Sally Elatta

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:35

Who is Sally Elatta and what’s been your story? This is the question that I start every podcast. 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  00:44

Love it. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. Who is Sally Elatta. She is a young girl from Sudan in Africa, that came to the United States with a big dream, to change the world and live the American dream. So that’s who I am. I came here in 1995. I was born in Sudan. I was raised in Scotland, Scotland, as I used to say, and lived in Saudi Arabia for high school, I went to middle school and high school, and I came here in 1995. So very ambitious, bold, African young woman.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:15

Nice. It’s interesting. You and I spoke, and I knew you were from Sudan, but I didn’t know you came 95. And I came to United States in 95. It’s crazy how time flies by though, doesn’t feel… And I’m older now than my parents when they came here and just puts things into perspective, as far as how time flies by. You said bold and something that I noticed the way that you describe, it says bold, on your words, be real and lead with love. What are those three things mean to you and could you maybe elaborate on those three?

Speaker: Sally Elatta  01:58

Sure. Be bold, be real, lead with love. That’s basically my leadership entre be bold, is I really believe in being fearless and having big dreams, and conquering your fear. Because all of us have that Negative nelly that tells us we can’t do it, we can’t succeed for whatever the reasons are. And I think that, you know what, it’s really all came from my mother, because she’s very ambitious, and she’s very courageous. But I think having big bold dreams and not being afraid and building the right team and having the courage to try and it’s okay to fail. So, my dream of Agility Health, is a very big bold dream, the dream to come to the United States and build a business is a bold dream. I started investing in real estate when I was 17 years old. I think that was very bold of me to do that. I bought my first home here when I was 17. The work I’m doing in Sudan in Africa, you know, it’s called Sudan, next gen. Trying to help my home country of Sudan, through the current revolution is a big bold dream. So that’s what boldness means for me, and it’s just about being ambitious and believing in yourself and going bigger go home.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:13

How much is it? Like the whole moving part, moving to Scotland and moving to Saudi Arabia, here, how much has that influenced that boldness? Because I think like for me, when I reflect back, like just those experiences helped me, in a way be bolder. What would you attribute of the boldness to it? I’m sure there are several things. 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  03:41

Yes, I mean, number one would be my mother. So I have to be honest, because my mother was raised in a small village in Sudan, and you know how it is women are not really supposed to go to college, or get an education or get a job, like just stay home and take care of your husband. And she was very different than that. So she was the first one in our family to go to college, to get a master’s degree, to graduate with honors and to get a scholarship to go to Scotland. So this was a very bold of her like, everybody was like, why are you doing this? Are you mad? Like, why can’t you just be happy, you know? So it definitely comes from my mother. And when she took me with her to Scotland and I was only four, she raised me in a very different way than I would have been raised. 

If I was still living in Sudan. She honestly she gave me confidence and it’s not ego, there’s a difference between confidence and ego, right? Ego is ugly, that’s not cool. Confidence is just teaching your children that they can do whatever they want to do and that they’re capable of it and not telling them that they can’t or for whatever reason, so I really would say my mom is number one because she’s inspiring, and very bold in everything that she’s done. And then the second thing I would definitely say being multicultural and live around so many different people and she even made me travel when I was 15 years old, and I came to the US when I was 17 on my own. She gave me that level of confidence that it’s okay. And she trusted me and I think just being around different people and making decisions early and being empowered, definitely contributed to that boldness.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:12

It just remind me like that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with teams and organizations too, like a lot of time with micromanaging. But really what mom did, I’m sure she was worried and everything, but she knew that that was the right thing to do, in a sense of.. What about be real.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  05:34

Authenticity just be real talk from the heart, don’t put on that face don’t be fake. I mean, everybody in my company knows, like, nobody calls me a boss, I’m just the fearless leader. And we all talk to each other at the same level, and you got to speak from the heart and be real. And I think that authenticity, you know, people only follow you if they can trust you, and people only love you when they know that you love them. So those are things that I guide myself with. And I think that that realness. When you think about Oprah, when you think about Obama, when you think about people that are just very real in how they talk. It creates a level of trust. So that’s what being real is.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:14

Great. Yeah, no, I mean, it is in like that realness and that trust, like, maybe just tie it back to organizations. There’s a lot of fakeness going on, too. And I think when we talk about leadership, at least I work with leaders, that authenticity is so hard, it’s like you can just say one thing it applies today, it doesn’t, the integrity of what you believe in is very important. And I think, I don’t know, in today’s environment, not many people are real.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  06:50

Yeah, well, especially with COVID. And with people working from home, and with all of the financial problems customers have had, and the pressure to change and transform now, I think that leaders…, I think it’s more important for them now to even be more authentic, and create real connections and real bonds with people and actually care about them. And that’s going to take us to the lead with love. But I think it’s even more important now. Because people are…, some of them are afraid some of them are worried about their livelihood, about some people got sick, some people have lost loved ones. So just being authentic and being real is super important right now. Because there’s a lot of change, and it’s happening everywhere, and everybody’s trying to speed up everything. So you got to be open and honest with people on what things are going to look like and why and why we’re changing. And I think we always forget that why part of being authentic is why, why is this happening to me? Why are we changing? Where are we going? So..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:46

Yeah, there’s a lot of fears tied to trust. And I think that being real sometimes in organization is tough, because of the maybe we’ll get to this organizational structure and the way that we incentivize the way the organizations are protected, but the third one lead with love, I love that one.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  08:13

Love, love, love. I love talking about it, because we don’t talk about love enough in the workplace. It’s only something we talk about with our friends or at home. But you know, when we have our town hall meeting, and everybody’s there, I ended with I love you guys, thank you so much for what you do, I genuinely love you. And I think that even when it was hard for me, I mean, we had COVID, we had to do layoffs that almost broke me because here I am in business for 11 years, and you think that after 10, 11 years, you’re just going to be extremely successful, you can almost retire. And then that’s the year where you have to lay off the people. 

