Podcast appearances and mentions of marsha acker

If your team keeps revisiting the same issues over and over again, Groundhog Day-style, this episode is for you. Leadership coach Marsha Acker shares why it happens, how to recognize hidden conversational patterns, and what to do when you feel stuck. Overview In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with executive team coach and author Marsha Acker to unpack one of the most frustrating challenges teams face: circular conversations that never seem to resolve. You know the ones; same issue, different day. Marsha introduces a practical framework, structural dynamics, to help leaders and Scrum Masters decode what’s actually happening beneath the surface of their team’s conversations. From identifying communication patterns to creating space for dissent and inquiry, they explore how to break out of those conversational loops, build psychological safety, and foster real change. Whether you're leading meetings or just stuck in too many of them, this episode will help you shift the dynamic for good. References and resources mentioned in the show: Marsha Acker The Art and Science of Facilitation by Marsha Acker Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyze clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others by Marsha Acker #137: Stop Wasting Time with Guests Kate Megaw #94: Connecting Teams and Leadership with Anthony Coppedge Retrospectives Repair Guide Better Retrospectives Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Marsha Acker is an executive coach, author, and the founder of TeamCatapult, where she helps leadership teams break out of communication ruts and lead real, lasting change. With two decades of experience guiding everyone from startups to Fortune 500s, Marsha specializes in transforming how teams talk, decide, and grow—one conversation at a time. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back, Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the honor of having Ms. Marcia Acker with us. So welcome in, Marcia. Marsha Acker (00:12) Hi Brian, it's good to be here. Brian Milner (00:14) Very very happy to have Marcia with us. Marcia is the CEO of a group called Team Catapult and she is a team coach. She does a lot of work with teams and leaders. She's an author. She's a speaker and we wanted to have her come on because of a book that she has out recently called Build Your Model for Leading Change. She also has another book called The Art and Science of Facilitation, which I'm sure is really appealing to a lot of people here as well. You know, as Scrum Masters, if you're a Scrum Master out there, we do a lot of facilitating. So that's probably a really interesting pickup for you also. But we wanted to have Marsha on because we wanted to talk about an issue that I hear a lot about in classes. This is something that I hear a lot of questions around, and it can be a really big source of issues when you think about working together in close, tight units as a team. And that's how teams communicate. kind of the issues and problems that we have with communication amongst teams. So, you know, when we're talking about this, we're talking about teams not listening to each other, not understanding each other, misunderstanding someone's motives, something like that. And one of the things I know that I've seen a lot, I've encountered this a lot, and this is one of the things that I know you talk about quite a bit in your book, is this kind of loop that we get in a little bit, right? We have these conversations where... It just feels like we're stuck in a loop. We're saying the same things over and over again. it's like, I in Groundhog Day? Am I reliving the same thing we just went through? So let's start there and just say, why do you think that that happens? Why do you think that teams have this kind of Groundhog Day effect where you might have these conversations that just kind of keep popping up over and over again? Marsha Acker (01:35) Mm-hmm. It's a great question, Brian. think a number of years ago, I had a background in facilitation, but I got really interested in this particular question because I found not only in my own experience, I had multiple examples that I could give you of conversations that I felt like I'd have with somebody. then we would be, a week or two later, we'd be back talking about the same thing. And I'd think, I, you know, from my perspective, I thought we resolved that. So, so why are we talking about it again? And then I noticed in my work with teams that they would do the same thing. So, you know, I'd be in a session with a team, I'd help them facilitate a decision. They'd make the decision and then I'd be back with them a month later and the same topic would be up. And I'm I just found myself confused. So I think, I think there are many reasons why that happens. But if I were to, If I were to create a theme for that, think there's a couple of big themes that I see play out. I think there are many places on our teams today where we stay at the surface level of the conversation. Like we get super focused on what we're talking about. So whether it's the tool that we're using, the features that are gonna be in the next release, like we get so super focused on it. And then we're hyper. aware of time boxes. So we want to make sure we talk about the thing, get the decision, and we want to do it in 30 minutes or less. I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day where someone was advocating that there shouldn't be any meeting that would need to go past 25 minutes. And I thought, see it really differently because I think while there are places where we absolutely do need to maybe just quickly exchange information or keep things moving along, or we just want to hear briefly from people. I think if we're advocating that every meeting should only take 25 minutes, we are likely going to have those Groundhog Day conversations because it doesn't give us the space to get to the real topic. So I think that's where we spend a lot of time talking about the thing, the topic, and we really don't create enough time to drop down into focus on are we really, there space here for me to share what I really think or do you just want me to show up here in this meeting that you're running? You clearly have maybe your own agenda. You feel like you've already got the decision made. And so you'd really like my role to be to just receive your information and go off and do it. So I think there's a complexity here of Brian Milner (04:27) Yeah. Marsha Acker (04:32) What's the topic we're talking about? Is it the real topic that we need to talk about? Or is there, is it sort of the mask for what we might be able to drop into a deeper conversation to have? Are we being super focused on a time box? And are we creating enough range in our meetings that we've got spaces where we are efficient and fast and very deliberate about the conversation and then other spaces where, you know, those topics that keep returning. They're great places to go, there's data here for us. I think of them as yellow flags. there's something here for us to explore further. So let's take this topic and let's carve out a little bit more time for it. I'm curious what you see. Brian Milner (05:15) Yeah. No, that's a great observation. And I think you're right. It is a frustration. Looking back over my career and looking back through corporate meetings and things I've been a part of, there is frustration with someone who's coming in and not really having a meeting planned and not really having an agenda. But I think there is another kind of side issue there that can cause a lot of misunderstanding about Marsha Acker (05:33) Yeah. Brian Milner (05:44) what we're trying to achieve and that's the purpose. If we're here for a certain topic, I can understand that, but then what is it that's expected of me in this meeting? Am I here to just receive information? Is this a knowledge dump or a status update from someone else? is this, we have an issue and we need to talk through it and fully understand it. Marsha Acker (05:47) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Brian Milner (06:13) And I think sometimes that's what I've kind of seen is that there's this mismatch of, well, I thought I was here for this. And now it's clear that you don't really want my opinion. You just want to tell me what it is. And so now I'm refocused or the opposite. I thought I was here just to receive information, but now I'm realizing that you really need me to dig in and give you my educated advice on this. Well, I wasn't prepared to do that. Marsha Acker (06:20) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think this notion, and I see it happen a lot with Agile teams, like somewhere in our professional careers, and I think there's very good reason for, like we get rewarded for, know, from the time we're in very early school all the way through the end of school, we get rewarded for having answers. And then we end up in the workplace and we find ourselves in collaborative spaces. And so I think there's this belief that, you know, someone who's calling the meeting, they will have a little bit of this internal story that if I come with only questions and no solutions, then what value am I adding? Like that's, how am I useful to this organization? I've actually had people say to me, why would this organization hire me to come in and ask other people questions? Brian Milner (07:28) Wow. Marsha Acker (07:29) And so I think that's really, I love giving voice to that because I do think that there's a narrative that sits in our organizations that I, and a little bit of a fear. Like if I come to a meeting and I'm asking people to collaborate or I'm truly asking them open ended questions and I want to hear what they have to say and we're going to listen to, you know, I talk a lot about wanting to create this collective intelligence. And I think it takes a while to access that in a group of people. that it requires us to be able to suspend this idea that we're not adding value if we're asking questions and to reframe our value as helping to tap into a collective. And you can certainly have a point of view or a perspective, but if you're really wanting to tap into that intelligence, then I think it requires something different of us if we're the meeting host or the meeting leader. I think the other thing that will happen too is depending on who's in charge, like senior architects or somebody senior in the team can also get caught in that trap. Like, well, I'm supposed to come with answers. And I think we can come with ideas. But if we're really wanting to collaborate, and then this gets to your point about why are we gathering? Because sometimes I think there will be places where somebody has already made the decision and they're not asking for input on the decision. Brian Milner (08:42) Yeah. Marsha Acker (08:50) but they're wanting to share the decision that's been made and enroll people in the decision that's been made and invite them into collaborating on actually how that's gonna get implemented. But we're not opening this conversation up for what's been decided about architecture, what's been decided about what's going into a release. So I think this clarity and intentionality like you talk about around purpose, why am I here? What do you want from me? It's huge. And I think it's really tied to also some of our thinking about how are we adding value. Brian Milner (09:23) Yeah. The comment about, know, people not feeling like they're adding value if they're just asking questions that, kind of, maybe it's just for my recent experience with coaching and everything, but to me that, that just, it's so contrary, you know, to, to my way of thinking now, I guess I would say in that, you know, when I've been a part of discussion, when I've been part of a meeting, that I've looking back, that I feel like has gone really well. Marsha Acker (09:26) . Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (09:48) Uh, or, or a person that I feel like has really contributed to the meeting. Oftentimes it, it is that person who is asking questions that get us to think in a different way to get us to consider from a different perspective. So, you know, that that's why it feels a little strange to think about it. I agree with you. I agree that that's, you know, the attitude of some people or that's the way they see, you know, how I contribute to a meeting, but it just feels like it's such the opposite of that. That might be the most valuable thing we could do is to get people to see things from a different perspective or consider maybe things they haven't considered about this issue. Marsha Acker (10:25) Yeah, I think it's one of the first mindset shifts in a transition from being a contributor to maybe managing or leading, whether it's you're just leading a team or whether you're leading a whole organization. I think this idea of where does value come from and what's my role in the value creation, it's a shift, I think, for us. I love when people can get to a place of thinking about creating containers in organizations where people get to be their best. And then it does, your thinking does shift from, what's the piece of content that I can contribute to? What's the question that would really unlock different perspectives? And I think the other piece about that is what's the question that would elicit a... I talk about it being opposed, but you know, a contrarian perspective or point of view, because I think that's the other thing that can keep us in these circular conversations is when what we're really thinking doesn't get said. So if I don't feel like I can tell you in the room what I'm really thinking, I'll tell everybody else offline. Brian Milner (11:34) Right. The meeting after the meeting, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that, course, gets to the heart of psychological safety and kind of those dynamics within a team. We started this off talking about kind of this feeling of getting stuck. And so I want to kind of come back to that a little bit and say, I want to ask you, what are some of the causes of that? Why do we find ourselves trapped in these loops? Marsha Acker (11:36) Yes. You Mm. Brian Milner (11:59) that just, know, whatever we decide doesn't actually do anything or we find ourselves right back in the same place. Why do these, what's causing this? Marsha Acker (12:08) Yeah, well, let's play around with a bit of a framework to help us think about what's happening in the conversation. Yeah. So there is a theory of structural dynamics. It comes from work of David Cantor. And what it allows us to do is sort of think about being able to code the conversation that we're happening. And by code, I mean it helps us focus not on the topic. So whatever the topic might be. It doesn't matter. It helps us focus on how we're engaging in that conversation more of the how. And so there are four actions. Everything that we say could actually be coded into one of four actions, which I think is really kind of fascinating. So you just made a move by taking us back and pointing to the topic about stuck conversations, right? So what keeps us stuck? And that's a move because you're pointing in a direction. So moves kind of set direction in the conversation. I could make a new move and say, you know, let's talk about, yeah, where we might meet at a conference sometime, Brian. But that's a totally different topic. So moves set direction in a conversation. The second action is a follow, which gets behind and supports. So I followed your move by saying, yes, that's great. Let's do that. Here's, and then. Brian Milner (13:12) Right. Yeah. Marsha Acker (13:26) And then a bit of a new move from me, let me introduce a language for thinking about that. So you made a move, I followed, and then brought in another move. So now we're starting to, by being able to name actions, we're starting to get a sense of patterns. So there's two more actions, the action of a pose. So a pose offers like really clear pushback. It says, no, hang on, stop. Let's not go off the bridge or. I really disagree with this piece about what you're saying. So it offers a clear pushback or constraint to what's been said. And then the fourth action is a bystand. And a bystand is a morally neutral comment that names what's happening in the conversation. So I could bystand on myself in a conversation and say, you know, I'm really feeling engaged by the dialogue, or I might say I'm really confused. or if we're noticing a pattern, somebody might say, I notice we're getting stuck. So a bystand is a way for people to name what's happening or bridge competing ideas. But the other thing, the benefit of the bystand is that sometimes it also slows down the conversation. So to your question about what gets us stuck, it's really helpful if we can separate. what we're talking about and start to briefly look at how we're talking because what gets us stuck in conversations is when one or more of those actions is missing over the course of time. So we need all four of them to be voiced. One of the biggest problems in our stuck conversations is that a pose goes offline. Not in every team. There will be teams for whom a pose is stronger. But in my experience in American business, for sure, a pose is often the thing that is missing or it goes offline. So the way it will play out, there's a couple of different patterns. One will be what we call serial moving. And those are teams. Like a meeting with serial moving will have lots of fast pace. So somebody says this. then we're talking about this topic, now we're talking about this. And it will, like, you'll have a feeling like we accomplished a lot, but then you walk out at the end of the session and you go. So we talked about, exactly, we talked about this, this and this, and I don't know what we decided. Brian Milner (15:52) What just happened, right? Marsha Acker (15:58) So people that leave those kinds of meetings, they'll have this sort of false sense of, yeah, we got somewhere when we really didn't, we didn't close things out. So serial moving can be a pattern that can keep us stuck because we don't close things. There can be another pattern where there's a lot of move and follow. We call it courteous compliance. Another word for it would just, I forget the other label that we can give to it, but there's the sense that somebody makes a move and everybody else just says, sure, fine. So it's lacking the energy of the dynamics that you would get if the other actions were active and being voiced. And then there's a pattern where we might have too much bystand. So in a team that starts to complain about why did we use this tool or, know, I'm noticing nobody's using Slack or I'm noticing, you know, when we, when something gets posted in Slack, nobody acknowledges it. So if you find yourself in a meeting where, people are sharing a lot of context or perspective, maybe we can, I call it a hall of mirrors. Like we've got lots of perspective, but what's needed is for somebody to really make a move and say, all right, so given that now, what do we want to do about it? So what's really fascinating about those, we can also get locked in a move and a pose, a really strong advocacy or argument. And what's needed in that kind of argument is we need more follow and bystand. But what I find fascinating, so a pattern that I see play out over and over again will be one of two, the serial moving or the courteous compliance. So we've got a lot of moves or we've got move and follow. Brian Milner (17:25) Yeah. Marsha Acker (17:45) And if I'm someone in the meeting that either doesn't feel like my voice is welcomed or that it would be a career limiting move to oppose you, what I'll do is start to use one of the other actions in place of my oppose. So if it's not okay for me to push back and say, Brian, I don't want to talk about that, or I disagree, I think we're going off track, then what I might start doing is just making new moves. Brian Milner (18:02) Hmm. Marsha Acker (18:15) So rather than say to you, hey, Brian, I don't want to do that, you'll be talking about something, and now I'm introducing another topic. Hey, can we talk about where we're going for lunch next week? Or can we talk about the meaning behind that word over there that we were using last week? we don't do it intentionally. It comes for really good reason. Brian Milner (18:36) Right. Marsha Acker (18:39) We will all have our own reasons about why we do or don't do that. But I think some of the greatest work to do in teams is to talk about those four actions, to normalize them, and to invite them. Brian Milner (18:52) I love this. what kind of fascinated me, caught my attention the most about what you were saying is when I saw these, and kind of reading up here and reading through your work prior to our discussion, those four modes, when I read it, the first time it seemed to make sense, move, follow, oppose, bystand. But when I saw bystand, it really did seem, my first initial gut response was, yeah. That makes sense. There are bystanders that are happening in meetings that just do nothing. They just kind of sit back and they're not going to be, you know, they're not going to get in the way of the flow of something. But the way you described it is really fascinating because it's not a passive thing. It is an active participation. Marsha Acker (19:35) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, if somebody is, well, I love that you're naming that because I get asked that question all the time. So again, American business trends. So if you step into the mind of someone who believes that I'm really only adding value if I'm bringing ideas and the way we would code that would be often you're making moves. So people will tend to value. making moves and opposes because a lot of times that's what the culture values. If you're in an organization that says, bring me problems, bring me solutions, you will find a cultural pattern in there of people showing up and making moves and opposes throughout their whole meeting. It'll be a stuck pattern. It'll be overused actions. But if we think about, so bystand could be questions, asking powerful questions. what's that mean to us falls along the line of bringing inquiry into the conversation. And so it gives us a way to balance advocacy and inquiry. But bystand is, bystand and follow are active. If somebody was not saying anything in the conversation, we wouldn't know, we wouldn't be able to code them because they're not speaking. And those four relate to speech acts. So, We have to speak in order for it to be coded as something. But those people who are sitting back often have some of the best bystands. Like if you were to tap that person on the shoulder and say, hey, I would love to know what you see right now in the conversation, they'd probably be able to tell you. Brian Milner (20:57) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love this. And, you know, one of the things we teach in our advanced Scrum Masterclass is having people kind of understand how to deal with conflict in their teams and stuff. And we talk about the Thomas Killman kind of five responses to conflict. And I'm seeing a lot of overlap here in these modes too of, some of these things sound like a certain response to conflict in certain ways as well. But before we run out of time, I want to... Marsha Acker (21:30) Mm. Yeah. Brian Milner (21:43) I want to make sure that we get to, if we're in this situation, what are some steps, what are some things we can do to break that chain and not just have the same conversation again next week. Marsha Acker (21:48) Yeah. Yeah. So I would love for people to just think about using those four actions, especially if you work with a team on a fairly frequent basis, right? You will likely, even as I describe those, you will likely start to be able to identify what's the pattern that might be showing up. So I think the first step is can you identify or create a hypothesis for yourself about what might our structural pattern be? So do I hear like really clear poses? You know, do we make a lot of moves? So if you can find the actions that are predominant in your conversation, that's really the first step. And then the second step, there are a couple of different things to counteract each of them. So if move is really strong and it's coming from certain people, designing your facilitated session or even inviting participants to other participants to be the ones to make the move. So inviting others to speak first is one way to do it. limiting the number of moves that people can make. So sometimes if I'm working with a team that has that pattern, I'll give them some kind of, I'll give them a poker chip or I'll give them a card that says move on it. And I will limit everybody to one move per meeting. So structurally, I'm asking people to start to constrain their own moves. And then asking them to then step into, know, if somebody makes a move, staying with it long enough. as, so as a facilitator, you might say, if you noticed that you've got multiple moves on the table, you might just say, Hey, we've got four topics. This, this, this, and this, which is the one that we want to dive into first. So that's another way of just prompting a group to follow a move that they've made. And I think if you're noticing, you don't have a pose. You. chances are that is not going to come naturally. So I think you've really got to design questions that surface it. asking for what are the risks or who sees this differently. A lot of times if I'm leading a session, I will ask people, where did I get it wrong or what do I have wrong? Brian Milner (23:47) Yeah. Marsha Acker (24:12) What am I missing? What might I not be seen? So those are all ways for me to prompt. And I think if you've got some hierarchy in the room or differentials about that, that's really got to come from the person who's sort of holding some of that positional power maybe. Brian Milner (24:29) Yeah, I love that because there's there's sort of a maybe it's an American culture thing. I don't know. But but I know in the business world I've experienced if you call a meeting if it's your meeting there there's sort of an expectation that you're in control, you know, you know, it feels like there's there's sort of a you're not invited to say something like, what am I missing? Marsha Acker (24:52) Yeah. Yep. Brian Milner (24:53) because that's sort of admitting that you weren't prepared for this meeting. But I agree completely with you, that's not really the case. It's just saying, I can't know everything, so what don't I know about this, I should. Marsha Acker (25:09) Yeah. And it's hard. That can be a hard question. And I often say to people, don't ask the question. Don't elicit a pose if you're not really ready to hear it. It can be hard when somebody says, I think it's a two-ee. I totally disagree with the direction that we're going. Because if I, as the person who's asked the question and now receiving that feedback, If it starts to show on my face or I disconnect from it, what's gonna happen is that gets registered across everybody in that room. And that'll be the last time anybody steps up to answer that kind of question. Brian Milner (25:36) Right. Yeah, I love as well when you were talking about, you know, the actions and maybe having tokens or stuff for people to have actions. think I don't, I'm sure this is maybe part of the intention of this as well, but I love the side effect of that, that yes, I'm limiting people who would be controlling to not, not take control of the entire meeting, but once they've spent theirs, now I'm in a situation where the people who maybe wouldn't be those people that would normally step up. They're the only ones who have that ability left. So you have that side benefit of I'm kind of making space for the quieter voices in this group to have a chance to speak up. And I think that's a really important thing in these kind of meetings too. Marsha Acker (26:35) Yeah, when we find ourselves in stuck patterns, there will be very good reason for, or the Groundhog Day conversation. There will be a pattern to the structure of that conversation that keeps repeating itself. And a lot of times what will be happening is somebody will make a move and very often the person that follows them will be the same person every time. So if Marsha speaks and then Brian follows and that's a pattern that gets set up. every single time. All it does is reinforce me to make more moves because I know you're going to be right behind me. And then over time, we're really unconscious, I think about it, as a structural pattern. But the rest of the team will start to fall back and be like, well, they seem to have it. There's no need. No need. So yes, what we're trying to do is change the behavior by looking at structure and finding ways to invite it. Brian Milner (27:34) That's awesome. This is fascinating. I want to be respectful of your time and everyone's time listening, I could go on for another hour in this conversation. This is just really fascinating stuff for me. And I want to point out to everyone again, if this is fascinating to you, we're going to put all the links to this stuff in our show notes so that you can easily just click on that and find it. But just to call it out again. Marsha Acker (27:41) You Brian Milner (27:55) Marcia has a couple of books out there that are in this topic area that could be really useful to you. One is the art and science of facilitation. And the one that I kind of took a deep dive into is called Build Your Model for Leading Change, which by the way, there's a subtitle of this, a guided workbook to catalyze clarity and confidence and leading yourself and others. And I just, would underline the workbook. Right? Because I think it's true. It is something to kind of work your way through. And it's not just a beach read. Yeah. Yeah. Marsha Acker (28:27) No, it's not. I like to think of it as a Sunday morning, maybe with a cup of coffee and a little bit of quiet space. Brian Milner (28:36) Yeah, love that. I love that picture. Well, Marsha, I can't thank you enough. You know, we've been kind of trading schedules and trying to align this to get Marsha on for a while. And, you know, when that kind of thing happens, for whatever reason, it always seems to be like, when the person comes on, it's like, wow, that was worth it. I'm really, really glad we went through that because this was a great conversation. So thanks so much. Thanks so much for sharing your research and wisdom here on this. Marsha Acker (28:56) I appreciate it. Brian Milner (29:02) and for coming on the show. Marsha Acker (29:04) Thank you for having me. It was great.

