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The Scary Truth about Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is the single most important part of creating a high-performance team or organization. When you have high psychological safety, you have the foundation for high performance. If you do not have psychological safety in your team and your organization, it’s virtually impossible to get high-performance levels.

Psychological Safety – The Foundation of Performance

Everybody in your team or organization is a human being, and human beings have this interesting thing called a frontal cortex: the seat of our reasoning. When we have higher levels of psychological safety, the blood supply to our frontal cortex is really good. But when we have lower levels of psychological safety, the blood supply actually gets cut off. We go into fight or flight or flight mode and the blood supply to our frontal cortex shuts off. We can’t think anymore. 

If you want to accomplish anything in your organization, get your projects delivered, or evolve your organizational system, that’s only possible when there’s a high level of psychological safety. That’s why it’s the single most important ingredient for high performance.

What Is Psychological Safety? 

The SHIFT314 definition for psychological safety is: the absence of fear. 

I am not in fear of:

  • What other people think about me.
  • If other people think I am doing my job well. 
  • Proposing an idea. 
  • Giving honest feedback.

That’s what psychological safety is: It means that we’re not fearful, we’re not afraid. We can do what we need to do to be successful, to take action, to move the work of our team or organization, or our family system, forward.

Moving Beyond Traditional Understanding

The definition we’re giving you is fundamentally different from the current leading definition by Amy Edmondson, a published researcher who’s written a book on psychological safety. In contrast with Edmonson, psychological safety applies in every environment we’re in, whether it’s with our friends, with our family, or at work. 

Additionally, psychological safety is a really inner trait. Of course, the environment around us could help lift or lower our psychological safety levels. But, ultimately, it’s an inner trait. It’s the inner story we tell ourselves of, “Am I safe?“

Organizational Impact of Low Psychological Safety

If you’re doing anything like business-as-usual – a traditional hierarchical organization – you’re guaranteed to have terrible levels of psychological safety. 

No one will ever talk about the term directly, but what will happen is you’ll hear about people feeling like they’re under stress or under pressure. People may be experiencing work-related illnesses or long-term disability because they can’t cope with what’s happening in the workplace. It’s very normal for these chronic problems to exist. 

Low safety levels also show up as low levels of employee engagement. If employee engagement scores aren’t really high, it means that there’s a challenge around psychological safety. 

Another way you’ll notice low safety levels is when people won’t speak up. People won’t volunteer ideas. People won’t voluntarily help and reach out to other people or other parts of the organization to help them. That’s how you know there’s a psychological safety challenge.

Safety Starts with You

You can only give what you have. As a leader, when you have a high level of psychological safety, only then can you give it to others. Because, ultimately, psychological safety is an energetic transmission. It’s not a tactic or a technique.

It’s about asking whether you, as a human being, feel psychologically safe. Do you feel secure? Are you able to navigate your fears? It’s not about being perfect or saying fear doesn’t come up. But when fear comes up, are you able to look at your fear in the eye and move forward past it?

Here are some things you can do to increase your own psychological safety.

#1. Commit to your evolutionary journey as a leader

When leaders see the importance of increasing their own psychological safety, they often jump to asking for a technique or a tactic that they can use. But it’s not some sort of knowledge that will help you. It’s actually a commitment to your evolutionary journey as a leader to shift your consciousness and your mindset. That’s what it takes to increase your level of psychological safety.

#2. Investigate and understand how your emotions work

Increasing psychological safety is an investment in understanding how your emotional system works because fear, the opposite of psychological safety, is an emotion. So, commit to investigating and understanding your emotions.

#3. Become aware of your fears and work through them as they arise 

The third step is to become aware of your fear and work through your fear when it arises. As normal human beings, we experience fear hundreds of times a day, but we don’t pay attention to it. We actually just ignore it. So, the third point is to become aware and pay attention and to begin creating a shift in your emotional system so that you’re no longer in fear. That’s the work of increasing your level of psychological safety. It’s not about building safety. It’s about decreasing fear. 

Psychological Safety – Focus on Prevention

Ninety percent of what we can do to help psychological safety is to stop causing damage. To understand that, as leaders, we are routinely damaging the psychological safety of people around us, and we’re not even aware of it. The doing side of the equation is to become aware of those places that we’re causing damage and to stop. 

#1. Ask for input and feedback

The number one killer of psychological safety is making decisions without asking for input or feedback – because that means people are not safe to express their ideas. If you wanted their ideas, you’d ask them for them. So, stop making decisions without asking for people’s ideas.

#2. Communicate your constraints 

Let’s face it. As leaders, many things are passed down to us from higher up the hierarchy or by the organizational environment that we’re in. We have a certain client, we’ve got a contract, we have certain legal terms, et cetera. 

Explain to people what decisions and constraints are out of your control and what decisions you can work with them on. When people understand what the constraints are and that you are collectively working together, it doesn’t feel like you’re making them do things. It feels like you’re on the same team, which will support their psychological safety.

#3. Consider everyone involved

The third killer of psychological safety is not thinking about the people involved. Oftentimes, as leaders, we’re busy, and we’re making decisions on tight timelines. High-performance leaders take the time to think about the people involved and the impact on them. So, what does this look like practically? 

It’s the simple act of thinking, “Well, how’s this going to turn out? What’s the impact on the people involved? Have I consulted appropriately? How are people going to react to this?” We can solve problems, all the damage we’re causing, in simulation-time so we can reach a better decision in real life.

How to Build Psychological Safety in Your Organization 

#1. Provide space and time for people to speak

The first thing leaders can do to build psychological safety is to give space and time for everyone to say something. You might say, “What? All I need to do, as a leader, is give space and time for other people to say something?” Well, yes. 

When you take time for other people to speak, it elevates their status. It tells them, “Hey, you’re important.” When you tell people, “Hey, you’re important. Your status matters,” and you lower your status relatively, it makes them feel more psychologically safe.

You can start meetings with something simple like, “Hey, everyone. Say your name, and the one word for how you are right now.” And then you go first: “I’m Michael, and I’m feeling excited” (or whatever your check-in is). That simple act of having people say their name and a word for how they are is a great way to build psychological safety.  

#2. Take the time to connect as human beings

There are some managers who think talking about what’s happening in the world, the news, or in sports, is a complete and utter waste of time. They’re correct that discussion is a waste of time for getting the work done immediately, but these discussions are invaluable for building psychological safety and team cohesion–– the foundation of results and performance. 

You can think of all that human connection time as a great investment in the team’s health – something that’s actually needed for the team to function. It’s kind of like the oil to make sure that the gears work smoothly. Without that oil, there’s going to be a lot of grinding and a lot of extra energy to get things done. So, when people can connect as human beings, it really creates a great opportunity for supporting that. 

#3. Create an inclusive environment

The third thing that leaders can do is create an inclusive environment. Just be yourself. Show your real background when you’re on a video conference. Have your kids come on-screen. Introduce people to your pets.

That authentic connection is what fuels people’s psychological safety because, as it turns out, everyone in your organization is a human being first and an employee second. When you connect as a human being, it elevates their function as an employee because they’re going to feel safer. Because if you’re a normal person, and you’ve got a pet or kids coming on, it’s okay if that stuff happens on their end too.

Conclusion

The scary truth about Psychological Safety is that it requires an inner shift. 

The creation of psychological safety is an evolutionary journey for people and the organizational system as a whole. As leaders, we can do a lot to create safer environments to unlock people’s ability to function and contribute. Ultimately, for ourselves as leaders and the people we look after this requires an inner shift in our being – a shift in consciousness – as well as learning new skills. This is what we call Evolutionary Leadership: the choice to evolve ourselves. We invite you to join us on this journey to become our better selves and through that create better workplaces and ultimately a better world. Change starts with us.

Why Scrum Masters and Product Owners are the New Managers

Have you experienced this common trap? It’s an unintentional happening, often very subtle. Scrum masters and Product Owners that begin to act like traditional managers. They may not have the same sort of traditional ways of interacting, yet they have the same behaviors: pushing for results, thinking they’re right, thinking they’re smarter, and thinking that they’re in charge of what happens. Ignoring this tendency can lead to disaster. Embracing this tendency can actually unlock high performance.

Performance Depends on the Scrum Master and Product Owner

The performance of your team entirely depends on your Scrum Master and Product Owner. If you have a great Product Owner and great Scrum Master, your team is on its way to the extraordinary. If either one of those roles is challenged in any way, the team performance will be challenged. These are two critical roles on any Scrum or Agile team. Here are some essential qualities of highly effective and amazing Scrum Masters and Product Owners.

People Default to Hierarchical Roles

Scrum Masters and Product Owners are the new managers. 

This is a controversial statement. “But isn’t the whole point of Agile to get rid of the managers?” Sure, in theory this works, but here’s the deal: as long as there are human beings, we’re going to have different levels of capability, different roles, and different levels of authority. 

What happens if you get rid of all roles and distinctions of authority is it’s really confusing for people to organize themselves. People have a very natural desire to have some sort of sense of order. Putting people on teams and letting them know who’s going to guide the evolution of the product gives people a sense of order. Knowing there’s someone there to act as a coach, to facilitate, to help them learn and grow and evolve as a team and as individuals, gives people a sense of safety and security. Having roles and responsibilities is actually a very natural thing.

