Woody Zuill: The Best Leader Is the One Who Leads Without Authority

Richard:

What were some of these behaviors again? I mean, you hinted at these ideas, like we need to be considerate and respectful, and so on but what did it look like? What were the behaviors that happened?

Woody:

So there is probably a million of these behaviors, I should say probably way over a million. So if somebody were write a book like the 26 Techniques of Leadership, you know, that’s just completely bogus. Don’t buy those books. I would say if the book says 26 techniques every leader should know, the first one is, don’t read books about 26 techniques every leader should know, because a real leader, we all are leaders. We all have to be leaders because on a team, because we are, you know, like back to a sport, if the ball is available to you in playing basketball and you don’t know what to do with it, you know, you’re actually leading the moment at that moment. And you’re watching for who else you’re going to pass the ball to. So we’re doing this kind of different levels of leadership all the time. So what just really good example would be, one team member was really good at noticing that somebody else wanted to talk, but didn’t take the opportunity to, because maybe at the same moment, someone else started speaking and they deferred to that person. Now, if we see that as a pattern, this person will always defer to this other person or to someone else or to the whole team then, and somebody’s paying attention to that. They can say something like this, you know, Mary, it looked like you had something you wanted to share, I do still want to share it? And that gives Mary an opportunity say, no, it’s been covered or to say, yeah, I’d like to share this. And it also tells the rest of the team just quit talking and listen to Mary. And so this is something that others, when we see that behavior happen, we can go, hey, that was really good to see happen. And we might not catch it the first time. In my life I had seen that with other, what I would consider team members in other teams. And so I learned that behavior modeling their behavior cause I’m more impatient, and I would say easily frustrated than a lot of people. I tend to try to be too efficient in those situations. And yeah, we don’t want to hear the voice that is always insistent that it’s heard, we want to hear all voices. So the reverse can be true as well, you know, if there’s somebody who’s always talking too much, how are we going to make sure they’re not talking too much? What is the behavior we would do there? So to co-lead or co-elevate each other, one of the things we did on the team was, if we notice somebody was really well tuned into to ourselves, they could become kind of our buddy and pointing out to us in a quiet way afterwards, hey, did you notice you hurt their feelings? Or did you notice that you didn’t give them a chance to talk? We have to be willing to accept that kind of a feedback and we have to be willing to act on that kind of feedback, even if we don’t think it was correct. You know, rather than saying no, no, no, that’s not what happened, we’d say thank you for that. So there’s lots of, so being considerate means being willing to hear those things is also means be willing to hear from others. if I’m considerate of the information I’m getting from another team member, that means I’m going to take it to heart and not attempt to dismiss it. Well, that’s a tough thing to do. At the end of the day, when it comes down to is we need to maintain our self-esteem. And if our teammates are not good at maintaining their teammates self-esteem, we are going to have a team that’s not going to operate very well. And some people will stop talking, they’ll stop contributing, or they will contribute in a much more direct manner, that is abrasive. There’s lots of techniques for decision-making. Not everybody needs to be part of every decision. So as a team, you know, like there’s a coach maybe, the coach is able to see things nobody else on the team can see. So there are other ways to get this happening. I think a coach is a good thing or individuals on the team taking that role. So these are some techniques we can use. if I can write a book with all the techniques I’ve been exposed to and think are worth using it would be a lifelong rest of my life. Hopefully my rest of my very long life attempt to do this, it’s just, I read books as you can see, I’m very fond of reading books about teamwork and there’s lots of contradictory stuff in there. I just read a great book just before the one earlier this week, I read two books this week. I get to do that sometimes. And this one’s called Unstoppable Teams by a Navy Seal. So Navy Seal is not a mascot. A Navy Seal is somebody who’s got massive skills of certain types of missions. So it was really, it’s a pretty good book about how can you have a really great team. And this is part of that, you know. Any team member, anybody on the team who wants to get better, who wants to make things better, there’s no end to how to make it better. So leading without authority, unstoppable teams, almost everything I read any more about teams confirm some of this, so I get to have my biases confirmed. I’m careful to read opposing views as well. I purposely try to read opposing views as well.

