Mastering Leadership Skills with Agile Methods

Pete Behrens: in this episode. So let’s just break that myth that personality doesn’t necessarily relate to better leadership. What’s a better leader? Again, the myth is, “Oh, I make the right decision.” The risk has changed. A lot of leaders are still managing risk to building the thing right, when in fact, they’re building the wrong thing. The best leaders we’re seeing today are making that shift from an “I know” to “Maybe I don’t.” We see this in organizations all the time: we’re agile from a movement perspective, but we’re not smart. One of the dangers for everyday leaders is to try to be these people, try to be an Elon, try to be a Steve Jobs.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Welcome to Pragmatic Talks, a podcast and video series where we discuss startups, contemporary digital product development, modern technologies, and product management. This episode is brought to you by Pragmatic Coders in collaboration with Agile by Example, one of the largest agile conferences in Europe. We believe that everyone should have equal access to knowledge about product development and entrepreneurship, and also everyone should have the opportunity to apply it in pursuit of making our world a better place. Through this series, we aim to create an impact on the future world. Today we welcome Pete Behrens, a leadership expert, the CEO of Agile Leadership Journey, a company that guides leaders and organizations towards success, and a fellow podcaster and host of the Relearning Leadership podcast. In this episode, we decomposed leadership and its impact on individuals, teams, and organizations. We discussed effective leaders’ traits and skills, and we covered the topic of becoming a true leader. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Pete Behrens. Welcome to the next episodes of Pragmatic Talks. Today we are here together with Pete Behrens at the Agile by Example conference. It was a great chance for us to have you here and to meet here and talk about leadership because you are an expert in leadership. You are also a podcaster, so it’s also great for me to meet you here and to talk with someone who is actually much more experienced in podcasting as well, not only in podcasting but also in leadership, of course. Your podcast is Relearning Leadership, and I will ask a few questions about it as well. But before we jump into the leadership discussion, the first question I always ask our guest is, who is Pete Behrens and what’s your story?

Pete Behrens: Who is Pete Behrens? So first of all, I am a father of two, a partner with my wife, Jana, living in Boulder, Colorado – beautiful country. And I was an engineer by training, curious by nature, and a leader by choice. And we were talking a little bit; I’m on my fifth startup company. And you know, so that’s a little bit about my nature of taking risks and trying things that are different and trying to find the road less traveled, so to speak. And one of my favorite quotes is, “Not all who wander are lost.”

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so tell us a bit more about the Agile Leadership Journey, which is your startup.

About Agile Leadership Journey

Pete Behrens: Yeah, so as I said, it’s my fifth startup. The one that started actually from my role as a coach of organizations. So as I shifted from engineer, engineering manager, to director and then learning agile ways of working as an engineering leader, I realized that this is going to be a hard path for organizations. And so back in about 2005, I took that step to becoming an agile coach, which never really existed at that time. I think there were a few Scrum classes out in the world, and there wasn’t really a coaching industry around this. And so what I quickly learned, though, was I could help teams use Scrum and do agile ways of working, but there was always a ceiling. And we’d always run into that ceiling at some point, which was that leaders were operating in a different realm. And that put me on a journey to try to figure out what has to happen up here at the leadership side to enable more of the agile ways of working on the organization side. So Agile Leadership Journey essentially is a licensed curriculum. It’s a coach and trainer community to essentially inspire and educate and catalyze leaders to shape organizations that have more agility.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, perfect. So if anyone here would like to join you in this journey, what should they do? How do they apply? How could they use your services and work together with you?

Pete Behrens: Yeah, there’s really kind of two ways to primarily engage with the Agile Leadership Journey. First is as a leader, just, you know, look us up and find a program. We have guides all over the world who teach and coach leveraging some of these techniques. And for those that are maybe a little bit more on that change agent journey, where you would like to be more of an influencer of change, we call them guides. You know, they’re a bit of an educator, a bit of a coach. We take a much more coaching than consulting approach to that journey. But we have an application process they can seek us out. But for the most part, all of that starts with just, “Come to one of our programs and learn a little bit more about how we work.”

Relearning leadership

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay. So let’s get back to your podcast, Relearning Leadership. So why should managers, leaders, relearn leadership? Yeah, why this title?

Pete Behrens: Yeah, thank you. Agile Leadership Journey, you know, the name “agile” has positive and negative connotations. You know, as anything that becomes popular, it becomes over-popular, and therefore agile sometimes is seen as negative, not because agility is bad, but because the big “A” Agile has become synonymous with frameworks and tools and a pretty heavy process workflow. We have the Agile Leadership Journey, which is focused on agility for leaders and organizations, but we wanted to reach an audience that may know nothing about agile, that doesn’t want to get turned away by that. And so the concept of Relearning Leadership is really born from the construct of every leader in this day and age, with what’s changing in the world, if they’re not relearning or rethinking about the way they’re operating as leaders, are not going to be successful. So it’s a challenge to all of us to just rethink, re-evaluate what is our role as a leader in a complex, rapidly changing environment.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So if you could give advice for someone who’s been in the leadership role for, let’s say, the last 20 years and was, you know, taught to do this in one way like 20 years ago and he’s still doing the same way, what has changed? And what should such a person change immediately to actually fit the current standards? I know it’s not an easy question.

