Aug. 6, 2024
Episode 332: In the Dynamics Corner Chair: Adapting Leadership Styles for Different Team Modes
When using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, there is a significant focus on the technological and developmental aspects of the team. One crucial but often overlooked concept is the management of a technology team. In this discussion, Christian Lenz joins Brad and Kris to explore the concept of elastic leadership and the different team modes – such as survival mode, learning mode, and self-organizing mode. The conversation also delves into the role of behavior in team dynamics and emphasizes the importance of ongoing expectation management.
Connect with Christian Lenz:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/curate-ideas/
#MSDyn365BC #BusinessCentral #BC #DynamicsCorner
Follow Kris and Brad for more content:
https://matalino.io/bio
https://bprendergast.bio.link/
00:00 - Adaptive Leadership in Team Dynamics
07:43 - Leadership Styles and Team Dynamics
17:16 - Focused Learning Sprints in Agile Environment
25:15 - Remote Learning Sprints and Elastic Leadership
38:29 - Team Development Through Learning Phases
55:12 - Effective Communication and Commitments
01:04:19 - Managing Expectations and Commitments
WEBVTT
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Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner, the podcast where we dive deep into all things Microsoft Dynamics.
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Whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting your journey into the world of Dynamics 365, this is your place to gain insights, learn new tricks and how to manage a team.
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I'm your co-host, chris.
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This is Brad.
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This episode was recorded on July 17th 2024.
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Chris, Chris, Chris.
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A team, A team Building a team Working with a team A team could just be yourself too.
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Maybe have a team.
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I don't know, team of one, a team of one, I guess.
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I guess you could have a team of one.
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Today we had a great conversation all about teams, all about the phase the team is in, how to build your team, how do you grow your team and how to work with the team.
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Today we had the opportunity to speak with Christian Lentz.
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Christian good morning.
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How are you doing?
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Yeah, good morning.
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I'm doing very well this morning or afternoon here in Germany.
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Yeah, I'm very happy that you approached me and that you're having me.
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No, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today.
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I've been looking forward to speaking with you, as we are with every guest, and before we get into it, would you mind telling everyone a little bit about yourself?
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Yeah, I'm working at a German partner for Microsoft Navision for nearly 28 years now and I'm in the field for Navision LAV BC for nearly 25 years.
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In the beginning, I was a finance consultant and after doing the first projects, I developed as a developer and worked as a developer many projects Back then.
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These were one-man shows in the early years, but the projects grew bigger.
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We need more people and I raised to a project manager where I worked many years, led development teams, consulting teams for for big and small projects, and decided in 2018 to shift in an internal role in our organization to bring this whole new stuff about going to the cloud and shifting to a, a language in development to to my colleagues just to condense it developing learning formats for my colleagues that they can pick up those big piles of information to to be able to maintain our customers, and I'm supporting that.
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I gave myself the role as development facilitator to make it easier for my colleagues to, yeah, get everything they need to know for the process.
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That's awesome.
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Make it easier, make it easy.
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Excellent, excellent.
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No, that's nice.
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It sounds like you've been around doing this for quite a while, as they say.
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There's a lot of us around here and one of the things that I wanted to talk with you about that I saw that you promote is a sense of team modes and leadership.
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I know that you talked about that.
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I seen some of the information that you have posted on that.
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I have shared with that.
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I just wanted to talk a little bit more about that and how that fits, you know, obviously with the sounds of your history and with the current role that you have, as well as within a business central type of role.
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Yeah, I came upon this topic of elastic leadership and the different team modes and to adapt the leadership style.
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Came upon this topic of elastic leadership and different team modes and to adapt the leadership style.
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While taking a look outside the Microsoft bubble.
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I'm going to other conferences and during the pandemic many things got to another mode and virtual conferences, so it was very easy to participate in those as well.
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And then I learned this elastic leadership model, which was developed by ryan osheroff, and it was very, very good to see that you don't have to be a certain kind of leader.
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It is often expected from from you as a team lead or a project lead or something like that.
