Episode 5 Part 1 

How does where, when and into which community you are born shape you? Dublin woman, Brenda McGuirk, chats about starting a career in the 1980s in Ireland (before contraception and divorce became an option for women), where her efforts took her and how these early experiences influenced what she pays attention to as she goes about managing products, programmes and people.

This is the first of a two-part episode and in this part, Brenda talks us through an example of what she means by "a process or team that wants to change itself" and her role in making that change happen.

Brenda Full Episode Part 1

INTRO

[Do you wanna see a band from Dublin? Music]

Belinda Brummer (host): Where were you when you earnestly started your working career? What was happening in your world, in your country, in your community? And how did this shape you? And what expectations did you have of your life because of when, where, and into which community you were born? My guest in this episode emerged into the world of paid work in the 1980s, specifically the 1980s in Ireland. Her experience of what it meant to be a woman in the workplace and in society set her upon a journey that in many ways is a story of emigration, homecoming, and, um, the invention and the reinvention of a person.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): So my name is Brenda McGurk. I live in a lovely little seaside town called Bray in Ireland.

Belinda Brummer (host): Managers are people too, but it's convenient to make them the baddie in our own work life, and so we don't tend to be open to hearing from them about their unique spot in the world. This closes us off from learning and growing from their perspective. In this podcast, we pause to give managers and their peers the opportunity to reflect on a moment they encountered and the legacy they hoped to leave over time. This is the manager's moment, and I am your host, Belinda Brummer.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Belinda, you and I met in 2002 in a company called Electric Paper, which was in Blackrock in Ireland. And I came in brand new in the January as the production manager to a lovely small team with a real sort of mom and pop feel to the company.

Belinda Brummer (host): This is the first part of a two part episode. In this first part, Brenda shares what it was like establishing a career in Ireland in the 1980s and where those efforts took her. She talks about managing high performance teams and after over 30 years of managing people, why she is now enjoying the freedom of not doing so. Brenda has managed, among many other things, different instances of change. In our conversation, she looks at a particular change process she managed and along the way sheds light on how to change a process or team that wants to change itself and the managers role in facilitating an environment that enables and secures behavioural change.

Belinda Brummer (host): Hola. Ah, hello. How are you this morning?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Oh, uh, sure, I'm grand.

Belinda Brummer (host): Give me a highlights tour, whistle stop tour of what you've done professionally. What are the kind of things that you've been involved in? So, whistle stop tour.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): My first ever paid job was looking after the family while my mother went back to work. I was about twelve years old, and then after that, my first out of the whole job, I was about 15. I worked in a restaurant where I eventually, at the age of 16, managed the kitchen and all the food. Things have changed since then. The job that I do now is I'm head of product for a company called Silbok Lab. I did a business course when I left school, but I ended up working in retail. There were very few jobs in the 1980s in Ireland, and, in fact, half of my school class left the country. Immigration and emigration were huge. Um, but I got a really lucky break when I was 20 and I was offered a job in an animation studio. I knew nothing about it. It was a bewildering, uh, experience for me, but I absolutely loved it. I always knew the kind of company I didn't want to work for. I didn't know who I could work for or where I could go. And suddenly I found myself in a place that was just so exciting and fun, um, and yet hardworking.

Belinda Brummer (host): And how did that opportunity come to you?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): It came to me through a woman that I had worked with in retail called Violet. And she knew the woman who was managing the studio in Ireland. It was just part of the studio. And they offered me a job because she had worked with me and knew me and thought I would be good. They interviewed me and, um, I got the job and, um, two weeks later I was in Los Angeles. A big part of the studio was in Ireland at that stage. But they moved 30 of us over to Los Angeles to work there and finish off a movie called American Tale. And a year later, we were back in Ireland. We had moved the whole studio to Cunningham Road in Ireland. Um, studio stayed there for about ten years.

