Ep. 149: Transforming Leadership for Remote and Hybrid Teams with Kate Megaw

In this episode of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock are joined by special guest Kate Megaw to explore the evolving landscape of leadership in the age of remote and hybrid work. The trio delves into the challenges leaders face in transitioning from traditional management styles to more adaptive, trust-based approaches. They discuss the importance of empathy, outcome-focused leadership, and the need for organizations to invest in developing leadership skills at all levels. The conversation touches on the complexities of maintaining team engagement, the value of in-person interactions, and strategies for effective remote leadership.

This week´s takeaways:

• Leaders must shift from managing work to leading people, focusing on coaching and building trust rather than micromanaging tasks, especially in remote and hybrid environments.
• Effective leadership, particularly in remote settings, requires increased emphasis on empathy, regular check-ins, and building relationships with team members beyond work-related discussions.
• Companies need to invest more in leadership training and development, recognizing that leadership is a skill set that requires ongoing support and education, not just a title or promotion.

Don't miss this episode! Tune in now to discover how leaders can adapt and thrive in the modern work environment. Listen to it today!

Chapters

• 0:04 Leadership Shifts in Remote Teams
• 13:30 Leadership Transition to Remote Teams
• 18:25 Leadership Challenges in Remote Work
• 30:34 Closing Remarks on Agile Leadership

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale.

Dave: 0:13

Hello and welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile. I'm your host, Dave Sharrock. I've got Pete Maddison here as well, your co-host and partner in crime for myself, and a great friend of mine, Kate MGaw from ARCLight. Kate and I know one another from the world of Scrum Alliance. We are both certified Scrum trainers, amongst many other designations, and spend a lot of time well discussing what works and what doesn't in the world of Scrum training. Amongst other things, Peter, over to you.

Peter: 0:42

Well, I think now we're going to ask Kate to give us an introduction, because I think that's a good way to start these things. So, kate, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Kate: 0:51

Well, thank you, good to reconnect with you, dave, and good to meet you, Peter. My name is Kate Megaw. I am based on the West Coast in Los Angeles, as Dave says, coach and trainer with Arclight Agile and, despite the accent, not originally from LA, via Scotland, via Northern Ireland and via Alabama to get here. So I'm excited to join the podcast with you both today.

Peter: 1:18

I think it's amazing how much of your accent you've kept, given that journey.

Kate: 1:21

Yes, yes, I mean it's interesting. I've gone from the y'all to all of y'all and then back to the West Coast again. So I'm sort of yeah, it's a mishmash, but people listen. It's quite good, because people do actually listen.

Peter: 1:34

Yes, yes, there is that. There's some advantages for sure. So what are we talking about today?

Kate: 1:41

Let's talk about the mindset shifts. So what shifts have our leaders have to make to lead different types of teams? So we've gone from the in-person teams to the remote teams and I know some of them are back into hybrid teams and some are back into the office. But what are some of the things we've had to do, particularly around leading hybrid and remote teams? How has leadership changed over the past four years?

Dave: 2:10

I was wondering, Kate, before we dive into how it's changed, what was the baseline? Or what is the baseline? Maybe we're starting from pre-hybrid remote teams? How would we define leadership prior to the shift that we saw a few years ago?

Kate: 2:26

I don't think it was great even back then. It's the truth we told. I think we I mean we've been suffering with, I do, a lot of stuff around the Gallup numbers. I don't know if Gallup is, is something that you use, but the engagement numbers for Gallup for the for the first time in 11, the last 11 sets of reports they finally get the engagement numbers have gone up, but we're still only at 32% of our team members are engaged. So that was the problem even back before COVID. So I don't think we're looking. I mean that's an interesting question, so we're not looking for what do we need to do differently in COVID? We're looking really, what do we need to do differently as leaders?

Dave: 3:15

because we weren't particularly good at it before either, or at least you know, whatever we were doing before was not creating the engagement we maybe were hoping it was and uh, it's.

Dave: 3:26

It's a great observation, I.

Dave: 3:28

I think when, when we're doing training, work around leadership, we often use the work of bill joiner and leadership agility and um. One of the sort of key things that I take away from that which is really helps understand the sort of shift that's needed, is Bill Joyner's work talks about an expert leader being somebody who is skilled at the job at hand and becomes the manager of people doing those skills. And it's all of us go through that in our leadership journey. And the interesting thing about expert leaders is they're very much about you know. They're brilliant at getting the work done. They become that leader manager, if you like of people or team that's doing that. But they're very, very focused on the tasks and getting results.

