#135: Leading Without Authority with Pete Behrens

In this episode, Brian Milner and Pete Behrens explore the difference between managing and leading, the critical role of middle management in transformation, and how anyone—at any level—can drive real change in their organization.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with leadership expert Pete Behrens to unpack what it truly means to be an Agile leader.

They dive into the difference between leadership by authority and leadership by respect, the importance of competency in leadership roles, and why middle managers often hold the key to lasting organizational change.

Pete shares insights on how leaders can navigate cultural shifts, manage organizational tensions, and empower teams to operate effectively in today’s fast-moving world. Whether you're a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or executive leader, this episode is packed with actionable strategies for leveling up your leadership impact.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Pete Behrens
Agile For Leaders
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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.

Pete Behrens is a leadership coach and Agile pioneer, shaping organizational agility for over 20 years—long before scaling frameworks took center stage. As the creator of the Scrum Alliance® Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) and Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) programs, he continues to empower leaders worldwide through Agile Leadership Journey™, a global network dedicated to leadership growth and culture transformation.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
Well, welcome back Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the one and only Mr. Pete Barron's with us. Pete, welcome in.

Pete Behrens (00:15)
Thank you, Brian, for the invitation and happy to be here.

Brian Milner (00:17)
Very, very excited to have Pete with us. If you're not familiar with Pete's work, you're in for a treat. Pete has been doing this for a long time and he has been really a foundational person in some of the things that the Scrum Alliance has done over the years as far as being involved with the coaching program and the leadership program and helping to design and put that together. His main focus has been in leadership. for several years now. And that's why we wanted to have Pete on, is to have him talk a little bit about Agile leadership. Because in today's world, in the context of a lot of the things that are shifting and changing in our day and age, I know that there's just a lot to consider in the area of Agile leadership. why don't we start, and I know this is kind of a softball, you probably get this question a lot, how do you define that? How do you define, is Agile leadership different than leadership, or is it... Is it essentially the same thing?

Pete Behrens (01:12)
Yeah, good, good starting question. So think of leadership as, you know, the ability or capability of influencing others towards a common goal. Right. That's that's what we look at as a behavior, a capability. Some people confuse that with being a leader. And that's actually different. We think of that as being, you know, having a title of authority. Right. So if you think about influence, there's really two aspects. One is I actually have a title that gives me the authority or I have respect. that allows me to do that regardless of title. So we do that a lot with leaders to actually kind of reset some of that and think about, right, this is a capability anybody at any level, any title can do as somebody. Now, the agile, you know, part of that, obviously, you you and I live in an agile industry and world. Why? Because things are changing, right? Things are changing faster than we've seen. Things are more complex. software has created endless possibilities of paths. And we like to use the metaphor of fog. So think of your operating in the fog. You need to sense and respond to make appropriate decisions. It's no longer available to us to kind of leverage the plan, follow the plan. And so Agile is simply a capability of leadership to operate in that complex, fast-changing world.

Brian Milner (02:31)
Love that. Yeah, I love that analogy. mean, I think about like all the times I've done cross country road trips and you drive into a fog bank, you're a lot more alert. You have to be really on point the whole time versus, you know, driving out in middle of Arizona somewhere where you can see, you know, the next five miles ahead, maybe relax a little bit more behind the wheel. That's a great analogy. So if we have to be kind of There's a difference here between being, I'm a leader in the organization because they've given me a job title and I'm a leader because I'm recognized as a leader. I'm recognized as such. What kind of characteristics, qualities come with that recognition? How do people, what differentiates somebody who is a recognized leader in an organization from someone who's not?