Belinda Brummer (host): You said that you knew what company you didn't want to work in at such a young age. How did you know that? And how did you have the wherewithal to even think that there were things that you didn't want to do as opposed to just go for it?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): It was a very interesting time. I think I was one of the first generation of Irish women who felt we should have not felt we should have choice, had the opportunity of choice. My mother didn't have it. My aunts didn't have it in the way that I did. And this is going to stand out. But I think it goes right back to a teacher that we had in Brian way school. And she was the first adult outside the home to treat us differently. I came from a very working class environment. There were huge classes, and she treated all of us like individuals. And she valued every child in the class, and she didn't have favourites. And there was something about that that had a huge impact on me. I mean, bear in mind, when I went to school with a very small child, they were allowed to slap you with a ruler or a stick, you know, that's what you're coming from. And this fabulous young teacher who we just all fell in love with, who just brought this different attitude. And I remember thinking that I didn't understand that that's what it was at the time. But we all knew it was something different. And we were fiercely protective of her. We absolutely. And, uh, she was only there for a year, and she left to school and went back home to Limerick, where she was from. But that stood out in my mind. And then when I was working, I worked, as I said, in the cafe. I loved that. That was great fun. But bloody hard work, you know, physical work as well as everything else. I did go to work for one of the large retail companies in Ireland, and I was in shock as to, we were searched going in and out every day, which I thought, okay, well, that makes sense, because there's a lot of, you know, security they have to do. People were called Miss or mister. Your first name wasn't used. Um, the managers were treated quite poorly by their managers, and they, in turn, treated the staff in a certain way. So it was very much the old fashioned world of being supervised, and you respect the title and not the person. And I did none of that set well with me. And when I had done my business course, I worked in an office for a small period of time for the other major retail company in Ireland. They worked in their corporate offices, and it was the same thing. Miss M. McGurk, Miss Bromer, mister so and so. And, you know, I remember being at work one day, and there was a lady who was an incredible woman, powerful woman in Ireland at the time, which was unusual, sitting at the desk, shouting at her secretary, and then sitting with her feet up on the desk whilst her secretary sewed the hem of her skirt and got her coffee. And I remember thinking, I have to get out of here. That will never be me. I can't do that. I can't be that person. And these women who worked as secretaries, as they were called then in this organization, were incredible. They were so organised, they were so efficient. They were so lovely. They managed the world in a way that you can't imagine. They were pas, as they would be called now. They were called secretaries. I mean, they were dynamic women. And, um, the people they worked for really, you know, valued them. But they were also the secretary, you know. Um, I remember thinking, I can't be in here. I have to go.

Belinda Brummer (host): What if that was your whole experience, the workplace, what made you believe that it could be different?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): I just believed that there had to be other companies out there that weren't like this. The world is a big, wide place. You know, uh, when you think about it, when I was growing up, you couldn't get contraception in Ireland. There was no divorce. There was no, you know, there were things that. It really restricted women's lives, and I couldn't bear that. I just didn't want that to be the world that I lived in. I wanted to work somewhere. I wanted to live in a world where opportunities were equal and that I wasn't always going to be miss somebody who does most of the work and sits quietly in the corner. Not that I want praise or. But everybody wants to be recognized and valued. And it always seemed to be the men who had it. Lovely, lovely, lovely men, great people. But that was a world I didn't want to be part of.

Belinda Brummer (host): And so it's lovely and fitting that Violet was the person, the woman who showed you a path that gave you an alternative.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Yeah, it really was. She mentored me in a huge amount of ways now. She was an amazingly crazy person in terms of she was out there. She was very different. She had a different way of looking at the world, and she was just wonderful. She wanted things for other people more than she wanted them for herself. And that's a unique individual. You don't get that very often. Yeah, she was very kind to me.

Belinda Brummer (host): Brenda found herself back in the US, this time in Phoenix, Arizona, with 21st Century Fox, working in the first digital animation studio in the world. She set up a team there, eventually managing a department of over 200 highly talented and creative people. Time moved on and she eventually heeded the call to return to Ireland. Upon her return, she established herself in the educational technology sector, in production, program and product management. In the years that followed her return to Ireland, one of the roles she had was made redundant. And I picked up our conversation here.