Dave: 4:12

And the next level of leadership that Bill Joyner describes is the achiever leader, which those of us coming from an agile background would recognize as a coaching leadership style much more about coaching the individual and the teams to be a better version of themselves, also a little bit more goal oriented. So it's more about outcomes than the work that they're doing. And that shift feels to me like the critical piece which is, you know, expert leaders sort of telling people what to do very much about assigning work, about tracking work versus an achiever kind of leader, where it's much more about coaching and outcome based.

Kate: 4:47

Yeah, and I think that's something that we've seen, no matter what industry.

Kate: 4:52

I mean, I was just saying to Peter, I'm traditionally from a computer training background and I remember we had someone who, multiple times, somebody who's a great salesperson and business development, and now we make them a manager but we don't give them any training, we don't tell them, we show them how to fill in a timesheet and approve vacation, but they get very stuck in managing the work rather than actually leading the people. And again, we do a lot of work around the leadership agility as well and we see time and time again, leaders who are technical leaders struggling to make it from that expert to the achiever level of leadership, because it's not their, it's not their go to, their go to is here's a problem, this is how you need to fix it, instead of here's a problem. Okay, team, I'm going to step back. What do you want to do to fix it? So yeah, I mean, I think it's a struggle we've had for many, many years and I still don't think we're. I still don't think we're doing a good job as leaders.

Peter: 6:05

It's interesting when I listen to some of these pieces because it made me think back due to the language you used about um, the. In terms of organizational design, some organizations are structured somewhat differently in that and um, one of the interesting ones is apple. So so apple leaders are promoted or brought up based on being the best at what they do. So and specifically, for example, there's a camera expert, so he will lead the camera division and they are the best at knowing how a camera works and exactly what the technical details of that camera are. They are the experts in that and they're supposed to know all the details of their organization, like three layers down, and really truly understand it.

Peter: 6:41

From a leadership executive perspective, as Apple grew over the last decade into a sort of multi-billion trillion-dollar company, they had to expand that model a little.

Peter: 6:51

It was no longer possible to have these leaders to have a small enough leadership team at the top to have this amount of expertise across so many areas. You need more leaders and that just isn't manageable. But we could talk about how NVIDIA does it, because they have another model, but from an Apple's perspective. So they introduced this concept of discretionary leadership and so for the areas where they're not the direct expert in that particular space. They also oversee other areas where they act in a much more leadership by intent type model, where it's much more of a. The people bring forth their ideas and the person helps, coach and guide and lead them in that aspect, while they still maintain their expertise in whatever specialization or place where they really truly are the expert at that. So they are the person who knows most about that particular topic. And this might work well where it is a very technical field, where somebody is going to be very good at a particular thing. So it's interesting when you start to look at different models, right?

Kate: 7:49

Yes.

Dave: 7:49

Yeah, what you're describing or what I'm hearing when you describe that, peter is this mixture of there's leadership skills about how to get the best out of the team that you're working with, whoever it is that works under you, if you're a hierarchical manager in an organization, and then there is the technical skills of knowing when a job is being done really well and what needs to be done in terms of problem solving and things like this.

Dave: 8:14

And I think that this distinction is really important because it really affects remote work and hybrid work really really strongly.

Dave: 8:21

That expert leadership that we were referencing from Bill Joyner's work in leadership agility is not saying you don't need to be technically excellent. It's saying you don't need to tell everybody that you're technically excellent and you don't need to second guess everything that your team is doing and say no, no, no, you're not as good as you think you are. This is what you need to be doing. And that one I really really relate to, because I can remember very early on in my leadership journey exactly that headache of almost not feeling that you could give anything away to the team, because you always feel like, in order to do it, I'm the best person to do it, because that's my job, and so you can't let go, whereas I think what you're describing at Apple is it's all about the letting go, and the question is are you that technical kind of genius, kind of expert up there, or is that discretionary leadership where maybe there's different skills that you bring to the table above and beyond technology?

