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  • Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”

    Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”

    OKRs are often presented as a goal-setting tool.

    Christina Wodtke’s perspective is sharper: OKRs are a way to create focus, alignment, and learning — as long as you avoid a common trap: setting goals and forgetting them.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Christina Wodtke, author of Radical Focus and The Team That Manages Itself, lecturer at Stanford, and long-time builder of teams and products in companies such as Yahoo!, Zynga, and LinkedIn.

    OKRs in one sentence

    Christina describes the objective as a qualitative goal:

    A mission for three months.

    Then key results answer a simple question:

    How would we know we actually fulfilled that mission?

    The key shift is moving from tasks to outcomes.

    If a key result reads like “install a new CRM”, Christina pushes the conversation further:

    What would be different in the world if that CRM were installed?

    That is where the key result belongs: outcomes that help you evaluate impact, explore alternatives, and avoid mistaking activity for progress.

    Christina has a phrase I plan to reuse a thousand times:

    Avoid the seduction of the task.

    The real power of OKRs is cadence

    One of the strongest points in the conversation is that OKRs are not “set and forget”.

    Christina insists that what makes OKRs work is cadence:

    • weekly check-ins to ask what is moving you closer to the goal
    • regular celebration of progress
    • a retrospective to learn what slows you down and what speeds you up

    This cadence creates organizational learning, and learning is what keeps teams competitive.

    Why a fable?

    Radical Focus is written as a fable, and Christina explains why.

    Stories teach better than facts alone. They help people recognize themselves in real mistakes and real tensions. They also increase retention and comprehension because human beings learned through storytelling long before we learned through writing.

    A surprising side effect of fiction is that readers often learn things the author didn’t explicitly intend to teach, because stories create layers of meaning.

    OKRs are not only for startups, but cascading doesn’t scale

    Christina is currently working on an updated edition of Radical Focus. One major reason is that many people using OKRs are not startups.

    In larger organizations, cascading becomes a problem. In some companies, it can take weeks, which defeats the purpose.

    Christina’s alternative is alignment:

    • the company sets the strategic direction
    • teams decide how they can contribute based on their role and context

    She also makes an important point: OKRs don’t work well in command-and-control cultures. If OKRs are used to squeeze productivity, tied to compensation, or imposed as “make it or else”, they become an anti-OKR and invite sandbagging or cheating.

    Her framing is very simple:

    If you are hiring A players, why not let them be A players?

    When OKRs are useful and when KPIs are better

    Christina offers a practical lens using the BCG portfolio model:

    • question marks are a great space for exploratory OKRs
    • stars benefit from OKRs because growth and learning still matter
    • cash cows often don’t need OKRs and can move to KPIs
    • dogs also fit better with KPIs and clear thresholds for when to stop

    A subtle but important idea emerges here:

    Sometimes the humane choice is to reach a high level of performance and then stay there. Not everything needs endless growth.

    Individual OKRs usually backfire

    Christina is very direct on individual OKRs: she has rarely seen them end well.

    The two big issues:

    • it is hard to keep them truly separate from compensation and pressure
    • the cognitive load becomes too high when you stack company, department, team, and individual OKRs

    Exceptions exist:

    • a “business unit of one” role might experiment with them carefully
    • personal OKRs set by individuals can work well, especially with an accountability group

    For performance management, Christina suggests separating what is often muddled together:

    • fulfilling the role you were hired for
    • contribution to shared goals
    • growth of skills and knowledge
    • contribution to the culture (mentoring, hiring, collaboration)

    OKRs are one tent pole, teams are the rest

    Christina frames high performing teams through three areas:

    • goals
    • roles
    • norms

    Goals are where OKRs help.

    Roles and norms are what make the team capable of delivering without constant management. When norms support feedback, conflict becomes workable instead of destructive. Psychological safety becomes something the team practices weekly, not something you hope for.

    This connects to Christina’s other book, The Team That Manages Itself, and to a view of leadership that feels closer to “first among equals” than command and control.

    Bonus: drawing, learning, and pareidolia

    We also detour into one of Christina’s other passions: drawing.

    Her point is practical and liberating: you don’t need to draw well. Humans are pattern-matching creatures. Even rough drawings can communicate clearly.

    She mentions pareidolia, our tendency to see meaning and faces in simple shapes. It is a permission slip to start drawing, and to start sharing ideas visually without waiting to be “good”.

    She ends with a line that sticks:

    Doodling is a joy.

    Listen to the episode here or on your favorite podcast platform:

    If you are hiring A-players, why don’t let them be A-players?

    References:

    Here is the transcript:

    Alexis:

    Hey Christina, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Christina:

    I definitely took the scenic route to get where I am today. So, I actually went to art school and changed from painting to photography because all the painting professors were abstract expressionists, and I wanted to work realistically. That’s when I first discovered computers. There were Macs there, and I started becoming interested in… This was before Photoshop, I was working on manipulating digital imagery.

    Christina:

    Then after I graduated, I moved to San Francisco thinking I was going to work in computers, but ended up going back to painting and basically painted and waited tables for several years. One day, a friend of my current boyfriend said, “Hey, we’re building a Yahoo killer. Would you like to help?” I said, “Sure.” I just fell in love with the web. I was reviewing 50 websites a week, and just the amazingness of it.

    Christina:

    Not to tell the background story in too long, but once I started falling in love with the web, I started learning how to code, became a programmer, then switched over to an information architect because I was very interested in why websites are so terrible, basically. Became an interaction designer, then became… So, I was starting to move up, and I was like, “Okay, maybe if I’m a manager, I can make better websites. I can make things work better on the web.” I’ve been an entrepreneur a couple of times, starting a couple of different companies. I started a nonprofit. My question is always why aren’t things better? Why do we launch things that we’re not happy with? Why is it so hard to work with other people? I’ve worked at Zynga and Myspace and LinkedIn and obviously Yahoo! I’ve worked as a consultant with people like the New York Times.

    Christina:

    When you go into this new thing, if only I could be in charge, I could do things better than everybody else. What I’ve really learned is that you need great teams, everything happens. So if you don’t know how to work with other people, if you don’t know how to connect to people, you really can’t get anything significant done. Of course, there’s single people who will build a cool game here or there or a cool website there. But if you really want to make a difference in the world, you have to figure out, “How can I work with other people?”

    Christina:

    That question has driven a lot of my work with OKRs and with high-performing teams, trying to figure out how do we make everything better for people? How do we make work better for people who work? How do we make the websites, the applications, the software that we interact with so much these days, how do we make it more humane? I’m now a lecturer at Stanford, teaching HCI, human computer interaction, still asking the same question I did way back in 1998. How do we make stuff suck less for the human beings that are affected by it?

    Alexis:

    I think that’s a great mission. I hope that there will be a lot of people that will follow your course. Christina, you’re also the author of a book that I already love and I recommended that book to a lot of people. The book is Radical Focus. I need to move a Post-it on the book to read the subtitle. It’s Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results. I left the book on my desk when I was traveling abroad, when I was in the US at that time. When I come back, I said, “No, that’s weird. I thought there was a book somewhere.”

    Alexis:

    I said, “Okay.” I forgot about it. A few days later, the book came back on my desk and with the Post-it notes, and it was mentioned, “Alexis, [french Language 00:05:17].” Of course, I’m French. People will probably recognize my accent. The book enjoyed traveling to India and back, and is looking forward to attract new friends. I love Wodtke’s approach. That was a great background. Jeff.” I was thinking, “Yeah, that’s cool.” Now, I have the proof point that the book is really cool and really great and really important. First of all, I’ve said objectives and key results, or OKRs. How would you explain OKRs?

    Christina:

    Well, thank you for that incredibly kind story. That just makes my day. So, OKRs, I always joke that I was writing a book about an acronym, and the only way I could make it interesting was to tell a story because I love OKRs. I think they can be really transformative to a person or a company. I’ve seen it over and over again. A lot of folks really focus on the OKR part, the objective and key results.

    Christina:

    So the objective is qualitative. It’s an inspirational goal. Sometimes I talk about it saying, “It’s a mission for three months.” Every company has a five-year mission or a mission statement. If you could make a mission statement for just a quarter, what would it be? It has to inspire people. Then you have the key results, which answer the question, how would we know, how would we know if we’d actually fulfilled this mission that we’re setting for ourselves over this three months? What would change in the world? What numbers would move? You have to avoid the seduction of the task, right? It’s very tempting to put down things you’ll do. If you do that, you might not get the results you want.

    Christina:

    So when I work with clients, I often say, “Okay, if you build this” … Let’s say somebody wrote for a key result, they wrote, “Install a new CRM.” I’m like, “Okay. So, what do you think would happen if you install this new CRM?” They’d say, “Oh, well, we would get better returns from our existing customers.” I’m like, “Well, how much more?” Have them guess at that, and I’m like, “There’s your key result.” Our current customers return back to us 20% more often. Then you can say, “Well, is the CRM really the best way to do it, or are there other things we could try?”

    Christina:

    So, by setting this qualitative and quantitative goal, you can unite the company. If you think about it, if you talk to the Biz Dev folks or maybe sales, they’re all about the numbers. We want to move these numbers. If you talk to design or customer service or other folks, they maybe care more about making a difference in the world, making a better experience for people, creating a better community.

    Christina:

    So, the OKR format really does unite these different points of view, so that everybody gets pointed in the same direction. By setting the objective and key results as the outcomes, I know in the lean community and other product manager communities, we talk a lot about outcomes over output. Output is just doing stuff and hoping something happened. Outcome is like, “We want to move these numbers. We want to make a difference in the world. Therefore, we’re going to think through all the different ways we can do it. We’ll guess how likely we think it will work. We’ll start running experiments to get smarter.” It’s just a better way to work if impact is your goal. If impact isn’t your goal, well, I’m not sure why you’re still in business, but this is a really desired thing.

    Christina:

    So, the thing to know about OKRs is that they’re not like a smart goal. Just setting and forgetting is dangerous. That’s the biggest danger you have. So, some people will spend tons of time word crafting, word crafting, getting just the right numbers, looking up everything. Then they’ll set that OKR, and then they’ll forget about it within a couple of weeks because the world is full of shiny objects. There’s always somebody yelling at you. There’s always an emergency. There’s always something on fire, literally, for me right now, unfortunately, since I’m in California. So, how do you make sure you still are doing the most important strategic things, despite the chaos of everyday life?

    Christina:

    The thing that makes OKRs great is that cadence. It’s all about the cadence. It’s that weekly… Looking at your goals and saying, “What are we doing to get closer to those goals?” On Fridays celebrating, “Look, we’re getting closer to our goals.” Then the retrospective at the end to learn what slows us down and what speeds us up. So, the cadence of the OKRs also create amazing organizational learning. That organizational learning is what keeps you competitive in the market.

    Alexis:

    I love it.

    Christina:

    [crosstalk 00:10:13]

    Alexis:

    The fact that we are aiming for an impact, it’s something really important. You can see that as an individual, as a team, as a company and as a society. You said avoiding the seduction of the task. I think I will reuse that 1000 time now. That’s really interesting. I would like to ask you, the book is a fable. What was the driver for you to use a fable?

    Christina:

    I’m a big fan of business fables and case studies, to be honest. I mean, HBR, the Harvard Business Review, used to open every magazine with a case study. I’d always be really excited to read it, to hear the stories of people struggling with the same questions I had. Then of course, Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a wonderful book, the goal. The Phoenix Project is another good one.

    Christina:

    So, I’m actually fond of this little, tiny, weird sub genre. I love fiction. I love stories. When I was a nerdy kid growing up, I read Lord of the Rings in the seventh grade. So, I found out recently that Reid Hoffman reads Lord of the Rings every year, which I think is wild. He was, of course, the CEO and founder of LinkedIn. He was one of the founders of PayPal. Now, he’s a VC dude. Stories are more important to us than we think they are.

    Christina:

    So, I thought if I could just show people this mistake that so many people make, which is set and forget, if I can show a small company that’s easily recognizable, and I don’t know how well you know the Silicon Valley, if you read it closely, you can probably guess where a lot of people said, “Oh, I know the Starbucks where they meet, the VC. I know that Starbucks.” So I really wanted to put a lot of places into it that would be recognizable.

    Christina:

    Through that journey that you go along with Hannah and Jack, you actually can see why they make the mistakes they make and how they fix it and how they get to where they are. I think a story is just a really great way to do it. What I didn’t know is that some people… So, when you write straight non-fiction, which is what my first book was, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, you learn exactly what people tell you to learn. But when you write fiction, you put in a world and you put in trouble and you put in challenges.

    Christina:

    I had an email recently from a reader who said, “I am so grateful to the part where Hannah fires that jerk.” The programmer, who’s messing with the code. He says, “Because I had to fire someone who was like that, and I didn’t know how to handle it.” When he saw how Hannah handled it, it really helped him. So, I think there’s a richness in fiction and ability to put in layers of meaning that you might not be able to do with nonfiction. Then the second half of course is where I just lay it out really simply and cleanly for people who want the cheat sheet of how to do it.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. This is really funny because I was thinking about business fable that I love. On my notes, I wrote The Goal, the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Phoenix Project. I had one more. I will give it to you because if you didn’t read that one, I think it’s a good one. It’s The Gold Mine by Michael Balle, a book about someone we will discover. It’s a manufacturing book. So, the setting is different. It’s trade industry. But I think it’s really a good one. I love fable.

