124: Bob Gower

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Joe Krebs speaks with Bob Gower about great teams and the psychology behind it that make teams great. Hear him go deeper on one of the principles of positive teaming, a collection of patterns he created based on his 25+ years of experiences working with teams. Access the Google Doc mentioned in this episode here.

Transcript:

Joe Krebs 0:10

Agile FM radio for the Agile community. www.agile.fm.

Welcome to another episode of agile FM today I Bob Gower here with me. Second time on on agile.fm the spoken very long time ago, on this long running podcast. And today's topic is really when talking about great teams, were talking a little bit about the psychology behind these great teams. And if you don't know yet, the association between great teams and bad apples and love bombing, then this episode is for you. We're gonna explore this a little bit and see what this is all about. But first and foremost, welcome to the podcast. Bob.

Bob Gower 0:57

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joe Krebs 0:59

Awesome. Yeah. So Bob, you you speak you keynote at conferences, on different continents, you. You wrote books, you wrote two books. And one of those books is called agile business. And the other one is radical alignment. And but today, we want to talk a little about great teams. I already said love bombing, possibly some listeners by now are intrigued. What does love bombing have to do with with great teams? Let's go there. Let's talk a little bit about the principles of positive teaming. We'll talk about love bombing, what makes great teams great, Bob, yeah.

Bob Gower 1:39

Yeah, so I'm glad you went right there. The love bombing. And this, it's been very interesting for me. So I teach a class on you know, it's for usually for new managers, I get Scrum Masters in the class, I get product owners, I get people who have been just recently promoted to management positions. And then sometimes I get older people who have been in those positions for a long time, who just want to kind of, like, update their toolset to be a little more collaborative. And so I've been I, I'm an agilist, you know, like, or at least, that's my roots. And so I go back to, you know, like, let's have good team charters, let's have good team measurements, there's, you know, a lot of very, very nuts and bolts kinds of things. But I've also, I'm also a student of psychology, student of philosophy, a student of sociology, and I, and I began to find that these things began to come together. And I realized that, you know, personality really matters on teams, and that sometimes we find ourselves working with people that are just not ready to work in a collaborative way. And not enough gets said about that, I think so I developed a module for the class, which I just actually just shared with, with some people, you know, at one of your meetups recently, that, because I didn't know it was going to be so popular, I thought it was just gonna be this topic, it was just gonna be the past and distant passing. And then people are like, wait a minute, no one's talking about this. And I really, you know, and I really appreciate it. I guess that's enough preamble. Maybe I should just talk about it a little bit. If that?

Joe Krebs 3:05

Well, what I do think is, and what's intriguing about the topic is that when you start talking about the individuals, and how this is all gonna work together as a as a team, are the challenges I remember, the Stacy chart, for example, right? Or the complexities of systems, and there's always requirements and technology as part of it. And people, and I always say, even just people makes it complex. Right? So it's like, there are two, two other parts to this. But if you have a team of 12 people or 8 people, if you have a group of people, there is a possibility of already having a high complex situation here. So yeah, so it is important. Yeah.

