The Journey of Innovation and Modernizing a Century-Old Company with Kevin Adams, Head of Business Solutions Development at Edward Jones

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Kevin from Edward Jones about being leader-led and the construction site accident that launched his career. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) He did say that in the prep meeting you guys had that we had similar background stories, and I'm curious about that. What's your background?

(Kevin at 00:00:24) So my background, and this really, I think it was in December, I forget which one of your podcasts it was where you had somebody interviewing you. So my background, I'd say growing up outside of Philadelphia, kind of the middle of nowhere farm country, very, very humble means. And, you know, to be sitting here today doing what I do in this industry was just something that it wasn't even an imagination or dream. You know, my father worked in a factory and, you know, it was either farming, you know, the one or two factories that existed in the area, or you were construction.

(Kevin at 00:01:07) And even through most of, you know, my early years, you know, middle school, high school, it was, you know, construction. And I didn't really know what the path was for me. And, you know, this is showing my age, but early eighties, and it's going to sound cliche, but it's not. It was the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick. And, you know, I'd been exposed through, like, the Commodore 64, the Apple IIc, you know, the Texas Instruments TI.

(Kevin at 00:01:38) I was already starting to, you know, do small programs, but the interconnectedness, you know, of computers, it wasn't just about, you know, the concept of the movie itself and, you know, using computers, but the interconnected nature is what really intrigued me and drove me forward. And I kind of always kept that skill up. I was always learning about it wherever I could in the school system that I was part of. If I wasn't in a classroom, I was literally in the lab tinkering around and having fun. That led to the point where, and again, this is dating myself, like, you know, PC clones, right? Building clones, helping to do support for neighbors, for people I knew, doing, you know, upgrades, like learning the inner workings.

(Kevin at 00:02:16) And I remember this distinctly. It was the summer that I was graduating high school. I was working construction. I had a pretty severe fall. I ended up fracturing the last three vertebrae in my back. So we were doing house framing and it's heavy, hard manual work. Was laid up for quite a while after that accident and really didn't know where life was going to take me. And this family friend, it was just, you know, I don't want to say dumb luck, but, you know, he knew that I was into technology and I had been tinkering around with computers and was really smart.

(Kevin at 00:03:00) And I had helped him, you know, with a bunch of things. And he said, you know, like, I know this guy. He's, you know, doing X and Y and Z, and I didn't understand any of it at the time, I'll explain it, you know, at a large pharmaceutical company. You know, why don't you go talk to him? He's always complaining about, you know, the IT support he gets there, and he's looking to just hire someone to be his jack of all trades. So I went on this interview. I go to this building that was probably an hour and a half, two hours from my house. It's this, you know, amazing headquarters building. I, you know, had never seen anything like it.

(Kevin at 00:03:35) I sit down with this gentleman who's the head of their treasury function. I couldn't have even told you at that time what that meant. And he's like, you know, I want somebody to do X. I want somebody to do Y. I want somebody to do Z. You know, I was like a deer in headlights the whole time. Before I even got home, there was a message on my machine that I had the job and when could I start. And two weeks later, I'm out there. I'm figuring out how to buy suits, how to buy ties, what this is even going to be like. I'm scared.

(Kevin at 00:04:04) I'm nervous. I don't think I'm sleeping at all. So I end up working for this gentleman who was the head of treasury at a very well-known, at the time, the largest pharmaceutical firm. And he basically has me doing everything from getting them kind of set up on certain corporate systems, but specifically working on, at the time, which I didn't even really understand it, which was performance attribution systems, shadow accounting. So basically, he was in charge of all the investable assets, pension funds, other money for this firm where they work with a lot of outside institutions to do those investments.

(Kevin at 00:04:42) But it's his responsibility to watch those institutions and pick those institutions and understand what they're doing. So an internal investment management team. So working on these systems, doing programming, DBA work, I mean, help desk work, I was doing it all. And for years, I did this. And it was just this, you know, amazing opportunity to go from, you know, thinking, you know, at one point in my life, I'd just be living in this small town and working at a factory. And I had no idea, you know, where the doors that would open and where that would lead to. And I'm still in touch with this gentleman today as, like, you know, a mentor who did so much for me and how I pivoted into financial services.

