Agile transformation happens in a team — not in a company
People don’t care which company they work for, they care which team they work in. Company visions, the acting of a CEO, company culture and brand are all important, but they are always trumped by the acting of your nearest manager and colleagues. Team culture trumps company culture. Team goals and visions trump company goals and visions. The trick is to align these.
While I worked with a department in a large financial organization to do an Agile transformation we saw teams ignoring change that happened on a department level. Or rather — they were not much affected. There was the launch of a new, glossy vision, a call to action of working differently and an ask to work with a different mindset. There were workshops, presentations, and more workshops. But at the end of the day, the team still worked with the same system, in the same way.
At the time I read a great book: Nine lies about work by Buckingham and Goodall. They bring up common misconceptions about how work is done and debunk these lies by using survey data. The first lie is:
People care which company they work for
This makes executives believe that if only they address the company culture if we have the right procedures and branding it will change the experience for all employees. But the data shows that there is more variance in the experience within a company than between companies. The accompanying truth to this lie is
People care which team they are on
The experience you get as an employee comes from the team you are on. It is how your colleagues act and whether or not you trust your leader that creates the environment you work in. In the book, they say that there is no such (at least not measurable) thing as company culture. It is not one lever for change. There is only team culture, and if you are looking for levers for change, you have to address each and every team. You can get the essence of how the authors present these lies and truths by visiting this site and watching two short videos.
Coming back to the department we worked with, we realized that doing a transformation on a department level would not necessarily improve the situation for the teams. Even though we needed to work with the department leadership to create vision and structure, change did not happen until we approached each team and helped them see how things could improve in their context. There was a big variance between what the teams needed and how they would approach change. They discarded many of the things the department was doing, but once they found something that was valuable we could see traction for the change. This meant that to get people on the bus, we had to work with each and every team. We had to meet them where they were and address their needs.
At the department level, we worked with creating a common structure, a level of alignment for all teams. We spent efforts to create transparency in work across the teams, a common rhythm for planning and delivery and a common vision for where the department was heading. This allowed the teams to align while keeping much of their autonomy. We worked with the teams (starting with the ones that pulled us in) to find out what they needed to do to meet the alignment. Then we addressed and worked with their specific context, the team rhythm of planning, executing, delivering and reflecting. But it was notuntil we started working with each team that the change started having an effect, and made sense to the people building the products.
My takeaway from this experience is that it is great to create department structures and have big goals. But change will not happen until you address it in a way that makes sense to each and every team. By helping them see how they will benefit and how their environment will improve you can get traction. If you ignore the teams your change efforts will be an ivory tower exercise that will have little, to no effect on the actual outcomes.