Pete Behrens: No, it’s but it’s actually easier than you think because there are a lot of things we teach today that have been around for a long time. I mean, you could go back to the 1960s and servant leadership. You go back to the 1940s and 50s about lean management, right? Agile leadership is not a radical new thing. It’s an evolution of the way we’ve been thinking about things ever since, you know, you go back to the beginning of time, but certainly, you know, the Industrial Revolution and what’s happened with, you know, Taylorism and some of the ways we’ve mechanicalized a lot of work. But what we’re seeing predominantly change today are fundamental shifts in the economy, right? So shifts from producing goods, like manufacturing things, to design studios where we’ve got to be more creative. So in the past, the risk was, are we building whatever it is we’re building in the right way? Like, I want to make sure this car is built with the best quality, this suit is built with the right stitching, right? Today, it’s, is this the right suit? Or is this the right car? So the risk has changed. And a lot of leaders are still managing risk to building the thing right, when in fact, they’re building the wrong thing. And so risk has changed, the complexity and the competition has changed, and everything’s sped up. And so what we were taught a few decades ago, that’s all changed. So it’s helping leaders recognize those shifts in the economy, in the way things are working, and then helping them with some tools that make it something that they can manage. So it’s not just theory; it’s actually a set of techniques they can apply.

Great vs. not-so-great leadership

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the great leadership versus not-so-great leadership. How to distinguish a great leader? What are the differences between great leaders and bad leaders? Maybe you have some examples, maybe you have some stories from this area of leadership?

Pete Behrens: Well, maybe we’ll, you know, let’s start with what I would call a myth, right? So a myth is that, you know, most of the leaders we operate with that we don’t think are any good are bad leaders. I often rather look at that as leaders who are likely unaware. So all of us as humans have a cognitive bias, right? We see internally differently than how others see us externally. So our internal orientation doesn’t match how others perceive, even right now, right? I might think, “Oh, I’m coming across as confident and composed.” Somebody’s looking at me and they’re saying, “He looks arrogant,” right? That’s a delta that I can control to some degree, but not all of it. Part of it is because I don’t know how others perceive, and part of it’s because how they see things is biased on their perspective. So what’s really interesting when we start to work with leaders is just helping them see themselves in a new light. And when you can start to do that, you start to open up data and you start to give them feedback, and they start to see that delta. So when we think about better leadership, like what’s a better leader? Again, the myth is, “Oh, I make the right decision.” In today’s world, there is no right decision. Strategy A or B, what’s right? I don’t know. Should we work from home or work from the office? I don’t know. There’s no right, there’s no wrong. What we tend to find is better leadership simply means I’m more aware, I’m choosing more intently, more consciously about my choice, and then I reflect on that. Did that work? Didn’t that work? What can I learn from that? It’s a learning cycle, like a personal OODA cycle, PDCA cycle, that I’m constantly getting better because I’m constantly seeking data and learning from that data.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So it’s also about self-awareness of the leaders?

Pete Behrens: Exactly. Yeah, so they know that they don’t know and actually that they need to work on this all the time. Well, think about this, right? Think of the word agile or agility. It actually has two definitions. We can go to definition one, where most people think of the word agility. It is movement, the ease and the quickness I can move physically. There’s a second definition to agility, which is the ability to think and understand quickly. Now, the second definition, if you apply just the first one, movement, well, I might be a dog navigating an obstacle course and I’m very agile. But that same dog without very smarts will just chase squirrels around. It just wastes energy chasing squirrels. We see this in organizations all the time. We’re agile from a movement perspective, but we’re not smart. So what we’re trying to do with leaders is help them recognize that when you say self-awareness, this is like, “I have more vision. I see more of myself, I see more of my surroundings, I see more of my organization, I see more of the environment around me.” That gives me better choice, which then I can situationally adapt. So these two combined are actually what make better leaders. So it’s the movement combined with the creativity of what is better movement.

Common organizational challenges

Wiktor Żołnowski: Oh, perfect. So you’re working with various organizations, starting from smaller ones but also including great, biggest companies like Salesforce, Ikea, I think Google as well, General Atomics, and a few others. So do you see any common challenges that those organizations face nowadays?

Pete Behrens: So yeah, I’ve been fortunate to work with organizations across the globe, in cultures across industries, in cultures across countries. And what’s really interesting is when you come down to it, an organization is a human system, right? It’s built by employees who are human. We’re all human. And the human condition is pretty common. Yes, we have biases, we have different ways of, you know, thinking about culture and what’s valued – family versus work, or some cultures are more touchy-feely and others are a little bit more standoffish, or some cultures have more male dominance or are gender-neutral. Yes, all those exist, but we tend to find industry culture tends to drive organizations more than country culture. So for example, insurance culture, banking culture, you know, transportation, healthcare – these are cultures where safety is the number one value. We cannot make mistakes because that means patients might die, right? You work in the medical field, safety is ultimately critical. If you lose trust, you lose your company. Now, what happens is we take those values and we apply it to every aspect of the business. So we have an organizational culture, like in healthcare, where safety is important, but then I’m going into research and I’m doing product development and I’m exploring new ways of working, and I take that same “I cannot fail” mindset and I apply it to a space where we actually have to fail to learn. And that’s where the imbalance starts to come in, is we start to see cultures that mean different parts of the organization, they shouldn’t. So what’s in common? Humans, culture, the values that get strengthened or biased in organizations. Now, what differs is – and let’s just pull a couple of those out there, right? Someone like a Google versus someone like a GE – two completely different companies, right, in different spaces. They’re both multi-conglomerates, so I’m going to oversimplify to some degree just to make a point. Google specifically develops policies to stay out of that safety-control realm. They’ve got, for example, one policy, it’s called the 70% rule, right? They use something called OKRs, objective key results. Well, one of their policies or their governance rules says, “We expect 70% completion at the end of a quarter.” And it’s like, I share that with other leaders, like in GE, and they’re like, “70%? Like that’s super low. Like, how do you get predictable?” and, you know, “That doesn’t seem like a commitment to me,” right? “I would expect that to be 90%.” Like, if you’re putting an objective out there, you better meet it. That’s two radically different cultures. My expectations, the metrics, how do we measure success, drive differences in those cultures. And that’s what starts to operate differently. So every organization starts to do this. Their rules, their mindsets, their beliefs in what success and good and bad are shape those cultures. So as I’m working with those organizations, without recognizing that, without knowing that, you’re going to come in and we’re going to do things that aren’t going to fit. That’s where we start to see differences in those large companies.

