Ruth, Taryn and Philippa from Mayden, a health tech company that's Made Without Managers

Lisa: So Ruth, Taryn, Philippa, welcome to the Leadermorphosis podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Taryn: Thank you.

Lisa: So I thought a really good and maybe obvious place to start is with Mayden. What is Mayden and what does Mayden do?

Taryn: Hi, thanks so much, great to be here with you, Lisa. Mayden - we are a software company based in Bath. We do software particularly around Healthcare Services, patient management systems, and we’re really excited about data and innovation in this space. That’s kind of where we occupy a lot of our space and energy. But we’re obviously here to talk to you also about how we work here at Mayden, which is a little different to your traditional organization. So in a very short and sweet sense, that is who we are and what we do. Philippa, Ruth, would you add anything to that that I’ve missed?

Philippa: No, that’s a great start and yep, we’re really excited to be here. Thanks for having us and looking forward to speaking about our way of working. I guess it would be worth mentioning the system that we provide mainly occupies a space for mental health, but we’re also exploring other Healthcare sectors as our organization sort of grows and develops.

Lisa: Nice, thank you. And I understand that you’re around about 100 employees right now, is that right?

Taryn: Yeah, we just reached our 120 mark as of last week, which is quite exciting.

Lisa: Congratulations! Maybe each of you could say something briefly about when you joined Mayden and what your role is.

Taryn: I’m happy to kick us off. Looking at you guys and having the chat, I think I joined, then Philippa joined, and then maybe Ruth joined. I think we kind of joined within a few months of each other because I think we’ve all been with the organization about six years. So I joined in 2016, and I joined the company at a time where they were really reviewing and being intentional about our way of working and wanting to make it great. But I came in on an administrative level and kind of very quickly got excited about what was happening in the organizational development space. I’m now working as a product owner around our ways of working and how we do things here at Mayden.

Philippa: Okay, so I followed. I joined the organization shortly after Taryn, also in 2016. I joined the business at a time when we still had what we called the executive team. I joined to support that team - it comprised of three directors and one of our amazing software developers. As is always the case in a smaller organization, there’s always too much to do and not enough time to do it. So I was brought on to support that team, to pick up projects, and to sort of be a program manager around things that the directors at the time wanted to get done but really didn’t have the time to do everything that was on their backlog.

So I was brought in to support that team, and then the main piece of work that we started working on was around our way of working. Actually, we had a staff survey during 2016, which we do regularly once or twice a year, that sort of suggested that things weren’t as well as we wanted them to be. So that was the piece of work that got me going, got me started at Mayden. My role has really sort of grown and developed in some very strange and interesting ways, not least because that executive team was disbanded within about three months of me starting because it was deemed to be too hierarchical.

So no doubt we’ll get into that in a bit more detail. Following that, I did spend a good sort of year, year and a half really focusing on our way of working and holding the space, working very closely with Taryn in that area. And then from there, I picked up some different project work around innovation, writing big bids for innovation for the organization. That has now grown into exploring new areas that we’ll grow into. So I’m currently in our Market Discovery team. That’s been sort of the main three areas that I’ve worked in since 2016.

Lisa: Thank you. We’ll hold our horses for a second because Ruth’s getting the doorbell.

Ruth: Hi!

Lisa: Do you want to tell us about when you joined Mayden and what your role is?

Ruth: Yes, I joined in 2017, just shortly after Taryn and Philippa. I joined the development teams as a developer initially, and then a bit like Taryn and Philippa, my role has also morphed over time. Now I spend most of my time as a scrum master. If you haven’t come across a Scrum Master before, it’s an interesting mix of facilitation and coaching, both individuals and teams, and supporting the kind of wider product team and also wider across the company in terms of becoming more agile and using Scrum in our development teams. So that’s more where I am now - more about the people, which I love.

Lisa: Thank you. All three of you have mentioned how your roles have evolved over time, and I think it might be really interesting for listeners to hear a bit of a timeline - at a high level, what have been some of the key milestones in Mayden’s development? Because I think that was one of the things that I really enjoyed reading about in the book, which by the way I really recommend to listeners because it’s fantastic. All three of you and several others have been co-authors of the book, so it’s such a beautiful example of how to kind of self-manage a book in a way because everyone’s contributing different perspectives. It’s really fun because some of the developments in your ways of working seem like they happened almost by accident, some of them more intentional. But can you give us a bit of an overview - what have been some of the key milestones on the journey?

Philippa: Yeah, shall I make a start? No doubt Taryn and Ruth will chip in. Mayden itself as an organization is actually now 22 years old. So a super high-level potted history - the first 10 years or so it was a boutique health consultancy with a very small number of people, driven by our founding director Chris May. The really sort of pivotal moment in terms of us becoming a software company was when Chris attended a healthcare conference and struck up a serendipitous conversation with the person - one of the people that was really spearheading a really important program in the NHS called the Improving Access to Psychological Therapy Program. That really started to steer our organization towards developing software around healthcare and mental health care that Taryn and I touched on at the beginning.

Then in terms of us growing a software development team, what we recognized around about 2013, so about 13 years into Mayden’s history, was that the software wasn’t being deployed as quickly as our customers wanted it to be. So we really started to hone in on what was the issue there - why weren’t things going out to the customers as quickly as we’d like and as bug-free or as pain-free as we’d like? That moment was when we honed in on this approach called Agile and Scrum, which I will leave Ruth to go into in a bit more detail if there’s an opportunity.

