Christian McCarrick  

This is simple leadership. Welcome. Thank you to our sponsor, all zero for helping make the internet a safer place by offering identities a service and support. We’re here to learn from New and seasoned technology leaders who all share a passion for improving the craft of technology management. Let’s take a deep dive into management and leadership challenges and best practices specific to Software Engineering and Technology teams. Do you want more engineering management leadership tactics and information? Subscribe at simple leadership.io to receive the latest updates from this podcast. Hi, I’m your host Cristian McCarrick. This is the simple leadership podcast. Welcome back. Today’s guest is Dana Lawson. Dana has 21 years of experience as an engineer and engineering leader. She has worn many hats to complement a product’s life cycle through her leadership roles that helped to envision New Relic and GitHub, where she currently serves as VP of engineering. With a background in Fine Arts. She brings your creative vision to chart new waters and lead the engineering team to the future on today’s show. We discuss an interesting dinner with Al Gore and tips for managers suddenly having to manage remote teams. Dana, welcome to the show.

 

Dana Lawson  

Thanks. I’m excited to be here.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah. For my listeners, where are you actually dialing in from today?

 

Dana Lawson  

I am dialing in from Damascus, Oregon. In Oregon, it’s outside of Portland, Oregon. So in the Pacific Northwest,

 

Christian McCarrick  

excellent. You know, you almost teased it you couldn’t you know, we’ll get to a little bit of remote work later in the show. It could have been from any number of Damascus’s that are out in the in the world, right. But today it’s from Oregon.

 

Dana Lawson  

Today Damascus, Oregon, not as exciting as the other ones.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah. Well, excellent. As I asked all of my guests on the show, if you could just give me a little bit of a brief background kind of what’s your story and how you got to be radar today?

 

Dana Lawson  

I don’t know sometimes I think I’m like the atypical engineer, but then you talk so many engineers and you realize we’re all a typical, so I got my background started in not thinking I was an engineer. I had this dream of being an artist, you know, it was a great conversation. In talking to my parents when I was like, I’m going to go to college for art, and my mom’s like “to paint?” and I was like “and draw!” .Renaissance! But I found very quickly being a starving artist, maybe not the best path long term, and in college I had the opportunity to take some computer assisted graphic and design classes. And this was back when, you know, Microsoft front page and HTML, all the great languages that still exists today. And I took some of those well, long story longer on a whim I joined the US military. It’s kind of a crazy way how I got there, but I went from art school, to the military. In the military, you have to take a test called the ASVAB. And it’s a skills assessment, and I scored really well in science and math and mechanical engineering. And I saw this job come up that said Information Systems operator Analysis and I was like computers need air conditioning. Why join the army and choose a job that needs air conditioning I’m going to be inside. And here I am 21 years later, I’ve been in every kind of position that you can be in for technology system administration, network, Product Management, sales engineering, every bit that you could be in are probably have been in it— support. And so, you know, that kind of windy path of just trying things out being curious and probably signing up for stuff I wasn’t qualified for, you know, you got to do

 

Christian McCarrick  

that certainly applies to myself too. But as long as you don’t think you’re gonna completely crash and burn if you think you have some aptitude to be able to learn the job, we all learn the job. So if anyone thinks that you have to meet like 100% of any job requirements, like you’re wrong, just apply for it if you think you know, don’t lie, but if they can do it, go ahead and do it. And I think that path to getting to where you are today actually makes you a better leader. Right? You have more empathy with the other teams you have more experience. I always love getting people on my teams to that have a sort of a bit of a Background?

 

Dana Lawson  

Oh, yeah, I think you know, especially when you are trying to build a global product that reaches people from all over the world, you want to have the diversity the diversity in thought. And engineering is such a creative field you can give me and you the same problem. And we come at it produce the same outcomes in totally wildly different ways. And it’s kind of code is our paintbrush boy that I always think of it.

 

Christian McCarrick  

That’s right. You might use front page, I might use something else.

 

Dana Lawson  

There’s a lot of us front page people out there.

 

Come on the 90s were hot.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Oh, yes, they were, you know, they’re they’re pretty good. So interesting to talk about empathy, you know, GitHub, global distributed, and Auth0 globally distributed as well. And I’ve often found that, you know, we didn’t set out to sell our product internationally or globally To start with, but people just started seeing the need, or it’s a global need for identity authentication. And then a lot of our early users became employees. And as you talk about empathy of thought like, that really helped us, I think, to grow into all these different markets organically because we had people there. They were evangelizing us, as well as, as you said, “Oh, this will never work in this culture”, or this is “You have to work this” and I think it just makes the product so much better.

 

Dana Lawson  

Oh, totally. You know, and, and that’s one of the like, pros of distributed work is you immediately have this insight that you may have not had, because you’ve bitten the bullet to find talent and all these different pockets. And so as your product skills, it’s like, wait a minute, I have people that probably have a perspective here, I can just go ask from this part of the world or this part of society that I may not have even considered. So I definitely think having teams like ours is one of those opportunity points you don’t actually like strategically Think about it for ourselves. Well, yeah, it was a little more interesting because it’s the whole primitive of open source software and bring in a whole bunch of randos around, gather to create amazing things. It was just a natural thing to kind of follow that cadence on how the engineering team is designed. But at the end of the day, though, you know, as companies grow, you have different personas. So it’s always interesting to see how that turns out.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Exactly. And this podcast is really about, it’s aimed at engineering managers and leaders. How did you get into being kind of a leader? Did that happen actually in the armed services in the army, or did that happen post actually, once you got into sort of technology or a completely different thing?

 

Dana Lawson  

You know, I don’t know.I honestly think it’s just an attribute that I’ve had ingrained in my like personality. Anybody can be a leader. It’s just how much you want to unlock it. And I’m bossy naturally. I’m kind of in A type to the extreme where I’m like, “Oh, I got an idea. Let’s go do it”, you know? “Oh, wait,” let her go do it. I’ve always just spoken my mind—good or bad. And really, my you know, professional leadership did start after the military. I was an engineer. You know as a as an individual contributor. And I happened to be the individual contributor that was always like, “Oh, look at this problem. Here’s an interesting way how to solve it”, “oh, this problem” or “that problem”, and was just taking the initiative to like, move the ball forward for our team. And I remember the day, my boss was like, you already are acting like the boss, why don’t you just be the boss. I was like, “Oh, no, I’m not gonna be the boss”. I’m just trying to make stuff happen. And they’re like, you’re kind of doing it. And so that started, they’re like, you know what, we’re officially going to just give you the agency, because you’re already taking it, get things done, and that really just started it and just being curious, and I think it’s about having a growth mindset. You know, leadership is such a loaded word. People think that only people with management titles are leaders. And it’s like, No, you should lead from any seat. Anybody has the ability to go influence change and bring up the people around them to do great things and I do believe that we all have that calling in us as humans, naturally, we were empathetic and want to help people. But some of us gravitate, you know, like, gravitate towards it more than others. And that’s kind of how I got my start. I never had like my sights on I’m going to be a manager, I want to manage people. In fact, when I ask people when they go into management, I said, Why do you want to be a manager? If I hear somebody say, “because I can control stuff”, I’m, like, really unhappy. I was like, I think management is getting in your way. It’s the exact opposite. It is the opposite of getting your way. There is no way you’re trying to just pave paths for things to happen. And make sure people are aligned. It’s like horse trading. You know, it’s a constant. “Hey, I give you this if you give me that”, especially at scale, so that’s how I fell into it.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, you’re a glorified broker. I think of it that way. 

 

Dana Lawson  

right. I do. I feel like I’m on the stock floor. And I’m like, hey, these are three of those words all day long. It’s just you know, Moving.

 

Christian McCarrick  

That’s right. That’s right. Interesting analogies, something else, I ask all my guests to anything that you can publicly talk about, about any mistakes, you might have made one thing that stands out or something you’ve learned from over the years that, you know, you’re like, ooh, especially maybe early on or even more recently, because I know I still make mistakes.

 

Dana Lawson  

Oh, I know. There’s such a good laundry list of stuff, you know, some of the themes when you’re early in your career, but the mistakes you make are especially if you like I said, you you gravitate to enabling people right, like I find fulfillment out of helping others and seeing them succeed. More so than I even see my own success, right. Like this is kind of I think, allow a lot of us are and so some of the early mistakes are, like over capitalizing on people pleasing, right? And taking on too much not saying no, because you’re trying to establish who you are. You want to come out with some wins. You want to show people that you’ve got it under control, and then what ends up happening is you spread yourself too thin, you start letting stuff fall off. And it’s like, “Oh great”. Instead of really doing things quality for this one thing in this one area, you’ve gone and over-consumed yourself. And now you’re doing a little bit and it’s not giving any value. And in fact, where you came from wanting to please people it turn into a pissing people off. And we all almost all new leaders fall into that trap because they’re so hungry. We’re so hungry, I’m hungry, give me more. And you almost want to prove yourself, right? Because we all have posture syndrome, no matter what level in the game we are. We’re like, “Oh, I have got to show these people that I am the right person for the job”. insecurity is a great natural thing to push us and not think that we can’t solve anything and that we don’t have big egos. I think insecurity actually plays well with with leaders, but I think also having too much of that you just make bad choices. So I say find the right level of confidence. Don’t try to please everybody, do a few things really well. And it almost seems like the basics. But I mean, I made mistakes. Not only doing that, but just other mistakes, of implementing, you know, massive design changes, like technical changes and Greenfield technology. Like I’m in there for the rewrite,

 

Christian McCarrick  

right, the rewrite that has to happen

 

Dana Lawson  

that’s 1.8 I was like, like, but I think those are okay, mistakes, to be honest, as long as they you know, don’t really impact the business. But I think the common leadership ones are just not narrowing in your focus. You know, because really ambitious people do want to solve big problems, but it’s like narrowing your focus, have some great wins and it will naturally happen in a lot of places where you’re scoping impact grows you I think it’s a constant reminder of, you know, you don’t have to try so hard. I don’t know, it’s it’s kind of like counterintuitive. Like, you don’t have to try so hard. But you got to work hard.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, no, that’s a great point. And I think it applies not only to new managers, but I think as managers take new roles, it also happens because you’ve still you fall back into that same trap, proving yourself. So I’ve done it. Control your whip. It’s a great advice for project management for yourself for personal life or in a ship like, yeah, it’s a great category of things to work on. Right, great points. Now, a little anecdote for my listeners to Dana, you and I, a couple months ago had the pleasure of attending a rather unique dinner. Why don’t you tell my listeners a little bit about that?

 

Dana Lawson  

So me and Christian met at a dinner at Al Gore’s house, and it’s a podcast so it’s kind of always fun to see like visual representations of like how we show up so I saw the email and it was like “it’s gonna be casual”. I had a dinosaur shirt on and a dress like I’m from Portland is always casual. We get to Al Gore’s house and everybody was like, “No way are you going to Al Gore’s house” I was like, “Yeah, I am” and they’re like, “How did you get that invite?” I’m like, “I don’t even know”. But I’m going. I’m going! I didn’t know what to expect. But we walk into you know, the lobby of the place and it’s like, oh, shit, like, we’re actually we’re at Al Gore’s house. I mean, suddenly kind of hit me like, wait a minute, you’re wearing a dinosaur shirt, at Al Gore’s house. Like it’s alright. You just be you. So we go up there. And it was a really compelling conversation. We were all in a circle hanging out with Al Gore eating some food and just talking about tech and some of the challenges that we face and it was almost like surreal. Yeah, you know, at the end  of the day I was like, I” can’t believe this just happened” cuz there’s people there wasn’t many. But that’s how we met but and I have pictures to prove it. So if you listeners out there, just like all my friends, or whatever pictures I was like, I have to prove that I was actually here.

 

Christian McCarrick  

That’s right—pictures or it didn’t happen. That’s right. I that’s actually that reminds me I’ll actually I have one too. I’ll it’s not the best, but I’ll put it up on the show notes page too. It’s SimpleLeadership.io. If you have one, send it over. So we can both put it up there to you know, proof of life there because it was so I thought it was a scam when I first got the email.

 

Dana Lawson  

But I’m showing up! For me, the CEO, they know and I was like, hear me better not be pulling one over on me. Come on now. And I was I’m sure people didn’t believe me. And when even when I got there, I was like, is this gonna be real? He was a really lovely person. People say what is he like? I’m like, “Oh, he’s like a normal dude. I don’t know. Like, whatever normal dude means. I mean, he’s totally approachable. He’s funny”. I thought he was funny. Like, the biggest thing is, he’s very charismatic. He was cracking me up in like, you know, politician and world leaders, I guess have to be a little bit more stoic. But he’s funny.

 

Christian McCarrick  

No, he is and I think, you know, and he also mentioned too I think shout out here to Andela, you know, I think they were participating and helping to put that on. I’ll put Andela in the show notes too. I think you have worked with them a little bit. I’ve worked with him, so props to them. I’ll put them in there. So thank you everyone for Andela too for I think what you’re doing and for having Dana and I be able to have this great dinner with Al Gore, which is so awesome. I’d like to say the same thing “You’re having dinner with who? At his house?” Like it was one that was the first order was like dinner, and then at his house was like an exponential order. Like above that.

 

Dana Lawson  

Yeah, that was where they’re like bullshit meters going off.

 

Christian McCarrick  

You know, I think one of the things I have a million things I could jam with you all day about this, but I think timeliness here. There’s something going on. Remote teams, right. There’s a ton of things again, I can talk with you but current coronavirus, you and I both manage large distributed teams, I thought it’d be helpful to go over some tips and strategies for helping other managers that might be thrust into managing remote teams recently, right? Maybe they’ve been thought about it. Maybe they’ve been like dead set against it. But now suddenly Right here they are, you know, forgetting about all the great things that remote teams and distributed teams are about, like we can talk about that too. But like tactically, if you got someone asked you for advice, or some of the top things you would say to this to managers say How could you start helping today to support your teams working remotely?

