Being a Supermanager with Aydin Mirzaee, Host of the Supermanagers Podcast

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Aydin, co-founder of Fellow App and host of the Supermanagers podcast. And they discuss the importance of having strong discipline in your career, how to talk about failure with your team, and why providing a path of growth is one of the greatest motivators. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:29) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Aydin at 00:00:42) Joel, welcome to the show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Dude, thanks for having me.

(Aydin at 00:00:45) Yeah. This is, I mean, this is really fun for everybody kind of listening in. This is a collab episode. So I was wondering if I should say, Joel, welcome to the show, or should I say, hey, both of us, welcome to the show. I wasn't sure how to play that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) Anything works, man. It's gonna be a good time.

(Aydin at 00:01:02) Yeah. No. This is awesome. Very excited to do this. I mean, it probably makes sense for especially our listeners since we're publishing this on both feeds. Tell us about the Modern CTO podcast, why you created it, what it's all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) Yeah. So I'll give you the brief origin story. I was into technology growing up. We hear that a lot, right, doing these interviews. My dad, he was in the Air Force. That's where he learned software electronics design, and they put the GPS system into the B-32 Stealth Bomber. That was like their big project. And from there, he freelanced outside of the Air Force, and I would go to work with him because my mom, she had a bunch of kids and she's like, take one of them with you, please. And I understand that now, having my own kids. So I would be the one that would go with him. So always different office buildings, different technologies, got into some basic, really simple programming pretty young. And then at 12, I got hit by a car. I was in a wheelchair for a year.

(Aydin at 00:02:05) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) Yeah. It was pretty crazy. So and then get this. So a year into my recovery, my sisters thought it would be funny to put oil on the floor, on the tile, to mess with me thinking like, oh, it'd be funny if you fell. Well, I did fall and I re-broke it. So it ended up being two years of learning how to walk again. And the beautiful part about all of that horrible situation was I figured out that I could write code and make money on sites like Scriptlance. So they didn't care that I was 12, you know, laid up in bed with hurt legs and stuff. They just wanted code written. So I figured out how to make money there through high school, built some real estate software, sold it, built apps for about a decade for companies, and then decided I wanted to sort of share or give back. I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk. And so I wrote this book. Before I published the book, I started calling other CTOs and I was like, hey, this is the information that I'm gonna put in the book. You know, am I gonna look stupid or what's gonna happen? And those conversations were a lot of fun. So after I finished the book, I wanted to keep them going, so we rolled it into a podcast. And then today, we're five years, 500 episodes in, and it's pretty crazy.

(Aydin at 00:03:22) Yeah. That is pretty crazy. You know, it's interesting. We just recorded episode 100, and so that's amazing. I mean, you've been doing this, 500 episodes, so I feel like I probably have a lot that I could learn from you. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:37) It feels like pretty much the same. I think after 100 episodes, you're just in a routine of doing it and you just keep doing it. And then you just look back and you're like, whoa, it's 500 episodes. That's crazy. And then the game is with yourself figuring out how to keep it interesting. Right? So we're building new studios. We got like a multi-cam studio here. And, you know, we do all sorts of interesting things, try to get different guests that we care about, relevant topics. And so we always try to keep it interesting for ourselves.

(Aydin at 00:04:05) Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I agree with you in that, you know, one of the things for me was just at the outset when starting Supermanagers podcast, I always thought about, like, how can I, I mean, it's exactly what you said, how can you make it interesting for you? And so I thought that if I can make it so that I can learn from every single episode, then this is, you know, independent of how many people even listen to the podcast, I'm always learning. And as long as I'm always learning, there's like a personal motivation. And so I think it's amazing. I mean, like, as you know, you get to speak with amazing people, ask them the questions that you want, the things you're curious about, and I always walk away learning something. There isn't an episode that I don't walk away learning something from, and I feel like it's almost like one of life's, it's a life hack. I mean—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) Yeah. And I think—

(Aydin at 00:05:00) To a certain extent, everybody should do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:03) Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, dude. It's crazy. So I'm just a software engineer for 17 years, you know, building apps and some teams. And then we start this podcast, and I get to, like, you know, I think one of the peak moments where I was like, this is real was when I got to interview Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I was like, this is crazy. I was like, he created the World Wide Web. This is unbelievable. And, you know, we were just hanging out and talking about life. And after that podcast, I was like, I don't know if there's another interview that I want more than having had that one. You know?

