Product Agility

Are People Unmanageable? (With Jack Skeels)

July 31, 2024 • Ben Maynard & Jack Skeels • Season 2 • Episode 27

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When you get Jack, you get complex management research converted into often humorous yet humbling management insights and practice. His journey: failed plumber becomes college professor, with stops along the way as the lead for Sapient’s Los Angeles office, a senior management sciences analyst at RAND Corporation, and a trained restaurant chef.

 Drawing from over a decade working with 200+ client organisations, Jack authored "Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organisations." In this episode, we went DEEP into the challenges and misconceptions surrounding management in the agile and product contexts.

  1. Introduction and Background:
    • Jack’s journey from a software developer to becoming a manager.
    • The realisation of the inefficiencies and challenges in traditional management roles.
  2. The Concept of Unmanaged:
    • Less managing can lead to more productive and empowered teams.
    • The importance of creating a belief system and movement around this concept.
  3. Challenges of Traditional Management:
    • The inefficiencies and costs associated with over-management.
    • How traditional management practices can stifle innovation and productivity.
  4. The Role of Managers:
    • Redefining the role of managers in modern organisations.
    • The importance of developing and empowering team members rather than micromanaging.
  5. Cultural Change and Organisational Dynamics:
    • How to engage leadership and align them with new management philosophies.
    • Practical steps for managers and leaders to start making changes within their organisations.
  6. Practical Tools and Techniques:
    • Practical advice and tools from Jack’s book to help managers adopt a less intrusive management style.
    • The significance of measuring managerial effectiveness by team growth and development.

Links and Resources:

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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A lot of Times Now what they'll look at in organizations is are you creating hypo high potential people in your organization? Are you moving them forward? And I came to the conclusion that the real way to measure a manager is by whether or not they are growing their team. And the best way, in fact, that's a singular job of the manager in today's knowledge workplace is am I making my organization stronger? Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between Agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Welcome to the Product Agility podcast. And my name is Ben Maynard and I used to be a manager, albeit a very bad one. I found that in my excursions through corporate life, looking at helping people with the product and agile mindset, I was not a great manager. And I found that most of the managers that I was working with or was trying to support generally got a really bad rap. And I have to admit, I was responsible for some of the awful things that were said about managers and these organizations. And for that, I apologize because I now have a different and more robust understanding of just how bloody difficult the task of being a manager can be. And today we're joined by Jack Skills who has written a book, but I have it on my left here called unmanaged. Let me read the subtitle master the magic of creating empowered and happy organizations. I like they guys from the screen as well. For those of you watching on YouTube, if you haven't been on YouTube channel, please do because every episode that we've recorded pretty much forever is present on the YouTube channel. So go and see what some of these people look like. And today we're going to be exploring the idea of unmanaged and looking at some of Jack's history, what took, what brought him to write the book, and give us all some practical tools and tips to become shit at being a manager and perhaps, perhaps create a bit of empathy. For the role of management, Jack. Welcome. Very much. Welcome very much. That is a crap thing to say. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Ben. Pleasure to be here with you and to chat with you again. Yeah, We had a great chat before. Yeah. Well, I I love it when people say that. I was laughing for 5 minutes afterwards. It was very good. Yeah. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I'm going to leave it there before I say something I shouldn't do, but no, it was lovely. And I've really been really looking forward to today, even though I'm fresh from three hours of train the trainer training. Oh yeah. You know, it's been good fun. It's for a lean UX, and that's with Jeff Got Health and Josh, Josh Seiden. So it's actually really interesting. Oh, cool. It's really nice. But yeah, yeah, that was three hours of me listening. Now I just get to spend some time talking. Jack, for our listeners and the people who are watching this on YouTube, could you introduce yourself and give everyone a taste of your history and what is what's provoked you to write this book? Wow, that's a lot of stuff. Because I'm an old, I'm an old dude also. So you know, like I was born in Lansing, MI and no. So basically, you know, I, I think probably the most relevant thing started in 1981 or something like that. I come out of college and was a software developer programmer. They called them back then. And I note it is all hot technology, factory automation and networking. All that stuff was so avant-garde back then. And the I had managers. I mean, I went to work for a big aerospace company and it was like, you know, piles of managers on top of me kind of thing. And I was struck by the singular uselessness of all of them. OK, one, so there's a phenomenon. OK, first of all, they probably weren't entirely useless, but I knew. So because I was freshly washed in brand new technology, I