(Kevin at 00:05:09) So that was, like, financial services within a pharma company. And one day, and this is after about five years, he came to me and he said, "Look, you could stay here and you can continue to make, you know, $30,000 a year. Or I can make some calls with some friends of mine on Wall Street, and you can go do this in a firm that's actually going to move at a faster pace. They're going to pay you more money to do it. It's going to be way more exciting."

(Kevin at 00:05:47) And he made some calls and I went on some interviews. And that, again, that relationship, that mentorship with him opened a door for me that just then, you know, dropped me into a team that at the time, and this is now the late nineties, a team in a very large financial services firm. In fact, you know, like, doing such cutting edge and innovative stuff at the time within the industry. In Bill Gates' first book called Business at the Speed of Thought, there's a chapter, you know, in that book about this team within this firm and the innovative work they were doing, the patents that were being developed.

(Kevin at 00:06:26) And, you know, I literally end up in this team that just, you know, changed even more in my life and working for just brilliant minds and brilliant people. So, you know, when I say our backgrounds are similar, you know, hearing your own journey and your own history, it was touching to me. It was meaningful to me because I was like, man, a lot of what, you know, got Joel his start and what dropped him into technology was, I think, in a similar way of how I got dropped into this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:55) Oh, yeah. And it's almost like your life is on this one track, and then this big thing happens, and it's redirection, detour.

(Kevin at 00:07:03) Yeah. Yeah. All through a fall. Really, that's what did it for me. A bad accident.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:10) And so you are working at these companies. You work on this amazing team. Where do you go from there?

(Kevin at 00:07:18) So yeah. So I land in this team at a large financial services firm, still one of the largest wealth managers out there. Some of the first projects I work on, and again, this is dating myself, was this firm had been the investment banker of Research In Motion, so Blackberry. So some of the first Blackberrys that were off the production line ended up at this firm. Three of them that came in, one ended up in my hands, and I was given the charter of, like, "Look, what else can we do with this besides email?"

(Kevin at 00:07:47) The guy I worked for actually thought, you know, mobile email was going to be kind of foolish, and he was a very visionary guy. But he's like, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could do X and Y and Z and deliver some more meaningful content on these?" And so at that time, I was literally figuring out how we could do XML off of mainframe transactions. So off of CICS transactions to get data out of the frame and deliver it up to these devices in a fairly secure manner, I'd say. Worked on that for quite a while.

(Kevin at 00:08:18) I actually worked between the retail wealth side and the investment bank on just really mobile. Blackberrys turned into Palm Pilots, turned into this, that, and the other thing. And so I really was building a niche around, you know, the design, the engineering around what we were doing as a firm with mobility internally. And then that led to what we were doing with our, eventually, our clients, you know, through the online banking and broker side. And before I left that firm, you know, just through engineering and architecture, I actually ended up taking over what would have been the core integration security framework for one of the largest online banking and brokerage sites at the time of a large wealth manager.

(Kevin at 00:09:20) And, you know, that experience, you know, getting to, you know, have senior executives from a Microsoft, a Cisco, I mean, you name it, you know, almost on speed dial to help us out, to look at the coolest stuff, to be, you know, wherever we could be on the cutting edge. And so when I left there from that firm, I took a break for a while. You know, I was now running a large engineering team, like I mentioned, for kind of their core frameworks. I took a step back. I moved out to the West Coast. It was, I burned myself out after seven years, you know, eighty, a hundred hour weeks.

(Kevin at 00:09:42) Ended up through, again, through relationships. And I always tell people this, like my career has never been through a recruiter. It's always been through people I know. And I tell young people this. I tell people this I work with now. People will never remember what you did. All they'll remember is how you got it done and how you treated other people. And that's literally going back to, like, the early two thousands. You know, someone had taught me that, and it stuck with me.

(Kevin at 00:09:56) So I move out to the West Coast in San Francisco. I end up through a relationship getting a job at a very large global asset management firm where I'm running engineering for all of their trading systems, all of their investment systems around the world. And that's led to leading other, you know, large engineering teams all within the wealth management or financial services industry. And it's just been this honor and joy that's been based on the fact of, you know, getting to travel around the world, getting to interact with so many smart and bright people, having mentors that to this day, and I really want to give a shout out to one, because it is International Women's Day.