Tänases saates on Andres Kostivi külaliseks Tiina Hiller, pikaaegse turunduse- ja personalijuhtimise kogemusega ekspert, kes täna tegutseb Futuristi töötubade fasilitaatori ja digiteenuste arenduse projektijuht.    Tänases episoodis võtame Tiinaga vaatluse alla fasiliteerimise kui strateegilise tööriista, mis aitab meeskondadel ja organisatsioonidel paremaid otsuseid teha, tulemusi saavutada ning kiiremini kohaneda.   Saates tuleb juttu:  Fasiliteerimise olemus ja tähtsus: Tiina selgitab, mis on fasiliteerimine ja miks on see tänapäeval nii oluliseks muutunud.  Fasiliteerimise mõju: arutleme, kuidas fasiliteerimine mõjutab positiivselt tiime ja organisatsioone, tõhustades koostööd ja suurendades kaasatust.  Fasiliteerimine juhi tööriistana: Räägime sellest, kuidas fasiliteerimisoskused aitavad juhtidel meeskonna potentsiaali maksimeerida, otsustusprotsesse kiirendada ja meeskonna ühtsust tugevdada.  Millal kasutada fasiliteerimist: Tiina jagab näpunäiteid olukordade äratundmiseks, kus fasiliteerimine on eriti kasulik.  Olulised fasiliteerimisoskused: Käsitleme vajalikke oskusi efektiivseks fasilitaatoriks olemiseks ning Tiina jagab ka soovitusi ja fasiliteerimisoskuste arendamiseks ja täiendamiseks.    Soovitatud materjalid:  Raamatusoovitus: The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams, autorilt Marsha Acker.  Blogisoovitus: The Workshopper blog by AJ & Smart).  Podcasti soovitused: Workshops Work (kuula siit) ja First Time Facilitator (kuula siit).  Kiiresti muutuvad turutingimused ja tehnoloogilised uuendused nõuavad ettevõtetelt pidevat kohanemist. Fasiliteerimisoskused aitavad organisatsioonidel ja tiimidel tõhusamalt kaasata oma liikmeid, struktureerida arutelusid ning jõuda kiiremini innovatiivsete ja efektiivsete lahendusteni.    Kuulake meie viimast episoodi ja avasta, kuidas fasiliteerimisoskused võivad sinu tiimi ja organisatsiooni aidata.

