The Power of Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence in Tech Leadership with Paul Johnson, co-founder of Leadership.Dev

(Paul at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Paul from Leadership.Dev about dismantling feedback landmines, increasing your levels of self-awareness, and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) One day, I was scrolling through LinkedIn, and I saw this video about leadership, and I had said to myself, where did this guy come from? Because over the past couple years, I've gotten to know a lot of the people that are making the tech leadership content. And when I saw, to me, what was a fresh face, I said, I gotta go talk to them.

(Paul at 00:00:35) Awesome. Well, I'm glad we connected through LinkedIn. Yeah. I've been doing a lot of that stuff these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) How long have you been doing Leadership.Dev?

(Paul at 00:00:43) Yeah. So I'll give you kind of a brief thumbnail. First of all, I worked at Qualcomm. I really made my career at one company, Qualcomm, and kind of watched that company grow up, certainly in terms of the software team. So I did that for twenty-plus years, and we can talk more about that if you want. But I've been doing Leadership.Dev for a little over two years now. Yeah. And, you know, for me, Joel, the impetus of starting Leadership.Dev was, you know, I wanted to try to broaden my scope a little bit. For one thing, if you work one place for twenty-plus years, you know, you start to feel like you know everybody and you kind of, you know, it's Groundhog Day a little bit. Right? And I thought, man, I just gotta broaden. I gotta broaden. And I had a lot of energy around leadership and what works, what doesn't work, but I really wanted to broaden, talk to more people, see if I can have a bigger impact, talk to others about what's working, what's not working. And so that's what I do now. I just work with companies big and small, all in tech, 100% focused on tech, and just learning and teaching what works in tech leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:49) So what are you doing exactly? Are you doing talks on-site or workshops? Tell me about that.

(Paul at 00:01:55) Yeah. Sure. You know, the main product, my main focus bread and butter, if you will, is I will go in and do leadership development training for tech managers at companies. So I do, you know, most folks, I do an on-site three-day program, which is really intended for new managers, but I've been really surprised by people who have been managers or directors, even vice presidents for decades, and they're like, wow. I wish I had the benefit of some of this training when I was a new manager. So, really, it's targeted at people that are transitioning from contributors to managers to leaders in organizations—three days of training with them. I also do one-on-one coaching. So I coach CTOs, vice presidents, directors at small and large companies. So that's more like the one-on-one coaching relationship. And then I'll also do half-day kind of Zoom sessions and team builders and that kind of thing. So that's really my focus is working with tech leaders.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) And you've been at this full-time for about two years now?

(Paul at 00:02:54) Full-time for two years. Yeah. You bet. Seen a lot and learned a lot, and it's been really interesting to go through that journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) Have you partnered up with any of the other tech coach type people out there, like Etienne de Bruin or Eric Weiss?

(Paul at 00:03:08) Yep. I know Eric. I know Etienne well. Done some work with SevenCTOs people. A number of CTOs from SevenCTOs have come up to me and said, hey, can we work together? And I did do some work with Lou from Flock Freight and Ryan Roslansky from Airspace. Work with those companies. And, yeah, it's been super positive. And also, of course, learning about who else is doing this kind of work. And, you know, the thing, Joel, one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about this—if I look at the leadership development space in general, I think it's overly dominated by business schools. Right. So, you know, especially the big companies, if you're a Fortune 500 tech company, it's like, oh, I need to do some leadership development. Oh, let's just send people to Harvard Business School's leadership class. And, you know, I'm not here to say that Harvard doesn't have a great leadership program. They do, but it, let's face it, it's generic. Right? And they're gonna teach an Applebee's manager the same curriculum as a leader in a tech company. And, you know, that's a problem, right? Because tech is different. And we can talk about that today. And I think you know this from being a leader yourself that the challenges in tech and the leadership challenges are unique. And so we need, I think, more curriculum, more of an approach that's focused on being in service of the tech leader. And I just have a lot of energy around that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) Yeah. It's definitely different people in the service industry versus the retail industry versus building technology. Those are—

(Paul at 00:04:42) Exactly. Right? I can't do leadership development for a sales team. I mean, I wouldn't really—I mean, I could give them some generic leadership content, but, you know, it's a different set of challenges, and we have to cater to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) Yeah. And then your class that you're doing, the thing you do most often, the on-site three days, walk me through day one, two, and three.

