Ravi Nemalikanti is CTO, Digital Banking at NCR. A seasoned technology executive who loves building great teams that build great products.
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Think of the most innovative companies. What words come to mind? Innovative, risk-taking, highly engaged and agile. If you intend to build a group that can breathe all those themes, you need to start with this: a company culture that is open and transparent and an environment that builds psychological safety. So what is the link between those cultural characteristics and agility?
Most companies start with a “want” to be agile or practice some form of an agile methodology. What does it mean to be agile, though? Have you seen teams that claim to be agile but fail to answer what benefits they have realized that they think are a direct result of this iterative approach? Have you heard leadership from the same teams complain about lack of innovation, missed timelines, poor reporting/governance, metrics that don’t make sense, etc.? Agile ends up being a buzzword that appears on company collateral and marketing/sales taxonomy.
The most important aspect of being agile is linked to the highest levels of vision and strategy. The hardest problem that organizations face is connecting the daily activities to the definition of success and the broader strategy of the company. For setting the context, strategy is a set of choices that a company makes to differentiate from everyone else that serves in the same ecosystem. Does your company’s strategy make that clear to you? If this is not clear, as a leader, it’s on you to ensure that you can connect those dots. Your job, as a leader, is to describe the landscape from the top of the tree to everyone else.
Once teams and individuals can make sense of their company’s strategy, they can make choices that realize the actions in alignment. What that allows the organizations to do is decentralize decision making. If that starts to sound like product backlogs and teams self-governing and making decisions, you are right—that’s what autonomous teams do. And for those teams to act in that fashion, they need to have confidence in their leadership that they will support them when mistakes are made. And yes, there will be times when you miss the mark. You should hope that you are more often right than you are wrong, and when teams or individuals make mistakes, you need to create an environment that is supportive.
That is why the culture of a company is so intricately tied to the results they see from an agile transformation. If at Company A, leadership is humble and believes in being a learn-it-all vs. a know-it-all, that team and its company derive more benefit from adopting an agile methodology. At Company B, a very hierarchical unit, on the other hand, will follow all the agile ceremonies and yet fail to realize the benefits. Company A will continue to learn from the mistakes, create a culture of learning and create metrics that focus on continuous improvement, while Company B, confounded by the lack of similar results, will bring more discipline, reporting and reviews in addition to the agile ceremonies.
Do you work for Company A or Company B?
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