How to avoid burnout in Agile Teams

Hi, I'm Steph Chamberlain, and this is episode one of the Stable Teams Podcast.

My guest today is Cheryl Tansey, who's an Agile coach and a wellness advocate.

What I really enjoyed talking to Cheryl about was how you can create sustainable pace for Agile teams, masculine and feminine energy and how that plays a part in the kind of culture you want for your organization, parenting and Agile coaching, and some of the techniques that Cheryl used when she became a parent.

wellness and back to the office and what impact that has and whether we can actually use data to ask the question is all this really having an impact on culture?

Where's the data to back up back to the office?

Enjoy my chat with Cheryl Tanzi.

Hey everyone, and welcome to the Stable Teams Podcast.

I'm Emerson Scotland, Y-Finder Coach, and I'm excited to be your guide on this journey into the world of high performing teams.

In each episode, we'll be taking a deep dive into the Stable Teams wheel, a powerful framework that holds the key to creating teams that not only excel, but truly thrive.

We'll explore how to infuse purpose, master skills, foster positive behaviors, fine-tune organizational design, and curate environments that breed both productivity and, importantly, happiness.

So, whether you're a seasoned leader or a team member eager to make a difference, you're in the right place.

Let's get ready to unlock the secrets

to building teams that redefine success.

Hi, welcome to the Stable Teams Podcast.

I'm Steph Chamberlain, and I'm joined today by Cheryl Tamsey.

Welcome, Cheryl.

Thank you.

And kia ora from New Zealand.

Kia ora means both

Thank you and hello.

It's great to have you here from lovely New Zealand, although you've just let on that it's actually raining in New Zealand, which is just my bubble there.

We've got some pretty crazy weather going on on this side of the world at the moment.

So, yeah, it's still raining, but I'm hopeful that summer is coming back at some point.

So, yes, we're on a similar, we're looking at a similar sky, I think, even though we're on the other side of the planet.

So thank you so much for joining us again and what I wanted to ask you first was, so I've been following you for some time on LinkedIn, I wanted to ask you what took you on this journey you've been on, how did you get here?

I've taken a really I guess non-traditional path, I never decided at an early age that I wanted to be a coach, I didn't have any idea really what I wanted to do,

But I know that I really love working with people, leading projects, but I found that for me, the values that were held in terms of as a good project manager, the behaviors that I needed to use to get my team to do what I was told they needed to do, really didn't align with my values.

And, you know, one of the biggest challenges I had was around this idea of controlling the team.

that the team was simply there to deliver.

And I really struggled with a lot of the conventional methods in terms of how I was, my success was measured, you know, on time on budget, making sure it gets out the door.

There was never anything in there around the well being or the health of the team once the project finished.

And

I observed this just over and over again in different digital agencies that I worked in that, you know, once a project manager was done with a team, sometimes there was nothing left of the team.

They were just dissipated.

There was nothing.

There was no energy.

A lot of them might have left or they're burnt out.

And then that team's expected to get up and do it all again.

Yeah.

So is that what led you to concentrate on

Yeah, I wish at that point it was a straight line into the wellness side of it.

Unfortunately, I got very caught up in this way of working and leading that actually led me to burnout because I was working beyond my means to try and achieve these unachievable goals.

and I found myself on in the bathroom cubicle at an office in London unable to get off the floor because I had completely used everything I had left and you know really again I would never pick that journey for myself and I look back and there were so many signs that I ignored

How to avoid burnout in Agile Teams

on a little island in the middle of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain.

And I just, I fell in love with coaching.

And I realized that I wanted to spend my energy helping build people up and help them grow and develop rather than controlling them to do what I want them to do.

So that was sort of led me into the path of understanding more about the people and how to grow and develop people.

And then I sort of, I, you know, thankfully had some conversations with people within the IT industry, including my dad, who was an Agile coach.

I never really took much interest in what he was doing for a long time.

And I suddenly realized that these skills I was learning as a coach might actually work really well with this new thing called Agile that people were doing.

And that was sort of, you know, bringing all of those together.

I was fortunate to move back to the UK and meet an incredible business owner who wanted me to come in and lead his teams.

But I said to him, I don't want to be a project manager.

I want to be a coach.

I want to coach your teams.

And he was, you know, I'm forever grateful that he said yes.

At the same time I was studying coaching at the academy in London and it gave me the confidence and the validation that this approach could actually work.

What are the signs do you think to look out for when a team member is struggling?