(Paul at 00:05:02) Yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah. So the way I break things down—look, I like to say, first and foremost, leadership requires higher levels of self-awareness. Right? So if you're a CTO, if you're a vice president, if you're leading anybody, any number of people, you have to be self-aware. People ask me, well, why? Well, because I think it's sort of self-evident. Right? What we bring into the room as leaders is gonna reflect on others. Right? And so if we're not self-aware, that's kind of like the first level. So day one is really about raising self-awareness. Okay? Who are we? What are our values? What are our opinions on management? It's interesting. I always start day one with—we kind of play a word association game. We're like, okay. What comes to mind?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:45) Let's do it. What do we got?

(Paul at 00:05:47) Alright. What comes to mind when you think Disneyland?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:50) Oh, Mickey Mouse.

(Paul at 00:05:52) Okay. What about the beach?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:56) White sand. Sand.

(Paul at 00:05:59) Good. Okay. How about the word manager?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:02) Uh, I saw Dwight Schrute in my head in The Office. I don't know why.

(Paul at 00:06:08) Beautiful. That is so awesome, Joel. So that's usually how I do it. I set people up with generic stuff, like home, family, so people get the warm fuzzies, and then I hit them with manager. And they'll say Dilbert or The Office. And I say, you know, usually it gets a laugh out of people, but then there's a deeper truth, which is a lot of tech people, especially, you can talk about CTOs, they see themselves first and foremost as members of technical staff, as engineers first, just one of the team, just there to help. Right. But the trick is, and I think this is where self-perception and self-awareness comes in, the lower-level people in the organization don't look at the CTO that way. They see them as, oh, wow, this person's a pretty big deal. In fact, a quick story for you. I still have my original offer letter from Qualcomm twenty-five years ago, and it's signed by this guy that some viewers might know, Jim Hutchinson, Director of Engineering. And I remember when I got that letter, I was like, oh, Director of Engineering. This guy's a big deal. And then I looked at that letter, you know, whatever it was, ten years later, and I was a director. I was like, oh, I guess some people think I'm a big deal, but I don't see myself that way. You know what I mean? I think that's kind of the first thing we have to understand is when you're a leader, it's like, yeah. You are Dilbert. You are the caricature of the manager, if you will. So that's up to you then what you're gonna do with that. What kind of a manager do you wanna be? But just a false humility, which a lot of engineers fall into—it's like, let's just code together, and we'll just kind of, it's all technical problems—I actually think that does a disservice to a lot of leaders. You gotta embrace the role to be effective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) And then what's day two?

(Paul at 00:07:58) So day two is all about leading others and specifically one-on-one. So we—you could think of it as day one, let's learn to lead ourselves. Right? Then day two is, how do we lead one-on-one? Okay? So there, we've got lots of interesting techniques we can talk about. How to coach. Right? What does it even mean to coach? It's a word that's thrown around a lot, but I don't think people know what it means. How to have a challenging conversation, because that happens all the time when we're managers. A module people love is how to negotiate. Because I usually ask a class, how often are you in negotiation? And when people spend ten seconds thinking about it, Joel, they're like, all the time. Right? It's like someone wants to negotiate with you on a promotion, on a salary. A customer wants to negotiate with you on a date. The C-suite wants to—it's constant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:47) Your wife for dinner, your kids for what show you're gonna watch.