That really started to enable us to have a foundation to our self-managing approach - this idea that teams can be self-managing. Agile really gave us that way into stripping out middle management, stripping out any kind of command and control, really challenging where silos were potentially building up in the organization. So 2013 was that sort of key moment there.

Fast forward a couple of years, that’s going really well for the software development teams, and those in the organization at the time (which I think were probably around about 30 to 40 people) thought this could work for the rest of the organization. That’s when self-managing was introduced - rolled out, for want of a better word - across the whole of the company. Then 2016 is, as you’ve heard, when we joined, and the organization sort of started to really intentionally work on our way of working and really wanted to explore how we can do this but in a way that’s true to self-managing. How do you really sort of make sure that everyone is involved in co-creating an organization that is self-managed? So that sort of brings us to 2016.

Taryn: I think one of the moments I reflect on in the storyline is around obviously our developers had done the Scrum journey, and Rob Cullingford who works closely with us was really instrumental in kind of bringing that into the business and championing Scrum. But we came to a point where two of our directors, Alison Sturgis-Durden and Chris May, were champions of Ricardo Semler and Maverick. Chris tells a lovely story in the book around what he tried to introduce - a different way of working on a production line in a chocolate factory - and how that went horribly wrong. But his passion for people and them being able to manage themselves and bring their whole self to the workspace… And you kind of had this beautiful blend of Scrum and Agile being introduced, but also two directors really wanting to look differently at how we work.

It was that combination, I guess, in around 2015-16 when we started to remove those line management structures and invite staff to do it differently. But we also kind of had an organization of two halves, which was kind of where some of the pain points came for us. Because you had your development teams who were already self-managing within a company that had line management, because they had the Scrum methodology to support their Agile self-management. But you had the other half of the business who didn’t have those processes, and so line management was removed for them but they had no frameworks or scaffolding to fall back onto to know how to manage the work. We talk about managing the work, not the people.

So that was really an interesting space, and probably the space that we all started to show up in was this tension going on in the organization of wanting to try something new but it not quite going as well as they’d hoped it to go, and how do we improve on that and make it work across the business?

Lisa: Listening to you, what strikes me is there was both a driver of sort of necessity and organizational effectiveness in terms of how to make the software development teams more effective, less siloed, etc. But it also sounds like there were some key principles as well, and kind of almost like philosophies or worldviews held by - you mentioned two of the directors there - around trusting people, involving people. Would you say that those principles have been… how explicit are they, and have principles been valuable in kind of navigating, you know, how far do we push this?

Taryn: I would say definitely. I think we often talk about our values at Mayden, and our values were quite instrumental in shaping the culture and the ways of working that we have today. I’m gonna hand that over to Philippa because she was massively involved - she kind of came together when we did some workshops around our values. And we often say when something isn’t working at Mayden or doesn’t feel like it’s flowing well, it’s because one of our values isn’t being lived by. So they are quite foundational to that as well. I don’t know if you wanted to add to that, Philippa?

Philippa: Yeah, I’d be very happy to. In the summer of 2016, Ali Sturgis-Durden and Rob Cullingford had run some workshops for the organization. The four values that we as an organization are really built on - transparency, collaboration, contribution, and forward thinking - had really emerged from talking to the staff at the time, from employees at the time. Rob and Ali had run some workshops to really help people to understand and get under the skin of those values - what does that mean in practice? How do we know when somebody’s really living those values? How do we know when those values are not lived?

I should also say I’m a grounded researcher at heart - that’s sort of my previous life before coming to Mayden. What those workshops generated was an incredible amount of grounded data about what people really believed was working and not working at Mayden at the time. We were really lucky to be able to then take the outcomes of those workshops to a full staff day, and that was a real watershed moment, I think - a real pivotal moment for the organization to really wrap their heads around what does this mean to become a self-managing organization in a way that everybody can have a voice and bring that about together.

I think that was a real pivotal moment for us in terms of building from values and then what we’ve also done since then is think about that in terms of ethos, which we do touch on in the book as best we can. What were Chris’s beliefs when he started this organization about what an organization needs to be and how do people thrive within an organization when they come together to work? Ali’s inspiration that I think Taryn’s already mentioned - she actually was really lucky enough to hear Ricardo Semler speak directly at a conference many years ago and has, through conversations with Chris, sparked her memory of “there can be another way.”

It’s a real sense of some misgivings about wanting to grow an organization but not necessarily in a kind of traditional way or “this is just the way things are done, let’s put layers of middle management in.” It was “we believe there is another way and we really want to make that happen and support the organization to make that happen.” So it has been, I think as you say, a real blend of intention and how things evolve naturally and emerge naturally and invite voices, once you trust people and recognize that we’re all adults that come to work in this organization - you can have really good quality conversations that enable everybody to contribute.

Ruth: Just on the values, I really love our values and I think it’s always surprising to me when I talk to people who are not Mayden, that pretty much everyone can name the values and they know what they mean and they use them. We talk about them a lot - you kind of see them pop up all over the place. Like Taryn said, we use them to diagnose when things aren’t feeling right or as guiding principles when we’re figuring stuff out. Like “is collaboration in there?” “What about transparency?” “How are we enabling contribution?”

They came out of a place of “well, what kind of culture do we want? How do we want our teams to feel?” And I think as we’ve already mentioned, a lot of it has come out of “something’s not working” or “there’s some pain.” So what are we gonna do about it? How are we going to change it? That’s what happened with introducing Scrum and that’s what happened, I think, with values as well - what kind of place do we want to work in, and therefore what are we going to do about it?

