Embracing an Agile mindset & agile skills can provide immense value to teams & customers alike. However, building these agile skills and adopting Agile values, principles & techniques to make a positive impact on projects & overall business is hard work.
Agile is an approach to software development that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, responsiveness, and innovation. It’s a way of working that has been adopted by many companies and organizations around the world.
But agile doesn’t mean that you’re only allowed to use it at work. In fact, there are many ways that you can apply agile principles outside of the workplace.
In this article, I’ll share five agile skills that you can use to set yourself apart at work.
Table of Contents
Emotional Intelligence
People may not even realize how much their emotions influence them until something happens to trigger an emotion within them. For example, if you’re angry at someone for doing something wrong, it could cause you to lash out verbally or physically towards this person. Such adverse reactions cause conflict within the team, affect morale, and disrupt work. Hence Agile team members must become emotionally intelligent.
It’s important to understand that everyone has different emotional strengths and weaknesses. This understanding means that some people will handle certain situations better than others. Emotional intelligence identifies our and others’ emotions, understanding our weaknesses and strengths, and being aware and positively relating to others. A higher emotional intelligence among the team members helps create a conducive agile environment. It also enhances customer empathy, which is at the foundation of approaches like Design Thinking to design and develop valuable products. These benefits are what make emotional intelligence one of the most critical agile skills.
Active Listening
Communication is one of the most critical agile skills for successful value delivery, along with technical skills. The information flow and understanding influence the behavior and actions of others. From an agile practitioner’s perspective, both – conveying and understanding – information is essential. Developing better listening skills becomes very important for agile practitioners. It empowers you to optimize communication with others, helping you create an environment of trust and open communication on your project.
Active Listening is a set of techniques to help you improve as an effective listener. It involves creating a conducive communication environment, establishing trust between people, focusing on the communication exchange, and providing feedback to others to ensure that you have understood them correctly and completely.
One can describe active Listening as having three dimensions; Understanding the communication, probing and questioning for even greater understanding, and dealing with emotional aspects of the communication.
Create Conducive Environment
The fundamental aspect of understanding communication involves focusing on the conversation in its entirety. You should avoid checking emails, mobile phones, browsing the internet, or any other such distractions. You can’t zone out on the speaker. Fundamental requirements, but we do see many people not following them today. You must be present, in body and mind, in the conversation.
Encourage The Speaker
A good practice to ensure your involvement in the conversation is to voice your encouragement to the speaker. This encouragement gives the speaker confidence to open up and allows the smooth flow of dialogue. It also demonstrates that you listen to what the speaker is saying and are interested in the communication.
Provide Feedback
Two techniques are helpful to ensure that you understand the crux of the matter. First, you might repeat what you have understood in your own words. This repetition is called paraphrasing. Sometimes, words assume different meanings depending upon the context, culture, and pitch & tone of voice. The listener must put them in the proper context. Paraphrasing allows you to do exactly that.
Another technique is to summarize what the speaker has said. This summarization helps –just like paraphrasing- to ensure that you have paid attention to the entire communication and have understood what the speaker was trying to convey. Summarizing also helps arrive at conclusions and helps developing an action plan to take the communication to its logical conclusion.
Probe Deeper
The second dimension to active Listening is to probe deeper to understand the communication in the proper context and sketchy details, to be able to think over it objectively. Sometimes the listener might not be able to present the full context for the communication. Or the communication might have been influenced by their own opinions and biases. Asking questions to clarify specific points during conversation or asking for more information helps get the complete picture. It also might be a good practice to ask the speakers about their opinions and analysis around the communication.
A couple of things to remember regarding such questions is that one should always listen until the speaker finishes. Cutting the speaker halfway through and assuming the rest of the part will not help get the complete picture. Also, an open-ended style of questioning is to be preferred. This style will allow the speaker to come out with more information. Finally, if you don’t understand what the speaker said, ensure that you let them know. An incorrect understanding of communication does not further the cause of Active Listening.
Be Engaged
The third dimension to active Listening deals with the non-verbal and emotional aspects of the communication. Observing the speaker’s body language and controlling yours profoundly impacts how the communication is perceived and understood. For example, an occasional nod or smile will let the speaker know that you listen to them.
Along with body language, using silence effectively can also help improve Listening. This technique gives you and the speaker both time to think and allows the speaker to open up more.
It is also essential that the speaker feels that you understand her concerns and emotions. Acknowledging this will help create an environment of trust.
The last and vital action is to ensure that you don’t rely on invalidated assumptions regarding the communication. Instead, you can ask questions and confirm whether what you are assuming is correct. Such confirmation will ensure that you understand the communication correctly.
Enterprise Awareness
This skill is not often talked about when discussing agile skills. Agile is a value-driven project management approach. It means that the value to the stakeholders is the driving factor behind all project decisions and actions. Unlike traditional projects, the plan plays a secondary role compared to the value. Every agile methodology builds upon frequently assessing and incorporating processes and activities that will optimize the value to the stakeholder community for an agile project. Let us try to understand how you can do it.
Before we move any further, let’s talk a bit about stakeholders. The definition of who the stakeholders are is not limited to only customers or management. Every direct and indirect user of the project’s product, the business management, the team itself, the product owner, everyone is a stakeholder on the project. Every entity, which either can affect the projector is affected by the project is a stakeholder project. So by this definition, the project stakeholder community is a rather large group.