    Alexis:

    It’s interesting that you said your first book was not a fable and your second one is a fable. When I wrote my first book, Changing Your Team From the Inside, I tried to be really serious about change. For the second one, I tried to learn from my mistakes in the first one. It’s a combination of a fable with experiments that people can try. So, I would like to interview readers to understand what they learn. That’s not a book about learning how to fire jerks, but that’s really interesting that someone can pick that. That’s a good one. That shows that the story is real. I wanted to know the end of the story, I was reading it. I was not able to stop because I want to know what happens next.

    Christina:

    Well, that’s the other thing is like, we learn better when we’re enjoying learning. So, I teach at Stanford. That means I spend quite a bit of time digging into learning theory. Stories are actually a better way to learn because of how our brains are set up to learn. I’ve seen that people say, if all of human history was a clock, right, a 24-hour clock, we’ve only started writing things down at 11:00 PM, which means that for thousands and thousands of years, the only way we could pass on knowledge, the way that we made sure people knew, donate those berries, they’ll make you sick, or stay out of that cave. There’s a big, fluffy thing with claws. Don’t go the, was storytelling. That’s how we learned. So, our brains are literally evolved to learn from stories.

    Christina:

    Using a fable is just taking advantage of how we’re hard wired to learn. It has a downside, too, that’s why if you have the anti-vaxxers, and they’re telling stories about this one kid who apparently became autistic, that’s going to be more powerful than a ton of facts. What I found over time is that if you can take facts and you wrap them in story, that people enjoy learning more, and they have higher comprehension and they have higher retention. So storytelling, it’s just better. It’s better for you. It’s better for me. It’s better for everyone.

    Alexis:

    In the book. The story’s about a startup. Do you think OKRs are only for startup, or do you see them being useful in other kind of environment?

    Christina:

    That’s such a good question. I told you, I’m writing 2.0 of Radical Focus. The number one reason I’m doing it is because so many people are not startups, and they’re trying to use it. Some of the techniques that were designed for startups don’t scale very well to larger companies. So, I realized I wrote it, what, five years ago? It seems like forever. Since then, I’ve had a lot of people come to me, big companies, small companies, struggling to figure out how to make certain things work with OKRs, working with them, trying different things. I’ve managed to come up with several techniques for larger companies.

    Christina:

    One of the more obvious examples would be the problem of cascading. So, if you’re in a little startup, then you have one, maybe two layers of management, cascading is not a big deal. You figure out your company, OKR, and then you figure out the team OKRs, and you’d go to town, you’re done. When you have multiple layers of hierarchy, you can’t possibly cascade. I’ve heard stories of large companies where it would take them a month to cascade. At that point, you’ve lost a third of your quarter to be able to execute. That’s ridiculous. At which point you want to move away from cascading and much more towards alignment, where the company sets the goal and then you trust the people underneath you to say, “What can we do as an organization or a group to help the company meet its goal?” If you can’t meet this quarter’s company’s goals, what is the appropriate thing to set, considering your function, your role within an organization? That was a big one where it just doesn’t work at all.

    Christina:

    I’ve been talking a lot to Marty Cagan. He was really kind and contributing to the book. He and I have both come to the same conclusion, which is if you’re an organization that is really all about command and control, OKRs are probably not going to be for you. We see a lot of people trying to use OKRs just to squeeze a little more productivity out of people. That’s not what they’re for. More times, it ends up with cheating. So, if you think about the Volkswagen scandal or the Wells Fargo scandal, those weren’t OKRs per se, but they were ridiculously difficult numerical goals that were handed from the top down, that were tied to people’s livelihood. You don’t get your bonus. You might lose your job if you can’t fulfill these goals that can’t be fulfilled, at which point people turned to cheating because they didn’t really have a lot of choices.

    Christina:

    So, in these really nasty companies, setting really ridiculous goals from the top down and saying, “Make it or else,” that’s like an anti-OKR. If an OKR could have a dark twin, an evil twin version of itself, it would be that. Where OKRs are much better at is saying, “Here’s what we want to see, figure out what you can do about it. We empower you.” Marty’s next book is going to be called Empowered. I’m really excited by it because I think that’s a message that more people need to hear, work is much more satisfying, much more pleasurable when somebody says, “Hey, here’s this ridiculous thing. I trust you to see what you can do with it. If you don’t make it, well, I’m going to believe that you tried your best.” A little more faith, a little more trust. If you’re hiring A players, why not let them be A players, right?

    Alexis:

    Absolutely. So that’s neither a top-down system, neither a totally bottom-up system. It’s something that is both a top-down and bottom-up, and people will figure out how they can contribute to achieve those higher-levels objectives. There’s the kind of reconciliation in between?

    Christina:

    Yes, exactly. When your company says, “This is our most important strategic initiative, this is the thing that we’re going to move into the European market, or we’re going to move out of B2B to B2C,” whatever strategic goal the company has, then everybody can ask themselves, “What does that mean for us? How can we contribute?” I will go even farther. I think that there’s always a possibility that there’s some groups that don’t actually need OKRs. The legal team, are they really constantly striving to be better? Or is there a level where they’re like, “Yeah, we’re good. We’re solid.” Or maybe the finance department, maybe they might do one OKR one quarter because they feel like they’re not being responsive enough or people are complaining about them. But once you’ve gotten good, there’s no higher level to take it.

    Christina:

    I don’t know what it’s like in France as much. But I do know in America, we seem to think the sky’s the limit, that things can always grow endlessly, and everything can be better. I think that can be very grueling on people. I think it can be disheartening on people. So, getting yourself to a really high level of performance and then staying there, moving away from OKRs and maybe just to KPIs. So you’re measuring, so you know if something’s changing or if things are getting worse, sometimes there are groups who go into a steady state, and that’s okay. That should be actually quite okay.

    Christina:

    Businesses need to be a little more humane. OKRs are really good at strategy because that’s the space where we’re asking, “What’s possible? What could we do here? When is the market actually saturated? What is the answer to these questions that we or a company are asking?” So I don’t think that every group, and maybe not even every company should have OKRs.

    Alexis:

    So, if there’s no behavioral change anymore that is needed, you don’t need OKRs. That’s an interesting perspective.

    Christina:

    Yeah. It’s a little different. But I think it’s a little saner, perhaps. The other thing that I’ve been working with, with companies is thinking about the relationship of strategy and OKRs. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the old Boston Consulting Group, 2×2, where they talked about how the dogs-

    Alexis:

    Yeah.

    Christina:

    Yes, exactly. So, if you think about it, if you have this complete unknown space, that’s the potential. You don’t know what’s really there. It’s a question mark. You have high hopes, but you don’t know. That’s a great place to do exploratory OKRs or hypothesis OKRs, where you say… instead of saying to go back and to moving into a new market, maybe your objective is have a product that resonates with Mexico. Then we say, “Okay. How are we going define resonate? Is it going to be a NPS? Is it going to be units moved? Is it going to be star ratings on Amazon or whatnot?” You come up with your OKRs, but you’ll notice that it just says, “Have a product.” It’s very open and very loose. At which point, then people can just run tons of experiments until they find the thing.

    Christina:

    So that’s a place where you can start finding your product market fit and use the OKRs to know when to stop. I know a lot of startups and innovation groups. The question is, how long do we keep up this thing? When do we say, “Okay, let’s cut our losses. Let’s get out?” So, the OKRs then create this cadence that allows you at the end of the quarter to say, “Do we want to keep working on this? Have we learned anything new? Is it time to pivot, or is it time to shut it down?” So, that’s good.

    Christina:

    With stars where you don’t know where the top is. You’ve got this really successful product. That’s going crazy. That’s a great place for OKRs because I don’t care if we keep pushing, pushing. Let it grow bigger, let it get better. But then when you get to the cash cows, which are a market that you’ve put a really strong product into, it’s not really growing anymore. Maybe you’ve been trying a bunch of things with OKRs and you can’t move the needle. You’re like, “Okay, let’s just move to KPIs. Let’s leave a handful of solid people. Let’s make as much money as we can as long as the going is good.” They don’t need OKRs, and dogs don’t. Maybe there was something that was working really, really well. Now everybody’s moved on. Maybe it’s a fax machine. There’s no growth in that market. There’s a little bit of money to be made still, but it’s going down. That’s another place where you have the KPIs. When it goes into the red, when it costs more money to keep it alive than it does that you’re making off of it, then you can put it to bed.

    Christina:

    So, you really want to be thinking about your entire product portfolio when you’re a larger company because you want to think where is growth possible and where am I just extracting value? It’s the old explore-exploit question.

    Alexis:

    OKRs for companies, for teams that wants to grow, what is your perspective on using OKRs for team members, for individuals, for people themselves?

    Christina:

    I got to tell you, for five years, I’ve seen people try it, and it just never ends well. There’s a couple of exceptions. So, let’s start with why it doesn’t end. When a upper manager is giving people an OKR, it’s really hard to say your compensation isn’t going to be tied to this OKR. That’s one of the things that if you do tie compensation to the OKR, that’s where we get into the situation of either you end up sandbagging the OKRs, you set them so low, you could easily make them, or you get into a situation where you’re being asked to do something ridiculous. Because your livelihood is on the line, your ability to feed your family is on the line, you are going to cheat. So, individual OKRs usually are terrible.

    Christina:

    The other reason is if you think about an individual within an organization, they’ve got the company OKR to think of. So that’s probably, if you have one objective and three key results, that’s four items you have to hold in your head. What’s really nice about OKR is whenever you’re trying to decide, “Where do I spend my time,” you can just say, “Oh, well, this quarter, the company is trying to do this. So I should really put the bulk of my work week towards that.” So, you’ve got the four things at the company level. Let’s say, you’ve got four things at the department level, and then you’ve got four things at the team level. Then you’ve got your four items. That’s too much stuff to hold in our brain. Our working memory just can’t hold that much stuff.

    Christina:

    There’s a reason I called my book Radical Focus, and I didn’t call it a guide to OKRs. It’s because it’s really, really important to say this is the single most important thing. Just for the sanity of it, just to simplify matters. I don’t think you should have individual OKRs. What are the exceptions? Exceptions are, if you have an individual that’s also basically a business unit of one, let’s say, you’ve hired a growth hacker, you can probably just set the rates, set the salary and say, “Here’s your goals. Let’s see what we can do.” But again, you can’t tie any compensation to it. It’s more a way of saying, “Okay, what’s possible here?” Again, I don’t super love that one. It’s slightly better. I have seen that one work.

    Christina:

    The other thing I have seen work really well is when individual human beings decide to set personal OKRs. This quarter, I’m going to work on taking care of my back because I’m spending so much time on screens because we’re all working from home. I’m finally going to get ergonomic. Letting individual people set their own OKRs, that they then either hold themselves accountable, or they are a part of an accountability group, that seems to work just fine. But I think the manager, individual relationship, when I tell people this, they’re like, “Well, how do I do performance management?” I’m like, “Oh my god. Okay. I can’t believe you don’t know how to do performance management, but sure. Let’s talk about that.”

    Christina:

    When you think about performance management, you want to think, “Okay, I hired you for a role. How well are you fulfilling that role?” There’s just a bunch of stuff you have to do as a manager. You’re a manager of a engineering team. You’re still going to have to give people feedback and manage projects and stuff like that. So, you’ve got fulfilling the role. You have contributions towards the OKRs. That’s a way of thinking of it.

    Christina:

    What amazing thing happened? Maybe, we were trying to go to the moon, and we didn’t make it to the moon, but we’ve now got Tang, and we’ve got Velcro, and that’s awesome, too. So let’s celebrate those contributions. Then you want to think about knowledge and skill growth, and have your people commit to some personal professional growth. You want to be growing your people. That’s something I personally believe in. It’s not necessary for everyone, but I think if you’re helping people become the kind of people they want to be, the kind of person that will benefit the company, let people study negotiation strategies or let them explore a new framework for engineering. Did you make time to grow? Did I, as your manager, allow you to make time to grow? That’s sometimes a good piece of the puzzle. Some of the companies I’ve worked with have added a fourth piece, which is, “Are you fulfilling the culture that we want to have? Are you helping hire? Are you mentoring other people? Are you pair programming? Whatever.

    Christina:

    One of the things about performance reviews that makes them hard is, again, the set and forget. We write up a job description. Maybe we steal it off the web, and then, we forget about it. So, when it’s time to do performance review, you’re actually asking yourself, “Do I feel good about this guy? Does he seem like he’s doing good stuff for us?” Sure. Okay. That’s fine. It’s one of the reasons I wrote the team that manages itself, it was really a followup to Radical Focus because OKRs aren’t everything. There’s part of the puzzle.

    Christina:

    So, yay, you’ve got OKRs, but you also have to figure out how do you make sure the roles on the team are really clear. Are you writing the job descriptions? Are you managing people? Are you supporting them? Then, are you creating a culture of high performance? Are you dealing with culture clashes? I mean, here I am talking to you. You have a French background. I have an Iowa background. Our teams look like that now, they’re European, they’re Asian. So, we really have to think about how are all these different cultures coming together to work effectively. So, OKRs are just one of, I think, the three tent poles of a high-performing team.

    Alexis:

    That conversation about personal goals was bringing us nicely to your second book, your third book, I think. The team that managed itself. Goals are not everything. The way to achieve goals is to have a real interesting, important team, and having people that are able to work as a team. When you said a team that managed itself, does that mean that there’s no managers needed anymore?