When people have evolved to the point where their inner sense of psychological safety is high enough, they don’t need these structures to function. That’s what we see on very advanced design teams and in improv where people just flow with whatever’s happening. Yet most of us are not psychologically prepared for that, we require a certain sense of order, a certain sense of structure for us to feel psychologically safe.

When people at their current level of consciousness take Scrum and apply it out of the box, people have an expectation that someone’s going to be in charge and tell them what to do. 

When we introduce Scrum or Agile organizations, people are naturally going to project their current mindset and understanding of how things function onto Scrum. And people who are taking on the role of Product Owner and Scrum Master are going to project their own understandings of how people function together in hierarchy onto their role. In short, they become managers without the title.

Example: Low-Consciousness and High-Consciousness

Scrum masters and Product Owners become defecto managers – this is a fact for most organizations. But instead of ignoring that fact, embracing it allows leaders to facilitate the creation of a truly Agile environment, instead of one in name only. It all comes down to the level of consciousness at which the Scrum Master and Product Owner are operating. Let’s take an example.

A Low-Consciousness Product Owner

A low-consciousness Product Owner acts more like a traditional manager. They think it’s their job to tell people what to work on. But that’s not what the Product Owner role was intended to be.

Unfortunately, a Product Owner can act more like a command and control manager. They can be the new manager and push for results or their agenda, tell the team what to do and what to work on, not listen to other people, kill the performance of the organization, and create terrible products. Or they may create products that are not sustainable because they haven’t listened to the team or built-in long-term sustainability practices, such as test-driven development or continuous integration.

An Evolved Product Owner

A more evolved Product Owner understands that their role is to facilitate a conversation. Although a Product Owner makes the final decision because they have ownership and accountability for it, they understand the best decisions will come from the wisdom of crowds. They listen to all the people involved, the customers, the stakeholders, the team, other groups, to understand how this product interrelates with the other products. 

When you have a Product Owner that has that more evolved mindset, then they can play the role of a Product Owner in a more evolved way without being an oppressive manager. They don’t go to that command and control type behavior that we all know so well. They lead through facilitation and influence.

However, most people need to go on an evolutionary journey to evolve themselves to the point where they can move from more of a directive role (command and control) to more of a facilitative role (evolutionary leadership), where they’re fully able to listen to people and involve them.

The Scrum Master

Everything you’ve just read applies fully to the Scrum Master. You can have a command and control Scrum Master who thinks they’re the owner of the process, that it’s their job to make sure the process is working well, they’re there to guide the team to be better. 

The evolved Scrum Master is a very different kind of person. They understand that they’re there to serve the team. They’re there to help the team be as successful as they can be. And if the team doesn’t want to be successful, it’s not their job to make them. They’re not there to enforce the Scrum rules. They’re there to act as a mirror, to invite the team to be their best selves.

Modeling the Evolutionary Journey

The Scrum Master can only invite the team members to learn and evolve and grow when they themselves are modeling that growth. Thus, the Scrum Master is a very important leadership role. When the Scrum Master that learns to act as a leader, to inspire, to hold space, and invite change, they act as a powerful catalyst for helping that team become extraordinary.

Recognizing it’s a Temporary Role

An evolved Scrum Master understands they’re more like a coach that’s there on a short-term basis. They don’t want to build a long-term dependency. They just want to help the team become awesome and develop the capabilities they need to be extraordinary on their own. That’s what great managers do. 

Guiding but not Controlling

Command and control Scrum Masters will use their knowledge and expertise in a way that will suppress the team and set their status higher. An evolved Scrum Master’s goal is to elevate the status of all the people. As an evolved Scrum Master, you can to grow, develop, and liberate the people that you’re guiding.

Quick Tips for Scrum Masters and Product Owners

The first step is to recognize that as a Scrum leader or Product Owner, how you show up impacts team performance. If you want to inspire connection and fuel the motivation for growth, it’s vital to focus on your own personal journey of evolution. It’s not just about learning new skills, it is about evolving yourself to really become what we call an Evolutionary Leader.

The foundation of evolutionary growth is awareness. Here are three things to become aware of:

Where is there turbulence in meetings?

Notice the places where there’s turbulence in relationships or turbulence in meetings. Also notice how much attachment to your ideas you have in any particular situation. Becoming conscious of your leadership habits and behaviors is a necessary first step to becoming a more evolved Scrum Master or Product Owner.

Where are you using authority?

You can also notice where you are using authority as a Product Owner or a Scrum Master. Where do you feel like you get to decide, that what should happen is your decision? These are places where you’re acting in a command and control framework. Seeing these places gives you an opportunity to look at your leadership edges and grow into a more evolved leader.

Where are you listening to others?

Where are you listening to others about what should happen? As a Product Owner or Scrum Master, are you listening to what should happen with the teams? Not listening is a sure sign you’re operating in a command and control framework.

Advice for Executives and Senior Managers

The first thing to ask is, how capable and competent are your Product Owners and Scrum Masters? Do the people who are in those roles know what they’re doing? Are they showing up in a way that leads and invites people to an evolved mindset – to the Agile Mindset or Evolutionary Mindset? 

Many managers want a checklist or rubric. Our definition of Evolutionary Leadership provides clear guidance for what signs to look for in more evolved leaders. The challenge is we can only assess people from our own, perhaps limited, perspective. The work-around is to look at the performance levels of your teams.

You probably have a good idea of which teams are performing better. More than likely, those teams probably have better Scrum Masters and Product Owners. 

As the managers of the system, it’s our responsibility to understand how well people are functioning. When we work with organizational systems, one of the first things we do is evaluate the Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Do they know practically what they need to do? And, how are they showing up? Do they have the right consciousness? Do they have the right mindset?

If you don’t have the capability or the expertise needed to evaluate that, that’s a great place to start asking for help and developing organizational capability.

Final Thoughts

We all have a desire to create better workplaces, better teams, better organizational systems, where people can show up at their best. This hope that changing our structures, moving to Agile, moving to Scrum, putting people on teams and having these new rules will somehow solve all the challenges of the past is inaccurate and misleading. The truth is that transformation and organizational change is a complex journey. It requires an evolution in how people are showing up to work within the system. And this often requires an evolution in one’s ability to lead change through extraordinary leadership. Evolutionary Leadership is a commitment to a journey of awareness, impact and the ability to lead through influence, showing up as a powerful and effective leader . 

Agile is insufficient to fully resolve this challenge, because it’s just a partial specification of a culture system. It requires a much more integrated and sophisticated journey than Agile can afford. It becomes apparent that organizations that are fully in line with Agile are asking for the incredible results from Agile, yet not fully understanding that the shift of process and structures are dependent on a shift in the culture of an organization. And this goes beyond what Agile alone can achieve.

The SHIFT314 Evolutionary Leadership Framework™ (SELF) is a coherent structure for organizational transformation. The SELF™ system creates the future of work that we hope for and accesses the promise that Agile provides, sustainable success that has the ability to deliver extraordinary results in the complex world of business. 

Don’t Panic: The Remote Leader’s Guide to Psychological Safety

The transition to remote leadership can be rocky, to say the least. It’s much easier to exert authority, either formally or informally, when everyone is together in the same location. The physical location itself enforces the rules of status, and people are basically forced to show up to work. Whether we realize it or not, there’s a lot of butts in seats. And that creates tension.

There’s a huge challenge as we move to a remote environment where suddenly leaders find the skills that they had for the in-person situation are no longer adequate in a remote environment. When people are at home in their own space, suddenly the constraint and the enforcement of the organizational system isn’t there. People have so much more freedom to do or not do the work. As leaders, we need to actually learn a new capability to lead through influence instead of leading through authority. 

Learning to lead in a remote environment is actually a great opportunity to develop the skills needed to lead high performance in any environment. While in person you can lead moderate performance by exerting authority, in a remote environment you’re practically required to learn to lead through influence by inspiring people – a style of leadership that ultimately has better outcomes regardless of the environment.

3 Quick Tips to Unlock Your Teams

If you’re struggling with a transition to a remote working environment, here are some practical steps you can take right away to increase psychological safety and performance. 

Keep Video On

Wherever possible, have video on during meetings. What does that do? When people see faces and have that visual connection, they can get extra information. They can actually communicate a lot of other things and have much higher bandwidth. Someone can be talking about something, someone else can give a thumbs up, and people can wiggle their fingers to show gratitude or appreciation. 

Having video on creates a much richer channel for connection. Plus, when we can see people, it supports a sense of safety and trust. Having video cameras on is a key element for increasing levels of psychological safety.

Use Tools that Support Co-Creation

The other element for remote work is to make sure that you have effective collaboration tools where everyone can contribute and communicate simultaneously. It’s called co-creation and it’s a hallmark of high-performance teams. 

For some organizations, that’s a Google Doc where all the people can type in their ideas simultaneously. For others, it’s a Mural board where everyone can write their own sticky note to contribute their ideas. 

What that does is it says, “Everyone here is equally important.” If everyone is equal in their contribution, you’re equaling out the status. When that happens, people feel more psychologically safe and secure. 

Very simple things like effective collaboration technology, where everyone can share their voice simultaneously, are very, very powerful for developing psychological safety. And they’re even more critical in a remote environment.

