The New Competencies

What Got You Here, Won't Get You There

Transformation means change of shape, form, structure, appearance, function, inner nature, and character. In biology, transformation refers to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to butterfly. In the physical world, transformation refers to a change of state, such as ice to water or water to steam. Transformation produces qualitative differences from the previous state. Relationships that exist in one phase do not exist in other phases. For example, the behavior of a solid can’t be predicted from the behavior of a liquid. Therefore, knowledge of the behavior in one state cannot help to understand and predict behavior in another. A lesson for managers is that the knowledge, skills, and practices that worked in the past will not work as well, and may even be counterproductive, in a qualitatively different future state.

Edward Martin Baker. The Symphony of Profound Knowledge: W. Edwards Deming’s Score for Leading, Performing, and Living in Concert. (Chapter 3)

THE AIM for this newsletter is to begin a short series of posts about management competencies, in particular those that frequent Deming collaborator Peter Scholtes outlines in his excellent 1998 book, The Leader’s Handbook, that take Dr. Deming’s management philosophy out of the abstract and put it into motion. These are the skills, knowledge, behaviours, and traits that leaders and managers must possess if they are serious about improving the quality of their products and services, as the old ones will not get them to where they want to be.

Along the way, we’re going to learn about the “old eight” competencies that will contrast with the “new six”, along with some real-world implications for those in my erstwhile profession of “agile” transformation coaching, which is now in decline. I’ll introduce you to the hapless Coach Vader who is trying to desalinate the ocean of old management competencies with a Brita filter jug, and to Prof. Bob Emiliani who provides us with a model to interpret competencies and why transformations are about individual change. We’ll also have a brief stop-over to see the consequences of aiming your transformation in the wrong direction, drawn from my erstwhile industry of agile transformation coaching.

tl;dr: Develop These New Competencies

Putting Deming into effect can begin anywhere and with only yourself, but the more who join in, the more fun and effective it becomes. This begins with recognizing that the competencies that got you to where you are won’t get you to where you want to be as long as your aim is to create a culture of improvement. This requires the following six new competencies, which we’ll dive into in later newsletters:

1. The ability to think in terms of systems and knowing how to lead systems

2. The ability to understand the variability of work in planning and problem solving

3. Understanding how we learn, develop, and improve, and leading true learning and improvement

4. Understanding people and why they behave as they do

5. Understanding the interdependence and interaction between systems, variation, learning, and human behaviour. Knowing how each affects the others.

6. Giving vision, meaning, direction, and focus to the organization.

Coach Vader’s Ignored Gains

Last week I posted a meme on LinkedIn to summarize why the market for agile transformation services was drying up, a riff on the “big gains” table in The New Economics that I reviewed in my October 11/23 newsletter. It features someone in a Darth Vader costume standing knee deep in the ocean pouring ostensibly desalinated water from a Brita filter into a 2l bottle, which I extended into a metaphor about “agile” transformations in general, ie. they’re an equivalent exercise in futility, focused on minor process gains that are continually threatened by a veritable sea of ignored old management competencies:

Don’t laugh: This is effectively an illustration of my 20+ year career.

I paired my meme with a request to my peers: If you identify with the hapless Coach Vader, it’s time to study new competencies for your own improvement over the long-term. My pitch is that by aiming your efforts at the sea of opposing management competencies, you will get the transformation you want, over the long-term, almost for free. This requires learning new theory…

Exhibit A: The Surrender of the Scrum Alliance

Almost as if by divine providence, as I was writing this post, a colleague shared with me a recent article published by the Scrum Alliance entitled Avoid Agile Layoffs: 3 Ways to Pivot an Agile Job Market Downturn, that describes what can only be called a managed surrender to the “ocean” of the dominant theory of management, ie. everything Deming warned against forty years ago.

To appreciate the gravity of this article, you need to understand the central role the Alliance has played over 20 years of “agile” transformations, being responsible for training and deploying thousands upon thousands of professionals in the ways of the world’s most popular software project management framework, Scrum. Now, however, with tightening budgets and rough economic seas, and no longer luxe budgets, these professionals are facing mass layoffs (see CapitalOne) and a precipitous decline in requests for their services. The transformation of the sea of old management competencies agilistas hoped would follow their diligent efforts with teams never entirely materialized, and in the end took them out as a cost-cutting measure.

So, what’s to be done? Well, the good news is that the Alliance conducted a survey of hiring managers about the skills they’re looking for and they largely line-up with those that agile professionals possess, they just need a little tweaking that can be effectively distilled into getting out of the transformation biz entirely and parlaying your now-latent skills into indulging the very system you tried, and failed to transform through the team room. Your sorry aim is to now row the oars, report figures, and get your ducks in a row for the next appraisal, because, as Deming warned:

Merit rating rewards people that do well in the system. It does not reward attempts to improve the system. Don’t rock the boat.

