Trust-Based Leadership and Team Implosion | Stuart Tipples

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches
Episode: Trust-Based Leadership and Team Implosion | Stuart Tipples
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Stuart Tipples
Release Date: June 10, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte welcomes Stuart Tipples, an experienced Agile Coach and Scrum Master, to discuss the crucial elements of trust-based leadership and the factors that can lead to team implosion. The conversation dives deep into the importance of psychological safety, healthy conflict, and fostering an environment where trust serves as the foundation for team success.

Book Recommendation: Trust Based Leadership

Timestamp: [01:25]

Stuart begins by recommending "Trust-Based Leadership" by Mike something (the exact surname appears unclear in the transcript). He describes the book as a transformative read for Scrum Masters and anyone interested in servant leadership. Stuart highlights that the book stands out from typical corporate leadership guides by offering a no-nonsense approach rooted in Mike’s experience as a former Marine turned executive.

“You don't build trust by managing. If you don't build trust, you're just managing compliance. You’re not inspiring commitment.”
— Stuart Tipples [03:00]

Stuart emphasizes that the book underscores leading with consistency, clarity, and courage—encouraging leaders to take initiative without waiting for permission. He believes that for Scrum Masters, building an environment where trust acts as the team's operating system is paramount. This trust not only enhances internal team dynamics but also reinforces the team's credibility with external stakeholders.

The Self-Destruction of a Team: A Cautionary Tale

Timestamp: [06:08]

Transitioning to real-world applications, Stuart shares a poignant story about a team he dubbed the "Get Along Gang," referencing a classic UK children's cartoon. This team was initially performing adequately but began showing signs of dysfunction under pressure.

Key Issues Identified:

1. Hero Culture:
   The team had a standout developer who inadvertently became the sole bearer of the workload. This not only led to an imbalance in task distribution but also fostered a dependency that stifled the team's overall growth.

2. Toxic Positivity and Silence:
   Despite slipping behind on their work, the team maintained a facade of happiness and cohesion. Retrospectives became perfunctory, lacking actionable outcomes, as team members were unwilling to voice genuine concerns or disagreements.

“Without psychological safety in our teams, teams, essentially, they'll rot from the inside out. Right. They're doomed.”
— Stuart Tipples [05:36]

3. Lack of Psychological Safety:
   The underlying issue was a lack of psychological safety, preventing team members from expressing dissatisfaction or challenges openly. This led to suppressed tensions that eventually erupted into personal conflicts.

Attempted Interventions and Challenges:

Stuart attempted to address these issues by:

• Reinforcing team structures.
• Encouraging the distribution of work to mitigate hero culture.
• Introducing pair programming to foster collaboration.

However, these efforts were met with significant pushback. Stuart reflects that earlier intervention using techniques like the "Five Whys" could have unveiled the team's silent struggles before they escalated.

“Silence is not agreement.”
— Stuart Tipples [08:00]

Lessons Learned: Building and Maintaining Trust

Timestamp: [12:15]

From this experience, Stuart imparts several critical lessons for Scrum Masters:

1. Trust Your Intuition:
   If something feels off, even if the team appears harmonious on the surface, it's essential to delve deeper.

2. Encourage Healthy Conflict:
   Normalize and welcome healthy disagreements as they can lead to better solutions and innovation. This involves creating a safe space where team members feel comfortable voicing differing opinions without fear of retribution.

3. Foster Psychological Safety:
   Psychological safety is the cornerstone of a high-performing team. It enables members to take risks, express vulnerability, and collaborate effectively.

4. Balance Civility with Honesty:
   While maintaining professionalism and civility is important, it should not come at the expense of honesty. Teams should strive for open and truthful communication tailored to their unique dynamics.

“Normalize that healthy disagreement. Encourage it.”
— Stuart Tipples [13:07]

5. Address Issues Promptly:
   Waiting too long to address underlying issues can lead to explosive conflicts that are harder to manage and resolve.

Conclusion

Stuart Tipples' insights in this episode underline the vital role of trust-based leadership in Agile teams. By prioritizing psychological safety, encouraging healthy conflict, and fostering an environment of honesty and transparency, Scrum Masters can prevent team implosions and cultivate resilient, high-performing teams. His experiences serve as a valuable lesson for Agile practitioners aiming to enhance their leadership approach and team dynamics.

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Notable Quotes

• “You don’t build trust by managing. If you don’t build trust, you’re just managing compliance. You’re not inspiring commitment.”
  — Stuart Tipples [03:00]

• “Without psychological safety in our teams, teams, essentially, they'll rot from the inside out. Right. They're doomed.”
  — Stuart Tipples [05:36]

• “Silence is not agreement.”
  — Stuart Tipples [08:00]

• “Normalize that healthy disagreement. Encourage it.”
  — Stuart Tipples [13:07]

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This episode offers profound insights into the mechanics of team dynamics within Agile frameworks, emphasizing that trust and open communication are not mere soft skills but essential components for a team's success and longevity.

