Tech Titans: Your Team Should be Acting or Arguing with Brendan Wovchko, CTO at Ramsey Solutions

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you our most timeless advice from our last conversation with Brendan Wovchko, CTO at Ramsey Solutions. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) You had sent over—I reached out to you, I think, on LinkedIn or text, and I was like, what's going on? We haven't talked in a while. And you sent over, I believe it was two talks. And one of them was about creating a culture of shared urgency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) Okay. And did that come from you being out on your walk and realizing that you need this somewhat anxiety, this tiny bit of urgency in order to keep moving forward?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:00:43) No. I would say where that talk came from was a really fundamental question that I think at some point in every leader's experience, they're going to end up asking, which is, why the heck is leadership so hard? So the probably the reason why I go out on these outdoor adventures is because—or I started doing it—was to try to cope with just the pressure of actual success. Right?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:01:12) It's cool to start a company and start a team or be involved in something really early stage and always have the hope of it growing and expanding and exploding. But then the reality is when it really does, the amount of emotional toll that it puts on you is crazy. Right? So at some point, you're going to open your eyes and just say, why in the world is leadership so hard?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:01:37) And so I spent some time over the last couple years just trying to explore that topic head-on. And because it's not always hard. It doesn't always have to be hard. I came across this kind of idea of shared urgency as a response to that because, you know, my experience as a leader is I was walking around every day just feeling like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:02:05) I was doing it alone. I was all by myself because a leadership position, and especially the kind of leadership position, you know, here in this audience, chief technology officers, you're kind of at the top of the pyramid. Right? And it's a very isolating experience. You've got a lot of—you're around a lot of people all the time, but you're alone largely because you can't talk to them about a lot of the pressures or things that you're going through.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:02:32) And so what I started to realize in my leadership experience is, hey, this thing's really hard. I have to start figuring out how to lower the stress of it. And where I kind of got in the journey was that it can be an isolating experience because in a large way, decisions in businesses are really hard. You come to a decision, which in itself can be a freeing thing.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:03:01) But actually getting that decision out there for, you know, and getting other people to adopt it is always a harder thing than you think it's going to be. I've always taken a great deal of solace in a story of an organization. It's of an organization I respect a lot, which is Chick-fil-A. They've got an amazing leadership organization, and I heard the story once that when the executive team at Chick-fil-A decided that they wanted all of their frontline stores to start saying, "My pleasure," you know, as part of the transaction, you have any idea how long it took them to get that rolled out to all their frontline stores? Three years.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:03:43) Six years. It took six years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:45) Mhmm.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:03:46) Right? So if you have this amazing leadership organization like Chick-fil-A, and it takes them six years to get something, you know, rolled out that's that simple. In the world of technology that we all work in, how much harder is it to get these far more complicated, complex things rolled out? And so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:04) Why is it so hard?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:04:06) Well, I mean, I think that's kind of what the talk that I sent you addresses, which is, I have had to learn as a leader to, when I make a decision, to have expectations tied to them. And my expectations are pretty simple, but the reality is I've spent a really big part of my career not actually speaking those expectations to anybody. So they kind of hang out there in that unspoken expectation space, which is not a good thing. And for me, decision making has started to become real simple, which is, you know, if a decision is out there or I put a decision out there, I make a decision, and, you know, in terms of my team, my most direct team, they've got choices they can make. They're either going to agree with that decision because it resonates with them and they kind of naturally align with it, or they're going to disagree with it, which is equally okay.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:05:08) Right? Like, as leaders, we should invite disagreement. But where my expectations are is if somebody agrees with me, I expect them to act. And if somebody disagrees with me, I expect them to argue. So this principle started to emerge that I started using on my team of act or argue.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:05:30) And if you can manage to occupy that space, your experience as a leader is going to be great. But the problem is that the reason why leadership is so stressful is because in most organizations, on most teams, in most leadership environments, it's not just a two-dimensional decision. There's a third dimension to it. And it's that third dimension that can make leadership a pretty miserable experience, which is some folks will choose not to act. They'll choose not to argue.