Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

Ever left a meeting feeling more drained than before it started? That’s the dreaded meeting hangover. Brian Milner and Julie Chickering dive into why bad meetings have lasting effects—and what facilitators AND participants can do to make them better. Overview Bad meetings don’t just waste time, they drain energy, morale, and engagement long after they’re over. In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian and Julie Chickering unpack the concept of "meeting hangovers"—the lingering negative effects of ineffective meetings. They explore why bad meetings happen, the shared responsibility of facilitators and participants, and practical strategies for turning the tide. From fostering accountability to knowing when to walk it off, this conversation will help you rethink how meetings impact team dynamics and productivity. References and resources mentioned in the show: Julie Chickering #137 Stop Wasting Time with Guests Kate Megaw HBR The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers by Brent N. Reed, et al. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink Remotely Productive by Alex Pukinskis Working on a Scrum Team Class Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com 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. Julie Chickering is the brains and brawn behind JC Agile Consulting, believes that Lean and Agile practices are packed with potential — to enable positive culture change, business agility, and breakthrough results. Julie is a past president and board member of the Agile Project Management Network (APLN), a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), as well as a traditional Project Management Professional (PMP). Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always Brian Milner and haven't got to say this for a while. So I'm happy to say again, welcome back to the show, the fabulous Julie Chickering. Welcome back, Julie. Julie (00:15) Thanks, Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Milner (00:17) Yeah, very excited to have Julie back. Julie is a friend of the show. We've had her on multiple times and it's been too long. We just need to have you on more often again. So thank you for making the time and coming back. We wanted to have Julie on sort of as a little bit of a continuation from our last episode that we had with Kate McGaw. You we talked a little bit about facilitation there and there was a lot that we talked about initially to set that up to talk about Julie (00:30) Sure. Brian Milner (00:44) just the fact that there's an epidemic of bad meetings. There's kind of a harmful thing happening where it's extremely prevalent that meetings are going poorly. There's not a lot of attention that's given to this. There's not a lot of focus in a lot of organizations because it's such a prevalent issue. of our meetings being so bad. And Julie pointed out to me this Harvard Business Review article that sort of became a touchstone, I think, for what we wanted to talk about. It's called the hidden toll of meeting hangovers. And we'll link to this in the show notes. But the idea behind the article was just to say, they quoted a stat early on saying that they did a study and found that more than a quarter, 28 % of meetings left employees with lingering negative effects, such as impaired engagement and productivity. And so that's what they were referring to this sort of this meeting hangover, that bad meetings take a toll beyond just the lost time in the meeting. And that's kind of what we were talking about more with Kate is, you know, yeah, we want to make our meetings better, but there is sort of this ongoing lingering that, you know, from my reading of this and what I've experienced, kind of compounds, you know? One bad meeting then can lead to another bad meeting and another one and that feeling of anxiety and disconnectedness and like I said here, impaired engagement and productivity, those kind of grow and get worse and worse the longer that you have these bad meetings. So Julie, I'll just start with you and say, you know, when you read this article, what was it? What was it that really stood out to you, that jumped out to you, that made you think this was an important kind of area of focus? Julie (02:27) First of all, I love the title because I can relate to it. So when you're having a hangover, you just feel terrible, right? And this person that they talk about first, Jacob, about like, he was so frustrated when he left the meeting. So the introductory story when he was so frustrated when he left the meeting, he canceled his one-on-one right after because he knew he couldn't concentrate. And then he was just like so upset. for the rest of the day and talking about how he just didn't even want to work on the project anymore. So just this, I just got this physical sensation reading this around how it feels when you're in a meeting that's ineffective. And we've all been there and I could just like feel it in my body when I read this story. And I also feel like once you know what I, what an ineffective meeting feels like, the ineffective one is more noticeable and draining. yeah, so and then this this lingering effect of morale and just wasted, just wasted opportunity. And it feels like Brian Milner (03:32) Yeah. Yeah. Julie (03:47) in the corporate world, this is the norm. That we just have meeting after meeting after meeting that's just sucking the life force out of everyone. And then we wonder why nothing gets done. Brian Milner (04:00) Yeah, I mean, this article is packed with statistics and it's tempting for me to just kind of read them all off to you. I'm not going to do that. But there's a couple of things that kind of jump out to me. they talk about how around half of people have this feeling of that as a result of the hangover from the meeting, that they have negative or harmful impacts on their interactions with coworkers. They feel more disconnected from their team. and they want to spend more time alone based on the fact that, I went through this really kind of, there's no other way to say it, traumatic experience of having this really harmful, bad meeting. they connect the dots by saying, people will leave these meetings and oftentimes they will then go commiserate with coworkers and say, share their frustrations, which is helpful, it's good. But it also, you know, they noted here, this can kind of spread some feeling of negativity or hopelessness, you know, that it's always going to be this way. You know, yeah, I had a meeting like that as well. Boy, I guess this place is doomed. It's always going to feel like this. And so they have this kind of ongoing, as I said, compounding almost nature of it that one bad thing leads to another leads to another leads to another. And pretty soon you've got this really harmful, negative work environment and it's not necessarily something that's just happened. It's just the repetition of going through those things lead to this ongoing negative psychological impact in the organization. Julie (05:28) Yeah, I'm just smiling because I can just think of some meetings that I used to have a leader that would always show up late. Always show up late. We'd be halfway through the topic and then he would show up and we'd have to stop what we were doing and go circle back and just speed and you could just feel. the whole mood of the meeting change. We were actually making progress and we have to stop and we have to go all the way over. And this is constant. So what we would do afterwards is then have meetings after the meetings to complain about the leader doing that. The more adult thing would have been of course to say to the leader, when you do this, Brian Milner (06:15) Yeah. Julie (06:22) This is the outcome. Brian Milner (06:25) Yeah. So, so that's kind of, you know, what we want to talk about a little bit in here as well is, in the last episode, we, focused a lot on facilitation and the idea that, Hey, there's a lot of responsibility to the meeting organizer, whoever's facilitating this to not have it be this negative kind of environment. And I don't disagree with any of that, that we talked about in the last episode. I think there is a lot of that, that is true, but I think it's, it's. important for participants to not look at that as, it's all the facilitator then, right? I'm just a participant, I'm showing up and it's your job to get all this stuff out of me. And if the meeting goes poorly, that's entirely your fault. And I think it's important for us to recognize, no, if I'm a participant, if I accept that meeting invite and I'm here, I have a role to play. I have a contribution to be made and I can have, you Julie (07:14) Right. Brian Milner (07:19) as kind of Pollyanna-ish as it sounds, I can have a negative impact or a positive impact on this meeting. And I think that's an important kind of responsibility to take a hold of. Julie (07:25) you Yeah, I agree. And I think about that in a couple of ways. So actually, in both Scrum Master and Product Owner class, I remind them at the end of every meeting to ask two questions. The next time we have this kind of