Overcoming Toxic Leadership = Team Success (With Simon & Amanda Cookson)

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Building autonomy and choice when you're trying to get somebody to do something that you want them to do is completely critical. So if you prepare a report which has loads of evidence in, that is really logical and it's blindingly obvious that you should do this. If you tell somebody you should do this, like getting our son ready on a morning, you need to put socks on. Just put socks on. See, it's easy, isn't it? You know, you just put socks on. You know, you just you need to get dressed because we're leaving the house. That would turn into like an hour long argument fight. You know, You know as bad as you could possibly imagine where if you give him a choice, do you want to put your pants on first or do you want to put your socks on first Sounds super simple, but i'll be doing your socks first and i'm happy because I control i'm choosing. So you report. If it has choices in it for people to decide and still feel that they've got that autonomy, you are much more likely to get engagement from. Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, The missing link between Agile and Product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why, I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and i'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Hello, welcome back to the Product Agility Podcast. Today we are joined for episode number two with Simon and Amanda. Welcome back again. The first episode was brilliant. So many great Nuggets that you haven't listened to about already. Please do go back. And check it out, it'll be the episode before this one, surprisingly enough. And we're also joined once again by Steph Ashmore as Co host. Good afternoon, Steph. No, it's not good morning. What are we going to talk about? Well, I thought what i'll do just because maybe people haven't listened to the first episode, i'll give a quick introduction to Simon and Amanda and then we'll get straight into it. So Simon and Amanda are the Co founders of Northern Valley Craters that have been going since twenty sixteen and i've been coaching technical specialists and experts to become better leaders. They have been pouring twenty years of experience working in technical education into how the best developed leaders. The career highlights include founding successful digital start UPS leading award winning customer experience programmes and building the UK 's first digital bank and winning and managing multi million pound digital transformation projects as a husband and wife team and amanda and simon are used to a frank and funny look at their own differences and biases to bring to life the different ways we see the world and how we can use it to have better conversations showing insights from neuroscience particularly the two neurochemicals that influence every conversation. is what we spoke about in the last episode. Amanda and Simon Cookson explained how to get a positive impact from any conversation. And it is an absolute joy to have you back because today we're going to be looking at toxic behaviours, something which many people talk about, many of us have experienced and observed, and let's get straight into it. So Simon and Amanda, could you share with us some of your most memorable stories around toxic behaviours and whether or not they were resolved or whether they remained toxic? Yeah, i'm gonna share a story about myself. So I was leading quite a big team, and how people felt on the team was really important to me. And there were some members of my team who I thought were quite grumpy, quite difficult, and they weren't people that I directly managed, they were managed by my managers. So I asked one of my managers, who I loved and trusted very deeply, to just gather some feedback about me as a leader and how people were feeling. And I got this feedback that I. Was like Marmite and that some people loved me. that's nice. And some people hated me. that's not so nice. And so then after i'd kind of, like taken a breath and absorbed that, I kind of leaned in and asked the question, well, you know, this person over here obviously is in that I don't like Marmite camp. You know, what is it, do you think that I can do differently? And my manager turned around and said to me or the person I was managing, rather their manager said, Amanda, it's all about your chair. And I said my chair, yes, your chair. Tell me more about my chair. I don't understand. And so we were in a big open plan office and my desk was opposite their desk. So every time I moved my chair backwards, their chair would get trapped in their desk. Now at the time, as a senior leader, you know, on my worst day when people said, Amanda, what do you do? i'd say I have meetings because i'd literally go from one meeting to the next to the next, and I might come back to my desk, the next notebook or papers for that meeting. So obviously i'd move my chair in to get my stuff and my chair would go out and trap this poor person at their desk. Now we've learned in later years, haven't we, that perhaps Amanda is a little bit on the neuro diverse spectrum. And of course when i'm not sat on my chair, my chair does not exist for me. So it never occurred to me that I was creating so much upset. So a massive toxic behaviour is that you have so little regard for a member of your team that every time you get up, you let your chest swing back, potentially even hit the back of their chair and then cook off and just leave it. So once I have the feedback back, I moved my chair. I was very conscious about it and I also asked my manager should I say something and she was adamant, No, no, no, don't say something to this person because they feel really embarrassed, they just don't want you