BONUS Transforming Conflict into Opportunity, Leadership Lessons for Agile Teams | Eagan Rackley

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches Episode Summary: BONUS Transforming Conflict into Opportunity, Leadership Lessons for Agile Teams | Eagan Rackley

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Introduction

In this insightful bonus episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte engages in a deep conversation with Eagan Rackley, a seasoned software engineer and Agile leader. The episode, released on March 13, 2025, delves into transforming conflict into opportunities and the essential leadership lessons applicable to Agile teams.

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Eagan Rackley’s Background

Eagan Rackley brings over two decades of experience in software engineering, spanning game development, enterprise architecture, graphics, and highly parallel programming. As the track host for the developer track at the Global Agile Summit, Eagan is renowned for his ability to build collaborative teams, drive innovation, and turn conflicts into opportunities. His passion lies in creating software that empowers people and transforms ideas into impactful solutions.

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The Pivotal Conflict

The episode begins with Eagan recounting a defining moment early in his management career. Approximately three months into his role as a manager, Eagan faced a significant conflict between his engineering team and the marketing department. The conflict arose from differing perspectives on integrating advertisements into the product to meet an ambitious company sales goal of a 300% increase within six months.

Key Incident:

• Timestamp [02:34]: Eagan describes how the engineering team prioritized product integrity and minimal ad intrusion, whereas marketing pushed for extensive advertising to boost sales.
• Timestamp [03:28]: He explains how initial meetings were tense, with both teams "sniping" at each other, leading to heightened resentment and anger.

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Leadership Insights

Eagan shares a transformative realization inspired by an Agile leader he respected, emphasizing that leadership is not about being the smartest person in the room or controlling every aspect. Instead, it's about fostering collaboration and creating a space where teams can solve problems together.

Notable Quote:

• Timestamp [06:45]: "Leadership is not about controlling people. It's about creating a space that facilitates collaboration and helps people solve problems together."

This shift in perspective marked the beginning of Eagan’s evolution into a more empathetic and collaborative leader.

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Strategies for Resolving Conflict

To address the ongoing tension between engineering and marketing, Eagan implemented a structured approach involving a set of targeted questions aimed at aligning both teams towards common goals.

Key Strategies:

1. Shared Purpose Identification:

   • Timestamp [14:37]: Eagan describes how teams used post-it notes to answer questions like “Why do we exist as a team and why does it matter?” This exercise revealed each team's motivations and fostered a sense of shared purpose.

2. Impact and Importance:

   • The next set of questions focused on the importance of the work and its impact, encouraging team members to see the bigger picture beyond their immediate tasks.

3. Defining Desired Outcomes:

   • By establishing clear, measurable goals such as "increasing sales by 300% without compromising product integrity," both teams could evaluate proposals against these shared objectives.

Notable Quote:

• Timestamp [18:38]: "Once we have those shared objectives, that shared purpose, you can sort of see the resentment turn into investment in that purpose."

These strategies effectively transformed resentment into a collaborative investment in achieving common goals.

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Building Trust within Teams

Central to Eagan’s approach is the cultivation of trust through active listening, validation, and empowering team members to find their own solutions.

Key Points:

• Active Listening and Validation:

  • Timestamp [29:34]: Eagan emphasizes the importance of listening and validating team members' experiences without taking ownership of their emotions. This practice builds trust and fosters an environment where individuals feel heard and respected.

• Empowering Through Questions:

  • Encouraging team members to ask probing questions helps them internally solve problems, reinforcing their sense of agency and ownership.

Notable Quote:

• Timestamp [30:26]: "Sometimes you get trust by just listening and validating somebody's experience. You don't need to take responsibility for other people's anger or frustration, but you can recognize it's there."

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Transitioning to Individual Contributor Role

Eagan discusses his deliberate decision to transition back to an individual contributor (IC) role after years in leadership. This move allowed him to re-establish credibility and lead without formal authority, relying instead on respect and collaboration.

Key Insights:

• Loss of Authority:

  • Moving to a new industry, Eagan faced the challenge of losing his managerial authority and had to rebuild trust from the ground up.

• Leading with Trust:

  • Timestamp [27:09]: "Trust is more important than your expertise. You don't lead with knowledge, you lead with trust." Eagan highlights that trust forms the foundation for effective leadership, especially in a lateral or IC role.

• Creating Positive Ripples:

  • By fostering trust and empowering team members, Eagan aims to create positive, lasting impacts within his teams.

