TECH TITANS: Leveling Up Your Communication with Bill Tingle, Certified Leadership Coach

(Josh at 00:00:01) Today we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans, featuring our most valuable leadership insights from leadership coach Bill Tingle, starting with an example of Joel's communication with me. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) And can you, before we forget, can you put a thing on the calendar or something real quick? We've got to repair that HDMI cable or replace it.

(Bill Tingle at 00:00:28) Yeah, that goes back to what you and I talked about. Yeah, you can do it now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) You've got to do it right now.

(Bill Tingle at 00:00:34) If you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) If you don't do it now, you forget.

(Josh at 00:00:35) This is true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) Yes, so—

(Bill Tingle at 00:00:38) Now, so you made a request of them. Wait, that's part of what I talk about in syntaxions is you made a request. Yeah, all right. Was there enough information in that request for him to do it exactly like he wanted to do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) Yes, I believe so. You can tell me no, but—

(Bill Tingle at 00:00:53) Well, part of the effective request is understanding the person that you're making the request of. There's background and context. So you make the assumption around—so if every time you buy, every time you all buy an HDMI cable, it's always this grade, this brand, this length, then you can trust, you probably trust he's going to do it. But if you leave those out, he might buy a 12-foot HDMI cable and you meant that you wanted a 24-foot HDMI cable, and you're not satisfied because he didn't deliver on the condition of satisfaction. Although your request wasn't complete.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) I agree with that.

(Bill Tingle at 00:01:26) Yeah, yeah. So that's the kind of thing. And, you know, it's the sort of thing I like talking about where one of the reasons there's so much waste, rework, failure in projects is that people aren't complete with their requests, but they don't think about it. You know, we just do it. It's like, hey, you know, could you bring me a coffee on Friday morning? And I'm waiting at 7:30 for my coffee and you show up at 10. It's like, man, I thought you were going to be here at 7:30 with my coffee. Yeah, so yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) One of the things that we do have in our culture is we stop in meetings and we put things in the calendar right away.

(Bill Tingle at 00:01:58) That's what you're telling me about, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:59) And for example, that request, I guess it went without—let's ask Josh. Now when you made that—let's talk about it. Let's give him a—

(Bill Tingle at 00:02:06) Yeah, this is like an exercise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) When you were going to do that, were you going to set the meeting to talk to me about it, or were you going to set the meeting to actually go make the purchase?

(Josh at 00:02:15) I probably—I think I would have set the meeting to make the purchase.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) Okay.

(Bill Tingle at 00:02:18) Yeah, so—well, you know, I could have—you could have said, hey Josh, could you order, you know, ABC brand HDMI cable, the model that we usually get, but I want it in 24 feet. I need it by Saturday morning at 8:00. Would you be able to do that, Josh? Yeah, I commit, I'll have that done. Great, we're done. And we didn't set up a meeting to talk about it, but I made a request. I think everything was there. And the conditions of satisfaction are I wanted this brand—what's the top popular brand? I don't even know. There's a lot of now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) Yeah, yeah. That might not be high quality now, but—

(Bill Tingle at 00:02:51) Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it's like you guys know Monster. You said 24 feet for Saturday morning, 8:00 a.m. You're both in Central time, so you have enough information. And then it's just done. Yes. And then if he doesn't deliver, then we've got an issue with reliability, which you're going to have to talk about because trustworthiness requires reliability. Yeah. So all this stuff just fits—it's just pretty—it's like, and the thing I mentioned earlier is, what are the things we can learn from computers? Right? Because we're always talking about what computers learn from us, but it's like what are the things we can learn from computers? I mean, and it's really what can we learn from how we've designed and implemented computers? And you start thinking about that, there's a lot of things, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) It was a lot of growth and self-development for me in my first serious relationship, which was with my wife, right? I would sit there and write code all day, and then I'd go interact with her. And she does not have debug log outputs. And if I tell her something once, she doesn't continue to loop that until infinity.

(Bill Tingle at 00:03:51) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:52) And so I just had to make these conscious mind shifts that, okay, I'm done talking to computers, now I'm going to talk to humans. Yeah. That was hard for me.

(Bill Tingle at 00:04:02) Right, right. And the thing about talking to compute—are we on?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:06) Yeah, yeah, we're recording.

(Bill Tingle at 00:04:07) I mean, around last time we just started, right?

