TLDR;
In a world where teams are up against burnout and inefficiency, Sonya Siderova, CEO of Nave, takes a unique approach—one rooted in trust.
“I don’t manage people; I manage workflows,” she shares, emphasizing the power of leadership that empowers, rather than controlling teams.
In this episode of Uncommon Leadership, Michael Hunter and Sonya Siderova explore the true impact of work-life boundaries, the role of self-trust in leadership, and how personal systems can drive positive business outcomes.
They also reveal why bottlenecks—not people—are often the real challenge in workflow management.
Tune in now to learn the surprising truth about managing people workflows.
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siderova/
Website: https://getnave.com/
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Presented By: UncommonChange
Transcript
Michael
Whether you are feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, or that something just isn’t quite the way you know it can be, you are not alone. I hear the same from leaders every day. On Uncommon Leadership, we explore aligning personal fulfillment with business success, creating authentic teams, and cultivating the resilience necessary to move beyond simply surviving today’s challenges into thriving.
I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams, and today we’ll uncover fresh insights into what it means to lead with resilience. Joining me today is Sonya Sidorova. Sonya is the founder and CEO of Nave. Nave was designed to help agile teams using platforms like Jira or Azure DevOps speed up delivery and make reliable data-driven commitments that they actually keep and continuously improve their processes. Well, Sonya.
Sonya Siderova
Pleasure to be here.
Michael
I’m excited for our conversation. When did you first recognize that integrating your whole self, bringing that into everything that you do might be a valuable approach?
Sonya
Well, probably a few years ago. I think that was when I actually made a conscious decision to put some boundaries around my work time and family time.
Because, you know, having two little kids, having two dogs, and running a business that’s just getting started, it’s certainly not an easy thing. It’s not an easy job. And if you’re passionate about what you do, you can certainly fall into the trap of being in that space 24/7. And I know what it feels like.
I’ve been there, and I burned out quickly. And I think the problem is that, when you’re immersed in work 24/7, you just don’t give yourself the space to breathe. You don’t give yourself the space to think. And there is simply no room to step back. There is no room to see the big picture. There is no room to answer the important questions.
Is this the right thing to do right now? Am I doing it right? Why am I doing it at all in the first place? You know? So, at some point, I just had to step back. I had to step back to revisit my why and give myself the rest and space to think. And I made a commitment for myself. I said, no work after 5:00 PM, no work during weekends, no work during the holidays.
And what actually happens, is I started coming up with ideas. I started coming up with big ideas that actually move the needle. And not only that, but finally I started to feel that I was bringing my whole self into what I was doing. And instead of feeling drained, which was usually the case, I actually felt energized at the end of the day.
So I have to tell you, like my simple answer is, that simple thing of respecting my time off, was the real game changer for me.
Michael
How long after you decided to make that commitment and then put that into practice, did it take before you started seeing these benefits?
Sonya
Well, it wasn’t an overnight thing, right? I mean, I had to start somewhere. I had to start somewhere. So the first thing that I wanted to do is to spend time with my family during the evenings.
That was my main thing. So I said, 5 p.m. I’m shutting everything down and then I’m dedicating myself to my family. And I had to build a specific routine. I had to have a shutdown routine in order for me, like, to stop thinking about work and really, like, shut down myself altogether. So that routine was related with me putting off my shoes.
So I said, I will start working when I put on my shoes, as soon as I’m without shoes, I’m no longer working. So it was that little thing that helped me make that mental break and no phones, no computers, everything got in my home office and I wasn’t allowed to get to that place. I mean, I have to be very, very conscious around how I’m going to approach this because here is the thing when you make commitments to yourself.
That’s the way you build confidence as soon as you make a commitment to yourself and you keep that commitment, that’s how you become more confident and I know that and that’s why I decided to start there, not to commit to anyone else, not to say to someone else, to my husband, to my team, no, I decided to make that commitment to my own because I know that if I can’t keep it, I can’t trust myself to keep my commitments by anyone else.
So that’s why I made that one. And I have to be honest, it worked tremendously. And once I get to that first step, the next was very easy because I actually saw the difference. I saw what it feels like to be like 24/7 in that workspace and to actually bring, that time, for yourself, that time off, and to respect that time.
Michael
Yes, that trust in ourselves is so critical to anything else we want to do. I, for a long time, I didn’t trust myself. And I remember distinctly the one time that I was walking down the street and saying something about how I never trust myself. And a voice popped up in my head that said, yes I do. Getting used to, but I do now.