(Paul at 00:08:50) Yeah. It's overwhelming. Right? And to me, the most shocking thing is we actually don't teach people how to negotiate. And there are—like, it's completely learnable. It's not—you know, I think there's an idea that, oh, negotiations, some people are just born huge car salesmen and they're just sort of good at it. That's a bunch of baloney. It's very trainable as a skill. And in fact, what's interesting is I think people that are highly analytical, i.e., you know, engineers, are actually highly effective negotiators. If you look at the best techniques, the top negotiators in the world, it's all very analytical. It's all just, how do we do it? And so, yeah, that's a skill that I teach. How to negotiate, and then we apply it to tech. Right? So it's like, okay, again, you can apply it to buying a car. Fine. Negotiate the best price. But where it gets real interesting is, okay, let's apply it to real-world situations that show up in tech leadership. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:49) I wanna jump into that. I've got a bunch of things I wanna jump into. The first thing I wanna say is you're absolutely right on negotiation skills and sales skills being 100% teachable. My background was software development, seventeen years, didn't know anything officially about sales. Started my business, had to learn sales, and it took a while, but it is absolutely a system. And it's a process, and you have good intentions going through it. And I think one-on-one is when you rethink that default of the haggling car salesperson.

(Paul at 00:10:30) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:30) That's a default image in your mind. But then when you actually have to do it yourself, you realize, oh, man. All I'm doing is just trying to figure out how we can help people and if it's a good fit or not. And if it is, just following up and making sure we go through the normal hoops. So I love that you said it's teachable because it is teachable, and I do come across many engineers and technical type people. They'll say, oh, I just don't have that. You know? I don't have that gift.

(Paul at 00:10:56) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:58) A sibling's the talker or they have some excuse in their head, and it's a teachable thing just like you can learn programming. But you also said a couple other things. The first one, I wanna go all the way back because I was taking notes as you're talking because you got great stuff. Leadership requires higher levels of self-awareness. Why does it require that? We'll start with that. So why does it require higher levels of self-awareness?

(Paul at 00:11:25) Well, I mean, I think fundamentally, because if you are in a position of leadership, your actions will reflect on others. I used to coach somebody, and I remember this very clearly. Maybe it's the best way to tell it as an anecdote. I was doing a 360 feedback for one of my coaching clients. I was talking about my client, and he said, you know, here's the thing about this guy. He says, if he's having a bad day, everybody's having a bad day. And it was like, wow. Exactly. Right? And so if you don't realize the impact you're having on others, the fact that people are looking up to you, that's a major problem. So you need to have the self-awareness to understand, you know, how are my actions going to affect the rest of the team? That's to me is first and foremost. You have to have that level of self-awareness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:12) How do you teach that?

(Paul at 00:12:13) Yeah. So I think there are ways to teach it. I mean, for example, every leadership training will actually teach a lot about emotional intelligence. Right? So you can teach people EQ effectively. And I actually think a lot of the HR training on EQ, I don't think does a great job of it. So I like to kind of take a bit of a fresh take on it, on EQ. I mean, the fact of the matter is EQ is a very important skill. You know, I have a friend who's a private pilot, and believe it or not, they actually teach some level of EQ to pilots. And people look at me like, well, why would a pilot need EQ? Well, so here's an example. You're in an airplane. Your engine cuts out. What's the first thing that's going to happen to you? You're going to get a flood of adrenaline and you're going to start to panic. Right. And what's the one thing you need when your engine goes out? You actually need to remove that fight-or-flight response and calm yourself down and be rational, be able to land the airplane. I tell people, look, at work, sure, it's not life or death, but it's the same thing. If you get emotionally triggered at work, you gotta learn to calm yourself down. Otherwise, you're gonna make bad decisions. That's the other maybe other answer to your question, Joel, is one of the reasons why we need self-awareness is the job of leadership fundamentally—your work product are decisions. Right? Once you stop writing code, once you stop contributing code, your output are decisions. You're a decision-making engine. And we have good knowledge on this from emotional intelligence research in psychology that when you are in a triggered emotional state, you make bad decisions. That's just a fact. The phenomena of being hangry is actually—they've proven this in the lab. There's some fascinating experiments, you know, for example, where they ask people to do math problems just when they haven't eaten for four hours, and you can show that statistically, you do much worse. Or they ask people to exhibit restraint while they're hungry. They can't do it. So hangry is real. So, you know, Joel, you asked me how do you teach self-awareness? A lot of it is just very basic things that we know about the human brain. I tell people, do not make decisions at 11:50 a.m. And that's just a piece of knowledge you can teach and, you know, just don't do it. You're gonna make a worse decision statistically if you keep doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) Well, and for people that are in different time zones or have different sleep schedules, he's talking about thirty minutes before you eat lunch. Right?

