Are you a Leader that Serves?

Last week, I had the fortune to enjoy the benefits of a concierge lounge at a prestigious hotel.  As I was enjoying hors d’oeuvres, I initiated a game I like to play called “observe the people”.  As simple as it sounds, it allows me to discern how people interact with each other and identify any interesting traits. I noticed and talked to people who were travelling for business, those that may be considered leaders in their respective industries.  Most of those in the lounge could be considered a bit privileged in their expectations of both service and amenities of the lounge, not at all unreasonable in the context.

I noticed the host who was checking-in the guests into the lounge at his desk.  He was busy registering people and providing information about the lounge.  He was doing this continually for an hour as I was working on my computer getting some odds and ends done.  As guests were getting drinks and food, I saw that the host had nothing to refresh his palette yet he was the busiest person in the lounge.  With that awareness, I walked over to the host and offered to get him a drink and some food.  He looked at me with surprise and said, “You are the first guest in 5 years who has offered me a drink.” That caught me by surprise.  How could that be?

Have we gotten so invested in our privilege that we forget that part of our responsibility as leaders is to serve those that help us?  If you are reading this and thinking, “Why should I serve those that I lead when they should be serving me?” you may have a learning opportunity to help yourself and your team, group, division or company.  A major part of your job as a leader is to help maintain and improve the health of your employees.  This takes a page from the concept of Servant Leadership.

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” in the 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader”. Greenleaf takes the approach of “the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived.”

While there are various key servant leadership attributes, the ones I find important are an ability to listen; capability to empathize with people; aptitude to heal others (both mentally, physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually; an awareness of your surroundings, ability to persuade and conceptualize, have foresight, be a steward to stakeholders, customers, partners, and employees; a commitment to grow people encouraging innovation, self-initiative, and learning; and a need to build community.

As a leader, your first response should be to greet your employees (aka, those you serve) and then ask if there is anything we can do for them and ask if you can remove any impediments in their way.  Understand that by being that servant leader, you make your employees feel known and important. You should also remove their impediments helping them deliver products and services quicker, which has the benefit of making you money earlier than later. Remember, employees or those that are helping you.  They are the engine to your success. Serve them. Remove their impediments, listen to their needs, and get them a drink. Is it time to get serious and sincere in helping them? 

Can your Desk become your Kanban Board? Yes, it Kanban!

Once upon a time, I found I had little space in the office to organize my work.  With the more recent office hoteling policies, while there is more flexible space, there is less of one’s own personal space.  I wanted a place where every morning I can quickly see my work ahead of me. While there are online tools that I can use, I wanted something more tactile.   What I did have was a desktop surface.  I did have post-its, and sharpies.  I decided to experiment with Kanban on a physical desktop. 

As an Agile Coach, I work in iterations and increments much like I educate and coach my teams and organizations.  It allows me to listen to what my customers want and prioritize the work based on value, much like a Product Owner should do. With this in mind, I used my tools to craft a kanban board on my desk.

Before I go any further, allow me to provide you with a brief description of what is a kanban board.  It is a work board that helps you visualize both the work and the flow of that work. It helps you optimize the flow of your work by understanding your WIP (work in progress) limit. In its physical form, it is usually shaped by a few state transitions as columns, the most basic include ‘To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done”. My work card (where I write the activity) was written in canonical form that included when the task was written and then when I completed the work on the card, the “done” date.

I took the initial discovery activities that my client (aka., customer) and I agreed to, wrote them onto post-its with my sharpie, and added them to the kanban board in priority order based on both value and order dependency.  As I completed some of the discovery tasks, I added new tasks from my customers to the “To Do” column and reprioritized on a regular basis.  I experimented with keeping my WIP limit to about 3 activities in “Doing” at a time.

What I liked about this kanban experiment was that each morning when I got to my desk, I had my work right in front of me.  This immediately reminded me of my work for the day. It was very easy to maintain as it only took some post-its and markers to update the board. Every morning I checked the work that was in “Doing” so I knew what I had to get done for the day. I also enacted a quick reprioritization of the work so I knew what to pull from the “To Do” column when I had WIP.  I managed to get a lot of work done this way. 