Taryn: I’m reflecting on our conversation, and I love how we’ve all been talking about “how do we want to change it?” and “how do we want to get involved to make that change?” And kind of reflecting back to what you were just saying, Lisa, around Chris and Ali and how they approached the space. They had such a people empowerment focus that they saw people could be brilliant in the space. I just want to honor them in this space because I think if it wasn’t for their leadership and them holding that space and going “you guys, we believe in you, you can do this, and we believe you have something to contribute, and we’re going to let go to allow that to evolve and to take shape in however that might look,” even if it might feel totally different to what we thought it would look like.

I think that is so powerful in this space - when you give people that permission to shine and to take ownership and responsibility, it’s really exciting to see what is possible in an organization. Philippa nodded to the ethos within Mayden, and we’ve tried so many times to visualize whether it’s a tree or a building or a village - like how do we describe how we work here? But every bit I do get comfortable with is we have a fantastic foundation, which is, I always think about ethos as the soil in which this began, and that is so much to do with Chris and his heart and his passion and his vision for the business and for people and for making a difference to people’s lives through software. But at the core, he wants to change people’s lives through the resources he has.

And then you’ve got the roots, which are our values, and they are growing in this soil of the ethos. And then what comes from that is a lovely tree or a building - I don’t know, it could go in different directions and go a bit crazy. But I think that’s just such a privilege to work in a space that is the foundation upon which we can build and evolve and develop.

Lisa: Yeah, I love that. I’d love to talk a bit about leadership. I think there are a lot of misconceptions when people start exploring self-managing teams that there should be no leadership, there should be no leaders. I want to talk about this in two parts because I know in Mayden that you do still have directors, so we can talk a little bit about that. But also, I think it’s really interesting to talk about leadership as a kind of activity or co-leadership, if you like - something that people can embody whatever their role is in the organization. So I’d like to know also what that looks like. Yeah, let’s talk a bit about leadership. Who feels energized to kick that off?

Taryn: [Smiling] I think my smile is more about going “oh, who would be good?” I was like “Ruth could do that” and “Philippa could do that.” I was in a different smile zone, but happy to start. Obviously as you said, there’s two parts to it, and we did a lot of work within Mayden around what is the role of the director in a flat structured organization. Whenever I do an induction with new staff around our way of working, I always say that we’re as flat as we can be, but being a limited company, we have a governing body which is our board of directors. So they are there within a purpose and have value there, just in the governance side of things.

But we also - a lot of what we do is through collaboration and around discussing with staff and working groups that get together around the subject or topic. So early on, around the time that the exec team got disbanded - and I might hand over to Philippa at this point - we did a lot of work around what is that role of the director in a company like this. We figured out a space in that. I don’t know if you wanted to pick that up, Philippa, because I know you were massively involved in really defining that space.

Philippa: Yes, I’m happy to pick that up, and I’m also happy to talk about another piece of work that was done by a couple of colleagues - one of whom is still in the business and was involved in the book, Dave Bold - around what progression at Mayden looks like. Within that, he unearthed some really interesting insight into leadership at Mayden.

So I think, like you say, there’s definitely two parts to this question, and Taryn’s sort of picked up and sowed those seeds around how we looked at the role of the director and what does that need to be and how does that function within a self-managing organization. And then also, what does a leaderful organization look like - how does that really sort of take shape and working, how does that work in practice?

In terms of the role of the director, we worked across the business and we use a tool, for want of a better word, from the Agile and Scrum framework called “stories.” The framework of a story is “As a [role], I would like [something] so that I can [achieve outcome].” We wrote our stories around the role of the director as: “As an employee at Mayden, I would like a really clear understanding of what the role of the director is so that I can deliver to my role.” And then we wrote the other side of the story as: “As a director at Mayden, I would like a really clear understanding…” So it was a kind of two-handed story.

Then that enabled us to - and it did take some time (we can often put these in potted histories, but it takes time to have the conversations, to make proposals, to consult, and to really develop these over time) - but where we’ve ended up is a four-part role of the director: Set Direction, Set Expectation, then we have something called Get Out of the Way (but we’ll go into that in a bit more detail), and then to Come Back In to Seek Assurance. Because ultimately, Mayden is a legal entity, it is a company that has to report to Companies House, and there are certain things that only a director is allowed to do in the legal entity. So we make sure that we acknowledge that as part of the role of director.

And then in terms of that leadership space, what we’ve recognized as a self-managing organization is that absolutely anybody could be leading and have leadership behaviors across the business, depending on the needs of the work, the needs of the business, the aspirations, and sort of where that individual is in terms of what they want to bring. Some of the insight that Dave and his colleague identified when they did a piece of work around this is - a lot of the behaviors for leaders and leadership within Mayden is about supporting other people to shine, supporting other people’s development, to listen, to challenge, to champion. It’s really exciting to see that emerging from our own… These are conversations that they had with members of staff, with teams across the business. And actually, that’s something - another sort of piece of work that we want to take forward and really explore further. I don’t know if Ruth might have more to add as well?

Ruth: Yeah, I think for me, when you talk about leadership, it’s really helpful to think about influence. Everybody has the ability to influence those around them, and what you say, how you act - it matters, and people see that and are influenced by it. Thinking about the development teams, we’ve taken an approach where every one of our 30+ software developers are all developers - there’s no senior, mid-senior. We don’t hire on that basis; everyone is a developer. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some with more experience or specialist knowledge in certain areas. And that is based on respect and knowledge of each other.