(Kevin at 00:10:22) The CIO of that large asset management company who was my boss the whole time I was there, Priscilla Moyer. I mean, this is a person that I haven't worked there in, you know, ten plus years, but I'm still close to to this day. And, you know, I think those relationships, that mentorship, you know, really getting the right opportunities. And I tell people this. It's never been luck. Luck is always a little piece of it, but it comes down to being able to take risks, and it comes down to also hard work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) It's a lot of things at once, right?

(Kevin at 00:11:20) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:21) What did Priscilla teach you? What's one of the big takeaways? I know you've had a long relationship there, but what was one of the first ones?

(Kevin at 00:11:27) I think the thing that she taught me the most was to get my emotions under control and to not react to things and start to display more of an executive presence, even when the world was falling down, you know, so to speak of, you know, a major production issue, systems being down. Keep your cool, hold it together, get through it, be the one with fortitude. I think that's one. And the second thing, you know, I had always early on had developed a love for this industry and a love for this business. But the encouragement she always gave me around leveraging that knowledge, you know, understanding this industry, it's not just about the systems themselves, but it's how the systems are really enabling, you know, a business. And then those relationships that you need to maintain with those business partners. I mean, those are the things that just being under her leadership were just so meaningful to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:29) No, it sounds amazing. Like, when I started to do these interviews and talk to all of these different technical leaders, I got a huge spectrum of different leadership styles, right? All the way from throwing stuff in engineering meetings against the wall and breaking lamps to, you know, the coolest, calmest person in the world that you can barely hear speak. And so it's been such a range that I've come to find it's more of an art given the context of the current people that you're with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:02) Because I've heard people, one of the more interesting pieces of advice that runs through my head from time to time, and maybe you'll help me have some perspective on this for balance, is somebody had told me, I can't remember who, but I respected them a lot, to give people reactions because they'll remember the reactions. But that's a pretty open-ended, that's a loaded gun, right? It's like, well, what type of reaction? How big of a reaction? How often do you do this? And so because you have experience working to control your emotions and develop a more executive presence, can you help share something real and tangible that people listening can learn from?

(Kevin at 00:13:40) Yeah. Boy, if I follow your question properly, I think it comes down to empathy, right? It's not all about you. And so whether it's, you know, somebody meeting you new for the first time and even in an interview, right? It's how do you build a connection with that person by listening to them, by understanding who they are? And we all naturally, right, when, you know, you ask me a question, I have to think for a minute. I think of my response. Maybe I'm already thinking about the next thing that I want to say, and I want to interject and I want to tell you.

(Kevin at 00:14:20) But to really stop yourself and, again, build a rapport, but understand the people on the other side. And that could be in any situation. It could be teams you're leading. It could be new people you're working with. I think that stands out the most to me about being a human.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:37) And it's tough. I have done 600 plus interviews, and the name of the game is being quiet and letting the other person speak.

(Kevin at 00:14:45) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:47) So how did you end up at Edward Jones?

(Kevin at 00:14:49) So I ended up at Edward Jones during the pandemic. So the CIO here, the chief information officer, is a person I worked for before at another firm. I had known him casually even, you know, before that. And, you know, he's somebody I respected. And I was, you know, in a state where my wife and I were going to be leaving one area of the country and moving to another.

(Kevin at 00:15:16) We had a baby on the way. It was our first child, and we wanted to be close to family. We wanted to be close to where she's from. And so we were putting all that in order. And, you know, I had reached out to him and was just catching up personally. And, you know, he used it as a great opportunity to say, "Hey. You know, we had talked before. You know, this is an amazing place with great people, and it's purpose-driven. And we're going through, we're kicking off a large, large digital transformation. Can you just meet with a few folks?"

(Kevin at 00:15:48) And I wasn't looking at the time. And, you know, I had three interviews, and I was like, "Wow." And then I had three more. And I was like, "Wow." And then I had three more. And I was like, "Wow." And it went on for almost five months because they were taking their time to make sure I was the right fit for Edward Jones. And I was going through the process because I wasn't looking and I wanted to make sure that Edward Jones was really going to be the right spot for me and where I could finish my career.

(Kevin at 00:16:38) And I don't want to say I was on the fence, but it was really the very last interview I had with our managing partner at the firm who's Penny Pennington, where it just sealed it for me. I mean, I was like, you know, a purpose-driven culture, a firm that has been amazingly successful for a hundred years. We just celebrated our centennial. And they're already talking about how and what they need to do to continue to be successful for another hundred years. And that's what sold it for me. And that's how I came here and it's, you know, career-wise, it's one of the best decisions I ever made coming into this organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:01) Who is the CIO?

