The Meridian Point with Kumar Dattatreyan
Episode: Agile Is a Verb, Not a Label
Guest: Tonya McCaulley-Slater
KUMAR: Hi everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with The Meridian Point, and we're live today with another episode. Today I welcome our guest, who spent fourteen years building agile programs inside a legacy insurance giant, then walked away to coach agile transformations full time at Cisco, Eli Lilly, JB Hunt, Fannie Mae and on and on. Tonya McCaulley-Slater is a Certified SAFe Program Consultant and mental performance coach who is running an agile transformation at St. Thomas University right now. And she does it in a specific way. She doesn't use the word "agile" until the results earn it. She's here to talk about agile as a verb and not a label, and why the jargon may be the thing harming these transformations. So without further ado, let me invite Tonya to the stage. How are you doing, Tonya?
TONYA: Great, Kumar. Thanks for having me.
KUMAR: Of course. So, fourteen years at Nationwide, working your way up to lead delivery for underwriting training. And then somebody out of the blue says, "I need you to come out to Silicon Valley and coach over there." And you said yes. But then what happened?
TONYA: I did not want to move my daughter to California, away from her dad. So I actually turned the job down. And they came back and said, "Okay, you can work remote, just travel when we need you to." So I took the chance. I stepped forward into a new career, and I haven't moved back.
KUMAR: So what made you leave after fourteen years with one company? You didn't know what this job was about, right? What was the impetus? What pulled you to it?
TONYA: I was hitting a ceiling. It wasn't about title. It was about impact for me. When that former colleague called and said, "We have this position and we think you'd be great at it," it was a chance to coach people and solve problems differently than what I had been doing. And honestly, when I stepped into it, I felt alive. I wanted to build a career I was proud of. Not that I wasn't proud of my career at Nationwide, but stepping into helping people understand that they are powerful, and being able to do that with agile, meant the world to me.
KUMAR: What was it about agile? We talked about this right before we went live, helping people feel powerful. How does agile help you do that? Or was that just a byproduct of your coaching?
TONYA: I think it's a little bit of both. The Agile Manifesto, the very first value, is about people. And there's a reason for that. People make everything else work. I have a psychology background. I have a psychology undergrad, and now I'm in industrial-organizational psych for my grad. People are what make everything run. We can snap processes around an organization all day long, but it's the behavior and the agility of people, the ability to be nimble and have a growth mindset, that makes it work.
KUMAR: I totally agree with that. So at St. Thomas right now you're running a transformation, and you have not used the word "agile" or "sprint" or whatever the ceremonies are. You haven't used that once. Tell us about that, and how it's working. It almost feels like guerrilla agile.
TONYA: Yeah, almost. It's like coaching on the down low. I look at it that way because in all my years of transformation coaching with Fortune companies, the biggest pushback is the fear of the unknown. When you go into an organization using the word "agile" and people don't know what that is, it can be scary. It's fear-based. So if you can get them to buy in and meet them where they are, you're going to have a much easier time getting them more efficient and effective.
KUMAR: So what words do you use?
TONYA: I use "efficient" and "effective" a lot. I use "collaboration." I use "cross-dependencies" a lot. I actually started introducing the word "impediment" or "blocker." But I do it incrementally, the same way Scrum does. If we go in with this big plan and start implementing everything all at the same time, people freak out. From a change management perspective, people don't respond like that. We're only so elastic. We can only stretch so far with so much change. So I've found that if we incrementally get them to the point where they understand more and more, then I can say, "Oh yeah, what we're actually doing is agile, and it's incremental delivery." And they say, "Oh, I didn't know that." So I'm very aware of how people are from a change perspective, and that first value lives its way through everything I do.
KUMAR: That makes a lot of sense to me, because I've lived in the same world for a long time. As an agile coach, but also as a people coach. I've never thought of myself as a performance coach, but I suppose I do a bit of that too. Not to the extent that you do, because we'll get to that in a minute. I'm not going to spill the beans. So you talk about increments. You're still helping St. Thomas work in shorter increments, right? How do you do that without using the lingo, the jargon?