Bob Gower 3:46

Yeah. I mean, one of my a book that I read a couple years ago that really moved me a lot was by neuroscientists named Antonio Damasio. And the book is called de cartes. Error. And in it, there's this quote, I put up I throw it up on slides when I speak sometimes. And he says that we are not thinking machines that feel we are feeling machines that think, right, that feeling as the way the human brain works, feelings take precedence over thinking almost always right. And that we have to be really, it's something we have to be careful of. And of course, there's the rationalist movement, you know, like people who we like to think we're logical, but I find often that people who think they're the most logical are the most illogical and the people who embrace their emotional nature and say, Hey, maybe I'm having a bias here, maybe something is kicking in. And I should check for it. I should watch for people who are kind of humble in that way, are often the most rational, the the easiest people to kind of like work with, whereas sometimes people would be like, no, no, I'm being purely rational. I'm very angry about this. And I'm like, Well, wait a minute. You're very angry about this, but you're purely rational. That doesn't make it you know, those two things don't go together because Anger is an emotion, the way I image it. So when I think about teams, when I think about organizations, I use the iceberg as a metaphor often. And I say, Look above the waterline are the operations. And I use operations as kind of a catch all term to mean, it's the tools, we use the information, we have the strategic frameworks. And we use the roles and accountabilities the team membership, all of the things that we can kind of see and act on relatively easily, which we can think of are sort of the rational parts. The frame, you know, whether we use Scrum, or whether we use XP or whether we use Kanban. Right, like even like the frameworks that we're using, right, all of that I would consider above the waterline. below the waterline is the culture and the rate. And the way I think about culture is really the emotional landscape of the team. It's whether we have certain things that are hard to measure, and hard to act on. That's why they're below the waterline, why they're present, right? Whether or not they're present things like psychological safety, things like cognitive diversity, things like trust. And we and we And so what's interesting about those, this this sort of dichotomy is that the bigger mass is below the waterline, right? Like, that's why I use the the iceberg as a metaphor, and it often moves the upper mass. So I would much rather work with a team that didn't have very good tools that didn't have very good, we didn't have very clear instruction that didn't have a good, you know, necessarily clear membership or roles. And accountabilities didn't know what process it was using, but yet trusted each other, was willing to share and kept conflict with each other, felt safe to bring forward all of their crazy ideas. And then but also could disagree and commit and move forward. Like all of those things that are sort of ineffable and hard to understand. I'd much rather have a team that had those things and had poor, poor above the waterline and rrich below the waterline, right. But the problem is below the waterline is very hard to act on, it becomes much more art like and much less science like. And so when I think of teen development, like, I want to be a scientist, but I'm also an artist at the time, right? I'm also like, often, like just trying to figure out who trust who, you know, like, who, who thinks of me is dad or something, you know, like all these kinds of like, weird questions start becoming a minor, anyway?

Joe Krebs 7:08

Well, it's obvious that the complexities are on the water right types, found out that the bigger piece of the iceberg is underneath your waterline, right? That's a great metaphor thank you,thanks for that. And I think everybody has this picture right now in front of them. But let's go a little bit into your tools. Let's talk a little bit about the principles of positive teaming. I like that term. So do you want to do you want to give like, a little an example of what these principles are? Maybe we take a deeper dive into one?

Bob Gower 7:43

Yeah, of course. Yeah. So yeah, I'm gonna want to give me a little of the history of them. And this is a little bit new for me, maybe by the time this podcast is out. And, you know, obviously, people might listen to this years later. So a little bit out for a while. I'm working on a white paper about this, this may be the seat of my next book, I haven't really decided yet Writing a book is very difficult. And I don't know if I want to do it again. But, but because I've been teaching this course for a few years. And the end, the seed of the course was, again, what do new managers need to know as they come in to a team leadership position, and I'm talking to a kind of a specific type of person, a person who wants to lead more collaboratively more humanistically, who kind of believes that teams can be self more self managing, less command and control, less ego driven and less narcissistic, like, those are the kinds of people that I tend to tend to, I think those are the better leaders. And I also think those are the leaders that I want to support. And so I you know, I have a 25-30 year career, I've been at this for a long time. And I've played a lot of different roles in a lot of different environments. And so this work is really the these principles are really my attempt to distill everything that I've learned from some amazingly smart people in some amazingly painful circumstances myself, at times, all this stuff I've learned into, I call them descriptive, but not normative, meaning I don't think you can you need to consider this area. But I'm not going to tell you exactly what you need to do in this area. I'm not going to tell you the like, you know what I mean? So like, the first one is, you know, teams are made up of people, right, like, we seems, and you kind of mentioned this before, right? Like, people are complex people are, you know, and people don't aren't logical, right? And so we have to embrace that I'm not gonna tell you how to embrace that. There's lots of different ways we can deal with this lack with this, the sort of like emotional nature of humans, but we have to consider if we don't consider it, we're not we're not going to get there. One of my favorite principles, and the one that I was surprised we've, you know, that you've sort of hinted at already, is that you can't is my principles, you can't team with everyone, right? And this was a painful, painful lesson that I had that I learned many, many times, or I didn't, I didn't learn many times. So I kept repeating, and then finally did learn and that is that I have to have better boundaries in terms of who I decided to be on a team with if I would if I had the authority in the power and the ability and the choice. So often sometimes we don't have that economically or just whatever, you know, circumstantially, we don't have that. But to the extent that I have the power, I need to be really careful about the people that I work with. Because there are people out there who are, you know, there's this thing called the Dark triad that psychologists will talk about. And so it's, it's very ominous, and I guess it is, it can be kind of ominous. But these are sort of like personality traits, that let's call it bad people exists for the first would be narcissism, that people are grandiose, they're superior, they have a sense of entitlement. The second is Machiavellian, which is more cynical, willing to deceive and get what they want. And the last is Psycho is psychopathy, which is more about they they're cold, they don't have empathy. And they might take big risks, they might try to take big swings, these often co-present, they often come together. And often they're sort of debt, but they're sort of separate. But the idea here is that we often find ourselves working with people like this, without knowing it, right. And this is the lesson that I've had to learn many times, because they can look really nice on the surface, or they can be really charming, they can be really attractive, often people who are the more manipulative they are, they've learned how to act in ways they've learned how to push our buttons, they're very good at reading us, they're very good at reading what we want, and they're very good at, like, poking at us and sort of like, you know, kind of telling us what we want. So so I've had to learn how to avoid those people in my in on my teams, and to get rid of them when they're on the team because it's unfair to the nice people around them. Because their their their their energy sucks on those teams. Right? So I don't mean to be cruel, but that's my Yeah, that's what I'm trying.