Belinda Brummer (host): You said something else, right? That was. You said, I was lucky to get redundancy for a second time. And a lot of people might not really understand that because redundancy comes with a lot of negativity. It is something that is done to people. And yet you link this word opportunity to redundancy. What do you mean by that?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): In that situation, I felt that I'd come to the end of the line in the position I was in. The way the company had changed, didn't really work for me. I knew that I didn't fit with the company anymore. And the company's values had changed in a way that didn't work for me. And I knew that I needed to get out. On a personal level, I had gone through an awful lot with regards to family, and I hadn't had the capacity to think beyond surviving for a couple of years. And that happens to people, especially as parents are aging. We lost a child. Our second child then was diagnosed with autism, and we were told he'd. Nick probably never speaks. My father had been very sick and then died. My mother was not well. My in laws were not well. So, you know, we get to these points in our lives where everything is just coming in on you, and having one steady thing in your life, no matter how poor it may be, is what's needed. Plus, financially, I couldn't afford to just up and leave. And the thoughts of going somewhere and starting all over again was just so overwhelming. When you're already overwhelmed, that just sounds unbearable. But I knew I had to go. And I'd been looking around at jobs, and I was working part time. I had cut my hours back because my son needed me. And everywhere that I looked, they only wanted full time. And I was devastated. I was thinking, okay, because flexibility wasn't really that great at the time in companies. So when the opportunity for a redundancy came, I was ticking my heels, because financially, it gave me a cushion to make decisions and hopefully be able to find a world that was going to suit me.

As I pulled into my driveway and got a phone call, I was like, I can't believe this. No, I was going to take time off. I had studied, I had also studied acupuncture. I was a bonafide acupuncturist. And I was like, no, I want to set up my own company. But at the time, we'd had a financial crash. The bottom had fallen out of the world in terms of, um, it was a huge recession. There's not a time to be setting up a company where people see spending money in the luxury. So, um, yeah, it meant that I was able to take another job at, ah, a lesser salary because I had the financial cushion and it was part time, and it was just, things fell together for me in a way that I just would be eternally grateful for, because at that stage, I needed it so much. And I just think, had the redundancy not come, how much longer would I have stayed in something that was unhealthy for me? I don't know the answer to that, but I know I would have stayed for as long as I had to.

Belinda Brummer (host): Because you had stayed.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Yeah. And nobody's. The person in question who had called me would have very strong moral values and wouldn't have poached me while I was still working there. So it was only because that person knew I had received redundancy that he called me and said, ah, did you know there's a role? Would you be interested in applying? I won't be doing the hiring, but I've been thinking about you and thinking you would be great in this. And now that this has happened, would you have a look at the role? It's out of my hands once you apply for it.

Belinda Brummer (host): So good people seem to attract good people because you have Violet, you have this individual, you have this, you know, opportunity. Because there was a, there was, you had every reason not to be positive about that redundancy. Um, what you've just kind of talked about what was going on for you and in the world, and yet you have a mindset that turns this into an opportunity. And what flows from living a life like that is somebody calls you within 24 hours and says, I have something for you is amazing.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): It really was like when I went from AOL to electric paper, that was, I'm leaving. And again, would you be interested? I'm not hiring, but I think this would really suit you. And in each case, the people who approached me and when I moved from Trinity, equally, that was, would you be interested? But in each case, it wasn't just that, uh, they were interested in me, but that they could see a situation where it needed me and I would be good for it, or it would be good for me. If that makes sense, that happens. So, yeah, no, I do consider myself to be extremely lucky because there are good people who work hard all their lives and don't get breaks, and I got breaks when I needed them. And all I know is, and, um, the one thing I say to everybody who's younger than me, even if you're going through a hard time, is the only thing I know is I've had to reinvent myself so many times in life. I opened a digital department at the first ever purpose built digital studio in the world knowing nothing. What do you mean? I relied on a guy called Liam, um, to save my boss through that whole thing. And I always would say, it's, had. He not been there, I don't know what I'd have done. I mean, I'm a quick learner and I learned quickly, and it wasn't as difficult as it looked, but, you know, I wasn't there because I knew how to do the digital stuff. I was there because I knew how to set up a team. But you can't not know what work your team were going to be doing.

