Podcast Ep. 153: How to Spot Individual Behaviors That Might Threaten a Team’s Performance with Justin Thatil and Mariano Oliveti

Episode Description:

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by Justin Thatil and Mariano Oliveti, both AgileThought colleagues. They are addressing today a very important topic, which is how to successfully address individual behaviors that might threaten your team’s performance.

In this episode, they dive deep into three efficiency killers: Procrastination, avoidance, and delay, while providing strategies and ways to treat these individual behaviors to effectively achieve teams’ goals and objectives.

Key Takeaways

When individual behaviors impact team delivery

You can’t solve individual behaviors from a team’s perspective
Disruptive individual behaviors can be procrastination, avoidance, and delay
Build to perfection can contribute to delays in delivery

How do you spot efficiency killers?

A procrastinator might be someone who is very busy but not with meaningful tasks that will help to achieve the sprint goal
Does someone have difficulties sticking to a productivity system?
The daily Scrum is a useful tool to spot disruptive behaviors
Make sure there is safety within the team to call on someone who is struggling

Which are the strategies to treat efficiency threateners?

Identify the root cause
If your to-do list is too long, you can split it into the specific goals you want to accomplish in a day
Prioritization is key! Ask yourself: Is this something I need to do right away? Can it be automated?
Do the hardest thing first

What happens when it is not clear what needs to be done or what the outcome is?

Not starting to work until you have an exact idea of what needs to get done could be a trigger for procrastination
There are intermediate steps too; you do not have to look at the entire journey at once

How to seek continuous improvement?

True conversations have to take place, especially when there is a failure in delivery
Inspect the process of the work on a continuous basis
Who can solve the problems that are being encountered? Assign responsibilities
Tackle the problems first
The whole team has to work together

Mentioned in this Episode:

Transcript [This transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate in its depiction of the English language or rules of grammar.]

Intro: [00:03] Welcome to the Agile Coaches’ Corner by AgileThought. The podcast for practitioners and leaders seeking advice to refine the way they work and pave the path to better outcomes. Now here’s your host, coach and agile expert. Dan Neumann.

Dan Neumann: [00:17] Welcome to this episode of the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast. I’m your host Dan Neumann. And today I have the pleasure of being joined by two of my AgileThought colleagues. I’ve got Mariano Olivetti and Justin Thatil, and I’m really excited to have you both joining us today.

Mariano Oliveti: [00:33] Pleasure as always Dan. Thanks for having us.

Dan Neumann: [00:36] I was like, wait a minute. Maybe it’s not a pleasure. It’s all good. Hey, but we’ll, we’ll be talking about procrastination as part of this podcast. So I think that’s probably totally appropriate. Our topic today is how you, the listener can spot different behaviors and address those individual behaviors that might threaten your team’s performance. Mariano, I think maybe it would be important to address why are we talking about individual behaviors? We hear so much about Scrum teams, agile teams, team this, team that, and maybe you can frame it up a little bit. Why aren’t we talking about individual behaviors? Mariano Oliveti: [01:18] Yeah, sure. Thank you Dan. So the reason we’re talking about individual behavior surveys, because those individual behaviors and up possibly impacting team delivery, right? But you can not solve these kinds of individual behaviors from a team efficiency perspective. These are very individual behaviors. They are going to see through a certain symptoms and then you or anybody within the team can spot those. And then it’s important just to address those things. And the main things that I see happening then if you allow me, are usually we, we see things just as procrastination, right? Like, Hey, we’re going to leave these just for the very tail end of the sprint. Because it’s difficult it’s too big or whatever that might be. And that’s the, the, let’s say the top layer that we usually see. But in reality, from what I’ve seen, it could be three different things. As I said, one is procrastination itself, which is a conscious delay of something that really matters, right? And somebody says, Hey, I’m not going to do this now I’m going to do it later. The second type of efficiency, killer is avoidance, which is shifting the priority to other meaningful stuff. But it’s again the same being busy for the sake of being busy. So not necessarily pushing, you know, the important thing to the bank, but bringing in some other stuff that is important a priori of taking care of, of that important thing that we’re delaying. And the third thing is straight up dealing with something, which is allowing your attention to shift a less important task by allowing interruptions. So it’s like, you know, like if you would say, Hey, instead of doing these podcasts today, can we do such and such? And I go like, yes, let’s do that. Instead of just saying, no, we do have, this. It’s a priority today. We just need to stick to the schedule. So those are three very different things. Procrastination, avoidance, and delay. Those are three different types of efficiency killers that could impact potentially your sprint, your sprint goal or delivery in general. And I’m not saying this is the, the all-inclusive list, but in general, these are kind of like three things that you can, that you can see happening very often. Justin, what do you think?

Justin Thatil: [03:38] Right. And so I was, as I was reading these three, that Mariano contributed. One of the thoughts that came to my mind are engineers being engineers, wanting to have build, you know, the perfection built building to perfection and how that can contribute to, you know, delays in delivery, where, whereas in, you know, the mantra of fast iteration inspect and adapt, the notion is w we we’ve got to test our hypothesis, right? It’s a build fast, does that to be perfect the first go round, but, you know, we can get to perfection perfection as, as we iterate over the feature, right? So engineers that tend to have come from an environment where they’re giving the time to perfect, plan and then perfectly build, versus when you’re in this fast mode of agile ways of iterating and building how that behavior can contribute to efficiency killers. Right? So, and that’s, that’s an individual level, right? So we’re focusing on the individual level. And to answer your question earlier, Dan, you know, why are we focusing on this? Like for any environment that we’re part of right. Good way to impact change is by reflecting upon yourself and how your contribution may be impacting an environment. Right? So that this is a great opportunity for us to talk about and, and introspect within our own ways of bringing value to a team.

Mariano Oliveti: [05:10] Now, fun fact for a totally different podcast. If you ask anybody, if they’re a procrastinator, they’re aware of it, this has don’t know how to solve for it. They usually say, yeah, I procrastinate. I’ll take everything to the very last second, but they just never get to it. And they don’t make an effort to it to address it. Either purposefully, unless, somebody else called it out. Dan Neumann: [05:31] We’ll see if I survive this, or if I get accused of procrastinating before the episode’s over, because I think I do at times, you know, see any, or all of these behaviors trying to perfect. Something is sometimes a defense mechanism. If you don’t ship it, nobody can make fun of it. Right? You don’t, you don’t get the feedback if you don’t ship it. And sometimes feedback is scary. So I don’t know if that’s a type of procrastination, maybe it’s not quite the conscious part, but perfection as a form of procrastination I think is, is pretty legit for sure. Okay. So we’ve, we’ve touched on some of the different efficiency killers, and we’ve talked a little bit about maybe why, why they’re efficiency killers are procrastinating, avoiding delay. They’re going to kill your personal ability to deliver and as well as the team, but how does one maybe go about spotting some of these, these behaviors? Mariano Oliveti: [06:32] And that’s, that’s a good question then. So some of the things that I’ve seen happening is number one, somebody tells you it’s Friday night, Hey, you know what? I struggled with procrastination like that. Those just very simply, if somebody tells you believe them, right. And then work with them on that. Then other seems like, you know, you’re going to see teams or even people, individuals who we’re talking about, individuals that actually have a lot of throughput have a lot of things that they get done, but the raw, the really not meaningful stuff is not where the meat really is. I’ve seen teams that actually have a lot of user stories completed without really achieving the spring goal. Right. And that is, that is just basically the typical that you can find where there’s a lot of, again, user stories being completed. But the, the main sprint goal, since this big or meaningful each, it has literally left for less. Sometimes people have a hard time sticking to a productivity system. So they don’t, they just don’t have a way to go about doing things. And they’re just all over the place or they differing methods on come to tackling their own, their own efficiency, their own productivity and their own delivery. Other things that I have spotted is when people have a lot of things to do, and this, this is not literally prioritization, but it’s kind of like when there’s so much that you could innovate it with what to do, right. And that tells you that that person not only struggles with, with prioritizing their work, but they also struggle with them defining, you know, if, if I would approach those properly, what would have done first, and obviously you become a little more lean when you catch yourself with a million things. So just having a boatload of things to do at times is an important indicator that somebody has a lot on their plate and likely they could be struggling just putting things on the back burner. Justin Thatil: [08:36] Yeah. That’s a great point. In my perspective, you know, I use the daily Scrum you know, listening into language from individuals and, and there are times when you can identify a team member, you know, that may be speaking to what they, they accomplished the day prior. And no one else on the team is quite able to grasp what happened. Right. So it, is it relevant to the, the story that in hand being worked on by the team? Is it something else? And if none of those questions are being asked, there’s typically there’s a tendency that, Hey, either the individual’s being pulled off for different priorities or it’s that going back to that perfection aspect that, you know, when no one is is questioning this person’s authority and knowledge over their craft. So, so they’re going in deep and trying to perfect, whatever is being asked of, of, you know, from them to the point where, you know, this bleeds to this procrastination aspect that things are not getting done the way the team anticipated it being done, you know? So, so yeah, I use the daily Scrum to just watch for behaviors of such. Folks coming forward, Hey, I’m struggling to figure out what I should be working on today. And that’s another when they that typically occurs. So language, you know, if the daily Scrum is being done effectively and, and not just being stuck to the script of what I’ve done yesterday, what I’m planning to do today, and, and the, the language that evolves natural on the team is that strategic, Hey, what is each person need to do today? Right. And I think about empathy as empathy grows on the team. The tone towards each team member, right? Somebody realizes, Hey, this person is struggling in this such and such area. I happened to have spare cycles. Why don’t I go help them out as opposed to asking, Hey, what’s the next thing I should be working on? You know. Dan Neumann: [10:47] Yeah. You talked about kind of a well-functioning daily Scrum, which is designed to be a chance for the team to plan its next 24 hours. It’s not a status report to the Scrum master, even a status report to each other. And so you talked about yeah, empathizing, you know, really appreciating when somebody else is struggling and related to that, I think there’s also making sure that there’s safety within the team to say, Hey, you know, person’s name, you know, it sounds like maybe you’re struggling with that, or it’s not obvious to me how that activity is going to contribute to the sprint goal. Could you maybe help me connect it? Maybe there’s no connection, which would be a chance to say no and limit your work and process and, and secure the delivery. You can avoid avoidance if you will, by doing the meaningless stuff. So lots of factors in there too, to helping identify where there’s an opportunity. Have you Mariano, have you seen other places maybe where, where there are some symptoms or some tilts, some telltale signs that, that some of these personal efficiency killers are at play.

Mariano Oliveti: [11:54] Aside from, from Scrum and again, the daily interactions that you might have with your team. You can, I mean, depending on the environment that you’re in, I mean, if you’re running a safe environment, usually in a quarterly planning, you can, you can see how, when it gets pushed somewhere else, instead of being tackled right now, because either you don’t have all the right information. And again, all of these are symptoms of why we push things forward, right. Either you don’t have all the right information where it’s still complicated or there’s a lot of dependencies. So aside from the daily Scrum at the individual level, at times you might see the Product Owner trying to push some of the EPICs further out just when they sake of either just having some of the dependencies resolved or having more information, being more clear on something that it might not be full of flesh at the moment. But yet again, I mean, it doesn’t say that the product owner can not work with the team to get those things accomplished. Right. So like Justin was saying, I mean, some of the things that can be very evident almost in, in any environment, he never said it. That’s what I look for personal behaviors and not just uniquely for team behaviors. I mean, the individuals are the, is what make up a team. So when we looking to you know, have somebody behaving and how that impacts the team, then, you know, at times he’d only take shifts to fix a couple couple of those behaviors just to get, you know, thing that not be true.

Dan Neumann: [13:37] As we then talked about some of the, the killer’s procrastination, avoidance, delay, seeking perfection versus being good enough, what kind of, kind of hope might you guys have to offer? So if somebody is struggling with that, or maybe they see it in others, hopefully they’re doing the introspection piece and not just going out. Oh yeah, you’re a procrastinator. Oh, that’s a bad like, yeah, look in the mirror first a little bit. So yeah, I, I know I have done all of the, all of the things in the problem statement and I don’t know, sometimes I have solutions strategies that work, sometimes I just embrace the procrastination, but what, what have you guys seen as far as ways to address some of the setup, Justin?

Justin Thatil: [14:20] Yeah. some, you know, strategies come to mind, right. So really identifying the root cause of what may be leading you to procrastinate. Right. for me personally, it’s you know, having a daunting list of, to do’s right. And I think of my Scrum teams, we’re looking at our board, it’s essentially a daunting list of, to do’s and one of our colleagues actually you know, shared a great link and Harvard, Harvard business review, your to-do list is in fact way too long. Right. so just, and the, and the, basically the main, the main idea there is out of your to-do list, what is the one goal that you would want to achieve for today? Right. Write that down into a separate piece of paper, completely out of, you know, the rest of the items that, you know, you have to do. And if you’re able to just accomplish that, how would that make your day? You know, and I thought that was powerful. Like for me personally, I actually started I’ve been trying to practice that, and that does contribute to that sense of accomplishment. Right. And as, as you’re able to get through you know, the day to day that practice becomes more common, then you realize you’re actually able to get through more of your list on a day to day basis. Right? Cause now practices are forming, good habits are starting to form. And you think of it. So if you’re doing that, able to do that at the individual level. Now you come into a Scrum team, you’ve got your Scrum board, you’ve got your tasks. It’s that dynamic has now introduced with the entire, all the rest of the team members now play. Right. And, and, and that’s where we talked about the sprint goal, right? As a team, what is the sprint goal of whatever we’re trying to achieve as a team and how do we each contribute towards that sprint goal? And that also comes back and the daily Scrum, right. Are we all working towards that goal? Dan Neumann: [16:18] So habit habit is the one, one part of that that jumped out to me, you know, procrastination can be a habit and turning some of these other positive things in by doing them regularly can also become supportive habits. Mariano, what, what comes to mind? What kind of strategies have you embraced? Mariano Oliveti: [16:39] So along the same lines of Justin, there is there’s a lot that has to do with prioritization. I do have my own method that I try to teach to, to my teams, which is trying to understand is kind of like a funnel where at the beginning, my first question is, do we need to do this? Yes or no. Right. And so I’m talking about me in my particular case, when I need to do something, my first question is very much being linked, lean mentality. Is this something that I need to do? Yes or no? If the answer is now, I just don’t do it. It gets eliminated right away. If the answer is yes, then the following step of the funnel is can I actually automate this right. If it can be something that it can be automated, then I don’t have to waste anybody’s time. I just do it once. And then for the following cycles, it’s just get down on itself. And if, if you need an example is for example, for a Scrums crumbs we use JIRA as a tool and we use confluence for Scrum since it keeps an update. So I just automated all, all the epics as they move into a confluence table. So I don’t have to do these every single week for a Scrum of, for example. And I’m sure that everybody can have their own examples of how they can do that on, in their own environment. Then after I decide if I can automate something or not, if the answer is now, my following question is can I delegate this right. Can I get it off my plate? Is there something that somebody else can do it? Without something horrible, if my time is better spent somewhere else, then I’m going to focus on something else that I can do. For the simple fact that if I want to have a bigger impact within the organization, and if the answer is still no, then it’s just literally up to me. I wasn’t able to eliminate it. I wasn’t able to delegate or automate it. So the last resort is I have to do it because I already agree that it’s important. Right? So the last question is, do I have to do this now? Or can this wait? And if the answer is, this can wait, I’m going to focus on something more important, right this minute. So that is my selection process. And then it comes into play with what Justin was talking about in terms of like our, to do list. It’s usually huge. So how I narrow that down I go back to literally what Brian, Tracy used to say, I eat my frog first. I tried to see what is the one thing that I really don’t want to do. And I tried to get it off the table right away, because that’s the one thing that I know for a fact, I’m going to push it to a different day. And let’s say, for example, it has nothing to the with Scrum, but if it is Sunday, and I know that I feel lazy, I’m not going to want to mow the lawn. So I will try to push that for later on, but guess what the grass is going to still grow. So it’s not going to help me. So that’s how, how I tried to figure the thing out for me you know, regardless of like, I know that it’s going to be painful, but I know that I have to do it. So I eat my front first. And then everything else goes on the for the rest of the day. That’s, that’s my thought process. Not that’s the truth is my truth.