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:06:00) What they'll choose to do is actually just ignore the decision. And we would all like to think that as leaders, that does not actually happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) Because we said it.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:06:10) Yeah. Because we said it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:11) It was discussed in the meeting. Everyone shook their heads up and down. And yeah.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:06:15) Yeah. Yeah. The whole head-nodding thing is a whole different—you know, that's a whole other topic. If you're a leader in a room expressing something, you have a bunch of people nodding their head.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:06:25) That does not mean they agree. It just means they heard you. Right? So I have tried to move into a culture of leadership where I've made it really clear to everybody, hey, listen. You don't have to agree with me.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:06:38) That's okay. You can disagree. Disagreement is just fine. Agreement is preferred, but if you disagree, that's just fine. But if you disagree, you have to argue.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:06:47) You have to constructively engage in the conversation. Because if you don't and you just kind of hang out in that space of ignoring, I call folks that hang out in that space of just ignoring, I call them energy vampires. Because if you're in a situation where, you know, leadership above you is giving you some sort of direction or some sort of plan, um, and you're just ignoring them.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:07:24) Whether you realize it or not, you're just actively drawing the life energy out of that leader. You're slowly killing them. You know? And so as a leader, you've got to actively fight against that, that it's become a socially acceptable thing to ignore, you know, decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) Hey. Just go to the meeting, nod your head, and then continue on with the things that are, quote-unquote, important.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:07:43) And do what's important to you. Yeah. You know? And that's a really unhealthy way to participate in a team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:50) I can feel it when it does happen. I'm like, I feel like everybody's just agreeing so they can go about their day.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:07:57) Yeah. It's kind of terrible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) It is. It is. And so I typically get self-reflective. I'm like, alright. Where did I go wrong?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:04) Is it, like, was it timing? Was it the way I presented it? Was I not clear about, like, the definition of done? Or, you know, I go through my mental checklist.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:08:12) Well, and I mean, all that illustrates is you're a really empathetic person. I'm the same way, and I would say that by my nature, that's how I react too. But particularly when things start to—you know, you have some success, things start to scale up in a big way, and you're not spending regular time with your team. I mean, you're spending regular time with your team, but your team's too big for you to regularly spend with all of them. If I couldn't have lunch with everybody on my team in three years if I wanted to.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:08:45) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) It's a big cafeteria.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:08:47) It is a big cafeteria. I mean, I could put them all there, but I could have a one-on-one lunch with that many people in three years. You know? So just by nature, you're not going to be spending a ton of time with people. And when you have that kind of, when that—you have that just natural distance because of what it is.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:09:17) You can't, like, you've got to shift some of the responsibility to be incumbent on those other people versus it always be, well, what did I do wrong? I mean, you always want to maintain a level of self-awareness and a high level of ownership around things that you could have done better. I'm not saying not to live in a growth-oriented mindset. But what I mean is, like, you actually have to expect things of other people at a certain size. You've got to be able to say to people, like, obviously, we're not all going to have a one-on-one meeting with each other this week.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:09:40) Right? So if you've got a problem with anything that we're saying or doing, it's incumbent upon you to actually be courageous, step up, and speak up. You know? And then, really, your responsibility as a leader is to foster an environment where that's safe and okay to do. You know?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:09:55) If you don't actually foster that environment of creating some shared urgency, you know, and the way I kind of define it is, shared urgency is a commitment to, you know, to kind of—it's a commitment to courageousness, you know, that you're going to act and argue, you know, in decision making.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) So signs of urgency would be that people are either doing the act or argue, or is there another way that you—if you walk into a team, let's say, you've got your team, but let's say I bring you over to another company. Right. And I'll, does this have a lack of urgency? How would you identify that?