David Dame, enterprise agility change agent and organizational coach describes scaling engagement agility in his recent blog. He explains the importance of scaling people egagement over process scaling.
Engagement scaling is how you build mechanisms within your organization to keep people passionate and purposeful.
David says that in scaling agile across large organizations, even when we put the right process framework and practices in place, we should focus on people engagement too. As agile is people oriented so while scaling agile not only the process, but also people engagement at various levels is important.
The process can’t scale the behaviors, talents, intangibles, or passion of employees. We need to foster people engagement in order to get bottom-up innovation. This will build the culture you need to support agility.
For scaling engagement agility, David suggests following points:
- Building that customer empathy that helps people understand the “why” the company is doing what they’re doing.
- Continually share the organization’s vision. Explain the values of the organization so that people understand how the organization wants to be seen in the rest of the world.
- Create a bond with your employee. Have a deep understanding and interest in their goals. What are their needs as an individual? How can you help satisfy those needs?
- Build a culture of ‘fail-fast’, learn, and make adjustments.
- Develop problem solvers. Actively listen and ask questions to help them get a deeper perspective of their challenges so that they can come up with options to solve them.
- When people win, share their happiness. When they accomplish goals give them time to reflect and let them reflect on what they’ve learned from the success.
People engagement impacts their productivity as per David.
People are more productive when they feel the organization shares in their development and success. Engagement Agility is developing leaders throughout the whole organization to create an ecosystem of continual engagement.
Colin O’Neil, Gillian Clark and Gareth Evans wrote a blog on The SAFe way to lean software development. In this blog they emphasized on respect for people.
An important aspect of Lean Thinking is the empowerment of teams to continuously improve the way they work. Knowledge workers (defined by Peter Drucker as those who know more about their work than their bosses do) are inherently motivated to solve problems and create quality solutions when empowered to do so. Therefore, management is tasked with building employee and business partnerships based on transparency, trust and mutual respect at all levels of the organization. This includes understanding who our customers are at each stage of product development and treating them with respect, as well as providing agile teams appropriate problem-solving tools and the authority to use them.