To ensure that we understand and incorporate what is of most value to this community, we will have to follow the following process;
Stakeholder Identification
The very first step would be to identify all stakeholders for the project. To determine the stakeholders, you would need to ask questions like who will be impacted by the outcome of this project? The impact can be positive or negative, direct or indirect. So this becomes the first category of stakeholders. End users, customers, the local community all can be stakeholders depending upon the project.
The second category of stakeholders has those who can positively or negatively impact the execution and outcome of the project. For example, the sponsors, managers, the team are all such stakeholders. Therefore, while assessing the value for the project and imparted by the project, you must consider all such stakeholders.
Define Overarching Value
The next step will be to take into account what is of value for all the stakeholders. These values may represent product quality and characteristics, and project processes. It defines the improvement from the status quo. Being a value-driven approach, assessing the stakeholder values is an iterative and incremental process in agile. You should prioritize the stakeholder requirements to provide optimum value at the earliest. From the customer & end-user perspective, agile seeks to deliver value through prioritization, incremental delivery, acceptance of change, and waste elimination. You establish the team values through empowerment, trust, and self-organization. Continuous process improvements and collaboration provide the business value.
Agile Value Management is a continuous learning process. At each stage, you assess the value, prioritize, and incrementally deliver to all stakeholders, including customers, team, and business.
Brainstorming/Collaboration Techniques
The process of finding solutions while using the agile approach is not top-down, as in traditional projects. Agile teams are self-organizing and empowered to chart their course and decide their actions. Effective self-organizing results from mutual trust between team members, open & continuous flow of communication between team members, and respect for each other.
The brainstorming techniques derive strength from these qualities of agile teams to generate ideas, possibilities, and options for finding a solution or a resolution collectively as a team. It is a group creativity technique that relies on developing a list of ideas contributed spontaneously by participants to find answers to a specific problem. Alex Faickney Osborn popularized the method through his writing. He claimed that collective brainstorming was more effective at finding creative solutions to problems than individual thinking. The technique involves four general rules;
- Focus on quantity – The idea of brainstorming is to collect as many divergent views, possibilities, and options as possible to find the most effective solution. The assumption here is that in generating many ideas, the team can find a more creative, radical, and effective solution to the problem.
- Withhold Criticism – You should ensure that no one hampers the process by early criticism. The free flow of ideas will enable many solutions to emerge. The critical review of ideas can happen at a later stage. Not jumping to judge the concept will enable participants to express themselves more openly and freely.
- Welcome Unusual Idea – Creative solutions do not come with run-of-the-mill ideas. Even if an idea sounds unusual, the team must not reject it just because it is unique. We have to let go of our biases and assumptions.
- Combine and improve ideas – This value indicates that combining many different, individual ideas into one more extraordinary idea may provide more value than the sum of the parts.
The entire brainstorming process goes something like this; You first generate an extensive list of ideas; the bigger, the better. Once you have this list, clarifications on each idea take place to be understood in its entirety. There may be a case where you may combine multiple ideas. Once you know all the details about the concepts, you should evaluate their effectiveness. The ensuing discussions may modify some ideas; You can form a possible solution based on the evaluation.
To have effective brainstorming, some of the areas where you must take care are these;
- Location – The participants must meet at a place that is conducive for open & creative discussions. The room must have enough space and other necessary items, for example, whiteboards.
- Purpose – The problem must be specific and be made clear to each participant. This clarity will ensure that the discussions remain focused. Each brainstorming session must deal with a particular situation.
- Facilitation – You must either know how to facilitate brainstorming sessions or designate an experienced facilitator. These skills will ensure that the discussions are realistic and that participation is inclusive. Each participant must contribute, and the conversations are open and accessible.
- Ground Rules – This is very important. Ground rules will define how people raise questions or contribute an idea, how you will record proceedings, who will record the proceedings, and how participants would propose a counter-argument. Ground rules ensure that the sessions are practical yet allows freedom of expression to each one without any adverse side effects.
- Postpone Criticism – When ideas are getting generated, everyone should refrain from jumping to criticism. Ideas must be evaluated at a later stage when the complete details behind the concept are known.
Brainstorming sessions, when conducted effectively, allows the team to find a creative and efficient way of solving a problem or dealing with issues. It also allows learning from diverse views, knowledge, and experiences to provide the project’s edge.
Delivering At A Sustainable Pace
Working at a sustainable pace is more of a mindset rather than a skill. However, it is critical to cultivating this mindset. Agile methods advocate continuous improvement and rapid deployment of value. If an organization or team attempts to deliver value continuously, but at an unsustainable pace, the team will burn out soon. That’s why work at a sustainable pace is an essential time management skill to learn for agile development teams.
It would be best to cultivate this mindset consciously, as our brain is wired to dwell upon unfinished tasks, as explained in this HBR article. If the anxiety about the incomplete tasks increases beyond a threshold, it will have negative consequences. Working at a sustainable pace ensures that you are effective in the long term, but your quality of delivery also improves, improving customer satisfaction.
To Sum Up
These five skills help you work in a conducive and collaborative environment while still ensuring that you leave your impression at your workplace. In addition, these skills will also positively influence your personal life.
Featured Image: Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash
