In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson welcomes Taylor Raffa, the mass email team lead at Semrush, to discuss agile leadership and creating an engaging work environment.

🎶 Check out Weekend Lover, Taylor Raffa's playlist on Spotify.

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Best Moments:

(00:40) Introduction of Taylor Raffa and Semrush

(04:00) Explanation of agile leadership and its implementation

(06:32) Making meetings fun and engaging

(09:09) Strategies for remote team building

(12:08) Introducing fun elements into a work environment

(14:10) The importance of psychological safety and silence in meetings

(16:53) Taylor's past as a bass player in a band

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Guest Bio:

Taylor Raffa is the mass email team lead at Semrush, a leading online visibility management SaaS platform. With a background in communications and a certification from the International Consortium on Agile, Taylor specializes in creating engaging work environments and implementing agile leadership strategies. Originally from the West Coast, Taylor has lived in Paris and is currently based in Amsterdam. She is passionate about languages, team building, and finding creative ways to make work more enjoyable.

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Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are here for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And we have a really cool human being here. Yay. Who do we got? We got Taylor Rafa. Now, Taylor is the mass email team lead at Semrush.

Before I tell you about Taylor, if you don't know what Semrush is, you literally might be living under a rock. I mean, they have over 10 million marketers that use them over. Over 30% of the Fortune 500.

Use them for everything from competitive research to making sure your digital presence is everywhere. And it's all Taylor's fault. She's the one pressing send on all those emails, making sure that you're finding out everything.

But she's not just an incredible email marketer. She also has a certification from the International Consortium on Agile. Ooh, I'm gonna learn all about this.

And that's all about getting your team to work better together and to work in these, like, small steps and adapt quickly and all this stuff. We're going to learn what it means to be agile, to do agile leadership. Taylor, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

All right. Did I just butcher all that? I feel like. Did I say that right?

You know, like, I. The funny thing is I don't really press send on the emails anymore. My team does. But, you know, I say, okay, you can press send sometimes.

That's, you know, can't take all the credit.

No, but it is still your fault. So let's just. That for sure is your fault.

All right, before we get into what agile leadership is, which I'm really excited about because I'm incompetent and I need to learn from everything you're about to say. How did Taylor get into all this stuff that you do?

Well, I went to school with the goal of becoming a pharmacist, and obviously that didn't happen. So I went from thinking I was going to be pushing pills to pushing emails into inboxes. And that journey. Journey also led me to Paris, France.

I'm originally from the west coast, and so it's quite a far ways away.

And from there, I ended up just finding my path within my master's degree, studied communications and I was in a role which required me to wear a lot of hats and I didn't like that.

And I created a role for myself with an email and just kind of took that and ran with it, you know, found a lot of connections within the email industry and loved it. So. So yeah, here I am today, now in Amsterdam.

So now when you go to the pharmacy, do you like, look at, do you know everything? Are you like, you know. Well, don't buy that because that has blah, blah in it. Are you, like, very knowledgeable?

You know, like, it's fascinating. My, my interest in, in pharmacy was actually more like the names of all the different chemical compounds.

And so now I'm kind of obsessed with learning languages. And, you know, I, I love that side of it as well. But, you know, I don't know, I'm. I'm not so much into that.

Yeah, I try to stay away even though I'm in Amsterdam. You know, it could be convenient, but.

Right, that's right.

Yeah.

Right, exactly. All right, let's get into the topic of the day. Agile leadership. For a lot of people listening out there, they're like, what is that? What is that?

Because sadly, that's what I. You took from it because I don't know, but I want to understand what does this mean before we get into how we can implement it.

Yeah. So I mean, I was previously in a workplace where Agile was kind of forced upon us, like the decree of the land. Right.

And I was immediately, no, you, Agile. What's that? I don't like it.

And so I think it's really important to convey that Agile is what you make it, and it's really based around rituals and so the daily standup and retrospectives and just making sure that whatever you have in place for your team and your system is consistent and that it's clear and that you're not wasting a whole bunch of times in meetings which people don't really enjoy anyway. So what we do on my team a lot is checking in with each other about whether or not our processes are still working and also making work fun.

That's really the bottom line for me is what Agile is. It's like making work more fun.

So let's. I need to unpack this a little bit.

So first off, when you talk about kind of being consistent and having these meetings that are not useless meetings, and now somebody's listening like, okay, I need to do that. My meetings are horrendous or we're not consistently meeting as a team.

Do you just come in one day and say, okay, we're going to be agile every day now we're going to meet at 9:30 no matter what and be there, be square. Is that Agile or is there. That's not it, No.

I think there's many different ways of doing it.

And actually on my team I had to rebrand some of the rituals so I named them differently because I had people who had worked at big companies like IBM or other places that had different versions of Agile.

So you have to kind of deal with people's, you know, bruises and past experiences around this word in general and figure out, okay, what's going to work for my team, my situation.