    Christina:

    I think that, yes, actually. I do think that it’s good to have a leader of some sort, a tiebreaker, somebody who can have time to manage up. It’s a real thing. But I think if you have a highly, a very healthy team, they manage themselves. They really do. When I was doing a ton of research, I already had my own personal experiences working in tech for, gosh, I don’t know how long, since ’95, before I switched over to academia, about five, six years ago. I realized that the people who really accomplish things through high-performing teams had some similar characteristics. Then I did a literature review, looking at books like The Fearless Organization, which is a wonderful book about psychological safety, the wisdom of teams. I think that’s one of the best books on teams.

    Christina:

    I’ve written a bunch of academic papers and just did a synthesis of all that, and came up with these three key areas, which are goals, roles, and norms. So goals, OKRs, that’s great. Do you have clearly defined roles that people have, that they’re accountable for? Are they growing in it? We’re really talking about hiring, firing and feedback here, especially that last one feedback. People tend to be conflict averse. They’re not always very good at giving the kind of feedback that they need to. Then the last one is norms. How do we interact with each other? As I was saying earlier, we have all these different cultures working together in a company, but I would argue even different companies have different cultures.

    Christina:

    So, when I worked at Yahoo!, the number one thing in the employee surveys were always, I love my teammates. We all love each other. It’s such a wonderful place to work. But it was very passive aggressive. There was no overt conflict. So, if you wanted to get something done, you had to go have a personal conversation with everybody. When I went to Zynga, I was in shock because they weren’t passive, aggressive, they were aggressive, aggressive. It was like another… A general manager would come up to you and say, “I’m going to take your game away from you. Or we’re going to crush you in these numbers.” It’s a real challenging. This is such a different culture.

    Christina:

    I’ve been in companies where all meetings start 10 minutes late, and I’ve been in cultures where every meeting starts on time. So taking the time to say, as a team, “Who are we? How are we going to interact with each other? How are we going to disagree? How are we going to make decisions?” That commitment to doing that followed up with a retrospective every week, remember cadence is everything, allows you to reduce the conflict and increase the output. Also, it helps keep people from quitting because if you’re working in a wonderful team, where you really feel listened to and you feel supported and you have the psychological safety, you’re not going to gamble that on another company.

    Christina:

    So, there’s so many reasons to set up a good, healthy culture. Yeah, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They don’t do everything. They’re really a great way to set goals and make goals, but without a healthy team, without the right people in it, you can’t accomplish it. They’re not standalone. They’re not a one-stop fix.

    Alexis:

    Do you feel that the people in the team, when they are clear on their norms, they know how to communicate out, to deal with conflict, how the acceptable behavior is defined? They know what their roles, and they know what is the roles of others. Do you feel it’s enough for them to be able then to manage themselves?

    Christina:

    Oh, yes. I think that’s the heart and the beating heart of a high-performing team is that they don’t need to be managed. If you think about it, like ask yourself, “What does a manager do?” Well, do they make sure everybody’s doing their job? Do you really need that if you’re hiring A players? Again, if you’re very careful about your hire, you’re hiring the right people that are really smart and strong. They’re motivated to do great work. They want to be at your company because they’re excited by it. It doesn’t matter if you’re making mechanical keyboards or a social network. People are excited to do that kind of work. There’s a lot of studies that show that people want meaning from their work. It makes them happy. So, you’ve got this team that knows what their roles are.

    Christina:

    Then being able to have a conversation around feedback is really critical. So, you think of managers doing what else. They’re hiring? Well, the team can get together as a group and say, “Here’s what we think we need from the new role.” Then, you headed off to HR to find people or do it yourself. It doesn’t matter. If you think about what a manager does in weekly check-ins, well, if you’re doing retrospectives weekly, and you’re talking about what’s working and what’s not working, if you have a healthy enough relationship, where I can come up to you and say, “Alexis, you were interrupting me in that meeting, and it doesn’t make me feel comfortable enough to be able to share new ideas. I just wanted to point this out to you because it’s making it hard for me to work with you.”

    Christina:

    If you have that level of psychological safety, where people can bring up conflicts like that, and actually work through them very quickly, that works really well. At which point then the manager becomes really… I’ve heard it called first among equals. I’ve heard it called service leadership. I like to just think of it as moving from being a manager to being a leader, instead of managing people. You’re really there to remind people, “Don’t forget, this is the goal we’re heading towards. Let me make sure that other parts of the company know what we’re trying to accomplish. Let me spend some time with the CEO or the general manager, and make sure that our group is doing what the company needs to do.” But it’s a very, very different role than the command and control, and “I’m going to boss you around.”

    Christina:

    If you can do that, just imagine how much head space is freed up for that leader. Now, instead of dashing around trying to solve, “Oh, I don’t know, I didn’t get the mock-ups from the designer,” all these little fusses and fights. If you’re freed up from that, you can spend time doing things like strategy and competitive analysis, and looking into new markets. It’s such a waste of our time to try to dash from person to person, just trying to Band-Aid an unhealthy team. Instead, you want to move your team into a strong, healthy team so that you can spend time on much more meaningful activities.

    Alexis:

    Oh, yeah. I totally agree with that. This is impressive how you’re summing up that very nicely.

    Christina:

    Well, I’ve talked a little bit about the second edition. While I’m coming back to it, I’ve talked a little bit about how I’m bringing in strategy and such. The team that manages itself is actually my fourth book, believe it or not. So, I don’t know if you know this, but I had started writing the team that manages itself. Then, I have a developmental editor that I love working with, Cathy Yardley. She got breast cancer, needed to go to treatment. Thanks to our fabulous American health care system, had to take a full-time job for a while to pay for her treatment. I’m so glad that she got better. I think we live in a time of miracles, medically, but the miracles have a price in America.

    Christina:

    So, I put aside the team that managed itself, and I wrote a book that I felt didn’t need a traditional development editor. I did do peer reviews because I’m a big fan of working lean with my books. It’s called Pencil Me In. It’s all about the importance of drawing your ideas. So, the first half of the book teaches you how to draw. The second half teaches you what to draw, things like personas and various different kinds of models and org charts and wireframes and all the things that people like to do. A lot of really great folks contributed the drawings they do. I have some wonderful sketches from game designers, Alex Osterwalder, who wrote the Business Model Generation book. He also gave me an essay and some of his drawings. You know he’s very, very visual. All his books are very visual.

    Christina:

    It was just a fun thing to do that was different than the fables. It was a bit of a… It was a labor of love. I’ve never been so happy while writing a book. Then when Cathy got better, we dove back into the team that managed itself. I always like to point it out because I’m very fond of it. I feel grateful to folks like Teresa Torres, who are now using it in her product management trainings as well because I think that none of us have to become great artists, but a little bit of facility with drawing. Just enough, so you’re not afraid to get up on the whiteboard and share what you’re thinking about. It makes all the difference in the world.

    Alexis:

    Now I have another book on my reading list. I’m really thankful for that. I love reading. Yeah, drawing is always the thing that… I love to draw things, to explain things on whiteboard or wherever. People are always saying, “Oh, yeah. Your drawings are so nice. How do you do it?” I’m always thinking, “No, my drawings are really crappy,” but that’s not the problem. I’m just doing it. That’s just the difference between not doing it and doing it. So, if there’s a book that can help people feel more comfortable just to start, just to try, that would be nice. If I can give them some tips, I will be happy to help more people to today how to draw things. So that’s a good recommendation. I love it.

    Christina:

    I agree completely. What’s funny is nobody expects you to sit down in front of a piano, having never played and be able to put out some show pawn, right? Everybody’s like, “Oh, I can’t draw. It’s so embarrassing.” You have to learn, you have to practice. You have to teach your hand how to obey your brain. It’s not a lot of learning. It’s much easier than piano, I would argue. But you can at least get to chopsticks and do a lot. I think human beings are really interesting.

    Christina:

    I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, it’s called a pareidolia. But it’s our ability to see faces and other patterns and everything. So, if you ever looked at the front of a car and said, “Oh, it looks like that Volkswagen is smiling,” or if you looked at an outlet in the wall and you say, “It looks like a little face,” that’s humans. So, you can actually draw really, really badly. Human beings can figure out what it means. We’re pattern matching creatures.

    Christina:

    So, I always try to encourage people to make crappy pictures. I’m like, “Please just make a crappy picture because there are times when a picture is just going to be more effective.” When you’re trying to talk about a user funnel, you’re going to want to draw a terrible upside down triangle to show the funnel. Just a little bit of facility can take you so far. It’s fun. Dang. I like to do in the evening, I just sit and get myself a glass of wine. Maybe the TV is on, I’m watching a little Trevor Noah. I’ll just make circles and make triangles and make goofy-looking little people just, again, to train my hand to obey my mind. It’s so relaxing.

    Christina:

    I feel like in this high-stress time with all the wackiness in the world, anything that can help you chillax is absolutely required. When you don’t have any pressure on your drawing, it’s just doodling, and doodling is a joy. So, you can do it for work or you can just do it for the pure happiness of letting yourself relax a little bit. I think that matters.

    Alexis:

    That gives us another really good reason to try it. Doodling is a joy. I know that’s a really good way to end our discussion, I think. Christina, I want to thank you for your time and all your advices. Thank you for sharing all your experience and knowledge in your books. Thank you for being in the Le Podcast today.

    Christina:

    Oh, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you, a joy. Thank you.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more and to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. Until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    Picture by CoWomen

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox

    Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox

    When I first saw Geof Ellingham’s work on Human-Centric Agility Coaching, I was skeptical.

    Why do we need yet another model?
    And why “human-centric” when the Agile Manifesto already states that we value people and interactions over processes and tools?

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, Geof Ellingham — business agility champion, leadership coach, and psychotherapeutic counselor — joins me to explore these questions in depth.

    His answer to the “human-centric” question is both simple and uncomfortable:

    We haven’t really lived up to that value.

    Why “human-centric” matters

    Geof describes how much of the agile world still centers on:

    • processes and tools
    • speed, cost, and business outcomes
    • “doing agile” rather than improving how people work together

    His interest, and his outcome as a coach, is different: improving what happens within the group of people doing the work. Internal communication, collaboration, and the team’s ability to be at its best.

    A model that came from research, not ambition

    The Human-Centric Agility Coaching model did not start as “let’s create another framework”.

    It emerged from research Geof conducted while completing a Master’s in coaching. His goal was to understand what happens moment by moment inside agile coaches as they work.

    Not what coaches should do.
    What is actually going on internally.

    From deep interviews with coaches, two paradoxes consistently surfaced.

    Paradox 1: the expert paradox

    Agile coaches are hired as experts. Clients expect answers, solutions, and certainty.

    And yet coaching, especially professional coaching, rests on a different stance:

    • clients are whole
    • they have the capacity to solve their problems
    • the coach is there to walk alongside, not take control

    Geof describes the tension viscerally: the pull to step in as an expert when you see an opportunity for improvement, and the pull to step back to protect ownership and learning.

    We explore how existing coaching models don’t always capture how embodied and difficult that shift can be.

    Paradox 2: the ideology paradox

    The second paradox is more systemic.

    Ideology can be a shortcut to change. It can rally people, create momentum, and align language and behavior. “Agile” can become a shared identity.

    But if ideology takes root too strongly, it can freeze an organization into a new rigidity:

    • a new set of rules
    • a new orthodoxy
    • a new “agile machine”

    And that directly contradicts one of the deepest intentions of agility: staying adaptive.

    Meeting people where they are, without doing harm

    Geof also introduces the idea of developmental “columns” in his model. Without turning it into a diagnostic tool, the model offers a way for coaches to reflect on:

    • how clients see their organization
    • what kind of language will resonate
    • and what the next reachable step might be

    A key part of our conversation is the risk of harm:

    • models can easily become boxes
    • boxes become judgments
    • judgments become contempt

    We explore the tension between using a model privately as reflective practice and sharing it openly with clients, and why transparency matters.

    Using teams’ language instead of imposing a model

    One practical takeaway from Geof is that even if you use a model internally, working with teams is often more effective when you start from their own metaphors.

    Instead of explaining stages, you can ask:

    • “When you think about your team, it’s like what?”
    • “When you say that, what do you mean?”

    This helps people understand each other’s models of the world without forcing a framework onto them.

    An invitation to iterate

    Geof closes with an important stance: the model is not finished.

    It is shared under Creative Commons and meant to evolve through collaboration. He explicitly invites people to treat it with skepticism, curiosity, and a willingness to iterate.

    If you want to connect with Geof, LinkedIn is the easiest channel. You can also email him at geof.ellingham@gmail.com.

    A final thought

    This episode is a reminder that agility is not a set of ceremonies or a process upgrade.

    It is about people.
    And the work of coaching is not just about change in the organization — it is also about the internal stance and responsibility of the coach.

    Here is the transcript of the episode:

    Alexis:

    Geof, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Geof:

    I can. I’ve had a very varied background. So I started life after school as a programmer, then went off to do a music degree, I became an elementary school teacher for five years. And then went back into IT again and started working for one of the big five consultancies, spent time as a consultant, had children and decided to move into a more flexible role where I could be closer to home. So I worked as a head of IT within local government for about 10 years. And then, I guess about five, seven years ago, I started training as a coach, initially as a professional coach.