knew way more than any of them did about this technology, right? So there was no mentoring coming down my way, right? And in a way, I knew what needed to be done. And so it was sort of like, how do I get the managers out of my way? And this, I think this forever influenced my perception of managers. And as nature and the universe has a way of sort of teaching you lessons about things, it, it wasn't much more than three or four years before I became a manager, right? And I thought I, oh, I don't want to be a project manager. And, and they said, well, it pays 40% more and you don't have to work on weekends. And I thought, Southern California here I come. So the, from that moment on, I thought, I don't want to be one of those guys or gals who comes by annoyingly to my cubicle back then, right? And, and says, how's it going? And when are you going to have that done and that kind of stuff. And I, I became even back then, I became the, the anti manager manager. In other words, I would just go and and stop by first thing in the morning, say you got everything you need today and let me know if you don't. So I had to fill my days with things and I filled them with writing status reports, which managers love to read. And so I just played with managers all day, went to their meetings and said smart things. One of the things I realized later on and someone had given me this, I know you've got the agile background. They gave me this. I triple E report from the mid 80s called iterative enhanced project management and it was quite interesting. You'll recognize it. What it said is write down the requirements for the next two weeks. What the team go do it and then look at what they've done. OK, it was the Sprint in 1983, right? And I thought this is great. I two weeks with nothing for me to do and I, and I started using it and I, I literally won awards at that company for my amazing managing and I thought I'm doing less managing than everyone else and I'm winning awards. And so that forever shaped my notion of, of essentially what the book is now, right? Which is maybe we just need to be doing a lot less managing. It isn't that we don't need managers, but we do better if we do less managing. And it's a, it's a complex topic, but it's it's been proven to be true both by the work I've done over the last 15 years with over 200 agencies and other organizations. But it's also in the research as well. But managers don't typically read the research either. So there we go. We got a book. And is unmanaged a book? Is it a movement? Is it a framework? What is it? And what would you say that the core message of it is? Yeah, it, you know, it's a great question. I actually asked myself that the other day because I thought I this really needs to be a belief system, right? And I think that's what I was trying to do in writing the book that titled Being the Provocation, right? In other words, my team is unmanaged and in a senior executive at a company that'd be like, what do you mean we have unmanaged teams, right. And my reply would be, well, those unmanaged teams are outperforming your managed teams. OK, So do we want to talk about what that means The I, I think it does need to become a movement. I think that I, I'll tell you personally, in fact, you know my origins now of disdain towards managers and it frankly, it hasn't worn off and I even have disdained towards myself as a manager like your, your, your opening thing. I realized I was a horrible manager in, in spite of all those things I'd done actually kind of right, but I'm still still horrible at it. I think The thing is to actually help managers and that's where I am today is how do we help managers be better at it? And, and in that way, I think it should be a movement. That's what I'm, I'm working on actively with online learning, learn along, read along with the book kind of programs and stuff like that. I think that it's a personal journey for a manager to learn that maybe they don't need to work so hard, worry so much and the like if they only make the right moves. Sounds like a panacea in in what way?

Pandacea 4:

00 Well, it sounds like it's too good to be true. Chat. I mentioned my corporate history. I think so many management fans went through and granted, most of them looking to control. I don't think that the agile world ever really got it right. Or it never, and maybe I don't know. I look at management 3.0 and I think there's some interesting stuff there. But how once I don't know how effective it was, you know, ultimately it never caught on. And man, in the product management world, in the product world, you know, if it manages, we've got a different, what's the word looking for? They're perceived differently, maybe they act differently, I don't know. But actually World had a particular. There's a word I'm not going to use now, the particular thing, right, for managers. And nothing ever really seemed to shift their behavior. No one could ever really empathize with them. And what you're saying here to open those, those doors for people so that they can see there is another way. You know, it just sounds too good to be true based upon my lived experience. Yeah. And I as I'm a I'm A tag on to your agile thing real quick here. You're old enough to know that the reason agile got all the publicity was because of the research done in the first five years of its life, right, Which showed that 300 to 500% improvement in project velocity and all this kind of stuff, which is absolutely true. And, and I was around back then obviously. And I, if you look at what really happened back then in those highly coached and structured agile teams, the, the two week Sprint for those teams looked like talk to the managers on day one, get work done for the next 8 working days and then talk to the managers on day 10. OK, It was the original, if you will. It's in, in our generation that the OG on management, right? It's the idea that just let people get work done and you