It's there's always obvious things at a high level are things like absenteeism you know people missing days are they not present are they falling behind on their work and you know some of those obvious ones but there's some that I look for that are a little more

I often refer to like the swinging pendulum of communication so I often find that people start to go really quiet or become really

Loud and vocal in their views.

So that for me, sometimes the loud vocal is a bit more obvious.

Often with that loud vocal behavior, I also notice repetition.

So if somebody is continuing to get stuck on the same problem, if they're continuing to complain about the same issue, or there's a pattern there that they're stuck,

yeah and when we're stuck it's like they're a computer isn't it they can't process something

Totally.

So, you know, sometimes, you know, if I'm coaching a leader and they say, oh, I've got this team member and they complain about the same thing over and over.

For me, that's a flag that that person, if they're not supported to move through that challenge, that could be their downfall.

And it could send them into a bit of a spiral if they're not already there.

So that feeling that we can't

get out of the situation that we're in can be incredibly exhausting.

It wastes a lot of our energy and time and can definitely lead to burnout.

And it's also quite contagious within a team.

Interestingly, that's called bad apple syndrome, right?

Which is sometimes a misrepresentation of what's happening.

Yeah.

So yeah, those sort of those things.

I do notice the quietness is the one that often gets missed.

When people start to disappear into the background, you know, little things in our digital age of working and working remotely, cameras off.

is really challenging, especially if you're a coach or facilitator or leader.

Best I can, I always work with teams and ask, and I'm really transparent about it.

I don't just say, can you turn your camera on?

Because that's the rule.

I explain to them why it's really helpful for me.

And I start to feel concerned for people if I'm not able to check in that they're engaging.

And so I try to be really open and transparent

around my desire for things like cameras and contribution and but yeah that you know especially if someone normally is um not super quiet and they start to go quiet um and then yeah in turn in terms of struggling uh there's usually um a point at which I find for people that we we disconnect and

that's really it's a really different signals for every person but you know it's when somebody doesn't complete something and they don't let you know that they're not going to complete it.

It's when they say something and they don't apologize if they've upset someone.

You know, there's sort of a disconnect between their behavior and the things that are happening.

Again, these are signs, you know, you could view that as, oh, this person's being really annoying or they're creating problems in the team.

That person's likely not in a very good space.

So what do you do with that?

situation what are some of the techniques you've talked a little bit about things like leaving camera on you know how do you minimize that burnout because in Agile one of the things is this kind of relentlessness

Yeah, sprint fatigue, right?

We use the word sprinting.

And nobody physically can sprint indefinitely.

You know, you go out on, I mean, my son tries.

When we go to the beach, he runs with everything he's got.

And I think he thinks he's just never going to stop.

But eventually our bodies, you know, we can't sustain sprinting indefinitely.

And it's the same in Agile.

Some things that I do to help squads, teams, individuals,

I now teach and practice emotional literacy.

So this is, you know, sounds really fancy.

It's really learning to talk about how we're doing and actually find words to be able to label how we're feeling and integrate it in as part of our daily practices.

So, you know, check-ins, stand up.

How's everyone feeling?

You know, we, the organization I'm with at the moment,

uses Teams, so they've got, you know, cool little polls you can use.

How are you feeling today?

Or do a word cloud.

How are you feeling?

It's anonymous, throw it in there.

Just getting people practicing with asking themselves that question.

And then, you know, also teaching from there.

What do I do if I'm feeling this?

Kind of once we start to label and understand how we're feeling, how do we design our work to support us?

And so that's really interesting because we practice Holacracy at Stable Team.

I'm a Holacracy coach.

And one of the cool things that I love about Holacracy is that focus on check-ins at every governance meeting, every tactical meeting, the first thing you do is you check in with the team.

And it's been a real eye-opener for us both internally and when I've practiced this within the consulting that I do as well.

So I think that's something though that is not very prevalent.

And so this is another thing that I teach and practice.

And I say teach and practice, I teach the concepts, and then I practice it myself in my own working rhythms.

And best I can, I try and keep it really visible to the teams that I'm working with.

So they can see that I'm not just preaching that you should do this stuff.

I'm testing it myself every day as well.

So yeah, really learning about, you know, when in the day do I have energy most?

What parts of the day do I have creativity comes into play?

You know, like learning to actually adjust and adapt our work in line with it.

Or if I've got a big meeting and I have to be on and I'm not normally on at that time of the day, what do I need to do leading up to that to get myself in that space?