Pete Behrens (03:14)
Yeah, you know, certainly title is a recognition, right? So it's one way, you know, people and it's in effect, probably the most desired way to become a leader is I want the title. you may have seen this. I know I did when I was, you know, I was a director of engineering, VP of engineering before I became, you know, a coach and consultants. And a lot of times I'd get people coming to me and say, Pete, I want that job. I want that leadership position. I want to be the tech lead. I want to be the development manager. I'm like, well, prove it to me. They're like, well, no, can't until you give me the title. And one of the things we've realized over time as we've been studying leadership and developing leadership programs is people who receive a title before they develop competency actually are worse leaders because they end up depending on the title to influence. And leaders who develop the capability and now where do you get this? You develop respect. How do you get respect?

Brian Milner (03:47)
Yeah.

Pete Behrens (04:11)
you develop respect through expertise, right? This is some combination of education and experience that people are willing and choosing to follow your lead. And this is the basis of where most people kind of get into leadership is they've developed a certain respect in the organization. Others are willing to follow them. And so that's a typical starting point, a typical entry into leadership. One of the things we also help leaders understand is that's also a trap. And I'll just pause there to let you reflect on it. We can go into that rabbit hole if you'd like to.

Brian Milner (04:48)
Yeah, no, let's talk about that because you're right. There's a lot of times when you see someone in an organization that they've been there, they don't necessarily have to have been there for a long time, but they've been there and they've developed the respect of their peers. They're the best programmer on the team. So the organization recognizes that, recognizes that others in the organization see them as being exceptional. So they elevate them. Now they're no longer just programmer where they did an exceptional job. Now they are manager of of the programming team and they've been elevated simply because they were the best among the bunch. Is that the right thing to do?

Pete Behrens (05:22)
Right. Well, it's definitely a common thing to do. And it's not it's not the wrong thing to do. I think the mistake a lot of organizations make and you know, you can go back to Marshall Goldsmith, who wrote the book What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And what he's alluding to is exactly that. The skills you need to get into leadership aren't the skills you need in leadership. And so the trap that that leaders fall into is, okay, and this is my path. And maybe your path as well is I'm the best engineer. I'm the best salesperson, marketing person, whatever that is. I'm now coming into leadership. What is your comfort? Well, your comfort is in the work itself. And so all this new stuff about working with people and projects and project management and people management culture and, and other things are very uncomfortable. So I go back to my comfort zone and that's when I start to micromanage. start to redo other people's work. I start to get too detailed into the weeds and I'm not doing the job of leadership, which is really influencing others down this path. And this is one of those traps that many leaders fall into is we get these steps up to leadership, but then we're not properly educated and provided the tools we need to do that job. I think the studies we've seen of only about a third of leaders get proper education, mentoring or coaching to be a leader. And the way we look at this is, is, you know, hiring anybody into an organization from the outside world. You would never hire somebody without a detailed resume that outlines every bit of education, every bit of experience. And then you're matching against 30 applicants or 100 applicants picking the best one. Yet every day. We're promoting people with zero expertise, zero education in leadership into those positions, and it's just It's really silly and it's really backwards. And yes, we want to give them opportunities, but we also need to help them. And that's what we're not seeing, is we're not seeing that help.

Brian Milner (07:20)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm old enough. I know that I remember in my dad's day and age, you know, it was not uncommon for any large organization to have a leadership training program within the organization. You would be recognized as being exceptional. You would be put forward and then you'd enter the leadership training program of the organization that would help you to elevate and become an effective leader. And we don't see that. as much anymore. You just kind of are elevated and hey, kids, you're on your own.

Pete Behrens (07:51)
Well, and what they're teaching is management, not leadership. And I think one of things we differentiate with leadership is we manage things like projects. We manage programs. We manage technology. We can manage documents and even HR programs, things like that. We lead people. And so, yes, there are a number of things that organizations, HR programs, et cetera, do to kind of help. Oh, you need to do a one-on-one. or you need to do basic communication. Like there is some, but it's not the things we realize help elevate. You know, we separate this concept of vertical development from horizontal development. we often teach or organizations often teach the horizontal. That's the skills. OK, so you need to communicate. You need to delegate. You need to empower. But we're not teaching what we call the vertical development. And so what they're doing is their mindset is stuck in this kind of one stage. They got all this like this toolbox, but they don't know how to use the tools. And what we're trying to do is help them understand and give them a bigger toolbox to help them understand how to use these tools effectively to be better leaders. And that's a much different problem. It gets into self-awareness. gets into my focus as a leader from shifting in terms of the system and what I'm focused on and what my goals are. as well as just the time horizon I work in and how tactical, strategic or visionary am I. Those are harder things to teach, yet that's where leadership starts to emerge.