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Practical Applications and Tools

Eagan shares practical tools and methodologies that have been instrumental in his leadership journey, particularly in resolving conflicts and aligning team goals.

Recommended Strategies:

1. Structured Questioning:

   • Implementing specific questions to uncover and align team objectives.

2. Voting on Priorities:

   • Facilitating team voting on what objectives are most important to ensure collective buy-in.

3. Continuous Alignment:

   • Regularly revisiting and realigning goals to maintain team cohesion and address new tensions as they arise.

Notable Quote:

• Timestamp [33:19]: "When you're able to ask that and help people come to their own conclusions meaningfully, it builds trust that you're not trying to somehow control them or get them to think in a certain way, but just empower them."

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Recommendations and Resources

Eagan recommends several resources for those looking to deepen their understanding of trust-building and effective Agile leadership.

Key Recommendations:

1. Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo: A comprehensive guide on modern management practices.
2. Works by Esther Derby: Specifically, "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great" and her podcast "Changed by Attraction," which explores productive change and team dynamics.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Eagan promoting the upcoming Global Agile Summit, emphasizing its value in providing real-life Agile success stories, inspiring collaborations, and offering practical insights across various Agile disciplines.

Final Thoughts:

• Timestamp [35:57]: "If you're serious about growth, about real collaboration and about building better teams, this is where you need to be."

Eagan underscores the summit as an essential event for Agile professionals seeking to elevate their practices and connect with a global community.

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Key Takeaways:

• Transforming Conflict: Viewing conflict as an opportunity for growth and alignment rather than a setback.
• Leadership Evolution: Shifting from a controlling leadership style to one that empowers and fosters collaboration.
• Building Trust: Through active listening, validation, and creating spaces for teams to solve their own problems.
• Practical Strategies: Implementing structured approaches to align team goals and reduce tensions.
• Continuous Learning: Leveraging recommended resources to enhance leadership and team dynamics.

This episode offers valuable lessons for Agile leaders and team members alike, emphasizing the importance of trust, collaboration, and strategic conflict resolution in building high-performing Agile teams.

Transcript

[Vasco]

Have you ever wondered what it really takes to make Agile work well? At the Global Agile Summit, we're bringing you real life first person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action. Whether you're a leader, a product innovator, a developer, you'll hear practical insights from those who've done it. They'll be telling their own stories from the stage. I'll tell you more about this at the end of this episode. So stay back and listen to the full detailed description of what we have in store for you at the Global Agile Summit. But if you can't wait, you can go right now to globalagilesummit.com and check out our full schedule for now onto the episode. But I'll see you at the end of this episode with more details on the Global Agile Summit. Talk to you soon. Hello, everybody. Welcome to one more of this Global Agile Summit episodes. This week or actually today, we have with us Egan Rackley. Hey, Egan. Hi. Welcome to the show.

[Egan Rackley]

Thanks.

[Vasco]

Excited to be here, or I should say welcome back because you've been a guest on the show before. Egan is the track host for the developer track at the Global Agile Summit, and he's also a seasoned software engineer and Agile leader with more than two decades of experience spanning game development, enterprise architecture, graphics, and highly parallel programming. Oh my God. I remember when parallel programming was a thing. It's a thing again because of the LLMs and the graphics card. He's also a passionate problem solver. He excels in building collaborative teams, driving innovation, and turning conflict into opportunity, which is one of the topics we're going to talk about today. And he thrives on creating software that empowers people and transforms ideas into impact.

[Egan Rackley]

Love it.

[Vasco]

So, Egan, that was a short intro, but of course today we're going to talk about leadership and specifically your journey with leadership. So let's start with a moment that changed everything for you. You were in a small team that was running experiments at the time, together with marketing, and things got heated.

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah.

[Vasco]

What happened? Take us to that room.

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, sure. So that moment really reshaped my entire view of leadership. And so at the time I was a brand new manager. Manager. I mean, maybe like three months into managing, I had no idea what I was doing. And. And in my head, a manager had to be the smartest person in the room. They had to have unassailable positions. They had to fix everything themselves because then it just, my managers had kind of been like that, you know, and I didn't really understand what it was like to be a leader. So we had this small experimentation team. It was like three people, you were there guiding the team and we were doing well. Like we were doing really well. We were accomplishing our goals. And so the higher up said, okay, let's put them together with marketing. And from the initial email.