meeting, what would you want to do differently? But you gotta ask the question. And if you ask the question and nobody says anything, then they can't feel victim to a poorly run meeting. But you gotta be able to listen. You gotta be able to listen to it. Doesn't mean you have to say yes in the moment. It could be that you would follow up after, but just ask the question. What would you wanna do differently the next time we have this type of meeting And then ask them, what did they like? Brian Milner (07:48) Yeah. That's good. Julie (08:11) I used to do it the other way around. I don't know if I told you this story before or not, but do you remember Daniel Pink did the he was our keynote speaker at the Scrum Gathering, our conference a few years ago when he talked about. OK, when he talked about timing. OK, so something he said is like, yes, he said, as people, if there's two, if there's good news and bad news to always start with the bad news first. And end with the good news, because as people, we remember the last thing we talked about it. Brian Milner (08:20) Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Julie (08:40) So if I say to you, okay, the next time we have this type of meeting, what would you want to do differently? And nobody says anything. Okay. What did you like? And then they leave going, we actually got something done. Unless of course we didn't get anything done. Brian Milner (08:57) That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think about like how in classes, a lot of times when we talk about forecasting and estimation, you know, I make a little joke. It's not really a joke. It's the truth. But when I present, I've learned over the years when I present information to stakeholders about timings, I, know, if, if I do calculations and it says it's going to take between five and six sprints to do something, I've learned to say the maximum amount of time it will take is six sprints. there's a chance it could come in as soon as it's five sprints and yeah. Yeah. I mean, I learned to do that because what I say in classes, I've learned a lot of people stop listening after the first one. And I think actually though, I may be wrong. It may be more what you're saying that, you know, we, we remember the last thing that we hear. but it may be a combination, right? Cause if, if I hear the low number first and I I'm happy with that, I stopped listening and I don't want to hear the bad news. Julie (09:27) Brilliant! Brian Milner (09:50) So if I say the bad news first, it could take as long as this, but there's a chance it could come in earlier, then I'm leaving them with the good news that it could be this, you know, as soon as this, but they've set their expectation that, you know, it could take as long as, you know, the bad news that I gave them initially. So I don't know, maybe there's a combination of that there as well. But yeah, I agree with what Daniel Pink says about that. And timings do make a big, difference for sure. and how we present things. Julie (10:18) Okay, so a key though in that is that you can only ask those questions if you're staying within the time box and you've allocated time to actually ask the question. And like some of these things that came up as the root causes of like poor time management, like running over or stuff like that. If you're running over, nobody's going to really want to take the opportunity to give you feedback. So what do you think about, so what you talked with Kate a lot about when we talking about here is the role of the facilitator. And I think we should talk about what people can do if they are feeling like they're the victim of the lack of facilitation or poor facilitation. So what do think about that? Brian Milner (10:52) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think we have several roles to play, right? I I agree. If I'm not the facilitator, then it's important for me to come into that meeting, well, knowing what the expectation is. know, like if I'm coming into a meeting as a participant, I don't think it's responsible. to show up to the meeting. And I've shown up to meetings like this, showing up with the attitude that, hey, it's not my meeting. It's the other person's meeting. You got me. I'm here. But now it's on you to get out of me, whatever it is that you're hoping to get. And maybe I put in very little prep work for it. So there is some kind of interplay here between the facilitator and the participant. Because you could say, well, that's the facilitator's responsibility to help you understand. Yes, it is. That's, this is what I'm trying to say is I, I think it's a mistake to shirk that responsibility entirely and say, I'm not the facilitator. Don't look at me. Right. If, if they didn't ask me to prepare or, or, you know, here's what I need you to, to, come prepared to talk about. Well, then I've got a bad facilitator and you know, we're just, we're hopelessly going to be in a bad meeting. No, when I get the invite, you know, Kate said last week, you know, Julie (12:17) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (12:22) You can decline invitations to meetings. You don't have to accept every meeting invite that you get. But if you do accept it, I think that there's an accepting of responsibility there to say, all right, I'm going to be a participant in this meeting. What do you need from me? And in advance, making sure you talk to that meeting organizer and saying, hey, I agree. This is probably a good thing for us to meet about, but I want to prepare. I want to know that I can come to this meeting armed with information that's going to be helpful to others and I can play my part. So meeting facilitator, meeting organizer, what did you have in mind for me in this meeting? What is it that you were hoping to get from me in this meeting so that I can show up prepared? And that small little question, I think, does several things, right? mean, one, it says, to the facilitator, do you know what it is that you want from this person? If they come back at you and say, I don't know, I just thought maybe you needed, well, if they say, you know, we just thought maybe you needed to be in the loop or whatever, well, I might come back at that and say, that sounds like an email, you know? Julie (13:31) Yeah, I'm also thinking though there's the flip side of then people, there's two different things. I want to go back to how I can also help. what also struck me when you were saying that is that I think there's also this cultural part of am I being excluded? That, you know, that sense of They're not inviting me. A lot of times people don't need to be there. What you're afraid if you're not there, does that mean something? Does it mean you're being cut out? You're not important? There's that whole ego part. Yeah. Brian Milner (14:04) Yeah. Right. Sure, mean, especially if there's a decision to be made, right? You could feel like, they don't want my voice in that decision. And I think that that's a legitimate concern. If I'm responsible for an area and decisions are gonna be made in the meeting and I'm left out of that invitation, I might have a concern and say, if there's gonna be a decision made around this, I probably should have an input. Is there reason why you didn't want my input in this meeting? And, you know, even asking that question can sometimes just trigger, well, this is lower level things. This is not really at the level that you weigh in on. Usually we didn't want to waste your time, you know, something like that. You might find out it has nothing to do with the fact that they didn't want your opinion. It was more of, we were trying to be conscious of your time and, and, and didn't think that this was the kind of thing that you would need to weigh in on. So you might have a micromanaging kind of problem there that you need to address as well. Julie (15:11) Yeah, this is all people's stuff. It's what makes it fun. Brian Milner (15:14) Yeah. I want to, want to just, I'm sorry. I don't want to mean to interrupt you, but there's one thing I've been thinking about this whole time as well, because we've been talking about bad meetings and bad meeting hangovers. And I think initially the first thought that kind of comes to our heads about that is facilitation and maybe the meeting not being organized well. But I think there's another thing that makes a meeting a bad meeting that it's important to call out as well. Julie (15:37) Mm. Brian Milner (15:40) I'll just give you an example. I remember there was a job I took the very first day of the job. It my first day on the job. We had a meeting with some of the other leaders in that organization, and I got called into this, and they introduced me. Hey, this is Brian. I remember them saying, he's the new whatever, whatever the last guy was that had my position. OK, he's the new whoever. And we got into discussion about upcoming things, the status of different projects and other things. in the middle of that meeting, there became a shouting match and there were F bombs dropped left and right. And I remember walking out of that meeting going, what the hell did I get myself into? You know? so what I'm trying to call out there is there are sometimes bad meetings. It's not about the facilitation or the order or the agenda or anything else. There's sometimes bad meetings because we don't bring kind of the Julie (16:15) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (16:29) best parts of ourselves to the meeting. We bring the worst parts of ourselves to the meeting. And sometimes we don't censor that and we don't let those, we don't kind of, I don't know how to put it. We're not engaging civilly, right? And I know that sometimes when I've been in those and I've had multiple of those kinds of meetings like that, that I would say, yeah, that was a bad meeting. But it wasn't because the facilitator did a bad job. It's because the participants were kind of letting their inner demons manifest through themselves in the meeting and they weren't really treating everyone with respect. They were very disrespectful to their coworkers. And I think that that's maybe more common than we care to admit. Julie (17:05) Mm-hmm. Yes, when you're sharing that to me, that goes back to meeting working agreements. like, what can I, so if we go back to, if you're in a situation where you're in a bad meeting, even if the facilitator is doing the best that they can, there's things that you can do. So to me, if we've had, and I know you were brand new, but you said that that was not. uncommon. If we had meeting working agreements and you let out an F-bomb and that was against the meeting agreements that anyone else in the room can say, you just broke one of our, you can, you, anyone can call people on that behavior. shouldn't have to be just the facilitator because the facilitator might be like just trying to run through, okay, now what am I going to do? It might be needing to just take a little breath to figure out what do, right? But I can imagine if that was the norm in that environment that people got that disrespectful in the meeting that when people left, there was a hangover effect. Like you kind of was like, what am I doing? Brian Milner (18:07) Right. Julie (18:27) What's happening here? What's going on? What did I sign up for on day one? This is day one. What's day two going to be like? Are we holding back? Right. Here's the new guy. Let's be on our good behavior. We'll only drop three F bombs instead of four. So, at, I was very fortunate that at, Brian Milner (18:27) Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, they were on their best behavior, right? Guess I was new. Yeah. Julie (18:50) rally software, just, this was norm. It was normal to learn, everyone learned how to facilitate and be good participants and all that, except it was really quite funny at our coaches events because we had to have the working agreement that the facilitator actually got to choose how to facilitate, but we didn't get to facilitate the facilitators. But anyway, I have started recommending Alex Bukinski's book, remotely productive. took a lot of what Jean taught us and help is helping people apply that remotely. So like chapter four is how to help in a bad meeting. So if you're a participant and it's going bad, how can you help get back on track in a respectful way? So not being, not being a jerk about it. But even, so he just even gives examples of things like. when somebody makes a recommendation. like noticing when people agree on an action and you type it into chat. It doesn't have to be the facilitator who types it into chat. Like as a participant, you can go, okay, the action was or a decision was made noting decisions, decision, write the decision down, but helping the facilitator be like, we would talk about that. Actually, I forgot until I just started speaking out about it that often, especially in Brian Milner (19:54) Yeah. Yeah. Julie (20:11) big significant meetings, would have a scribe, a facilitator and a scribe. So this is what he's talking about actually is somebody scribing. Brian Milner (20:22) Yeah, yeah, that's a very important component because if we just shout things out and no one's really capturing what the next steps are, those are going to get lost. And we could have to repeat this meeting because we just didn't really follow up in any way. We didn't take any action. So I agree. That's an important component of it is at least designating that it doesn't have to be one person, but just designating that, hey, here's the expectation. Here's what we're going to do. Yeah. Julie (20:49) Um, yeah. So there's a bunch of really good tips in here and like the Kindle version's 1499 or something. So I've been telling people like, if you can have just one meeting that sucks less, you're going to get your 1499 back. So if you could have one less meeting hangover, you're to get your 1499 back, think for sure. Brian Milner (20:49) That's a great tip. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I should clarify with my story earlier that I'm a big boy. It wasn't the language that bothered me. It was directed at someone else, like kind of F-U, that kind of thing. That's a very different dynamic than just saying, those effing suppliers, I sure hate that. That's fine. Or maybe more fine for others than some, but. Julie (21:21) Mm-hmm. Right. Brian Milner (21:38) That didn't bother me, was more just that the attitude behind it was a negative one towards someone else. But yeah, that's a great tip there, just understanding that when I'm a participant there, when I show up, that I have a role to play in it as well. There's things I can do and if there's not notes being taken, then I can maybe step up and do that. Hey, someone said we're going to need to do this? All right, let me put that in the chat. Remember, this is what needs to happen. Julie (22:05) Yeah, and he gives nice, some like a template here on when we're making decisions like data, diagnosis, direction, do next. So he's given a nice, he gives a lot of really great tools. I'm really, and like liking it quite a bit. back to your, your example that is, in the, the behavior part. was a lack of respect versus really the content. Yeah, I get that. The conflict that's going on. Brian Milner (22:42) Yeah. The tip from the book you just mentioned kind of aligns also to something that's in this article, the Harvard Business Review article. One of the things it says is they have some tips in this as well. And one of the things they say is demand accountability every time. And I think that's a good kind of takeaway as well is they're specifically talking about these action items, things that we would do as a result. As a participant, think it's important to, I like that language, demand accountability. If we have this meeting, all right, what is it that you're hoping to get out of this? I'm showing up, I'm here, what do you need from me? What are we gonna do as a result of this? Any participant can ask that. Any participant can say, so that we don't just waste this time, what are we going to do next? Julie (23:11) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (23:29) I think you demand accountability when you do that. Julie (23:33) Yeah, and I would say too, the first thing we should ask is what's the purpose of this meeting? And so if you go up to turn agendas into action plans, Jean taught us is you have a purpose statement. And then actually she taught us that what are the questions we need to answer in order to meet the purpose? Those are our agenda topics. When we've answered those questions, we're complete with this meeting. And then like where the Brian Milner (23:39) Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Julie (24:01) come back down here to make every minute count. Don't run over. Alex also gives some nice gentle waves of doing like we would say time check. We have 10 more minutes left. You could just put that in chat time check. We have 10 more minutes left. You don't have to be the facilitator to be like time check. So I do like that. He's helping people think about what they can do versus just being victim to Brian Milner (24:05) Yeah. Julie (24:29) the lack of facilitation. Brian Milner (24:31) Yeah. And as a participant, I can, I can check in at the start of the meeting and say, all right, just, want to, I want to, have a time box check here. Our meeting is scheduled from this time to this time. That's our time box, right? We can't, is there, or I have something right after this. just so you know, here's my time box. can't go further than this. and you know, I think as a participant, it's. Julie (24:46) Hmm. Brian Milner (24:56) you can have those same effects just like you said, hey, time box check, it's this, we got this much time left. And as a facilitator, I know I've reached the end of our time boxes sometimes when we haven't really gotten as far as I had hoped, but I've been okay saying this was a good start. This was a good start to what it is we need to decide. Obviously this is gonna take more time. We are at our time box, so we're gonna have to wrap this meeting up, but we'll schedule follow-ups and we'll take it from here. If I'm entering a meeting where I need a decision by the end of that time box, then by all means, make sure people are aware of that from the start. If I'm a participant or if I'm the facilitator, we're here together, but we all need to understand that we need to leave this with a decision on this. Julie (25:37) Yeah. So the other thing, Kia, I believe, around the decision is, and also be clear about how we're going to make the decision. So is this going to be a collaborative decision? We're all going to vote? Or are we getting, everyone going to give their opinion? Somebody else is going to make the decision? And then we'll check, like, how are we, how is the decision going to be made? So that's not a surprise as well. Brian Milner (25:50) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, extremely important. I know when I talk about in our product owner classes about doing things like buy a feature as a way to prioritize, one of the things I always try to say to the stakeholders is, hey, we're going to play by a feature, but this is no promise that this is going to be what the final prioritization is. You're helping me to prioritize, but I want to set the expectation. I have to take into account your opinions and other people's opinions and market factors and lots of other things. So make sure we're on the same page. We need to understand this is a component of the decision. I will make the final decision outside of this meeting, but I really appreciate the input and I need your input to help me make the decision. Julie (26:32) Right. Yeah, love that example. So moving down when they say press paw, how to recover how to press. Brian Milner (26:55) Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you find yourself having a hangover from one of these bad meetings, yeah. Julie (27:01) Well, even if it's a great meeting, I am a fan of Adam Grant and I can't like pull up the where he said it. And he said it someplace that the studies show that people actually need like 10 minutes between topics. So if you're going to finish a meeting, you should have at least 10 minutes before the next meeting to be able to. Brian Milner (27:19) Yeah. Julie (27:27) focus and reframe. So I also feel like sometimes these meetings are bad because people are rushing from meeting to meeting. They don't have time to take a bio break or get a bite to eat. So now they're hungry and all that kind of stuff. But we do this to people on a regular basis. Brian Milner (27:46) Yeah, yeah. But, and I agree with that. if it's a good meeting or a bad meeting, I'll find myself, because I work from home exclusively. Well, I shouldn't say exclusively. Sometimes I'll go and work on site with different companies. But when I'm working from home, I'll leave the meeting of something I've just talked about and I'll have to go get more tea or something. And there's a little decompression of, wow, let me kind of throw that off, right? Let me take a deep breath. And now I can reset and I'm ready for whatever the next thing is. But I find I do that kind of naturally and I can't imagine not doing it. I can't imagine kind of going one thing to the other all the time and never having that break. That would kill me. Yeah. Julie (28:31) It happens all the time. It happens all the time. back to meeting working agreements. That's another one that I suggest is people don't start like at the top or the bottom of the hour. Like they offset it a bit to build in breaks. But when you're setting that time box, you got to set, you got to leave space in your agenda time. You have to leave space in your time, your meeting time to close your meeting properly. Brian Milner (28:59) Yeah. Yeah. Julie (29:01) We don't think about how much time that takes either. So it all adds up for sure. Brian Milner (29:09) I like the idea too that they have in here of walking it off. I know just in my work history, kind of like the example I gave you, there have been times when I've been through meetings where I feel like, yeah, I just got to get this off of me. And I have taken... remember, know, in certain circumstances, I'm not a smoker at all, but I, I had, I've always had developers that smoke in some way, shape or form. I, I wouldn't be uncommon for me to go and just stand outside with them while they smoke. or I'll walk down to the corner and get a drink or something and come back. there's something about taking that walk, getting outside the office. or if I'm here working at home, you know, maybe I'll even just go take the dog for a quick walk around the block. And by the time I come back, that's such a good way to. just kind of let whatever that is go away and reset. Now I'm ready to do what I need to do next, but it all goes to know, eliminating that hangover effect that I might have that came from a bad meeting. Julie (30:12) Yeah, so another facilitation tip around that, especially if you've just done a big meeting, if you can, walk it off with someone else. But do it in a debrief way, like what did you learn? And so we would talk about walking the walls. If we're physically together, we have stuff all over, like grab a friend. Brian Milner (30:21) Mmm. Yeah. Julie (30:34) or grab something you don't usually talk to and then walk the walls, so to speak. So at the end of class when I do have enough time, I like them in their breakout rooms to just debrief each other. Like what are a few things you want to try and remember? Because we all remember different things. So there's different ways you can do it. The way they talk about walking it off is it Brian Milner (30:38) Yeah. Julie (31:01) to avoid the hangover, but hopefully we're gonna switch the culture and people are gonna have good meetings and they're gonna wanna talk about positive stuff at the end. I mean, there's both ways of thinking about that physically, I think. Brian Milner (31:13) Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Well, I hope people have gotten a lot of this. You know, we kind of debated, we do this? Should we talk about this? It's so close to kind of the last topic, but I do kind of see it as a part one and part two. You know, there is a part one of that that is, bad meetings sometimes are very much a cause and effect of not facilitating well. But I would hate for people to entirely think, well, it's just the facilitator. there are only one person in the room. And if all the other people think that's not really my responsibility and I don't really have a part to play in this, then the facilitator can only do so much. Julie (31:45) Yeah. Yeah, and depending on what type of meeting it is, like really big, significant, like quarterly planning meetings, then the facilitator needs to do more work, in my opinion, to set everybody up for success. So depending on the size, the length, the... Some meetings need more structure than others, but I agree that as participants, you gotta have accountability to and how it's going and do I need to be here? What's the purpose? If the purpose isn't introduced, then you would ask kindly, what's the purpose of the meeting? What are we trying to accomplish here? I'm just wondering, I'm just checking in. just, not like, the hell am doing here? Brian Milner (32:38) Right, right. Julie (32:39) was to make sure that I'm, you know, whatever. But I do like what Kate said. don't know. You should be able to ask the questions. You should be able to decline all of that. So here's what I'm thinking now, Brian. Another thing people could do, though, is if they start to pay attention to the cost. Brian Milner (32:44) Yeah. Julie (33:05) of being in meetings just through their own health and well-being, then yes, they can be proactive. They can learn a few tips from Alex, but then maybe they, even if they're not the Scrum Master or someone who would normally be assigned to becoming a facilitator, maybe they can get some of the facilitator training because... The training that Kate was talking about really is applicable to any kind of role. It doesn't have to be the scrum master or product owner or team lead or manager. It's really applicable to all people. And then the other thing too, if it's something that say you're in the developer level role, even if you're a business analyst, quality, whatever, quality engineer, whatever, and you wanna become a facilitator. get the training and see if you like it. Then you can kind of be stealth-like in there with, and I feel like that's some of the things Alex is trying to teach people as well. If you're going to be the facilitator or the participant, that there's ways that you can make a difference in a positive way. Brian Milner (33:59) Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely agree. agree. Well, this has been a great conversation. We got to have you on more often. So I apologize it's been so long, but I really appreciate you taking the time and bringing this topic up. And it's a great, great focus for us, I think. thanks for bringing it, Julie. Julie (34:21) Beautiful. Well, I don't have a meeting hangover, do you? Brian Milner (34:36) I do not. I feel great. I don't need to walk anything off right now. Awesome. There we go. I'm right there with you. All right. Thanks, Julie. Julie (34:39) Me either. I'll just go back to drinking tea. Okay. right. Thank you. Yep.