Justin Thatil: [19:43] Oh yeah. I think you were going to touch on the eating the frog first. Cause that was a brand new idiom for me. And then just realizing that there’s actually a quote from mark Twain Twain famously said that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog. You can go through the rest of the day, knowing the worst is behind you. Right? So that was a brand new idiom that I, you know, hearing from Mariano for the first time. And I thought, Hey, this is very applicable. So thanks for sharing that.

Dan Neumann: [20:10] One of the things that jumped out to me as you were talking about, you know, should I do it, can it be automated? Can I delegate it, et cetera. One of the places I find myself, you know, falling into that procrastinate, avoid, et cetera, is when it’s really not clear what needs to be done, what the outcome is. When’s good enough, what, you know, acceptance criteria. It might be what we call it from a user story spirit. Is it specific enough that I can actually complete it? And if it’s not, it’s often harder for me personally, to get started on, on, I’m not quite sure what done looks like or what the deliverable might look like, even if it’s a sketch of something. So I think does that fit into to some of the ways that you folks have seen solutions around some of this efficiency and effectiveness? Mariano Oliveti: [21:01] Oh, I’ll think that might first because it, although, although I don’t have an answer for your specific question, I do know somebody in the prior thing that I used to work years ago that actually he would not start working unless you had the a hundred percent idea of exactly what you needed to do. He was a perfectionist, right? So this guy was super good, but he needed to have every single detail in order to begin something. And, and again, he was a perfectionist, he needed his north. He wanted to make sure that he achieved those expectations to the T. So you were talking about right now, acceptance criteria and going through all your checklist and the user story. And I’m all I’m thinking is this person again, but I admire, but I, I usually have to push it a little bit to get him comfortable with about 80% of what he was known to get the work started and, and explore a little bit of what was possible. This person particularly would, struggled with procrastinating starting with anything, unless he had everything that he considered needed, but the team really did not consider that as part of like, Hey, we need every single detail. The team felt comfortable, but he particularly was again on the perfectionist side. Right. So but yeah. Thank you for asking that question and again, sorry that I wanted attention, but if I didn’t bring it up now, I was totally going to forget because it’s something that I’ve seen. And Justin, you made this point about perfection versus being good enough. But it’s, it’s something that I’ve seen him more than once these particular kids were super strong though.

Justin Thatil: [22:40] Yeah, for me, I mean, it’s, it’s not just at the developer level. This can happen throughout the entire Scrum team, you know, even starting from the product owner, business analyst and that, that behavior, it just trickles down. Right. To the point where the entire team has been procrastinating, they can cause at the top where we don’t have enough detail type thing, you know yeah.

Dan Neumann: [23:05] And, and making it, making it clear that there are intermediate steps. We don’t have to, I’m familiar with the requests from developers where I need to know everything before I start one way to help that is to say, Hey, we don’t need know here’s the next checkpoint. Here’s what the next mile mile marker looks like if we’re on the highway, right. How many miles? I don’t know, but we’re going to, let’s go to the next rest area. Can you make it to the next rest area? Right. You don’t have to do the whole trip. And so sometimes that, that can be an effective way of getting people moving down the road. It also, as we were talking about the individual effectiveness, they, the lack of effectiveness compounds on itself. And everybody else’s lack of effectiveness in a Scrum team. It isn’t like, well, okay, Dan missed a little Mariano, missed a little Justin, missed a little it’s exponential. If I miss and Mariano counted on that thing before he got his thing going, and then he misses these, these, these misses in effectiveness compound, and you, you end up with a team and a group of individuals that just really aren’t delivering to their capacity or anywhere near their capacity.

Mariano Oliveti: [24:14] And it will destroy the team morale too, on that because once you, once you get them on that cadence of, Hey, we didn’t get these same place and you had the internal dependencies to deliver anything else, whether it was the entire sprint or any piece of work, and it becomes a pattern, it becomes a habit. It is very hard to break once that better needs to be established within the team. You’re absolutely right then.

Dan Neumann: [24:42] So what kind of let’s, let’s offer some hope here. We’re getting kind of. So for, for, for listeners, zoom, maybe more participants in the podcast here who are prone to procrastination or avoidance or delay, or for Peck perfection, what are some of the maybe efficiency engines to kind of help address these and, and seek after continuous improvement? Justin Thatil: [25:08] Retrospectives, right? Nothing that comes to mind, right. First sprint goes through the team, realizes they’re falling as a whole, that’s true, hard conversations have to happen. Hey, do we, did we realize that we’ve failed? That’s the first thing, you know understanding or realizing that we’re, we’ve failed as a team and, and those conversations that, that generate as a result, what do we want to try next time around a team that, that realizes, okay, they’ve either taken on too much or there was just no clarity, you know, it could be a fast SWAT reasons that they may have missed the mark this time. Right. Right. But that, as long as those conversations are happening and genuinely being had, as opposed to just staying at the surface level you know, that’s key, that’s, that’s one way I think one of the effective ways to get it started at least. And then it’s just, you know, the notion of inspecting adapt on a continuous basis. We talked about this during retro, and then you get to meet on a daily basis. Hey, how are we tracking towards where we talked about, you know?

