Tuesday 8 September 2020

Emotional intelligence, leadership… and Zidane

Emotional intelligence, leadership… and Zidane

In 2006, there was one player dominating the football world… He carried the France national team during the entire World Cup campaign. Being at his best and considered the best player in the world back then... he was Zinedine Zidane… So, for the final game, France met Italy. It started merely with a penalty given for France, and Zizou scored with precision and grace. Italy pushed harder and managed to score for 1:1… Both teams slowed down the pace and played the rest of the official time without more goals. After the first extension, the final was slowly getting to penalties when Zidane and Materazzi (the Italian scorer) exchanged some ‘compliments’… and it led to the most famous headbutt in the football history. A red card ended the carrier of an amazing player… Even worse, Italy managed to secure the victory and the World Cup 2006, later that night.

Zidane’s story is a perfect example of how devastating emotional hijack could be, and how lacking in emotional intelligence (even for a moment) could lead to bitter consequences for you, your team and organization.

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top 10 skills in 2020

14 years later, in 2020, Emotional intelligence (EI, EQ) is considered one of the top-most needed skills, along with ‘Complex problem solving’, ‘Critical thinking’, ‘Creativity’, and ‘Negotiation’. In fact, most companies embedded emotionally intelligent behavior in their values like: ‘value people’, ‘master teamwork’, ‘focus on client needs’, etc… And, the following are results of insignificant EI level:

  • Poor internal alignment
  • Burning unnecessary energy
  • Unproductive conflict
  • Inefficient leadership
  • Low resilience
  • Low engagement

If you still have doubts, testing your EI will help you identify the level of your maturity and the areas to improve. You can find a simple and extensive test over the link: How to lead with EI by Annie Mckee

The test covers both 'personal' and 'social' competencies, through the following chapters

  • Self-awareness
  • Positive outlook
  • Self-control
  • Adaptability
  • Empathy
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there are 34000 emotions. the basic ones are: glad, mad, sad and scared

An emotional hijack happens when the limbic systems take over your body. As a result, you might have any of the following:

fight or flight physical response

When emotionally hijacked you would be in fight or flight mode and in case of non-life-threatening-event the possibility for poor decision and action would be very high. (just like in the story of Zidane).

Practicing an 'Emotional fire drill' could help you manage your triggers. To practice you need to

  • Acknowledge how you feel and what triggers it
  • Name your emotion
  • Find the internal source of the emotion. Could be a belief, value or assumption
  • Evaluate what the consequence could be
  • Act in a way to avoid the trigger or introduce a change in the internal source
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the six leadership styles

It's highly recommended to look at the different leadership styles. Even better is watching amazing leaders and practitioners in order to improve yourself by 'analyzing' and ‘stealing’ elements of their styles. (many videos and analysis on Youtube)

  • Tony Robbins
  • Barack Obama
  • Jordan Peterson
  • Oprah Winfrey 
  • Joe Rogan
  • Donald Trump
  • Elon Musk
  • Ben Shapiro

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Imagine the following...
‘You are at the Oskar ceremony. The host says your name to receive an Oskar. You come out on stage, get it, deliver a speech. However, you are interrupted, and the host says there is a mistake: you shouldn’t have received it, another person won.’

Think about how you feel and what do you do?... Then watch Jordan Horowitz classy and impeccable reaction


And here is what happens when you are not so good at hiding your frustration :)))))

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Reframing empowers you to take negative thoughts related to a problem and convert them into positive solutions

  • From passive to active: “It’s impossible” to “What small steps can I take?”
  • From negative to positive: “I don’t want to do it as it makes me sad” to “Which part of it can make me feel happier?”
  • From past to future: “I’ve never been good at it” to “If I were good at it, how would I do it?”
  • From liability to an asset: “I’m so slow” to ”What benefits does being slow bring here?”
  • From victimization to empowerment: “It always happens to me” to “What steps can I take to avoid it in the future?”