Transcript

[Vasko]

Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if, for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.

[Host]

Hello everybody. Welcome to our Team Tuesday. This week we have with us Stuart Tipples. Hey, Stuart, welcome back.

[Stuart Tipples]

Hey Vasco. Thank you, thank you.

[Host]

So Tuesday is Team Tuesday here on the podcast and we'll talk about teams in a second.

[Vasko]

But before we go there, if you.

[Host]

Think about a book that inspired you in your career as a Scrum Master, what would that be?

[Stuart Tipples]

Yeah, so this one comes a bit left field when I suggest it to people. And this is a great book for Scrum Masters. It's a great book for anyone really interested in servant leadership and the idea of how you lead with the team rather than lead in front of the team. And it's a book called Trust Based Leadership. It's by a guy called Mike. Probably going to terribly mispronounce the surname, but it's Etor or Etor. What I found really interesting and really connected with me with this book is this isn't your sort of standard corporate how to be a sort of a team leader. Right? It really, it's devoid of that sort of corporate fluff, shall we say? Right. And the reason being is Mike is a former Marine turned executive and what I love about his approach in this book and his message in this book is that it is super duper clear what the message is. And it's you don't build trust by managing. You just if you don't build trust, you're just managing compliance. Is the direct quote from the book, you're not inspiring commitment. He spends a lot of time in this book drawing on how trust and trust based leadership is in place in the Marine Corps. And by no means is he making any claims that the Marines invented servant leadership, but they kind of have it there as a principle. And it's super, super, super interesting. And I really just thought it as a piece of reading and as a sort of a refreshing break from your sort of normal, sort of corporate how to Be a Great Leader book. This one is like a drill sergeant out of a Stanley Kubrick book, sort of yelling you into awareness. Right. It's that sort of refreshing. His message ultimately boils down to. It's about how you lead with consistency, how you lead with clarity. Coming back to what we spoke to previously about how you lead with courage and ultimately not waiting for permission to do so. And that was sort of a couple of the key elements that sort of stuck with me was don't wait for permission. So sort of that invitation to sort of go and do it, you know, it's an old favorite expression of mine. I'd rather ask forgiveness than permission. It's. It's great because I think it's consumable, and it's a lesson that can be learned by anyone at any level of their career, whether they're in a leadership role currently, whether they have aspirations to be a leader, whether they're just part of a team. Right. It's still that sort of. There's still value in that message. I think if my. I'm going to boil it down as to why I think, as a Scrum Master, you should read this book. I think your role as a Scrum Master, it's not just about protecting the team from that sort of wider outside corporate barrage, although that's a big part of what you do. But you are, as a Scrum Master, you are responsible for building a space in your team where trust is almost your operating system. Right? It's the currency by which that team succeeds. You have to trust each other, and you need to build perceived external trust of that team. And again, we come back to the idea of sort of, you know, how do you build a team's credibility and how do you build that sort of trust organizationally and individually with stakeholders we all know.

[Host]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Stuart Tipples]

Without psychological safety in our teams, teams, essentially, they'll rot from the inside out. Right. They're doomed. This book, as a Scrum Master, gives you an adrenaline shot into your mindset thinking. It gives you language that's really helpful, and it should bolster your courage to lead with your team and sort of not lead at them. Okay, so you can't recommend it enough.

[Host]

So talking about teams, of course, because that's the next topic we cover. Tell us the story of a team and how they over time kind of delved into maybe negative patterns. What were those patterns and how did that affect the team? So tell us the story of that team that self destructed, Stuart.

[Stuart Tipples]

Yeah, so I've told this story quite a few times and I tell it to sort of new teams I'm working with to the point that I've given them the name and I lovingly refer. Referred to them as the Get Along Gang, which if you're of a certain age in the uk, was a children's Saturday morning cartoon. But yeah, this was a team that I didn't start with. I was sort of brought in as a coach to support the Scrum Master and support the team get out of a bit of a funk. They were in. They were behind on work, supporting A. It was a B2B customer portal that was linked to a much larger program of work and it was a key piece. And again, on the face of it, with this team, things seemed okay, right? The Scrum Master was running the events, everything was happening. They had slipped their retrospectives, as we've talked about before, that sort of, that happens. They sort of had that terrible view that they were just a drain. It was output focus rather than sort of focus on how they could help the team. Despite this and despite the sort of pressures they were under to deliver, they all seemed quite happy. Everybody seemed to get along. Everybody. Retros were just not silent. But there was no real sort of. There was nothing actionable coming out of it. It was kind of, you know, it's all fine, it's all good, you know, yeah, we're happy. Yeah, we know we've got lots of work to do. We've just kind of got to get on with it. That attitude wasn't helped by the fact that I had a little bit of hero culture in that team where we had a sort of one, one of the devs who was, you know, a rock star, but they kind of felt like they were taking the lion's share of the work. It was a lot on their shoulders and they'd kind of fallen into that trap of as long as my work's done, it's okay, I've done my bit. Which is really sort of bad for any team dynamic, right? It's bad to be over reliant on any one single team member, but it's also bad that you're sort of just breaking away to like, what my bit's done. It's, you Lot. You suck. The other reason we didn't sort of achieve the goal, so I, you know, my support initially was to just, let's, let's. Let's sort of reinforce the structure. Let's try and sort of break away from that hero culture. And I started to sort of encourage a Scrum Master to share the work out a bit more evenly amongst the devs. I even suggested we just try some simple sort of approaches, like a bit of sort of pair programming so the other devs could work with the more experienced device. That did not go down well at all. It was huge, huge pushback. Ultimately, I think what really sort of shattered this team was, and my big sort of learning from it was silence is not agreement, right? So as a Scrum Master, we need to sort of recognize that and recognize that early on and push, you know, use real sort of rudimentary, you know, the five whys. If I'd applied that a lot earlier in that particular situation, I no doubt would have uncovered this. So.