And that was very painful for me. So I think just figuring out how do you still respect people? How do you love them? How do you take care of them, even during really bad times, and during when you have to let them go or you know, downsize, giving people feedback with love, right? I love a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean that I’m soft. If people are not performing, I’ll tell them but I’ll tell them from a place of love and respect and caring about them in their future, whether they stay with us or whether they have to transition. I think just coming at things remembering that you’re dealing with human beings, you know, you’re not dealing with systems. And people want to know that you care, you actually care. You don’t have to be all up in their business like, hey, tell me everything. You don’t want to be like that. But you do want to care enough and show that you love and that you care about people. And I think that it creates trust and it creates love back. I think you surround yourself with positive energy. And you put it out there in the world. And so it comes back to you as well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:50

Yeah, and the love part remind me of I think it’s Simon Sinek that said you can’t really say I like my wife, you know, well, you could but there’s difference between like and love. And I think, when you look at the love from that perspective, like, the way that you just described it, that when you say you love your team, it’s stronger than like, it’s almost like family. So it was probably really hard making that decision. Maybe to segue into Agility Health, I remember, like, I can’t believe it’s been that long. But I remember when we who started and at least I started sort of seeing some marketing materials and videos around Agility Health. Could you tell us, what was the story? What was the story behind Agility Health and what is your vision for Agility Health.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  10:49

The story was, I was really fortunate to work with an amazing CIO, [name not clear] [10:54], Nebraska. And we were transforming. She allowed me to stay there for several years, because a lot of companies kind of short term memory, they’re just like, come in for six months, nine months, and then you’re done. But she allowed me to be there for three, four years and help the transformation, truly scale business teams, executives, leadership. And one of the things that we were struggling with is we had about 40 teams, I would go and talk to all the teams, and I would be able to sympathize what they’re trying to tell me and where the problems were at. And then I was like, the buffer that would explain to her what the issues were. And I was telling her like, this is not sustainable, like you. And honestly, I didn’t feel like teams were able to communicate directly, what their problems are, what their issues. So it really started with that. First of all, I didn’t know how to answer the question of, is this thing working or not? Is this transformation I’ve spent X number of dollars, what’s the ROI? 

How do I know my teams have actually matured? And beyond just the quantitative metrics, everybody’s looking at velocity and cycle time and all that, which is great. But how do I know that the teams have truly maturity? And how do I know that they’re achieving outcomes? So one was, I really wanted to see real metrics that mattered to tell a story. The second was, I wanted to hear the voice of the teams. And I wanted to bypass the entire middle layer, and basically say, what are the people that are closest to the work telling you? What’s the problem? Where is it that they are saying they want to improve instead of bigshot Agile Coach coming in and telling the team you’re not doing this well, you’re not doing this well. What are they saying. 

We always say people closest to the work know what the problems are. And then how can we consolidate that kind of information and make it actionable? You know what I mean? So that I have 100, teams, 200, teams, 1000s of teams, how can I start to see patterns? Oh, look, all these teams are struggling with the role of the product owner, maybe we should do something there. All of them are struggling with testing and technical excellence and automation, maybe we should do something there. So that was really the heart of it was hearing the voice of the team and empowering them to decide on what they want.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:01

It’s all really with your problem with trying to figure out how are you doing? And so what was the initial kind of like, that emersion how did that come about, from having that idea to actually piloting something and trying…

Speaker: Sally Elatta  13:18

I didn’t think immediately about building a product. To be honest with you. I started researching online, like what everybody does, I went online, I did a Google search. I’m like, I need to do a real like, and I called it a team health assessment I was looking for how healthy is my team? And so I ran into honestly, competitive agility. I ran into a couple of others. And I’m like, okay, cool. Let me start using this. And my problem is I’m super picky. 

First, I’m picky about visualization. Because I’ve worked with a lot of executives, and I always want things to look very easy on the eyes and simple to explain. And two I don’t like things that are too complex like numbers that are too, like -0.1 or 1.75 or you know what I mean, I think that some things are great for analytical people, but I’m a business person, and I want to talk to leaders. So I couldn’t find anything. And I didn’t want it to be all about agile. So the other ones that I found online, were very scrum oriented, or Kanban, or agile. 

My question I was trying to answer is, is this a healthy team? You know, with the agile practices, but beyond the agile practices, do they have the right leadership team supporting them? I mean, do they have clarity on their vision and purpose, there was just a lot of things I was looking for. So we ended up building it, we ended up building the Team Health Radar, that was the first one. And before I built it, I use because I always say, test it, nail it before you scale it. I tested it on just a blank piece of paper. I printed out the radar. And I took it to several customers and we called it color in the radar. We brought crayons with us. And I…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:46

How did you decide on the radar, I mean, I know it’s used a lot but like what was your initial.. because it is a great visual tool and especially like when my first impression was, this makes sense. It’s visually appealing. but it’s also easy to read in a sense, of it’s something that’s.. but what was your kind of experience like how did [inaudible] [15:11]