Thursday Night Interview Program with William Strydom. Talking Shifts in Agile Space, Interview No. 21.  William Strydom, Integral Agilist, Professional Coach and Leadership Developer.  An Agilist who is currently spreading the joy of modern ways of working and agility across teams, departments and organizations. He believes in evoking excellence in others.  William and I met through Marsha Acker and her cohort activities towards earning IC Agile's Expert in Agile Coaching program William's profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamstrydom/ Reference report: https://businessagility.institute/learn/skills-in-the-new-world-of-work/750/  The Thursday Night show will start at 8pm EST with the podcast version to follow up at 9pm EST.  Please stay tune for more interviews with agile people and change agents. Please reach out if you want to be on the show.  Happy Scrumming, Please don't forget to sign up for out weekly mailing list with its freebees. Social Media: - search 5amMesterScrum or #5amMesterScrum  and you should find us and if not please let us know LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok     Podcasts: (search 5amMesterScrum)

Marsha Acker, the CEO of Team Catapult and the author of "Builder Model for Leading Change," shares her insights on the essential elements of leadership and personal growth in a recent podcast episode. With an engaging and thoughtful dialogue, Aker discusses the significance of empathy, self-awareness, and structured self-reflection in fostering positive changes both in personal life and within organizations.Understanding Happiness and LeadershipFor Acker, happiness comprises simple yet profound elements: a warm cup of coffee, a beautiful sunrise, and a serene blue waterscape. Her definition extends into her professional philosophy, where happiness influences leadership styles and organizational change. Acker emphasizes the importance of understanding personal and behavioral models as foundational aspects of effective leadership. She advocates for leaders to develop a consistent self-awareness that informs their interactions and decision-making processes.Empathy in LeadershipThe role of empathy stands out prominently in Acker's discussion. She highlights how the current lack of empathy in many professional and social interactions can hinder meaningful communication and progress. Acker's approach involves recognizing differences and finding ways to empathically engage with others, especially in challenging workplace dynamics.Dealing with Change and Setting BoundariesNavigating change is a central theme of Acker's book and her professional coaching practices. She introduces concepts from David Kerr's structural dynamics theory, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a "center of gravity" through one's leadership model, behavior, and life philosophy. Acker encourages leaders to establish clear personal boundaries to prevent work from overwhelming other aspects of life. She stresses the significance of starting each day with intention and space, allowing for a more controlled and positive impact on daily activities.Tactics for New and Established LeadersAcker provides practical advice for both new and established leaders. She suggests the use of journaling to reflect on interactions and experiences to better understand personal reactions and the dynamics of high-stakes situations. By recognizing when stakes are rising, leaders can more effectively manage their responses and engage in more constructive dialogues.Acker also touched upon the importance of navigating high-stakes situations without escalating tensions. She advises leaders to ask reflective questions and encourage open dialogue to better understand and address underlying issues in high-pressure scenarios.Final Thoughts and ResourcesMarsha Acker's insights offer a roadmap for leaders aiming to enhance their efficacy through self-awareness, empathy, and proactive change management. Her strategies are designed to help leaders foster environments where creativity, productivity, and positivity are at the forefront. For those interested in deeper exploration, Acker's book and the additional resources at Team Catapult provide valuable guidance for personal and professional growth.Through her work, Acker demonstrates a profound understanding of the complexities of leadership and the transformative power of adopting a model that values empathy, clarity, and personal integrity.Enjoy the episode above or watch the video below. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit happyaf.substack.com/subscribe

