Leading Modern Technology Teams in Complex Times

Complexity. The world we live in today is complex. The world yesterday, to the people who lived yesterday, was also complex. Tomorrow will be complex, and so will the day after that. The world has been, continues to be, and always will be complex. Our challenges are as vexing to us as the challenges of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were to the people who lived and worked and lived and died in those days gone by.

What distinguishes today from earlier eras is not that we live in times that are more complex; rather, we live in times that are differently complex. Our challenge as leaders of modern technology teams is not one of facing complexity for the first time. Our challenge is that the way work gets done today is differently complex than the way work used to get done. The way work gets done today can be complex; agile software development is differently complex. And different challenges require different leadership.

Work done differently requires leadership done differently. The authors of the Agile Manifesto recognized that the work of software development was a different kind of work. The purpose of the Manifesto was to guide this work, enable this work, and assist the people doing this work—the software developers—to do the work to the best of their abilities.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, or as it’s commonly referred to, the Agile Manifesto, lays out the values and principles whose aim is to enable software development teams to work more efficiently and effectively in service of their customers.

Think of the values as the guiding principles for agile software development and delivery. Then think of the principles as structuring and informing the practice of agile software development and delivery.

The values emphasize the importance of individuals and their interactions. The values emphasize that making progress matters more than making something perfect. Collaboration matters. Responding to changes—in priorities, in needs, in requirements—matters.

The principles are not rules, and they are not strictures. Instead, they are tenets that structure and inform the practice. The principles provide a framework, and they are ours and they are yours to apply in service of your team and in service of your customers.

Leadership today is a social construct. It evolves in response to demands and changes in the social, political, economic, and business environment. Leadership is practiced in the relationship between a person designated as the leader and the person, team, division, or organization that person has been designated to lead.

In practice, leadership is conjunctive, processual, and generative.Conjunctive Leadership. Conjunctive leadership connects people with other people and connects people with resources, ideas, and objectives. Vision is the catalyst of conjunctive leadership. The leader who can see and imagine and then connect ideas and learnings from separate domains is demonstrating conjunctive thinking. Conjunctive leadership leverages this interconnectedness. Conjunctive leadership matters because no single person or single team accomplishes the objectives of the organization or meets the needs of the customer alone. No team is an island, and no one succeeds alone.Processual Leadership. Processual leadership is a series of actions. It is not a discrete event. Processual leadership is a fluid process, not a fixed state. It is through the process of dialogue that includes diverse thinking that the best ideas and the best solutions emerge. In this process, leaders engage others, they listen, they seek to understand, and then they act.Generative Leadership. Generative dialogue can be thought of as the practice of identifying corollaries. Corollaries include combinations, transference, and borderlands between and across bodies of knowledge, and they lie at the heart of innovation.Generative leadership matters not only because today’s challenges are global and unprecedented in our lifetimes but also because our current state changes rapidly. The world we live in and the world we work in changes rapidly and changes at scale. It demands more than one thinker. It demands more than one voice. It demands inclusive dialogue.

Today’s employee is described in many ways: by age, by generation, by motivation, by hopes and dreams. Regardless of the various descriptions, one attribute is common across today’s employees: each is an individual. Each is a unique individual with unique characteristics, both visible and unseen. Each is unique in who they are, what they do, what they care about, what they want in their work, and what they want from you, their leader.

Today’s employee wants—and in many cases, demands—a sense of purpose. The desire for a sense of purpose is a fundamental human need. Fulfilling work is more than a title or a salary. Today’s employee wants to invest their time, energy, and attention in meaningful work performed in a hybrid environment.

Work gets done differently today: hybrid arrangements, remote arrangements, global teams collaborating across time zones and oceans. Environments are different, customer expectations continue to evolve, and employee expectations continue to evolve.

These differences and these changes require a change in the way we lead. These differences underscore the importance of effective communication. Effective leaders recognize the differences in work environments, and they leverage one or more mediums to communicate effectively.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Developers and customers have different definitions of what constitutes value. You learn what “value” means to your customer by bringing her together with your team. You accomplish this through dialogue. The dialogue generates clarity of requirements and a common understanding of the process. Developing software that satisfies the quality, speed, and value expectations of customers is what matters most. This is what customers want and need, and this is what they are paying you for, so this is what you as the leader must deliver. Leaders of agile software development teams know that this is far easier said than done. It involves dialogue, iterative development, risks, and failures.