don't need to over manage them. And I agree with you. When it rolled out into the rest of the world, everyone put it in and then didn't change what they were doing. Right now we're doing agile, but I can still go interrupt my people. Now we're doing agile. I can still change my mind on Thursday if I want them to do something different. And and so in that way, the frame that made agile so effective, which was instead of unmanagement frame just got obliterated by the fact that the the company didn't didn't want to really change. The company wanted to be adopting the fad, as he pointed out. And I, I think that that most, I wrote a couple articles on on medium, will management consultants destroy agile? Yes, they did OK, the elusive search for organizational agile. Do you really see organizational agile done in in like large scale corporations? No, everyone tried, no one succeeded. It's all gone. They killed it right. So there's this thing that for managers to change, managing has to change, and for managing to change, there's a whole bunch of other people pieces that need to change as well. But, and it's a very complex puzzle, my goal right now in life, if it's the only thing I accomplish, is to get people thinking about it right? To think about is there? How do we really need to change and can we and why should we? I love that as a goal. What it says to me is that you appreciate that this isn't something that will change in a short time. This is something that will change gradually over time if we're lucky. And for you to just want to help people think differently than yes, that's a very fantastic goal. I like that when we stay, but you want people to think differently. And you spoke about some of the the critical complex nature of organizations and the things that need to change in order for people to really embrace this. I'm assuming that you've seen lots of cultural change happen in organizations or in in project groups that to enable what you were talking about to really take hold. Yeah, we work with a range of companies. OK. And I was at Rand Corporation, the think tank, after I did all that agile stuff early in my life. And then I came out and ended up working in the agency space, advertising, marketing agencies, product, product dev shops, that kind of thing. Crazy organizations that get very quickly over managed as they grow in size, right? A50 person development or agency style organization has 1520 managers a lot of times, right? Way, way more managers. And they should really have in a sense. And and so the question is, and what we were succeeded in doing over the last, you know, decade plus is you can go in at that size of organization. And if you enroll the leadership and the idea that maybe we should be managing this whole enterprise differently, you can do it. OK. And you can think of it as a bubble, right? That fifty person bubble, even that hundred person bubble, if you get the leaders aligned, then you can actually change the structure and the nature of management and the sort of flatten the organization and better managerial behaviors and higher all the things you'd hope for higher productivity. People are happier, even the managers are happier kind of thing, right. The the challenge I think is that you were sort of alluding to earlier is is this little thing which is. If I'm in 1000 person organization and the top of the organization thinks managers should behave in the following ways, right? In other words, like are you in control of your teams? Right. And the the true honest, great manager would say, no, that's not my job. It's my team's job to be in control of their work and themselves, right? My job is to make sure they have everything they need. But in a traditional corporation, I that might get you fired, right? There's this ladder down of authority and power and the like. And, and at the end of the day, maybe it's a generational thing for us that needs to change. It needs to change and we need to get it takes the leadership enlightenment to actually make change happen inside of an organization. I think I'll, I'll leave background to the leadership part in a moment. I just want to pick up something you said, which is it's not about kind of monitoring the workers, such as making sure people have got what they need to do the work. Do you see what you're proposing in your, in your book and your practice as it be about increasing the capability of the teams and the people rather than like managing the work? Yeah, one of the things. So yeah, here's a question for you. How do you measure a manager? You know, it it struck me that if I said I was going to make better managers, right, I better have a way to measure it, right? Yeah, it can't be that I make managers happy. OK, That's not a good measure. The raw productivity I, you know, again are a lot of Times Now what they'll look at in organizations is are you creating hypo high potential people in your organization? Are you moving them forward in the like I came to the conclusion that the real way to measure a manager is by whether or not they are growing their team. And the best way, in fact that's a singular job of the manager in today's knowledge workplace is am I making my organization stronger? OK, not not because of me, but the through my actions that other people are getting stronger. And and part of this is side to this the meritocracy right now. There's I got to this managerial job because I was better than a bunch of other folks. And my job is not to stay on top, but to carry everyone else up to that level. And see, there are a couple ways to measure a manager. One is to ask the workers and say, how good is your manager and how good are they at it helping you develop your potential? And the numbers are really interesting when you do that, right? The another way I always do is I ask a manager, I say, who are your weakest people? And I'll hear answers like this. Wow, You know, I got 11 people and like, only three