Speaker: Sally Elatta  15:12

When we first drew it up on the wall, it was four different circles. There was a circle around leadership, there was a circle around performance, a circle on clarity and foundation. And then Susan, we were just like, how do we bring this together? That’s too many things to look at. How do we bring this together? And then I was inspired, because I attended a workshop with Lisa Atkins on the leadership circle. And I remembered, and that was like, the leadership circle was like [inaudible] [15:37], it was like, so before that, and then like, I remember that it was multi-dimensional, you know what I mean? It was a circle inside of a circle. And so that was like, my inspiration to bring the four circles together. And then that became our bread and butter. It’s all history since then.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:55

It’s really interesting, because a lot of times, especially now people are looking at it. But I always like to know, the origins of [inaudible] [16:01]

Speaker: Sally Elatta  16:04

It was four circles that we finally brought into one. And then it was a flip chart, everybody knows everything started with a flip chart. And there is a big flip chart that we kept adding and removing stuff from. And I still think we still save the original flip chart so that everybody can be reminded on where it came from.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:23

So what about the vision? So how long has been 11, 12 years?

Speaker: Sally Elatta  16:30

We started building in 2013. So I mean, the company’s been in business for 12 years now. But we started building Agility Health the platform in 2013. And we had our first unveiling of the radar in 2014, at the Agile conference, the vision really has shifted to enabling business agility. And I would say that business agility for us is, you know the definition is the ability to respond to change, learn, pivot, deliver at speed and thrive in a competitive market, because gone are the days where big companies eat small. Today, fast, companies eat the slow. And we want

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:04

Say that again, because I think… 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  17:07

Business agility is the ability to learn and pivot. So respond to change, learn and pivot, deliver at speed, and thrive in a competitive market. Because gone are the days where big companies each small, today, fast, companies eat slow. You have to out deliver your competition, out learn your competition. And we at Agility Health believe that it takes three different types of metrics to enable business agility, and its maturity. Those are practices and behaviors that have to change throughout the entire company, team level, product level, portfolio level, even individual level, those are practices and behavior, performance, or quantitative metrics, that’s what we’re all in love with. And it’s cycle time, velocity throughput, mean time to recover all of the quantitative metrics, then outcomes or OKRs. And through this outcomes, or did we achieve the results that we thought and that’s the power of what we’re bringing together and Agility Health is maturity, performance and outcomes and visualizing that at the team level, at the product level, at the portfolio or at the enterprise level.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:20

So maybe to stick on the first one around maturity, right. So practices and behaviors pretty straightforward, right? But I would also look at organizational structure in architecture, maturity, right? I will put that in a separate category, because there you can look at, policies, you can look at the art governance, you can look at that. And for instance, you talked about, I think with Nick plus one in that podcast about organizational structure around product lines, right, versus being in and having that type of structure rather than traditional, maybe siloed matrix type of structure. So would you agree that organizational structure is also part of that maturity and like policy?

Speaker: Sally Elatta  19:13

Yeah, 100% so when you look at the radar called EBA, Enterprise Business Agility radar, what we measure there is not practices and behaviors like team level, what we measure, there are seven pillars. The first one is customer seat at the table, and that measures product maturity, and product discovery and design thinking. The second one is lean portfolio management. And it is have we shifted to outcome-based planning, and have we shifted to quarterly and did we change our funding models? The third one is the one you just talked about. Team design, organizational design, value stream, we’re not talking about physical redesign, we’re talking about logical team structure, are we putting the right business, it doesn’t matter business technology teams, back end, front end, it shouldn’t really matter. Who are the teams that can be aligned to the outcomes that we just identified. 

And then Agile is number four, leadership and culture is number five, make it stick and sustaining the change is number six, and then technical agility, and digital transformation is number seven. So that radar, you can just imagine the concepts that we talked about there. And what we measure from a crawl, walk, run is very different than at the team level.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:22

That’s almost like a meta level, like, when you looking at the whole organization. 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  20:26

Exactly. And I would say organizational structure is at the core of a lot of the work that’s happening right now. But I will also argue that it should be preceded by outcome-based planning, because you’re supposed to design your structure, with understanding what are the business outcomes you’re trying to achieve over the next couple of years, so that I can align the valuations. I see a lot of companies today that are redesigning their teams away from systems, but still, I would say in a way that still does not align to outcomes, may have shifted from system based and they’ve moved to more capabilities. But when you’re still saying, how do I get outcomes completed, you’re still having to go stand in 100 different lines within the company. And there’s so much dependency, there’s not flow. And if you want to flow, you’re going to have to organize teams to achieve flow of outcomes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:14

Yeah. And just to clarify, you’re talking about for audience that are listening, when you say systems, you mean IT systems, typically, organizations have been organized by IT systems. So why do you think like, it’s almost like when it comes.. this is without any data, it’s just subjective. But if I had to evaluate, like maturity of most organizations around their understanding of organizing by outcomes and flow, it’s very, very low. And I think it’s easy to say, let’s have the teams do Agile, or let’s be agile at the team level. But that structural, or really what is business architecture? I’m assuming, because that’s where those outcomes are. I don’t see many organizations are very mature in that domain.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  22:05

I would say that whole movement is just getting started. And I would say it’s going to take us the next three to five years, to really take organizations to the next level, we as a community, whether agile or technology have been focused on outputs and have been focused on projects and deadlines. And even PMI, project management, is everything’s about a project. And I think shifting that entire mindset to say, but what is it that you’re trying to achieve? And working with so many companies, I’ll tell you, even business leaders struggle to answer that question. It’s so easy for them to tell you three years from now, here’s my strategic intent, and I want to conquer the market, and I want to have X million, billions of dollars. But if you ask them, but what’s the strategy for this year to achieve that vision? And how can you break that strategy into a quarterly outcome? That’s very difficult, because in my opinion, outcomes, especially one year and quarterly, are a reflection of your strategy. And I think that not every executive and leader is very good at strategy. 