Belinda Brummer (host): So, uh, yeah, so let's talk about that. You set up a team, right? At what point did you move into management? When did you start managing people?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): I suppose when I worked in retail, I was a manager in a shop. I was about 19 at the time, but it was the sort of environment where managers came and went and people got zacked and it wasn't a very nice environment.

Belinda Brummer (host): So, right, in the very first experience you've been involved in managing people, you had a life in between then, right. So where you are now, when you think of what management needs, what does management mean to you?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Good management is somebody who facilitates. I'm a real believer in high performance teams, and high performance teams self manage, but if you don't make the space for that to happen, and if you don't make sure that the people have the tools and the training that they need and the protected environment to make mistakes, if you don't make sure that people have that, then you will never have high performing teams. And I think the other thing, I've seen it with fantastic managers and I've been guilty of it myself, but we're in a position that we love and we're very happy in that position. We take about succession planning as emergency planning a lot of the time, but we should always be looking at our colleagues and saying, which one of my colleagues is next for this position? You have to be doing that, and that's a very threatening thing to any human being. But if you're not doing it, you're not actually doing a proper job as a manager because you're not doing it for your team. You're also not doing it for yourself because again, that fear of, well, what's going to happen to me, that's a totally natural human survival instinct, and I love this job and I don't want to be, but the fact is you have to make that space. If you're serious and you say, I'm making space for people to grow, one of them might be growing into your role. So you have to be thinking about that as well. And, um, you know, that kind of, I think, sounds like a lot of management buzzwords, but it really is true. A good manager is not doing things for themselves. They're doing it for what does the company need for success and what do the people need for success.

Belinda Brummer (host): This is exactly what you said about Violet. Violet wasn't in it for herself. And so without realizing it, you learned what management is from that experience. Because what you've just said is they're, they're not in it for themselves. Well, that it's not themselves that come first in this instance. And it sounds like you are, you are living, Violet.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): I think that is true. Definitely.

Belinda Brummer (host): One of the things that I am really conscious about in the work that I do is that as people's careers progress, more and more women leave management for lots of different reasons. They leave the workplace to start with because of all, um, decisions that they have to make.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Um, for the third most expensive childcare in the world in Ireland, and most.

Belinda Brummer (host): Limiting because, you know, it just limits the family's ability to grow in terms of their income, the company, in so many ways. But so many women leave management. And that a lot of really good people leave management.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Mhm.

Belinda Brummer (host): And you opened by saying, it's really great. I don't manage people anymore.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Mhm.

Belinda Brummer (host): I don't even know what my question is there because I don't know what ….

Brenda McGurk (Guest): I heard it when I said it. Yeah, so I heard it when I said it to you.