of them are really good. And here's what I hear when they say that I hear, well, I don't really know how to develop the other eight people. So I'm just going to lean on those three people and let the other people languish. And I can blame them for any underperformance we have. I know that's a cynical approach, but it's actually quite true. We see it all the time is that my job in becoming a manager is to become the, the shepherd, the coach, the helper, etcetera, to these people to help them become better at what they want to do. No, I, I really enjoy what you're saying now. Now I think there is, I'm hesitating because it just reminds me of conversations I've had recently with with other people about people that aren't performing. And I do remember there was a book that I read, I can't remember which one it was. It might have been the book based on the Gallup Q12. OK, The Gallup. I know, I know their work. I don't. You mean strength Finder or whatever is, is that the one? Yeah. I think that's what it might have resulted in. But originally we did this big piece of kind of meta research to find the which quote where the key, key identifiers are of an engaged workforce. And they came at this thing called the Gallup Q12. And I think it was in that book where they said you kind of have a few options when you're looking to bring people into the organization. You can either spend all the money and all the time finding the absolute best person. Or you can find the person that you, you can of the time that you've got the money you've got. And then you have two choices. You either invest in them and make them fantastic, or you pray. Yes, exactly. I, I think, or you pray and blame, right. Any manager who blames their people. I'm just like, oh, you've just told me that you're a horrible manager, right. Well, I've always remembering lots of old books I'm not going to talk about. There was another one I've said in our session, there's one good to great, which I know isn't like it's, it divides people. Some interesting stories in there. Yeah, there's one nice thing. Some are true actually, too. Yeah, some of them are true. Yeah. I found it interesting. But there was a great big quote in there about leadership badly the stands that when they looks out and says it's all their fault, a good leader takes a step back and said, we can see the rain reflection in the mirror and says, like, what have I done wrong? And I think, and that's really important that that reflective moment for leaders and managers to say actually on me a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that happens and we talk about this in the book, there's a moment the Japanese have called the BA moment BA, where they enlighten the workforce in everything about the situation. And one of the great researchers in the field, and I forget his name, but I'll give you a citation after we get off this call. He talks about one of the Japanese Motor Company executives when they were fielding the racing motorcycle. And he was trying to get the engineers to understand how to think about the motorcycle. And he took them out to a track and he had the motorcycle go past and they would watch and they would listen and feel the ground. He would show them how to feel the ground as the motorcycle went by and really feel what was going on as the motorcycle hit the curve going really fast. And so they could they could think about how to engineer the vehicle in a way that would be a winning vehicle and the like. And so this is that, you know, seeing the world through others eyes kind of thing like you're like you're saying, is that if I were going to use the window metaphor, it would be more like, let's all stand at the window and talk about what we see, right. And I'm going to use my knowledge as a leader to help you understand how I see the organization. And I'm going to use your knowledge as everyone else to under for me to understand how you see the organization. And and we grow that way. It's a very, it's, it's a thing that doesn't happen in our Western management cultures near enough or actually very much, I think. Takes your way back to systems thinking and the 5th discipline totally, totally, you know, and that the whole the inquiry and the reflection and seeing things from people's perspectives and yeah and how, you know, thinking systemically is about hearing other people's point of views, exposing your mental models, challenging each other's assumptions and finding, creating new perceptions through the combination of having things shared with you. And I think, yeah, I've always, I've always loved that. And I always thought, you know, systems thinking as a just as something to help managers understand that from think more systemically. You know, the idea of I think as a manager, I think it's very easy to just focus on the trees and not understand you're part of a forest. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I want a loop background because you kind of teased some stuff earlier talking about your starting at the top and leadership. And again, I know how difficult when you're talking about organizational change, how difficult some people find it there to start at the top to open a door and then to know actually, how do you relate to those senior leadership team members and get them to want to actually go on this change journey to really fundamentally shift the culture and the way that management is perceived and executed within that organization. I've already little tips you could share with people as to how maybe you can help open their eyes and get them motivated for the change. Well, look, I, I think that again, that that's a great, great queue up of that question because that's the little of the same thing we do. We do a workshop, which is amazing. It just is so fundamentally mind blowing the if, if I asked you, do the leaders see the organization the way same way that the doers or makers do? OK, Do they see the same