The People Problem That’s Quietly Killing Agile Marketing

Episode Transcript

The People Problem: 2026 Edition

Okay, friends, today we are diving into something messy, a little uncomfortable, and also extremely important. I'm gonna call it The People Problem: 2026 Edition. And yeah, I know it's not quite 2026 just yet, but it's, like, December 8th when I'm recording this, so it's basically 2026 right now. And I wish this was a nice, simple episode with a title like, "The Three MarTech Tools That You Should Buy Right Now." That might not be really good advice, but at least it would be simple.

But instead, today, we're gonna have to unpack a triple threat of issues that are quietly shaping the future of marketing and marketing agility, and that's gonna continue into 2026 and well beyond. And those three issues are: number one, job hugging, which is people staying put out of fear and what that means for skills and growth and agility; number two, skills and capability gaps, especially around leading through volatility, upskilling, and AI adoption; and the ever-popular hybrid versus remote versus return to office, that fun workplace tug-of-war that seems to refuse to die, and where agility fits in this debate — that's our third topic for today.

So you can think of this episode as your practical guide for navigating a world where humans really, in a lot of ways, are the operating system, and if we're being honest with ourselves, that operating system needs an update.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas, and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing, from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. Hit Follow wherever you listen, and let's carve the next switchback together.

Okay, you can probably figure out that this week we are sitting squarely in the people part of the Agile marketing operating system. And if you follow along with the Agile Marketing Edge newsletter, which is called Beyond the Edge, where we dive into the topics from this podcast in more depth, you will know that we have been, in the most recent issue, talking more about how people are really the underlying cause, the root issue in a lot of the topics that we have been touching on recently. And so I really want to grapple with the people topic really thoroughly in this episode.

And so there's these three sub-topics that we're gonna get into in a lot of depth today, because people are this common thread throughout the operating system. It's the people who are doing the work. However much AI might be involved, we still have to have humans in the loop in a very real way, and the effectiveness of how those humans work, either alone or together, underpins everything. So we're getting really deep into the people part of the Agile marketing operating system this week.

So let's start with sub-topic number one, which is job hugging, otherwise known as, "I hate it here, but it feels safe."

And we hear this in so many of our clients lately, and it feels new to me — newer, right? So I know this is not brand-new, especially in a lot of traditional organizations. People have stayed for decades. This is not a new phenomenon, but I think something that is newer is the fact that people are staying put now out of fear. They're staying because they're scared, and a recent report from Monster seems to be bearing this out. What they found was that 48% of workers said they're staying longer at a job than they otherwise would because they want stability and safety. And I mean, that makes a lot of sense, because some days it feels like we're living in a world that is a Jenga tower built by toddlers right now. And so prioritizing safety and stability doesn't seem like a bad idea, but there are definitely some not-good aspects to job hugging.

And in that same Monster survey, they found that 94% of those same workers who are doing job hugging admit that they are feeling a downside. So for instance, 26% of job huggers say that they are missing out on potential higher pay by staying at a job because they want stability. 25% say they are burning out because they aren't getting stimulation, there's no change or new work to be done, and 25% say they feel stuck and there's limited advancement in their current role.

And we've talked about status quo bias, both here and in the newsletter before, and this is really textbook status quo bias. And that's that cognitive little gremlin in our heads that convinces us that not doing anything — not moving, not trying, not changing — is the safest option, even when staying put is quietly eroding our skills and draining our energy and short-circuiting our career trajectory. And this is especially true in marketing right now, where everything is changing all the time, and so job hugging can have real implications for marketing agility. So I think the million-dollar question for us is: is job hugging good or bad for Agile teams?

And I think the answer is yes. Right, it can be good and it can be bad, depending on the situation and how we handle it. So let's start with the pros of job hugging, because it doesn't have to be a bad thing, because it does give us stability, and for Agile teams especially, that can be a really positive thing. We like long-lived, stable teams in an Agile environment. That allows us to build rhythm. We get more maturity in how we work together. We get comfort, psychological safety. We get alignment and shared context, right? And once we have these long-tenured team members, they can be culture carriers. If the culture's healthy, that's really good. They can be the ones who can kind of pollinate newer members and make sure that the culture gets disseminated in a good way to everybody, so now we have everybody working in the same way with the same shared set of values and priorities.