[Vasco]

Why was this important by the way? Let's explain that a little bit. Why was it important to do it with marketing?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean a lot of the experiments we were running were to sort of increased engagement, increased retention, increased sales. Marketing had some fundamental ideas around this. They also had some pretty major incentives they needed to achieve around getting more sales in the company. I think the whole organization had one of these big hairy goals of like, we need to increase sales in the next six months by 300%. So you know, we all had these incentives to work from, but I think also we had fundamentally different ideas about how we were going to do that. So anyway, so from our initial email exchanges with the group, I think that our engineering team and the marketing team both felt like, hey, they just don't get it. So engineering, we wanted integrity of the product without a lot of ads, right? And the ads we wanted in there, we wanted to be like really tasteful to collect our power users because we were all power users. We all joined the company because that's what we were. And marketing wanted a lot of ads to hit these sales figures, this big 300% goal. So our response on the engineering team when we kind of got together to huddle before our meeting with marketing was like, let's defend the castle. Let's fend off these invaders because we know best. And right from the first meeting, and I am, I am confident that engineering shot the first salvo here in this, in this, this conflict. We just started sniping, marketing started sniping back. It got heated. I mean we moved from sort of regular like corporate resentment to full blown flight fighting. You know, I don't know if there was yelling involved, but we were, we were angry. And this aha moment, that sort of shape. I think my whole philosophy around leadership is this agile leader that I really respected, which was you said like, hey guys, we're all on the same team and you did like this like Ray Charles movement with your head. We can solve this problem together. And it had a huge impact. Everyone felt like, oh, maybe were being jerks. So I was really into like Zen Buddhism at the time. And there's this Cohen shodo Konbo which is the obstacle is the path. And it's sort of like it's about leaning into conflict, leaning into your ordeal. And just like, what you said was a Cohen of its own, and it kind of like. And Egan was enlightened, you know, and so I realized at that moment, like, oh, that's leadership. It's not about controlling people. It's not about being unassailable. It's about creating a space that facilitates collaboration and helps people solve problems together. And that blew my mind because it's something I might actually be good at, right? The leadership being unassailable, it's not a strength I'm ever going to have, but, like, helping people solve problems, maybe I could do this. And so, you know, when our two teams got to that meeting, our team came to the table in a way where we both felt something was happening to us, not with us. And when you said what you said, it changed that dynamic. We were now together on the same team. So my core takeaway from that moment was like, the best. The best leaders don't fix everything is sort of the opposite. Right? The team is in charge of that. They're just helping that happen.

[Vasco]

So one of the things from that story that comes to mind is this idea that being a leader isn't necessarily about providing all the answers. That's what you started from. Right. But it might be bringing in the important questions that the group needs to handle. And of course, we're talking about leaders to teams. Right? Like, not leaders to individuals. That would be a different. Different stance. But. But. But to bring out the questions. And one of the things that you mentioned is that it's not about controlling the situation.

[Egan Rackley]

Right.

[Vasco]

And I mean, one way to say this could be to say, like, it's about empowering people, but. But it's not just that. It's about allowing people to see and to feel that they have permission to come up with their own answers. Right, Right.

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, exactly. I think that, like, as people who have had jobs in the world, we've all felt powerless at some point, right? And nobody does their best work when they feel powerless. You know, what is the point of bringing in these highly skilled, highly trained experts in their field if you're not giving them the space and agency to do their best work? If a leader, you're taking up all the air in the room, right? So when I think about that, like, why. Why people feel powerless, misaligned incentives always comes to mind. Now, you know, and the way that, you know, maybe the loudest team members the ones who are best at sort of pushing their agenda can steamroll other disciplines or even steamroll people on their own team because they're being driven by their own sort of perspective about those incentives. So usually when I see that happening on a team or my team, the first goal is to sort of shift that from, oh, this is happening to me, to how do we make this work for all of us? And I've got a strategy to do that if you want me to share that.

[Vasco]

Okay, yeah. Before the strategy, though, you said something that I think requires a little bit of opening up. The idea of misaligned incentives. What do you mean? In practice?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah. Okay. So I mean, I guess with misaligned incentives, everyone has optimized their work style for a different outcome. Right. In any organization, it's an ecosystem, and there's always this tension between individual and collective objectives. And if those individual objectives rule the roof, you know, let's say just marketing has more power, has some kind of power dynamic where they get to what they want to do and engineering doesn't, they might come up with alone a great strategy to increase scale. Sorry, increase sales at the expense of engineering quality. Right. Or engineering alone could have the perfect software at the expense of timelines and miss marketing deadlines. So the strength in the tension between these sort of individual and collective objectives is when they can work together. Right. And it's in the overlap between those. So together those teams can find a solution that's good enough to do both, where no. 1.