TONYA: I express to them that we want to see working product as we go along. With that comes a weekly or biweekly meeting. If you've ever worked in higher education, they work in a lot of committees. So every two weeks we have an operational task force that comes together, and we do a demo of what we've completed over the last two weeks. And we bring up any impediments. So we're doing a lot of the ceremonies. I've implemented LPM. For the leaders, we've prioritized the work, we've put it in Jira, but they just don't know it's called LPM. They don't know it's called agile. As they ask, then I will tell, when they're ready. But only if they're ready to hear the change piece.
KUMAR: So once they're bought in, then you give them the lingo, and they're more apt to start using the words. Is that right?
TONYA: Exactly. And that's shown through a lot of different circumstances in my career. I've run into organizations that say, "Oh, we don't want that. We've tried that before." And then I draw the framework out on a piece of paper with no labels and explain it to them. And they say, "Oh yeah, we love that." It's the same exact framework they said they didn't want.
KUMAR: That's really interesting. At my company, Agile Meridian, we have something we call the Disruptor Method. It's basically what you're describing. It's stripping out all the lingo, all the jargon, and just doing the thing. Because doing the thing is more important than the theory of the thing, right? And it sounds like you've landed in the same place. Doing the thing is more important than explaining the theory and hoping people get it. It's just, let's do it. Let's figure this out together.
TONYA: Exactly. And it's interesting. I started to realize this five or six years ago. Before that, I was very much, "Okay, we have to teach them agile. We have to teach them all the pieces of Scrum, all the pieces of Kanban, what this all means." And then I realized, if we can just get them to do, then they will buy in and say, "Oh, I really like this. What is this?"
KUMAR: That's great. Convergent evolution, or something like that. So at Fannie Mae, I was also there for a little while. We compared those notes and those stories in our prep call. You worked in the transformation office, I'm assuming, for years, right?
TONYA: I went to the multi-family space.
KUMAR: Multi-family space, okay. And the center of excellence, in spite of the success, because I know they were successful, Fannie Mae was successful in their transformation, the center of excellence got dismantled anyway. What lessons did you take from that?
TONYA: It's interesting. When leadership changes, if they don't see the why, they'll undo the how. When new leadership comes in, and this goes for any kind of organization, but Fannie Mae is government, anytime leadership changes you have to get them to buy into the why so they understand the how. Otherwise they will dismantle the how, because they don't understand it. I heard a lot when the new leadership came in that agile is a bad word, and, "What are we getting out of it?" I think they saw it as an opportunity to cut costs, because they didn't understand it.
KUMAR: Interesting. I wonder, and this is theory of course, we can't go back in time, but had you applied that no-jargon approach, what do you think would have been the difference at Fannie Mae, or any of these big transformations you've been a part of?
TONYA: For Fannie Mae, that was probably within the last six months before I left. The difference, in my opinion, would have been access to leadership, making sure we had the right verbiage coming through, and that they were able and willing to see the why, to see what agile was, that it's not some fragile thing, that it competes and it shifts priorities. In the past I would have done some things differently. I remember setting up training. The very first thing I would do is teach everybody roles, responsibilities and ceremonies, all of that. It was good, but they understood the theory, not the how. I would try to walk them through practical applications, but until you do it, you don't quite grasp it. So I would definitely change that. I would not do initial training up top that's so cumbersome. I would maybe do a leadership piece to get them on board, to understand without using jargon, to speak their language.