Small-Group Interactions

Create small spaces for people to talk and communicate. Avoid large meetings because people won’t feel comfortable talking and only the most senior people will end up contributing. Try to limit meetings to the people who really need to be there. 

Sometimes you’ll need to have bigger meetings, in which case you can use technology like breakout rooms to have people in smaller groups coming up with discussions. You might need to be more of a facilitative leader to create that kind of structure. 

Meeting in small groups will support people in having equal voice, which will give them the psychological safety that they need to function most effectively.

3 Steps to a High-Performance Remote Culture

While the above tips are useful to get started with immediate results, changing the structures of your working environment alone can only do so much. The root of high performance rests with the organizational culture and its ability to support psychological safety. Building an effective, high-performance culture in a remote working environment takes more deliberate effort than doing so in an in-person environment. With that in mind, here are the top three new interaction patterns for working in a remote environment.

Reach Out and Connect

To borrow a phrase from an old commercial, “Reach out and touch someone.” Which just means, talk to people for no reason whatsoever. You used to do this all the time when everyone was working in-person. You’d just bump into someone and have a conversation. When you’re working remotely, you’re not going to bump into them, but you can still have a random conversation – you just have to be intentional about creating time for it. 

Say, “Hey I just got my coffee, why don’t we just sit down and chat for a bit? I’m not here trying to accomplish any work, let’s just connect. What’s up with you? How are things going?” 

What happens is after a while of chatting, you’ll start talking about work, and these spontaneous things that you never had time to talk about will come up. You’ll have time to address things that employees might not have bothered you with if they’d had to bring it to you during formal working time. 

Even if you don’t connect about work, you’ve just made an investment in their psychological safety, and their health as a team member. And you can always use that time to check in with them about how you can support them better. So it’s showing that, as a leader, you care and that you’re there to support them.

Be Authentic

The second thing you can do is be open and authentic with what is going on with you, as a leader, with working remotely. Just be honest. What are your challenges? For example “My kids keep coming in and distracting me.” 

Just be open and authentic about what’s going on with you. When you’re authentic with the people on your team, they’ll respond in kind. It will signal to them that they’re in a safe environment.

The main challenge of working remotely – lack of human connection – can be solved. It’s really about taking an extra step to lean in as the leader, to show who we are as a human being, to make space for others to show who they are as human beings. 

Model that it’s okay to show kids in the background, or a spouse, or whatever’s happening. It’s fine to say, “Oh yeah there’s some guy working on my dishwasher because it needs to get fixed.” Normalizing things like that means you understand that people are human beings with lives beyond work.

Lead Through Influence

Oftentimes, because leaders aren’t in the room with employees and there’s not effective reporting on whether people are doing work or not, leaders feel a lot of insecurity. They have this fear of,  “How can I stay in control? How can I make sure that I’m doing my job? How can I make sure my team is successful?” 

Being in a remote situation can actually bring up a lot of fear for leaders that, of course, will cut off the blood supply to the frontal cortex and impair their ability to function. Thus, the starting challenge for most leaders in a remote situation is actually overcoming the fear of lack of control.

The great thing about this challenge is that it’s actually an opportunity to learn to lead through influence. This is based on what we call the Paradox of Power. Ultimately, the Paradox of Power is about understanding that you can’t make anyone do anything. You can use your authority to try to convince or coerce people into doing things. However, high-performance teams are made up of people who are positively engaged, who are excited and passionate about what they’re doing. 

Leading through influence actually requires an inner shift, where you’re comfortable sharing power and recognizing that your success depends on the people around you. What high-performance leaders have discovered is that control is just an illusion, and they realize that they only have influence over what happens. It allows them to become much more laser-focused on how to influence effectively. 

Putting It All Together

Working remotely can actually be the biggest gift you have ever received. It’s a chance to evolve your leadership in the workplace. What we have seen with our leadership training programs is that this leads to a ripple effect that impacts all aspects of our lives. Sometimes the most touching and profound benefits that people report are from the new ways they relate to their partner or kids.

It’s time to stop focusing on the challenge of being remote and dive into the opportunity it presents for you to evolve to greater levels of connection, impact and an inner sense of peace. It may be time to get on with the work of evolving your leadership so you can sleep better at night.

What we are sharing here is a small part of the SHIFT314 Evolutionary Leadership Framework™ (SELF) that provides leaders an integrated framework for developing the evolutionary capabilities needed to support new ways of working and being.

How to Define Roles and Responsibilities

Why do people talk about roles and responsibilities, and why should we care? Everyone wants to know what to do and who to go to for help. People want to be successful, but in order to achieve success they need to feel confident in their roles and responsibilities.

When talking of roles and responsibilities in the workplace, a traditional boss might tell their employees they are responsible for a, b, and c, and to leave x, y, and z to someone else. But a leader in a great working environment would ask: “What do you think you’re best at? How do you think you can contribute the most to this organization? What do you think you can do to help our team be rock stars?”

By doing so, they are involving the person in the decision of how they will contribute every day: How can they contribute to the team’s success? What are they good at?  What’s going to add value to the company? Approaching roles and responsibilities in the right way is the core of unlocking high performance. 

Knowing what other people’s roles and responsibilities in the workplace are is important, too. If a team member knows who to turn to for help with a specific problem, they will benefit from the psychological safety of feeling supported.

When people feel supported by their team they are more productive, and when they’re more productive they’re happier. This creates a virtuous cycle that fosters an environment where people can rely on those around them for support. Knowing other people’s roles and responsibilities is central to creating an amazing team. 

Roles vs Responsibilities – What’s the Difference?

Although the terms differ slightly depending on the organization, a role tends to be the broadest area of defining the scope, and includes many areas of responsibility. 

But roles and responsibilities are not static: the way they are seen goes through an evolutionary shift at different organizational levels of maturity. 

Understanding Roles and Responsibilities

Start where you are. What does that mean? It’s really about paying attention to your team. What level of roles and responsibilities are needed to help them be successful with where they are on their journey? The first step is simply: ask them. 

Are roles and responsibilities clear? Is the team doing well? Which areas could be improved? This creates an opportunity to listen to people, to guide them in creating the clarity that they need to be successful. And this process applies at every level of an organization’s journey, whether in a younger, less mature team, or in a really evolved organization. 

It’s important not to mandate having ambiguous roles and responsibilities if your team isn’t ready for that. Rather, make sure that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined initially, and model the way of working you would like to see your team emulate. 

How to Define Roles and Responsibilities

The best way of defining someone’s roles and responsibilities is to co-create with them. Sit down, open a shared document, and brainstorm. What should the role be? What should the responsibilities be? What things are included in those responsibility areas? 

Alternatively, if you do not have time to do this, ask the person to write up their own role and responsibilities, and then look over them together.  This creates a sense of ownership, and shows you believe in them. 

If you’re dealing with people at a very low level of growth, it may be better to define their role and then get their input.  

Regardless of the approach you go for, get feedback from other people on the team who interact with that role to  improve the quality of those roles and those responsibilities, and foster a team spirit. 

Common Mistakes When Defining Roles and Responsibilities

Giving Too Much Authority

Giving too much authority or responsibility to someone who’s not ready for it is a common mistake. If the person turns out to not have the capabilities or maturity, it’s difficult to then take that authority away without damaging someone’s confidence. It’s far easier to give people more authority if they show they’re ready for it than it is to take authority away.

Having  people in positions they are not fully competent creates a situation fraught with challenge: work is not getting done as it should, but constantly telling people what to do can leave them feeling threatened and micromanaged. 

This is where the Decision Cards technology is helpful: rather than giving away roles and responsibilities, the focus is on how to talk about decisions: who’s the best person to make that decision? How involved should you be in this decision? How much ownership do you have of this decision?

Breaking it down to the level of decisions rather than roles or responsibilities creates a much finer grain way to get people fully involved based on their level of expertise. Rather than giving people full authority all together, it’s all about giving them authority incrementally based on how that person is showing up, how much responsibility they’re taking, how they’re growing, and how successful they are at making decisions.

Sharing Too Little Authority

Another common mistake is the exact opposite: giving away too little responsibility.

Not giving people enough responsibility creates boredom, disinvestment, and deflated egos. Giving people responsibility, and therefore ownership of their work, activates their ego in a positive way, and helps them care more about the success of their work and the project. Having a sense of ownership and pride over one’s job cannot be underestimated, and the benefits of this override the small errors the person might make. 

Oftentimes, our default solution is often to give responsibilities to the most senior person, but when we start giving responsibility to junior people, they’re going to start learning, growing, and being much more excited about coming to work. Similarly, senior members of the team will have more time to do other important work, including mentoring people or working on long-term strategy. Giving up on the need for perfection leads to a much better outcome long term. 

Developing People to Take on Responsibility

When people start out and have a low level of psychological safety and personal growth, crisp, clearly defined roles and responsibilities are necessary and will support them in their personal and professional growth. 

However, in organizations with higher levels of psychological safety, people’s consciousness grows and they become more evolved. People think less in terms of rigid roles and responsibilities and more about how they can best serve the team and the organization. In a secure, high performance team, people will dynamically trade off roles and responsibilities, decisions, and ownership on a regular basis. People just notice what needs to be done and get it done. 

