4 Crazy Leadership Moves for Better Team Outcomes: Interview with Todd Lankford, Agile Coach

Matt: Welcome to “Around the Product Development,” our 25-minute weekly show on hot topics in digital product creation, from monetization to innovation. We share actionable insights from digital product experts in the Agile Product Builders community, powered by Boldare.

This week, our guest is Todd Lankford, an Agile coach with over 15 years of experience. Todd is passionate about lean leverage, helping managers and product teams maximize outcomes while respecting people. He recently wrote an intriguing article, “Four Crazy Moves Leaders Can Make Today to Improve Team Outcomes”, with the subtitle “Change Needs Some Crazy.”

Todd, could you introduce yourself and explain the kind of “crazy” we need in this context?

Todd: Yeah, sure. As you said, I’ve been doing this for quite a while. I’m kind of a career consultant, so I’ve worked with many corporations, from big enterprises to startups to midsize companies to government. I’ve seen a lot of different things, a lot of different companies, and it’s been a great journey. As you mentioned, I’m focused on something this year I’m calling lean leverage. It’s really a move to get back to doing less to get more, if you will.

Today, I find that many teams and organizations, maybe because of the pandemic or remote work, are just very, very busy and keep adding more and more processes. I’m looking for ways to reduce that process and to respect people, including teams, stakeholders, and customers.

Regarding the article, the crazy moves really came about from observing the current state of things. Today, companies are almost cookie-cutter in what they’re doing. Many have deadlines for everything. I see people working alone more today and collaborating less due to remote work. There’s a divide between teams and customers, and change is being managed or reduced. With all that, I thought things needed to be shaken up a little bit. Sometimes you have to be a little crazy and look a little crazy to break out of the mold and make some real change happen. So that’s what the article is centered on, and I think it’s very valid.

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Matt: You mentioned you have experience in corporate culture. In your article, you talk about the divide between what corporate culture requires and what teams need to truly perform—like following the rules versus not following them. Can you elaborate on that?

Todd: Sure. And it’s not saying, like, break the law. What I’m saying is, you know, the change that needs to happen today can’t come from a couple of little tweaks. It needs almost a seismic shift.

As a manager, you often don’t want to look different. Most managers get promoted because they follow the rules, follow the playbook, and do what the organization desires, which is typically the status quo. It’s what they’ve always done. When you step outside of that mold to do something different, you’re going to look a little crazy. It requires some courage—courage and being crazy are kind of the same thing here. It takes a bit of guts to step outside the mold and be different.

As I was writing the article, I thought about my own experiences. When I’ve made these changes in the past, I’ve often been seen as, “What are you doing? That’s not what we do.” But if you can push through that initial peer pressure, you end up successful. Everything I recommend and have done in the past actually reduces your risk and amplifies your ability to succeed. In the end, you’ll look great—not crazy—but you will in the beginning.

Matt: It takes a lot of courage, and there’s some risk involved. If you step outside the boundaries and fail, it can be daunting. But you could also ask, what if you don’t step outside and still fail. How is that for you? Does it come from experience, a deeply ingrained belief that things should be done differently, or where does it come from?

Todd: It does. It does come from my experience. So maybe a little context. I’m typically brought into situations to course correct something. This is actually how I came to identify these four things. I was thrust into a situation where things had already gone bad. These four factors had already made the team go completely off track. They were ready for change, but they also felt like they just needed to do things better. I had to shake them out of that mold to actually reduce risk. Even though it adds a little more risk on me, it reduces their risk in the long term. You have to push through that initial resistance.

The cool thing about these four things is that you see almost immediate value. It’s not like you’re waiting months and months. When you do any of these four things, you can start seeing value within a few weeks. But you have to try it. You have to be willing to step outside the norm. If everyone else is setting deadlines and you’re not going to set deadlines, you have to take a little heat until you can show that you’re focusing on value and delivering value for the customer. If you can do that, you’ll quickly start delivering value for the customer, and that will get noticed. The angst around not setting a deadline will go away.

Matt: So you come into what you call bad systems, where things aren’t working as they should, and try to correct them. You mentioned in the article that you used to be a rule-following manager. I’m curious, was there a specific point when you realized things had to be done differently, or was it a gradual insight that led to these four principles?