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expressing genuine interest in someone is the foundation of emotional connection

The three steps of creating outstanding connections with people are

  1. Attention (interest)
  2. Attunement, mirroring
  3. Empathy

The short video provides a good example of Empathy. Although, practicing it might be challenging enough, it could be even more difficult to get rid of the following empathy busters

  • Solving the problem ('I’ll fix it', 'I’ll talk to her', 'I will do it')
  • Unsolicited advice ('I think you should', 'If I were you', 'Why don’t you just')
  • Dismissing feelings ('It’s not that big deal', 'You shouldn’t feel that way', 'Get over it')
  • Sarcasm ('That’s such a tragedy', 'It’s just the end of the world', 'Boo, what a shame')

The amazing ability is to lead the others into positive actions, without offering solutions.

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The workshop is highly rated and the feedback very positive. Some of it below

“I loved everything about the Emotional Intelligence class. Hearing about emotional hijacking, how to be aware of it how to respond and manage it, triggers, and all the other topics gave me a new perspective on it overall. I loved the content and the practice, very easy to follow. The games and discussions we engaged in during class were also enjoyable. Wonderful class.”

“Such training is extremely useful for every Scrum Master. I wish I have attended this training years ago. I would encourage to make such trainings way more visible for everyone who has just picked up such responsibilities.”

“Simeon is a great trainer, actively encouraging participation from everyone. He is friendly, humorous and makes the training that much more enjoyable.”
Blogger Widgets

Sunday 31 May 2020

Product development – master the game

top factors for company success in product development

Last week we were in the zone… the “Product development” zone. For a whole week EPAM's focus and energy were mainly on sessions and workshops about products, business and success. Brilliant minds from all around the globe shared their fascinating experience and knowledge, teaching those - hungry and eager to develop great products and conquer the world. My humble contribution was a workshop, dedicated to Product owners, and everybody interested in improving their mindsets and knowledge about great products’ development, marketing and business success.

The participants had to design their own product from scratch, elaborating vision, roadmap, backlog and strategy, and then present it to ask for feedback and decide on changes or even a complete pivot. As usual, I will be sharing some of the content we covered below.

Starting with a research presented by Bull Gross on the ‘Top factors for company (and product) success.’ It covers the inconvenient truth – no money, idea, or business model could guarantee product’s success, nothing can save you if the timing is not right and the execution is bad.

bet on a contrarian truth, Peter Tiel

Moving to Peter Teal’s ideas and beliefs “All happy companies are different – each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem.” At the same time “All failed companies are the same – all of them failed to escape competition.”

Porter's generic business strategies in product development

Discussing and elaborating on Michael Porter's generic strategies (on business and product development).
- Cost Leadership – targeting broad market by offering the lowest possible price.
- Differentiation – targeting broad market and providing unique product and service. Success comes as your clients would be happy to pay premium to use your products.
- Cost Focus – targeting a niche market and offering the lowest possible price.
- Differentiation Focus – producing unique features for a niche market. Strong brand loyalty among customers should be top priority.

hidden feedback - observe emotional level and ask laser sharp questions

On the topic of the ‘effective feedback’ it is important to never be satisfied with a surface-level feedback. Dig deeper, observe hidden feedback and ask precise questions to uncover the truth. Observe your product’s users very carefully. Are they excited, when playing with your product? How do they use the features? What do they spend money on?

Learn to ask laser-sharp questions
- What exactly did you like about the product, and why?
- Which feature are you going to start using immediately?
- What is your main issue / pain-point?
- What about it made you feel ‘wow’?

Agile planning onion is a trap

The ‘Agile planning onion’ could be a trap for the inexperienced Product owner. If you notice most of your day, energy and effort go towards solving mundane issues, problems and dramas – you might be losing the big picture in mind. And the vision should be your top priority and you are the person to be reminding and driving everybody, every day, every hour and minute towards achieving it.

