A Masterclass in Communication as a Leader with Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs, about his most groundbreaking advice for mastering communication. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) Hey, it's good to see you again. It's been 300-something episodes since we've last talked. How are you?

(Mark Porter at 00:00:23) Yeah, you guys just keep going. I've looked through some of the episodes. They look pretty impressive. It's a pretty impressive train you're on. I'm doing really well. I'm at another company, which is awesome and changing the world just like MongoDB was before, and now dbt Labs is changing another layer of the stack, but with a lot of the same impact. So I'm really excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) So you moved from the database company to what's the new company?

(Mark Porter at 00:00:50) So I'm at dbt Labs now, which is an analytics transformation company. And our job in the world is to empower data practitioners to be more productive and to get more work done and to be of more value to their business through insights. And so the interesting thing is, at my prior career, I was always about making sure that those transactions were perfect. They executed in, you know, a couple milliseconds. And now the goal instead is a more human goal—to help people make sense of the vast amounts of data that they have that come from hundreds of relational or non-relational databases into their data warehouse or their data lake. And it's a fundamentally different problem, even though, you know, the words "data" are still there. SQL is still there, but it's literally helping people accomplish a whole different set of jobs to be done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:45) That's interesting. And then how do you sell it to be in line with what the customer's trying to do? For example, it'd be a hard sell to just say, "Hey, we got analytics. We're gonna plug it into all your data, and you're gonna find out some really interesting insights." How do you sell it to what they're trying to do?

(Mark Porter at 00:02:02) So it turns out that most companies—in fact, every company I know of—already does analytics. Now they may do them well, they may do them poorly, but every CEO, every chief revenue officer is using analytics in some way. What does our pipeline look like if they're selling any product? It doesn't just have to be tech. If they're the CEO, they want to know how is our support going? Are we satisfying customers? What's our NPS? If they're in engineering, they want to know how's my bug trend going? You know, are people reviewing code on time? Every single company uses analytics throughout the company. So, again, I said a couple minutes ago, in my prior life as an OLTP person, I was helping them write the analytics which customers used every day. Now it's actually more human because I'm helping people inside the enterprises do their actual jobs better, which is really awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:59) Whenever somebody does an acronym on the show, I ask them to explain the acronym. You said OLTP or something of that nature?

(Mark Porter at 00:03:06) Oh, I said online transaction processing. So the data stack is divided up into various layers. One is true real-time processing, like what you might see in a car that's driving. The next is online transactional processing, something that you would see when you go to a website and you check out and you put things into a basket. And there might be a thousand people checking out in the same minute. And that's an incredibly complicated problem. And if you're at a bank, you can't drop a penny ever. Analytics is a whole different problem where the amounts of data might be two, three, four orders of magnitude higher. I mean, petabytes are common in analytics, and gigabytes or terabytes are common in OLTP. So you have three, four, five, six orders of magnitude. And they're trying to answer different questions. They're trying to answer more human questions like, "How did that sales promotion go?" And so it's a different set of problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:05) Very cool. I want to talk with you a little bit about some leadership stuff. Alright? So I pull out to the audience as a whole, and I message them out through email and LinkedIn, and I ask them what they're working on and what they're thinking about. And one of the topics that's come up quite a bit is communication—becoming better at communication, wanting to learn more. They're pretty ambiguous messages. They don't typically say I'm struggling with this specific thing. They try to abstract it a little bit and be like, "Yeah, it's communication." You work with a lot of engineers and software people. What do you see them struggling with in relation to communication?

(Mark Porter at 00:04:45) 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. 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 you want me to go on?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:30) Keep—I'm making notes. You see me typing. I'm making notes. Yeah, so keep, get it all out. Let's get it all out.

(Mark Porter at 00:05:35) So you're not gonna 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, and it works great. 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. The 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. 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 gonna be taking it up the management chain. Before I do that, do you want to talk about it one more time?" 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. 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. 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 I probably, 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 00:09:21) No, you make a large amount of good points to the point where, Josh, we should probably just title this like "A Masterclass in Communication."

(Mark Porter at 00:09:31) No. Look.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:32) First of all, by the way, I love the way you describe cascading because that's a very specific tactic which everyone's already kind of experiencing, but you've turned it into words. And whenever I hear people articulate something very simply that I already know to be true, I prioritize that higher. So you think about this a lot. What's your habits like? Are you writing? How did you become a better communicator?

(Mark Porter at 00:09:58) I would say that I am still on a journey. In my verbal communications, I work very hard to speak with the point first and then figure out whether I need to back it up later. And there are many, many people who have articles on this. I could forward you one after, which is really, really good. A lady from Harvard Business School has a great video on this. But the very first thing you should do is, if you truly believe that the people you are talking to are both brilliant and well-intentioned—and for those of you who are new to Mark Porter, there's a website called marklovestech.com, and you can go look at my cultural tenets, and "brilliant and well-intentioned" is one of them, shameless plug there. If you are in an environment where you believe that people are brilliant and well-intentioned, then your role is actually to start with your point. "We need to change this because this is the outcome for the company. Now would any of you like to ask me questions about why I feel that way or what data I have to back it up?" But that's not how people lower in the org communicate. People lower in the org or people who are more junior in their careers—notice I didn't say age, I just said junior in their tenure and their skills—they will start by saying, "Did you see the bug count last week? Did you see that it hasn't gone up?" And everyone in the room is just sitting there going, "Get to your point." And so they might say something like, "Our bug count doubled last week," and someone sharp shoots them because they say, "No, it didn't. It went up by 1.9x, not 2x." Because they didn't start with the point. The point was "Our bug count is out of control." And whether it's 1.9x or 2x is irrelevant to that point. And so what I coach people to do is to start with the point and then pause and listen.