(Kevin at 00:17:03) So the CIO is Frank LaQuinta.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:05) How did you meet Frank?

(Kevin at 00:17:07) So I knew Frank casually at the first big financial services firm I worked at, and then we got reintroduced back in, I think it was 2013 when I was still living on the West Coast, and he was at another large global firm as the CIO. And they were going to be going through a transformation at the time themselves. And we got connected, and it worked. And I ended up going there and working under his leadership and have always learned a ton from him. And even to this day here at Edward Jones, I still do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:46) So that initial engagement of you working under his leadership, that's how you built the trust for later in life when an opportunity comes up, he could pull you in.

(Kevin at 00:17:55) Yeah. And, again, I think it goes back to it's never about what you did. It's how you did it and how you treat other people and how the work gets done that stands out for anybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:07) I agree. I learned that lesson in my mid-twenties when I heard a motivational speaker person say that people don't remember what you say. They just remember how you said it. Right? And I thought about it, and they gave some working example of think about the last three conversations you've had, recite a sentence or two from any of them, and you really can't. It's very difficult. But then think about how you feel after talking with that person, and you can instantly remember how you feel about that person.

(Kevin at 00:18:36) Yeah. You know, I give that advice to other people when they're nervous of public speaking. I go, just remember, there could be a thousand people in the audience, but probably only four or five are even listening at any given second and even really deeply seeing if you mess something up. So never let it stress you out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:57) Have you done a lot of public speaking?

(Kevin at 00:18:59) I have. I have. It's something I'm, as much as I've done it, we all still get nervous. We all still get the jitters. I'm a big believer in prep. I've, you know, I presented here recently, did a fireside chat at our annual partners meeting, but I've done presentations to boards. I've done presentations to VCs. You know, I've done presentations to senior people when I was at an earlier part of my career that I don't even think I should have been allowed to talk to. And, but it goes back to that human element of what we do. You know, getting stuck in the bits and bytes is totally fine for certain people, and I totally respect that. But, you know, for people that want to move up, they want to be leaders in an organization, you know, even a role like working as an enterprise architect. Right? You have to be able to influence. You have to be able to talk to people and to understand and to have some cache, have some gravitas with an audience. So there's a place for both sides in what we do as an industry. But, you know, I think the people skills are important for anybody who wants to rise in the leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:16) I agree. Four days a week, I have a one-hour block, and it alternates. So two of the days are writing practice, and two of the days are speaking practice.

(Kevin at 00:20:26) Oh, that's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:27) That's helped a lot. I've been doing that for about four months now.

(Kevin at 00:20:30) Yeah. My written could always use a little bit more help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:33) Yes. Yeah. I fully agree. I definitely, Gary V is a marketing guy, one of the people that inspired me to do the podcast in the first place, and he had been very clear about find your medium that you prefer the most, and you can have other people translate the content. So I can have people make books or articles from the conversations that we have. Definitely talking to people is my preferred medium.

(Kevin at 00:21:01) Me too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:02) So what type of projects are you working on now that you're allowed to talk about?

(Kevin at 00:21:06) Yeah. So the first two years I was here, my main responsibility was software engineering for really what are the tools and systems that our branch teams, our financial advisors use, also what our clients use. So like, our mobile apps, our online platforms, but then our operational platform. So how we process trades, how we move money, our books and records, and even our core investment system. So, you know, really fun, really wonderful team of engineers of about a thousand people. And recently, just this year, I was given the opportunity to step into a different leadership role, running the firm's enterprise infrastructure and architecture. So, you know, now focused on areas from an architectural perspective, you know, what is what is the five-year roadmap look like? So, you know, where are we going to continue to invest? What makes sense to invest from a functional perspective? So something that needs an upgrade that's important to the firm, something that needs a nonfunctional upgrade, so maybe an elimination of tech debt. You know, where are we really going from a compute perspective, a digital experience from the end user perspective? You know, is that going to be virtual? Is that going to be mobile? But the, you know, what stands out to me, and just because I have a team here in Saint Louis doing some off-sites around it today is really our move to, you know, and I shouldn't say move because we've already moved there, but really continue to refine our strategy, but also our execution plan for infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. So, you know, a lot of times to me, I think people just simplify it and think it's just moving some applications into Azure or AWS. But for many of your listeners and folks that you've had on that you've interviewed, it's much deeper than that. Right? To change that whole application delivery mindset, that architectural mindset that even, even the shift within how disaster recovery needs to happen. So, you know, those pieces right now from an architecture and infrastructure perspective are really top of mind to me, but objectives and priorities for the firm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:33) And then are you, I've got some deeper questions, but I want to clarify some stuff first. Are you a direct report to your CIO?

