TECH TITANS: Our Best Advice on Communication and Hiring Strategies with Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans with Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs, where we've put together some of our best advice on communication and hiring strategies. Thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. For a simple cloud and powerful AI that's built to scale, visit digitalocean.com or just click the link in the show notes. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) You work with a lot of engineers and software people. What do you see them struggling with in relation to communication?

(Mark Porter at 00:00:37) So I don't know how many hours we have. I may be different than your typical guest. I think about this problem deeply every week, at least. There are many problems with communication. One is knowing who your audience is.

(Mark Porter at 00:00:54) If you take the vision of a billion-dollar company and you tell it to a software engineer who's two years out of school, they can't connect what that vision means with what they do every day. So the very first thing to do is to always know your audience, and that means that the exact same message may be different at every level of the org, and yet it's the exact same message. So that's piece number one. Do you want to ask me questions, or do you want me to go on?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Keep—I'm making notes. You see me typing. I'm making notes. Okay, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) So keep, get it all out. Let's get it all out.

(Mark Porter at 00:01:28) So you're not going to get it all out. The next thing is cascading. So many companies, when there are 50 people, you know, an executive sends out a note to the whole company, and that's great. It works. But when there are 500 people or a thousand people, I mean, no one wants to get five messages a week from some C-level executive who they actually don't have a personal relationship with. And so cascading is a skill, and I actually have an article about this I could share with you after the podcast.

(Mark Porter at 00:01:56) An article on it is your job when you as an executive have a piece of information or when you as someone lower in the organization have a piece of information—do I cascade it up or down? If I do cascade it up or down, how do I put it into the context of my listener? And so what I do as an executive is I make it the responsibility of every one of my leaders to not only understand what we talk about, but to make sure that their teams understand what they talk about and to carry that responsibility fractally, i.e., repeated down through the org. So cascading is very important. The opposite of cascading is a kind of communication which is fundamentally dysfunctional at the vast majority of companies, and that is escalation.

(Mark Porter at 00:02:47) Now, Joel, if you and I disagreed about something at a company, we should try and work it out. And when we go to our bosses and complain about just how wrong the other person is, the very first thing that boss should say is, have you talked to the other person? Have you tried to work it out? Okay? And then the next thing that should happen before I go up the chain and say, hey, you know, boss of my boss, can you get Joel disciplined because Joel's clearly wrong, is I will come back to you and I will say, hey, Joel. I know that you're well-intentioned. I believe that you're well-intentioned, and yet the two of us cannot decide on the priority of this task or whether this person is doing their job or whatever the issue is. So I wanted to let you know that I need help, and I'm going to be taking it up the management chain. Before I do that, do you want to talk about it one more time?

(Mark Porter at 00:03:44) In other words, the worst thing that can happen at a company is surprises. Surprises create a feeling of fear, a feeling of mistrust, and that destroys a company. So to sum up, it is important that every message is in context for the people who hear it. It is important that messages are cascaded with context down through the org, and it is important that a company focus on really, really intentional escalation. Escalation is a high-stakes thing for people who are lower in the power dynamic.

(Mark Porter at 00:04:20) And I don't really care how much granola you eat or how organic your company is, there is a power dynamic because your boss controls whether you can pay your rent, whether you can send your kids to school. The reality is your boss has an outsized influence on that. So there is a power dynamic. And people who pretend that that doesn't exist, I just think you're naive.

(Mark Porter at 00:04:45) So escalation requires not only telling people how to do it, but setting an example of doing it to create the psychological safety so that people go, oh, I'm escalating because I want this company to be a better place. I'm not escalating because Joel's a jerk. And so that's really—I mean, I know that was a longer answer than you wanted, but those are the things that come to my mind when I think about communication.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:13) One question I have is when I get frustrated rather than writing a frustrated email, I open up Evernote and I say what I want to say and then I decide later if that's a good thing to say. And then I almost always don't send it or modify it to a degree where it's palatable and kind. So the act of writing out your thoughts has helped me become a better communicator. Everything from when I want to approach my wife about something to when I'm in a business transaction, I just write it out a lot and get it to a point where I think I can step outside of it, read it, and then analyze it. So that's a good tactic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:50) How do you build confidence and communication skills? So let's say I am that developer that's going to yell about the bugs doubling or bring this to everybody's attention and make that main point. But let's say I'm shy or I'm nervous. How can I go about developing confidence in order to have that first at-bat at becoming a better communicator?

(Mark Porter at 00:06:15) So before we go there, I want to comment on what you said about writing something and setting it down for a while. If we could teach people to do that, I've learned to do that very painfully through many years of hitting send and feeling incredibly powerful hitting send, and then two hours later, feeling like an idiot. And so I love that skill, and I just want all your listeners to hear if you can just set it down for an hour or two hours—you can still send it today. Like you said, the vast majority of the time, you won't send that email.