 

Dana Lawson  

Honestly, the number one thing is write it down. Like if you don’t have a good practice of writing stuff down, like Congratulations, now you write it down. Second of all, is, you know, you need to form a daily structure for your team and for yourself, have a stand up, do a stand up. If especially if this is the first time and you’re just thrust into this. Take the practices that you do in person and apply them digitally. You have the tool set, be creative, but don’t stop the practices you already have in place just because you have a new obstacle. Find a way to continue on with your normal business as best as you do during this time. So if you have a stand up every day at eight o’clock, have a virtual stand up do it the same way, but write it down in case you have people you know, that had to drop off a kid or have some other, you know, problem come up or impeachment come up because they’re at home, you know, don’t change your rituals. Second of all, be okay with over communicating. Like say it multiple times throughout the days you also as a manager have to give your team a sense of comfort that they feel supported during this time. Because everybody, especially if you come from a button seats, culture, suddenly, you don’t have anybody watching you. And I believe that most people are adults and behave like adults. So you just need to remind them, I trust you. I don’t need to see you. Whatever you need to do as a manager, though, which is a part of your already ingrained ritual. Find a way to do it digitally. Like if you sit and talk to somebody, you know, maybe after lunch, the team gets back together to regroup, make that the thing that you do. You could even go in your—if you’re using Slack or other instant messengers, you could do things like in a stand up written. Another good tip too is like nurses notes. I think when you have a distributed team and you’re on different time zones, or if you’re thrust into this due to the current situation within the world, at the end of the day, just like a charge nurse does in a hospital is that everything you did that day, just write it down, replay it in a place that your team members can see. And then when you start off in the morning, if somebody’s starting off at different times, they’re going to see what was happening. It’s not this radical from how most important teams already behave. I think it’s really understanding that people the people side of it more than the toolset, side, keep your rituals, use new tools, write it down, but realize that people are probably going “How does my ex boss person coworker know that I’m actually adding value?”, you just have to say “I trust you. You’re on the team. This situation doesn’t change that trust that we have in each other, let’s find a way for you to feel good about it”. And so I find ways like, Cool, let’s keep a running one on one document that we write. And like if you want to write on it daily, we can asynchronously stay connected together without physically being in the same place. That gives you a sense of comfort for some devs. And some people on the team. You know, some engineers really, really like to have this kind of workflow because we already work in in epics and sprints and issues in JIRA, as we already have this kind of work take how that development workflow is that will be written and use it for also your people management. But those won’t be the the first few principles. And like, I think another big one, too, if you’re having an online conversation for more than five minutes, call them or make a video call. 90% of our communication is nonverbal, and so I’m kind of an animated speaker already so you can tell how I usually feel from how I thought Not everybody’s like that. And especially if English is a second language, you need to find different ways for people to feel comfortable. And if you’re going back and forth and having a communication barrier, while you’re remote, get on a call, talk, talk it out, turn on your video, you will be amazed how quickly you saw stuff. We seem to get this pattern of like, “Oh, just do it over instant messenger. And it’s like “No, talk to somebody”

 

Christian McCarrick  

excellent advice, all those ones. And kind of PSA too. I know that for video conferencing, there’s a number of companies out there just recently—I think Google for their Hangouts and Zoom and Microsoft have either you know uncapped there things for like the next couple of months or they’ve gone free. So if it’s a question of your company doesn’t you know they can’t afford it or they can’t do it or it’s going to be a purchasing thing. I think right now most of these companies are allow you to just kind of sign up. You know, I think go ahead and do that. I totally agree with that. I was actually on a phone call the other day. I can actually pick up the phone and it felt so odd like holding this thing up to my ear. That my ear was hurting. And because I haven’t been in a phone call that wasn’t a Zoom in so long, like maybe if I have to call the travel agent or something, like,

 

Unknown Speaker  

Well, I know but we’ve been at it for a while. Yeah, it is. I like I know if I have to use a phone, I’m like, “Wait a minute, you don’t wanna see my lovely face?”. They’re like, “no, we just want to talk to you”.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, the, the funny thing whole anecdote not about this, but our company get together every year for kind of an off site, and we do some quarterly ones with different teams. Now that’s a little up in the air. I think lately, you know, as a lot of companies, I think whether it’s conferences or just team offsites, right, I think that’s that’s coming into a little bit more kind of “wait and see” on what’s happening there. But we always see like the talking heads, and it’s always funny when you meet some people first time and you’ve worked with them for so long, and they’re like 6′ 7″. And you know, you didn’t realize that was like wow, you know, there’s just so kind of different in person, but the video gets you a little bit much better than a phone or slack. But still there’s another piece in person that was interesting.

 

Dana Lawson  

Always. We do the same thing. You know, have an annual wherever you put together. And our company’s getting to a size right? Where we’re way past on bars numbers for social interactions and relationships. So even though you have these, like, I talked to some of the people for months before I get to meet them in person, and then it’s like, it’s not like sizing up, but it’s always like, “ah”. I’m actually kind of tall and people are really surprised. They’re like, “You’re kinda tall” and I was like “Yeah, I am kinda tall”. People never know. I’m like, “You’re kind of short!”. But it’s kind of interesting too, because if you think about generations, the millennials and the generation behind them, like 90% of their communication is already driven through text, or Teamspeak and discord servers. So I think it’s easier by cases but also harder because especially at work, right where you haven’t established yourself, maybe if you’re in a young if you’re younger, into your career, not age, but actually Your career, like leverage the things that you already do and like make them better. It’s just interesting times and I think that there’s a ton of great resources for remote work out there like Auth0, GitHub, Zapier, Get Lab, there’s so many companies out there that have these workforces already, go read their blogs, go hit one of those up. Read their blogs, and you’re gonna see a wealth of information on how different engineering teams and product development teams have work distributedly. Like, look at those tips, see the patterns, see what worked for them and apply them to your own needs. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Mm hmm.Yeah, good points, too. I’ll try to put some of those in the show notes as well, because there are like Buffer and a lot of them they have online docs, even if you look at Twitter recently, there’s just a lot of people looking to, hey, I’ve put this doc together. Our team does this. They’re kind of open sourcing, or at least making public some of their internal docs right now, so that’s awesome advice. And what you said before was, maybe if you’re a manager at a company and you haven’t done this before. Go to some of maybe your, you know, less tenured employees. Maybe they’re right outta college. And as you mentioned, this is how a lot of them function socially, and it’s not very different professionally. So grab some of them and say, Hey, anoint someone or help them. “Hey, let’s all get together in a room brainstorm. You know, how can we help? I’m new to this” and they’d be like, “Oh, I totally help you”.

 

Dana Lawson  

Krishna, forgot my most important tip of all for remote work, is learn your emoji game. Okay. You gotta learn that emoji game. I forget about verbal and nonverbal. It’s all emoji verbal. So, I have to say like, you can communicate. We’ve gone back to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Now It’s global enoji’s. There’s so much to be said with the right emoji after like, “Are you serious?” And like, “trust me, I’ve been working remote almosy five years—gotta be hot on that emoji game.

 

Christian McCarrick  

And each company has their own sort of norms around the emojis. And God forbid you like introduce a new one and confuses the hell out of everyone. Like what does he mean?

 

Dana Lawson  

I should make an emoji glossary like “You only use the party parrot if you really are excited. What that means you’re excited party parent equals excitement.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Oh the party parrot. Yes. Oh yes. And you can add your own in slack too. So lots of ones you can totally add your own if it’s open and that’s always fun to be gone back to hieroglyphics. That’s all we’re doing a more of like a you know, Asiatic pictoral based language now with our with emoji’s.

 

Dana Lawson  

I’ll bring it in a little bit… Wingdings!

 

Christian McCarrick  

nice for those with Word and a long time ago.

 

Dana Lawson  

My way I mean I’ve been 27 for a couple decades. I could talk about front page and wingding

 

Christian McCarrick  

So a couple other tips I’ll add to. One Yeah, like you mentioned it again on the video. Right? And once you get on the video, that’s not witness protection program yourself. Right like get a camera. Like order a $69. You know, what is it the Logitech 920 online it’s pretty good. It’s not the end of the world but more important than that. Just get a light. I mean, you can put a lamp in front of you sit in front of a window. No one wants to talk to the like the blacked out fuzzy all you need beyond that is like to disguise your voice, right? And you’re just freaking people out.

 

Dana Lawson  

Totally. And like, I probably am not best because I’m so mobile or one of those where I’m at my desk. I’m on my couch. I’m on the porch. But yeah, I have a light source of some sort. You don’t want to be the nefarious character in the shadows. Tey do think you’re up to something so then you have to really use those party emojis.

 

Christian McCarrick  

That’s right. And I think another thing you alluded to before that I’ve found sometimes gets missed in remote work is don’t avoid or skip like the the normal daily pleasantry stuff, right? I’ve been on waiting. It’s so weird, like you get on some town halls and there’s like 150 people on it and it’s silent. You know, if you walked into a room at a town hall, there’d be people talking and you could barely hear yourself, but everyone’s being silent but even just starting meetings with, “Hey, how’s it going?” Right? You know, “How you feeling? What’s going on?” Right? I think don’t lose that just because you’re remote.

 

Dana Lawson  

And I also think in addition to that is, like you said, like, forget the pleasantries. Like Don’t forget the niceties, it really becomes easy to just become transactional. There are humans on the other end of that message you fired off. And it’s okay to take a few moments to say, “Hey, how are you doing today? What’s up? What’s new?” Because if you went to their desk, you would probably be like, “Hey, what’s up? What are you doing?” Because you’re distracted by all the things going around, and then you’re gonna ask your question, and just behave the way that you already would behave. like it’s funny when people go and get hugs, and they get into slack where we are so slack heavy, where I’m sure you are. And they’re like, people just talk all day. And I’m like, because we’re in an office, people would be talking all day. And I was like, and we have a Slack channel for everything you almost want to encourage it. With the reason being is you want to build that empathy even when you won’t have that physical contact. So leverage, right like knowing somebody because subconsciously, or consciously if you’re not a really cool person, like the more you know about somebody, you’re going to be willing to help them you’re going to empathize with needs, and it’s not going to be this random flyby, you’re gonna be like, “Oh, Christian has this dog. You know, he really loves the party emojis and then hanging out with Al Gore. He’s pretty cool. Maybe he can help me with this”, “Hey, Christian radio and hanging out with Al Gore?”, you know, you cannot take away that. Because then when those moments when you get back together in person, it just makes it so much more special. It’s almost like a reunion. You’re like, “oh my gosh”.

 

Christian McCarrick  

That’s right. That’s a totally great analogy. And you talk about humanizing it. I think at times like this, people, especially if you’re a manager, some of your employees might be anxious, right? They might be anxious, they might need someone to talk to you And don’t forget, you maybe would have gone out to coffee. Someone in the past maybe would have gotten a beer. So just schedule a one on one. ask people how they’re doing just try to reassure them because as a manager right now, I think any type of change makes people anxious so and it’s your job now you might be anxious to get in contact with me and you can you know, you can, I’ll help you out. But for your managers and your employees, just make sure you alleviate any stress and anxiety they have because I know they’re having some.

 

Dana Lawson  

100% we’re our own worst enemy when we ruminate about how we feel with change, right? We have all these things, you know, humans, it’s like the evolutionary response of like, “be paranoid, you’re going to get eaten” exists all the time. And so as managers, we have to say, when change happens like this, you’re not gonna get eaten. Like I trust you, I care about you and it’s okay that you don’t feel okay. And I don’t feel okay either. But we’re here together, and we’re still going to solve great things. And I think it’s also as a leader being realistic about your deadlines. This is a time to start reevaluating and saying like, “Is something going to be impacted? Is the personal and emotional toll going to cause us a few delays?” so that we can re normalize. And I think really coming at it at both sides and ensuring one, what you can do with high quality is important, but not forgetting that it’s affecting everything. And so you can’t say, “Oh, well, this isn’t gonna affect that”. No, it’s gonna affect everything. It’s that change. Be realistic about the deadlines, because that’s what I think makes people really start nervous, especially in a professional setting is “Oh, you changed my world, but you didn’t allow me to figure out how I’m going to do it now”and the goalpost isn’t moving in or out and I think we have to be realistic there. Cut scope, which no product manager ever likes to hear. But hello, we should think about it as a group.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, special times call for some special measures, right? One very specific tactical thing too that I maybe you can let’s let’s jam about a little bit new employees. Right. So you’re onboarding potentially someone this week next week, and your office has said everyone’s working from home. So what tips can you give in it for new managers? organizations where they’ve never like how do you onboard them. In some cases, they might not even be able to give them a laptop like, so any tips for how people might be able to handle that?

