Transcript
Narrator:
Welcome to Cyber 909, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and Cyber Aficionado Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions, and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for Cyber 909, soon to become 909 exec. New name, same podcast.
Den:
Hey everybody, it's me, Den. Den Jones, the host of Cyber 909. I figured we'll try and do these introductions a little bit differently and see if people can get jazzed or not are. For me it's a Monday morning and I've only had two cups of coffee, so I'm still trying to get over my exhausted brain syndrome. But let's talk about today's guest. We've got amazing guests on today. Okay, Dan Winter from Altus Executive Coaching. Dan, why don't you introduce yourself because you know more about you than I do. So jump in man to the show.
Dan:
It's a pleasure to be with you and your listeners. So I was born in a small farm town in northern California called Santa Clara, and they built Silicon Valley around my head. And so I spent about 35, almost 40 years working for big tech companies and was working in management, leadership development and not just delivering training, right? Lots of people are delivering training, but working with leaders and the people that work for 'em to go create teams around the world. And that was everything from individual coaching with people in China who were growing and developing. And we realized often the only person they could go to for coaching was the direct manager. And there were times where either their direct manager wasn't the person they wanted to have the conversation with about some of the things they were struggling with, or their direct manager may not have been a very good coach.
And so I would go out and work with those folks as individuals and then also do a lot of work with teams that were standing up around the world, Latin America, Asia, figuring out what's the learning edge, where were they in their growth and development as a team and what would take them to that next level? And then at the same time doing stuff in corporate in the us. And I found myself, as much as I was a training and development person by job code, I was getting called into strategy meetings and sitting down with the leaders and the C-suite to help figure out the conversations they needed to have with their teams about creating the future for the companies. And that was just a tremendous blast and gave me exposure to both the strategy, the technology, as well as the real human piece of turning interesting ideas into really effective business results.
Den:
And so I think you were there for like 25 years, is that
Dan:
Actually I did 30 years at one company and then another couple of years at another, and my official job title was HR director. So I had 25 people reporting to me plus a matrix doing everything for about 15,000 employees and realized that my heart was not in the nuts and bolts of hr. My heart was in the organizations and the teams and the leaders, and there's lots of really good HR people out there to run the machine. There were not as many good people who could bridge business and people and really accelerate the leaders to become even more effective.
Den:
One of my favorite titles that I saw in your LinkedIn is HR research and management development. The minute you can drop in the word research, I'm like, that must've been fun, but isn't it interesting? And I want to dig into this a little bit. So yeah, my brain's all over the place right now. So I want to dig into the thought that tech companies, especially in the Valley, would promote people who are technically gifted. So they're great engineers, but then they promote them to leadership roles without really giving them any adequate leadership training. So it's interesting in your tech role, they will teach you on technology through the wazoo, right? But when you go into leadership, they maybe have one or two little courses for becoming the new manager, but that journey is really lacking a lot of education and training. So I want to park that one for a second, but that was my brain fart. And so Altus, why don't you explain who Altus is, why you guys exist, how did the company begin? What was the origins and the idea and impetus behind that?
Dan:
Altas at its core helps leaders in their teams have the conversations they need to get results. And it seems really simple, but it actually turns out to be pretty hard work. All results come through conversations, and that may be the conversation we're having right now. It may be the conversation I had 25 years ago with a mentor or even with my parents that talked about what being a good employee or a good leader is, or maybe a conversation that's running in my head about how much do I trust you and what do I do if I don't trust you?
We help leaders in the teams become much better observers of themselves, of the dynamics so that they can go have the conversations that are typically missing in an organization. I've worked with leadership teams where they've been together 2, 3, 4 years. We get into a basic strategy conversation and we discover that the head of engineering has a vision for the growth of the company that's way off from what the CEO and the finance team thinks. And if you're trying to build a company and your revenue goals are off by two three x, you're building different companies at a different pace. And in that process you're going to have maybe a real different mood, a real deep frustration, why aren't we growing faster? When you realize that growing at the rates you're growing may be tremendous leadership.
So we work with leaders to become better observers so that they can see more options to take better actions, to get better results. And sometimes, as I said, strategy, sometimes it's stepping into breakdowns between organizations. Sometimes it's as you were saying, how do I help someone who's got a deep technology background who may have spent 25, 30 years focused on creating things, learn to tune into people and just how different people are. I've seen so much leadership that takes a very mechanical model of humans and tries to turn that into results only to discover that humans are a lot messier and a lot more interesting than things can be.