Leadership and culture

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, let’s dive deeper into this topic of culture. So you already said that, for example, objectives, some policies, the environment of the company working, like healthcare for example, and let’s say like other startups in e-commerce or something like that, they have different values. What else is impacting the culture of the organization from your perspective, and where is the leadership there as well?

Pete Behrens: You know, Edgar Schein, who’s one of the founding minds around culture, describes culture and leadership as two sides of the same coin. So you cannot separate the two. As a company forms – you work in startups, I worked in startups – as a company forms, it often forms from the mindset of the founder. For me, that means my mindset is a bit on the creative side, a bit on the go-go-go. I don’t like to talk about things, and if anything becomes routine, I’m bored, right? It’s kind of that Elon Musk-esque. I’m not putting myself in his category, but he’s kind of similar. Like, if it’s routine, it should be automated and pushed aside. That drives a certain culture as a startup. Now, certainly as companies grow, we bring on different types of people. So sales and marketing and delivery tend to be competitive cultures, and operations, support, finance, governance, legal, they tend to be safe, control cultures. You know, things like agile coaching and HR and, you know, you think about project management, they tend to be more of that connective tissue in an organization. We call that the collaborate culture. Culture forms in organizations from mindset, and then what ends up happening is the culture starts to get its own mindset because it builds. And so as a leader, I come into this, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, like do I fit in here or not?” And some cultures can exist, etc. One of the ways we like to describe it is like a shadow. You know, I can cast a shadow now, right, with the light. I can see that shadow, I can sense that shadow, but I can’t touch it. I can’t even change it. I can’t change that shadow directly. The only access I have to that shadow is through other things. Culture is like that. It’s not directly… that’s why when we say, “Hey, let’s do a culture change,” it’s kind of like, “All right,” but it’s not something tangible. What you can actually do is you can actually talk about the tangible nature of culture: governance, like a policy, like the 70% rule at Google, or what defines success or not, or failure; structures and the way we define roles, responsibilities, teams. Those are levers, macro levers that shape culture. The micro levers are what we call mindset: how a leader shows up every day, how we make decisions, what we believe to be good and bad. Those also shape culture. So yeah, leadership and culture are totally intertwined. And so when we’re teaching agile leadership, we discuss both of those. We talk about the leader themself, we talk about culture, and we work with both of those systems.

How to become a leader

Wiktor Żołnowski: Let’s get back to leaders as well. So how to become a leader? This is the question that many people ask themselves. Like, okay, I’m working in a team, and it’s not sometimes even about being promoted, but maybe like having more power, empowerment, or something, taking ownership for something and getting this ownership from someone else. So how to become a leader?

Pete Behrens: I look at my career, right, and I’ve been very fortunate to get many leadership opportunities as a role. You know, and I think about even then when I was a leader and the employees that I was leading, one of the frustrations I would often see when I was in the leadership role, people would come and say, “I want that role, I want that title, I want that promotion.” And I would say, “Well, you’re not demonstrating you’re doing it.” Like, “Well, if I get the title, then I’ll do it.” I’m like, “That’s not how it works. You get rewarded when you show it.” So I think a lot of people come at this wrong. I think they wait for the title before they do something. What we try to talk about is leadership, the “-ship” side, we call it the act of leading. Everybody has leadership, everybody influences, everybody can shape the culture around them, right? So even on a development team, even sitting around a table working on a design, the developer who might even be an intern or young in that organization is a leader to some degree, shaping a little bit of that interaction. So the concept of stepping forward, the concept of bringing additional influence is purely a limitation of what I can and can’t do as just who I’m showing up as. So most of us put walls around our… like, “I can’t do that.” No, not true. You are, and you can do those things. So for us, it’s much more about mindset and then showing that in behavior. So these are teachable traits. Leadership is all about relationship. You’re not going to get others to follow you if you’re a jerk, if you are coming at this from “I’m right, you’re wrong,” if you’re going to come about this where you even don’t play well in a pool with others. So, you know, ultimately leadership is a relational business. Not everybody needs the title, the role of leader, to be a leader. And I think that’s where we get mistaken. In fact, I think there are too many leader roles in most companies, especially in Europe. One of those reasons we see more what I would call “fake leaders” – leaders in title only – in Europe is because there are a lot of employee protections in Europe. We hire people, we need to keep promoting them or giving them status bumps. We give them things like, “You’re Head of…” “You’re Head of…” All of a sudden, we have an organization, I’ve got 50 “Heads of” or more, or 500 “Heads of.” So now we’ve all got the title, but there are so many “Heads of” it doesn’t change anything because I’ve got to coordinate with five other “Heads of” something else to get anything done anyway.

The myth of status and titles

Wiktor Żołnowski: Are you aware where does it come from, like this idea of making so many levels of promotion and management? Are you familiar with that or not? Sorry, it’s mainly because, you know, some wise people figured out that they don’t need to raise salaries of people indefinitely. Or, raising a salary is just one dimension that they can, you know, reward people for doing a great job. But there is something more important for many people in the world, which is status. Yeah, so building like 15 levels of, you know, manager, senior manager, vice president, head of something, etc., just gives the opportunity for the organization to actually reward people in a way that doesn’t require infinitely increasing their salaries. So actually, the cost is lower. So I’m sorry to say that, but for many people who are just there catching up to the next title in the organization, well, you’re sort of in some game that the organization is playing with you. So just be aware of that.