In this episode, Kate Megaw joins Brian Milner to share simple but powerful techniques that can turn those soul-sucking meetings into dynamic, action-driven conversations. If you're ready to make meetings worth attending, this one’s for you! Overview Brian Milner and Kate Megaw uncover the secrets to running highly effective and engaging meetings. They tackle common facilitation pitfalls, the staggering amount of time wasted in ineffective meetings, and how simple tweaks can transform team collaboration. Kate shares practical strategies for keeping participants engaged, fostering psychological safety, and ensuring meetings lead to real action—because no one has time for another pointless meeting. References and resources mentioned in the show: Kate Megaw ARCLight Agile Katanu Katanu’s Facilitator Certification Course Katanu Resources #44: Transformations Take People with Anu Smalley Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com 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. Kate Megaw is the Founder and CEO of ARCLight Agile, specializing in helping organizations create empowered, high-performing teams through agility and collaboration. A dynamic Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Team Coach (CTC), and Project Management Professional (PMP), Kate is a sought-after speaker known for sparking ‘aha’ moments that drive real transformation. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as I always am, Brian Milner. I'm with you as your host. But today I have the one and only, amazing Kate McGaw is with us. Kate, thank you for coming on. Kate Megaw (00:17) Thank you for having me. Brian Milner (00:19) Absolutely. If there's some of you out there that aren't familiar with Kate, she is a CST, a Scrum trainer like myself. She's also a certified team coach. And she also has the other side of things, the dark side. She's a PMP. So she has that project management kind of background that she brings to the table as well, which I think is awesome. She's a CEO of a company called Arclight Agile. And she's a co-founder of one of our favorites here that's come on the show, Anu. But they team up together. So it's Kate and Anu. And so their company is Katanu. I love it. love it. So why we decided to have Kate on is because Kate and Anu both have done a lot of work around facilitation. And we did have a user request. Kate Megaw (00:57) That's it. Brian Milner (01:09) to have an episode where we focused on facilitation. And listeners of the show know there's nothing I love more than being able to fulfill listener requests here and try to do those as soon as possible. So let's dive in. Let's talk about facilitation. It's a funny word. There's lots of different misconceptions and things about it, I'm sure. What do you find people misunderstand most about facilitation? Kate Megaw (01:34) think one of the key misunderstandings around facilitation is that you're part of the meeting, you're part of the event, you're actively involved. And when you're facilitating, you're actually, taking a step back because you are accountable for making sure that everyone is speaking and that we're keeping an eye on the agenda and things like that. And if you are actively involved in the discussion, You can't be doing that because you're missing body language. You're missing people who need to talk and who aren't talking. So I think one of the main misconceptions is, or that people forget is a facilitator is neutral. So if, for example, you have a scrum master facilitating a retrospective and they need to be actively involved in the retrospective, they should be inviting somebody else in to facilitate it. and I think We're beginning to see a lot more interest in it now because it's one of these key things. If it's done badly, people generally will notice. If it's done well, hopefully you don't notice that much other than, you know what, that meeting was very efficient. We achieved the goal and I feel as though it was worth my time. One of the things I like to say to people at the end of a meeting is the fist of five, how worth your time was this meeting? And I'm looking for fives or fours. If we're getting threes, twos and ones, we've not facilitated it well, or the meeting didn't achieve its agenda and things like that. think a lot of the statistics around facilitation that have come out recently, and you and I were talking about these briefly before we started that the average at the Microsoft trend index shows us that average time spent in meetings by employees at the moment is 21 and a half hours a week, which is an increase, I know, an increase of 252 % since the pre-pandemic. So. Brian Milner (03:36) That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, that's more than half of a work week, right? I mean, we're spending more than half our work week in just locked in meetings. So you're right. We had this conversation beforehand and you were telling me that stat and it just kind of floored me that we're spending that much time in meetings. But it was the next one you told me that really floored me. And it's a combination of these two, I think, that people need to really grasp onto. So tell them what you told me next. Kate Megaw (03:49) Mm hmm. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So the next one is that the Harvard Business Review indicates their research, 67 % of meetings are considered by executives to be failures. So if we look at the financial impact of that, and this is something I didn't share with you, but the financial impact of that is for a company, imagine you have a company with 100 employees, unproductive meetings are wasting upward of $1.7 million a year. If you have a thousand employees, increase that number. it's one of these things that it is not difficult to do. It is just understanding why we need someone in the facilitator role. And the basics around the basic facilitation, the basic getting ready for the meeting, facilitating during the meeting and properly closing the meeting. takes those unsuccessful numbers up to successful numbers where you're getting those fives and people are sort of, yep, that meeting totally achieved the purpose and the outcome and it finished early. So I've got 20 minutes back before my next meeting. Brian Milner (05:24) Yeah, it's so incredible that combination of those two stats. I thinking that we're spending over half our time in meetings and that 67 % of them are failures, we're having a lot of them and we're not doing them well, clearly. Kate Megaw (05:36) Absolutely. I think with, I don't know with Zoom, well, I think with Zoom, it's got easier to have meetings. So we're probably having meetings where we don't need to have meetings. That's one of my favorite things to ask is, does this need to be a meeting? Or are you just going to talk at me and roll data out? In which case, send it to me in email. Don't tie me up for a meeting. Brian Milner (05:44) Yep. Kate Megaw (06:02) Because so many meetings are a waste of time that a lot of people are spending meetings multitasking. So we're taking an hour for a meeting that we could do in 25 minutes if people were 100 % engaged and following the agenda and things like that. Brian Milner (06:22) Yeah, yeah, that's so fascinating. it seems like such a, it's hard to believe that there's not more of that skill in just basic business training, right? Because if we're having all those meetings, then it would seem natural that there would be more segments that would say, you know, a little facilitation skill for, you know, a, you know, bachelor's in business, you know, like that might be a little helpful, right? Kate Megaw (06:41) Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a small investment for something that will make a huge difference. I mean, one of the things Anu and I have been working on is the mnemonic of ready, reach, and wrap in order to make sure we have effective meetings. And the ready part of it is setting the foundation. So before you even get to your meeting, this is ahead of time. You're understanding, okay, what are the Rs? What are the roles and responsibilities? So if I'm facilitating, then who are the decision makers? Who is mandatory? Who's required to be there? Who are the, you can come if you want. Let's stop doing meetings to 30 people and expecting 30 people to show up. So we've got to understand the