organization? No, they're two different organizations, right. And so literally we do this workshop where we we and we focus around what's not working right. OK, but we bring them all together into the workshop and they all come up with their ideas. Like you were saying, they all they all come up with their perspectives. It's very systems thinking style and they talk about them and they sort out and what one of the things that happens is they start to agree on how to see a lot of the same things in different ways. And that's a, you know, one is it gets workers and makers and, and the like all engaged in terms of, wow, we're finally, I'm finally talking, right? This is my voice now, right? Which is amazing in terms of its effect. But it gets the leaders engaged and gets out of this sort of managerial or leadership myopia in which they think they understand the business. They they're usually fast moving thinkers and they, they need to understand only so much and they make a decision and usually it's a richer problem than that, right? And so they Start learning how to think of the organization and a lot more nuanced of a way. And that's, that's one of those things that we really see start cracking open the door in terms of helping managers and leaders see what's really going on inside the organization. I said it wasn't like I get it. And I agree with you. I think like I would love to see or experience that workshop. I was wondering if you were going to go with a cost element because I guess when you were talking about over management, that is really costly and management is really costly and over management gets in the way of achieving business goals. Yeah. I thought you might have gotten there with that kind of just follow the money a little bit. Well, you know, that was the original, the original title of the book, the working title was the manager Tax. It is based on a piece of, it's in section two of the book or chapter two of the book. There's a piece of research out there that won Nobel Prize. It wasn't even research. It was theory. In 1937, School of Economics, one of the two APHD student said, you know, it seems to me that managing is the greatest cost in any organization's growth. Guy named Ronald Kos won a Nobel Prize 54 years later, thank God he was still alive. And the the real premise is this is that essentially the management function both adds cost to the organization. It also reduces productivity. And the more managers you have, the less efficient managers become. And it sort of thing that a really simple example is that if I have an organization with no managers, then everyone just produces things, right? So I add a manager and now I need to divide that manager into the productivity because they don't produce anything, right? And as if I add multiple managers, now those managers are less productive because they have to deal with other managers. OK, so essentially and, and, and Coast showed essentially what amounts to a curve. That said, the yes, organizations get better as they get bigger because of scale and repetitiveness and all that kind of thing. But he he said this funny thing. He said, if that's true, why isn't there just one big company? He said, but when I look at almost any industry, there are big companies for sure, but there are a lot of medium sized companies and they're way more tiny companies. OK, so that says something happens that in all of that and it turns out and she got a Nobel Prize for the idea that the increase in cost and size of management, the manager tax is what ultimately limits the size of a company. OK. And so your question is how add into that how efficient you are at being a manager also, right? And so there I have like 7 different forms of the manager tax and the like. And it's kind of a dark subject because it makes you want to, you know, I an economist when I worked at Rand Corporation, the think tank, for a bunch of years, one of my running buddies, Dave Lauchran, where he said, you know, a policy macro economist. And, and I said, Dave, do you ever think you should just stay home? And he laughed. And the the joke was this is that, you know, Dave will do some research and publish it, and policy makers will read it and, and, and go, OK, well, then we'll allocate $15 billion this way, right? And that kind of thing. And Dave's response would be, yeah, but it was just a piece of research. I mean, it may be wrong. OK. And in a sense, you know, there could be $15 billion policy decisions that should have never been made and maybe they should just paid him to go home and, and not spend the money. And I, I think that that's the challenge around managing is that how do you go in there and do no harm, right? How do you go in and not decrease productivity or minimize your manager tax? It reminds me of a part of your book where you talk about the like the the alternatives, like a daily standard with the team and the managers. And actually there was very interesting kind of what you discovered. Would you mind sharing that little story with us? Oh yeah, yeah, this. So yeah, that's right. I know what you're talking about now. So the the the managers seem to think here's here's the problem. And I highlight with the story, it's pretty early in the book. Managers seem to think that the managerial interaction is more important than the worker action, right. In other words, like I'm a manager, so it must be important. And therefore I, my, my needs preempt any other needs in the organization because we need to be managing right. And and this by the way, is absolutely incorrect because the organization functions by producing, not managing right. So you think about the organization's organization that produces things and tries to minimize the amount of managing because managing and producing are opposites, if you will. So stand up meeting, just like all your listeners probably know stand up meeting. And we have this multi project, you know, large team, thirty