(Kevin at 00:23:40) Yes. I am. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:42) How do you connect your five-year roadmap within your teams to what they want?

(Kevin at 00:23:48) So that's a really good question. I think the, when I'm talking about five-year roadmaps, I'm actually talking about at the enterprise level. So not just for our infrastructure team. So we shifted within the last couple of years in our new ways of working towards a product model. So functioning more like a commercial software firm, you know, durable teams where necessary, starting to think about a piece of software. But now even an infrastructure system as it's a living, breathing thing. So what's its life going to be? Who's the product owner of it? You know, what needs to go into it? What doesn't? So whether it's software, whether it's infrastructure, that shift into product management, I think naturally drives a lot of those roadmaps. The pieces that I'm talking about at a five-year level are really at, I'd say, a more strategic view around what, where, why those investments need to happen. And so if I think about an investment that some people could take for granted today, like, you know, moving off of, let's say, a physical piece of hardware with a local operating system and saying everything's going to be a non-persistent virtual connection up in the cloud to do your work in a secure manner. You know, that's a roadmap to get there. Right? But along the way of that roadmap, what things start to fall away? What things do we not have to support anymore? That investment you're making now, where does that investment start to pay off in the longer term? And then what other elements of technology that correlate to it do we think we're going to need to make that investment?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) And as you're going through this planning, you obviously have a ton of brilliant people around you. I get to see companies all the time. Right? And I started recently seeing a lot of research IT consulting-type companies. It looks from the outside, obviously a lot of the agencies' websites are fairly ambiguous. Right? But it looks like they're doing a lot of research. And I was curious, are you utilizing any third-party research or internal research when making these decisions, or are you just finding the brightest people within your team and saying, hey, what should we do?

(Kevin at 00:26:21) So we do use third-party sometimes in that element of research. I mean, there's obvious ones that everybody uses. If I want to see a ranking and rating of low-code, no-code platforms, you know, I can go out to Gartner. Right? And I can look up what their ranking is of those. We can lean on partners and firms around, you know, how have you done this? How have you done that? You know, ultimately, I just, I think it comes from surrounding yourself with really bright people that had diverse mindsets, come from different backgrounds. You know, the people that have been here thirty years, I love just as much as the people that have been here three months because they bring so much different perspective together. And I really feel most of it happens within an organization rather than outside.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:15) What's the thing that you're learning most this year?

(Kevin at 00:27:20) The thing I'm learning most this year is for myself and my teams. You have to be the CEO of your own destiny. And that destiny in the workplace is our development plans. It's how we get trained, how we continue to evolve, how we continue to learn. And then everybody, you know, just really embracing the purpose of this firm. And, you know, our purpose is about, you know, it's about positive impact. It's around serving our clients. It's around serving our communities all for the better. But that has to translate down to everything that we do. So whether I'm, you know, the person administering a virtual environment or the engineer that's working on UX components or the architect, you know, who's thinking how to solve problem X or Y or Z or, you know, I'm the person on the front line doing level one support for clients and advisors, you know, having that purpose of what the firm is really about and what we're doing is, you know, is it's got to be number one. And then that aspect that I talked about earlier with being the own CEO of your development, people have to take time to grow, to learn, to think. I mean, I love what you said around spending that time to think about your own verbal and written development. You know, I'm a big fan of, if people have to make the, what we do, you will get consumed. Right? You know, it can be eight-hour days, ten-hour days, and then you have something that breaks in the middle of the night, and then you have people on calls or on a weekend. But you've got to carve out downtime to think, to get organized.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:11) I fully agree. And to your point about communication, can I share a small story? Something I'm learning? Okay. So my background, you know, software engineering to entrepreneur. And so my early career was just working with engineers, and there was this common, I guess, trope, this idea that, you know, they're bad at speaking, communicating. They're really good. They can do good work, but the people who can communicate better get farther ahead, right, because they can communicate the value of their work and connect those things to the people above running the company. I thought that that was isolated because of maybe introversion. That principle wasn't being learned because of that. But what I have found now as our company has expanded here at the podcast, and we are working with clients and building them shows and doing all of that, we build about fifteen, twenty shows for other companies, and that's new for us in the past year and a half. So what we've learned there is the same thing, but it's with creatives, like all types of different creatives from very introverted people to very not introverted people. This principle, this understanding of you did the work, so you feel good about it, and you think the work should speak for itself versus your ability to actually communicate what was done and how that brought value. That's something all humans have to work on.

