I Thought I Was Helping People. I was just squeezing them.

I wrote this article one year ago while I was still working in corporate.

At the time, I had no idea that a few months later I would be laid off.

I never published it because I was afraid of what people would think.

Today I'm taking part in Anne's No More Playing Small challenge and it made me realize how often I've kept my thoughts to myself simply to avoid disagreement.

So here it is.

Reading this article today, I noticed it wasn't really about Agile.

It was the first time I started questioning a much bigger idea:

What if we keep saying that people come first while continuously asking them to give more, do more, contribute more and be more?

What if we've become so focused on performance, optimization, and growth that we've forgotten the human being behind the role? And what if business success and human wellbeing don't have to be opposites?

What if it's possible to build projects that grow without constantly demanding more from the people behind them?

At the time I couldn't fully articulate it but today I can.

This article marks the beginning of a shift in the way I think about work, projects, and people.

It was the moment I started realizing that I wanted to build things differently.

Starting from people, their energy, their well being.

That realization eventually became Equanima: a way of creating projects with intention, humanity and coherence of values.

Looking back, this article was one of the first steps in that direction.

So I'm sharing it exactly as I wrote it.

While in Norway, May 2025 Agile, again. For almost 9 years I studied the framework, improved my coaching, joined several transformation projects, spoke with thousands of people and trained, coached and mentored them to help them learn, practice, and improve the way they worked toward Agile principles and values, continuous improvement, collaboration, communication and the practices that Agile uses to foster those very valuable ideas.

In those 9 years, I developed transformation strategies, trained and coached everyone from newcomers to top managers, took part in conferences and organized barcamps, events, gatherings and workshops and sharing knowledge moments as a good Agile Coach should be doing. Because yes, I’m a very good Agile Coach and I’m known as an "Agile purist" who, with my empathic approach and attention to people’s well being, is capable of bringing lots of people to the bright side of Agile.

And that's why I started questioning the role itself.

Agile is nothing but:

• the subtle way that upper management uses to squeeze employees’ skills without paying for that

• the subtle way that corporates get richer and richer by convincing employees to voluntarily give more than what they were hired and paid for, while making them feel part of "something bigger."

Let me first explain what Agile really is with a simple example.

Let’s say I have a business. I own a cleaning service with 5 cleaners that I send to different offices in the same building after the employees leave for the day.

Every day at 5 pm they start their work. At the beginning it takes them 4 hours to clean the building. Over time they become better and better at it. They know exactly what to do, where to start and how to organize their work. After a while, the same cleaning takes only 3 and a half hours.

They save 30 minutes.

Then one day I hear about Business Agility and all the amazing ways it can improve a business, so I decide to apply it to mine.

We now start every day with a quick meeting where everyone shares what they're working on and if they have any problems. Fifteen minutes gone already.

We also introduce a board where they track their daily work and report blockers. Maybe they run out of window cleaner. Maybe they need a new vacuum cleaner. The idea is that I can help remove those obstacles more quickly. (aka Kanban Board)

Every two weeks we meet again in front of the board. We discuss priorities and I explain what should be the focus for the next two weeks. Another 30 minutes. (aka Sprint Planning)

At the end of those two weeks, after they finish cleaning, we meet once more. I ask them what went well, what didn't go well, what could be improved, and what they should do differently next time. Another 30 minutes, if we're lucky. (aka Retrospective)

Sometimes I also invite them to meetings with the client, the owner of the building. The cleaners explain what they accomplished during the last two weeks and the client gives direct feedback on the quality of the service. The cleaners can also make requests of their own, like asking for more lights to be left on while they work. (aka Sprint Review)

Everyone feels involved, heard, responsible.

At least that's the theory.

But here is the reality: before introducing Business Agility, they mastered their job and they saved 30 minutes of their time, which they could have used for learning a new skill, reading a book about something related to their work, or simply cleaning better and more precisely. Or doing absolutely nothing, as they gained experience in their work so they deserve extra time for having done things better.

But they can’t because now I decided to meet them every day using their extra time for:

• asking them to share, communicate, think more, improve more, do more, while I pay them the same amount of money I paid before the Business Agility

• do things I can easily do by myself and cascade down the information to my employees. But now, as they spoke, they asked, they raised their voice and opinion, I can also make them responsible for their choice.

Some time ago, in a company I worked for, I attended a workshop, “Find Your Ikigai”, the sweet spot, the reason to wake up every morning. At the end of the workshop I found that my ikigai was “to help people feel better during their working hours”. So I believed that Agile was the best tool to make people happy at the workplace, as it promises to give meaning and purpose to what people do at work.

And this is when I started to pursue the Agile Coach career.

I made 2 big mistakes here:

• assuming that my ikigai is connected with my corporate job. Why the heck should I have a reason to wake up in the morning to work in a corporate?

• assuming that people want to be happy at work. We don’t work to be happy in a corporate, we work to have a salary and pay the bills.

Life does not revolve around work. Work is just a tool for living, it pays the bills but life and happiness belong outside of it. And still, we spend so much time trying to make work feel like life itself: lunches with coworkers, coffee breaks, team buildings, extra training, corporate activities... all of it is there to make those eight hours more enjoyable.

And then there is another thing... because I was a high performer and I delivered my work fast, I often found myself filling the extra time with workshops, trainings, side projects and new programs. Yes, they gave me new skills, knowledge, and experience. But at what cost? I was giving away my talent, my ideas and most of all my energy, energy I could have used for my own projects and my own development.

Recently I spoke with a person who left the company after we implemented Agile in their team. They left because “I was asked to participate in the roadmap creation and I was asked to constantly contribute to the continuous improvement of the team. But what I wanted to do is just deliver my trainings as I was hired for it, go back home and do my stuff”.

This was enlightening.

A cleaning person is hired to clean, a trainer is hired to train. By implementing Agile in their teams, we ask them to be a problem solver, to think outside the box, to bring new solutions, to be active, to communicate and speak up for the good of the company, for a higher purpose, because "we’re going through a transformation". Because if they don’t adapt to the new way of working, they’ll be left out.

But we always forget that they were hired just to clean, just to train.

Agile gives team members the illusion that they can improve their work by providing their feedback but at the end of the day the final decision is only on those who have the power. So yes, we gather hundreds of feedback during retros to improve the work, but only a handful of them will be actually taken into consideration. And guess what? The same ideas that align with what upper management had already in mind.

What if we had skipped the retrospective? Upper management would just bring the idea and the team would execute. 1 hour for retrospective saved, 1 hour that could be used for something that employees really matter.

I always say that I’m a people person because I care about people and not business. After many years in the Agile coaching business, I realized that if I want to keep claiming that I’m a people person, I need to drop the Agile coaching because it’s not intended for people but for business.

Most people just want to work for the salary, go home and enjoy life outside work.

And this is the most beautiful truth you’ll hear today.