 

Dana Lawson  

I mean, once again, it comes, you may have been, you may have logistic delays, if you’re sending gear where you would typically provision it when they’re in the office, I think it’s not just keep constant contact with those new employees. That’s probably the hardest part of going through it is being new. And especially if maybe this is temporary due to the response or even if you’re joining a company that already has a culture, it doesn’t matter. It’s still almost unnerving. I think being there more so than you would and not just saying, “hey, here, come hit me up”. You know, I think sometimes you’re like, “just tell me when you have a problem”. They’re not gonna tell you. They’re not gonna know how to tell you. Schedule stuff, schedule stuff, put stuff on their calendar, have their phone number, give them different areas caught like if they don’t have their laptop, call them. Call them every day that they’re onboarding. Check in with them say “How are you doing? Then give them actual details. Like, here’s where your inventory is, here’s where your laptop is, and continue to feed that information. I would even go even further and be more prescriptive, just like you do an onboarding, go ahead and fill out their calendar, but give them the tools that they need and the things that they should be seeing and make those connections. So if you have onboarding videos, maybe you haven’t recorded them, I would get one of your engineers go record a three minute video of what we typically present, go make a recording of it, let’s go share that recording. Schedule that onborders time, say, “hey, at two o’clock, watch this video”, and then check in with them. I would always clear the deck for your managers in some sense, especially if this is not a part of their culture, because they’re on the fly trying to figure out how to enable new employees. And so let them also figure it out. But treat it as you would and I think the best thing to do is bring structure don’t bring too much ambiguity during this time. The ambiguity already exists with the new situation that people are within. So doing anything you can cut back on that. And like I said with the team, check in at the end of the day, nobody matter what, just say, “Hey”, and it could even be like this is where it’s okay to be a slight message, “How you doing? How is day one? What do you need? What do you need?”, here’s some other things. And then make sure you have those days filled out. And eventually they’re going to get jelling and going. But I think you have to do a lot more outreach, and a lot more connecting. If you already have a really rich onboarding, documentation or experience. Like I said, don’t just give people hey, here’s an email with all these links—schedule their calendar, say, “Here’s a good cadence that I would read these”. Take the horse to water, I mean, can’t force them to drink. I think you have to actually say, you’re going to drink at noon and you’re going to drink this. And then at one o’clock, we’re going to have this Kool Aid and then we’re going to talk about it. And so just be really intentional. Continue to be intentional, just like you would onboarding class and be creative, right? creative logistics problems, find other avenues to get done what you need to get done. And if all of that else fails. Push the onboarding out, that’s okay too. Maybe not every company can do that, but maybe you can. I think with the tool sets that we have today, there’s no reason that most—at least technology companies—can’t find a way to make this work. You probably can.

 

Christian McCarrick  

I really like the point you made about doing screencasts screen recordings doing this up. One, it helps you scale anyway. And what does it take like you take an engineer, you take a manager, you take four hours in one day, and you can probably whip through almost all your onboarding stuff. Then you mentioned like a drip campaign of the onboarding, something I want. I want to reiterate here, and you mentioned at the beginning, the best practices of distributed are actually probably the best practices for what you should be doing in an office anyway, so it’s not something new. Now, I do want to ask you kind of philosophically, how do you think—and this could go either way and maybe it’s going to some company is going to be one or the other—company was thinking about it, they’re on the fence. And either this process goes terribly for them and it sets him back, you know, three years or it goes awesome for them and they’re going to accelerate maybe their distributed workforce. Like, what do you think about that?

 

Dana Lawson  

I think that if something goes that terribly wrong during this period, or or, you know, even if we want to call this an experiment, I would really go back and look at my practices because what is the big delta between having people with butts in seats in your office versus them butts in seats at their home office or coffee shop? You need to look at the people that you’re hiring would be my first like, I would probably step back and say, one, is our practices wrong? OR are we hiring the wrong people, because this is all about, you know, having people that believe in your mission that want to show good work, no matter where they are, about being a part of something larger being, you know, responsible to help their teammates. It’s amazing, like humans actually want to help each other. And if you have a culture that embraces that, if it’s going terrible, you probably have bigger problems. Now, I can imagine it may not go smooth. And there could be road bumps. But that’s what the process is your rollout and I truly believe there isn’t a huge difference between applying them remotely versus in office, you just need to take account for the things that we take for granted. That’s where it is, is like in office, you may not be as disciplined about writing everything down, or displaying it in different clients. Because you’re all co located. Well, remote, you’re going to do the same thing you always did, except you’re going to write it down, you’re going to repeat it and you’re going to share it in many different avenues for people to ensure that they’ve seen it. I think it’s adding a little bit more on to what you already do. But really, I honestly think that if you’re having that kind of problems, like take a look at your company culture, like how is it that you have such a narrow way to have people be successful. We have to be flexible as leaders and meet people where they are and build a company that really in a process that really take care of the majority and then the outliers you kind of deal with independently and that’s okay.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Sue, foundational problems, right. Now, here’s an interesting thing. It’s maybe not tactically related to just this couple of weeks. But in general, I think the majority of engineers, except for those that we’ve all managed, they are not the best at self advocacy, you know, especially from members of underrepresented groups. And, you know, how would you help? Having distributed… I think being distributed can exacerbate that problem, right? There’s a fear of missing out. How do you help people? What guidance would you give to people about helping to, you know, be their own little PR machine and do better at self advocacy? Because I do think, out of sight, out of mind a little bit, how do you make that better?

 

Dana Lawson  

That is really a real problem. And I think like it’s the same problem we’ll see in offices expectedly when you don’t just have diversity in how you show up with diversity in thought and just character. You know, like, if you’re an introvert and you’re in an office like you may be able to not fall in the mix, because you’re just sitting there like you’re reliable, they always see you at your desk, you don’t talk to nobody. Adding an extra layer of remote especially for just on just not the majority of people or and like you said, it’s a definitely underrepresented people that already feel like it’s harder to get their voice out of there. And a lot of us were raised to not have big egos and not to like toot our own horn because that ain’t nice. But you got to get people over that and say “You do good work, it’s okay”. Don’t do it in a way that’s braggy and that you’re stepping on people, but you should feel comfortable to advocate and so some of the ways that you can do this and like tactically, is, you know, think about having Employee Resource Groups thinking about having a guild that people relate to where they can help find tips to advocate and find those channels, but also finding mechanisms and putting in some, some processes that allow that seat at the table. For an example is every Friday for statuses we reproduce agile demos, as a manager rotate who makes a demo even the shy. Everybody on your team should have the opportunity to build a demo. Everybody on your team should have the opportunity to write an internal post about the work they did. I think as managers we have to recognize that. That’s where leaders do come in and say, hey, I see that this person may not because I’m a loud person too like our pot calling the kettle black. I can dominate if I don’t self restrict myself calling people out like I’m in a meeting and I’m overly conscious going, let the next person talk and I think it goes further even distributedly, but I also think about even those people that may not self advocate, you need to find a system so all people can advocate and help push their rotation. I think you know, having the value set with your engineers of like one of the you know, the values and skills that I think is important as a senior engineer is to lift up the people around them. Incentivize, bring up the people around you. It should be a part of them going to the next level. And there you have somebody saying like, I don’t have to have a culture of being a hero or a rock star, right? I always say, I don’t want to rock star, I want the Beatles. They’re all rock stars. And if you have that kind of mind set, then you want to enable every member on your team. But there’s many ways to do that. And I think you have to be intentional. The first step is being intentional and saying, we know with distributed work, that some people will not feel comfortable speaking up for themselves, because x, y and z. How do we build a system that enables them? But you know, you can’t always force people, but I think if you give them the right tools, and you build the right processes, and have the right incentive structure to lift those up around you, you take that down a little bit. But I think more importantly, is you put people that look and feel and represent those groups and positions. And then you know what, there’s suddenly this advocate and there’s also this reality behind it, that they can get to that level that they want to be and that maybe should be advocating for them because they see people that are like them in the positions that they wish to be. If you have all your senior positions from one demographic, you’re going to have even a bigger problem of people self promoting. You will. You’re going to be like, “Oh, I’m going to self promote”, but well, you know, maybe even unconsciously, where’s it gonna go? There’s nobody up there that I feel an affinity to, right. So it’s not like a one size fits all. And I think, find those ways. Once again, there’s so many resources out there that you can experiment with, because depending upon how your team is already composed or what you’re hoping to compose. Try things out, shift to learn, right? approach it like we do software, this may be a good way or not, but it’s one of the challenges. I’m heavily involved in two of our  groups for our women in our LGBTQ and I always go and tell those underrepresented groups like self promotion is important. I know what your parents and the people around you told you. But I’m going to tell you you’re special, you’re amazing, you work hard, be proud of it. work, you earned it.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Great tips. You have to throw off the shackles of like your upbringings, like Irish Catholic or whatever the things are. Now, as a manager, I think it’s important to not only advocate for individuals on your team, but you have to advocate for the team in its entirety to how do you recommend, you know, managers helping that PR upwards?

 

Dana Lawson  

Yeah, I think it’s about once again, like all work is important work. If you’re working on it, I would hope that companies are having their people spend their energy on prioritized work. And even if you don’t feel 100% that it is like be proud of what you’re doing. Right? As a manager, like, I don’t know. I think all issues are interesting in some form or manner like I’ve had the opportunity of getting to break down three monoliths, which sounds like the worst job, because it is because once you have a monolith you always have a monolith. These challenges, you can say, well, oh, what does that manager of the monolith breakdown I’m going to talk about one of the hardest problems that the company will ever face. Like, it’s all about looking through the lens of the value that you’re giving and advocating for it. Now, if you as a manager absolutely cannot see no value, that’s when I would start asking questions like, “How are we measuring this? And how is it going to make an impact?” So I think, taking the opportunity to really visually share, whether it’s written blog posts, you know, having agile demos, going and recording a video, doing an all hands, getting a team meeting and showing the great work that people are doing, it’s going to elevate it. And I think also to that it makes your company better. Because if you think about why open source is awesome, because a whole bunch of people can see that project and say, “Oh, I can go help and contribute”. Or “Wait a minute, I’m tackling the same thing”. When you raise the visibility as a manager for what you’re working on. You never know who has expertise and where they can help accelerate you. doesn’t mean they’re gonna be on your team. But share knowledge is so powerful, and so I just encourage If you’re working on it, like be proud of it, and like, show off that work, do not be ashamed to. And if you can’t, in a way measure how it’s impacting, then maybe you need to go talk to your next leader up or go to props and be like, “Why are we doing this?”. We’re here to ask tough questions, because I believe that, you know, especially in the way of the world now, the way products are developed, especially in our case, you know, we’re building tools for developers to build products or services for developers to build bigger products. Like we know some stuff about what we’re doing like it’s okay to have an opinion. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, absolutely. personal question, now. Do you think you could ever go back to an office like it placed a job as an office every day? Like, what do you feel about that?

 

Dana Lawson  

No, no. I mean, I say no, because I haven’t yet broken my streak of pajamas over five days. It’s not like I will actually go past five days of never leaving my house or wearing pajamas, then I’m going to be remote for a while. But honestly, I think that I work more productively being remote because I get to—I 100% gonna manage my time. If I’m heads down and focus, I turn off Slack, I turn off Zoom, and I block my calendar. If I’m in an office and trying to do that, I’m not gonna be a rude asshole and be like, “Don’t come by and see me”. And this is not who I am. And people know I’d love to talk to ’em anytime. I think that it would have to be something so awesome. Like, I don’t know, I’m sitting next to Al Gore in his office. Maybe that would bring me back into an office? You know, it’s not about the perks in office. It’s about the work and me giving the best of myself. That’s why I say no, like, I don’t know, I feel like I’m giving the best of myself because I feel like I have control over my time and my attention. Moreso my attention. And that’s where quality comes is when you really focused.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Awesome. I mean, I have a list I could talk all day, you know, we both probably have back to back And this sort of thing. But one thing I do ask any recommendations you have might be a book, a conference, a podcast, anything you’ve read recently, or is a seminole kind of piece of work that you might recommend to managers out there.

 

Dana Lawson  

It’s kind of been out there for a bit, but I still resonate with this, especially when you’re working distributedly is, you know, enablement, not empowerment people come with their own power, how do we enable people it’s like, information to be informed. And I always go back to “Turn This Ship Around”. It’s a fantastic book that really is about working with intent instead of seeking permission. And when you really think about distributed work, you want people to work with intent and be informed and not seek permission because who knows where in the world you’re going to be and what the time zone is. And so having the ability to be decisive and go fast and be okay with failure, as long as you’re doing it in a way that’s written, repeatable and known, then you’re going to be alright, and so I love that book, “Turn The Ship Around”. I read a lot of management books, but I didn’t I love that book and podcasts, this one, hello? The Treehouse team have a pretty great podcast, too, that they realize for all sorts of different conversations, whether it be leadership remote work, it’s pretty good one. So I think that one’s a pretty interesting podcast as well.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Cool. And I know you had kind of an online sabbatical for a while. If anyone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way? Should it you know, just GitHub or are you back? 

 

Dana Lawson  

I’m always on an online sabbatical. The internet is mean! I’m a happy person. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m in a LinkedIn poll right now because I say that every time I go and talk to people. Give me maybe a month but I will get back to you. I read every message. I try to respond, but I’m in a hole right now. This weekend, maybe I’ll dig myself out. So LinkedIn, dg Lawson, you’ll find me on there hit me up.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Awesome conversation, the time and Al Gore. You know, this was awesome to love talking to fellow tech leaders jamming about all the things again, I call this my weekly therapy session for lots of reasons. It’s great to talk but thank you for coming on. Stay safe, stay in your pajamas and we’ll chat again soon. 

 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the simple leadership podcast hosted by me Christian McCarrick. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please subscribe. And don’t forget to leave a review in iTunes. Full show notes in additional information can be found on simple leadership.io. If you knew someone who would be a great guest for the show, or you want to share your own experiences, please drop me a line. We’ll see you back next week for more technology leadership tips and advice as I interview more top software engineering leaders

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

Christian McCarrick  

This is simple leadership. Welcome. Thank you to our sponsor, all zero for helping make the internet a safer place by offering identity as a service and supporting this podcast. We’re here to learn from New and seasoned technology leaders who all share a passion for improving the craft of technology management. Let’s take a deep dive into management and leadership challenges and best practices specific to Software Engineering and Technology teams. Do you want more engineering management leadership tactics and information? Subscribe at simple leadership.io to receive the latest updates from this podcast. Hi, I’m your host Christian mckarrick. This is the simple leadership podcast. Welcome back. Today’s guest is Susan bond. Susan is an executive coach who works with technology leaders. She’s the former CEO of Travis CI and has spent over a decade in technology mostly at scaling companies. She’s currently building a product to support new leaders and making the transition from management to executive leadership. She’s a regular contributor to Fast Company where she works for the work life section. Covering leadership, personal effectiveness and productivity. She has an educational background in psychology, organizational behavior and community organizing and received her coach certification from the coaches Training Institute. On today’s episode, we discuss the issue of loneliness as a new software engineering executive. Good afternoon, Susan. Welcome to the show.

