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Marsha Acker

5 Reasons You Need to Listen to Season 2 of the Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast!

It’s here! 

After a successful first season, Season 2 of Defining Moments of Leadership  podcast is underway. Episode 1 was released on November 9, 2022 with guest Melissa Boggs. Melissa and Marsha’s conversation centered around unconventional leadership. They explored what it takes to lead in a way that does not fit with traditional societal norms of what leadership might look like. In addition, Melissa shared some tips on how to find your authentic leadership. Curious? Listen to it here!

Moving forward, a new episode will hit your favorite podcasting platform every 2 weeks. 

We have plans! So many great plans for this next season. Here are five reasons you need to listen to Season 2 of Defining Moments of Leadership podcast!

Defining Moments of leadership

What Will You Learn Listening to Season 2 of the Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast?

1 Lessons of Failure

In podcast Season 1 we met fourteen incredible leaders who went through struggles. Some even admitted to failures. Why is this important? Many of us avoid mistakes by learning from other people through the mistakes they share. 

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt 

Taking time to listen to the lessons of others, helps us from making those same mistakes ourselves. We are thankful for the new leaders in Season 2 who will share their own missteps. 

2 Stories of Triumph

At the same time our podcast guests have shared stories of triumph. Wonderful stories of triumph. Stories of success after failure, stories of success despite adversity.

We look forward to more stories of accomplishments from the lineup of guests in Season 2 of Defining Moments of Leadership.

3 Get to Know Leaders 

Spending time in the recording studio with leaders allows me to get to know my guests in a brand new way. Most of my podcast guests are people I know or have worked with. 

By interviewing them in an intimate, private setting, I get to know these leaders like never before. Your benefit comes in when they lift the curtain and give us a peek at how they think, work and yes, lead. 

Through Defining Moments of Leadership, we all get to know these leaders better!

4 Gain Knowledge

Non-fiction books, liveshows, podcasts, webinars… they all serve to feed our thirst for knowledge. My goal for Defining Moments of Leadership is to learn something new myself each and every episode, and to pass this new knowledge on to you, the listener. 

If you want to keep learning and improving your leadership skills, this season is for you!

5 Leadership Success

What is leadership success? Self awareness of one’s leadership style is a definition that comes to mind. Self awareness of your leadership style and your own shortcomings, coupled with the drive to learn more, do better and be better at leading a team, is the ultimate goal.

What better way for us to learn about leadership success than to listen to those leaders who self-identify their leadership style and have a journey to share as they grew into today’s leaders. 

Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast

We invite you to listen to and then subscribe and review our podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

You are also invited to continue the conversation about all things leadership in our community. We can’t wait to hear what you have learned from our leaders!

3 Things Needed to Lead Successful Virtual Meetings for a Hybrid Team

It’s Nearly 2023. Is Your Team Hybrid?

At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, most in-person teams went remote, forced to go this route due to worldwide quarantine orders. In the USA that meant that nearly all of our workforce stayed home, and learned to navigate working remotely.

It’s safe to say that by 2021, most of us figured out how to lead virtual meetings for fully remote teams. Now that we are headed into 2023, what does your team look like?

  • There are companies who are requiring employees to return to the office. 
  • Others have fully embraced all things remote and don’t want anyone back in the office. 
  • Then there are those who have found a balance; creating a hybrid workspace that  allows employees to divide their time between working in the office and working from home.

Team Meetings for Hybrid Teams

What do team meetings for hybrid teams look like.

It can be messy! 

While virtual meetings for hybrid teams by design take place… well, virtually, it doesn’t mean that everyone likes these types of meetings or gets the most out of them. 

Those in the office might be resentful of having to sit in front of a computer and join a Zoom video call. At the same time, those working remotely can suffer from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) of what’s going on in the office – and even feel excluded or isolated.

The 3 Things Needed to Lead Successful Virtual Meetings for a Hybrid Team

If you are the facilitator and in charge of a hybrid team, here are 3 ways to move forward! Remember, that we’ve all had to figure this out and it might take some time to get it right. The more you practice and the sooner you get familiar with these types of meetings, the smoother these meetings will run.

1 Determine the purpose of the meeting.

Ask yourself these questions AND take the time to answer them honestly.

  • Why are you meeting? 
  • What’s the desired outcome? 
  • What will be accomplished at the end? 