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:10:32) Well, so I actually—I mean, when I do the actual stage talk on this topic, I've got a drawing where you do four quadrants and you do some personas and you kind of talk it through that way. But, you know, the, you can actually measure people's likelihood to act and their likelihood to argue. Okay. And so for example, you could observe someone after working with them for a little while, and you could say, like, well, this person's, like, they're pretty likely to act, but they have a very low likelihood of arguing. And if you were to encounter somebody like that, there are some specific things that you can do to actually coach them.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:11:18) So I actually see those two as kind of like variables, act and argue. So you'll have people that are inclined to act, but not inclined to argue. You'll have some folks that are, you know, the flip of that. They don't really like to act, but they are highly inclined to argue.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:11:35) And then, obviously, the other two, like, you know, act and argue are both strong, and act and argue are both weak. You know? But, depending on the characteristics of the person, there are some very specific ways that you can kind of coach out that behavior. But that's on an individual basis. I think the thing that you were asking about is more of, like, a company-wide behavior.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:11:56) I would say as a generality, like, if you looked at companies as a whole, the vast majority of corporate America has a shared urgency problem. In fact, the vast majority of all companies have a shared urgency problem. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) Can I tell you that I fully agree with that statement? We sell into businesses. Yeah. And sometimes I just sit there after the call and I ask myself, how did that company get that big?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:12:28) Yeah. Oh, well, a little tangential to this idea that we're talking about. You know, they're—I'm not a big fan of the idea of labeling things, you know, generationally and stuff like that. You know, like, you'll hear people wail on millennials or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:46) Oh.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:12:46) You know, whatever. And that kind of stuff is annoying. But I will say that there have been some shifts, particularly in our space, the software development world, in the last twenty years that have been really interesting. Mind if we talk about it a little bit?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:03) Yeah. Yeah.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:13:04) So when I got into software development, I remember, you know, I got into it. I never asked, like, what is this pay? You know, what are my opportunities for advancement? You know, like, those ideas never entered my mind. I was just a computer nerd.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:13:26) I was enthralled by the possibility of, like, manipulating a computer. It's just fascinating to me, you know, back in the nineties. And to me, like, those first and early experiences I had where I got to mess with something on a computer and got it to do something were, like, mind-blowing. A lot of those moments are still, like, etched into my brain. Right?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:13:51) And so when I got into the commercial world of software, I still wasn't really, like, success-minded or money-minded or advancement-minded. It was all just about the sheer innovation of getting out there and trying to do something new. And, and that, you know, fortunately, you know, life becomes more complex and, you know, you think about those other things, you know, with time. But I've been very fortunate that my motivation has always fundamentally been around, you know, using technology to make a difference in the world. Right?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:14:28) And the big shift that I see happening in technology right now is the same shift that I imagine probably happened in the world of law and happened in the world of medicine. And, you know, I imagine a couple hundred years ago when somebody was pursuing a career in law, they were predominantly driven by the idea of justice. Yes. Right? And I would say by the world that we live in now, this highly litigious society that we live in, is probably the result of people growing up and losing kind of that pursuit of justice and saying, like, well, I want to be a lawyer because it's good living.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:15:09) I can make a lot of money. I can have some influence. I can have high social standing. You know? And, and in some ways, I've seen it happen in the medical world too.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:15:18) I've got two doctors in my life. And one of those doctors, every time I go into the doctor's office, is talking to me about the American Medical Association and all the numbers and all the figures and where my stats line up according to that and how I, you know, how I'm either, like, you know, exceeding the average or behind the average. None of the advice is ever personal. You know, it's all diagnostic. And then I've got this other doctor, this chiropractor, who the first time I showed up to his office and I got out of my car, I noticed he was peeking at me through the shades.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:15:55) And he watched me get out of my car and walk into the building. And when I walked in, the receptionist said, oh, hey. You know, we'd like to check you in. And he was like, we'll do that later. And literally grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the back, and he's like, okay.