KUMAR: That's a good learning. One of the things we're doing is training through our company. We're not doing the typical two-day certification program, because it doesn't work. People retain maybe ten percent of what they learn in these certification programs. They get the certification, but it doesn't mean much. People learn on the job, by doing. So we've changed our approach to be more about the doing and less about the theory. I'm a big subscriber to the Training from the Back of the Room approach made popular by Sharon Bowman. She wrote books about it. She's retired now, but the work she's done lives on through a lot of people, including me. The approach is that the learner needs to do the learning, and the trainer needs to provide the environment for them. So what we've done at Agile Meridian is shift our entire training model to be cohort-based, spread out over time. Between sessions, the cohort is doing real work from their company. They bring it back into the live sessions, and we discuss it. I've got AI enabled in there, and it's really making a difference. I have a comment here from Tressie White: "Higher-level presentation instead of detailed training." Yeah, that's what you were talking about, Tonya. Rather than go into the details when people are less ready to absorb that material, because they don't have the context, you start at a higher level. Thanks for the comment, Tressie. All right. So agile is a verb. It's something you do. That's the whole title of this podcast. And your experience, which very closely mirrors mine, is that it's a doing thing. It's almost like a sport. So I want to segue to the sport analogy, and maybe it's not so much of an analogy in your case. You want to talk about your performance coaching?
TONYA: Sure. I've been an athlete my whole life. I ran college track. I played semi-pro soccer up until I was forty years old. And now I golf. My husband is a PGA pro and a university golf coach. I decided that my love of athletics, my love of sport, my love of competition, and my love of performance and psychology all went together. I've been coaching leaders in an elite manner for so long that it lends itself to athletes as well, because they are elite performers, especially at the university and pro level. So I took my why, which is helping powerful people remember just how powerful they are, and I use it to help athletes understand how powerful they are too. Everybody has power in them. We just have to know how to unlock it. So I work with athletes, especially in golf. I work with a lot of university golfers, and I have a pro golfer I work with too. It's about helping them understand their behaviors and how to respond to them. There's an equation I use on a regular basis. I probably say it every single day: event plus response equals outcome. E plus R equals O. I say it to leaders as well as athletes.
KUMAR: Hold on one second, I just want to check for questions or comments from LinkedIn. Okay, please add your questions, there are people watching. I love that. I want to draw the parallel between what you do with athletes and what you do with leaders. And when I say leaders, I don't mean people with the title of leader. Everyone's a leader in their own right. If they're not leading others, they're leading themselves, right? So when you're working inside an organization, what are some of the parallels between coaching an athlete for human performance and coaching a developer, a tester, a leader or a business analyst?
TONYA: I'll give you an example. One of the tricks of the trade I use is called the Three R's: recognize, release and reset. In athletics, and in regular coaching too, recognize is about recognizing what color you're in. I use a light system. Green means all systems go. Yellow is caution. Red is all systems stop, I am seeing red. The release is the emotional charge. For a golfer, they might smack their club, and I really hope they don't do that, but some of them do. Some release by breaking a tee. Some bend down and tie their shoe. Some tuck their shirt in. This is the release. I always say you get ten seconds to wallow in your grief. Ten seconds. And then we reset, and we make an intentional action toward the next step. I use that with leaders too. And you are a leader from the seat you sit in. You do not have to have the leader title. So I work with developers, with QA, with Scrum Masters, with other coaches, with product, with all the business partners, about their Three R's. Sometimes things don't go your way. So how do you respond? If that event happens, what's your response? Your response should go through the Three R's: recognize, release, reset. Sometimes that means you write that email and put it in draft, and the next day you look back and think, "What was I thinking?" That was your release. You took that short time to pause, get your emotional charge out, and then come back and reset.
KUMAR: I love it. They're not these words for me, but I might have to borrow them and say, "Hey, Tonya taught me this." I might use it in my classes. I do something similar, but I don't have the words. You have the words.
TONYA: I really think it's from marrying the two. I've been an athlete for so long that I know what it's like. I've played in golf tournaments. I know what it's like to sit on the first tee and have first-tee jitters. And I know what it's like to be a leader getting up and doing a presentation in front of two hundred people. It's the same feeling. It's anxiety. You need to know how to handle that. I always tell my athletes and my leaders that we have this brain that was meant, all the way back in prehistoric times, to get away from the big scary thing. That fight-or-flight response is still with us today. We're just scared of a different big scary thing. So we need to know how to respond to that.
