competency

Source: http://www.mikesastrophotos.com/tag/andromeda-galaxy/

In a previous post about letting go i mentioned having a hard time getting started with the process of hiring a new person to join my team of agile project managers. That was way back in January. I’m happy to say that we’ve since hired someone and she started two weeks ago.

In this post, i’d like to share what the hiring process was, and what I’ve since learned.

Step 0: The Job Ad

In writing the job ad, i took the competency profile that I had been working on at the time, and used it as a starting point. I made sure that the main competencies were sufficiently covered in the job description and list of duties. I also wanted to make sure the ad reflected a bit about what our overall context is and what our values are.

Step 1: Sort through applications

After posting the ad, on LinkedIn, the ads started coming in pretty fast. It was really important to follow up as quickly as possible to the applications and in general I spent at least a couple of hours a day looking at the new applications that came in, reading CVs, and perusing the candidates’ LinkedIn profiles.

My criteria at this point was to see

that the person had at least 2 years hands-on experience as a scrum master and/or coach
that they had worked in software development
and finally that they had mentioned TEAMS in their CVs and/or profiles
an extra nice to have was evidence that they had worked in more than one company or division within the same company — this was important to me to hopefully ensure they had acquired some different experiences from which to draw.

Step 2: Skype Screening

The purpose of the initial skype screening was to meet the candidate and get a general feel for what they were like. I conducted nearly all the skype screenings with 2 other colleagues present. One was on camera and took turns asking questions with me, and the third colleague was off camera just listening. I found this really valuable because once we got started it was easy to get caught up in the conversation and miss things.

The format i used was

my on-camera colleague and i would introduce ourselves
we would give the candidate about 5 minutes to introduce themselves
we would ask questions for about 10-15 minutes
the candidate would ask questions for about 5 minutes
i would explain the rest of the hiring process to the candidate so they would know what to expect

After every skype screening my colleagues and I would independently score the candidate on 4 criteria: 1) emotional intelligence; 2) focus on teamwork; 3) interest in learning and teaching and 4) general organizational skills and evidence of project management skills.

During busy weeks we would do 8-10 skype screenings a week and at the end of the week i would add up the ratings for each candidate and put them in a spreadsheet. My colleagues and I would meet and review the scores. We usually decided to proceed to the next step with the candidates who had the top 3 scores. There would already be discussion about what we noticed, what topics we thought we should dig deeper on, and what our general feeling was.

Step 3: Written Sample

For step 3 i asked the candidates to send a written piece on the topic of ‘something they learned about teamwork’. I usually gave them 4-5 days to submit the piece and said they could submit something they may have already written in their own blog, or published, or write something specifically for this process.

The purpose of asking for a written sample was to see how well the candidate could communicate in writing. Because our teams are distributed, with all our stakeholders in Germany, being able to communicate sometimes obtuse topics in writing is frequently required.

The second reason for the written sample was to see what the candidate had to say about the topic. It was really interesting to see how the candidates would talk about the teams they worked with — or not.

The same colleagues who had participated in the skype screening with me reviewed the written samples. Sometimes we would annotate comments in the documents and share them before deciding together whether or not to proceed with the candidate.

Occasionally we would follow-up with another skype call to the candidate to ask questions about the written sample and then decide. These follow-up calls were valuable because we would probe really deeply into the topic that the candidate wrote about. In some cases, our initial decision regarding the candidate was reversed once we had the chance to discuss the written sample with them. In retrospect I would make that it’s own step the next time I go through this hiring process.

Between step 3 and step 4 we would normally halve the number of candidates. In this specific situation we moved a total of 4 people to the next step.

Step 4: Face to Face Interview

The face to face interview was scheduled for about 2 hours. The first 45 minutes would include myself, and 2 other members of the BLT. We use the same format more or less for these interviews, regardless of what role we’re hiring for.

We introduce ourselves
We ask the candidate to tell us about themselves for 10 minutes. In most cases we find that the candidate’s prepared speech runs out at about 5 minutes. What they say after that buffer usually reveals more about who they really are.
Then we ask questions for about 30-35 minutes
and the candidate has the last 5 minutes to ask us questions.

This part of the process gives us the chance to really dig deeper on any topics that may have been surfaced in the previous steps. We ask for specific examples and normally don’t accept general or vague answers.

The 45-minute interview was followed by a series of 20-minute interviews. I scheduled one with product owners, and another with some of the people on the team the candidate would be working with.

After all the interview sessions I did a debrief with the people who were involved in the 20-minute segments. We did a quick show of thumbs (thumbs up/thumbs down/flat hand) to see initial perceptions. We count down 3-2-1 before anyone can show their thumb so as not to let any one person influence the rest of the group with their vote. If there were flat hands and thumbs down we discussed why. Then i did a final session with the participants in the 45-minute session, again with thumbs vote to decide who to move forward to the final step. In this instance we moved 3 of the 4 candidates to the last step.