(Josh at 00:04:09) Yeah.

(Bill Tingle at 00:04:09) Yeah. And you used some of that, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:11) All of it.

(Bill Tingle at 00:04:12) Yeah, okay. Yeah, I love it, I love it. So the thing about computers—I mean, I started out as a software engineer, you know, and my first programming job was assembler, which was totally cool. And assembler, any high-level language—I'm not up to speed on all the current high-level languages because it's been a while—but one thing I knew is that every language came with syntax and there were only so many commands. The language was finite. And if you didn't type in the language as intended, number one, it may not compile. And number two, if it compiled, it doesn't mean it was going to be correct. And in order to get, you know, to get computers to do what we want them to do, we have to construct language that is our intentions and the computer will accept it, right? And then, you know, if we have bugs, it doesn't know what to do. Well, think about how people communicate with each other. We have language, and everything we do is in language. We invent, we declare, we generate everything. And in fact, language is action. You make things happen. If you delegate, that's a request, that's action, and you get things done through language. But if we're not complete and accurate and clear and concise with our language, we may not get what we intended, right? And when people don't respond as we want, we can have problems in terms of not getting what we want. We have trust relationships, we have reliability, and we have rework and waste. And so I've just been thinking a lot about that in terms of what I do in my leadership practice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:41) So let's go deeper with the Josh example. So him and I have been working together for a while.

(Bill Tingle at 00:05:47) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:48) And when it comes to equipment, he is the guy. Right? So I defer to him on all things audio. And "you tell me" is the conversation we have all the time, right? Yeah. And so we've got this sort of working relationship, and then you bring in this new idea of hyper-clarity or very specific, explicit instructions in how you're communicating. How do you then change that relationship? Is it as easy as I just start doing that as the leader now? That's just something that I put on me to learn and to hold myself accountable to do? Or how does that actually happen when you go and you coach people that aren't doing this and then they start doing this with their team?

(Bill Tingle at 00:06:27) Yeah, fair enough. And I've done this in organizations for years. In fact, it's—I used to do this as a leader. And then when I started my leadership development program, it's just, well, I've been doing this for years and so I know that it works. First of all, you pull the team together and you have to be prepared for what the new rules of engagement are. So you make sure you're prepared to answer questions and specify it. But you pull your team together and say, look, you know, I've been thinking about something and I'd like to change the way we work. And I want to run this by you, I want to make sure that we all own it, that we understand it. And so I want to explain some things to you. And here's what I'm thinking, here's what I'd like to do. You know, as we work together, there's five or six sort of language constructs that we can use. First of all, I can declare. And if I say, hey, I want to make a declaration—starting next week we are going to start looking at a different testing product, or we are going to start writing these back-end services—I make some form of declaration. If you think about it, the Declaration of Independence was a declaration. So you could make a declaration to your family, we're going to move to Tennessee. You know, and look, you created a reality, right? So you say, so here's how declarations are going to work. And you have to have the authority to make declarations, but here are how declarations are going to work. And then here's our requests. Here's what a request is. Here's what the construct is. And then—and there's other language constructs, I won't go into them, and we can go deeper if you'd like—but get everybody talking about understanding it and then everybody making a commitment to do it. And then there's a certain amount of grace to say, oh, I made a mistake. Yeah, I know, I'm learning this. Learning—it takes time and practice and iteration. But over time, as the group commits to it, that's the first thing you want is a commitment to it. They commit to it, they start working through it, and it is so cool because it increases engagement, it increases trust, it increases reliability. And actually it can be kind of fun, like, hey, you know, you made a commitment and you—you know, people can start to have fun with it. But you've got to get people together, have the conversation, and then get a commitment to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:31) I got some feedback after my first year or two of running this business about how I had made certain people feel. And part of me—because I do have a stronger personality—my initial reaction was, get over it, become stronger. Yeah. But I realize it's somewhat of a meet-me-in-the-middle thing.

(Bill Tingle at 00:08:49) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:50) Like, yeah, they could be stronger, but I could also realize that they're not there yet, and maybe I kind of give them a little help along that journey, and I'm not so sharp. And so I really learned how to be aware of that, and I guess the way I would describe it was I was a little flippant, I guess, is the word. After I heard three people in my life tell me that, I was like, okay, maybe I need to go Google what this word means. Because I would just react quickly and react fast, and that had worked well for me.