(Mark Porter at 00:06:51) You won't send that Slack. You will send either nothing or something different. So that's a key piece of wisdom. But to your point, I made a comment earlier about we're all on journeys. And many of us have been brought up through either our work life or our personal life where functional communication, functional verbal communication is not present on a reliable way.

(Mark Porter at 00:07:17) So here's what I do. And this is a little bit nonstandard, and it puts some people off, which is I role-play. So in every org I've been in for the last ten to fifteen years, if someone is either having a hard performance conversation with someone or, God forbid, letting them go, I will ask that manager to call me up. And from the first moment of that conversation, I will say, I will be the other person. And I'll say, hey, what do you want to talk about today? And they'll be like, what do you mean, Mark? And I'll say, oh, I'm Sam. And they—well, no, no, Mark. I want to talk to you about my conversation with Sam. And I'm like, no, I'm Sam. Let's have the conversation. What is it you want to talk about today?

(Mark Porter at 00:07:57) And I don't let them get out of the role-play. And I say, we are going to role-play this until we hang up this call. Now there's one out. You can switch roles. Like, let's say I role-playing Sam say something Sam would never say. The other person can say, I'm Sam now. This is what Sam would say. And by role-playing, it moves something from the theoretical at the back of your head to the frontal lobe present, into the emotional present. So if you have had to have a hard conversation with somebody and you've had to have it where your boss won't let you off the conversation until you've done it well, then the actual conversation with that human is so much easier. And by the way, in many of these role-plays, people will say to me, wow. That thing I was going to say, I'm not going to say that anymore because it sounded different out of my mouth than it did spinning around in my head. And so I do this with people probably at least once every two weeks, not for letting people go all the time, but for other people who are having trouble communicating. And I found that it builds their confidence because at the end of the day, it is a safe space. Right? It's not having the hard conversation with the person you need to have, whatever that hard conversation is.

(Mark Porter at 00:09:20) I coach people on how to have hard conversations with their bosses about compensation or promos. I will sit there and I will role-play with them. And pretty much a hundred percent of the time, they get off that call going, wow, this is useful. I'm going to have a different conversation than the one I was going to have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:39) Real quick, before we continue, I wanted to give a special shout out to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. DigitalOcean is cloud infrastructure that's simple to spin up, complete with integrated AI dev tools, plus 99.99% uptime SLAs and industry-leading pricing on bandwidth. We all know DigitalOcean. It's super reliable. It's been around forever. And now with DigitalOcean's Gradient platform, developers can train, fine-tune, deploy, and scale AI workloads all in one place. DigitalOcean is reliable and affordable at any budget. Companies can save up to 30% on their cloud bill when they come to DigitalOcean. Use code DO25 and get $200 in free credits to get started. Simple cloud, powerful AI, built to scale. That's DigitalOcean.

(Intro Narrator at 00:10:28) Now back to the episode.

(Mark Porter at 00:10:30) Now can I give you a life hack? It's not a work hack. It's a life hack. My wife and I update each other every day on our days, and so we're relatively in touch with what's going on with each other's lives. And she's my soulmate, and I'm hers, and it's a wonderful relationship. But that is something you build. That is not something that lands. And so I will role-play all of my hard conversations with Bonnie, my wife. And she will sit there and say, oh, so I'm your boss today? And I'm like, yeah. And sometimes when I get off a call, I'll go sit down at the dining table. And, you know, because of remote work, she can often overhear parts of the call. And she'll say, hey, why don't we role-play how you could have sucked less at that conversation?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) She would be friends with my wife. Yeah, she would.

(Mark Porter at 00:11:13) And I'm like, okay. And she just jumps into it, and she's like, I'm the other person. Let's go. And I'm like, oh my god. And it's so hard, but it teaches us to be authentic with other people. I think that's really key. And just another life hack, I don't know if you or your listeners, you know, each of you has a different life. You have partners. You have children. Bonnie and I pretty much role-play every hard conversation with our children for a while together. And it comes off much better that we are their partners. We are their friends. We are here to support them. They have their own life journeys they're on. We're not here to tell them what to do because that never works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:55) So they never do what you tell them. They'll just copy you.

(Mark Porter at 00:11:58) Yeah, or they'll do the opposite or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:59) They'll do the opposite.

(Mark Porter at 00:12:01) The perfect thing. So the reason that's a life hack is because there are so many things between executive leadership and parenting that are similar. And I often find that you need to focus on those. So another thing is my wife came to me once, and she said, you're messing up your relationship with our kids. And I said, wow, that's really nice. Thanks for saying such a nice thing. And she says, you're treating them all the same. You're trying to be the perfect father to everyone. Every one of them needs a different dad, a different Mark. Learn to be who each of them needs rather than who you want to be to each of them. Like, wow, okay. Thanks for screwing up my life.

