Hiring for the Culture of your Future

As an Agile Consultant, I occasionally help companies hire for talent as I’m transforming companies (e.g., an Agile transformation, business transformation, digital transformation or similar). When I’m helping with interviewing or hiring talent process, the interviewers circle back together to discuss the candidate. I often hear things like “They don’t seem to fit our culture”. Sometimes, there is a question built into the interview questionnaire asking, “Are they a cultural fit?”. 

When a company is satisfied with their culture, I can understand that you would align with the concept of hiring for cultural fit.  However, when you are working through an agile, business, or digital transformation, this implies that you are also transforming to a different culture with new ways of working. When you say “hire for a cultural fit” it needs to be to the new culture that you want.

For example, if the culture is more command and control where work is prescribed upfront, then the work culture tends to be very individual driven (I have been assigned my task and I will work on it) with little feedback is asked for (do the work and get it done by the deadline). If you are transforming to Agile ways of working, you need a much more collaborative and team-oriented culture where people are pairing up on tasks, helping each other, and where feedback is expected. Hiring for the former (command and control type culture) will not help you get to an agile culture of collaboration.  

If you are going through any type of transformation as a company, include a theme or work on re-evaluating the hiring process. Take a look at your standard interview questions and adapt them for the culture that you want. Also, describe the type of people that will fit your future culture (e.g., collaborative, team-oriented, etc.) and share this with the interviewers.  This will help embed your current culture with the people that will support the culture you desire for the future.    

Being Agile in HR with Peer Recruiting

A collaboration by Alexa Fuhren and Mario Moreira

Does a manager know better than a team who fits best to a role? How can we recruit the right people that fit best to our Agile organization? The answer is, by being Agile ourselves, particularly in the recruiting process!

In a more traditional working environment if there is a vacancy in a team, the manager approaches the recruiter, shares the requirements of the role, hands over the responsibility for the recruiting process to the HR department, and will be involved again when interviewing and selecting candidates. The recruiter is responsible for creating a job ad, posting it in appropriate recruiting channels, pre-selecting candidates, inviting the manager to interviews and making an offer to the selected candidate. The team usually plays a minor role in selecting the candidate.

Many teams in Agile operate with a self-organizing model.  This model includes much more team ownership, autonomy, as well as responsibility and accountability for all team members than traditionally operating teams. In self-organizing models, the concept of peer recruiting can be applied where the team should play a much stronger role in selecting the right candidate that fits best to the team. Due to a better person-team fit, a reduction of early employee turnover could be a desired outcome.

If teams are responsible for selecting new team members, this will change the role of the recruiter from owning the recruiting process to supporting the process and coaching the team. Depending on the knowledge and experience of the team, the recruiter will be more or rather less involved in selecting the right candidate.

Self-organizing teams can be responsible for the whole recruiting process and accountable for hiring the right candidate. It starts with creating a (new) job profile for the vacancy. The Recruitment Coach will challenge the team to figure out which profile is needed to increase their current and future team performance. When creating a job ad, the Recruitment Coach can give advice on how to make it compelling and will provide templates that are in line with corporate design.

Team members can post the job ad on job boards and in their social media channels (LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, chatrooms, private networks). After pre-selecting the candidates based on previously defined criteria, the team invites the selected candidates for interviews, roles plays, presentations etc. They can choose to ask the manager or recruiter to interview the candidates. The recruiter’s role will be to train the team on interview techniques and how to avoid evaluation errors like stereotyping, the halo effect or the Pygmalion effect etc.

Implementing peer recruiting means moving the decision to the people who know best who fits to their teams. It helps to speed up the recruiting process by reducing long decision making processes with managers and HR.

What is in it for the company?

• Faster decisions due to less interactions with HR and the manager
• Higher team commitment
• Less turnover in the first 6 months of employment due to a better company-person fit
• Recruiter can focus on strategic work, e.g. employer branding, building networks etc., and become a valuable coach for the recruiting processes

What is in it for the candidate?

• Candidate experiences an Agile culture right from the first contact with the company
• Candidate gets to know the colleagues he will closely work with
• Job interview at eye level with team members instead of the potential manager

Peer recruiting shifts the recruiter’s role to a coach who supports the business in making hiring decisions faster, selecting candidates that fit best to the company and lowering the early turnover rate. Enabling the team to select new team members increase their autonomy which can lead to higher team commitment and higher team performance.