to trap them in with your chair. So I started to put more care into what I did with my chair and that started to turn around their behaviour. So I think for me a lot of toxic behaviour is a lack of awareness, even if it's really awful, like trapping you behind your desk and having that exchange site then can really help turn things around. So that's mine. I think I want to talk about I had a team lead once who had a very particular style, and that style was very abrasive. This guy mean he was a man. He was a white man in his late fifties ex paratrooper man, had a very particular way of doing things. The had made him massively successful. He was brilliant at what he did, but what he was completely unaware of is the absolute trail of destruction that he left in his wake and quite literally the tears. i've never been in so many meetings with people. Where people broke down in tears, you know, after the meeting and at the time we all hated him. He was a real hate figure. You know. i'm sure everyone 's worked with people like this where it almost, it's almost like galvanizes the team together that your hatred of this particular individual and you gossip about them, you moan about them, you complain about them all the time. But what a little bit of time and distance has given me is that different perspective. Because a lot of the things he talked about and a lot of the things he knew are absolute gold dust. He was an expert, he was successful, he got what he needed to do done, and he was brilliant at it. And what time, and that distance has taught me is that the missing piece of his jigsaw was the difference between what he intended to achieve and to motivate us to get us to do and the impact that he was actually having on us on a day to day basis. There was a massive difference between that intent and. Impact. He wasn't a complete, he wasn't there to make us cry. He was there to be successful and he was following a path of what had been successful for him in the past and he was just blind to the impact he was having. let's not get the behaviors confused with the person, I suppose. Yes, Yes, exactly, exactly. And another side is that we are adoptive parents. So we we have two children that we've adopted that have a number of kind of challenges, a number of ways of thinking about themselves and a number of ways of behaving that when we first became a family were utterly baffling to us. And one of the fundamentals of changing our family dynamic on quite literally reducing levels of violence in the house, it is that important is changing the conversation and seeing the behavior, not the person. i'd say thank you for sharing that. It was nice, appreciate it. I think something I will share toxic behaviors that i've seen in workplaces that i've been in. And to tie it into what you both said is a lack of awareness of the impact that you have across the board. And sometimes i'm going to use a phrase, I think exhaustion as a status symbol. And a lot of the time we hear people say like, i'm back to back meetings today but i can't i i don't even have time to take a lunch. i'm gonna eat my lunch at my desk. Or I worked last night until eight PM and I think in some situations it's a case of that person is that I don't know that they want people to see how hard they're working or it might even be, I think a little bit of a cry for help, like they're trying to say I am stacked. I have so much to do. But if you're a if you're a leader or a team manager, I think it can give the impression that i'm working this hard. You should be. And it doesn't give people the space to actually take that care for themselves. You end up in burnout, you end up working all the time. Is it? Even when you're not working, you're thinking about work and I think that's for me, that's probably one. I have others, but it's probably one of the worst toxic behaviours I can see in leadership and management, where they're just not exercised behaviours of taking care of yourself. To take that even a stage further, I think there is a burnout breakdown badge of Honor Lily in the startup founder community. you're not. you're not a real entrepreneur unless you're burnt out and you've had a breakdown. And you've had to spend three months in Barbados recovering. that's the path that you're expected to go, to be a real entrepreneur. And it's really interesting what you said there about Steph, about how we as team members react to those kind of behaviours. And this is because of this fundamental neuroscience the we are social creatures, OK it's ingrained, imprinted on the way that we think and how our brain works, that it is better to be part of a group. OK we we need to belong and our brains. Number one job is to keep us safe. And a really dangerous place to be is to be excluded from the group and to be removed or the threat of removal from the group, from the team, from the tribe, is absolutely fundamentally terrifying to our brains and our to our core beings about who we are. And if you are looking at a behavior from a senior person in a team and going, your natural reaction is there or what they're telling me to be like that? they're telling me that I need to do that and therefore I feel compelled to do that because of that fear of being excluded. So that it sort of replaced some of our fundamental fears about being left out, being excluded, being left to die in the corner of the Savannah. And that's why that awareness of the impact that your behaviour is having is so critical to this. And i'll take that one step further. And so there was again a really interesting piece of research I came across when I was studying the neuroscience of change. And this is where the psychologist set up an experiment. So an individual would go in and they would be asked to answer a question, and the question was