    Geof:

    But I trained in agile way back in the 1990s. In my work in local government, I’ve been starting to really bring those agile practices back in, because we’re starting to deliver digital services and so on and so I started to bring the two things together. So I started off separately as someone involved in agile and someone who was a coach and bringing them together as an agile coach is something I’ve only been doing for the last five years or so. Then most recently, I got really interested in what drives people to be the way that they are, the people that they are, and I did some more training.

    Geof:

    I’m now practicing as a psychotherapeutic counselor, so that I’m kind of interested in the full spectrum of human experience, and especially internal experience and how that plays out when people are in a group setting or an organizational setting. So that’s a that’s a long story. But it’s… There are lots of different bits to my story and I tried to bring them all together in the work that I do now.

    Alexis:

    Wow, this is really impressive. I think about all what you said. My mind was stuck with being an elementary school teacher. Because I was thinking, “Oh, that’s some time I feel that I should have those skills to be able to capture the attention of a few people in the room that are not necessarily highly motivated to engage in the conversation.”

    Geof:

    Yeah, they weren’t chosen to be there.

    Alexis:

    Yeah.

    Geof:

    I love teaching. As I said, I did that for five years as a full time teacher and then three years as a part time teacher, after that, I was a music specialist and my degree was in music. So I did these big shows with kids, I took these big whole school singing assemblies, all that kind of stuff and it was very intense. And I just decided that there was no way I was going to be able to keep that intensity up for another 40 years. So either I had to leave behind this career that I really loved, and do something different, or I could watch myself fade over the years as that intensity dropped. I just decided I’d go out while I still loved it. But I do still look back on those years very fondly and I’ve enjoyed going in and doing work with my kids when they were a little younger in their schools and stuff like that.

    Geof:

    But being able to being able to hold the attention of people who have not chosen to be with you is a challenge.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, absolutely. I’m really surprised and the first time when you shared with me, your article about Human-Centric Agility Coaching, I was really surprised about the Human-Centric part. I felt that agile was already something that was putting people first in a way, the Agile Manifesto start with the idea of individuals and interactions that are valued more than processes and tools. So I saw that people were already first, can you tell us a little bit more about the model and maybe the why behind the model?

    Geof:

    So that said, there may be two parts to that question. So I’ll answer it twice, if that’s okay, more generally, why Human-Centric? Why am I interested in this, when, as you say, “It’s already the first line in the Agile Manifesto values.” And I think the reason is that we haven’t really lived up to that value. I spend a lot of time at conferences and so on and it seems to me that processes and tools remain the driving force for a lot of the economy of the agile community certainly and a lot of the focus that we have on our agile initiatives is on business outcomes or speed or cost.

    Geof:

    And it seems to me that the focus of agility, in terms of what I’m interested in, I’m interested in what’s going on within the group of people who are engaged in the work, improving their internal communication, the ability for that group of people to achieve more than they could as separate individuals. So my outcome when I’m working with teams is all about the team’s ability to be its best. And I’m not sure that that’s… I know, lots and lots of agile coaches absolutely adhere to that principle. But I think as a community, we haven’t really managed to live up to that. So I see myself as one of the many people out there trying to just come back to that, that basic value, this is what we’re trying to achieve, we’re trying to achieve a situation where with a combination of principles and values and some practices we’ve built up over time, we can create added value in all senses, happiness, outcomes for people on planet, we can be better when we work together in teams in these ways, and I keep it as broad as possible. So that’s the first answer.

    Geof:

    The second answer is about the model itself. So the model itself does not come out of me wanting to do something, me wanting to create a model, the model comes out of a piece of research. So my intention was to get into the heads of agile coaches and find out what’s really going on when agile coaches are working. We’ve got some great literature around agile coaching, like Lyssa Adkins book, most of it is about kind of what should happen, what do we think coaches ought to do? And we haven’t really got much that looks into what actually happens moment by moment, what’s the internal experience in an agile coach, what’s really going on? And I was really interested in that internal experience, because I know that for me, as an agile coach, there’s a huge amount of internal conversation that’s going on when I’m working with a team. And I know that my internal conversation will be different to other agile coaches and we learn by understanding, our own models of the world. So I set about doing a piece of research as part of a Master’s I was doing in coaching.

    Geof:

    And my question was just sitting down with coaches for 90 minutes in depth interview and no structure. It was just tell me what is going on for you when you’re working with the team. And the model came out of that research through some paradoxes that emerged there that I guess we’ll talk about. So the model was a consequence of the research rather than something I intended to produce.

    Alexis:

    Really, really valuable. I was absolutely not aware of that and I really love it. I was thinking why do we want to produce another model, yet we have a model? The perspective that you bring in, what is happening when you interview agile coaches, about what is going on when they work, I think that’s a really interesting angle and you mentioned two paradoxes.

    Geof:

    Yeah.

    Alexis:

    Those paradoxes really resonated with me. Can you tell us more about those two?

    Geof:

    Yeah, sure. So there are two, in the research they did, there are actually some other tensions. But I decided that these were the two that came through most strongly for all of the coaches that I interviewed. So the first I’ve called the expert paradox. An expert paradox is, it’s there in the name of the role agile coach, because our clients hire us to be agile experts.

    Geof:

    To understand this particular approach to solving problems of organizations and end users, and so on. So, our clients hire us as experts in agile. But we’re coaches and those of us that have done training as professional coaches will have this strong idea in us that as a coach, we’re bringing a lens, a mirror, a set of tools to help people frame their problems, but we’re not bringing solutions, that we come to our clients as whole human beings who possess everything they need to solve their problems and all we’re doing is walking with them along the way. So when you put those two things together, you get a paradox, how can I be at the same time, someone who stands back from my own expertise and walks with my client, and believes in my client’s ability to solve their own problems, and at the same time, bring expertise around how to approach problems, how to make this agile stuff work better.

    Geof:

    For all of the coaches that I interviewed, this was a really powerful paradox that they felt themselves pulled, almost viscerally in both directions. So when they spotted an opportunity to improve process, that expert really comes to the fore and wants to step in. But there’s a part of them that recognizes that the more they can step back and allow their clients to be whole and complete and in control of their own destiny, the better their overall outcomes.

    Geof:

    I didn’t think that our existing coaching models really helped us with that tension. Because if you take for example, the Lyssa Adkins as your coach institute model, which is, you may know it’s a kind of it’s a cross drawn on the ground with some segments. And the idea is that you can walk across this model and take up a different stance. So sometimes you’ll be in a coaching stance, sometimes you’ll be in a teaching stance. And that for me doesn’t capture the kind of embodied challenge of moving between those two poles, that they’re so different inhabiting the expert, inhabiting the coach, is so different, that we need to understand more about what we need as agile coaches to enable us to do that for our clients. So that’s the first of the two paradoxes.

    Geof:

    So the second is, I’ve called the ideology paradox. And this, again, came out from my interviews, this strong tension and it also comes from a piece of academic research into based at Pivotal Labs in the States. The idea here is that agile as an ideology, as a cult, as a kind of magnificence, we are the truth in a way, and we know the answer to how to make the world a better place that I certainly know that I hold within myself, I try to hold it lightly. But I know that it’s there, I know that there’s a sense of, this is something really important and valuable we’re bringing to the world, that this ideology has plays in different ways. So when we’re trying to transform an organization, we’re trying to take an organization on this journey of change towards agility, we are taking an existing culture, an existing model of the world, and we’re looking to change that model, or uproot, in some ways destroy that cultural model and replace it with something new, these new values, these new ideas, and there’s a shortcut to doing that, which is to use ideology.

    Geof:

    Ideology has always been used as an instrument of change. Because if you can get people believing in this new way, as something that, where we can bring in group thing, we can get this, everybody walking the same walk, talking the same language using the same terminology and we’re all in this together, agile is our way that actually that does help to make that transformation easier. The tension, the problem is that if we use ideology as a way of transforming, then we were still left with an ideology. And if our root value is to continue to be flexible, and continue to iterate on what’s good and to continue to adapt, inspect and adapt at every level of the organization.

    Geof:

    An ideology is just something else that freezes us and we end up trapped in ways of doing things that are just as hard to get away from the culture that we started with. So ideology is something that pulls us it’s something that’s attractive, believing that agile is somehow special, is a really attractive proposition and our clients find it attractive. But allowing that ideology to take root can freeze an organization in a state that makes you have to continue to be adaptive.

    Alexis:

    I really love those two paradoxes, I have said that they really resonated with me. I can empathize totally with that idea of you’re coming in an organization, you are the expert, you are asked to really every time improve. I remember one time, I was working with a really small startup. And they were, not a lot, but they knew that there was a lot of traction for what they were providing and so they needed to grow really fast. The people in charge, there were three of them that were managing the company at the beginning. They were telling me, “Okay, Alexis or we will do the thing.” I remember the CTO telling me, “Okay, we will hire a manager for that, manager for that, manager for that, manager for that and then they will hire their teams and so on.”

    Alexis:

    I said, “I don’t think that can work. Because you still need to deliver a lot of things. So instead of hiring those managers that will then hire their team and so on, probably we should focus on the people that will already do the work.” And the question was, “But how they will be organized?” And I said, “we will adopt an agile way of working. So your goal is to have small teams that will be able to deliver end to end value to your customers.”

    Alexis:

    And he was asking me but, “What is the target organization? At the end, how will we be organized? How the company will be organized?” I was trying to stay on my stance again, “We will have smaller teams, and they will be organized to deliver value end to end.” And we’re thinking, “Oh, but I understand what you say. But can you draw me the organization in the end?” I said, “No, I can’t because I don’t know, we will design the organization along the way. There is no model, there is no end game. We need to agree on those principles and we will design the organization along the way.” And he was still trying to ask me that, “I’m pretty sure you know but you don’t want to tell me.” I tell him, “I don’t know.”

    Alexis:

    That was really hard for him to discuss with the expert. And at the same time that the expert is studying that. I don’t know, I don’t know the results. I know we can do it, I know we’ll do it along the way, but I don’t know the end game and the results.

    Geof:

    Yeah, exactly.

    Alexis:

    It was really a hard time. If you explain that, that was my expert, thought of… destroyer that I was feeling that was okay. I need to old on that line. Because if I don’t, then I will design everything by myself and it will be totally wrong for the people in the company.

    Geof:

    Yeah. So you’ve led me beautifully into the model and I wonder whether this is a time to kind of bring the model out of the box and start talking about it a little bit. Because I think that particular encounter that you had really is one of the things I was trying to address in the model.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, please.

    Geof:

    So the model is organized into columns and the columns are based on work by a whole sequence of academic and practical research is going back to Piaget, who was working in child development 150 years ago. And the terminology I’ve used comes from a guy called Bill Joiner, who writes about leadership agility. But the basic principle idea is that as children, we go through stages of development, and they’re pretty well understood now. Children start off as babies not being able to differentiate themselves from their parents and from the world. And then they learn that they’re separate and you go through these very explicit concrete stages of development. The idea that was put forward by this, all of this chain of researchers, and people will be familiar with things like Laloux and Reinventing Organizations and Spiral Dynamics, there’s a whole bunch of stuff out here. They’re all based on the same principle, which is, “As adults, we also go through these stages of development.”

    Geof:

    We start off and in turn, in terms of the first column in my model, we start off with what Bill Joiner calls expert, and an expert, it’s all about our skill, our ability to perform a task really well. And we see the world in quite mechanistic ways. So I’ve… The title of the column in the model is machine. So we kind of see the world as a machine and our idea is that if we can just put the things together in a way that we understand it’s kind of all logical, it all fits together and I understand what my purpose is in this machine. I’m really expert at it. When I become a manager, I can tell other people how to be expert. I can teach other people

    Geof:

    It’s very mechanistic view of the world and many people. So Bill Joiner reckons that something like 35% of people in management roles are still locked into this kind of expert role and the accounts that you had was with someone who had that view of the world, they want to see their organization as a machine, that’s the way that they conceive of how things work. So I’ve got a machine at the moment, it works like this, you’re going to come in, and you’re going to help me build a new machine that works differently. So show me what it looks like, what’s the blueprint, I want to be able to see it then I’ll understand.

    Geof:

    And if people are in that column, that’s where you have to meet them. So the challenge that many coaches come across is they’re looking to move people into a different way of thinking, and the person they’re talking to just doesn’t yet have the language or the model of how the world works enables them to participate in that conversation. So we have to move people across the columns. So the columns in my model go, start with this machine, the next column is family. So this is what Bill Joiner calls achiever and this is where we start to understand that the groups of people in organizations have these kind of, these complicated power structures going on and these different in groups and out groups and ways of communicating and that people have all kinds of little daily struggles and conflicts that are some sometimes part of the business of the business.

    Geof:

    Sometimes they’re to do with people’s personal lives, and it all comes together in a big mess. And that organizations aren’t like machines that actually the groups of people within organizations act much more like families where power is contingent, the idea that families have a head of the household and anyone listening who has a family knows that that’s not how power works in organizations. Power is slippery and difficult, and it’s all over the place. And a family doesn’t work like a machine and things are always changing, people are always finding different roles.

    Geof:

    So the reality is whatever structure you have written down on paper, that’s not really what’s happening in your organization, stuff is moving around. So that’s the next step is to recognize that and to stop being so focused on what people are doing, and start being focused on what people are achieving. So we stopped being interested in the process, and telling people what to do, because that’s what experts do, is they say do it like this, and it’ll work, we start stepping back and saying, “Okay, this is what I want to happen.” And you lot organize yourself and make it happen.