Marsha Acker reveals how to break free from the cycle of miscommunication and misunderstandings. — YOU'LL LEARN — 1) The root of misunderstandings and miscommunications 2) The four actions of every conversation 3) The more effective way to disagree with someone Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep949 for clickable versions of the links below. — ABOUT MARSHA — Marsha Acker, CPCC, PCC, CPF, is the host of the Defining Moments of Leadership podcast, the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, and the author of two groundbreaking and thought-provoking books: The Art and Science of Facilitation and Build Your Model for Leading Change (a workbook). Marsha has an international presence and reputation as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue, and a passionate agilest. She coaches leadership teams to grow their collective leadership and to build the capability of achieving true, sustainable behavior change through dialogue. • Book: "Build Your Model for Leading Change: A Guided Workbook to Catalyze Clarity and Confidence in Leading Yourself and Others" • Book site: BuildYourModel.com • LinkedIn: Marsha Acker • Website: TeamCatapult.com — RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW — • Study: “Essential Conflict In The Workplace Statistics In 2024” from ZipDo • Theory: 4 Player Model • Book: "Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together" by William Isaacs • Past episode: 159: Increasing Confidence by Increasing Self-Awareness with Dr. Tasha Eurich • Past episode: 366: Mastering Conversations through Compassionate Curiosity with Kwame Christian • Past episode: 707: Amy Edmondson on How to Build Thriving Teams with Psychological Safety See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, I'm joined by Marsha Acker, and we're Unveiling the Secrets of Leading Change. Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a leadership development firm. She is also an executive and leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and host of the Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha helps leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication that get in the way of high performance. She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue, and a passionate agilest. Her latest book is called Build Your Model for Leading Change: A Guided Workbook to Catalyze Clarity and Confidence in Leading Yourself and Others. Listen in as we Unveil the Secrets of Leading Change. Show resources: Marsha Acker on LinkedIn TeamCatapult website TeamCatapult leadership blog Build Your Model for Leading Change: A Guided Workbook to Catalyze Clarity and Confidence in Leading Yourself and Others Sponsors: Leader Connect The Qualified Leadership Series Ignite Management Services Liberty Strength  ____ Get all of Jon Rennie's bestselling leadership books for 15% off the regular price today! HERE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our latest episode of the Women in Leadership Podcast, our host Annemarie Cross deepens our understanding of how to lead change, with transformational insights from the remarkable Marsha Acker, founder and CEO of Team Catapult. Marsha is internationally recognized for her expertise in facilitating meaningful conversations, breaking through communication barriers, and promoting agility across organizations.   Host of the Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast, she is also the author of The Art and Science of Facilitation and Build Your Model for Leading Change. She emphasizes the importance of facilitation and coaching skills as essential for 21st-century leaders.  Tune in to this powerful episode and embrace the tactics, communication strategies, and self-awareness needed to lead impactful change in your organization. On today's show, Marsha is going to share:   How leading change often means that we get stuck and have the same conversations over and over again without getting anywhere  How deepening of your self-awareness to understand your impact on interpersonal and group dynamics     4 primary questions to ask when leading change  RESOURCES:   3 Stages of the Customer Journey Podcast Episode   Book in for an Authority Audit  5 Pillars to Build Visibility, Generate Leads and Enrol Clients with Ease Quiz  Are You Ready to Launch Your Coaching Business Podcast? Take the Quiz  Contact Marsha: Website: https://teamcatapult.com/ https://buildyourmodel.com/ Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker Twitter: @marshaacker Email: macker@teamcatapult.com  A Personal Message from Annemarie Have you enjoyed listening to this podcast interview and want to know how you can create your very own podcast platform to so you become known as an influential voice in your industry? Access my free How to Create a Profitable Podcasting Masterclass, where I'll show you: Six Common Podcasting Myths that'll keep you stuck from creating your profitable podcast; Why focusing on technology (i.e. which microphone you should be using) is unwise and what you MUST focus on first if you want to start a profitable podcast. Sadly, SO many Change Makers and aspiring Thought Leaders miss these key steps and fail to generate the ROI/income they hope their podcast will generate; Three Changes in Consumer Behaviour you need to be aware of BEFORE you launch your podcast to help keep you focused on what's MOST important and/or no longer relevant; The NUMBER ONE reason why businesses fail to create a profitable podcast so you can avoid falling into the same trap; Three Podcast Profit Models that'll help you nurture listeners into leads and into paying customers, step-by-step. Go to: www.PodcastingWithPurpose.com/Masterclass YOUR SAY: What did you think about the message shared today? What action step will you take to turn this around? Go ahead and share. We'd love to hear from you! Please leave your comment in the box below, and remember to share and Like the show with your colleagues. Also, stop on by our Facebook page to say hello and to give us a shout out on Twitter – we promise to shout back! As always, we appreciate it. The post [Ep#218] How to Lead Change appeared first on The Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast Network   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bio Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership   development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change.  She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. TeamCatapult is a partner to mid-size start-ups and global fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, healthcare, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Clients have included Microsoft, Riot Games, Epic Games, Capital One, Blizzard Entertainment, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, and Chef. Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha's unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication  that  get  in  their  way  of  high  performance.  She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilist. She is the author of Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyse clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others.  Interview Highlights 04:15 Having effective conversations 04:45 Move-follow-bystand-oppose 09:30 Functional self-awareness 15:50 Build Your Model for Leading Change 18:00 Articulating your own model for change 26:00 Collective alignment 27:20 Getting messy 30:00 Making space for open conversations 35:40 TeamCatapult    Social Media  ·         LinkedIn: Marsha on LinkedIn ·         Website:  www.teamcatapult.com ·         Twitter: Marsha on Twitter    Books & Resources ·         The World of Visual Facilitation ·         The Art & Science of Facilitation, Marsha Acker ·         Build Your Model for Leading Change, Marsha Acker ·         Reading the Room: Group Dynamics for Coaches and Leaders, David Kantor ·         Where Did You Learn To Behave Like That? (Second Edition), Sarah Hill ·         Coaching Agility From Within: Masterful Agile Team Coaching ·         Making Behavioral Change Happen - Team Catapult ·         Changing Behavior in High Stakes - Team Catapult   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. In this episode, I have Marsha Acker, the CEO and founder of TeamCatapult. Marsha is a respected and sought after leadership development expert and her team, or her company organisation, TeamCatapult, focuses on equipping leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change. So this is the second part of my conversation, the second and the last part of my conversation with Marsha. And in this conversation, in this part of the episode, we talk about, or Marsha talks about having effective conversations, functional self awareness, what does that mean? She also talked about how one can articulate one's own model for change, and the need for getting collective alignments and the fact that it's not easy, sometimes it gets messy, but it's important to make space for open conversations. I found both the part one and this conversation, which is the final part of my conversation with Marsha, very insightful, and I hope you get something useful out of it as well. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Marsha Acker. Marsha Acker I'm very focused on behavioural-led change at the moment. And so in that behavioural-led change, what I place at the centre of any change is how are people communicating with one another? Are they able to actually have the real conversation? Is there enough awareness in the system that they can kind of catch sight of when the real conversation starts to go underground? And can they actually have the muscle, the range in their leadership to catch sight of it and then bring it back in the room? Change doesn't happen until people feel heard and understood. I think one of the biggest questions that I think we help leadership teams look at is how do we work with difference, and actually welcome it rather than try to minimise it, because I think that's the rub where, if we don't have skills to work with it, we tend to minimise it or send it out of the room or suppress it. Like we say, you know, we don't have enough time for that, or, gosh, we've got this deadline, so we've become super deadline driven, and I think sometimes at the expense of having a real conversation with one another. And I don't know that I could find you an example of any organisation that I've worked in, including my own TeamCatapult, where something that we're trying to do or accomplish or move forward doesn't meet a roadblock when some aspect of our conversation isn't fully online or we're not fully having the conversation that we need to have. So you asked how would I do so how, one of the ways that I would do that today is, first, whenever I'm engaging with a leadership team or any other team that's really trying to bring about change and just noticing like they're trying to level up or there's something that they're wanting that they feel like they're kind of capped at is I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation, because I think in the conversation there are lots of indicators about how that conversation plays out and are people really able to say what they're thinking or do we get stuck in some common dysfunctional patterns that can show up? So one example of that would be, we use a sort of a technology for looking at conversation and there are four actions that happen in all effective conversations, a move, a follow, an oppose, and a bystand. So a move sets direction, a follow supports it, an oppose offers really clear correction. It says, no, hang on, wait a minute. A bystand offers a morally neutral perspective, so one way is to help a team onboard that, but there are common patterns and one of the common patterns that will come out, particularly in tech teams where there's pace and we need to move things forward, is that they can get into this pattern of someone makes a move, and everyone else just sort of remains silent or, so something to the effect might voice ‘sure, you know, that sounds good.' So they start to fall into this pattern of move and lots of follow. And what's missing often is the voice of bystand, which says, hey, I'm wondering what's going on, or I'm wondering what we're not saying. And then really clear opposition. So the ability to bring pushback, constraint into the conversation. So if you go back to that original leadership team that I was telling you about, you know, way back when, I think one of the things that was going on in that team is they weren't, no one was able to say, this is an incredibly difficult decision, and I don't think I can make it unless I have these things answered. So they kept making it about the process and it wasn't really about the process at all. It was really, it had a very personal component to it that wasn't being discussed, and so the inability to discuss that really created the drag. So the way that I think about helping any team work through any change is, helping them onboard the skills of being able to have, we call it bringing, it's a principle that we hold about bringing the real conversation in the room. Can you bring the conversation online versus offline? So the other flag that you might have for when your conversations are going offline is, if you feel, I often think about if I leave a conversation with you and I, for example, if I left this conversation and I went off and I felt the need, or I was compelled to one of vent or complain about it to someone else, that's my kind hazard flag. But, there was something that I was holding back from in this conversation that I didn't say, and that's my signal to actually circle back around. And so maybe, maybe I need to check in with myself, maybe there's something that I left unsaid. Ula Ojiaku That's so insightful. I've been making notes, but the question I have, one of the key ones I have right now is based on what you've said, you know, if one is to go out from a conversation and realise, oh, there's something I'm needing to vent, which I didn't say, you know, in front of the people or the person involved, as a facilitator or coach for that team, how can you help them to, because there could be several factors. It could be that they don't feel safe, they feel that they might be punished for actually saying what they have in mind. So what would be the process for addressing it, such that people can actually say what they actually feel without feeling that they would be punished or side-tracked or ostracised for it? Marsha Acker Yeah. I think there's two things that will be happening, and so when we are working with leadership teams, we're often helping them onboard these skills collectively. And that does take a process, right? So I think there's a piece around helping them build a container. So when I say container, I mean we're talking about the four actions, we're talking about the value of the four actions, we're talking about kind of normalising that oppose can feel really scary or difficult, but that'll very much be based on the individual. So we're working at both that whole team or system level, but also at the individual level, because for me, you know, in my own behavioural profile, oppose can be low, and there are really good reasons for that. Like I grew up in a household where it was rude to oppose an adult, so I've got that, you know, childhood story about why I would not want to oppose. I've got other stories that have happened along the way that sort of started to build this kind of old internal narrative for me about, ooh, it can be dangerous to oppose. So I think there's some individual work that all of us, you know, when we're ready to engage in, can do around noticing when I might hesitate to do that, what's the story? What's sort of the old narrative that I'm telling myself about that action, and what has me hold back in the current space today. So there's that individual component of growing what David Kantor calls functional self-awareness, so the ability to sort of catch sight of my own behaviour to also be able to grow my own behavioural range. But then Ula, you've, like, you very much are naming, there's also a system level component to that. So if I'm on that team and if I'm sort of in a positional leadership role where I might hold some kind of authority over people get paid and I'm responsible for those performance reviews that we seem to do only once a year, like I need to be really aware of where I might be, even unintentionally, really closing off those conversations. So how willing am I to put out an idea and have someone offer an oppose? Or am I not comfortable with that? Like, I don't like it when someone opposes, and so how might I be consciously or unconsciously kind of squelching that? So there will be that role and then there will also be the role of the team. Teams that have this, I call it sort of the foot tapping, like we need to get things moving or rolling or we only have a 30 minute time box for this meeting. It's not that you'd never have 30 minute meetings, but if 30 minute meetings are all you ever use to meet, you are really missing an opportunity, like there are places where I think we have to slow conversations down in order to create the space for people to really be able to think together and to take risk. But if there's never any space for me to take risk, I'm just not, you know, it can be scary enough to do it, so I think there are multiple things that you have to attend to at multiple levels. I think there's an individual level, I think there's a whole team level, a system, I think there's the positional leader or whoever's in authority or sort of whose voice carries a lot of weight in that team. All those things will be playing a part in whether that conversation can fully come online, and I do think it takes work. So I'm just a big advocate of work on how we communicate, because if we can equip everyone in a team to be paying attention to how we're communicating and we sort of have that range in our behavioural ability and our communicative competence to kind of bring all those things online, then I would hold that there aren't many things that we can't work through. But when we just attend to the process first, without having some of the skills about how to engage in the conversation, I think that's where we get really stuck and then we just start searching for other process, right. It becomes hard to have a conversation and I know I need to have a conversation, so I go looking for the new facilitation tool or I go get my, you know, bag of stickies and markers and I'm like, we're going to, and I just, I think sometimes we can become sort of over-reliant on facilitation processes and look, I'm the first proponent of facilitation processes, but sometimes I think they actually, we lean so heavily on them that they actually might be hindering the real conversation coming in the room. Ula Ojiaku What you've said so far, Marsha reminds me of, you know, the values in the Agile Manifesto sets people and individuals over the processes and tools. It doesn't mean the process and the tools aren't important, but we're dealing with human beings first and foremost. And my philosophy as well is about winning hearts and minds, because that way you can go further with people once they, like to use your words earlier on, they feel heard and listened to, rather than imposing something on them and what you've said so far as well, reminds me of in your book, The Art and Science of Facilitation, this is gold dust. Yes, I refer to it almost every quarter since I got it. I refer to it in, you know, to just sharpen my myself. And you said something on page four, in other words, facilitation is not just about what tool or technique you're applying, it just as much, if not more, it's about what you believe. So you did mention something about the self-awareness and functional self-awareness and proposed by David Kantor. So it's not just about what you, you know, it's about what you believe, who you are being in the moment, and what you see and sense in the group. We could go into this, but I am also mindful of time and I'd really like to dive into this book, your latest book, Build Your Model for Leading Change. I thought, like you may have mentioned before we started recording, it's not something you'd read over a weekend. I opened the first page and I was like, no, I have to slow down and think about it. So what got you on the journey to writing this book? What was the intention? Marsha Acker You know, so I was mentioning earlier, I did several coach trainings, individual coach training, systems coach training, and then I got introduced to David Kantor's work. So he wrote a book called Reading the Room, and it was through my introduction to his work and meeting Sarah Hill and Tony Melville, who run an organisation in the UK called Dialogix. But it was through meeting them and David and really starting to understand structural dynamics that I got introduced to the concept of model building. And that does come from David's research around face-to-face communication and what it looks like for leaders to be able to bring clarity to their work. And I remember along the way, one of my first conversations with Sarah Hill, you know, I had, so I had a whole background in facilitation, what it looked like to facilitate groups, and at that moment I was really kind of struggling with what's the difference between team coaching and facilitating, and I was having this kind of personal, what I realise now, I was deep in building my own model for what team coaching would look like for me. But at the time it felt like a bit of an existential crisis or a midlife crisis, or something that I, because I saw difference between the two, but I was really confused as I onboarded all of the different tools and models for how to coach about the difference between the two. And I remember one day Sarah looked at me and I had shared with her a perspective that someone else had shared with me about what happens in team coaching, and I was really confused because it really conflicted with what she was saying to me, and so I went up to her after we'd done a session and I just said, so I really want to talk about this. You said this, and then someone else said this and it just makes no sense to me, and she just looked at me and she said, well, they have a different model. And I thought, okay, well, which one is right? And she was like, neither. You know, neither right nor wrong, just different. And boy, I walked away and I just couldn't, I don't know how many years, it's probably been at least 10 years since we had that conversation, but it really stuck with me and I think in my own journey I've gotten so clear about the value of being able to articulate your model for leading change, your model for looking at behaviour, your model for leadership. And boy, you know, one of the things that I value the most about that is David's stance that we all have our own, and that is some of our work to do, is to define our model and that there will likely be a phase where I am taking in other people's models and I'm learning how they talk about it and I'm learning the language and so there is a version of that where I'm kind of imitating others like, you do it and I'm going to do it just like you did it and I'm going to follow the language. It's one of the reasons that I published the first book around facilitation, like, that is how I think about facilitation and the facilitation stance, but I also hold that at some point, it's intended as a guide, and, you know, there are a couple of ways of thinking about just getting started and then developing and then mastering, but it's when we get to mastery that essentially the job becomes to build your own model. So there will be parts about even that facilitation book where you might find along the way, Ula, you're going yes, that's my, like, that's totally in my model too. And then, hey Marsha, you know, this thing where you talk about this, like, I don't know, it's just, it's not for me. So, I'm going to discard that, it's not here. And then there's this new place, like I do this really differently, so I'm going to start to invent, you know, this is a place where I'm going to do some model building of my own, where this is going to look like a new part that very specifically becomes mine. And David would've said that models are our picture of the world, and our map of how we intend to go about working in the world, and so much of what I see when it comes to change is that I just think we're not really uber intentional and thoughtful about how we want to go about change. And if you go on LinkedIn at any given day and just search on Agile and you can find all kinds of social media debates about, this is the way it needs to be done, and someone else will chime in, and I think that's baloney, this is the way I think it should be done. And what I would love to say to all those people is it just means there's difference, right? And I think the work to do is to be really, really clear about what is it that you are trying to change. So you've heard me say like I'm about changing behaviour first, like really focused in on using conversation as a way for that behaviour change to happen. And then I hold and trust and I've seen years of evidence of once that gets ironed out, once we're able to have more of that communicative competence in a team, that the other things become less of an issue and we're able to navigate that, but that's me, and that's my model. That doesn't mean, that doesn't make me right or wrong. It doesn't make me the only way to go about change. I think there's so many other different ways. So others listening to this podcast might have a place where they put process in the centre, and that is their focus, and that gets to be okay. So I'm just a real advocate of being clear about what is it that you're trying to change and how do you go about making that change happen in the world. Ula Ojiaku What struck me is you're saying the need to be clear about what you're trying to change, what you're trying to, if I may use the word, achieve as a result of the transformation. Would there be a place for the why? Because you might, and if so, how does that weave into the whole picture? Marsha Acker Well, I think in the process of building a model, you get clear first about how do I believe change happens? And then it becomes, okay, so what would I do to bring about change? So even if you think about leadership, what do I think about how leadership should, in my world, you know, should behave or act? How would I grow leadership? How would I grow leadership in others? And then what are some of the things that I would do? Where might I take action? And then why would I take action in those places? The same thing with change. I'm really clear about conversation and behaviour and helping people look at that. And so there are certain things that I would do in the room with a leadership team, and there's certain things that I would not do. And I'm really clear about why, like, because I hold, like what you'll hear is that phrase, because change doesn't happen until people feel seen and heard. And that's a real key, becomes a guiding North Star and I think it helps me navigate difference. So when I run across someone else who has a really different model than me, there's a version of myself years ago who, you know, it's kind of like the example that I gave of saying to Sarah, well, let's, you know, let's debate this out about which one of us is, you know, right or wrong. I don't actually think that's our work to do, but I do think our work to do is to just be really clear. So can you name what's in your model? Can you name what it is that you're trying to change? And then you and I could engage in a, what we would call, kind of a cross model conversation where it's not about beating the other down or making either of us wrong, but we can be really clear about, oh, well I would do this because this is why, this is what I believe about how change happens and this is how I'm helping the team change. And you could say, actually, I see, you know, my focus is a little bit different and here's why, and here's what I would do. And now, gosh, that's a learning conversation to have, that's not a debate. In leadership teams as leaders are trying to lead change in an organisation, I think this is the conversation that doesn't get had almost ever is how do we believe change will happen, and what are we going to do to bring about change? And even if there are ten people in that team and we each might have a slightly different personal view about how change happens, we have got to come to some alignment around how we are collectively going to look to bring about change, because if we don't, it's going to feel really dispersed and really challenging as we try to move forward in a large scale change, if we've all got ten different versions, we've got ten different models on how change happens. Ula Ojiaku What I think I'm hearing you say, Marsha, is, as a leadership team, it's really about taking the time to be aligned on what you're trying to do and also, presenting a united front, because the whole organisation will be looking up to you, so you need to be saying the same thing. But this is now me extending, extrapolating, not that you said this, but within, you should also be able, within yourself as a team to have those difficult conversations. You know, you could make your move, or follow, or oppose yourselves, but come to a conclusion which you present as a united front to the organisation in charging it forward. And there's something else you said in your, well, it's a quote in your book, Build Your Model for Leading Change, which said that leadership is being in the mess and being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Do you want to expand on that please? Marsha Acker I think it's so true. There's, it's in the space between us that I think gets messy and having, we were just wrapping up a cohort program for a group of internal leaders, just recently and I watched sort of the thinking and the shift in mindset happen over time. Like I said, I have a lot of compassion for leaders that there's a ton of pressure and expectations, you know, from bottom side, up, across and I think in those moments, some days it can be just really challenging to navigate which end is up. How do I manage through that? And I'm responsible for all of this out in front of me, and yet the propensity, like the compelling, I think, reaction is to just keep moving things forward, like the go faster. Just go faster, get through the meeting faster, get the things done, delegate it more, and that, it's not that that's wrong, and it's really helpful, but there just sometimes needs to be space where they slow it down and they actually create space, and I think that's the messy part. Like if I were to, you know, if I were to even channel what I would describe if things get tense or if I feel like somebody's possibly going to be disagreeing or not cooperate in the way that I want them to, I sometimes think the propensity to just keep moving forward and step over it or go past it is what often plagues us and the path of like, let me just slow down, I think it feels messy, I think it feels uncertain. It lacks a little bit of clarity about how, okay, so if I open this up, if I give voice, or I allow someone to give voice to a different point of view or a different perspective, am I going to be able to clean it up and move us forward? And for me, that's part of what I mean by the messy part. Like, it's unpredictable and yet I watch, I've been in a room to watch it, I've experienced it myself, there's such a gift when you do just slow down a little bit. Like, there's misunderstandings get cleared up, assumptions that are not correct, get corrected. They, people who are just really charged up and have a, they're making up all kinds of stories about why things are happening, like the pressure valve gets released off of that and then, and the anxiety comes down, like I've just watched it happen over and over again. So I just, I think there is the things that we tend to want to stay away from because they're not comfortable, I think, are the things to find a way to make space for. So it's messy, it's uncomfortable, it's feels like it's going to take more time. It all the kind of negative talk that I hear leaders say or navel gazing, that's my favourite one, it's going to feel like navel gazing, but yeah, I think we have to create space for some of it. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Marsha. And there might be some listeners who, like me, are saying, okay, so in practice, how do we create the space? How do we go slow? Because in my area, in my field, I'm just quoting, you know, things seem to be going at break neck speed and there's never, things are never going to slow down for me. So how do I intentionally slow down or create the space to be able to do this? What are the practices, should we go on a retreat? Marsha Acker Yeah, well, I'll give you an example of at TeamCatapult. So, while we recommend this to all leadership teams that we work with, back during the pandemic, we, early on in the pandemic, I started to notice that we had grown, things had changed even for us internally. And so I made the decision to actually, even though we're all coaches, we brought coaches in to help us for about a year. And one of the things that we started to do for ourselves that we often recommend to others is carving out time once a month to create space where we would work on how we worked together. So, I don't, I'm not a huge, I think offsites and retreats are great, we do them, we have one coming up, we're all ridiculously excited to go to it, but we can't accomplish everything that we need to accomplish once or twice a year. And so we started to, given our size and our pace and kind of how we work together, the once a month really made sense for us. So we carve it out, it's the first Thursday of every month, it's for three and a half hours. We worked with a coach in that time night, right now we're not working with a coach and it's agenda-less. It's really an open space. It's not open space, the technology of open space, it's just an open conversation without an agenda. It's an invitation into dialogue and it is the place that we, I know that it's on my calendar, it's reserved, I don't have to, we can go at a pace in other meetings, but I know that we have that space and it's the place where we just show up, we all show up differently, we give time to actually surface the, sometimes maybe the things that did get stepped over intentionally or unintentionally across, you know, the last couple of weeks. And we have some of the most difficult, challenging, real, honest conversations in that space that I've ever experienced in my professional career, so it definitely also I've learned to try to block my calendar off after those calls to, you know, just to create a bit of processing time. So that's how we do it. I just recently, a couple months ago, interviewed someone on my podcast and he talked about, I loved this idea, of two week sprints and a one week retro. And so that was his way of really, intentionally carving out reflection time and really placing the value on catching sight of things, slowing down. So I think we need places where we're creating variability in the kind of meeting we're having, and I think when we're working at a really fast pace, just having, for me, I love knowing that it's on my calendar. I preserve the time, there's very little that will take precedence over it other than, you know, being on vacation or something, but, yeah, I really value it. So I think it will look different for every team, depending on the frequency and how often you meet and how much work is being done. Ula Ojiaku And would you say, because you know the one about blocking out the time in people's calendars as a team. What about as individuals, people as individuals also taking the time to do that for themselves? Marsha Acker Yeah. We are, you know, so in TeamCatapult, I think most people also work with individual coaches, so I think we all have a practice of doing that. When we're working with leadership teams, we often recommend both so that there's a carved out space on a monthly basis to come together collectively, and that they're each getting individual coaching as a way to help work through those things. Like I was saying, I notice when I show up in that space, my oppose goes silent, or I don't always bring my voice in, working one-on-one sometimes to help become more aware of why we're doing those things really helps us show up differently in the collective space. So yes, whether you're working with a coach or whether you're just carving out the time to do it yourself. And you asked me, you know, why I wrote the book, the Build Your Model book. It's partly that just wanting, it's a guided reflection workbook, and I really wanted to find a way to help people do this work on their own, with some handholds or some guidance around what it might look like. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. And is there, on TeamCatapult, is there any program that could be, for example, I want someone to guide me through the process, is that available? Marsha Acker Yeah. We have two public programs, where we lay down kind of the technology that I've been describing and help you think about your own model for how, so there's two versions of that, there's one path that will lead you to thinking about your model as an agile coach. And there's a second path that will lead you to thinking about your model as a leader, as an interventionist. So, kind of two different programs. So the Path for Agile Coaching falls under a program we call Coaching Agility From Within, and that's a cohort program. It's about building your own model for agile coaching. And then, if that's not of interest, we have two other programs. One's called Making Behavioural Change Happen, which is part one where you sort of onboard the technology of structural dynamics. And then the second part is called Changing Behaviour in High Stakes, and that's where we go a bit deeper into helping you think about how you would intervene in behaviour and in conversation, both at an individual level, but also at a system level, so how you might map the system. So two different paths, and very complimentary in our Coaching Agility From Within program. There's also a thread of structural dynamics, it's underneath of that and how to coach a team using structure. So yes, a couple of different ways. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. And what, I mean in addition to your fantastic books, and I'm not saying it just because you're here, what other books do you find yourself recommending to leaders? Marsha Acker Yeah. Well, I referenced one a little while ago Reading The Room by David Kantor. So all of our work really is informed greatly by that book. And my book Build Your Model for Leading Change, is based off of a lot of some of the concepts that David introduced and his book captures kind of in a narrative format, the story around it. And I would say mine is much more the workbook of how to onboard the technology of looking at behaviour and then the guided reflection of creating your model. The other thing that I am super excited, so my colleague Sarah, just re-released version two of her book. She has a book called, Where Did You Learn to Behave Like that? And I am deep into reading the new version. So it's top of mind for me. It further takes you down the path, like if you're hearing me talk about my childhood story and why I hesitate to oppose, Sarah's sort of the expert in that space around childhood story work and doing it with leaders. So her book is all about some stories around leaders who have done the work on childhood story, how it's really impacted their leadership, how they make space for difference and where they notice some of the kind of high stakes behaviours they may have as leaders. So yeah, if that's of interest, that's a really great resource to check out. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that. It'll be in the show notes and so that the audience can get it. And any ask of the audience before we wrap up. Marsha Acker Yeah. You know, we've covered a lot of topics today and I think what I would just say in summary is an invitation to anybody to kind of be on a really intentional journey about what do you think about leadership? How do you go about leading in the world? How do you believe change happens? You've heard me share some examples today, but I think there's a calling for all of us to do some of the work because I think in the doing the work, and getting clear for ourselves, I do think that's the place of clarity and competence. I think that's where we learn to kind of find our feet when the pull, the gravitational pull of the real world kind of gets in our way. And we're all dealing with that in many ways. So that's what I want people to think about and whatever shape or form that looks like for folks, that's the big thing. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that, Marsha. And if one wants to get in touch with you, how can they reach out to you? Marsha Acker A couple of ways. The best way to just connect with me will be on LinkedIn, so you can find me at Marsha Acker, and just, you know, when you send me them, I get tons and I don't say yes to everybody, so it's just really helpful if when people connect, they just tell me a little bit about how they're connecting. How they managed to get there, so that helps me do the sort and sift that I know we're all doing these days. The other place would be buildyourmodel.com so you can find kind of a free download there about model building, so if you're curious about that. And then our programs, you can find at teamcatapult.com. So the Making Behavioural Change Happen starts this fall and there's a Changing Behaviour in High Stakes program that starts in February, and the Coaching Agility From Within program starts in January next year. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. So the programs you mentioned that can be found on TeamCatapult, the one starting this Autumn is Autumn 2023 and the February and March dates are in 2024, just for the audience clarity. Thank you so much, Marsha. I wish we had more time, but I do respect your time and for me it's been really enriching and enlightening. And I do want to say thank you again for making the time to share and impart your knowledge, your wisdom, your experience with us. Marsha Acker Yeah, thanks a lot. I really appreciate being here. Ula Ojiaku Likewise. Thank you again. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Bio Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership   development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change.  She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. TeamCatapult is a partner to mid-size start-ups and global fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, healthcare, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Clients have included Microsoft, Riot Games, Epic Games, Capital One, Blizzard Entertainment, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, and Chef. Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha's unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication  that  get  in  their  way  of  high  performance.  She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilist. She is the author of Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyse clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others. Interview Highlights 02:30 Background and beginnings 03:35 Reaching a cap 08:50 Working with difference 10:45 Process-centred focus vs people-centred focus 15:50 Behavioural-led change 17:25 Having effective conversations Social Media LinkedIn: Marsha on LinkedIn Website:  www.teamcatapult.com Twitter: Marsha on Twitter  Books & Resources Making Behavioral Change Happen - Team Catapult Changing Behavior in High Stakes - Team Catapult Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku Hi everyone. My guest for this episode is Marsha Acker. Marsha is the Founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, and she is a respected and sought after leadership development expert, and her firm works to equip leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change. This episode is the first of a two part series, because there were just a lot of nuggets to get from Marsha and in part one, we talked about Marsha's background and beginning, how she got to a cap and she knew that she needed to break through a certain ceiling to get to more, to achieve her potential. She also talked about process-centred versus people-centred transformation and the differences and where each one might be considered. Of course, there is a bias for, and I am biased as well towards the people-centred focus, but there is a place for process and how you might go about implementing a behavioural led change. Without further ado, Part One of my conversation with Marsha Acker. I hope you find this as insightful as I did. I have with me the very one and only Marsha Acker, who is the founder of TeamCatapult and a coach, facilitator, much, much known in the Agile coaching discipline and beyond. Marsha, it is a big pleasure and an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you. Marsha Acker Thanks a lot. I'm super excited to be here with you today, so thanks for inviting me. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. So, Marsha, could you tell us a bit about yourself? Marsha Acker Yeah, well, I often say my first career was, you know, two degrees in software engineering and I spent some time working with developers, sort of bridging the gap between end users and developers. And so that was my first start, it's actually where I learned about facilitation, was trying to bring whole groups of users together to align on what they wanted in terms of requirements. So it was back before we talked about Agile, it was back before any of those methods and processes had made their way. But that's really where I got my start in facilitation. And then, yes, towards what I call my own retooling around my career, was when I, I actually went to look for professional coaching as a way to up my leadership. I didn't have a desire originally to become a coach. I wanted to do and learn coaching because I wanted to up my leadership, I just, I had reached a point where I was really challenged in my own leadership and so the very short version of that much longer circuitous path was, I found that I did go through coactive coaching. So I started in that space. CTI (Coach Training Institute) had a huge impact on me personally, it's responsible for many life decisions that I made coming out of that program. But that was where I got my certification in professional coaching with individuals, and then I went on to do ORSC from CRR Global, and then I went on to do structural dynamics and that's where I met the work of David Kantor, where I met David Kantor. And we can talk more about that, but that's certainly changed my whole view of how we enter interpersonal relationships, how we have conversations with one another, it gave me a lens for sort of looking at even some of the previous coach training that I did. So yes, I have, I often say I sort of have two backgrounds that I think the tech side helps me just stay connected to a, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for techies and people who have a lot of technical and scientific knowledge. And then I often say I learned a lot about process improvement and automation and making things effective and efficient, but I think one of the things that I really lacked in the first part of my career was the human skills, like how to work with other human beings. And I would say the second half of my professional career has been, yeah, how to work with others. It's a big thing. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, Marsha. Something you said about the second part of your career has been focused on working with humans. Well, I have a technical background in Electronic Engineering, Bachelor's degree, a Master's in Computer Science. And at the beginning of my career, it was more of, okay, what could you do? You know, what's your technical understanding? But as you move on, it's really more about how, you know, work well with people and get people to do the best work together. Would you say that's a general trend that you've also observed apart from your own personal experience? Marsha Acker Yeah. I don't know if it's, sometimes I wonder, you know, it's maybe just the lens that I look through or it's the organisations and the kinds of leaders that I somehow attract into my sphere. But I do find myself working a lot with technical leaders and I think one of the things that happens, technical and scientific tracks, you know, we move forward in our careers, we get rewarded for knowledge, for having the answer, for being able to connect and do things quickly. And I think in that career progression, we get really good at knowing the answer, having the answer, you know, we're working with things that we feel like are discreet, you know, we can own them in some way, but as we move up, and I think many, you know, I've talked to many a developer, engineer who, you know, sometimes reached that cap, and then the next step is to lead people, to lead others, and to, you know, to be the senior architect, to be the senior engineer, the Vice President or the Director. And you know, it's that famous saying, what got us here won't get us to the next level, and so I think there are those moments, I certainly experienced that, that was one of the reasons I went off to coach training was I just, the metaphor I use often is that I was out over my skis. I knew something was, like I was trying to make something happen or I was trying to get things to happen, and my only model for that was because I said, so, like, please do this, because, I think this is the way. And I just, I really, I started to realise, I felt like I was running on a hamster wheel some days, and I'm like, this isn't working and I feel like I'm missing something. So I often do find myself working with leaders or leadership teams who are, it's not that they're underperforming, it's just that they've reached a cap. The place where all that they know and all that they have, have served them really well, up until this point, and then like what's required to go to that next level or to be effective and efficient in a different kind of way. It's sort of when our focus starts to come off of the very discreet task and it becomes more about how do we create an environment, a space, a container for others to be their best, so it's no longer going to be, you know, me making all the decisions or me moving something forward, it's that we need to work together. And boy that we space is tricky. Yeah, we are going to see things differently and there's going to be conflict and there's going to be difference of opinion. And then, you know, ooh, how do I work with that in a way that's, I just, you know, I think one of the biggest questions that I think we help leadership teams look at is how do we work with difference, and actually welcome it rather than try to minimise it, because I think that's the rub where if we don't have skills to work with it, we tend to minimise it or send it out of the room or suppress it. Like we say, you know, we don't have enough time for that, or, gosh, we've got this deadline. So we've become super deadline driven, and I think sometimes at the expense of having a real conversation with one another. Ula Ojiaku Gosh, I have so many questions. I don't know which one to ask, but I'll just go with the last, based on what you've said, the last few sentences in terms of not having time, you suppress the conflict or the differences or the disagreements, because we're always like on a deadline or we don't have the time for this. So how would you get these leadership teams to step back and say, you know what, we have to deal with this elephant in the room, otherwise it's going to get bigger, fester, if we were to use an analogy of the wound on it, you know, if you just cover it up with a band-aid, it's not going to get better, sometimes you have to treat the wound, get the scab off so that it can heal wholesomely and you move forward. So what's your approach for this, please? Marsha Acker So I can tell you how I would've approached it early in my career, in a version of myself that really led with process. So at that time, I had a model for change that was very focused on ‘know the process', like document the process, define the new process, get people to follow the process. And I definitely, I kind of laugh about it now, but I, you know, it's not wrong, I mean, it worked, but this is very early in my career, early 2000, because I just began to work with agility. I had left one space where I was a part of a small startup and I was heading up all of our programs and we had really started to use extreme programming. So I'm sort of fresh on this, on this thinking of, okay, so there's different ways we can begin to work. And I'd gone into a smaller organisation, it was a consulting firm. We were leading process led change, and we were working with a leadership team who was really charged with a huge internal transformation effort. And at that time, working directly with that leadership team, I would've said we took a very process-centred focus to that, we documented the current process, we helped them. It was  over a year of working with this one leadership team, and then we started to help them craft, okay, so what's your desired change and what would the process under that look like? And as we got towards the end of that transformation, one of the things that I started to notice is that the process-led decisions that the leadership team was being asked to really make some decisions about, had a huge impact on people, both them and the staff and the people that they were managing, they cared greatly about their culture and the people, and they reached a place where they just, to describe it, they just dug in their heels and progress wasn't moving forward. And I remember thinking, we'd been on retreats with them multiple times, and it was in that moment, that was the moment where I learned and had the insight, that there was way more to change than just the process. And what I can tell you now that I couldn't quite articulate back then was that we were missing the people part of this equation. And what was starting to happen is that as the pressure increased and the leadership team was being asked to make decisions that were truly going to impact not only them personally, like where they lived, where their children went to school, you know, family impacts, but that was also going to have an impact across all the folks that they managed. And so they were reaching a place where they just couldn't make that decision kind of collectively. I think one of the biggest mistakes in that particular process was that we were so process led. And what was missing from it was a coaching perspective and a way to help them have the real conversation because the real conversation actually started to go out of the room. And I was certainly playing a part in, potentially a little unaware at the moment that in favour of wanting to push things forward and get things done in my process-led change model, they were really needing to have a different kind of conversation that wasn't about the process at all, but that had since become the undiscussable topic and it didn't get brought into the room. So we sort of, we left it out. So that's an example of an earlier model for change that I had, and I didn't have a way of bringing that conversation on mind or really even paying attention to it. Now you asked for how would I do it today? Ula Ojiaku Yes, because you've said the process-led model for change, I'm excited to know what the next one is. Marsha Acker Well I want to be really clear, I don't think that that's a wrong model. But I think for me, I learned that it was missing something, and I can reflect back now and tell you that, but I don't want your listeners to draw any wrong conclusions. That wasn't an overnight insight, that definitely took a little bit of time. But what I would say now is I have, you know, in my model for leading change, I think process is important, but it's really not at the core of how I think about change at all. I think in my model, it's definitely a sub-task, but I would say I'm very focused on behavioural-led change at the moment. And so in that behavioural-led change, what I place at the centre of any change is, how are people communicating with one another? Are they able to actually have the real conversation? Is there enough awareness in the system that they can kind of catch sight of when the real conversation starts to go underground? And can they actually have the muscle, the range in their leadership to catch sight of it and then bring it back in the room? And so, I place conversations and behaviour kind of at the core of change, and I hold a perspective that change, that no one will change, change doesn't happen until people feel heard and understood.  And I don't know that I could find you an example of any organisation that I've worked in, including my own TeamCatapult, where something that we're trying to do or accomplish or move forward doesn't meet a roadblock when some aspect of our conversation isn't fully online or we're not fully having the conversation that we need to have. So one of the ways that I would do that today is, first, whenever I'm engaging with a leadership team or any other team that's really trying to bring about change and just noticing like they're trying to level up or there's something that they're wanting that they feel like they're kind of capped at is I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation, because I think in the conversation there are lots of indicators about how that conversation plays out and are people really able to say what they're thinking or do we get stuck in some common dysfunctional patterns that can show up? So one example of that would be, we use a sort of a technology for looking at conversation and there are four actions that happen in all effective conversations, a move, a follow, an oppose, and a bystand. So a move sets direction, a follow supports it, an oppose offers really clear correction. It says, no, hang on, wait a minute. A bystand offers a morally neutral perspective, so one way is to help a team onboard that, but there are common patterns and one of the common patterns that will come out, particularly in tech teams where there's pace and we need to move things forward, is that they can get into this pattern of someone makes a move, and everyone else just sort of remains silent or, says something to the effect might voice ‘sure, you know, that sounds good.' So they start to fall into this pattern of move and lots of follow. And what's missing often is the voice of bystand, which says, hey, I'm wondering what's going on, or I'm wondering what we're not saying. And then really clear opposition. So the ability to bring pushback, constraint into the conversation. So if you go back to that original leadership team that I was telling you about, you know, way back when, I think one of the things that was going on in that team is they weren't, no one was able to say, this is an incredibly difficult decision, and I don't think I can make it unless I have these things answered. So they kept making it about the process and it wasn't really about the process at all. It was really, it had a very personal component to it that wasn't being discussed, and so the inability to discuss that really created the drag. So the way that I think about helping any team work through any change is, helping them onboard the skills of being able to have, we call it bringing, it's a principle that we hold about bringing the real conversation in the room. Can you bring the conversation online versus offline? So the other flag that you might have for when your conversations are going offline is, if you feel, I often think about if I leave a conversation with you and I, for example, if I left this conversation and I went off and I felt the need, or I was compelled to one of vent or complain about it to someone else, that's my kind hazard flag. But, there was something that I was holding back from in this conversation that I didn't say, and that's my signal to actually circle back around. And so maybe, maybe I need to check in with myself, maybe there's something that I left unsaid.   Ula Ojiaku So there we are, this is the end of part one of the conversation with Marsha. In part two of this conversation, which is the final one where we are going to talk about having effective conversations, what functional self awareness means, why it is important to slow down conversations in order to get results, as counter-intuitive as this might be, and many other things, so stay tuned and watch out for part two of my conversation with Marsha. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!     

