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As Agile practitioners, our focus imainly on things like how to breakAs Agile practitioners, our focus is mainly on things like how to break chunks of work down to manageable pieces, optimize and guide the performance of the self-directed teams, etc., but those are all items related to the focus of the work, the teams and the methods and not much on the emotion involved to allow that work to be done right in the first place.
As Agile practitioners, our focus is mainly on things like how to break chunks of work down to manageable pieces, optimize and guide the performance of the self-directed teams, etc., but those are all items related to the focus of the work, the teams and the methods and not much on the emotion involved to allow that work to be done right in the first place.
Like it or not, our emotions play a large if not largest part in the success of our projects. The central idea in Agile of facilitating a collaborative and learning environment is predicated on the emotional stability of the management and teams involved and if this emotional aspect is not stable, then it WILL drag down the performance of your project no matter how well people “do” Agile correctly.
So it was nice to read this article on the Harvard Business Review on the need for “Emotional Agility”, for as the article states:
In our people-strategy consulting practice advising companies around the world, we see leaders stumble not because they have undesirable thoughts and feelings—that’s inevitable—but because they get hooked by them, like fish caught on a line... We regularly see executives with recurring emotional challenges at work—anxiety about priorities, jealousy of others’ success, fear of rejection, distress over perceived slights—who have devised techniques to “fix” them: positive affirmations, prioritized to-do lists, immersion in certain tasks. But when we ask how long the challenges have persisted, the answer might be 10 years, 20 years, or since childhood.
Clearly, those techniques don’t work—in fact, ample research shows that attempting to minimize or ignore thoughts and emotions serves only to amplify them. In a famous study led by the late Daniel Wegner, a Harvard professor, participants who were told to avoid thinking about white bears had trouble doing so; later, when the ban was lifted, they thought about white bears much more than the control group did. Anyone who has dreamed of chocolate cake and french fries while following a strict diet understands this phenomenon.
Effective leaders don’t buy into or try to suppress their inner experiences. Instead they approach them in a mindful, values-driven, and productive way—developing what we call emotional agility. In our complex, fast-changing knowledge economy, this ability to manage one’s thoughts and feelings is essential to business success. Numerous studies, from the University of London professor Frank Bond and others, show that emotional agility can help people alleviate stress, reduce errors, become more innovative, and improve job performance.
The idea of “emotional agility” is a great one and one that should be discussed and articulated more in the Agile community. I know as hardcore software engineers who currently dominate the Agile industry that you will perceive such things as “touchy-feely” topics that have no real bearing on your Agile projects, but consider that this is the most essential component of who we are as human beings and if Agile is such a proponent of a more “human-centric” approach to managing projects than this topic must be addressed.
This may be a topic for which I write a more detailed article!
So it was nice to read this article on the Harvard Business Review on the need for “Emotional Agility”, for as the article states: chunks of work down to manageable pieces, optimize and guide the performance of the self-directed teams, etc., but those are all items related to the focus of the work, the teams and the methods and not much on the emotion involved to allow that work to be done right in the first place.
Like it or not, our emotions play a large if not largest part in the success of our projects. The central idea in Agile of facilitating a collaborative and learning environment is predicated on the emotional stability of the management and teams involved and if this emotional aspect is not stable, then it WILL drag down the performance of your project no matter how well people “do” Agile correctly.
So it was nice to read this article on the Harvard Business Review on the need for “Emotional Agility”, for as the article states:
Posted on: November 17, 2013 09:17 PM |
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