Agile and the soft skills negotiation

novembre 26, 2015

Agile and the soft skills negotiation

Key soft skills negotiation qualities for the effective implementation and practice of agile are: emotional intelligence, collaboration, adaptive leadership, negotiation, conflict resolution, servant leadership. [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

– 6 keys
Emotional intelligence
Collaboration
Adaptive leadership
Negotiation
Conflict resolution
Servant leadership

6 keys of soft skills negotiation

– Emotional intelligence

– Collaboration

– Adaptive leadership

– Negotiation

– Conflict resolution

– Servant leadership

Emotional intelligence

Having a high emotional intelligence means self-awareness, control over your own emotions, and being attentive to other team members’ emotions. A high emotional intelligence allows team members to collaborate effectively. [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

Higgs & Dulewicz (1999) defines emotional intelligence using seven components :

1) Self-awareness,

2) Emotional resilience,

3) Motivation,

4) Interpersonal sensitivity,

5) Influence,

6) Intuitiveness, and

7) Conscientiousness.

[Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

Collaboration

Collaboration is a key soft skill negotiation skill. It involves working in groups to create ideas, solve problems, and produce solutions. [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

Pair programming is an effective method for improving team collaboration. [Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, Ken Schwaber.]

Adaptive leadership

Highsmith defines adaptive leadership as two dimensional: Being agile and doing agile. Being agile includes focusing on cornerstones of agile project management, like incremental delivery, continuous integration, and adapting to changing requirements. Doing agile includes several activities that an agile leader must do: do less; speed-to-value, quality, and engage and inspire. [Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products – 2nd Edition. Jim Highsmith.]

Adaptive leadership :

– Being agile

Being agile includes focusing on cornerstones of agile project management, like incremental delivery, continuous integration, and adapting to changing requirements.

– Doing agile

Doing agile includes several activities that an agile leader must do: do less; speed-to-value, quality, and engage and inspire.

Negotiation

Agreement found through discussion.

Key soft skills negotiation qualities for the effective implementation and practice of agile are: emotional intelligence, collaboration, adaptive leadership, negotiation, conflict resolution, servant leadership. [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

Negotiation is a key soft skill negotiation skill. It involves discussion or conversation to work towards a common understanding between two parties. [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

 

Conflict resolution

Conflicts are unavoidable in the project environment.Conflict resolution must not focus on personalities and past events. The people who are in conflict are first responsible for resolving it.

Conflict resolution is a key soft skill negotiation skill. It involves applying proper leadership techniques to resolve and diffuse any conflict between team members or other stakeholders. [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

 

Servant leadership

Servant leadership has its roots with an essay written in 1970 by Robert K Greenleaf. Greenleaf defined servant leaders as humble stewards devoted to their company and work to serve their peers, teams, and customers. In a self-organizing team, a servant leader, as Greenleaf defined it, is ideal as the team leader is an enabler, listening to the agile team’s needs, removing obstacles, and providing tools or other support to promote high productivity. [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]

Servant leader is an expected leadership style from Scrum master.

In high performance teams, leaders manage the principles and principles manage the teams. [Becoming Agile: …in an imperfect world. Greg Smith, Ahmed Sidky.]

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