1 and 2 “help you set the
stage for productive, collaborative conversations” (p.154).
[2] 30/30 is the name given to a meeting that happens every 30 days to review the team progress, results and discuss some possible changes and adjustments. The goal is always to keep learning loops, experimenting to identify leverage points and adapting to the new circumstances and changes.
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