So when you have a question about databases, you’re going to talk to the people that know about databases, and you’ll still respect and ask for that advice and influence from people who are more experienced or have knowledge. But it allows everyone’s voice to be respected. I love that no matter how long you’ve been there, even maybe a placement student who’s just joined, their opinion and their ideas are just as valuable and might be a completely new perspective. So by removing that kind of title and automatic authority or leadership, you allow everybody to have a voice.

But yes, there are still leaders - it’s just recognized maybe in a different way and maybe more through respect and how you interact with each other and how you build up those relationships more than a particular structure.

Lisa: Yeah, I love that. I wonder then, what does progression look like in Mayden? Because this is another question I get asked a lot, where people say, “Well, you know, if you take away the career ladder or if it’s a flat or flatter organization, where can I grow, where can I develop?” So what does that look like in Mayden?

Philippa: I’m happy to make a start on answering that one. Lisa, you’ve already said some of the key words that really spring to mind for us. Something we find - we have these kind of guiding mantras that have been developed over the years, and for us, it’s about “grow, not climb.” Exactly as you say, because there isn’t a predetermined ladder or hierarchy that traditionally, you know, narrows as you go up. Because there isn’t that, it really is with the individual, with a great deal of support and scaffolding, to find their way of growing and developing within the organization.

We give people that sense of opportunity, I guess. So it is helping all of us to see: okay, where does the business need to grow and develop? What are the business opportunities? But then also, you as a person, what do you find really interesting in this space and how do you want to grow and develop? What we hope to achieve is that we’re creating an environment where people can really take the opportunities to grow and develop personally and professionally.

There are a few sort of tools and practical things that we have in place. Like everybody has access to a training budget, their own personal training budget, and it is completely up to them how they choose to spend it. We really support and champion that everybody does make use of that every year in a way that suits them, in a way that they want to access that and make the most of it.

There’s a good comprehensive coaching program that people can access. Again, we’re happy to talk in a bit more detail about that. So we do recognize that actually, sometimes you want a private conversation to say, “Okay, I’m thinking about this” or “I’m having some challenges in this area.” So again, people can really seek some space in a coaching environment to help them figure out how they want to grow and develop in the organization.

It’s not without its challenges. There is a lot of ownership that needs to be taken by the individual to really take hold of those opportunities. So there’s a lot of tools and scaffolding and things that people can access to support them in that, but ultimately they really have to own how they want to grow and develop in the organization. And you heard our stories at the beginning - each one of us has probably taken some good opportunities and taken that forward in ways that we’ve wanted to. But I’d love to hand over to Ruth or Taryn because I know they’ve both got some great stories and insights about progression at Mayden.

Taryn: Yeah, I think I’ll just tag on to it. While you were speaking, Philippa, I was just thinking of ownership and responsibility. So much of it is on the individual, which is that nod to “We Believe In You, we believe you can carve the path that you want to do.” But I do also recognize - looking back at my journey, from coming in as a receptionist to then being a PA to then moving on to working more around other projects in the business, and then ultimately discovering organizational development (which, when I was looking at what to study after school, I didn’t even know was a thing) - and I’ve loved that. I trained as one of our internal coaches and am working toward my accreditations and recognitions in that space, which I love. It’s just been amazing to be able to explore those opportunities.

But it has also been really hard at times. Yes, there’s the support, there’s scaffolding to take you on that journey, but sometimes you have to really fight for it because I think it’s such a fluid space, it’s such an area that you can really just explore and experiment, that it’s almost - it’s not always clear when have I progressed officially? At what point do I get recognized for the changes that I have and responsibilities that I’ve taken on?

But I think that’s where we work a lot as well, and we spent a lot of time looking at what we call our Core Curriculum. Because working in this way, soft skills are really, really important. I have a little bug bear that they’re called “soft” because there’s nothing soft about them - they’re essential, they’re really core to a great working environment. Particularly one where you haven’t got a line manager to kind of do those conversations for you - you’re gonna have to speak to somebody about those opportunities, you’re going to have to deal with that team conflict or that misunderstanding.

We want to make sure we give staff those skills and help them to feel empowered to have those conversations, to give feedback, and to move forward together. So again, it’s just that growing outwards. How do I grow outward? And that might be in my soft skills, in those core essential skills that I need to be a great person (never mind a great product owner), and how do I grow in those skills? Or a great coach, and how do I grow in those skills? It’s looking at what makes a whole person and what are those different areas that I need to grow in and identify, and then take the steps that I need to, which are supported by the training budget, to make me the person that I think I want to be rather than the career path I want to go on. I think that’s also a nice way of looking at it.

Lisa: Yeah, I really like that.

Ruth: I was just reflecting on what you’ve touched on a little bit around what can sometimes be challenging also, the kind of shadow side, I think, of being in a self-managing organization. That the onus can fall quite heavily on the individual to sort of own your own development and seek those opportunities out. How do you support people when they join Mayden, for example? I’m guessing you have a pretty - you’ve probably honed your recruitment process also to find people, but once they join, do people find that challenging? And if so, how do you support them in adapting to this way of working?

Taryn: Yeah, we’ve definitely done a lot around, first of all, recruitment. So we worked with a business psychologist in kind of early days - well, probably around 2017, I imagine. I wasn’t massively involved in that, that’s why I’m being a little hesitant. But I am massively involved in our induction process. So I guess… Ruth, did you wanna…?