- Out of the Crisis, 3rd. Ed. (p. 87)

Now, not all the advice in the article is wrong or awful per se: the author also advises becoming more skilled in communication, which will be needed to spin bad figures, but also to develop deeper abilities in two or more competencies (there’s that word, again) to become less “T” shaped and more “Pi” shaped:

Source: Avoid Agile Layoffs

I agree, however, in contrast to their guidance of matching agile coaching or team facilitation skills with say, communication, or chasing the ever-changing Zephyr of technical understanding, I suggest learning new management competencies to go after the big fish in the ocean and make the case for a much more purposeful transformation.

However, this requires understanding a little bit about ice and water…

Of Ice and Water

Dr. Deming was fond of collecting metaphors and expressions to convey aspects of his theory of transformation in ways that could be more easily grasped by the mind, most of the time. More often than not, they would slow down your response reflex and make you think about what he was saying. One such phrase goes like this:

It will not suffice to learn all about the present style of management. One could learn all there is to know about ice, yet know very little about water. (Contributed by Dr. Edward M. Baker.)

The New Economics, 3rd Ed. (p. 85)

Put more simply: the management competencies that have got you to where you are, won’t get you to where you want to go, ie. towards improvement of quality. Transformation in the Deming sense isn’t learning more about how to get the most out of ice: it’s about changing state entirely. This is effectively where my industry has has stumbled in their advocacy for an “agile” transformation of how teams work to deliver software with water-like fluidity while leaving the surrounding “ice” intact.

To get to a new state of seeing and thinking we need to understand where the prevailing competencies in “ice” come from, so we can get beyond them…

Beliefs➡Behaviours ➡Competencies

Where do management competencies come from?

Whenever I introduce the topic of competencies to managers, I reach back to a model Prof. Bob Emiliani first described in his 2003 paper, Linking Leaders’ Beliefs to Their Behaviors and Competencies, wherein he advances an argument for lean management practices by dissecting traditional leadership competency models into three parts: Beliefs that drive certain behaviours which over time manifest in managerial competencies.

For example, the belief that people understand management requests and pronouncements could drive the behaviour of stop asking questions and becoming impatient. Over time, this would develop into the management competency of speaking in abstract terms, and giving un-actionable or contradictory directions. Similarly, if there is a belief that people are the problem, this would obviously drive the behaviour of blaming people, which would then set management competencies for perpetuating fear of failure, a disinterest in understanding processes, and a perpetuation of power-based organizing routines.

Emiliani’s hypothesis is that no meaningful change in management competencies can be effected without first shifting underlying beliefs, and these may have deep roots that were established early in life, and later in school, or through various life experiences, or as a pre-condition for advancement in an organization.

Ergo, transformation starts with your individual beliefs, which is precisely what Dr. Deming goes after in his philosophy for the transformation of management when he says:

The first step is the transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding of the system of profound knowledge. The individual transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people.

- The New Economics, 3rd Ed. (p. 63)

Unfortunately, we tend to get in our own way with our cognitive biases, and as Eli Goldratt once observed, “do almost anything before shifting our own paradigm” in the belief that we just need to work harder.

The Ice: Eight Old Management Competencies

In The Leader’s Handbook, Scholtes describes eight old management competencies that contribute to keeping organizations stuck in their ways and unable to meaningfully improve or transform. See how many you identify with yourself or have observed in your own organization or those of others:

1. Forcefulness: Part of a manager’s responsibility was to control the workforce, making people do what they may be otherwise inclined to ignore. Good managers could look their people square in the eye and get them to respond.

2. Motivator: The “softer” side of forcefulness was the ability to inspire your people to do great work. The judicious combination of carrots and sticks, of inspiration and exhortation, was the manager’s stock-in-trade.

3. Decisiveness: To make quick decisions in the absence of information was routinely expected of the old-style manager.

4. Willfulness: Good bosses knew what they wanted and were dogged in their pursuit of it.

5. Assertiveness: A good boss was outspoken. Old-style leaders could not show weakness or ignorance lest their people run all over them.

6. Result- and bottom-line-oriented: Bosses held people accountable for meeting quotas and standards and achieving measurable goals. Maximizing ever-increasing profits every quarter and minimizing ever-diminishing costs: These were the goals.

7. Task-oriented: Managers kept everyone busy and occupied. No slacking off, no socializing. People don’t really want to work and, left to themselves, will screw off. Therefore, be their conscience and taskmaster.