around the size of a box and the length of a line. And so it was something that you couldn't disagree with. And there was a very obvious right answer. But what the psychologist did was they made everyone else in the room a stooge. So everyone in the room said that the wrong answer was the right answer, and the experiment was to see whether the individual when they came in. Knowing that the answer 's blindingly obvious would they be the, only one in the room saying I think the answer is this or would they comply to the rest of the group in the room and every single time people would comply to the answer that everyone else? was sharing now i think that we are quite familiar with groupthink but there's also group behaviour so the problem with toxic behaviour is for example working long hours burnout was a badge of honour is that we start to have presenteeism we start to be busy falls and we start to do things that we know deep down isn't right for us but because everyone else is doing it we think that our perception our thinking is wrong yeah another aspect so i'm just trying thinking of i'm trying to think what are the what's a good toxic behaviour i could talk about because i wanted to join on the party a little bit and a few people come into my head and it's all about getting products out of the door a few different scenarios popped into my head and i was trying to really figure out was it because of toxic behavior was it because of something else And what I have seen with all the little stories of options on my head, the one common theme was because there was a person who wasn't prepared to let go of control of something. It made everyone else so disinterested in actually trying to do the thing that he really wanted to do. And the sad thing is this, this unwillingness that these are awesome people who really want to do great things with their products. I think of product managers, I can think of very technical people who want to do very technical things. There was always someone there that wouldn't let the product manager with some research and come up with a revised vision for what they were trying to produce and who they're trying to serve or wouldn't let the team work with an expert to think of a new pattern to implement something. You know the what the the biggest time it ever blew up was when the CTO who had and this ended up being just an extension of the same behaviours he had delegated to his right hand person to work with this team to come up with a rather significant new approach to the way of implementing something. And the lead product person really keen to get this piece of work out because it had various regulatory commitments and it was also. I think looking to save you know twenty thirty million a week if they were able to do this thing in this different way. So the stakes are reasonably high and it wasn't until three or four days before it was due to go out into the live environment that the CTO turned around and said it's not happening, like it isn't what I wanted. This isn't what was agreed and said, but you formally delegated. It doesn't matter. i'm in control, it's not going live. And this pattern happened and that was the kind of the crescendo I think to this long running, toxic behavior of not wanting to let go and not wanting to actually appreciate that other people might have a better idea and say you know, there is that. Not understanding the impact over people. But more than that, it was the the toxicity of just thinking that they were, they were always it. And this person was amazing human, really great motivations. It just came out in the really toxic way. I want to ask a question on that actually and maybe Amanda and Simon have a good answer for it because I was thinking as you're talking these leaders or these people who can't let go of being in control and then the impact that that's that has on the team and being and have been in those teams, you kind of feel like you can't affect change. So then you give up trying. And I was wondering in the same way of we're talking about we want to be part of the pack and we want to be in the group, is there a reason why when we can't we just give up, we stop trying? When we can't affect change in a team, I wonder whether it's not as conscious as that. So i'll give you another example. So I worked for the National Center for Popular Music. So this was back in the early two thousands and there was a massive lottery funded project based in Sheffield. And I was one of the the team and the people who were running the so setting it up with this lottery funding, I think they had about thirteen fourteen million. They were ex pop stars and people who'd worked with all these big bands from the eighties So it was like amazing and have Phil Okie walking in and all this sort of stuff. It was just so cool. But there were certain things as the exhibits were being developed where I thought, well, that's not right, That doesn't seem right to me. That doesn't seem very good to me. And it wasn't necessarily about giving up. I can't affect change. It was actually more about my internal dialogue about this was, it must be me. So I convinced myself that pop stars had different ears. Yeah, so pop stars hear things differently. They experience things differently. And because i'm just, you know, little old Amanda Cookson, when i'm listening to something, of course it's not gonna sound like people were saying it should sound. So I just didn't say anything and just carried on da da. But also, I was never invited to give my opinion because who am I? You know, i'm not for Loki or anyone important and i'm just me. So when the National Centre for Popular Music launched, it flopped. It was a massive failure. And so the lottery people brought up this big chief, this consultant, this expert. And I