[Vasco]

What you're saying is that leaders should be aware of that tension and they should, together with the people, find ways in which the tension can be removed or at least most of the tension can be removed. Right?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah. I would say, like, tension is a good thing. I think it just make it visible. Right. It's kind of like a leak in a wall. It's going to cause problems even if you don't see it. But. But if everyone has a shared set of goals, those goals can transcend those individual incentives, which will reduce the tension or redirect it so that everybody's kind of rowing in the same direction or going toward the same goal.

[Vasco]

So let's take an example from your life as a leader. Right. Because you now have a lot of experience. But of course, it can also be from your life as a contributor, whatever that is. But walk us through that situation that illustrates this tension and how we might, as leaders, be able to dispel it.

[Egan Rackley]

Probably, you know, just the. Just the one that comes to mind is actually from that first situation, right, Is. Is we revisited that tension later because it's not something that just goes away when you have one meeting. Right. Everyone is going to continue to work for their own incentives. Is we got together later and we sort of answered a set of questions around how we align each other better. And we came up with a goal of increasing sales by 300% without compromising the integrity of the product. So everything that we did as a team needed to be measured against that goal. And it gave the engineering team a sense of agency where we could say, hey, wait, does this meet our goal? Does this violate the integrity of the product? And there were several advertisements that we objected to. Like, they wanted to put a wheel of deals in the product that someone would spin and get a discount that didn't go into the product because we were all now working from that shared goal. Does that answer your question?

[Vasco]

Okay, so let's break it down. All right, so we start from the conflict. We recognize there's a conflict. Right. Marketing wants to push more ads into the product. You, as the technical team, also kind of representing the power users, as you said. So you almost felt invested in the product itself. You wanted to say, hey, no, this isn't aligned with what we think the product should be. Yeah, that created the tension, but then the tension was resolved.

[Egan Rackley]

Right.

[Vasco]

Like you were talking about. Okay, so we found a way in order for the ads to be in the product, but for them to be, you know, in line with something that we could accept. Right. Like, how did you get to that point? Right. Because it isn't just about, hey, we're all working together. That's maybe the beginning of the opening, but it's not how it happens in practice. So what happened? What. What got you the tech team and the marketing team to a point where you said, okay, we still have our own incentives, but now we have a common direction.

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, that's a great question. And so, I mean, I think that really came from thinking about that initial meeting a lot. I spent a lot of time thinking about how do we do that sort of more upfront, Right. How do we solve that problem from the get go? And I did a lot of research online. I looked into how other people solved it, and I wish I had a reference for this, but I came up. But with that research, with kind of three sets of questions that are designed to have everyone take a step back and look at everybody else's pieces of the pie that they're holding. So everybody kind of has the whole pie. And that is what I Think brought us forward and would it be valuable to go over those and what they're for? Okay, great.

[Vasco]

Yeah. Let's make it practical. I don't know if you have one or more examples, but let's make it practical.

[Egan Rackley]

Sure. Okay. So we had this team, we still had this tension and conflict. We occasionally argued again from time to time as we went forward. So we got together as a team with a set of post it notes. And everybody got their post notes and a pin. And we started by asking three sets of questions. The first set, why do we exist as a team and why does it matter? And this sort of the answers to this, Everybody would write them down and then share what they wrote. Just let everybody see what everybody else's piece of that puzzle was. Right. And when you start to hear what everyone else says and when we started to hear that on the team, you could start to see a sense of shared purpose, start to settle in with the team. Right. We're getting a better idea. Why engineering? Why is that so important to them? Right. And engineers are getting an idea from marketing. Hey, why is that so important to them? And because you fundamentally, naturally cannot see what other people's incentives are, what pressures they're under. And so it just makes those kind of visible. The next step in that sort of discussion is that we ask, why is the work we do important and who does it impact? And this was just more parts of the puzzle. Right. It makes me think of this question that I heard around the time I was looking into the antifragile philosophy, which is, what does your software do when there's a downturn in the market? Engineers have no idea generally how to answer that question. Right. Marketing might have some ideas, but engineers are great problem solvers. So from my perspective as an engineering leader, it gives us an opportunity to step forward into a space that we're not usually presence in and start thinking about our software problems from the big picture. And I think that's what this question does for the teams as well. And then the last set of questions is, what is our desired outcome and when have we achieved it? And this kind of moves the question from, you know, the problem to our outcomes, which is just a great measuring stick for teams. So thinking about sort of, you know, at my last game studio, one of our outcomes was pretty minor by comparison, which was get 1% better sales than the release of our last game. Right. And there's a lot of ways to solve that. Right. But when you're thinking about it from the perspective of another discipline, you're going to think outside the box that you normally would. And if you don't have that information, you won't necessarily be rowing in the same direction when you try to solve that problem. And the last part of that question, when have we achieved it? Is left sort of intentionally vague because we may have achieved it in the past and it's just as important to look back as it'll look forward. So I've definitely had several teams just thinking about that game team, where you're thinking about a perspective from production, art, engineering, game design. Everybody has different problems to solve, and it just makes sure that we have measurable goals that all point in the same direction. So once everybody got together, we all answered those questions, then we just did this silly thing, which is we voted on what we thought was most important, which is like. Doesn't seem like it would be that impactful, but in that moment, you can sort of see, you know, once we have those shared objectives, that shared purpose, you can sort of see the resentment turn into investment in that purpose. And that's like a really great moment with a team where we really, I think more than any other time when we were working together, stopped hating each other and really started thinking like, oh, these are other human beings and we really can do this together. So that's sort of the impact that I felt like it had.