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Just look at in which phase your team is in and then adapt your leadership style so you don't have one size fits all leadership style, which is really hard to maintain and often not the appropriate mode, just to be able.
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What should I observe and what can I do to assess the phases my team is in?
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Are they in survival mode, are they ready to be in the learning phase and are they ready to be in the self-organizing phase?
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Everyone was expecting in the last years and my experience was that many company managers forced teams to switch to self-organizing mode in an instant, while being in survival mode, just jumping too quick from the survival mode and thinking, yeah, let's all be self-organized as the solution for all our problems, and that didn't work out very well.
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So you have to assess in which phase you're in and then, when you're not in the right phase, what can you do to go to the next phase?
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You hit on some points.
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Yeah.
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Just with that there, but before we get a little bit deeper, you mentioned elastic leadership and, based on the conversation you just had, I have a good understanding of what elastic leadership is.
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But can you tell us what elastic leadership is?
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Yeah, it's this adaptive leadership style.
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It's, uh, yeah, adapting to the faces your, your team is in, your other people you're in.
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So the base um assumption is you can grow your team and then think of okay, what is the appropriate leadership style in this phase and the the goal to grow the team to a self-organizing team doesn't mean it stays there, so it can shift back to to another team, to another phase, back to survival mode, and then also be elastic in your leadership style and adapted to the phase the team is in this moment and then perhaps act more like a captain of a ship instead of the facilitator role you have when you are with a self-organizing team.
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Self-organizing team.
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With that elastic leadership model, is the leadership group consistent or would you have different leadership based on the phase that the team is in?
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So I understand it's an adaptive model, but is it adaptive to the sense where a person would change the leadership role or is it?
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Just the leadership style.
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It's more the leadership style, regardless of who is the leader in this phase.
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It could be a designated team lead or it could be a team member who is taking the role of a leader.
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And then it is more about the behavior.
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It is more about how do I interact, how do I communicate with, with the team members, and something like that and, adapted to the face, you're currently in the team see Brad behavior.
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I'm kind of speechless because it's it's.
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So much comes to my mind, because of the points that you have made, that things are different now in the way that we work as a group, the way that we work as people and, as you mentioned, there's different phases of projects, right?
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So if you're working on projects, whatever it may be, or even the development of a new team for a new group or a new project, you have different levels and I think there's a lot of times there's an assumption made that everybody works and thinks the same.
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Therefore, the leadership style is consistent throughout, where, in reality, as you're saying it's, it's almost behavioral based in a sense.
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yeah, it's about how you, how you communicate with the team and with your communication you shape the conditions for the team.
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For example, in this mode I think we have to talk about what is the definition of survival mode in this model.
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In this model, survival mode means that you don't have time to learn, so you're constantly fixing fires, you're constantly busy with acting on starting to build features and finishing them and everything like that, and you're not able to pick up new things.
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And in this VC space and for us, as old enough dinosaurs, many new things came up and we were very struggling with how can we get the time to soak this up and be able to maintain our customers in the new world and bring them there.
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So this was kind of a survival mode for us, even if we are not really projects that are forcing us to fix files all the time.
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But if we have no time to learn at some point in time, we are not able to maintain our customers with this product.
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So, coming to this, we need to make time and that is something you can do with some methods.
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I learned and I taught at workshops excellent when you're in survival mode, do you?
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And some are fast learners and can get to self-managing.
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Is it more of an individual approach with different modes, versus the entire group, because sometimes you have different levels of skill set?
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So is that how do you manage that?
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When you have like, for example, you have younger talents.
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Someone new may not understand your internal process, so in many cases they're surviving as well.
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Is that is my understanding?
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Correct you?
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These team modes can also be individual team members as well?
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That you're okay?
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It could be okay, could be it could be, and the tendency is that those fast learners pick up many tasks because they get features done and this, on the one hand side, relieves the team of some of the stresses they are in in the project, but on the other hand, the team is in very high risk if these fast learners are not available and cannot pick up something else.
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So one of the aspects is that you look at your best factors in your team, which means how many people need to get hit by a bus to stop the team from working, whereas the bus factor of one is the riskiest.