Todd: Okay. Yeah. So this happened early in my career. When you’re first starting out and maybe when you’re a new manager, you think, “I need to learn the ropes. I need to figure out how things are done as a manager.” I was all about that. I wanted to be the best at doing what managers do and get my career on the right path. But then I was assigned to this team that was off the rails. As a manager, the buck stopped with me. I had to help that team out, but everything they were doing was exactly in line with the things I was trying to get good at. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing. I had to do something different.

So I looked at the opposite of some of the things they were doing to see if that would work. They were all very frustrated and in a broken system. They were disengaged, their morale was low, nothing was getting done, they couldn’t work together well, they were struggling to hit deadlines, and they didn’t have any time to change. They had all these issues. I had to slow them down and say, “Let’s reorient in a different direction. Let’s look at all the things that are causing the pain.” It was these four things. That allowed me to work with them to course-correct, but I had to challenge what I thought was the right path at the same time. I had to learn to work with my leadership to say, “Hey, this is what’s going on. This is causing it. I know it’s what we normally do, but we need to change the game for this team.”

Matt: Super impressive. I can imagine, stepping outside is quite difficult. Now, moving on to these four moves we’re curious about. The first one is prioritizing value over deadlines, if I can put it that way. Could you briefly share what it entails or how it works in practice?

Todd: Yeah, sure. So I think with a deadline, we’ve all heard this outcome-over-output conversation, and deadlines are about output. Just think of any product you’ve used in the past that you love. It wasn’t a product you cared if it was delivered on time, necessarily. You just love the way it works and that it meets your needs. So instead of driving teams towards a deadline, which is 99% fake, I mean, most companies just say, “Hey, I’m going to create urgency, and I’m going to set a deadline to create that urgency.” They want you to hit that deadline no matter what. Everything gets forced onto that deadline, and it’s just stressful. Everyone starts caring about the deadline more than they care about the customer and the value they’re trying to deliver. It takes your eye off the ball. Value is the outcome of delivering what you’re building, not hitting a deadline.

Matt: You mentioned that 99% of deadlines, maybe 90%, are fake. Do people often pick a date just to create urgency, or is it sometimes tied to something else crucial happening on that date?

Todd: Absolutely. There are real deadlines every once in a while, like tax day or holidays. So, yes, some deadlines need to be met, but they are very rare. Most organizations don’t have that constraint, but they set deadlines anyway. It could be due to a promise from a sales team to a customer to drive a purchase, which can set a date. Internally, you might need to set a budget and, to do that, you have to calculate the return on investment. To calculate a return, you need a date when you will start seeing that return. So people put that date in their budget, and the whole organization starts focusing on it because, in their minds, that’s when everything happens.

This focus on the date distracts everyone. They care more about the date and the plan than what really matters.

What matters is talking to the customer, working as a team, getting fast feedback, and all those other important things. It’s not about hitting the date; it’s about learning quickly what is the right thing to deliver to the customer. That’s what’s important.

Matt: That makes sense. The second point you mentioned, moving on to crazy move two, is somewhat connected to the first one. It’s about finishing one thing before starting another. It resonates with me. How does that exactly work? Because I imagine we often find ourselves juggling multiple tasks simultaneously, especially in today’s increasingly complex world. So how do you ensure as a team that you finish one thing before moving on to the next?

Todd: Yeah, I’ve seen this happen in a couple of ways, and it’s rampant, especially in the past four years since remote work has become more common. Teams will start more than one thing at a time because they’re serving multiple needs or goals simultaneously. They feel that by starting, they’re showing progress, so they get all these plates spinning.

Another way this happens is when people work alone and focus only on their specific roles. For example, a front-end developer or a back-end developer will only want to do their type of work. As a result, all the features we’re delivering to a customer get divided into tasks for front-end developers or back-end developers, and they only do that one thing. This leads to multiple things being in progress simultaneously because they’re just cranking out front-end tasks for various needs and features. You end up with stacks of tasks that are finished but not tied together.

I see both of these scenarios quite a bit, and what happens is that everything takes longer when you start more than one thing at a time.

Matt: I think these days more people work alone than they did six years ago. Perhaps six years ago, more people worked alone than ten years ago. Do you think it’s connected to remote work or a shift towards individualism? How do you see teams working together, physically versus online? Do you think it has an impact?

Todd: I think teams tend to be in Zoom meetings all day long these days, and the meetings aren’t for collaboration; they’re for coordination. This has caused collaboration to take a backseat because people are tired of Zoom meetings and don’t want to get on another one to collaborate. So they retreat into solo work.

