2020, A year of great opportunity for leadership growth 

During the beautiful spring time fo 2020, nature was generous with us, reminding us with beauty that life is what matters most, and that we, as our businesses are committed to serve life. The challenging period of 2020, when I experienced the richness of void, the place of infinite opportunities, has gave me an idea of creating a servant leadership manifesto. 

Leadership styles?

I am working on developing a servant leadership mindset, and I wrote the principles back in early summer. Then other moments of reflection came and I was thinking… maybe … it’s more a “hosting leadership” mindset manifesto… or… even better, an “inclusive leadership” manifesto. After all, I don’t believe there are multiple leadership styles. My definition of leadership is: capacity to live life with purpose and serve life with intention. Therefore, this is a just leadership manifesto as a gift for the new year. 

A Just Leadership Manifesto

Allow things to get done over getting things done

Welcome what comes over seeking for perfection

Listen rather over making statements 

Nurture a shared purpose over setting expectations 

Express “power with” over “power over” 

Support people growth over compliance 

Embrace fearless trust over demanding righteous evidence 

Just Leadership Manifesto by Oana Juncuis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

We are all leaders

I believe every one of us is a leader. This “Just Leadership Manifesto” is my gift for you to step into the new year. May 2021 be the year when you will be fully aligned and connected with your genuine selfless leadership. My mission will be here to support you on the journey, while I will continue on my own leadership learning journey.

Happy New Journey for 2021!

Whether you are an Agile Coach, an Agile transformation facilitator or a Scrum Master, did it happen to you to feel frustrated because the change you wanted to see in your workplace was nat the change that was taking place? Did it happen to you to have that feeling of  frustration because the values and principles you promoted had not the desired echo? Did you ever felt the pressure to “succeed a transformation following a plan”, while people had other operational priorities? If you are a manager, did you feel excited by a more collaborative way of working, then felt lost because your hierarchy hase the same “old ways” type of expectations form you? The intentions of an “Agile Transformation Program” are probably true and generous.  Unfortunately it has high chances to turn into  an  “Transformation without leadership” pattern, because the reality on the field is driven by collective unconscious behaviours that sees any change as a threat. I  believe that true resilient transformation happens when we acknowledge and accept our natural emotion to threat: fear

Fear in the Modern (Western) World

The good news is that fear is a very healthy emotion. It is designed to keep us alive. So before going further through this quick blog post, stop and have a grateful thought for your own fears. They are ment to keep you alive. 

The other good news is that nature takes time to adapt. Nature designs for resilience not for performance. Well… not for financial performance for sure. And because nature takes time to adapt, our brain did not really emotionally adapt to our times of fast changes an multiple sollicitations. 

There is little probability to get attacked by a hungry tiger in our office, but our brain respond to our bosses critic on our performance in the last meeting just as if we were attacked by a tiger. We become frightened.  

This is the tricky point of the fear story. Fear is a priority emotion for our brain so it will take immediate action. What “immediate” means? It means it has no time to get it to the rational, aware part of the brain. What “action” means? It means our brave speed-decision unconscious part of us launches the “survival program”. The result? We have certains behaviours without knowing exactly why. 

The Modern Source of Fear : The Ego 

Fear is not something we are willing to face, therefore we give “good reasons” for our behaviours, including those we have in situations that we are uncomfortable with. . As Brené Brown would say , we show up armoured. 

Among others, fear triggers in judgmental behaviours. It may also trigger shame. We don’t like to look bad.  Hey wait, actually who does not want to look bad? The Ego. Our ego is our trickiest friend. It turns often into a liability. And as it’s smart enough, it won’t show up as  liability but with smart avoiding scenarios like :

“I won’t talk about it, it’s not very interesting what I have to say” ( smart, ego found a way to avoid exposure and confrontation).

Let’s go back to the situation of the critic boss , we are very likely to say something like “the boss was not even clear about the purpose of my role in that meeting”. Ego has found a way to blame someone else and avoid or , even more likely, hide self-delusion. 

Nowadays, when tigers don’t jump in our offices, the most current reason of our fears is our ego. Of course I’m not referring extreme situations. 

Ego wants us to “look good”. And everything that threatens our “good-looking” self  calls our ego to play the “survival scenarios”.

We armoured our Ego to avoid hurt and burry fear. Now it became our regular source of fear. 

The Change : between Ego and “Power Over” 

So change means stepping out of our comfort zone to uncertainty, which is a dangerous place. 

Alright,  and who is really at threat in a change process of our business or society? My answer to that is our Ego.It’s our Ego who does not want to step out from the comfort zone, because challenge puts us at risk of not looking good.

The deep blocker  of the most wonderfully intentioned workplace transformation program, is Ego.

 Ego is the source of our fear and it is ego who launches the “survival scenarios” to keep the status quo. 