Joe Krebs 11:38

That will be like a hidden agenda, or somebody would be nice, but has a hidden agenda hack into this territory is like this would be the bad apple, right?

Bob Gower 11:47

Exactly. Well, yeah, so like a case in point, like I was director of marketing, I've worn many hats in my career. At one point, I'm not a good director of marketing, but I did wear this, this organization. But I kept struggling because I liked the technology guy who was working with, and I thought we were friends, you know, like, we would go out to have drinks, we would talk. But I became really aware that he had lied to me at different times, and often about things that were inconsequential. And I don't know, you know, like, it was just very weird. And I ended up having a talk with with my coach about this. And he's like, this guy doesn't sound trustworthy. Like, you may think he is, because he's charming. And he is. He was charming, and he would tell me great thing, you know, he would make, he would compliment me and tell me good things about myself. And I just started realizing that no, he was lying. And then I started to realize that, like, his motivations for doing the job, were very different than mine, I wanted the organization to succeed, I had my own ego involvement, but I think he just wanted power. You know, like, he didn't really care whether we hit our numbers or not, he just kind of wanted to be in charge of this organization for a while, he wasn't very committed to it. So I did sit him down at one point, and I was like, I don't trust you. And it was the most difficult conversatuon, one of the most difficult conversations in my life. And the end result was we stopped being friends, we stopped working together, you know, like, and I count myself very lucky, right? Like that I got out of that organization. And I didn't spend any more time in it.

Joe Krebs 13:13

Now, I myself if I would assess myself, I have a very sarcastic kind of humor. You know, I don't know if that's already cynical. If that is already something, you know, even self assessing yourself. Is that something you will be working on? But is what's what's the line here? Like if somebody says, Hey, I like sarcasm or I like, ironic statement. .