Being territorial about roles and responsibilities is a sign of a low level of maturity and a low performance team and  organization. Mature people in a mature organization will just do what has to be done to serve a purpose. Ultimately, the meaning of roles and responsibilities is dynamic and will shift based on the level of consciousness and maturity of the organizational system.

The first most important part of the journey towards an evolved, mature team is focusing on your own evolutionary journey as a leader. By working through your own issues and fears, and being comfortable with ambiguous roles and responsibilities, you’re leading by example and transmitting a sense of psychological safety to your team. 

Finding The Right Amount of Authority to Share

Like everything else, through learning. Learning about yourself, learning about the people you’re working with, learning about their skills and capabilities, and experimenting to see what works. Everyone is unique, so what works with one person might not work with another.

The first step is to go on a learning journey.  We’re inviting people here on a learning journey, to understand this complex art of roles and responsibilities, decisions, and to truly understand what it means to evolve people. That’s a shift away from demanding the right answer, or giving all the answers: it’s about creating a path that will lead to much  greater success for the individual and everyone around them.

Agile Transformation: How You Can Succeed Where Most Leaders Fail

Why Leaders Fail Their Agile Transformations

Leaders in organizations are exceptional in their industry’s domain of expertise and have proven themselves applying leadership styles that have defined their success to date. It is this momentum and reassurance that propels leaders into failure with their Agile Transformations. 

When asking employees to change to a completely different way of working, most leaders fail to recognize that it also requires a more substantial change in how they lead. Industry leaders are always experts, but never experts in everything, especially with Agile Transformations. A false sense of confidence closes leaders down from seeking and having faith in the advice of others. 

The Seven Keys

If leaders must change their ways of thinking and leading, how do they do so and be successful? We offer seven “Agile Transformation Keys” to provide leaders the guidance they need. They are a distillation of the wisdom from decades of leaders that have made similar attempts in the past. Some have succeeded, and most have failed, and we have extracted the essence of what leaders do when they succeed.

The Seven Keys give executives specific, tangible ways that leaders can apply starting tomorrow. These business patterns are essentially keys to unlock the transformation that they’re responsible for. 

Each Key is a Successful Business Pattern

At SHIFT314, we’ve been leading with Agile for decades. What we’ve realized from looking back at what does and doesn’t work is that much of what happens in the Agile industry is not a reflection of the Agile manifesto. 

We also have enough experience to know that your transformation is probably not performing as expected. There is even a chance your transformation is more of a facade than a real change. We want you to succeed and are handing you the keys to your transformation’s success.

The mainstream thinking on Agile hasn’t always worked. There’s a lot of guidance out there about Agile that is based on theory or hearsay. What we have found is that the organizations that are successful with Agile transformations are not following the herd. 

While they may not follow the mainstream narrative, The Seven Keys contain the successful business patterns leaders need, and put them into a format that’s easy to understand, communicate, and apply. 

How Are the Seven Keys Connected to Agile?

Over the last couple of decades, our industry has been distracted by a lot of the initiatives that sound like they’re Agile, but aren’t actually mentioned at all in the Agile manifesto.

I’ll pick on Scrum or Kanban just for fun. Scrum and Kanban were around before the Agile Manifesto and there’s not even a mention of them in the Agile manifesto. However, when we work with our clients who ask for our help with their transformations, they usually begin describing their deployment of Scrum with detail. Additionally, when asked, they can’t recall most of the four values of the Agile Manifesto. 

Early in my career, I had a pivotal experience which led to an epiphany. As a leader, I was implementing Agile as best as I could within my organization, but we weren’t achieving substantial improvements in outcomes. My epiphany was that the Agile manifesto was telling me how to be a leader and that it was really a framework for making decisions. Once I implemented this, we saw the improvements we’d been seeking. These Seven Keys give you the simple and practical steps to implementing that framework in your day-to-day organizational environment.

How Are the Seven Keys Different from What We’ve Already Heard?

Most organizations we work with initially approach their transformation overly focused on what the employees and teams do. What’s their process? What are the job descriptions? What are the hiring practices? While these are useful structures, the reason why the transformations are not working is that organizational leaders are not embracing the values that are defined in the Agile manifesto.

They’re missing the point that the Agile manifesto is really a description of how to lead a team and make effective decisions as a leader. When you’re rolling out Scrum or Kanban, the focus is on teams. However, the Agile manifesto speaks more to the leaders because the leaders are the ones who have the power and authority to create the space for these frameworks to be successful. Asking employees, scrum masters, or coaches to do this makes no sense.

While there’s no doubt that everybody on the team needs to embrace the four values, it’s the leaders who shape the culture and model what’s acceptable and unacceptable in an organization. 

The Seven Keys help executives and leaders to figure out specifically how to embrace these four values as business patterns in their organization. As leaders work to bring those values into their decision framework, they can use these Seven Keys as a simple way to actually embrace the Agile manifesto through specific and practical steps that will help them create a successful transformation.

Leading the New Way of Working with Results

As an executive or a leader of an Agile transformation, you may find the Seven Keys rather counter-intuitive. They’re not a parrot of the common industry narratives. Why is this? 

You simply have to do the math. At least 90% of the Agile transformations in flight today are not working. So listening to what the whole industry is parroting is just going to have you go down the same path as everybody else. 

What these Seven Keys help an executive understand is that listening to the industry is a design for disaster. Instead of the unsuccessful narratives that are dominant in the industry, these Seven Keys represent the business patterns that have actually been proven to be successful. These are the approaches that organizations have used to achieve success with Agile. 

The Seven Keys have been called “The second wave of Agile.” It’s the new way in which organizations have cracked the code on Agile after we’ve spent the last two decades not getting it right.

Your Leadership is the Key

The Seven Keys also point to an important message: Agile has a lot more to do with the leaders than it does to do with the teams. The business patterns in the Seven Keys are really trajectories that leaders can take and help their teams progress towards. 

There is so much Agile certification and training for the teams, but very little support for leaders. The Seven Keys fill this gap. With them, leaders have good insight into specifically how to lead their teams towards success in an Agile transformation. This also supports the teams, because they actually have the right context and the right environment to thrive and to succeed.

What we are sharing here is a small part of the SHIFT314 Evolutionary Leadership Framework™ (SELF) that provides leaders an integrated framework for developing the evolutionary capabilities needed to support new ways of working and being.

Culture – It’s not just for Breakfast Anymore

The success of any transformation program such as Agile or Digital is wholly dependent on the culture of the organization. And 80% of organizations have a challenged or low-performance culture that is incompatible and block the introduction of innovative new ways of working. 

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

Most people are familiar with Drucker’s now-famous business maxim: “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast.” Our extension is to add that: “Strategy eats Tactics for afternoon tea.” Most change programs fall into the trap of focusing on tactics and strategy instead of culture. So creating a lasting shift in organizations requires a focus on culture all day long – not just for breakfast. Read more about tactics, strategy, and culture.

What’s even more interesting is that people can influence culture at all levels of the organization – without power, budget or authority. In fact culture usually evolves in Culture Bubbles – a powerful pattern for unlocking change. Culture change is open to anyone wanting to have impact – not just top leadership.

High-Performance Culture Is Necessary for Survival

Many organizations are now facing what we call the VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Organizational leaders find that the world is changing so rapidly that it’s hard for their products and services to keep up with change. It’s challenging to keep up with competitors and meet the needs of an evolving marketplace. 

Organizational Survival Is Optional

Organizations are going out of business at a faster and faster rate. Just because an organization has been around for a hundred years does not guarantee that it will continue to exist. Organizations are faced with a choice: either innovate and evolve or go extinct.

Even in a stable industry, once an innovator has entered your marketplace, your organization will not have the time to respond. That’s the importance of a high-performance culture. If your organization doesn’t have it, it may not survive.

What Does High-Performance Culture Look Like?

What does it really mean to have a high-performance culture? Fundamentally, it’s about creating success and achieving the purpose of the organization. Of course, organizations define that differently, yet whatever an organization’s definition of success, there’s one thing that ties them all together. The culture is one where people come together and are motivated to deliver for the organization, because they want to. Or to be more blunt the workers have a strong desire for the success of the organization.

There are many models that attempt to define high performance culture such as Frederic Laloux’s model of Teal. When we extract the essence of all the various models, what we find is that it all comes down to the people.

It’s About People

When you have a group of people who are excited, motivated, and ambitious, you’re going to see better results. People who are passionate and motivated can overcome any kind of obstacle. They’ll figure out a way to work around it and create organizational success. Thus, the core of high-performance culture is engaged, motivated people.

Some common characteristics of organizations with high-performance cultures include:

  • People are learning and growing every day
  • Employees are passionate, motivated, and engaged
  • There’s a strong sense of purpose; a clear vision
  • There’s a shared agreement about how people work together
  • People feel psychologically safe
  • People have equal voice; everyone can speak up to help make the best decision possible 

A high-performance culture is not an end state, it’s a journey. A transformation program alone won’t get you there. Rather, it’s a daily process to make continual progress on the journey. 

Daily Activities to Create a High-Performance Culture

If a high-performance culture is so important, how do you create one? Here are some practical steps leaders can take to develop a high-performance culture in their organization.