remember he was called Rob King, and he was a very sort of imposing, very expensive, suited guy. And he took all the senior leaders out and he had all the kind of workers, of which I was one, 'cause I was like the education manager. And he just asked us, you know, what did we think, You know, anything, anything at all. Just share your views. So I was sat at the front, put up my hand and I said, look, I don't think that this particular exhibit sounds very good. It was at the time that you went to the big cinema in Sheffield, you had that surround sound with that, you know, and you could really feel it. And it was amazing. And soundscapes promised to transport you on the stage of Wembley so you could really feel what it was like. To be a Rockstar. And i've always fancied that you know, idea of being a a singer, a rock star, but my singing voice is absolutely awful and i'm terribly shy. So it was never gonna happen. So I was dead excited about having this visceral experience and it just sounded utterly shit, you know, your TV at home sounded better. So I shared my view and then this guy said, anyone else agree with Amanda Put your hand up. And of course I was sat at the front, he said. Amanda, look behind you. And every single person in the room had their hand up and it still kind of can feel myself going right. But i'm sad because I was so about that project. I really wanted it to work. I believed in it. It was one of the coolest things i've ever done in my entire career. And it failed. And it failed because collectively nobody said anything. And at the time, 'cause i'm old and this is like twenty four years ago, I didn't think toxic behaviour was a thing. It just wasn't a thing that we talked about. But actually, collectively, that organization was working in a way that it was not inviting feedback. It was not valuing every single person 's voice it, was an elite few people that thought they were it knew everything and they really didn't and they needed to listen so i i think that it's really important and i'm quite passionate about this that it's not about people giving up i think it's about people being brave and it's about voicing what is there because what i say to people is if you see it feel it notice it believe it it is real and it needs to be said and often when you voice it and you're the first person to say it loads of people then chip in and it starts to spark a real change in the shift in what's delivered i totally agree i think of such organisations been delivering products you've got a founder who really believes i think when you've got people who are really aligned against the purpose and it's really exciting everyone pushes forward and it's fantastic but then things happen along the way which take that founder that leader that product manager whoever it may be tech lead CTO who really is passionate about it but because of things that are happening around them. That turns into something which is actually not sustainable and could be then determined as toxic. So are there. And I think of one particular founder who I had spoken to and nearly did some work with, but it didn't work out because they had just got some VC funding and the whole thing for the founder then become, I need to find a way to hit these targets. The way we hit these targets is by putting out as much this list of things that we have to do, even though the product Pearson was saying this makes no sense, like we would absolutely achieve more if we just reworked this current thing because that's what everyone 's complaining about. Like, no, the funders are saying that we need to hit these these targets and I believe this is the way we do it because that's the way we've done it in the past. Now this situation, I don't know if it ever resolved itself because the people for I would work, I was working with their they resigned because there was number convincing this person. In those situations when it's hard, we don't feel like we can raise our hand. Like what can we do? I I I think the first thing is to try and stay clear. Of judgement and personal labeling. You know they're not listing. They are stupid. They don't get it. They are toxic. If we're in that space, we have shut down any idea of understanding and empathy. So first of all, it's avoid that judgement and instead put the energy and effort into curiosity and understanding. So why is that person saying that? This What are they trying to achieve? let's see if we can see it from their perspective. Because in that little story that you told there, Ben, if you are a founder and if you have achieved the gold standard of a successful founder getting some significant money in, that is what they're there to do. You know, in the kind of current narrative around ship, the absolute gold standard of a successful founder is to bring in all of that new cash. OK so we can then do gold, go and do exciting things. So they've achieved, you know, one way of looking at it, the absolute pinnacle of what they set out to do, However, what's probably happening in their heads is that, oh God, now we get, now the hard work starts. And i've never realized this. Getting the funding is not the end point. it's actually the beginning of a completely different, very scary new phase. And they're probably feeling really undermined and threatened and like, oh God, i'm not quite sure what my role is now. Because I was chief cheese. I could do anything I want. Now i've got this kind of board of advisors and funders that are telling me what to do. i've kind of lost my sense of self and now i've got the team as well, who we used to work really closely together with and we used to have a really. And they're telling me i'm rubbish as well. So i'm i'm then immediately falling into reactive defensive mode where i'm going to go, Yes, i'm right to add