Leading Beyond Code: Unpacking Tech Leadership Trials with Noah Cantor, Tech Leadership Coach & Advisor

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to tech leadership coach Noah Cantor about how he evolved from a tech-focused individual contributor to an empathy-driven leader. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) I wanted to start by just briefly summarizing the email you sent me because you had listened to an episode with Nathan, who was CTO at Synergy Cinemas and Entertainment, so a movie theater company. And when we asked him the question, you're like, can you see this coming? Can you see the automation of movie theaters happening? Yep. Like, why not build this technology that's going to destroy you? He gave a super, super honest answer, and that caught your attention. Why did that catch your attention, him giving such an honest answer?

(Noah Cantor at 00:00:47) I spend a lot of time working with people, and there's quite a lot of don't bite the hand that feeds you at every level of every organization, whether it's public-facing or whether it's kind of internal to the organization. There's very much the things we don't say, and everyone acknowledges that we don't say them, so we don't ask questions about them. And so it's just kind of this accepted non-questioning of the status quo. And so when you asked him—he runs a movie cinema, like a chain of cinemas in a theater, and you can see and talk about what's going on with streaming and how there are challenges to the cinema and that experience—and you just straight up asked him, well, there's this opportunity you've got, right, about cinema boxes, and it would definitely eat your own lunch to do it. But why don't you do it? Because if you don't, someone else is going to. And I thought it was a really insightful question because it ignored some of those norms about don't ask the things that are uncomfortable to ask. And what I really loved was his willingness to just answer it and say, actually, it's a really good question, and we don't because we're not big enough. We'll get in trouble if we do it. And then we would go out of business before we could ever do the thing that actually, you know, was the next step in evolution. Maybe one of the bigger players can. And it's just his honesty, I thought, was really refreshing. And he must have felt really comfortable here to be able to answer the question that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) Oh, yeah. He's a great guy. That was a personal favorite episode of mine, and I got a lot of feedback after that show. Hey, so you're a leadership coach. So you get to see a lot of different leaders in a lot of different industries across the board, correct?

(Noah Cantor at 00:02:33) Yep. Mostly focused on technology leadership, but talk to people who do work in a lot of different industries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) And what type of problems are they facing as technical leaders?

(Noah Cantor at 00:02:43) Probably the biggest one is that—and this is actually shared across industries and leadership types—is that most leaders don't receive any sort of training about how to be a good leader. And so they step into these roles from being a fantastic individual contributor focused on a small detail, a small picture. And then they get promoted and they're asked to do something that's completely different. It's a completely different skill set. It's a completely different approach. And it's a completely different set of needs. So they're going from looking after some technology to creating an environment where people can be successful. And if they don't get the support to do that, then how are they supposed to learn? And then some of them are lucky, or unlucky, depending on your perspective. And they get promoted again. And then they're supposed to look after people who look after environments. And then they sometimes get promoted again, become CTOs or executives. And then they're supposed to understand how the business works and what drives it and what it needs. And then connect that to all of the other stuff that they're supposed to learn. But at every step along the way, they get further and further removed from the stuff they were really good at and often just don't get any support in growing into that role that they're supposed to be doing now. And so success is often, for some of them, random. But because there's no predictor that what they're going to be stepping into is relevant to what they were doing, and so there's no way to know if their new role is going to match a hidden set of skills that they've never shown before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:23) And so you coach people through this. How do people pay for it? Do they pay for it themselves personally or do their companies? And the reason why I asked that is I was having a conversation the other day with somebody who was mentioning that, you know, some sales objections were that they were too shy to go to their employer to let their employer know that they needed help, and instead they were just paying for it personally. So that made me think, oh, on this interview today, I'm going to ask. For your clients, what are you seeing? Is it mostly the companies paying for it or a personal individual?