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:16:07) This is what I noticed how you're walking when you walked into the building. Right? And my, this particular chiropractor, I'm not saying this about all chiropractors, but this particular chiropractor that I have, I think of him more as a healer than I do a doctor.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:16:23) In the same way that I might think about some lawyers as somebody, a lawyer that's predominantly motivated by justice instead of policy. Right? And what I see happening in our space right now in engineering, I think is that same metamorphosis that's happening. The folks that were drawn into this industry because they wanted to use technology to make a difference in the world, that motivation is starting to shift. And what you're seeing is people come into the workplace who are predominantly motivated by money, influence, and power.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:16:58) And I personally, I think it's a huge problem. Huge, huge problem. And I think it's in a lot of ways why you've seen a lot of the really big tech companies, their innovation curve slow way the heck down, whether it's Apple or Google or, you know, I mean, there are some interesting things happening at those companies. But, you know, and by the way, well, just to be clear, I'm not saying that this is an age thing. I've met my fair share of 22-year-olds that have the same, you know, vinegar and passion that I did when I was their age too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:36) It's not really an age thing.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:17:38) No. It's all about the fundamental motivation. Like, what caused you to do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) I mean, people, and I had the age thing in my head, and yeah, it is a trend, and it can describe large amounts, and it does work some of the time. But you really sell yourself short if you don't take each person for an individual on an individual basis. I've met 60- and 70-year-olds who think as sharp as 35-year-olds.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:18:03) Olds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) And I've met 35-year-olds who are thinking like 12-year-olds.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:18:07) One of the great mentors in my life, he is probably creeping up on probably 70 years old right now. When he retired, he retired as the head of North American sales for Microsoft. And you might think, like, well, Brendan is a software engineer. That's a pretty weird mentor to have, like, head of sales. To this day, he can still write code faster than I can. It has nothing to do with age. In fact, you know, some of the highest potential software engineers I have on my team today are within five years of graduating college. I mean, they're just amazing, highly motivated, ridiculously hungry people, you know. But when you're talking about the average that exists out there today, I think I see over and over and over again in the interview process that what people are motivated by today is very different than what people are motivated by in the past. And it's actually sad for them because the reality is they're gonna get a very different outcome in their career than I've gotten. Right? Like, the, you know, you're not gonna have the same kind of forward motion, excitement, and monetary benefit in your career if you're just showing up every day and trying to walk out the door the first moment that you can and that you're not really passionate about the problems that you're solving and you wanna push the envelope forward. Like, you're not gonna get all those benefits, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:35) What motivates you today?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:19:37) Same thing. Today, I've become more aware of, so I would say 20 years ago, I was a technical guy in search of a problem. And today, I am a problem guy who knows how to leverage technology. But the motivation is still the same. I've always been fundamentally fascinated by the human condition and how technology can kind of reach into that world and make a difference and an impact in people's lives. Like, for years, I worked in entertainment. And when I worked in entertainment, it was about, you know, really entertainment at its core is really like how to encourage someone, you know, and bring some light into their life. For me now, really, I'm far more interested in kind of the more, you know, almost scientific process of actual material life change, you know. And both of those things can look kind of similar to each other. But the problems I'm interested in solving now are still the very similar problems to what I wanted to solve in my twenties. But like, how do you fundamentally make a difference in people's lives? Not as easy as people think to do with a five-inch square of electronics, you know, or rectangular, or rectangle of electronics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:56) We call it a glowy rectangle.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:20:58) A glowy rectangle. My wife's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:59) We put down the glowy rectangles. Yes. Yeah. All-knowing glowy rectangles. You just put them down and have some human time. Well, we did it, man. We made a podcast.

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:21:08) We did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:08) How do you feel?

(Brendan Wovchko at 00:21:09) That was the fastest hour of my life, maybe. That's a compliment. Yeah. Thank you. You make it easy. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or a 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.