(Kevin at 00:30:31) Yeah. I love that. I love that, Joel. It's the outcomes. Right? And this is where, you know, I know these words get so overused in our industry now of technology, but like, it's what was really the experience. Right? You know, you could have built something that checked this box and it checked that box and it checked that box. But the person who's sitting, let's say, using that application or interacting with that piece of technology hates it. You have to think about that experience. You have to think about what was the intended outcome, but then listen to that feedback. Right? And that's why when I think about product management as a discipline within software, but also within infrastructure, it's really getting focused on ultimately that feedback loop along the way of the experience and what someone's interaction with it was.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:29) And as you're working with these people to help achieve this high-quality experience, I'm always working on patience. You have more professional experience than me. Does that get any easier, or is that just core to who I am?

(Kevin at 00:31:43) I don't think it gets any easier. I think certain people are, and I don't know if this is the right way to describe it. And there's not one as bad and one is good. But you're either type A and you're either chomping at the bit and biting on your nails, or you're type B and you can sit back and be a little bit more relaxed. I just think that's the way you're woven or I'm woven.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) Yeah. I get depressed at type B. I got, I'm definitely type A. I have a, over there behind my camera is a checklist of the projects that I'm hyper-focused on, and it's kind of funny. I was actually thinking about this this morning. I'm working with this copywriter, and I'm very specific, said, hey. I want you to come in and do these two very specific things. I've, here's the checkbox on my to-do list. It says I need someone who can come in and a couple hours a week improve the email sequences we use for sales email outreach. Just tinker with it, have fun, do whatever it is that you do. And then the second box I have checked is I need a KPI, some sort of maybe no more than three things to watch and then just report on that week over week. It's been like five or six days. You know, she came in. She talked with the team. She went through these exercises and all this stuff. And every morning I wake up, and from their perspective, they're all doing a bunch of good work. But from my perspective, there's been seven mornings I woke up and my checkboxes aren't checked. And I'm trying to play it cool and work on this a lot.

(Kevin at 00:33:11) Yeah. I love that. I'm the same way. I have to force myself not to be that way in the professional world because and it kind of leads into them being a micromanager. Right? So if, I love to be very organized. I'd love to use OneNote to keep track of everything I want to talk to different people about, what I want to accomplish during a week, what the overall objectives are for the next six months and be able to scan those and think about things. But there's a principle that we use here at Edward Jones around being leader-led. And, you know, leader-led to me is when you're talking with teams that you lead, it's really around seeing that development, is that person's own development and their needs, their aspirations are being talked about. And it's not just this very task-driven, you know, I'm going to command you to do X, and I want to know where Y is.

(Kevin at 00:34:20) It's around using more of a conversation when you're talking to people and keeping that focus on them as the person and their development. And I'd say along with that, it then starts to flow to empowerment, right? We're really big on seeing that decisions are closer to where the work is and empowering people. And with that empowerment, it builds trust, but also a level of accountability with those teams that are closer to the work. And I think in the last two years of my career, what I've learned here through other leaders at this firm and their approach has probably been more valuable than anything I've experienced in almost thirty years at other institutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:10) That initial new relationship from that point to trust to empowerment. Right? Do you have any insight or advice on dealing with those first, let's just say, couple months for lack of a better time frame, where you can't just bring someone on day one and fully and totally 100% trust them? The trust is built through the act of delivering. So how do you get through that initial stage from new relationship to trust?