(Noah Cantor at 00:04:52) So it's been about a mix, about 50-50. So for people where it's important enough, they will absolutely pay for it themselves. But the simple fact is a lot of people think about this as, this is something my company should be helping me do. And so if they have a personal development budget or they have a training budget that's available to the IT department or the technology area or, you know, they've got a good relationship with the CEO, they can sometimes just ask and say, right, I would like to use some money to help me be better at my job. And kind of by the time a lot of people get to CTO, they're more comfortable expressing those sorts of feelings. But a lot of people earlier in their career and lower down don't want to say anything. And so if they don't have a personal budget, like a development budget available to them, they'll end up paying for it themselves. And it's well worth it to them. But I think in a lot of ways, it's unfair to them as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:48) Are you taking new customers right now?

(Noah Cantor at 00:05:51) I am. I've got a few slots at the moment. They tend to work with me for about three or four months at a time. So it's kind of rolling over the course of the year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:01) Can we work out some deal where, like, some of the listeners from the show can get a free call with you, just like an intro call?

(Noah Cantor at 00:06:08) What I'd like to offer is a one-hour consultation with me so they can start their journey with me. And if during that call we find out that we're a good fit for each other, then I'll invite them to join me on my coaching program. But I only have a few spaces at the moment, so I encourage anyone who's interested to move quickly. But also, if during our call we find that we aren't a good fit for each other, I will do my absolute best to give them resources that can help, whether that's referring them to somebody else or pointing them in the direction of things they can find online that will help them. It's really important to me that people be able to make this progress. And if I'm not the right person for it, I don't want that to stop them. And so listeners can book a call by going to my website, noahcantor.com, and following the book a call link. So please, if you're interested, if this has really resonated with you, book a call and help me help you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:05) Yeah. Well, that's the purpose of our entire show, right? And I've got a million more questions for you, by the way. I just wanted to throw that in there. I was like, hey, the whole purpose of Modern CTO from their founding through 750 episodes is to help that next generation of technology leaders. There were times throughout this show and throughout these past seven years that we had leadership training, that we did some of these things. We don't currently have anything today that we're doing. So if I speak to a leadership trainer and I'm like, hey, this is something that you do. This is what you help people with. Like, let's open that door so that anyone who's listening right now that has questions can reach out to you. But I want to get—I want to move forward, and I want to talk about demotivated staff. So in your email to me after listening to Nathan's episode and sharing with me a couple of things, you mentioned that—you self-described—the first thing you said, I help tech leaders who are facing demotivated staff, teams. I'll go through the list, but the first one was demotivated staff. What are you seeing there?

(Noah Cantor at 00:08:09) So it's really interesting, and I think I can possibly tell that bit best relative to my own experience. And so when I became a tech leader, there were lots of things I didn't know. And I had no way of knowing what success was going to be like or what kind of leader I wanted to be. And what happened was I did a lot of homework. I did a lot of research. I went online, I found lots of resources, and they all talked about what should I be doing and what actions should I take, what habits should I be developing. But none of them talked about why I should be doing those things. And so I would get management advice from someone who believed in strong command and control and strong hierarchy. And I'd see, oh, that habit looks interesting. Let me take that. And I'd get different advice from someone else who was very open and democratic in their leadership. And I'd say, oh, that looks like an interesting thing. Let me do that. But none of them explained why they were suggesting those things. And so what I ended up with is this kind of pick and mix of different habits from different schools of thought, which when applied by a single person, makes the team feel like you're really inconsistent and unpredictable. And so one of the big struggles that the team had, that I was working with, is what Noah are we going to talk to today if we ask him a question? What's he going to tell us? Is he going to help us with advice? Is he going to coach us by asking questions? Is he going to just tell us to get on with it and find the answers somewhere else? And so my approach, despite doing my best, which I think everyone is doing, really threw them. And when you're dealing with knowledge work, which isn't just, you know, maintain the outputs and, you know, just go through these motions, but it's really considered, it's really thoughtful and it takes up a lot of energy and a lot of mental time. Like those things throw you. And so my behavior contributed significantly to the team's ability, or in my case, the team's inability to perform well. I almost lost an employee because I was so inconsistent that I ended up managing him into a corner through these different interactions that didn't make any sense to him. And one of the favors, I didn't see it this way at the time, but one of the favors my company did was took him and had him report to somebody else where he thrived. And so this mix of styles and approaches that comes from having to forge your own way can make it really difficult for the team to do well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:58) Yeah. And that's a hard thing too, because when you first start searching for answers, as you said, there's lots of different books and there's lots of different styles. And that was one of the reasons why I was interested in continuing the show when we started is I got to interview all these different leaders. And I'd say around maybe 200 or 300 interviews in, I started to realize that the common thread between success is not necessarily which specific tactic or skill or system. It's the fact that they all find one and they stick with that one thing. And they figure out how to get that one piece of advice continuously working in all these different cases, right? Because I'd interview Kyle. He was, you know, VP of Engineering and then CTO, and now he's like the CEO of Verizon. You know, I was like, what's going on? Like, how do you do this? And then he's like, all right, you've got these like three things I do. And then I interview like the CTO of Microsoft. Like, what do you do? He's like, here's the two things I do. And what I realized is they all have these things that they focus on consistently over a long period of time. They don't go jumping around to all these different great leaders' skills and tactics and styles. And so I think that was a lesson I saw on the notes that took you years to learn, and you don't want other people repeating those mistakes.