Belinda Brummer (host): And so what did you hear and what did you mean?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): I surprised myself when I said it. I was like, wow, that's interesting. And I think it is that there's two things happening. One is that I'm not career building anymore. I'm 59 in a couple of weeks. I've had the big jobs, and I've learned that the big jobs are fantastic and amazing, but they're not always that fulfilling. You know, I got to tick things off my list in my life. Like, I had a big job with big salary. I, uh, had bought my own home, and I lived on my own. There were things I wanted to do, but I'm not sure that they were as fulfilling as I thought they were going to be. And I reached a point where the job I'm doing now, I can do it for me and my own enjoyment and pleasure. And that's unusual because I'm, um, still dealing with people's problems. And, you know, I still so say, for example, part of my role when working on new features and working with the teams who are building that, and I'm facilitating them to make decisions. They're all super smart people. I can't make those decisions. But I'm saying, okay, if we've to reach this goal and we've to do this, how are we going to get there? And how are you going to ensure that happens? And if the user needs to do this, how are we going to, uh, what will that look like? And so I'm constantly asking questions. So I'm not managing them or their performance, but I'm managing the outcome of a product or a feature, which is quite different. Mhm. You know, I don't have to do the project management part of it and I don't have to do the people management part of it. I more manage, I think, outcomes rather than people. So there's a lot of facilitation and question asking, but at the end of the day, people do still ring me and say, oh, I've just had the worst day, or I'm really struggling with my colleague or whatever, and, um, you know, I'll get on and chat with them and that's lovely and I like that, but I don't feel responsible for it. And that's the difference. There's a freedom in that that I never had before and didn't realize could be really nice. So I expose, I'm at a point now where I have a role that's very fulfilling. It's a senior enough role that I have influence and I can negotiate things within the organization and influence decisions, but I'm doing it without directly managing people for the first time. There's a lot of freedom in that. So I'm technically a manager, but not a people manager.

Belinda Brummer (host): In the context of what you've said around people should self manage, but you can't just say that managing people, there's a huge amount of responsibility with that. And so after a career, freedom to not have that responsibility.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also because that's the kind of person I am. I am a bit of a caretaker. So when I'm managing people, I think I take on, um, too much responsibility for other people, and I don't think that's a healthy thing for me or for them. You know, I've definitely learned that, that you can't do it for other people. And drawing the line where facilitation stops and sort of doing something for another person, it becomes actually disabling for them.

Belinda Brummer (host): Have you noticed if there are any things that kind of keep coming up, that actually, as you step back, you can see that it's a thread of things that you pay attention to as a result of them keep coming up?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): I think for me, I'm always the one who's thinking a year ahead or two years ahead and thinking, what should we be thinking about what should be planning, what could we change, what can we improve? So, you know, that whole thing of change is the only constant. I actually like that. You know, I'm a furniture mover. I, you know, I am always thinking about how something can be better the next time and not change for the sake of change, but better in that. And, um, it's not always about efficiencies or cost savings, it's about will that make people's lives easier? Will they be happier? Will we get a better outcome? So constantly looking ahead at if we automated something or if we moved the teams around or if we do. But yet you can't impose your ideas because you might be wrong. So trying to then step back and say, what are the questions I need to ask so that a team or a process will want to change itself? And, uh, we'll see the benefit of that.

Belinda Brummer (host): A process or a team that will want to change itself?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Yeah.

Belinda Brummer (host): The manager's moment is brought to you by boost learning when management development is done differently. Our eight week programs are designed to fit perfectly around your schedule, your experience and your development needs, all delivered online and virtually. To find out more, go to www dot boostlearning. Dot online, you are listening to the managers moment and I am your host, Belinda Brummer. I am speaking with Brenda McGurk, who currently works as a product leader in an educational technology company in Dublin, Ireland. Before the break, Brenda talked about a team or process wanting to change itself. I asked her to talk me through an example to help me understand what she means by this.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): There was a time in an organisation where we had quite siloed teams, some of them very large, and some of them had a lot more dominance over the organization than they should have. And there was a legacy reason for that. We needed to make change. And I could see really clearly where that change needed to happen. And I knew that the team who had a lot of dominance would be the ones that were going to dig their heels in the hardest and say, no, no, no, we're not doing it. No, no. And they were very protective of their know how, whether it was consciously or subconsciously they had a dominance in that organization. So rather than bring, um, the change, it brought the question. So we got into working groups and presented the problems and invested quite a bit of time and to the point where I know that senior management were kind of going, what's going on out there? No, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. Trust me, it'll be okay. And I was nervous as hell. Because it could have backfired. And I knew it could backfire at any time. And then I was going to have to come in and say, well, we're changing anyway, and that's appalling. So got into the working groups, outlined, ah, the challenges, in fact, got the groups to articulate what the problems were and what the challenges were and where the problems were, got them to think about how we might solve the problems. And the change happened. We changed the teams, we changed the team setups, we changed how people interacted with each other, and we even changed where people sat.