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And if you look close into these teams with different skilled people and when you have different talents that are needed, you get in this situation very early.
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And to remove these best factors is to make free time to learn that others can learn these skills as well.
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So you distribute the knowledge you need to have in this team for more team members so that you get more free time in the next phases that you get more free time in the next phases.
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Take it a step back.
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We talked about survival mode and we talked about the elastic leadership.
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What are the modes that a team would fall into within these leadership styles?
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So we talked about I think I heard you mention survival learning.
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What are the other phases of this process?
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I think I heard you mention survival learning.
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What are the other phases of this process, and are they linear or does it vary from project to project, team to team?
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I would say it's varying, it is not linear and you stay there.
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So the three modes that are described as survival mode.
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Then the next phase is the learning phase.
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The learning mode and then the self-organizing mode, which is the goal mode you want to grow your team into.
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But there could be some disruptive technology and you are back in the survival mode.
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So you have to look at is there something my team needs to grow into?
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So I have to make time for them to be able to teach them these new technologies, for example.
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So I have to be adaptive in this phase.
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For example, when a new technology puts the team into survival mode.
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You have to be very direct with your commitments so you cannot put your commitments as you did when you were in your self organizing mode, because you need very much time to do the things with new technologies or new methods or something like that.
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So as a team lead, you have to be very strict in this phase with keeping the commitments, making the commitments and making your team members thinking about what they can really commit to, to keep some free time to go through the learning phase.
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When you're coming back into survival mode, then you take back the strict mode of leadership style and just look around how are they doing?
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Do they have all what they need?
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And something like that.
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Do you need something for me?
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So you're acting differently in those phases.
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Excellent, those phases, excellent.
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Now I still have so many leadership questions with this.
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It's one of the things even that you talk about.
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It's the survival mode, because then I think of the survival mode as you talked about, like if you have to learn something new and the benefits of learning something new, but also when someone is in survival mode, I also think of like the crisis and the stress and the anxiety of them as well too, and then the impact on the team and the benefits of learning something new.
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But also when someone is in survival mode, I also think of like the crisis and the stress and the anxiety of them as well too, and then the impact on the team and the impact on the output.
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And also you talked about retaining customers, or retaining or maintaining success based upon being in survival mode or not and not having the opportunity.
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And there has to be a balance, I think right, a balance between someone being in survival mode, where you know, again, survival is like that you know fight or flight, you know aggression uh, typically a little bit more stressful.
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You're trying to get things done.
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You talked about the firefights and then also is with that, okay, now we need to take some time to upskill or reskill our team to be able to work with whatever change may come that would drop us into survival mode.
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How do you assess the value of the learning and then the output and the effect on the team learning and then the output and the effect on the team, because that is also a challenge of if you take a look at.
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You talked about development.
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You know al development, this changes to the al language, this changes to the business central application, and this is even more so now and it's like my question that I'll have in perpetuity probably.
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How do you keep up is the question that I ask everybody, because we have so many rapid changes coming from the application point of view itself, the development environment.
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On top of that add solutions and technologies that integrate with the introduction of Power Platform, power BI, and you have some of these data-driven events within Azure.
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How do you assess all that and keep all that contained with the team and the group while still moving forward?
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I think how we approached this is that we created safe spaces where this daily operational mode is suspended.
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So what we try to establish is a format I called learning sprints Back in the time when we weren't agile, and sprints nobody knew about, just me and something like that.
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It was a bet for me to bring in this term, possibly loaded with positive experiences, so that is good to pick up.
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When we switch to these agile modes, we we tried, after every developer was educated in AL, how can we keep up this knowledge when the first projects with VC and AL will come, which could be for some of our colleagues, three years ahead, depending on the projects they're actually in back then, when they had NAD projects and we conducted small learning phases for four or five days and let the people work on what they ever wanted to work on, as long as they use AR language and the new tools, but not alone.
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I was in this role who was educated a little bit more and had my ear on the community and was hearing what is needed in this current moment, in this phase we are actually in.
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So I was one of those two people we also put in those sprints who could give some input and offer some help for the colleagues.