We are all as a community not good at strategy. I think we’re okay at setting goals, lofty goals, KPIs. Conquer this market, by this date, achieve X number of new memberships. That’s wonderful. Those are goals. How are you going to get there is strategy and those are what the OKRs should be written as is, what is it? What are the leading indicators that I can move that will get me to these impact metrics that you just told me, there’s lagging, and there’s leading, and I think there’s a whole art and science that will be developed around that we’ve been working in this field for a little bit of time, and it’s very immature.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:43

Yeah. So maturity, performance outcomes, they kind of build on each other. So we can look at maturity from many different perspectives, like you said, you know, we can look at maturity from behaviors, practices, systems, I think another thing that you mentioned that, I would look at is culture, maturity of the culture, what type of culture how resilient your culture, how diverse your culture is, organizational culture. But so, when we look at the maturity, and then looking at the performance, what are your thoughts from that perspective? Now, obviously, there’s correlation between, I’m assuming the more mature you are, the higher performance is that, or… 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  24:27

There is a correlation, we just published a report with the business agility Institute, and with Deloitte, that talks about the top predictors of team performance. And when we talk about team performance, we were looking at five different things predictability, our team delivering in a predictable fashion, time to market how long does it take for them to release and how frequently do they release and what’s the cycle time value delivery? Are they actually delivering value? And that could also be business value outcomes, but also throughput, are they giving me more quality? Is it performance metrics and then responsiveness, how fast do they respond to change. So we looked inside the radar, the team health radar, and we found some leading indicators and the drivers. So we looked at the top performing teams, and the lowest performing teams, and we are like, what’s the correlation? What is it that they were doing differently?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:15

How exciting is that by the way? You have like [inaudible] [25:18]

Speaker: Sally Elatta  25:20

I’ve been waiting. Honestly, it’s just like you kind of you build data, you build data, you build data for the day where you can do this, or like, yeah, let’s make sense of it. So I was really, really happy. Because obviously, people can download their report from our homepage, agilityhealthradar.com. But the top five drivers, two of them, three of them, here are going to say, oh, that makes sense. But some of the other ones I think were surprising. So the number one was iteration, short iterations. So highest performing teams, plan and deliver in short increments of value check. Like, I think that makes a lot of sense to all of us agilist, which is great. 

The second one was planning and estimating, teams that know how to break work into smaller chunks and plan that an estimated well, are higher performing and deliver, which is wonderful. The third one kind of got me excited, T shaped individuals, generalized specialist, team members that are empowered to play other roles, not just their specialty role, basically teams that are allowed to do whatever it takes to get the work done, and that are cross skilled and cross trained. And then the last two are my favorite. Next one is self-organization. Organizing teams are all about empowerment. And I love that one. Because it’s a cultural value of agile, it’s not a practice, you know what I mean? It’s not like a daily stand up, or writing user stories with acceptance criteria. It’s a cultural thing that we’ve always said agile stands with. And that was number four. And then number five is creativity and innovation, allowing teams to be creative, and allowing them to identify the how they’re going to solve the problem, giving them the problem to be solved, and empowering them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:04

So that’s almost like autonomy, right? Like, it’s certainly that the autonomy and giving them… 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  27:09

It’s a self-organization. Yeah. So I love that two out of the five, self-organization and creativity are all about empowerment and autonomy. You know what I mean? So I thought that was super cool in that we can now quantifiably say, the teams that have actually invested in maturing, those are 37%, higher performing than teams that were not mature in those five competencies. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:31

So let’s maybe talk about, I want to talk maybe about a couple of these. The third one that you mentioned, which is T shaped people, I think that’s pretty common, right? But in organizations, the idea comes back to the mindset, right of developing, be willing, it’s a choice, personal choice, do I want to be the T shaped person? Cross functional, it’s like people are going to put me on a team, I have no say.  But understanding like, as coming from a development background, you understand that, as a developer, you’re not just producing code, you’re solving problems, right? So thinking about what skills do I need to have to help my team solve problems is different. And it’s a personal choice to develop T shape. So what do you think and what are you seeing maybe from both quantitative and qualitative? How hard is that in some organizations, because and also in some cultures, I’m actually working with a bank in Saudi Arabia, and also at work with people from back home, and then the Balkans. And that mindset of somebody thinking of themselves as developing, as a T shaped person is not an option for them, they’d rather go somewhere else and work. So it’s a personal choice, in essence, is to develop that T shaped skills. So what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: Sally Elatta  28:57

It is and I completely agree with you. First of all, it has to be a culture that the company supports and advocates for and says, Guys, it’s so important for us that everybody’s cross trained, it’s important for us that everybody has a backup, and maybe even creating the activities. We play a game in our companies called the skill wall is something that we teach other people. And the skill wall is where everybody kind of says, what’s my primary skill? Specialty, remember that the long part of the team? And then we ask them, what’s your secondary skill or what would you like to be a secondary skill? And we brainstorm as a team, what skills are we missing on the team? Where are the gaps that we have? And we ask people to move the sticky notes from the backlog of skills basically, into their secondary, and then we asked who wants to be mentored and coached? So we make it more of an interactive conversation as opposed to your boss said that you need to learn how to do front end development because that’s what we need to do. So I think that just that whole culture of opening the conversation and saying as a team, what skills are we missing? What are the skills gaps? Rank them and prioritize them as a team, what do we have today? And what are the gaps? I think that’s all very important to be honest with you in the Middle East in some other countries, career progression, and certifications and moving to the next level and getting a promotion sometimes is more important than supporting the team on delivering the value. And so everybody’s almost like, what’s in it for me, if I learned that thing, am I going to get certified? Will I get paid more? And if the answer is no, then it’s like, well, why would I need to do that. So that’s why I’m saying it’s a culture, it’s a mindset thing. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:35