Ruth: Yeah, I can say a little bit about recruitment because I’m involved in the developer recruitment. The questions that came out of that conversation with a psychologist really help us to figure out what are the questions that we need to ask to figure out whether not only does this person have the competency, the skills that we’re looking for, but also how they get on and what’s their perception of hierarchy.

For developers, especially when we’re hiring experienced developers, how do they feel that they will be a developer, not a senior developer, and how do they feel about that? What’s their approach to leadership? Like we said before, some of these questions about approach and how will they get on - we’re not looking for a particular - we’re not looking to hire just like ourselves, but we’re looking for people who will thrive in this environment. Some of those questions were guided by times when people really struggled or found it really challenging to work in a self-managing way. So trying to look for these aspects when we’re hiring has been really important.

Taryn: Yeah, I think obviously we really want to ensure - and we make sure in that process as well - people are really clear that they’re coming into an environment where we don’t have line management and what that might be like. And we try and make sure our website does that as well as much as possible. Our recruitment team are really great at setting that scene, and obviously the actual interview process is there.

But then we do go on a real journey with staff when they join us. Obviously when you join Mayden, you’ll get set up on a laptop and the basics of what you need to know and our communication systems. But then I’ll spend a morning with a new starter just talking through some of the language and understanding around the role of the director, how it works here at Mayden, what is the language that we use. I often talk about managing the work, not the people, how we’re a self-managing, as flat as we can be organization.

I then talk about how we believe in guidelines over rules and fluid frameworks over rigid structures. So you won’t find a lot of policies at Mayden, or if we do, it’s normally just one line with a bunch of guidelines to help you to self-manage yourself and your team about how that works for you. And I talk through some of those tools. But then I will stay in touch with those individuals and probably touch base with them in three months’ time to kind of then take them a bit on the journey of why we work this way and how we introduced some of our practices and approaches.

Because obviously, I’m very much aware that when you’re a new starter, you have that “deer in the headlights” moment - lots of information coming on board. One of the things I’ve realized and really value is us being a bit more back in person. So much of our culture is experienced, and our ways of working is learned through osmosis. The teams are really great - each team has like their way of expressing it as well.

So I can tell and train everyone on the bare bones and the blueprint, so to speak, but it’s down to each team - they’ve interpreted it in a very special way, in a unique way to them. So also, I want them to experience their team’s approach, their team’s self-managing way of working. Some teams use Scrum, some teams use other Agile methodology to organize themselves.

So you want the individual to experience it for a while and then have another touch point of a bit more clarification. But as we’ve said, we want you to get involved from day one. Whether you’ve been here a week or whether you’ve been here 10 years, you can get involved in our working groups, you can make decisions, you can be a valid contributor from the beginning. So it’s kind of touch points but also lived experience that happen as well.

Ruth: Yeah, just as a small example, often when developers join one of our teams - I’m the Scrum Master for a team, and that is a servant leadership role. So I do have a place in coaching and facilitating, but I’m not in charge, I don’t have authority over the team. I support and facilitate and make the space for the team. But often when developers join the team, they’ll come to me and say, “Can I take holiday next month?” And I’ll go, “Well, I can tell you my opinion, but it’s not up to me - you need to ask the team. I’m part of the team, but I can’t tell you yes or no - the team needs to make that decision.”

So it’s just a small way that often when people have worked in a different way or in a different structure, they come, and it takes a bit of adjustment of “oh, that’s not how it works here - it’s the team.” It’s just a bit of adjustment over time, which does happen.

Taryn: I think that’s a conversation I often have with new starters as well, around mindset, recognizing this is going to be a mindset shift for you. Because I don’t think - as far as I’m aware, I could stand corrected - I don’t think I’ve ever inducted anyone at Mayden that has worked in an organization like ours. Hierarchy is so ingrained in our culture, whether it was in school or university or in other job experiences, even in our family structures - there is hierarchy. So it is such a shift for individuals and a mindset shift to get their head around this - that I don’t need to ask permission, I don’t need to have somebody tell me what to do, that I can take that initiative. But as long as I’ve got that accountability within my team and we’re working towards this together, that I can take the holiday or I can buy myself a laptop cover if that’s what I need to make my job work well.

I think that’s really a huge shift for people, but also giving them permission that it’s going to be a shock to the system, but we’re here to support you on that process. So keep the conversation going, access that coaching, your team’s a great support for you, etc.

Lisa: I love that you say that because my main interest when I talk to people on the podcast is always wanting to learn about that process of exploring the mindset shift and also the kind of human skills shift, if you like, as well. Like you mentioned conflict and feedback, for example. And you touched a bit on the Core Curriculum, but I’d be interested to know - when there are disagreements or interpersonal conflicts, how do you handle that? And has that been challenging, and have you evolved that process over time?

Ruth: I think this is where our Agile foundations really, really help us because Scrum in particular kind of gives you some really quick feedback loops. So every morning when you have your stand-up, which is when you come together and go “oh, what did you do yesterday? What are we doing today?” - it gives you that opportunity to adjust and feedback very quickly. And then every two weeks for us (but it can vary), we look at the work and feedback in terms of that. Also, our team have retrospectives, and I think retrospectives are really key in making sure we talk about what’s going well and what’s not going well and what we need to change, particularly in team dynamics and interpersonal things.

The longer you leave tensions, the worse they get, often. So having a space to air and to talk about it and to be honest with each other in a vulnerable, safe space is really important. When I first joined Mayden, I joined a team with some really strong characters. At the time, there were lots of great, heated exchanges, really strong opinions, often wanting the best for the code but maybe not going about it in the best way, and lots of talking over each other. As a new person, I wondered “how am I ever gonna have a word in edgeways? This is quite tricky.”