Bob Gower 13:38

Yeah, I mean, it's a great point. Like, I mean, there's a difference between like style of humor, I can have a kind of dark sense of humor myself, like I don't I, you know, like I, I and I've told off color jokes at times as well. But it's more the people who are cynical about the task at hand or the job at hand. So I usually give people a little bit of a checklist. There's lots of checklists out there. If you look up dark triad checklist, you can find it you can find it in there's there's many, many points, but the ones that really mean something to me, or that I've noticed, as most indicative to me, is one somebody lying or exaggerating. That can be a real sign and often about something inconsequential. They're just lying. Like I went to this concert over the weekend, it was great. And you wait, you find out the concert was canceled, you're like that was a weird thing to lie about. Like that's something to pay attention to. The other is if they're very charming, and they're telling you great and they're complimenting you a lot especially with very little information and we call this love bombing right that cults use this manipulative people use this all the time. They'll say, Oh my God, you're the greatest person ever. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so I want to work with you forever, right? If they're, if they're kind of trying to like move the relationship along very, very quickly. Whether it's a work relationship or a personal relationship, we call that love bombing. It's a really, really big warning sign and then the other one, sort of the third one that I really pay a lot of attention to is, I try to watch how people treat people treat other people who have nothing to offer them lower status people. So if I'm out to dinner with them, I want to watch how do they treat the waiter or waitress, I want to watch how they treat the parking attendant, I want to watch how they talk about people who report to them on their team, they're, you know, not their colleagues, but people who are, you know, who are kind of lower status than them. Those kinds of things. So people, because because people like this tend to manage up, they'll, you know, like, if they think you have more power than them, or at least equal, they can be very nice to you. But if you have less power than you then done, and then they'll start building and you and you have to be really like you. So you have to like watch these folks carefully. So I find those three traits are the ones that I watch for behaviors are the ones that I watch for quite a bit.

Joe Krebs 15:46

It's really interesting, why because there will be like scenes, for some people, again, alarming signal, somebody might say, like this person is just walking off, it's a loss of time to work with other people, they have nothing to give or nothing, nothing that adds to possibly status or power within an organization. It's true. And I think in all by just listening to what you say, like I think everybody knows somebody word with one of them. Not necessarily love bombing only right. But any of those things you're talking about. I think we see these these, these warning signs, giving and receiving feedback.

Bob Gower 16:22

Yeah. You mean you see them when they're giving receiving feedback? Or yeah,

Joe Krebs 16:26

we're like, just like that. It's another area of concern, right. But if somebody gets extremely, you know, negative feedback or something, how do they react? You know,

Bob Gower 16:35

oh, yeah, yeah, if someone gets really aggressive when they get negative feedback, that can be a real sign, too. I mean, we all get wounded when we get negative feedback, you know, at least I do. You know, I'm part of a writing group right now. And when it's, it's great. One of the rules is that we can't say negative things about other people's writing. So and it creates this wonderful space where I feel much more creative and much more free in this space, because it's wonderful, because negative feedback can have this impact. But in a work environment, look, we got to look at numbers, sometimes we sometimes have to say, hey, look, when you did that, it had this impact for me, when you fail to make that decision, the downstream impact of that was I had to, you know, I had to push work and I ended up late, I ended up overwhelmed, I had to work at nights. And you have to kind of give that feedback to people sometimes. And it's really important. It's important not to give the feedback about the person, right? You know, like, it's not, it's not to say you're an inconsiderate person is more to be like, hey, when you did that I had this right? We no ad hominem, no personal attacks, right. But if we do give someone feedback about their work, and they become extremely defensive, or we get really angry, that can also be a sign of this kind of these kinds of cluster of personality traits as well. So it's just, it's something to consider. And again, none of these by themselves are definitive, these are patterns of behavior, be very careful, we don't want to like ostracize people for you know, for the wrong reasons. And you know, sometimes people are having bad days, or people suffer from depression, you know, like, I know, in different times of my life when I've been overwhelmed or having or, or suffering from depression, having a new baby at home, and those kinds of things. Like, I don't show up at my best. And so we do want to cut people slack. But at the same time, we want to be really careful that we're not you know, when we cut people when we cut too much slack, I you know, we've talked about this, that when we cut too much slack, it's can be really, really unfair to other people. Like let's say, I'm a team leader. So I frequently speak to people who can hire and fire people. Those are my kind of core audience right now. And so if you can hire and fire people, and you have a team member who you think is a bad guy, or a bad person, bad woman, equal opportunity, right, like, they're bad, they're not great. And you keep that person around because you yourself are conflict avoidant, you don't want to go through the hiring process of finding somebody new or, you know, like, well, they're not that bad to me. I've seen them be bad to other people, but they're not that bad to me and I can put up with it. You are now being a bad leader, because you're subjecting your people to abuse essentially, you aren't, you know, just it's not you're not maybe not be doing it yourself. But you're condoning it, you're tolerating it. And I've seen some very, very well intentioned leaders create some very toxic cultural team cultures, because they have been unwilling to be they've been sort of conflict avoidant. You don't always have to fire the person, by the way, right. Like sometimes, you know, like, if the person is just if it's mild. You know, you just need to like, make sure that we keep that keep that opinion, keep that behavior out of work, like, you know, don't like you can hold a terrible opinion in your head. Just don't say it. Maybe that's maybe that works. But if you know, or maybe this unintentional, you know, we just need to point it out and they'll try to correct but if someone's a bully, man, I just don't I have no patience for bullies anymore. I just have zero you know, from on my team. There's just you know, like, it was a Reed Hastings who had talked about the the No, I'm not going to swear by the No, the no eight something rule, right? Yeah, yeah.