Belinda Brummer (host): Sorry, where people sat, yeah. As basic was that, yeah.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Because where people were sitting at the time, because we were all in the office, actually helped with that siloing and lack of dynamism across the team. And the change that we arrived at, uh, was 90% what I had thought of months, uh, earlier. But people felt empowered. They felt they owned the change. And the change was pretty painful.

Belinda Brummer (host): Even the team that was more dominant.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): They were the most vocal during the process. So I think that they felt that they had driven the process, maybe more that other people had, and that kind of suited their, it fulfilled a need for them. We had gone from creating a very waterfall approach to huge, uh, juggernaut type product that we were producing at the time.

Belinda Brummer (host): And waterfall is a methodology of project management.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): And so it suited that because we knew what we needed to build. It was very prescriptive. We knew how to do it. We had been following this process for years. Everyone knew their role in that. We were coming towards the end of that, we were going towards creating much smaller, customer focused, bespoke work with a smaller team. And so we were going to have to be more dynamic. We were going to have to be more interactive across teams and work in a more agile way. So rather than come in and say, we're doing these kind of projects now and you're all going to have to change, it was, okay, this is where we've been and this is where we need to get to. How are we going to get there with what we have? Because it was a reduced team also. And, um, so with that context and saying, what problems have we been experiencing? And everybody had been experiencing the same problem, but with a different lens. So, Belinda, I'm having a problem with you not understanding what I'm telling you. And Belinda said, well, I’m having a problem understanding what you’re trying to tell me because you’re not sitting with me or just giving me something that’s written down and I have to interpret it. And when I ask you a question, you’re too busy. So these kind of things where everybody started to see how that could be facilitated.

Belinda Brummer (host): The example that you gave us was about saying you don’t listen well, you only email me and don’t talk to me. That's about behaviour.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Mhm.

Belinda Brummer (host): So when we talking about process change in this, because you had to get people working in a different way together, it's not really the process that you have to change, it's how people interact with each other and with whatever the systems are that are there. Is that fair to say?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): Absolutely.

Belinda Brummer (host): But behaviour is so hard to change. Uh-huh you can't just get people to say oh, I'm going to do this differently. How do you make that a reality or how do you get people to make that behaviour change a reality?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): You have to accept that it's not going to change overnight. You have one step forward and two steps back at the beginning and you can't see that as failure. And everybody throws their arms up in the air, this isn't working. I uh, knew it wouldn't work. You have to accept and you have to manage that with people and say look, this is going to be messy for a few weeks, but it will settle down and you have to set up parameters for behaviour boundaries and say okay, so what we're agreeing here is that when you're handing over, if you're used to throwing something over the fence for the other person to pick up, that is a huge behavioural change that I now have to spend my precious time explaining something that I've written down beautifully, thank you very much, and listening to this person's ideas back. But once people got used to it and we would say okay, and uh, I would say okay, limit that. How much time do you think you need? Okay. So when it's going over that amount of time, you can call a hold to it, you have the right, and so that gave people the confidence to know that this is not going to take my whole day. Every time I had something over, it's a whole day of my work on and I have targets to make. And also I'm not somebody who likes talking, I like writing or I like drawing, or I like developing. And now these people want to talk to me because in software development a lot of people actually really enjoy the application of their work and find meetings and discussion quite distracting. You'll get the odd person who loves it, but a lot of people don't like that, so that has to be a really high value for them. Mhm. They have to get so much out of it. And so if you can measure what the change is going to deliver, that can be really helpful.

Belinda Brummer (host): What do you mean by that?

Brenda McGurk (Guest): So Belinda, this might not save you time because you're now going to have to spend a half an hour talking to Brenda every time you finish with your piece of work, but it's going to save Brenda. She estimates about 3 hours.

