Creating Psychological Safety in High-Pressure Workplaces

Is workplace stress just about long hours? Not quite. Brian and Marcus Lagré unpack the real equation behind stress—how pressure, complexity, and security interact—and why your team’s performance depends on getting the balance right.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with Marcus Lagré, product organization coach and author of The Stress Equation, to break down the science of workplace stress.

They explore the differences between mental and emotional stress, how pressure and complexity impact teams, and why security in the workplace is a game-changer for performance. Marcus shares research-backed insights on interruptions, stress contagion, and how leaders can create an environment where teams thrive without burning out.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Marcus Lagré
The Stress Equation by Marcus Lagré
Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Marcus Lagré is an author, speaker, and consultant with 20 years of experience in software development, from small-team Scrum to massive 50+ team LeSS transformations. Creator of The Stress Equation, he helps organizations tackle workplace stress systematically, ensuring teams thrive under pressure without burning out.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as I usually am, Brian Milner. And today we have with us a really special guest, Marcus LeGray is with us. Welcome in, Marcus.

Marcus Lagre (00:13)
Thanks, Brian, pleasure to be here.

Brian Milner (00:15)
We were saying before that I'm actually kind of butchering or Americanizing his last name.

Marcus Lagre (00:20)
Nah, Americanizing, yes, but butchering, no. I wouldn't say that.

Brian Milner (00:24)
So I'm gonna give you a chance to set the record straight. Why don't you tell us the actually the correct pronunciation? Because I probably can't do it.

Marcus Lagre (00:31)
Well, my... I would say La Gré, but that's with a Swedish southern accent and not even most Swedes do that, so...

Brian Milner (00:34)
Okay. OK. Do the Swedish people look on people in the South like we do here in America? Like they're kind of more laid back and slower and... That's funny. OK. Well, we have Marcus on because, first of all, Marcus is a product organization coach. He's an author. He's a speaker.

Marcus Lagre (00:48)
Yeah, yeah, I would I would say so I would I would say so yeah

Brian Milner (01:03)
And he has a really great book that we wanted to kind of dive into the topic of here. Because in this day and age, this is a really important topic, but his book is called The Stress Equation. So you can kind of see where we might be going there with that. Well, so let's dive in. Let's talk about that a little bit. And I think probably a good place to start would be, how would you define then stress, when you, if we're talking about stress and the stress equation, how do you define stress?

Marcus Lagre (01:30)
I usually use the definition of stress because I let's start like this. I think that most people have like a too narrow perspective of what stress is. Like most people probably see it as working long hours and you know, spending a lot of time at work, but it doesn't necessarily have to. And there's this definition of stress from the Oxford English Dictionary that I found really well that stress is the result of, of, of, emotional or mental strain due to adverse or demanding circumstances. So yeah, so there's differences there. And I think that most people, if you're not in a very toxic environment, you don't suffer from emotional stress a lot at work, but mental strain is probably what we're looking at most often.

Brian Milner (02:04)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I wouldn't discount that entirely. I think that there's probably a lot of people out there that have the emotional strain of a bad boss or manager or something like that, right? But yeah, hopefully, you know, hopefully you're right that the majority might not be, you know, dealing with that. It might be more of the mental side of this. So what is mental stress then? What is a mental strain?

Marcus Lagre (02:38)
Well, mental strain is usually diversified by saying like emotional strain is like the stress from being like in a toxic environment, for example, which is more common than it should be. But mental strain is more of the when you have too much of a mental load, like you're trying to solve a complex problem, like you have high cognitive load in order to solve it, or you need to

Brian Milner (02:48)
Hmm.

Marcus Lagre (03:03)
Well, it's also related to cognitive load that you have a lot of context switching. So you need to change information in your working memory quite often and a lot. And that can lead to mental strain. And the problem with mental strain, as I see it in white collar worker or knowledge workers, is that most of us are, we like mental challenges. We like puzzles, we like solving problems. So we're not great at identifying when a mental challenge becomes a mental strain for us. We're used to just pushing on. we try to just, you know, it's just something that I haven't figured out yet. If I push myself just a little harder, I'll crack it. Yeah.