Joe Krebs 19:59

So, what's interesting about this, what you're saying is right, there are certainly some character traits people, that might be impossible and maybe very, very hard to change. But what you're describing is that is something that can be changed, right? So you can actually go into an organization and say, we can work on other things, we can improve a possibly toxic environment and change that into something a little bit more positive. So there is this is not something that is fixed with a with a DNA of a person, right? Where you would say, like, there is there's no room for improvement. I think all of those principles, are there. Is there room for improvement?

Bob Gower 20:37

Yeah, and people, but people also have to be, you know, willing and interested in change, right, you know, like, and so, yeah, there's a, there's a, I'm gonna recommend another podcast on your podcast, but there's a podcast, I listened to his guide. It's called psychology in Seattle, I really enjoy him. He's, uh, he in he's a, an expert in something called borderline personality disorder, which is, which is one of these really challenging things to deal with? I got interested, because I've had people in my personal life who exhibit these traits. And I've been, you know, at a loss of how to deal with them. So I wanted to do a deep dive. And one of the things he says is like, look, it is like, there's a lot of stigma around these things. Like, if someone gets labeled as this and they get labeled as a as borderline, then there can be a lot of stigma on that person. And that's really unfair, because that person is suffering themselves often, but at the same time, in order to change that that person needs to be an active participant in the therapy. Right. So, so one of the things I tried to ask myself is like, is the person do they have self awareness of their behavior and its impact on others? And if they have self awareness? Do they seem to have a willingness to take a look at that? And are they actively looking at that? You know, so, I, you know, borderlines are very, it's kind of an edge case is sort of a special case. But like, I, you know, I, I've worked with some, some leaders who are who are very, very open, you know, one question I like to ask, during the sales process, actually, is, because people often hire me to fix their teams just like this a classic, like, hey, my team is is struggling, can you come in and help my team? I'm like, okay, sure I can, I can do this. But you're the leader. Right? So what do you want me to do? When I find out? Some of you are part of the problem, you know, like, how do you want me to address that to you. And that, and by asking that in front of those two things, one is it is it lets them know that they probably are part of the problem, you know, and so it, it sort of sets that up that expectation, it's almost like a hypnotic suggestion, you know, like, I'm going to talk about this at some point. And to it allows them to, like, reflect to me about how they like to receive feedback, because as the person I'm, you know, they're paying me and often they're paying me a lot of money to do this work. So I don't want to, you know, I don't wanna get fired myself, you know, like, I want to do the, you know, and sometimes I have to, you know, I sometimes I find myself like, oh, I can't work with this person, I actually have to like, fire a client, I've done that. But mostly, I have to like work, I have to believe in the person and work with them and as long as they're willing to, but, but I'm often testing for that I'm often testing for like, Is this somebody that I feel like I can work with and somebody that I or somebody that I don't feel like,

Joe Krebs 23:13

this is actually very general, good coaching practice as well. Right. So everybody should be putting this out there as an as an Agile Coach, what is it we're finding in our work and equity, going into this direction? I heard you make us make a statement, not on this podcast, which is very interesting, I would love to have you elaborate a little bit on that is bad manager, a bad manager is incredibly expensive.