The people in the group were fantastic - active, full of energy and willing to learn, get better and kick ass with their products. We all had a lot of fun - designing, scoping and executing on products... to master the game of product development.

job to be done concept in product development

Wednesday 13 May 2020

Efficient teamwork from home

Efficient teamwork from home

Yesterday I had the honor to participate as a key speaker at an EPAM webinar on the topic of “Efficient teamwork from home”. As the topic is trending and attracted a lot of viewers, let me share some key points, tips and tricks presented.

Started with a brief story of one of the most embarrassing projects I have managed years ago. In short, we were a distributed “team” of 4 (2 Devs, PO and me as PM), working on a Drupal-based learning platform. In just a couple of weeks of chaos and non-working-software-delivery we decided to cancel the project, as the frustration in all the parties went to critical level.

The learning from the experience - we messed up all the vital components of developing a successful product remotely, more embarrassing we failed to do so with only 4-members crew:
  • Focus
  • Alignment  
  • Regular syncing
The project left bad taste in my mouth and since then I have aways been 'a little' skeptical on the performance of distributed teams and folks’ contribution while working from home.

So back in 2020, I worked mainly with a squad of brilliant and motivated teammates on an innovative platform for the Airline industry. The following slide tells our story best

Efficient teamwork from home

In essence, we are achievers, and happy ones. We owe it mostly to our impeccable face-to-face way of working. And, when in the end of Mar ’20 all of us had to work from home, it’s no surprise we were a little bit worried on the impact of our results.

And… surprisingly it didn't negatively

Efficient teamwork from home
(backlog items delivered per sprint)

Not only we sustain being efficient and effective, but also keep on improving our delivery... and don't mind S32 results - it was our Christmas sprint with only a skeleton crew left to cover.

And, here are the promised key tips, tricks and advices, provided by all the members in our squad.

I. In general
Efficient teamwork from home
(communication should be clear, brief and on point)
  • Keep a conference room open all the time so the team mates could jump in quickly when needed. We use the daily sync conference room/link for the purpose.
  • Put your goal(s) as topic in your team chat channel.
  • Use separated team channels for the different topics – to help focusing.
  • Remind about the upcoming event(s) on the same day over the daily standup.
  • Update tasks and put comments in Jira more often.
  • Be available for conversations, anytime. Have the team chat and conference apps installed on your mobile.
  • Pair Programming works very well with screen sharing. Just do it :)
  • Dedicate time to rest away from the the PC.
II. On tooling we use (free & powerful)
III. Collaborating with the other teams
  • Scrum of Scrums. Keep it short. Only share blockers, dependencies and highlights (in that particular order, in up to a minute).
  • Attend other teams’ reviews, all-hands gatherings, and any other sync & alignment events. Keep them brief and on point.
IV. Personal
  • Isolate yourself in a separate room. Helps with focus.
  • Dress for work. Helps with the ready-for-work state.
  • Beat the social loafing with team-members keeping each other accountable.
  • Exercise regularly – it helps not only your body, but mostly your brain!
  • Isolate yourself from your family, to keep distractions at minimum.
V. Extra stuff... good stuff
  • Play online games with your team mates. It boosts team morale to extraordinary level.
  • Do mini hackathon events online, to keep everybody engaged.
  • ... work from your balcony... and get some beer :)... classic
Efficient teamwork from home

On the research side, Nick Bloom’s study on the "work from home" topic seems to be invaluable. It shows clearly the main benefits: "13% improvement in performance in the working from home teams and 50% reduction of the quit rates in the company". (Watch the full study and research summary here)

In the end, let us remind ourselves the big winner in the working-from-home situation is the nature, and it means that we all win (somehow) being stuck in a quarantine. Maybe it's a good idea to think about the future: how could we keep on reducing the city pollution, caused by the daily commuting even without viruses, aliens, software bugs and all other life threats.