But it goes back to what you said about whoever learns the fastest and delivers faster, is going to have advantage. So, these companies and cultures, in many instances, are influencing the organizational culture as well. And I see that as a challenge too, because being from one of those countries, working with people from one of those countries in those companies, I can see that cultural aspects. So,

Speaker: Sally Elatta  31:11

And I don’t want to stereotype for anybody listening to us, sort in here or Africa or whatever, there’s no one size fits all this problem we’re talking about exists here in the United States. People here in the US also are protecting their job. And people that have been there in the company for 30, 40 years, you know, are afraid to teach people things because they want job security. So there’s a lot of different things, that influence this, and I think fear of losing my job, and just making a mistake and doing it wrong. There’s a lot of different things. And I think it’s all over where.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:42

It is I agree. And it’s one of those things that maybe to tie back to it that you mentioned in another talk, middle managers or managers and the role of managers is to help people understand like, hey, what skills do you want to develop? These are the skills that we need, and helping the team. So could you maybe talk about the middle managers in this instance, people that are responsible for helping other people develop skills. And what is the correlation between managers, and their role in helping individuals develops.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  32:20

Managers are critical part of the next journey, I would say for agile and digital maturity, one of our radars is on the agile leader, how do I develop myself as an agile leader. And one of the core things that we measure and we assess there is developing talent, assessing your existing talent gaps within the teams and developing it. Another one is developing people. So coaching as a manager, coaching one on one or as a team and helping people grow. Number three is developing strong teams that are actually delivering value measured by those three different things. And then customer focus, how can managers engage the teams with their customers? That is very different than today. And also sorry, the another one that we measure is designing cross functional teams. So how can I as a manager design stable, remember stable, cross functional teams that can deliver value? What measures

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:13

And T shapes I guess in the people…

Speaker: Sally Elatta  33:16

And T shapes yeah. Today, managers move people around all the time between priorities, they do a lot of firefighting and solve problems on a day-to-day basis. I don’t think that they do a lot of coaching, some managers do, but not every manager loves it. This is a very big shift, I would say it’s one of the biggest shifts that’s going to happen is that the role of the manager has really been disrupted. And there’s a completely new role for them to play and removing obstacles. Remember, when I said when we use Agility Health, we identify all of these issues and challenges that the teams are saying, guess whose backlog that is, that’s the management backlog. And so we teach managers how to prioritize this backlog and how to commit to two or three things in the next three months that they’re going to do to support their teams. That is servant leadership. You know, we’ve been talking about servant leadership for years. To me, real servant leadership is when the managers say, tell me what your problems are. Let me work as a team on removing that for you. That is servant leadership.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:13

It is and another thing that maybe just to touch upon, around theme design, is now we have a lot of people that work in remotely some mixture, different time zones. And I don’t know if you have any data on that, but it would be interesting. A lot of times managers are putting people together like plug and play like, oh, we need developer, here, he is a developer, do you have any data or any insights around for the last I guess now almost two years of teams that are fully remote or maybe combination of those teams in different time zones. When you look at maturity, and performance, is there any correlation or anything that..

Speaker: Sally Elatta  34:58

Surely I can share with you that let’s just think about COVID. We did an analysis pre COVID. And after COVID, because we just wanted to see in what way, and we just wanted to see if maturity was going to decrease because everybody’s remote right now. And in fact, maturity increased. So the same teams, before COVID, versus after COVID, you’ll see a very consistent increase in team maturity and performance. So, my data scientists told me, you can’t say that it was the driver, so we forget that because people, work from home, that is why they matured, you can’t create a, what do they call it like a causation effect, right, it’s not causing it. But what I can definitely tell you is it didn’t impact it negatively. I would tell you, from almost all the teams that we talked to, they’re saying they’re more productive, especially when the team is fully remote. 

I think the hardest thing that we’ve seen is when teams are half remote and half in person, the fact that they are remote, don’t get the right attention. But now that some of these teams are all fully remote, it’s 100% remote, then you’ve now designed everything you’ve designed every interaction, every meeting, every brainstorming session, to be for those remote team workers. And so everybody’s got an equal footing. I’ve also heard from customers that there’s a lot more engagement across the globe, because everybody’s working remotely, that they’re able to bring in people that they normally wouldn’t have invited to the session to participate in the session. So I think that not saying anything against co located team members, if you’ve got the full team sitting in the same room in the same office in the same building, wonderful, more power to you. But in the world we live in right now, that’s become a little bit difficult. And so if you have to design it, it would be best to design it to be either fully remote, or like fully in person.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:49

What about like new teams that are being put together? And the reason I ask is like that initial developing trust, right? So like, if you and I are put together and like we’ve never met each other. It might be harder to develop trust versus when we’re in person, but I’m just guessing here. Do you have any insights around, like teams that are put together? And how, I don’t know probably but like, how relative to the team that’s in person or when it comes to maturity how do they…. Yeah.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  37:27

