How Dare You!
“How dare you send an email like this without consulting me! You had absolutely no right to do this. With this thoughtless message, you’ve completely eroded the trust I’ve spent months building with my business partner. I demand a meeting with you and your manager at once!”
I sat at my desk, stunned. Where did this come from? I thought I was being helpful!
Earlier that day, a fellow agile coach and I sat down to write an email together to the IT leader and business sponsor for a new agile team we’d just started coaching. This response was the opposite of what we expected. In our discovery conversations, the IT leader and business sponsor had told us how enthusiastic they were about Agile. They were friendly, upbeat, and open to our suggestions.
But after a few early conversations with the team, we’d learned that our definition of “Agile” as coaches seemed quite different from the one the sponsors were so enthusiastic about. One of the senior team members shared with us a detailed project plan, along with the dates when various contract staff would join and depart the team. There was a planning phase, an analysis phase, a development phase, and a testing phase. This was going to be a problem. Nothing about the design of the team or the plan for the work aligned with agile principles or methods.
In the spirit of transparency, we jointly penned an email to both the manager and the business sponsor explaining the situation. We did our best to be clear and direct. “The design for this team and project does not align with agile methods. To function as an effective agile team, the following changes are required…”
We fully expected to receive a response that began with “Thank you” and continued with a hearty embrace of our suggestions. I did not expect to be fighting back tears at my desk a few minutes later while my manager went to clean up my mess.
As I reflect on this situation a few years later, I am mostly amused by my naivete. I did not even consider for a moment how my email could possibly offend, and I was completely taken aback by the response I received.
While I’d love to believe in a world where senior leaders are always considerate, magnanimous, and open to feedback, this is simply not the case. Senior leaders, like all people, have reputations they’d like to maintain and interests to protect. This doesn’t make them bad people or bad leaders–this makes them human!
By “educating” this leader on the misalignment of her stated desire and her design in my email, I inadvertently portrayed her as ignorant and incompetent in front of a person she very much needed to impress. Of course she was livid!
So what would I do differently in this situation now?
I might approach this leader with a mindset of humble inquiry, as I’ve learned through the writing of Edgar Schein. Instead of telling (which would put her down), I would gently inquire. I might ask for more information about why the project and team had been structured in this way. I would ask what was most important for her as she oversaw the project and what she would consider success.
After learning more about what was important to her, I would offer suggestions in service of her goals. I would take care with my language to help her feel in control of the help she was receiving. For example, I might ask, “As you consider what I’ve shared with you, what seems like the best path forward for you and your team?”
Although I have no way of knowing whether we would have been able to partner together successfully to introduce agile ways of working on this project, it’s much more likely that this second approach would have yielded a more respectful dialogue and better working relationship on both sides.
This experience, along with several others like it, served as a catalyst for my professional coaching journey. As I drove home that night after receiving the “How dare you” email, I felt angry, hurt, and misunderstood. I thought about how leaders like that are always the problem, how they never understand how we’re just trying to help, and how their actions keep their teams stuck in the status quo.
And then I started to wonder…what would it be like to really, truly empathize with this person? What would it be like if I could serve her as well as the team? How might I change if I saw my job as supporting everyone in the system, instead of protecting the team from their bosses?
A few months later, I enrolled in my executive and professional coaching graduate program. I’m so grateful for how this experience–and all the other “resisters” I’ve encountered–have so profoundly changed my life.