Brian Milner (03:42)
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. We do like puzzles. We do like challenges. I I know one of the popular things here in the US is the escape room kind of thing. I don't know if you guys have that there as well, but we actually pay people in our free time to give us puzzles and challenges that for fun, we'll go and put ourselves under some mental duress and try to figure out. So I think you're right. there is part of us that really wants to do that. Well, if that's true, then the other side of that is, shouldn't we all be under some kind of mental stress then, since work is challenging and complex and hopefully.

Marcus Lagre (04:20)
Well, yeah, I mean, not all stress is bad. So I usually say that the stress that we feel at work usually comes from two different sources. So this is the equation. Like the mental strain comes from the complexity that we need to, now that we need to handle. Either the complexity of the problem that we need to solve, or if we're working in, the complexity could also be like the frustration of working in an inefficient organization. That could be part of the complexity.

Brian Milner (04:23)
Yeah.

Marcus Lagre (04:46)
So I usually say that pressure is our sense of urgency. The pressure comes from our sense of urgency in order to finish the work that we're, the task that we have at hand or whatever it is that we're trying to solve. And the complexity is whatever makes it harder for us to actually finish that work. So to relate back to what you were saying, shouldn't we be under some kind of stress? Yes, we should. If we don't have any sense of urgency, we're probably not delivering at all. And if there's zero complexity in what we're doing, That should probably be an automated task long ago. We will probably suffer from severe boredom if there's zero complexity in what we're doing.

Brian Milner (05:25)
Yeah, I always, you know, this comes up sometimes in classes where, I think, you know, I want to find those people who are under zero pressure at work, because I've never been in that situation. I've never had any kind of boss or organization that was like, just take as long as you need. It doesn't matter. There's always some pressure and some places it's more than others and some places it's extreme. But yeah, I think you're right. There's a right amount of pressure. that can be applied.

Marcus Lagre (05:48)
And there's also constructive stress. I usually diversify like constructive stress is when you try to achieve something because if you're under a lot of pressure solving something very complex, there's also pleasure in actually solving it. So there's some kind of release in the end. But if you're constantly under a lot of pressure or...

Brian Milner (05:51)
Hmm.

Marcus Lagre (06:09)
I usually say that the pressure usually comes from things like how we set deadlines, how we handle our backlog. So if you have two short deadlines, then you're under negative stress or unconstructive stress, or we have an ever-expanding backlog. We can never finish everything in this backlog. have no way of saying no to things. They just keep piling on. That's unconstructive stress, but...

Brian Milner (06:30)
Yeah.

Marcus Lagre (06:34)
A sense of urgency to reach like a goal? That's more of positive kind of stress.

Brian Milner (06:39)
Yeah. Yeah. I I've heard, my boss, Mike Cohn talk about before how scrum has just the right amount of pressure that it's, it's not, you know, it's, it's not the kind of, when we think about commitment and stuff inside of a sprint, it's not the kind of thing of, you're going to lose your job if you don't make this sprint commitment. But it is kind of, you know, my, my word is on the line. My name is on the line. And if I don't deliver. I'm letting down my team, I'm letting down those around me. So that's way he describes it. It's kind of just the right amount of pressure that's kind of baked into the way Scrum works. I've always liked that. I've always thought that's kind of a good take on that. So we're kind of in these pressure cookers a little bit, right? We've got pressure and sometimes more than others and we do need some kind of pressure. So we have some sense of urgency in what we're doing. How does this align with our Agile Manifesto kind of ideal of working at a sustainable pace? Is the pressure going to crack us under trying to keep a sustainable pace? And what if we don't have any say over the amount of pressure we have?

Marcus Lagre (07:46)
Well, if you don't have any say, then I usually say that the pressure isn't a force of nature, that it usually stems from someone's decisions. And if we don't have a say in it, then we can't influence that pressure really as a team maybe. But from a leadership perspective, if you put unlimited pressure on the team, you're gonna see decreasing results anyway. It's not... constructive, you're going to burn your people, you're going to lose, worst case, lose them from the company, either because they change jobs or because they burn out and they have to go on sick leave. So and that's going to cost you in the end. But also that you're going to see either a lot more well, as I said, either a lot of people leaving or people doing quite quitting. That's that's what's going to be because once caring about your own performance becomes dangerous, people are gonna put in the bare minimum. That's the people you're gonna keep.