I think there’s no doubt that relationships are going to be forged to be stronger. When people are kind of in person because they get to have the coffee breaks, they get to go have lunch together, they get to see each other everyday, like, hey how are you, you don’t look good. And so I think that from a relationship perspective, you’re going to see stronger relationships with team members that are able to see each other. I do however, see a lot of organizations we do the same, where if we have remote teams, once a year, we’ll bring them together in person, meaning it could be during forming. Or it could be after that I personally think that it should be after they’ve already formed. Because when people are forming, they’re not being truly open and honest with each other yet, it’s very kind of category, a little bit formal relationships. But I think give them three months of working together. And then create a team building events where they can see each other, it will go a long way, a long way in building those reports. And it’s honestly why a lot of virtual teams are starting to figure out online games, and virtual coffee, and just stuff that makes them allows them to be together and laugh and have a little bit of fun.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:37

Yeah, it is, I think it’s going to be very interesting how it evolves, because I think this is here to stay. And we’ll see maybe the next one, the fourth one that you talked about, which is the self-management and self-organization, that’s another one that, you know, how many people like you know, want to be self-managed, some people want to be self-managed, some don’t. But organizations that can help team members see the benefit in self-management, right, and create maybe the environment of trust. But in a lot of instances, I see where people don’t want to self-manage or self-organize. It’s like, no, I’d rather have people tell me and have some type of person help me organize rather than me being accountable for. When it comes to maturity, performance and now outcomes. Is there any or what type of correlation do you see in that mindset of people that do want to maybe that’s the maturity more mature teams do want to self-organize.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  39:50

Well, I mean, it’s one of our five which means that I can tell you factually that teams that have invested in being self-organizing, and I want to differentiate that from self-managed teams because there’s a definition online that says self-managing teams are teams that can hire and fire people on the team. So they actually have management experience, you know, management authority, and self-organizing teams are teams that are given the vision, what the problem is, but are allowed to be creative around how they’re going to solve it and their tasks and some of that, so self-organizing teams, along with those other five, the four are 37%, higher performing than teams that are not. So that’s quantitatively, we now know that there’s a 37%, higher performance for teams that do invest in being self-organized, being creative, having tipped individuals planning and estimating well, and delivering in small increments. 

It’s just a fact now, so that’s good to know. But I also agree with you that not everybody, you can’t just turn it on be like, hey, you’re empowered, be self-organizing. And everybody’s like, yay, I would even say some cultural things happen. There are some cultures that want to be told there are some different types of people, younger people don’t want to be told what to do. So I think age and culture and the company itself in the history, fear, if a company is driven by fear of making mistakes, and somebody is going to be reprimanded, they’re not going to want to be self-organizing. So there’s a lot that goes into the really creating a self-organizing team. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:26

But that goes back to like, maybe maturity of the managers, because a lot of managers, if you’re saying like managers are responsible for removing roadblocks for maturity of the teams, helping managers understand how to do that, because I think if they’re that glue for the teams, a lot more effort than we typically see should be spent in developing those managers so they can help the teams, design the teams remove those obstacles. And that’s another thing that it seems like we’re not spending in organizations enough. And developing those leaders and managers.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  42:06

One of our new certifications. So we have, if everybody’s familiar with us, we have something called the Agility Health facilitator certification. And that is to enable people to facilitate the team health retro, the DevOps assessment, any of our radars, you have to be a facilitator, so you can learn how to, because again, data is very powerful. Using it the right way. The next one that we just created, that we’re launching next year is called Continuous Improvement Champion the CIC certification. The whole purpose of a Continuous Improvement Champion is somebody who can influence managers and leaders on removing obstacles for the teams, and building continuous improvement programs. That was a very big missing gap that we saw clearly, like you said, is that we are not focusing on enabling and coaching managers and leaders. They do not know we give them all these, we call them organizational growth items, improvements, they don’t know what to do with them. 

They’re too big, they’re fixed. They don’t know how to break them down into stories. They need a coach, they need somebody to coach the management team. And so that’s honestly why we created the new CIC the Continuous Improvement Champion. Because of this problem, we do have them ourselves. We train a lot of managers. But we think that we as an agile coaching community should shift to understanding that continuous improvement starts with leaders and managers, not just teams, and that all of us have to be part of that journey.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:26

Exactly. Could you maybe share, like a client story or something that, maybe resonates with what we’re talking about here? I’m sure you have plenty, but maybe something that’s on your mind that, maybe related to how they use the radar, or how they help managers.

Speaker: Sally Elatta  43:50

Yeah, I mean, all of them have a manager aspect to it. But I’ll just give you a couple examples, one, maybe I’ll talk about one company that wanted to go wide. I’ll give you two stories, one company go wide, which is we have to 1700 teams, we need all of them to… 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:06

1700? 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  43:50

1700 teams. Yeah, like really like almost 20,000 people, I think it was. Their goal across five different CIOs. And their goal was, we need to get a baseline. Where are we today? What’s our maturity? What’s our performance? And we need all these teams to learn about agile and DevOps practices. And we’re like, well, do you only want to do the agile teams? Do you want to do some other ones, they’re like, we don’t care, all teams. Because the whole point of this is not to collect data. The whole point is to educate all those teams on what does good look like in terms of agile and technical practices. So that was an organization as you can imagine that each line of business we had to create a continuous improvement team within each one of them. And we had to certify a lot of different facilitators. And we ran what we call two by two by two. So we had two weeks where we launched all of the assessments and people were able to answer them, and we had two weeks where the team members came back with their team and did a retrospective of facilitated retrospective and built an action plan. 