So really helping people understand and reading their own energy so that they can take control of their situations.

Are you thinking about your purpose and your direction?

If any of this is unclear to you, why don't you drop me a line at emersonstableteams.com and then we can have a discovery session, a chemistry session, whatever you want to call it, and we can see if we can help you so that you can get that clarity that you need.

Do you think that there's something about the female way of leading a team that you are more connected with the emotions or do you think that men are just as much they just maybe society doesn't let them connect?

What's your thinking on that one?

Great question.

I perhaps maybe use the word feminine in terms of feminine energy and masculine energy because from what I've learned

and what I believe we have both.

Every person holds both of those types of energies and which ones are stronger is hugely impacted by who we spend time with.

So, you know, as I talked about in, you know, some of my earlier career, I was often one of the only females.

Yeah, sometimes in the whole pandemic.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm like the only female.

There's never a queue in the toilets.

But there was, there was definitely a lot of masculine energy in those working environments, which, you know, if you do a bit of reading and learning about masculine energy, you know, we lean towards things like control and stability and certainty.

And so when that is, that was so prevalent and prominent around me that I started to

How to avoid burnout in Agile Teams

There is a lean towards masculine energy.

There's a lot of our reward systems are set up around very controlling behaviors and things that lean that way.

So it can be quite challenging to bring things like emotions and feelings into a conversation.

in those environments, but I've learned for myself that the evidence and the data is too overwhelming now to ignore the fact of the impact of how we feel at work directly relates to the value we deliver.

Yeah, that's absolutely just, yeah, I mean, happiness and productivity are hand in hand, aren't they?

Just to think about the personal element for a minute, because one of the reasons why I reached out to you is because I've been following your journey on LinkedIn,

and noticed that you had had a little boy.

So congratulations to that, although it's been two and a half years now.

So I just wondered how the birth of your child impacted your attitude to coaching and supporting teams.

Yeah, well having a boy is interesting just we were talking about masculine and feminine energy.

I grew up with two older sisters and a younger brother so that's been a big learning for me but it completely

How to avoid burnout in Agile Teams

You're a geriatric mother.

So I thought I'm going into this later.

I've got heaps of life experience.

This is gonna be sweet as it's gonna be easy.

And any parent will hear that and go, oh yeah, she's got a bit of a realization ahead.

I was running my own business at the time, we'd just moved to a new town, we'd bought a house and... Did you do that thing, that typical thing for a high flyer where you just basically move house, have a baby, just everything up in the air all at the same time, did you do that whole thing or did you keep it fairly... Yeah.

Yeah, everything changed.

I changed kind of everything all at once and thought how hard could this be?

How hard can it be to put a little person alive 24-7 on no sleep?

Exactly.

You know, a massive part of it for me was a full change in my identity in terms of who I was.

You know, for a long time I'd been

Cheryl, the coach, the international traveler.

I hadn't stayed in one country longer than a couple of years.

You know, my work was hugely tied to who I was and who I thought I was and my ego and all of these things.

And to all of a sudden spend my days trying to keep this little human alive and try and keep sane with minimal sleep and all of these things, it was really confronting.

So given that journey that you've been on, which is quite familiar by the way, what would you say to your younger self?

What would your advice be?

And I know advice is one of those things you get loads of obviously when you're going to have a baby, but I think actually this is the moment where if anyone's listening out there and they're about to embark or think in the future they might embark, this is actually some advice you should listen to from someone who's been there and got the t-shirts.

I find this a really hard question because I'm learning that every mother's journey is so different.

And what I experienced, you know, I look for some mothers who that transition is really natural.

Being a mother is very natural.

I felt like I was right at the beginning of the biggest learning curve of my entire life.

And for many years, I'd been really good at what I did.

I wasn't used to being not good at something.

And so for me, one of the things that saved me through that time was

This is like really geeky.

This is my Agile love coming through.

I actually still have the laminated sheet that I created.

Because it reminds me every time I like have moments where I just need to be reminded that it got this challenging.

I actually created a checklist for myself every day.

I needed some sense of done.

Like nothing ever felt done in my day because it felt like every time I did something I just had to do it again.

And I never felt like I ever got anywhere or achieved anything.

And so I created this checklist which ended up being, and I still use a version of it today, was basically my well-being checklist.

What are the things that ideally I'm doing every single day

and I would give myself a tick.

And they're for things that I wouldn't even now think about, like, have I done that?