 

Suzan Bond  

Hi, thanks so much.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. Now, where are you calling in from today?

 

Suzan Bond  

Brooklyn, New York.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Brooklyn, New York. Awesome. You know, I actually get a decent number of my guests on the show from New York and I grew up there. I think a lot of my listeners know so always great to talk to somebody, a fellow New Yorker.

 

Suzan Bond  

Wait, where did you go up? I did not know that.

 

Christian McCarrick  

I actually grew up out on Long Island. And then I my parents and I moved to the Upper East Side. So I kind of kind of split between Long Island and the Upper East Side. I go back there visit my family. It’s great.

 

Suzan Bond  

Oh, very cool. Yeah, that’s awesome.

 

Christian McCarrick  

So you know one thing I always ask all of my guests to just a high level brief background, you know how you got to be where you are today. You know, what makes you who you are and what you’re doing today.

 

Suzan Bond  

I’ve always been really fascinated with the place where individuals and organizations or larger groups meet my whole life. I studied it, I read books about it, you know, I read books about leaders when I was 12, there was like this whole shelf in the library, and I read every single book on that shelf. That was like such a nerd. My Library card was my best friend. And so I’ve always been really fascinated with that. And that’s sort of an introduction to sort of, like, how I got into the field. You know, I studied psychology and organizational strategy and those things in school. And then I think that the path really into where I am today started with, I managed a project management department in technology. And so that was my first real introduction to management and leadership. And I thought, Oh, I like this. And that took me into going to get coach training and it kind of just went from there. So that was sort of like the genesis of of that and then I do stints as Director of Career Development, and then my most recent was CEO of scaling startup. And I’ve worked for myself off and on. But I’ve also worked at every stage of business but most frequently, scaling startups. That’s like sort of my… I like it. Like I call them the awkward gangly stage of like the juvenile, things are growing. And that’s the stage I like.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, yeah. I kind of like that, too. And I keep going back, you know, to the thing, and it’s very painful. But you keep going back. I don’t know why sometimes. That is right. Feel, at least I feel I can make one of the greatest impacts. And that always feels good, right to take it through that adolescent stage.

 

Unknown Speaker  

It does. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of like, risk and potential stress, but there’s also high reward and some people I think, if you enjoy the chaos there, and making sense out of it, and that’s what’s exciting for you. It’s a really great time of the phase of business to work and so we share that in common.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, total anecdote. I was at a dinner last night. With Plato, it’s an organization I actually do some coaching with. And one of my first mentees that I had years ago there, as a beginning manager, I just saw him on the platform as a director now who is mentoring other people. And I kind of thought that was so cool.

 

Suzan Bond  

That’s, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s great.

 

Christian McCarrick  

So kind of as a coach now, especially with executives and managers, and I have often asked the question of engineering managers kind of what mistakes they made. But in your case, you know, I can ask you what mistakes other people made that you see in coaching them, you know, going from that transition from manager end or that transition from manager to lead more executive.

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, mistakes I made too.

 

Sometimes you’re like, “Oh, you spot that mistake? Yeah, you got that one? Yep. Did that one? Yeah.” I would say that. I think there’s a couple of big things. I think one is just understanding that making the leap from manager to leader it’s just really, it’s different. It’s much bigger than me, people think and people who have Then in executive leadership, say, I think then move from manager to leader or executive was a bigger jump then from individual contributor, so to speak to manager. And I think part of it is because we don’t treat leaders as if, like, we think, oh, the well, they’re big, they’re ready to go. They’ve got this. They don’t need support, like, that’s why we hired them. And I think that’s part of it. And I think where they struggle is a couple of areas. One, and before this, even as a manager, many of them derived their value in their work, what they thought their value was. So for many of them, they derived their value or what they thought their value to the organization was was in executing and getting things done even as a manager, right, you’re still close to the work, you’re managing the work, you’re making sure it’s getting done. And they have a hard time making a turn into being an executive. It’s really about overseeing and influencing. You know what it what that means, right? It’s like you have to make that turn. And I find that the ones who really struggle is they’re still going down and trying to get into the work and like, wait, but I need to get my hands on the code. You know, I think I need to get in there. And, you know, folks have said to me, I’m nervous, I don’t feel confident in my role anymore. And when I said, What’s that about? If the code something goes wrong in the code, I can’t get in there and fix it. That’s a great example of what you know that that shift the mistake, right is that they don’t realize that it’s like a mental shift.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Mm hmm. And a loss of control and power, I think in some cases, right? their comfort,

 

Suzan Bond  

right, and how they see themselves—”I get stuff done for the company, I can ship but now it’s like, oh, but now I have to influence Wait, what? What’s that right?” So they have to derive value and change their their mindset shift right along with a loss of control because you do have to work through other people.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Exactly. And Do you have any tips then for managers making that transition to executive, any like top thing you would say, hey, focus on this, or you need to learn this anything that stands out to you.

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One is really understanding that you’re making a transition. I know that sounds basic, but sometimes people just think, Oh, yeah, I get more autonomy. I get to have more impact.

 

Unknown Speaker  

Yes. And you need maybe a pay raise, pay raise, right? Yeah.

 

Suzan Bond  

Yep. Autonomy impact pay, raise, and make sure that you don’t underestimate the mindset shifts. So making sure you get support, I think, inside your organization, developing also a network of other people who are executives, some who maybe are further down, but other some who are maybe closer to where you are. So you have people to talk with and help learn from other people’s mistakes and help you see yourself and then of course, get an executive coach because they can help you. I mean, it’s, you know, they’re paid. That’s what they’re paid to do.

 

Christian McCarrick  

And we’ll get into that a little bit more. Yeah. You know, I think the main topic today, you know, as we chatted before this episode to focus on is really around the loneliness experienced as an engineering leader. Now you have interviewed and coached many tech leaders about their struggles. How would you say the concept of the theme of loneliness for ranks as far as their kind of top struggles?

 

Suzan Bond  

I think it varies a little bit depending on time in role. I think that leaders who are more experienced would say it’s their second leadership role, or they’ve been in leadership about three or four years. I think by then they figured out their support systems and they’ve been able to process and say, Oh, it’s not just me who’s feeling this, there’s not something wrong with me. There’s, again, it’s like I’ve undergone this shift and that’s why but I would so I would say like as they get more experienced, loneliness gets better. Those I don’t know that it always goes away, depending also on who else is around them and what the organization is going through. But in terms of like new leaders, I would say it ranks in like probably like the top three. I would say that’s pretty high up.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, you are an executive yourself to, you know, how did you kind of struggle with some of that loneliness as well?

 

Suzan Bond  

I did. You know, more than I sort of thought, I think it surprised me a little bit. And honestly, it snuck up on me. I didn’t realize until I was like, I feel lonely. Why do I feel stressed? Why do I feel so tired? Yes, the calendar my calendar was busy. Like any executive, right? I would get up at five or six in the morning sometimes to work with my European folks. But then I would have my Pacific Coast both two or three o’clock then they want you know that I’m supporting them. So sure, there were long hours and a great number of demands. But what I discovered was I was losing energy from because I felt lonely and I didn’t have quite enough support systems. I think it was also you know, I mean, depending on the size of an engineering leader You will definitely feel that for me, it might have been a little bit exacerbated because my role as a CEO was really supporting the entire organization. Dear me like so I think that it was exacerbated a little bit by that.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Sure. I was reading and I think in the post that you wrote online, which is a really good post on this, and it will put it in the show notes, simple leadership.io, if any wants to look at that and read it in more detail. I think there was a quote, even on your Twitter stream you put on there about the concept, you can be in a crowded place, but still feel lonely, right? And it’s like you have meetings all day you’re not like with people. So being around people does not mean you can’t be lonely. Those are not the same thing.

 

Suzan Bond  

Exactly. I think it’s like what do we understand loneliness to be personally, I have never felt more lonely than when I was in a crowded room and I didn’t feel understood or you only mean like, I think it actually makes it feel worse. But the worst part is that we don’t get that we’re live but you’re around people all day. How can you be lonely?

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, that’s right. You know, out of curiosity, and will continue Kind of on this film industry. But what were some of the other top struggles that you know execs go through as well, I’m just out of curiosity.

 

Suzan Bond  

I think part of the thing that executives can struggle with is the influence piece, which is, okay, so you’re used to working in your team. And now you have to work across an organization. Right? As you know, right. You have to work with product, you have to work with marketing, you have to work with the people team, you have to work with revenue or sales. And I think that can be really hard because they have to that means that they have to define their also they have to define their team differently. You don’t have any say over those people. So that means influence and how you work with them. And that collaboration becomes critical. And I think that that I think that that’s just that’s something that many nearly all of my execs we talk about every single one of them talks to me.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, and I think that that’s a good one. You know, I’m just kind of curious about some of the things you you’ve noticed and that aligns a little bit you know, I can talk about that all Day Two other struggles. But we’ll focus on this topic here today I could talk all day about all these great things. I think one thing you also mentioned that that caught my eye in your article was the concept of loneliness versus solitude kind of wanting to go into a little bit about what you’re talking about in that order.

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, I mean, I think loneliness is really about a state of mind. It’s not just about being alone. It’s like what we said, you can be in a crowded room and still feel like the loneliest person, like you’re on your own little island, which is awful. I’d rather be alone and feel lonely than being a big room and feel. But loneliness is really about a state of mind. And it’s like feeling misunderstood or not connected to other people. And I think, I mean, I think about a lot of it is like, such as existential angst, but it’s like a deep, feeling unseen, you know, or like other people just don’t connect with you, which is a very tough feeling. Whereas I would say solitude is a much more positive place where we’re going internal, this time. But instead of sort of in a negative way, it’s about understanding ourselves better and thinking about like, what do I think about understanding what’s on my mind? How do I really perceive that issue or feel about that issue? Or what are other ways I can see it. So it is more about going internal and a really positive way.

 

Christian McCarrick  

I think that time is super important. That self reflection time that solitude time where you need to whether you’re an introvert, you need to recharge, or you need to just do that strategy planning, you need to think about the future versus the fire that’s at the door, which is an executive. I think that’s another transition that I think people have to go through right thinking a little bit more about the future and not just the current fire because you have to, there’s delegations, all the things you need to do to try to deal with that, which you know, we’ve talked about in the past as well. But I want to go into the details of in your article and then the post you put out. I want to go into some of those details you mentioned about some of the top causes of information, kind of going to Some of those and one of them you mentioned was gaps and information that gaps information can exacerbate some of that feelings of loneliness. So let’s go into that a little bit more. What do you mean by that?

 

Suzan Bond  

You know, listen, there’s a big trend around transparency. And I love it. I am all for it. I think transparency is really hard to live. You know, I mean, like, it just is, I love the efforts, like if you think about buffer buffer is doing a tremendous amount of work around organizational transparency, not just internally, but also externally. I think that’s wonderful. I want that trend to continue. And I think people even if they’re not in, let’s say, a radically transparent organization or a stated value. I think leaders are still trying to be as transparent as they possibly can. It’s something I think that actually keeps leaders up at night. That’s what I hear from leaders. I know what kept me up. Am I being transparent enough? Am I being open enough? Am I giving enough context? And the struggle, you know, as I’m sure you know, is that there is just simply information that sometimes you can’t see for legal reasons, or for there’s a ton of people reasons doing like, over but like personnel, you’re like, I went back to the 80s there, but like things that address people’s, the humans in the business that you just can’t share. And I think that those gaps in information can be hard because then the team doesn’t actually have always have all of the, they don’t have all of the information and you’re sort of like, trust me.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Trust me,

 

Suzan Bond  

which is awkward as a leader, right, you’re like, I understand why this may not make sense or why it’s tough. And I think that the result of that gap in information is that the team members can be upset about things and and not because they don’t understand which I it makes perfect sense to me, right? Like you don’t understand the decision. I’m always like, why but why did you do that? So I think I can see me being upset about that. And I think what can happen is that then leaders feel misunderstood. Are the people think? I think sometimes what can happen is either they can look at you like you’re incompetent, or they can look at you like you don’t care. And then of course, that can probably feel lonely, when those are not your experiences. That makes sense.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, totally, you’re trying to do what’s best for them, and maybe the company, they don’t know that. And as a leader, you have to have somewhat of thick skin. Because you’ll get, you’ll get attacked, whether it’s in person or in a group setting or you know, on Slack, and you’re like, and you can’t, in some cases, defend yourself not because you can’t say something and then you do have to go that will trust me, they don’t have the context. And it’s rough. You know, I’ve read studies to that by withholding things, whether it’s in any type of relationship that increases your stress levels, and this is the same thing.

 

Suzan Bond  

I would love to read that article actually, I think that’s exactly it like with withholding things done definitely increases stress. For sure. Well And I think it’s really interesting to I made just made a connection to, you know, if we go back to what we were talking about earlier, which is what are some of the the areas where new execs can sort of fumble a little bit related to influence is building trust. And you because you have to have trust because of those gaps in information. It’s going if you have a little bit there, then that, trust me, goes a little bit further. You know what I mean? 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Bhe trust nank.