How can developing a model for leading change impact your leadership?I'm thrilled to share with you some golden nuggets from the latest episode of the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. I had the pleasure of chatting with the incredible Marsha Acker, a mastermind in executive coaching, leadership transformation, and the art of facilitating conversations that matter.

We are thrilled to announce that Season 4 of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast with Ula Ojiaku is almost here!  With a line up of expert guests including Marsha Acker, Bryan Tew, Victor Nwadu, Fabiola Eyholzer, David Bland, Brant Cooper, Luke Hohmann, Myles Ogilvie and many others, each episode is packed with insightful discussions and actionable takeaways on topics touching on leadership, business agility, innovation and much more. Trailer Transcript Marsha Acker: “Whenever I'm engaging with a leadership team or any other team that's really trying to bring about change, like they're trying to level up, I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation.” Ula Ojiaku: Get ready for Season 4 of the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Bryan Tew: “If you're solving the right problem but you have a terrible solution or a solution that doesn't really fit the need, then you're still not winning.” Ula Ojiaku: Join us every episode as we embark on a journey with thought leaders, industry experts, entrepreneurs, and seasoned professionals. Victor Nwadu: “The success of the transformation depends on the leader, the leaders and the person at the top, how committed they are to it.” Ula Ojiaku: Who will be sharing with me strategies, insights and stories that would empower you to lead with agility, drive innovation, and thrive in the digital augmented age. Subscribe now to be the first to know when the first Season 4 episode drops.    

Have you ever witnessed patterns of communication that didn't seem helpful or productive in your teams? Leadership and communication go hand in hand, and who better to unravel this intricate relationship than Marsha Acker. As the CEO of Team Catapult, Marsha understands that there is more to leadership than just technical prowess; it's about understanding people dynamics and creating a safe environment for open and honest communication.  Throughout the episode, Marsha dives into the complexities of leadership and effective communication within teams, self-awareness challenges and discusses the significant shift from individual to systemic thinking, shedding light on the growing popularity of team coaching. Key discussions include: 1.     A self-leadership quest: How to work with other humans 2.     An insight into communication dynamics and the four speech acts 3.     Communication patterns in teams and organisations 4.     The principle of bringing offline conversations into the room 5.     Are leaders holding back from being vulnerable at work? 6.     The edge of leaders in navigating fast-paced business environments 7.     Change management: The importance of explaining the why   8.     The evolution of team coaching and the benefits of coaching as a system 9.     Recommendations for leaders navigating change Plus lots more! With a focus on the evolving nature of leadership in today's fast-paced environment, Marsha emphasises the importance of embracing vulnerability and diverse perspectives. This episode will help leaders drive positive change, improve communication, and build better organisational cultures by understanding speech acts, introducing shared language, and focusing on team dynamics. “It's impossible, I think, for any one person to be able to have all the answers anymore. But yet, I think that's an edge. I think it's leftover from what we believe we think about leaders and what they're supposed to be able to do, to what they need to do today.” – Marsha Acker. ABOUT MARSHA ACKER LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72/ Book: https://buildyourmodel.com/ Work: https://teamcatapult.com/ ABOUT SCOTT McINNES:  Learn more about Scott McInnes, your host and the Founder and Director of Inspiring Change, by clicking here.  ABOUT WORKVIVO:   If you're struggling with communications in this time of new hybrid workplace conditions, click here to explore Workvivo, a collaboration platform that offers seamless digital integration.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider clicking here to rate and review it!  This podcast was proudly produced in partnership with Podlad.com

Build Your Model for Leading Change invites you to take an exceptional journey of personal growth that will have a direct impact on your ability to successfully lead others.

Ever wonder why communication breakdowns seem to be a perpetual cycle in organizations? Join me as I get to the heart of this issue with the dynamic Marsha Acker, CEO and principal at Team Catapult. With her unique expertise, Marsha highlights how we can initiate the solution from within ourselves just by 'reading the room' and identifying when we're stuck in an endless loop of redundant conversations. She underscores the pivotal role of our choice of words in framing a conversation – how a simple shift in vocabulary can flip problems into opportunities. Listen in as Marsha walks us through her remarkable journey to the leader she is today.To connect with Marsha Acker online, visit:Website: https://teamcatapult.com/Booksite: https://buildyourmodel.com/Boon on Amazon: https://amzn.to/45zphGcLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72/

“Leading change is high stakes, but we don't spend a great deal of time focusing on conversation and creating space to engage in real conversation." Marsha Acker is the author of “Build Your Model for Leading Change” and the host of “Defining Moments of Leadership” podcast. In this episode, we discussed building our own model for leadership and leading change. Marsha first started by sharing the concept of a model and some of the common challenges for organizations in making changes. Then we discussed David Kantor's theories on structural dynamics and functional awareness for understanding behavioral model, which include the concepts of leadership range and communicative competence. Marsha outlined what makes communication so challenging and what we can do to achieve a more effective communication. Towards the end, she shared the three different models that leaders need to think about, i.e. model for leadership, model for living, and model for leading change.   Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:03:54] Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast - [00:10:14] Building Our Model - [00:14:11] Challenges for Making Organization Change - [00:19:48] Behavioral Model - [00:23:57] Structural Dynamics - [00:27:30] Functional Awareness - [00:33:01] Communication Challenges - [00:38:12] Model for Leadership - [00:40:55] Model for Living - [00:44:12] Model for Leading Change - [00:46:10] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:54:44] _____ Marsha Acker's BioMarsha Acker is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha's unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication that get in their way of high performance. She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilest. She is the author of The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams and Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyze clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others. Follow Marsha: LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72 Website – teamcatapult.com Twitter – @marshaacker _____ Our Sponsors Miro is your team's visual workspace to connect, collaborate, and create innovations together, from anywhere.Sign up today at miro.com/podcast and get your first 3 Miro boards free forever. Like this episode? Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/151 Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Buy me a coffee or become a patron.

When we're afraid to have difficult conversations, we hold ourselves back and create more frustration and work in the long run, says Marsha Acker, founder and CEO of Team Catapult. “We spend a lot of time trying to avoid conflict and the things that make us feel uncomfortable. And yet in our attempts to avoid … The post 120 / Understanding Communication Structure To Effect Positive Change, with Marsha Acker appeared first on ITX Corp..