8. Integrity and diplomacy: Good bosses covered toughness with tact and amiability. Be honest, fair, and respectful while letting your people know that you know what to do when things get out of hand.

Leader’s Handbook, pp. 18-19

You may be able to come up with even more than these using careful observation, and with Prof. Emiliani’s model, trace them back to the driving behaviours and underlying beliefs that need to be transformed. For example, whenever I run the Red Bead Experiment with managers, I find it makes short work of reflecting back the effects of all eight competencies and attendant behaviours to the participants and observers in situ, with the debrief diving into the supporting beliefs (which often spontaneously erupt from them), eg. workers are entirely responsible for their performance, rating and ranking helps me sort the good from the bad, laying off poor performers optimizes performance, incentives and rewards help get the best from people, etc. In the context of the game, they’re fun and easy to name, but they are quite difficult to confront in yourself.

However, there’s also a hidden problem with these competencies: the more they are relied upon to solve or manage problems, the more they will incentivize failure demand as they are returned to time and again, seeding future problems that will reinforce the perceived need to use them. Getting beyond them means challenging beliefs and that requires, as Deming would say, “the illumination of outside knowledge”, ie. alternatives to the “old eight”.

The Water: Six New Competencies

So-armed with our new understanding of the “old” competencies that prevent improvement or transformation, what can we learn, instead? Scholtes provides us with six alternatives to develop in ourselves that extend beyond what Dr. Deming advised through the 14 Points and System of Profound Knowledge, and feel a bit more approachable, manageable, and enjoyable:

1. The ability to think in terms of systems and knowing how to lead systems

2. The ability to understand the variability of work in planning and problem solving

3. Understanding how we learn, develop, and improve, and leading true learning and improvement

4. Understanding people and why they behave as they do

5. Understanding the interdependence and interaction between systems, variation, learning, and human behaviour. Knowing how each affects the others.

6. Giving vision, meaning, direction, and focus to the organization.

- The Leader’s Handbook. (p. 21)

In contrast to the “old eight” which predominantly revolve around negative themes of control, manipulation, incentives, fear, micromanaging, and closed, local optimizations, the “new six” are a world apart, emphasizing systems thinking and the interdependences and interactions of systems and their inherent variation, learning and the building of knowledge for improvement, psychology, and leadership. Where one has you continually shoe-gazing, the other has you looking up and around in all directions, making you more situationally aware.

I think these make for a much more appetizing and appealing “pivot” than what the Scrum Alliance is advocating for laid-off professionals, and I think they’d be ideally suited to the work.

Summary

My aim with this newsletter was to introduce the concept of management competencies in the context of transformations and how the corresponding “old” patterns of beliefs and behaviours contributed to creating an impediment to improvement because they are no longer sufficient: “new” ones are required. We’ve looked at the “old six” and “new eight” competencies that Peter Scholtes outlined in his book, The Leader’s Handbook, and reinforced how these are anchored by corresponding patterns of beliefs and and behaviours. I’ve also contextualized these with a real-world example from my own erstwhile industry, demonstrating the consequences of mis-aiming your transformations at low-gain process optimizations while leaving the big-gains of the old management competencies on the table. My argument is that a new way of thinking is required, because the old runs contrary to what’s needed to improve, based on Dr. Deming’s management philosophy.

Over the next several newsletters, we will return to each of the new competencies with some examples of how to begin using them to effect real change wherever you may be now or will go to in the future. This will be a mini Deming management method “boot camp” where we will learn the basics of what he meant by leadership, beginning with the keys to the kingdom, systems thinking.

Reflection Questions

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this newsletter, pushing up against the boundaries of what constitutes “digestible”. Here are some questions to think on until the next issue:

Consider the eight old and six new competencies that Peter Scholtes introduces in The Leader’s Handbook: How many of the old have you observed in your organization? How many do you currently subscribe to? Which ones, if any, are still applicable in your opinion? Do you agree or differ on the point of the old practices being insufficient for the way we want to lead in the future? Why? What other competencies have you observed? What risks do they carry? What holds them in-place?

Are any of the new competencies practised in your organization? Which ones?

Using Prof. Emiliani’s model, what behaviours do you see at play? What beliefs do you surmise are behind them?

Consider the hapless Coach Vader in my meme about the agile transformation industry and the career guidance for laid-off professionals from the Scrum Alliance. Does this comport with what you have observed or experienced in your own organization or those of others? In what ways do they differ or align? What other observations do you have?

Related Posts

• The First Step

• 14 Points

• The Deadly Diseases

• 16 Obstacles: 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16

• Things You Can Stop Doing to Improve

• Enlarging a Committee

• The Parable of the Red Beads