Act as a Role Model

The most valuable thing a leader can do is to act as a role model. To model the future ways of working and ways of being that you hope to see in the organization. The rate of an organization’s evolution is determined by the rate of its people’s evolution, and the best way to impact that is to act as a role model.

Let’s imagine that you’re not seeing people take on as much responsibility as you’d like them to. The recommended action is to consider, where are you in taking on more responsibility as a leader? Where could you be more responsible? Where are you lacking in desire to engage in the organization? 

If we want people to be more responsible, then they need some sort of ownership. So another question to ask is, where are you giving space for people to have ownership? Do people have the space to take responsibility for things? Do you trust others to be responsible?

In both cases, you’re taking responsibility and modeling the change that you wish to see. How are you showing up as a leader who create leaders? 

Share Decision-Making

In many organizations, there is a hierarchy where decisions are moved up and up and up the ladder. A very simple practice for a leader to create learning capabilities in their organization is to move those decisions down.

 What often happens when you move decisions down to more junior employees is they come up with radical ideas and innovations. And when they’re taking charge, they also learn how to lead that project better. They may not be the most expert, but if they have passion and ownership, they’re going to be motivated to make it successful.

When those people are in a place where they can get advice from other people who can help them be successful, you’re off to the races because now you’re developing an organization that’s learning. So the organization is able to accomplish more, not just this month, but the next month too. 

Talk Less, Listen More.

The simple practice of listening first and talking last creates space for innovation to happen. When the most senior person always speaks first, the space for innovation drops because nobody else gets to contribute ideas. Nobody wants to contradict the leader and people think, “What they said is good enough.” 

When we create a space for others to contribute new ideas, not just through brainstorming sessions but in regular daily meetings, that leads to a shift in innovation capabilities.

Look After the People

The other thing leaders can do to create high-performance culture is to really look after the people. Oftentimes leaders are focused on results and getting things done. But everything that gets done is actually accomplished by people. Thus, the secret to a high-performance culture is to look after people. Understand what motivates them and what inspires them and connect with them to make sure that they’re looked after. 

For example, when you check on a project’s status, instead of asking about the date and the timeline, ask, “How are the people doing? What’s going on with people? What are people frustrated about, and how can I help?”

Create Spaces to Explore the Future

The other thing that leaders can do is to create spaces to allow people to explore the future. Create opportunities to ask, “What kind of organization do we want to be?” This helps to create a clear sense of purpose.

Do people have a sense of shared inspiration? Do they have a shared desire for what they want to create for the organization? Without this, it’s difficult to create a truly high-performance culture.

Unblock the Organizational System 

It’s important to look at the infrastructure, processes, and rules of an organization to see whether they are helping people or getting in their way.

One approach is to convene a group of people who are interested in making the organization better. Ask questions like, “What are the biggest challenges that span across groups or divisions that we can work on to move us more towards our star on the horizon?”

Look at Areas of Tension

The next thing a leader can do is to look at tensions in the organizational system. It’s a concept from S3 or sociocracy, which is to look at the places where things aren’t working that well. Noticing problem areas where there’s a recurring pattern, or there’s some sort of interpersonal challenge or there’s tension between groups. And when we look for these tensions, then we can help steward the system and help it move towards resolution of these tensions.

And it’s not very complex. You can simply say, “Hey, I notice a bit of challenge around this. What do you guys think?” And just listen to see if people agree. And if they agree then say, “Well, how big a problem is this for us? How valuable is it to resolve this tension?” 

Then actually work as a steward of the system to look after it. 

How To Evolve Your Culture

Evolving to a high-performance culture means moving to a people-centric model of interaction. While it sounds simple, it is not an easy shift. In order to support leaders in achieving both the level of inner growth and as well as the skills and tactics needed to create a high-performance culture, we offer a variety of courses that will support you on your journey.

In this post we have outlined how you can immediately start to make a culture shift locally simply by making different choices for how and where to engage. To learn further we refer you to a related post How To Change Your Organizational Culture or get immediate access to in-depth information via our Agile Leadership and Transformation Training.

Leader vs Boss: Who Are You Inspiring?

Anyone can be a boss. For most of us, the choice to be a Leader takes us on a journey of self-discovery and growth. The choice can make a difference between effective, influential leadership that will impact high performance or the choice to remain in the business as usual approach of management. Which path will you take?

What Is the Difference Between a Leader vs a Boss? 

So what’s the difference between a leader vs a boss? Being a boss is easy. Being a boss just means you have power and authority–you can tell people what to do. The boss has authority that’s given to them or granted them by whoever gave them that position–it could even be themselves if they’re the founder. 

The difference between a leader vs a boss is that a leader is one who inspires others and creates those who follow by their own free will. People follow a leader not because of their authority or rank, but because they believe in them, have admiration, and are inspired by what they are doing.

Anyone can be a leader, regardless of their position or level of authority, because anyone in an organization can lead their team forward and inspire their colleagues. What does that really mean?

What Does it Mean to Be a Leader?

At the Sasquatch music festival in 2009, the attendees were all sitting on the hill listening to music. Then one crazy guy stood up and started dancing. For a long time, he was just this one crazy guy on the hill dancing by himself, then other people joined him. Then more and more people joined him until it became a mass dance on the hillside. People were excited and connected, it became an entirely new experience than before.

That’s the essence of being a leader. A leader is someone who takes an action that might be scary and vulnerable, yet creates a place where other people choose to follow. That’s the big test.

Leaders Evolve First 

One primary difference between leaders vs bosses is that leaders take personal responsibility for their evolution and that of the organization. When considering the gap between where an organization or a department is and where it might be, a boss thinks, “How do I fix my people? How do I get them to change?” A leader thinks, “How can I change? How can I grow and evolve? How can I inspire?”

The sign of a true leader is that they focus on their own growth first. In doing so, they become a role model for learning and evolution. Creating a high-performance organization requires that leaders evolve first.

The secret we tell people in leadership positions is, “If you spot a behavior you don’t like in other people, look at how you’re exhibiting that behavior yourself. Where can you grow around that dimension of leadership?” 

Qualities of Effective Leaders

Ultimately there’s only one quality or only one observable phenomenon that defines if someone is a leader vs a boss: whether there are people willingly choosing to follow you. The proof is in the pudding. With that said, here are some characteristics that good leaders tend to exhibit. 

1. Leaders Care About the People Around Them

Oftentimes, bosses get promoted because they’re focused on achieving goals. While that’s great for short-term success, in order to create long-term success, it’s vital to actually care about the people. Leaders understand that results come from people, and when they take care of the people, they’ll take care of the results.

2. Leaders Listen

Richard Branson once said, “No one learned anything by talking.” Listening is a superpower. If you want to learn and understand what’s happening with the people around you, the only possible way to do that is to truly listen. 

Listening is not an easy skill. To truly listen without an agenda is a crucial element needed for success. When we genuinely listen, we can actually understand what’s happening around us and can take effective action. One of the best ways to tell the difference between a leader vs a boss is by observing how much they listen and how much they talk.

3. Leaders Are Emotionally Clear

One of the most important aspects of a leader is that they’re emotionally clear. We all experience a range of emotions throughout the day. Positive emotions uplift everyone around us. When we experience negative emotions like fear, anxiety, or frustration, our bodies tighten up and everyone around us can feel that. Let’s look at an example of how a leader vs a boss’s emotional state can affect their employees.

Say you have a project team in crisis, and the boss walks in. Everyone tightens up and experiences fear. They stop talking. The boss issues questions and gets short replies back. But when a leader walks in, they say, “Hey everyone, it’s okay. Don’t panic. We’ll figure this out somehow. Let’s just work together to figure out how to solve it. What ideas do people have?” People come to life and start brainstorming. Not only does this help solve the problem, but people’s level of psychological safety also goes up.

This ties in with our book Emotional Science, which we created to help people get a much deeper understanding of their emotional systems. It contains a technology that goes beyond the usual understanding of emotions and can support leaders in developing the ability to be emotionally clear most of the time.

4. Leaders Have Compassion for Others

A typical boss’ view is, “Why aren’t they getting this done on time? This thing was due already, why are they only asking for help right now?” These judgments can be devastating because everyone can feel the energy coming at them even if the boss doesn’t say anything.

For a leader, patience and compassion are essential. When a leader is patient, they’re able to really listen and ask, “Where are they coming from? What’s getting in the way of them being successful? How can I help them grow and develop to continue on their growth journey so that they can be more successful going forward?” 

5. Leaders Speak the Truth

Leaders lead with truth. The truth, when said with compassion and understanding, will increase trust. The dimensions of truth-telling are being authentic and having candor. 

Being authentic means that people get what they see. You don’t have a hidden agenda. You say what’s going on. When you feel an emotion, you express it. This builds a sense of connection, trust, and safety.

The other dimension that’s very important is about having candor. A lot of bosses build lists in their heads of things employees are doing wrong but never communicate these until it’s too late. A leader immediately has a conversation with an employee, from a place of both candor and compassion. 

6. Leaders Celebrate Others’ Success and Build Leaders

A great leader builds other leaders around them. Celebrating others is an essential part of that. What that means is, instead of thinking, “How can I make myself look good?” a leader considers, “How can I make everyone else look good? How can I celebrate the things that other people are doing?” 

