The Lagging Team

Every team says fine. On a survey, in a one-on-one, in a stand-up, it looks the same whether the team is thriving or gave up months ago. This Sidebar takes one line from Tuesday's conversation with Katrina L. Coker (she/her), "We're fine, everything's fine," and follows it all the way in. Why "any problems?" measures what feels safe rather than what is wrong. Why nothing wrong and something's right are different sentences. Why a team that gets along can still be a team that isn't okay, and why fine gets worse every time a team is asked and hears nothing back. And three things to do Monday, none of which cost money or need permission: retire "any problems?", read the fours like twos, and close one loop out loud. The full conversation with Katrina L. Coker: https://thelaggingteam.com/podcast/0009-nobody-asked-the-team Talk about your team: https://thelaggingteam.com/start?episode=0010-fine-is-not-a-status&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=fine-is-not-a-status

Katrina L. Coker has walked into team after team where the job had already changed: a new tool nobody chose, a lift-and-shift that turned into a full rebuild, a timeline handed down without a conversation. The people got along. The work kept moving. What was missing was anyone asking the team what it actually thought. Katrina, known as The Scrum Mother, walks through what she does in her first weeks with a team: the questions she asks everyone, why she takes the answers to leadership before she takes them back to the team, and why she pushes back on calling a team "behind" at all. Along the way: voluntelling, what a defeated team looks like before anyone says so, how she got her name, and when helping a team turns into making it depend on you. For the leader who inherited a team mid-change, and for anyone on a team whose job description stopped matching the job a while ago. Added after the recording: Katrina is clear that tight, immovable deadlines are part of business. Her concern is expecting more velocity when the tools, the people and the processes all stay the same. Talk about your team: https://thelaggingteam.com/start?episode=0009-nobody-asked-the-team&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=nobody-asked-the-team Katrina L. Coker is "The Scrum Mother" — CEO of The Scrum Mother, LLC, and the author of ScrumMaster Application and Interview Process (2024) and Scrum Master First 90 Days: The Scrum Mother Approach (2026), available on Amazon in ebook, paperback and hardback. She holds an M.S. in Conflict Management and a B.B.A. in International Business from Kennesaw State University, and lives in Georgia with her two cats, Avery and Fiona. Find her at scrummother.com, on LinkedIn at /in/katrinalcoker-thescrummother, and as @TheScrumMother on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The Scrum Mother: https://scrummother.com/Katrina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinalcoker-thescrummother/

Slow and behind get used as if they mean the same thing. Slow is a fact about a team: how long it takes to turn an idea into something somebody uses. Behind is a comparison, the distance between where the team is and a date somebody picked, usually at the start, when everyone knew the least. This Sidebar takes one line from Tuesday's conversation with Chris Sims (they/them), somebody set them up to fail, and follows it all the way in. Why a recovery plan quietly produces months of evidence against the team. Why busy is visible and moving isn't. Why the move that got a leader here feels identical to the one now holding them back. And three things to do Monday, none of which cost money or need permission: trace the date to a name and a reason, put last month's work in two columns, and slow one thing down on purpose. The full conversation with Chris Sims: https://thelaggingteam.com/podcast/0007-the-harder-you-work-the-behinder-you-get Talk about your team: https://thelaggingteam.com/start?episode=0008-nobody-checked-who-set-the-date&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=nobody-checked-who-set-the-date

"Behind" is not a measurement. It is a judgment somebody made against a standard somebody set, and the first useful question is who set it. Chris Sims has spent a career watching teams answer that badly. The founders whose own strengths quietly became the company's bottleneck. The engineers whose hardest-won expertise stopped being the valuable thing. The leaders whose answer to falling behind was to stay later. They have a line for it, from a mentor who was trying to get them to see it about themself: the harder I work, the behinder I get. This is a conversation about why the obvious response makes it worse, what slowing down actually buys you, and which skills quietly changed places while everyone was watching the code get written faster. For anyone leading a team through a shift they did not pick. The Satir change model Chris walks through: https://tlt-clips.b-cdn.net/0007/Assets/Satir-2026-04.pdf Pendo's 2019 Feature Adoption Report: https://go.pendo.io/rs/185-LQW-370/images/2019%20Feature%20Adoption%20Report%20Digital.pdf Talk about your team: https://thelaggingteam.com/start?episode=0007-the-harder-you-work-the-behinder-you-get&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=the-harder-you-work-the-behinder-you-get Chris Sims (they/them) is an agile coach, a Certified Scrum Trainer, and the founder of Agile Learning Labs. AgileLearningLabs.com

Resilience isn't a trait; it's a resource, something a person spends and something that can run out. This Sidebar takes one line from Tuesday's conversation with Apriel Biggs (she/her), Chief Transformation Architect at Blagile, about the person who catches the first impact when change hits, and goes all the way into it. The teammate who went quiet is usually depleted, not disengaged, and the two look identical from the outside while needing opposite fixes. This one is for leaders who think someone on their team has checked out, and for the person on that team who has been catching it. If you want to talk about what this looks like on your team: https://thelaggingteam.com/start?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=somebody-takes-the-first-hit Apriel Biggs is @AprielBiggs on socials. Her full conversation is episode 0005, Left Behind Isn't Evenly Distributed: https://thelaggingteam.com/podcast/0005-left-behind-isnt-evenly-distributed?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=somebody-takes-the-first-hit