There are many ways fear triggered by our ego manifests its survival behaviours and one of them is judgment;  we’d rather like to put the spot on some other people defaults dealing with our own fears and lack of comfort. 

I was always very uncomfortable by power games in organisation dynamics, and, maybe because of that I became interested by what is the motivator of power games.

I’m using here the term power with the meeting of “power over” , as stated by Brené Brown in her book “Dare To Lead”.

Why people are striving for power over? One easy answer is having power means “looking good” so Ego will be pleased. Even if that’s true, I think there is even a deeper reason. Having power over is an effective way to armour ourselves. And we armour ourselves because we ( or better, our Ego) are scared to show up as we are. Not because we are not worthy enough, not good enough, not wise enough, but because our Ego also whispers in our ears that “hey, you might not be worthy enough, good enough, wise enough…and you don’t want that to be known, don’t you”. So we are scared. So we armour. One of the armouring acts is to take the power and exerce it over other people.

Here is what Ego might tell you : “f I have the power, I have control, the world is less uncertain  for me, and it will prevent me from looking good. “

So power games are also a survival scenario of fears triggered by ego.

I believe most “powerful over”- like people in the world are those that are the most afraid of themselves.

From Ego and Fear to a Journey Towards Leadership 

People who are afraid cannot have a leader posture. Therefore I believe people who demonstrate a “power over” attitude are no leaders. And they can become leaders. Just like anyone else, if they accept to work on their fears. Leadership does not mean to be fearless, leaders can be freaked out by uncertainty, the lack of control, the pressure of other people around them who pushes them into their power games. Leaders are at the service of the power of the group together, the power with. 

And maybe the most important power of the leader is the “power within”: the power to show up as they are are with all their doubts, Brené, who I quote the third time, calls the power within, the   “Power of Vulnerability”.  

We cannot embrace change if we want to control reality. And we cannot let go of controlling the reality if we don’t admit that it’s hard to do so. 

We cannot embrace change if we have high expectations. And we cannot  be empathic without don’t express our own needs and dreams.

We cannot really embrace change without courage. And the first act of courage is to face and admit our fears. This is the first step on the Leadership journey.

Epilogue

I’m enrolled in the Shakti Leadership Program for Women a program offered in collaboration with the University of San-Diego.  Nilima Bhat , who built the program refers also the “power with” vs “power over “as a healing posture for our broken (business) world built on competition rather than collaboration. The impact of fear in organisations dynamics is my project. If you think you can help me with, if this work is interesting for you, just show up.

We need reassurance. Therefore we plan. There are situations, mainly in our personal life, when we recognise that our plans are just wishful thinking. Sometimes we are so sadly skeptic about our bold plans that we cut ourselves from our dreams. Then comes the professional life. Here, on the opposite, we often push ourselves in an extreme state of denial and believe that our wishful thinking plan is the only acceptable reality. If a little inner voice tells us that universe may care little about what our view of acceptable reality is, we seek ways to obtain some extra-reassurance via extra-plans: we perform risk management, estimation of time to complete tasks … and other complex expert analysis on everything-that-could-happen-in-the-future. All these tasks we need to reinforce our self-reassurance about our ability to control the future, have a cost. I call it the cost of fear.

The (Agile) Change: from Intention to Action

Organisations today aim to change toward a more collaborative, customer-centric, flexible format. Leaders have a genuine intention to create an Agile organisation, where people thrive, are allowed to wrong, as long as they learn from their errors:experimentation will the new way.
This is the dream, the quest, the purpose. Then, as in all stories the tension between the intention and the status quo steps in. Stories of change have the same pattern than all stories :).
Let’s look a little bit at what can bey the impact of the status quo on the aspiration fo change.
Peter Senge says that true tension is born when the theory exposed (what I aspire for) is different of the theory in action (what I actually do). There is no problem with this tension; as long as it acknowledged, learning can occur and effective alignment between the exposed theory and the theory in action can be achieved. Peter Senge, in his book, The Fifth Discipline, who is for me the father of system thinking – says that tension is an opportunity for learning.
If you’re familiar with coaching terms, seeking alignment between intentions/speech and actions is called “congruence”. So far, so good, and how can be the Nirvana of congruence be achieved?
I believe that there is only one magic formula to address the gap: becoming aware of it. Is this easy?
No! Why? Because we have a genuine state of denial that makes uns think that as long as we believe in what we say we’ll do, means that whatever we will do is in harmony with what we say we’ll do.

Our first trap is trying to achieve change with tools of our status quo.

One common example is “planning the change”. We believe planning is “a professional attitude”, when it’s only utility is to reassure us. Farer we are of our comfort zone, more we need to be reassured.
And here is the gap where the cost of fear sneaks in: the gap between the needs of the ecosystem (market, customers, teams, organisations) and the natural need of leaders to control their ecosystem.