Brian Milner (08:41)
Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure there's lots of research baked into this and you've probably crossed a lot of different studies and things that have kind of jumped out at you. And to me, that's always one of the things that's the most interesting when I dive into a topic like this and go really, you know, kind of knee deep into it. what, was there any kind of research that you stumbled upon as you were preparing for this or, you know, creating this book? that really kind of surprised you or that you found extremely interesting? Any studies out there around the effects of stress that kind of shocked you even maybe?

Marcus Lagre (09:18)
I wouldn't say shocked, but one thing that surprised me was that there was this study that showed, because I talk in the book about complexity, and I mentioned earlier that if you need to change the information in your working memory a lot, that leads to mental strain. But there were actually studies that showed that interruptions in work does not lower the quality of the work. It does, however, increase the sense of stress. But it doesn't necessarily lower the quality of work, which was something that I was absolutely convinced it would. However, there was a correlation between how far if you got interrupted, if it was on topic, so to speak, so that you didn't have to throw everything out of your working memory, then the quality level was still on par with what you would have seen if you weren't interrupted. However,

Brian Milner (09:48)
Yeah.

Marcus Lagre (10:06)
if it was something that was diametrically different to what you were actually doing, then yes, the quality would also drop. But I actually thought there would be like a clear correlation between interruptions and lower quality of work. And it wasn't.

Brian Milner (10:20)
Yeah. So it's not, I mean, what I'm hearing is it's not necessarily the interruption itself. It's the content of the interruption. And if the interruption is, you know, taking you wildly off track from your thought process, that's higher stress kind of a reaction to it. And that leads to more problems. But if it's, if it's an interruption that's near in the same area of what it is you're working on and thinking about, then it's not as hard to get back to it. Less stress, less, let's kind of end result effect, right?

Marcus Lagre (10:52)
Yeah, there's less mental strain in that scenario. However, you do often feel like you're less efficient, that you get less joy out of what you're doing if you get constantly interrupted, and that the workload is heavier than it actually is. So there's negative sides to getting interrupted a lot, but as long as it's sort of on topic, as you say, it's not really that harmful.

Brian Milner (10:54)
Okay. Yeah. Well, I know you do a lot of work with organizations and with leaders and organizations. And I know one of the difficult things, difficult kind of parts of having these conversations with leadership is trying to help them to understand the importance and kind of the impact and why this is important in a business sense to them. Not just that, you know, the way I phrase it in classes, it's not just that it makes you a better person, right? which there's value in that. not negating that being a good person is bad. I'm just saying from a business sense, oftentimes leaders want more than just saying, yeah, I'm a better human by doing that, but is it better for the business? So how do you have that conversation with leaders, with organizations to say, this is actually an important thing to focus on. This makes an impact on your business.

Marcus Lagre (12:07)
usually the challenge is to get leaders to understand that they are also affected by this. Because a lot of the challenges I see in organizations is that I come in and I usually do like an analysis of the organizations, ask around, do interviews and analyze everything. And what I come up with is rarely news to the leadership. They have seen the same thing. The problem is that they never had the time to just sit down and figure things out because they're constantly rushing between meetings. They're constantly rushing to do various budgets, updates, stuff like this, just keeping the mill going. So I usually say that they're too operationally occupied to take a look at the strategic goals and the strategic direction that they need to be going in for the business to run smoothly over a period of time. And so I usually tell them that the most important thing that you can get yourself is like an hour, at least every week that you just sit on your rear end and just contemplate things. I usually use a different word than rear end when I tell them this, just to drive the point home. But yeah, they need to find time. where they can just like no phone, no computer, just sit down for an hour and let whatever enters your head, enter your head because otherwise you will never figure this out. And you don't have to pay people like me premium to come in and tell you things that you are actually clever enough to figure out yourself.

Brian Milner (13:41)
Right, right. Yeah, so that's so interesting. So it's hard to convince them that stress plays a big impact on their work. I hadn't really thought of it from that perspective, but that's a great point to make. If you can help them understand the impact it has on their work, maybe it's an easier conversation than to say the impact it has on your teams or on your employees' work. Yeah.