2 Decide if it’s a meeting or an email.

Many of the meetings that occur today are one way monologues where people show up to receive a download of information. If your purpose is to ‘understand’ or ‘be aware of’ then write an email, or record a video that people can watch . There is no need to gather everyone to listen to one or two people in a one-way conversation. 

If your meeting is about buy-in, new ideas, decision-making, collaboration, co-creation, and gathering input on a decision then have a meeting, and have a facilitator. 

3 Design the meeting to match the desired outcomes.

People will support what they help to create. If you truly want participation then create a meeting design that supports hearing all voices. 

This is what that looks like:

  • Create a question based agenda
  • Send it out ahead of time

These 3 ways help you get your team to a meeting. Now, to get them engaged and active, read these next 7 tips to increase engagement.  

7 Ways to Increase Engagement During a Virtual Meeting for a Hybrid Team

The following tips can be shared with your team and become standard practice for every Zoom video team call. 

Expectation should be set that from no matter where you join, from the office or remote, these standards are firm.

  1. Ensure high-quality video resolution 
  2. Hide your self-view
  3. Ask people to refrain from using gifs or really detailed graphics in their background 
  4. Look at the camera
  5. Check-In with everyone who joins the call
  6. Invite people to a virtual collaboration tool like Mural or Miro and ask them to participate 
  7. Agree to unmute

Virtual Meeting Resources for Facilitators 

If you need help, here are additional resources!

5 great resources to get started as a facilitator

Virtual meetings

Team meetings

Virtual training

Last but not least, we offer a variety of virtual workshops for those on their journey to facilitation mastery.

They are offered throughout the year, please take a look at the workshop calendar to find your preferred workshop and dates. 

Facilitation workshops offered include:

Agile Team Facilitation

Advanced Facilitation

Virtual Facilitation Masterclass

3 Things to Never Compromise On When Building Your Career

No matter where you are in your leadership journey: at the beginning, in the middle or on top of your game, at some point in your career you will be asked to compromise for the ‘good of the team’. 

Now, chances are high that we all experience this situation at one time or another. So it’s prudent to reflect on it and think about it so you’re prepared when it occurs. . 

The truth is I was asked this question a few years ago. Fortunately, I was able to articulate three things I am not willing to compromise on. No matter what. 

As I wrote them down, I found comfort knowing that if I feel myself wavering, I can easily go back to these three things. I encourage you to make your own list and to put it somewhere where you can reference it quickly. 

Some might even consider that this is about your reputation and your self-preservation that’s at risk. 

What Will You Never Compromise On in Your Career?

Here are the 3 things I’ve identified I will not compromise on. 

1 Doing work for free

If you’re just getting started in business it can be easy to fall into the trap of giving away work for free. 

Don’t do it. 

It devalues what you bring and the product or service you have to offer. Instead, have a purpose driven strategy for when you might discount work or do pro-bono work and stick with it. 

I have discounted rates in order to support a cause or non-profit mission that I believe in.

2 Doing work with others when it’s not a good fit 

Early on in my company I was focused on revenue and keeping the lights on. That led to clients and partnerships that I didn’t really enjoy. 

As Marie Kondo says, those relationships did not bring me joy.  

Today, I trust my instincts and when I meet someone – potential colleague, client or business partner – and the relationship just feels ‘off’, or I’m having to work too hard to move things forward, then I know it’s not a good fit. I’m always asking myself ‘does this bring me joy?’

3 Saying yes to projects without clear goals

When asked to contribute to someone else’s projects, I don’t immediately say no. 

I am often asked to contribute my

  • Time
  • Funds, i.e. sponsorship
  • Thoughts, i.e. podcast, blog, speaking

Before I say decline or accept, I honor the value of being curious and ask for distinct goals. 

If there are no clear goals, no measures of success put in place, no data to be shared with myself and my team, I pause to evaluate if this is worth my (our) time? If not, I circle back up to #1 and 2 and I decline.

Ideally, goals align for all parties. If the goals set forth do not align with my own business goals, I will also decline.

Build Your Career Your Way

I encourage you to do this work soon. 

Answer the question: 

“What are 3 things I would never compromise on” and write down your answers.

Someday soon you’ll be glad you did.

You will save yourself a lot of headaches, frustration, time and ultimately money! 

~Marsha

7 Keys to Successful Delivery Culture Change

This is a case study, a story, of how one organization changed their delivery culture and used Agile training as a cultural intervention to level up their delivery leads and their teams. 