Mariano Oliveti: [26:22] Yeah. I agree with you, just anything that’s by far the most powerful way to tackle the problem is through continuous improvement and retrospectives, right. In which if it’s them properly or appropriately, and you have an open forum, you have people that actually feel safe enough to be able to speak up their mind and provide their point of view regardless of health delivery to play for the past two weeks, or I’m assume that’s the most normal cadence for a sprint. Right. But people will be able to talk about, Hey, I was waiting for these, these things didn’t happen. Therefore, you know, we got stuck over here. One of the things that, that you mentioned as well was just the daily Scrum, just to plan daily where we are and what, what are we going to be doing? Hopefully people are raising their concerns about, Hey, if we’re not getting decent, I can not move forward with X, Y, Z. Right. and something that we can do from a coaching perspective, or from some perspective at times, he’s facilitated the idea of like, Hey, if we can not do this on your own, or if you don’t feel confident or comfortable enough of tackling this on your own, when you compare program just to solve this, right. At times that bridges the gap off somebody meeting the a hundred percent of the information and somebody being like, know a little bit more experimental with the way that the work, or you can just go ahead and get the team together and say, Hey, instead of leaving these for the retail end of the sprint, how about we swarm on this? And we tackled these as a team at the beginning of the sprint, let’s get rid of this, let’s get these sprint goal accomplished. And then we move, we move on onto the rest of the stuff. And again, it’s all icing on the cake. So those are the kinds of things that I, that I try with, usually with things that I coach and I simplified that by talking about, you know what are, what are the things where things are falling in terms of like, are these like important and urgent, or are these just important? Everything that falls under the important and urgent quadrant. I don’t know if it is something that should be on the top. Right. But we don’t have a screen to show anyways. Let’s try to tackle that first. Let’s get that out of the way. And then let’s focus on the important if we’re going to be focusing on the main new chef from the get-go, then we’re missing the mark. We’re, we’re bound to miss the mark without a doubt. But again, you address that at the beginning of, right. Like probably setting up some gut rails and, and prime your working agreement with the team just from the get-go helps understand where everybody’s mindset is at and how the team was to collaborate and lift each other up along the process.

Dan Neumann: [29:00] Yeah. What you, what you described there, Mariana with the swarming reminded me of the, the article, the new, new product development game back from the eighties, which was where the Scrum metaphor came from. It’s the whole team working together to move the ball down the field, which is different than the relay race, where you’ve got the Baton, the first person hands it to the second, hands it to the third. Hopefully nobody drops it. Cause if they drop it, the whole team breaks. So that, that metaphor and that kind of quintessential article came to mind.

Justin Thatil: [29:28] Yeah, same, same for me Dan. Then it’s typically what I see a lot of teams struggling with is getting a, of their comfort zone of just doing their, their specific expertise in their role. Right. And another metaphor I’ve heard is the notion of of the firefighter. You know, you’re not, if your house is on fire would you rather wait for the expert firefighters to come and, and extinguish the fire, or would you rather know a little bit about what extinguishes fire entails, take the fire fire extinguisher in your home and start extinguishing it right away. Right. So the whole notion that if there was, if there was knowledge among the team about what everybody on that team does a little bit, right. It doesn’t have to be the full to the full extent, but there’s an, you have enough knowledge to contribute to another team member’s need you know, that collective swarming can happen. You know, and I always see this happening on teams where there’s that constant struggle that we need to be in a relay race now and you know, collaborative nature team.

Dan Neumann: [30:39] Perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you. Well, hopefully the three of us work together to move the ball down the field on this podcast, and we didn’t count on one person specializing. So I want to appreciate Mariano and Justin, you guys taking some time to contribute to the greater agile community. And I also am curious, is there something on your continuous learning journey that you’ve been reading, has you thinking anything you’d like to share with the listeners?

Mariano Oliveti: [31:06] I’ll let you go first. Justin Thatil: [31:09] For me lately, it’s all been about the, the coaching coaching profession, right? There’s life coaches out there and how that correlates to the agile world and the agile coaching profession. Right. There’s, there’s a lot of parallels. There’s also a lot of mutual exclusive areas as well, but exploring that area has been my current pursuit. Dan Neumann: [31:38] Perfect. Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Mariano Oliveti: [31:41] Yeah, likewise, over here I’ve been reading a lot about team dynamics and needless to say about how to, what I called a minute ago, procrastinate on purpose. Instead of just trying to do time management because funny enough, once you start reading about time management, you realize that time in essence is the same for everybody. You’ve have 24 hours in a day, so you’re really not managing time. What you’re managing your behavior within that time. And that’s a game changer because then it’s not about, I didn’t have enough time to do this is how do you organize yourself? You putting the ownership of what you do on your own. So I’ve been doing a lot of reading about that. And if you want to get a tidbit for our listeners, Rory Veda is the one that I’ve been reading a lot, and one of his books is called take the stairs which is about literally just getting the work done. And you’re going to see a lot of the things that I talked about today in his book.

Dan Neumann: [32:43] All right. So Rory Vaden, V A D E N, correct.

Mariano Oliveti: [32:47] V A D E N, correct.