Den:
That just reminded me of the whole Myers Briggs and all that stuff. It's like you the rainbow red, therefore you behave like this. I'm like, if I've not had two cups of coffee in the morning, Dan.
Dan:
Well, and it's interesting, I've used a whole bunch of assessments. There's a ton out there and many of them are very good and very useful. But the thing I find most useful is just the curiosity that when something is broken down, am I curious about what broke down? Can I have the conversation to understand it and get back on track? And so for something like Myers-Briggs, you may be someone who really likes to get bottomed out on the plan and move forward. I may be someone who is open to the plan, but I want to stay open to what may change. And so I'm sitting there thinking, boy, we still need more information. I think we may need to see what happens in our pilot before we commit resources. And you're thinking, Dan, I just don't like your lack of commitment. We've got a clear plan. Why are you not investing? It's like, great, Dan, let's have the conversation. I think we've got a really good plan. I don't know that we have enough data to know if that's the right plan. Actually, it was interesting.
I ran into a conversation with Gordon Moore decades ago and he said that he was a research scientist finding himself running a company full of engineers and engineers love plans. They'll sit in a conference room and develop an elegant plan for six months. And when they go out into the real world and discover that the plan isn't working because they're so invested in the plan, they'll double down on the plan and they'll keep pushing. And he believed that as a research scientist, you learn more by measuring where you are. Take a step in any direction. If it gets better, keep going. If it gets worse, turn around and go the other way. So that commitment to always explore and to keep your mind open runs headlong into a finance organization that wants you to commit to an annual budget, a revenue target, a sales target that's hopefully going to be linear so that it keeps the book smooth quarter to quarter for the investors. And with something like a Myers-Briggs, you can get insights into that. But who has time to go take a Myers-Briggs every time you start working with a new employer or a new partner?
Den:
I was just about to say that there's where the flaw is. And the other thing is we're not walking around with a bloody notebook with everybody's results, right? So training a leader to be thinking on the fly, to read people on the fly, to understand, and you mentioned this, right, is listening. I'm the world's worst listener, definitely I'm a good storyteller, but the ability to teach someone that, because that for me is more important than any personality test. Ask the question.
Dan:
And you started by putting a really heavy responsibility on the leader. That may be impossible. You said that ability to read people on the fly, I don't know that any of us is going to get that good because I don't know what you're willing to show me. So if we don't have any trust, you may play a really defensive game with your cards held pretty close, and you're going to try to tell me the things you think I want to hear. What I found very often with leaders is we'll start to detect either there's something that's not connecting and what am I reading? I'm reading the signals from my body, from history, from maybe a hundred thousand years of evolution saying then I don't know that we're having the conversation where we need to. Are you having that same sense?
Den:
Is that gut feeling though, right, Dan? I mean there's a gut feeling in you that you're like, something's not feeling right.
Dan:
And
Den:
It is a feeling. So my thing is the reading of someone is what they're saying is their body language is the feeling I'm sensing. It's the energy level I'm getting back. It's all of those things. And for me, yeah, then you've got to have a good toolkit of questions that you can ask someone in order to try and learn where they're at. Right.
Dan:
Well, and I mentioned going out to China for years to coach people, and it is a really fascinating experience to see a two hour meeting put on your calendar with someone from corporate that you don't know because your boss said you should talk to them. Just think of the story running in your head when that happens. And by the way, he's from HR and who likes to talk to HR for two hours. And I would sit down in every one of those conversations, I say, what are we going to talk about? I said, whatever you want to, my goal is to help grow you as a leader as fast as you want and as fast as you can. Now my experience is you're going to start by sharing really safe topics with me, and somewhere about six months in, you're going to make a decision about whether you trust me enough with the really hard topics.
I'm not going to tell you. You have to trust me. And if I do anything that causes you to wonder, if you can trust me, let me know. But we may just talk about safe topics. There's plenty of safe topics. How do you manage one of your subordinate managers? How do you set up a strategy conversation? How do you go dig into a policy? Glad to do that. But it was interesting as I would talk to some of the people that I'd been coaching, they would say, Dan, it was at six months, third or fourth, two hour coaching conversations, sitting in a conference room after having had some dinners and drinks over the trips, I finally got willing to ask you the hard questions. And it would be things like, how do you learn to be creative? These are people who are making that transition from Mao China to modern China.