Pete Behrens: It’s totally a game and it’s happening all over. And some of the reasons for that is, you know, the concept of, you know, we’re all trained, right? Our brains are trained to want those status hits, right? Just like in a game, when I level up, that’s a status bump, right? That feels good. I get dopamine in my brain. You get a promotion, you get a title, you get, you know, a few perks here and there. That’s something that’s that status. We don’t see it quite as much in the US because in the US we have a right to fire. There’s a lot less employee protection, which has different problems, right? I’m not saying the US is better than Europe or vice versa. We just see different cultures because of that. In Europe, we find that’s more fear of hiring because “I know if I hire you, then I can’t let you go. I’m going to be stuck.” So you see a lot more contracting in Europe than you do in the US, where in the US they might be willing to hire and fire. But to give you one example, I lost a great system engineer once as a VP of engineering. And I was asking him what he’s doing. He said, “Yeah, I got an architecture position at another company.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool, you know, congratulations.” Well, I caught up with him, you know, a couple of years later at a party, and we’re talking. And I’m like, “How’s it going?” And he’s like, “Well, I joined because I thought I was going to be, like, important and have a title and be an architect. I come to find out that everybody has architecture titles.” So yet once again, I’m an assistant that has no more influence, just a higher title. So we in the US still have that problem. It’s a hard one to break. You know, one of the things that we go back to is, look at some of the patterns. The more roles and levels you have in an organization, the less collaboration there is. If that’s the problem, if we’re trying to be agile, we’re trying to collaborate, we’re trying to get things done, roles actually get in the way. So if I have a junior engineer and a senior engineer and an extreme senior engineer or whatever, architect, all of a sudden those have to have rules. “And I can decide this, and you can decide this.” And now all of a sudden, “Who do I work with to make this decision?” It overcomplicates so many things. Yeah, so yes, it’s one of the fundamental areas we talk about with agility is we’ve got to start to break some of that stuff apart.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Are you familiar with the five levels of leadership by John Maxwell?

Pete Behrens: I am familiar with a lot of John Maxwell’s work. When you started to talk about five levels of leadership, I actually think about Bill Joiner, which talks about something called leadership agility, which also has a five-layer system, but not John Maxwell’s five levels of leadership.

Levels of leadership

Wiktor Żołnowski: Because what you are talking about, you know, these titles, etc., is just the first level of leadership by Maxwell, which is a position level, that you are the leader because someone told you that you are the leader. And there are four other levels. But what I would like to also touch a little bit is that the fifth level of, or the fourth level maybe, starts here. Of the leadership according to Maxwell is the people development leader, the leader who is actually focused on building other people and actually turning them into other leaders. So what do you think about this concept? It’s like the fourth level. And the fifth level is that this is like a level where the leader actually assures himself or herself a succession, so he will be replaced by people who will build leaders in the future. This is something that I was always aspiring to be, and it’s extremely hard, I would say. But maybe you have some thoughts on how to get there?

Pete Behrens: Sure. We teach a very similar construct in leadership agility. Bill Joiner’s – there’s been a lot of research. I was introduced before Bill Joiner in the ’90s, but there is a lot of study on adult development, right? So we’ve had, we’ve done a lot of research on child development, and then it was thought, “Well, once you’re somewhere in your, you know, 18 to 27, your mind’s fully developed and we’re just adults.” In truth, what’s happening is you’re still having maturity levels. And I can even trace my career from about, you know, when I first got into companies to today, I can look at various stages of my own leadership. And this is true for most people. What you’re describing, this concept of leveling, it’s a bit of a myth that when I go from one level to the next, the first level goes away. What we like to talk about is more like the nesting dolls you would have. So if I add a layer, what I’m doing is I’m adding a wrapper, and then I add another, I’m adding a wrapper. So what’s happening is as I go from level one to two, we call it expert to achiever, I’ve added a layer, but the expert doesn’t go away. So I’ve got an achiever on the outside that’s focusing on coordination and teams and strategy, but inside there, I’ve got this expert who’s focusing on what to do, how to do it right. It’s the ability to know and how to do things. Again, as I go to layer three, we call this Catalyst, I’m adding a layer, but the achiever is still inside there, the expert’s still inside there. The word “agility” comes in from the fact that as I go to that level three, I’ve got three ways to respond to situations. That’s more agile than my achiever who has two ways or my expert who has one way. So as I’m going up these levels, I’m adding complexity to my own leadership. I’m adding multiple dimensions to my own leadership that give me more situational adaptability and more self-awareness. So yes, we totally support what John Maxwell was saying in a slightly different way. And as we get into that Catalyst, and then there’s a couple of other layers past there, the focus is around things like, “All right, I’m shifting from products and services to the organization itself. What is the culture? What are the people? How do they work together? What are our processes?” So the focus of leaders changes, but the myth is that’s the only thing they do. That becomes what we call hollow leadership. And you’ve seen this when leaders are a bit aloof, they’re disconnected from the work. They’re there, but they don’t really know what’s going on. That’s a hollow leadership. That’s really dangerous. So what we try to teach is helping leaders recognize that as you move up, yes, you’re going to lessen those other focal points, but you don’t want to get rid of them completely, or you will become disconnected.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, that makes total sense for me, especially right now when you were talking about this expert inside. I imagine Elon Musk, that you mentioned before, as a person who, okay, like people may say different things about him, etc., but in some situations, he, for example, jumps into the war room, into the, you know, the office or the workshop and does the stuff himself because he first became an expert in this field of something. Yeah, he was able to provide advice to his team members, to the employees, if that was needed on the very low level as well. So that concept makes a lot of sense for me.