Dan Neumann: [32:52] Okay. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes and maybe something about life coaching versus agile coaching. Maybe we’ll have something there we can throw in the show notes for folks too, and they can find that at agilethought.com/podcast. So gentlemen, thank you very much for joining and I hope to have you back again sometime. Justin Thatil: [33:09] Thank you Dan. Mariano Oliveti: [33:10] It was good. Thank you for having us appreciate it. Justin Thatil: [33:13] Same pleasure. Thank you Dan. Outro: [33:16] This has been the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast brought to you by AgileThought. The views, opinions and information expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and the guests, and do not necessarily represent those of AgileThought. Get the show notes and other helpful tips for this episode and other episodes at agilethought.com/podcast.

Speakers

Dan Neumann

Principal Enterprise Coach

Dan Neuman is the Director of the US Transformation and Coaching practice in the Agility guild. He coaches organizations to transform the way they work to achieve their desired business outcomes.

With more than 25 years of experience, Dan Neumann is an experienced Agile Coach with a deep knowledge of Agility at the team and organizational levels. He focuses on achieving business outcomes by shifting both mindset and practices, resulting in a disciplined, yet practical approach to solving problems.

10 Things a Java Developer Should Learn These Days

We are halfway into the year and, looking back at what the last 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic left us, we can say that the advancements on technology and all the different languages, frameworks and development tools have not disappointed us and even in many cases have overtaken us. It doesn’t seem that long since Java 8 was released more than 8 years ago and, although it is true that today the latest version is Java 18, we must remember that there are still many companies stuck with Java 8 and even a few with Java 1.4 a 1.6 and a few other legacy frameworks.Because of this great advance in programming languages and frameworks in recent years, many programmers could feel overwhelmed due to the large number of updates that we are exposed to in our industry. However, we have begun to see very marked patterns in different industries, and we believe it is important to mention what are the 10 things that every Java programmer should learn.

6 min read

August 25, 2022

Podcast Ep. 153: How to Spot Individual Behaviors That Might Threaten a Team’s Performance with Justin Thatil and Mariano Oliveti

Intro: [00:03]

Welcome to the Agile Coaches’ Corner by AgileThought. The podcast for practitioners and leaders seeking advice to refine the way they work and pave the path to better outcomes. Now here’s your host, coach and agile expert. Dan Neumann.

Dan Neumann: [00:17]

Welcome to this episode of the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast. I’m your host Dan Neumann. And today I have the pleasure of being joined by two of my AgileThought colleagues. I’ve got Mariano Olivetti and Justin Thatil, and I’m really excited to have you both joining us today.

Mariano Oliveti: [00:33]

Pleasure as always Dan. Thanks for having us.

Dan Neumann: [00:36]

I was like, wait a minute. Maybe it’s not a pleasure. It’s all good. Hey, but we’ll, we’ll be talking about procrastination as part of this podcast. So I think that’s probably totally appropriate. Our topic today is how you, the listener can spot different behaviors and address those individual behaviors that might threaten your team’s performance. Mariano, I think maybe it would be important to address why are we talking about individual behaviors? We hear so much about Scrum teams, agile teams, team this, team that, and maybe you can frame it up a little bit. Why aren’t we talking about individual behaviors?

Justin Thatil: [03:38]

Right. And so I was, as I was reading these three, that Mariano contributed. One of the thoughts that came to my mind are engineers being engineers, wanting to have build, you know, the perfection built building to perfection and how that can contribute to, you know, delays in delivery, where, whereas in, you know, the mantra of fast iteration inspect and adapt, the notion is w we we’ve got to test our hypothesis, right? It’s a build fast, does that to be perfect the first go round, but, you know, we can get to perfection perfection as, as we iterate over the feature, right? So engineers that tend to have come from an environment where they’re giving the time to perfect, plan and then perfectly build, versus when you’re in this fast mode of agile ways of iterating and building how that behavior can contribute to efficiency killers. Right? So, and that’s, that’s an individual level, right? So we’re focusing on the individual level. And to answer your question earlier, Dan, you know, why are we focusing on this? Like for any environment that we’re part of right. Good way to impact change is by reflecting upon yourself and how your contribution may be impacting an environment. Right? So that this is a great opportunity for us to talk about and, and introspect within our own ways of bringing value to a team.

Mariano Oliveti: [05:10]

Now, fun fact for a totally different podcast. If you ask anybody, if they’re a procrastinator, they’re aware of it, this has don’t know how to solve for it. They usually say, yeah, I procrastinate. I’ll take everything to the very last second, but they just never get to it. And they don’t make an effort to it to address it. Either purposefully, unless, somebody else called it out.

Mariano Oliveti: [11:54]

Aside from, from Scrum and again, the daily interactions that you might have with your team. You can, I mean, depending on the environment that you’re in, I mean, if you’re running a safe environment, usually in a quarterly planning, you can, you can see how, when it gets pushed somewhere else, instead of being tackled right now, because either you don’t have all the right information. And again, all of these are symptoms of why we push things forward, right. Either you don’t have all the right information where it’s still complicated or there’s a lot of dependencies. So aside from the daily Scrum at the individual level, at times you might see the Product Owner trying to push some of the EPICs further out just when they sake of either just having some of the dependencies resolved or having more information, being more clear on something that it might not be full of flesh at the moment. But yet again, I mean, it doesn’t say that the product owner can not work with the team to get those things accomplished. Right. So like Justin was saying, I mean, some of the things that can be very evident almost in, in any environment, he never said it. That’s what I look for personal behaviors and not just uniquely for team behaviors. I mean, the individuals are the, is what make up a team. So when we looking to you know, have somebody behaving and how that impacts the team, then, you know, at times he’d only take shifts to fix a couple couple of those behaviors just to get, you know, thing that not be true.