(Aydin at 00:05:37) Yeah. And that's amazing. You know, it's interesting. So you interview a lot of CTOs. And, fun fact, this, we just interviewed for episode 101, we interviewed Brendan Eich, who's CTO at Zoom. I don't know if has he been on your show as well?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:55) Their VP has. He was a, there was a CTO there at Zoom, ZoomInfo, right, or Zoom?

(Aydin at 00:06:02) Zoom. Zoom. Just the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:04) Oh, no. But Harry has. I think Harry is the CIO, Harry Moseley.

(Aydin at 00:06:09) Cool. Yeah. That's awesome. So it's just, so we've interviewed a bunch of CTOs on the podcast, and you've obviously interviewed many, many hundreds. So curious, like, from all the conversations that you have had, are there things that, you know, you've noticed in terms of leadership traits or things that, you know, the CTOs you've been chatting with do that just make them, you know, what makes a great CTO, if you were to really think about it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) So we get super nerdy over here. So, you know, there's a producer in every show taking notes. And for about 300 episodes, what we did was we tracked in a spreadsheet different attributes of different leaders and our objectives on their strengths or how much they mentioned it or something and created this entire matrix to figure out like what's the most common things across all of these leaders. And so we boiled it down to like a handful of things. Do you want me to share them?

(Aydin at 00:07:10) Yeah. That'd be awesome. I'm very curious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:13) So they know how to put the right people together, which means not just find the most talented people, but find the people that work best together. Right? So it's not just all about hiring a ton of rock stars. It's like, how can we get these human beings to work together to achieve a specific goal? And part of that is also that they're really good at curating the environment. So one of my favorite people out there is CTO of PBS, and he said it's like a gardener. Right? He's like, the gardener can't force the plant to grow, but it can create an environment where the plant can grow. And so I was like, oh, that's actually really good. And so those two things I sort of put as like one bullet point. They put the right people together, and they curate the right environment, and they're aware of their environment. So often people are aware of when they're in toxic environments because they can very clearly identify that. But being able to identify a healthy environment and what attributes make up a healthy environment and where it's currently at and do you wanna change it, do you wanna grow it, do you wanna maintain it. Having the vision to see that for a group of people, and it's great because it's something you can practice without being the leader. You could be an individual contributor on the team and practice identifying the environment and figuring out, you know, where it's currently at.

(Aydin at 00:08:33) Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It's interesting. And so you would put that all under one bullet point. Are there other bullet points?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:40) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing they do really well is they're really good at understanding the energy of the team and how to adjust it. Is the team overly excited? Is the team depressed? If they are excited, how do you get the energy down enough to focus? Like, are they too, when you're too excited, you can't focus. Right? But like, how do you get it to focus? Or when you're down, how do you get it up? So they have really good understanding of how to change the energy on the team.

(Aydin at 00:09:10) Yeah. You know, that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, as you're going through the different points, it's, you know, these are traits that can apply to any leader, not necessarily just a technology leader. So it's very interesting. So in interviewing, I think, you know, 100 episodes in, if I was to boil it down and say what makes a great manager, great leader, the thing that I've noticed in the conversations is, above all else, they're constantly working on getting to be a better leader. You know, best athletes in the world, they have footage, they mark up the footage, they look at it, and then they deliberately practice the things that they wanna get better at. And so it's the same thing for the world's best managers and leaders. It's they're just not leaving it to chance and just saying, like, hey, if I'm doing this for a long time, I guess I'll get better at it. But, you know, the ones who are consistently focusing on like, how can I do this better? So even for all the topics that you talked about, you know, finding the right people and getting them together. So, I mean, that's, you could just hire people and see what happens, or you could say you could write decision memos on why I hired this person. You know, how did it work out? You know, what are the learnings, and like, be very proactive about it. So I think like this is one of the main insights that I've gleaned, and people actually do this. They journal. They talk about it. They have executive coaches. So it's a very big focus area for people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:42) Yes. Continuous improvement. That's one of our like five culture items, and I don't have them all memorized. We just kind of live them, and then we ask the team, like, hey, you know, who are we? And then we just post that as our culture on our site versus trying to make up words and change the company to meet those. But constant small improvements over time, it's like an amazing part. It's, you know, like Warren Buffett talks about compounding interest. It's like that. I mean, it's truly a magical thing. There was some guy out there that had wrote a book and done a couple talks, and his main story that he used a lot was about putting apples like on his countertop. And he would, because he put them in the environment, he would eat them, and then it became a habit. And then he was a person who ate apples. But, yeah, understanding how to—

(Aydin at 00:11:29) That sounds clever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:31) Yeah. Yeah. I wish I remember their names. Do you have this trouble of like, you talk to so many people, you can remember their stories, but you can't remember their names?