I’d say the experiment was a success.  What did I learn? That it is too easy to add more activities into “Doing” adding to WIP. This had the unfortunate result of slowing my throughput. What else did I learn?  That yes I kanban!

Who really is the Customer?

As straightforward as this question may seem, it engenders a wide variety of answers that tend to be murky. The real answer is clear. A customer is someone who has a choice on what to buy, external to the company, and a choice of where to buy it.  As it relates to your company, a customer pays you with money to help you stay in business by purchasing your products.  For these simple factors, engaging the customer is of utmost importance.

Most companies like to say that "customer is king" and some indeed are.  But if you ask those in a company when was the last time they actually talked to customers, many say rarely or never. As bizarre as it may sound, there are challenges that companies have in relation to engaging with customers.

The first challenge is that the term “Customer” is being applied to a number of people “internal” to the company who are not really Customers. This means they don’t pay and bring revenue to the company. Instead, they are really internal stakeholders or partners. When you incorrectly title someone a customer when they are not, then when you apply Agile, it will not really be customer value-driven as you are not using actual customer feedback to drive toward customer value.

The second challenge is that some companies do not really engage their customers to get their feedback to understand what they find valuable.  This is often for two reasons. The first is that there is pretend or arrogant certainty from those in the company on what they think is customer value so they don’t really think they need to engage with customers. The second is that the company optimizes for sticking with the plan over adapting to customer feedback. In both cases, this prevents the opportunity of gaining valuable customer feedback. 

The key to engaging customers is to gain their valuable customer input and feedback.  The input and feedback should be the basis for driving a majority of your decisions and setting the direction of the product. As you look to build a customer value-driven engine within your enterprise, the customer or more specifically, customer feedback, is the “driver” that steers the engine of customer value.  The more you incorporate the customer at the center of your company, the more likely you will have satisfied customer and greater business success.

Learn if you incorporate customer feedback with the Empty Customer Chairs technique at: 

http://cmforagile.blogspot.com/2016/03/empty-customer-chairs-illustrating.html

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Six Tips to make Story Mapping more effective

Story Mapping is a practice that helps you experience a customer or user journey. You would first capture the end-to-end customer experience by asking what would a user do? This includes establish a backbone, steps, and options.  

The story mapping process promotes the team to think through elements of what the customer finds as valuable from a process perspective. It moves away thinking of functionality first and instead advocates thinking about the customer experience first.  Then you would use an incremental approach of building, inspecting, and adapting for the next increment. What might be some tips to help you more effective work through a story mapping session? 

Tip #1 – Craft your Persona (aka, customer)

Draft the persona that will be taking the customer or user journey.  Place the persona at the top or head of the story map. This provides empathy for the user and inspiration for those that are attempting to craft the journey through the eyes of the user (via the story mapping practice).  Learn more about personas at Personas - Getting to really know your Customer.  

Tip #2 – Everyone stands up around the story map

As simple as it sounds, have everyone working on the story map session stand-up and around the story map as they are creating it. This keeps everyone engaged on crafting the story map.  

Tip #3 – Everyone writes options

When it comes time to imagine options for each step along the customer journey, provide everyone with a post-it pack and marker.  Ensure everyone knows that they should put up the option ideas as they think of them.  This gets lots of options up quickly. This also reduces any single threaded thinking where only one person is doing the writing.  

Tip #4 – Promote lots of chatter during Affinity of options

After a number of options are written by a number of people, it is time to determine if there are affinities.  This is a good opportunity to promote conversation for understanding the customer journey together as each option is discussed.

Tip #5 – Ask owners of options if they are similar

If two options are similar, ask the owner of each to determine if they form an affinity.  Often times when there are similar options on post-its, those that didn’t write them speak up to discuss if they are indeed related. Instead, those that wrote them should determine the affinity (or not) as they would know better.  

Tip #6 – Use verb/noun

Use short verb/noun phrases to capture the backbones, steps, and activities (e.g. capture my address, view my order status, receive invoice). This helps with understanding the expected action for each step of the user journey. 

You can learn details of executing a story mapping session at Story Telling with Story Mapping.