Dan Neumann: [13:37]

As we then talked about some of the, the killer’s procrastination, avoidance, delay, seeking perfection versus being good enough, what kind of, kind of hope might you guys have to offer? So if somebody is struggling with that, or maybe they see it in others, hopefully they’re doing the introspection piece and not just going out. Oh yeah, you’re a procrastinator. Oh, that’s a bad like, yeah, look in the mirror first a little bit. So yeah, I, I know I have done all of the, all of the things in the problem statement and I don’t know, sometimes I have solutions strategies that work, sometimes I just embrace the procrastination, but what, what have you guys seen as far as ways to address some of the setup, Justin?

Justin Thatil: [14:20]

Yeah. some, you know, strategies come to mind, right. So really identifying the root cause of what may be leading you to procrastinate. Right. for me personally, it’s you know, having a daunting list of, to do’s right. And I think of my Scrum teams, we’re looking at our board, it’s essentially a daunting list of, to do’s and one of our colleagues actually you know, shared a great link and Harvard, Harvard business review, your to-do list is in fact way too long. Right. so just, and the, and the, basically the main, the main idea there is out of your to-do list, what is the one goal that you would want to achieve for today? Right. Write that down into a separate piece of paper, completely out of, you know, the rest of the items that, you know, you have to do. And if you’re able to just accomplish that, how would that make your day? You know, and I thought that was powerful. Like for me personally, I actually started I’ve been trying to practice that, and that does contribute to that sense of accomplishment. Right. And as, as you’re able to get through you know, the day to day that practice becomes more common, then you realize you’re actually able to get through more of your list on a day to day basis. Right? Cause now practices are forming, good habits are starting to form. And you think of it. So if you’re doing that, able to do that at the individual level. Now you come into a Scrum team, you’ve got your Scrum board, you’ve got your tasks. It’s that dynamic has now introduced with the entire, all the rest of the team members now play. Right. And, and, and that’s where we talked about the sprint goal, right? As a team, what is the sprint goal of whatever we’re trying to achieve as a team and how do we each contribute towards that sprint goal? And that also comes back and the daily Scrum, right. Are we all working towards that goal?

Justin Thatil: [19:43]

Oh yeah. I think you were going to touch on the eating the frog first. Cause that was a brand new idiom for me. And then just realizing that there’s actually a quote from mark Twain Twain famously said that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog. You can go through the rest of the day, knowing the worst is behind you. Right? So that was a brand new idiom that I, you know, hearing from Mariano for the first time. And I thought, Hey, this is very applicable. So thanks for sharing that.

Dan Neumann: [20:10]

One of the things that jumped out to me as you were talking about, you know, should I do it, can it be automated? Can I delegate it, et cetera. One of the places I find myself, you know, falling into that procrastinate, avoid, et cetera, is when it’s really not clear what needs to be done, what the outcome is. When’s good enough, what, you know, acceptance criteria. It might be what we call it from a user story spirit. Is it specific enough that I can actually complete it? And if it’s not, it’s often harder for me personally, to get started on, on, I’m not quite sure what done looks like or what the deliverable might look like, even if it’s a sketch of something. So I think does that fit into to some of the ways that you folks have seen solutions around some of this efficiency and effectiveness?

Justin Thatil: [22:40]

Yeah, for me, I mean, it’s, it’s not just at the developer level. This can happen throughout the entire Scrum team, you know, even starting from the product owner, business analyst and that, that behavior, it just trickles down. Right. To the point where the entire team has been procrastinating, they can cause at the top where we don’t have enough detail type thing, you know yeah.

Dan Neumann: [23:05]

And, and making it, making it clear that there are intermediate steps. We don’t have to, I’m familiar with the requests from developers where I need to know everything before I start one way to help that is to say, Hey, we don’t need know here’s the next checkpoint. Here’s what the next mile mile marker looks like if we’re on the highway, right. How many miles? I don’t know, but we’re going to, let’s go to the next rest area. Can you make it to the next rest area? Right. You don’t have to do the whole trip. And so sometimes that, that can be an effective way of getting people moving down the road. It also, as we were talking about the individual effectiveness, they, the lack of effectiveness compounds on itself. And everybody else’s lack of effectiveness in a Scrum team. It isn’t like, well, okay, Dan missed a little Mariano, missed a little Justin, missed a little it’s exponential. If I miss and Mariano counted on that thing before he got his thing going, and then he misses these, these, these misses in effectiveness compound, and you, you end up with a team and a group of individuals that just really aren’t delivering to their capacity or anywhere near their capacity.

Mariano Oliveti: [24:14]

And it will destroy the team morale too, on that because once you, once you get them on that cadence of, Hey, we didn’t get these same place and you had the internal dependencies to deliver anything else, whether it was the entire sprint or any piece of work, and it becomes a pattern, it becomes a habit. It is very hard to break once that better needs to be established within the team. You’re absolutely right then.