Peter: 9:17

I think there's a bit of both in the leaders are supposed to be that expert. It's like they're supposed to have a very strong, well-grounded view of exactly how something should be done. To your point. There they are the expert. They know how these things should be put together. But be open-minded to the idea that when people bring forth other ideas, they're collaborative, they're thinking about how else might. They may not always be right, willing to think about what some of those pieces may come to. That, and it's for the areas where they're not the expert as well, to apply that drug and say, hey, I really am not the expert in that area. I need you to help guide me.

Kate: 9:52

And I think what we're talking about is the transition to leader. As a coach, so as an expert, I'm telling people what to do, and the longer lasting solution is, as a leader, I'm there to coach you and help you get to the answer. I mean, what we what? What I see often is someone who's okay, so you're now a leader, but you don't know. So I was working with a client recently and we now have new managers who are responsible for who've traditionally been development managers and now they're accountable for the QA team and the analysts, they're accountable for the entire scrum teams, and they're saying well, I don't know anything about QA and I'm saying well, your role as a leader, you need to understand what they're doing, but you don't need to be an expert in it. Your role is to be able to coach the team and grow the team without telling them what to do, and I think that's one of the huge mindset shifts that people don't necessarily make, which is, I can lead people without knowing every single thing they do as part of their job.

Dave: 11:03

And in fact, without being, you know, an expert, you know trained, with eight, 10 years of experience in that space.

Kate: 11:09

Yeah.

Dave: 11:10

And it isn't to say that you don't need to. You know there's this whole thing of technology leaders coming in from outside of technology, and my mindset there is you need to have some sort of an understanding of technology to be able to relate to the complexity and the difficulties and the things that go wrong and the things that kind of hint at things going wrong and everything else however you don't necessarily. I mean.

Kate: 11:31

It's very difficult to be current in the technology space when it's moving as fast as it is yeah, and and I was I was mentioning earlier on I was talking to Peter about I'm not from a technical background. I'm from a learning and training and operations background, but I, the majority of my life, have worked with technical teams. But that's been okay, as you said, dave, because I've, because I understand what happens when you get a bug into production and things like that. But I think it's also been a benefit because I haven't got as sucked into the doing because I can't do it. So I've been able to concentrate more on growing the team and the team dynamics and the psychological safety and building trust in the teams, because I tend not to get pulled back into the doing.

Peter: 12:22

Yeah, leaders who are direct experts, and especially the ones that are newly rolled up and rolled, it's very, very hard often for them not to like dive back into it.

Kate: 12:32

Yeah.

Peter: 12:32

And one common conversation I have quite a lot with um senior leaders is around how much, how much time should they be looking for people who are in some of those middle management roles to be doing that mixture of hands-on keyboard versus leading, because there's a, there's a this kind of need to understand how do these things work so that you can have that level of conversation with people. Yeah and uh, so it's the keeping your hands in type piece of it.

Kate: 12:57

Yeah, because I think it's a credibility thing, because if you're coming in with, I think if you're coming in with no technical background you have to make, you've got to make up for it in other ways.

Dave: 13:07

Yeah, I think that's a great way of looking at it.

Dave: 13:09

I don't think I think the credibility we look for, credibility when leaders are very close to where we are, you know if I've been, if they're a peer of mine and they now weave up or they're a few years ahead, but when you look at leaders who are, you know, a decade ahead of you, in that we're not. The credibility comes from other places, and I think that's something that's really important. I mean really important to understand this. Leadership, leadership skills are not tied to expertise in an area.

Dave: 13:35

They definitely give you a pass early on, and this it's often how you get that promotion path opening up in front of you Great. However, as we develop, we want to let go of that and again, some of the best leaders are way above where many of these things you know ignoring the fact that there's also these sort of micromanager leaders that seem to bounce backwards and forwards.

Dave: 13:58

I'm never 100 sold on that. That feels to me like micromanagement slash you know a task switching extraordinaire. I'm not sure that you quite. They're often backed with an amazing team behind the scenes that kind of mops up and makes things work behind them. It's my reading yeah, seagull management is optimal.

Dave: 14:16

Oh, I love that love that phrase, but I wanted to pull up on the thread that you introduced there, kate, which is if, if I'm an expert leader and I'm really close to the work and I need to see it, and so on. And then, all of a sudden, my team that I'm used to, walking around and looking over their shoulders and listening to the conversations to make sure I understand, I'm confident they're moving in the right direction.

Kate: 14:40

The.