(Aydin at 00:11:39) Yeah. It's really hard. And the same thing happens, you know, if you consume a lot of content or read a lot of books, you just forget, like, you'd like to attribute it, but you just don't remember where it came from. It just all kind of melds together over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:53) Oh, yeah. Yep. And sometimes I'm like, did I think of that or is that something I heard? I don't really care. I'm just gonna push it out for the audience.

(Aydin at 00:12:00) Yeah. It's good. I mean, I think, you know, part of what we do is just curation and make sure that great ideas go out there. You know, it's interesting. So when you think about the, you know, so far, the things that we've talked about are very much people-oriented. When you think about the other skills that, you know, people like this have, I mean, how important is it for them to be extremely technical? Like, can you be a CTO and have been the worst software developer, you know, growing up and growing up through your career, that is, and still be an amazing CTO? Or how do you see that? Or are the CTOs you talk to, especially in larger organizations, still extremely technical and, you know, that's a big part of their role?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:44) No. It's, you do not have to be extremely technical to be a good CTO. You have to understand, the way I see CTO is understanding the needs of the organization and providing that. You know, how do I fit in? Because every executive team is gonna be slightly different. Every company is at a different stage of growth. There's like the CTO maturity model, so the things will change. They constantly change as the company grows. But one of the things that you can, you know, look at as like a core principle is paying attention to what the business needs and how you are providing that to help achieve, you know, what your executive peers are trying to achieve. But, yeah, I've seen a spectrum of people that are great at technology. I've seen people that aren't great programmers, be great leaders. But one thing that I do know that kind of touches on the technical thing is they all have a deep understanding of the market and the problem that they're solving. And so often that breeds like a certain level of technical competence. Right? Like, if I'm making a cloud ops app that helps scale infrastructure in AWS, and I know nothing about how cloud works, that's a rare case. Usually, they have some understanding or they got acquired by another company and they built some tool and they have some real good understanding of how the core technology operates. And as you know, with programming, like, you can be a full-time programmer and you can stop and the technology changes so fast that you might not fluently write code as quickly as you did, but you understand some of these core principles on how to structure code systems.

(Aydin at 00:14:13) Yeah. So it still makes sense at a high level to, you know, understand the technology systems, the paradigms, the frameworks, thought patterns, how these things generally work. But it seems like the larger that an organization gets, it starts to become more about people at the end of the day. So, you know, larger organization, it's always about people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:35) Yeah. The first person that said that to me was Cody Sanford, the CIO at T-Mobile. He was there for like 20, 30 years, and he recently retired. But he had said this thing. I asked him, like, what's the one thing that's rung true throughout your whole life, you know, in your career? And he paused for a second. He said, it's all about the people. I mean, people make the numbers. People make the product. People buy the product. You know, we're not out there doing commerce with raccoons. Right? Like other animals, we are just humans, and we're doing business with each other, and we're making tools that can help solve each other's problems. And those tools create new problems and so on and so forth. So understanding the people and then how they fit into that marketplace, those two things are incredibly important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:23) I can't tell you how many times I've gone around and I've gotten to do talks, and I'll ask someone that's in a higher level position, like, how does what they do affect revenue, or how does what they do affect the customer directly? And they won't necessarily be able to tell you. And the great ones can, but some people get into this unfortunate rut of they'll have a title that's an executive title, and they'll just be given tasks by some other people within the org, and they won't actually know some of these core business principles that I argue—I will say that you need to know in order to have a successful organization.

(Aidan at 00:16:06) Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's all of these things. And the thing that I would add on it is also the systems. I mean, just going back to your point on curating the environment, like, you can't make the plant grow, but you can basically create the environment where a plant can grow.