Dan Neumann: [24:42]

So what kind of let’s, let’s offer some hope here. We’re getting kind of. So for, for, for listeners, zoom, maybe more participants in the podcast here who are prone to procrastination or avoidance or delay, or for Peck perfection, what are some of the maybe efficiency engines to kind of help address these and, and seek after continuous improvement?

Mariano Oliveti: [26:22]

Yeah. I agree with you, just anything that’s by far the most powerful way to tackle the problem is through continuous improvement and retrospectives, right. In which if it’s them properly or appropriately, and you have an open forum, you have people that actually feel safe enough to be able to speak up their mind and provide their point of view regardless of health delivery to play for the past two weeks, or I’m assume that’s the most normal cadence for a sprint. Right. But people will be able to talk about, Hey, I was waiting for these, these things didn’t happen. Therefore, you know, we got stuck over here. One of the things that, that you mentioned as well was just the daily Scrum, just to plan daily where we are and what, what are we going to be doing? Hopefully people are raising their concerns about, Hey, if we’re not getting decent, I can not move forward with X, Y, Z. Right. and something that we can do from a coaching perspective, or from some perspective at times, he’s facilitated the idea of like, Hey, if we can not do this on your own, or if you don’t feel confident or comfortable enough of tackling this on your own, when you compare program just to solve this, right. At times that bridges the gap off somebody meeting the a hundred percent of the information and somebody being like, know a little bit more experimental with the way that the work, or you can just go ahead and get the team together and say, Hey, instead of leaving these for the retail end of the sprint, how about we swarm on this? And we tackled these as a team at the beginning of the sprint, let’s get rid of this, let’s get these sprint goal accomplished. And then we move, we move on onto the rest of the stuff. And again, it’s all icing on the cake. So those are the kinds of things that I, that I try with, usually with things that I coach and I simplified that by talking about, you know what are, what are the things where things are falling in terms of like, are these like important and urgent, or are these just important? Everything that falls under the important and urgent quadrant. I don’t know if it is something that should be on the top. Right. But we don’t have a screen to show anyways. Let’s try to tackle that first. Let’s get that out of the way. And then let’s focus on the important if we’re going to be focusing on the main new chef from the get-go, then we’re missing the mark. We’re, we’re bound to miss the mark without a doubt. But again, you address that at the beginning of, right. Like probably setting up some gut rails and, and prime your working agreement with the team just from the get-go helps understand where everybody’s mindset is at and how the team was to collaborate and lift each other up along the process.

Dan Neumann: [29:00]

Yeah. What you, what you described there, Mariana with the swarming reminded me of the, the article, the new, new product development game back from the eighties, which was where the Scrum metaphor came from. It’s the whole team working together to move the ball down the field, which is different than the relay race, where you’ve got the Baton, the first person hands it to the second, hands it to the third. Hopefully nobody drops it. Cause if they drop it, the whole team breaks. So that, that metaphor and that kind of quintessential article came to mind.

Justin Thatil: [29:28]

Yeah, same, same for me Dan. Then it’s typically what I see a lot of teams struggling with is getting a, of their comfort zone of just doing their, their specific expertise in their role. Right. And another metaphor I’ve heard is the notion of of the firefighter. You know, you’re not, if your house is on fire would you rather wait for the expert firefighters to come and, and extinguish the fire, or would you rather know a little bit about what extinguishes fire entails, take the fire fire extinguisher in your home and start extinguishing it right away. Right. So the whole notion that if there was, if there was knowledge among the team about what everybody on that team does a little bit, right. It doesn’t have to be the full to the full extent, but there’s an, you have enough knowledge to contribute to another team member’s need you know, that collective swarming can happen. You know, and I always see this happening on teams where there’s that constant struggle that we need to be in a relay race now and you know, collaborative nature team.

Dan Neumann: [30:39]

Perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you. Well, hopefully the three of us work together to move the ball down the field on this podcast, and we didn’t count on one person specializing. So I want to appreciate Mariano and Justin, you guys taking some time to contribute to the greater agile community. And I also am curious, is there something on your continuous learning journey that you’ve been reading, has you thinking anything you’d like to share with the listeners?

Mariano Oliveti: [31:06]

I’ll let you go first.

Mariano Oliveti: [31:41]

Yeah, likewise, over here I’ve been reading a lot about team dynamics and needless to say about how to, what I called a minute ago, procrastinate on purpose. Instead of just trying to do time management because funny enough, once you start reading about time management, you realize that time in essence is the same for everybody. You’ve have 24 hours in a day, so you’re really not managing time. What you’re managing your behavior within that time. And that’s a game changer because then it’s not about, I didn’t have enough time to do this is how do you organize yourself? You putting the ownership of what you do on your own. So I’ve been doing a lot of reading about that. And if you want to get a tidbit for our listeners, Rory Veda is the one that I’ve been reading a lot, and one of his books is called take the stairs which is about literally just getting the work done. And you’re going to see a lot of the things that I talked about today in his book.

Dan Neumann: [32:43]

All right. So Rory Vaden, V A D E N, correct.

Mariano Oliveti: [32:47]

V A D E N, correct.

Dan Neumann: [32:52]

Okay. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes and maybe something about life coaching versus agile coaching. Maybe we’ll have something there we can throw in the show notes for folks too, and they can find that at agilethought.com/podcast. So gentlemen, thank you very much for joining and I hope to have you back again sometime.

Agile Podcast: Agile Coaches' Corner