Richard:

Which is hard because these days when we go to the bookstore, which might have a name that starts with, hey, it’s going to give us things that confirm our biasses.

Woody:

Yeah, and that’s, you know, the trouble with confirmation bias is that we will do a bias search for information. Not just interpreting, so that’s another thing is we will interpret it in a biased manner. And the worst part of all this is, we our memories are biased. So memories, as far as for what I be able to read, they’re not like the truth, they’re how we’ve painted the truth. So it looks like something we want to see. So whenever you hear somebody say that won’t work because we tried that last year. Yeah, you’ve painted that last year’s experience in a biased manner. you’ve already destroyed the usefulness of that. So I’ve got, I’m always careful. The first thing I say in any workshop or any presentation I do is a quote from Peter Block. I hope I get it exactly correctly, but he says, “Other people’s experiences are there to give us hope, not to tell us how or whether to proceed.” And so this is brilliant. So I got to say, you know, I have, she will share, I’m looking from this, at this stuff from my point of view. And I’d like the rest of everyone else. I have confirmation bias, I have the funnel attribution error. I have all of the same problems that every human has. I cannot see things clearly, I will see, you know, if I picked up a piece of toast, sure. I could see a religious figure burnt into the toast. Because even though it’s not really there, this is a human nature. We see patterns that the data doesn’t actually exist. So yeah, I’m as biased as anyone else I try not to be. And I warn people that I am, that’s the best I can do.

Richard:

And that’s, that’s one of the things I love about you. And I’m sure a lot of people love about you is honesty, modesty, humility. And just, just a statement like that one you just shared with us is a great example of that.

Woody:

Well you’ve made my day, and now I really feel bolstered and proud. That’s that’s one of the problems, right. But it’s what teamwork’s about, right now we are a team of two. And if you weren’t able to get me to say some things that might be interesting to your audience, this wouldn’t be a very good matchup. so even a noticing in that in me, I got an email earlier from somebody, I want to mention the name, a message. I think maybe in Twitter, a private message from Jim McCarthy. I know who Jim McCarthy is, right?

Richard:

I do

Woody:

Yeah. And so whenever I get a message from him, it makes me feel really good. Any message I get from him makes me feel really good. Whether it’s telling me something that I need to improve about myself, or if it’s telling me something, he likes about what I’m doing, those are the people we want on our team. Now we’ve never really worked together, but there’s this other team, right of everybody we know and everybody we communicate with. What if we could co elevate each of us every chance we get this would be at least a slightly better world. Hopefully a lot better world.

Richard:

Okay, so now that we’re mentioning Jim McCarthy, and I think before we press the record button, and we were talking about protocols for joining a team or protocols that happened when you’re on a team, I don’t know, advice for listeners and viewers. What advice would you have? Are there any, you know, I just biased you by saying, what about protocols, but anything that you think people ought to could do to have a team that is like that team we’ve been talking about?

Woody:

So I’m going to go back to a book that Jim McCarthy wrote, I think in 1995, The Dynamics of Software Development, you’re familiar with that book probably. He actually did a talk of that, which was a couple hours long that got broken up into 20 smaller talks, and I’m pretty sure you still find it online. And although much of what he did then, I think was pre-agile thinking. And I think that a lot of this stuff we moved forward, I’m going to share one that I kind of, it has a silly name to it. And it’s like, don’t flip the bozo bit. What that means is no matter what your first impressions are or that at any point, not just for first impressions, if you shut off the value of someone else in your own brain and say, nah, that person’s usually got bad ideas, you’ll lose a huge value out of the people that you’re working with or the people that you know. So, you know, we internally have to have, and I’ve kept that one with me over the years, because I know for myself, when I used to manage things a lot, I was always trying to be too efficient about getting things done, and that means I’m racing towards the idea, I think already will work. And I’m looking for the things that’ll support, that’s a kind of confirmation bias. We want to believe the things we want to believe or already do believe. So as far as the protocols go, listening is like the big one. Your mom probably used to say this, but of course, I’m assuming that you had a mom, but mothers, when I was a kid used to say, you know, why you have two ears and one mouth, you know, that’s just an old saying, and it really on a team, you know, we have to have 15 years to the one mouth we need to hear more than we speak. So the protocol should be, you know, from Stephen Covey’s book, Strive to Understand not to be Understood, that’s the protocol or that’s one of the fundamental bits. So, you know, I, and, and we, again, we can write a book on this. It would take the rest of our careers, all the techniques we can use are ever evolving. And then the list of ones we think are active and useful today that’s ever evolving. The techniques themselves are evolving and which ones we will use is evolving. So McCarthy’s protocols, I think are quite useful and I have seen them used and I’ve been involved in using them a few times, but in a typical team, we innately kind of know, it’s like the modern idea of the golden rule, which is treat people the way they want to be treated, not the way you want to be treated, which was probably about the same at a fundamental level. We need to figure these things out. So the very best teams I’ve been on probably are the ones who could put up with me the best. It’s like they had those skills to be able to say, yeah, like get what he’s a crackpot, but he’s got a few good things there. So let’s keep this team, you know, active. Yeah, don’t flip the bozo bit is just one. I really liked all of everything, he wrote, Jim. I hopefully he gets a chance to hear this. I’ve told him that before, I’ve recommended his book, like endless times.