Now that's verbal communications. Written communications are different. In written communications, you write yourself a letter about why you're so smart. And then you read the letter, and you realize that you're actually a bit FOS. And I'll let you guess what S is, but it's "full of..." yeah. And stuff. Yeah. And you read your letter and you go, "Wow, I'm wrong. That statement isn't clearly backed up by data." And then you write the document again. And at Amazon, by the way—I love Amazon. Amazon is great in many ways. I also don't like Amazon because I think their culture has lost most of its humanity. And we can talk about that more if you'd like. But the reality of the situation is that when you're writing a document, it's mostly for you. It's mostly for you to get your thoughts together. Why do I say this? Why is it important? Why isn't it important? What is the data that backs it up? What's the data that doesn't? And then when you take it to someone else, they read it, and they get to read just the parts that mean the most to them. Like, maybe they care about the profit margins, so they really dig into that page. Or maybe they care about how it's gonna affect morale, and they dig into that page. Whereas slide decks or verbal presentations, I'm leading you down the garden path. I'm gonna talk about profit margin for five minutes, then I'm gonna talk about morale for five minutes, and you don't get to customize your learning to my teaching. Writing allows you to have customized teaching and customized learning, and that's what I think is so powerful about it. So at every company I've been at, even Oracle long before Amazon, we believed in a written culture in most conversations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:53) I read books like that. I look at the index and then I cherry pick, like, this book, Co-Intelligence. I don't know if you've gotten it yet. No. Ethan Mollick. He's one of the most brilliant people on AI. But I've been following him for maybe about a year now. I haven't had him on the show or anything, but I've just been following his work. But, yeah, I—that's just the most recent book I have right here. But what I do is I will open it up and I'll look at the index and I'll just pick the parts that I'm specifically interested in. However, I never thought about it as it's a customized learning path, which it is.

(Mark Porter at 00:14:30) Yeah. And it lets you—I don't know how many times you sat in front of PowerPoint presentations and the phrase "death by PowerPoint" comes to mind. So written documents don't have that characteristic. Also, to be clear, some points need more proof than other points, and unfortunately, all slides fit the same amount of text. And so there's a real mismatch there. So relating this back to why I'm so happy at the job I'm at right now, Tristan Handy, the CEO and founder of dbt Labs, realized that analytics people were not making great cases. They weren't making great reasoning. Now his initial insight was that none of the tools let them make great reasoning. So you'd have one data analyst with their SQL scripts and one data analyst with their SQL scripts. And not only were they using different SQL scripts to determine, "Did we have more customers this week than last week?" but they were actually using different data. And so by standardizing your inputs and standardizing your processes, it simplifies the obtaining of insights. And then if you have processes like the ADLC, which we do—it's like the software development life cycle, but for analytics, the analytics development life cycle—then it's reliable. Now I don't know if you've worked at any large companies, but at most large companies, the CEO dashboards are broken at least once a week in some way. Until you bring in solid analytics workflows, jobs to be done, software that does it. And so this is very similar to SDLC where, I mean, imagine if your website was down once every 10 days, and that just wouldn't fly. And so we're doing that for the ADLC. But it really relates to me to this concept of helping people have better insights and communicate those insights. And I think that's really valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:29) So to kind of wrap up on the communication topic. Right? We've got same message at different levels of the org, so that cascading. You've talked about messages and context. One question I have is I really like the writing it down because I do that personally. 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.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:22) So that's a good tactic. 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 00:17:48) 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. You won't send that Slack.

(Mark Porter at 00:18:26) 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. So here's what I do.

(Mark Porter at 00:18:52) 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 10 to 15 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'll say, 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? 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.

(Mark Porter at 00:19:37) 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.

(Mark Porter at 00:20:42) 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. 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 100% 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 00:21:13) No, that's brilliant. You know where I got comfortable with the role playing concept? From sales. So when I started hiring salespeople and training them, man, it was so—my background is 17 years as a software engineer, right? And so when I got into sales and I had to learn it myself and then start closing sales and then hiring salespeople, I realized it's something that's really common in the sales world. So I had to pick up that skill. And it was super uncomfortable at first, but now I can pick up my fake phone right here and ring ring. But I love the way that you've adapted that role play skill to actually handle difficult conversations and think through what the person's going to say. That's brilliant.

(Mark Porter at 00:21:53) Now can I give you a life hack?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:55) It's

(Mark Porter at 00:21:55) 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 00:22:33) She would be friends with my wife. Yeah, she would.

(Mark Porter at 00:22:36) 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 00:23:17) They'll never do what you tell them. They'll just copy you.

(Mark Porter at 00:23:20) Yeah. Or they'll do the opposite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:22) Or they'll do the opposite.

(Mark Porter at 00:23:23) Just 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 00:24:12) 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 weren't 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 00:25:03) What age did she tell you that advice as far as the kids' ages, and then where are they at now?

(Mark Porter at 00:25:10) The kids were six, five, three, three, three at that time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) Okay.

(Mark Porter at 00:25:16) And they are now 23, 21, 20, 20, 20.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:20) Okay. Wow. So you've got that advice when they were young. You implemented it, and now they're over 20.

(Mark Porter at 00:25:27) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:28) And it's good advice.

(Mark Porter at 00:25:29) It's great advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) It works. Okay.

(Mark Porter at 00:25:30) But the point 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.

(Mark Porter at 00:26:09) 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 00:26:35) 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.