The leader's compass when joining a company

What should be your first steps principles when joining a new company in a leadership role? What should you focus on? How should you seek to be impactful? An attempt to summarize my experience.

I have recently joined a small yet well-recognized company, in a role of an Interim CTO, to help them make sense of digital product development. Let's say that historically there are a few blank spaces in the value creation equation. In spite of strong business vision the company could not sort out its value delivery and was drowning in frustration of the crew that led to personal conflicts. Quite typical, nothing unusual, definitely nothing to be ashamed of, and a lot to be proud of! So I found myself in my comfort zone.

I realized I had enough comfort and space to consciously focus on how I am going to lead. I always aspired to such conscious approach, but as many, never could fully implement it ;) There was a thought in the back of my mind: "Finally I got my chance!". In parallel, there was also a debt in my mind, debt towards myself, a debt that I got myself into during the last time I was playing a role of an IT Director. Let's just say, I could have done a few things differently back then. When I was looking for my next engagement I was determined to step into the management role again, because I thought about myself that I never felt more ready to play the role of IT Director again.

So I joined with a strong need to use the opportunity to learn. It is a small company and much less complex than enterprises I used to work with in the past. After a few days of the initial observations, listening and orientation I asked myself about cardinal principles I would follow as a base in my role. 

The leader's compass when joining a company:

1. Click with people, gain their hearts. 
   Remember that the initial credit of trust, a.k.a. riding on a free fuel, will end in a few months. Similarly, your unique perspective, so different and thus so valuable, because coming from outside of an organization will evaporate. Use the time wisely to proof in action that you are a trustworthy person.
   
   
2. Build a map of a landscape of the organization in your mind.
   Listen more than talk. Ask the right questions. Observe. Seek patterns and anti-patterns. 
   
   
3. Identify your allias
   There are teams and individuals in the organization who were waiting your arrival as dessert awaits rain, suppressing hopes for their ideas to be implemented and their will to contribute to be understood, appreciated, and encouraged. Usually, these people are among the most valuable people in the organization. You cannot afford to lose them.
   
   
4. Share your initial observations frequently. 
   Your initial observations as as fresh and as refreshing as spring vegetables, or oranges during winter (I live in Poland atm). Feeding your observations back to the organization serves as a mirror, causes a reflection and at the same time lets your colleagues to get to know you.
   
   
5. Help individuals get to know yourself. Introduce your personal style by revealing what you value and what mindset you are driven by. This is far more important than jumping into action immediately.
   
   
6. Share your plans frequently. Don't let uncertainty to slip in and disperse the initial energy and credit of trust. People need direction.
   
   
7. Set expectations by setting a timeframe. When I joined everyone was expecting a significant change. As we know the change lasts in time and cannot be pushed. Yet timeframe matters. By sharing timeframe of how you envisage your first weeks and months lets your colleagues align their plans and expectations.
   
   
8. Hold the pressure to conform to the existing ways of how we do things here (culture).
   You are a hope to change the existing culture. Otherwise, you are most probably a hiring mistake. You were hired for a reason and in the leadership positions this reason is more than tackling with the operational issues. It is usually about introducing a systemic change. Mature organizations understand that, and definitely mature hiring managers understand that. Make sure to communicate your need to assess "how we do things here" and consciously click into the existing one or your votum separatum to the existing culture.  
   
   
9. Select your first battles carefully. Not every battle is worth fighting. Perform consequence analysis. There certainly exist issues to be worked on yet in your first steps people expect a look forward not a look backwards.  
   
   
10. Avoid manual interventions.
    Treat the current state of how things work as a legacy. This is the lagging world. Do not waste your effort on trying to change the old habits and thinking - sometimes its better to let them die out. I prefer to focus on strategic themes first. The leading question is "how will we work together" (new culture)?
    Still there is value in interventions. Do not hesitate to intervene when you spot an intervention that would make it easier for everyone to understand what you value and where your thinking is rooted.
    