Richard:

Yeah.

Woody:

And Michelle as well, Michelle is his wife.

Richard:

I was rereading some notes from some, some stuff I teach or talk about sometimes, and I use that quote, the reason we have two ears and one mouth, and I attributed it, you know, I have it in square brackets in my notes, I attribute it to unknown. But now I’m going to change that, now I’m going to say it, and I can put in the square quotes your mother.

Woody:

So whoever first said, it probably was a woman. I hate to say it, but gosh, guys, we got to step up quite a bit here. One thing that I often hear on teams is somebody will say, I just said that, okay. When somebody says, I just said that, we have to recognize two things. Yeah, you might have, but not everybody hears everything that’s getting said, but on the other hand, some of us are purposefully tuning out some people or everyone or whatever. So yeah, when we hear these cues, I’ve watched for like, if I’m with a team and I want to be with them, let’s say a few days, I’m there to help them improve. One of the techniques that I use is I start keeping notes of how many times any particular word is used. So if we hear meetings and then I hear meetings again and meetings, get them in, then it go, I better keep track of this and see how many times we say meetings. And then I’ll watch for, it will be anything that they will repeat that seems to be an indication that that’s something we need to pay attention to. So yeah, just shutting up is what I often do when I’m in those situations. Cause I want to hear what they will expose without too much being tainted, cause I happened to be there. My friend that’s a big problem as someone who’s trying to help others because that’s sort of my place right now is I get asked to come in and help others, is that your presence is this, that cat?

Richard:

Yeah, it’s like the Schrodinger-

Woody:

Schrodinger’s cat, yeah. It’s like, you don’t know, as some scientists would say, the cat isn’t alive or dead until you can see. So, you know, when you’re there, it’s everything has changed.

Richard:

Yeah, they’re actually observing changes, what you’re observing, yeah.

Woody:

So whoever said that originally, I would like to give them attribute that to them. I really love the idea though, of being asked to come and help, cause that’s a special demand in a way. I was asked to come in and help a team. This main job was to at certain times, was to resolve a field incident. So if something happens in the field, they had to quit production. So that means this product lines would stop and they would have to determine what was his failure? Was it somebody broke something because of they misused it, was it a manufacturing problem? Was it a design problem? Was it a, this part’s been around too long. What caused it until they could determine the cause, and if it needed a solution, they couldn’t start making that stuff again. This was in the medical field. That they would even ask me to come there was wonderful. And it didn’t take me long to see what the real problem was. And that was, they weren’t working as a team. I don’t know how well they did after, you know, I was there, but it was fun for me to see that they called themselves a team, but they weren’t working as a team. So this happens a lot in this wasn’t software, but in engineering and software. A lot of times people are on the fill in the blank team. We’re on the front end team. We’re on the feature team for this feature, we’re on the whatever. And they got that team on the end of it. But they don’t act as a team. They don’t do anything that we would recognize as teamwork.