Vignettes from leaders at Nokia, UScellular, and Centene Corporation illustrate these leadership challenges and how to address them.

It begins with dialogue. You as the leader bring your agile software development team together with the business owner to establish and execute a sustainable, repeatable process for prioritizing requirements, defining what will satisfy the customer and how the customer will use the software solution, and defining what the customer deems valuable. The objective of joining the teams and executing the process is to generate solutions. Leaders overcome challenges by implementing a repeatable and sustainable process for generating solutions. Teams must agree on what “valuable” means and what “continuous” means. Answers aren’t revealed. Rather, solutions are generated, and they’re generated through dialogue.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Requirements will change throughout the lifecycle of your project. Some changes you will be able to accommodate sooner and faster than other changes. Requirements can change for several reasons: new information, clearer understanding, changing market dynamics. Your development process must not only allow for change, but encourage and generate change, so that the product you deliver is valuable to your customer at the time you deliver it. Customers require what is valuable; customers don’t require what was valuable last year.

Vignettes from leaders at Centene Corporation, Oracle, Amazon, and Nokia illustrate the objective, the challenges, and solutions relative to this principle.

Leaders will experience changing requirements throughout the development process. To address these challenges, leaders establish a repeatable, sustainable process for generative dialogue with their customer. The leader ensures roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. The joint team—developers, business owners, testers—executes in an agile manner, which in turn allows for, accommodates, and even encourages changing requirements throughout the process. This iterative and conjunctive process generates products and solutions that enable the customer’s competitive advantage.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Your customer wants and needs solutions as quickly as you can deliver them. Solutions delivered late are less valuable than solutions delivered early. Customers want and need you to create valuable opportunities for them today, not tomorrow. Customers want and need you to solve their costly problems today, not tomorrow.

Vignettes from leaders at Oracle, Amazon, and Nokia illustrate the objective, the challenges, and solutions relative to this principle.

The most effective way to satisfy customers with valuable software sooner rather than later is to bring them along on the journey through the process of software demonstrations, or demos. Demos provide the opportunity for developers and customers to learn together and to co-create. Honest feedback that serves the objective of the project is imperative to progress. Acknowledging all feedback is imperative to maintaining trust. Honest and constructive feedback that is addressed by the development team generates progress toward the goal of delivering working software frequently.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Businesspeople and developers must be aligned on the objectives of the project. And they must be aligned on the deliverables due at each stage of the project. Priorities and deliverables can change, and this makes daily connection and daily alignment that much more important. When businesspeople and developers work together daily—when they commit to generative dialogue and meaningful progress—they create the products and solutions that matter most to their customer.

Vignettes from leaders at Oracle, UScellular, and Amazon illustrate these leadership challenges.

To ensure the development team makes progress every day, you as the leader must connect the businesspeople with your developers. Your team must commit to generative dialogue. This dialogue will help ensure that your team gains insight from the businesspeople. The questions your team asks in this dialogue help achieve clarity. The team reaches alignment. The teams jointly prioritize and reprioritize as customer needs evolve and as the marketplace evolves.

With insight, clarity, alignment, and prioritization, the team is positioned to make meaningful progress toward delivering valuable software quickly.

People matter. Relationships matter. By developing talent, you are creating conditions that foster growth, both personal growth and professional growth. When you empower people, you are creating conditions that foster growth. People who feel empowered feel trusted. People who feel trusted feel empowered. And people who are trusted and empowered will make things happen.

Vignettes from leaders at Centene, Nokia, Amazon, UScellular, and Oracle illustrate the leadership challenges that come with developing talent.

Motivated individuals are key to success. You as the leader motivate and inspire individuals from the day they join your team to the day they leave. You motivate and inspire the people on your team by teaching, sharing, empowering, challenging, trusting, holding accountable, rewarding, and developing.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. The most efficient and effective method for conveying information is that method—whether in person or virtual, synchronous or asynchronous—that maximizes your three most valuable resources: your time, your energy, and your attention. Efficient and effective communication matters because it is the sole means for causing and ensuring teams stay aligned on their objectives.