(Noah Cantor at 00:12:08) No. Absolutely. It was one of the discoveries that I had was that when I was 16, I knew that I really liked helping people and it was really important to me. But, you know, you're a teenager and your mind changes. And by the time I was 18, I thought I didn't like people very much and I didn't want anything to do with them. And that was part of what took me into back-end systems. And I spent the next 10 years of my life avoiding people until I was about 30, and I realized that people are where all the interesting problems were. And then started my management journey, right? And made those mistakes that I've just talked about, but and lots of others. But during the course of the conversations that I had with people, I had two really interesting experiences. One of them pointed me at the book Drive by Dan Pink. I don't know if you're familiar with it. A lot of your listeners, I'm certain, will have heard about it, which talked about human motivation and psychology. And that was new to me and really fascinating. And another conversation talked about the effective environments and systems and constraints on people. And that was the book The Goal. And they both really resonated with me. And so after reading them, I went out and I read everything I could find on both subjects and continued reading and probably read a couple hundred books. And during the course of that reading, the things that mattered to me became clear. And they hadn't been before. And looking back, the really entertaining thing is that what I discovered was that being open and being clear and looking after people and caring about people was something that really, really mattered. And I knew that at 16. And then I forgot it for most of my adult life and had to relearn it the hard way. And so that's one of those really fascinating things where I can look back and see the path that you went on. But when you're traveling it, it's really hard to see. And so if I had managers who had tried to help me along the way, they would offer me advice, offer suggestions about things to do and behaviors to try, but none of them were able to help me understand what really mattered to me. And so I had to go through that journey myself, and it did take 10 years of struggling and discovery only to learn the thing that I knew when I was 16 years old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:40) Which is that helping people is what really mattered to you?

(Noah Cantor at 00:14:43) Not just helping people, but being open with them, right? And so there are various ways to manage as we've discussed, and there are, you know, command and control and hierarchy. And that was the school I was originally indoctrinated into as a manager. And so those were the things that I knew. But it turns out that thinking doesn't work for me. What works for me is sharing information with people and being transparent as much as possible and being collaborative and being, in many ways, a conduit for information. But I had no professional experience that would teach me that. That came entirely through this journey of self-discovery.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:26) I'm almost entirely certain that you can't arrive to that without a significant amount of pain. It takes a lot of heartache to get there.

(Noah Cantor at 00:15:35) I think there's some truth in that, but also, I don't think everyone has to go on a 10-year journey to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) Correct. I get it.

(Noah Cantor at 00:15:42) Yeah. I think you can get help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:45) You can get a crash course, but you're going to put in some—there is this moment of time when the pain or the annoyance or the effort of reaching out and getting help is more attractive than experiencing the pain. And everybody goes through that. I'm assuming a lot of people when they come to you, they feel overwhelmed and frustrated, and it's like the sky is falling. Is that correct or no?