You’ve shown that you are committed to yourself, and I trust you now. I trust me now, like you said, everything changed after that.
Sonya
Yeah. It’s like, if you think about this, sometimes we don’t treat ourself fairly. I mean, if I’m talking to my best friend, I wouldn’t say the things that I used to tell myself, which is so silly, you know?
And, I think this is a very important point that you’re making. We are the most important person in our lives and the trust and the confidence starts with us. If we cannot get to a place where we respect ourselves and we treat ourselves with that respect. I can’t imagine being able to doing this with anyone else.
I love that. I love that.
Michael
Yes. And this can be, one of the hardest things for people to accept, but no one else is more important than you. This is opposite what so much of the world, and society, and upbringing, and all the other influences we may have had tell us that other people are more important, and the airlines have it right. You have to put on your oxygen mask before you can help anyone else. You have to put yourself first and keep yourself healthy before you can help anyone else be healthy. If you’re in bed, wiped out, sick, because you’ve been burning too much away, then you can’t be there for your family.
You can’t be there for your friends. You can’t be there for your business.
Sonya
That’s absolutely true. You just don’t show up with the same energy. In fact, sometimes you don’t show up at all. And it’s just a matter of, let’s take a step back. Let’s look inwards and start there.
Michael
Yes. How do you build cultures for yourself, for your company, your family, the companies that you’re working with and all their people, where you and they all feel safe and empowered to bring your, and their unique talents into everything that you and they do?
Sonya
Well, let me tell you, my team is the most important thing in my business. By all means, my people, are the most, the top important thing for me. And I have a very simple management style. I start from 100 percent trust. I don’t manage my people, I manage the work instead. We have built explicit policies, we have built systems, and we have set goals that are tightly aligned with the outcomes of my business.
And I assume by default that my people are there for the right reasons. My sole responsibility is to build that decision-making system that suits the needs of my business and the rules and the process policies that come with that framework, that self-made, that decision-making framework, enable autonomous teams to make decisions on their own.
What this means is that everyone knows what to do in every single situation and they own the framework, meaning they have the autonomy to change the framework. So, it doesn’t really matter whether they’re working from nine to five, from office, from home, or some nice sunny place on the beach. It doesn’t matter at all.
All I care about is, preserving the efficiency of our delivery system. So my focus is on the workflow. It’s on how the work flows, right? The workflow. Resolving any bottlenecks, blockers, dependencies, anything that’s staying in the way of that work getting to our customer’s hands. Because, in the end of the day, it’s not the amount of time we work that makes our customers stay with us, right?
It’s the level of service we provide for them. So as long as the work is done on time and to a high degree of quality, my team have achieved their goals. There is no need to track time, to track hours, none of it. I believe that people want to show up in a workplace that feels more like a community. A workplace where they can be among friends, where they can bring their whole self.
I don’t want to manage my people. I want to inspire them. I don’t stand behind them and say, go. I stand in front of them and say, let’s go. Because I believe that every leader has to champion their team. No matter what. They need to work with somebody that has their back. So, I strongly believe that this is, this leadership mindset is what actually let people show up with their full self and explore their talents and develop them.
Michael
How did you come to this philosophy? This is everything, I believe. Is this, have you always felt this way or are there experiences you’ve had that have led you into this?
Sonya
Well, it was always there, for sure. I believe that this is part of my core values. Because this is everything when it comes to my business.
That’s how I run my business. That’s how I treat my people. That’s how we talk to our customers. Those are the values we live and breathe. And back in the day, when we were, a software development agency, we are now a product development company. We have our own product. It’s a sales product that, we develop and improve continuously.
Back in the day, it was, we were responsible to help small, companies and support their development efforts. So there was a situation where, I had to come into, a business, a startup, that was managed by the two founders. There was a very small team, and I was brought there in order to help them deliver results faster.
And I have to tell you, the culture was toxic. There were fingers pointing at each other all the time. The requirements were unrealistic. Every time when I heard someone start talking, they were asking for something new that should have been delivered yesterday. People stayed till 5 a.m. in the morning to be able to meet those unrealistic deadlines.
Everyone was burnt out. Everyone was overwhelmed. Of course, the development costs went through the roof, the partners were not really delighted by that, and the quality was really, poor. The deadlines were always missed because obviously, they were not realistic at all in the first place. And because of that, people were really like, drained.