Dan:
And
Dan:
There were real questions about whether the education system in China was creating people that could be creative. We would get questions like, Hey, I'm really interested in this international assignment. My parents want me to get married and move back to their town so I can take care of them. How do I talk to my boss about my career and my obligations to my family?
Dan:
And
Dan:
It's a barrier to growth. It's something that they're really struggling with or people. One of my favorites, I had a guy came up to me in the hallway, said, Dan, we're having our first meeting. I'm not quite sure we're going to talk about, but one of the things I'm wrestling with, I'm 30, I'm a controller. I've done everything that I wanted to do in my life and I'm not sure what's next. And I looked at him and said, I think this is going to be a great conversation, and I don't know you, but my suspicion is you've actually accomplished everything your parents wanted you to accomplish, and now you're wondering what's next. And you've never asked yourself that question. He just stopped and he looked at me and said, that's it. And he didn't want to have that conversation with his boss because his boss wants him to keep on the track that he's going and keep doing the job that he's doing. Or I knew the boss would be open to the conversation. He didn't. I knew that boss. They'd actually been through leadership training with me, so I knew the way they thought and they thought broader than many others, but he was afraid to open that conversation with his bosses. It's like, fantastic.
Den:
That's excellent. And I think a lot of people go through their career just following a path that is predetermined for that career path or some of it's predetermined by parents or other external factors.
Dan:
They're running the programs that they were raised on. And those get created pretty early in life in many cases, and we lose track of where it came from and what problems it was solving when it showed up. And this is one of the things I see. You mentioned technical leaders, right? I've got engineers who are in a structure that rewards deep expertise often in a pretty thin area. So they'll be an expert in a piece of a technology, and the more they learn about it, the more they get promoted up as the expert in that for a company. But they don't necessarily know how to put that together with four other technologies into a product that a customer will value enough to pay for,
Or they get invited to come up into a leadership role with the business leaders of the group. And the business leaders are trying to make a decision about where to go with the business. And they keep getting frustrated that the technical person who's being brought in is going down into deep detail about how they got to all of their conclusions. Like, wait, I know you know this well enough. Tell me what we need to know to make this decision. Don't tell me how you got to that answer. Don't tell me all the details. If I don't trust you, I'll ask you to give me all those details.
Den:
And I was about to ask, what do you think in all your years the biggest failing of a leader is that's transitioned from the technical to the building of teams?
Dan:
It's interesting. I think biggest failure is the same for technical and non-technical people. It just shows up a little bit differently. The biggest failure is people are used to operating in groups, not in teams. And I'll give you a small example. Being on a project team, there's maybe 10 of us involved in the project. There's a project manager, maybe it's our boss, maybe it's a program manager, whatever. And we all have our tasks to do. And every two weeks we get together, get on a meeting, maybe get into a conference room, and the boss asks, okay, where are we? And they say, Dan, give me an update. Where are you on your work, Dan? Where are you? Give me an update on your work. And what you notice is everyone's listening for their name before they pay attention. And the only person who's really paying attention to the promise of the team is the project manager or the boss.
We're all just doing our piece of it, but we're not actually committed to the full promise of the team. And we'll see with technologists, they're really enamored of the technology, but that marketing thing, that customer sales thing, not really their issue. I've worked with a team that the marketing sales folks were good, but they didn't have the technical chops to really ask the questions needed to do the pilots successfully and win the contracts that they needed. And engineering was constantly frustrated with the salespeople. And sales and engineering would go back and forth about what's wrong and who needs to do better and no, no, no. You don't understand how hard sales is. Not once did engineering say, can I give you one of our engineers to train into a technical sales engineer, or can I have one of my engineers work closely with your salesperson to make sure that we are able to position that person to get the answers they need? And sales would always say, for God's sakes, don't put an engineer into the sales meeting. They're going to distract us. Neither of them learned to work together to solve the problem for the company. They just kept pointing out how the other one wasn't doing their job very well or couldn't be included in the conversation.