(Bill Tingle at 00:09:18) Yeah, to a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:19) To a certain point of maturity. Yeah. But then it stopped serving me as well.

(Bill Tingle at 00:09:24) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:24) And then I had to change.

(Bill Tingle at 00:09:24) Yeah. Well, with some people that will still serve you well. And I think what I've learned over the years, and part of it is just having taken so many assessments—DISC and, you know, Myers-Briggs and all the other ones—is, it's true people can come along to be more like you, but it is also true that people are who they are. You know, a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists have put people into categories for a reason. You know, there are some people that are very just assertive and dominant, type A, and there's some others that are sort of quiet, but they're analytical, and some are caring and supportive. And I think understanding the type of person that you're working with, letting them be who they are, having expectations and holding them accountable and making sure they're in a space where they can be strong—but, and I think that's what a lot of empathy is, is understanding, okay, if I know that you're driven and type A, and all of a sudden you're slacking off, you're not really doing your job and something's up—like, hey Joel, this isn't like you. Joel, this isn't like you. Is everything okay? And we can have a conversation around that. But I, you know, for me, care, you know, the care has always been that sort of soft word, like, you know, we care for each other. But to me, all humans require care. And my number one thing is, whoever I'm working with, how can I approach them with care and empathy, which means I'm thinking about their concerns as if they're my own, right? Right? Because so often it's like, it's about us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:59) Yeah. And one other thing I noticed too was—well, obviously I was very new. So previously—

(Bill Tingle at 00:11:06) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:07) I was a co-founder. I was the technical person. I could build the product, I could build the teams, I knew engineers. That was all really great.

(Bill Tingle at 00:11:12) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) But this is the first time—these past six, seven years is the first time that I was the only one. So I had to learn the sales side of things, the people side of things that weren't engineers. I knew how to communicate pretty well with them. And at first, one of the mistakes made was I had people that I didn't trust, and it was definitely because I was hiring the cheapest people I possibly could, and they just didn't have the skills. So rightfully I didn't trust them, and then I ended up doing a bunch of work, and it was just a huge mess. I slowly found that if I get high-quality people that can execute in the given area that I need them to execute in, my life becomes beautiful.

(Bill Tingle at 00:11:54) Right, right. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:56) And then I just have to care about them. And that's one thing I have found that you can't—you can correct me if I'm wrong—but I found you can't train that. You just—you can't train people to care. You have to find people who do care and then empower them.

(Bill Tingle at 00:12:08) Yeah. I think, you know, I've had people who seem to have no empathy, and I've worked with them on care. And deep down, people do care, but it's like, what do they care about? And I think some people can develop empathy. I think others, they try to change their behavior, but that's not caring. It's just you're acting like you care. You know what I mean? You touched on trusting people, and I think that's—how do you define trust without using the word trust?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:37) Yeah, without using the word trust. I believe—let's, I'll try to make this up on the spot.

(Bill Tingle at 00:12:43) That's okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:44) I guess when I—Josh, I trust him for audio. So it's like, why do I trust him?

(Bill Tingle at 00:12:49) Yeah, yeah. Why do you trust Josh?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:51) I think there was a very specific moment in time that I trusted him. Uh-huh. When I brought him on the team, I had gone through the interviews with him. I had my other audio engineers interview with him. They said he's got the core skill set that we need, and then it was just a time thing. Over time, he delivered. I found that if I left Josh alone that he would do good things without me having to push him to do good things. One specific example is we often over-record the show and then he chops it down. And at first I used to be really worried about which parts he would keep in and, you know, wanting to make sure we got the main thing to be the main thing. And I had sort of forgotten about it for four or five months, and then I went back and I was doing a review with Andrea, one of our marketing people, and I said, oh look, all the episodes are, you know, this length. That's what I had asked for, and it was something that was beautiful because I had basically mentioned it once and he just kept it as a constant, very computer-like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he kept that up, so that was a big plus-one credit on the trust ledger that we have.

(Bill Tingle at 00:14:01) Yeah, yeah. And we do so much just automatically. You know, we wake up in the morning and we get out of bed and we get a cup of coffee and we don't—you know, we're just not even thinking, right. Our subconscious is doing it and our mind's going, thinking about the day.