[Vasco]

Yeah, this is a beautiful story also, because, of course, it's a concrete set of questions, but. But also because it kind of brings out something that is critical for many. Well, for. For all product developers out there, whether they're testers or coders or designers or marketing or copywriters, whatever you are, like, there's a lot of this. You called it misaligned incentives. I would say different goals or goals that are, at least on the surface, not really going in the same direction. And when you name it, and this is actually a very powerful tool, very powerful coaching tool. If you help the team name the problem, whether you help with the naming or you ask the questions that lead to the naming, once you name it, you can tackle it. Right. Like you said, we went from resentment to a level of investment that I had not seen before. Like. And that's the power of naming the conflict, right?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's just, you know, making that visible. And I think it's something where. Where if you're. If your boss came, said, you're going to work together now, and here are your shared objectives, that wouldn't work at all. So it's not just that it was named, but that we named it. Right. Because the collaboration needed to come from us, not from on high. And I think that having the autonomy to figure that out for ourselves built trust. And I think that's part of what helped us move forward together.

[Vasco]

And this is actually very interesting because it leads on very. I'd say it's a beautiful segue into the next question. Now, I know you. We've worked together quite like three years or whatever it was. That's about right. And we went through a coaching process where I was coaching you in your journey and you revealed something that is part of our conversation. So it's not a secret in any way that you once saw conflict as something to avoid. Right. Like you would avoid conflict and would get the impression that things are getting better because we successfully avoided conflict.

[Egan Rackley]

Right.

[Vasco]

But now you see that maybe an opportunity. Right. So what changed and what was that? I guess insight and perspective change in you that allowed you to understand that conflict is not necessarily a problem, but something we can harness as a source of energy.

[Egan Rackley]

Right, Right. Yeah. I mean, and this was, you know, this was, this was a process to come to this realization. But like you said, I am conflict averse. Right. I have always been terrified of conflict from this worldview that, you know, being a leader, good leader, making everybody happy and being the most knowledgeable doesn't really work for me because I've lived with imposter syndrome my entire career, so I never really felt like I was a achieving that, even though I sort of thought that's how it was supposed to work. So, you know, through this process with several teams, I started to realize that, you know, conflict when, when we were fighting just. I know I keep coming back to this old story with the marketing team, but. But it was a signal that something wasn't clear. Right. Whether it's our priorities, our goals, our boundaries, you know, our incentives. It's data, Right. It's like a bat signal, which I now look as like a juicy opportunity to help people add clarity. Because it's kind of like, like I was saying before, misalignment or not misalignment or not having the shared goals, it's going to cause problems whether you see it or not. And conflict's going to give you the space to do what you said, make that visible to everyone. Right. And. And if you don't harness that conflict, you're going to lose that opportunity and that problem is still going to be there like a leak in your wall. So probably a good example about that. I know you mentioned sort of earlier is that I've made a very intentional decision to go back to being an IC as an engineer because I'm in a new industry and I want to spend some time doing technical work before I go back into leadership again. And I recently had two members who were just had communication styles that triggered each other. Right. On my team. And so we're in a meeting and it's very similar to the marketing meeting where one is saying something, the other one is getting more heated and they both think they have the right way to do it. Right. Like this is the right way to do it and neither of them are technically wrong. Right. But they drive each other crazy and they started fighting. So I pulled that same trick out of my hat that you did, which I just said, hey, everybody, we're on the same team, we can solve this together. And then just ask a couple other questions like what do we gain, what do we lose? And what's good enough for our studio to deliver this game? So as we're thinking about being conflict averse, a lot of ics are. Right. I'm not the only IC that ever.

