When we’re afraid to have difficult conversations, we hold ourselves back and create more frustration and work in the long run, says Marsha Acker, founder and CEO of Team Catapult. “We spend a lot of time trying to avoid conflict and the things that make us feel uncomfortable. And yet in our attempts to avoid all that, I think we create a lot of extra work for ourselves,” Marsha adds.

In today’s episode of Product Momentum, Paul and Marsha go deep on the topic of communication and leadership, exploring the structure of our communication and the role it plays in effecting personal and organizational change. Marsha is a coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and podcaster whose work is focused on communication in leadership.

“Communication sits at the core of our ability to lead,” Marsha says. We don’t all see the world in the same way, leading to gaps in understanding, she adds.

“What I’m articulating here is how I believe change happens,” Marsha explains. “When we communicate with one another, the words that we say, it’s like putting a train on a track. [That communication] moves us forward, propels us back, or just kind of keeps us stuck in a place. So I think it’s about how we communicate with one another and having a language to make sense of it that makes the difference.”

Leadership range and communicative competence are cornerstone concepts that Marsha uses to analyze the way successful leadership is measured. There’s a very specific way she helps people self-assess not only their ability to bring a variety of different communications into a conversation, but also to examine the breadth of their leadership style.

Listen to hear more from Marsha Acker in today’s episode of Product Momentum.

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Paul [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to Product Momentum, where we hope to entertain, educate, and celebrate the amazing product people who are helping to shape our community’s way ahead. My name is Paul Gebel and I’m the Director of Product Innovation at ITX. Along with my co-host, Sean Flaherty, and our amazing production team and occasional guest host, we record and release a conversation a the product thought leader, writer, speaker, or maker who has something to share with the community every two weeks.

Paul [00:00:43] Hey, Marsha, how are you doing today?

Marsha [00:00:44] I’m doing great, Paul. Thank you.

Paul [00:00:46] I’m really excited to share some of the ideas that we’ve been preparing. A lot of these insights that you’ve put together, I think can really help organizations get unstuck. What are you most excited about sharing with our audience today?

Marsha [00:00:58] I think it comes simply down to how communication sits at the core of our ability to lead, and that’s what I’m excited about talking about.

Paul [00:01:05] Me too. Can’t wait. Let’s get after it.

Paul [00:01:10] Well hello and welcome to this show. Today we are really excited to be joined by Marsha Acker. Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a highly respected leadership development firm that equips leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioral change. She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence, and think together; accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change.

Paul [00:01:32] TeamCatapult partners with midsize startups and global Fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, health care, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Clients have included Microsoft, Ride Games, Epic Games, Capital One, Blizzard Entertainment, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, and Chef. Marsha is an executive leadership coach, team author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. And she’s the author of Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyze clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others. Marsha, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Marsha [00:02:11] Thank you, Paul. I’m excited to be here because we’ve had some initial, very brief initial conversations and I’ve gotten a lot of energy from them. So thank you for having me.

Paul [00:02:20] I’ve been looking forward to this one. So just to jump right in, I’ll say I read your book, although the book isn’t one that you just sit down and read.

Marsha [00:02:27] No.

Paul [00:02:28] I highly recommend it for that reason. If you hear recommendations of business books and you just get tired thinking about that. This is not that. It’s a very interactive book and I’d love to talk just for a couple of seconds about what to expect if you do happen to pick that up for the first time. I found tremendous value in just the challenging questions that you pose to leaders as they’re thinking about things. And maybe we can unpack some of that to get started. What are some common barriers that leaders face in organizations? Maybe barriers to change, especially as product managers are looking at the world today?

Marsha [00:02:57] Yeah.

Paul [00:02:57] What are some things that teams and leaders are looking at in organizations that you encounter?

Marsha [00:03:02] Well, do you know something that’s interesting? So this little factoid I figured out a couple of weeks ago, that if you go to an online bookstore and you search in the bookstore the term change, that it will return over 70,000 book titles with the word change in them. So I think that change is something that clearly we’re curious about. And so yes, like you [said], the book is an interactive workbook, but barriers to change, I think that it’s a really complex topic, but there’s two things that really come up for me when I think about barriers. One is I’m not sure that we ever really step back as leaders, I know I certainly didn’t for a while, and think about, what is it that we’re actually trying to change.