Vignettes from leaders at Centene, UScellular, and Oracle illustrate the challenges of efficient and effective communication.

The medium you choose for communicating with your team matters less than the content of your communication. With multiple mediums—face-to-face, video, instant message, email—at your disposal, you get to choose the medium best suited to your purpose. Recognize that with whichever medium you choose, you must be consistent in how you use that medium and what you use it for because with each message you send or dialogue you engage in, you’re setting an expectation with your team on how you will use the different mediums and for what purpose.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. As with the word “valuable,” the word “progress” means different things to different people. Developers define working software as software that functions. Customers define working software as software that has value. Progress toward valuable software is the only progress that matters to your customer.

Vignettes from leaders at Centene, UScellular, Nokia, Amazon, and Oracle illustrate the challenge of defining what working software is, and how to apply the definition of working software in measuring progress.

The most effective, efficient, and productive way for developers and business owners to stay in synch on the development of the product is through demos. Demos properly conducted elicit the feedback from business owners that influence the next sprints. Developers need to listen to the feedback, evaluate the feedback, determine the disposition of the feedback, and communicate decisions with the business owners who provided that feedback. The feedback loop is the generative aspect of the demo process.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Process matters because done right and done well, it generates valuable outcomes. A constant pace requires high levels of effective communication among all the key participants. Where there is speed, there will be risk. You as the leader cannot allow the pace to create unacceptable risk.

Vignettes from leaders at Oracle and Nokia illustrate the challenge of sustainable development delivered at a constant pace.

Sustainable development at a pace sufficient to satisfy your customer comes with risk. Requirements, and the problems that the team is tasked with solving, must be carefully and clearly framed, or you risk wasting time and effort. There is risk that your development team will sacrifice quality for speed. Progress toward a valuable goal is different than progress for the sake of progress.

Leaders overcome these challenges by framing the problems clearly at the beginning of the development process and ensuring that the development team and the business owner remain aligned on making valuable progress.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Attending to technical excellence and to design quality can enhance agility. Create and apply automation selectively and strategically. Acknowledge and address defects and bugs and chronic performance issues in the software.

Vignettes from leaders at Oracle, Amazon, and UScellular illustrate the challenge of applying the discipline of technical excellence and good design to enhance agility.

Channel your team’s technical prowess toward technical excellence and good design in service of delivering valuable software. Defects and chronic, customer-impacting issues must be fixed. Technical debt must be addressed. The objective of technical excellence, and the objective of good design, is the agility that enables you to deliver valuable software frequently.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. The notion of simplicity needs to be applied to requirements, documentation, and priorities but not to code reviews. Simplicity reduces waste from the system and sharpens the team’s focus on delivering what matters most and nothing more.

Vignettes from leaders at Amazon and Nokia, and a reminder from Albert Einstein, illustrate the challenge and the importance of achieving simplicity.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. The best architecture is the architecture that respects and accommodates customer requirements. The best requirements are simple and clear. The best designs enable the customer to do what they need to do the way they want to do it. Taken together, the best architectures, the best requirements, and the best designs comprise a solution that enables the customer to use the product the way they want to use the product. The best solutions are sensible, scalable, hardy, and timely.

Vignettes from leaders at UScellular, TDS Telecom, Nokia, Amazon, and Oracle illustrate how the best architectures, requirements, and designs can emerge from self-organizing teams.

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Teams can improve. They can be told what to do and how to do it. Or they can be trusted to engage in honest self-reflection. Honest self-reflection becomes the best and most effective means for the team finding and creating sustainable improvements in the way they operate.

Vignettes from leaders at TDS Telecom, Oracle, and Calstate Management Group, Inc., and a reminder from Richard Feynman, illustrate the challenge and the importance of regular reflection.

You as the leader must encourage but not require self-reflection among your team. Enable it without prescribing how they should do it. Self-reflection can lead to discovery, and discovery is the key to continuous improvement.

Leadership is a social construct. It is conjunction, processual, and generative. It is best practiced with a keen eye and a kind heart.