We need to find a way to get rid of some of these coordination meetings. Many of these meetings are to take individual work and somehow coordinate it to figure out when we can put it together and make it work. If we can reduce the amount of alone time and have some collaboration time—while still allowing for some solo work—but come back together frequently, we won’t need as many coordination meetings. This will enable us to collaborate again. I think a lot of teams find collaboration too stressful, so they’ve retreated into individual work.

Matt: Makes sense. By the way, we have one question from the audience. I will read it out to you next. How do you work when the Project Management Office (PMO) controls the resources and budget for teams? This situation can create strain if deadlines are imposed. So, how do you navigate working under external control, where you lack the freedom to make decisions or work differently?

Todd: Yeah. So I would still turn the table on those things and say, okay, I hear you. We have to hit a deadline. Can we get to know our customer better? Can we figure out the value we’re trying to achieve and ensure that we have time to iterate to get to that value? I would work on these things to reduce risk even if you have a deadline and a set budget. Right. Any of those hard constraints are difficult in a product development situation because you have high complexity and high uncertainty. So what you have to do is figure out how to reduce the complexity and uncertainty. Keep the constraints if you want. I’m going to work on risk reduction.

Matt: Makes sense. Let’s move on to the third move, which is about establishing a direct connection between the team and the customer. How does that work? Is everyone on the team directly connected to the customer, or is there more to it?

Todd: Well, let me explain. When I first started my career as a software developer, I didn’t even question the fact that I had direct customer interaction. My team and I would talk to the customer all the time. But over the years, due to scale and other reasons, organizations have created layers between the team and the customer. Nowadays, teams often don’t even know who the customer or stakeholder is; all they know is their ticketing system. It’s like, “Hey, where’s my ticket?” and then they just go do the work. It’s as if they’re just following a recipe, completely disconnected from the customer.

I find that if you can reconnect the team with the customer so they truly know their customer, understand their needs, engage with them, bounce ideas off of them, and get their feedback, you can build that right back into what they’re doing.

They’ll get to the right product sooner than if they don’t know their customer and are just following orders from a task list. It’s just like being in a factory—it’s not inspiring. And you’re also less likely to get the right product because you’re delivering an idea that hasn’t been validated.

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Matt: It creates, I guess, a lot more motivation for people to work in a more enriching way, rather than just being someone who solves tickets without even knowing what’s happening. Especially in today’s job market, it’s important to be attractive to potential employees. Employers should consider making this move to make work more appealing and to attract the best talent out there.

Todd: Absolutely!

Matt: Let’s go to your last point: fix it now. If it doesn’t work, fix it right now! It’s something I strongly believe in too. We haven’t discussed this article before, but I think it’s a great approach. If you can fix something now, do it. What are your thoughts on that? How does it work in the context you mentioned?

Todd: Yeah, the team I joined back then had 1,200 defects, for instance. You get into a situation where you just throw another defect onto the pile and think it doesn’t matter anymore because the pile is so big. You might as well keep adding to it. It builds up to a point where no one wants to touch it, and it’s demoralizing. You know it’s there, and you’re working around it. This is problematic.

It’s not just defects; it’s anything that comes up. Let’s say you need to make a change to improve things for your team so you can deliver better for your customer, but there’s no time to do it right. You just keep piling up the change. It’s a form of debt with a high interest rate that slows you down, stresses you out, and makes you less effective.

I strongly believe in the Toyota philosophy of pulling the andon cord), stopping the line, and fixing the problem now. Sometimes the team can’t solve it on their own and may need political capital from a manager to help them out. As a leader, you have to jump in, figure out the problem when the alarm sounds, and help them break through that barrier.

Matt: Do you think this approach works across all company sizes and types, or is it more suited to specific contexts? Can it be effective in both small and large companies alike?

Todd: It’s challenging for larger companies because they’re driven by deadlines, budgets, and sticking to plans. There’s often resistance to stopping and addressing issues immediately. That’s where the “crazy” part comes in. You have to disrupt that cycle, even within a big company. You can start by experimenting with one small, contained team. If it proves successful, it could gradually expand and influence other teams.

Matt: Thank you for sharing your insights. Where can people connect with you? LinkedIn is a great way, but do you also have a website or another platform where people can find you?

Todd: You can find me on LinkedIn. I’ve got a website called coachlankford.com dot. And I also write on Medium under the handle at KT Lankford.