Marsha [00:03:48] So I think we can talk about, “Yeah, I have a software background, so I could say I want to develop, you know, the software product that’s going to change your life. I want that to change or I want things to get more effective in the way we work, or I want to install a new process and I want us to become more productive.” So I think we put big sentences out there and we put big goals and objectives, but I’m not sure that we ever stop to look at exactly what it is that we’re trying to change, and then more importantly, how change happens in that thing.

Marsha [00:04:21] So many times I listen to leaders really actually wanting something to change about their culture or about the way people work together. And then the artifacts are, you know, we’ll create new processes or we’ll put new ceremonies in place or, you know, as a product manager, will articulate the new vision that we want everybody to get on board with. But I think that we don’t think about exactly what we want to change and how change happens.

Marsha [00:04:48] And I think the second part of that is that we tend to see the world through our own lens and that we really kind of believe everybody else. We make an assumption, we might not believe it, but we definitely make an assumption that others see the world just as we do. And that leads to, I think, some of the biggest communication gaps and it’s challenging to work with one another and it’s challenging to navigate them. And so when those things become a challenge, I think the thing that we go to is, “Just do it because I said so,” or, “Do the thing that I said we need it to do because we need to get it done.” And so we sort of start to default to our version of change because, “It’s my role,” or, “I get to say so,” or, “I just need you to do it, so just do the thing I said to do.”

Paul [00:05:31] Yeah. Another anti-pattern that I find crops up from time to time is that “We wrote it down,” or, “There’s a policy so just go read it.”.

Marsha [00:05:39] Yeah.

Paul [00:05:39] And a lot of these stuck patterns, or anti-patterns, become sea anchors for organizations because they tend to become, “Well, there’s a file on SharePoint or there’s a Miro board where we brainstormed it, so everybody must already know everything that we talked about in the room that one time.” And, you know, this is one anti-pattern among many. What are some other things that you can start to look at to maybe predict the outcomes for good or for maybe more challenging scenarios that teams can keep an eye out for?

Marsha [00:06:08] So for me, the way I go about doing that is we use a technology, if you call it, but it’s a way of looking at the structure of our communications because I believe if we can look at the structure, the structure is where we can see the nuance in our conversation that we were communicating with one another and how that actually is moving us forward or holding us back. So it’s a technology of, you know, how to make sense of conversations. But, you know, what I’m articulating for you is really actually how I believe change happens. I think that how we communicate with one another, the words that we say, it’s like putting a train on, you know, a track. It either moves us forward or it propels us backwards or it just kind of keeps us stuck in a place. So I think it’s about looking at how we communicate with one another and having a language to make sense of it.

Paul [00:07:02] Yeah, and a lot of this is couched within the terms of organizational change, but there’s also people are always changing within their own individual selves, and that’s how we show up to work. We can’t leave our personal development at home when we come to show up. And I’m wondering, for product managers leading product teams today, there’s a lot of worry: AI, machine learning, you know, civil and governmental changes. Economics certainly is on everybody’s minds and this is all affecting how we show up and I’m wondering, how can we develop leaders within these organizations to develop a model for personal change that has integrity? That they believe they can show up authentically, they can think together, and you mentioned the train tracks, how can we have this group of individuals that is feeling their feelings in the way that they feel them, but they need to come together to increase their collective intelligence and they need to move that train forward. What are some of the things that you help people do to facilitate that sustainable change?

Marsha [00:08:01] You know, so there’s a couple of things that come up for me as you say that. One is, when we think about leading change, one of the questions that I ask leaders to think about is, you know, what is it that we’re trying to change? What is the thing that we’re trying to change? But then also, if we’re trying to do that in an organization, then are we aligned on what that change is going to look like? So I think there’s a great deal of emphasis to be put on the alignment, not agreement, but being aligned around, you know, where we’re headed and what that looks like and where we’re trying to bring about change.

Marsha [00:08:38] And then I think the second part of that is… So we do a lot of work with leadership teams. Some leadership teams would tell you, like, they’ve reached a place where they’ve noticed there’s challenges in their organization and they’re not quite sure. They’ve tried all the things and they’re still not having the impact they want to have as a leadership team and so they’re trying to sort that out. I think there’s another kind of leadership team that we end up working with who actually would probably describe themselves as pretty high-performing, but they’re wanting to work on coming together as a collective. And so in either of those cases, we will often start with sort of giving them a language for naming both when things are going well, but also when conflict emerges.