Brian Milner (09:29)
Yeah, well, it makes me think back to what you were saying about the person that would come to you and say, I want to be promoted. I want to be put into this next position. And your response of, me, kind of help me see that. I know you're right. There's a lot of times when people will look at things and say, I need the title or I'll be a leader when I am called this or when I'm put in this position. But what I'm hearing from you and what I hope everyone's hearing as well is, this starts far before that. If you're going to be on that road to being a leader, then it's actually something that you begin wherever you're at. And these are skills you can start to build over a lifetime to venture into that vertical area as you describe it. Does that sound correct?

Pete Behrens (10:10)
Exactly, exactly. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, I want to, you know, maybe warn the listener on here, we get a lot of people who come through and we work with a lot of, you know, agile coaches or leaders who want to become a coach or, you know, we have change agents, right? People who are, you know, their focus is change in the organization, right? This is where you see a lot of scrum coaches and things like that. And one of the things that we've realized over time is this notion of individual as change agent is incredibly challenging. And for the most part, we, the way we visualize or we talk about this to leaders is it's like, you know, you start singing a song and everybody looks at you like, okay, he's crazy. Like he went to like this evangelical school. He drank this Kool-Aid and he's coming back and he's like, yeah, yeah, that's just Tom or that's just Susie. And, and nobody listens to him. And we see this over and over again. And, and You know, one of the things we talk about is we've got to shift that solo into a chorus, right? So the construct of leadership, we think of often as an individual sport, but truly the only way change really starts to take hold in an organization, and that's where we're starting to shift from me to we, is how do we catalyze that choir to start singing? That's when organizations start to excel. And that's one of the things that when I'm starting to work with leadership teams, we start to understand this isn't just something we teach individuals. This is something we've got to collectively act on. mean, you think about any sports team and European football or US football or hockey or whatever that is. Those teams are are are awesome because of that choir element, because they all sing in the same tune, because they're all practicing all the time together. That's the other part of leadership that I want us to kind of focus on as we kind of take this journey. This isn't a solo sport.

Brian Milner (12:07)
That's such an important point. I can't agree with you more. just the concept there that I hope people kind of pick up on is, yeah, I mean, the Scrum Guide has for years talked about change agent and the Scrum Master being a change agent, but the kind of maybe indirect association from that was, you know, it's your job to take it on yourself to go and do this thing where You're right, it's too big of a job for one person to do this kind of thing by themselves. We have to have help, you have to have compatriots, you have to have someone who comes alongside you, because like you said, otherwise you're singing by yourself and everyone's looking at you like, what's that guy singing?

Pete Behrens (12:48)
Yeah, unless you're Satya Nadella, know, or somebody who has that capability on top of the org. And we actually see change happen, from people like Satya Nadella is kind of a rare example, I think, in our world and how he shaped Microsoft. But we actually see more change happening from the middle. You know, when we're teaching organizations and working with them, one of the things that I often

Brian Milner (12:51)
Yeah.

Pete Behrens (13:15)
I'm speaking to is the middle tier, you know, it's it's the frozen middle. It's the the between the rock and the hard place. They often feel the most pressure because it's the pressure from above, but the incapability of delivering below. But I try to help turn it around for them. And I say, you're the only one in the organization who feel the pain, but have access to the top layer for change. And and when it comes to organizational change. We actually find more change happening from the middle than we do from the top. Just because the top is so risky and they already have so much power, they don't really need or want change so much. They want to push it. But oftentimes that change happens from the middle.