(Kevin at 00:35:38) So I think new relationship, it just takes time. Right? It takes time of seeing that things get done, not jumping to a preconceived notion, not thinking—you know, many people that you interact with are gonna have different styles. Some people are cranking out 10 things a day, but you don't hear from them for two weeks. And so when you touch base with them, that's the time when the sort of light bulb goes off and you start to realize, oh, wow, they're just the person that doesn't need to constantly reflect or voice everything that they're getting done and they're doing. And then you have other folks that every time they get one task done or deliver one thing, they wanna tell you about it. They wanna, you know, maybe seek some praise around it, but just let you know and be informed. I think it comes through understanding people's style and approach and even going through what I went through the last couple of months of saying that, okay, you were leading a large software team that I love these people. I developed a great rapport with all of them, and here's a brand new team.

(Kevin at 00:36:44) And so, yeah, naturally, I'm going through that phase now. And it's not like they're new here. Some of them have been seasoned and been here a while. Some have only been here a couple of years. But it does just take time to get to understand everybody's style and approach, and you figure out where you need to lean in a little bit more with others or be that person that proactively checks in or proactively offers help. It's gonna vary based on the people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:11) Do you have a formal way to set an expectation? I'll give you an example. Some people, couple years ago, I heard about this concept of a manager README, right, where essentially when new members join the team, the manager says, this is what I'm expecting. This is how I operate. This is how I think. I find that I've—I've never put that—well, I put it together as an exercise. I've never used it consistently. I'm more so because my company is smaller and my—you know, fewer than 20 people, I just have strong relationships with each individual, and I understand that. Obviously, that's not scalable to 30,000 people, but right now it works. Do you have any sort of system that you use, or is it just being close to people and getting to know them?

(Kevin at 00:37:52) I think it's being close to people. It's creating space and time to touch base. It's creating space and time to have skip levels or double skip levels and meet different people across the organization. You can glean quite a lot of information. You know, you may think something's going swimmingly well, or you may have a perception that something's not going so well. And if you broaden out your touch points of who you're gonna talk to, casually check in with people, even sometimes just as simple as a Teams message, right? So an instant message to members of the group. Hey. Saw you in that presentation today. You really did a good—thank you so much for going through that with me. That was so helpful. They might be surprised initially to hear from someone much more senior to them. But then that opens the door. How are you? What's going on? Do you wanna have just a quick chat? If you ever need anything, reach out to me, please. I think you have to, as a leader with a large organization, you have to open yourself up to folks. And obviously, the pandemic and people working from home and the hybrid model has changed that. You're not just walking the halls because everybody's on the same floor and checking in with folks. But through digital tools, we can do it now. Right? I think you have to not just make yourself available, but you have to proactively seek folks to check in with and talk to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) That reminded me of a good question I had for you. A lot of the banks have been in the news lately. I didn't track which ones. I've just sort of seen it existing about really pushing for return to office work. And I know you guys are a bank. What's your thoughts on that?

(Kevin at 00:39:40) So we've—and I'll speak from our technology organization, our digital organization. As we accelerated our own digital strategy, digital transformation, you know, we had to go across the country to hire people. You know, historically—I wasn't here at the time, but, you know, majority of people were here in Saint Louis at the Edward Jones headquarters, whether they were employees or contractors. And now we've got folks all over the country. And so, you know, I think it's important from time to time to bring those folks in where you can. You know, nothing beats having a drink or eating pizza together or going bowling or doing a team meeting. But yeah. So we are—you know, we've got folks remote. We've got folks here in Saint Louis. We've got folks working hybrid. But also, you know, now we have people we're partnering with globally. Right. You know, people in Eastern Europe, engineers, developers in India. And they may be through a third party—they're not employees of Edward Jones, but they're third parties, and really reaching out and extending that same relationship to, from time to time, go to visit them in person, but using Zoom and including them in stand-ups and meetings and etcetera. So, you know, we are—the way I nail it is we're a hybrid shop. And so, you know, do I see people coming into the office more? Yeah. Absolutely. But for the folks that are spread around the country, they're not going to be able to do it unless there's a reason that we're flying them all in. But, you know, and this is my personal view on it, I've worked with a lot of really talented engineers in my career. I mean, really talented engineers that if you made their life miserable for five minutes, they could have five other firms waiting in the wings to pick them up. And this goes back to already the early 2000s when I was working at a global asset manager. You know, there are people that are really self-driven and they have to do some really complicated work and they do it best alone. But when stuff goes bump in the night and breaks, which it does, a trading system goes down, a money movement system goes offline and you gotta react and you gotta be quick. You know, those folks that are doing it and working from home or working remote, it eases a lot of their pain of what they have to do by having that flexibility.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:15) I'm watching the time. I wanna make sure we're respectful of that. Got a couple leadership questions, family type questions, if that's okay.