    Geof:

    So people who are in that second column are able to step back a little bit, if the person that you’ve been speaking to, within that green family kind of column, they would have been able to meet you more easily and be a bit more flexible and say, Okay, I get it, it’s going to be a little bit complicated, it’s going to emerge, and stuff will happen. So that’s the second column. The third column is living system. So this is what Bill Joiner calls catalyst. And at this point, people are able to move a step further and start seeing that their organization isn’t a little bubble, separate from the rest of the world, but the actually is part of a much bigger set of systems.

    Geof:

    So this is the living system column, we start to see that those power structures that I talked about at family that are kind of flexible and fluid, that actually there are systems at play here. But the team itself is a system, each individual person is a system of thoughts and desires, that groups of systems the different teams interact with each other in systemic ways. And that you can follow, you can understand what’s happening when you start to look at those interactions and start in a systemic way and you can start to see the organization as part of a wider world.

    Geof:

    People who are able to meet you at that in that column and build your records. There’s only 5% or so of managers who are in that column, people are able to meet you in that column will get agility in a completely different way to the expert, because they will immediately understand that what we’re doing here is working with a system and helping the team to see its own systemic processes to be able to understand what’s happening between you and me and this person over here and to be able to inspect and adapt not just the work that we’re doing but but who we are as a group of people. So they’ll meet you in a different place.

    Geof:

    Then my fourth column is called wonderland. The idea that almost it’s kind of post agile, really, this is where we’re stepping back from the idea of ideology completely and saying, “All right, we are now about being curious about everything, about getting out of any silos that we might be in being open to experience, we might start really allowing different value systems to compete within the same organization in the same team, where we’re able to deal with things like conflict in a completely different way, we’re able to take the scratchiness and challenge the world and just get interested in and use that as a source of information.”

    Geof:

    So those are the kind of four columns and one of the first reasons that I wanted this model was as a way of helping us to understand as agile coaches, where we are meeting our clients. So first question is, where am I? So as an agile coach, where do I recognize myself in these columns? And it might be that in some parts of what I do, I’m in one column in some parts of what I do, I’m in another. None of this is black and white. This isn’t about putting people in boxes. But it’s about understanding, what’s my capacity for taking that curious route. There’s a concept called transcended include, which is that every time we move through the levels, we still have all of the capabilities we had in the previous level.

    Geof:

    So as I move through to living system, and I’m getting to the point where I’m past the kind of this is how agile should work. I’m getting really interested in systems and I’m using systems thinking, and I’m working with teams and that way, I can still step into expert, I can still go back into that first column and inhabit that. But I can do it from a different stance. So I take my curiosity and I’ll step in deliberately, intentionally into that expert teacher role. And I’ll share that with the team I’m working with now say, “Okay, I think that there’s something I know about that that might be able to help you here. Do I have your permission to put a different hat on and to step in?” And I can do that in a way that that allows me to still be me, I don’t have to be a different person. But I can just step into that different role and then I can step back again, or what I’m interested in helping coaches to do with this model is to find the learning edge of their clients and meet them there.

    Geof:

    So if you understand that your client is sitting in that first expert column, they’re going to be focused on process and machine. So we have to meet them there, we have to show them something that they can get a handle on. But in doing so we want to pull them into this next stage into family, we’re not going to get them into systems thinking straightaway, we’re going to have to take them through and just help them to understand what’s going on within their teams that they might be interested in, isn’t just about their role definitions and how they handoff works one another. It’s about the quality of the communication and relationships between people in those teams and that’s where we need to focus on next energy.

    Geof:

    So that’s really where the model comes from. It’s taking those paradoxes and recognizing that both of those paradoxes exist because of the need to move between these columns as an agile coach in a way that professional coaches don’t have to, if you’re a professional coach, you typically operate within one column with one client, I’m either here to… I’m here as a skills coach, I’m going to teach you how to do something, I’m here as a transformational coach, I’m going to sit back and work with you and you’re going to tell your story and we’re going to create a new narrative for you however we’re working. With agile coaches, we’re constantly having to move around these different columns. If as an agile coach, we are still ourselves, but they’re very much on the left hand side of that model, we just need to recognize our own limitations in what happens when we meet a client who’s further to the right.

    Alexis:

    This is exactly that kind of difficult realization. I was looking at, where my client is not necessarily where I am now and I think a that’s an important thing to realize that if you are in the system, you are in a complex system, you are part of it, whatever you want, you are still there. That’s really an interesting first thought on that. The thing that I’m struggling a little bit with is considering the client, considering a team or as being in one column. How do you deal with teams that the individuals in the team, the people in the team are not in the same column? How do you deal with that situation?

    Geof:

    So the individuals within teams are rarely in the same column, certainly in my experience. Again, for me, what’s helpful about the model is understanding, so where’s the center of gravity of the team? What does that mean for the people who are outliers? So if the center of gravity of the team is in that family column, then you’re probably going to have some experts there who are struggling with the fact that, what they want to do is just do their job. So my job is to sit here and write this code, or my job is to whatever and their understanding of their role is they have something to do in which they have expertise. And yet around them, this team is, is having completely different conversations about trying to collaborate on this and do this, be adaptive in this way, and it just doesn’t make sense.

    Geof:

    So what we’re going to have to work out is how do we manage that potential discrepancy? Are we going to do some work with the team to help them to get into each other’s models of the world. So some of the work that I’m doing at the moment is with Caitlin Walker, systemic modeling. She’s a British woman who has worked for years with groups and started her work with teenagers who were disenfranchised, disillusioned about school and she realized that when you have a group that’s really heterogeneous, lots of really different kind of things going on in that group and there’s conflict, that giving people the language to understand each other’s model of the world is really important. So if I have a group that’s like that, then I might bring in some of that systemic modeling language, to help the people in the teams to get into when you say this, this is what I’m making up about what you mean, now you tell me what you really mean and I’ll try to understand what your model of the world is and then I’m going to share that with you.

    Geof:

    This is my model of the world, when I say this, this is what I mean, and really giving people the language to understand that we have different models of the world and if I’m going to challenge my own model, my biggest challenge to my model is that despite the fact that I said earlier, I don’t like putting people in boxes, I think it’s difficult to use a model like this without putting people in boxes. So if there’s a way of evolving this model in the future, to be less boxy, that’s what I would want to do next. Because as you say, “People don’t inhabit these boxes, teams certainly don’t. But I do think that there is value in understanding, I think these four columns give you a way of understanding where abouts people are in relation to each other and therefore, where the potential tensions might lie, and how you can think about, do you just have to just allow those tensions? Do you find a way of bringing people into the same space? Do you just help people to understand what’s going on for each other? So you have some choices to make.

    Geof:

    I think the model helps with just understanding where people are and what choices you might have, what levers you might be able to pull.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, and those columns are even more like scales and that’s how you are somewhere on the scale.

    Geof:

    Yeah.

    Alexis:

    I assume that if you are making assumptions about other people, you will probably move yourself on the scale to try to fit what they want or what they need. I can observe that in my team when some people are really hierarchical in their mindset. So they assume things about the boss, that the boss should do certain things. And they expect the boss will do that. But unfortunately for them, the boss is not in the same hierarchical view of the world. So they frustrated about the lack of things that the boss should do. It’s an interesting situation to be in. So I’m trying to meet them somewhere in the middle and it’s an interesting situation to be in, try to say, “Okay, that’s your expectation about the world and you need to realize that the older people expect you to do things.” That’s that’s an interesting tension.

    Geof:

    Yeah, for sure.

    Alexis:

    So, if we see that as scales, we can move along those scales to adjust to where the people are. Explaining the model can help them see that the others are not necessarily seeing the world the same way?

    Geof:

    Yes.

    Alexis:

    Okay, and you’re really using the model this way with your customers, with the teams you are working with?

    Geof:

    Yeah, so one of the one of the challenges is, so at the moment, the model is still very much in its kind of early iterations. It’s in its current form for quite a while, but COVID has kind of interrupted a lot of things. So I’ve been using it. I haven’t been using it explicitly with clients, so I haven’t been sharing it and I have mixed feelings about sharing it. And the reason I have mixed feelings is comes back to this question about putting people in boxes and about the idea of assessing people. So at the moment, I’m using it as a way of, as part of my reflective practice. So I will, if I’m working with a team, I will use the model as a way of thinking about, “Okay, so here are my key individuals whereabouts do I think they are? Where would I meet them? What does this help? What does this tell me?” So I use it as part of my reflective practice, but I’m not sharing the model explicitly.

    Geof:

    Now, there’s a part of my coaching practice that says, if I’m using a model, to think about my clients, then generally speaking, I want to be open and share that model with my clients. Because, there’s danger of doing violence to clients by modeling them without them knowing that’s what I’m doing. So there’s a bit of a tension there. So at the moment, I’m using the model in my reflective practice, but I’m not explicitly using it with teams, and I’m not sure that in its current form, I would advocate using it in that kind of transparent way with teams. I might use some of the language and certainly, I might use some of that some of the underlying language about our views of the world, how do we think that organizations work? But I would probably do it in a more of that systemic modeling way that way of getting people to use their own language about how do they see the world?

    Geof:

    So if I think that what’s going on in a team is that some people are locked into the machine expert column, and some people are kind of happily living in the family, and maybe even getting into living systems, what I might do is invite people to talk about, “Okay, so when you’re coming into the organization, and you’re in your team, and you’re working with your team, that’s like what?” And see what people come up with and see what metaphors might arise from people and see, it might be that somebody says, “Well, I kind of see the team a bit like, it’s a bit like a watch, there’s this really intricate little cog, that’s me, I’m over here, and then there’s this big hand over here that goes round.”

    Geof:

    So you might start to hear the metaphors coming out, you might find that machine metaphor come out. And somebody else might say, “No, it’s more like, I feel more like we’re, we’re kind of like pebbles in the ocean,” or whatever it is that comes out. So I think I would, at this point, I would use the model as a way of doing reflective practice. But in my work with teams, I’m more likely to use their own language, and test my reflective thoughts against what comes up in the team’s own words.

    Alexis:

    Excellent, I thank you for sharing that. I remember when I read the Laloux book about organization, that’s Preventing Organization, I think, I was really excited about trying to explain to different stages of organization. I was ready already to explain that to everybody.

    Geof:

    Yeah.

    Alexis:

    And I realized that the first time I started to explain the different levels, I was definitely in an oriental organization really no machine organization. And they were thinking, “Okay, it will not end well,” because I’m trying to explain something that will not really resonate with them and basically, I will tell them, “You are not good. That’s not how you should be, that will not work.” And I was thinking, “Okay, now I need to escape that conversation. This was exactly not the thing to do.

    Geof:

    Yeah, exactly. And to build on that, not only when we’re doing that, not only if we expose the model, we risk doing harm, but actually if we keep the model to ourselves, but we’ve already made that determination, there’s a risk of harm because there’s a risk that we’re holding that organization in contempt because of the hierarchical view that we have about what a good organization looks like. I think that the one of the things that models can do if we use them well is to recognize some of those internal biases and the contempt that we might be holding, and use the model as a way of providing a warning that Okay, so if I think this organization is a machine orange, what does that mean about the way I’m going to think about the people in this organization and what care do I need to take to ensure that I’m seeing every human being in this organization as a fully competent human being?

    Alexis:

    Yep. This is a very good point. Our expectations or our biases, and when we start elaborating organization or even worse people, we are blocking our thinking and we are not able to interact with them in an efficient way in a really human way. We are seeing them as problems instead of seeing them as human beings that are fully responsible of who they are, how they are interacting with the world?

    Geof:

    Yeah, exactly.

    Alexis:

    I was surprised in organization that are more mechanistic more machines, the people in those organizations, some of them are, let’s say, comfortable with their position and their role. And some of them are suffering in those position and would like to change things. How to come in support of those people, all of them is an interesting challenge.

    Geof:

    Yeah, absolutely. Because, as I said earlier, one way that organizations do that, is this use of ideology and to some extent the way that we use frameworks, I think falls into this, You see people, almost subverting some of the ideas of agility by saying to someone who’s comfortable in that orange expert column, are actually you can still be like that in this new world. I’m just giving you a new process, I’m just giving you a new machine, it’s okay. And there’s a danger in doing that and there’s comfort in doing that. So there’s a real tension in the way that we approach those people who are very comfortable with the world the way that is. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, I remember to using Scrum. Yeah, as you said, as an ideology that will enable you to start a transformation, to start to change. With some teams after the first or two or three iterations, they were starting to reconsider the framework itself, they will start to reconsider that they could change things, how they were doing things, because that was not necessarily the best way for them. Which was really interesting and I’ve seen teams using exactly the scrum by the book for months. And you say, “Okay, there’s something broken there.” The probability that it’s still the best way of doing things for you is really low. So instead of using the framework as a starting point, you are stuck with that framework now. That’s your new way of working, that is not necessarily the best way.

    Geof:

    Yeah, your new machine.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, exactly. When we send order, and when we see the columns and the tables, and it can feel a little bit like the metrology model that some people are selling and it’s really scary. But when we listen to you explaining the model, it changed everything and now, I’m totally with you on calling it a Human-Centric approach. Because I understand that it’s really what it is, based on what you say, it’s really fascinating. Is there other things that you would like to share today?