Marcus Lagre (14:06)
I have never, mean, stress is contagious and it ripples down. If you have a really stressed out management, you're gonna have stress in the rest of the organization as well, like on the floor and in your teams. That's just a given, I would say.

Brian Milner (14:11)
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, so I'm following along. I think this is good. So we're talking about how you kind of explain this a little bit more to leaders and help them understand the impact. What about when you get one of those leaders who's just, and I know I've had these before where they're kind of more old school and they look at things and think, you know, you... Well, on your graph of pressure, right? They're much more leaning towards the higher pressure side to place on employees because they take that attitude of, you know, the old phrase that we all hate, work expands to fill the time allowed or whatever that thing is, right? How do you convince that person that, you know, there's an okay amount, but you're kind of really skewing it to the high end and this is now going to have an adverse effect?

Marcus Lagre (15:00)
yeah, yeah,

Brian Milner (15:12)
on what you're ultimately trying to do.

Marcus Lagre (15:14)
My usual angle of attack is to address the complexity of the part of the equation. I probably can't get them to understand or accept that they're applying too much pressure, but what they're actually trying to achieve is to get more output. I mean, that's the goal of their actions. And so I try to get them to understand the complexity that their teams are working under and try to get them to understand that you need to reduce this in order to free up more time and mental bandwidth for output. And that's usually a better way forward than trying to get them to accept that you only get so far with a whip. Once you've whipped one time too many, people are going to just stop caring.

Brian Milner (16:02)
Yeah. Yeah, you can't come back and use that tool over and over again. It's going to have kind of the opposite effect that you're hoping it will have eventually, right?

Marcus Lagre (16:14)
People are going to start telling you about problems, for example, because these people are usually the same people who don't want to hear about problems. Don't tell me about problems, tell me your solutions kind of attitude. And I usually get them to understand that you have absolutely no idea what the problems of this organization is, because people are afraid to tell you.

Brian Milner (16:22)
Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's such a huge point, I think, for leaders to kind of soak in and understand. If you have that culture, if you are generating that culture of fear in the organization of, don't come to me with problems, only come to me with solutions, then you're right. You're absolutely right. You're closing yourself off. And you're kind of establishing the norm that if there is an issue, The last thing to do is to raise it, to let people know about it, live with it, right? Just kind of exist with a status quo. If there's a problem, then you just have to learn to live with the problem.

Marcus Lagre (17:09)
Live with the problem or game the system so the problem isn't apparent.

Brian Milner (17:13)
Right, right. So back to the equation then. So your equation here, pressure times complexity over security. I don't know what we've talked much about security so far. So how does that come into play when you calculate this kind of pressure equation, stress equation?

Marcus Lagre (17:25)
Bye! Yeah, well, we kind of touched on it now, like with leaders who act in a way that lowers the security or the sense of security. So I define security as the freedom from fear at work. And psychological safety is one part of that. But it's also that you feel that you have... I'm sort of reluctant to use the words servant leadership anymore because there's sort of... sort of become a tainted word in some ways. People see it as a passive leadership style, which is not really, I don't quite agree with that, but security is in essence that you are able to take high pressure and high complexity if you feel that you have the management in your back, that you're taking it on as a team, that you're not alone with all of that pressure and all of that complexity, but you have people around you who you can rely on and ask for help. If you have that, then your security is higher and then you can take more pressure, you can take more complexity without burning out.

Brian Milner (18:32)
Yeah, yeah, that makes complete sense because if I have the kind of that sense of security that I'm not at risk, I don't feel like I'm being put in a position to fail so that I'm now in danger, but I've been given difficult problems because I have been trusted to conquer them. I've been trusted and empowered to kind of overcome them. That's such a different approach and mindset from an employee standpoint than, my gosh, I got to do this or I'm going to get fired.

Marcus Lagre (19:05)
Exactly, there's probably, management has probably let me know that we understand, we're handing you like a really tough thing to solve. if you need anything, if you need any resources, if you need any extra help, just ask us for it and we'll solve it. And in that situation, you're a lot more likely to... be able to get into that without burning out simply because you know that I have the management backing me up.

