I’ve been helping people with Scrum for a long, long time. In the early days many teams and organizations I helped achieved knock it out of the park results. Somewhere along the way, I noticed a shift from organizations eager to evolve to the messy middle, and even laggards.
These organizations would still benefit from some flavour of Scrum, Kanban or other Agile flavour. (In fact they need the benefits more than the early adopters). However, equipping Teams, Product Owners and first level Managers with basic knowledge of is no longer enough. After talking with a numerous people, about where they’re getting stuck, the surprising answer that I get time and time again, they lack Influence.
Many Managers and Product Owners have a surprisingly good idea about what they need to do. Yet, they spend much of their time begging for obstacles to be removed or stick handling stakeholders —it’s like trying to nail jelly to a wall, right? Frustrating, right?
It turns out that begging and stick handling are not effective forms of influence. So how do you actually influence? Over the next 30 days (or 6 weeks, because I’m Canadian and we count weekends and holidays out), I’ll explore:
- How Influence works
- How we undermine ourselves
- How Effective Agile Managers and Product Owners use influence
#Influence #Ship30For30