The Delivery Culture That Wasn’t

The Client:

A mid-sized tech development company who was growing fast and experiencing the consequence of growth pains. They were what they called ‘practicing agile’, and yet they were struggling with team cohesion, decision making and delivery.  

The Struggles:

Teams did not feel heard. 

Teams felt like they were getting stepped on.   

Ideas from younger team members weren’t taken seriously by older team members.  

The attitude around meetings was ‘Why would I bother coming to a meeting where you’re going to ask me my opinion, but you’ve already got a solution figured out? Why don’t you just tell me what to do, and I’ll go do it? Don’t waste my time.’  

Team leaders were frustrated by on-going team resistance. They struggled to get their teams on board with new ideas or changes in the direction that the leaders knew needed to happen.  

Teams would revisit topics that had already been discussed and decided, because, in fact, they hadn’t really been decided.

This lack of team cohesion and the constant resistance to ideas and change impacted product development and delivery. The process impeded creativity and efficiency. It caused frustration for everyone involved.  

None of this is good for a growing tech company looking to break through the market and survive long-term. 

This company was growing quickly and knew they needed to be more adaptable in their execution. They had laid down the core principles of agile. They thought they knew agile well.  

But why were they still not seeing the results they needed? They had spent thousands of dollars in agile training, but they were not seeing the improvement results they expected or needed from this effort.  

What was going on? How could this be fixed?

The Pitfalls Before Delivery Culture Change

The world of work is becoming more adaptive. No longer do we create five-year strategic plans or twelve-month project plans and expect them to be relevant past the end of the week. Markets and needs change quickly. 

1 We need businesses who understand agility and adaptability at a core DNA level. Training is just one component. 

2 We need leaders who can guide the process internally. Agility does not happen in big movements; it happens in small decisions that get made at a moment in time. The point where a leader says: I’m going to choose emergence over knowing all the answers upfront. Or I’m going to trust that the team will produce value, even if I don’t quite understand exactly how it will happen at a level that would make me comfortable.

3 The problem is viewed as a knowledge gap rather than a systemic issue. Sometimes in the case of facilitation, yes, it is a knowledge gap, but it’s also so much more. Just acquiring the new knowledge will not solve the systemic challenge in an organization that has a culture of leaders showing up late to meetings, refusing to hold themselves accountable to working agreements like ‘no technology’ during the meeting

4 No internal champion or sponsor. Training is procured by a vendor or even developed in house. Intervention and culture change at this level requires someone with seniority and gravitas inside the organization to be an ongoing champion

5 Training staff in the practices of agile without skills in how to help teams implement them – beyond the “what”, ensures that your teams spend their whole day in meetings without the skills to make them effective. It also makes everyone hate meetings.

6 Helping teams, scrum masters and agile coaches make some of the key mindset-shifts needed for agile, but failing to engage middle management and executive leaders or provide them a path for their own leadership growth. 

7 Keys To Success of Delivery Culture Change

Today, this company is thriving! 

Teams are high-performing, and the delivery leads are equipped to handle challenges as they come. Newer team members have more senior delivery leads they can lean on to help mentor them through tough team dynamics. 

These are the reasons of how they got there:

  1. Laid down the foundations of agile – mindset, practices, key principles. They know why agile is important. They understand why you’re doing it. 
  2. Effective collaboration and facilitation skills are table stakes for agile transformation. Facilitation is not optional. Everyone in an organization needs to understand what makes meetings effective. We need to wage a war on ineffective meetings that waste time and just repeat the same conversation over and over again. 
  3. Used a competency model for agile coaching – scrum masters and agile coaches are being asked to lead teams in different ways. We are leaving behind the days of telling people what to do, putting everything in a project schedule and managing to the schedule. Effective meetings and collaboration are at the heart of agility. 
  4. Developed the skills of facilitation and coaching throughout the organization – at all levels. Patrick Lencioni in his book “The Advantage” said “there is no greater way to change the culture of an organization than by starting with how they meet.” 
  5. Leaders went first. Leadership must model and support this – not contradict it. Leaders hold power and privilege over those learning. The fastest way to frustrate someone who has just learned a set of skills that light them up is to not support it. Mid and senior level leaders in the organization need to develop their own leadership. 
  6. Setup systems that support and reinforce what people are learning. When the skills of facilitation and coaching are not supported by the organizational structures they will not stick. Training in large organizations we often hear, “When will my boss go through this training?” 
  7. Built the competence of facilitation and coaching. Facilitation and coaching are professional bodies of knowledge. To become certified in either one requires hours of learning and practice, which helped to embed these skills through competency development programs. 
    1. Competency cohort with certification 
    2. Learning circles
    3. Coaching circles
    4. Work with a professional coach
    5. Get mentoring and supervision from a professional facilitator

You Can Facilitate Delivery Culture Change Too!