[Vasco]

Even managers as well. Right. We're all humans, right?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, exactly. So that can happen. Right. You don't have to to be a manager, to lean into the conflict and make it better. That's what makes Agile so great. Right. There's an opportunity for everyone on the team to inspire change and others in the organization.

[Vasco]

I want to highlight what you just said. This is what makes Agile so great. So when you say that, you're actually implicitly also alluding to the fact that in an agile team, everybody is brought in on the decision process. Right. It's not the manager that knows the answer, but I mean, they might know. But in an Agile context, we expect the answer can come from anywhere, can come from the manager, from any of the ICs, from another team who we are collaborating with, whatever that is.

[Egan Rackley]

Right, Right. And that's what makes it so powerful. Right. Because if you have one guy at the top or woman who knows all the answers and tells everybody what to do, there is a ton of knowledge and skill at the bottom that's just wasted. Right. And so like when you bring everybody in on that solution and you have tools and strategies to build trust and bring people's skills to the forefront, I think you have a much more powerful team.

[Vasco]

Yeah. There's this principle in the book Shift from product to People, which we have helped publish here on the podcast, and the principle is called the Ratatouille Principle. Based on, of course, Pixar's movie of the ratatouille mouse, who. Which ends up being a wonderful cook. And the whole premise of not the video, the movie is that, you know, great cooks can come from anywhere. Not everybody knows how to cook, but a great cook could come from anywhere. And this is the same idea that we're expressing here. So as a leadership principle in agile teams, we start from that perspective that the leader might even be able to name the conflict, but they can't bring up the solution because the solution needs to happen in the team. Right. And you said something which I think was very well articulated, which is that the job of the leader is not to solve the team's problems, but rather to create the space in which the team themselves can solve the problems, because we want them to continue to do that later. But also because it brings them along. Right. Like they own the solutions.

[Egan Rackley]

Exactly, exactly. And they've got perspectives that each other don't have, even about those other disciplines where someone from marketing might have an engineering idea that has not occurred to engineering that might be like, oh, wow, because they're coming at it from a completely different angle. So those other perspectives are so valuable. And when you all own the solution, you get access to them.

[Vasco]

Yeah. And you were just talking about this, this kind of career step that you took. You decided to go back to gaming and take an IC role. So you've worked in leadership roles, but you have also had and have influence without authority. Right. Because leadership usually has that authority. But where you are now, for example, you're not working from authority, you're working from respect, from collaboration. What did you learn about this aspect of, I mean, you call it bottom up leadership, but let's say this, lateral leadership, if you will, especially when, when stepping into, into a new industry. Right. Because you need to establish your credibility first.

[Egan Rackley]

Right, right. Yeah. And that's exactly what I lost when I joined the credit new industry. As I decided originally to go to a video game studio. It was the middle of the pandemic. My wife was on this artist residency in the mountains of Wyoming and she called me and she was like, you know, we don't have to live our lives this way anymore. And what she was talking about was moving to the mountains and not living in a city anymore. But what I heard while she was gone was like, you could go get a video game job. And that's what I did. And it was always intentional to want to be an engineer for a while again, just because it is such a different industry. Different technical problems and different leadership problems and styles. But when I became an engineer again, what nobody told me was going to happen was that all of my authority and credibility was going to be lost. So when I went into this, this new work culture, I was coming from one where it was highly collaborative and you could just say whatever you want, like if you didn't think something was working well, you just tell someone. And that was just totally normal for us. Where I entered a culture where it was not normal to do that, everybody had authority in their own realm and you really weren't supposed to upend it, especially not as the new guy, right. Who had never worked in video games before. So I learned a hard truth from that, which is you can't help people who don't want your help and people don't want your help if you haven't earned their trust. So I think that my lesson from that was that trust is more important than your expertise. And you don't lead with knowledge, you lead with trust. And once you've established that trust now you can offer tools. Right. And not solutions. As someone who's an ic, so instead of telling right. Which a lot of leaders do, you just help facilitate clarity. And that could have been what I did in that discussion with my team members here. It could be just creating space for transformation for other people. Sometimes that's just validating that they're frustrated. It's definitely something. In this new studio we just gone through a really big major release and everyone was exhausted and everyone was a little broken because releases in the game industry are intense. And so sometimes it's just validating people's experience experiences and then just asking some open ended questions that might spark change. Like oh yeah, that I can see where this cycle didn't work for you. You know, what would have made it better? What are three things you would do differently?