(Aidan at 00:16:24) What are some things—I mean, when you think about creating a great environment for people to be successful, what are some of the things that you think about or that you've heard from the people you've chatted with?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:40) That's a good question. So going to make a good environment is you're going to need people who are good at what their responsibilities are so you can establish trust with other members of the team. That's one thing we're really good at here. And we only have, like, less than 15 people, so we're not a big company. But everybody is super, super good at what they do. And that gives sales a lot of confidence that production's going to deliver, and that gives production a lot of confidence that they're going to get paychecks because sales is doing their thing. And it sort of creates this atmosphere of everybody's super excited to be on the team because we're all really strong players, and that produces a good result. So I'd say curating the—like, hiring and firing people. I mean, that was the hardest thing for me because I tend to be quiet and introverted prior to the podcast. And, you know, the first time I had to let people go, it was super difficult. And then you start to go broke, and you're like, uh-oh. Now I got to get the right people together so I don't go broke. And then you sort of figure out how to be better at hiring. The better you are at hiring, the less firing you have to do. So you get better at hiring and figuring out culture items and how this person's going to fit in with the team before you bring them on. But, you know, it's never perfect. And when it doesn't work, you have to let people go, and that's a hard thing to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:46) At first, it was a hard thing to do, but since then, I've sort of found perspective that makes it easier for me to let people go in the sense that, like, if you're at our company and you're getting let go, I'll give you some context. If you are at our company, you're getting let go. That means, well, first of all, you were an A player. So something happened and we would, of course, identify your performance drop and try to figure it out. Like, is this something in your personal life? Like, what's going on? How can we—let's say that for this conversation, they couldn't solve whatever the problem was, and it's gone on, and they still are underperforming from where they were when we brought them on. At that point, I would have the perspective of, you know, it's a marketplace. We are in an economy. Right? And so if you don't let them go, you're giving them a false reality of what's acceptable within the economy. And at the same time, you're reducing your chance of success and increasing the probability of failure within your team. So you sort of have to do it both out of respect to your team who is being A players and out of respect to that individual's growth for them to understand that, like, this isn't an acceptable level of productivity for the position, and then that gives them the opportunity to reflect and make changes because, you know, one of the most frustrating things in the world is expecting above average results without being an above average person.

(Aidan at 00:19:31) Yeah. You know, it's so interesting because a lot of the things that you're saying tie so well together. I mean, we started by talking about the environment and making sure that there's trust in between the teams. And this is not a thing that I knew starting out my career, but what I've realized is that trust and hiring are very interlinked. Right? So if you don't hire the right person, then they're not going to do a job in accordance with your expectations, which is then going to result in you watching over their shoulder more. And as a result, it's going to lead to less trust because, you know, you—it turns out you didn't do a good job at hiring, and the role is not working out. And so you're watching over their shoulder more. You're being a little bit more micromanaging. And then as a result, it just—less trust develops over the course of time.

(Aidan at 00:20:26) Now you can get out of this spiral, but hiring is so, so important. And I think you're absolutely right. I mean, nobody is perfect. Nobody gets, you know, a 10 on 10 on every hire. And, unfortunately, it's one of those things that, you know, if you do more and you reflect on it and you figure out what went right and what didn't go right, it is something you can get better at. But a lot of it is just the setting expectations. Right? The not only setting expectations when you're going to hire, but it's also setting expectations once they're on the team. Because I don't think—like, the challenge is that I think this is one of the—you know, one of the questions that we ask everybody who comes on the Supermanagers podcast, one of the questions is, you know, what were some of the early mistakes that you made when you first started managing and leading teams? And what's interesting is one of the ones that gets said often is just, I didn't do a good job of setting expectations. I wasn't very clear. Like, I thought that my team would know things, but it turns out that they didn't because you didn't clearly communicate them. And I think that's a—it's a hard thing to get really good at, but it's so, so important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:44) Yes. That is definitely on my list of things. Anthropomorphism is another one where, like, we think that, like—I think you're like me because I'm me. It's just like our natural state. We tend to think people are like us. And so I'm a very driven type of person, very disciplined type of person. So I would assume by default, everybody's like that. And that's not the case at all. So having an awareness of that and then, like, as you said, setting expectation is something we learned. One way that we actually put that into practice at the company—you want me to share that?

(Aidan at 00:22:17) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) Well, in the hiring process, the first thing that we do is the bullet points of the job description are the same as the training bullet points to train for that position. So that's really clear. It's like, this is what you're going to do from the moment they come in and see us. It's the first list they see and then they see that list again when they're hired. The next thing we do is we tell them, you know, upfront what the culture's like and how we operate, and we tell people, like, if you're this way, A, B, and C, you're going to love it. And if you're not that way, this is going to be the most miserable job on earth for you because you're going to be surrounded by people who are that way. And so I've had people be like, yeah, that's not me. Thank you. You know? And that's great. Right? Saved a whole lot of pain. But the way we actually put it into practice by saying it upfront in the interview and then the Friday after they start—they start on a Monday. The Friday after they start, I meet with them and I ask them how the expectation of what we said the job was going to be like matched with the reality. And then we get that really tight. We get that really, really tight for the next hire for that position.