Dave: 14:40

Moment that team goes remote. Yeah, I mean, and I think this is what we saw and we're still seeing, which is a lot of leaders lost confidence and control, if you like although I don't like that word control but confidence in their ability to lead, because they depended on being able to see the people they were leading frequently.

Kate: 15:00

Yeah, so it's the introduction of having to embrace trust over control, that we trust that the team is doing what we need them to do, because the more we micromanage them remotely, it's going to be even worse than doing it in person, I would imagine. So it's. How do we, as leaders, build that mutual trust within the team, but also between the team and the manager?

Dave: 15:29

Well, because the manager is still accountable, right? Somebody? If they have a question about the team that you're working, they're not going to go into the team, they're going to go talk to the manager, and the manager has to be able to say here's what's going on over here, here's what we've achieved over here, here's what's stuck over here. They have to have that transparency, and I feel this is something that's often lost on scrum teams, especially when they're new, because they go leave us alone. Well, you can look at the sprint backlog and know what we're up to. Well, that's not enough.

Kate: 15:55

As a leader, you need to have a good understanding of the direction they're going, the trend the overall trend, what's holding them back, what's not, and so on, and I think it's an increase in the check-ins that happen. It's not a check-up. I'm not checking up and micromanaging the work. I'm checking in over and above. I mean I'm not attending things like the daily stand up or the daily scrum, because that's micromanaging, but I'm doing. Maybe I'm doing one on ones with some of the team members, maybe I'm doing skip levels with them just to check in and understand more about them as individuals.

Kate: 16:31

And I think that's one of the huge transitions that not a lot of managers have made, regardless of whether they're in person or remote, and that is increasing their empathy and building that relationship outside of work.

Kate: 16:47

So if we're doing a one on one, the first five minutes of how are you, what's going on? Not how's your work going, but how are the kids, how are the hobbies, whatever happens to be going on, not how's your work going, but how are the kids, how are the hobbies, whatever happens to be going on and I think I I still don't think we've done a good enough job as leaders of doing that for our teams, whether they're remote or in person. It's obviously easier to do in person because I'm going to get my 15th cup of coffee of the day and I can wander past and check in with people, but I've actually got to schedule it when I do it remotely and make sure that it does happen. One of the things that we've got to do is make sure we're over communicating with our teams so that we know what's going on, without having a one hour status meeting every single day where I'm listening to you ream off everything you've done yesterday.

Peter: 17:39

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? We've got to be much more explicit about exactly what's going to happen when it's going to happen that we are going to have these conversations, because they're not going to happen by accident, because there isn't the opportunity for them to do so in a remote setting, generally speaking, unless you've got some. If everybody's consistently just chatting online on some sort of check-in, there may be opportunities to do that, but we haven't really come up with a good way of dealing with that type of interaction. I think one of the other big differences that we see is that, well, this setting that we're in even now is that only one person can really talk at a time.

Peter: 18:22

Now, arguably, in person, that should be the case, but it very rarely. Is Like, if you've got a group of people, people will have side conversations and they'll tap someone on the shoulder or they'll talk in the background. We haven't found a good way to do that in the digital communication. There's been many, many attempts, I've been interacted with lots of them, but none of them really quite work in the same way as a group of people in a room together or in the same general vicinity with each other.

Dave: 18:48

The spatial dimensions get flattened out in Zoom or in any sort of online conference. It's a totally different because, you're absolutely right, People will interrupt, you can hear conversations going on around and we can sort of shift our attention between those conversations. Never in an online forum. It becomes confusing and off-putting. Not, you know, we can't just kind of dial in our attention because it's really omni channel in that case.

Kate: 19:14

And there's also the focus element is what people are still and you know when people are checking email because you can see the head and the eyes going backwards and forwards. And it's the fight for some organisations to get webcams on. I mean, by default, we all turn them on. We didn't ever make the assumption that we wouldn't have them on for this, but a lot of organizations still struggle with that.

Peter: 19:38

Yeah, I had that with a number of my clients.

Kate: 19:41

Yeah, yeah, and I think one of the other things is we talk about it with Scrum teams particularly, all of the time, but it's the focusing on the outcome and not the output. Whether we have teams that are in the office or remote or hybrid, are we still requiring teams to work from nine to five? Are we rewarding people for working 50 hours a week, or are we focused and celebrating the team delivered what they said they would and our customers are happy? So I still feel that the focus on metrics and we've got to measure the output is still not a good focus for leaders. I mean, I know we've tried various things over the years to focus on the outcome, but I think we still got a long way to go with that and and even that's a metric right.