Richard:

Yeah, what would you say are the characteristics of something that would really be a team? Not just a word with the word team after it, or a group of people who happen to have been assigned to a group with this title blank and the word team after. what would-

Woody:

Team work is about actually doing the work as a team. So if we call ourselves a team and we meet occasionally, and then we go do the work alone, that’s one indication. But you know, again, I’ve used too many sports analogy. I’ve never, I ran track in high school, which is about the least team oriented sport you can find because everybody is doing, they’re trying to get their individual best for some specific event, but still it’s a team sport. And I can explain about that a little bit if you want. But the thing is like with basketball, you can see if he’s on that court over there and you’re on this court over here, you’re not a team at that moment. So we really need to be doing the same thing together. So that’s the starting spot for me. Now, sometimes a team member needs to go do something else for the team to continue to progress, that makes sense. As soon as a team has other duties than what the team is trying to achieve, I would say, I feel would feel very much less that we have a team. Now, there are time we need that. And we talked about this before we start recording the idea of being able to gather really quickly and being effective as a team. That’s probably an important thing for the future, but there are certain benefits about being a team that kind of mindfulness you can get as a team. And if you really are improving as a team, so this would be things like we, we have, we’re building a team memory of the work that we’ve done. We now, as a team can notice patterns. You can never notice patterns if you don’t see a multiples of something, I often will hold up. Like, you know, workshop. I might hold up something like as pen and say, what is the pattern here? And if anyone offers a pattern, I say, but you haven’t even seen the second thing I’m going to hold up.

Richard:

There’s a slightly different one of those.

Woody:

They are slightly, so the pattern here is maybe black felt writing implements, but what if I held up this, now what’s the pattern. So we don’t know the pattern until we’ve seen several of something. When we divide the word cup, we’re not sharing the same context and we don’t see the patterns. So part of a team is that we are now increasing our ability to see patterns and any good team I’ve worked on we get to better results quickly cause we have that shared memory. Have you ever had it like this, where somebody has gone, you know, like you, you went out to movies and, you remember the days when we used to go out to movies and, you know, afterwards, and somebody goes, you know, that guy in this movie reminds me of that guy in that other movie.

Richard:

And you are oh yeah, that guy.

Woody:

The one that wore a red dress, that really tall guy that wore a red dress in the movie. And then somebody else said, yeah, that was this person. So the team memory will bring it together. Matter of fact, here’s an exercise, maybe some people can try sometime. Get a really difficult crossword puzzle and have some people do it alone and have some other people do it as a team. If you integrate the ones who worked alone, to work later is will never give you the results. I’ve seen this, I’ve done it a few times. I’ve seen a team able to do a crossword puzzle that any one of us might take three or four hours to do go really difficult one, no, nobody’s allowed to look it up on their phone that takes the fun out. They get it done in 30 minutes or 15 or 20 minutes. It just goes rapid fire, when we do it as a team where we’re actually all working on this together. Not, you work on those, the odd numbers, I’ll work on the even numbers are breaking the work up in any arbitrary manner. It’s worth a little experiment to try.

Richard:

Really good experiments, really good demo of teamwork versus individuals working in their each other.

Woody:

Yeah, so, you know, agile, I think this is why agile came about. I don’t know, but this is sort of like, I believe from reading the agile manifesto and the principles. They understood that a great deal of what we were doing was not in software development in say the nineties was not effective because people were not working on the same thing at the same time. So we might work on the same thing, but I’m working on it six months before you’re working on it cause I’m running some requirements and six months later, you’re working on it by writing the code, and maybe I’m even put on a different project. So you can’t really easily even communicate with me. I’ve had to where you have to get to your boss to go to someone else’s boss, to get permission, to get an hour, to talk to someone who’s working on something else now. So that’s like introducing a lot of queuing and waste. So a team can communicate in real time because of working on the same thing at the same time. Now, nowadays we are often remotely, but being in the same space and Alistair Coburn used to, he shared a lot about this in those earlier days of agile and preamble, about how being co-located, it really ups our chance of being able to communicate well and quickly. And then by doing the things like rapid delivery, trying to deliver things as soon as you can, all of this. So I think that that’s what agile was about, was what’s this concept, you know, that team has people are working on the same thing at the same time, in the same space. And of course, for us, Mob Programming just added and we’re sitting at the same computer looking at the same screens. This really proves that we are focused on this together. And then the gaps in understanding get filled automatically. The ability to go directly from start to finish is now possible. It’s not possible if I have to send an email to someone else. If I have to send an email to someone I’ve entered a queue, and that queue is when I can get a response from them. And then I have to send them back and they’ll say, oh, you didn’t understand my question. And then say, yes, I did you’re an idiot. You know, as that goes back and forth, pretty soon, their boss is on the email and then their boss’ boss is on the email. So we have to start ending our boss. And it’s like, it turns into a nightmare.