But then the first retrospective I remember - it was in a loft room in the building we worked in at the time - and the team, who’d been kind of arguing and talking over each other, sat down and talked about how it had been for each of them and listened. When somebody said, “Oh, I felt like you weren’t listening to me” or “that my opinion wasn’t valued,” somebody would go, “Oh, I’m really sorry you felt like that - I didn’t know that’s what happened in that exchange” and were willing to have that honest conversation about what wasn’t working and how it was going.

I was able to say, “I’m not sure how I managed to get to speak - I’m not sure there’s space for me.” And to have people go, “Oh, okay, what do we need to change to allow you some space?” That point for me was when I thought, “Well, if we’re willing to have these honest conversations and we’re willing to listen to each other and make a change, then this can work - we can change. If something’s not working but we’re able to talk about it, we’ll be okay.” And I think that’s the pattern we see over and over since then - that space to talk about things openly and to make a change from that is what drives the ability to make progress.

Philippa: Yeah, I would agree with Ruth completely and add a couple of things, if I may. Some of our teams are not completely guided by Scrum and Agile, but most teams now have some form of retrospective or team space where that is the space to have those kinds of conversations.

We have made use of team coaching - a very similar function to the Scrum Master but not somebody that’s completely embedded in teams. Any team at any point can say, “We think we need a bit of help with something - can you hold a space for us, hold a space for a difficult conversation? Help us to understand what tools we could employ to really slow ourselves down” or “to really get under the skin of something.” So some of those tools that have come into play (and Taryn mentioned the Core Curriculum, which we’ve done some lunchtime talks on) are things like transactional analysis - helping people to really understand that adult-to-adult space and what those kind of conversations can look and feel like.

Another one that we’ve really introduced and encouraged teams to use is the ladder of inference, where you can really start to recognize some of your own underlying assumptions, and you can help one another to sort of raise that awareness of “where are you coming from in this conversation and how can we seek to understand one another?” We find that’s been really, really important - that people have really honed those communication and listening skills so that difficult or potentially difficult conversations can be held in a really constructive way. We recognize that everybody in the business needs those skills, and we work hard to try and help people to access the information that they need to do that for themselves.

Taryn: I just would add, I think feedback is a huge subject, and there are fantastic resources out there. It’s something that we’ve been working on ever since I’ve been working here, because it’s not easy. I’m originally from South Africa, so I find sometimes the English culture is very polite around this, and nobody wants to say anything or upset anybody. Learning how to do those conversations and have that brave communication… So many of my coaching sessions, I’ll talk to somebody about coaching, and they’re so worried about how that person is going to react, even if they haven’t had an experience of that person reacting negatively. There’s so many assumptions in it.

But what I’ve really appreciated is we talk about a feedback culture. As Ruth has said, we have it built in in our retros, we have it built in in team stand-ups. Whenever we have a big project across the business that is also cross-team, we will do a retrospective of that project. So you get it happening in lots of pockets and lots of ways across the business.

But I also love on our Core Curriculum - Philippa has mentioned some of the tools, and we’ve got an internal intranet that’s through the Google Suite - we have different individuals who’ve found resources and have done lunchtime talks. Anybody can do a lunchtime talk here at Mayden if you’ve got a subject or something that you’d find interesting - you can say “I want to do a talk on this,” and then you come and do a talk and invite people to come and have lunch with you while you chat.

There’s been quite a few around feedback where different individuals have addressed this for themselves and found a way that works for them. But in that, they have found really great tools and then share it with the business. So there’s a real culture of learning and experimenting and trying and finding a way that works.

But I think the challenge for any organization is that continuous learning and bringing people on the journey. Like we talked about new starters, depending on where they came from, they might still be - it might be so new to them and they’re just starting out on the journey. Versus somebody like Ruth, who’s had lots of experience of working as a Scrum Master and with and across teams, would be a little bit more okay with different feedback conversations. It’s kind of meeting everybody where they’re at and supporting them on their journey.

Ruth: Just on feedback - it’s something we’re still working on. Last year, I think it was last year, my team went through a few months where the topic of feedback and wanting to do more feedback, kind of on a personal level to help each other grow, kept coming up. The conversation went along the lines of “Yeah, we’d really love to figure out how to do feedback, we’d really love to do more feedback.”

So as the Scrum Master, I was like, “Okay, let’s sit down and talk about how we want to do it.” And it turned out that we really loved the idea of feedback, but when it came to actually doing it, the room kind of tensed up and went, “Oh, actually it’s quite hard” and “I find receiving feedback quite difficult” was the kind of vibe that the room suddenly changed from “Yeah, feedback, that sounds great” to “Oh, that’s a bit tricky actually.”

So we had to explore, okay, well how do we start small then? What kind of tools can we use to help and become more comfortable, or try out little ways? So one of the things we found really worked was, rather than feedback, “feed forward” - which is proactively coming to a group saying “I would like to grow in this way” or “I would like to get better at this - could I have some ideas about how I could do that, how I could explore that?” So it’s very forward-focused rather than giving feedback on something that’s already happened, which felt easier to kind of tackle first. But I really love that concept that feedback sounds great, but in practice, it’s possibly more challenging.