Marsha [00:09:18] And I think conflict is this really fascinating thing because there’s big conflict, like flip-the-table kinds of moments where you’re super triggered and you are so angry that you want to just flip the table up and storm them out of the room. Or you just go super silent and you withdraw and disconnect and you might be physically in the room, but you have mentally left 25 minutes ago and couldn’t really repeat anything that’s been said the last 25 minutes. So I think there’s two different ends of like really high conflict. I think there are so many places on a day-to-day basis in a leadership team where you might say something to me and my internal thinking is, “I don’t know that I agree with that.” But I make a choice in that moment to either sit on it and file it away as, “Eh, it’s fine, you know, we’re 10 minutes for the meeting, I think if I say this, it’s really going to disrupt something, so I’ll just hold on to it.” Or, “I think it’s not my role to say that to you right now, so maybe I’ll save it for a one-on-one.” Or, “I see this really differently and the last time I voiced it it didn’t go so well for me.”

Marsha [00:10:28] So, you know, there can be lots of reasons, but I think there are places in our conversation where those things happen. And if they happen over and over again, it’s equivalent to sort of sweeping things under the rug until the rug so big we can’t open the door and get in that room. And then it feels really difficult to move things along. So you asked about how we work with leadership teams. I think in any of those continuums, we’re all about helping the leadership team have the conversation that they need to have. And a lot of times it’s about slowing it down enough so that they can name those things. So it is about helping them build the muscle of like, “Okay, that just happened and it’s not sitting well with me, so can I voice it and say it?” Because when we’re able to collectively be able to do that, I think it produces two things. I think it is one of the greatest ways to grow as an individual and a collective team is to get that kind of real conversation going in the moment. I’ll speak for myself, that happens internally, even in our team, and it is where I have noticed the most growth for me professionally. I can go away and get individual coaching all I want, but getting feedback real-time like that is tremendous. And I think the other thing that it unlocks is the ability to actually bring people along through change.

Paul [00:11:51] I think the humility and authenticity of that answer is really striking. Those tools for having conversations aren’t just the grease on the skids, that is the organization. People tend to shorthand this as culture, but I feel like that doesn’t really do it. Service is a toolset. It’s a skill set. It’s more than just, “This is how things are.” Culture tends to be more of a passive term in the way that people will use it, not to say it’s a right or wrong application of the word, but, you know, I think the way that you describe it as an active tool, leaning into these conversations is a really helpful perspective.

Paul [00:12:24] I want to make sure that we have enough time to unpack two key cornerstones of the way that you analyze the way successful leadership is measured and the way that you describe those axes is across leadership range and communicative competence.

Marsha [00:12:36] Yeah.

Paul [00:12:37] These words are, you know, at the same time very interesting and also intimidating.

Marsha [00:12:42] That’s a great way to say it.

Paul [00:12:44] So what do you look for when you look for those kinds of things in teams?

Marsha [00:12:48] That communicative competence word, just, it tangles my tongue every time. I think for communicative competence, you know, there is a very specific way we help people both individually and collectively self-assess where they are in terms of their ability to bring a variety of different communications, speech acts, into a conversation. But, you know, like with many things, we’re all going to have places, depending on, you know, which hat I’m wearing and which team I’m in, whether it’s my team or working with another team, you know, I can be really good at putting things forward and making moves. But I also need to be able to inquire. So I can advocate, but I also need to be able to inquire into what other people say. So that’s part of that communicative competence. And when a team is able to onboard that, that’s when the magic happens. And I have been in the room, I’ve had the humble opportunity, and it’s so striking to me every time those things get unlocked inside of a leadership team, like the conversation changes, the energy changes, and new things, new thinking gets unlocked and it’s really cool to watch it happen.

Marsha [00:13:55] So that’s like, do people have the awareness but then also the skills to improve their communication? I think we tend to, particularly in the tech space, we tend to this, you know, “it’s a soft skills sort of thing.” Communication isn’t maybe something that you spend time working on. I think the other piece is, “Do I have range in my leadership?” Meaning, “Can I step forward and be the one that is bringing ideas or bringing content or, you know, setting direction? And can I also step back? Can I create space for others? Can I lead from behind? Can I support others in creating ideas that I will get behind and follow or support them going on?” So I think it’s both about the minute skill of communication, but also, “Where am I in what I believe leadership to be?”