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And that was a learning opportunity for our colleagues.
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That was very well accepted.
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So they could pick their challenge, what they want to work on, and they had at least two people who can help them go in the first steps, but with a real thing they wanted to develop.
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It wasn't necessary that it was for a customer project, it could be, as long as it was intriguing them to make something new.
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As it was intriguing them to make something new and in the end, after the four or five days, something new is visible in the product that didn't exist before.
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So that was the principle we had.
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We were very strict on this time.
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It was not allowed to put any new task during this learning sprint for them, to put any new task during this learning sprint for them.
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So I as a conductor was very strict on keeping everything from outside, from my colleagues away, and I was very strict on there must be something visible that you can get feedback when something is using it.
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But everything else they can manage for themselves.
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I just hold the space for them and so spending the daily business was the key there.
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We had three to six colleagues in each sprint, which we didn't pick.
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Why are they on the same team or are they in the project we picked them?
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Who is in a phase there?
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He's not assigned to a project or something like that, so we can pick some people together and conduct the sprint, and we made this over three years, I think 10 or 12 times.
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So three years, 10 or 12 times.
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So you're doing it about four times a year with your group and then that also does help them become more comfortable, get out of survival mode and also for lack of better terms better service their customers or your customers.
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And they were allowed to pick any topic they like For your customers.
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And they were allowed to pick any topic they like.
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In the first phases it was AL VS Code and having source code management and something like that.
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We started with the basics and we tried to bring something new for every colleague but, as you mentioned, you have different skill levels but you can react on it.
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So we didn't put a class there.
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So you have your pre-configured exercises or something like that, because everybody was allowed to work on their task for his or her own and we, as the facilitators for this format, were able to help everybody.
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And if someone has a problem, we're sitting in the same room.
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Somebody can just come up and look at it and help this person who has a problem right at this stage, this person who has a problem right at this stage.
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So this was very convenient because they were not forced to follow the agenda or the curriculum of something we prepared in advance, like this is in the projects you don't know what you get at your next task or what the customer wants to know the next day or something like that.
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So we just tried to let them have the experience of helping each other, because it is so easy to ask someone to learn the new stuff, regardless on which skill level you are, and that we try to maintain during the years.
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And then the next time we had while we were in CAL and NAV, we put the main topic of events inside it, because many of those developers who were in projects with NAV needed to learn how to work with events in the code to have a code that can be converted to AL better in the future and get the modifications out of the base app.
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So we set a theme for each of those learning sprints, but we could adapt on the skill level of each one.
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So that was something we we developed and adapted as needed as the whole skill level of our developers grew over the time and even now if we have new things.
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If someone thinks, okay, automated testing is a topic that we should elaborate on that, okay, we conduct a learning sprint on that so they can learn, but they are not forced inside a real customer project, but they need to have something developed after those I do have a quick comment.
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It's quite interesting that you're maybe from my perspective here that you're treating training and the learning aspect as if it's a and you mentioned sprint.
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It's almost as if it's a project base.
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Is that what you're doing so that you can keep track of, you know specific sprints?
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To say, hey, this is what we're going to be focusing on for the next two weeks, this is what, in this case, you talked about events.
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Is that the approach that people should consider when you're working with your team?
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Say, hey, we're going to be focusing on one thing.
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This sprint is to learn this.
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We didn't organize our work in sprints.
00:25:17.869 --> 00:25:38.804
Back then when we developed this format, the main aspect was to suspend the daily business so make a safe learning space, because they had no other commitment than being in the sprint and developing something and learning something new.
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That was the main aspect.
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We had a certain time frame so it was easier for them to know okay, I have to manage in advance.
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I can do something within this four or five days, within this four or five days.
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So I have to reduce my commitments or fulfill my commitments before this sprint starts, or remove those commitments after the sprint.
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And the length of four or five days for a learning phase was a little bit hard to negotiate with our upper management because it is some time where they can work on projects and something like that.
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But it had a very good outcome of leveraging the skills and reducing the anxiety of am I able to program in AL with all the new tools in the future?
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It's a long-term investment program in AL with all the new tools in the future.