on to that. Think about what is it that that individual that you're communicating with wants. So ultimately they want a successful organization. So if you can couch it in the thing they want other than the problem you've seen, that's really important. And I think the second thing, and that was pivotal for me in my understanding of working with the National Center for Popular Music, is that check to see if it's just you? Yeah. So if i'd have asked around and had more conversations and known that it wasn't a lone voice. Then that I think shifts, doesn't it? The nature of the conversation because sometimes you will see something, you will think something and you will experience something that when you voice it, you are the way that your brain works and the way that you're wired. So one of my superpowers is on any single piece of technology, I will press the buttons and go through a user pathway that no one has ever considered anyone would think about doing before. it's just a gift that I have drive Simon mad and when I used to work in tech companies it would drive everyone else mad because I would do something that everyone would be like, why are you pressing that button? You know the big obvious one over here? And The thing is then you have to accept, is that just this unique user case and is it worth changing the whole product for that one weird person? Yeah. Or is this part of actually a stream of particular users that will also behave in this way? So I think that's the other thing to bear in mind is that it's important whether we are the leader who needs to listen more or the individual highlighting an issue that we must not get ourselves addicted to being right. And this is more about offering thoughts and then Co creating the way forward. Yeah, I think choice and autonomy is important as well, because nobody, whether you're the most junior person in the team or whether you're found a CEO nobody likes being told that they're wrong. We have an instinctive reaction to that. But what we do like is we do like to choose. OK So maybe, yeah, in scenarios where you're gonna try and manage upwards and try and you're gaining a little bit of control, maybe you can gain that control from somebody that doesn't want to give up that control by giving them choices. we're talking about our family and managing the conflict and disruption and the anxiety in our family has really informed how we think about work because we're really not that different at home and at work. And when we're young and when we're older, we're really not fundamentally that different. So building autonomy and choice when you're trying to get somebody to do something that you want them to do is completely critical. So if you prepare a report which has loads of evidence in, that is really logical and it's blindingly obvious that you should do this. If you tell somebody you should do this, like getting our son ready on a morning, you need to put socks on. Just put socks on. it's easy, isn't it? You know, you just put socks on you just you need to get dressed as we're leaving the house. That would turn into like an hour long argument. Fight as bad as you could possibly imagine where if you give him a choice, do you want to put your pants on first or do you want to put your socks on first Sounds super simple about your socks first and i'm happy because I control i'm choosing so you report. If it has choices in it for people to decide and still feel that they've got that autonomy, you are much more likely to get engagement from them. But mine 's like the lovely person I know called Gabrielle Benifield always spoke about a corporate judo which is the the the ability to take someone 's momentum and then just like suddenly kind of throw him into a slightly different directions. If you can take that, that will the wanting to choose as an example. But then just give it a subtle nudge into a direction which limits the choices down to the ones that maybe you think are more relevant right now. Then I think that's a lovely way of thinking about it. And corporate judo or something i've I always try and do in organisations when someone 's coming out of this amazing idea that maybe doesn't align, what can you do to just nudge it over? But then also when you say about things being obvious, if it's obvious, we'd already be doing it. So we have to assume that if they were aren't already doing it, but it isn't obvious. And calling it obvious, I think is actually i'm guilty of it. But I think I think that's quite toxic behavior, that it's not rocket science, it's obvious. But your base saying is you're an idiot because you can't see this. And there's another one I think that people do there, like there's little words that people use, right. So oh, oh, that's like, so that's obvious. But when people say things like, oh, as I mentioned, oh, I think I mentioned this before like what they're saying there is you didn't like you're not listening to me or I can't believe i'm having to repeat myself and my previous e-mail. Yeah, that's the original, isn't it? Please see previous and what you really want to put an e-mail just like FFS But you do have to bear in mind, you know, going back to what we were talking about in the last episode. Good that when cortisol is elevated, we become reactive. Yeah, we behavior is very habitual. We drop all those IQ points and so that ability to see what's right in front of us disappears because we start to have perceptual areas as our focus narrows on the thing that's really frustrating us. So what is obvious when we're in a whole brain state isn't what's obvious when we're stressed. And I think when you are really passionate that you can see something that should be happening and it isn't that's a high cortisol situation. And way to then bring that back into a green conversation