#147: The Power of Quiet Influence with Casey Sinnema

How do you lead change when you’re not the boss? Casey Sinnema shares what it takes to build trust, influence outcomes, and make Monday feel a little less dreadful. Overview What happens when you give a self-proclaimed utility player the freedom to poke holes in broken systems and lead cross-functional change without official authority? In this episode, Scott chats with Casey Sinema about navigating ambiguity, building trust without a title, and leading impactful change through curiosity, clarity, and a deep understanding of what people actually need. References and resources mentioned in the show: Casey Sinnema Wolf Pack by Abby Wombach The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins Micromanagement Log Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Join the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [e-mail] This episode’s presenters are: Scott Dunn is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer with over 20 years of experience coaching and training companies like NASA, EMC/Dell Technologies, Yahoo!, Technicolor, and eBay to transition to an agile approach using Scrum. Casey Sinnema is a self-described utility player who’s built a career by asking great questions, poking holes in broken systems, and leading meaningful change across teams—without ever needing the official title to do it. With a background in accounting and a talent for cross-functional problem solving, she brings curiosity, empathy, and real-world savvy to every challenge she tackles. Auto-generated Transcript: Scott Dunn (00:01) Well, welcome everyone to another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I am your takeover, not your normal host, of Brian Miller, who's done a smash up job over a hundred plus episodes if you haven't checked those out. But part of the podcast takeover was not only a fresh voice, but also perspective and a lot of what I typically focus on for the people who know me. On leadership and culture and leading change. And I thought of no one better that I'd rather talk to about some of this. Casey Sinnema and I'll give you a little bit of introduction about who she is, what she does. Maybe also I think it'd be fascinating Casey on how you yourself in the role that you have. I think it's kind of a cool role, at least on paper. You can flesh that out a little bit more but I'll hand off to you. Tell us a little about yourself. Casey (00:46) Yeah, hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, so I currently am most often referred to as a utility player. And I'm still trying to figure out my elevator speech for how I talk about what I do because my role, my title is manager, which doesn't say much, right? And I actually don't do a function, but the easiest way to talk about it is I'm a project manager of sorts. I'm involved in a wide variety of projects from a varying level of involvement, from leading the project to leading the change to being a key stakeholder to just being the voice to leaders or executives or that type of thing. So yeah, I am a little bit of everything. And I got here on accident. I have... Scott Dunn (01:32) I was... Casey (01:34) You know, way back in the day when I was, you know, doing the like, what am I going to do for the rest of my life? I'm like, I just want a marketable skill. So I have a business degree and I went into accounting and I quickly became the troubleshooter. So I would go into a company, troubleshoot, fix the process, fix something broken, and then find myself in another company doing the same thing. And, so throughout my career, I've just sort of built this unique set of skills that allow me to poke holes in processes. and help companies fix them and then kind of find the next thing. So that's just kind of how I wound up here. I've been at my current company for almost a decade, which is going to be a record for me. And, but I'm still doing the same thing. I'm moving around the company and finding new places to, you know, rock the boat a little bit. Scott Dunn (02:20) Cool. Very cool. Yeah. It does sound like you have a number of things on your place to where that makes kind of expand on that a little bit and where you comfortably share those stories as we go through some of this because there's a lot, there's a lot more underneath based on what Casey shared before. And I love it that you found yourself like a happy accident and I guess have enough challenges and learning and growth there as long as they move you around that you're, you know, you need to be working on that are meaningful. things to be working on. Casey (02:51) Yeah, absolutely. That's the biggest thing, right? Is to like find work that you find valuable and that has an impact on the people around you, which is, know, squarely...