Den:
Yeah, no, that's great. And as you say, the groups to teams. So you got a little book picture in the corner there so people can go check out your book. So what does the book tell everybody? What's the key message in the book?
Dan:
It's interesting. When we wrote the book, there's a lot of books out there about being an effective team. We tried to pick a series of topics that looked at it through a different lens. And so it's designed so that you can make each chapter standalone. It starts with what is a team and what's the difference between a team and a group? And it's really simple. A team is a group of people who commit to creating a shared future and they commit to coordinating really well to produce that future and being able to say, I think we're off track. Or Dan, I'm not sure I'm seeing from your team what I was expecting. Can we go figure out what we need to do together to make that happen? I've got a client, they've got a really good set of values with what they consider to be behaviors.
We're customer oriented. Well, every engineer can point to something they're doing that's customer oriented. Every salesperson can point to something they're doing that's customer oriented. What we're going to do to coordinate between sales, engineering, product management to meet the needs of our customers is a really different set of behaviors. And so being able to really coordinate that, not just do my individual part, but coordinate it well, we've got chapters in there around how do you do that with geographically dispersed teams? So I shared some stuff that I had done around Asia region where we were trying to create teams that spent almost no time and make that work. We've got some really interesting things around moods, emotions, and can you tell if someone's got a promise in their body and you've had that moment where someone says, yep, I'll get that done, and you just feel like it's not going to happen. Or Dan will say, Hey Dan, when can you get that to me? I say, I'll get it to you ASAP. And we realize ASAP is when I get around to it, not
Dan:
Actually
Dan:
As soon as I can. And so we've got chapters to give managers and leaders individual insights into different kinds of challenges that they can tune into as an observer to improve performance as a team.
Den:
One of, and it is funny you mentioned about the dates, right? One of my old bosses years ago, this guy was all about data. He loved data, but everything, every communication, email, communication, he always put in there, please me, I expect reply by. He'd always add in. It's like, can you do this by or I will get, and even in his stuff when he was replying to people, he committed in that reply when he was going to have the thing done by. And I think it is vital. It is really building trust and credibility as a leader, I think for me is the biggest thing I learned over the years being the recipient of a leader I couldn't trust many times, or also people being a recipient of me being their boss and over the evolution of my maturity, could they learn to trust me? So I found that for me to be critical,
Dan:
I love where you're going with that. We spend a lot of time on that clarity and what gets in the way of the clarity. So in addition to when do I need it? Why are we doing this? And so here's the problem I'm trying to solve. I need data that helps me make this decision, not I need data. Who's going to do it? What are they going to do by when? And to what standard and that to what standard is often missed. The why is often missed. And then you get to this real question of, once I've made that clear request, is there anything that's going to get in the way of you actually delivering it? And I see organization after organization where we all went through an education system where the teachers coordinated well, so that if I took a full load of classes, it was a workable load, right?
Six in high school, four or five in college, whatever it was. And then I get into the workplace and I bring this mental model that just because my boss asked for it, it must be possible. And that's actually not true. There's almost always more work that needs to be done than we have the capacity for. And so when I make that request, do I have a performer, someone who's doing the work, who's willing to say, given the other things you've asked for, I don't think that one's going to be possible, or something needs to slip or That sounds great. I've never done it before. Can I get some coaching? Can I get some help? And boy, there's a lot of organizations where asking for help is embarrassing. It's shameful. I was having a conversation with a colleague who said, teaching leaders to get them to be to the point where they're vulnerable enough to ask for help. It's like, this is really weird. I love it when people ask me for help. I love teaching training, supporting mentoring, coaching, helping them see things that they don't see. Why is it that I would feel vulnerable and ashamed when I ask someone to love doing that for me
And working with teams to get them to realize we all love helping each other. We've all helped people who've helped us, and if we can help each other get there faster, then the team succeeds as opposed to, you're not doing your job somehow, I'm doing your job for you.