KUMAR: That has a lot of bearing in the workplace too. In a sport like golf or tennis, where it's just you, you don't have a team around you. I don't know this to be true, because I've never played professional golf. I goof, I don't golf. So I don't spend a lot of time on it. What was the second R?
TONYA: Release.
KUMAR: Release. My release is pretty sudden. It's flinging the club across the green. But I think there's something to learn from sports. When you're on a team in a professional environment, I want to probe into that a little bit. Do you work, as a professional athletic coach, with teams, or is it mostly individuals?
TONYA: Both teams and individuals.
KUMAR: What parallels can you draw from coaching a team, like a soccer team, and a development team in a corporate setting?
TONYA: I work with a women's lacrosse team. We work on culture, and I use the Tuckman model all the time. If we're just forming, more than likely we're in the honeymoon stage, and nobody wants to step on each other's toes. Then we get to storming, and that always happens. It's the same exact thing that happens in a team at work. Anytime you add somebody new to the team, you have to go all the way back to the beginning. More than likely you'll go through those phases faster, because you've set the culture up. If you don't set the culture up, you're going to spend more time in those phases again and again. Same thing with the women's lacrosse team. I set up a state-of-the-team address with them. We do a retrospective to see how it's going, how they want it to go and what their goals are. We come up with a mission statement, a vision statement and their principles, and how we want to operate. And then we hold ourselves accountable to that. I do that with corporate teams too.
KUMAR: It's interesting. In the corporate world, we tend to think of sports teams as, that's a good team and that's a bad team, and it's borne out by the results. What's their record? How many wins, how many losses? What are the stats? Then you shift into the corporate thing, and it's diluted, it's opaque. We call lots of groups of people teams, but they're not really teams. They're just groups of people who happen to work on the same thing. Because we haven't done that work you're doing with your sports teams. The vision setting, the mission setting, the ways-of-working setting. If you watch Ted Lasso, all the stuff that goes into building a strong team, we skip all that. We just assume we're going to put these people together and they're going to be a team. Do you agree? And what's your advice to people working with teams, whether it's sports or otherwise?
TONYA: I totally agree. But first, I want to go back on something you said. You said athletic teams are good because they have certain stats. I'd say that's not true. Athletic teams are good because they support each other through those stats. That's the difference. A team, to me, is a team that's supportive, that lives its values and principles, and goes toward a goal the same way. If we can get our business teams to do that, then we will be a team. A lot of times people think it just happens in business. We forget about the common-sense stuff. We think it's supposed to happen. But these practices and this culture are the supporting foundation. People and interactions. People over processes and tools, every single day. That's the foundation of working toward a team rather than just a group of people.
KUMAR: I agree. My point was more that you know exactly what kind of a team a team is in the sports world, because their metrics are front and center. That's the measure of whether a team is operating at a high level. You can always tell. In football, some teams always seem to do well. They always make it to the postseason. They're competitive right up until the playoffs and the Super Bowl. It's the same set of five or six teams that trade spots. And why is that? You're into the psychology of teams. I think there's a strong element that transfers to corporate teams, whatever the team is, a legal team, an HR team, a development team. What does their scorecard look like? What do they look like from the outside? It's going to be a reflection of what they look like on the inside. If their insides are good, their outside is going to look good. Do you agree with that?
TONYA: Absolutely. The very first ceremony I go to is the retrospective, because I can tell if they're a team pretty much just by attending their first retrospective. It's about the culture, about how they work together to get things done and how they problem-solve together.
KUMAR: You're absolutely right. I want to end with one final serious question, and then some fun questions. This is kind of what we've been talking about. You're coaching athletes, and you're also coaching transformations in the corporate world. At the core, it's the same job in two different arenas. Would you agree with that?