Brian Milner (13:54)
Well, I know we've all seen the surveys and studies and things that talk about, you know, agile transformations and change movements and stuff and organizations that have identified leadership as being a kind of a ceiling or some kind of a blockage to real change taking place. So I guess what I'm hearing from you a little bit is don't let that become a blocker for us if we're not the top leadership, that doesn't need to be something that we need to look at and say, that's out of my hands. I can't do anything about it. We actually do have a role to play to that in the middle or other layers of our organization that we can affect the change through the leadership. Is that right?

Pete Behrens (14:35)
It's a perfect, perfect point. something we try to iterate all the time. Yes. You know, the number one thing we hear when we're working with organizations is I wish my manager could hear this, right? Because they are feeling constrained. They are feeling bound by certain rules and policies and governance and, you know, all the things that feel like our constraints. And that is true. And, you know, the only one who has access to these constraints is leaders. You know, we often describe, I call it the two games we play. You know, we get the agile and you get involved in a lot of these agile transformations. So we get the agile game played at the team layer. And maybe we get a little at the program layer, you know, if you've got some some cross team kind of coordination going on. And then we have the leaders and they play a different game, different rules, a different ruleset. And and then they've got the conflict, right? That's happening between these two layers. And I see this so often. right in the organization. Again, it's that middle tier who sees both games, has access to both games. And I think a lot of the problem we have in our agile community is we don't speak leadership. We don't speak the language leaders speak. I've been working, I worked with the organization and I talked to, know, this is like the CFO and the chief risk officer and, you know, the CIO. And I had a comment that came out and he said, Pete, For about three years, I've heard Agile blah, blah, blah. And I just didn't get it. And now I'm starting to understand the value because what we've learned how to do is speak leadership, risk, right? What is the risk in the approaches we're taking that are or aren't Agile? And what are the pros and cons of that risk? know, oftentimes our Agile evangelists. put agile on the good side and traditional on a bad side. And that's not true at all. Agile lives in kind of what I'd call a peak. Aristotle called this the golden mean, right? There's a peak. And on one side, there's a deficit of agility, and that is too much planning, too much rigidity, too much bureaucracy. But there's an excess agility. And this is where a lot of our coaches land. It's like hippie agile. Hey, man, what are you going to be done? I don't know, man. We're agile. Hang with us. hear that and they're like, I don't accept that. And so yeah, we've kind of swung right across this hillset down from deficit to excess and leaders aren't buying that. And I think that's been some of the downside of our agile community, our agile messaging. We've never broken through that ceiling of leadership.

Brian Milner (17:12)
Yeah, by the way, just I'm going to interject this a couple of times throughout, but if you like what you're hearing here from Pete, you can find out more from his site, agileleadershipjourney.com. Pete does a lot of classes and coaching and teaching and other things. And there's a lot that you can connect with Pete on through that site. And we'll put this in the show notes so you don't have to scramble to write this down. You can get back to this later. So I love that. that explanation, though. And it kind of resonates with me in a way, because I know one of the things I've talked about when I talk to product owners is the idea that product owners sort of serve as translators between the two worlds a little bit, right? Because they have to speak with developers who speak in very tech-speak kind of language. They have to speak to stakeholders who speak in very business-speak kind of language. Are product owners kind of that function? Are we losing the as product owners in doing that? Or is it not really a product owner thing? It's just more of an entire Scrum leadership thing.

Pete Behrens (18:13)
Well, yeah, take the word Scrum out. It is a leadership thing. Product owners are leaders, right? They are leading product. And again, the role of product ownership is a role of influencing others towards common goals. And I used to teach product ownership. was a certified Scrum teacher and taught product ownership, Scrum Mastership. I found product ownership to be the most challenging role ever because

Brian Milner (18:16)
Yeah.