[Host]

So when you say silent affected this team, silence, pardon me, affected this team, you mean like the. The team was not like taking ownership. They were not stepping up and owning the challenges that they were facing even though they were late. They were just kind of accepting it as just a given.

[Stuart Tipples]

I think. I think it was. I think it was sort of almost. It was. It's. What's the expression? It's. It's almost. It was almost toxic positivity. I think if I look back with this team, right, it was this sort of the unwillingness to sort of address the issues. It was the unwillingness. And I say unwillingness, that's probably not fair. They didn't feel safe or comfortable to disagree. So the psychological safety was missing. And I think that was. That was really painful for me as a coach to realize. Again, quite later on, as I said, if I maybe sort of hit them with the five whys and address the sort of. The silence and that sort of very sort of muted.

[Host]

So what you're describing there is like, instead of engaging in conflict to resolve a problem, they would just sit back and wait for the problem to go away on its own, right?

[Stuart Tipples]

Yeah. And you know, what ultimately happened with this team, Vasco, is that like, in any situation, right, it exploded because it was on a. It was just. It was left unattended, it wasn't addressed, and it sort of exploded into quite unpleasant, quite personal sort of disagreement. So by that point, it's very difficult to sort of apply beneficial sort of conflict management because it's too Late, right.

[Host]

It's too late.

[Stuart Tipples]

And emotions have sort of taken over. So I guess boiling it down. Yeah. Toxic positivity is real. Don't just accept that sort of. If people tell you it's all good and it's fine and you have a feeling in your gut as a Scrum Master, trust your intuition, push a little deeper, push with the team, push individually with one on ones. Right. And understand, scratch below the surface. There's probably something that is giving you that feeling and the longer you leave it, the bigger the fallout is. Yeah.

[Host]

And actually that's a very good point. Right. Like one of the patterns that we should always have in our minds is that when there isn't the conflict, it's because people are not taking the conflict that is latent there. I mean, and conflict doesn't need to be disagreement. It could be just, you know, positive tension, positive energy in the conversations. Maybe we could call it passion. Right. Like, and where, when there isn't, we very often oscillate between silence and explosion. This is a very normal human pattern, right. Like we hold off until it's too late and then we have to get everything out of our chest. And of course, sometimes we lose. We lose kind of the guideposts of what is productive and respectful conflict. And we go too far. And if we do that, then it's too late. So it's a very important pattern to.

[Stuart Tipples]

Have in mind for anyone that's sort of experiencing this right now. I think my learning and how I ultimately sort of very slowly sort of repaired and rebuilt the trust in this team, I would say, is you can foster the psychological safety by normalizing healthy disagreement. Right. Encourage it. Again, as a Scrum Master, you have to sort of bring that out, tease it out. You can have fun with it, right. You can be a bit sort of cheeky with it. You can. We're very good as human beings at sort of reading each other, even in remote, sort of in the world where we live now, where we have sort of teams that are remotely, you know, as long as even without cameras on, we can hear it in the voice or we can hear it by the fact that people aren't engaging. Right. There's something driving that. Trust your intuition, scratch below the surface. But yeah, normalize that. Healthy disagreement. Encourage it. A key one is, and I was guilty of this very early on in my career as a Scrum Master in that I would sort of perhaps over labor the idea of civility and that we must all sort of be very civil, professional, and keep our emotions in check. But civility is kind of empty without honesty. So make sure that you really are getting honest views and you sort of work with your team. And every team's language will be different, right? Every team's idea of civility will be different. You'll have one team, whereas a group of people, they perhaps have enough trust to sort of be quite blunt. And in other teams, they need a bit more of a delicate approach.

[Host]

Absolutely. Always keep civility. But of course, if there's no conflict, be aware of that.

[Stuart Tipples]

That's a sign 100%.

[Host]

Thank you very much for sharing that story, Stuart.

[Vasko]

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