(Aidan at 00:23:23) You do that one week after, you said?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:25) Yeah. Mhmm.

(Aidan at 00:23:26) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:27) Yeah. Because they know. You know. Like, you were sold something when you joined this job. You just spent a week there. You came in, and you will know at the end of the week if what they said was reality about what the culture is like, what the job training is going to be like, all of this stuff. They'll know if it matches.

(Aidan at 00:23:44) And just to highlight that, I just think that that's such a great question. You know, person starts, you know, a week in, two weeks in, whatever the cadence, you know, based on what you were expecting and what you see now that you're here, like, is there a mismatch between your expectations? Like, that's just such an enlightening great question. I feel like everybody should do that if they're not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:06) Yeah. I did that because I hired people. They had a misunderstanding. I had to let them go. I hate doing that. It's not fun. And so I was like, how do I reduce this from happening again? And it's like, let's really make sure that their expectation lines up with what actually happens.

(Aidan at 00:24:21) Yeah. Super systematic. I love it. And you're baking it into everywhere. This, uh, setting expectations even before someone joins, checking in on, you know, are the expectations what they thought, and how to constantly make that better and a more true indication. You know, it's interesting because you also—I mean, just in passing, you mentioned that you're a very disciplined person, and so you might want to hang out and hire people that are more disciplined. I would love to dig in on just discipline in general and, like, what role you think it plays in managing your team, your company?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:02) Yeah. Well, it's something I didn't have for a large part of my life. So I sort of—you know, that quote I said earlier about the most frustrating thing in the world is expecting above average results without being an above average person. That quote came into my life at a good time because I was doing that. I was expecting these amazing results. I was seeing the news feeds and the IPOs and all these things happening, and I wanted that. And I had to sort of match my reality, you know, with what I wanted out of life. And I figured, okay, well, I just have to be an above average person. So then I started googling around, watching YouTube videos, you know, finding a lot of the motivational type people like the Tony Robbins, the performance and productivity people, the Tim Ferrises. And I saw that this is the behavior the successful people have and it's monkey see, monkey do. And if I just slowly adopt all these behaviors, eventually, I will be seen as a successful person. And I knew from collecting bad habits and things like that that they're so easy once you collect them—you don't think about them. So all I needed to do is really focus on a transition from the habits I currently have to—Atomic Habits is what it's called. I think his name is James Clear—that's the Apple guy I was talking about earlier—and, you know, transition my habits. And I did that, and it worked. It worked. And to be honest with you, at the same time—it's going to sound weird—it was easier and it was harder. It was easier to make the change and change all the things than I thought it would be because once you start building that momentum, right, like, you can make more changes and more changes and you get results and you're kind of excited about it. The hard part is, you know, we live in an entropy-ridden world. Right? Everything's constantly dying and decaying. So consistency is like got a premium on it. So if you can be consistent with good habits, then you can win. So they're kind of like two separate things.

(Aidan at 00:27:07) So it's interesting because you mentioned Tony Robbins. I'm a Tony Robbins fan. Have you been to any of his seminars?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:16) No. I want to so bad, and one of the kids that—like, we—I've got two kids and a third on the way. And my oldest is—yeah. It's amazing, and it's horrible. I love it, and I hate it. But my daughter plays with one of the daughters of one of the people on Tony Robbins' team. So, like, they always do the conferences and stuff, but my schedule has never aligned. And then some—the short answer is no. But my schedule never aligned. And then at the same time, they went online for a lot of them when the pandemic happened. So in between, you know, all there was—I learned from all of Tony's materials, and I started to have a lot of success and then I got to the point where I was financially good and that took a lot of time, right? So I'm just listening to the YouTubes of all the different people, reading the books and everything. So when I got to the point where I could afford to be spending, you know, the amount of money that you need to spend to go to those things and to take the time off, you have to get your business to a certain point so you can take the time off from it. By the time I got there, it was around the pandemic and so I haven't been, but I want to go. I look forward to it. I know they're in Miami, I think, every year or they're, like, South Florida at least. So—