Dave: 20:35

As soon as we put a number on it, we've got a metric and it's going to get distorted and played and gamified in some way, and this is really challenging. I love parts of the conversation we're having here, if we kind of just pull them out again.

Dave: 20:48

One of them is, as we're all coaches, so I'm describing these conversations we're all coaches, so as we're describing these conversations, we're all of us thinking of course it's a coaching contract, it's some sort of a contract with. This is a one on one. I'm not going to talk about the work you're doing we have other conversations to discuss whether or not the work is going where it needs to go, the support you need. Are you in a good place in terms of education and career problems? Are you getting conversations you need, or whatever it might be, if that's the contract for your one-on-one?

Dave: 21:18

yeah and of course it's really challenging because if I finally get hold of you and go great, we can have a one-on-one then I immediately go.

Peter: 21:24

I'm getting asked about this.

Dave: 21:25

Can you tell me where that's at? And so on. So separate like that contracted. This conversation is about X rather than let me run through the list of all the many different things I need to cover with you. It's actually really powerful if in a remote environment, but if we're and we do it implicitly in a physical environment.

Kate: 21:47

Yeah, we do, because we it's more it happens informally, based on I'm leaving a meeting, I'm joining a meeting, I see you in the hall, that type of thing, and I think that's really hard and I'm not sure anyone's done a good job of making that environment remotely, even. I mean even leaders that try office hours and drop in it's. It's still. It's still more forced than hey, I've got a cup of coffee. Tell me about the sports jersey you're wearing today, type thing.

Peter: 22:18

yeah, there are. I mean, yeah, there's. There's lots of ways that teams try to do like just have a permanently open channel that anyone can drop into at any time and if there's somebody there, you have a chat with them or not, and those type of interactions, and but none of it quite builds that same level of interaction that you get when you're just saying, hey, you want to go grab a coffee? Yeah, but there's actually. But there's another interesting piece of that too from a, if you get down to the bottom level, if we're doing managers to developers, developers need a lot of contiguous focus time to actually work on the things that they're doing so.

Peter: 22:51

Leaders walking around and tapping on the shoulder and saying they want to go for coffee in the middle of them thinking about something is also nice.

Peter: 22:58

But there are definitely there's lots of complexity in this space and lots of things to be thought about and thinking about how we act and behave as leaders and interact with people. I think there's a lot of great ideas of thrown at you, and it all becomes all that much more complex when we're talking about remote and in-person. I'd hybrid into the mix of that and then it's like when and how Is it worth me being there if I'm basically going to have to come downtown? One of our coaches had to go into one of the client offices and they were insisting that he was on site because it was too complex to set up the bpn, uh, in a short enough time. And you're like, really, so you want him to come into the office, even though all the people he's going to be working with are all remote.

Kate: 23:42

so yeah, and it's a very different feel in the offices. I was at a client and they came in for training, which was great, but they all work remotely and the office was like a ghost time. So when those organizations are going, I think you were talking, peter, at the start about organizations that have gone out of their way to make it a place we want to go to. If we have a choice, we're going to walk from one room to the other and do it remotely, if we can.

Peter: 24:11

Yeah, I was describing one of the downtown places that a friend and colleague took me to and, uh, it's beautiful, beautiful new office building, lots and lots of light. It's got. They've got like a yoga studio, relaxation rooms. They've got um, they've got a marketplace so you can just go buy food and things inside there. They've got a uh, they've got vending machines where you can get whatever. If you need a new mouse, you can just swipe your employee card and it's charged back to your cost center and all sorts of fun stuff like this. It's. It's a lot more. I think you've talked about ping pong table. It's much more practical. It's like actually useful things.

Peter: 24:47

And so I found this yeah.

Kate: 24:49

I found this. Is it working? Are they coming in?

Peter: 24:51

Yeah, yeah, that was the interesting thing. So they've been in there a week and he said I actually like coming to the office now. It actually is working, at least for him.

Kate: 25:01

Yeah, no, sorry, I was going to say I guess it's asking your team what do they want, what are the struggles they're having working remotely, and how do you give them what they want to get them back in? Instead of just mandating, you must do it. Make it something that they actually want to do.