Den:
And as you're saying that, I was thinking back to that old boss that was the one with the dates and stuff. He would often, even when I didn't report into him, actually, he'd quite often ask me if I needed help because the programs I was working on were covering all of it or all of the company. And quite often we'd have that conversation is like, how can I help? Do you need help? And again, first of all, I rarely ask anybody for help. Even in my personal life, I can be going through the worst week in the world and you'll not know about it because my thing is I'm not going to complain because it could be worse. I still consider myself blessed regardless if I'm having a shit there or not. So in that scenario, I would never ask for help. As a leader, I would remind everybody, my role as a leader is to enable you to do your job. And that means how can I clear the runway? How can I ensure you've got what you need to do the job? And that could be resources, but that could also just be council
Or that could be me running triage with other executives in the company. Because my role was not to do the thing. My role was to empower the team to do the thing, but that side of it took years when you are working with teams. So I want to jump up shift topics a little bit here. When you're working with teams, could you share what's the most common reason they pull you in and after you've done the thing you do, your little magic, where do you see the team has benefited or that company's benefited? Do they see a tangible business benefit that can be measured in dollars and cents or something else? So how do you get there? We'll cut out the bit in the middle. We've talked about that, but then the leaving part. So why don't you start?
Dan:
Yeah. Most of our clients call us for two related circumstances. One, they're facing a new challenge and they are realizing that what worked for them before is not working anymore. And so that may be an individual leader who's stepping up into a new role, A CFO, who's becoming CEO or a head of engineering who's stepping up to become a member of the C-suite or a merged company. We've done a merger and acquisition and finance people put together a great value proposition, and we discovered as soon as people got into the room that that value is not being created. And so there's something about a new challenge. Maybe we're at 20 million in revenue, we're trying to go to a hundred million. We don't have the muscle memory to lead something that big. And so we really need to learn to lead bigger organizations, think bigger, more strategically about the work we're doing.
Related to that, sometimes an organization's realizing they're just not delivering the results. They're facing a more complicated environment, they're making bigger promises, and they're not able to grow at the rate that they were planning on. And so we'll come in and figure out where they are. We really listen for what are the conversations that are present and working? What are the conversations that are present and not working, and what are the conversations that are missing? And they will usually identify a symptom and we'll figure out what would it be? What is that problem costing them?
And so if I'm at 10 million in revenue, I'm trying to grow to a hundred million in revenues flat for the last two years, that's a serious cost. There's a real lost opportunity. And so we will look at our work and how the things that we will do will enable that value, that revenue growth. It's a nice side benefit if they can all have better relationships and feel good about themselves and the work that they're doing, but we really want to tie our work into the impact to the business that they're trying to run. And often there's a lot of personal hardship that's showing up because things aren't working well. We can get better conversations, better results, and have people feel a lot better about the company that they're running.
Den:
And so at the end of it, you walk out and the company from a measurement of success, generally speaking, either there's some dollar value at the end of it, I mean their income is growing or staff retention is better because that's a huge loss if you've got high turnover. I was thinking of epic failures, so I'm going to share an epic failure of then the leader from probably about 15 years ago, and then I'd love to hear from you an epic failure that you've seen that just blows your mind. At Adobe, we used to every November almost have layoffs, and it started from that early bubble bursting in the early two thousands. And for whatever reason, I think there was 10 years of this, but they were pretty known for this. In November, I was partnering with our HR team because we were running a team building series across my organization and I was visiting each of the locations and grabbing all the people in that location to do this with my HR business partner.
And we flew up to Seattle and everybody just knew it was Dan and this person from me, hr, I guess that's the first eyebrow raising concern for the guys in Seattle. So we get in there and we've got this meeting room put together. We didn't share the agenda because we didn't think we had to really, we weren't even thinking about it. We had worked on the agenda. We said to them that we're going to be doing a team building event already upfront and honest, but the problem is it was November, so we're flying up there, the manager, the executive team with the HR business partner pulling everybody together. Their whole thing was they thought we were going to let the team go.
Like Stan, I never even thought about, it wasn't even a like I thought. And so I had the local leaders up there plus the team, and at dinner that night, everybody's starting to share this and we're just like, oh my God, this has been in the calendar for a month and for a month that means these guys have been stewing on that possibility. And I just turned around to them and I was like, you guys know me? I went, especially the guy who was the leader in Seattle that reported directly to me, I was like, you should have, the minute that started, you should have just reached out. And we would've tweaked it and clarified it. We'd have added the agenda in so that people would realize this is a team building event, not a stew the month before event. So that was my epic fail. I have a couple of those actually, but that one sticks out for me as being a, oh my god, how long these people were stressing over this for sure. So there's one epic fail. Dan, why don't you share the epic fail that you've seen over the years? What's one that will stick out in your mind?