(Aidan at 00:28:31) Yeah. Some place with good climate. Yeah. I've been to the—so, I mean, very similar to you. I've listened to, you know, a lot of his materials, books, and I had a chance to go to both Unleash the Power Within, which is one of them, and then also Date with Destiny. And I will say, like, especially for Date with Destiny, it was a big commitment. I mean, we're talking about seven days. It was—I think it was seven days if I remember correctly, but it's a long period of time. And you have to—you're right. Like, it's one thing to say, okay, I will pay to go, but it's also another thing to say that I can take off that much time and, you know, things will just run and it'll also work, which reminds me of this—and, again, just like you, I forget which guest it was that mentioned this on the Supermanagers podcast, which was, you know, the vacation test, which is, you know, can you go on vacation without things falling apart? And it's actually a sign of being an effective manager or leader. We just talk about this concept of how can I put myself out of a job? And if you can build the systems and things so that you are less critical—like, you're less a critical bottleneck to just your company or your team succeeding—that's actually a good sign. So if you can go to these conferences and take the time off, it's actually a very good sign.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:55) Yeah. And it's one of the early mistakes I made a lot was, you know, you don't need—there's no, like, the prerequisite to have a business is what, a filing fee for the state, like 100-something dollars or something like that. And I think you could just do it as a sole proprietor. So there's very little barrier to keep people from going into business. So there's no standard of qualification. And I was, you know, inexperienced when I started like everybody, and I assumed—my first thought into leadership when I was going from individual contributor to the first time a project got traction, I started to build my company out and build a team around me and everything like that. I had this vision of, like, me being in the center of this room, like, almost like on, uh, like, in a cockpit. And I've got all these people around me, like, you know, in Star Trek or whatever. And I can just, you know, shout out things to all of them and command all of them. And I can just extend myself and amplify myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) And I was like, yeah, that's what I want to do. And then I realized that's a stupid system. It creates way too much work for you, and it gets you the wrong people. You need people that can think for themselves, can problem solve, can push things forward, and come back to you and tell you about what they did versus coming to you expecting you to solve all of their small problems. So yeah, that was a mistake I made early on, and I found that if your goal is to sort of get a bunch of administrative assistants that can do various isolated things you can do, it's a super fragile system, and it doesn't scale and it doesn't work very well.

(Aidan at 00:31:27) Yeah, that's the problem. And I feel like in the realm of mistakes, this is one of those things where, especially as you rise up the ranks and you start as individual contributor and you're a manager and you're leading teams, I mean, you were likely the best person that was doing whatever you were doing. And so it's really hard to also make the transition to say that I need to now hire people who can do what I was doing in a better way and get satisfaction from different things. I don't need to be doing the work.

(Aidan at 00:32:08) I don't need to be the most critical piece. I'm the designer of the systems. I mean, like, we started the conversation with, my job is to create the environment where these goals can be met and these things can be successful. And it is a mental transition that you have to make, but it's also the best people, like you said, they want to work in an environment where they have autonomy and control and they can contribute. And hardest problems in the world, you can't solve all of them yourself.

(Aidan at 00:32:40) This actually reminds me of a great story. It's interesting, and I'm going to forget who it was. But there was a technology leader, and they were very, in their business, they were at a certain point where they had this really big problem. Like, it was a very big existential threat for the business. And they were saying that, oh, I'm so busy. I need to clear my time so I can focus on this and solve this problem, and I need to solve it. And they got the advice that, no, what you need to do is you need to make it clear to everybody on the team what the problem is and, you know, explain it to them and make sure that everybody knows this is the most important problem in the company to focus on. And by doing that, then they were actually able to solve the problem. So even for things like that, it doesn't need to fall on your shoulders.

(Aidan at 00:33:31) You can leverage the team. And by the way, that's what makes the team enjoy working there. Like, they're there to solve hard problems, you know, make progress and grow. And if you're depriving them of that, that's not a good environment either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) No, not at all.

(Aidan at 00:33:49) So, Joel, you've also talked about this concept of creating momentum with your teams. Do you do one-on-ones with everyone? Do you do them weekly, biweekly?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) I do one-on-ones with my direct reports, and there's an official one, typically weekly. And so on Mondays, I have an update meeting with each one of the department heads, so marketing, sales, and production. And so on Mondays, we'll figure out what was produced last week. We track it week over week. We have very clear KPIs in every single position at the company that makes everything really easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) And they're not nerdy to the point, like, there's a balance, right? You don't want them to be annoyed with tracking stuff. Like, you don't want to track too many things. You want to track the right amount of things. So we have those, and we've refined them for the positions that we have. And so we track those week over week, see if there's any issues, any roadblocks, things like that. And then, I just, a thing that's hard to teach would be you just got to care about people. Like, you got to care about them. Like, I'll call them throughout the week, and I can tell you what drives each one of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:12) And those things change too. So if you figure out what drives the person when they're hired, that will change. Like, things change in life. So I stay up to date with the human, in an appropriate way. You know? And again, that's a very subjective thing. But keeping in mind, like, people go through different stages of life, right? Like, you can be in your twenties and wanting to build a name for yourself. You can be at a point where you're having kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:42) You could be at a point where everything is super, super good and you just love the craft. Maybe you can be at a point where you want a bigger house, so your thing is money right now. So it'll change as you go through different parts of your life, and I think it's important for the leader to have some awareness of what's driving the people that work for them. That way they can make sure that the team's running smooth.