Here are some of the sources that sum-up as important costs for organisations and that I call “the cost of fear”

Continuous planning vs continuous delivery

Planning as a reassuring activity that addresses fear of not controlling was already mentioned above.
Over planning need stakeholders and teams to be involved and spend (sometimes) an impressive amount of time in planning meetings. While planning is happening, decision to deliver is deferred.
While planning is on the agenda, value does not reach customers.
The cost of fear is the cost of continous planning

Ongoing estimation and frozen development

What about a team more that 10 people focused on estimating backlog’s User Stories for 6 weeks in a row? Meanwhile PMOs, Project Directors, CxO people and other coordinators spend at leas half of their time taking decisions on how the future will look like when the estimation will be done. No development or delivery happens before leaders are reassured with a number (estimation).The value of an approach like NoEstimates, domain where Vasco Duarte and Woody Zulli have had major contributions), lies also in reducing the delay to deliver.
While estimation is ongoing, no value reaches customers.
The cost of fear is the cost of ongoing estimation.

Risk Management vs Emerging Architecture

Locking our options in early decisions about architecture of our future product is another way we address our need of reassurance that the future will behave as we decide it. Personally I still recover of IT architecture committees I’ve been in years and years ago ;). The protocol is the following : a lot of talented experts meet to analyse all the risk of the future and address them with a list of operational actions and or adequate design. Usually these Risk Management committees end-up with a deferred decision as a new risk revealed in the just closed committee has to be addressed and discussed over in the next one.
The only decision is to defer decision£.
While analysing risks, no solution is emerging and no value reaches the customer.
The cost of fear is the cost of focusing on risk management.

The Cost of fear, a systemic description

System have self-regulating actions called feed-back loops. The feed-back loops are rather reinforcing : system behaviour is reinforced by the feed-back loop- The Cold War period is an example of a system within a a reinforcing loop – or balancing: system behaviour is regulated to stay in given boundaries.
I think the cost of fear is causing a reinforcing loop that leads to growing frustration of leaders and increasing organisation bureaucracy.

How to reduce the cost of fear?

Well, my part of the answer is in the title of the paragraphs above, and to pit it in only one word it is : Experiment!
Experiment has some magic powers for two reasons. One is that triggers a mindset where we know we are allowed: to try, to be wrong.
The second is that it puts organisations on a learning path, that addresses the systemic nature of an organisation. And by the way, true learning is fun, true food that keeps our brain happy.

Principles that (may) reduce the cost of fear

Deliver a prototype rather than plan,
Define a team capacity rather than estimate tasks
Drive by emerging design rather than performing risk management.

The cost of Delay is included in the cost of fear, as we don’t act until we are reassured.

Okay, this looks like reduce cost-of-fear just-to-try-principles cheat-sheet. It’s not enough. An additional question to answer is “How to address the fear that generates these costs?”. And this is the most tricky question. Fear is the strongest symptom that some basic needs are not met.
Just telling leaders/managers/architects/teams/stakeholders/Decision makers/ that their action is not aligned with their intention ( of delivering true value to customers fast, collaboration, self-empowerment, test&learn) is simply not enough.
Were you more brave when someone just told you “don’t be afraid!”?Addressing the fear needs compassion, listening and observation.

Epilogue : The (mostly) hidden cost of fear

Peter Senge also says the 2most powerful motivation drivers are fear and aspirations. Aspiration leads to positive vision: “We want to achieve something” , fear to negative vision : “We want to avoid something”.
Vision lead by fear trigger compliance behaviour : people do their job to be compliant to a vision issued by hierarchy its related rules and regulations. Vision lead by aspiration trigger commitment : people do their job because they want that vision, and they can empower themselves to change the rules and regulations accordingly. The 20th business “led-by-fear vision behaviour” was considered “professional”. I believe that the only thriving organisation model is the “led-by-aspiration” one. I do hope the 21st century will consider “led-by-aspitration” behaviour to be nevertheless “professional”.

Ultimately, what is your best guess about   the cost of a non thriving organisation?

Our brain is wired for stories. A story is the most effective way to meet our brain somehow contradictory needs of logical sequential reflection ( this happens because of that, then comes other …) and emotional involvment.

If Agile Adoption may turn in circles in your organisation, in spite of all great feed-back and proven evidence , it is mainly because logic, data and information is not enough to take action.

As Dan and Chip Heath say , action is ignited when  you speak to your emotions elephant while giving the direction to your rational rider. There nothing better to do both that an involving story. If you want to on-board people in Agile Adoption , you’d better tell a good true story where they can picture themselves as heroes.

Here is the “Storytelling for Agile” interview I gave  on InfoQ , facilitated by Ben Linders.

 

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