You and I

Hola once again! Wow! It's nearly the end of the month! Reaching the 29th entry of the month! Posting stuff 29 consecutive days! Let's make room for a cortado!

Few days ago, I posted something about how useful attending conferences can be. Check that out here. Today I'd like to illustrate one example of a learning experience. A mechanism that I brought back to my team in Athens. "Resolving conflicts".



As a non-native English speaker, I took the liberty of requesting a bit of consideration from the audience in case they couldn't understand me well so that I could try to rephrase it, repeat it or just speak up. That's how I created my safe environment. I was protected. We could start off at that moment.

This was just a simple example on how to accept other needs in order to contribute to someone else's safe environment creation. Why is that important to me? It is easy to discern that any attack to my speaking English could have killed my confidence. Simple enough example, but what happens when there is a conflict of needs? So that's the key question. And the answer is the success in Agile teams - and any other teams of any kind.

What are your needs? 
Why are they important to you?

"She wants a blue color"

Sadly on IT, the career path usually puts you from a Junior Developer position into a "Lead" position and 99% of the cases, "people" skills are left behind. Now in the Agile world where everybody leads everybody this becomes crucial. To summarize, there are a few tricks:
  • Promote the neutrality
  • Facilitate the dialogue
  • Use an appropriate language full of hypothesis and empty of assumptions and prejudices
  • Do not try, do it. "Fear is the path to the dark side".
  • Contribute to create others safe environment
  • Be (live) as you speak. You have to believe it!


Mechanism References

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