Brian Milner (19:37)
if I'm one of those employees who's under a high pressure environment, and I don't really feel like I have the power or authority to make that change, what can I do about it?

Marcus Lagre (19:50)
I mean, the thing that you can do is to change what I usually, one of the reasons why I wrote this book is that stress is one of the leading causes of mental illness and sick leave in our line of work, which is software. So if something is the leading cause of a problem, it's probably systemic, it's not individual. So one of the most important thing, that you can do is to identify what in the system is causing the stress in me, because ultimately stress is a subjective feeling. it manifests itself in people, but you can get the tools to identify what in the system is causing the stress in me. that can be quite a relief to not put that... I mean, put additional pressure on yourself by thinking that you're the one who's bad at your job or you're the one who don't have the correct coping mechanisms for the situation. The situation might actually be insane.

Brian Milner (20:51)
Yeah. Yeah, it's that subjective nature, I think, that is kind of a variable that I would throw into this equation. It's sort of like, I know one of the things I found really fascinating in kind of the earlier history of Agile and the idea of a sustainable pace was originally there was kind of talk about saying, using words like, no one should work more than 40 hours a week. But then that got changed to sustainable pace because of the realization that for some people 40 hours was too much and for other people 40 hours was not enough. And so that idea of sustainable pace was, it's individual, it's different to different people and that's part of what we got to do is know ourselves enough to know, hey, I'm kind of slipping beyond that point where I can sustain this indefinitely.

Marcus Lagre (21:37)
Yeah, and I think that's one of the myths that I want to bust a little bit is that, you know, it's not about 40 hours. It's not about the hours. I mean, there are some people who can work 60, 80 hours without burning out. So it's not the hours. It's something else. You know, so it's the end of the... Maybe it's the pressure that we have too much pressure. Maybe it's that we have too high complexity in combination with pressure. Maybe it's that we are in a toxic environment. So it's like how much mental energy do I need to handle the context that I'm in? That's.

Brian Milner (22:13)
It's almost like there needs to be kind of this balance between those three things that you've got to, one thing might go a little higher, but the others then have to drop a little bit so that it kind of equals out, right?

Marcus Lagre (22:22)
Yeah. That's what I, like, I always say that if you want to put high pressure on your teams, on your organization, you have to reduce the complexity because you can't do both at the same time. Those are the two variables that increases the stress. But then as we mentioned, like feeling of security is the lowering factor. So you always do well working with

Brian Milner (22:38)
Yeah.

Marcus Lagre (22:46)
the sense of security within your teams and working with your culture and making sure that toxic behavior is simply not acceptable in this organization, for example. And so that's always, you always get a reduced level of stress from that kind of work. But as I said, if you have high complexity and you put too high pressure on something, it's gonna break sooner or later. You're either gonna break your people or you're gonna break your product. because you're going to reduce the quality of the work because you have to stress through everything. And quite frankly, I don't care about your product. You're free to break it if you want to, but breaking people, that's just not okay.

Brian Milner (23:18)
Ha ha. Yeah, now we're back to being a good human, right? mean, these are humans. They're not AI programs, at least not yet. And they have lives. the more that you, like you're talking about, the more that you increase that pressure on them or decrease their sense of security, the less complexity they can handle. And you know, You have diminishing returns on your employees, on their productivity.

Marcus Lagre (23:48)
It is unsound business.

Brian Milner (23:50)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, this is fascinating. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this. Again, for anyone listening, if this topic is interesting to you, highly recommend you check out the book, The Stress Equation by Marcus Le Gray, even though that's not actually the way to say the name. it's L-A-G-R-E, just so everyone knows. I don't want you to struggle searching for it if you're looking for it. We will put the links to it in the show notes for this episode so that you don't miss out if you're trying to contact Marcus or you want to know more about the book. We'll make sure you find a way to do it. So Marcus, I really appreciate you coming on. This has been a fascinating topic and I appreciate you sharing your wisdom, your research and your knowledge on this with us.

Marcus Lagre (24:31)
The pleasure was all mine, Brian.