(Noah Kantor at 00:16:07) Yeah. There's quite a lot of stress in the lives of people who show up. They're often, exactly as you say, overwhelmed and frustrated. And often, one of the questions they want to know is, is this the right job for me? I'm doing this, and sometimes they don't feel like they're good at it. Sometimes they just feel like they're being overwhelmed by it. And they really want to know, is it the right role for them? And it's that willingness to be introspective, to self-reflect, and actually think about the work that they're doing from an internal perspective that really makes a massive difference in whether or not I can actually be helpful. Because for people who think they're already killing it, they don't need me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:53) Yeah. Well, they might need you. They might just not know it. Sometimes people think they're killing it, and there's just like wildfires emerging around them, and they don't even realize what they're doing. Those are the toughest ones among us.

(Noah Kantor at 00:17:07) Yep. Yep. But they're not in a position where I can be helpful, I guess, might be—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:12) Right. Yeah.

(Noah Kantor at 00:17:12) Might be a good clarification.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:15) Yeah. You have to get them to where they want the help. Right? Teams that struggle to deliver. What different flavors of this do you see?

(Noah Kantor at 00:17:25) So I see it a lot in two different forms, kind of based on, often based on organization size, but more likely correlated with organizational age, where there are things that they're trying to achieve and they're being pushed to get them done and they're really struggling to do it. And they've got a lot of the common problems. They've got bugs. They've got an inability to understand what customers need. They've got an inability to finish things in a reasonable amount of time. They've got all of the kind of common struggles that we talk about and we hear about on a regular basis. And that set often comes with the age of the systems that they're working with. And the reason that that comes up and the reason that that becomes so problematic is that people in technology—CTOs and tech executives, VPs of engineering, IT managers—they tend to be the only ones in the organization who really know how bad the debt is. But they're often, because of this lack of training and support they've had, they're often incapable of articulating it in a way that the rest of the business then can understand and buy into. And so over time, as things slow down and as debt accumulates and as problems accumulate, people leave the company, domain knowledge is lost, the ability of IT to respond quickly degrades until eventually they become the bottleneck in the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) And everyone is always shouting at their tech leadership, saying, "Why can't we get this done? Why can't we go faster?"

(Noah Kantor at 00:18:56) And there are some of the common answers to that about, you know, we should have CI/CD pipelines, we should work at developing against trunk, we should look at agile practices. But quite a lot of that is still affected—quite a lot of the rest is still affected by how are the leaders approaching their teams. How do they talk to them? How do they listen to them? Do they listen to them? How do they interact with them? What sort of practices and habits have they developed over time that allow the team to surface the uncertainty that they have, or the problems that they're having, or whatever isn't working for them? And actually, do they get a chance to do those things? Or do they have to, because of things that are outside the team's control, do they have to pretend things are better than they are?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:58) I want to talk a little bit about, like, when you first start working with somebody and you're trying to figure out the evaluation of them, like, what gaps you can fill and things of that nature. How do you, like, what do you do? Do you walk them through a set of questions at the beginning? How do you target how you can be valuable to a person?

(Noah Kantor at 00:20:19) It's often just a coaching session to start with, because whether or not I can work with them depends on a lot of things, including whether or not our relationship will work as a coaching relationship. But also, a lot of people come to me and aren't entirely sure of the things that they really need. They have problems, or they have the symptoms of problems, but it's not 100% clear what's causing them. And so we have a conversation where we talk about it, and we talk about the pain that they're feeling. And then we talk about, what are the sources of that pain? And often they can't articulate it. And so we continue to dig and probe and ask further questions and hopefully highlight some of those things. When they can articulate it, when they do get to that point, then it becomes clear whether I'm the right fit for them. And sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. Sometimes they need just a consistent approach, and so some guidance from books would be great. Sometimes a different coach would fit them better. In some cases, maybe a therapist is a better solution, because coaching isn't therapy. But there's, like, there's a journey of discovery that we do on the coaching program that's kind of done in a small version when we're first talking to each other to see how well we fit and whether or not we're a good match and whether or not their needs match up with what I'm good at doing and helping them with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:55) That's something interesting I learned a few years ago. So when our offices were in person, our second or third office was from a company that was a growing counseling therapy place. Right? So they were growing, so they moved to a bigger building across the street, and we leased their old office space. And so I got to—and they were still the landlord there—so I got to meet the owner, really cool guy and everything. But there was a time when I realized that I was going through something with an employee, and I was working with them and helping them through it. And then this internal switch flipped and said, "Oh, we're—there's a transition here from coaching them professionally to they need to talk about this with somebody personally." And I just referred them out to that group. And it went really well. But for me, the thing I learned was at what point—and I can't even articulate it that well, but I know it when I see it and experience it—but at what point do you move from, like, coaching this person through something difficult to getting them into some help? For example, you have an employee, they lose a parent. Right? That's going to immediately affect whatever project that they're dependent on and, like, whatever their role is in that team. Well, there's you helping them talk about it and just exploring this is what's happening and so on and so forth. But then there's sometimes they need a lot more. And so realizing when to transition that away is really critical.