Bob Gower 23:38

Yeah, that's actually a direct quote from a longtime client of mine, and who has become a dear friend, and she was sort of, it just sort of popped up in a meeting that I was facilitating a few months ago. And I and I was like, Yeah, that's exactly it. That, you know, and we were talking at the time about burnout on her team. And we were also talking about the great resignation. So she had a technology team having a hard time hiring, losing key people losing tribal knowledge, you know, like, a lot of stuff was going on. And, you know, like, and I just, I was like, Yes, this is exactly what I've been trying to say, in so many different ways that, that people don't tend to quit their company, right. I don't quit my CEO, I quit my manager, right. Like, and so many organizations that have I've been in this many times, and probably your listeners have as well. I've been in many organizations that have toxic cultures in general, but they have pockets of like really great leaders who are doing really great work who have really great teams, or the inverse can be true. In general, it's a great culture, it's a it's a happy company, they get high marks, you know, when their pecan reports or whatever it is they're doing, and, but specifically, you're like, oh, wait a minute, this this person is a problem like I got one or two managers. And so I always try to like remind people that the way that the saying goes is not Uh oh, he's just a bad apple, you can ignore him. It's one bad apple can spoil the entire bunch and or the entire bushel or whatever, right. And so the and so a couple of things happen with bad managers. One is that bad managers tend to create dysfunction around them on their team, people don't they'll have more attrition. As long as people have options, people will quit. And also, they're the work the out of the workout purchase. Isn't that great, right? So if you have jerks in management positions, but the other thing they do, which I think is more insidious is that they set the tone for what leadership looks like at the organization. So and I've seen this with CEOs, especially unfortunately, where you'll have a very, you know, how to put it emotional or changeable or mercurial CEO, not to name any names, but somebody who's like, tweeting things at people and calling them names and trying to buy companies they can't afford. Anyway, I'm not naming names, but like they're setting the tone about this is what leadership is like. So if I'm going to be a leader in this organization, I'm this is who I'm going to emulate. This is who I'm going to become this is who I am, you know, and that that then creates, I think, a real concrete a real downward spiral, you might do fine for a while, like, I'm not saying it's not terminal immediately. But if you want to create an organization that has a sort of an efficient operating budget that works, you know, that doesn't have a lot of overhead, that makes good use of its resources and is able to focus on work and do good work. You know, bad managers, especially jerks, you know, like, it's, you may do okay for a while, but it's but but it's just not going to do not do well, long term.

Joe Krebs 26:41

So this is obviously not about the salary of the manager. This is about the ripple effect that comes from the behavior. Exactly, right?

Bob Gower 26:47

100%

Joe Krebs 26:49

Cool. Bob, there is one topic I want to touch on, before we talk a little about the tool you're providing, right is one thing, I believe 99.999% on this, the listeners on this podcast would have an immediate response to that about the transparency on salaries, classes, around salaries, nobody talks about salaries, and there is this statement that salaries are, you know, like knowing about salaries, talking gossiping about salaries is really for the not doing that, obviously, is in benefits of the organization? Not the employees? Yeah, I think everybody can relate to that. Right. And so, but why why did this make into your work? Like, why is that so important? Yeah.

Bob Gower 27:39

Yeah, well, I mean, I go back to like, you know, Dan Pink's, you know, drive, right, that the goal of money is to remove money from the calculation, right? Like, if someone's working just for money, that's not great. But you have to, like, pay them enough. So they're not job hunting, and they're not, and they're not looking around. And I also think, as we, you know, when we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, which is something that I care about a great deal, there is, you know, pay symmetry between various populations, you know, traditionally excluded population. So, you know, women and people of color tend to tend to earn less for the same job. And we can say that that's due to a lack of negotiation, skill, or behavior, or prowess, or whatever. And that may or may not be true, but it also is doesn't mean that it's fair, it's still unfair, no matter what the source of that is, it's still it's still deeply unfair. And when people find out about it, it can really send, you know, the way trust is very fragile, right. So like, if, and so like, you can, you can have a lot of trust, built up over a long period of time, and then one small thing can erode it very, very quickly. And so, you know, for myself, I found out at one point because of glass door that I was earning 40%, less than somebody else doing a similar role to me, I managed to negotiate, I actually thought My manager was behaving in good faith, I didn't, you know, like, I still actually have a good relationship with that person, and still work for them occasionally. But at the same time, and and I also had, you know, like, when, as soon as I approached them, they were like, okay, yeah, we're gonna have you, you know, I guess he knows now, right? He's gonna have this. And so but it was, but it was really, but it was really shocking. And I think had I had a few other data points about that. Unfortunately, that was for organizations that I really liked, and with people that I really liked, and people that I respected and still respect, but had it been for an organization that had a couple of strikes against them that could have caused me to immediately quit and it could have been unrecoverable. And of course, training a new person is more expensive than paying the salary for an old person. So Netflix not to keep talking about Hastings But Netflix had a policy for a while I don't know if they still do which was to proactively up people salary to market at least a market competitive rate without them asking like to do regular reviews and to sort of make sure that people were being paid competitively, but, but a lot of organizations and this is especially in america I think I don't know, in Europe, is it more common for people to talk about money?