(Mark Porter at 00:12:49) A couple years later, it really made a difference. And I'm sitting in my staff meeting. And in my staff meeting, I have four principal or senior principal engineers and five leaders. It's about a 500-person team at the time. And I look around the room, and I'm like, oh my god. My engagement scores aren't that good. My engagement scores of me personally, like, you know, they run these engagement surveys, and there's the engagement score of your group and the engagement score with customers, and then there's the engagement score of your directs with you. My scores weren't that good. They were terrible, but they weren't that good. And I looked around the room, and I said, oh my god. Every single one of you needs a different Mark, a different boss. And over the next year, I embarked on that, and my engagement scores went up almost 20% that year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:40) What age did she tell you that advice as far as the kids' ages, and then where are they at now?

(Mark Porter at 00:13:47) The kids were six, five, three, three, three at that time. Okay. And they are now twenty-three, twenty-one, twenty, twenty, twenty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:57) Okay. Wow. So you got that advice when they were under 10. You implemented it, and now they're over 20. Yeah. And it's good advice.

(Mark Porter at 00:14:06) It's great advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:07) It works. Okay.

(Mark Porter at 00:14:08) But to roll this back to the CTO podcast, which is part of communication is being who the other person needs you to be. Now you're still there to get your job done. There's no doubt about it. But you have to be who the other person needs you to be because the imperfect process from nine neurons through my vocal center, through your ears, to your vocals, to your language center, to your neurons, and back is an eight-step deeply imperfect process. And we need to do everything we can do to improve that process. And it doesn't matter whether we're talking about selling shoes or building software or making our sales number. If people don't feel heard, they won't work hard. They won't be engaged. Everyone has to be heard, and the only way you can be heard is to meet them where they are in their communication skills, in their career, in their maturity. You have to meet them where they are. That's how to be an effective executive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:13) What are your tips or thoughts on attracting top talent?

(Mark Porter at 00:15:18) Oh, man. Be pickier than you even think. I have a phrase, it never gets better than the interview. And, by the way, that's both ways. The employer is often on best behavior during interviews, and the employee is on best behavior. So if you have a problem during the interview, you need to dig in pretty deeply. So that's thing one. And yet we all want to talk ourselves into, oh, that thing they said in the interview trashing their current employer—yeah, we can train them out of that. You know? Because you want to hire the person. Right? The reality is you've got to be pretty careful. So the first thing is you've got to be incredibly picky.

(Mark Porter at 00:15:57) The next thing is, and I'm actually going through this right now, you have to define the role with all the stakeholders. You have to meet with them after every candidate. You have to say, not just are we going to hire this candidate or not, but what parts of this candidate resonated with you, will be successful at our company, or what we need or not. So that's part of it. And so every candidate is like this ongoing journey where by the time you hire somebody, you're all so attuned that you're just like one team, and that makes their onboarding better.

(Mark Porter at 00:16:33) So that's thing one. Thing two is spread your net far and wide through your network. It's depressing these days that when I post a job, I will typically get between one and three thousand applicants for the job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:49) Wow. Really?

(Mark Porter at 00:16:50) And a senior job. And yeah, sorting through that is hard. We use tools to sort through it, et cetera. But the other thing is, you know, a lot of it's about networking.

(Mark Porter at 00:17:02) So what I tell people is, sure, apply to all the jobs. But the reality is find the jobs that you think you are a perfect fit for and try to create relationships with that company because that's how you get hired these days. And so when I see someone make the effort to get to know me, when I see someone make the effort to get to know someone who reports to me, I mean, that's someone who's all in, and it raises them above the crowd, frankly. I also do backchannels. So on top talent, on exec talent, you have to do backchannels because—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) Backchannel.

(Mark Porter at 00:17:43) A backchannel means talking to other people in this person's network. And I do it very controversially. I will ask the person when they give references, I would please like one to two people who are going to say not great things about you.

(Mark Porter at 00:18:00) Look, we've all had places we failed or we've worked for people who think we failed or something. I'm gonna be listening to this person for, did you behave with integrity? Were you mature? Did you, you know, were you a good human in this process?

(Mark Porter at 00:18:19) I don't care if you got fired for being incompetent at coding twenty years later. How much could that matter? But were you a good human sticks with you. And so I do that. And then we do a process at the end of our interview process, which is pretty intense.