is to really think about discovery and to sit in that space of understanding, exploring, sharing, so you know you've done something wrong that's gonna make you very uncomfortable. i've discovered something really interesting i'd like to share with you. it's the same content, but it's framed in a way that's going to encourage. I think more listening or connection. I think that that is something that software development teams, infrastructure teams, people like that, that have a lot of technical expertise within them. One of the kind of toxic behaviors that they often see is that being excluded, you're brought, you're excluded from decision making. on your hat. you're having significant strategic decisions around solutions, platforms, software, whatever. It might be imposed upon you as a technical team, and the constant complaint is you're bringing us in too late. Why didn't you talk to us? Why didn't you include us? And I think that often plays to that thing about I don't want to look stupid, I don't want to feel judged, I don't want to feel inadequate because you guys are far cleverer than I am. You talk a language I barely understand. You see the world in a different way than I see it. And that puts you. That kind of scares me. You know, that triggers me. That makes me feel my status has been undermined. So therefore, actually, i'm just not going to engage until I absolutely have to. Where if those technical teams can think about that context, How do we show our expertise? How do we challenge thinking? How do we ultimately choose the right solution and do that in a way that's not going to make people feel uncomfortable, challenge their status, or take away their autonomy or talk in a way that makes us feel? what's that phrase from that you often use that coming from that place of knowing, which is very difficult, you know, makes the other person feel. If you come at it conversation from a place of knowing, IE you're on a bit of a pedestal, you elevate yourself. That makes the audience feel really quite reactionary and defensive. What we're digging into is what gets thrown around a lot is, oh, we have this policy of open communication. And that I guess is the opposite of a it's a toxic behaviour. Antidote is communicating in the open. Whereas what we're saying here is there are examples where closed communication can be identified as things like you tech teams only speaking in language that engineers can understand that is an example of closed communication. Make that conversation accessible to product managers, to product leadership to who have to all stakeholders. that's how you have real open communication Or yeah, that was the one that stuck with me that I think that's a really good point, Stephen. I think that that reminds me of one of the kind of little indicators, red flag if you like to use the kind of like popular way of thinking is that if you are in a meeting where you've got maybe somebody from the business that's that's a good phrase in itself. we're all the business, but if somebody from the business, God forsake marketing or product or operation. And you've got people from technical teams. If anybody begins their contribution by saying i'm not technical, but that's really, i've said it endlessly. i've spent many, many years as you're on account management but working very closely with technical delivery teams. And I would say it all the time myself, i'm not technical. But what's actually that is telling you is that there are certain people around the table that feel like impossible. It should not be there. There they are devaluing their contribution before they've even made it. Yeah, I actually, I actually got called out for that once because as as like the team coach, I always try. And if the engineers are talking, it's very technical. I will often ask questions that force a more layman terms answer in order to open up that conversation for other people in the room. And I think I must have said something like, oh, with my, you know, probably i'm not technical, but to be honest and one of the engineers who had worked with a lot, I said that's not true. Like I know that that's not true. And I was just like you've caught me out like this is a tool in that I use all the time to try and open up communications within teams and but it can be quite difficult as it's gotta you gotta balance that I think then sometimes people can just they end up oversimplifying and it can be a bit unuseful to the project maybe but yes there is something though about jargon. The whatever your technical language jargon is, it will automatically exclude everybody who doesn't speak that jargon. And I think that you could include amongst that jargon really big, long elaborate descriptive words for things as well, where perhaps not everybody would have that within their own vocabulary. So one of the ways that I get people to think about this is that the words you use create world worlds. So this means that if I were to well, like we've been talking about toxic behaviour that will be firing off lots of neurons in our brains to create a pattern. So we've talked about people that we've worked with, behaviors that we've observed, organizations that we've worked, and it creates this whole interconnected system of ideas in people 's brains as soon as you start using jargon or language that not everybody understands people have a gap in their brain don't know what that is and they start to formulate assumption. And make guesses about what that is. And so people then start to have conversations where the world in which they're operating in becomes misaligned and mismatched. So it's excluding it makes people feel uncomfortable. And it also increases the chances that assumptions mean that you're not all working on the same page, you don't have the same shared