(Aidan at 00:36:09) Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I agree with you. The hard part, but the most important part, is you've got to actually care about the people on your team. And if you can actually do that, you know, care above all else, I think that just a lot of these things fall into place. And it doesn't have to be, you know, process step one, step two, step three.

(Aidan at 00:36:29) You know, if you just start from a place of, hey, these are people. And I love what you said about just cycles. Like, people definitely do go through cycles, life events. They care about different things at different stages. Everything in life has cycles. So I think that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:46) Yeah, absolutely.

(Aidan at 00:36:48) What about failures? This is another topic that I know you've thought a lot about. You know, you have this quote where you say success is built on a collection of failures.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:02) Yeah.

(Aidan at 00:37:02) But you also said, but it doesn't drown in failure. So I'm curious how you think about this and what you talk to your team about or just things that you've heard about how other company leaders think about failure and talk about it within their companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) Yeah. So I got the best experience from a TED Talk that really stuck with me, and they were giving a brief story of laundry detergent, the powdered laundry detergent versus the liquid. What they would do with the powdered is they'd actually spray liquid onto the wall and scrape it off into the giant bin, and then they would package the material and then they would sell it, right? So it turns out that a very important part of that manufacturing process was the design of the nozzle that sprayed the liquid onto the wall.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:59) That was the difference between the different brands, and they were all competing to have the better nozzle. And so they ran an experiment where they hired someone, scientists, just based off of physics and liquidity and everything that we know about science, design the single most perfect nozzle. And then they hired a second person to just take the current performing nozzles and trial selection variation of them, scientific method type deal, where they just took three, you know, made a couple variations of each, took the top two or three performing variations, dropped the others, made variations, and just cycled. And at the end of the process, of course, that person won, and they had no idea why their nozzle's better. They don't know. They just tried different shapes and they went through the process, and that was it. They looked at hindsight to try to figure it out. They're like, this one produced the best, but why? And they tried to come up with a reason why, but that process works. It's how we get all of our amazing inventions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) And honestly, I don't understand how you can do something without doing that to some degree, even if you only tried once, right? Like, you're always trying things. So if you're going to succeed, you know, you've got to try different things, and those are failures. But you only really fail, like, I believe that you only really fail if you actually stop attempting to achieve the result. And I'm specific about that too, because I'm not saying to get the exact outcome you wanted. I'm saying to get that result in general. So, you know, it's a hard thing to do. But when I was raising money for the company, they asked me, they said, alright, you want us to write you a $500,000 check? Like, most businesses fail. We see a hundred of you a day. Like, why should we write you the check? And I said, well, you know, this isn't going to fail.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:58) It's going to work. I'm not quite sure exactly what's going to play out, but I can promise you this. Like, I'm not going to stop until it does get the result that I want. And I want this more than anything. And I will, like, if I spent all the money and everything was gone, I would still, I would get a job at Walmart scrubbing toilets to pay my bills and to continue to work on this as much as I possibly could until I get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:22) Because I was just determined on the fact that the only way I could be okay with myself on my deathbed is to have tried completely my entire life and failed. And if I tried as hard as I possibly could my entire life and failed, then I could die a failure and I'd be cool with it. Be like, dude, you went out there, you put on your best effort, and you tried for 60, 70, 80 years, and you didn't get it. I admire that in you. And so I did that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:51) Dude, it was like, what, a couple years? And so much easier than you would think, and the time is going to pass either way. So I don't know, you know?

(Aidan at 00:40:59) I don't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) I try to sell people on being great, but—

(Aidan at 00:41:02) Yeah. No, that's awesome. I mean, you know, with that type of determination, it's hard not to want to invest. So that's awesome. It's a great story. I did want to, you know, just add one more thing to what you said about sometimes you just got to try things. And the scientific method doesn't, you know, just basically being super programmatic about things sometimes doesn't lead to the results because you can only explain why something happened in hindsight. And there's this great book. Have you read Alchemy, the book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:36) No. But it's been recommended to me more than once. Yeah.