Modeling famous leaders

Pete Behrens: Let me talk about a couple, because you asked earlier for examples, and I want to maybe highlight a couple of big names that people may have heard of. One is Musk, another one’s like Satya Nadella at Microsoft, a name that often comes up. One of the dangers for everyday leaders is to try to be these people, try to be an Elon Musk, try to be a Steve Jobs, Satya Nadella. These people are quite special, right? Elon Musk is a very complex character, has very talented gifts and some dysfunctions, right? You see those played out in all of his companies. You’re describing his ability to, what Joe Justice calls, “put his sleeping bag in the place that’s the bottleneck,” right, in the place that’s the problem. And what that does, and when a leader recognizes this, what it does is it puts a spotlight, and all of a sudden everybody else cares because the leader cares. That’s one of the powers that more senior leaders have, their ability to shine a spotlight on something, give it attention. Things get done. It’s really powerful. So Elon Musk’s capability of doing that is beyond anything I’ve kind of seen or witnessed. But for others who want to be that, be careful if you go down that path. What I look at, what we look at, is some of the more general characteristics that will make you a better leader without necessarily going into the specific behaviors, what like Elon Musk does or what Satya Nadella does at Microsoft. So yeah, it’s just a word of caution. You know, you take Steve Jobs for another one, you know, a lot of people want to be that Steve Jobs product owner and, “I’ve got the decisions. I know more than my customers do.” They just turn out like jerks, right? And Steve Jobs had a gift. Yeah, he was pretty special. He did some great things, but he was human too. And to model ourselves that way is a bit risky.

The impact of Satya Nadella at Microsoft

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yeah, and you mentioned Satya. I think it’s a great example of a leader who actually changed the company culture in a way that it became from, you know, a company that was, okay, a long time ago, a very successful company, then not so successful, and now becoming more and more successful. Like, do you know, maybe you have some ideas where these changes came from or how that made, how the change went?

Pete Behrens: You know, I think a lot of people ask, “Why can’t our CEO be like Satya Nadella?” You know, and he’s again another special character who has, from everything I’ve read about, both his book and the writing from others, been probably one of the best turnaround agents of our time, right? Microsoft has, in its early days, been wildly successful under Bill Gates. Steve Ballmer brought in a different type of result. So what we saw Steve Ballmer do was double down on what Bill Gates did. And what that was was a competitive culture. Microsoft won in the early days because they fought everybody else and they won, right? They fought Lotus 1-2-3 and they won, right? They fought WordPerfect and they won, right? They were fighting the early Apple wars and they won with Windows, right? So a lot, and they fought Netscape and they won with Explorer, right? So a lot of their early days was everything about fight, fight, fight, win, win, win. That worked until it didn’t. Pretty soon, they started to lose, right? They’re losing to Amazon, they’re losing to Google, right? They’re losing to the phone companies, right? They tried all these steps where in the past they would win. All of a sudden, they’re losing. So what happens is a competitive culture becomes a toxic culture. He was literally copy-pasting what Bill Gates was doing, but it wasn’t working in that time. Satya Nadella comes in, just completely turns around the mindset. We should be collaborating with these companies, not competing. It’s a whole different mindset, right? We should be “learn-it-alls,” not “know-it-alls,” right? We should come at this with vulnerability and openness to learning something and not being the best in the room. That’s a huge shift. So someone like Satya Nadella can cast what we call a huge shadow over the organization and start to shape that culture. A lot of people say, “Why won’t our senior leaders do this?” To be honest, the most senior leaders have the most risk, right? They have the farthest to fall if they make a mistake. So they get conservative up there. So what we often find is change is actually easier down a few layers. Change is easier in some of the program layers and the departmental layers and the director layers. We actually see more change happen where it’s activated by lower layers of the organization. You can take a Satya Nadella mindset anywhere in the organization. It doesn’t have to be the CEO to do that.

Wiktor Żołnowski: And I think that he also was in the situation that he had not so much to lose, because every, I think maybe not every, but many shareholders saw that the previous strategy doesn’t work. So something needed to be changed. So he got this permission to at least try something new, and he did it. And as we see that, maybe it was still a bold step, still a very courageous step.

Pete Behrens: He had a lot that went on in his personal life. If you watch videos of him talking about his child with special needs, he said it changed his approach to life. That’s what we find. So we had somebody on our podcast that was a director of human resources and insights at Swiss Re, you know, the reinsurance company, Jasmine Keel. She talks about the leaders of the future. One of my favorite podcasts we did. And she talks about the leaders of the future are grounded in their own personal vision. They’re grounded in who they are and who they’re trying to be. And that authenticity is what really attracts people, right? They know who they are, and there’s this sense of values and purpose to them that others want to be around. That’s something that can happen anywhere inside an organization with anyone. It’s doing that own self-reflection about what’s valuable to me, who am I, what do I want to bring here? And that’s often what we try to help leaders do. Is we often complain about our environment. “Oh, our leaders don’t get it. Our culture is unchangeable. You know, oh, woe is me.” It’s like, what are you doing to contribute to that? And what is it you can do to change that? Right? You have that ability. And I know this isn’t easy because I know when I was that leader, I felt the same. But that’s the message we try to help leaders understand. They can change that.

Are leaders born or made?

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so you already mentioned the childhood of Satya, you already mentioned about, you know, the history of Elon Musk. The question that I’m really curious about, and I’m curious about your answer on that is, is leadership something that people are born with? Or is it something that is shaped in them during their childhood, the way they are rising up, the way they are growing, the environment they are growing in? Or maybe this is something that, for example, someone like me who is 36 years old and never became – okay, I’ve been a leader, but someone like me who has never been a leader before and never even thought about being a leader, and maybe doesn’t have some predispositions for that, could simply learn how to do this and could become a leader? And what does it take and how long does it take to actually teach that, learn that?

