"Behind" is not a measurement. It is a judgment somebody made against a standard somebody set, and the first useful question is who set it.

Chris Sims has spent a career watching teams answer that badly. The founders whose own strengths quietly became the company's bottleneck. The engineers whose hardest-won expertise stopped being the valuable thing. The leaders whose answer to falling behind was to stay later. They have a line for it, from a mentor who was trying to get them to see it about themself: the harder I work, the behinder I get.

This is a conversation about why the obvious response makes it worse, what slowing down actually buys you, and which skills quietly changed places while everyone was watching the code get written faster. For anyone leading a team through a shift they did not pick.

The Satir change model Chris walks through: https://tlt-clips.b-cdn.net/0007/Assets/Satir-2026-04.pdf

Pendo's 2019 Feature Adoption Report: https://go.pendo.io/rs/185-LQW-370/images/2019%20Feature%20Adoption%20Report%20Digital.pdf

Talk about your team: https://thelaggingteam.com/start?episode=0007-the-harder-you-work-the-behinder-you-get&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=the-harder-you-work-the-behinder-you-get

Chris Sims (they/them) is an agile coach, a Certified Scrum Trainer, and the founder of Agile Learning Labs. AgileLearningLabs.com