person stand up meeting with a bunch of managers in it. And suppose I'm a manager who has new information. OK, like overnight I got an e-mail from the client, I have some new information. When do I tell the team this information? OK, now most managers would say, well, I'm going to tell them at the beginning of the stand up meeting. And because why? Because it's important, because I need them to have the information and because I'm manager and I, I, I want to speak first, right? All all kinds of reasons, right. We got, we'd worked with about 5050 companies or so. And, and I noticed something one day when someone did that and I felt like the meeting got really fuzzy all of a sudden. And so I went back to our other coaches. We had our internal meetings and I, I asked them, I said, what do you think about when managers should put new information in? And we, we debated it. We had a couple clients we were working with at the same time doing, doing that kind of our special stand up training. I said, let's play with that a little bit, OK. And we did an experiment, which is we had, we took turns having managers bring in new information at the beginning or bring it in at the end. And then we did serve qualitative assessments. We watch these teams all, you know, the agile coaching thing, you can tell what's going on inside the team. Well, so it turns out it was a short lived experiment. It was like one of those, you know, when you've got a drug that that cures cancer in babies or something like that, and you've got the placebo group, you know, after a while you just stop with the placebo group, give it to everyone, you know, that kind of thing. And we went for about two weeks and we said, no, just stop. This is cruel. It turns out that managers should wait. And it's very interesting why, But managers should wait until largely till the end of the conversation in the stand up meeting, because the stand up meeting is about planning. It's about people putting a plan together in their head. And so a manager would reply and say, well, I'm just trying to give them the information to plan. Well, we humans are far more complex than that. And we actually show up into a meeting like that with a plan in our head already, OK. And so if I, all my people show up and they've kind of got their plans and they've talked through them and all that kind of thing, and everyone's all settled, but what the day's going to look like. It's more efficient for me to drop in new information in a completed plan and let people replan than it is to scramble plans by throwing information in the beginning. Just light years different. I mean, literally like almost no impact in meeting duration and focus if I do it at the end and massive impact and, and in duration and focus if I do at the beginning. This is one of those things where you've and, and there are like how many of these decisions are there in a day? Like when do I interject? How do I interject? All that kind of thing. Management can be if I think I do the math in there and it's like, you know, doing it wrong was costing like 4 worker days per month or something like that. I mean, a big, a big difference by just doing a little thing, right? I think it's a paradox of unmanaging is sometimes you need to manage, but more important is when do you manage to think about the personal journey for managers here, right? And I mean, everyone's context is a little bit different here, but I can imagine some people here and that saying, well, do you know what? I know I've got these people. I just can't, I just can't step back. I just can't all of a sudden trust them because, you know, they're just not capable. And I know maybe that is my fault here or there's something going on systemically which means that they're not capable. But all this sounds great, but I can't just step back. What would you say to managers who or people who support managers who are thinking that? Well, I think the, there's a difference and, and again, I, the title of the book is provocational, right? I mean, I, I don't mean we don't need managers. What I think we need managers that know how to essentially engage in such a way that, that minimizes their impact on team productivity, in fact enhances team productivity, right? And individual productivity, one of the key things that managers need to do is master the use of questions rather than statements. Yeah, so I can come in and say, hey, here's you guys need to do this, this and that, and what are you going to do about X? And you know, that kind of thing. But that's all very directive. Even though I gave you a few questions in there, right? I can come in with another posture and say, all right, what do you guys need today to get things done? And how are you going to do that and, and really mean it and say, look, why don't you guys explain to me what's going on and how can I be of help in this situation? And do you think you guys think you have enough to get things done? Whatever. But I can literally lead it with the you got this handled or not, right? And what happens when we do that, when we let someone know that they have a chance to go take control and drive it, they will. I mean, that's it's the bravest job in the world, by the way, to be working for you. If you're, you know, reporting to you as a manager, right? Because you're coming in every day hoping that you can just get work done right? And, and a lot of times managers inadvertently interfere with that. But if I come in as a manager and say, I know you want to get a lot of work done today and do the right thing and all that kind of thing, what is it I need to do to help you? Who do I need to keep out of your face? Who do I need to what do we need to not do today to enable you to get something done? That's my job is to to protect you, if you will. Picking up kind of a coaching servant leadership vibes. Yeah, we we use a thing called the ACE model. Authority, control, empowerment. OK, the the thing you don't