Richard:

And imagine if we’re in different times, you know, we can’t communicate with each other until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Woody:

Yeah, it often is a two day round trip. If you’re working with someone in a far enough away time zone, this is something I don’t know how to fix. I’ve suggested I have a fix, but nobody seems to take me seriously. What if we just use the same time zone everywhere in the world, it’s always noon everywhere, whatever. Then we don’t have this problem.

Richard:

It’s a good idea and I did this once. We were working with a couple of developers in Belarus, and they changed their work time zone to match us in Boston. And they thought it was awesome. They could wake up really late, they could do, they could go to the bank or the grocery store, whatever they needed to do in the morning. And they liked staying up late at night. They just worked in our work time zone.

Woody:

Well that now you’re bringing up a good point. Cause I had this exactly with a team in China and know I’m in the Pacific coast and then the team in China, I don’t know exactly how far apart we were, but basically about when my recollection is about when they were at the end of there, I mean, when we were the end of our day, they were at the beginning of, theirs and a vice versa. And so I just flipped my hours and I worked their hours.

Richard:

I did this once too, oh jeez, I forgot about this, I did it, I worked with a team in Finland and they weren’t going to change their time zone to mine. There were two, there were like 20 or 30 of them. I would wake up at three o’clock Boston time in the morning and work with them for a couple hours and take a nap and come back and work with them some more, you know cause I was tired waking up at three in the morning. Yeah, we’ve done this, yeah. That’s a thing that works.

Woody:

There have been people experimenting with the idea of at around the globe team that there are enough people that there’s always somebody going off the team and always somebody coming on the team.

Richard:

Oh gee, you know, do you know what Judy Race.

Woody:

I might but remind me.

Richard:

She’s well-known for clean language, I think it was Trudy. I had her as a guest on the podcast and she told the story of working BBC, I think, and her news editing team did this. They overlapped enough, the editors were always talking to each other, they had a 24 hour team memory.

Woody:

So that 24 hours, this could be compared to a mission like a space mission or something like that because you don’t say, oh, it’s the end of the day, everybody go home and the guys fly their space shuttle down and go to home. And then they go off, take off the next day. It’s like, everybody stays where they are. We rotate some of who’s doing work during those hours. And that means we have to have people, you know, around the clock doing this, you know, for myself, I like to experiment with things. And I think that we can alleviate some of this. I’ve had teams I’ve worked with when I was in Brazil and working with people on the Pacific coast, which I think is four or five hours off from each other. Just somebody’s got to adjust their time and it’s that’s okay. So, but if a team doesn’t do that, then now we have to ask ourselves, are we introducing problems we don’t even know yet. And we want to think that we can solve these. Here’s a secret to all of you doing whatever work you’re doing. Most of the time when we try to solve problems, we are actually addressing symptoms. But even when we identify the problem, usually today’s solution introduces tomorrow’s problem. So yeah, being focused on solving problems, I think that’s faulty. I think we need to be focused on what’s working well and how do we get more of that? And if we can do that, then we get, I think my experience and remember I’m as biased as anyone. I think we get a better result. This is something that I’ve seen happening and I would love to hear what other people are experimenting with that, there’s a whole psychology to it and there’s a positive psychology and other things that are related.

Richard:

Yeah.

Woody:

So, yeah.

Richard:

And in my teaching notes, it’s turn up, the good is all in the square brackets.