On today's episode we are talking about why you may not be hearing your employees.Marsha Acker is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue, and a passionate agilest. Through her keynotes, books, workshops, and leadership coaching, she empowers leaders around the world to show up authentically in their lives and work — and to grow their leadership range so they can create sustainable, intentional, and positive impact. Drawing on systems thinking, structural dynamics, agility, and over 25 years' experience in the field helping leaders and teams collaborate and align, she developed Build Your Model for Leading Change to support those stepping into new leadership roles and responsibilities.Episode Highlights:Front Page Crisis in Leadership: The concept of a "front page crisis," is where leaders must deal with high-stakes situations and receive feedback from employees that becomes public news. This emphasizes the importance of effective leadership during critical moments.Communication Styles Matter: "Structural dynamics" can be a framework for understanding communication styles, including power, affect, and meaning. Leaders need to recognize and adapt to these communication domains to improve their effectiveness in various situations.Childhood Stories Impact Leadership: Childhood experiences often shape how leaders respond in professional settings. Exploring and understanding these early stories can help leaders navigate their communication patterns and behaviors more effectively in the workplace.Three Operating Systems:Open System: Encourages open dialogue and participation from all.Closed System: Involves hierarchical decision-making with limited autonomy.Random System: Emphasizes autonomy and fosters innovation Four Conversation Actions:Move: Sets direction and proposes new ideas.Follow: Supports existing ideas.Oppose: Provides a different perspective or correction.Bystand: Offers neutral observations.Identifying Communication Issues:Repetitive Conversations: Repeated discussions without resolution signal communication problems.Resistance to Opposition: If opposing viewpoints aren't welcomed, diversity in discussions is lacking.Subtle Signs of Concern: Unvoiced concerns may manifest as topic shifts or silence in meetings.Marsha's Top 2 Takeaways for the Audience:1.     Separate the What from the How in meetings and conversations. What is the topic and how are people engaging?2.     Catch yourself when you start to defend your point of view. Instead, try to bring inquiry into the conversation.How to connect with Marsha:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72Website: www.buildyourmodel.com      

"Have you ever had the frustrating experience of having the same conversation over and over at work or at home? Because if you have, that's your indicator, your canary in the coal mine telling you there's a lot more to that conversation you're missing."In this episode, I'm joined by the extraordinary Marsha Acker to discuss how to identify and crack down on stuck patterns of communication that get in the way of performing at the highest level. Marsha is a Leadership and Team Coach, Author, Sought-after Speaker, Host of the Defining Moments of Leadership podcast, and the Founder and CEO of TeamCatapult.Throughout our conversation, you'll hear Marsha's thoughts on the most common communication issues and their devastating effects on organizations, families, and personal and professional relationships. Marsha also shares tips to enhance our communication skills, reduce the noise's interference to the minimum, and create sustainable change.You'll also hear about Marsha's background, what inspired her to become a facilitator, create the Model for Leading Change, and much more.Tune in to Episode 394 and learn to identify and crack down on the communication issues holding you and your team back.Some Questions I Ask:Tell us about your background, including any turning points that massively influenced you and your work today (3:10)What are some good communication tips for us today? (9:20)In This Episode, You Will Learn:What led Marsha to work as a facilitator and become a communication expert (6:20)Learn to separate the WHAT from the HOW (12:40)What happens when an individual keeps coming back to a core issue (16:10)Tips to maintain sustainable change (21:30)Be welcoming to opposing ideas when communicating (25:20)Resources:Book: Marsha Acker - Build Your Model for Leading Change: A Guided Workbook to Catalyze Clarity and Confidence in Leading Yourself and OthersDefining Moments of Leadership with Marsha Acker podcastConnect with Marsha:WebsiteLinkedInBecoming Your Best Resources:Becoming Your Best WebsiteBecoming Your Best University WebsiteBecoming Your Best LibraryEmail: support@becomingyourbest.com Book: Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful LeadersBook: Conquer Anxiety: How to Overcome Anxiety and Optimize Your Performance Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Does this sound familiar? You're a leader or manager in an organization, struggling to manage meetings and foster team collaboration. You've been told to take charge and lead from the front, but it often leads to disengagement and a lack of input from your team. The pain of feeling like you're shouldering all the responsibility and not getting the desired results is overwhelming. But there's a better way to balance leading and collaboration, and it starts with understanding the role of facilitation in leadership. About Marsha Acker:Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership development firm that equips leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioral change. She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence, and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. TeamCatapult is a partner to mid-size start-ups and global Fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, healthcare, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and host of the Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha is unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication that get in the way of high performance. She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue, and a passionate agilest. She is the author of The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams and Build Your Model for Leading Change: A Guided Workbook To Catalyze Clarity And Confidence In Leading Yourself And Others. In this episode, Dean Newlund and Marsha Acker discuss how to:Unlock the secret to maximizing productivity and enjoyment through better meeting management.Explore the crucial role of facilitative leadership in encouraging collaboration.Scrutinize how decision-making processes morph the effectiveness of your meetings.Tackle behavioral model conflicts in meetings for fruitful conversations and diverse ideas.Develop acute clarity, robust preparation, and smooth facilitation for superior meetings. "Facilitation is a magical skill that brings clarity, engagement, and meaningful conversations to your team.” —  Marsha Acker Connect with Marsha Acker:  Website URL: http://www.teamcatapult.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72/X (Twitter): @marshaacker  Connect with Dean:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgqRK8GC8jBIFYPmECUCMkwWebsite: https://www.mfileadership.com/The Mission Statement E-Newsletter: https://www.mfileadership.com/blog/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deannewlund/Twitter: https://twitter.com/deannewlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/MissionFacilitators/Email: dean.newlund@mfileadership.comPhone: 1-800-926-7370  Show notes by Podcastologist: Hanz Jimuel Alvarez Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

In this episode, I sit down with Marsha Acker with Team Catapult. Marsha shares her leadership tips and expertise with me as we dig through some event industry challenges.Episode Highlights:It doesn't matter what strategies you have or the tools you buy. If you can't come together for a conversation and create change, then these things won't matter- it's the relationship that we are able to build and the effective conversation that we have that makes the difference.Leadership is the art of engaging with others in a way that helps us all be the best version of ourselves - Marsha AckerJust because we lead differently, it doesn't mean that we can't be impactful in our own way.It is important as leaders for us to be clear on how we behave, how we lead, and what is our model for leadership.Do you make space in our companies to think and talk as a team? We are excellent at communication, but we may see things differently than others. Marsha talks about the key thing she does with her team to encourage relationship-building and open communication. Discussing your team's individual values and then collective values can be a useful tool for leaders of thriving teams. Choosing not to maintain relationships in your business, can be detrimental for companies and teams. In change management, we can resist change that is happening, or we can consider what we might create from it.   If you feel like you are efforting more than others, it may be time to do a self-check to see if you have to let go of the perspective that it has to be a specific way.Links and ResourcesTeam CatapultMarsha on LinkedInDefining Moments of Leadership PodcastBuild Your Model for Leading Change BookThank you so much for listening!Support the show

Marsha Acker is a coach who specializes in executives and leadership teams. She has a background in tech and software engineering as well as degrees in those fields. Her career eventually led to increasing leadership positions where she struggled with the people side of leadership. About 20 years ago, Marsha began a process to become a better leader and eventually transitioned into working with leadership teams and coaching.   Key Takeaways: Leaders should take the time to hear different viewpoints, even if it may be a lot of work. It can shape and shift the thinking of all parties involved and lead to a shared understanding of the business picture. No one person can have the full picture, and it's valuable for everyone to hear one another's perspectives. Individuals can feel like change is being done to them and that their voice doesn't matter. Effective leaders listen for all four actions in a conversation and prompt for any missing action. Having a structural language to analyze conversations can help leaders understand what is happening differently. Conversations can be looked at in a morally neutral language to see what is happening differently. There are four actions that can happen in a conversation - follow, oppose, bystand, and support. Effective conversations have all four actions voiced. Ineffective conversations leave one or more of these actions out. You can connect with Marsha through linkedin: linkedin.com/in/keeleyhubbard Enter our monthly drawing for an insulated High Tech Freedom tumbler - www.hightechfreedom.com/mug   Host Contact Information - Chris Freeman LinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/in/chrisfreeman Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/chris.freeman.9461 

Welcome to "Defining Moments of Leadership" with your host Marsha Acker. In this thought-provoking podcast, Marsha engages in an insightful conversation with her guest, Leanne Loombe, a prominent figure in the gaming industry. They explore the impact of fear-driven leadership, organizational culture, and the need for open feedback conversations. As they delve into the complexities of leadership behavior, you'll be inspired to reflect on your own model for leadership and change. Don't miss this final episode of Season 2, and stay tuned for exciting changes coming in Season 3.

In this episode I am speaking to Marsha Acker about leading change in the organisation. Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioral change. She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. You can contact Marsha here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72/ Chceck out her book: https://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Model-Leading-Change/dp/1735655422 Thank you for joining me on this episode of IDEAS+LEADERS. If you enjoyed this episode, please share, subscribe and review so that more people can enjoy the podcast on Apple https://apple.co/3fKv9IH or Spotify https://sptfy.com/Nrtq.

There are 6 key qualities for great facilitation: Starting with your core beliefs Maintaining neutrality Standing in the storm Honoring the wisdom of the group Upholding the agile mindset Honoring the group's agenda According to Marsha Acker, Founder, and CEO of TeamCatapult,  “The job of facilitator is not to become the agile process police that says we have to have a daily standup and every day we have to answer these three questions…Facilitation is all about reading what's happening in a group, [and] tapping into the collective intelligence and wisdom of that group." In this episode, Marsha sits down with Erin and JH to discuss the art and importance of facilitation in group settings, focusing on the 6 key principles of great facilitation she wrote about in her book The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams. Tune in to hear her approach to facilitation, including methods, the preparation process, and how to build your facilitation skills.

An inspiring episode with Marsha Acker, who is a principal at TeamCatapult, leadership and team coach and author. We talk about how leaders can use some facilitation techniques or strategies in order to involve, engage people and create more. Some of the takeaways: - In many places leaders are the ones who step forward and make a move and provide alternate ideas, however, we need of the people to be making moves.  - It makes big difference when leaders involve people  - Facilitation becomes a way of building skills for leaders that give people something to do other than just talking to them or giving presentations. - One of the things that facilitation does is that it helps you think about designing environments where others can thrive.  These and much more were discussed in this conversation. Until the next episode, stay INSPIRED and make the biggest difference in your area of responsibility and beyond. For any inquiries, please contact fouad@alame.ch

Join host Zorina Dimitrova on the GrownLearn podcast as she interviews Marsha Acker, founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected leadership development firm. Marsha shares her expertise in enabling leaders to drive sustainable behavioral change. Together, they explore the barriers to organizational change, effective communication, leadership range, and the importance of personal models for leading change. Gain valuable insights and practical advice from Marsha to facilitate transformative leadership and unlock your organization's true potential. Marsha Acker's website: https://teamcatapult.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Facilitation is a key leadership skill." – Marsha Acker In this podcast episode, Innovation Meets Leadership host Natalie Born talks to Marsha Acker, a skilled facilitator can identify hidden dynamics in conversations and guide participants towards actionable outcomes. Marsha emphasizes that following good facilitation principles in meetings is crucial for success, even without a facilitator present, to avoid wasted time, lack of clarity, and missed opportunities. The conversation centers around the cost of repeated and unproductive meetings in organizations, and the speakers identify warning signs of ineffective meetings, such as impulsive eye rolls and unclear decisions. Key skills for effective facilitation are neutrality, intentional planning, clear design, engaging all voices, and knowing when to provide input. Facilitation is a skill that takes practice and maturity, and staying present and curious when things get difficult is key to successful meetings.  Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. She is the author of The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams and Build Your Model for Leading Change, coming in early 2023. Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioral change. Key Highlights: The Power of Facilitation  The Importance of Effective Facilitation in Meetings  Mastering the Art of Facilitation  Key Quotes: "As a facilitator, the beauty is in standing back, looking at the lay of the land, and cutting right to the heart of what we're really trying to say. It's about bringing focus to the discussion and preventing things from going off in different directions." – Marsha Acker. Connect with Marsha   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72 Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast: https://teamcatapult.com/podcast/   LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone empower their businesses through collaboration, innovation, and transformation by sharing this episode or clicking here to listen to our previous episodes. These are proven solutions to advance your innovation process. Check out our website innovationmeetsleadership.com, or connect with me on Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube Don't forget to subscribe and leave a 5-star review. Let's go transform something! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/natalie-born/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/natalie-born/support

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Glenn Sigl and we are exploring a key aspect of his leadership model around embracing difference. Difference is what raises the stakes for us. When we encounter differences, we are in the territory of stakes-raising themes and triggers, and if they remain invisible to us and to others, it is the source of what can lead us to our most unhelpful and hurtful behavior in a moment of crisis or pressure.

If Agile is a “Copernican revolution in management,” as Ed Denning suggests, is it also a “Copernican revolution in leadership? That question spawns more questions before we can answer it meaningfully. Is management (the quality of managing) different in leadership (the quality of leading)? Are managers (people who manage) also leaders (people who lead)? Who are the managers (which people manage)? Who are the leaders (which people lead)?In this workshop, we'll address how to begin answering these questions for yourself, by introducing participants to “leadership models” and “how to build yours.” The session will be practical because we learn by doing; it will be interactive because we learn faster when interacting (doing) with others. The session will be thought-provoking because only you can develop a leadership model that's your own.The first learning objective will be focused on revealing and reflecting back to you on what your assumptions and understandings of leadership might be. Some of these assumptions may be unconscious, based on biases, or both. This section will be interactive using real-time questions to solicit data and feedback to help open our thinking about leadership. At the end of this section, participants will have tools to reflect on their leadership assumptions and some of those assumptions explored and declared.The second learning objective will be focused on how we traditionally study and teach leadership, and why those established practices make no sense in the Agile/Lean organization. This section will be a short lecture, using a statistical model to expose the limited utility of our traditional approaches to understanding and developing leadership in the organization. At the end of this session, participants will have some tools for beginning to tease out what they think “leadership” is, what is “good” leadership, what is “bad” leadership, and who the leaders are in their organization – as well as some references to continue this reflection going forward.The third section will introduce leadership as a systems model, including a meta-model for defining and improving that model. This section will involve an interactive group breakout exercise. At the end of this session, participants will have a good start on their unique leadership model to help them “show up with leadership in the moment” or perhaps not – because the task at have may fall outside the boundary of our leadership system.Speaker: Christopher CurleyAn ICE-CE, Chapter Leader ("People Manager") at a global financial institution serving a team of Agile Coaches, a graduate of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, with degrees in political science and history, and a student of leadership for the past thirty years (James MacGreggor Burner, Barbara Kellerman, Ahmed Sidky, Bela Banathy, Chris Argyris, et al.) I introduced this topic on Marsha Acker's "Defining Moments of Leadership" podcast.Certified Agile Coaching expert (ICE-CE), Program (SPC 4, PMP), and Team (CSM) Leader with +15 year history of delivering quality products, improving the efficiency of processes, and developing performing teams, spanning Fortune 100 enterprises to mid-sized technology, manufacturing, and financial sectors. Led Agile/Lean transition and adoption across the enterprise, including hardware design teams, software development teams, infrastructure services, business operations teams, manufacturing, and marketing.https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccurley/ Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In today's bonus podcast, we are excited to have Marsha Acker, CEO of Team Catapult, back again! We are excited to be part of Marsha's journey by helping to launch her latest book: Build your Model for leading change. Here at the Agile in Action podcast, we want to offer you the best resources to help you with your career, so this is not a paid advertisement. Marsha and Bill Raymond discuss essential topics you will learn, including: ✅ What is a model for change?   ✅ The four types of models   ✅ Examples of models   ✅ Ways to build your model   ✅ How Marsha and Bill work on their models  

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We are joined today by the TeamCatapult Team and we're talking about the collective leadership journey we've shared over the past two years. You'll hear how real and vulnerable dialogue led them to a walk-your-talk conversation. We genuinely hope it will spark ideas for how you might engage with your own teams. This is the second episode in our six-part mini-series focused on model building. Also, today is the official launch of the book, "Build Your Model for Leading Change". It's a full-color, seven-chapter, 336-page guided workbook to help you catalyze clarity and confidence in leading yourself in others. My intent with this book is that it will sit alongside your journey. It's a life's work exploration should you choose to explore. You can learn more about this book and get a sneak preview at buildyourmodel.com. Order your copy today!

