by Dr. Ilga Vossen, Stephan Kahl, Odile Moreau, Caroline Schäfer & Yannick Penz
This is the first in a series of articles on leadership and Agile transformation. Thought leaders from Deloitte and Scaled Agile worked together to share their insights and advice.
In ancient times, our species developed a strong desire for predictability and safety to ensure survival. However, this desire for safety often fuels fear and can lead to behavioral patterns that are counterproductive in a world of rising uncertainty and ambiguity. As fear intensifies, our personal emergency protocols kick in. These response protocols, aptly coined as “fight, flight, freeze responses” by evolutionary psychologists, are instrumental in how we react to uncertainty.1
Consider how humans responded to threatening circumstances in the past. The recent COVID pandemic serves as a perfect case study: Some individuals chose isolation (flight), while others took to the streets in protest (fight). One thing united both these groups – their propensity to rally around leaders who mitigated their fears by providing a roadmap to deal with the uncertain situation.
Creating psychological safety as a foundation for successful change
How is this related to Agile transformations? Organizational transformations challenge the status quo and thereby cause uncertainty about the future. Agile transformations in particular have the characteristics of a vague target operating model as well as a vague roadmap towards it. Concerns about job security, professional relationships and power dynamics, though reasonable, induce fear and trigger the emergency response system.
We often observe resistance and rebellion (fight), employee turnover (flight) or avoidance (freeze) during Agile transformations. Ultimately, these emergency protocols thwart the goals of the transformation by conserving the status quo.
If we want to drive real change successfully, we need to deactivate the emergency protocols. Just like a courageous captain guiding his crew to sail a ship through stormy waters, we need effective leadership to guide the way, mitigate fears and make it safe enough to try.
People follow leaders because they make them feel safe. Leaders from all planes, from the very top down to department level, including leaders without official leadership positions, need to create psychological safety despite change, clarity despite ambiguity and purpose despite confusion. Their task is to turn the fear of the unknown into courage to try something new and be open to the unknown. It is about motivating and providing the ability to change.
Key steps for leaders facing uncertainty in transformations
What we often forget, however, is that leaders have the same instincts as other human beings, also adopting behaviors of fight, flight and freeze when being confronted with situations of insecurity, unknown circumstances and vague target pictures.
How can you shape an environment that fosters and nurtures psychological safety, that provides clarity and purpose for others, if you yourself are feeling insecure in the face of the unknown?
In order to deal with this ambiguity, we recommend three actions:
1. Individual fear facing. Give safe space to leaders to face their own fear, talk about it and find individual solutions for dealing with it. Professional leadership coaches, but also trusted peers and their own superiors, are important conversation partners. Only if you are clear about yourself, can you pass that on to others.
2. Trusted circle and leadership alignment. It is important to have allies and a trusted circle. Provide the right setting to get leaders into one room to talk about the lack of certainty and develop a joint plan of how to turn uncertainty into clarity and how to communicate it to the organization. Be clear on the knowns and unknowns, the opportunities and risks, when it comes to a joint vision and the transformation approach.
3. Walk your talk. People follow what they experience and feel, not just what they hear. People need good behavioral role models they can follow. It is important for leaders to take on this role model task. However, changing one’s own behavioral patterns requires awareness, attention, practice and time. It starts with a shift in mindset which smoothly transits into a change in behavior. Time dedicated to supporting leaders in going through this mindset and behavioral transformation is time well invested, because those leaders will spread the new spirit through the entire organization.
More on guiding Agile transformations
In this article we highlighted the importance of effective leadership for Agile transformations, emphasized the support leaders need from coaches, and described the three most helpful actions the authors have observed during their transformation work.
This article was the first out of ten in a series entitled Leadership & Change in Agile Transformations. The next article will focus on how to deal with change fatigue.
1 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smi.2626