(Bill Tingle at 00:14:12) And we don't often think about the words that we use. And, you know, in my work, what I do is sometimes people think I'm too picky about words, but words have meaning. And if words bring life into existence, then words are important. And so trust is a big one, right? And most people, I say, you know, tell me what you think trust is, and I think people meant, you know, it's like, well, how do I experience it? How do I feel it? But as you work with Josh, you think about that a second. When Josh says something, do you assess that he's sincere?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) Not consciously.

(Bill Tingle at 00:14:45) And sincerity, it's hard to measure sincerity. It's like sincerity is if when somebody says something, it's consistent with what they're thinking, like their private conversations. Because we're always talking to ourselves, right? So when Josh says something, you know, do you think, well, he's thinking that? I'm sure he's thinking the same thing that he's saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) Oh, I believe Josh is in sync with his words and his thoughts.

(Bill Tingle at 00:15:05) Yeah. And you don't think about it, right? But that's part of trust, is like somebody is sincere. And then the other one is probably why you're hiring him. Is he competent?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:13) Yes.

(Bill Tingle at 00:15:13) Right. So if you hire somebody that's not competent, you're going to jeopardize the trust, right? It's like you want to trust people, but you just hired somebody that's incompetent. Like, so you're going to have a problem. And people will do that. Like, oh, I think so and so will do a great job, but they're not competent. You can give them time to become competent, but, you know, that's going to impact trust. And the other one is when Josh says he's going to do something, does he do it when he says he's going to do it? How you expect it to be done?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) Yes. So he's reliable?

(Bill Tingle at 00:15:41) Yep. So those are the big, there's other ones, but those are the big components: sincerity, competence, and reliability. And when we're working with people, we can actually make assessments when we select people. Are they trustworthy? And when we interview them, when we ask questions, we can then make an assessment of, you know, do I think this person is trustworthy or not? So it's interesting when you start getting into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:03) How do you do that in such a short time of knowing somebody, the trustworthy exercise?

(Bill Tingle at 00:16:08) I think several ways. One, behavioral interviewing is always good, you know, because it puts somebody on the spot to like, okay, this is how I handled this in the past. And interviewing is always interesting because you ask somebody a behavioral interview question and they might say, well, you know, when you do this sort of thing, you know, what you should do is, like, no, I asked you, you know, when in your situation, tell me about a time when you did this. And that's why behavioral interviewing is so important, is because they're explaining how they did something. Were they competent to do it? Were they reliable? Sincerity is a hard one. You know, that you kind of have to pick up on. And then I think making reference calls. You know, and that's always a challenge because, you know, sometimes those are prepared and planned and that sort of thing. But if you ask the right questions and you just, kind of like a podcast, you know, you forget that the camera's rolling and the microphone's on after a while, same thing can happen when you're doing reference calls. They sort of, like, you just get in the conversation, they forget.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:04) Yeah. I only have one skill with the reference calls that I picked up by accident. I noticed that when I started doing them, so I started doing them based off a recommendation of somebody else that I looked up to, and I said, okay, I'm going to start doing those. And I would ask somebody, okay, any two people that could speak to your character, your work ethic that you've worked with or around? They'd give me these two people, and I would call, and I would ask them a couple questions, and then one of them would be, if this person could work on anything and improve anything, what would it be? And then they always go to that their strength is their weakness is their strength, and all that. They're great, great, great, great, great. But one time, I found out that I had accidentally said something along the lines of, I'm always working on this. I was working on something at the time, so I said that to the person. I was like, I'm working on this currently. That's what I'm trying to do. What is the one thing this person could work on? And when, for some reason, I don't know why, I haven't questioned it or looked deep into it, but when I offer up the example of what I'm working on and what I'm improving on, and then I ask them versus just straight up asking them, they'll give me the real thing.

(Bill Tingle at 00:18:13) Yeah. Yeah. It drops the guard. It makes it, I think it makes it safe because people want safety. You know? They want to be assured that it's safe. I think that's a lot of it. You know, on the interviewing topic, I know a lot of your listeners are, I mean, everybody's interviewing, right? One of the things I learned that might be helpful, and some people do not like this, but I learned this during one of my interviews years ago, and there's a firm out there called ghSMART, and they have a whole practice around us. And there's really two questions and a statement. One is, well, actually three questions. One is, what's the name of your, Joel, what's the name of your boss? Like if you had a boss, you'd say—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) The Marquis.