    
11. Be inclusive. Invite people to co-create the NEW. 
    Do I need to say anything about it?
    
    
12. Find a mentor or a coach. Or both. Depending on your situation you may need a domain advice or help in making sense of the reality.
    
    
13. Join peer communities. CIOs / CTOs.
    Leverage knowledge exchange.
     
14. Remember a few quotes
1. If you want to go fast - go alone, if you need to reach far, go together" a.k.a. The Leader's Dilemma
2. Build leaders not followers (David Marquet)
3. Build a system that is independent from yourself (David Marquet)
   
   
15. Focus. Use a systemic approach. Now, finally!, you are set up to act! There is always more to do than it is possible to handle. You need to use your time wisely. What will you focus on? How will you seek the biggest impact? Where will you look for smells? How will you improve? 
    Personally I am a big fan of The Douglas Talbot's Creating Extraordinary Organizations and the Organizational Engineering Model.

Good luck, share your experience with me!

Leadership in times of "Agile is Dead" awakening

 When I hear someone says "Agile is Dead" I hear a disappointment, nostalgia that the time has come to say goodbye to something highly valued and meaningful, and also I hear hope there is a way to save Agile. 

Do not mix commoditization of ideas (i.e. Kano model) with their death. On the contrary, commoditization means the ideas become ubiquitous. Your business model may be dead, but not the ideas.

On the level of "Agile" buzzword - I don't care. It's probably better that it is dead. Personally, I hope that certifications are dead - all these 2 days trainings for thousands of dollars need to disappear. The quality of those trainings was tragic, their impact - negative. The existence of those trainings clearly reflected the existence of the Agile bubble. A word of mouth and an appealing productivity boost story caused the irrational pressure both on individual level and inside companies to follow the herd. This is how myths and cargo cults are created. Pragmatism and practical daily routines, e.g. XP, design thinking, coaching, is what counts for me. Cutting through the smalltalk and buzzwords, making decisions, getting things done count. Getting the best out of people and empathy count.

On the level of an idea - I do care. Agile is not dead. First, we barely touched agility as the whole thing (take the Integral Agility perspective to understand my point of view). Second, there are ideas building on agility that can take us to the next level. By us I mean not only companies, but in the first place individuals, societies, and the whole humanity. 

For those who narrow down the meaning of Agile to organizational effectiveness (aka performance machine), this may sound like claptrap, and I expect them to be among those preachers of 'Agile is Dead'. Don't worry abut these guys - they represent the fixed mindset, and clearly have not appreciated all the lessons learnt from two decades of the Agile era. If you paid them for leading you through Agility journey, I can imagine you find yourself disappointed - leaders abandon you once their business model, i.e. evangelizing without responsibility, collapses. That's the worst thing one can expect from a leader...

Personally, I was processing all the signs of disintegration of the idea of Agile, all the corruption and manipulation that led to the 'Agile is Dead' slogan very carefully. I wrote a few mini-books sharing my perspective on the phenomenon (see Agile 2020s - The Great Retrospective). First of the books were focusing on sharing experiences from the trenches, from the enterprise companies (see The Secret Ingredients of Agile Transformations, or The Landscape of Enterprise Agile Transformations). The latest book, Good Companies, takes a different stand. I have drawn an inspirational future of what is possible if we really care. It took a deep personal journey to discover all the beauty, and all the burden necessary to let the beauty shine, of where we can be if we focus our potential on what is important.

I strongly encourage you to find your own answers, coin your own meaning, and shape your own path, preserving a proper distance from the mainstream mourning of the Agile is Dead' transition.

As a side note, let me brief you with a bit of my personal transformation. If Agile is really dead, that would mean we are able to masacre even the most valuable ideas. I isolate myself from such thinking. I see it differently: we are so trapped in the wrong framing, we do not even realize there is one, and as a result we lost the ability to follow what is important to us. The reductionist frame and the group biases don't let us assess the situation clearly. 