Training programs CAN be one component of a successful intervention. If you want to change the culture, start by changing the way you meet. Management must get on board.  Agile as a culture starts at the top.  The leadership team must lead by example to create real cultural change. Companies who are willing to invest in this change can have real, lasting impact on employee morale, creativity, efficiency, future change and pivots. 

An agile culture leads to greater productivity in less time, tapping fully into the creative and intellectual capabilities of the entire team; making employees feel valued, heard and a part of something bigger than themselves. 

We Are The Team To Help Your Company!

We at TeamCatapult are a team of passionate, caring agile coaches who want to help your team transform, find your path and flourish. We want to help you get unstuck. We want to help you find true collaboration, creative process and team efficiency.  

We believe deeply in the principles of Agile. 

We are:

  • Adaptable
  • Able to bring clarity to complex situations
  • Experienced
  • Results-oriented
  • Growing in Capacity and Capability
  • Committed

We believe:

  • Conversations are fundamental
  • Performance is directly tied to leadership effectiveness
  • Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get
  • Challenges are addressed from a whole new system view

In research and real-world application.

How You Can Identify Your Own Defining Moment of Leadership

In January of this year TeamCatapult launched the first Podcast season of ‘Defining Moments of Leadership’. This podcast highlights inspiring stories and tangible lessons from leaders growing their leadership range, clarifying and refining their model for leadership and daring to define a moment rather than let a moment define them.

Season 1 consisted of fourteen episodes, each of them with a different perspective and a new defining moment of leadership shared by a leader. 

This article will give you a link to each episode of season 1 should you have missed one or more, and then I’d like to share with you how you can recognize your own defining moment of leadership within yourself, and what you can do to move forward! 

The Podcast Season 1

Here are the fourteen episodes of Defining Moments of Leadership.

Episode 1 | The Power of Curiosity as a Leader with Mark Franz

Episode 2 | Growing Human Centric COO Leaders with Ahmed Sidky

Episode 3 | The Power of Collaborative Conversations with Carrie Robinson

Episode 4 | Living Your Truth with Jeanie Duncan

Episode 5 | Being Authentic and Extraordinary with Mags Ng

Episode 6 | Co-Leadership with Sarah Hill and Tony Melville

Episode 7 | Cultivating Environments with Leslie Riley

Episode 8 | Perseverance and Persistence with Mike Seavers

Episode 9 | Leadership Systems with Christopher Curley

Episode 10 | The Courage of Speaking Truth to Power with Aaron Smith

Episode 11 | The Gift of Leading from Behind with Lyssa Adkins

Episode 12 | Becoming Self-Authored with Benjamin Carcich

Episode 13 | Knowing your Impact with Jardena London

Episode 14 | Breaking through Limiting Beliefs with Shannon Ewan

The Podcast Season 2

It’s in the works! 

I am so excited to share that season 2 is being recorded, is in the works and is going to be amazing. More leaders have stepped up to share their defining moments; I can not wait to share these leaders and their stories with you. Season 2 is slated to kick off on October 19, 2022. 

How can you be first to know when we launch the next season of the Defining Moments of Leadership podcast?

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to this podcast on your favorite platform

  • Apple Podcasts
  • Spotify
  • Amazon Podcasts
  • Google Podcasts
  • Stitcher
  • iHeart Radio Podcasts

How to Identify your Own Defining Moment of Leadership

We all have defining moments – those moments you vividly remember – that were likely a little, or a lot, difficult and that grew you as a person and as a leader. I call these ‘defining moments of leadership’.  

Answer this:

What defining moments or experiences of your own life have shaped your definition of leadership? What did that moment teach you about your own leadership? 

Meet Other Leaders | Join Our Leadership Community

I am writing another book. It’s called ‘Build your model for leading change’ and is available for pre-order in our store now. 

When I started my podcasting journey, and now that I am writing this second book, I am building an online community to support leaders like you as we each travel our own journey of leadership. 

Join me, my team and other leaders from around the world for meaningful conversations about leadership, defining moments and now, about building a model of leadership! 

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