Pete Behrens: I do believe there are some innate capabilities, right, that help raise some leaders up more quickly than others. We actually, I did a podcast that was, “I Wasn’t Born a Leader” was the name of the podcast. And yet here I am, a leader. Not only that, a leadership coach. I go back into my childhood and I wasn’t trained to be a leader, yet somewhere leadership emerged. What we’ve seen is there are some characteristics that are recognized by others as being leadership. Some of those are positive, some of those are negative. Let me share that. So we see in organizations people that are more extroverted are promoted over introverts, right? Why? Well, the person who’s heard and seen is often rewarded in companies. We see people that are more assertive get promoted over those who are more accommodative. That means the people who take initiative, the people who are outgoing or jump in or are impatient will tend to get promoted before the people who are more respectful, let others go first, right, more creating that space. That doesn’t make them better leaders. That simply makes it so they’re knowing how to manipulate what gets seen. There’s been a number of studies that have proven introverts are actually better leaders than extroverts. Accommodative power styles like servant leadership are a more effective form in a complex space, yet we’re promoting the opposites. So what I encourage, I guess maybe if I speak to the audience here, what I encourage all leaders out there, or all people who would perceive or want to be a leader, you are not constrained by having to show up in what gets rewarded as leadership. What we need to recognize is when we can find our balance. What we try to teach is it’s not the assertiveness or the accommodativeness that makes you a better leader, it is the balance. So for example, in this conversation right now, I could keep talking over you, I could keep interrupting you. That’d be being assertive. But I could also just take a step back, give you two-word answers, and be really soft and accommodative. The best dialogue, the best relationship, the best decisions, the best engagement on teams happens with the balance. And so for leaders who are on the more accommodative spectrum, the more introverted spectrum, stepping out doesn’t mean you need to be a jerk, right? Finding a voice, facilitating dialogue, bringing some of your voice into that is needed for you to operate more effectively in that environment, just as those who are over-assertive, over-talkative, taking that step backwards will make them better leaders. So what we find in true effective leadership, when we measure it through 360s, it’s the balance, finding the “both/and” that makes for the best leaders. Short answer: it’s not born, it’s made. But it takes work. It takes work.

Where to start your leadership journey

Wiktor Żołnowski: So where to start? Of course, Agile Leadership Journey is one of the ways to do that. But if someone would like to make a first step, what kind of materials they should look at? What, you know, what they should type in Google? Like, “how to become a leader?” Okay, but you know, like going through all of this…

Pete Behrens: That search won’t be very effective. I suppose when I was taught leadership, you know, when I was a leader, I was taught things like how to run a performance review, right? How to hire somebody, how to interview somebody, right? There are these tasks that I would call more management, right? These are management activities. So there’s a lot of management courses and even taking an MBA, right? Management of a business. There’s a lot of those types of things that are good to know. What we find, what we teach actually, is more about mindset. And that’s the thing I think is missed in most MBA programs, most leadership programs, is working on your self-awareness and working on your situational adaptiveness and learning a little bit more about yourself. So things like even personality tests can help you with that, right? Like DISC or Myers-Briggs. Right? Those types of things are very helpful for knowing who I am, how I interact with others.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Therapy. What’s that? Therapy? Yes or not?

Pete Behrens: Yes. So think about the coaching realm, right? So getting a coach isn’t cheap, right? But yet, talking to somebody who you can get honest feedback from can be free. Talking to your manager, you get feedback from. Talking to HR, get feedback from. There’s a huge amount of coaching resources. Doesn’t make them the best coach, but coaching resources you can get to learn. Therapy is a very special form of coaching, right? So the one way I’ve heard this described is, as coaches, we primarily focus on the future going forward. We go into the past a little bit for context. Therapists on the other hand will go way in the past because what they’re trying to really uncover are some root, hidden methods. Most coaches are not trained for therapy. All right? Therapy can be very, very helpful. A whole other domain that I was thinking about, you know, if you want to go to…

Wiktor Żołnowski: …go to the professional therapist, not to the coach or whatever. Like I know a few professional coaches who sent some of their coachees to therapy because they felt that the coaching is not enough or it’s not the time for coaching, it’s time for therapy. Yeah, so that’s also something that professional coaches do. The other thing I would ask or, you know, maybe invite the watcher or listener to is, don’t stay in the agile bubble. Like if this is about an agile podcast, people come here because they want to know about agile. I found most of my best learning came outside the agile space. David Rock in neuro-leadership was one of my… was, you know, to be honest, Bill Joiner was not in the agile bubble, but he kind of came into it from the outside. Peter Block was a famous consultant and advocate that I learned a ton from, going through that. Organizational development specialists, right, who understand culture and how change works, change management, right? So my kind of personal MBA program that I constructed for myself as I went on my journey was to reach out into the areas of leadership and culture that had nothing to do with agile, and yet we can apply those in an agile construct. So I just encourage them to search. Yeah, we’ve got a bunch of books and book reviews and stuff on our website they can add to their list.

Wiktor Żołnowski: For some people, it would be easier to learn to become leaders. So are there any essential skills or, I know, mindsets that make some people more successful in being leaders, becoming leaders, or is there nothing like that that is common for everyone?