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, yeah, exactly. building that trust bank. And I think a lot of times execs come in and they want to prove themselves they want to have a big strategy document. And my opinion is spend time like doing someone’s called it like the interview tour. I cant rember they called it and I think that that that the listening to her, I think the listening to her is actually just as powerful around that building trust. So when you get to the gaps and information phase, you have some foundation for a relationship.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, no, I agree. And I’ve gone through this even even in my career. current role, as you mentioned, the personnel issue, someone might for whatever reason is needs to depart the company. And then the rest of the team feels like you aren’t transparent enough. But what are you going to do? I mean, you can, when you mentioned there’s legal reasons and two, it just might not have worked out, I might have a personal reason or a health reason or any other things that you just you can’t disclose.

 

Suzan Bond  

Kinda also protect that person, because they have a right to privacy around—maybe they’re dealing with something. It’s hard. And of course, at the same time, the team members probably feel shocked because for them, it might have came out of the blue even though you had been working on it most the time for a long time. It’s always that balance.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah. And not to get into a flame or anything. But I also have noticed that the concert transparency, when you’re dealing with more of the millennial generation, I’ve also seen that there’s more expectation of this full transparency, which they will do to each other. But you know, it doesn’t necessarily, there’s some things as you mentioned, us can’t talk about or sometimes transparency. There’s just so much information that if I was to give everyone everything, they’d be overloaded and couldn’t do their jobs.

 

Suzan Bond  

It’s a fire hose, right? Well, and also for you to sort of digest it and to be able to add context in a way that they could understand takes a tremendous amount of effort and you have to like is, you know, you gotta juggle your priorities. Where do you put your energy? Which fire Are you trying to put out? Because you are surrounded by them?

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. Kind of getting to one of the other points to power dynamics, in your experience, and in talking with the people that you also coach, define how the power dynamics and kind of add to that loneliness factor.

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, so when I say power dynamics, I think this is actually a really hard one for most execs, because even though they have more autonomy, they don’t quite realize that other people see them show differently. Sure. Right. So when they might toss off a comment. People are like writing a lot. Oh, you said to read that book. I read it and it’s One exact told me that they were like, when did I say that? Well, you mentioned it in this email. And this was a real moment of where this, you know, it was about a, you know, very technical topic, and then the person thought they were going in that direction. And leader was like, Oh, no, I just, I just thought you might be interested in it. So they don’t think they realize how much a tossed off comment might impact. And you know, power dynamics are not just I mean, it’s about your actions, right? What are you what are your actions? What are you reinforcing it even as simple things as like, if you are co located where you sit, who go to lunch with, and but it’s also all of those communication and the way that we speak to them. And I know I talked about in my article, I worked very hard to connect with my team. And they were all in Europe, and I was in New York working remotely. And so I worked really hard to connect with them. And I realized, and I worked really hard to build trust with them really hard, and I realized I will always be their boss. And we were pretty darn close. closes a team. But I think that was a moment I thought, Oh, yeah, this is a very different relationship. I’ve been a manager many times, but I’m not used to being you work with the CEO you have influence across the company. Now I was like, Oh, yeah, I mean, there was no conflict there for us. But it was just a moment where I realized, Oh, I doesn’t matter what I do this power dynamic is always going to be

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, absolutely. Even with my teams, I’ll have some icees. And they may be will feel reluctant about scheduling just a meeting with me or skip level or and it because oh, I’m the VP I’m so busy. I’m in charge of all the stuff I you know, I’m not as important like, and it hurts me a little bit, because that’s not how I try to come off. Right. But as you say, it’s that power dynamic, and it’s just assumed,

 

Suzan Bond  

Right, exactly. And I think that’s true what you said about thick skin and it does hurt you and and you have to learn how to not let it hurt you because you know, you’re like that’s not how I feel at all. Yeah, and I think in some ways you have to accept that no matter how hard, you work to reduce that power dynamic that is still there. And you have to keep finding ways I’m sure as you did to make sure they feel welcome or to reach out to people so that you can try to, like remove as much of that gap. You can erase it but as is to narrow it to as small of a crevice as you can make it.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, absolutely. Now, I’m going to ask you kind of a specific scenario, under the power dynamics issue. There’s always the case like if you’re an icy and you get promoted to a manager, and then you have to manage your former peers, that’s one level. But do you feel that going from you know, kind of a manager to an executive is even a stronger kind of pull there like it’s a stronger dynamic difference, maybe due to competition or more power dynamic seems that do you see that at all with some of the people you coach?

 

Suzan Bond  

I definitely think it can be that way. I think it depends upon what’s going on inside. Organization around openness and transparency, how execs are viewed. And I think also the previous relationships that you’ve had in in the organization. I mean, we all know that there are some managers who’ve been promoted, and people are really excited. And there are some who are promoted and people are less excited I because of lots of different reasons people people are humans. But I do think there is a bit of that leaders have to be cognizant of that that relationships will change and that there can be there’s just an adjustment period there.

 

Christian McCarrick  

You also mentioned the unrealistic expectation on leaders. And in one case, I think you mentioned in the article as well, someone mentioned to someone you had coach and sort of mentioned, how do you show kind of that vulnerability, which is important, but at the same time, like projecting confidence and steadfastness, especially in times of crisis, where your team is looking for you, and if you are panicking, they’re going to panic. How do you do that balance? How do you coach the executor It is to find that balance.

 

Suzan Bond  

When that person told me I just thought, wow, they really, they just articulated that so incredibly well, that challenge that they face. Because there is a call for us to be, I think at the same time, we expect leaders to be perfectly up, but actually also want them to be vulnerable. It’s like these two things happening at once, which is an interesting sort of place for the years to occupy. That one big variability is also the size of the company if you have like a bunch of VCs because there’s also more stakeholders that you actually have to be aware of customers and internal team and, and VCs and investors and all of that, those sort of things. I think that’s an interesting challenge. I think that first of all, you have to understand what’s right for you, as a human being some people tend to just be a little more guarded than others. I tend to be open but guarded, like I’m a little bit of a tweener in that way. And so, I think that you have to find the place where maybe you feel a little bit of an edge To be vulnerable, but not so much where you feel like so uncomfortable, like you might throw up joining me. There’s a little place that I think, how can I share the real things that are happening? And I think it can be simple things. Like, I know, this is disappointing, I’m disappointed to, or this didn’t work out the way I wanted to. And I’m looking at that. I think simple statements can even small things like that can help just give a tiny peek into a leaders mind.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Sure. I think that’s important showing your human I think goes a long way. You know, it might take some of that pressure off of being you know, superhuman when you’re not. You also mentioned helping with some setting expectations. You mentioned a morning ritual. Having a ritual in the morning can kind of help you prepare, what are some of the things you might recommend for a person looking to do that?

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, actually, I think I’m morning ritual. So glad you brought that up a morning ritual is really important, I think for every leader before their date. gets pulled into meetings and everything else so that they can listen to themselves. I think morning is great. But anytime that you can take that is fantastic. And I think really the goal of it is to just really have a time when you can block out all of the inputs, so that you can listen again listen to yourself. Part of that will be I think ideas come up about handles and how to handle situations. You’ll crystallize how you’re feeling about something, what you maybe need to say, or I know when I have a my mornings of solitude. I’ll often come up with like, Oh, wait, I perceive it this way, but they’re perceiving it that way. Oh, so I need to communicate differently. You know, I think there’s lots of ways you can do it. I personally think writing is one of the best ways you know, like literally hand writing. I know we’re all in technology, but handwriting there’s something they’ve even said there’s something different about the way your brain processes when you have when you hand write and when you have a writing instrument in your hand. And so I think that’s actually very important. And I think a lot of leaders don’t do that, because I think they’re so busy taking care of everyone else they forget.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah. And you’re right. It doesn’t matter. I mean, I know some people who do something, they get up early, and they’ll do it in the morning. And others. It’s kind of the thing they do before they go to bed to help unload their racing mind, put it down, prepare for the next day.

 

Suzan Bond  

That’s another way to do it. As long as they get that done is wonderful. I know for me, it was the thing that really helped me a ton.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, great. Now, another topic that near and dear to my heart, poor support networks, which I think for me has been one of the biggest contributors to kind of that loneliness feeling and as I talked to kind of some other executives and other managers as well. I’ve mentioned this before, it’s one of the reasons why I started this podcast, just to be able to jam and chat and you know, have a little bit I call my our therapy session.

 

Suzan Bond  

Love it.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Other leaders What are some ways that leaders can help to build support networks? You know, what are some of the ways that you can help co or you help coach people to say, one? It’s true, you don’t have a good support network, especially a newer executive, how can you go about building one?

 

Suzan Bond  

If you don’t mind, I want to step back for a second. George, I think one of the unique challenges about being a leader is that why they’re actually more important, because everyone should have one. And I think it just gets harder as you go along. And the reason it gets harder is because of all of the pressure and all the things we’ve talked about. And I think also, there’s fewer of you. And you’re all going a million miles an hour, and you’re just like, there’s a fire, there’s a fire, there’s a fire. And so I think that what that means is it gets harder to do and also we’re not used to doing it because in some ways, our support network we have to work a little less hard earlier in our career because we have more natural peered forms of it. Right, exactly. We are peers or other people who understand when you get to be No leader, there’s fewer of you. And then also even reaching out because sometimes feels scary because of all of that confidential information that you sure right? You can’t talk to people. Yeah. Well, right, you’re like, so this thing sort of happened, you know, my friend, right? Like, it can be tricky to find that balance and it can lead you to self isolate, and not so I think part of I just wanted to go back to that, because I do think it’s a little bit different. I think it’s important for everyone. But this is the first time we’re not the first time but I think a very big shift when someone actually has to create one. So people don’t know how to do that. And some people don’t they get to that point in their career, and they don’t really know how to do it, like I always did my naturally I just reached out to people. And I think it’s more about like having a plan, recognizing, again, I’m big on transition, recognizing that you’ve made a transition you have pushed off onto a new land and you can’t see the old one. You’re on the middle of a big ocean, going to new land that you think is around the corner. So So a couple things. I mean, it really is about, I always recommend that if you’ve heard of the gallops done some research about employee engagement is to work for Gallup certified strengths coach, I’m a big fan of their stuff. And most people think that polls are how they make money, but they actually make 85% of their money through what they call human capital consulting. They’ve great stuff. But so they talk about employee engagement. And one of the important factors is having a best friend at work. Interesting. Yeah, that didn’t actually make the article because I mean, it was 2000. Yeah, I couldn’t include it. But having the best friend at work is much easier earlier in your career, and I think it but it’s still important for leaders. So finding a best friend at work, probably someone else on the exec team though it doesn’t necessarily have to be I think that that’s one thing is making sure that you have that confident that person who you can be like did you see that thing? How Mike What do you think about that you right, where you can just they have a lot of context and they have the similar information. So you can can just be, you can let down and be yourself and not have to self monitor. I think that’s actually the one of the things that is super important to it can happen, but just to make sure that you have at least one of those folks inside the company. And then of course, networks outside are also really important, right other exactly where you feel even where you can just talk about the broad strokes, even though you won’t be able to talk about the specifics those that can make you feel less lonely, like, Oh, it’s not just my company, or me. I mean, that’s part of why I write what I write is because I want to make I ultimately want leaders to feel less lonely and to feel like “Oh, got it, oh, there’s other people experiencing the same thing”, even when I’m not writing about loneliness is actually a massive reason. I write what I write. And then I’m going to say, obviously, hello, executive coaching is very good for that. And increasingly, companies are really investing in that. But I would say the other thing is Is I really am not trying to be self promotional, I just…

 

Christian McCarrick  

No, no.

 

Suzan Bond  

…really believe in it. And then I would say the last thing is making sure that you actually have outside interest. Like, remember that you have a life outside of the company, even if let’s say you’re not talking directly about work, that’s maybe a good thing. Having social time you’re being a human being reminding yourself that you’re not just always being watched, and you feel a lot of pressure, but that you’re just

 

Christian McCarrick  

laughing and being a human refilling your kind of coffers and getting some self worth to outside of your, because you might have a terrible week or something in your job. And if that’s the only thing you have, that you’re valuing yourself on, well, that’s pretty bad. But if you can distribute that out to whatever else you do, you go to the gym, you walk you yoga, you do art, and you can kind of get some of that good feeling and confidence from other things than the low one one. It will be an averaging effect and not a total effect.

 

Suzan Bond  

It’s a really good point because you can get so consumed. Yes,

 

Christian McCarrick  

I know, to my detriment. And one thing I want to point out too and again, Back to your coaching piece is most execs are probably going to report to the CEO or maybe a CEO, coo. And they just are not going to have the time for you. Right? So if you think you’re going to be exact, and you’re going to be coached by your CEO, I mean, you might learn by osmosis. But I mean, from experience to, you know, you’re very rarely going to get that wisdom an hour long one on ones where there’s this like coaching thing going on, they might point out things you’re doing wrong or becomes a very tactical, or you might get a good job. Back to your point. I think that’s why it becomes even more important for execs to have that coach because it’s a little bit of taking a place of the CEO and, and Frank if you’re in golf, or basketball or wherever you have a coach. You know why sometimes management is different, right? It’s a skill, you can learn it, you can hone it, you can get better, why wouldn’t you want to have every opportunity have to advance yourself and improve?

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, I do think that folks, we don’t realize that How little of that time that will get much development or, you know, support unless it gets really critical with the CEO because they are just so busy. I mean, it is no shade on the CEO so you know, busy and the loneliest person in the company for the most part. But yeah, you have to take control of your getting that support you need in a way that I think it ramps it up even though you maybe have done it early in your career. You’re right. It’s harder. You have to you have to work harder at it.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, absolutely. One even a specific theme on this kind of support network to I want to I want to talk about your second that I’ve personally found is the specific challenges of being a technical executive, where I found most CEOs and other members of the exec team are usually not technical, right? They don’t always understand the technical needs. So you’re kind of on an island in the executive team. Yes. Where they just Why do you have so many people like I don’t understand Like, why is a third of the budget going to engineering which they don’t understand about? So it’s

 

Suzan Bond  

why can’t we all be co located? Why do we have anyone remote?