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Learn more about Alexa Fuhren at: https://de.linkedin.com/in/alexa-fuhren-b745843/de

Mario Moreira writes more about Agile and HR in his book "The Agile Enterprise" in Chapter 21 "Reinventing HR for Agile"

The Forgotten Agile Role – the Customer

Many Agile implementations tend to focus on the roles inside an organization – the Scrum Master, Product Owner, Business Owner, Agile Team, Development Team, etc.  These are certainly important roles in identifying and creating a valuable product or service.  However, what has happened to the Customer role?  I contend the Customer is the most important role in the Agile world.  Does it seem to be missing from many of the discussions?

While not always obvious, the Customer role should be front-and-center in all Agile methods and when working in an Agile context.  You must embrace them as your business partner with the goal of building strong customer relationships and gathering their valuable feedback.  Within an Agile enterprise, while customers should be invited to Sprint Reviews or demonstrations and provide feedback, they should really be asked to provide feedback all along the product development journey from identification of an idea to delivery of customer value.

Let's remind ourselves of the importance of the customer.  A customer is someone who has a choice on what to buy and where to buy it. By purchasing your product, a customer pays you with money to help your company stay in business.  For these factors, engaging the customer is of utmost importance.  Customers are external to the company and can provide the initial ideas and feedback to validate the ideas into working products.  Or if your customer is internal, are you treating them as part of your team and are you collecting their feedback regularly?

As you look across your Agile context, are customers one of your major Agile roles within your organization?  Are they front and center?  Are customers an integral part of your Agile practice?  Are you collecting their valuable feedback regularly?  If not, it may be time to do so.  

The Power of Agile is in your Customers and Employees

I’m Agile, you’re Agile, everyone is Agile.  Or folks think they are.  But are they really? If Agile is only a process to you, Agile will fail. If Agile is pretending certainty without validating with customers, then Agile will fail. If Agile is commanded from above with little ownership from the team, Agile will fail.  More importantly, not only Agile will fail, so will your business.  Agile is a move to a lean culture focusing on customers and what they find as value and focusing on employees who are the engine that can create that value.  Agile is effectively about creating a thriving business. 

I believe there are the two primary success factors in creating a thriving business: a culture where customers matter and employees matter. I’m not talking about the lip service that is prevalent today. In some cases, we see quite the opposite, where employees are disenfranchised and customers are rarely engaged. Instead, the goal is to have a culture and practices in place that truly gain the benefits of engaging with customers and employees. Through the customer and employee, a company draws their power within an agile culture and, I contend, within any thriving company.

When you have a riveting focus on the customer and you believe that an engaged customer matters, then you have the basis for a relationship where you can truly understand what the customer wants. When you have a sharp focus on employees and provide them the space to make decisions and own their work, then you will begin to understand the value an engaged employee base can provide.

If the values are sincerely translated to organizational objectives and agile approaches are applied, then it can act as a differentiator between the success of your organization compared to the success of other organizations. Of course, every company likes to say that employees and customers matter, but are their objectives and actions really aligned with these values?

Upon closer inspection, the values should translate into objectives focusing on customer engagement and employee engagement.

• Customer engagement focuses on establishing meaningful and honest customer relationships with the goal of initiating continuous customer feedback to truly identify what is valuable to the customer. This includes establishing all of the activities involved in a Customer Feedback Vision.
• Employee engagement focuses on empowering employees so they can self-organize into teams and can own and be a part of the decision-making process at their own level.  When employees have ownership, they have more passion in their work.  When they have more passion, they give 110%. 

Then we add the “secret ingredient” of applying a continuous and adaptive approach (a.k.a. agile culture, processes, methods, practices, and techniques). If done properly with the ability to adapt, this can lead to an increase in customer sales and an increase in team productivity. This finally leads to your incentive, which is an increase in company profits.  

Now is time to take a moment.  Are employees disenfranchised or fully engaged?  Are customers rarely engaged or is their feedback continuously engaged?  Is Agile just a trend that others should do or are you serious about Agile and the culture shift it requires?  Keep in mind, the combination of customer and employee engagement within an Agile context isn’t just a good idea, it is great for business.  

PS - to read more about the importance of customers and employees, consider reading Chapter 3 of the book entitled Being Agile.  

Patterns of Resistance in your Agile Journey

Resistance is a common reaction to a change initiative. As organizations attempt to grow or improve, it must change. Change can occur for many reasons. When moving to an organization that is embracing Agile, there is often a need for a significant culture change since Agile is effectively a culture change.

Agile brings about a change in mindset and mechanics, which affects both employees and customers. Whereas change can create new opportunities, it will also be met with resistance.  Agile change really isn’t any different than any other culture change, ergo the resistance will have similar patterns.  There are many reasons for resistance. Here are some of the patterns:  

Here we go again! It is comforting when things remain the same. Employees have seen change efforts come and go without any true commitment and may attempt to wait the new ones out.