(Kevin at 00:42:22) Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:22) Okay. So if you were to copy and paste one professional experience to your whole team out of your life, what would that be?

(Kevin at 00:42:30) Copy and paste. Yeah. I share this with people a lot. Before I moved to California, that first large financial institution I was working for in New York—why am I not getting promoted? Why am I not getting promoted? I deserve to be promoted. So and so got promoted. Here I am. I'm reporting to somebody that's two levels above me. So, you know, patience. Like, cut and paste patience, and you need to take control of your own career and your own destiny. I didn't get this job because of X. I didn't get this promotion because of so and so. I didn't, you know, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. Well, you've gotta own your own career, and you've gotta take responsibility for yourself. And, you know, I would say that those were things at that stage in my life. I was still in my late twenties and early thirties at that time. And it took me a lot of other life lessons to learn patience with my own career, but then also to stop being my—I'd hate to say it—my own worst enemy and blaming other people or other situations rather than taking accountability for who I was and how I was acting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) No. I don't have much to add to that. Just yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, preach, Kevin. Right? Yeah. As far as family and fitness and faith and all of that, I'm assuming you have a family?

(Kevin at 00:43:57) I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:58) Yeah. So you're a very fit guy, well groomed individual. I think that that matters, honestly, because I think that people want to see themselves as better. They wanna follow people who are often better than them. At least that's in my experience. But I'm curious. How is your—just you can respond however you want to family, faith, fitness question. How has your family helped you get to where you are in your career? How has that played a role in it and your fitness and all of that good stuff? Very open ended question.

(Kevin at 00:44:26) I'll start with the fitness piece first. I love going to bed early. I often tell people that I go to bed when most toddlers go to bed. And I think sleep is really, really important. And, you know, just in society, right, we all suffer from not getting enough of it. I think fitness is a big key to that. I generally wake up between 4:30 and 5:00 every day. I like to ease in slowly, drink some water, drink some coffee, read a little bit of the news, maybe do a little work and then hit the gym. Days I don't work out in the morning, I feel it. Even when I travel, I'm at home. And so fitness is important for the mind. For me, it's really important. And it helps really allay a lot of stress that can come with this industry and this type of work. And then the family piece of it. So I'm a late dad in life. I have a little girl who's turning two on Friday. I'm 50 years old. And as scary as that was when I found out that my wife was pregnant, as excited, as nervous and scared I was, I look back now and I go, I love being a dad at this age because I'm also a different person at this age. And I'm not saying I wouldn't have been a good dad when I was in my twenties or thirties, but I have the ability to structure and set my priorities in a much different manner now in life. And so work's important. Family's important. Faith is important. But that little girl and my wife come before it all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:06) That's amazing. So she's two. I've got a—we just had a bunch of birthdays, but I have a five year old girl, a four year old boy, and a six month old boy.

(Kevin at 00:46:20) Oh, that's awesome. What a blessing. I saw the pictures online.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:24) Oh, nice. Where did you see them, on LinkedIn, Facebook?

(Kevin at 00:46:28) I think it was on your site. I think yeah. I thought they're—yeah. Yeah. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:34) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. So you're definitely—you're past the point of losing sleep, and you're into the walking around and talking now. You're starting to get to know her a little bit. That's the best part is when you start to see their personality start to emerge.

(Kevin at 00:46:47) Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, everybody says it, and it's so true. It goes so fast. And so, you know, staying present, staying off the phone when I'm with her. Just being present, being engaged.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:02) If people are interested in working with your organization or with you, is there a careers page on Edward Jones or tech career specific page, or is it just the one for the whole company?

(Kevin at 00:47:14) No. There's—I'm almost positive there's a section on our careers page that you can do the drop down, and it gives you the tech roles. I think you'd see in most of those roles, they're gonna say, you know, remote or, you know, we can hire from anywhere. You know, we've still got so much going on at the firm that there's still a lot of amazing opportunities here for amazing people that are willing to really embrace the purpose and be genuine and be part of just an amazing great team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:50) I love it. So you can head over to edwardjones.com, check out the careers page, do some work with Kevin. Man, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Kevin at 00:47:58) I feel good, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) 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.