They didn’t know why they’re doing this. They didn’t understand why none of their efforts are actually valued. And this was the time where I was clearly seeing the gap between the expectations that are coming from one end and the efforts that are wasted on the other. And it was obvious to me that the problem is not in the people.
The problem was that there were no systems. There were no frameworks, there were no, there was no agreement on how the work is going to be done. There was no clear understanding of what’s the capabilities of the team versus the demand that’s coming from the market. There was no clear understanding of how to make reliable delivery commitments.
Everyone was like shooting in the dark and just picking up a date and they were expecting that this is going to come true. And it was that time when all of that started growing inside of me. And that’s when I decided to start putting some systems in place, some processes in place, and we started building the analytics that we’re currently using to help agile teams in order to reveal what’s happening there, in order to unhide all of that flow of work and try to understand where the problem comes from. Because I have to tell you, when things go south, the first inner reaction, the first good reaction is that you have to push people work harder. They have to stay long hours. They have to stay during the weekend. They have to work more in order to get to those deadlines in order to deliver results on time, to be faster, to be like more productive.
And when we started doing this, it actually turned out that there was a very strange status in the flow of work, that was some sort of approval that has taken 40 percent of our delivery times. And just by us saying, “Hey, can there be like, a second person who can approve the work?” We managed to increase our delivery capability by 40%.
Our cycle time shrinked by 40 percent, just by making a small tweak in how we make decisions. We would have never done that if it wasn’t for the analytics and the data and the charts that would give us those insights. And I have to tell you, the team was at the point where all of them would have left.
All of them would take the ins and outs of the business. All the experience and would take it in the, into the front door, all of them. Can you imagine what such a situation can become for a startup? It would have killed the business. So, this is the point when I realized that this is my thing. And all of those insights that we were able to, reveal and to unhide, those could be helpful to so many businesses in that situation.
So that was the time when we actually decided to start our own product and come up with that value proposition in the market.
Michael
In that initial phase, while you were gathering all the data and didn’t yet have any outcomes to show that the data and the actions you took based on the data and provide business value. How did you persuade the leaders in that company that taking the time to gather this data and understand the right adjustments to make to the process, would pay off?
Sonya
Well, you have to start talking in their own language. All they care about is business outcomes. They care about deliveries. They care about having all of those ideas come true and be handed to their customers’ hands. Because to me, that’s the most important thing for every business. As soon as you are capable to deliver results to your clients, get that feedback from them as soon as possible to understand whether that’s the value that they need, and then pivot accordingly, then you’re in a great place. So that’s how I approach that. I just put some initiatives in place and said, “Hey, we are going to change a little bit, how we manage things here. The objective in the next couple of months is going to be to improve our delivery speed by 40%.” And they said, “Okay, you got this. Go ahead.”
I mean, that’s all they wanted. They wanted to see results. They didn’t care how we get the results. I’m telling you, they were ready to have people work like 80, 100 hours per week in order to get to those results. I knew there is a better way. So we started digging deeper into the data, we started building the charts and we get to a point where we started optimizing the flow of work.
As soon as we get to that improvement, we actually moved quickly to the next one, because I have to tell you, as soon as you get to the point where you see the bottleneck in the system and you resolve that bottleneck, it moves somewhere else. And that’s the bad news. Your system is going to always, it will be broken all the time.
It’s just the bottleneck is going to move and now it’s your job to figure this out and then start running initiatives to keep improving the bottleneck. So, we kept improving, we had the board, we had all the work on the board, we put some policies in place on how to manage it. So, it was a game changer.
It was just a game-changer for us. And it took some time for the partners to wrap their heads around that idea. But as soon as they saw the results, they were all sold. And I think this is the most important way on how to approach situations like this. You want to speak your stakeholders’ language. You want to give them the objectives that they’re after.
And you want to hook those objectives with the efforts of your team.
Michael
As you said, there’s always another bottleneck. At some point, the bottlenecks aren’t interfering enough. At some point, the return on investment on eliminating those bottlenecks may disappear. Or maybe less than the cost will take to eliminate them. How do you understand and how do you help your clients understand when you hit that point, when you might be approaching that point, or even just more generally, how to decide which bottlenecks to go after and which to let be, or workaround, or do something else for?
Sonya
You evaluate the impact and prioritize them based on that impact. In our platform, we have something that we call, for example, blocker clustering analysis. What this means is that we have the capability to measure how much time you’re wasting because something gets blocked. You do external dependencies, external teams, work that’s stopping other work because it has higher priority.