(Aidan at 00:41:39) Yeah. So Rory Sutherland wrote this book, and I believe he is the—you know, I'm just looking this up, but I believe he's a leader at Ogilvy. And, yeah, Ogilvy, he's the Ogilvy advertising legend. But this book is awesome. It basically talks about how a lot of the greatest things learned in marketing, a lot of them were by accident. And he talks about just a very basic thing that in tech we talk about a lot, which is A/B testing various things.

(Aidan at 00:42:17) And I think there's an example in his, in the book where he talks about, you know, sending letters, fundraising letters to people's homes. And he talks about all the different variations, and the variations that often win aren't necessarily the ones that you expect will win, but they win. And then after the fact, you might say, oh, that's probably because this happened. But you could only back into the reason why certain things play out. And so if you're not willing to try some irrational things, some crazy things, then you might not get the outsized outcomes as well.

(Aidan at 00:42:56) So failure is just, also, if you're not failing enough, maybe you're just not trying hard enough too. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:03) Well, that's one of the things people ask me to speak about a lot in person. They'll have executives at multibillion-dollar companies, you know, 50 executives in a room, and they'll ask me to come speak about failure because they'll have these executives that'll be scared to make decisions. And the first thing I always ask them when they ask me to give this talk, I was like, have you designed their compensation structure to hit certain targets that they absolutely have to hit to get their buyouts or their payouts and things like that? And like, well, if your financial incentive is off, if your financial incentive tells them not to take a risk, then they're not going to take a risk.

(Aidan at 00:43:39) Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense as well. You know, on the decision-making front, another great piece of advice I've heard is that for most decisions, you just need to be 70% sure. You don't need to be 100% sure. I feel like a lot of people just wait to be 100% for what they also talk about, you know, type two decisions, like reversible decisions. You don't need to be 100% sure for any decision that is reversible. So I think that is, but yeah, it's such an important thing. If you have a high degree of fear of failure, then obviously you're going to try and want to be 100% sure, right?

(Aidan at 00:44:20) But you don't need to get there for every decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:24) Yeah. And that's hard. It's a hard game I always play with myself too, right? Like, you have to make some move. At the moment I'm feeling stagnant, that's usually my sign to just pick something, because if I'm just iterating over the static variables, then it's just insanity. I need to do something to change the context or to get new data. So I need to take some action. And then, like you said, the one I've heard a lot, which is pretty much identical to what you said, is the amount of time spent making the decision should directly relate to the impact that decision can have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:59) Right? So if it's a really low-impact decision, you can make it fairly quickly. If it's a really high-impact decision, you can spend more time on it.

(Aidan at 00:45:07) Yeah. I like that. Just a simple framework and gets you to the same place. I love it. Joel, this has been really awesome. I'm really glad that we have the chance to do this. We talked about, you know, everything from characteristics of CTOs, but really, I think it applies to all leaders. Everything from putting the right people together, curating a great environment, the energy of the team, trust. We talked a lot about setting expectations. We even chatted a little bit about Tony Robbins, which I thought was a cool thing that we have in common there.

(Aidan at 00:45:42) But this has been awesome. One of the questions that we ask everybody who comes on our show is for all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft, are there any final tips, tricks, or words of wisdom that you would leave them with?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:00) I'd say go listen to your podcast. Do you want to give a shout-out for your podcast real quick?

(Aidan at 00:46:05) Yeah. So Supermanagers Podcast, we, you know, we focus on more tactical tips to help people continuously be better at the art of managing teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:19) Yep. So there's that, and there's also we have a podcast, but I would say the most effective thing would be to join a group, like some sort of in-person group or, you know, something to build real relationships that can help you solve the details of the problem. One group that I like is called Elevate 150. But really getting around people who are similar to you, have a similar role. Typically, I try to find people who are a little bit ahead of me that I'm learning from, a little bit below me that I can help, and then some peers so I can bounce things off of directly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:55) And so try to design that network for myself. And then, you know, it really helps, but the relation, nothing's going to beat having someone that you trust and respect and being able to pick up the phone and talk to them and have a long-running relationship with them. And you have very few of those in your life, but if you, you know, build them up, they're super rewarding long-term.

(Aidan at 00:47:14) That's great advice, and I think I second everything that you said. This was really fun. Thanks for doing this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:22) Dude, I had a blast. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:44) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.