Efficient teamwork from home

Tuesday 14 April 2020

Scrum deep dive


“We need an Advanced Scrum training” - it has been requested for years, and I have always responded with arguments why such an extensive training doesn't make sense to be delivered, and provided a questionnaire to prepare more focused training-agenda for my employers and clients. After all, there are too many 'advanced' Agile and Scrum related topics to be covered in just a single training, e.g. product ownership and product development; Scrum team and personalities; Scrum roles, events and artifacts; the countless number of good practices, tips and tricks related to the different context and situations, etc…


It seems the first quarter of 2020 was a magical time for me, as I finally decided - 'now is the time'... and managed to prepare and conduct the so-long-waited comprehensive Scrum training, proudly naming it: "Scrum deep dive"


The vision of "Scrum Deep Dive" is to educate, inspire and guide enthusiast in mastering the application of Scrum and make the most of it in order to fully reap the benefits of being Agile, while using the Scrum framework. Every step of the training answers the questions "Why is Scrum difficult to master?... and what would help you improve?" by providing insights on how to get closer to the "awesome state" with any Scrum team.


After the training the participants are able to:
  • Identify the root cause of their Scrum-related pain points
  • Be prepared to lead positive change in their teams and organization
  • Understand the meaning and importance of the Scrum values
  • Be able to easily recognize the availability or absence of Scrum values in team members
  • Do the "Big 5 personality test" with their teams in order to influence improvements
  • Fight team dysfunctions and lead the team to greatness
  • Experience and learn from real case studies related to Scrum teams, Scrum events, artifacts and practices
  • Learn from the extensive journey of a lousy-to-great Scrum team
  • Learn when being Agile and using Scrum framework is not beneficial
  • Plan the steps in applying the learning in their respective teams


After conducting the training, the feedback was extremely positive, and the participants shared "Scrum deep dive" helped them to:
  • Improve their knowledge of SCRUM, and were able to discuss many real situations from different perspective, reevaluate them and understanding the gain in different approaches
  • Understand their team’s weaknesses and how to address them
  • Learn how to improve all the aspects of the Scrum events, and how to benefit the most out of the Scrum artifacts
  • Understand the importance of the culture, the mindset and how to influence them
  • Learn from the different experience, mistakes and bad practices in implementing Scrum
  • Support their teams on the path to “mastering Scrum” and experience all the benefits by doing so

Friday 9 August 2019

All Blacks scrum… is da best scrum

All Blacks scrum… is da best scrum
Over a recent retrospective we inspected and discussed the ‘path to greatness’ for every agile team. To learn from the best, we watched the New Zealand Rugby team’s greatest plays


The idea was to identify traits and characteristics, to help us improve. And here is the list we ended up with

Passion & energy 
As Donald Trump says “If you don’t have passion, you have no energy; and if you don’t have energy, you have nothing”. As mentioned by the developers: It's visible and very obvious the All Blacks’ players live their childhood dreams. The passion and the energy are so strong, and the players are turned into unstoppable team force.

Dedication and Willingness to sacrifice 
The players risk grave injuries and even their lives in many of the runs and plays, all in the pursuit of victory.

Clear vision and goal(s) 
To be the greatest rugby team of all times; To win every game and dominate every other team.

Team results > all 
Every player cares only for the common good; There are no internal competition, envy, jealousy, or destructive internal politics

Teamwork all the time, all the way 
Every time a player runs, he is covered by the team! 4-5 players run in parallel, guarding, supporting, removing impediments or just being ready to help if needed. Often, their support is not even needed, still they keep doing it all the time.

Smashing impediments decisively 
Opponent players are neutralized quickly and efficiently. There is no hesitation, everybody acts quickly and decisively when things go wrong.

Everybody leads 
In different plays, different players lead and score. Everybody is eager to act and lead the team to score yet another point and achieve victory.

Great preparation and training
Strength, speed, reflexes, positioning, timing - it is clear everybody is going the extra mile of the extra mile constantly, to be in the best shape.

   

In the end, a quick reminder, even the best scrum could fail sometimes… and that’s ok, as long as we learn