Belinda Brummer (host): But I don't care about Brenda. This is my job. How do you.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): That's the behavioural change that by that facilitation and the listening people start to see the problems they're causing downstream. Not put it as problems you're causing, but by not doing it. So, you know, the cost of, whenever I'm making a decision, I'm always thinking, well, what's the cost of not doing it? Because we tend to focus on the cost of doing and say, oh, that's, you know, that's going to take three people two days. That's oh my God, that's six people days. What's the cost of not doing it? And if the cost of not doing it is somebody's mental health to do their job, that's valuable. How do you measure that? But by being able to say it's saving us as a team, this, we're going to get to this end point, which the end point is not you finishing your piece of work, but having that common goal and being able to report back in that and being able to say to people, wow, guys, because of what you're doing, this team over here have increased their output or they're 20% more productive or 50% happier, whatever it happens to be, being able to measure that and hand that back to people and say, this is what you've done. There's a great sense of achievement in that. Uh, not for everybody. You'll still have people who go, I really don't care. But you're making me do this anyway and that's fine. You know, we can't all be the same and that's fine.

Belinda Brummer (host): Gosh, you're really helping people in this process to build empathy. Yeah, but it has to matter to them as well. And you linked that to us as a team. And so you have to have built a sense of belonging that I belong to this team and that that matters. In order for me to achieve, I need to be motivated to achieve, which means I need to care about the achievement itself and who is involved in that achievement. In order to care, I have to empathize. In order to empathize in this context, I need to have, uh, a sense of belonging as a team, to have a sense of belonging as a team, I need to trust myself and others in that context. And in that I think you have laid out the role of the manager is to create that environment to get to the achievement. It's not just about measuring the achievement, it's about how does the manager facilitate that environment in order to achieve and.

Brenda McGurk (Guest): People individually still have to have a focus on, I need to get ten widgets done a, um, week or whatever their, their targets are, because people have targets they need to meet or I need to, by the end of this sprint, have this piece of work done so that the next person can do whatever. People still have that and they will go back the minute you're finished talking to them, to their desk and focus on that. But by reporting on, um, the overall goal and putting the focus on that in terms of how we view achievement, rather than saying, oh, Belinda, you did ten this week. Super. We're saying, okay, we need it at the end of the sprint to be able to do this or at the end of this quarter. So I think quarterly goals are really helpful. By the end of this quarter, we wanted to have three products delivered to whoever you're working with. It doesn't matter. We need to have three products for them because their people on the floor are suffering because they don't know how to do x, y or z, whatever it happens to be. And we got there. We got there because you guys did this and you guys did that. Now people will go home, complain to their family and say, oh, my God, I had to listen to a pilot nonsense. A whole hour listening to your one going on. And, um, I knew all along that if I just made this change and, um, it's really helping these people. It doesn't matter how people present that or how they internalize it or how they see it, that doesn't matter. The goal is being achieved and, uh, people are happier. Whatever way your happiness manifests is your own business. I, uh, don't mind. You know, for some people, being right is the only joy for other people. You know, helping others is the only joy for other people named mule. And I just want to do my coding is the only joy. That's fine. That is absolutely fine. So long as we're losing the path for people in their daily lives, that's the most important thing, that they feel that it is of value to them personally in some way.

Belinda Brummer (host): We've come to the end of part one of my conversation with Brenda. Ah. In part two, she zooms in on the individual in a team and explores things like self sabotage, the naysayer in the room, and being married to one of the quiet ones. Thank you for listening today. If you've enjoyed this episode, there are three things you could do. Let your friends and colleagues know. Follow the show and be part of the conversations and make connections by joining the managers moment club on LinkedIn. The manager's moment, seeing the person in this and every moment. Oh, and a shout out to boost learning where management development is done differently. Find out more at www.boostlearning.online.

Belinda Brummer (host): Mmm

Belinda Brummer (host): Brenda zooms in on the individual inner team and explores things like self sabotage, the naysayer in the room, and being married to one of the quiet ones. Thank you for listening today.