Pete Behrens (18:39)
you're essentially optimizing for a solution that doesn't exist. So you have all these stakeholders who have all these needs and there's no possible way to meet the demand. And so the role of product ownership is how do I find the optimal across this dimension? so it kind of gets us into this world of, in business, there are often no right answers. Should we do strategy A or B? Well, it depends. You know, we're often as leaders chasing answers when there isn't one. I often talk about this as managing tension. And if we can kind of switch our mindset from there is an answer to this is a tension that will never go away and give you an example of this, like product owners struggle between tech debt and features. Well, that's something that will never go away. No matter how much we work on tech debt, no matter how much work on features, they will always be there. This is a tension that We simply need to learn how to manage. It's never a solution we can come up with. The same is true with strategy and tactics. Should a product owner be more tactical, live with the team, or should they be more strategic and sit with the stakeholders? Yes. The answer is yes. And again, this is not something a product owner will ever solve, but it is something that they can learn to manage. And you start to shift this mindset. And all of a sudden, my role as leader

Brian Milner (19:50)
Ha

Pete Behrens (20:01)
starts to change. We had one product owner speaking of that that I was working with years and years ago. And she said, Pete, I feel like a tennis ball getting whacked around the court by my stakeholders, you know, and she'd go talk to the state. I need this. Bam. You know, and she got to talk to the team. we can't do this. Bam. And another thing, bam. And she's like, just I can't survive this. And so we talked and we said, OK, let's let's think about your role different. And what she did, she ended up doing is she brought the stakeholders together and she said, OK, stakeholders, you guys can never agree. I'm forming a meeting that you must come to and you must fight each other for the feature prioritization. And if you don't come to the meeting, you're likely not to get prioritized. So that incents you to come. And number two, you got to convince your peers that that's more important than their need. And it just completely changed her association of her role from this. I'm the tennis ball to. Now I'm managing the court and they're all hitting balls back and forth at each other. And she's facilitating, you know, and that's just kind of one of those switch of mindsets where I can start to change my association, my work and get out of this, this sense of, there's an answer and I can figure it out to how do I manage this tension?

Brian Milner (21:11)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, we believe in working in teams as a Scrum team. Why wouldn't we believe in working in a team of stakeholders as well? Right? Yeah, this is such great stuff. So I'll throw out another really loaded term at you because I know that whenever the term, whenever we talk about leadership, whenever we talk about agile leadership, or just leadership in general, you got to talk about culture. You got to talk about the idea of culture and changing culture and affecting culture and

Pete Behrens (21:19)
Yes, exactly.

Brian Milner (21:38)
You know, year people talk about, culture's a whole ball game, culture's everything. And other people who say, no, we focus too much on culture. It needs to be more about tactics and actually how we carry things out. And if you just do that, then the culture will follow. What's your take? Are we focused too much on culture? Is culture something that people care too much about? Or are we not focused enough on it?

Pete Behrens (22:01)
You know, I think as a as a word, just as like words like servant leadership or words like agile to get they get used and abused and people get tired of them. So I do agree culture as a word has is tired. But if you look underneath, what is culture representing? One of the terms we like to use is, you know, culture is like a shadow. It's simply reflecting something about us that we can't touch or change directly, but we can influence it. And people feel it like they feel the shadow of culture. They can sense it. And this is where, you know, again, we get into these tensions. You know, this culture is one of the things I use is culture's attention, not attention, but a tension like this, this fighting between sides. And, know, one of these is empowerment or alignment. You know, do we do things together like. Let's take a safe approach and everybody's in the same framework and the same process and the same RTE and the same rhythm. you we have the same rules and we use the same methods for estimating and that's alignment. But we know that taking alignment too far becomes routine and rigid and a death march and, all those negative sides of being in that heavy rhythm. But then we go the other way. Well, let's empower, let's Spotify, like everybody their own ruleset and they can just follow on principles and And then we know we take that too far and we've had this kind of wild chaos and people like, what's going on? And every team's different and we can't align. And this is like one of those elements of culture. You what we talk about is culture is that representation of that tension we're feeling. And it might be about speed and quality. You know, it might be about this empowerment alignment, but it's there. And whether we talk about it or not, it exists. And it influences. We like to use the metaphor of culture is the opposite side of the coin to leadership. And so we can choose to ignore it, but it is going to influence or it does influence us every day. I don't believe while the term is overused, I don't believe our focus on it is enough. And we've shown over and over again when we work with organizations that when leaders put a spotlight on some aspect, of that tension that's happening to your culture, they improve the system. And whether that's tension between leaders and employees, whether that's tension between quality and speed, whether that's tension between, you know, giving autonomy and freedom to doing things together, we can improve that system. And so what we try to help leaders understand is you need to make this part of your understanding and your focus, because if you don't, it will take care of you.