I just do it naturally because my life is a little bit more normalized.

And it was some of the things that I wasn't doing that I knew I should be.

You know, having a nap, I found it really challenging to nap as a new mom, which, you know, and I would, so it was like a little bit of a reward system I set up was sort of, you know,

What are the things that I'm ideally doing?

Because what it also helped me to do was notice when I was having days that I hadn't done any of them.

It helped to visualize that myself.

I helped my partner to visualize that as well and go, she hasn't napped, she hasn't taken a walk, she hasn't eaten any good food, like all these things that I knew I needed to do in order to keep myself sane.

If he could look at it and get home from work and go, you haven't done any of them?

Okay, let's, let's... It was like the bomb going off, yeah.

Exactly, exactly right.

It's like, you know, these are the signs that I'm likely going to hit some sort of low really soon.

So that was really helpful for me.

Again, I don't know whether if someone had told me to do that before I became a mum, whether I would have taken it on board because I really didn't think I would need anything.

But having some of the real, you know, fundamental basics of well-being

in place.

You know, like I mentioned, some of the things on there was, you know, for me, I'm hugely driven by affirmation and positive thinking and reading, just reading affirmations that help my brain to program into a positive mind state.

So I had like, you know, read five affirmations, you know, and I would look at it and go, I don't really need to do that.

And then I would read them and I go, I feel better.

So learning whatever those things are that you need, you know, journaling for me is an absolute must when I'm not well because it just helps me to get out of my head all of the thoughts that are spinning around and get them out and look at them on a piece of paper and make sense of them.

So these were all the, you know, these were some little things and, you know, walking, ideally walking to the beach or in the forest or something.

And I found if I could do a couple of those each day,

I could start to build up my strength mentally, physically.

And after a while, I just noticed I didn't need the checklist anymore.

I was just starting to do them.

So yeah, that would probably be one piece of advice is know what some of those kind of things are that you need.

And we should mention at this point as well that you were actually going through all of this partly when COVID was in town.

Yeah.

So it was a bit small.

You know it wasn't just a normal oh I'm pregnant and I'm having a baby this was actually some of the most challenging times in history so so yeah so first of all well done for coming up with that because even when I was in the same position that you've just described I never had a checklist and I didn't really think about wellness and I think that whole idea of mask on first you know we're not taught that we're not taught that that's a good thing to do and I think as a coach that's so important as well it's

One of the reasons why I started looking at high performance and what happens to people in high performance situations.

And one of the really interesting podcasts, I don't know if you've come across Cheryl, but the high performance podcast with Jay Comfrey and Damian Hughes, they talk a lot to big sports personalities.

One of them was Johnny Wilkinson.

And they talk about the fact that how with high performance comes this load, which is

High feelings of never being good enough because the target is so high.

So it's almost like the people who tend to fall off the side of the mountain aren't people who are not pushing themselves.

They're actually the people who are going for the heights.

And that, when I heard that, I actually took a lot of solace from that because it made me realize that a lot of people go through things in life and they feel like failures when they hit the heights and they're trying to get up the mountain and they fall off.

Are you looking for a new gig?

Look no more.

If you go to stableteams.com forward slash blog, click on the Maestros newsletter and sign up.

There,

You'll receive weekly updates on new roles.

If you're interested in any of these roles outside IELTS 35, or indeed a permanent contract or a fixed termed one, contact Alex at StableTeams.com.

If you're a recruiter or a client with specific recruiting needs, please also contact Alex at StableTeams.com.

I can only give the perspective of

How to avoid burnout in Agile Teams

I'm noticing a shift in directive in these organizations around coming back into the office as a goal of improving culture.

I'm really curious about what

information and data we're using to come to those conclusions because I'm not totally convinced that there's one answer to improving culture which is to bring people physically located and you know don't get me wrong I

I get a lot of my energy and what I do from interactions with humans.

And I, you know, all of the reading and the learning I've done in the past five years around psychology of humans, we're wired for connection.

So I, not for a moment do I doubt that we get value from spending time physically together.

But what I'm observing is there's been a big shift in human

lifestyle over the last three years and how we live our lives and how work fits into that.

And I feel like we, through this past few years, we've been forced to work in different ways because we weren't allowed to be physically located together.

And I've seen some amazing things come from that, that I

I feel that the shift of implementing policies that say you've got to come back to the office, I see some negative impacts of that that sometimes I think perhaps are not being discussed or acknowledged.