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It's a long-term investment.
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There's a number of ways to look at that and a number of challenges I see with that.
00:26:41.490 --> 00:27:04.242
You hit the point of you know, sometimes upper management may not see the value in taking that time in a for lack of better terms, controlled environment to raise the skill level, which would also allow you to create better products that you deliver and in a more efficient manner.
00:27:04.242 --> 00:27:22.769
Because I think we've all been there you know you could work with skilled and you know highly skilled, skilled and less skilled team members and the output is different and that output could put you in a box in the future potentially or create other issues.
00:27:22.769 --> 00:27:29.839
So having the opportunity to do that it's investing in the future.
00:27:29.839 --> 00:27:30.722
I guess you could say.
00:27:30.722 --> 00:27:36.857
I see a couple of challenges with this and I have some questions or your thoughts on this.
00:27:37.392 --> 00:27:52.457
In this mode that we're in here, one team size has an impact because if you have 10, we're talking development, in this case AL developers 10 AL developers you can afford the opportunity to say, okay, well, two or three can go through this training phase.
00:27:52.457 --> 00:27:57.511
If you have a hundred, you can still keep that same two or three or go with a larger group.
00:27:57.511 --> 00:28:00.317
If you are a smaller group.
00:28:00.317 --> 00:28:06.175
I don't know if you can be afforded to suspend operations for a period of time.
00:28:06.175 --> 00:28:11.192
So that's one challenge that I wonder how one could combat that, if you have any ideas.
00:28:11.192 --> 00:28:16.900
And then two, you mentioned a great peer review type or peer.
00:28:16.900 --> 00:28:23.457
You know serendipitous learning, you know you're learning with everybody in the same room.
00:28:23.457 --> 00:28:29.362
How does remote work factor into that?
00:28:29.362 --> 00:28:39.674
Because remote management alone has its challenges, because individuals sometimes feel isolated or they're separated, they're less likely to seek assistance.
00:28:39.674 --> 00:28:53.750
So with this type of survival mode and leadership and elastic leadership, is it geared more towards in-person management, remote management, hybrid management?
00:28:53.750 --> 00:28:55.532
How could we handle some of those challenges?
00:28:58.115 --> 00:29:16.785
I would say that it is about how you deal with your commitments when it depends on the team size, because we had team members in the sprints who are one or two person size teams.
00:29:16.785 --> 00:29:33.182
So with two persons they could manage to delegate their issues and for some people who have very specific knowledge and specific tasks, it was very hard to be out of business for five days or something like that.
00:29:33.182 --> 00:29:36.314
We shifted the mode a little bit five days or something like that.
00:29:36.314 --> 00:29:56.904
We shifted the mode a little bit so we just conducted it per day from 9 to 3 or 9 to 4, for example, so they could manage to handle the requests before and after the sprint each day.
00:29:56.904 --> 00:29:58.670
So we adapted this as well.
00:29:58.670 --> 00:30:03.080
In the beginning we said no interruptions allowed during the sprint and we made it a full day.
00:30:03.080 --> 00:30:12.542
And some of the colleagues who were in this exact situation said that's too hard for me and we adapted it a little bit.
00:30:12.542 --> 00:30:24.935
We shortened the time per day so they can manage in the morning or in the afternoons to deal with the urgent cases if they can't reduce their commitments.
00:30:24.935 --> 00:30:47.823
But it is very important to negotiate isn't something that can wait until after the sprint or if there is really nobody who can pick up the task during the sprints and adapting the commitments freed the space and that was key to that.
00:30:49.089 --> 00:30:56.016
And the experience with remote work is, I think the elastic leadership model and the team faces are not tied to.
00:30:56.016 --> 00:31:00.144
Is it remote or is it in person?
00:31:00.144 --> 00:31:10.684
I think that it can be used for all settings because it is not that tied to it.
00:31:10.684 --> 00:31:27.632
In my experience in the first phases it's really good, especially in the survival mode phase, to bring the people together or have something if it needs to be remotely, to build some team trust.