(Mark Porter at 00:18:37) I will fly to see the person, and I will spend four to six hours plus dinner with the person. And I'm telling you, by the end of four to six hours plus a three-hour dinner, you know whether you want to base your success in your career and whether they will know whether they wanna base their success in their career on each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) Mhmm.

(Mark Porter at 00:19:00) Hiring is deeply imperfect, and all we can do is make it as least imperfect as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:09) I like that.

(Mark Porter at 00:19:10) So what I tell people is, look, I can't tell you if you're gonna succeed at this job because hiring is deeply imperfect. But I can tell you this. I and my team are gonna tell you so much about the company, and we're gonna be so candid about the problems we face. And we're gonna tell you what's great at the company, what's crappy at the company.

(Mark Porter at 00:19:32) And then you're gonna have to decide whether you're gonna succeed at this company because—and this is something which is something everyone who knows me on this podcast will know—if you are not remarkable, you will not stay working for me. That's it. That's it. And I will exit you with respect.

(Mark Porter at 00:19:54) I will give you every chance to fix yourself. But the reality is I would rather you go be remarkable somewhere else than mediocre with me. And so I will help you. I will do everything I can. I will exit you with respect in every way.

(Mark Porter at 00:20:08) But at the end of the day, the bar is to be remarkable. And I tell people that at the very front of the interview process, and about a quarter of the candidates exit the interview process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:20) Woah. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, so they've got some self-awareness then?

(Mark Porter at 00:20:25) Yeah. Which is a plus, but they say, "So, Mark, you're not looking for someone to come to this job and for it to be a challenge, for them to just be right at the tippy tip top with the water right up to their nose?" I say, "No. I'm looking for someone who the water's up to their waist, the water's up to maybe their chest, the water's up to their knees. If you think this is a job where the water's could be up to your nose, this is a bad idea."

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:52) Interesting. Yeah. It's because that reflects on their experience, whether or not they know how to achieve the outcome. Nice.

(Mark Porter at 00:20:58) Well, and the other problem is is that as execs, remember, I'm hiring mostly execs in my role or senior people. Short stints on your LinkedIn profile are deeply damaging to execs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:11) We filter out. Like, we don't hire people that job hop year after year after year. I look for people that stay three to five years at a place.

(Mark Porter at 00:21:18) Exactly. You know, there are many reasons why someone might be at a job 1.5, and that's fine. And you ask them about it. But if someone has three jobs in a row that are between one to two years—so my experience is that hiring has to be priority zero. And for those of you on my current staff right now, I'm really sorry to bring this up on this podcast.

(Mark Porter at 00:21:42) But that means that you must move quickly. The best people are gone. And so if you move slowly, you are Darwinianly—I don't know if that's a word.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) We'll give it to you.

(Mark Porter at 00:21:57) Yeah. I just verbified Darwin. You are Darwinianly selecting for mediocre candidates in the vein. Now that's not always true. Someone may be just happy at a company and you have to wedge them out of there with a crowbar.

(Mark Porter at 00:22:11) But in general, you have to move fast. And so that's one thing that tells the executive or the high-performing person, "Wow. I like moving fast, and this company moves fast." And so here's the rule. When I'm interviewing someone and someone is in the pipe, I communicate with them every working day.

(Mark Porter at 00:22:33) A Slack, a LinkedIn, a something that says, "Hey. Just wanted to let you know I was thinking about you. I read this blog post you wrote. Oh my god. That's great. How are things going for you?" Every day. Because what I want them to understand is what would it be like working with me? Would I be a jerk who's just trying to get things out of them, treating them like a machine? Or would I be someone who genuinely cares, like I do, about them and their worth and their ideas?

(Mark Porter at 00:22:58) And so by the time we get to the end of an interview loop, I have a very—this may come across as snarky—I want everyone I interview to want to work for me so that then I get to choose whether I want them to work for me or not. And that has to be genuine, obviously. I'm not trying to be faking and inauthentic, but I put so much effort in that the vast majority of candidates who we put through our loops want to work for us, and then we get to choose whether or not they're the right candidate for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:31) Well, your strategy is good because it forces you to hold the line tight, like, to constantly be making yourself better and to push yourself and to be growing and to be learning. Because if that's your strategy and that's your outcome that you're looking for, to achieve that, you have to work really hard at becoming a better person.

(Mark Porter at 00:23:54) Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely true. I mean, look, like I said, we're all on journeys. I am deeply imperfect. My communication is not clear. I can become agitated when I'm defensive. I, you know, we all have things we're working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:08) Mark, thank you so much for doing this episode. I really, really appreciate it.

(Mark Porter at 00:24:12) Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I appreciate the time. And to your audience, I hope this has been useful, and I hope they've learned something. And please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have anything you'd like to say, and I love having conversations with people. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:27) 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.