Paul [00:14:53] Yeah, I think that that is a very interesting idea. It’s very hard to see in real-time because as you’re describing it, I can see myself sitting in meetings sometimes being the idea person and sometimes being the meeting passenger, and it’s difficult to put a finger on how deliberately I’ve thought about showing up to those meetings beforeforehand. I don’t think I’ve often taken the time to say, “I’m going to this meeting and this is going to be my role beforehand.” It kind of happens. And I think that for leaders, especially for product managers… So just to bring this back down to earth for a second, you know, a product manager might be leading a user story refinement. They might be trying to get a release out the door on time. There’s all sorts of tactical crunch that goes on, especially in the space that many of your clients live in. So I’m wondering, what does that look like for a leader to be deliberate about how they show up with having range and making proactive decisions about that range feel like two different things. How do you get people to show up the way that they mean to show up?

Marsha [00:15:56] I think one of the easiest and fastest ways because I think many of us have exercised leading from the front version. Like, I know what that looks like. It’s been modeled for me many, many times, many years. I think what’s modeled less for us is what leading from behind looks like. And I think one of the easiest and fastest ways into that is to think about your role in facilitating a meeting. So product managers, when you’re getting ready to step into a room, I think one of the first questions becomes, “What do we want to achieve with the time that we’re going to spend together?” “Given that objective, what do I believe is the most important for the role, for these people who have been invited to play?” Right, so am I looking for them to make recommendations that I’m going to be the final decider on? Or am I just really looking to put forward my ideas and here’s some risk and then we’re going to move forward?

Marsha [00:16:51] So I think the lack of clarity sometimes about what’s the role you’re going to play and what you’re expecting from others is where we get so tripped up. So then the task becomes, given the outcome that I want to have and given the role that I want others to play, I think the question is to ask, “How do I want to show up in that? Do I want to create a space and an environment that invites all voices?” And I really focus on the process of helping people think through the ideas with clarity around how decisions are going to be made at the end, whether we’re going to do it collectively, or whether I’m going to be the one to make the decision. And then I think you open up that meeting, and if you really think about being a facilitator of process and very clear about the outcome, but your role is actually to lead from behind and create a space for other voices, I think that’s a really different role and it’s a really different way to show up and there’s a lot of intentionality behind it. But I think when I talk about developing your range, that’s one way into it.

Paul [00:17:51] Have you ever been as on the nose as naming those roles in a meeting? Have you ever said, “You are the space maker, you are the content creator, you’re the whiteboard scribe?” Do you feel like that’s a worthwhile approach adopting when teams get stuck?

Marsha [00:18:06] I do. I think because it clears up what you’re expecting of me in this meeting and then that allows me then as a participant in those meetings, you could run a simulation and people get invested and passionate about it. So when it is something that we’re building together, people get invested in it and it takes emotional and social capital for me to really come to that meeting and offer my ideas. And if I don’t feel like I’ve been heard or I’m clear about how the decision is going to be made, I think that’s where, you know, I take some risk. I offer that up in the meeting. Maybe I push back a little bit or I offer or challenge ideas and then it gets walked over or dismissed or some decision gets decided in what feels like a black box to me as a participant. Then I show up to the next meeting and I’m less participatory. I’m gonna hold back and I’m just going to eventually get to the place of like, “Well, you know, you clearly have the idea, so just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

Paul [00:19:06] I have so many more questions that I want to ask. I’m going to choose one that’s a bit more tactical before I close out with a couple of quick ones at the end. And there was one comment that you made when we were chatting before the show about the aspect of 360 feedback for leadership development and you had a pretty strong response to that tactic specifically. And since it tends to be a fairly popular and I think widely adopted, most people would consider it a fairly benign corporate feedback loop. You had some pretty, pretty strong considerations about it. And I’m just wondering, as people are hearing this and thinking about, you know, their one-to-ones, directs, team supporters, what are some of the things that you’ve observed in those kinds of tools that may not be as helpful as people tend to think, maybe counterintuitively so?

Marsha [00:19:52] Because I place such an emphasis on our ability to engage in a collective conversation, and actually when we’re working with teams, we work with the principle of bringing the conversation in the room. So there will be a part that, you know, if we were working on a product together, there’s going to be interactions and things that I’m doing that likely tick you off some days, vice versa. It’s just the nature of humans and working together. I think 360s certainly have a place. But my experience in receiving them long ago and for sure doing them with executives and leadership teams is that they’re sort of like the release valve on a pressure cooker. It doesn’t actually turn the heat down in the situation or make our working relationship all that much better because I go off and get an individual 360 and you go off and get an individual 360 and somewhere in there, I’m going to put a comment that says, “Paul really needs to, you know, do this a little bit better and this could be a lot.” You know, it’s really off-putting.