But it's not all puppies and kittens and rainbows. There are definitely some big cons here as well, and we saw them in the Monster survey answers, right? And it's things like stagnation, because job huggers are gonna be less likely to put themselves out there in a risky way. They're not gonna stretch into new skills. They're not gonna put their hands up to experiment with new ways of working or try out risky projects because they're prioritizing stability and safety. So they may drag the rest of the team into their stagnation if we let them, and at the same time, we might see capability gaps widen because people are not stretching, especially as we're seeing AI continue to push and demand new capabilities. If this is happening across large swaths of our team, we're going to fall further and further behind.

And although long-lived teams can foster psychological safety, they can also potentially degrade psychological safety, and I hate to say I have seen this happen with clients, because people will stay and insist on finding excuses for toxic environments and not try to change them because they don't wanna rock the boat, and so that can actually erode and degrade psychological safety. And then of course, we can also see that Agile rituals and events and practices can become just sort of blah and rote, just things that we go through the motions on and don't really have any meaning behind them — again, because if we're job hugging, we're just here for safety and stability. We're not looking to grow and push and try to make things better. We're just gonna do the minimum to keep our job and not make any waves.

I've also seen leaders in these situations who know that people aren't leaving, people aren't going anywhere, and that they might not even be able to push people out no matter what, and they may intentionally or unintentionally allow dysfunction to linger. And if they themselves, if leaders are job hugging, they're not gonna push for confrontational conversations. They're not gonna try to have difficult conversations themselves, and so you can have these toxic situations continue to fester over time.

And so job hugging starts to become a real threat and a real problem for our attempts to be agile when teams stop challenging each other, when everybody is just letting everything slide and nobody's calling each other out because we don't wanna rock the boat. It's a problem when learning slows down or stops completely, because a huge part of the reason that Agile teams win is because they have those rapid feedback loops. They can test and learn a lot faster. That's not happening — Agile is losing a lot of its power. Job hugging is a big problem if comfort has become our dominant cultural value. If we're just here to be cozy and do as little as possible to not get fired, like, that's not fun work, that's not challenging work, that's not work that's going to, especially in marketing, differentiate us in any way. That's a big problem.

And last but not least, job hugging is a problem when, especially in the early days of an Agile transformation, we're using these kinds of perspectives to design pilots that are not there to really test out Agile ways of working — they're there to create the least amount of change and discomfort possible. That's not really the purpose of a pilot, but in a job hugging environment, that's what a pilot is gonna be set up to do, and that's when it really is a problem.

And agility, true marketing agility, requires newness, right? New information, new ideas, new ways of thinking, new experiments, all of these things. But in a job hugging environment, in a place where everybody's just holding on and trying to do things that won't disrupt, you end up with this kind of cozy, slow, risk-averse ecosystem that is counterproductive. It's counter-indicative for agility.

So job hugging can, in some instances, support Agile ways of working, but only if we are very deliberate about how we leverage these kinds of situations to be supportive of agility. In more cases, if we are lackadaisical about it, it can be a really big problem.

Okay, people problem topic number two: skills and capability gaps. And I'm gonna come out with a bit of a spoiler here, because the number one skill that is missing in marketing right now is not AI fluency. And that's not just in marketing, actually. That's across all functions in the Fortune 100. That is not what people are struggling with, and it's not even MarTech mastery. It's not the ability to bring in new tools and technology. It's not even data, data manipulation, data science, none of that. The number one skill that the Fortune 100 says they're missing right now is the ability to lead in a volatile environment, and this is according to research from Ohio State's Angus Fletcher. And honestly, this super tracks for me.

The more that I talk to CMOs and senior marketing leaders, the shift that I'm seeing is this need to really unlearn their old patterns and to be okay with not having all the answers, but to act anyway. These old command-and-control styles and this need to have total and absolute certainty, or the "I add value here by reviewing everything or knowing everything," just is not how leadership works anymore. But if that's how you got where you are, it's really hard to let go of those kinds of behaviors.

But what leaders have to do now in order to be able to lead through volatility is embrace agility — kind of lowercase-a agility, not necessarily working in Agile frameworks, but being responsive, being adaptable, and learning all the time, setting aside real chunks of time to educate yourself and to learn how to be different in a different world.

If you're curious about exactly what that looks like, we do have an episode on exactly what CMOs need to unlearn, so you can go back and listen to that. We dug into a lot of specifics on what's holding CMOs back right now and how you need to be different to be an Agile CMO.