    Geof:

    I think the thing that I would like to share is that this model is very much a first iteration. And I touched on this earlier, this is not how it ends up. This is a first attempt at taking what I learned from this research and putting it onto paper in a way that I think certainly helps me to think about where things set, I know that my personal bias is to work in a bubble for longer than is helpful. So really, what I want to do at this point is invite people to kind of join a conversation with me, if people think there’s value in this model, then to get into a conversation about, “Okay, what next? How do we try out some of these ideas in practice? How do we get some feedback on what happens when we use them? And what might the next version of this model or next iteration look like?” It’s published under Creative Commons, that’s my intention, it’s not mine, my intention is that if there’s value in it, then I’d like the world to do something with it.

    Geof:

    So I think that’s the thing I would say is don’t treat it as a fixed artifact. Don’t treat it as something that I think is finished, treat it with some skepticism come at it with curiosity and intend to iterate and collaborate. And anyone who would like to collaborate with me on it, please do get in touch because I’m going to be putting together a group of people who are interested and we’ll collectively see what happens next.

    Alexis:

    Very cool. I love it. And to contact you, they can contact you through LinkedIn?

    Geof:

    LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. My email address is geof.ellingham@gmail.com and Geof is G-E-O-F, slightest strange spelling, but LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me.

    Alexis:

    Perfect. I will put that in reference and I will of course put the article in reference of that recording.

    Geof:

    Right.

    Alexis:

    Thank you, Geof for joining the podcast today. That was really amazing to have you. I’ve learned a lot and I bet the people who listen, we’ll learn a lot too. I’m eager to continue to discuss with you after that. Thank you very much.

    Geof:

    You’re very welcome. I’ve really enjoyed having the conversation. Just to add that every time I have a conversation about the model, I learn new stuff about what might happen next. So these conversations are just so valuable.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to Alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and for more help to increase your impact and satisfaction, drop a comment or an email with your feedback or just to say hello, and until next time to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    Picture by Dylan Gillis.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • The Job of an Open Leader: Context, Trust, and Growing Others

    The Job of an Open Leader: Context, Trust, and Growing Others

    Open leadership is often described through principles such as transparency, inclusivity, or collaboration.

    But what does the job of an open leader actually look like, day to day?

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Preethi Thomas, Software Engineering Manager at Red Hat, to explore this question through her own journey and experience.

    From individual contributor to manager

    Preethi’s career started as a software developer, then moved through quality engineering, before she joined Red Hat as an individual contributor.

    Like many experienced engineers, she eventually reached a crossroads:

    • stay an individual contributor, or
    • move into a management role

    What helped her navigate that decision was reflection, guidance from her manager, and the OPT model used at Red Hat.

    Finding the right intersection: the OPT model

    The OPT model stands for:

    • Opportunity
    • Passion
    • Talent

    Preethi shares how she realized that her passion was centered on people and growing others, that she had the talent to support that, and that she needed to actively look for opportunities to explore management.

    Participating in Red Hat’s Aspiring Managers Program gave her the space to experiment, learn, and decide intentionally.

    The four axes of leadership

    During the conversation, we explore leadership through four complementary axes:

    • People: attracting, developing, and supporting others
    • Business: understanding strategy, customers, and the broader context
    • System: removing obstacles and improving the environment
    • Execution: delivering outcomes

    A key insight Preethi shares is that execution is often a result of the other three. When people, business context, and systems are taken care of, execution follows.

    Context and trust as foundations

    A recurring theme in the episode is the importance of providing context.

    Preethi explains how transparency and communication help people understand the “why” behind decisions, connect their work to the bigger picture, and collaborate more effectively.

    Context and trust, together, become the roots of collaboration.

    Open organizations in practice

    We also explore the five characteristics of open organizations:

    • transparency
    • inclusivity
    • adaptability
    • collaboration
    • community

    Rather than ranking them, Preethi highlights how they reinforce each other and ultimately build trust.

    Inclusivity, in particular, shows up through everyday signals:

    • who speaks and who doesn’t
    • how disagreements are handled
    • whether people feel safe to contribute

    Open leadership means noticing these signals and acting when something feels off.

    Mentoring: you need a village

    One of the strongest threads in the conversation is mentoring.

    Preethi shares how having mentors radically accelerated her growth, and why she believes:

    “You need a village to help you succeed.”

    Mentoring is not transactional or time-boxed for her. It is a long-term relationship where both mentor and mentee learn, reflect, and grow.

    She also encourages everyone, regardless of seniority, to both have a mentor and be a mentor. Everyone has something to teach, even if they don’t realize it yet.

    Learning, confidence, and short-term wins

    Transitioning into management came with its own challenges. Preethi reflects on:

    • the importance of short-term wins to build confidence
    • how difficult it can be to recognize relational work (like one-on-ones) as “real work”
    • why naming and valuing these responsibilities matters

    These insights apply well beyond management roles.

    Books and resources that shaped the journey

    Preethi recommends several books that supported her growth:

    • The First 90 Days
    • The Manager’s Path
    • The Making of a Manager
    • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

    Combined with mentoring and reflection, these resources helped her navigate different phases of her leadership journey.

    A final thought

    Open leadership is not about control or visibility. It is about creating conditions where others can grow, contribute, and scale their impact.

    As Preethi beautifully puts it, the job of an open leader is to help others succeed — and in doing so, to build something far greater than individual performance.

    Here is the transcript of the episode:

    Alexis:

    Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

    Preethi:

    Thank you, Alexis and thank you for inviting me for this opportunity. Like you said, my name is Preethi Thomas. I’m a manager for the Containers team at Red Hat. So a little bit of background about myself. I have a background in computer science, I have a master’s in computer applications from a university in India, and I moved to the US. I worked for a little bit in India, maybe, a few months in India before I moved to the US. So I’ve been here 20 plus years now. I started off as a software developer, remember programming and visual basic C, C++.

    Preethi:

    I can remember when it probably was because of an opportunity that I moved to quality engineering. So at the time when I moved to quality engineering there was a lot more manual testing and things of that sort going, but then I enjoyed that part of being on the customer side of things, maybe the first customer getting to use a software. So I went back and forth. After I moved to the US, I went back and forth between development and software engineering, or software development and quality engineering or quality assurance for a little bit.

    Preethi:

    Once I had my kids, I decided quality engineering was more where I could focus a little bit more while managing my kids. I found my passion there. So later on, I think I applied to Red Hat three times before I finally got a job at Red Hat. I got hired at Red Hat and as a quality engineer so I was an individual contributor. So I think that is where my most of my career for worse apart until like maybe a few years into the career I was at the cross roads as in where do I move? Do I stay an individual contributor or move to a leadership role?

    Preethi:

    I think my manager at the time kind of guided me through my questions. So at Red Hat, we followed the OPT model. I remember listening to a session at QE camp in Brno about the OPT model. And that’s when I really thought about what it is that I’m passionate about and where the opportunities are.

    Alexis:

    You need to tell us a little bit more about what is the OPT model?

    Preethi:

    All right. So the OPT model is the intersection of the opportunities, your talent, and the passion. I always have felt that I am passionate about people and growing people or being there for people. And I thought as a parent and my passion, I have the talent to do that. And then the next thing was the opportunity. So finding that opportunity, and I wasn’t sure where I would find that opportunity or how to go about that.

    Preethi:

    Doing a little bit more research into it, I found there was the training program that Red Hat offers called Aspiring Managers Program or AMP training. So I took that and I decided that I wanted to try it. Two years ago I decided to take it the opportunity or move into management. And then here I am. So far I have to say, I’m enjoying this.

    Alexis:

    You were an individual contributor, or you were already within Red Hat so within an organization that is an open organization where the individual contributor can really be real leaders and you wanted to go to management. Nice thing I like with Red Hat is that Aspiring Manager training that can give you a lot of tools, insights if you decide to stay an individual contributor to really increase your impact as a leader, as an individual contributor, or can help you decide if you really want to switch to manager.

    Alexis:

    So you already mentioned that you wanted to go there because you like growing people, helping people be the best of themselves. What were all the aspects that were attracting you to be a manager?

    Preethi:

    I felt at the time that I was a little bit more focused on just what I am doing. So I liked the thought that just to get a little bit more perspective into the company’s vision, or yes, as an individual contributor, I could do that, but I felt like I would have a little bit more opportunity to learn that and be passionate about what the company is passionate about and be able to help other people who likes to be the individual contributor and help them along as well. And get them to understand that make the connection a little bit better.

    Alexis:

    I love it. When I try to describe what is the role of leader, I have a four default axis. My first axis is the execution piece. That’s how what you deliver or what your organization delivers. And second axis, it’s the people, it’s how to attract, retain, develop people so they can really be the best of themselves. Usually I’m saying the people part is the first axis by the way, but that’s too bad. I failed on that.

    Alexis:

    You touch on what we can do for the business. That’s my other axis, the business axis where we think about the strategy, we think about where the industry is going, we think of what our customers really want to achieve and how can we support them with our partners are doing, with all the communities are doing and how we can be involved in that or support that or change the way it works already to think larger than what our team is really doing. And our team can contribute to that or influence the direction where we are going.

    Alexis:

    And the last axis is the system part. We live in the system, we have to improve that system so that the people can work in the right way. That’s a bad system will beat people each time so that we need to really improve the system. And I think as a leader, you need to consider the four axis to be able to work on that. How do you feel about those four axis, execution, people, business and system?

    Preethi:

    Yes. I think I completely agree with you on that four axis, because we need all that to have a successful product or a company. I think I would probably call execution as the last piece, at least in my opinion, because once you have a strategy, once you have a business problem that you’re trying to solve, and you have people and you’re taking care of your people and removing obstacles-

    Alexis:

    The system part, absolutely, removing obstacles is a great summary of it. Yep.

    Preethi:

    Yes. The system part. And then once you have all those three taken care of, I think the execution comes naturally, or that is, I think I would say execution is a product of the three.

    Alexis:

    It’s relatively a rare that people have that level of clarity. I had some into your contributors or even manager when I was asking them about their role, they were 100% focused on execution. And when I was asking about all those things, either they were saying it’s a, “That’s a manager problem,” or “That’s my manager’s problem,” it’s not theirs.

    Preethi:

    Yeah. I think for, especially for people, when you take care of people and create context for people, the why, it makes them understand the bigger picture. As an individual contributor, I think there were times that I was too focused on what I was doing. So I think once I started thinking outside of the box I think it kind of, I made the connection and then that my passion increased.

    Alexis:

    The open organization it’s said that they have five main characteristics, transparency as a foundation for everything, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community. Do you feel that in your work you experience in a way those characteristics? Is there one in particular that you feel is really really important compared to others or are they all important?

    Preethi:

    I think each of them has its own… I mean, each of them are important in its own way. A product of all that together is the trust. And without trust, I feel like you lose that. So when you have open communication and transparency, I feel like you are creating a culture of collaboration. So then it becomes easy to gain people’s trust and help them move forward. However, as a leader you create that passion in them by following these open management principles. To me, transparency is extremely important. So I think transparency and communication helps create that context for my people.

    Alexis:

    Creating context for the team is really important. By being transparent, we can provide the information that everybody needs to make those decisions. What about the inclusivity, welcoming others’ perspectives?

    Preethi:

    Yes, absolutely. So to have a healthy and collaborative community, you have to be inclusive. As a woman there is different contexts that you see, there is people not being inclusive. So you kind of notice a little when you are a minority group if I say so. Then I think that having a healthy, inclusive community makes it easy for people to grow and collaborate better. So if you have a hostile community, people don’t want to be part of that. So like a meeting, the end result of not being inclusive is you end up having a retention problem. People who are of a diverse opinion may not want to be in that organization when it is not inclusive. Like I said, I think the five aspects, I don’t know what is better than the other.

    Alexis:

    That’s probably not the right question. It seems that they are all really important.

    Preethi:

    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Alexis:

    You’re right. On the inclusivity aspect, I feel that it’s sometimes difficult to realize if the team or the community is inclusive enough. What are the signs we should look at?

    Preethi:

    Well, I’m not an expert at that, but then again, I’ll try. I don’t think there is a bar as in how much inclusivity is enough. So I think the more inclusive you are, there is always room for improvement. I think a couple of things that you would notice if a community is not inclusive would be fewer contributions from the outside of the project or someone, especially on a company sponsored project. If you have fewer people coming in contributing, then that means there is something not right.

    Preethi:

    Another way to look at it is be mindful of the platforms that you use in the communication channel, email lists, or even GitHub conversations where you get those hostility to see if there are people being really mean to each other. Okay. It’s okay to have really good discussions and sometimes the discussions getting heated, but then there is also… I think, looking for signs of those… If the results have really heated discussion as people leaving the community, then you’re not doing something right. I think there are, I think, signs that you can watch for, if you are paying attention, it’ll show itself out.

    Alexis:

    How do you get people in your team paying more attention to those signs and how can you help them to fix those issues?

    Preethi:

    Really paying attention, and making sure that if there is a conversation that happens, that you noticed and making awareness for that. If one of your associates is you see that something’s happening, sometimes you’re not watching it all the time, or someone raises it to you, that there is this incident that happened and getting to the why behind it, and being able to talk and coach your people on the right behaviors. Or even making sure that they are aware that some of these might have caused someone to feel a certain way or not included in that, I think making sure that you say something when you see something.

    Alexis:

    I love it.