Whatever the reason is. The work is getting stuck in the workflow. And I have to tell you, if you think of your overall time, then, your overall delivery time is split in two things, in two parts, active time and waiting time. The active time is the effort time of your team. The waiting time is the amount of time the work is just sitting and waiting for something to happen.
Sitting and waiting for it to move through the different statuses. Sitting and waiting to be unblocked. Sitting and waiting for it to be released, to be picked up. The waiting time in your process, on average, represents anything between 60 to 99 percent of your total delivery time. Hear me out on these stats.
It is so important. The waiting time represents anything between 60 to 99 percent of your delivery time. So what’s the point of trying to optimize the endpoint time? Your main goal should be to reduce that waiting time in order to get results faster. So, in our platform, we have the capability to perform an analysis of that waiting time and tell you, “Hey, you have three types of blockers: you have internal dependencies, you have unclear requirements, and you have expedite requests. Or those are like items that are taking over the other because they’re more important.” From those three, the one that’s representing 90 percent of the waiting time that you’ve wasted is the expedite requests.
So this is your main opportunity for improvement because this is what’s impacting the most your delivery speed. This is where you have to start looking into, and then it’s just a matter of, “Hey, can we make sure that when we’re prioritizing work, that’s more important than others, it’s really more important.”
Maybe we have to change the criteria of how we mark more important work. Or maybe we can actually have some capacity from the team. Let’s say one or two people, who are just, let’s say, not working on the planned work, but they’re just available for anything else that would come between. So just by putting your attention there and start brainstorming ideas, you can actually come up with a solution to reduce all of that waiting time.
And at some point, even though my opinion is that it doesn’t matter how efficient you are and how efficient your teams are, there is always, and I mean, always a better way to make things better. Always. Even if that’s the point, our dashboard is going to give you your thresholds. So every metric, when it comes to flow and when it comes to business outcomes, every metric has a threshold, has a stable, healthy threshold.
As soon as you’re moving in those thresholds, then your goal should be to maintain that consistency, to maintain that predictability. As soon as anything goes outside of them, that’s a signal for you that you have to take action. We have a dashboard that’s dedicated just for that. To give you those insights so you know, at any one time, what’s the status of your flow and where you need to put your focus on. So that it’s clear for your teams what are the next steps for them and what are the main priorities for them so that they can keep improving and they continuously optimize the delivery system.
Michael
This makes a lot of sense to me. It maps to what I see with my clients as well. Even though I’m working in a completely different aspect of the leaders and teams than you are, that it’s always the aspects of the situation that are invisible, that are the most problematic. In the way that you work with teams, the work that they’re doing is visible.
The time that things are waiting is often very invisible. That’s where you find a lot of the efficiencies and help your customers make improvements. With the work that I do, it’s often the interactions I’m having with someone or with myself are; and the friction that’s there may be visible, is often very visible in uncomfortable ways. And, so the reasons behind that are often very invisible, and it’s identifying and resolving those reasons behind that are causing that friction that helps the friction go away versus trying to put oil in between all the interactions to help reduce the friction.
How do you help your people, the people that you’re working with, your clients and customers, yourself, your family, find their way through all the change, uncertainty, and overwhelm that seems to be what life is full of these days?
Sonya
I give them the opportunity to focus. I give them the opportunity to focus and keep things simple. I let them design their days. Focus on the main things that lead to meaningful progress. And the way we do this is that we cut out all distractions. We block the time to do the work. One example is that our mornings, for example, our mornings are the most productive time for us. So because of it, we don’t schedule any meetings at all. Our dailies happen at 4:00 PM in the evening, when we plan the next day, and then we just go with the day. And I believe that being proactive is the key here. It’s just that simple. Instead of being reactive and letting the day control us, we are being proactive and just live by design. And that’s not only at work. It’s also how we manage our weekends, how we manage our holidays. You’ve probably realized by now that I’m a systems person. And I have it all in my calendar. My meals, my workouts, dog walks, kids activities. It’s all there by design.
If it’s not in my calendar, it’s just not happening. And the reason why we do this is because we want to be in control. The decision-making framework we’ve built and continuously optimize is what helps us make sure we’re heading in the right direction when making decisions. That’s how we reduce uncertainty and overwhelm simply by, living by design.
Michael
Yeah, this is a lot of what I help my clients with is understanding, who are they? How do they work best? For some of them, like with you, having that very crisp structure across every aspect of their life is so helpful. For other people would drive them nuts. And, if we don’t understand where on that spectrum we are, then we hear all the people telling us that we should just be able to, be in the moment and do whatever seems right.