(Noah Kantor at 00:23:30) So it's a good question. It's a good insight. I work with a couple of people, and one of them on occasion has told me this is kind of bordering on therapy. And that border really matters. If it turns into therapy, then I'm no longer qualified to be the person actually working with them. But one of the distinctions that's made about how you can tell the difference, and it's not perfect, but coaching talks about the present and the future, and therapy often talks about the past. And so in the coaching role, we may dive into things that have happened in your past. But if you stay in the past and you kind of stay and explore that trauma and try to deal with it and see how it's affected their lives that far and that aspect of it, you're much closer—like, you're pretty much in therapy. But if you're talking about, you know, what are the things that have happened in the past and how do they affect you now and how will they affect you in the future, that's closer to the coaching. So it's often, in many ways, you can sense the difference based on the timeline you're working with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:39) I want to—and thank you for that clarification too, because I didn't think about that at all. I just thought about, like, oh, this is too emotional for me. I'm passing you along. I was like, I don't go there. I was like, I'll give you a pat on the back and I'll get you pumped up and I'll help you—you know, I'll be an ear for you to talk to, but that's like, I got to get you moved on here. How do you stay ahead when the tech ground shifts overnight?

(Noah Kantor at 00:25:06) So in many ways, I don't. Like, the ongoing pursuit of technology relevance and keeping up with the things that technology leaders need to know on a day-to-day basis isn't coaching. And so my focus is on what are the things that I need to do in order to be a better coach, in order to help people develop and grow and get the skills that they need. And that also shifts, but it's not shifting as fast. So as a tech leader, AI is a great example. I can use AI to help me ask better coaching questions. I can use AI to be a digital coach. I can ask it for a bunch of things, but it's not quite threatening my job in the same existential way that a lot of people feel it is. Because it's based on personal interactions. It's based on relationships. And AI doesn't have personal relationships yet. It may someday, at which point, you know, we'll have to have another conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) Have AI girlfriends. That's a whole other episode.

(Noah Kantor at 00:26:17) That's—we're back in therapy land.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:20) Yeah. What's your greatest—anonymize—I know this is, I'm putting you on the spot here, but we can—we're not live, so we can edit around it if you want. But can you anonymize, like, a great success story that you've had where someone came to you, they were, like, super in a jam, and you put together a strategy with them that helped them get to that light at the end of the tunnel?