roles and responsibilities. The other, the E for the ready is expectations and engagement. Brian Milner (07:29) Ha ha ha. Kate Megaw (07:41) So if the expectations are that this is an interactive meeting, we're using Lucid or Mural or Mira, whatever tool we're using, it's going to be collaborative, webcams are going to be on, multitasking is going to be at a minimum, everyone knows going into that meeting what the expectations are. And then the A again is the agenda and the alignment. The agenda should be very clearly saying these are the items that the D is making sure where we have defined the purpose and the outcome. So every meeting, we need to know what the purpose of the meeting is, what the outcome of the meeting is, and they should be included in the agenda. We shouldn't be accepting meetings. Imagine the power of being able to decline a meeting if it didn't have an agenda in it. And if you think about it, why do we attend meetings? Brian Milner (08:27) Ha Yeah. Kate Megaw (08:33) with no agenda and people turn up to the meeting and said, okay, so what's this meeting for? Pretty sure we've all got better things to be doing. So make sure for every meeting we have a defined purpose and outcome. And then the why is making sure we as facilitators have your logistics ready. If it's Zoom, if we're using a remote whiteboard, do people need to practice it? Do we need to set up an environment? Do we need to make sure webcams are on? All that type of thing. So a huge amount of meetings would be better if we did nothing other than better planning with the roles, responsibilities, the expectations, the agenda, the defining the outcome and the logistics. If we just did that. Brian Milner (09:09) Yeah. Kate Megaw (09:23) I bet we're going to see the amount of productive meetings increase considerably. Brian Milner (09:29) Yeah, there's so much transfer here too as well, just to the normal scrum meetings that we have because, you know, one of the things I'll talk about lot in class is just to say, you know, you can't just expect to show up to something like Sprint Planning and have it go smoothly. You have to put in some work beforehand and get ready for it. Same thing with like a Sprint Review. You got to put in some work beforehand and make sure you know who's going when and who's speaking, you know, that speaking order and all that stuff. Kate Megaw (09:42) Yeah. Brian Milner (09:55) goes miles in making those more successful meetings. But the other thing that really interested me in that is you talk a little bit about purpose and that we don't really understand the purpose of the meetings. And that's something that's really stuck out to me is when I talk to people who don't like their Scrum meetings, it feels like 90 % that is just Brian math, but it feels like 90 % of the time, right? Feels like this. It feels like 90 % of the time. Kate Megaw (10:04) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (10:20) that the people who have a problem with those meetings don't know the purpose of the meeting and that's really the root cause of it, right? If they knew why we were here, then the meeting makes sense. Now I understand what we're trying to do. Kate Megaw (10:26) Yep, absolutely. And I think one of the interesting things, I would love to repeat these numbers around the Scrum events, because I think by default, the Scrum events do have a purpose. They do have an outcome. We know what the roles and responsibilities are. We know what the expectations for engagement are. So I think the Scrum events are much more productive than your average event. Brian Milner (10:41) Yeah. Kate Megaw (10:59) But I do feel if we don't have well-facilitated Scrum events, that's where we get our criticism, or, this meeting was a waste of time. Okay, well, let's look at our facilitation and see, it an error in planning or was it an error in expectations? But it always surprises me when people say, well, Scrum's just so many meetings. And I'm so... No, we should have fewer meetings and if they're well facilitated, we need all of those meetings. So it's not as though we're having a meeting for meeting sake, which I think is unfortunately something we can't say for our non-scrum events. Brian Milner (11:43) Yeah, yeah, I mean, I go so far as to say, if you don't understand the purpose of it, don't show up. I mean, there's really no need to be there if you don't know what we're trying to get out of it. One other little side correlation there too, because this kind of ties in a little bit to some of the stuff I did this last year in kind of studying a little bit about neurodivergency and different neuro types and that kind of thing. And one of the things I found really fascinating was certain neurodivergent types, Kate Megaw (11:48) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (12:12) really need to have an agenda in advance. And if they don't, then it just raises their anxiety level. they're just, you even not, you know, neurodivergent types, just regular, normal, you know, neurotypical people. There are those that just don't respond well when you're just throwing out a blank slate and saying, give us your best idea, right? They need time to process and think in advance and Kate Megaw (12:15) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yep. Brian Milner (12:38) And so yeah, if we could send out that just the day before, it's not that much work. It's just one day earlier, right? It's actually the same amount of work. It's just doing it a day earlier. Right. Kate Megaw (12:45) Absolutely. Absolutely. It's just better organized. Yeah. I mean, I even on my team meetings, I know some members of my team want to know, because I always like to start them with segue questions and some of my team completely fine. Ask them a question, favorite food or you want to have any sort of segue question and they're fine with it. But I have my thinkers who want to think about it ahead of time. So I think it's important when we're facilitating any event that we understand the audience. How many of the audience are going to want to maybe read a document ahead of time? How many of the audience are, you know what, they can think on the feet, I can throw anything at them, but there are others that do need the preparation. yeah, I think that the planning that we do, if we can do it just slightly ahead. And then things like when we get into the meeting, of the mnemonic that we use for actually facilitating during the meeting is the mnemonic of reach, which is we're guiding the process. The very first thing we do when we go into the meeting is we review the agenda and open the meeting. So here's the agenda. I've got the agenda visible. mean, what the agenda that we use in classes. Is the to do doing and done. I use that for all my meetings. I've got that up on the virtual board and the topics of the meeting are moving across to doing and done because then our visual people can see how we're doing. But the reviewing, at the start of every meeting we said, OK, let's just review the agenda. Let's just remind everyone this is the purpose and this is the desired outcomes. And if the right people are not in the meeting. There's no point having a meeting that we cannot achieve the purpose and the outcomes because we don't have the right people. So, I mean, I always say open it, open it with a segue question and things like that, but level set on the agenda. And then the middle part of the meeting is the bit that people are familiar with, which is the gathering ideas. It's exploring. It's the A is the assessing, making sure we've got the collaboration and the discussion and the... Brian Milner (14:39) Yeah. Yeah. Kate Megaw (15:07) The C is our concluding, are we doing dot voting or is somebody else who makes the final decision? But the H is the one that we often forget at the end, which is let's highlight the action items from the meeting. Let's make sure we know what it is, who's accountable for it, when it's going to be done by, and then close the meeting. mean, you... Brian Milner (15:18) Hmm. Kate Megaw (15:33) you and I will both close out our classes. Maybe we use one word, maybe we use, give us a statement, all sorts of different things, but we forget to close out meetings. go, time's up. Okay. Bye everyone. And we've not reviewed the, this is what we're going to do for next time. And we've not formally closed the meeting, even if it's as simple as one word, but we've got to open and close it. Sorry. Passionate about that. No. Brian Milner (15:44) You You mean that's not how you close out a class? I've been closing classes like that for years. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, exactly. Ding, sorry. Kate Megaw (16:03) Yes, sorry, time's up, clunk. Yeah, sorry, dog's barking, dog needs to go out. So, but yeah. Brian Milner (16:11) Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, no. And there was something I came across just in trying to put together materials for classes where we have little segments on facilitation in it. Because I think sometimes there's a lot of focus on the different various techniques, like fist to five or thumbs up or whatever. There's different kind of techniques. I'm not trying to belittle those. Those are things we need to know. But. Kate Megaw (16:21) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (16:36) One of the things I came across was that the root word of this thing is this Latin word, facilius. stands or it means literally to make easy. And I've always had that kind of in the back of my mind when I'm a facilitator is like, what are they trying to do? And whatever they're trying to do, just, my job is just to make that as easy as possible, right? You know, it's always difficult when you're trying to make a decision and you have no direction about how that decision is going to be made. Kate Megaw (16:46) Yeah. Brian Milner (17:05) But a good facilitator can give the structure to it and say, no, no, no, it's OK, I got you. We're going to go through this little journey together, and we're going to end in this other side, and you're going to have something to take away from it. Kate Megaw (17:16) Yeah, we're going to have heard everyone's voices as we go through. We're not going to let one person dominate the conversation. We're going to use techniques like, that's a great point. Can we also check in on the other side of the table? Let's hear some counter points here. It's pulling people in, it's summarizing. So if I'm hearing you correctly, Brian, you're saying A, B, C, D. It's all of that going into it. And I think one of the other... big has when we teach facilitation is the facilitator is not the scribe. So people say, well, I'm the project manager or I'm the facilitator. need to be taking all the meeting notes. And I'm like, well, what direction is your head pointing when you're taking notes? And it's down at a piece of paper. So you're not seeing who's yawning because you're tired and you need to take a break. You're not seeing people who are confused or wanting to talk and things like that. sort of either you turn on the AI tool and have the AI tool summarize the meeting for you. Do check it before you submit, it out or B have everyone in the meeting as a grown ass adult. They can take their own agenda items. mean, their own action items, have an area on your virtual board or in the room you're having the meeting in that is action items. And again, what is it? Brian Milner (18:18) Sure. Kate Megaw (18:36) Who's gonna be doing it? When's it gonna be done by? And I think one of the key criticisms of meetings is, and you'll hear this as well, particularly by retrospectives is, well, nothing changes. And I'm sort of, well, who has the action item? well, there isn't an action item. And I'm sort of, at the end of every meeting, we should be doing the mnemonic we use here is rap. The first thing is retrospect. Brian Milner (18:53) you Kate Megaw (19:04) How was this meeting? We talked about the fist of five. Give me one word. Anything we need to do differently next time. And then the A is make sure we have all of these action items assigned to someone. And then the P is the one we forget about. Tracking that progress. How are we going to hold each other accountable for making sure that something changes as a result of the meeting? So. Brian Milner (19:22) Mm-hmm. Kate Megaw (19:31) If we're doing retrospectives, if the team is voting whatever technique they're using to choose the one thing they want to do differently, how do we make it visible? Do we put it on our scrum board somewhere? Do we talk about it every day as part of after we've done daily scrum? How are we doing with the communication techniques that we wanted to try and do differently going forward? We've got to have that visibility. Otherwise nothing changes. Brian Milner (19:57) Yeah, yeah, that's so awesome. I completely agree. And that's something that I think you're right is missing, not just from retrospectives, but just a lot of meetings in general. We don't really understand, all right, well, what's the takeaway? What's the thing we need to do as a result of this to make this not a waste of our time, to make this something that was a useful, not the 67 % that were failures, but something that actually leads to success. I want to. Kate Megaw (19:59) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, yes, so that we're not having the same meeting again next week and the week after and nothing's changing. Brian Milner (20:30) Exactly. Exactly. I want to ask you one question about facilitation. I've heard this a lot in regards to retrospectives, but probably it's more a facilitation thing than it is a retrospective thing. But I think probably the number one question we get from people about retrospectives is, how do you handle a quiet team? so I'm just kind of curious. When you talk about facilitating and working with individuals who are a little more introverted, Kate Megaw (20:50) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (20:57) or just not as comfortable speaking out in public, are there special considerations or are there things that you do differently just to try to accommodate and make those people feel more comfortable when you're facilitating them? Kate Megaw (21:09) So yes, several things. So one, I will look at a theme. So do they have a team name and do I want to set up a mnemonic around the team name to gather the data? Are they a visual team? Do I want to do something like the sailboat that's interactive and people can add things to the board? Are they a movie buffs? Do I need to do a Star Wars themed retrospective? So I'll generally try and find something to connect the team. I've done it before where I'm working with airlines. Okay, what is it keeps our planes in the air? What is it that grounds our planes? What are the storm clouds we need to be aware of? What are causing bumps during the air? So all of that type of thing, it's a theme relevant to the team. And I generally will find that if I can start a team talking, I can keep them talking. So if... one of the ways that I will often start a retrospective is if the retrospective, if your last retrospective was a ride at Disney, what ride would it have been? and get them talking or give me one word that describes the last retro or in a scale of one to the, mean, the last sprint, give me one word that describes it or scale of one to 10. How well do you think we did at the last sprint? But I love to get people talking. If I'm in the office, I sort of adapted the Adam Weisbart's retrospective cookies and I'll use candy bars and I'll wrap questions around candy bars and the team grabs a candy bar and there is a question on it which they answer and then other people in the room will then answer as well. Maybe things like, what can I do to better support you as a scrum master? Or, What can we do to better support each other as team members? So I think it's getting people talking, making sure the big reminder for me is as a facilitator, if you did not write the Post-It note, you should not be reading the Post-It note and you should not be moving the Post-It note. The team owns the Post-It notes. Everyone should be adding their own Post-It notes, whether it's virtual or in person. Brian Milner (23:07) Yeah. Kate Megaw (23:28) They should be grouping their own Post-it notes. They should be moving them. And the other one, people always say, well, what happens if there's the elephant in the room and this thing on the board that nobody wants to talk about? And I'm said, well, often I will say, okay, I'm going to add, we're going to do something different for this round. This time, I'm going to ask you to introduce something you did not write