And then we had two weeks where all the managers had to roll up the data and identify one or two things, they were going to help the teams and commit to it. So very aggressive two by two by two, that was across, 1700 teams. Another company, they’ve been using scaled agile in the financial industry, using safe for many, many years, over three to five years they said, but they said that the inspect and they adapt, and the everything was very subjective. And they didn’t have enough data to tell them where they should really actually focus. And everybody that was complaining was concerned like a squeaky wheel like there was no really data to drive leaders. And so when they started to adopt Agility Health, that was the problem they’re trying to solve. And they said, the most powerful aspect was the voice of the teams, being able to see what people were saying and the comments, were all saying the same thing. And their problems were churn, too much churn, change in priority, the plan never stay stable. And the teams did not understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. There was no alignment to business value. And I remember there was like 800, different organizational growth items that came out of that organization. The managers were all trained, they started to remove obstacles, and they did demos back to the teams, I think it was once a month or once a quarter in the all hands, the managers themselves demoed back to the teams, what they solved for them. 

And the end of the day, from a bottom line perspective, the team’s I believe, throughput increased by 50%. They were achieving, sorry, there was sorry, five additional teams, there was 90 teams, those 90 teams were able to deliver five additional teams throughput, without changing the number of team members that were much more productive, much happier, more aligned, they all now understood the business outcomes. So that’s another story of 90 teams, it was a portfolio within a large financial institution.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:08

Something that you also said, remind me of like you collect a lot of data, right? And people can sometimes question that data, they can question that. So, what do you do? And I think many of us know if people don’t trust the data, or they don’t trust the people that are collecting the data. A lot of this kind of is pointless, right? If you don’t have the right, or accurate representation, or people fearing how this is going to be used. So what are some of the things that you do, you help companies do to create that environment where people feel safe to really share what’s

Speaker: Sally Elatta  47:52

Going on? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:52

Yeah, 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  47:53

Rule number one, and this is my famous quote is if you ever punish or reward the teams or their leaders, you’ll never see the truth again. So let’s repeat it again. If you ever punish or reward the teams, or their leaders for the data, the output of Agility Health, you’ll never see the truth again. So the way to monkey with data, the way to really scrub data is to try to punish or reward based on the data, the moment that you do that people will gain any data can be gained in JIRA, any data can be gained if you put a carrot and a stick around it. So we believe that Agility Health as a platform is only meant to help you grow. So that’s number one is that rule. 

Number two is the sessions themselves. The reason why we have a facilitator, everybody’s like, well, why can’t we just send the survey, everybody’s at their desk, let’s just have them fill out the surveys. We don’t do it that way. The reason you come into a retrospective, and there’s a certified facilitator is for psychological safety is so that facilitator can show you, your answer is going to be adopt. It’s anonymous. Please be open and honest. This meeting, our goal is to create breakthroughs for the next quarter. What are those big elephants in the room that we haven’t talked about that are causing us? The whole purpose of a facilitated session is to create psychological safety. It’s to make people feel open and honest and feel safe. And it’s for people to be present. Everybody’s overwhelmed by surveys, like no one wants to fill out another survey at their desk. And I think that when people think about data gathering as surveys, they’ve missing the whole point of continuous improvement. It’s the conversation that matters, yes, we gathered data, but it’s that conversation. And it’s that commitment to action by the team members themselves. Not a big shot, Agile coach that’s coming in. It’s the team members themselves in that moment said, you know, I really think we want to improve our quality. That’s what we’re all voting on right now. 

Now they’re going to actually do it. They’re really going to improve on quality because it was their commitment as opposed to your manager or the Big Shot enterprise coach said you need to improve quality. So that’s our magic sauce honestly, is creating psychological safety through facilitation, allowing the team members themselves to decide on what they want to work on. And then from the beginning teaching the leaders and the executives that they cannot punish or reward for results of a radar.  

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:18

I love how you put that. And another thing that I guess that’s going through my head is coming back to maturity performance, those are all means to help organization with outcomes, which is the last one, right. And maybe just to clarify to something that I’ve heard you say there are business outcomes and transformation outcomes, right. So when we measure maturity, when we look at performance, it’s really to say like, how are we doing with our business outcomes? How are we doing with our transformation outcomes? That’s the I don’t know if it’s the end goal. But that’s definitely the impact that you’re looking for. How’s my organization? Like you said, at the beginning, being faster, be learning faster, delivering fast. So could you maybe just talk for a second about business outcomes, and transformation outcomes as the last thing just to wrap this? 

Speaker: Sally Elatta  51:15

Sure, like when you think about business outcomes, like, let’s say you’re in a product type business, you’re a product company. So you’re going to think about pirate metrics, which is AARRR, activation, acquisition, revenue, retention, referral. So from a product perspective, am I acquiring customers? Am I converting customers? Am I generating revenue from these customers? Am I retaining the customers? Are they referring? Are we expanding our market? It’s going to be bottom line numbers, are we generating more revenue? Are we reducing costs? Those are great, those were all business outcomes. And to be honest with you, that is what executives they know how to generate those. 

But when you speak to them, what they think about immediately is the impact metric, what they want done in two years from now. What’s very hard on the business outcomes is identifying leading indicators, leading indicators are, what are the metrics that we have control over their levers that could make that impact metric happen. And that’s what I said, that’s the art and science of what’s coming next in the Agile world is us learning and teaching executives, and leaders and business leaders how to find leading indicators that can really impact your outcome metrics. Transformation metrics are wonderful. But they’re different than business metrics, because it’s all about doing what we do better. So increasing time to market, improving quality, a lot of the things that we say, this is why I’m investing in digital, it’s being more flexible, moving to the cloud, there’s a lot of things that we’re doing that not necessarily are going to have a direct business impact. But they’re about us being more operationally efficient, faster, better. And so those were kind of transformational outcomes. 