(Noah Kantor at 00:26:44) So I can talk about something that I've done. And this will be kind of an amalgamation of several different things, but it'll be presented as one. But I was working with a woman named Anne, and she'd recently been promoted to being the CTO within her organization. And she got there through a route that she considered unlikely. She wasn't particularly technical because she'd come up through working with products and providing a product focus in her organization. And she'd been exposed to technology for years, but wasn't altogether comfortable being responsible for it. So she'd been recommended for the role by two of her technology leadership peers, who thought she'd be fantastic for it. And when Anne came to me, she had this impression that there was a gap in her capabilities. She was working with the executive now, but from her perspective, her lack of direct technical experience made her question whether she was the right person for the job. And through our work together, what she realized was that regardless of her own beliefs, at the executive level, her ability to bring people together and to form teams out of disparate groups who needed to work together, which was built on her own value of being open—well, that was a skill sorely lacking among her peers, and it was highly, highly valued by the people that she was responsible for and was one of the key reasons that her peers had recommended her for this role in the first place. And so recognizing that difference and the different skills needed between kind of being an individual contributor and being a CTO really helped her recognize that she was not just adequate for the role, but could be really great at it. And that kind of eased her mind and let her focus on the work that she needed to do. And so she went on, and we continued working together for a while. And she came to me with a dilemma. So Anne was feeling very stressed because of the financial situation the company found itself in. Redundancies were a possibility if certain contracts weren't won. Cash flow had been an issue in the past, and so people knew of it kind of in the abstract, but she was keeping the magnitude of the issue from them because she didn't want to avoid a panic. And when she brought it to my attention, it was almost as an aside, as part of a separate conversation we were having. "Oh, and by the way, I'm feeling some stress due to the severity of our cash flow problems. Of course, I haven't told the team because I don't want to cause a panic." And in her head, for this problem, there was no alternative to not telling them. And when things were really bad, the executive that she was working with kept things to themselves, and so others didn't have to worry about them. It's what her predecessor had done when similar things had happened. And that was kind of the only time she'd experienced that situation before, so it was what she did. And as we explored that problem more, and realized that the stress was out of proportion to the problem—so yes, of course potential redundancies are stressful, but she was, you know, that's a level here and she's way up here. What she recognized was that by keeping everything inside in order to protect the team, she was actually violating her own value of openness and what really mattered to her as a leader. And that conflict, more than anything else, was the source of her stress. And so once we had that out in the open, we worked together to identify ways that Anne could share enough information with her team so that they could make informed decisions about their futures without sharing anything that was really confidential. And so by recognizing the conflict between her values and her actions, she was able to come up with something that more closely aligned with who she wanted to be and how she wanted to behave and put it in place and then ended up reducing her stress levels to the point where she was able to focus on the work that she actually wanted to get done. And she was able to relieve a lot of the invisible stress the team had been feeling but couldn't articulate why. And so that particular conversation happened over the course of two of our sessions, took about a month to go through it, from when she kind of first showed up with that problem until we had that resolution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) Fair enough. That's a hard problem. I mean, I'm a founder of a company. I mean, that is a tough problem because what happens—like, employees and general team members, they will freak out, and they will get nothing done, and then it'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I tend to lean towards openness as well. So for me, it's that balance is the art. It's figuring out how to do that. How do I be open but not poke the nest to the point where no one can focus and nothing is getting done?

(Noah Kantor at 00:31:50) It's a good point, and it's that balance really matters. But there's something I think we lose sight of as we get promoted more and more, which is as individual contributors, we have a sense of what the organization is going through. We have a sense of how it feels and what's happening. And when the things that we notice, whether it's consciously or unconsciously, when those things don't match the words that are coming from our leadership, that causes as much stress as actually knowing what the problem is. So rumors are the result of not having information that allows you to make sense of the world. And so as a leader, you can potentially hide all of that problem, and so people never know. And you're always wearing a mask and a facade, and that works for some leaders. Or you can be completely open, and you can share all of the information all of the time, and that works for different leaders. Or you can do what Anne did and find the right amount of information that allows people to make informed decisions about their futures but doesn't panic them. And it's not that any of those decisions is right or wrong.