A breakthrough is required, and possible as presented in Good Companies, to offer the world the best of who we, humans, are. A journey starts from the current state of how we interact with the world, i.e. Careless Exploitation and leads to state of the Caring Guardianship. It is a state where an independent observer, e.g. one of the species inhabiting the Earth can call our interactions with the world a caring guardianship. I believe this is the best of us that we owe to offer to this world. Whether we can make it will be the ultimate answer of meaning of our existence. 

This shift in understanding our role here results in shifts in cardinal aspects of how we understand the meaning of business, the mental model of economy, the relation between societies and the economy, etc. We have not yet started the journey! In my case the triggering event for opening the quest for Good Companies were the observations from many companies that I worked with, and the existing frictions not addressed, not even recognized(!) by digital and agile transformations.

Loose birthday morning thoughts

Even people who write about an alternative thought framework of economics, the relationship between business and society, and those who would like to see this entire system based on and derived from the mission of humanity [please wait for this! ...] keep arguing, exercise pecking ordering, fight for the primacy of their ideas.

Writing the Good Companies book was wonderfully liberating and helped me make sense of the mess around. I learned a lot and it taught me a lot. It also has given me a few important lessons. And as you can guess, it had both positive and negative consequences. 

That's what happens if one pursuits her/his self-developmental path: breaks from the socialized mind, discovers the self-authoring mind, and explores the self-transcendant mind. 

With regard to family life, I have always been on a path to build multi-generational family that has roots in one place where kids, with their kids, meet for family events. I am far from achieving it. But it remains my dream.

p.s. I called a friend with whom I attended my secondary school and a few years at university. Feels really good investment of time at my birthday. A follow up planned.

Interview (in Polish): KRYZYS WARTOŚCI w nowoczesnym świecie - jak się ODNALEŹĆ? | Piotr Trojanowski

W dzisiejszym dynamicznie zmieniającym się świecie, gdzie technologia i biznes ewoluują w zaskakującym tempie, często zapominamy o podstawowych wartościach i równowadze między życiem zawodowym a prywatnym. W tym odcinku "Kryzys Wartości w Nowoczesnym Świecie", zgłębiamy tematykę holistycznego podejścia do życia i pracy. Rozmawiam z Piotrem Trojanowskim o tym, jak zarówno liderzy biznesowi, jak i każdy z nas może odnaleźć harmonię i sens w codzienności. Poruszamy kwestie sztucznej inteligencji, transformacji biznesowej i znaczenia pełni człowieczeństwa w nowoczesnym świecie. Dołącz do nas, aby odkryć, jak możemy razem budować bardziej świadomą i zrównoważoną przyszłość. *W filmie poruszymy tematy* Redefinicja Sukcesu: Jak nowoczesne spojrzenie na sukces wpływa na nasze życie zawodowe i osobiste. Rola AI w Biznesie i Życiu: Zrozumienie wpływu sztucznej inteligencji na decyzje biznesowe i codzienne życie. Zmiany w Edukacji i Biznesie: Jak adaptować się do przewidywanych rewolucji w szkołach i firmach. Wyzwania Transformacji Biznesowej: Przejście od status quo do innowacji i autonomii pracowników. Społeczne Skutki Technologicznej Ery: Dyskusja o nowym układzie społecznym w obliczu zmian technologicznych. Holokracja i Nowoczesne Organizacje: Eksploracja nowych modeli organizacji biznesowych. Równowaga Pracy i Życia: Jak znaleźć balans między karierą a życiem prywatnym w świecie pełnym presji. Duchowe i Emocjonalne Aspekty Biznesu: Znaczenie wartości, duchowości i emocji w podejmowaniu decyzji biznesowych.

