Effective Communication in a New Engagement

Be Respectful

In general, people don’t like to be told what to do. In the Agile space, many folks are even more sensitized to it for several reasons:

1. People doing product development are used to having a great deal of leeway in how they work.
2. Many Agilists are heavy-handed. Those that are, are usually using the popular frameworks. Stories of people telling people “they must do this” or “they must do that” are rampant.
3. When you come into an organization, you’ll be walking into this presupposition.
4. Product developers are thinkers, they often know more than they are given credit for and they like to think they know what’s going on.
5. They may be doing some form of Agile already.
6. You may be coming in after multiple failed attempts which has only increased resistance.
7. You may be coming in after someone came with training, spun up some teams, and told leadership that Agile is complete. 

Here are two ways to lower resistance you might face because of this. Both have to do with letting the people know you respect what they know and letting them tell you what didn’t work before.

Be aware that they may be having an internal conversation with themselves that you are going to tell them what to do. Most people don’t like this. So however you do it, it’s important to let them know that’s not your intention.

Story 1. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

Open up an engagement with something like this.

“Hi, I’m <name>. As you know, I’m here to help you and your organization improve. But I want you to know that this is not a “me” leading this. Yes, I have a lot of experience doing this. I’m in a lucky position where I get to talk with a lot of different companies so I’ve seen a lot of different things and I can often spot challenges and potential improvements because I’ve talked to a lot of people. But I’ll never know as much about your company as the least experienced of you. We want to bring our blend of experience and work as a team, together to solve our problems. Me with what works in different places and you, in what will work here.

Story 2. I’ll be making hypotheses, but you’ll be presenting the evidence.

I tell this story at the start of any session where I’ll be introducing new ideas, and I have said this before.

“Hi. I’ll be presenting a lot of assertions. An assertion is a statement where there is a claim for evidence. Except I won’t be providing the evidence, I want you to provide the evidence from your experience. We often talk about running experiments to prove or disprove theories. The experiments take place in the future. But most of the time we can use our past to validate or invalidate our experience.

In our case here, however, I’ll be talking about how to create value. You all have been doing this for a while. You may not be using the methods I’ll be talking about, but you do have experience with what works and what doesn’t. That should give you insights to see if what I’m saying makes sense.  So, if something doesn’t make sense, please challenge me on it. One of several things could have happened:

1. I may be wrong
2. I may have misstated something
3. you may have misunderstood me

But I assure you that real learning takes place when you challenge my statements because you believe your experience does not validate what I’m saying.

If we come to an agreement, then you’ll believe that based on your own experience, not my saying it’s so.

This is an excerpt from Being an Effective Value Coach by Al Shalloway and Paula Stewart