Lisa: Yeah, I find that’s really common - that people in organizations say “We’d love to give each other feedback more, have more of a feedback culture” and then when you say “Great, so when do we start?” or “What’s the first step?” then people are like, “Just kidding!” I think there’s so much baggage as well with feedback, especially people who’ve come from traditional organizations. I find there’s some kind of wounds and trauma (with a little ‘T’) as well where feedback is not always done well in traditional organizations and can be attached to reward and pay, or can feel disempowering if someone’s trying to correct you or fix you.

So it sounds like in Mayden, it’s much more driven from a personal growth angle or wanting to be more effective as a team or wanting to learn more as a team, which sounds like a much healthier starting point. I think I’d really be curious to hear from each of you, what has been challenging for you personally in this journey and the evolution of your role in Mayden? It could be something that you’ve overcome, or it could be something that you’re still wrestling with now, or a learning edge that you’re working on.

Philippa: I’m happy to start. Something that I find challenging is - so much of what we do, there’s so much opportunity. I am somebody that gets very interested and very excited in getting involved in things. Because at Mayden, you are so much a master of your own destiny, for somebody like myself who struggles perhaps to say no and struggles to prioritize, I can find myself in places of being involved in too many things. Then you recognize actually you’re not giving the best that you can in the spaces that you’re in.

So I guess for somebody like myself who has that sort of way of proceeding, there’s nobody there saying “Don’t do that, Philippa” or “Put that down.” That really is up to me to make sure that I generate the conversations that I need to have and recognize when it’s time to move on or put something down. So I think for me, one of the personal challenges is there’s so much opportunity - it’s recognizing how to prioritize and how to really make the most of the opportunities in front of us. As Taryn will often say to me, it’s the power of a positive no.

I wonder as well - Ruth and I have often had conversations (we do still work closely on things like decision making and helping the organization to figure that side of things out) - is that people often seek a framework or a structure or a process to try and make what they think is going to make something easier. Like, “Oh, we’re going to have a framework for feedback because that will make it easier.” And actually, sometimes these things are challenging because they’re challenging to the human being, like you’re saying, from past trauma or things that people have experienced in the past.

So that’s the other challenge - recognizing the human aspect of organizing. You can’t always put a structure or a framework or a process in place to take all the pain away. Sometimes difficult conversations will be difficult, but we need to learn how to have them in a really meaningful, mindful way and in a way that supports one another. So I guess that’s the two things I would point to from where I’m sat.

Lisa: That’s interesting because I can imagine it would be so tempting in your role, or perhaps maybe this applies to all three of you actually - in your role, instead of supporting people to be effective or to develop ways of working, it would be easy to want to rescue people or alleviate pain. But I find that sometimes, as you say, it takes courage to have “difficult conversations,” and no process is gonna take that away necessarily. It might increase people’s confidence.

But I think that can be the lure of the heroic leader as well sometimes - that you want to help people, and that’s not always helpful or empowering in a sense as well.

Philippa: Yeah, I have an example just from the other week when things were reasonably stressful in the lead up to a staff day. My team in particular were really involved in getting ready for this staff day, and it was stressful. You’re sort of looking to somebody else to go, “Help us in this.” And rather than someone leaping in and saying “I can do this,” people will say “What do you need?”

There is that reflecting back, and you still own this - “What do you need? I’m not gonna come in and try and rescue you, but sort of really holding that space and saying what do you need right now to support you through this?” Not take the pain away, but support you through this. And that’s what we really do support each other in, time and time again.

Taryn: I think answering your question about areas of personal growth and learning kind of ties into what Philippa was saying. Because we were both massively involved in the staff day - actually all three of us were - but it is that - one of the things I’ve had to learn, and what Philippa has said around “What do you need?” and holding that space… my journey has been massively around holding the space. Because I am a recovering control freak. I like to plan things really well - my natural bend is to be well organized, whether that’s an event, whether that’s projects, or whatever. Like every “i” dotted and “t” crossed, everything thought of in advance.

That’s not always possible in an Agile working environment. So I think early on on this journey, I had to learn how to just hold that space - that I couldn’t control it, I couldn’t control the outcome, I couldn’t control the conversation, but I could support it. I could bring some structures that would support the conversation or support the flow of the conversation.

I used to work with a lot of creative people, and I used to say to myself that structure breeds creativity. But it’s not necessarily a rigid structure - it’s about having… I always have a picture of almost a paddock in which you can keep a horse. You’ve got the parameters of the fence, but it’s a nice big paddock where they can roam around freely and get to the grass that they need to get to and have a good run and be expressive and be creative and be a horse. But actually, there’s still parameters within that field to help you to look after that horse in the best way that you can.

I’ve had to really learn those skills around how do I balance that - around when structure is needed, when a plan is needed, and when people just need to be people. They need time to just have a conversation, or they just need time to process, or just time to be left alone so they can get on with the work that they need to get on with, or whatever that might be. It’s a forever journey. I don’t think I’m done - I’m in the process of learning and have learned, but continue to learn.

Ruth: Yeah, I think my challenges have been similar in a way. I really love the Agile principle that’s “people and interactions over processes and tools” - just kind of what Philippa was talking about. I often say that the best part of my job is people and seeing people grow and empowered, and I love that. People are the best, but people also fall out, and conflict happens, and people are also the worst. It’s always people - it’s always about people.

I guess the challenging part for me is feeling when it’s about encouraging and empowering and coaching and supporting with processes we already have and the kind of structures, the boundaries that we’re already working within, and when something’s actually not working and we need to change more significantly than the kind of iterations that naturally occur. The kind of “Oh, something’s really not right and we need to make a bigger change.” I think I find that challenging - when is it just about supporting people and holding the space and facilitating, and when is it about noticing there’s a bigger change or a more drastic kind of shift that’s needed? I personally find that challenging.