 

Christian McCarrick  

Is this something that other kind of executives have mentioned to you as well?

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, I think it’s a really good point. Because, depending on like the structure, sometimes they’ll be you know, you know, exec teams, their structure really depends. Sometimes there’s the CTO, and VP who sit on the exec team, sometimes the CTO, sometimes it’s dual VPS. But it can be very lonely. The only kind of group that might sort of relate might be your product, folks, depending on how your product VP or you know, CPOE, depending on how technical they are. Yes, I do think that they do feel lonely. And I think part of that goes back to the making that turn around, oh, I’ve got to really figure out how do I connect with folks from very different functions? How do I make sure that the people team or operations or sales understands the question strengths. I have why we do need so many people why we can’t just add a feature overnight why these infrastructure costs have to be so high. All of those things I work almost not exclusively with technologies. But most of my folks are from the software side like technical CTOs VPN. That’s the people I work with the most. I think it’s absolutely true, that they I think, in some ways can feel extremely lonely because of that. Yeah.

 

Christian McCarrick  

And it’s a skill. I think you need to get a CS degree part of that curriculum is not how do you work with your CFO? Right? How do you create budgets? How do you justify expense? How do you translate tech product speak into Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints and things that the rest of the executive team might understand. So I think that’s a skill that it’s training some you get it over time, but I think it’s something seriously lacking as you come to the executive About how to properly manage up and out at the exact level

 

Suzan Bond  

100%. Because when you’ve been going up in the throughout the engineering part of the organization, many times you will talk to other people outside of your area, but you’re not having to influence or collaborate or you don’t need as much. And now this is really different. It’s a different kind of skill set and try to I also like, oh, how do I talk about the importance of this? Make sure they understand why it’s important. And how do I put it in words? Because I’m used to just saying to another engineer, well, you gotta get it edited up, right.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, totally. Something a whole nother podcast, we could talk about, you know, you’ve also written about the lack thereof of executive onboarding. And companies like that is something I think, which again, it’s a whole nother episode, but just, I think for the listeners out here, too. I like how you put it in that it’s a transition, whether you’re going to a new company, or whether you’re at an existing Company transitioning into that executive role. I view it as a transition take it seriously and know that it’s not just the same old.

 

Suzan Bond  

Well, yeah, that, you know, I noticed that as a COO, you know, part of my job was really supporting the executive, the executive team. And I saw that right away that when, when execs might be, you know, coming on board and having a hard time with it, but I also did, just for some context, I interviewed a bunch of leaders last spring and last summer can just understand what their challenges were and, you know, hone in on that. I came up with three things and one of them was validated what I thought which was onboarding, it’s non existent. Like when I asked the question, people literally chuckled like, Did you mean I got my computer? And I got an invite for the executive meeting.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, pretty much

 

Suzan Bond  

but all of them really wanted that and we don’t do a good job at that again, because we have our perception around leaders being invincible and ready to go and of course, then we don’t want to be like, Hey, I’m I just got this role, but I don’t, I could use a little bit of help. So it was one of the biggest trends that I saw. Loneliness was the second trend. And the third trend was executives, you know, really need support around organizational, just some of the functional strategic like acting from an organizational perspective, they wanted more support around the organizational dynamics and working through that. So this person contacts that that’s where that comes from. And I the onboarding is the thing that really grabbed my attention and great, I think can help a lot.

 

Christian McCarrick  

I do recommend a book, their first 90 days, it’s not perfect, but as you’re going through a transition at any point, first 90 days is certainly a book there. I think there’s another book did you mention transitions, I think is another one.

 

Suzan Bond  

So good by William bridges is so old, but it’s so good.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah. Any other recommendations you have books, podcasts, like anything else that you might recommend for my listeners,

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, a book that I buy for pretty much every one of my leaders comes into coaching is called multipliers. The subtitle is, you know it that’s I do. Yeah, the subtitle is how the best leaders make everyone smarter. It’s by Liz Wiseman. It’s a fantastic book that I think can help folks, especially around making the turn with basically micromanaging right like that, that going down and the influence. It’s just such a great book that I give all of

 

Christian McCarrick  

all of my books. I was discussing this with somebody last night, that book multipliers and they mentioned the kind of the converse of that, which is like the subtractors. Right, there’s the there’s the opposite of that and you have to kind of watch out for that as well. Now, you are a coach Now give me like the kind of the, you know, the two minute elevator pitch, you know, kind of what you specialize in and you know how you could help some of some of my listeners.

 

Suzan Bond  

Yeah, so my specialty is I tend to coach newer execs, who are making that transition Because I want to offer them support during that time, although I coach more experienced execs too, but I would say most of my folks are somewhere between one and five years and their first or second role. I’ve got one who’s been in a couple roles, but now the organization is scaling and they came to me because now they’re managing people who they’ve never done that role. And they had they were like, Oh, wait, I have that’s that thing we’ve been talking about, like, what’s my value in working through asleep, like confidence stuff like the confidence and making that turn them I work with them on on loneliness, influence around the organization. And then sometimes it’s around managing managers, which you know, is different than managing icees that is a different sort of thing. So it’s all around those kinds of things amongst others,

 

Christian McCarrick  

Okay. And what would be the best way to contact you if people want to reach out to you to, you know, inquire about your services, or just kind of some Thing triggered something from the conversation and they want to follow up with you.

 

Suzan Bond  

I’m a Twitter lover who’ve been on the platform for 11 years. And so it’s always a great way you know that folks can reach me at it’s at Susan bond as she’s ENVO nd I’m on the platform a lot. And I, my DMS are open. And I’ve been very lucky that I can keep them open but I answer questions folks write me all the time and I’m happy to answer questions there. You can also contact me on my website, there’s a contact form on there. And then my email is Susan at Susan bond calm. I love talking about this stuff. So I love it when people reach out because I enjoy it so much. And I love talking with other people who are thinking about the topic so

 

Christian McCarrick  

excellent. And as usual, the book recommendations and everything will be on my show notes on this episode. Simple leadership.io. Susan, appreciate the time. I had a great conversation today. Thank you very much for joining the show

 

Suzan Bond  

It was great, it is the most fun I’ve had all day.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Thank you for listening to this episode of the simpler leadership podcast hosted by me Christian mckarrick. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please subscribe and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes. Full show notes and additional information can be found on simple leadership.io. If you know someone who would be a great guest for the show, or you want to share your own experiences, please drop me a line. We’ll see you back next week for more technology leadership tips and advice as I interview more top software engineering leaders

 

Christian McCarrick  

This is simple leadership. Welcome.

 

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We’re here to learn from New and seasoned technology leaders who all share a passion for improving the craft of technology management. Let’s take a deep dive into management and leadership challenges and best practices specific to Software Engineering and Technology teams. Do you want more engineering management leadership tactics and information? Subscribe at SimpleLeadership.io to receive the latest updates from this podcast. 

 

Hi, I’m your host Christian mckarrick. This is the Simple Leadership podcast. Welcome back. Today’s guest is Loïc Houssier. Loïc started his career as a security researcher in France and has a background in mathematics and cryptography. His career evolved to more management roles in software engineering, focusing on critical infrastructure of European administration’s working for Orange, Thales, and Naval group. He eventually decided to join a startup, OpenTrust, to help with growth and organize the teams and eventually became the CTO there. Luke joined DocuSign via the acquisition of OpenTrust four years ago and is today a VP based in San Francisco leading DocuSign’s efforts on mobile, eCommerce, and billing systems. On today’s show, we discuss mergers and acquisitions along with engineering team efficiency. Good afternoon, Loïc. Welcome to the show.

 

Loïc Houssier  

Well, welcome for having me. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. And look, I had the pleasure of having dinner with you a few months ago at a Plato event. I greatly enjoyed our conversation at that time. So I’m super excited to kind of continue the conversation and to have you on the podcast today. So thank you very much for joining.

 

Loïc Houssier  

Of course. And I’ve listened to your podcast more than a couple of times and I feel I was a failure or not to be a part of the people that you haven’t interviewed so far. So thank you for having me again. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Oh, absolutely. Thank you. My pleasure. Also, Loïc, where are you calling in from today?

 

Loïc Houssier  

From San Francisco, so from the DocuSign office downtown San Francisco. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Excellent, excellent, very close to me. I’m actually working from my home today in the East Bay, we’re pretty close to each other at least in the same time zone and in the same city. One thing I do want to point out to my listeners, I also apologize, I haven’t recorded an episode in almost six months. As some of you other engineering managers and leaders know, I’ve been running engineering for a super fast growing unicorn. And that’s pretty challenging. And it’s taking up most of my time. The good news is that I’ve been able to get some help on this podcast and will be returning to a more consistent schedule in the coming months. So definitely appreciate everyone’s patience  and thank you for all the listeners out there who have been pretty dedicated to the show, and have been inquiring when the new episode is coming out. And I can say, you know, when this launches, that’ll be a good New Year’s resolution to keep the show going. Like I asked all my guests, if you could just kind of give me a little bit of a brief background, kind of what you did to get to where you are today. You know what might be interesting to my listeners?

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, so I’m now in San Francisco. I basically started my career in France, studied math, most of my time and ended up doing cryptography as my specialization of math. I started my career as a research engineer in the security field. I did that for something like three years and a half. In a big telco company, Orange, for people who are mostly in Europe. It’s a pretty big company, hundred thousand people, and that company is a pretty big structure. I’ve been working there for like three, three years and a half, I was saying, I moved in another big company like 60,000 employee called Thales, which was and still is working in the defense industry. And I was basically working on the security of critical infrastructure and mostly focusing on government’s *inaudible*. And I was there some kind of a half a security expert as you can be after 4 years of experience, but they call it expert anyway. But I was also basically managing the development of a platform that We were basically providing to, to our customers a woman’s. After that I had a nice opportunity to basically go outside of the software industry. So after seven, seven years in my career, basically inside a Thales group, there was a subsidiary called another group. And their focus is basically building submarines and frigate for the French marine. And basically, I took this opportunity to be outside of the software industry just to understand how the heavy industry is working. So I was there to help from an organization perspective with some kind of a program management background. And I was basically trying to apply what I’ve learned in that area, which was basically just amazing for my the rest of my career. So it was only two years outside of the software industry. That gave me the opportunity to basically help people that were way more senior than me, were more knowledgeable but as you could have field because I was basically newborn on this area and not knowing anything about what is a torpedo, well, what is a radar, but I still had to basically influence the way they work by providing some processes or tools, basically around their work. And that was one of the best experiences I had, which I could reuse as my job as a manager. So basically how to influence people where you don’t have the technical legitimacy anymore, which the more you, you climb the ladder, the less you can be really technical. So that was just an amazing experience. But it was still a big company. So after these two years outside of the software industry, I wanted to come back to my first love which was security and an engineering. So I had an opportunity in the tiny company of 60 people and they were looking for basically kind of a program manager with a security hat and working for the government. so I had kind of the perfect profile for them. And then they were 60. So I was so happy to have an opportunity to understand what is a startup. How this is working because I was mostly working on big companies with a highly processed and a lot of people supporting you. And I just discovered a world where you have to do everything by yourself, which has some downside. But the good side is, if you are able to do some impact there, the impact at this scale is huge for the company. So in that startup, starting to be like, some kind of a big Program Manager, and you know, having a dedicated software team because for my biggest basic customer, I needed to basically make some dedicated release with some specific modification for governments. And it was working pretty fine. And at some point, they moved in on the engineering side totally without any more customer relationship, and just helping teams to be more efficient. And I basically ended up being the CTO of that small company. And we move from 60 to 120 through an acquisition, and which was interesting because we called it a merge and not an acquisition. So it was basically two companies. As you can number one and number two in France in our area, and so ended up being 120. And that company has been acquired by DocuSign, four years ago. So managing, again, a merge of this time, it was a real acquisition. So we have been acquired. And I had to basically manage that. And I basically ended up going in San Francisco two years ago, who basically took on a bigger a bigger scope. And now I manage mobile, the eCommerce side to sort of self service side of the design. And I have some team in Brazil too. So this is what I’m doing right now. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Okay, excellent. I love hearing how people kind of got to the positions they are today because they they really are varied. And it really shows there isn’t necessarily one path, which I think sometimes people think that there’s only one path to become, you know, software leader and the more people I talked to, the more I realized, and I hope my my guests realize that there is no true path. You know, I’ve often found in talking with some of my other guests on the show too that they’ve found that whether it’s in software companies themselves doing roles that are not necessarily technical, and or going outside of software engineering, I think it is those types of opportunities and experiences. I think everyone is pretty much said really helps them when it when they do become a software or an engineering manager. And those skills, like you mentioned before, helping you along the way on that path of becoming a better leader and a better manager.