Remote work has completely transformed the way we work on teams and communicate with each other. Leadership still has many of the same responsibilities, but the way they can successfully accomplish them has changed.   During this final part of Building Better Games's series on remote work, you'll learn the necessary skills remote work leaders need to keep company culture at the forefront of an organization's structure. We discuss how producers/leaders in game development can stay in alignment with their team's goals, and actively build trust and respect remotely.   There are key takeaways for leaders of every industry as well, such as how to effectively communicate and decide what is important to communicate, collaborate creatively remotely or in a hybrid work environment, and MORE.   We're just starting to understand our roles and tools needed to succeed in a remote world, so tune in to get started!   Topics discussed in this episode: - The pitfalls of remote work for game dev - How leaders should be guiding teams in remote work - Alignment is crucial to success - Building trust and relationships remotely - Using your facilitation skill set - Tools and tips for leaders - Creating a game jam environment - Meetings as an alignment tool - Effective communication   To learn more about facilitation, check out Marsha Acker's book, The Art and Science of Facilitation, here and follow the author on LinkedIn!   If you've enjoyed this episode and wonder if we could help your studio or company out, email us at info@valarinconsulting.com to set up a free 90-minute call!   For more episodes head to the Building Better Games Podlink.   Connect with us: TikTok Instagram LinkedIn   This Episode Was Produced by PodcastBoutique.com

I spoke with Marsha at the Business Agility Conference 2022 in NYC about her work with Team Catapult.  How facillitation and leadership play off each other in an organization.  How can we help leadership teams to engage in conversation and organizational development. Enjoy Bob Payne 

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Oksana Kubushyna and we're exploring what it takes to really trust yourself as a leader and battle the inner critic in your mind, as you push your own edges, you make mistakes and learn and grow. I think it's a really rich conversation, so I'm really excited that you're here.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Melissa Boggs and we're exploring the concept of Unconventional Leadership. What does it take to lead in a way that does not fit with traditional societal norms of what leadership might look like. We'll take a deep dive into this and share some tips on how to find your authentic leadership.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Shannon Ewan and we're exploring what it takes to become more aware of our self-limiting beliefs. These are those stories that we tell ourselves about what we can and can't do, mainly what we can't do, and this practice of knowing where they come from and how to not let the stories limit what we do.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Jardena London to talk about your impact. If you've ever been in a situation where you got some feedback about the impact you were having on others and thought that cannot possibly be me, then this episode is for you. If I walk into a situation and I'm upset about something else it's an entirely different experience than if I walk in ready to engage, open-minded and curious. Two very different energies that spark different actions and outcomes from me and others. If this is an aspect of your leadership that you're working on, listen to this episode for a couple of practices.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Benjamin Carcich to talk about rejection. Think about a moment when you've been told that you've not been selected for something that you really wanted or were asked to step out of a role you were already serving in and move on to something else. In this conversation, we will cover everything from, are leaders made or born, why ethics should be considered in leadership, and what it means to become self-authored vs other authored.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Lyssa Adkins joins the discussion to explore what it looks like to lead from behind. Lyssa is gifted in her ability to articulate a passion or need that she sees in our world and inspire others to action. She is an internationally recognized agile thought leader, speaker, author of the book Coaching Agile Teams and co-founder of the Agile Coaching Institute.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Aaron Smith that had the courage to solve a problem by first deeply listening, respecting the voices and stories of others, willingness to suspend any bias or other organizational narratives, to use the political capital that he had in service of team over seeking the next promotion – not to say that he didn't want a promotion but he was willing to take the risk, knowing that he was going to offer a point of view that would not be liked. And the most important part of this story is that it wasn't easy, it came with doubt and fear, and it took courage, bravery and risk taking.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Christopher Curley, where we will deep dive into leadership in organizational settings and how it's just as important to be paying attention to the collective leadership system you're creating, as it is to be thinking about your own leadership. Christopher Curley is an Agile Coach, leading a team of coaches helping to shepherd a global enterprise technology organization to achieve their transformation goals. While it's important to have a model for your own leadership, it's just as important to have a model for collective leadership. Some of the most impactful work a leadership team can do is to be aligned on how they are co-leading and what's the atmosphere they want to create and what's the atmosphere they are actually creating and what do they want to work on closing?

In today's podcast, Marsha Acker shares the art and science of facilitation. Marsha shares stories and ideas that will help you run more efficient, outcome-driven meetings. Book LinkedIn

Welcome to the Defining Moments of Leadership podcast, hosted by Marsha Acker! On today's episode, Marsha interviews Mike Seavers, the VP of Development at Epic Games. Mike has been a leader in tech and business for over 20 years, and has spent the last 10 years in the gaming industry. Prior to his shift into gaming, Mike worked in consulting, project and portfolio management, and leading software teams. Through all of his various roles over the years, Mike has dedicated his career to helping leaders, teams, and organizations with solving problems (both technical problems and people problems!) in order to unlock their full potential. He joins Marsha today to share about what leadership means to him and what it takes, what it looks like to persevere, and how persistence in leadership has served Mike in his own career.

Welcome to Defining Moments of Leadership, a podcast hosted by Marsha Acker. We're joined today by guest Leslie Riley to explore leadership through team communication while cultivating environments.

On the new episode of Leadership at the edge, the Institute of Leadership & Management's CEO, John Mark Williams, joined by Executive Coach and CEO of TeamCatapult, Marsha Acker, explore overcoming patterned leadership behaviour, the shift towards supporting people rather than achieving results, and whether ‘command and control' still has a place in 21st century leadership. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/leadership-at-the-edge/message

Welcome to a new podcast by Marsha Acker where you can hear Inspiring stories and tangible lessons from leaders growing their leadership range, clarifying and refining their model for leadership and daring to define a moment rather than let a moment define them.

Get the bookMore about the authorJoin our book discussion group on SlackSupport the show (http://patreon.com/agilebookclub)

In this episode I have a pleasure to talk with my third guest in this podcast Marsha Acker, the author of the The Art & Science of Facilitation book. Marsha is a founder of Team Catapult and she is one of the most passionate people about facilitation I know. We have a lot in common, we collaborated on several occasions, and she was always my inspiration on a field on facilitation. This quote resonates with me a lot: “Inside every person is a great leader just waiting to emerge.” Let's hear more about facilitation and leadership from Marsha on this episode of the #AgileWay Podcast.

What is your conversation lens? How do you even see what's happening in a conversation at work or at home? How do you know it's going well or awry? How do you get conversations "back on track"? And how do you see and *shape* how *you* show up in them? How do you know what you bring into the room, good and not so good? Conversations impact the outcomes we get: Conversations propel people  and organizations forward, or they get stuck: The groundhog day conversation! Marsha Acker, the CEO of TeamCatapult, sat down with me to talk about her unique view on these things and much more, along with her passion for ending stuck conversations in organizations. Marsha has over 22 years of experience designing and facilitating organizational change initiatives and TeamCatapult has been helping develop leaders and transform organizations since 2005.  Meeting someone with a *totally* different "heritage" who has come to some very similar conclusions about the nature of conversation design is truly delightful! What I loved about chatting with Marsha is connecting around a sound that's deepening in me: That facilitation is about being conscious  of what conversational  tools you pick up: Knowing where and when you're stuck and picking up the right tool for the moment, instead of the habitual one. The Structural Dynamics concept of a conversational operating system is deeply resonant with the three creative energies of Open, Explore and Close that I sing about non-stop  and it was amazing to get her take on the Four Conversational Actions, which give a better shape to idea of "threading" in a conversation than any model I've encountered yet. It's really profound to see how each time someone speaks they are shaping the course of the conversation, helping it to slow down or speed up. I geeked out pretty hard with her...nevertheless I think you'll find a lot of amazing tools to bring into your own work! I'll link to some of her upcoming workshops in the show notes: Her company offers a host of amazing experiences, from a 2-day Advanced Facilitation workshop to a 5-day Agile Facilitation and Coaching Intensive with several dates coming up in May and June. Do check out the show notes, where I'll break down some of Marsha's points on Structural Dynamics and share lots of other links.   You'll also learn about: The Facilitator's Stance: Finding another place to lead from. The "front" of the room is familiar to most, but facilitation can increase your "range" of leadership capacity. Developing a shared "pool of meaning" to help people get to the same "place" together Setting agreements with your group: Asking people to  say what needs to be said *in the room* so it can be processed and worked with.   Marsha's Three key takeaways to transform conversations at work: Start with the Tusks: Find the conversation that matters - the critical or most stuck conversation. Start where it's hot. Go to the elephant in the room! Look at how *you* show up...how you are is how you'll facilitate. Bring Your Authentic Voice: Find your natural stance and work from there, instead of trying to imitate someone else's.   Structural Dynamics in a Nutshell Action: A move (sets direction) A follow (continues)  An Oppose (offers correction) A Bystand (morally neutral comment) The Language or communication domain is where we're speaking from or our goals in talking Power: Using language in order to get something done. Meaning: Asking for evidence and action that can support their desired outcome. Affect: This is about using emotive language to affect feeling and to develop connection and intimacy with others. The Operating System: Open Random Closed   Advanced Facilitation: Self-Mastery and Reading Group Dynamics is June 27-28, 2018 in Washington, DChttps://teamcatapult.com/workshops/advanced-facilitation/. Sarah Hill and I will be co-leading this workshop. You will learn about your own model for communication and how to shift the nature of the discourse in conversations and how to work more deeply with group dynamics to become a more confident and effective facilitator.   Reading the Room by David Kantor. This books tells the story of a coach working with an executive team and how they learned to see and shift the structure of their conversations https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Room-Dynamics-Coaches-Leaders/dp/0470903430   Where did you learn to behave like that? by Sarah Hill. https://www.amazon.com/Where-Learn-Behave-Like-That-ebook/dp/B076NTJXY5/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524220764&sr=1-1&keywords=where+did+you+learn+to+behave+like+that In the fourth level of structural dynamics is the important role that childhood stories play in how we behave in the room today. Sarah tells many stories, including her own, of how she worked to become aware of the story and change the narrative.   Diagnosing and Changing Stuck Patterns in Teams https://teamcatapult.com/2016/08/   What to do when change requires a new operating system. https://teamcatapult.com/what-to-do-when-change-requires-a-new-operating-system/   Big Apple Scrum Day, New York May 11, I'm giving a talk on Diagnosing and Changing Stuck Patterns in Teams. This is a brief introduction to the model of Structural Dynamics https://www.bigapplescrumday.org/speakers   Marsha's Full Bio and Additional Links Marsha Acker is a leadership and team coach whose passion and expertise is helping leaders and teams identify and break through stuck patterns that get in their way of high performance. Marsha is the CEO of TeamCatapult, a leadership development and organizational change firm, founded in 2005. She has over 22 years of experience designing and facilitating organizational change initiatives. She has served for six years as the track chair for defining the ICAgile Coaching and Enterprise Coaching learning objectives and is currently a member of the ICAgile Agile Coaching Expert Certification panel. Marsha is a Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF), Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), Professional Certified Coach (PCC – ICF), Certified Interventionist in Structural Dynamics and Changing Behavior in High Stakes (Kantor Institute and Dialogix), Organizational and Relationship Systems Coach (Center for Right Relationship), Certified Change Management Professional (CMP), and an ICAgile Certified Expert Agile Coaching. Website: www.teamcatapult.com Twitter: @marshaacker and @teamcatapult2 Facebook: @teamcatapult2 ­