00:31:27.632 --> 00:31:40.117
And if the pandemic hit us, I was in the situation that we got new colleagues and that we had to conduct those learning sprints remotely via Teams.
00:31:40.117 --> 00:31:48.419
But it worked out well because before the pandemic we had, together with this group of people, one learning sprint in person.
00:31:48.419 --> 00:32:02.041
So if you do this in person up front, it's very, very easy to do it remotely as well, because the trust was there, they knew how it is done and what happens and something like that.
00:32:10.751 --> 00:32:15.115
Chris and I think a lot alike, and I'll jump in there, chris.
00:32:15.115 --> 00:32:16.826
See, I'm talking louder.
00:32:16.865 --> 00:32:22.371
No, I'm just yeah, no, go ahead, cause it got me thinking a lot of the things that you had, um, uh, you had mentioned about.
00:32:22.371 --> 00:32:32.635
For me, it's always about that, um, when you bring in a new talent or someone new or you're, you know, building a team, uh, everybody has different learning skills.
00:32:32.635 --> 00:32:47.597
Everybody has a different behavior, what you mentioned earlier, and sometimes I don't know if it's a cultural thing, maybe it's a different country.
00:32:47.597 --> 00:32:57.083
Wherever you're at in your case, germany or here in the US it's like, how do you convince others to also teach others?
00:32:57.083 --> 00:32:58.010
Right it's.
00:32:58.372 --> 00:32:59.698
It's always like I don't have time for that.
00:32:59.698 --> 00:33:01.616
I am in the middle of learning, right?
00:33:01.616 --> 00:33:03.696
So, okay, once you're done learning, can you teach others?
00:33:03.696 --> 00:33:11.036
It's like, well, now I got to do, maybe they go back to survival mode or they go back to learning something else.
00:33:11.036 --> 00:33:16.923
It's always kind of a challenge, in least in my career.
00:33:16.923 --> 00:33:29.218
Sometimes they'll get there, sometimes just takes a little bit longer, but they just some people just don't have that mindset of like, okay, I want to teach others, and it's like I'm just here for myself.
00:33:29.218 --> 00:33:31.041
I'm like, how do you manage that?
00:33:31.041 --> 00:33:33.075
Like especially remote too, right it's.
00:33:33.075 --> 00:33:35.921
That's also difficult at the same time.
00:33:36.561 --> 00:33:50.923
Yeah, I think it's hard to convince someone with this because you cannot force someone to change his mindset to being able to teach someone something.
00:33:50.923 --> 00:33:59.964
So you can offer the opportunity, a safe space to hey, let's try this out and invite someone.
00:33:59.964 --> 00:34:23.313
In parallel to the Elastic Leadership model, I had an education on future leadership and some of the system salary things here in Germany which got me thinking about not jumping too early, seeing someone's personality as a problem.
00:34:23.313 --> 00:34:56.971
So my point of view is can I build a structure in our organization in our case this learning sprints where someone has the opportunity to try out teaching someone something very easy in a safe space, even if they are together, they have someone like me, like a facilitator who tries to get some commitments on that and explaining what is the benefit of doing it.
00:34:56.971 --> 00:35:06.007
So the role of a team leader in this phase is see the benefit when you teach the knowledge you have to someone else.
00:35:06.007 --> 00:35:08.597
What is good for the team and for the company for this.
00:35:10.331 --> 00:35:39.815
This education or this conversation is easier to have one-on-one and not on dailies or something like that, or stand-up meetings with those people who are not that easy jump into this teaching role, but the possibility could be they can be in those situations and just observing how someone else is doing it, just have the experience.
00:35:39.815 --> 00:36:00.976
So my main theme was let the members in the sprints have the experience how it feels to jump into these learning ravines where I'm extremely slow at what, I'm very fast about it Because I have to learn it for myself or teach it someone else or something like that.
00:36:00.976 --> 00:36:07.739
But after this experience then decide can I do it in the future or not?
00:36:07.739 --> 00:36:18.619
And offering this space, this experience space, is something I think a leader or management can do in this organization.
00:36:20.670 --> 00:36:23.697
It's see I'm circling back to a couple points here.
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