Lisa: I’m thinking also about zooming out again to Mayden as an organization. You’re 120 people now - what do you see on the horizon? What are things that you’re hoping to develop further, or what are sort of challenges that you’re grappling with as you move forward?

Ruth: It’s probably fair to say we’re still figuring out what we’re doing coming out of the pandemic, where we changed where we were working drastically. Even though we’ve come back to the office a lot of the time now, it’s different to how it was before. The size of the company grew approximately doubled, I think, during that kind of two-year period. So we’re still figuring out - well, who are we now? And in that time, the business has grown in other ways, and what we’re doing and what we’re producing has also changed.

So “Is everything all right? What’s going on? What do we need to change or adjust? And what’s the culture now? How has that evolved? How does it need to evolve as we grow and continue to grow?” I think an area we’re really homing in on at the moment is - I’ll come back to the decision-making piece of work - to this point, we are a very collaborative organization. We really hold that value very dear. Consulting and involving people in decision making has always been a very important part of what we do and how we do it. We think that is what gets the best in terms of the best for employees, the best for customers, the best for developing new things, innovation.

But we recognize that sometimes that decision making can be slow, and the bigger we are in terms of number of employees, the harder we are finding it to balance that efficient, effective decision making with involving and collaborating. So I think for me, one of the things that we’re really homing in on is the impact of scaling for collaborative decision making, and how do we strike that balance as an organization? Because we really want to get it right - we really want to still hold true to that value of collaboration, but also be fleet of foot. We’re exploring new markets, new opportunities for us, and we need to know that we can also make decisions quickly. So that’s definitely an area that we’re homing in on as an organization.

Taryn: I think I would just add in that for me, it’s kind of looking at all of our ways of working - the areas that we’ve looked at over the last six years, whether it’s been progression, decision making, role of the director, feedback, management arrangements within the organization. We’ve put some processes in place that are working, have worked, but we have scaled, we have grown, we are hybrid now. So tying in with what Philippa and Ruth have said, we’ve got to learn - we’ve got to look at a few areas in the business and go, “Right, we’ve implemented these when we’re 60-80 people, but we’re more now, and we’re going to continue to grow. So how do we keep these evolving, and how do we keep them moving and evolving with us?” And that’s what I get to do as a day job, so that’s always fun.

Lisa: In wrapping up our conversation - which is difficult because there’s five million more things I’d love to ask you - but I’d love to know what your advice would be for listeners who are on their own journeys with new ways of working, self-managing teams perhaps. What advice would you have valued when you joined, for example, or what has stayed with you?

Ruth: I think the shorter you can make your feedback loops, the better - in line with the kind of Agile mindset of don’t be afraid to talk about what’s not working, figure out something to try, you won’t get it perfect, that’s okay, try it and then see what happens. That continuous experimenting, adapting, progressing by just making small changes, seeing what happens.

And transparency, I think, is really, really key in that. It’s something that - it’s one of our values, but it’s something that we’re still exploring. Often when something isn’t quite working or communication isn’t really flowing, it’s because transparency isn’t there, or something is being hidden, or something isn’t as visible as it should be. And transparency - you really need it because you can’t ask the right questions unless it’s transparent and unless it’s there for you to go, “Oh, what’s that? Oh, have you thought about this?” or “Oh, we’re doing something similar over here.”

That transparency is really key to the right people being in the room and thinking, “Oh, we should try this then” or “Have we tried this?” And then that kind of flow of the transparency and then the inspection and then the adaptation - keep making small changes. I think that could be my biggest advice to myself and anybody else who’s wanting to make a change in their team.

Philippa: I think mine would be that you have to find your own way, but don’t travel alone. By that, I mean every organization is completely unique - the people that work within it, the purpose of that organization, their starting point. So it’s really homing in on listening to the people that you have on your journey and tapping into their knowledge, their wisdom, hearing their voices in that journey, and finding your own way.

But recognizing there are incredible resources out there now - there’s amazing people that are journeying similarly, asking similar questions. There will be people out there that will challenge you and say “What are you doing?” And all of those voices are really important to hear and to listen to, and to take all of that on board. But ultimately, to do it your way, find your way, and recognize the uniqueness of your organization and what you need to do from where you are.

Taryn: I think for me, I guess I’m thinking of the phrase “My greatest gift to you is a healthy me.” That probably more comes from a therapy space or a space where you’re wanting to work on your personal development and self. I think that is important here - is being safe in that space and feeling that the best you can do is work on you and make sure that you show up well in the space, that you’re equipped in this space and can move forward in strength, and be what you can be in the best way possible. I’m only responsible for myself - I can only change myself and support others on that journey.

Lisa: Wow, thank you. I just really want to acknowledge all of you for how honestly you talk about your journey and what you’ve learned, and the generosity with which you share this brilliant book that people are going to get so much value from. I know that for sure. I think it’s a really unique and special book in the way that it’s been put together with a lot of love and care. So just thank you for doing that and for providing that example for people that I know is going to be super inspiring. So I’m really grateful.

Philippa: We’re so grateful to have been given the opportunity to speak with you, Lisa. We really, really appreciate your interest and your questions - they are amazing. And yeah, thank you very much.

Ruth: Yeah, definitely. Definitely buzzing off the back of this, as you said at the beginning.