The webster dictionary defines guilds as “an association of people with similar interests or pursuits”. I am helping a company rollout OKRs, as only 1 person I don’t have the time or capacity to be across every team. I needed support and set up a champions guild for OKRs and as a way to learn and grow together, to create a standard that could help drive consistency across the organisation. I may be stretching the guild definition a bit, especially when you look at the article from Epic Agile on setting up guilds here. So how do we ensure we learn and grow? How do we share the knowledge and build skills? Harvard Business Review believes it is through our connections with others and that is what we create when we set up our guild of people from various areas in the company.
Before our first group catchup which I facilitated, I met with each person individually to set the context and discuss their interest and level of commitment. We are a small group of people volunteering our time to increase our knowledge and extend that knowledge and capability throughout the organisation. We are contributing to this group in addition to our day job. We needed to be motivated to solve problems and learn.
Agenda for guild initial catchup
- Each Person to introduce themselves and their current/previous experience with OKRs.
- Review why the company is doing OKRs and why we are here as a group.
- Agree on our experiment card and goal for the quarter,
Next quarter our experiment will be different and depending on the outcomes of the experiment will depend on how we tweak or build on these learnings.
- Defining what our guiding principles are and gaining agreement across the group. We answered many of the questions mentioned in this article about how to set up a guild here.
- Work through creating a destination postcard – where do we want to go and why should people care. It was important that we were tying in the emotion so that when times were tough and the elephant strayed from the path we had something to draw on for the behavioral change. This group was leading change after all.
Drawing all the answers from a modified empathy map, (See, Hear, Feel and Read brainstorming) we came up with some ideas for what our end result should be. There were many that were similar and after a few iterations and consensus dot voting we decided on “We are committed to creating an empowered team, who enjoys working together to achieve amazing results”. How we achieve that is based on working through the learning of the frontrunner teams, creating a safe space where everyone is clear on expectations and effort. Creating transparency or learning and results and bringing the theory to life with learning resources and templates
At present, our sessions are primarily focused on creating a baseline for teams to work from. We are alternating between an education session and a lean coffee session with the group catch-ups.
A great learning point for me was how we shape the initial destination postcard or why of the group. It felt like some people became overwhelmed by the magnitude of where we were heading and we didn’t finish the catchup with the energy and engagement that I was hoping for. Next time I would like to explore facilitating the why of the group using the north star approach as I feel this would tie everything together in a more cascading way that will provide more of an achievable roadmap.
In Conclusion. Sharing learnings and creating a safe space for questions is where we have seen the most benefit, people are engaged and eager to give things a try. The lean coffees have been especially useful in sharing this knowledge and gathering concerns and questions from people and I feel the group is engaged and learning from each other in a way I would not be able to do on my own. Our next step is to work on a way to ensure we continue to develop the skills and capability of all members of the guild by creating a mentoring/ support buddy system within the group. Then we can look to onboard new members and promote our guild by creating an online presence on the intranet site and posting in the weekly comms bulletin. See more information about Guilds from Management 3.0 here.
