Finding Blind Spots in Your Steps to Creating a SAFe LACE Team

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Leadership, Culture, and Behavior.

According to the BCG article, “Is Leadership Your Agile Blind Spot?”, 65 executives stated that the #1 obstacle was fear of getting out of the comfort zone and #2 was leadership dynamics. In SAFe, “Reaching the Tipping Point” a series of steps in the Implementation Roadmap works to help address these obstacles. Below are a few highlights:

Establish a vision for change
Train Lean-Change Agents
Charter a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence

How confident are you with the following?

Your vision is truly transformational. You are not staying within your comfort zone or conducting business as usual.
Every leader understands how to put their energy into leading change or contribute to change and understands the “why” behind it.
Your leadership team puts their energy into leading the desired business outcomes within the timeframe expected.
Your Change leadership team effectively collaborates and focuses on strategic and implementation levels when needed.

Find your blind spots by measuring change impact energy

What is Impact Energy?

Impact energy is the preferred way an individual uses their energy to contribute to working towards an achieved outcome. This is the question of WHY someone wants to do something that is completely independent of their personality, skills, experience, or mindset. In truth, it is the driver of your skills and capabilities.

There are five impact energies and thousands of different combinations. These five “proclivities” have different levels of energy that vary per individual. Later in this article, you will see, one individual’s energy levels between the five.

As a Mindset and Success Coach, I start with a better understanding of an individual’s purpose, personal core values, and impact energy. Based on their defined achievable outcomes, I help them work through blind spots which are related to their mindset that drives specific actions and behaviors based on their current mental model of the world.

In the corporate world, this means clear outcomes are the first step to the process.

Based on your individual impact energy results, you will learn how to maximize your strengths in the following areas:

Making the greatest impact
Approach to leading and innovating change and creativity
Engaging, contributing to and influencing change
Getting things done
The power of your changemaker role in a team

Internal Dialogue that might be happening with the individual’s dominant impact energy when it comes to change.

How Can We Measure It?

Measuring impact energy is scalable in adapting to your needs in the moment. It’s possible to help a leader understand their change in leadership impact energy, form a change team, view the current state of an ART, area of the organization, and the entire enterprise. As someone who loves endless possibilities, I like that it can allow you to use the data in many different ways. It depends on how creative you want to be and the questions you are trying to answer. It can be combined with existing data, like skills and experience.

How Do We Use It?

Individuals

Each leader or change agent understands his or her own unique impact change energy. This allows them to lead and contribute to change during the initial creation of the Strategic Lean Change canvas, to foster collaboration and the different ways each will put their energy into communicating and coming up with outcome success criteria to the change vision.

Uses within the SAFe Implementation Roadmap to Form A LACE:

How each individual contributes to creating a strategic vision
Personalize Leading Agile training
Personalize Training Lean Change Agents
Forming a LACE team aligned to achieving the business outcomes
Improve collaboration and communication as a change maker
Learn how each team member can make their best impact within the team

Teams

Understand the collective energy towards the overall vision and defined outcomes to the change mission. Based on the current team collective energy, the team can better understand their blind spots which potentially can provide insight to missed opportunities in creating a vision that is truly transformational and strategic.

Uses within the SAFe Implementation Roadmap to Form A LACE:

Creating a strategic vision that is transformational
Finding blindspots as a LACE team
Improve collaboration and communicating as a team based on dominant impact energies as a collective
Adapt team based on new discoveries during the implementation of SAFe

In the example above, this LACE team has the following blindspots as a collective:

The team may focus on improving what exists today and miss opportunities to innovate in the market or create new creative ways to approach current challenges.
The team has dominant energy towards a tactical focus and may need help with direct conversations when a strategic focus is needed.
All voices on the team may not be heard, which may impact diverse ideas and action plans within the group.
The team may struggle to become fully cohesive when little energy exists for playmaking.
The people-side to change may be missed and the buy-in to the transformation may be at risk without focusing on getting buy-in and feedback from outside the team.

Team of Teams and the Organization

Understand the impact energy of your ARTs and the organization with multi-team views or a map of the organization.

Everyone can be a Changemaker. We just have to unlock the potential in people, align them to the right outcomes, and learn how to master their impact.

I am your Game Changer-Strategist, helping imagine and mapping change.

Are you ready to learn your change impact energy?

Email masteryourimpact@ingenuousgile.com to learn more.

Written by Veronica Stewart