Dan:
There's one that I continue to come back to product development group developing a multi-billion dollar product, and it was about an 18 month development cycle. And I was talking to one of the engineering managers that I used to work with pretty closely, and we were doing a large group conference and I mentioned approach that we had for improving communications and that we were going to have this engineering manager come in and talk about how we applied it on this project. And one of the people in the audience raised his hand and said, I'm on that project. It is a lie. They're not doing this. Everything in the planning system's wrong, it's complete garbage. And it's like, hmm, sounds like we're going to have a fascinating conversation with our guest speaker tomorrow. So breakfast the next morning, I'm talking to the engineering manager, I said, okay, here's what I'm hearing from people in the audience.
He goes, oh yeah, no one on the team and it was a 500 person product team. No one on the team is doing this except me. And my boss says, here's what I need your team to do. I say, that's not possible. Here's what we're going to do and here's where we're going to do it. My boss yells at me and threatens to fire me. I buffer my team from all of that, and I just deliver what I know my team can deliver on time with quality. And everyone else just puts into the planning system whatever the boss told them to do, knowing that it's not going to happen. And then as things progress, they just note 30% done. We had nine weeks to do it. We're three weeks in, we're 30% done and the game we're playing, we know at some point it's going to be discovered that some team is so far behind that it's going to be a failure and we'll have to adjust the schedule and we'll fire that manager and everyone else will breathe a sigh of relief because they're just as far behind. But now they're given permission to reset their schedule.
That project ended up three years behind. It ended up releasing, and this is what you've seen with technology. If I know I'm going to be on a three-year development cycle, then I know the specs that I need to set for the product. If I accidentally slip from 18 months to 36 months, I'm now releasing a product that costs twice as much to develop and it doesn't meet the competition in the market. So I've got a failed product that cost twice as much, and I've got 500 people who are miserable about having been beaten for three years knowing that they were lying to each other about what was going to be done hoping they weren't the one who got fired.
Den:
Shit. Yeah, I mean, by the way, it's funny as leadership goes though, that for me is like an epic executive leadership fail for that person and their boss.
Dan:
Absolutely. And let me give you the crux to this story. I said my engineering manager told the boss what he would do when they finished the project and looked at the work that each of the teams had done. His team had delivered as much as any other team had, but he delivered it when he said he was going to deliver it, and everyone else delivered it later than they said by two x.
Den:
Yeah, wow. But it is interesting because his boss in that scenario clearly hadn't created an environment where there was an open dialogue of reality. And I've seen this as well, actually the startup is that just recently Banyan the guy who runs engineering there, Colin, he would sit there with the founders and he'd be like, not possible. This is what is possible. This is. And then they'd have a dialogue. Literally they're having the dialogue about what's important, what's possible with the marketing people in the room, the marketing exec, the sales exec, me for it, and security. All of the execs are in the room and they're talking about this is what the market wants, this is where we think we're at, this is where we're going. This is what's possible with the resources we've got. These are the levers we can pull. And at that executive level, everybody, again, go back to your thing, A group isn't necessarily a team.
So for me, I felt that that executive leadership team, I felt like it was making efforts to be a team. We were all in it together. We all knew what we were trying to beat from a competition perspective. We knew what we're bringing to market, we knew the quality of what we're trying to deliver. And I think it's important just to recognize that, and you said this earlier, you might be, I might've been the IT person in that room or the security person in that room, but that wasn't my role in that forum. My role in that forum is actually I'm also able to represent our customer because I was a CISO and we sold to CISOs. So in my hat there, I'm now going to play the customer, the market and some of the stuff that I know. And I think that's important to recognize that an executive level, you wear many hats. It's not just a hat of your one specific organization. If you're reporting to the ceo, then you've got a bundle of hats on
Dan:
Two things. One, I have seen a ton of organizations where the scorecard is all green because everyone wrote the scorecard based on a KPI that they could control,
Den:
Even
Dan:
Though in aggregate, the organization's failing
And the leader comes in and says, I just saw this scorecard. Everything looks green. And then I just saw 300 foils of problems we're having in products that are delayed. And by the way, there's one of these on Ford that's out on the internet, and he came in and he said, it was really interesting. I'm hearing about a product that's got a tailgate problem and the engineering lead on that product is trying to fix it. We had this same problem with two other products. Why haven't you called those people up and find out how they solved them? Why are you trying to solve the problem because you own that KPI as opposed to I've got an engineering team with a ton of experience. Why are you trying to solve the same problem? They've solved that recognition that I'm committed to the success of the team, not just my KPI, not just my budget, not just my headcount, not just my career. And we spend a lot of time with our clients talking about a concept of care. Most leaders, most managers particularly, are looking at what are the actions you need to take to get results? And we know you need to be committed in order to take those actions.