(Paul at 00:14:51) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:52) I read that story about the they took judges that would grant people yes, their freedom. Right? I forget the name of the type of board, but they essentially are trying to get out, and the judges will see them. There will be a panel of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:05) And they took the statistics of them granting the freedom or not, and they noticed that as you got to right before lunch, they denied people more often.

(Paul at 00:15:13) Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. It's absolutely real. And I feel the same way about bias. When people hear bias training, they groan. It's like, oh, here we go. It's gonna be an HR kind of legal compliance thing. But there's some amazing research on cognitive biases. You know, Thinking Fast and Slow is a book that gets quoted a lot, and I've read that book. And I actually teach a lot of the findings in that book because there's a lot of important biases that exist.

(Paul at 00:15:42) And again, it goes back to the self-awareness point. If you're not aware of some of these biases, you will fall prey to them. They're just extremely prevalent. And engineers, I think, tend to think, well, I'm a rational agent and I don't fall prey to that, but you can very quickly demonstrate, and I do it in my class. It's trivial to show bias, actually. It's very easy to in a class show how people are biased. One famous one is called the anchoring bias. Right? Which is I can anchor people with a number. So we can do it right now, Joel. I can ask you, do you think Gandhi was younger or older than a hundred and twenty years when he died?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:20) Younger.

(Paul at 00:16:23) What's your estimate on how old Gandhi was when he died?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:25) I don't actually know Gandhi really, but old guy, 75.

(Paul at 00:16:33) Okay. Good. So I do that experiment. Now I seeded you. Right? I said, do you think he's older or younger than 120? Now 120 is ridiculously old, so you said younger. What I do is I do that experiment twice where I ask people, do you think Gandhi was younger or older than 45 years old when he died? And people are like, oh, you know, older than 45.

(Paul at 00:16:56) Right? And what's fascinating is if you do this experiment with 100 people, if you seed them with the 120 and then you ask them the estimate of his age at death, they will all say an older number. Right? In other words, the fact that I seeded you with that 120 is gonna make your estimate of his age at death a higher number, like you said 75. If I had said 45, you would have guessed a lower number. You might have said 60.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:23) I'm a bad participant because I built retirement planning software, so I just took the average age and I bumped it up a little bit.

(Paul at 00:17:29) So I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:30) was like, let's give them a little bit better than what the average death age is for a male.

(Paul at 00:17:35) And that itself is a cognitive bias because you have that precondition. So things like that, Joel, is what I mean by self-awareness. We can demonstrate to people in concrete ways that you might say that you're an unbiased, completely rational agent. That's not true. We're all—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:51) We can't not be biased.

(Paul at 00:17:52) Biased.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) That's like you saying you created something original. It's like, no, you didn't.

(Paul at 00:17:55) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:56) You can't not be impacted by your entire environment.

(Paul at 00:17:59) I think that's right. And I wish that more of the, quote unquote, bias training we see would focus on that aspect. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) It got a bad rap. It got a bad rap because when it got presented to, let's say, consciousness or people as a whole, it came with the tag that they're bad.