on the board. And let's talk about, I'm going to ask you to choose a topic and we're going to talk about that. Just read it, you read it out. Brian Milner (23:39) Yeah. Kate Megaw (23:58) and then we'll have a discussion around it. So as a facilitator, I can uncover the elephants in the room without anyone feeling too uncomfortable. Brian Milner (24:07) Yeah, that's great stuff. of parallel to this, think is kind of, I know we've, I've heard you talk about this, but the sense of safety in the room and just that people feel safe to talk about that. Are there things we can do as facilitators to actually raise that sense of safety? Kate Megaw (24:25) There are absolutely, there's a lot of things we can do. And I, every now and then I will hear something and I will just cringe. And there's, well my team doesn't really like sharing. They're not honest in the retrospective until the CTO disconnects from the retrospective. And I'm sort of, okay, so maybe what do you think this is maybe telling us? I'm sort of retrospectives are Vegas rules. It is the team. I will do retrospectives even with non-scrum teams, but it is the team that is there. There are no visitors. It is the team only. The other thing that makes me cringe is, yes, well we sent out the minutes of the retrospective and I'm sort of, excuse me, the retrospective again, Vegas rules. What is the one thing we're going to do differently as a team in the next sprint? Okay, is everyone okay if I put this up on our scrum board so it's visible? Brian Milner (25:07) Ha Kate Megaw (25:20) Okay, that's the one thing we're taking away. But back to the question you were asking, one of the biggest signs of a lack of psychological safety is that the team just doesn't want to talk. They're worried that the minutes are going to be captured. Somebody, one of the leaders is in there and, well, everyone's fine with my leadership. They're completely open and honest in front of me. And I'm sort of, okay, let's try a retrospective then with you there. Brian Milner (25:32) Yeah. Kate Megaw (25:50) And then we'll also try retrospective without you there. And let's see which one is more comfortable because otherwise it's a, it's a colossal waste of time. If nothing's going to change, why are we wasting sort of 45 minutes to an hour or even doing it? So I think that the psychological safety is a key one, making sure it is the right people, making sure that minutes are not being captured. The other thing is. A lot of times people say, well, I need to capture it because I need to bring all of the information again next time. And I'm sort of, no, you're trashing the Post-it notes. You're trashing the mural board, whatever. You're starting from scratch next time. they're sort of, well, I'm going to lose all this information. I'm sort of, no, if it's important enough, it's going to come up again next time. Brian Milner (26:23) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And things change, right? mean, what the universe of things we might identify this sprint could be entirely different for next sprint. I've always loved, Jeff Sutherland had this phrase, he would say about it to say that, you have to remove that one big thing. And when you move that one big thing, then the system adjusts and you don't really know where the next bottleneck is going to come from until you remove that one big thing. Kate Megaw (26:58) Yeah. Brian Milner (27:02) So it's likely to be somewhere you wouldn't expect. so you can't just hang on to your number two issue from one retrospective and then say, well, next retrospective, we'll just do that and we can cut out having the conversation because we identified important things in this one. Kate Megaw (27:14) Yeah. And it anchors the tea. It stops the creativity. that's the other thing with retrospectives. I occasionally will work with a client and there's the, oh yes, we've been doing what's going well and what's not going so well every two weeks for six months. And I'm sort of, it's not really any wonder your team's bored out of their minds at retrospectives and nothing new is coming up. There's so many websites out there. Brian Milner (27:41) Yeah. Kate Megaw (27:42) that retrospective should never, in fact, no meeting should ever be boring because we should always be opening and closing a meeting in a creative way. Even if it's, mean, one of the things that we like to do in the morning of class is have music. So when people are joining, the energy is there so that we're getting that interaction and things like that. So people are starting on a high and then... I mean, you'll notice in the afternoons people begin to yawn, especially after lunch. Okay, you know what? It's been 65 minutes. Let's take a break. Let's do a segue question at break. So when we come back, show us something on your desk that tells us a bit about you. Or one of the ones I like is go stand up, go and look outside and come back and tell us something you saw outside. We have chickens. We have all sorts of things that people are saying. but it's encouraging them to get up and go get some oxygen in their system, take a break and then come back and then it's more engaging. But if as a facilitator, I'm not planning that type of thing, the energy is going to go down and I'm not going to achieve the purpose of my half day event or my one day class, whatever it is. Brian Milner (28:56) Yeah, it doesn't happen by accident. It's all very intentional. Well, this is fascinating. And we could have this conversation for another several hours, I'm sure. I just wanted to let everyone know that in case you were scrambling to write down these mnemonics and other things, we're going to link that in our show notes. So you can go to our show notes, and we'll put you over to Katanu team. Kate Megaw (28:58) No. Yep, absolutely. Yep. Brian Milner (29:20) Katanu, I keep on saying cat and Anu, trying to say it right way. Yeah, but we'll link you over them so you can get those three Rs for meetings and know kind of what each one of those little letters stands for in there. Kate Megaw (29:24) Yeah. Brian Milner (29:33) This has been really eye-opening for me and it just is a fascinating topic and it's so delightful just to hear the intentionality and how we can do simple things. They're not hard things, but simple things that make such a huge difference. Kate Megaw (29:48) Yeah, yeah, mean, that's the key. This is not rocket science. It's one or two simple things that helps us take that if we are going to spend 20 % or 20 hours a week, which is half of our time in meetings, let's at least make sure they're productive meetings so that we're not literally burning money by having unproductive meetings. Brian Milner (30:12) Yeah, absolutely. Well, I also forgot to mention here at the beginning, and we'll put this in the show notes as well, but Team Katanu also has a facilitation course. The Scrum Alliance has a certified Agile facilitator designation that you could obtain if you were interested in that. We'll link that off as well. But yeah, I couldn't recommend any better people for you to take that from than Kate in a new idea. We were saying that she had a, when she was younger, used to have the nickname Cat, and now everyone's calling her Cat from that. Well, thank you again for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it. Kate Megaw (30:46) Yep. Yep. Thank you very much for having me, Brian. And I look forward to hearing amazing facilitation stories from everyone once they've implemented some of this stuff. Brian Milner (31:03) Absolutely.

Andreas Schliep, a Certified Scrum Trainer and executive partner at DasScrumTeam AG, shares insights on the shifting landscape of Agile coaching. He discusses the critical differences between Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, emphasizing integrity and resilience as key qualities. The conversation addresses the challenges of navigating a post-COVID world with an influx of unqualified coaches, the importance of foundational training, and the need for ongoing mentorship. Schliep also reflects on embracing unique strengths and developing a personal coaching style.

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 Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com 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.

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