The shift from “I know” to “I don’t know”

Pete Behrens: Well, maybe a myth to break is personality is not associated with better leadership. You’d think, right, “Okay, somebody who’s more extroverted or somebody who’s more aggressive will be better leaders.” They may get promoted sooner, but they’re not better leaders. So let’s just break that myth that personality doesn’t necessarily relate to better leadership. What we’re finding in today’s leader, right, different from 30, 50, 80 years ago, is the shift from an “I know” to “I might be wrong.” Now, let’s just talk about this. The “I know” leadership is very common. About 90% of leaders come at leadership with an “I know” mentality. That can help you be aggressive, make choices, get people to follow you, but it doesn’t make for the best leadership. Why? We work in very complex spaces, right? We’re working with many different people around many different disciplines, trying to develop new things we’ve never built before. That takes an entire complex community to do. When a leader comes with an “I know” mindset, they begin to shut others out, and others start to turn off. And so all of a sudden, what they think is leadership is actually turning people, repelling people away. It seems counterintuitive, but the “I don’t know,” or “I may not be right,” or “I’ve got an idea but I’m open to others,” right, that feels very vulnerable. It feels very weak. Brené Brown, she calls this the courage to be vulnerable, right? It takes a certain amount of confidence, a certain amount of just self-trust to let go of knowing. All of a sudden, that’s the activator to engaging. It’s the activator to empowering. It’s the activator to coming up with better decisions because everybody else feels like they can step in. When I can step back, they can step in. The best leaders we’re seeing today are making that shift, right, from an “I know” to “Maybe I don’t.” And in one sense, it feels weak and vulnerable, but it’s probably the most powerful shift that we can make.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I think one important thing here is also that a person who is trying to do that needs to prepare himself or herself for some attacks from other people that will be, you know, trying to tell them what their role actually is if they are not knowing anything. Even today at one of the presentations that were in one of the rooms at the conference, the speaker was telling the story of a Red Hat board member who invited people from the organization to actually collaboratively make decisions on some various topics. And someone from the audience asked the question, “So what are the leaders paid for if they are not able to make decisions?” I also think that some people are not ready for this kind of leadership, or maybe they haven’t ever experienced this kind of leadership, so they don’t know how does it work and why is it important. Even Satya or Elon or someone else, like there are many people on the internet, of course, who are claiming that, “Why are the C-level people earning so much money if they are not even making decisions or they are not taking responsibility for this decision because the responsibility is somewhere downwards in the organization?” So what do you think about this? How to prepare for that as well? Is it both?

Dealing with politics and system-wide change

Pete Behrens: Well, there’s a lot of threads I could pull on from your conversation. The first thread I was thinking of is actually we get asked a lot, “Pete, why don’t you help political leaders?” Politics is a whole other game, right? Like government politics, at least in the US, it’s so black and white. It’s so boiled down to win or lose, right or wrong. They don’t have any space for nuance. Most answers, I mean, take one: immigration. You’re dealing with a lot of immigrants here in Poland coming from Ukraine, right? Do we take them or don’t we? Okay, from a human catastrophe, yes, we take them. But can we support all of them? There’s not a yes and no there. There’s a “yes, how do we manage and how many and how do we deal with that?” Politics will always boil it down to it’s good or bad. Why? Because the human brain and most people who are uneducated want a simple answer. Politics does enter into business. That’s a danger because then all of a sudden, what we do is we boil it down to using emotion and using threat-reward systems to make decisions. My encouragement, if people are finding a very political landscape in the organization, I would not stay. That would not be a place that I would want to put myself into. Most organizations, politics plays a role, but not as direct, right? So when we start to think about the layers and the directors and the C-suite, one of the things we hear often is, you know, we get somebody in our class and they say, “Oh, my leader needs to understand. Like, my leader needs to do this.” So we work our way up in organizations. And so we get the directors, we get the VPs, we get the C-suite. You know, so I’m in the room with the C-suite. And I’m like, “Okay, we’re done with this. Like, we’re at the top. They’re not going to say, ‘Our leaders need to hear this,’ because there’s no leaders.” And certainly within the first half a day I’m with the C-suite, they’re like, “Our board of directors needs to hear this,” and then “Our shareholders.” So, you know, it’s a system that’s interdependent. And so given that, yes, it’s better if we can kind of educate and help that whole system, but we’ve got to start somewhere. We’ve got to start somewhere in that system. And I think the people likely watching, listening to this podcast are the activators, are the catalysts. They’re the ones who probably feel the problems. They’re the ones who I believe can activate the change the best. They could take ownership and start the changing.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yeah, that’s a really, really good advice. Okay, so we already spoke about, you already spoke about the changes that leadership faced during the last few decades and how the leadership changed. Let’s imagine that we are 10 or 20 years from now. What will change in the next decade or two in terms of leadership? Like, we can even consider the impact of AI. That’s the one everyone asks about. I ask everyone about AI and their feelings and their predictions on that because we will check in the next decade who was right and who’s not. But what do you think will change in the next couple of years?

The future of leadership and AI

Pete Behrens: Yeah, AI is going to be part of that conversation. So one of the things we see as trends, right, we go all the way back, you know, go back 100 years in terms of trends, Industrial Revolution to lean to agile ways of working, right, process change. But you also go back to major shifts in the economy, from transportation to telecommunications to globalization and data, mobile, right, that we’re seeing shifts in that, right, social media, things. So we’re seeing shifts in technology, we’re seeing shifts in process, and those will continue, right? So the next shift… so I look at AI as repeating. So AI is doing exactly what Taylor, Frederick Taylor, did in the early 1900s. Think about this. Back in the early 1900s, we had people forging steel. They were craftsmen who built the best steel pieces. And Taylor said, “Oh, who’s the best here?” And they’d all raise their hand, “I’m the best.” He’s like, “Well, that can’t possibly be true.” So he studied them for a really long time, realized that each one had good parts, bad parts to their process. So what did he do? He took all that information, he boiled it down to small steps, gave it to a bunch of novices who ended up building 10 times as much with higher quality. How do you think the craftspeople felt about that? Right? “Here I get unskilled labor building faster and better than me. I just lost my job.” Okay, circa AI, exact same thing is happening. I’ve got a bot now that can do everything I did faster and better. So this is not new, it’s just a new medium, right? Work will go on. We will find other ways that we engage with this work. We all are going to have to learn how to live with this work. And that’s going to change leadership. I don’t know how yet, right? I know we need to be educated in it. I know we need to start to play with it because it’s impacting every single space in business. We know that’s going to impact, and we also know that the pace of change is a curve that has never in our lifetimes or many lifetimes slowed down. So the pace of tomorrow’s organizations is faster than today.