 

Loïc Houssier  

Oh, yeah. When I started, so I was a security researcher. And basically, I was, so I was coming from a, it was an average University in France and the lab I was working at it was people from a school called Polytechnique in France, which is kind of the MIT in the US to give you a sense. So it’s as if I was coming from community college, or let’s say, definitely Bootcamp, and I was mostly working with people from the MIT. So that was just amazing for me, like the opportunity to basically ramp up and have all those brains that were basically running so fast compared to me when I just joined. And after three years I was, let’s say on par, I just I had this feeling so basically my ego was just too big. So basically when I moved to Thatles, in my first management role, my technical legitimacy was probably the first asset I was using to influence people. And then when I moved out of the software industry, I didn’t have that technical legitimacy anymore. So I had to put my my ego in my pocket and try to find other ways to have people listen to me. And that was honestly the best experience I ever had. So it’s just the understanding that you don’t have to be the best technical person in the room in order to make a decision or two, to make sure that people follow the same path and and listen to you was, was just amazing for me. That was eye opening. And I’m not sure that if I, let’s say let’s assume that I would have just continued the same road on the software industry. I may have become a jerk, honestly. I could’ve become someone with a big ego and just trying to be there. Just like “I know, I know I’m the best. I know what I’m talking about. So guys, you just have to follow me”, I could have become that person, honestly. But that experience, the fact that you’re talking to people that are just in a totally different field, you have to find the ways you have basically have to learn to listen. Because if you want to help them solving problems, you have to listen and understand what they do, and not assume from the beginning. So yes, that was that one of the suggestions I can give to people is try something that’s totally different. The experience that you will get there will be tremendous.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Sure. And I think the higher you go in software engineering, leadership and management, the more that you actually have to rely on those skills, not just downwards to your team. But as you’re talking with the executive team, you’re talking with people in other departments sales and marketing and you have to talk to board members. You have to rely on those non-technical skills to be able to translate as you mentioned, to have the influence, to have the proper communication, to get what you need to get done in a way that’s not relying just on your technical chops. 

 

Loïc Houssier  

Definitely, definitely. So as part of those two years, so one was working on submarine…the other year, I was working on nuclear plants. And I was kind of a deputy director of the operation. So I basically was a kind of a young guy. So walking aside, the really senior person on that area that was basically managing contracts with the French. I was a four wheel supply main contractor. And I was basically working with him and he was explaining to me how to manage the different contract, how to do claims on some contracts in order to achieve some goals strategically on other areas, because of the levels we can have between the different contractors. So trying to also understand all the businesses side and not only the technical side, trying to understand how they think and how they look at the problem was just tremendous. And now when I’m basically managing Europe and trying to understand what is important for my boss or  marketing or product commerce side, and it’s really helping me a lot to figure out and try to understand how they think. And not only being good at managing technical people on all my directors, so it’s definitely a big asset.

 

Christian McCarrick  

And something I asked all my guests is any mistakes you’ve made that you can publicly talk about, maybe protect the innocent or whatnot. I know. We all have probably a whole litany of them. But part of I think what so my listeners get out of this show is understanding that none of us are really perfect. And we’ve all had our mistakes along the way. Any ones that come to mind for you that you can share?

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, basically, I will talk about two. So the first one was on my very first experience, so I had the team that I was assigned to for a government project. And basically I was stupidly assuming other people that will efficient well look at me, so I was like “They should be outspoken. They should speak loud, they should be always jumping on to new opportunities, they should provide value pretty fast in mostly working on a quick and dirty and not slowly losing time” and stuff like that. And I had that guy on my team. He was so slow. He was really slow. I just requested a small document for the particular customer to explain how we do things from basically organization perspective. And he was a guy that was on the team for quite a long time. And I said, “Yeah, I need that document pretty fast and it’s fine. basically give me a two pager and this is just what we need”. And after a week, he came back to me and said, “Yeah, just a couple of more days”, so “Okay, that’s fine”. And then like midweek after that come back to “Are you OK, are you good with the document? Can you provide it to me?” “No, no, a couple of tweaking again”. So basically, it took like something like three or four weeks to provide me with the document and I was totally going crazy because if I were me, I would have done like two pages in one day, it would have been good enough. So I went to my boss and I said, “Damn, I cannot work with that guy, that guy in my team. It’s not possible, took a month to provide that document”. And he basically clapped, looking at me and saying, “Congratulation”. So what’s up? “Why are you saying congratulations?”. He said “No, you just made your first management mistake”. I was kind of curious about it and pretty defensive. And he said, “So describe to me the guy”. I said, “Well, he’s too much on the detail and is always taking the time to be sure that what is written is right, and is not able to do some shortcut”. Okay? So basically, you know, the guy you know that this is the way you behave in What did you ask him by to provide me with a two pager like a quick and dirty. So basically, your mistake is that you assigned a guy to the wrong task. This is your fault. And that was the very first time that I basically looked at it in a different way and the way my manager was direct with me, so there’s a lot of learnings from that. So basically, my manager was a great mentor, and was fairly direct with me. So he was not trying to say, you know, everyone is different. He was really blunt and told me you made a mistake, and this is the mistake. I’ll try to think about the say it in a different way right now. So that was first thing that I learned from that is being direct is probably the best way to help people to improve. And as a manager basically is like it’s my role not to change people, but to understand how people are efficient in their own way and basically give them the work where they will be successful. So which is basically the way we did it after that the guy was working and we just curious about what it would be. I was happy to work on and willing, it would be feeling efficient and happy to work and basically manage all the configuration management of the project, which in the defense industry is something that is pretty huge. And you know he did amazing work, amazing work. I was really quick on judging that person just because he was different than me. And basically I learned that I was the guy basically world In that story, so I was lucky that I had a good manager calling me wrong on this. And that was early in my career. That was one of the best things that I’ve said the best mistake that I’ve done in my career. 

 

And I have a second one. So this one was pretty early in my career. This is usually what I tell to my folks is like, you don’t have to make all the mistakes early in your career, you have to learn from them, whether you are in your 20s or you’re in your 40s. And so I can talk about this one. So it was like kind of eye opening for me. Discussion again, with my manager, I read a lot about management and how you can manage your priorities and how to set them up and the difference between urgent and important. I used to talk about this, that that story and the way to look at management as someone that is juggling with eight balls, and you’ll see he has 8 balls and is not able to basically manage more than eight balls. Balls being project being initiative, this is only what he can do. And if a ninth one, he’s coming on to another one, he’s coming on top of it, he needs to drop one, I would say the least important of that and delegate that one to the people that are below. And each one in the basic organization. Is able to manage, let’s say, between six and eight balls. So basically, if everyone is dropping the least important balls that they are managing, at the end of the day that people that are like really working, they will stop doing the things that are less important for the company. I love this idea of way to manage the real priorities because there’s kind of a funnel where you know that the things that are the least important won’t be worked on. But I will say there’s a difference between understanding the concept and being able to apply that in day to day life. And coming back to my background, so I was kind of a program manager. So I used to do a lot of dashboards with a lot of KPIs and for quite a long time and I was always trying for each of my teams to understand all those KPIs. So I wanted to know anything, everything. So whether it is the throughput of the projects, the number of … and what are the SLAs on top of it. I wanted to have all those information. Even if I knew my priorities, and what will my priorities, I had the feeling that and this fear of missing out something. So I wanted to receive all those KPIs. And I was basically putting a framework for the semi boss team in order to for him to have those the information that I thought were crucial to drive your business or your teams. And you look at me say how much time do you spend on this? Yeah, I don’t know. But it’s, it’s obviously building the framework is pretty long and everything. He said, this is not where you need to spend your time. What are your priorities? So this my priority and say, “Okay, so how much time you spend on that?” “See, I don’t know maybe like, in my day, in my week, maybe a 15 to 20%”. He said, “Forget about those KPIs and spend 60% on those priorities, this is what I need”. And basically, that’s all it comes down to the what is your limit in terms of workforce, what you’re able to achieve, and it was always hard for me to let go and not see them, obviously, every single detail, but there’s so much only so much you can do. There’s only so much that you can look at. And I was basically at the time where I need to let go, I need to let go. And just basically, you know, so I won’t look at those KPIs. Just my guys will look at it. I need those teams to look at that and I just need to trust them. And they will inform me if there’s an issue on that so that I can just look at the right KPIs that make sense for me, and they were the ones that are really important. And so even if I’m in my 40s, and I’m a VP now, I was still struggling with that. And it was like two weeks ago, and that discussion was eye opening for me. So just you know, for the people that are listening to that maybe the takeaway is like, you don’t have to make all the mistakes early in your career. Even if you are pretty advanced in your career, it’s totally fine, to accept that you’re making some mistakes, and you can change the way you look at things. Two big mistakes, I would say that I can disclose. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. And I think it’s true. I think we do make mistakes every day. And as you point out, the the most important thing is being open to learning from them. Some of those learnings can come from not only your manager, but they can also come from your peers. And they can also come from some of the people you manage as well. So be open for learning all up and down and sideways as well. You know, you’ve mentioned a couple things, you’ve been a part of a couple of mergers and potential acquisition. And I think this is something that almost all managers will have to deal with at some point in their careers, right, especially fast growing companies. You know, it could be called a reorganization. And that really could be something that is pushed down to you or to something that is initiated by you yourself as a manager. It could be large, it could be small. There’s other types where you talked about two and you’re actually combining two different entities and what we’ll chat about that in a second, but let’s walk through some of these kind of scenarios. As a manager of teams, if you’re looking at your teams and you’re looking at again, as a efficiency are the things, what are some of the reasons that would kind of make you as a manager, look to want to potentially want to merge teams?

 

Loïc Houssier  

That’s a good question. I would say merge that I took my experience from was basically a business merge. So we decided to merge two different companies in which you basically don’t have the choice. And you just have to make sure that the merge is working well, and you’re trying to mix the culture, where that is basically a working product company. And then from that perspective, maybe a couple of thoughts, one mistake again, that has been done at the time. We called it a merge, but it was an acquisition. And when you have basically two different cultures, two different set of stacks and you have two teams that you need to work together as a one team, but they work totally differently. You need to be clear in the early beginning, basically what would be the set of cultural practices that will keep. In terms of merger was basically to say, in fact, it’s not a mergers it’s an acquisition. And I’m sorry, guys, maybe you’re not really happy with that. But you will have to convert within this set of practices or this set of stacks or the set of to set because for efficiency reason, we cannot have like, I don’t know, two CICD  processes, or so many stacks. So you will have to change. And this is one thing that we didn’t do very well in the beginning, is clearly set the expectations. So people were like, yeah, it’s a merge, but we want to keep our stacks. It’s another team. We don’t have projects together. So nothing was really clear. And that was probably one of the key learning that I have right now. It’s if and when we do acquisition, it’s to be clear on setting the expectation.

 

Christian McCarrick  

sure, from the very beginning, making it clear if there’s going to be a technology change or an acquisition, like you said, being clear about which one is going to be, I don’t say winning out right, but which one is going to be the ultimate path you’re going to kind of merge towards right or transition to

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, and exactly what you said, you said, choosing the one that is winning out. But this is the feeling of the people that are already working, when you have to change your… your stacks to the the one that the other team is using, you feel like you’ve lost something. So there’s a feeling that you have to manage. But if you don’t do it, so if you don’t set the expectation in the beginning, people will always have this kind of fear. What I mean is, there’s a need for clarity, if you don’t have the clarity, people will always assume or they go on the path that is not the one you want to have. So it’s better to set the path in the beginning, even if there are some consequences to that. Some people may decide to quit because they don’t like the new set of stacks of your new set of practices or the culture. But if it’s clear in beginning, at least you can manage the consequences. If it’s not clear, it will lead to friction between the teams and a lack of efficiency.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Okay, and do you any tips that you would recommend for any, any managers that are leading teams right now that might be, you know, they’re getting acquired their recently acquired or you know, it might be something in the future? What are some of the top things you’ve learned? Maybe not as a, as a leader at an executive level, but more if you’re, you know, a line manager, maybe managing one team or senior manager. Any recommendations you have for how they can help their teams get through a transition like that?

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, I guess the worst is the the uncertainty. Trying to be as transparent, seeking information. At first, I would say that the early beginning on the why. Why are we being acquired? What are the reasonings? Let’s say you’re part of the company being acquired, you need to understand why that your company is acquired. Is it acquired because they are looking for the tech stack or the piece of software that is fairly well complementing the offering. Are they mosty interested in it as a marketing asset, or is it they don’t really look down at looking at the stacks or the product you’ve built, but they look at the team itself. As a manager, you need to understand the reason for the acquisition to basically tell your team because uncertainty is the worst. And as the acquisition is moving, so during the due diligence, so after the deal is closed, basically explaining and trying to understand what would be the impact for the team and be clear. And in the beginning not trying to protect the team was as long as you can to protect the the identity or whatever trying to understand what is the overall goal of the acquisition. And if there’s a chance, let’s say I don’t know you’re part of an acquisition and they want to change the way you hosted. So you were in a Ws and they want you to move to GCP. Or you were using some monitoring system and they totally want you to change that how you will make it even the stacks. They want to change the language of your of your software and wants you to rewrite about of it, I think this is the kind of information that needs to be clear from the outset as soon as the as possible, because no matter what you will have to manage the transition will say sooner or later. And the sooner you know, the better you will be prepared and the better you and the people you manage, will be able to provide you the feedback. Some people will say, “You know what, if you’re changing that, I will quit”. So then you know, so you will be able to be prepared for that and to to manage that. If you don’t also seek those information and share that with your team. Basically, that would be way harder to manage. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Okay, sure. Anything post acquisition—so you’re a manager the first 90 day. Is there anything important that they should look to do or try to manage through that transition? Because I know as you said, there’s going to be some uncertainty. It’s a little bit of unease, anything that a manager post the acquisition/closing should focus on?