• What can you do?  The commitment to change must be clearly stated.  The change initiate must be treated as a program, with clear motivations and rewards for change.

Fear of the unknown.  Change is often defined by a journey into the unknown and it natural to resist what we don’t understand.  For most, it is unclear what the change will entail.  

• What can you do?  Leaders should provide a vision of what the new world will look like 

Lack of communication. Employees need to know what is occurring to them. As information trickles down from the top, the message can be lost.

• What can you do? Plan for continuous communications at all levels is important.  Include various communication channels and messages from as many champions as possible. 

Change in roles. Some employees like to retain the status quo and do not want to see their roles changed. When roles are vague, some don't know where they fit in the new culture, making them feel excluded. When they have no say in their new roles, they can feel alienated.

• What can you do? Discuss the role changes with employees.  Give them time to adapt to the roles or give them time to try new roles.   

Competing initiatives. Introducing an agile initiative when there are already multiple initiatives occurring can lead to employees feeling overwhelmed, causing them to resist. Hardly an auspicious start!

• What can you do?  It is important for management to prioritize initiatives and focus on the higher priority ones.

Change for people, not leaders. When asked “Who wants change?”, everyone raises their hands. But when asked, “Who wants to change?”, no one’s hand goes up.  This can be particularly true with leaders.  Leaders want change to occur within their teams but are not particularly interested in changing themselves and this may be been prevalent in past change initiatives.  

• What can you do? Acknowledge the change that the leaders must make and convey the leaders’ commitment to change. 

New management's need to change something. New leaders often feel they must show they are action-oriented. They may reason that the change that worked in their previous company should work here. Some know their term is short, so they are not interested in long-term change. Some are unaware of what it takes to affect culture. Employees who are used to this scenario may resist. 

• What can you do?  Avoid what may appear to be random changes.  Ensure the Agile change is aligned with better business outcomes and not just to do Agile. 

It will not always be possible to identify and manage all types of resistance.  However, it must be treated as a real and tangible activity.  It is better to start addressing resistance to change in a pro-active manner. The more you review and enact the "What can you do?" tips, the more likely you will increase your changes of a successful Agile change (or any culture change).   

Have you Crossed the Agile Chasm?

In 1991, Geoffrey Moore refined the classic technology adoption model with an additional element he called the “chasm.”[1] He advanced a proposition specific to disruptive innovation that there is a significant shift in mentality to be crossed between the early adopter and the early majority groups. Disruptive innovation is the development of new values that forces a significant change of behavior to the culture adopting it. In this case, Agile is that disruptive force that insists on applying a set of values and principles within a specific culture of “being Agile” to be successful and for the organization to realize the full business benefits of Agile.

At first glance, it would appear that many companies have adopted Agile. I believe, however, that this perception is specious, in view of the further observation that the majority of companies that are “doing” Agile have not actually adopted the new values and principles and not made the cultural shift to actually “being” Agile. Such companies look at Agile as a set of skills, tools, and procedural changes and not the integrated behavioral and cultural change it truly is. In other words, they think they have crossed the chasm, but they have not made the significant change of behavior required to make the leap.

My experience in the field leads me to posit a refinement on Moore's chasm concept as applied to Agile. First, there is the real Agile chasm between those on the left side who have made the organic behavioral changes consistent with the values of being Agile―and those on the right side who are just doing” Agile mechanically. Second, there is a fake chasm, which many organizations pride themselves on having crossed by virtue of adopting some mechanical features of Agile, whereas they have not been willing or able to make the behavioral changes and adopt the values required to cross the real chasm. Although many companies say that they are doing Agile in some form, a large proportion of these are actually doing Fragile ("fake Agile") or some other hybrid variant that cannot deliver the business benefits of Agile.

I cannot overstate this point: many companies and their teams are mechanically doing some form of Agile without having actually crossed the Agile chasm, not discarding the behavioral baggage that is keeping them from behaviorally and culturally being Agile. Until a team attains the state of being Agile, the business benefits that Agile can provide will be elusive. I contend that the industry has barely entered the early majority of true Agile cultural transformation, and many companies continue to struggle to leap the Agile chasm.  What have you noticed across the Agile landscape?  Have companies crossed the Agile chasm?

Note: If you are looking for more insight in crossing the Agile chasm, consider reading the book Being Agile. This book lays the foundation for those who want to cross the Agile cultural chasm, understand the behaviors that need to change, and gauge progress along the way. It provides an Agile transformation roadmap to the destination of achieving better business results.

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[1] Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (New York: Harper Business Essentials, 1991).