Dealing with change fatigue

Pete Behrens: Yeah, well, we did a conversation with our leadership community, and we actually asked them about change fatigue and how they’re feeling. And one of the survey questions was, “Compare your last two years to previously. Are you feeling extremely or more fatigued than any other point in your life?” And 80% said that this is the most fatigued they’ve felt in their entire life. There might be some bias because of the pandemic. We typically put it not the year of the pandemic, but even two years after, 2021 through ’23. But yes, you’re right there. But the second thing we asked them was, where is change fatigue coming from? Is it coming from work? Is it coming from family? Is it coming from yourself? Is it coming from society? Is it coming from your community? The number one answer was family. Family. Which is really surprising to us. And we think about, like as leaders, you know, we think we’re operating with employees and they come in and then we’re frustrated they don’t want to deal with the change initiatives. And these are human beings coming into a human organization with baggage, baggage of, you know, my kid and my parents and all the other things happening in their world. And they’re coming into a system, and then we assume that this is the only system they live in. So I think as leaders, one of the things we try to help leaders recognize is try to see the whole human system. And I do hope, I don’t know if it’s a trend, what I hope to see is more human organizations going forward. And Gary Hamel, one of my heroes, he talks about humanocracy, right? So the next generation organization should be more human. Now that’s counter to AI, but at the same point, what I’m hopeful for is organizations are actually smaller, more nimble, and then in that way, more personal, more collective, more connected. That’s my almost hope versus what I think might happen.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yeah, there’s like a huge chance that AI will, you know, take all the boring stuff from work and all the repetitive stuff, other things, etc. So people, so as I said, organizations could be smaller, so people could be more connected to each other. So actually, the management would have more time to take care of the people. I’m not saying employees, but people there who are there and their families, etc. Just, it’s very interesting.

Pete Behrens: Yeah, I mean, the other hope of AI is maybe AI can do a lot of things that get rid of a lot of management roles. So we get more people, like a flatter organization. More people are contributing to services and products and value that we’re trying to do in companies. So there are less layers, right? That could be another way AI actually helps us and organizations connect more to our customers and be closer to what we actually build and serve.

Wiktor Żołnowski: You also mentioned the pace of the changes that are happening right now, and I think it’s very important to mention to everyone that many people compare the AI, let’s say, revolution to the Industrial Revolution. But the difference is that the Industrial Revolution took a few decades, if not even more, to actually happen. And that was because if someone was about to lose their job because there was some factory built and or lose or change the way they were working, that doesn’t happen overnight. Like, the factory needed to be built, the decision needed to be made, etc. That took like a decade or something. But right now, if the company decides that they are starting to use AI for something and they are, you know, like releasing some employees who are redundant or who don’t have skills that will be needed, it could happen overnight. Actually, it will happen.

Pete Behrens: It will happen faster. It’s learning faster. And I think, you know, we need to be prepared for that, right? How are we retraining ourselves? Yeah, so I don’t disagree with that. But again, it’s not an excuse. It’s our world. I’m hoping that we start to look at ways of making our world better, right? That we start to focus more on the issues hurting us right now: climate change and social justice issues and, you know, war. I would love for us to solve more of the problems that can make all humanity a little bit better off. So, you know, that’s another hope, that we apply the speed of solving problems to things that help everybody.

Final thoughts

Wiktor Żołnowski: I think it’s a great conclusion for our conversation today. So thank you very much for your presence. Thank you for these brilliant thoughts that you shared with us today. Thank you all for watching this episode. And thank you for being with us here for this almost an hour. And remember, if you would like to learn more about leadership, please check out the Relearning Leadership podcast by Pete, and also check the Agile Leadership Journey company and its services. I will check it out and see if there is something that I can benefit from as a leader as well. So you can expect some email from me soon.

Pete Behrens: Very welcome.

Wiktor Żołnowski: And of course, I heartily recommend you to check the recording of the keynote that Pete gave here just two hours ago at Agile by Example. So I’m even more grateful that he decided to join us just after your keynote, and we had the pleasure, we had a chance to have this conversation here. So thank you very much.

Pete Behrens: You’re welcome. One of the things, just to maybe conclude here, you know, some people ask why I do the podcast. And I say it’s a bit selfish, is it allows me to keep relearning and stay in curiosity. And I see a lot of that in you. So I applaud you for staying in a creative mindset and sharing your learning with the world.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Thank you very much. That was always our, actually, it was my personal mission since I used to be a trainer, a consultant as well. And I was always about teaching people, like sharing knowledge, getting from one place some knowledge and getting it to another way. So the podcast is just the next level of that. So it’s a way to scale it a little bit. Maybe in the next 20 years, someone will watch it and see, “Okay, they were not so, not so idiotic as we thought back then.” So maybe there will be something useful even in a few decades for people. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Pete Behrens: Thank you.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Pragmatic Talks is delivered to you by Pragmatic Coders, the first-choice software development partner for startup founders. Be sure to catch all new episodes. Subscribe to our YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast channels. And if you are thinking about building your own startup or struggling with product development, contact us and find out what we can do together.