[Vasco]

One of the things that I do have to kind of highlight and point to is this ability you have to step back and take the role of the person who listens. This is very important, right? Like for either lateral or hierarchical leadership, whatever that is. And you said something that is very important. Sometimes you get trust by just listening and validating somebody's experience. Right. Like when somebody comes to you and says, I'm really frustrated and we can just say, you know, you have the right and you're absolutely right to be frustrated. Even if they're telling us they're frustrated towards us, that's fine because it's their experience. We don't need to take ownership or blame for their frustration, we can just recognize it's there. So, I mean, I can clearly see you've done therapy. That's really great because it's a great tool when dealing with people, right?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would recommend this for all human beings. I honestly think that we should have, like, a school we have to go to when we turn 40, you know, where we just, like, if you. If there's any emotional intelligence you haven't gained up to that point, just make sure that you've processed, you know, your stuff. Because when you start to see other people, you can also influence them in positive ways. Right. And I sort of see my job as an IC or as leader is going out there and creating positive ripples for other people. Right. And you hope that those ripples will spread out to other people. So, yeah, I think that having the skill to just listen and validate is one of the most important skills, whether you're a leader or not. You don't have to be in charge. You just can't be a jerk about it. And that's where that really helps.

[Vasco]

Yeah. And listening and validating is so powerful. Because of what you said, we need to lead with trust, not knowledge or answers. Right. Many leaders see themselves as, I must have the answers to everything I get asked, but there is no human being who has that. I mean, maybe AI at some point will be able to do that. Not yet, but maybe at some point. But humans won't be able to do that because we can't have an infinite number of experiences. Everybody's got their own experience, and they need to go through processes, challenges that we can't see now, even in that, I think it's super important to understand that we need to build trust in very practical ways. So you've already pointed to a couple of them. Listen and validate. So we don't need to take responsibility for other people's anger or frustration, but we can recognize it's there, and we can tell them it's fine to be angry, it's fine to be frustrated. That just means you're invested. You want to do something great with the time that you spend here. Okay, but how else do you build trust with your colleagues and your teams? Egan.

[Egan Rackley]

Right. I mean, sometimes it is that it's not just your job to listen and validate, but it's your job to. To even if you know something is ineffective through your own experience, to let people learn that for themselves, especially if you're in an IC role. And I think that kind of the Other thing that will create trust is making sure that. Hey, that's a great question, actually. I think that I generally build trust through listening and validation, through making sure that I'm taking care of my part of the problem, but also looking for opportunities to ask people questions about why they're solving the problems the way they're solving them. Right. And I think that. That we don't think about it. Right. We're all in survival mode half of the time. Right. Just saying, like I'm going to.

[Vasco]

Especially in the gaming industry. Right, right.

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, absolutely. Right. It can be. It can be a little unnerving. So asking people sort of, oh, why are you solving this that way just gets them thinking about, look, well, why am I solving this problem that way? And I think that when you're able to ask that and help people come to their own conclusions meaningfully, it builds trust that you're not trying to somehow control them or get them to think in a certain way, but just empower them. Right. Because that's where teams are the least productive, in my mind, is when, like I said earlier, they're powerless.

[Vasco]

Absolutely. All right. This is a deep conversation. We could be in this conversation for a while. There's so many nuances to the human experience. But if people want to dive a little bit deeper and understand more about this listening and validating the trust aspects, what is one resource you'd recommend for people that want to go deeper?

[Egan Rackley]

I mean, I have two. Right. And they're both resources that I got through you or by listening to your podcast. And I think that these are great because they really get to the root of the problem. One is Management 3.0 by Jurgen Apollo or some of his new work. And the other is I really resonate with Esther Derby. So agile retrospectives, making good teams. Great. By the way, retrospectives are a great tool for establishing trust. And her podcast, Changed by Attraction, really blew my mind. And her sort of seven laws of positive productive changes, where you can just help people in organizations deal with change, and they've just got a lot of great tools for doing that. So both of those really resonate with me and are tools that I've come back to again and again in my career.