definition of good, and that end product that you're working towards is misaligned. It reminds me of the early days of Agile, going back, you know, fifteen years or so, maybe slightly longer. I was working in teams and adopting Agile, adopting Scrum. We thought we were the bee 's knees. We were talking about Sprint. Oh my God, what the hell 's that? You know, Scrum. And you know, we had boards and in all of this sort of stuff and it was a whole new language that we thought was amazing and really cool. But actually you know one of the clients that we were that was our Guinea pig if i'm being completely honest was a local authority and how exclusionary was that and. Actually, when I think about it could what we were doing and the way that we were behaving, the language that we were using, I think you could just describe that as being toxic because we were deliberately setting ourselves aside. We were doing it for the right intention because we were trying to do things differently and trying to get the result in a better way, but we were being very exclusionary at the same time. I think Ben has an anecdote of where you something about acronyms. Too many acronyms or something like that. Obviously the classic tier Tlas, too many Tlas, three letter acronyms and yeah, the ones that no one ever understands. Think it brings in like is it cronyism? there's another kind of toxic workplace behaviour like, oh, we've got all these secret words that they're just part of our team and kind of gets you into politics. And there's so many toxic behaviours that we could really talk about within teams. But I think we might be looking at wrapping because we've had your time for so long. So yeah, Steph, you're right, it is time to wrap up. We have taken everyone 's time for for quite long enough, but it's been an amazing conversation as we've been going. i've been trying to keep a list of all the toxic behaviours that was that were mentioned or the ones actually popped into my head. And can you guess how many i've written down? This is gonna go badly because you're gonna come up with a number much higher than what i've actually got, but Simon and Amanda Steft and I guess how many toxic behaviours I got, i'm gonna go with like fifteen seven eight seven No, I i've got twelve So let me go through them as a way of recapping. And what we'll do is we'll get all these written up and out on social media as well for people to get. And I think what we'll also do in time for this episode going out is we'll suggest some antidotes for each of these. So number one, I feel like maybe I start at fifteen and do a countdown like a top of the pop style or or like, yeah, for a very cultural reference like bullseye, like twelve I could be like that but then that 'd be terrible so I talked to haven number number one the first one we came up with was a no regard for other team members which was a chair story number two was an abrasive style that leaves a trail of destruction that you just don't see which is about intention versus impact and number three was live a leader set an example for the team as a role model IE always working late doing things which you perhaps don't want to be happening stephus was yours but everyone thinks they should be doing it and number four was threatening to remove from the tribe this exclusion ideal being ostracized number five is not letting go of a decision or idea because of ego and number six was a saying things like you know it's obvious or it's not rocket science number seven which was everyone steph you mentioned again is i think i've mentioned this before please refer to my previous email number eight one of my favorites here exclusion from strategic decisions that involve you i think this is a fantastic warm talk about team members product managers including the included in these strategic decisions that will have a direct impact on their daily life number nine is one that i put up here i think that the poorly implemented no blame cultures are toxic because it just leads to conflict avoidance the phrase at number ten i'm not technical i'm not a product expert whilst there is personal fingers go on that i think sometimes it's used by leaders as a way to undermine the experts number eleven language that excludes people such as bang on about scrum in the local authority whether not used to it or product managers talking about road maps and visions when people are more used to project plans and then number twelve last one that i've made up was people using unsanctioned means to reduce shared understanding so effectively gossiping and going behind people 's backs in an effort to actually reduce the shared understanding of the collective so there's so much there and i know we could probably spend another forty five minutes talking about all those again but unfortunately time is not our friend amanda and simon thank you very much for coming along. Thank you. Thanks. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. And we will be looking to get you both involved in a live stream that'll be happening if you're well after this podcast is released, if you're still up for that and let's get a date in and then we can decide upon the topics over listeners and our followers on social media. If you want to come and ask Amanda and Simon some questions about some of the things in the episode or about the topic that we're covering over the day, please do make sure you follow us on LinkedIn, particularly productivity podcasts, if you can be made aware of when that's going to happen. Steph, anything from you? No, I just want to say thank you. Such a great conversation. And it's really nice to see Amanda and Simon again. So it was a great chat. I can't wait for the webinar. Thank you. Brilliant. Thanks. OK But let's call it a day. Thank you everyone for listening.