Future of Work Talks S3E1: Janusz Leski: Focus on Collective Leadership Effectiveness

Focus on Collective Leadership Effectiveness

Organisations - including both corporations and start-ups - are usually established for a specific goal or purpose. Very rarely entrepreneurs want to build an organisation simply to have it. They want to accomplish something meaningful and important. Organisation’s purpose, more noble than to generate profits, is critical for its sustainability and for the impact it can have on its customers, employees and the society. We assess organisation accomplishments through its business performance or business effectiveness which should not be reduced to financial profitability. Organisation’s achievements can be assessed by the way it brings its noble purpose or vision closer to reality. This is also important from the point of view of the organisation’s sustainability. Business effectiveness is correlated with leadership effectiveness. Leadership Circle Profile methodology analyses leader’s effectiveness in relation to leader’s natural, protective or reactive tendencies, and creative competencies. Effective leaders have certain sets of both. The biggest impact on business effectiveness has not leadership effectiveness of individual leaders but, and this is extremely important, collective leadership effectiveness of the leadership team. I will explain why this is so important especially in modern organisations which are Complex Adaptive Systems. I will also analyse what it means to be a team - to be a good or effective leadership team. I will propose creation of a Deliberately Developmental Ecosystem (DDE) or Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO) as a way to build effective leadership teams. After describing the nature of DDE and DDO, I will explain why this is not an easy journey and what can help us to be successful on the way.

Janusz Leski (ICE-EC) is Transformation Leadership Coach, Enterprise Agile Coach, Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) and Collective Leadership Assessment (CLA) Practitioner. Janusz helps leaders to grow and transform their organisations. Currently he is Senior Agile Coach at Ørsted, a company with a vision to create a world that runs entirely on green energy. Previously Janusz led from the start an agile transformation in a large financial institution. He transforms organisation leadership and culture to make organisations more successful and resilient in the Volatile Uncertain Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. He assists organisations with becoming more value focused, increasing collaboration and supporting people development. He stands for being an authentic and integral leader. Janusz serves our shared humanity - we can be human only together.

A gift to welcome you into 2024!

Here is a gift from me to welcome you into 2024!

To celebrate the upcoming 1st anniversary of Good Companies book release I offer you a free copy of its kindle edition. Spread the word! #goodcompanies

I appreciate following me or resonate.company profile in return. Or simply visiting https://www.resonate.company website. Thanks!

A word of encouragement: If you are planning a sabbatical or hesitate to prioritize what has been on your mind, but you never had time, resources, or courage to do it, just do it!

For me, the time of writing the book and ever since it got published has been transformative. I have made sense of decades of my experiences, redefined my future trajectory, and rebuilt myself personally. Everday this experience brings joy and sense of integrity. I would repeat it with no hesitation!

The best things in life are not things. It is all about fulfilling yourself. I'm happy to help you! I'm happy to talk about Good Companies! 

And I am currently planning my engagements for this year - I am back on the market, #opentowork, happy to talk. Get in touch. I have never felt more ready to play a role of IT Director, or in general a role in a senior leadership of a technological company.


Time limits: 10-11 January. Available at your local AMZN website.
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSKH47LW

An epigram on Good Companies.

Hey, Product gurus! 

Help me understand: Have we been helping to build the wrong thing for the last 20 years? Have we been optimizing companies for the wrong metrics? Why haven't we seen the elephant in the room? I guess, apparently we were in the elephants stomach...

Why haven't we noticed the uber-container, in which companies reside, is flawed and needs rethinking? The economy, I mean. It serves the wrong purpose. And thus companies do.

We tried to play a good game in the wrong pitch. I have learnt it is called Agent - Arena mismatch. 

I shape this epigram for you to spread: 

Instead of optimizing companies within the current economy, fix the economy to let companies regenerate themselves!

Happy 2024! I have a feeling it will rock!!!

AI & Developer Productivity

The biggest impact of Gen AI I have experienced so far is its support in developer's productivity. Coding feels really friendly these days thanks to #pairprogramming with Gen AI ! It feels like a reincarnation of the #extremeprogramming concept, yet this time you partner with the accumulated knowledge of the whole software development community as your peer. Just amazing!

Now, how far is your organization from this Developer's Nirvana? #developersnirvana

p.s. yes, I remember the times of C++ coding without STL library...

p.s. A tiny helpful thing to check out too - ML support in Code Review process - https://blog.research.google/2023/05/resolving-code-review-comments-with-ml.html

Surviving service market collapse together!