Brian Milner (24:42)
Yeah, yeah. Well, if I'm part of that, I mean, we talked about that, you know, people in the middle have kind of the biggest impact or you can have the biggest impact. That's where a lot of change takes place. If I'm in that middle and I recognize the culture of my organization is not what it should be, you know, we're not really in align with some of this stuff and we're definitely out of alignment with several of these things. What can I do? I can't make an edict across the organization, but how can I start to make that change if I'm in that middle section?

Pete Behrens (25:13)
Yeah, we had a leader that went through a number of our programs for a few years. you know, we have both educational programs, but we also have coaching programs and development programs that can kind of work on developing leaders. He moved to another company and for two years he sought to bring about what he knew to be a better way. Right. He saw the gaps. He saw the tension. He's like, I got it. I know this. But again, single voice. Everybody's looking at him crazy. He hires another person who's been through our programs to help him on his team as an agile coach. Now they got to. OK, now they're starting to sing together. It's a duet. And, know, from him for his perspective, simply it was these these conversation after conversation after conversation, the tenacity, you know, to to to say, give this a shot now. From that, we've been able to provide some more education to some of the HR, some of the senior leaders in this organization. And all of a sudden, the cascade, the dominoes start to fall. And they start to think, now I see what you've been saying all along. And so my message here is everybody can be a catalyst. Everybody can influence. But you're correct in the fact that it is not easy. What we try to help some of these catalysts, these one offs do is simply activate a second step, activate another voice that can help you bring about, you know, a message of change. And that's enough. And I think a lot of leaders get stuck because they like, I can't run a transformation. I can't get focused on this change of metrics or policies or governance. And you're right. You will never probably have access to some of those levers unless you move up the chain enough. But you can influence one other person. You can influence a few people. You can influence one class or, you know, bring someone in to help change our voice. So that's what we try to aim for some of these change agents.

Brian Milner (27:12)
Yeah, I love that. It's kind of the cascading effect, right? I mean, if you spark that one spark into something else, well, as long as that continues, that chain continues, it can spread. It's the old, if I tell two friends and they tell two friends, then this thing is going to work. Yeah, I love that. And that's a great practical thing too, right? mean, because I think a lot of people in that middle start to feel frozen and feel like, What can I do? I can't do anything. I think that's a great point. If you can just affect that cascade into one other area, one other person, one other department, then that's all it takes for it to start to get rolling. I love that. Well, this has been a great conversation. And it's never long enough. And this one, we could go on for another several hours on this one. If you really like this, I'm

Pete Behrens (27:38)
It's hard.

Brian Milner (27:58)
I'm going to encourage you again to visit Pete's site, agileleadershipjourney.com. There's a lot of resources for you there. You can get connected to Pete. And there's a lot of things you can move forward with in your agile leadership journey from Pete. So I can't thank you enough. Thanks, Pete, for taking the time out and sharing your wisdom with us.

Pete Behrens (28:16)
Thank you, Brian. Appreciate the conversation.