It could be a high five or a thank you. It could be sending an email to the whole team saying, “Hey, so and so did this. I just want to recognize their accomplishment. Thank you so much for what you were able to do, it really made a difference.”

Leadership: It’s a Choice

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em” – Shakespeare. 

Leadership is for those who are interested in achieving greatness and living your fullest potential. It’s a daily choice that leads to a never-ending journey of discovery and growth. We call this Evolutionary Leadership – the choice to evolve both one’s inner state of being and one’s ability to interact in more effective ways. The moment you stop looking at how to lead more effectively is the moment where your leadership starts to fail. 

At SHIFT314, we are committed to our continual growth in service of our mission to evolve the world of work. We hope that you also chose this path and that together we can create a better world. Are you ready to be an Evolutionary Leader?

Culture and Leadership: Navigating the Journey

Many organizations seek to improve their performance. Some even try moving to novel organizational structures with the promise of unlocking success. However, well-intentioned leaders often miss one vital point: all ambitions to change an organization rest on its culture. To quote Druckers’s now-famous maxim: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And culture and leadership are more connected than many of us care to admit.

Culture Follows Leadership

The culture of an organization is the sum of all the people. Everyone impacts the culture around them – for better or worse. And leaders – those who hold power – have the greatest impact. The more senior the person, the greater their impact on the overall culture. Without a shift in leadership, culture change is simply not possible. The notion of assigning culture shift to Human Resources or a transformation team simply does not work in practice. Thus, culture and leadership are inextricably linked. But how can a leader create a cultural shift?

What Is Culture?

Before we dive into culture and leadership, let’s clarify what we mean when we’re talking about organizational culture.

Culture is the integrated set of behaviors of all the people in an organization. It’s the mindset, energy, and consciousness of an organization, together with all the tangible structures, practices, and policies. Together, these form the organization’s culture. 

Organizational culture is actually about the people. The collective behavior of all the people in the organization creates its culture. If you want to change the culture of the organization, that requires a change in the behaviors of all the people involved. 

Culture and Leadership Co-Evolve

Culture and leadership are so interconnected because leaders create culture with every interaction they have within an organization. There are two primary ways that leaders impact culture. 

Number one is through how they are. Leaders impact culture through their way of being, how they hold themselves, and even how they’re feeling internally. Every human being has a built in sensor to check how other people are feeling around them. When a leader is relaxed, open, and curious, that gives the people around them the psychological safety that they need to function at a higher level. We call this aspect of influence “Being.”

Number two is through what they do. What does the leader actually do? Are they taking actions that demonstrate that they care about people? Are they listening to what’s happening around them? Are they making decisions that are in the best interest of the people in the organizational system? 

Put together, these two aspects of leadership have a profound impact on an organization’s culture.

Culture, Leadership, and Personal Growth

Why is it important for leaders to focus on personal growth? The answer is simple: culture follows leadership. When a leader has an evolved consciousness and interacts with the people in the organizational system, they create a high-performance organizational system around them. 

The way to create a very high-performance organization (called a “Teal organization” in the Laloux Culture Model) is very simple: just show up as an evolutionary leader.

The Leadership Gap

The truth of the matter is that most people don’t show up as evolved leaders most of the time. They actually show up as very traditional leaders, because a lot of dysfunctional behavior patterns are coded into how we’ve been taught to behave since we were very young. For example, trying to convince people, trying to sell our ideas, and being overly attached to our ideas. 

There are many conditioned behavior patterns that leaders have, and it’s important to grow out of them in order to show up as more evolved leaders. Leaders who accomplish this can inspire a shift in all the people to create a high-performance culture.

How to Grow as a Leader

Since culture and leadership are inseparable, the question for leaders becomes, “How can I grow so that the culture I create is high performance?” Let’s explore some of the most important qualities of high performance leaders.

Emotional Regulation

Evolutionary leaders are able to understand how their emotional system works and navigate their emotional disturbances. It’s not about becoming a robot, it’s actually about becoming a real human being who is honest about what’s actually happening. The leader who feigns calm comes across as inauthentic. But a leader who demonstrates healthy emotional regulation fosters a psychologically safe environment. 

Psychological Safety

High-performance leaders hold a very high degree of psychological safety. They’re able to stay calm and unflappable no matter what’s going on around them. When a leader has psychological safety and walks into a room where everyone’s in a panic, they can say, “Hey everyone, everything’s going to be fine. We’ll work it out somehow.” When a leader has psychological safety, they can propagate that state to other people so that they feel psychologically safe.

Leaders Go First

Another thing that we see with evolutionary leaders is that they focus on their own growth and evolution. When leaders go first, they show everyone that they’re on their leadership journey too, that it’s okay to be imperfect, and that learning is part of everyone’s job. When leaders model that for everyone, that’s the foundation of creating a learning culture. And a learning culture is essential to creating an adaptable organization, because without learning, there’s no growth or innovation–and no hope of adapting to the complex business world that organizations exist in.

Authenticity

Authentic leaders focus on relationships and building trust. They understand that an organization is not a machine, it’s a collection of people, and that helping people evolve and grow is one of the most important things they can do. In addition, they’re also vulnerable. They’re ready to share exactly what’s going on with them. And when leaders are vulnerable, it creates connection. It’s the foundation of creating the trust and the psychological safety that employees need to function at their best.

Being vulnerable is being able to surrender in a complex situation. One example is leaders dropping the facade that they’ve got it all together. Powerful leaders say things like, “I don’t know the solution to this, but I believe we can all work this out together.” And when leaders are that authentic and vulnerable, it opens up the door for the extraordinary to emerge from organizations.

Listening First, Talking Last

High-performance leaders listen first and talk last. By listening first, they show that they respect other people’s input and voices. Leaders who listen first are able to very practically influence organizational culture in a positive direction. 

Of course, this kind of change requires an inner shift in the leader’s consciousness or mindset. Most of us are afflicted with the challenge of the ego running the show. The ego wants to talk and express itself, and so it doesn’t create places for others to contribute. Even a simple activity like listening first requires a lot of inner growth for most leaders.

Sharing Power

Leaders who understand the paradox of power know how to share power effectively with workers and peers. They know when to share power, how much power to share, and when to give away power completely or stay involved in decisions. Through this effective sharing of power, leaders develop other leaders around them. They help build systems that can operate while they’re away on holiday.

To feel comfortable sharing power and to actually want others to be successful requires an inner shift in mindset. The built in mechanism of the ego is that we want to take all the credit for ourselves; we want to look like the star. However, high performance leaders help their people become stars and they move themselves to the background. 

How to Lead Better Meetings

Here’s an example of positive culture and leadership in action. It’s also a technique you can use to lead much better meetings. As the leader, let’s say you’re looking to solve a problem. Oftentimes, leaders go in and propose what they think the solution is and then say, “Does anyone have any input or advice?” They often hear very little feedback. 

If you’re interested in creating better outcomes for your organization and developing other people to be leaders, there’s a very simple practice you can do: at the beginning of the meeting, just set up the problem but don’t offer a solution. Here’s how it can work:

  1. At the beginning of the meeting, say something to the effect of, “Hey, we’re here to solve challenge X. I’ve got some ideas, but I’d like to hear what you think first.”
  2. Everyone else shares their input first, before having any discussion. Just have everyone share their thoughts on the topic. 
  3. Once everyone’s had a chance to speak and share their ideas, you can guide the group through an open discussion of what will be most effective.

What happens is that you’re able to help people contribute to the solution and recognize their contribution. Ultimately, this helps develop people as leaders. What’s even more important is you’re using the collective wisdom and intelligence of all the people to make the best decision possible. 

Oftentimes as the leader, you don’t even need to make the decision anymore. You can just say, “Hey, it all sounds like we’re in agreement that solution X is the best option. Great. Let’s go do that.” This is a very practical way that leaders can model positive culture and leadership while developing the people in their organizational system.

Taking the Leap: Becoming an Evolutionary Leader

There are many ways that people can grow as leaders. Here at Shift 314, we have created a technology of consciousness that helps leaders experience a rapid inner shift and gives them the practical external tools to interact in new ways that unlock performance. 

Practical tools include strategies for:

  • Deep listening 
  • Enhanced learning
  • Interacting with people
  • Understanding alignment within the organizational system
  • Observation skills for a deeper level of understanding 
  • Navigating complexity
  • Effective facilitation

We also offer vital practices that leaders need to show up as high-performance leaders that are able to manifest a change in culture. This includes understanding decision-making, understanding how to share power effectively, and understanding how to use technologies such as the advice process to help people become leaders.

On the “doing” side of the equation, we provide detailed training in everything from how to listen and how to facilitate meetings to how to send emails and share information. It’s repatterning and relearning all of these normal practices in ways that are more engaging, that help people model a more evolved way of working that leads to greater employee interaction and helps build other leaders within the organization. 

The “being” side of the equation is an inner shift in consciousness. What we see for leaders who create high performance organizations is they have a different view of themselves, the world, the organization, and other people. The inner shift that’s needed is a shift in mindset to a more evolved worldview. We have created technologies of consciousness to help leaders go through this essential shift of consciousness and have a sustained impact on their organization.

Mind the Gap: Leading With an Agile Mindset

In order to create Business Agility through Agile, organizations must not only embrace Agile Processes but also integrate the Agile Mindset. To create an Agile organization, everyone needs to shift to the Agile Mindset. Many teams can make this move with the right environment. Yet, what about the leaders who are creating the environment?