(Noah Cantor at 00:33:02) It's that when it's inconsistent and you're trying to be one of those things and your team thinks that something else is going on, that's when those rumors start happening. That's when stress for the team really builds up. And that's when they end up with problems that often you don't see because you're trying to protect them. And in your attempts to protect them psychologically, you tend to overlook the things that contradict the ways that you're behaving. So if your protection actually makes things worse, often we just won't notice that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:34) We had a similar issue like that early on in my company where, and all this advice is prefaced by your company culture and team and everything like that. And here's a small example, right? So early on, we would do group team meetings where we would do sales update, and we'd do product update, and customer update, and all of that. Each team would report in at the meeting, each head of the team, and then everyone else would be observing it so that we could all understand what's going on within the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:04) Well, I found out really quickly that the sales team is motivated by "sky is falling, you gotta close sales today." But if you do that tactic and the product and the customer team observes it, they're on Indeed looking for new jobs. They don't understand that all the sales come in in the last week of the month, and this is how you run salespeople. Whether I was doing it right or wrong, I don't know. But that's how we were running salespeople.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:27) And they were really motivated by this command and control. You have to hit the number. You've got to get the sales goal. You've got to do it. You've got two days left. You've got one day left. You've got to sign a deal. You've got to sign it. That's just how they were communicating and how it was working. And so we learned to separate sales meetings from product and company and team meetings because they were coming to me all stressed out. "Am I gonna have a job?" So I was like, "No, no. This is just how we do sales. We can miss goal this month, hit goal next month, and it's gonna be okay."

(Noah Cantor at 00:35:00) It's an interesting approach in that different culture between different teams can, exactly as you observed, be a real source of stress for the people in them. And what I find really interesting is a conversation with the people in the product and technology teams about what their interactions were like with salespeople on the ground during those times. Was the fact that they were managed in a completely different way, did that impact the way they interacted with each other? Because often it does, but not always. And that again is dependent on company culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:34) A hundred percent. Yeah. Because I've seen so many different iterations of what we call quote unquote salespeople, right? From account executives to closers, different sizes of companies. And that's why I think it's so important that people get a coach or an advisor, somebody that has more experience. And I would even preface that with, if you can find somebody that is paid to help, like Noah or any other type of leadership coach that has experience here, that's gonna be better than just asking a couple friends here and there. Because when someone's financially incentivized to help you achieve an outcome, that's way better than the text I get saying, "Hey, do you have five minutes? Got a quick question about x, y, or z." I'm just gonna be like, "Yeah, alright. Here's my experience." Throw it out there versus somebody who's trained and knows how to help people figure out the strategy and then walk them through execution of the strategy.

(Noah Cantor at 00:36:28) Yeah. Because a large part of my job when I'm being paid for the work is to focus a hundred percent on the person that I'm helping. And that's, when you're just being asked for advice, that's not the relationship that you've got. And so the financial transaction does actually make a difference, whether it's a large financial transaction or a small one. Sometimes it's paid mentoring, sometimes it's, you know, there are all kinds of different ways to have that relationship. But when you've got someone whose role is exclusively to help you, then that's very different than working with ad hoc advice that comes from someone who's been where you want to be, but maybe doesn't have the same time and attention to dedicate to helping.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) Will you help people? Like, if I come to you and I'm new to this, I don't know how to ask my CEO for the money, or I don't know how to ask my VP of engineering for the money, or whatever it may be. Do you help facilitate that? Can someone come to you and say, "Hey Noah, I need help. Can you help me figure out how to sell this internally to my team?"

(Noah Cantor at 00:37:33) Well, if it's a very specific thing, it's much harder to do. So I'm usually more on the side of help them understand what are the blockers for them being able to do it. So I can help articulate that problem in a way that will help them sell it. But what I'm really curious about is why are they struggling to do that for themselves? Why are they struggling to figure it out? And sometimes it is just lack of knowledge, but other times, you may have gone through this when you started a business. I know that I went through it when I started a business. Selling things to people is a different skill than doing things. And so often what people find is that they are nervous about asking. They're scared. They don't have the confidence because it's not their skill set or they're worried about failure. Or there might be a dozen different reasons. They might be nervous about doing the work, and so they find reasons to put it off. And that's a conversation that I find really interesting is, why are you struggling to go through this? And if they're not, if it's just a skill, then actually the Internet's a really good resource for finding the skill gap. But if it's a psychological issue that they're struggling with, and maybe they didn't realize it until we started talking, then that's something where I can add some real value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:55) Well Noah, we did it, man. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Noah Cantor at 00:38:59) I feel pretty good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) Call Noah. 1-800... That's not his number. That's not gonna work. You're gonna get crickets if you dial that number. We'll put his contact information in the show notes and links to his website and all of that good stuff.

(Noah Cantor at 00:39:15) Oh, thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:18) 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.