 

Loïc Houssier  

Try to follow the change and not be reluctant to the change but with an acquisition you will go through change no matter what. Whatever it is, maybe you were using title when you will be using JIRA. Maybe it’s a downgrade, that’s fine. Maybe you were using, I don’t know get lab that you need to get her or maybe you were using Slack, you need to, to use Microsoft Teams or whatever. I would say even though it’s usually the the silly stuff. So for someone moving from the one that I would say instant messaging to one another, in the big scheme, it’s kind of silly, not really important. But this is the kind of stuff that basically will annoy most your team. So you need to be aware of the change and have the change to move as fast as you can. That is really important. The second aspect is making sure that your team has a mission, it needs to be clear from the beginning. Let’s say in the first 90 days, there will be a lot of work for the integration. Integrating the systems, integrating the product, maybe you’re doing some change in the stacks. But in the long run, what will be the mission of your team? And that is really important especially if the acquisition of the merge make you some kind of a satellite site. So I will give you an Example: DocuSign has two main offices, one in Seattle and one in San Francisco. But we have offices in Paris, in Tel Aviv, in Warrenville, in Chicago, and South Paulo. When 70% of your workforce is in basically the two main city sites in the US, you have to make sure that these, let’s call them satellites have a real mission. Because if they don’t have a real mission, it would be really hard for them to exist. So it’s, if you’re part of those small teams that have been acquired by your big thing, you need to be really clear and understand what is the mission so that you people understand that they belong to something that is bigger. And it’s, and it’s really important.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. And that certainly helps with motivation as well. And I think one last thing to add on this is, as I’ve gone through some of these myself, there’s an urge, either by yourself or by some of your teams to maybe make a rash decision. You know, something that they might make emotionally, when, as you said, it might be something silly like, like an instant messaging tool, and they might be willing to change jobs over that. Well, I think in some cases, too, it’s give it a little time wait and see how things are so you’re better able to make a more sort of impartial decision instead of just a pure emotional one.

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, I would also add, it’s important to understand because I’ve heard that so many times “Ahh they want us to change to their tool, but it’s not the best one”. And trying to first understand as a manager of that, the best solution for your team is maybe not the best solution for the company. That is something that is hard. So for example, I don’t know—the database. Maybe your solution is way better and more efficient for your product. But at scale, adding your centralized DBA team that are really specialized and able to choose one stack or one version of the database is probably better for the company, in terms of SLA in terms of performances. So maybe for you it’s not optimal, but it would be for the overall company. And that is one of the hardest thing to do is accept for the good of the company, that the your team is downgrading some of the aspects that they were doing. So that is one of the hardest thing to do. Because you have to be convinced yourself, which is hard. But you have to convince your team then this is not easy. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. I think that segues to into kind of the second part of this the conversation of what I want to get into around, especially as growing teams and companies grow that concept of what’s the most optimized thing for a team might not be the most optimized thing for the organization. And especially as you’re trying to build a engineering team that is operating as efficiently as it can and especially at scale. At some point, adding people linearly just doesn’t work. it incurs an increasing management cost. And of course, payroll is one of the largest expenses at a company. So what are the things that you have learned about scaling engineering teams and scaling them you know, as efficiently as possible throughout your career?

 

Loïc Houssier  

It’s a matter of prioritization. So when you want to grow and grow fast, my learning is focusing on hiring the right people is the number one priority. So you want your job to do, you want your job to do you have your, basically your release to, to go through the door, but if you want to, to scale, you have to hire other people that can make you scale. So when when we hire we try to surprise over here, we always try to find the people that have the network so that they can bring more people so that you reduce basically the kind of the lead time between the job offering and the people that come in. That’s one thing, talking about the tech stack. That’s one thing too, the more you bring out a new stack, the more maintenance it will need. So trying to reduce or converge into a standard in a company. It’s always good. And it’s kind of interesting and it comes down to the the way I do personally trying to manage things. There’s, we try to I don’t know if you read that book “The Zone to Win” by Geoffrey Moore. So it’s a different world basically world the famous one than “Cross the Chasm”, which is about product lifecycle and how to to reach your market. But he wrote the second one that he basically, I think he wrote it when he was working with Microsoft and Salesforce, basically (now I’m not trying to spoil it for people that want to read the book). He basically explained that there’s a way to look at innovation, try to be simplifying, there’s one side that is disruptive innovation, disruptive from your customer perspective, and something that is more like sustaining innovation or continuous innovation. So you have your current product offering and you add features on top of it. But those will say continuous innovation happens on the product or service that is already working, which is basically the bread and butter of your business. Here you cannot be too disruptive. So you cannot probably bring on new stacks or a new way to host, or a new way to deploy. You need work through incremental, small increment to make sure that you’re not disruptive. Because this is your business. So you cannot disrupt it. But on the other side on the positive, but you want to bring up a new service to the market on top of the portfolio you have, you can, you don’t have much customer yet. So you can be really agile there. And you can basically test new ways to host new ways to, to deploy. And so for example, talking about infrastructure, whether you want to be like your bare metal, have to do your managed communities on Google or Amazon. There’s a wide range of solutions. At DocuSign, for everything that is the core business, there’s one way basically to deploy the product which is on prem on our own data center as a new fairly, let’s say not cutting edge way. Because what we want to achieve is basically five nines and this is what we will achieve in terms of SLA, because our customers do not want us to basically mess with the, the desolace because of contract and when you sign a contract is is highly time sensitive. On the other side of the spectrum, we are providing innovation to our customer on some stuff that are kind of before and after the medical doctors signing a contract, preparing the contract or acting on the after the signature. And this is more using cutting edge technology. So we can have some stuff that are maybe, let’s say, are not yet mature terms of operations, or in terms of even on wage or, and but that’s okay, that’s okay, because we want to get fast. And we optimize for velocity, or compared to optimizing for stability, just trying to be on the growth side of things. So it’s, there’s two ways to look at the growth. So there’s a slow growth production business because you cannot just be like disruptive and the disruptive growth where we trying to adapt and to add more solutions to your current portfolio.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I was just going to mention to even at Auth0, we have our core login flow is something that is absolutely mission critical and you know, that has to be met with the highest level of SLAs. But innovating around things like the dashboard or reporting or other types of things that providing gives us a little more flexibility to be able to innovate on that. Because even if that’s down for five or 10 minutes, it doesn’t have a huge impact. Now, we don’t want that anyway for lots of other reasons for perception of whatnot. But it, like you said, it does allow you to, to kind of innovate on the different areas of your product, depending upon how poor they are or not.

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, maybe three, nine, it’s perfectly fine for this dashboard, compared to your very own audition mechanism where it should be at four or five nines because it’s so much critical. So yeah. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. One thing I want to talk about too, because this sometimes becomes a controversial topic is measurement and metrics. As an engineering manager, I have sometimes found teams skeptical and sometimes hostile to any type of sort of measurement and you know, talk about before wanting to measure everything with with some of your background, how do you recommend a manager to have conversations with teams about introducing metrics? And how they can be important and helpful.

 

Loïc Houssier  

I went a long way, as I basically talked before, I’m a data person and I love dashboards with like hundreds of KPIs that I can try to see and detect patterns to better understand how basically my teams are going. But eventually, now I can say it, I think it was, if not a waste of time, it was probably a waste of focus. So now, I would argue that, and this is what we are trying to do with my team is to focus the team on one or two KPI that makes sense. And so we did I did my offsites kickoff for FY 21 with my teams. And we spend basically that it’s all basically based on the company priorities and everything trying to define what is the definition of success for us. And our definition of success is probably not the velocity of the scrum teams. It’s probably not this level of details. We basically said okay, we need to release this by that time, and we need to change that architectural design. In a couple of, let’s say, two main milestone, basically team, so that this was the definition of their success. And we will all align that we need to optimize for that. And I’ve been clear that, of course, you want to be reactive on p ones on. But I would say being clear on what is the, the one big thing or the two big things that matters helps with the prioritization. Because when you’re trying to look at too many pieces of data or too many metrics. And again, and talking about the velocity of the scrum teams, based on the story point and everything Sure, obviously, on the paper is really good. It’s nice to see over time that your VC is trending down because the new employee are no more efficient and everything. So sorry, not the velocity 20 down, the trending up would be better. You get what I mean, right? It’s satisfying. It’s satisfying. At the end of the day, the energy you spend trying to put in business metrics. I’m not sure what types of business. I’m now in a position and I can say it. That is for me and my team that it’s probably better to focus on the one or two KPI that matters the most for the business, and making sure that those are good. And basically, the success will be there. And that’s all part of the discussion I had with my boss when I was trying to put that framework to have all this visibility and everything told me what about those small projects, if you when we say those big two, and all of those are basically are not very successful with dealing with that be a good year for you. So yeah, that would be a great year. If I fail to see I’m successful on those ones. So focus on those ones. I don’t care about the others. I will say it’s not I don’t care obviously about it. It was a word who said focus on those ones. So going down to the metrics now I’m trying to be as scientific as I can with my my lead. So that we are all aligned on what is the most important and the rest difficult without teams. They will have their own metrics. Maybe they will be a bit more detailed than I am. But at the end of the day, I’m fine. And I trust them perfectly to manage their… Yeah, I’m more like that now, it was a late change. So if I had to restart my mercury again, I think I will have less scrutiny on all those KPIs. And maybe be less picky when also working with my teams. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Sure. No, excellent focus on what matters. And by doing that, you know, and if you measure what matters, then that’s the thing that the team again in a circle the teams will focus on. And then you’ll hopefully try to improve and make sure that they align to the business because ultimately, that’s the most important thing.

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, and it’s, it’s funny, you mentioned “Measure what Matters”, which is a great book, and talking about rkR and stuff, and even if you look at those books, they provide a way to be aligned, but they don’t provide the granularity. And this is probably where I struggle. I won’t say struggle. I’m pretty okay with my career, but this is probably where I struggle with all those frameworks. It’s hard to adapt them or implement them in your ecosystem within your company and trying to find the right granularity. What shouldn’t be, what should it be those results that you put on the objectives, how many should be what what is exactly what you need? And it can depend, I think there’s no one size fits all. But, I more and more like, you need one objective and maybe one or two week period, that should be enough for your team, they should understand what is the definition of success with that little information.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Perfect. And as we kind of wrap up this episode a little bit. We’ve mentioned a couple of books here already. But are there any other resources that you have that you might recommend for a book, podcast, blog you like to read or anything that that either has helped you in the past that you recommend or something that you might have might have read recently?

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah. I would start with the one that I just finished basically, on Wednesday, when I was in Seattle, another snow which is the “Bad Blood” sort of story of theranos. And it is up at times. So I think this is that was a good book. Because for one time we were talking about a failure. And not about…on that will be more so maybe you are one of my two cents. But it’s when we listen to people that are like outspoken and successful in their career. It’s very impressive and I was looking up to those person that were like, you know, Steve Jobs but not only older, those guy like Elon Musk and everything and we focus on those successful people. You look at the gap between them and you and say “Damn, I won’t be able to, to achieve anything like that in the end”. That can be depressing, honestly. And again, you’re trying to understand what makes them successful, but you have this survival bias. So you’re looking at the other people that succeed, but what about the others—why people are failing? and I find that this book is for once looking at someone that was  brilliant, so being able to start that business at 22. And so she was basically uniformly recognized as a brilliant person. But still the company failed. And it was basically because of the poor management. There was some technical issues. But the poor management was one of the reasons. I found this book really interesting because for once we were looking at what management can play in your business. Even if you have a lot of money, you have raised a lot of money, basically end up losing your business because of your poor management. So that one was really interesting. And another one that I will mention is “Creativity, Inc.” I don’t know if you read this one, written by Ed Catmull. He was the CEO of Pixar. And he went also through an acquisition by Disney. And the book is about how to foster creativity in your teams. And there’s a lot of learnings for obviously engineering leaders because it tells how those guys were open to any comment on the other movies they were building. So from anyone in a company, everyone was able to raise their hand and say, “I don’t know, this piece this moment. I don’t like it because it’s whatever”. And they’re forced to have this energy where everyone felt totally allowed to, to express their concern about the piece of a movie.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Their legendary screenings that they used to do inside, right? 

 

Loïc Houssier  

Yeah, yeah. And that was just amazing. Of course, it’s obviously for people making movies, but you can definitely adapt for your own teams and try to foster that. I will say that kind of true, because it’s really easy for and I look at my key ones in my teams and they feel p ones being. Sorry, my young engineers so that I people that just joined a company straight out of college. In the beginning they can be shy and how can you during design reviews or during meetings—how can you give them the feeling that they are totally entitled to, to say what they don’t understand, or they want to challenge an architecture? So it gives you a lot of, obviously tips and stuff that you can apply. So I really love that. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Excellent. Excellent. Well, couple of definitely good book recommendations that I haven’t read the theranos one, too, I actually have it, it’s on my book list to read. I do want to read that because I’ve got that recommendation from a couple of people now. What would be the best way for people to contact you? Whether it’s Twitter or LinkedIn or anything if someone had a question or or wanted to reach out to you about something on the show? What would be the best way?

 

Loïc Houssier  

Well, definitely LinkedIn. I guess it’s the easiest. I have a Twitter handle, but I’m probably mostly tweeting.  I’m not really I was really good at that. But definitely LinkedIn. So I think I’m Louic. L-O-I-C. There’s not a lot in in the day. So at DocuSign especially. So definitely the easiest way. 

 

Christian McCarrick  

Sure. And for those listening to the episode, I always post my show notes on simpleleadership.io so any links to the books we mentioned and contact information for Loic, I will certainly post on there too if you weren’t able to write it down during the show. So had a great conversation today. Always great to talk with you. I really appreciate your time. And so thank you very much.

 

Loïc Houssier  

Thank you for having me, Christian.

 

Christian McCarrick  

Absolutely. Have a good weekend. 

 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Simple Leadership podcast hosted by me, Christian McCarrick. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please subscribe and don’t forget to leave a review in iTunes. Full show notes and additional information can be found on simpleleadership.io. If you knew someone who would be a great guest for the show, or you want to share your own experiences, please drop me a line. We’ll see you back next week for more technology leadership tips and advice as I interview more top software engineering leaders