Step 5: Retrospective Facilitation

In this step I asked the candidates to facilitate a 1.5 hour “retrospective” with the team they would be working with. I sent a brief describing the context, and also some of the issues they had been facing. The retro was observed by myself and one of person from the BLT. After the retro we did a debrief with the candidate to see what their perceptions were of the team, and also to give some feedback about what we observed. I also separately asked the team to send me comments about their experience of the retro. And finally i asked the candidate to email me their notes from the retro.

This step was tricky to pull-off simply because in the span of 2 weeks the same team had 3 different retros. What was interesting to see though, was that different topics emerged. I also found it really interesting to see how well (or not) the candidates were able to perceive the different personalities on the team. Finally I was able to gauge how receptive the candidate was to receiving feedback.

What I Learned

At certain points I felt uneasy because it felt like the process was taking too long. In retrospect I’m glad I had all the steps. It helped me feel more sure at the end about the hiring choice I made.
Have a hiring ‘team’. It was good to have the same people participate in the skype screening/ratings/evaluation of written samples because we became more efficient over time. More importantly we had the same baseline in terms of the number of different people we were screening.
Be clear about your criteria for each stage of the process. It’s always good to check in with your team upfront about what we’re looking for in each step.
Take lots of notes during the entire process and share with your team. For the written samples it helped to annotate the samples directly. I used a trello board to track the entire process. I made a card for each candidate and saved everything on the card.
Keep the communication with the candidate flowing as quickly as you can. Don’t wait more than a day to reply. Be super explicit when making scheduling arrangements — confirm everything. And always let them know what to expect next and how long before they can expect to hear from you again.
Especially in the first steps try to keep your feelings/opinions separate until your hiring team submits their evaluation. You want to try and not influence other people’s opinions.

Source: http://www.purpleclover.com/work/633-renaissance-man/

Firstly, let me go on the record by saying the role name is how my employer calls people like me. The good news is in reality the name doesn’t really matter, it’s what you do and also what expectations your colleagues have of your role.

Myself and a few other colleagues decided at our last offsite, to take a stab at re-writing some parts of our competency profile to better reflect a) what we do day-to-day and b) what our aspirations are. More or less our goal is to put a heavier emphasis on coaching competencies which we feel are underrepresented.

The 6 (max) competencies we’ve chosen are:

Shaping a Sound Performance Culture

This competency covers our objective to help our teams, and in fact the whole organization, cultivate a mindset of continuous improvement. The emphasis is on leading by example, staying open to and creating space for diverse viewpoints. and maintaining a solutions-oriented focus.

Fostering network, community, and team

This competency is about our role to act as a bridge between our teams and the rest of the organization in order to keep information flowing smoothly. The emphasis is placed on developing and managing our relationships, and in showing our teams how to do this. Additionally, this competency covers one of our main areas of focus which is to help build high performing teams.

Mastering Conflicts

Not surprisingly conflict resolution is either important enough or prevalent enough that it warrants it’s own competency. Our role is to stay emotionally neutral and to act as a a mediator when there are conflicts. More importantly our goal is to teach the members of our teams how to navigate through these types of situations themselves.

Leading Process Improvement

With this competency our focus is on continually bringing new ideas, best practices to try not only with our teams but the entire organization. We are responsible basically for not just maintaining the status quo but of always looking for ways to improve.

Expertise

This one is kind of a miscellaneous to cover the fact that we should have a fairly deep and broad knowledge of agile methodologies. It includes keeping our agile tool-kit well stocked with experiences we can share, games, powerful questions, and any other ‘tool’ we can use to help our teams become better. We chose this competency to really highlight the coaching (vs. project manager or even scrum master) aspects of our jobs.

Emotional Intelligence

This is a new competence that we decided to add. Surprisingly this is an area that is frequently ignored and omitted. As agilists we often need to tap into our emotional intelligence. Consider the above competencies of Mastering Conflicts and Shaping a Sound Performance Culture — competencies such as self-management, self-awareness, motivation, social skills and empathy all help us do our jobs better. If i had my way this would be a competence in every single role in the entire company.

Some observations:

in our small working group of three it was fairly easy to agree on what changes to make. however, feedback from our other colleagues sparked more discussion about whether it made sense to insert coaching competencies into a project management role. we explained that doing this way at least ensures that there are some coaching competencies included in our role. Yes we agree that ultimately we’d like to see a true coach role at the company but for now that seems like a longer process to get pushed through.
similarly some colleagues were wondering where the project management aspects of the role were to be found in the profile. our colleagues are currently reviewing the profile one more time to make sure this competency is sufficiently included.
for me this profile still has a strong orientation towards the teams we work with. we are still also missing an orientation towards the organization as a whole. here i’m missing more systems thinking, organizational agility and agile at scale. perhaps we can introduce this into the profiles for the senior role.

Notes From An Agilist

On Hiring an Agile Project Manager

what is an agile project manager?