    Preethi:

    To me, something that I feel, if I feel something is not right, that doesn’t mean that you feel the same way, but then I have that opportunity to raise it to you saying, “Okay, I felt this. It doesn’t mean that you may have…” But then the next time this happens, you might think, “Oh, this may be something that is going to be offensive to X, Y, and Z.”

    Alexis:

    Do you feel that it’s the job of the manager in particular, in that context or is it the job of anybody in the team?

    Preethi:

    I think it’s the job of anybody in the team. A manager may not be watching all the conversations or everything that is happening, especially in the open source community, right? If you have a set of standards, making sure other people in the team are aware of this. A manager cannot be a gatekeeper for the community. We can make sure the expectations are known to the team so that the team can to be inclusive. It’s everyone’s responsibility to be inclusive.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. Excellent. So, that’s where I can see the power of the team agreements, or the code of conduct in communities so we can raise the awareness of what are the expected behavior from each other. As you said before, when you see something, you say something and you are expected to speak up when there’s something that is not going well.

    Alexis:

    I know you mentioned, if I recall to encouraging and using mentoring in your team to help people grow in their roles. Can you tell us more about that?

    Preethi:

    Oh, absolutely. That is something that I’m very passionate about. I think in my journey to be here right now, you need a village to help you succeed. I have a village of mentors, but then I did not have a formal mentor until like maybe four years ago or five years ago. So once I got a mentor, my growth has been exponential. I think it helped me come to terms, to crystallize my goal so what I want. I came in even to the point that as in, even though it was in the back of my mind, it was I found it from within me, but then someone helped me get to that by asking the right question.

    Preethi:

    The thing about me, I think I’ve read somewhere that you use a mentor for a certain period of time, and then you find other mentors. But then with me, I’ve had excellent relationship with all my mentors and you know that as well. I keep learning from all my mentors. So I don’t want to stop the relationship. I say, “Now okay, this is two months into it. Okay, I’m done. I achieved this goal so let me move on to another mentor.” It’s not that for me, it’s my village of support that I need. Because I’ve personally experienced that relationship and what it can do to grow you in your career, as well as, as a person, I really encourage my team to be mentors and mentees.

    Preethi:

    Each one, wherever they are in their career I think they have an aspiration to do whatever the next thing is. And everyone has something to teach. That I think, it took a long time for me to realize that, “Okay, there may be something that I can teach others too.” And then I’m like, “Okay, I can be a mentor for someone and I have something to offer as well.” So yes, I think mentor and having a mentor and mentee is super important. And that is something that I think you learn from a mentor as much. And you learn from your mentee as well.

    Alexis:

    How it works for the people that you nudge or you pushed to become a mentor of others, we always have something to teach to other how to… How it works? Because I guess some people were more reluctant than others to try to be a mentor.

    Preethi:

    So in my team, I think I’ve mentioned this too, I’m very open and creating that context is really important to me. I’m open and honest about my journey as in how this has helped and how this relationship is super important and how that can help them grow as an individual contributor and however they want to grow their career. I keep repeating or I’m honest about and answering about any questions that they have in those contexts and my experience, I’m always willing to share that my experience that can inspire others.

    Preethi:

    I think when people hear stories and when they see the value, people do not hesitate. And I always tell them that even now sometimes I feel I don’t have anything to offer to a mentee, but then I have to think of myself and my journey, there may be someone who was looking for something, what I was looking for at the time that I was looking for.

    Alexis:

    Very good point. I have an experience like, I think last week I had a discussion with a mentee. She started the call asking me question about what I was doing. And I was surprised because usually people start with, they come with their problems and they want to discuss those problems. They don’t necessarily come to ask me questions. So I was not ready for that. I started to discuss that and at some point she stopped and says, “Oh, this is interesting, what you are saying, because it make me think about something I’m working on right now. I didn’t think I was ready to discuss that, but maybe we can discuss that topic.”

    Alexis:

    Until we discussed her topic and I realized discussing her topic that we were in the discussion designing something that could be a solution to one of the problems I had. So it was really interesting to see, okay, that we went back and forth discussing both our different challenges we were working, perfectly helped each other design solutions for us. I’m always saying it’s a social learning experiment. And we both learned that one call, that was 40 minutes call and it was really the embodiment of everything I’ve seen. Those relationships, those discussions are really special to me. That’s really something that I hope everybody will be able to experience.

    Preethi:

    Yeah absolutely.

    Alexis:

    Have you experienced things that are similar to that?

    Preethi:

    Oh, absolutely. Red Hat has the mentoring program, I have a mentee now and we were talking about something or even last week. As I’m asking her questions I keep thinking, “Okay, this is where I was, and I think this is, while I’m preaching, am I doing this as well?” So maybe there is a room for improvement for me in implementing what I am suggesting, or we are talking about. So what is it that…

    Preethi:

    I think it kind of instills the qualities a little bit more into your brain too, like inspires you to try them out as well, to come to a solution that works. You’re helping someone, but then at the same time you are learning as you go. You come up with ideas that you can try on yourself as well. Yes. So I think I’m completely with you on that.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. We covered a lot during that call and I’m really glad that we cover those things about being an open leader, could be an individual contributor or the manager. When you started your journey, what is the one thing you wish you should have known?

    Preethi:

    I think more recently, the one thing that I would say, or I don’t know if it just ended up being one thing, it probably ended up being multiple things. So, it’s like, I felt like I had the tools to try it out, but then again, I didn’t have like a practical experience. I remember reading this, I came upon this book, First 90 Days when I started my management journey, I think I started reading that around maybe around 60 days into my new job and I was, “Maybe I should have done a little bit more research and read this book before I started.” Because in that book, there was things like, okay, what are your short-term wins and your long-term wins.

    Preethi:

    I think that short-term wins really would have helped me realize, okay or give you that confidence that, okay, you may be on the right path. It’s like for the first three months, I felt like I didn’t know what I’m doing. I was doing it anyway. Just thinking, “Okay, this may be right or maybe, otherwise someone will tell me,” but I think having those tangible things that you can check off that first few months of you are navigating a new job or new role would definitely help you give you that inspiration to go on or the motivation to go on.

    Alexis:

    It’s interesting because it’s at the same time, the inspiration to go on, it’s the motivation to go on. And it’s really building the confidence that you need to do all of that.

    Preethi:

    Exactly.

    Alexis:

    Short term wins are really, really important in that process. So it’s already good one. I think whatever role you’re starting, it’s really an important insight.

    Preethi:

    One of the biggest thing that I felt when going from individual contributor to a management role was that quantifying your achievements or quantifying what you’re doing. It took me a long time for example, it took me a long time to admit that, to myself, that my one-on-one is part of my job or it is something that I can say, “Okay, this is my responsibility.”

    Preethi:

    To me, it felt like, “Okay, I’m just having a conversation. I’m not verifying a bug. I’m not writing any code.” It wasn’t quantifying enough for me. Seeing that written down as in, okay, this is part of my job, this is my responsibility, this is a check mark that I can do, was important to me.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. Is there a question I should have asked you?

    Preethi:

    I think along with the mentors, my manager, I think the village, the village that helped me grow and still continuing to help me grow has been I think another thing that I’ve picked up over the last two years that has been a little bit more helping me grow more it’s been some of the business books. So I think a couple of a few books that I really enjoyed and helped me find these little nuggets everywhere so I have these post-its from multiple books that is on my desk in my room. So I think a couple of books that I really want to call out are The First 90 Days, I really recommend it to anyone who is starting a new job.

    Preethi:

    So the two other ones were to help me earlier on in my management path is A Manager’s Path and The Making of a Manager, both are written by people who’ve been in individual contributors in tech space growing into management. And then they’re really honest, really stories about things that didn’t work for them, things that kind of, they figured out on their journey. Those have been really helpful for me.

    Preethi:

    And then I think I’ve felt like I’ve been going from what I can do as a manager and now I’m getting into how I can help my team. So I think I’m in my journey in that right now. So how can I, as a manager, help my team grow, be there for my team. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it was another great one that I really enjoyed reading. I feel like I’m growing in the books that I find too.

    Alexis:

    It’s really interesting because that in the book you mentioned, I read a few of them. When you combine the book reading, when you combine that with having several mentors, like you said, I love your expression that you need a village to help you succeed, I think combining that book reading, mentoring, and probably having those kinds of distribution about the insights or the nuggets you find, this can be already powerful in helping you in your journey. Thank you for mentioning those books. I will put that in reference in the blog post that will-

    Preethi:

    Oh, thank you.

    Alexis:

    … at Le Podcast. Okay. Anything else you want to share to the audience today, Preethi?

    Preethi:

    I think one other thing that I would definitely say is I’m really thankful for the Red Hat mentoring program. And I think that really helped me grow and really gave this opportunity to connect with you too. I think, with my personality, I’m an introvert, so I would not have on my own have had that opportunity to reach out to you and talk to you before. So I think that got us to here. So I’m really grateful for the program that I have found me mentors. And I think I’ve really enjoyed this journey so far and shout out to all the people in my village.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. I hope they will listen to you and appreciate your progress in your journey. I’m pretty sure your mentees will also love that and see the path forward for them, that they will help other people to grow and in this way scale their impact. And I think this is really the job of an open leader, really helping the others to scale their impact. Thank you very much, Preethi, that was really great to have you on Le Podcast.

    Preethi:

    Thank you so much for this opportunity. I enjoyed this as well.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback or just to say hello. And until next time to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    The picture is by Jehyun Sung.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Growing as a Software Engineer: Learning, Sharing, and Impact

    Growing as a Software Engineer: Learning, Sharing, and Impact

    Career growth in software engineering is often described as a matter of accumulating technical skills, mastering new tools, or moving into more complex systems.

    In reality, the journey is more nuanced.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Emilien Macchi, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, to discuss how learning and sharing have shaped his career.

    Learning as a continuous practice

    Emilien is a long-time contributor to OpenStack, having been involved nearly since the inception of the project. Originally from France and now based in Canada, he has built his career in distributed, open-source environments.

    A recurring theme in our conversation is that learning never stops. And more importantly, learning rarely happens alone.

    We discuss how practices such as:

    • peer reviews
    • pair programming
    • open discussions
    • and shared problem-solving

    contribute not only to better code, but to better engineers.

    Collaboration, including remote work

    Emilien shares a perspective that may surprise some: he believes that collaboration can be easier and better in remote contexts.

    We explore why remote work, when supported by the right practices, can:

    • improve focus
    • encourage clearer communication
    • and create more inclusive collaboration

    This naturally connects with earlier conversations on distributed teams and asynchronous work.

    Growing beyond technical skills

    Of course, I also asked Emilien what he believes are the most important things to develop as a software engineer.

    The answer goes beyond technical skills.

    We talk about:

    • communication
    • curiosity
    • responsibility
    • and the ability to learn with others

    These capabilities shape long-term impact far more than any specific technology.

    A reflection on practitioner leadership

    As Emilien was also one of the first people to leave a written review on Goodreads, I asked him what he thought of I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge.

    This led to a broader reflection on responsibility, ownership, and how engineers can increase both their impact and satisfaction at work.

    A final thought

    If you are a software engineer wondering how to grow without chasing titles or hype, this episode offers a grounded and inspiring perspective.

    Growth, as Emilien shows, is less about standing out and more about learning, sharing, and contributing over time.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Thirteen Rules for Building Strong Teams

    Thirteen Rules for Building Strong Teams

    Great teams are not defined by talent alone. They are shaped by clear expectations, shared responsibility, and leadership that shows up consistently.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the great pleasure of welcoming Jason McKerr, Engineering Leader for Management and Automation at Red Hat, to discuss his Thirteen Rules of a Team.

    A practical leadership framework

    I first encountered these rules during a mentoring conversation with a member of Jason’s team. What struck me immediately was how practical and grounded they were.

    They are not aspirational slogans. They are decision rules — principles leaders and team members can rely on when things get difficult.

    My objective for this episode was simple: to have Jason explain where these rules come from and how he uses them in practice.

    The Thirteen Rules of a Team

    Here are Jason’s thirteen rules for team members and team leaders:

    1. Have fun.
    2. Do good work. Make some money.
    3. Take care of the people who work for and with you. The team comes first.
    4. Take care of the user or customer.
    5. Take care of the people you work for.
      Rules 3 and 4 will do most of the work here. The boss always comes last.
    6. It is the team’s obligation to challenge its leader.
      You won’t get smacked down, you’ll get more respect. Do it appropriately and respectfully. In private.
    7. Once the leader has made a decision, even if a team member disagreed before, it is now their responsibility to support that decision externally as if it were their own.
    8. There is no such thing as a bad team, only bad team leaders.
      If the team is struggling, it is still the leader’s responsibility to make it better.
    9. It is the team leader’s job to protect the team from the outside so they can do their work.
    10. Don’t ever say, “That’s not my job.”
    11. Passing knowledge on is a core part of leadership.
      Teach others. Share what you know.
    12. It is a leader’s job to push power and loyalty down, not up.
    13. See rule number one.

    Rules that guide everyday leadership

    What makes these rules powerful is not their originality, but their consistency.

    They:

    • clarify responsibility
    • make expectations explicit
    • remove ambiguity when tensions arise

    Jason also explains how he reviews these rules with new team members during onboarding, using them as a shared reference point from day one.

    A final thought

    Frameworks don’t replace leadership. But the right framework can support it.

    If you are leading a team and looking for principles that are both demanding and humane, this episode offers a clear, actionable reference.