And it takes conversations to build that commitment, vision, mission, agenda, alignment, all that stuff. But underneath all of that is the care. And do I really care about the success of the team? Do I care about your success as my partner? Do I care about my customer's success or do I just want to get my stuff done and keep my job on track? And I've seen lots of organizations and it becomes most obvious at the executive level, like you were saying, but I see it all the way down in the organization that everyone says, well, my manager holds the promise for this. I'm just doing what I'm told.
Den:
And again, though, that says shitty leadership. I mean shitty leadership is you're not cascading and collaborating with your teams. I used to always try to say, we do strategy in this bizarre way where I want the individual contributors, the boots on the ground to share and have a working session with their direct line manager, and in some cases be also pulled into the conversation with their manager before it even gets to me and me and my team. Because strategy isn't three leaders sitting in the ivory tower saying, this is a strategy. It literally is for us. I want to get the information coming up from the grassroots. Then I want to cascade down and blend and really devise a strategy with my leadership team so that it is a strategy that we feel is recognizable by all the people who's implementing this stuff. Because generally speaking, they're the ones that know if we're going to go a direction north, that's what North should look like. I want to cascade that information up and down several times as part of that formation. And then I want to do town halls or all hands. And then literally we'd have a hundred people in the room listening to what we think the strategy is. And then I'd ask them after the all hands to have round tables again with their leadership and then start to talk about what they think they heard me say.
Dan:
Yeah. Well, and you'd mentioned data earlier in our conversation. It's really about information and it's really about information that helps us understand and create the future. And one of the lenses that I come back to frequently, three kinds of knowledge. There's the things that I know I know, and that's expertise. And that's a lot of the reason we get put into the jobs we're put into. There's things I know I don't know, and that's ignorance. And I hire people to fill that gap or I go take a class. But if I am CEO, I don't really know enough about finance. I hire A CFO. If I came out of the finance world, I hire A CTO because I don't know those things and I need someone who knows those. And then there's this third category things I don't know, I don't know. And that's where the breakthroughs are. And part of what I love about your move of here's what I'm hearing from lowering the organization bubbling up, here's what we're doing with that and bringing it back down. Now what are you seeing? It gives me access to that. Things I didn't know, I didn't know.
And I look at, I don't want to get political, but you look right now, we're in the middle of what's going on with Doge. They're not making room for the things they don't know. They don't know,
Den:
And
Dan:
They get surprised by 'em. And there's people who know those things, but they're going so fast and making such big logical for them moves that they get surprised. And that's really painful on an organization. And it's really hard on a leadership team.
Den:
Well, it is really funny. As I mentioned, I've done many layoffs over the years, and when you do that, you go through the organization with your leadership team, you talk about the reduction you're trying to hit, and it's usually a financial target. And then you go through and you say, okay, let's talk about how we can achieve that percent reduction in a way that makes sense. And ideally, you're looking at the performance of the organization, you're looking at the different teams and how they function and whether you still want to invest in that area as much or less. You go through all that process. You don't necessarily grab a bunch of kids who are in their early thirties that run through some algorithms and just spit out some answers. And as you say, the evidence is clear. There's a lot of impact because they don't know what they don't know, and they don't care what they don't know. And then they'll rehire people back or try to rehire people back when they realize the mistakes.
Dan:
And let me bring this back to a corporate environment. I had a head of IT security came into our company and he had his kind of first staff meeting and he asked everyone, put together an update on your part of the business, and I want to really get caught up to speed on where you are. And everyone comes in with their 10 to 35 slides of what they want to cover. And he says, great, everyone take your materials. Hand them to the staff member to your right. That person's now going to tell me about your piece of the business.