So let's talk a little bit more about the state of skills in 2025, because there are some real, sobering stats around this. So for instance, 63% of employers say that skills gaps are their number one barrier to transformation, and organizational and cultural resistance is actually number two. And I feel like a lot of people say, "Well, our culture is really the challenge," but skills is showing up as the number one problem for almost two-thirds of people. And related to that, 85% of employers expect upskilling to be a primary strategy all the way through 2030, and this makes tons of sense for me, because I hear from clients over and over and over again, "How are we supposed to fit in education and training and upskilling on top of everything else?"

It's a huge challenge right now, especially in marketing, where we need to upgrade our skills faster and faster and faster because there are new tools and technologies and channels and everything's changing all the time, and yet we are constantly overwhelmed by our existing workloads. And also, we are trying to shoehorn AI into all of this without updating and evolving our processes. So we have this kind of perfect storm of challenges coming in and making our lives difficult.

So we have these skills gaps that are really a major barrier to making everything better. Whether it's an AI transformation or a digital transformation or an Agile transformation, skills and capability gaps are a big barrier to making those things work. So what do we do about them?

Well, if you are a leader — team leader, executive leader, whatever kind of leader hat you have on — you've got to start thinking about skills development as a top priority for yourself and for your team. And that means it needs budget and it needs capacity. You can't just say it's important and then not put aside any time or any money to make it happen, and it has to also be part of your approach to psychological safety, because if you say it's important and don't set aside anything for people to work on it, this is an example of not doing what you say. And so it's eroding psychological safety in all aspects of your leadership. And honestly, telling teams to upskill or innovate without providing any space or money to do that is basically workplace gaslighting.

So don't do that. If this is important — and if you are in that 63% who has this gap, it is important — you need time and you need money set aside to deal with it. If you are more on the individual contributor level, hopefully you do have a training budget, but if you don't, you can still shadow your teammates. You can still find somebody who has the skill that you need and ask to work with them. Work alongside them, pair with them on a project so that you can learn what they know. And you can ask for learning tickets, or if you have an Agile system where work is visualized in kind of a ticketing format, ask for things to be visualized so that it can be prioritized and you can pull some of that capacity out of the system and set it aside for yourself to learn.

And that might be attending conferences. It might be allowing time to just even go to webinars or take classes, whatever it is, and then make sure that you bring those insights from any of those learning opportunities back, right? If you remember one of our recent episodes from John Weidenhaft, that's how he got Agile launched with his teams: someone, not him, went to a conference, heard about how Agile was working for someone else, and brought back the recommendation independently from him, and that second voice making that recommendation allowed him to really launch new ways of working. So having these educational moments can really be an inflection point to make big changes.

Okay, so remember, agility can work on the team level, but if you're an individual contributor who is maybe not even yet in a fully Agile team, agility can be a personal journey and a personal focus for you as well. And this is a big deal because, as we've been hearing, the ability to lead in a volatile environment, the ability to adapt to changes — these are key capabilities that employers are looking for. So your future employability depends on your adaptability, and leaders, your team's future depends on its combined adaptability. So set aside the time to upskill your people. That's the only way to make sure that you're gonna stick around and that they are gonna stick around.

Okay, we are on to our third and final sub-topic of the people problem 2026, which gets the award for the most exhausting debate that nobody ever seems to win: hybrid versus remote versus return to office. This is like the workplace cage match that nobody asked to be trapped in. We just can't seem to land this plane. Nobody can seem to agree on what's best. We have executives in one corner and individual contributors in another corner, and there's study after study that is saying this is better and that's better, and nobody can really nail this down.

So, some things that we do know. If we go back to the OG Agile Manifesto, there is an explicit value on face-to-face communication. We've kind of started to put in these kinds of digital face-to-face, like a Zoom conversation, as a placeholder for that, but honestly, having humans in a room together, physically in a room together, is different than being in a virtual room together. So there is value in face-to-face conversations. And there are studies, many of them now, that show that some in-office time does improve interpersonal connection and creativity. And we also know that 60% of employees say they would take a pay cut for more work-from-home flexibility. Turns out that a lot of things can be true at the same time.

So for us on this podcast, the real question is: if agility is our priority, does that change the calculus around work from home versus hybrid versus return to office? And I'm gonna argue that yes, it actually does change some of the weight of this argument, because for true agility, what we need is fast feedback. We need rapid feedback loops with one another, with the team, and with the external environment. We need clear communication with the team, with leadership, with stakeholders. We need strong relationships — again, within the team, between marketing and the rest of the organization, with marketing and its stakeholders. We need clear shared context about what our goals are, what we're trying to accomplish, who our customer is, what our vision and purpose is. We need real-time problem solving, so when issues or opportunities come up, we need to be able to jump on them in as close to real time as possible. And we need real collaborative planning moments — not maybe every single day, but we do need to have the opportunity for those collaborative planning situations.