    Listen to the episode to hear Jason walk through the rules, explain how they play out in real situations, and share how they support strong, self-managing teams.

    As always, I would love to hear what resonates with you.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • OKRs in Practice: Learning, Focus, and Common Pitfalls

    OKRs in Practice: Learning, Focus, and Common Pitfalls

    OKRs are often presented as a goal-setting framework. Something to roll out, track, and review.

    Used well, OKRs are something else entirely: a learning practice that helps individuals, teams, and organizations focus on what really matters.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Bart den Haak to explore OKRs from a very practical perspective.

    From startup practice to long-term learning

    Bart is a software engineer who first encountered OKRs more than ten years ago in a startup context. Since then, he has continued to use OKRs across different environments and now advises companies on how to adopt them meaningfully.

    This long-term perspective makes the conversation especially grounded. We talk less about theory and more about what actually works.

    Revisiting the foundations of OKRs

    Building on a previous episode where I shared an approach to creating great goals using OKRs and Impact Mapping, this conversation goes deeper into the fundamentals:

    • what OKRs really are
    • how they differ from other goal-setting approaches such as MBOs, Balanced Scorecard, Hoshin Kanri, or 4DX
    • who can use OKRs: individuals, teams, or entire organizations
    • where to start when introducing OKRs

    Rather than treating OKRs as a one-size-fits-all solution, we explore how context matters.

    Learning zones and common pitfalls

    A key part of the discussion focuses on learning.

    Bart explains how OKRs can help teams:

    • step out of their comfort zone
    • enter a learning zone
    • while avoiding the danger zone where pressure and fear take over

    We also discuss common pitfalls:

    • turning OKRs into performance evaluation tools
    • confusing activity with impact
    • setting goals that are either too safe or too vague

    Resonance with practitioner leadership

    Bart’s approach resonates strongly with me and aligns closely with the ideas I explore in Changing Your Team From The Inside and I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge.

    In all cases, the underlying idea is the same: leadership is a practice, and tools only work when they support responsibility and learning.

    More about Bart

    If you want to explore Bart’s work further:

    Bart is also currently working on a book about OKRs. I’ll be sure to share more when it’s available.

    A final thought

    OKRs don’t create clarity by themselves. People do.

    Used with intention, OKRs can become a powerful way to focus attention, learn faster, and increase impact without falling into control or bureaucracy.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • The Myth of 10x Engineers: Growing Beyond Technical Skills

    The Myth of 10x Engineers: Growing Beyond Technical Skills

    The idea of the “10x engineer” has been around for decades. It suggests that some engineers are inherently more productive, more impactful, or more valuable than others.

    But is that really the right way to think about excellence in software development?

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Julien Danjou, an open source software hacker with more than 20 years of experience and the author of several books on Python.

    Questioning the 10x engineer myth

    I invited Julien to discuss the myth of 10x engineers and to share his perspective on how engineers actually grow their skills and impact over time.

    Very quickly, the conversation moved beyond code.

    According to Julien, while technical skills are important, two other dimensions are essential:

    • understanding the business, and
    • understanding the social component of work.

    Beyond technical excellence

    Great engineers do more than write efficient code.

    They:

    • understand the context in which their work creates value
    • communicate effectively with others
    • collaborate across roles and disciplines
    • and take responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks

    These capabilities multiply impact far more reliably than individual technical speed.

    Examples you can apply immediately

    One of the strengths of this conversation is how concrete it is. Julien shares examples drawn from real experience, all of which can be applied immediately by engineers who want to grow.

    The discussion resonated strongly with me and aligns closely with the ideas Michael and I share in our book I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge.

    Further references

    You can find more about Julien and his work here:

    A final thought

    If you are an engineer looking to grow, or a leader wondering how to support excellence without relying on hero myths, this episode offers a grounded and practical perspective.

    The real multiplier is not being 10x faster, but being 10x more connected to people, context, and purpose.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • The Anatomy of Peace: Leadership Starts With Who You Are

    The Anatomy of Peace: Leadership Starts With Who You Are

    Many change efforts focus on behavior: what people should do differently, what processes should change, what practices should be adopted.

    The Anatomy of Peace invites a deeper shift.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, John Poelstra and I explore the book The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute and what it teaches about leadership, responsibility, and inner stance.

    From behavior to being

    John first recommended The Anatomy of Peace in our previous conversation on how (not) to provide feedback. I read it twice and fell in love with it.

    In Changing Your Team From The Inside, I write that change starts with you.


    The Anatomy of Peace pushes this idea further:

    Change starts with who you are.

    Not with techniques. Not with intentions. With the way you relate to others, and to yourself.

    A heart at peace or a heart at war

    One of the core ideas of the book is the distinction between:

    • a heart at peace, and
    • a heart at war.

    When our heart is at war, we tend to see others as:

    • obstacles
    • objects
    • or threats

    When our heart is at peace, we see others as people, as human beings with their own needs, struggles, and intentions.

    This inner stance profoundly shapes how we lead, collaborate, and respond to conflict.

    Boxes, judgment, and responsibility

    We discuss the idea of being “in the box”:
    stories we tell ourselves such as I deserve, I’m better than, I need to be seen as, or I’m worse than.

    These boxes justify our behavior and keep us stuck. We also explore how this maps well with Christopher Avery’s Responsibility Process, where responsibility increases as we move away from blame and justification.

    The book reminds us that we always have a choice:

    • to honor or betray our senses and desires
    • to judge others or to become curious
    • to judge ourselves or to show compassion

    Signals from the body and inner practices

    Another powerful idea we discuss is how our body gives us signals when our heart is at war. Tension, discomfort, and reactivity can become cues to pause and reflect.

    We also touch on practices that support this inner work, such as:

    • Hoʻoponopono
    • meditation

    These practices help create space between stimulus and response, allowing more intentional leadership.

    Further resources

    You can find more information and resources about The Anatomy of Peace on the Arbinger Institute website.

    A final thought

    Leadership is often described as something we do to or for others.

    This episode is an invitation to see leadership as something that starts within:
    with how we see others, how we relate, and who we choose to be in each interaction.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Psychological Safety: Creating Teams Where People Can Speak Up

    Psychological Safety: Creating Teams Where People Can Speak Up

    Psychological safety is a term coined by Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization.

    At its core, psychological safety describes an environment where people feel safe to speak up, ask for help, take risks, and admit mistakes without fear of being blamed or rejected.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I explore why psychological safety is such a foundational condition for effective teamwork.

    Psychological safety as a conversation starter

    I first discussed psychological safety with my team when sharing Google’s work on Project Aristotle, which identified psychological safety as the most important factor in high-performing teams.

    What made it powerful was not the conclusion itself, but the conversations it enabled. Psychological safety gave us a shared language to talk about:

    • fear and risk
    • mistakes and learning
    • inclusion and respect

    Assessing psychological safety in a team

    In the episode, I share a simple set of questions that can be used to assess psychological safety within a team. Each question can be answered on a scale from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”.

    • When someone makes a mistake on my team, it is often held against them
    • In my team, it is easy to discuss difficult issues and problems
    • In my team, people are sometimes rejected for being different
    • It is completely safe to take a risk on my team
    • It is difficult to ask other members of my team for help
    • Members of my team value and respect each other’s contributions

    These questions are not a diagnostic tool. They are an invitation to reflect and to start meaningful conversations.

    Beyond safety as comfort

    Psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as being “nice” or avoiding challenge.

    In reality, it enables:

    • honest feedback
    • learning from mistakes
    • healthy disagreement
    • shared responsibility

    Without psychological safety, teams tend to hide problems, avoid risks, and limit their contribution.

    Further reading

    In the episode, I also mention several books that explore related themes:

    • The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson
    • The Coddling of the American Mind
    • In Great Company

    Each of these books, in different ways, examines how environments shape behavior and learning.

    A final invitation

    Psychological safety is not something you install. It is something you practice, through everyday interactions and leadership choices.

    If this topic resonates with you, I would love to hear your feedback and experiences.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Leading Distributed Teams: Collaboration Across Time Zones

    Leading Distributed Teams: Collaboration Across Time Zones

    Distributed teams are no longer a special case. For many organizations, they are the default.

    And while tools make remote work possible, they do not automatically make collaboration easy.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, John Poelstra, Michael Doyle, and I explore what it takes to lead and work effectively in distributed teams.

    A conversation across 15 time zones

    This conversation took place while we were spread across 15 time zones:

    • John Poelstra in Portland, Oregon
    • Michael Doyle in Brisbane, Australia
    • and myself in Boston, Massachusetts

    The episode is republished from John’s show, and the format itself reflects the reality we discuss.

    Beyond efficiency

    Rather than focusing only on efficiency, we explore distributed work as a leadership challenge.

    We discuss:

    • how collaboration changes when people are not co-located
    • why clarity becomes even more important in distributed contexts
    • how trust is built when interactions are mostly asynchronous
    • what leaders need to let go of when teams are not physically present

    Distributed teams make invisible issues visible. Assumptions, habits, and gaps in communication surface quickly.

    Practices that support remote collaboration

    Throughout the conversation, we share practical approaches to:

    • improve communication across time zones
    • reduce unnecessary meetings
    • create shared understanding through writing
    • support autonomy without isolation

    These practices help teams stay aligned without resorting to micromanagement.

    A final invitation

    If you are working in or leading a distributed team, this episode offers grounded perspectives drawn from real experience.

    If you would like to exchange ideas or approaches around remote facilitation and distributed collaboration, feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to connect.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Changing Your Team from the Inside: A Practitioner’s View on Leadership

    Changing Your Team from the Inside: A Practitioner’s View on Leadership

    Changing a team is often associated with authority, plans, or Changing a team is often imagined as a top-down initiative. A new structure. A new process. A new framework.

    But in practice, some of the most meaningful change starts much closer to the work, through everyday leadership choices.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I share a conversation with John Poelstra about the ideas behind my book Changing Your Team From The Inside.

    A conversation worth revisiting

    This conversation was originally recorded on John’s show. John later suggested that we cross-publish it on our respective podcasts.

    To do that, I had to re-listen to the episode. And I genuinely enjoyed it.

    Yes, there is some ego involved in listening to yourself talk. Fittingly, ego is also one of the topics we explore in the episode.

    What makes a team great

    Beyond the book itself, the conversation explores broader questions such as:

    • what makes a team truly great
    • how leadership shows up in everyday interactions
    • how individuals can influence their environment without waiting for permission

    We talk about leadership not as a role or a title, but as a practice that shapes how teams work together.

    Leadership from the inside

    A central idea throughout the episode is that changing a team does not require being “in charge”.

    It requires:

    • attention to how work is done
    • responsibility for how we show up
    • and the willingness to experiment and learn

    This is what Changing Your Team From The Inside is really about.

    A final invitation

    If you are looking for practical ways to improve how your team works, without waiting for a reorganization or a new mandate, this episode is a good place to start.

    Give it a try, and let us know what you think.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Why Shared Language Matters: How Terms Shape Collaboration

    Why Shared Language Matters: How Terms Shape Collaboration

    Many collaboration issues are attributed to disagreement, lack of alignment, or resistance.

    In reality, they often start much earlier, with something far more subtle: using the same words to mean different things.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the great pleasure of welcoming Michael DeLanzo to explore why coming to terms with terms is such a critical leadership practice.

    A misunderstanding that sparked the conversation

    The idea for this episode came from a feedback exchange following the podcast episode How to Create Great Goals?.

    As a listener, Michael initially disagreed with the level of abstraction and scope I was proposing for goals and objectives. As we discussed further, it became clear that the disagreement was not about intent or quality, but about definitions.

    We were using the same words, goals and objectives, with different meanings. Once we clarified our respective definitions, the apparent disagreement disappeared.

    Clarifying terms as a leadership act

    This led us to a broader realization: clarifying terms is the starting point for any meaningful collaboration.

    Without shared definitions:

    • conversations drift
    • decisions become fragile
    • frustration accumulates silently

    Clarity of language creates clarity of thought and action.

    Communication modes matter

    We also explore how different communication modes influence understanding:

    • written versus spoken communication
    • synchronous versus asynchronous exchanges

    Each has strengths and risks, and misunderstanding often arises when the mode is chosen by habit rather than intention.

    Cultural and language differences further amplify these challenges. As the quote often attributed to George Bernard Shaw puts it:
    “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language.”

    Thinking, meetings, and time well spent

    The conversation touches on the difference between passive thinking and critical thinking, and why writing can be a powerful tool to support deeper reflection.

    We reference ideas such as:

    • “Meetings are the last resort, not the first option”
    • “Five people in a room for an hour isn’t a one-hour meeting, it’s a five-hour meeting”

    We also discuss practices used at companies like Amazon and Twitter, where written documents replace slide decks and create space for shared understanding and better decision-making.

    A question to close

    Michael ends the episode with a question from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:

    A bat and a ball cost $1.10.
    The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
    How much does the ball cost?

    It’s a simple question that reveals how easily assumptions slip in when we don’t slow down and examine our thinking.

    Further reading

    During the episode, we reference several resources:

    • Understanding A3 Thinking
    • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
    • Changing Your Team From The Inside

    All of them, in different ways, explore how clarity, thinking, and responsibility shape effective work.

    A final thought

    When collaboration feels hard, it’s tempting to look for better tools, better processes, or better alignment.

    Sometimes, the most impactful move is much simpler: slow down and clarify the words you are using.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One