So we have a meeting every Monday called Planning Poker, where I physically got these really cool cards printed for the team and sent them to the team. And everybody, you know, takes a look at the tasks, all the emails for the week. We all hold up the cards and we rate them together.

So everybody knows what everybody's working on. And you know, that actually is sort of planning meeting that happens within Agile. But if you look it up online it looks really boring.

But by making it into kind of like a poker game with these cool cards of weird stuff on them, that really made it more engaging for everyone.

So yeah, so when you have these more fun meetings, I mean, they're still meetings, right? You mentioned. Well, come on. I mean, hold on a second.

All of my meetings are fun. There we go. Yeah.

So you think people leave your meetings like, oh my God, that meeting was so much fun. Is that what you think happens after.

I need to send out an anonymous survey?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Get myself a check.

Yeah, but what about consistency? I think that one of the biggest problems in workplaces is you put something in place that lasts for a couple weeks and then they, then you stop.

How important is consistency as it relates to this kind of Agile environment?

So I do think some level of consistency is important in terms of the timing, but of course change is inevitable. So. So we had a period, you know, over the summer where everybody's PTO was overlapping.

It kind of made no sense to try and force a retrospective or a fun, you know, Friday is what I call them, where we do activities together as a team that really kind of have nothing to do with email per se, and they are sort of within the realm of serious play.

So it's more about having these tools within your toolbox which you can then kind of slot into these time Slots where you know that you're going to be able to have time together dedicated to planning or dedicated to, you know, you know, looking back and figuring out what worked or what didn't, or trying to address blockers at the beginning of the day, every day. So yes, of course things come up and you have to maintain a certain level of flexibility, but a dedication to at least carving out these types of.

I mean, that's why they're called rituals. Right. They can be enacted differently or they can be kind of shuffled around.

But just to know that you have those and that people understand what that means, you create a shared understanding over time, I think is really important in terms of like building the culture of your. Your smaller team.

So I'm curious about something. At my company, when Covid hit, we used to all be in person. We're about 100 people or so.

We went virtual and I said, oh, I'm going to go out of business, because we're not connected, whatever. So during COVID we started a Monday morning, not a Monday morning meeting, a meeting Every day at 30am Everybody. Every day.

And I said, everyone's going to be there. And then we kept it going. We've kept it going ever since. Every single day at 9:30. It's brutal. Okay.

But it keeps us all locked in because we stayed remote. I'm like the only one that comes into the office. So my, my question to you is, a, am I doing agile?

Probably not because they're not fun meetings, but B, how do you do agile kind of work environment with remote people? Not everybody being there.

So that's a bit, you know, this adds a little bit of fun to it. So already. But yeah, I would say that, you know, within our team environment, we're like 100% hybrid at SEMrush.

I don't, I don't know if there's any one team that is fully all together in the same office. So on our team, we have two people who are remote.

One's in Spain, one's in Ireland, and then there's someone in Serbia and there's someone in Barcelona. And the person in Barcelona goes into the office quite regularly. I also go into the Amsterdam office.

And so I think from that standpoint, we kind of all started on our team with that hybrid aspect. Today's actually, actually the company holiday party at Amsterdam.

So that was a little bit hard to sort of break the news that some of us are meeting up in person to have a lot of fun and swing off the side of the. A dam tower. But, you know, that's, you know, you gotta.

You gotta deal with that as it comes up, you know, for the people in their own home environment. But, yeah, for sure. I would say one thing that I try and do with the team is ask them. Two times per year I create.

I come up with a creative list of about six ideas. I try and find the weirdest stuff I can possibly find, like a tea reading for horoscopes with tea.

Or like, I found this company that will send vials of wine and do like a wine tasting, and then we do like a trivia and wine tasting thing. Or there was another one that was Aaron Meyer's the Culture Map.

And she talks about how different cultures have different, you know, sort of values within the workplace. And so she offers a test on her website.

And it's funny because the team really prioritizes a lot of these get to know you activities over the wine tastings and the pottery and like, whatever else. They really want to find those ways to connect. So I think that kind of comes through with the fact that we're. We're hybrid, right?

It's like they want to get to know each other in that way that you would sort of over coffee if you were in the office.

Okay. I love everything that you're talking about because I have the same vibe. You know, we got to insert fun works, hard works, crazy.

And if you don't have fun, the whole thing sucks. And people out there are listening right now, and they're like, oh, my God, Taylor, I need to work with her because my. My company is so boring.

It is terrible. It's torture. I wish I could insert some of this fun stuff because I feel like it would actually lift the vibe of everything that we're doing.

So what do you say to that? Maybe the person's not in charge of the meeting and they want to introduce this idea to their team or something. How do you do that without the. The.

The person you report to thinking that you're a fool and you get wind up getting fired for a dumb suggestion.