(Bill Tingle at 00:18:56) Yeah. Yeah. Well, my boss is Susan. Oh, okay. Susan, what's Susan's last name? Smith. Oh, okay. Susan Smith. Yeah. I don't, I've heard of her. I think I might know her. And I'm sincere if I do or I don't, right? All right. So if I was to call Susan this afternoon and I said, hey, what are Joel's top three strengths and accomplishments? What would she tell me? And then you'd tell me and I'd say, okay, now, you know, let's say I call Susan this afternoon and I ask her what three opportunities for improvement are, what are they? I almost always get what I believe to be sincere answers. Where normally if you'd ask somebody, you know, what do you think your top three strengths and weaknesses are? They're going to be like, you know, and these are famous interview questions, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:38) The stump speech they have.

(Bill Tingle at 00:19:40) But when you set it up with what's your boss's name? And if I was to, you know, it creates like this psychological context that, well, Joel really could call my boss this afternoon. And some people don't like it, you know, but to me it's like, look, I need answers on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:58) People have been resistant to it?

(Bill Tingle at 00:20:00) No. People always answer the question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:02) But they don't like it?

(Bill Tingle at 00:20:03) But when I explain it to other people, like if I'm mentoring somebody and I explain this method of interviewing, they're like, oh, you know, that's just, I'm not sure I can do that, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:12) Well, I'm in support of it because that's how humans work. For example, if I said, pretend you're Bill Gates right now, you can do that. There's, all humans that, relatively speaking, 80% of humans can do that. You can just imagine you're someone else as a character. And so if you're jumping into that character of their boss, they're going to actually answer you through the eyes of what their boss would say. I don't think that that's a weird thing at all. I think that's very good.

(Bill Tingle at 00:20:39) Well, it's, you know, again, for those listening, it works very effectively.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:43) Yes.

(Bill Tingle at 00:20:44) And we should all be okay as interviewees answering those questions. Right? Because it's like, no, here's, you know, I got things I'm working on. I got strengths, and, you know, I want to be as transparent as possible because you're making assessments of trust in advance. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:59) And it's way easier to live your life just being transparent and open. It's way harder if you're trying to keep checks and balances of who you told what to or what you've exaggerated. And it takes a lot of introspection to figure out who you are, what drives you.

(Bill Tingle at 00:21:15) Yeah. Yeah. And there's so much cost in the whole recruiting and hiring process, and don't be that person that, you know, is playing the game and making, you know, creating costs on everybody. Right? That's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29) So what are you seeing right now? You coach several different people. Are you seeing any trends across all the people you're coaching?

(Bill Tingle at 00:21:36) One of the things, so if it, let's talk about my audience. You know, my clientele, if you will, I typically seek to work with people that are at the C-suite minus one. So let's call it C-suite n, you know, n minus one, maybe n minus two, you know, and I've got a program for new managers, emerging managers, and I've got a program for, you know, director level. Many of the problem, and I think the pandemic made this worse, and that's around relationship development, visibility, building an identity, building eminence. And that's the thing that's hardest. And a lot of what's required, especially if you're, let's say you're a director of IT, you know, it's really important that you're known. It's really important that your accomplishments are known, your contributions are known. It's important that you make offers of value and help to the organization. And if you don't have relationships with people throughout the organization, the CMO, the COO, the CFO, or one level down, it's going to be hard to be successful. And so many, and a lot of highly technical people, they struggle with that. You know, I like to say, you know, your functional skills, your technical skills get you hired. And at some level, it's the relationship skills, the communication skills, the emotional management, mood management skills, and more that help you get promoted. And in fact, I think if I think of a lot of people that have been let go, a lot of times it's those, it's those softer, we call them soft skills. And there was a day when I was looking around, this was like right after Y2K, and I noticed senior people leaving the company or getting demoted or marginalized. Like what's going on? And I think at that point I started to think it's got to be the soft skills. You know, but what are soft skills? And so I started paying for coaching and paid for a teacher and started, oh, okay. You know, communication, relationships, emotional management, empathy, these things are really important. But I think as I look around, the biggest blockers for people are relationship, communication. We should go deeper into communication, but communication, and then emotional and mood management.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) 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'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.