And if we're being honest with ourselves, almost all of those things get easier with at least a little bit of intentional face time. And you know, the Agile Sherpas team is totally remote. We are in something like four different countries now, and so we don't get literal face-to-face time, but we have gotten really, really good at virtual face time. So we have to figure out what intentional face time means for us in our context, but this is not mandatory Tuesdays in the office no matter what, even if we're all just taking Zoom calls from our various cubicles, right? And this is not badge-swipe policing, right? Like, how many times did you swipe your badge? I don't really care what you did while you were in the office, right? But you have to be here a certain number of hours. This is about purposeful, high-value interactions.

So maybe for you this is quarterly or monthly planning moments where everybody is physically together, and we're really maximizing those opportunities. Maybe it is clearly documented team charters. These are great documents to make it really clear about what our working arrangements are, what the expectations are, and how we're gonna maximize all of those. Retros that really require deeper reflection about the effectiveness of our working arrangements, so that we are continually refining based on what's working, on people's personal situations, and all of those things. And really, working sessions where our alignment and our connection is the most important thing, not our physical location.

So for me, the bottom line here is that remote work, great; hybrid work, great; in-person office work, also great. What actually matters is how thoughtfully and deliberately you use each mode of working.

So the intersection between all three of these sub-topics is the real people problem. Because when we have job hugging, plus a skills gap, plus workplace conflict over the right style of working, we end up with this perfect storm of people problems. We end up with teams that are afraid to move, afraid to change, unsure how to grow as individuals or evolve as teams. They're uncertain about where to work or how to work together. They get exhausted from constant change and upheaval. We're in the office Tuesdays and Thursdays. Oh no, wait, it's three days a week. Oh no, wait, it's whenever you feel like it. Constant change is just exhausting. They're overwhelmed by unclear AI expectations. We're trying it out as individuals. No wait, IT says don't do that. Like, only use embedded things. That is overwhelming, and they're under-supported by outdated leadership norms.

This is the perfect storm of people problems, and this is why marketing agility is increasingly the only viable operating system for marketing teams, because it replaces that perfect storm with clear cadences. This is when we're getting together and this is how we're getting together, and that's what we're trying to accomplish. It gives us alignment around our goals and around our teams and around our stakeholders. It gives us capacity management, so we can bring in skills-gap-closing work when we need it. It gives us psychological safety, so we can talk about the hard things when they come up. It gives us fast learning cycles, so we have a shot at dealing with those skills gaps. And of course, it gives us clear prioritization so that we can tackle the most pressing problems quickly. And above all, it gives us a human-centered structure that's designed to match the speed of change, which is not slowing down and is not going away.

So you know I love me some practical takeaways, so we're gonna end with those. If you're a leader, name the fear. Don't be afraid. These are real problems that people are not ignorant of. Job hugging is gonna thrive in silence. Psychological safety will thrive in transparency. Name the fear. Next, budget for upskilling like it is a strategic priority, because it should be. Third, don't weaponize hybrid work arrangements. Be intentional about in-person time. Use it properly, and don't mandate it just for the sake of optics. Use it properly. And last, use Agile rituals as anchors for your team. Allow them to create the connection and the resilience and the predictability that your team needs, especially if you are in a hybrid work situation.

If you are an individual contributor, don't lean into the negative sides of job hugging. If that's where you are, that's where you are. But don't cling so tightly to the safety part of your job that you stop growing. There are a lot of long-term negative ramifications there. And ask for learning time the same way that you would ask for project capacity. Make sure that you're asking to set that aside so that you keep growing. And lastly, work hard to really build cross-functional relationships. That's inside of marketing and outside. That kind of growth is gonna allow you to become more valuable in many different contexts, and that is really the career rocket fuel of the 21st century.

All right, in closing, I wanna point out that the people problem is not going away. It is fast becoming the defining challenge of the second half of 2025, and that is continuing into 2026 and well beyond. But the good news is that people are not obstacles to agility. People are agility, and when we lean into transparency and continuous learning and smart collaboration and human-centered leadership, we can create marketing teams that can thrive no matter what the future holds.

If you need help supporting your people, building their skills, or navigating the hybrid circus, of course the Agile Sherpas team would be honored to help you. You can find ways to contact us and resources for free at agilesherpas.com. As always, until next time, I'm your host, Andrea Fryrear. Remember, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.