Interview with Chris Murman

In this episode, we talk to Chris Murman. Chris has spent his
IT career focused on how the newest technologies are made and
iterate on a better way. That comes from learning to build
smarter, harder, faster, more accurately, and with greater
transparency. Those are the tenets of how he works. Chris has
worked on Agile teams in art direction, quality assurance, product
management, project management, and coaching. Currently, he is a
Senior Agile Consultant for Solutions IQ, an Accenture company.
  Along the way, he’s accumulated three certifications from
the Scrum Alliance, spoken at over a dozen
conferences, co-authored a book on building mobile
applications, and regularly blogs on his work
at chrismurman.com. He also serves on the board for
the Agile Uprising Coalition.   Here are the key
takeaways from our interview: A passionate team needs
diversity.

[…] A passionate team feels safe that they can ... When those
moments come out, they're not worried about offending anybody, or
if they express an opinion that differs, people are just seeing
your ideas as it's just you're passionate about it, and they
don't take offense super easy to it. […]


[…] There's also a lot of diversity in passionate teams, because
really if you have a team where everybody looks, and acts, and
talks, and sounds kind of the same, you get into a rhythm, and
passion doesn't like rhythm. […]


[…] Passion really needs to have its own drumbeat, and you get
that from diverse ideas. […]
Too much passion may be dangerous

[…] Yeah, and it doesn't have to be a constant movement, right?
You would just burn yourself out if you just woke up every day
and said, "No, we need to just be going at a breakneck pace,"
right? "We need to put the pedal to the metal, as they say." You
would just burn yourself out after a while. I mean, really, I
think, in a way, you have to make room for passion to enter when
it needs it, because maybe you don't always need it. Maybe you
just need some heavy downtime. […]
A passionate team needs a fail-safe environment

[…] Not everybody's gonna be a great public speaker, but when the
team is speaking to each other, they know how to hold a room. And
when I say that I mean when they speak, they had everybody's
attention. […]


[…] We're emotional creatures. How is it to be successful that I
have to suppress a part of who I really, really am?


I feel that if you are a truly authentic, passionate team, right,
your emotions will shine. They will just absolutely shine through
and through. People will cry. People will laugh. They will hug
each other. They'll make jokes. I think one of my favorite teams
ever, I had a couple of people pull me in for discussions, and we
cried together, and we hugged, and people were frustrated. Their
family life was difficult at the time, and hopefully that came
from a feeling of safety, right? They felt safe in that group.
Going back to another trait, but if they are safe then their
emotions will come through, and it will be okay for those
emotions to come through. It's so important. […]


[…] I think that leadership can help. So I mentioned earlier that
one of the agile principles is to create the right environment
around motivated individuals, and I feel like leadership has to
be a part of that. Now, the team has to use it, right? The team
has to use the environment that they've been given once they get
it, but there are so many companies where they don't have the
ability to create their own environment. […]


[…] When you don't have a feeling of safety in organizations, and
when the leadership, and the systems and the workflows have been
set up in a way to not encourage people to speak up, eventually
people just start saying anything. They just say, "Look, I'm just
gonna go do my job. I'm not gonna really innovate. I'm not gonna
care. If something goes wrong and my boss is making a decision I
don't like, it doesn't matter because my boss isn't gonna
appreciate my ideas anyways. So I'm just gonna shut up and I'm
not gonna say anything." And that is a toxic, toxic environment.
[…]


[…] You wanna talk about a company of unpassionate people? It's
when they don't feel like they can speak up. And so many
companies struggle with that. I mean, just think of the number of
companies you've worked with, and the times you've been in a
meeting room, and someone should have spoken up but nobody did
because they felt like they couldn't, you know what I mean? […]
A passionate team needs slack

 […] But I think the thing that you can do most is just,
like you said, create some slack, because if your days are just
hour after hour after hour, you're scheduled and you don't have
times to just be in the moment and work, and huddle, and
converse, that probably fosters passion better than anything
else. By just giving us some slack. And saying like, "Hey, let's
all go ... " Whether it's lunch, or bringing donuts and coffee
in. As awful as donuts are for you, sometimes sugar can be really
helpful in getting the motor started. […]


[…] Sometimes the best leadership that you can do is to just sit
back. Create the best environment you can, sit back, let them
have some slack, and just watch them go, and sometimes it may
just happen regardless of whatever you do, you know what I mean?
[…]