want to do as a manager is the control piece. The authority piece looks like this needs to get done by Friday and we tell me if we can't, but it needs to get done by Friday and we'll figure it out. If you think it can't, empowerment is the coach piece, right? What do you need from me? What do we need to change to make this doable? The control piece I passed to them and I say, and this is very agile, by the way, right OK, here, here's what I get done during the Sprint, right. How are you going to do it right get it done, that kind of thing. And literally that shift makes people causes people doesn't make them it causes them to step up to the problem solving challenge and, and and claim the work claim ownership of the work take responsibility. Just keep an eye on the time. And we haven't got a lot of allotted time left. And what I'm fearing, Jack, is that you're, you're, you've got such a deep experience in all of this, right? And you're extremely intelligent. I'm not blowing smoke up your eyes. So I think you are, I think your book is beautifully worded. It's, it's rich. There's so much in there, you know, and I think trying to cover, I don't know, even the essence of it, right in 45 minutes is tough. So I'm going to do something I hate doing, but I want to make sure that that people listening kind of get the most on this right. You like you're so connected to this work. Is this book is a big part of your life and you're sure we've been on some podcasts and things in the past. What question is it that people don't ask you about the book or about the approach that you wish they did? That's that's very good. That's a very good question. I think the thing that everyone does ask and, and should be asking, and a lot of people don't, which is how, how do I do a baby step here? How do I take little steps? And I, I tried to do that in the book. Again, it's a, it's, it's there. I overemphasize telling the why behind all these things and the like. And I've got four sections where I, I talked about here's how to do a basic stand up in a lot better for way. Here's a way to do the BA technique, that kind of thing. I think it's baby steps. I I think the thing that they probably should be asking also is how do I change me? This is my answer to your question. If, if I really believe in what you're saying, I'm going to need to detangle my need for being in control from my managerial behaviors, right? And how do I change me? How do I change my mindset at at how how to think about these things and and how do I learn to sort of lean back and be brave, OK, rather than be leaning forward and being afraid sort of thing. The typical manager behavior if it's an internal journey, and that's why I started, you know, describing my journey that way, which is I got lucky, right, I got lucky and I just got annoyed with managers right and then didn't want to be one. OK, there are a lot of most managers out there like the idea that they're manager, but what they've seen of managing isn't the right way to do it. So you've, there's got to be a mind shift there. What's been the biggest success or and if not a success, the the one engagement, the one story that you're most proud of on this journey? Yeah, I have it in there in some of the later chapters. A agency in Australia, Dan is the the CEO and he brought us in 30 people, 30-40 people. And they had, they didn't have a, a ton of structure in the organization, but they had, you know, half dozen managers or something like that. And, and Dan loved what we were talking about and that kind of thing. He said, come in and do the training and all that kind of thing. And usually we spread it out over several months so they can adopt pieces of it all that kind of thing. He said, no, no, no, we've got a little lull in the business here and let's do it all in May. I was like, sure. OK, so we, we, you know, I spent and I used to spend a lot of time in Australia. I love Australia, so we were there for me and a couple folks for four or five weeks training them and practicing and everything like that. We get done and I found out later, Dan said to the team. He said OK, great, we've got the training. I'm thinking we'll we'll start doing it at the end of the year. The team said no, we're not doing it at the end of the year, we're doing it now. And if you don't want to do it with the stand, we're just going to do it. And, and Dan got overruled by the team seeing how great they could be working in this way. And Dan said, OK, fine, have it your way. And they, they love it, OK. And they've, they've been running that way for, you know, half a decade at least. And I, I thought it was an interesting sort of mix of those things where, you know, they've got the leader coming in with a vision of, Hey, maybe this would be cool thing to do. And then the team saying, it's so cool, we're not going to pay attention to you as a leader and, and we're going to take leadership here. And then the leader being brave enough to say, sounds good. I can go back to doing cool stuff and you guys can run the organization. And I, I think that's the, it's those sorts of transformations where you just, it sort of blows your mind. I never would have seen that coming where it blows your mind to see how people, how organizations can change. When you you take away a few of these things, it's interesting. And I mean, that's often the problem. What you're talking about is the story of motivation that they were motivated to want to go make for change. You were giving them a solution to a problem that they could perceive as real and painful enough to an accident immediately. There's a model for change called the trans theoretical model. Probably two people don't know that one. Yeah, interesting. By by by a Procaster and de Clemente. And it is like a piece of yeah, no, the five stage model of change. Yeah, yeah. So when Yeah. And starts with with pre contemplation and contemplation. Yeah. Don't they use that all the time? It's