Marsha [00:20:52] And so then you’re left to go process that with a coach. And it’s not that you won’t learn something from that. And I think sometimes people do need that kind of feedback. But what I think is so heartbreaking about that process is that you and I don’t get a chance to have the conversation together and quite frankly clear up the misunderstandings and assumptions that are sitting behind that feedback that we just gave to one another that actually might not be the real issue anyways. And so I’m such a fan and I’m a huge advocate for leadership teams and teams in general need to do the work to build this idea of having the conversation. Can we bring the real conversation in the room? Can we do it in the moment, real-time where you say something, and then I say, “Hey, hold on, Paul, I’m really confused by that. I thought you meant this. Can I just check with you?” And then you say, “Well, that’s not what I intended at all.” And now we didn’t have to hire somebody, get a 360, sweep it under the rug for six months. Like, I just want that for all of us.

Paul [00:22:04] You mean I have to talk to other people about my feelings?

Marsha [00:22:06] Yeah. Yeah.

Paul [00:22:07] In all seriousness, I think those kinds of ideas really resonate because there is an aspect of the way that businesses are designed, it is to minimize conflict, it is to maximize productivity. And when we talk about these things, I’ve heard it shorthanded lately as hard conversations. I’m making air quotes. I’m really not a fan of that phrase because these are not hard conversations if you develop the muscle memory around having them. It’s only hard when you’re an organization that’s used to non-confrontation and used to sweeping it under the rug, as you say. So I really appreciate you sharing that. You know, it is a really helpful reminder that a lot of the tools that we’ve put in place aren’t necessarily for the benefit of the people. They might be for the benefit of the organization. And if we’re going to help grow people, we have to work on those skills first.

Marsha [00:22:53] Paul, I think you’ve really hit on something, which is I do think we spend a lot of time trying to avoid the quote-unquote conflict or things that feel uncomfortable or hard. And yet I think in all of our avoiding all of that, I think we create a lot of extra work for ourselves. I think we create extra meetings. You know, whenever I hear an organization bemoan or belabor, you know, they’ve got tons of meetings or they’re inefficient, I’m like, “I don’t know that it’s the meetings, folks.” I do think it’s the way we engage when we come to a meeting. And I think there are structures that prevent us both culturally, individually, like I think there are structures that prevent us from actually having the real conversation that we wouldn’t need to have the six other meetings after the meeting.

Paul [00:23:35] Yeah, I really appreciate that. It’s really hitting. I have two last quick questions for you that we ask all our guests as we close out our episodes, the first of which being, what is your definition of innovation?

Marsha [00:23:47] Well, no surprise. I think innovation comes through conversation. And I think innovation is anything that’s, you know, breaking us out of the status quo of, you know, somewhere where we get stuck. And I think that what’s reflected in our human systems is also reflected in the work that we’re able to do. So I really hold that there is a strong connection between our ability to be tapped in collectively to, you know, the conversation that we can riff and experiment and try new things. And so I think that’s one of the sources of innovation.

Paul [00:24:21] Love it. Last question. I will recommend your book for you so you don’t have to. Build Your Model for Leading Change should absolutely be on every product manager’s desk. It’s really helped me think through some things, but I’m curious, what’s on your desk? What blogs or YouTube channels or books have you read that you think would really help a product manager out to crack open?

Marsha [00:24:39] Hmm. I am a huge fan of Tricia Broderick and she just published a book with Diana Larsen called Lead Without Blame and I love the title. We’re highly aligned in the thinking about leadership space, and I love just the simple title of really catching ourselves when we go to blame, making it about someone else and how difficult they are or how challenging they are, and not particularly looking at the part that we might play in that.

Paul [00:25:08] Marsha, thank you so much for taking the time. I feel like I could talk another hour and not exhaust this topic. So I think this was a really great peek inside how you’re really helping organizations and taking a few moments out of your day to share it with our audience is really been super helpful for me, and I know it will for others, too.

Marsha [00:25:26] Awesome. Thanks, Paul.

Paul [00:25:30] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get, so please leave a comment or a rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch, and inspire the world, just like you’re doing. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next episode.