TONYA: Yes, I would.
KUMAR: So where do you see that convergence? Performance psychology and organizational change. Is there something there people should learn more about?
TONYA: A lot of people will try to wrap processes around things. I can go into an organization and snap a process around them in six months. The question is, will the people do it? Will the culture support it? Culture is the first thing you start with and the last thing that actually happens, because it takes a long time. I think that's the convergence. I said it when we first started, but that first value of the Agile Manifesto rules most things. It's about the people. We have to understand that, and not expect that we can just go in, snap a process, and it's going to be fine.
KUMAR: I like the phrase you use, "snap a process." For me, it's the mental image of a rubber band. You snap this band around something. And as soon as you leave, the band breaks and things go back to the way they were. So maybe you get some short-term gain, but long term it doesn't really last. It's more pain than gain.
TONYA: Absolutely. It's funny you say that analogy, because that's exactly the vision I have in my head too. That rubber band snapping.
KUMAR: Interesting. Okay, let's have some fun questions. Your husband is a PGA golf coach, right?
TONYA: He's a university golf coach, yes.
KUMAR: University golf coach. And you're a mental performance coach. So who gives better advice under pressure, you or him?
TONYA: Well, when it's for other people, that's the difference. We cannot coach each other. We've tried that. I've referred him to a very dear friend of mine who's a mental performance coach. He works with her, and she says basically the same exact things I did. But giving advice under pressure, I think it's a pretty close tie. I've been doing it a very long time, though, so I'll just say me.
KUMAR: There you go. I wonder if he's watching.
TONYA: I hope he is.
KUMAR: You coach in a lot of different organizations, right? Nationwide, Cisco and so on. Which one changed the way you coach the most, and why?
TONYA: JB Hunt. I think it was because of the leadership buy-in and the leadership support. I had not had that before. That was a very impressive organization, and a very impressive group of leaders that I worked with.
KUMAR: How did they change you?
TONYA: They changed me because I learned that leadership isn't always fighting against you. There are times when they see a different path, and I needed to understand that. I was still young in my career. When I had a leadership partnership, I started to treat it as a partnership. And that changed the way I coached.
KUMAR: Amazing. All right, one last question. We talk about the release, the trigger. What's the first R?
TONYA: Recognize.
KUMAR: Recognize. And then there's the release. You mentioned that some golfers, to release, might bend down and tie their shoelace, just to reset their mental focus. What's a physical trigger you'd want every burned-out leader to steal?
TONYA: A really good one is mindfulness breathing. I'm also a mindfulness coach. I did the mindfulness, honestly, for myself, because I needed a way to help myself in high-pressure situations and de-stress. So I became a mindfulness coach to do that, and to help my husband as he was going through his PGA certifications and testing. You can do mindfulness breathing a lot of different ways, but I enjoy box breathing. You breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, and then breathe out for four, or out for six. If you breathe out longer than you breathe in, it relaxes you more. You're building a rectangle, or a box. That's my go-to. I've helped a lot of leaders just take that pause. You recognize, and then you take that pause, and that's the breath.
KUMAR: That's great. I do it quite often, actually, between meetings. I'll do a short mindfulness exercise just to clear my mind. You're coming out of a meeting, and you want to be fresh and ready for whatever you're going into next, without carrying the thoughts, the biases, the feelings and the emotion into wherever you're going next. So I think that's great advice. Anything I haven't asked you that you'd like to share?
TONYA: I don't think so. This has been a great conversation.
KUMAR: It has. I've really enjoyed it. And I welcome you back. Maybe we can talk about what we cover next.
TONYA: That would be great.
KUMAR: All right. Well, thanks everyone for watching. And thank you, Tonya, for appearing on the show. I'll talk to you soon.
TONYA: Thank you for having me.
KUMAR: You're welcome.
