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

When a team falls behind, everybody doesn't fall the same distance. Somebody catches the first hit, and whether the rest of the team feels a stumble or a collapse depends on who that person is and what they do next. Apriel Biggs has led teams of 160+ through deployments three weeks from a date they'd already promised, and she makes the case for skip-level conversations, for leaders who go get their own data, and for a one-page exercise she calls the 2% Truth. This one is for leaders whose team is behind right now, and for the people on that team waiting for someone above them to notice.

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=left-behind-isnt-evenly-distributed

Apriel Biggs is @AprielBiggs on socials. Connect with her on LinkedIn and tell her you heard the episode.

A leader says the team hasn't shipped anything in months. The team has been quietly preventing disasters nobody asked them to name. Both are telling the truth.

This is a sidebar — I take one thing from Tuesday's conversation and go all the way into it.

This week: the capability audit. The moment a team falls behind, the meeting becomes an audit of whether the team is good enough. Skills matrices. Do we have the right people. Should we bring somebody in. And while everybody argues about that, the actual gap walks straight past the room.

Here's the tell, and it's why this is worth twenty minutes: a capability gap and a clarity gap produce the exact same status report. Red. Behind. Slipping. Identical on the page. Opposite fixes.

A capability problem is they can't. A clarity problem is nobody said.

I also correct something. I called Tuesday's episode "Stop Blaming the Team," and I was wrong about it — that conversation defends leaders, and I put a title on it that wagged a finger before anyone pressed play. It's called The Theory Is Usually Wrong now. That's Brandon's line.

Three things you can do Monday: ask three people what the goal is and count the pauses · write down what your team has actually delivered, including the things that only prevented something · say it out loud, together, until somebody can say it back to you.

Before Tuesday, one job: ask three people on your team what the goal is and who it's for. Separately. Then count the pauses.

If you want to talk about what this looks like on your team:

https://thelaggingteam.com/start?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=video-description&utm_campaign=they-delivered-nobody-saw-it

More at https://thelaggingteam.com?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=video-description&utm_campaign=they-delivered-nobody-saw-it

He drove four hours to get to work. He hadn't been to a training in seven years. And that same year, the company he worked for was named one of the best places in America to work — partly because almost nobody ever left.

Both of those things were true at the same time. Only one of them was on a plaque in the lobby.

This is the first episode of The Lagging Team, and it's the story that gave the show its name. A man who wasn't complacent, wasn't checked out, and wasn't a bad employee — he was a person who couldn't leave, in a market with no door in it. Every tool I had assumed he was the variable. He wasn't. His position was.

Then the part that should worry you: right now there are more than seven million open jobs in this country, and people are leaving at almost exactly the rate they left when there was nowhere to go. The door is open and nobody's walking through it.

In 2010, a frozen team looked frozen. Today it looks like a team that chose you.

One question to take with you this week: who on your team can't leave? Not who won't. Who can't.

If you want to talk about what this looks like on your team:

https://thelaggingteam.com/start?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=video-description&utm_campaign=falling-behind-is-a-position

More at https://thelaggingteam.com?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=video-description&utm_campaign=falling-behind-is-a-position

Turnover is down. Nobody's quitting. Every leadership team in the country is reading that as good news.

This is a sidebar — the Thursday format, dropping early for launch week. Sidebars take one thing and go all the way into it.

Today: I take something back. Last episode I said nothing worked. That's wrong, and I want to be precise about why — because what I actually meant was that nothing I was trained to do worked. That's a different sentence, and the difference is the whole show.

Then the part that matters for your team. We use two words like they mean the same thing and they don't: stayed and chose. Stayed is a fact about the exits. Chose is a fact about the work. Every retention number you have only knows about the first one.

You didn't win the retention war. It was called off.

Also in this one: why trapped and frozen aren't the same problem, why stable and stuck look identical on a headcount report, and the one question to ask that you don't already know the answer to.

Before the next episode, one job: ask one person on your team what would make them turn down an offer. Then notice whether you got an answer or a pause.

If you want to talk about what this looks like on your team:

https://thelaggingteam.com/start?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=video-description&utm_campaign=staying-isnt-choosing

More at https://thelaggingteam.com?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=video-description&utm_campaign=staying-isnt-choosing

When a team falls behind, the leader almost always has a theory about why.

I asked Brandon Raines how often that theory turns out to be wrong. He didn't hesitate: "It's wrong most of the time."

Brandon has spent nearly three decades walking into rooms with frustrated leaders and teams that have stopped talking to each other. In this conversation he describes a gap so wide he compared himself to a Martian — looking down on a planet, seeing something almost familiar, and realizing the people living in it saw a completely different reality. The leader thought he wasn't getting everything out of the team. The team had been quietly shipping maintenance work that kept a license from expiring and a system from going down — work nobody ever heard about.

Nobody was lying. The information just never crossed the room.

We get into why blaming the person is the easy move ("I'm going to give you an answer that always makes me sad"), what the misdiagnosis actually costs — Brandon's line is that you can't put a price on reduced morale — and how he tells a clarity problem from a capability problem when they look identical from the outside.

Also: reaction versus response, why clear is kind, what the biggest tell really is, and what to do when the leader is the gap.

Brandon closes with three questions to ask yourself first:

1. Have I articulated to the team what the goals are and what success looks like?

2. Have I positioned the team in a successful way?

3. Are the skill sets really, truly there for the team to succeed at the goals I just set?

"And if the answers to those things are no, you have your starter list for your homework to do."

About Brandon Raines

Brandon is a professional certified coach and the founder of Shokunin Advisors, where he works with leaders and teams navigating change.

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=the-theory-is-usually-wrong

More at https://thelaggingteam.com?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=the-theory-is-usually-wrong