Moment to moment in that no planning is ever necessary. Or, and, we hear all the people saying that things should be even more structured than what you prefer. And we try one, we try the other, we try different things, and none of it works for us, and we don’t understand what’s going on. If we can just take even, just a few minutes of reflection on, these are the 28 things I’ve tried. This part of this one worked, this one didn’t work at all, this kind of worked, but not really because of these three things. Then, we can make, we can have a little better understanding of how we work best and try a few more things. And just by these little tiny, short periods of reflection and tiny, experiments, we can very quickly get into something that works well for us. And end up in a situation like you, where you know exactly what you need to do to accomplish the outcomes that you want to result.
Sonya
I strongly believe that you have to hold yourself to certain daily standards, that are going to make the realization of your goals inevitable. I believe that, and James Clear said that, “We don’t rise to the level of our goals, right? We go down to the levels of our systems.” So that’s why I love so much the idea to live by design because in order for me to be able to achieve my vision, to be able to achieve the vision of my business, and to be able to help as many agile teams as possible, I should make this work.
I should find a way to structure it so that I can get to that place. And the moments of reflection that you’re talking about are so important because that’s the feedback mechanism. You want to be able to improve every single day. You want to be able to understand what’s working and what’s not working, do more of what’s working, and do less of what’s not.
That’s also part of why I understand when I talk about living by design. You need that mechanism to be able to learn from it. Because in my opinion, there is no such thing as failure. You either succeed or you learn. So, when you’re saying that you have to have those moments of reflections, I’m trying to distill that and have every single person in my team to live by that value. Every time when jump on a call every day, when we’re having the daily call, we start with, “What was the one thing that you believe can be done better from today?” And everyone is intentional about searching for those little things, right? So this is so powerful and so simple at the same time.
And I would say, if you just do that, if you don’t do anything else, but just that, you’re actually going to be in a great place one year from now.
Michael
Yes, absolutely. Software teams often do that reflection every sprint, so every week or two or three. I love the idea of doing that reflection every day for 30 seconds even. As you say, that’ll bring big, large, great dividends.
If people would like to learn more about the, your tool, how it might help them improve their processes, talk with you more about how you found your ideal way to work and do that for themselves, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Sonya
Getnave.com. This is where you can learn more about our tool.
I’m on LinkedIn, so, I would love for everyone to go ahead and get in touch with me. We work closely with agile teams, and one of the major things that we hear about time and time again is actually the struggle to make those sprint commitments. They are struggling to make reliable sprint commitments.
They, what happens is that they estimate the work using, let’s say, hours or story points, but usually this can lead to overwhelming results and for them to overcommit and under-deliver, which usually creates stress and causes teams to fall short of their goals. So to address this, we’ve actually created a free resource that’s designed to help teams set achievable goals, achievable commitments, and improve their performance at the same time.
Because in the end of the day, it’s not about working harder, but it’s more about working smarter. Balancing the team’s capacity with the demands and refining how you plan and ultimately building trust with stakeholders. So this specific guide is packed with practical strategies you can apply right away, whether you are like a scrum master, a team lead, or even part of the development team, it’s all about making sprint planning easier and more effective, so you can consistently meet your commitments. It’s completely free. You can download it now at getnave.co/uncommon-leadership. So getnave.co/uncommon-leadership. If your team has been struggling with over-committing, this is the great place to start. I would love for you to check it out and again if you would like to continue the conversation, I’m on LinkedIn, so make sure to reach out.
Michael
Thank you. And I’ll have all those links in the show notes. What would you like to leave our audience with today, Sonya?
Sonya
If there is one thing I want to leave you with, it’s this. Leadership starts with intention. Whether it’s setting boundaries, building trust with your team, or even creating systems that make life easier for everyone, you have the power to design how you lead. Keep things simple. Stay focused on what truly matters and don’t be afraid to revisit your why. Because when you lead by example, with quality and purpose, the impact actually goes far beyond just your teams.
It reflects in everything you do.
Michael
Thank you, Sonya, for a wonderful conversation today.
Sonya
My pleasure.
Michael
And thank you, audience, for joining us today. Sonya and I would love to know, what is your intention today? What is your why? Contact us and let us know. If you don’t know what it is, we’d love to help you figure it out.
Thanks and have a great day.
Sonya
Thank you.