Den:
Oh, that's smart.
Dan:
They all looked at him and said, but I don't know what that team does. I said, then why are you on my staff? How can you be making decisions about what you're doing if you don't know what the other parts of the group are doing? And you're putting all the pressure on the head of IT security to be able to integrate that and make the tough calls as opposed to, okay, I've got hardware people, I've got software people. I've got engineering work that needs to be going on. How are you coordinating and having the conversations you need so that you can recognize, oh, given where we're trying to go, I may need to give up 10 of my people to another team
Dan:
To
Dan:
Go do the groundwork. I was just reading a Wall Street Journal article. The headline said, you don't need an AI strategy. And it's like, that seems really dangerous. Given what I'm seeing with ai. What was buried in there was to make AI work, you actually need data. And so you don't want to standalone strategy about bringing in an AI tool. You need to have a strategy around how do you get the data to train your AI to be useful. And I've seen company after company bring in something, drop it, and just have it disappear because it wasn't integrated and thought out well for how it's supposed to work. And that's putting pressure on the executives or the leaders of groups to know everything instead of helping those people get their teams to know what's implied, what needs to happen, and to make that happen as a team as opposed to as an employee of a manager.
Den:
Yeah, no, that's brilliant. I do love that whole idea of get the person to your left to read it. That's brilliant. And you mentioned ai. I guess we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about ai. So in this management consulting space, what does AI mean to you guys, and how, if at all, are you leveraging it?
Dan:
I'm seeing it showing up in a few different ways. Some of it is, there's some really good reflective questions that can help leaders, managers, employees think through some issues or some concerns that they haven't been thinking through very well themselves. And in some cases it's almost like quick access to a book. What are the 10 best coaching questions that you can ask yourself? I've seen some tools out there that do a nice job at really kind of fundamental foundational coaching. I'm starting to see a real shift in training,
And it's not quite there yet. We've gone from in-person instructor-led training to LinkedIn learning, right? Web-based videos. All of those have had two big, maybe three big problems. One training is about consuming knowledge, but it's not about really turning it into practice. So I will go to a class, I'll get insights. I need to turn those insights into practice and those practice into habits, and that is not going to get there from LinkedIn learning. Also, it may not be very well customized to the individual. So my circumstances, my team, or as you noted, my personal leadership style may not line up with what I'm being told is the best way to do it, when in fact there's five or six different ways to do something. I'm seeing with ai, more mass customization so that you can customize training and learning a little bit more to the individual. I'm still not seeing it with teams,
Am not seeing it do a very good job picking up on some of the human pieces of leadership and change. And so I think we're going to see AI doing more automation of process. You'll see it managing kind of mass customization of process. There's some really good stuff for information management that AI can come in and instead of me interviewing executive team, there may be some ways that AI can actually do those interviews, consolidate the information into themes that would be useful to me. But in the meetings themselves, in the training themselves and in the one-on-one interactions, it's still pretty human, particularly when you get down to real relational things. I've had situations where leaders just are not having the right conversation, and an AI is not going to pick up on that, and the AI is not going to manage it through mediation to go build and rebuild the relationships that are broken.
Den:
Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, it still doesn't have the emotional,
Dan:
That
Den:
Emotional need. It is not going to have that. It won't know the nuances. It could be cool for recording all of this stuff and then transcribing it and then drawing some conclusions or themes or commonalities along larger data sets. But yeah, I'll be curious to see how that whole thing changes this industry. But I think it's of all the industries, this one is I think going to be the harder nut for AI to crack just because it is such, it is totally tied to the human, the emotion, the individual nature of that team, as you said, or that leader, that style, that culture, that company culture and stuff. So it'll be a good one to watch. Dan, thank you very much, man. Look, I appreciate it. You bring a lot of wealth and knowledge to leadership and building organizations. Everybody go check out the book Growing Groups into Teams. So Dan, we'll make sure we include that link in the show notes. Everybody, thank you very much, Dan Winter, Aldis Growth Partners. Thank you so much, Dan.
Dan:
It's a pleasure. Glad to come back anytime. Cheers, bud. Thank you.
Narrator:
Cyber 909 will soon become 909 exec. New name, same podcast, and love. Look for the new name soon, wherever you get your podcasts.
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