Joe Krebs 30:03

No.

Bob Gower 30:04

Yeah, I think it's a worldwide thing. Got it? Yeah, I just feel like, you know, like, we're, we're sort of trained to that. It's that it's, it's gossip. It's how to put it. It's like,

Joe Krebs 30:18

I don't people talk more about politics and religion at work, then.

Bob Gower 30:21

Why No. Which is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and, yeah. And so and it does, it's it basically is just information asymmetry, right, like, so if I go into something, if I go into a car dealership, and I don't know what the manufacturing cost, or the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price is on a car or something like that, then I you know, the dealer has more information than I do. And so the Internet has actually kind of like, reduced that information asymmetry, because people go to read it, and they figure things out, and then they go in armed and so they can negotiate more effectively. And but at work, like it's very hard to negotiate for a salary, especially because I think a lot of us, myself included, sometimes we question our own value, like we're humble, or we're even worse, you know, at times, like, we lack confidence at times. And we're waiting for somebody to tell us that we're valuable. And so and then it's, it's like me negotiating against this giant company is what it feels like, they have all the information, I'm a dime a dozen, they can hire somebody else. And and so but when we have the salary information, we we at least have a little bit more power. Yeah. Which is why I'm a big fan of unions as well doing collective bargaining. I know, there's problems with it at times, but like, I think, I think workers we need we need to organize, and we need people kind of speaking for us. So I'm letting my sort of socialist roots out here, I guess.

Joe Krebs 31:40

Well, there's also something to be said, like, if you don't have to worry, let's say about the salaries, right, you can put all your energy into the work, right. It's like I don't have to self promote myself, within the company. And I'm using the time at work for, you know, putting the best into the products and the teams you're working with. But I think there's different kinds of models out there, right. But one of the things is when you let's say we have some someone listening to this conversation, your right answers, this is all awesome, which I personally think is awesome. But what can I do about it? Like what is what's out there for me to do? Obviously, there's BobGower.com, where you can go to and and start the process. But on the other side there is there's a tool and maybe give like a little brief connection to the tool because we when when I just want to talk about bad apples, let's say we also want to say hey, what are we going to do about it? How do we learn how to what can I do within my organization? Maybe I was a little self help first. Before I risked a big step right afterwards when so let's just let's just talk a little bit about the tool.

Bob Gower 32:44

Yeah, so I have a I think by tool me, my the class that I teach is that.

Joe Krebs 32:50

Yeah, we're like interests, like in terms of, you know, questionnaires and things. How do you assess Oh, yeah. So that how do you how do I find out that say, who falls into the category into the spectrum? A and B, and C? And how do I determine if this if there's a toxic behavior within the team, like things like that?