[Vasco]

And of course, you're here because you're also the host of the developer track at the Global Agile Summit. So from the host of the developers track, why do you believe people should come to the Global Agile Summit?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, I've been thinking about this. Okay. And I think that whether you're a leader, a product owner, an agilist, a Scrum master, or an ic. The summit is going to be where these aha, moments that we were talking about are happening en masse. Right. It's not just some technical conference where we're going over like, this is how SCRUM works and this is dry process and strategy. It's an experience that will change the way you think and that's why we're all volunteering for it. We know how powerful that is. So if you're serious about growth, about real collaboration and about building better teams, this is where you need to be. That's my pitch.

[Vasco]

Absolutely. Great pitch. And I would only add to that, bring questions, right? Like we're not here only to share answers. We're also here to bring questions that we can, you know, tackle together and try different experiments, create a community, try different things in different parts of the world and learn from each other.

[Egan Rackley]

Absolutely.

[Vasco]

So, Egan, if people want to get in touch and maybe ask you a few follow up questions, where can they link up with you?

[Egan Rackley]

Yeah, so I love having conversations about we can build better teams. So if you're interested, let's definitely connect and just talk about it. Actually, I'm working on a workshop right now for game developers that's sort of focused on reducing burnout and reigniting love of games. So if people are interested in having that conversation or helping me test that reach out, you can go to eganrackley.com, you can find me on LinkedIn. My email is egan.rackleymail.com I mean, feel free to reach out. This is something that I love to talk about with other people.

[Vasco]

Absolutely. Egan, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time and for your generosity with your knowledge.

[Egan Rackley]

Oh, thank you for having me on the show, Vasco. It was really fun.

[Vasco]

Hey friend, thank you for staying here. Is all you need to know about the Global Agile Summit. If you've ever suffered or know people who are suffering from Agile fatigue, this event is for you. Agile fatigue is that feeling that settles in when we can't really see a light at the end of the tunnel. We get discouraged. Especially when conversations revolve around the same old frameworks, the same old buzzwords and theories. We don't feel that energy anymore. Well, the Global Agile Summit is a different kind of event. We're bringing you real life first person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action and transform the way you work. The Global Agile Summit will happen In Tallinn, Estonia, May 18th. That's the workshop day, then 19th and 20th, the conference day. And Talinestone is one of the most innovative tech hubs in Europe. The Global Agile Summit is hosted together with Latitude 59, which is kind of a citywide celebration of software startups and groundbreaking ideas. And we'll have a shared ticket for you to attend those those events as well. So who will be speaking? Well, we've got an incredible lineup of thought leaders in software and agile. For example, Clinton Keith, the person who wrote literally wrote the book on game development with Scrum and is busy bringing agile to the world of game development. You must check his session. The very famous and well known Jurgen Apelo, Author of Management 3 Point. We'll be talking and exploring about AI's impact on leadership. We also have Goiko Adsic, who's taking an unconventional look at product growth with his Lizard Optimization keynote. Other speakers include, for example Sig Sven Dietz, who's challenging everything we know about software development by ditching, literally ditching managing contracts and estimates. Can you imagine his teams deliver software before their competitors are even done with the contract negotiation? How agile is that? But there's more. We'll cover engineering practices in our developer track with talks on, for example, AI assisted test driven development, developing products in minutes with a different approach to how we develop, configure, deploy platforms and much more. We also have a product track where we cover cutting edge ideas around product discovery, delighting customers with product delight frameworks. We'll have a talk about that. And we also have an agile business track where we will talk about, for example, open strategy, a very agile approach to managing organizations and delivering software faster to clients faster than you can even write a contract. Literally. I mean, I already told you about Svendeet's story is amazing. It definitely is a must see. I'm sure you'll be inspired and get a lot of ideas for your own software projects and software delivery. Now, whether you're a business leader, a product innovator or a developer, you'll definitely find value in our three focused tracks. That's Agile Business for those working with businesses and organizations, Agile product for product managers, product owners and innovators, and Agile developer for the builders making agile work in practice. The coders, the testers, the designers, the producers, the score Scrum masters, you name it. If you join, you will meet over 200 agile professionals from all over the world. People who just like you, want to grow, want to share and want to learn by challenging the ideas that don't work anymore. At the Global Agile Summit, you'll get new connections, fresh ideas and the energy to take your own Agile to the next level. And who knows, maybe even find your next career opportunity. So don't miss out. Check out the full program and grab your ticket now at global agile summit.com I'm really looking forward to seeing you all in Tallinn, Estonia in May. I'll see you there.