a great model. Yeah, yeah, yeah. TTCM is much easier to say than the trans theoretical. But I mean, if I ever want to sound completely British, I always say the trans theoretical model by procrastin Dick Clemente. I think it's a very precious beautiful. That's very sexy. Yeah. Oh, thank you. But yeah, it talks about pre contemplation and pre contemplation, no one's going to change. But if they don't perceive a problem to the whatever solution you're suggesting and it takes something to put people into contemplation. And it's like great question they've posed, which is how quickly do you want to solve this problem? How quickly do you want to put something into effect? And if they say anything other than like next couple of weeks, you can say great, just give me a call when you're ready because people need to be ready for a change because they won't happen. Another great thing they say there and it's lovely to hear they've been doing it for half a decade. This company in Australia which is never never mistake changing for change. Because I think we all too often can take the foot off because I've changed my behavior or that manager changed their behavior and we think the change is done, but the change is far from done at that point. Now that's they're still good for the process of change. I think they're they, if I read this stuff a couple years ago and haven't gone back to it, but we use it as part of our structure. But I think they'd said something like more than half the cost of a change is in sustaining the change. Yeah, Right. Yeah. I mean, that's the hard part. Yeah, exactly. That's the really hard part. And yeah, it's a great book. The book circle change for good. If anyone looked up on Amazon, it's a really, it's an interesting book. My neighbor recommended it to me because she was doing work years ago, the NHS on cessation of smoking. And that's the model they use for cessation of smoking, which is quite, quite well received, worked quite well here in the United Kingdom. Now I've got this. I would love to explore this in more depth. But Jack, we're kind of running out of time, man, which is sad, sad time. If people, let's say, if people, people listening when people, when people check out your book, because everyone listening, please do honestly go and find Jack's book. Where can they get hold of a copy of it? Amazon, which, you know, we, we sell at other places, but nobody buys it anywhere but Amazon these days. So it's kind of a sad comment on the book industry. It is it is really sad, but I will we will put a link to to the book on Amazon into the show notes. If people want to learn more about you, Jack or your company, where can they go? I think the best thing these days is go to LinkedIn, connect with me if you want to have a conversation. Happy to get on a call with you. There is also a book website calledunmanagedbook.com and we're doing, we're watching this book seminar thing where you can read along with me kind of thing and and that kind of thing. And of course, agency agile.com, which is the the consultancy that we've done and built all this stuff in inside of over the last 15 years. Fantastic, Jack. I've been really looking forward to today then, because this is amazing, simply amazing. You say very kind things. I hope I'm guessing bollocks. You know what? I Yeah, I find it hard to take. I find out good. I do, apparently. Yeah. Yeah, I did. I did the podcast of conferences. As I'm interviewing speakers before and after their talks and the conference organisers always say to them, So what the hell do you say to them that they come down to at the best time? They feel really relaxed. They've loved it. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. I think they're just being polite. So I don't know, I don't know. But if you listen to this and you're wondering what is this experience like, drop me a dim on LinkedIn. Maybe we can get you on the podcast. Maybe you can. You've got you've got a lot of style to you and it's it's great and it makes it, you know, the your brain is you've got some nonlinearity to you. And just in my opinion, I've just. And that's a beautiful thing. OK, That's a beautiful thing. Yeah. I think that's the nicest way anyone's ever put in. So thank you for that, Jack. Jack is an absolute. We also have drugs for that by the way, too. Yes. Yeah, well, we're we're we started talking about the doors of perception. What I saw doors was a great book before the podcast recordings and no, but you can look up listeners, everyone. Thank you very much for listening. Think of something that you have really enjoyed about this episode. There's some of the mid light bulb came come on for you go on to LinkedIn, write a post tag Jack tag the podcast too if you like, but let other people know. The more that you share the great wisdom and insights we get from our guests in this podcast, the more popular we become. The more popular we become, the more I can carry on doing this because I was looking at the LinkedIn podcast industry and two really great product podcasts have stopped in the last three months seemingly and there is and there and as much as new people are trying to the market. I have seen some podcasts I didn't think would, yeah, we're going to kind of demise. They're not around anymore. And I think that's a great pity. And I don't want it to be the same because, yeah, I need, I want to carry on doing this. And the more you share, the more you let people know about it. You know what? It's just an ego thing. It just keeps you motivated. There's a financial reimbursement for followers on LinkedIn. And so at least not yet anyway. Jack, thank you very much for coming on the show. It's been fantastic. And everyone, thank you very much for listening. And we'll be back again next week with somebody else. So, yeah, have a great week. And this has been the Productivity Podcast. Thank you for listening.

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