Bob Gower 33:10

Yeah, so I have a diagnostic tool that I share. It's actually a workbook that I use in my class, which is called leading great teams, I also provide it sometimes for free. I'll tell you what, I'll actually we'll we'll put it in your show notes here, and people can grab it and use it. So it's a diagnostic tool that I developed. Actually, there's enough context in the tool because there's an article that I wrote, I use in the beginning, it says, just open Google Doc that you can kind of make a make a copy of and use, but it gives you a series of questions to sort of just ask, you can either ask it to your team members, or you can ask it to yourself about your team member. So you can use it one, you know, either way. And it's almost as like a journaling exercise. Or sometimes I'll plug the questions into a tool like, easy retro or parable, or we know one of these sort of like, you know, kind of like or was it Mural and Miro? And those kinds of things, right? So I'll plug it into that, and then we'll and or just or send out a survey. And it's just a way of figuring out like, where is the team aligned, because what I found is that teams can kind of get misaligned, in sort of a variety of places, either they're lacking a sense of purpose, like a shared, like, we're all working for the same sense of of meaning and purpose and vision and values in the world. It can be around how those things now get applied into sort of strategic pillars, which is much more concrete, like what are we actually doing in service of that purpose. And then the other is our sort of operational framework, like how we are, how efficient we are at sharing information and doing the work and getting access to tools, all of the things that kind of like are internal inside the organization or the team. And then the final is the is the culture like how do we do we trust each other? Are we able to disagree and commit meaningfully? Are we like the emotional landscape that I mentioned before? So this tool is just a way that we can, that we can that we can sort of analyze analyze our teams. So I call that this is part of one of my principles, which is about, essentially that you that you can't, you can't move too many steps ahead, the way I described in the principle is that the adjacent possible is your only move adjacent possible is a phrase from evolutionary biology, like that you can't, an organism can't evolve an eye overnight, it has to evolve like photosensitive cells first, and then you know, other structures have to come in. And then the eye becomes possible in the eyes of all of what three or four times in terms of sort of the biological evolution of the earth in different ways, you know, flies eyes being different from humans eyes being different from cat's eye, you know, like, all these certain things, right? So, but the idea is that is that we can't move to a big complex organizational change structure. And I know that you've, I think, you know, in your, you know, some of your frameworks, right? That we need to be a little more evolutionary in the way we think in your Agile Kata, right, that we need to be a little more evolutionary in the way we adopt processes, rather than adopting all of them all at once that, you know, the way we might do in, you know, some frameworks that I'm not going to name here that I've been trained in. And when I found out right, that there's, there's sometimes this idea of the big bang approach to change. Sometimes it's necessary, but usually, it's just destructive. And I don't think I don't think it's valuable, that we need to be much more evolutionary. So this tool is designed to at least begin to give us some context about where we are. So we can then begin to determine about where we're going to go. And so I use it as a diagnostic tool. And I begin to work with organizations and just trying to get a sense of where we are now. So we know what's possible.

Joe Krebs 36:33

Oh, this is awesome. Bob, just in case listeners want to find you, they don't know how to spell your last name, that is BonGower.com. So people can find you, they can also find you via your books, agile business and radical alignment. That's also another way of finding you, we will put a link in into the show notes, as he said, to find access to the tool. And I'm going to invite all of the listeners right now to go on to what's your LinkedIn page and give you a thumbs up and encouraging words, to write a third book, you know, so maybe maybe the group can put some words out there and convinces you to write another book, I know what it means to publish a book, lots of work. But you know what, thank you for sharing all your great ideas. There's obviously many, many more principles out there, we only had time for one, one and a half,

Bob Gower 37:28

one and a half, we got to go to and we and very cursory, much deeper, we go much deeper. And I also do want to just plug my my classes were so I do a lot of consulting work, I always remain an independent consultant, I don't work as part of organizations anymore. It's just, it's just not me, I've done it enough. And so I remain independent. But we're the thing I do try to big get big groups together for is for this class, it's a much lower price point than having to like hire me as a consultant. And you'll and the I and if you do join my class, I also have a community that you end up joining us. So anybody who's ever taken the class as part of the same sort of we do office hours once a month, we do. And we also do, you know, kind of regular, you know, regular meetups and those kinds of things as well. So please go check it, you can find it on my website, bobgower.com. Go check out the class, depending upon when you're listening to this. I do have a cohort starting in September, late September 2022. But I do it about three or four times a year. So please, please do come to that you're most interested.

Joe Krebs 38:25

Absolutely. Bob.

Bob Gower 38:27

All right. Thank you, Joe.

Joe Krebs 38:29

Thank you for listening to Agile.FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host show greps. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www.agile.fm. Talk to you soon.