Yeah, I mean, I would say be the change. Right. I haven't always been a boss, so I've.

I've always tried to carve out my own little space within whatever company organization I was working for and, you know, figure out what you can do with what you're. What you're given. And if you Have Slack or you have Microsoft Teams, you know, then you can. Right.

You can, you know, figure out different ways of sort of combining really serious work related topics with fun. I think that's the key here is it's not just about, you know, doing really odd team building activities and forced fun, all of that.

One thing that I'm, I'm really happy with, that I've sort of found that works with our team is trying to ask them to like rate things with weather emojis. It's. Yeah, it's an interesting concept.

You know, it's kind of like in kindergarten when, when they're asking you like, oh, what color do you feel today? That sort of thing.

So, so we have these weather emojis and it's, it's a non invasive way to really get people to start talking about how they feel about an idea. And it could be a very work related project or idea there.

But then once you sort of add that more abstract or fun layer to really sort of unblocks people and it allows them to open up and change the way that they think.

Or if you were to ask them straight up, how do you feel about this most the time you may not have the psychological safety buildup within your team for people to truly approach that in an authentic way.

What do you think about having a meeting about meetings?

Like, what is it worthwhile to be like, hey, we want to start to doing more kind of team building and fun stuff, whatever, and everyone come to their, come to a meeting with their ideas. Is that a worthwhile thing to try to do?

Yeah, and we do that like within my team for sure. We have a process audit, you know, at least. Yeah, process audit. Yeah, where you take a look at like, okay, are the meetings useful?

How much time do you spend in them? What's the purpose of them and can they be consolidated? Can we change up the format? But what's most important. I think there is.

I mentioned psychological safety before. Before, but. And that's, you know, a big phrase, a heavy loaded phrase.

But I think most importantly it means leaving room for silence and getting uncomfortable with silence. That's a big one that I see. Yeah, that, that sometimes gets missed or.

What does that mean? I don't know what that means. What does that mean? Getting comfortable. Silence. Should I shut up? Oh, we just did it. Do we just do it? We just did it.

Do we make it a couple seconds? Yeah, yeah.

Somebody just touched their radio. They're like, oh, it stopped working, right?

Yeah, yeah. They were like washing dishes or something and Just thought skipped. Yeah.

Who's ever leave me to, like, shut their mouth and listen to everybody else kind of thing?

Yeah. I think if you. If you stick something out there, you got to let it, you know, give it. Give it space to land, give it some time.

Sometimes I really think probably way too much about this stuff and.

And occasionally I will send things to the team beforehand, but I always do like to include some element of surprise to it, so I'll never share the full thing. Just give them a little piece, a little taste to think about beforehand to sort of like prime them for what's about to happen in the meeting.

And then from there. Okay. There's somewhat within that headspace to be able to respond in a more thoughtful way.

I love that. I love all this. You know, in my company, with our conferences, we have a meeting called does this suck?

And everybody comes to the meeting with their ideas and we all go around and everybody has veto power. So if one person says it sucks, we don't do it. So we were having a meeting about our conference Guru conference. We had an 80s theme.

And the idea I brought to the table that we should play Dead or Alive, where we put up different people from the 80s in front of the whole conference and say, is this person dead or alive? And let the chat answer. And I thought this was the greatest idea ever, but that got vetoed because they're like, that's not appropriate.

I'm like, come on, you would play that game?

I would have played it. I would have participated more than the spam eating competition. So there we go.

Yes. Well, we're going to get you involved with something ridiculous next year. Now that I know your vibe, you're. You're.

Get ready because I don't know what. I'm down ass. Oh, good. So speaking being down, you're like a legitimate rock star, right? Do you go in Amsterdam and play like concerts with Coldplay?

Isn't that like what you do?

Not anymore, no. But yeah, I was in a band at some point. I'm a bass player.

What was it called?

It was called Dirty Looks and then changed their name to Weekend Lover, which is like, just great. And then I think they changed it back, so. I mean, the albums are on Spotify.

No way.

Yeah.

Wait a minute. Can we put them in the show notes?

Yeah, I could try and dig it out. Yeah. Visiting me and she would love that. She would love all the extra listens.

Yeah, it's happening, it's happening. I love all this. All right. You're awesome. Listen, Taylor, how does everybody find you? Get involved with you tell everybody what to do.

LinkedIn. Taylor Rafa. You know, it's hilarious because there's now two other Taylor Rafa's in the world. One of them works in email marketing as well.

So I feel like confident that I reached my destiny, that I was not meant to be a pharmacist because we're both here doing it. So find the one with the red blazer and I'm there. Yeah.

All right, everybody. Taylor Rafa R A ffa. We're gonna put everything in the show notes. She's amazing. She's an incredible follow. Connect with her. You're awesome, Taylor.

Thanks for doing this.

Great. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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