Agile Leadership Gap

It is important that leaders in an Agile organization live the Agile Mindset to unlock the full benefits of Agile. The truth is: most don’t have the Agile Mindset. That’s what we call the Agile Leadership Gap. Leaders don’t have the shift in mindset and the “being” and “doing” needed to model an Agile way of work. 

Agile training alone doesn’t give people this mindset shift. Giving managers, product owners, Scrum masters and executives Scrum training isn’t going to help them achieve the Agile Mindset. 

There is a huge gap in giving leaders the mindset shift that they need to model the Agile Mindset. And it’s virtually impossible for organizational leaders to make their organization more Agile without a shift in mindset. 

This is the leadership gap.

What Is the Agile Mindset?

The Agile Mindset. It’s a mysterious, elusive concept. People have heard about it, people want it, people understand it’s essential for success. But what on earth is it? 

In order to understand the Agile Mindset, we have to look back at the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto contains three essential items–what I call the essence of Agile:

  1. Culture of Learning 
  2. Valuing People 
  3. Responding to Change 

Let’s look at each of these in-depth.

Culture of Learning 

Many people have heard about this shift from a fixed mindset to a learning mindset (or a “growth mindset” as it’s called in the work of Carol Dweck). In order to have a learning mindset, people must be open to learning, considering new ideas, and discovering new information.

However, we discovered that in order to truly be successful with Agile, leaders need something beyond even the traditional learning mindset. We have discovered a deeper, new type of mindset that unlocks the Agile Mindset, which we call the Evolutionary Mindset.

In an evolutionary mindset, we’re not just open to learning, we are open to learning about ourselves. We’re ready to examine things like:

  • Our behaviors
  • Our ego
  • Our consciousness
  • How we’re showing up
  • The damage our leadership behaviors could be causing to others
  • How to take ownership of our mistakes

Having the courage to take an honest look at ourselves and use it as a catalyst for growth, using the evolutionary mindset, is what we call Evolutionary Leadership. This is what the manifesto is pointing to. And this is how to be successful with Agile.

Developing the mindset of an evolutionary leader is actually a very practical step. If you have a team of seven people and you want them to collaborate, guess what? People’s egos and conditioned behavior patterns are going to get in the way. To truly have collaboration–to truly have people working together, to get results, and to successfully build the extraordinary–is for people to be committed to evolving themselves.

This inner shift is an essential part of the Agile Mindset.

Valuing People

The first line of the Agile Manifesto states: “Values individuals and interactions over process and tools.” What that’s really about when we simplify it is, people over process. 

If we think about a high performance culture, it’s about highly engaged, motivated people. Agile, through the manifesto, is pointing us to what the mindset is about. It’s about people who are focused on showing up as their best selves, collaborating with others to create amazing products and very successful organizations. Agile is a guide to create amazing workplaces, to transform the world of work.  

However, the transformation to a “people first” mindset doesn’t just happen because we see value in it.

Many of us unconsciously react in ways that aren’t people first–and we may not even be aware of it. We might have an emotional outburst or get irritated with people. A lot of us get attached to the way things are done. Oftentimes, we use processes and rules to create stability and safety for ourselves. Those are all ways that we’re not acting people first, and thus not realizing the potential of agile.

Putting people first means an actual inner shift in our being. 

Since we’re highly conditioned to have typically reactionary behaviors that do not put people first, there’s a lot of reshaping needed internally for how we show up. That is the mindset shift, which will manifest as a shift in our behaviors that allow us to put people over process.

Responding to Change

The third part that’s essential is the phrase, “Responding to change over following a plan.” What does it really mean to respond to change? Responding to change requires an inner shift in our being. If done effectively, we may create plans, yet we are able to adapt when the situation calls for it.  

We understand that most organizations are highly complex systems and that the best outcomes often arise when we let go of our plans. We let go of our need for certainty and we embrace what’s happening around us.

This third point is saying, “Hey, do you notice you’re more successful when you respond to what’s happening around you instead of following your plan?” Are you getting stuck pushing your agenda, or pushing what you think an organization needs? Are you getting frustrated, angry and resistant when plans change?

That responding to change over following a plan creates better results is a simple observation–it could even be called common sense. And yet it requires a shift to an evolved mindset for us as human beings to feel comfortable letting go of our plans. 

How Do You Know if You’re Living the Agile Mindset?

How do you know if you’re living the Agile Mindset? That is, how do you know you are showing up as an evolutionary leader? 

The very simple test is to look behind you. Are there people following you? Are there people reaching out to you to ask for your help and your guidance? That’s how you know.

The Agile Mindset is a Shift in Consciousness (Not a Skill or Technique)

What we’re speaking about is a transmission. It’s an essential attribute of our being. There’s no technique that will give you the Agile Mindset. The skills and techniques are there to help you create self-awareness so you can see where you’re living the Agile Mindset and where you’re not. But, ultimately, this is an inner shift in your being, a transmission. 

We’ve all had these experiences where we’re around people who feel inspiring and motivating–there’s something different about them we can’t quite put our finger on.

That’s what it will feel like as you evolve the Agile Mindset in yourself. People won’t quite know what it is, but you’ll be showing up in a very different way that will lead to completely different outcomes that may astonish you.

The Agile Mindset is Possible

While this all may seem intimidating, we know it’s fully achievable. We’ve had many of our graduates from around the world report that they’ve seen the shift. They suddenly see people reaching out to them and seeking their advice because they’ve learned how to show up in a new way. They’ve learned how to live the Agile Mindset, so it’s integrated as a living transmission through their actions.

How Can an Organization Develop the Agile Mindset?

Once we put all of this together, the question becomes “How can people get there? How can teams get there? How can our whole organizational system get there?” Let’s dive in.

First, let’s look at how we create Agile teams. Creating Agile teams is not new. If you have an effective Agile coach, they can create teams that work in an Agile way. But in order to create true business agility, we don’t need Agile teams – we need an Agile organization.

In order to create an Agile organization, the organization’s leaders must have an Agile Mindset–which brings us to the great importance of the Agile leadership gap.

How Do We Overcome the Agile Leadership Gap?

How do we overcome the Agile leadership gap? Let’s start by looking at how we help teams achieve an Agile way of working. We know that if we give teams effective training followed by embedded on-the-job mentoring, that over time they can make progress on the journey. The same exact thing is needed for leadership. 

Leadership would be more effective with specialized training to understand Agile leadership–how to live and model the mindset to lead a successful Agile transformation. It is important to to understand very practically and tangibly how to maintain an Agile culture. They need to understand what specific behaviors and practices will allow them to operate in the way that’s aligned with the Agile Mindset.

Transformation Is Not Delegable 

It’s important to note that managers and executives cannot delegate transformation to a transformation team–it simply doesn’t work. As the holders of the power in organization, they are the ones that lead the transformation. They can take a very passive role leading it and not much will happen, or they can take a very active role and see real transformation.

From a Traditional Mindset to an Agile Mindset

Most people in organizations are put into an environment where the system is telling them how to function, essentially programming their mindset. In order to live the Agile Mindset and to show up as evolutionary leaders, we have to overcome the constraints around us. 

To be an influential leader of change, one must be able to show up in an evolved way no matter what’s happening around us, no matter the structures and conditioning. Through this shift in our being, we can lead a shift in what’s happening around us.

Practically speaking, this works at a local level by creating a culture bubble in our part of the organization, or by showing up in a way that will inspire and influence others around us at our level and upwards. 

That’s really the challenge and the possibility: focusing on our own evolution, whether you’re a team member, executive, manager, product owner, or coach. How are we actually interacting with people? When we see a shift in our interactions, that’s when we’ll be able to say, “I’m living the Agile Mindset.”

Agile Alone Is Insufficient 

Real transformation in an organizational system is only possible to the extent that leaders learn and embody the Agile Mindset. So what we’ve discovered is that Agile is insufficient. It’s great at pointing to these three essential items: a culture of learning, valuing people, and responding to change. However, Agile training doesn’t help leaders develop these essential elements, and the mindset shift that goes along with them.

Changing Structures Doesn’t Work Without Changing Mindset 

Here’s one of the biggest traps in Agile: people often say, “What structures do I need to change in my organization to create a different outcome?” But changing structures doesn’t work without changing mindset.

There’s no structure that works for everyone. There’s no copy-paste system that you can use. Each organization has its own unique DNA. It is important for leadership to have the skills to create new structures and new ways of working. 

This requires leaders who have fully developed inner psychological safety to run experiments. It also requires leaders who have the knowledge and skill to create new structures that are unique and customized to their organization. 

This is the type of leadership that forms the foundation of high performance through leading through influence and is based on a dissolved ego. Rethinking Agile requires supporting each leader’s growth so they show up as a more evolved leader. This is what allows a more evolved outcome to happen and creates the shift in organizational performance. 

“Being Agile” – Based on responses from hundreds of people during a keynote lecture.

Understanding the Laws of Organizational Dynamics

What we’ve discovered is that Agile is great at pointing to what’s needed, but it’s incomplete. So we created what we call the “laws of organizational dynamics.” It’s an integrated understanding of what’s needed to create success through Agile (and even beyond Agile!). What’s needed to create business agility is what we call Evolutionary Leadership.