And they’re usually around, flow, increasing flow, improving value, delivery, quality and happiness of our people. So we call it flow, value, quality, happiness, I’m sure you’ve read the book, also, from Jonathan Smart about, safer, faster, happier teams, I always say those in the wrong order. But those four metrics of flow, value, quality, happiness, a lot of people are starting to anchor around that as the four ways to measure business agility.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  53:23

Great. And I really, like how you distinguish those because there’s definitely, difference and different focus. And also, this goes back to the policies like changing how we incentivize leaders to look at those, both of these and look at the leading indicators, not just hey, this is what I’m responsible for this year, and how we’re doing against that. And, you know, maybe as a last thing, one of the things that, I’ve thought about is like, many coaches many consultants don’t fully understand how to engage with Agility Health. And there’s a lot of stuff that you share with me earlier, before we started recording I wasn’t aware of so could you maybe just share what are some of the opportunities for coaches, consultants, others that might be interested of how can they use Agility Health radars, but also your videos, too. I was joking. Like, I know Sally from playing some of your videos in my classes and those are great. And I didn’t even know this is another thing. I didn’t even know that you had a subscription type of where. So could you maybe talk about both of those?

Speaker: Sally Elatta  54:42

Sure. Last year we built something called a referral program. So it’s an affiliate referral program because we just had so many independent coaches that love what we do they love like you said agile videos they already recommended anyway, they play it in some of their, courses, or they really want to bring Agility Health into the customer that they’re working with and they want to be certified. So the affiliate or the referral program basically is, if somebody wants to get certified, they want to join the program. And I always say, please only join the program when you have a customer because we’ve also spent a lot of time enabling people and getting them up and running, but they didn’t have any active customer. 

So again, rule number one is just when you feel like you actually have a customer that is potentially interested in either agile videos as a learning library or Agility Health as a measurement, we call it learn, measure, grow. So they’re interested in either learn or measure and grow, reach out to us, you can reach out to us at partners@agilityhealthradar.com, and just say, hey, I have a customer, how can I get started, I’d like to refer them. So what we do is we schedule a demo or an overview with that customer and you there as well. And if the customer moves forward and buys anything, then we have a 20% Thank you, we call it a thank you bonus that we can do for agile videos. And then we have a 10% for Agility Health. But we also certify you at no cost. So if people want to get certified, because we want them to deliver, we want them to be an integral part of delivering for that customer. 

Again, like I mentioned to you, we’ve moved on to the consulting business. So we use our partners as the ones that actually deliver and do a lot of the implementation. So we would also train you and show you how to implement, whether it’s agile videos or Agility Health, so that you and the customer are successful. So that’s basically it, it’s really quite simple. Just once you have a customer, email us at partners@agilityhealthradar.com. If they move forward, and we schedule a demo, and they want to move forward, then you get 20% for agile videos, or 10 to 15% for Agility Health, and you also get certified and trained at no cost.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  56:47

Right. Great. That’s again, I think that’s something that many don’t know. So thank you for sharing that. Maybe as a last thing. So you were joking earlier, like you’re looking at a lot of data. It’s exciting. From a leadership perspective, I was talking to Evan, and I was kind of business agility Institute. And one of the things that he mentioned that, year after year, is coming up as either one or two is leadership and leadership mindset. What would you maybe say about leadership, importance of leadership or anything that for leaders that are listening, or that working with leaders that they should pay attention, or maybe is the most critical things for them to think about as leaders?

Speaker: Sally Elatta  57:43

Well, there’s a lot we have a radar for leaders. So I would first say…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  57:47

I know but like is there anything that stands out that, or maybe a couple of things that

Speaker: Sally Elatta  57:54

I think designing teams in the right way, and aligning them around business outcomes, and then as leaders understanding what business problem they’re trying to solve for their customer. So I think just the whole customer centricity, and customer focus, and designing teams the right way, because leaders can make or break the structure of teams, and then the whole self-organization and getting out of the weeds and not like micromanaging. To me, I mean, those four things that I just mentioned are like, make it or break it from an agile perspective. 

So I could throw so many more things like talent development. I mean, I want to talk about that, too. But I think that, if you really think about how do I know that this leader is successful, I’m going to ask, did you design your teams effectively? You have the right skills, are they focused on the right business outcomes? And are they able to talk to their customer directly? And are you removing obstacles for them? You know what I mean? And then if you say yes to all those things I’m like, great, you’re doing a great job as a manager, as a leader. If you’re an executive, then there’s also vision and strategy, then there’s also being inspiring. There’s also kind of creating that, big picture and motivating people to get there. If you’re an Executive leader.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  59:10

Great, great advice. Anything else? Maybe that I didn’t ask you, that I forgot to ask you. Is there anything else that?

Speaker: Sally Elatta  59:19

No, really, I just want to wish everybody Happy Holidays and Happy New Year, and then hopefully, they come home and they just, you know, I believe in positive energy. And I believe that the energy that we put out there manifests itself. So let’s kind of dump the 2021 and 2020 energy, and sort of really just be hopeful and excited about what’s coming ahead. I think we’re all going to be super busy. And I think just, I want to say one thing, don’t forget the lessons that you’ve learned through COVID If you’ve spent more time with your children or with your family. Don’t forget about that. Because even though we’re going to be super crazy, I’ve learned to stay home more I’ve learned to cook better. I’ve learned to take care of my Health. I did you know keto and I lost weight. And I can totally see that if I get really busy again, I might forget some of these lessons and I think it’s important for us to not forget those really important life lessons that we’ve all learned in the last few years.