When I (re)started my consulting career at the beginning of 2020 I was so pleased to be on my own again! The feeling of the wind in my hair, endless opportunities, and being a skipper of my own fate. After 4 years it still feels natural for me, it reflects who I am. However, these 4 years turned to be the most challenging period in my career. First due to COVID-19, and this year, 2023, due to the effect of "the most expected recession ever" when companies literally cut all budgets to their roots.

I have been working in IT industry for 20+ years: I followed a technological career path for circa 12+ years, then got involved in running teams and projects, then I evangelised all the best practices of IT, software engineering practices, starting from XP, ending at Enterprise Agility, to massive companies that were lagging behind the innovation levels of their competition. In a way similar to many IT people, I was pulled out from IT work to play a bigger, "societal" mission to help those companies catch up. And then the mission was exposed to the market conditions of 2023. 

Instead of doing purely the domain work I spent a significant portion of my time on pre-sales and marketing activities. (By the way, allow an off-topic here: this is why I claim that companies should replace hiring for positions with hiring to a distribution of roles, where, as in our personal lives, we play multiplicity of roles. Positions are oftentimes to rigid structuring limiting value generation and contributions).

Here are the lessons learnt that I feel I should share with my peers: advisors, contractors, small boutiques, expert think-tanks, etc.

1. You are still the same valuable (wo)man! Your knowledge and expertise are needed. It's not the right time of the cycle though. 

2. Don't panic. Understand and respect the market cycle. There are things you can control, things you can influence, and things that concern you (which you cannot change).

3. Invest in yourself - as countries extend their engagement in public service work during crises, you should also invest in yourself. Get ready for the new cycle! Refresh your value proposition - the market will require more in the new cycle as the overall body of knowledge grows and experiences from the past are processed and transformed into new ideas and needs. 

In my case, for example: I passed SAFe SPC certifications (never needed it - my experience was self-explanatory). I have caught up on th AI / ML trends and progressed on the Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer Path towards Google Certified Professional exam. (it's been great fun by the way to see all the concepts that were "theoretically possible" when I was a student, implemented at an enormous scale).

4. In parallel - refresh personally: first close all open loops from the past. Process experiences, accept them. Look for what new qualities have emerged through your experiences. Find your preferred channel, reading, writing, physical activities, art, and leverage it to process the cloud of thoughts into clarity. 

In my case, my natural channel is writing (check out my Good Companies book, available on amazon) and (amateur level) sports. 

Before jumping into new endeavors, you need to understand, refresh your understanding, who you are, who you want to be, where your skills are, where your interests are, where your values call you. As they say: start with the end in mind.

5. Take special care of and pay special attention to your relation with your life partner. They may not be fully aware of the sources of your changed behaviors. Put yourself in their shoes and see how this "infected" you infects them, their stability, their roots, so that they do not lose ground under their feet - they are used to relying on you, they have relied on you for years. 

For example: I took my wife on a trip to Paris that we have been postponing for years. This was the best trip ever!

6. Network heavily - during recession there are plenty of people who lost their jobs or contracts. It's not an easy time and you may not want to go through it alone. You also may not want your peers to go through this alone. There is a certain level of pressure coming from societal norms for those labelled as "unemployed". For me, historically, the network has been the most effective source of work. 

Again, what I did in this area: I promised myself to reach out to one person I used to work with in the past every weekday. It really feels great.

p.s. I am planning a separate post on what I did with the blessing of more free time that was usually the case.

Credits: Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

InfoQ article: How to leverage Good Companies to Fight Civilizaitonal Debt?

After my #XP2023 talk, Ben Linders led me through the process of publishing an interview article on InfoQ about my ideas from the Good Companies book (available on amazon). Not an easy task, but here it is. I learnt a lot!

Thanks Ben, I do appreciate!

Here is the link: https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/11/good-companies-civilization-debt/

#goodcompanies #infoq