Executive Engagement and the Realities of Agile Transformations
There are some executives that engage in agile efforts throughout transformations, but this isn’t the norm. Most often, early support for an initiative is more along the lines of, “go get it done”.; NOT, continuous support, necessary air cover, and key moment involvement or even, “how can I change what I am doing to help drive results.”
In the 2022 State of Agile report 3 of the top 4 top obstacles to agile transformation success are directly (2) or indirectly (1) related to lack of engagement by executives. I’ve often experienced this myself and it’s caused some serious reflection. The first and easiest inclination is to blame a general, executive lack of courage. This is a sentiment echoed by many…but is bemoaning a lack of courage productive? Does it cause better results? Does complaining about potholes in a bad road make it any better? Or, do we just need to either accept them as a component of our drive that we need to adjust to OR figure out how to fill those potholes ourselves?
First, the realities. Executives, especially in larger companies, live in a different world. Their political capital is most often, limited. Therefore, they are very careful about where they expend it. Another reality is that executives have kids in school, a mortgage payment or two…real life demands that often temper courageous action; especially, when this behavior is not helping to advance their career. In other words, executive behavior can be heavily influenced by the incentives or threats of the executive layers above them. It’s unfortunate but true.
Too often in Fortune 500 or even 1000 companies there is also a quarterly mindset driven by the market that adversely affects the longer term thinking necessary for successful transformations. Transformations that result in generating true business value and sufficient ROI to substantiate the investment.
Sure, there are mitigation strategies for dealing with all of this but is there something deeper at play here? Are we really expecting senior executives to consistently engage on a board, even an electronic board? A quick aside. I’ve seen it happen through much effort and it is awesome when it occurs. The reality is that unfortunately, it doesn’t happen enough.
Typical agile transformations focus on team performance with the hopes that team performance improvement will positively affect company financials. That’s a leap. Especially where processes are complex or contain lots of team external dependencies and parallel activity. Granted, sometimes it does work, but not often enough (more than legacy project management but still surprisingly low success rates). We can also scale our team efforts…but is this ideal? We can ask the same questions. How does scaling team agile translate directly to business value increases or for that matter effort ROI? And, back to our primary question, how does any of this encourage executives to deliver necessary sustained engagement to the efforts they are investing in or cause them to change their own behavior?
Even with mitigation strategies, it seems that we in the agile transformation business are missing something key. We can build great execution engines at the team and team of team’s level but this isn’t where executives are focused. Executives are more focused on the strategic level and financial results…or they should be. Some will say that OKR’s are the new “magic pixie dust” that will solve all of our ills. They can certainly provide some connection to strategy but still, something is missing.
Until there is an executive first, strategic level experience to supplement the team and management execution experience, we need to temper expectations of executive engagement…especially in larger companies. As an industry (agile transformation) we must engage executives directly and provide them a real-time, interactive experience, that is “sticky” and of real value to them. Frankly, the vast majority of the time that is not on a scrum or kanban board, buried deep in development software, or anywhere else currently.
It must be an experience that ties transformation efforts and successes directly to the heart of what executives care about:
1) What is the real time status of the executive level stuff I care about, in one place, with detail accessible in a click or 2 and
2) How does this investment affect our financials and do the results substantiate the investment of time and money
When we create this “sticky”, valuable, executive first experience and which drives sufficient executive engagement to match what agile can be fantastic at (optimizing execution) we can drive better, more consistent business results. Ok, there is another significant factor to discuss…but let’s save that for another article.
That is all I’m going to say for now except, we have something up our sleeve and are working toward a significant announcement in early 2024. Until then, use your executive engagement mitigation strategies to bridge that gap.