Woody:

Well, thank you. So, you know, I kind of got that, the idea, the way I share it now I kind of got from Kent Beck. So you can put what he’s old and kept back. In reality I recall this from my childhood and seeing people operated this way. It’s like, we’re watching for what we’re already getting that’s good. Can we get more of that? Yeah, you know, and I like to think of that. What is it all over twist or what was the book where the kid asks for a Copperfield, David Copperfield, I dunno one of those books where they kid goes, you know, more porridge please or whatever, it’s like that’s naturally built into it. Let’s just ask for more and do our best to always turn up the good. Yeah, instead of saying, you know, let’s solve the problems. Matter of fact managers out there, I think the misplaced focus of management is to always be looking for the problems to solve and thinking that’s where our efforts are best put. So if you want to tip, think that through and maybe just to experiment with trying to get more of the good that you still have to, like, if the servers are down in your massive social media application, everyone in the world uses, you better focus on that problem right now. But maybe it’s possible if you’d focused on the good for the last 15, 20 years, you may never have these problems. So yeah, the famous paper from the MIT professors, Sturman and Repenning, nobody ever gets credit for solving problems that didn’t happen. That is a fantastic paper to read. It’s still available as far as I know, you can get it online without having to go behind a paywall or whatever, great paper they basically are saying, you know, we incentivize the problem solving. We basically are always working harder rather than working smarter. Let’s learn how to work smarter and I think a big part of that is, is turn up the good.

Richard:

Yeah, all right.

Woody:

Well, I think we’ve covered like 20 subjects.

Richard:

We’ve talked about a lot and this is great, this is great. I have another question. And even though we’ve covered so many subjects, this is a very open question. Is there anything else that you want to add? Any projects you’re working on, anything you want people to know about? What else about, about what you’re doing?

Woody:

So if I’m promoting myself here, I do workshops on Mob Programming and I occasionally do workshops on no estimates and sometimes on refactoring although I think there are some really great people out there to do the refactoring. I do kind of rudimentary refactoring, but it’s a good introduction, but in a bigger sense, everybody that I’ve worked with, every place I’ve been, they already have it within them to become better and to become great, and so I encourage everybody, like don’t think there’s some secret formula out there that you just need to get the right trainer. And then you’re going to, that’s what’s going to solve it for you. It’s already built into you, your manager types and whatever leaders, make sure your teams are given that opportunity to become their own leaders. And you who can’t even get that into company in your at. Let’s learn how to lead without authority, how we can make things better without having the authority to make things better. Don’t do in a way that you lose your job, please. I’ve heard from three people who followed some advice I gave, or some of the things I was sharing did end up getting fired. So, don’t, that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. Matter of fact, everybody who listens to me, probably is going to get end up getting fired. So don’t listen to me.

Richard:

Don’t do it.

Woody:

So there you go, so you’ll already have it in you. You’re all certified experts. You just maybe don’t yet have the awareness of that. So please don’t think there’s some secret knowledge that you’re missing out on.

Richard:

And how can people get in touch with you? What’s one of the best ways to get in contact with what Woody Zuill?

Woody:

So really easy is LinkedIn. If you connect with me in LinkedIn, I’ll connect with you back or in Twitter, if you don’t want to do that kind of thing. I don’t hand out my email anymore just casually, because now my email system is so clogged with stuff that I can’t even see when something reasonable comes in. So yeah, Twitter is really good, and I think he LinkedIn’s even better cause you can connect up, send me private messages. I will always connect with everybody who, but if you don’t want to use LinkedIn, call Richard, send Richard and email. Hopefully that’s useful. I do have a couple websites, I haven’t updated any of them in years. Cause I think I’ve already said everything I got to say, maybe I should start doing that again. I do have a book on Mob Programming. You can get through Lean Pub.

Richard:

All right, we’ll put it and we’ll put links to all of this, and the, I don’t know, over here in the notes to be able to find all of this.

Woody:

Yeah, I would love to meet you in person, everybody out there, maybe we will get to do that again sometime.

Richard:

Yeah, I’m looking forward to that for sure.

Woody:

Thank you Richard so much.

Richard:

Oh, Woody, thank you so much for joining us today, this has been great.

Woody:

Well thank you for having me.

Richard:

And a dear listeners, dear viewers to support this podcast, visit my website kasperowski.com.