Dave: 25:21

Is that not exactly the distinction between pre and post? You know this whole conversation that we're having, which is, if I'm an expert leader, I expect to be able to say I need you to do this, do it, and we're on the same page Great. Whereas a coaching leader is much more about looking for what works or what doesn't in the different contexts, and this is something that what we're seeing, where the organizations really get the remote work and the office work and, first of all, I think I love the remote work.

Peter: 25:49

I love the remote work.

Dave: 25:50

I think it's been. It's been sort of hugely influential in a lot of people, those of us who work, recognizing what we value about what we work on. Here I can make you know a walk around the building 20 minutes worth of getting things out of my head.

Dave: 26:03

Commute time nobody wants, but recognizing the value of getting everybody together and so making sure you know there's weird things like the organizations have different departments coming in on different dates. Well, we're now losing all of the cross-pollination that is the best thing about bringing people together. Or I hear stories about people taking meetings where you're in the office but everyone's still remotely connected because and it's just like so we see, some of the best experiences I have is organizations that don't book any meetings because they know it's going to get interrupted, because everybody walks around and chats and they have all the brainstorming, conversations and the whiteboarding and the problem solving that they needed to do, and then they get their work done in the rest of the week when they head off and they go. Thank goodness my brain is up to here with conversations about whatever it was I need, but now I can get the work done and I've had had the input.

Kate: 27:12

Yeah, I think it's finding that. It's finding that balance, and it's also a lot of times starting with that Well, why are we telling people we need them back in? What is the case? Tell me the real reason, because if it's well, the corporation says well, why are they saying it? Do you not trust me? And we're back to one of the the first things we talked about, which is making sure we embrace trust and trusting our team over being able to control them.

Dave: 27:41

I had one of the best experiences I've had around. This was um, a government group that I was working with, and literally their response was we want you to come downtown into the offices because the businesses here are closing and we're a government organization. We want you to come downtown into the offices because the businesses here are closing and we're a government organization.

Dave: 27:55

We want to support the local community and we can't do it from remote yeah I I loved that because, whether you agree or disagree with it, at least I know what they're thinking yeah, yeah, well and and yeah, you've got the, the reason behind it. It's not just mandated because we say so, yeah okay, peter, are you gonna try and wrap this up?

Peter: 28:13

otherwise I was, I was gonna say okay, so fantastic conversation, and uh and uh. So if we were gonna, if we're gonna pull three points out, and we've done this, um, uh, on previous occasions we've uh, we've just invited different people, so so, kate, I'll invite you first. What? What point would you want to draw for our audience from this conversation today? What main thing would you like them to take away?

Kate: 28:36

I think it is understand what your team needs. It's the transition as a leader, from managing the work to leading the people. But if you're going to mandate that they come in and things like that understand, start with the why and understand what they need in order to make that happen. So it's knowing your team above just them. As an employee, it's the empathy and things that go with that trust. What about? What about you, peter? What are you taking away?

Peter: 29:11

Oh, I'm going to. I think I would take away the piece around expert leaders and achiever leaders and understanding that there are different types of leadership and largely depending, as well as this organizational design part of this, talking back to the conversation around Apple and different types of organizations, but the sort of commonalities that we look for and in leaders at different levels and making sure that people are supported on both sides of the conversation, I think is a critical part. And so, dave, do you want to take it away? Final thoughts.

Dave: 29:43

I wanted to just touch on something that I think, kate, you said one sentence about and then the conversation galloped away from it, and that one sentence is about supporting or training leaders, and I think this is a huge, huge thing, which is where we can be pretty rude about the leaders and what we expect of them and when it's not working, and so on. However, there's a huge gap and corporations are going to have to invest to build out leaders. We need leadership everywhere in our organizations.

Kate: 30:12

Yeah, and it's not just the title. Exactly yes.

Dave: 30:16

It's a skill set. It's experience and a skill set and I see, I think there's a gap in that leadership. There are leadership courses and there is work being done, but it needs more and more and more of it because it's becoming more and more of a big deal. It makes a huge difference, kate. As always, great conversation. Thank you so much for taking your time as we close out.

Kate: 30:38

Anything you wanted to sort of pull attention, to say you know, shout out for as we go no, just thank you for thank you for listening in and and I I look forward to continuing conversations around this so as thanks again.