Do you think that's the whole thing of I've got to see you're working to acknowledge that you're working and I need to be looking over your shoulder?

I hope not.

But this is why, again, I get curious around, you know, the data or the evidence that we have that tells us we have a cultural problem.

You know, if we believe that to be true.

Now, I work within data and business intelligence.

Like, so much of what we talk about, we do, you know, qualitative and quantitative information is so important.

Where's the data that tells us we have a cultural problem?

Let's get that.

So then if we run an experiment like we're going to ask everyone to come back to the office, let's measure it and see does it start to shift the dial on the things that we say it's going to or that we believe it's going to.

Because I'm not sure what the impact is going to be for these organizations.

I'm not sure if we're going to get people leaving en masse because they like this new way of working.

Whether they just suck it up and start doing it and they really love it.

But I am certainly observing that the decision to do that isn't majority supported by the people within these teams.

There's confusion around why it's happening.

So, you know, one of the things that I certainly encourage leaders to do, if that is the directive coming in, is to open up the communication channels and allow people to talk about it.

You know, whether or not you have the ability to influence that decision, depending on what level you're working at in a big organization, you always as a leader have the opportunity to open up the dialogue and to allow people again to talk about how that feels for them.

Sometimes if you get enough evidence together, you might be able to put a case forward to talk about trying some different experiments.

Again, as a parent, probably before having a child, I wouldn't care because I traveled all the time.

I loved traveling.

I lived by an airport for a couple of years just so that I could constantly travel.

And now

You know, with a little human that I want to be present for, that has a big impact on the mum that I can be.

And I get the sense there's a lot of other people, especially parents out there, that have really enjoyed being able to be more present with their kids.

I mean, that's been one of the biggest impacts, I think.

I mean, I think the stats are that women actually came out worse from the pandemic.

but I think for men it's kind of showing them a different way of thinking about work and family and giving men access.

So some of the biggest proponents of working from home I think are men who've just been able to connect with their family so much more than they would have before.

And also one of the stats I read from one of your posts was that it costs $30,000 if you're paying someone $54,000.

and it costs a company $30,000 if the wellness thing goes wrong, then it has a price tag.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and you know, if you're in the role like that we are, where we're in roles of coaches or anyone that's in there to try and support the development of healthy culture, and we get a policy like that comes in, it can be really detrimental.

You know, we've got all these great things happening and we're doing,

um but if at the end of the day someone can't spend time with it you know put their kids to bed at night or be there when they wake up or whatever that might be it doesn't matter how good a job you do with your teams these policies can have a real impact and so I just you know encourage anyone that's looking at that and you know if you seriously believe that is going to have a positive impact

How to avoid burnout in Agile Teams

and listen, because otherwise I think we're going to possibly see another, you know, silent resignation wave come again.

Yeah, I think autonomy as well.

Like that's one of the things that I'm really passionate about is it's all very well telling people to go into the office two days a week, but which two days a week and why?

And I think unless you can give teams and individuals the autonomy to make these decisions, like you say, it's not using the data

to say why you've got to do it, and then using the data to work out what works for teams.

So Cheryl, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today.

I'm so glad you could make it.

And what I've got out of this is that this whole idea that there's a better way, and you came to that conclusion through your own story, and thank you again for sharing it.

But also that there's this concept of masculine and feminine energy, and if we can get that balance a little bit more, especially in tech, then we can all benefit from it.

And again, just that whole focus on data.

What's the data that's telling us we've got a culture problem?

Yeah, it's so good to talk to other people that are experiencing these challenges, share ideas.

And if ever I can be of value to anything you're doing and encouraging this level of thinking, please ask if anyone listening

wants to connect, LinkedIn is the best place for me.

That's where I kind of hang out and share things.

This has been a really nourishing conversation.

And I guess my final thought is, you know, anything that you're trying to encourage in your teams, you've got to do it yourself.

You've got to work on these things yourself.

Every single day I'm working on my well-being.

So I can show up authentically when I am working with others.

And so that would be kind of my final thought, whether you're a mum, a coach, a project manager, a leader, whatever it is, whatever you're hoping for from your teams and the people around you or your children, you know, role modeling that stuff and working on it every day is, I've found to be the secret to just continuing to

Live in this way and live in line with your values.

So thank you, Steph, for inviting me in.

I'm going to have a good sleep with the rain pouring down.

Thanks for being here and sharing your experiences with us.

And hopefully the rain stops soon in New Zealand.

Liberating Leaders Podcast