The Helpful Leader: Why the helpful ones are dangerous, and what to do about it
Details
Our Agile & Scaled-Value Project Management Meetup hour in November 2026 is scheduled for Thursday, November 12th, 2026.
Time: 12:00 pm PT/2:00 pm CT/3:00 pm ET
Topic: "The Helpful Leader: Why the helpful ones are dangerous, and what to do about it"
Our Guest Speaker: Brian Link
Pls. Note: To protect privacy and ensure a smooth session flow, we request that attendees refrain from using AI-assistive recording or note-taking tools during the meetup session. Thank you.
An introduction to the meetup:
Who is the “most dangerous leader”? Every room can name the tyrant, the micromanager, the blamer, the one who shouts. Almost nobody names the leader who is always available, always willing to weigh in, always ready with a suggestion. And I think that's the one quietly doing the most damage, because it doesn't look like damage to anyone, least of all the leader doing it.
You can make the teams awesome, and you even get top-down executive support. But if leader behavior doesn't change, everything you fixed in strategy, discovery, flow, and structure tends to revert within a year.
Takeaways:
Brian will open with the best leadership move he's ever watched: a brand new CIO standing in a rented hotel ballroom in front of three hundred middle managers, telling them all to stop pretending they know everything.
Then we'll look at the four ordinary, well-intentioned behaviors that leaders often think are helpful but are not:
- Leaders can accidentally provide instructions or commands to the team if they aren’t careful with their language and respect the team’s processes
- Leaders can break trust and psychological safety by filling the silence and answering their own questions
- Leaders unknowingly introduce waste and delays by trying to be helpful, offering to have teams “run something by them”
- Leaders who say thank you to feedback but fail to follow through do damage to relationships and further break trust with the team
Our Speaker:
Brian is an Enterprise Agile Coach whose path to agility was forged in the trenches — from software engineer to CTO of internet startups, including Digg.Inc, to leading large-scale Agile transformations at some of the country's largest financial institutions. He currently leads the team of coaches in the Transformation Management Office at Huntington Bank.
A practitioner first, Brian brings hard-won experience helping individuals, teams, and entire organizations build genuine Business Agility — not just adopt frameworks. He is the author of The Practical Agilist Guidebook and the recently published Assembled. Aligned. Adaptive: The integrated operating model every leader must build, a field manual for leaders navigating organizational transformation.
Brian is also an Adjunct Professor teaching Agile courses at Columbus State Community College, where he works to shape the next generation of practitioners.
Outside of work, he is a word nerd, a competitive Scrabble player, a juggler, and deeply obsessed with dystopian science fiction.