What have we learned after decades of studying leadership? It turns out it’s not actually about Agile. It’s something we call Evolutionary Leadership, which is an integrated way of doing and being that reflects a shift in consciousness. It’s a shift in behaviors and inner worldview that creates high performance. That’s why, when we look at the Agile Mindset, it starts with this kernel of Agile, but becomes something much bigger.

Evolutionary Leadership

Put simply, the Agile leadership gap is this: to create a successful leader and Agile environment requires more than just the Agile Mindset. It’s the mindset of an Evolutionary Leader–a broader understanding of what it takes to create business agility and how high-performance organizations truly function. 

All of this is achievable. With the right instruction, training, and mentoring, it’s possible for leaders to get there.

This is how we look at creating an Agile Mindset in the organization: ultimately when we look at the root of it, it’s a leadership problem. Without the leaders modeling it, the Agile Mindset can never really be fully embedded in the organization and the full benefits of Agile can never be realized.

Creating Mindset Shift With Technology of Consciousness 

The Shift 314 Technology of Consciousness is a technology co-created by myself and Audree Tara Sahota. We took Audree’s 20 years of experience in working with personal growth and transformation, plus my experience of working with organizations creating business success. We put the two together, along with information we’ve learned and evolved by working together. 

What we’re sharing with you is the best of the technologies that we have co-created by putting our superpowers together. These technologies allow people to rapidly create a shift in consciousness. 

Some people may feel overwhelmed with the idea of shifting mindset and behavior and assume that it’s a lengthy process. In the old modalities, it might have involved 20 years of counseling. Yet now it doesn’t have to be that arduous. We’re talking about very rapid shifts by accessing people’s consciousness directly. By helping people connect in a very deep way to the inner state of their being, we facilitate an experience that creates a lasting change in mindset while shaping new behaviors.

We at Shift 314 hold a transmission of an evolved consciousness. Because we hold that transmission, we can share it and help others on the journey. Because we’ve done our work of personal growth and self-evolution, we can help others on their journey of self-evolution.

The Evolution of Michael K Sahota

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ― Rumi

Michael K Sahota is Evolving ….

Over 20 years ago, I started a search for how I can function more effectively as a person to create better results. Like many people, I had normal parents and did not enter adulthood with all that I needed to create the success that I desired. My quest for creating greatness around me, led me to realize that I needed greatness in me. I came to be aware that it wasn’t just about skills and techniques, it was about my inner state of being. Creating deep and lasting change requires the calm, presence, and stillness to look beyond the surface to what is really going on.

The photos capture over time how my inner transformation was reflected in my outer transformation.

My journey of evolution has been filled with ups and downs. It has taken me to places that as an engineer and scientist, that were alien and unfamiliar to me. I have taken up meditation, traveled to India to study consciousness and more importantly looked inward to discover the nature of the human experience. I have come to realize that almost all challenges we face are internal and that we can through inner work create and achieve much more than we may even dream.

Our Organization – Agilitrix – is Evolving ….

For the last 15 years, we have been operating as Agilitrix to serve organizations in their efforts to improve how they are functioning through Agile. As a result, our work has shifted iteratively and incrementally by our deeper understanding of Agile. Consequently, our primary focus is now on leadership, culture, organizational change and personal growth. While we continue to support organizations that want to shift to an Agile way of working, the focus is now on the leadership and organizational shifts needed to create a context where Agile can thrive.

And on humorous note, it seems like we could never spell Agiltrix correctly…

Who Are We Now?


We upgrade the evolutionary capabilities of people and organizations to realize the extraordinary.
Through a shift in mindset & practices we enable new ways of working.

Shift314 is a next generation conscious training and consulting organization. We work on Organizational Evolution and Leadership Evolution. What wakes us up every day, and has us excited about what we do? Our purpose to help others to be successful.  Our vision to create a create a global impact on our world by creating local shifts with people and organizations.

Why SHIFT314?

When we stopped to look at what we were doing, we realized that we were helping make the shift to high performance – to realize evolutionary capabilities.

Pi = “π” = 3.14 represents the universal principles of mathematics that govern reality. Our work is about unlocking the Universal Principles of Organizational Dynamics and Human Evolution. This combined understanding enables the SHIFT towards high-performance (Teal) organizations. Our unique IP is an integrated system that fuses together culture, leadership and organizational change to create effective tactics and strategies.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb

Evolving Together

As evolutionary leaders, we are all on our own unique journeys. My journey is one that I could not have made alone. I would like to thank my wife, co-trainer, coach and personal chef Audree Tara Sahota for helping me discover my truest authentic self with (mostly) unwavering support 😉 I would also like to thank my mighty companions who form the SHIFT314 core team, Ron Laudadio and Abbey Bishop, who helped me again discover and work through my leadership edges as well their passion and desire for living SHIFT314 teachings and bringing our work to the world.

Agile Success Pattern: Start with Managers, not Teams

The usual approach to Agile – train & coach teams to move to an Agile process – is backwards. When we approach Agile from a Team Perspective, the role of the manager usually becomes an afterthought. But wait, don’t managers need to learn how to operate with an Agile Mindset along with teams?

Start with Leaders

The usual approach with Agile is to set up autonomous self-organizing teams. The official role for a manager in Scrum – the most popular version of Agile – is nothing. There is no role for a manager. What? No role for managers? Hard to believe, but true.

 “Scrum is designed to disrupt the hierarchy.” – Ken Schwaber, founder of Scrum

Well, it’s doing a very good job disrupting the hierarchy: Version One’s research shows that 45% of organizations report “Lack of Management Support” as a challenge experienced adopting and scaling Agile. Often, their roles become conflicted as they do their best to bridge between the existing power structures and the new Agile ones. It is actually quite mind-boggling what is happening: Managers – who are “in charge” of the organization – are being disenfranchised and then labeled as resistors. 

The process level training such as Scrum or SAFe is meant for teams and products – not for the role of the manager. Teams get specific training and coaching. Managers will be lucky if they have a session that explains the Agile Mindset but, are unlikely to have any significant help making the shift to a new way of working and being.

Start with Managers!

Managers are the leaders of the organizations. They are put in charge of what happens because of their intelligence and experience. What if they were involved and guided the introduction of Agile in ways that actually fit their organizational context? What if they were responsible for modeling the Agile Mindset of learning by running experiments to iteratively and incrementally change the organization? Wow! That would be incredible. An approach like this would put the Agile Mindset at the forefront, as so it would not be skipped. 

What if managers were provided with intensive training and coaching to support their jump to the Agile Mindset? Of course, they would need to learn how to create a healthy environment for Agile, how to evolve the organization and how to lead in a new way. Ultimately, there will be team level training and intensive coaching, but this will happen as managers are able to support the success team transitions.

When consulting with organizations, we have found this to be a very practical and powerful approach we call the “Evolution of High Performance”. We have received extraordinary feedback on our public and private training from managers around the world on how this helps them finally understand their role. They are able to see, not only how they play a key role in the future of the organization, but how to begin operating in alignment with the Agile Mindset.

It’s never too late to start

We have discovered that it is never too late to start with managers. For both in-progress transformations and established Agile organizations, a strong focus on managers is what is often the missing piece for unlocking success and taking growth to the next level. Of course, starting with managers will be the most effective approach, but it’s better late than never.

Managers: How to Get Started

For sure there is a lot to learn for managers discovering how to operate in a new way of working. Here are some practical articles to understand how to operate in the new world of Agile:

Agile Mindset = Journey to High Performance

Do you know Agile Requires a Permanent Shift in Behaviours? That’s what the Agile Mindset is all about.

On the surface, Agile may seem straightforward- we change from one structure/process to another one. Just train and coach people on teams and we are good.

When we look deeper at successful Agile Transformations, we see people learning a new mindset or new ways of being that enable collaboration, engagement, and feeling safe enough to run experiments. Without the behaviour shifts there is no change – only talk or a shallow veneer. This is what we call Wave2Agile – living the Agile Mindset.

How well equipped are we to support others on their journey? 

And where are we on our own journey? Are we modeling the behaviours needed to invite people to join us on such a profound journey of personal and organizational evolution?

It’s easy to blame others for not changing. I often hear frustration, targeted at managers, workers or at teams.

An alternative is for each of us to look at how we can support others.

How we can improve the overall environment or organizational climate? 

Yet the most important, the highest impact change is to shift our own behaviour. Most people have heard: “You can’t change anyone else; you can only change yourself.” And that we do have control over. Are you ready to make the change? Change starts with us.

Agile Mindset – Where do I begin?

Here are some practical tips:

  • The most important starting place is self-awareness. Often we are not even aware of some of our challenges. If you are ready to grow, ask the people you work closely with for your top 3 challenges.
  • Check if you are in any of the common team and organizational change traps that are creating resistance: Selling, telling, convincing, mandating, etc. Learn more here!
  • Check to see how well you are modeling the Agile mindset. Some key behaviours are: Flexible, Open, Respectful, Responsive. Learn more here! 

Shift your behaviour. Hahaha.. Like that is easy. No, you don’t need 10 years of psychotherapy. You are normal, we just end up with unproductive behaviours. We have an accelerated personal growth technique.

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