(Paul at 00:18:18) That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) Everybody learned about unconscious bias or whatever the word is by learning that it's a bad thing and there are these bad things that are causing you to make these bad decisions. And it's not. It's a whole field of a concept.

(Paul at 00:18:32) I think that's exactly right. Instead of framing it as a black or white, bias bad, non-bias good, you know, you're right. We should just acknowledge that everyone is biased in some way because it was a product of their upbringing, what they had for breakfast, everything that brought us to this point, you and me talking, is sort of precursor to what I'm gonna say next or what the next decision I'm gonna make is. Right? And so that's kind of what we should be teaching.

(Paul at 00:18:59) And that, by the way, is why we want diverse opinions because you don't want 100 people working together that grew up with the same upbringing, had the same thing for breakfast. That, you're just gonna get groupthink. Right? And so, yes, once you kind of unpack that aspect, then you realize, okay, I get it. There's real bias out there. So yeah, that's kind of what the self-awareness, I think, component brings. It allows us to do things like, you know, we just, I just did the Gandhi thing, but it could just as easily apply to estimating software schedules durations. Right?

(Paul at 00:19:34) If I just got off the phone with somebody negotiating a sale, you talk about sales. Say I just negotiated a sale, and I'm gonna say, oh yeah, you know, it's gonna be $20,000,000. And then I go, my next meeting is with my team on a schedule. I actually have that number, 20,000,000, just got anchored in me. And now if I have the self-awareness, I could go into that meeting and say, you know, I just got out of a meeting. What numbers were we discussing? I can be aware of that bias. I could even disclose it to the team. I could say, hey, team, here's what I'm coming into the room with. Here's the meeting I just had. What did you guys just have? We can kind of get that on the table, and we can raise the self-awareness. But it takes a leader to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) We use it in pricing all the time. I just talked to this guy, Jim, who's brilliant, the other day. He's a real popular accountant for CES and on LinkedIn, and he gave this brief example of there's this restaurant in a big city, and they have a hamburger that has a gold leaf. Like literally, the lettuce has gold on it, and it's a $250 hamburger. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:34) You can buy it. And the purpose of that hamburger is, you know, maybe one out of 30 people buy it. Right? So it's not to sell a ton of that hamburger. It's to anchor the price so that when you see the $50 hamburger, you think I'm gonna splurge and get that. I'm not gonna spend the $250, but I'm gonna splurge and get that 50. Where if you were to walk in and the hamburger was $15 or $20 and you see a $50 one, you'd say, I'm not buying that expensive one. I'm gonna get the 15 or $25 one.

(Paul at 00:20:58) I love that example, and I want to look that up. Gold leaf hamburger. That's awesome. But you're absolutely right. And it's to your point when you said this is totally trainable. The fact that you and I are talking about this, hopefully someone listening to this can understand. It's like, oh, now I know that this thing exists. All you need to know is to be aware of it, and that's sort of half the battle. It's not gonna make you completely immune to it, but it's gonna raise your self-awareness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:20) 100%. I love that. I never connected those things, but you're exactly right. The biases, they're not bad, but you have an advantage understanding the principles of them, like the anchoring bias.

(Paul at 00:21:34) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:35) Yeah. It's tough for me because I'm a business owner. Right? And so I sit there and I'll run six figure payrolls. Right? And then I go to my life, my personal finances, and we're talking with how much we spent at Target or something like that. So I learned real quick that I had—I always think to myself, okay, I'm doing personal finances now. And I just say that to myself. That's something I've just picked up as a habit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:00) I actually didn't even realize I had the habit until I'm telling you right now, but I picked that up as a habit so that my brain could better process this difference.

(Paul at 00:22:10) Yeah, that's, you're absolutely right. You see, you raised your self-awareness. You have that kind of awareness, and so yeah, hopefully that'll help you make the best decision. That's the name of the game.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:21) Yes. I have enough self-awareness to know that when my wife was pregnant, we have three kids, so three times, that she would get so hangry, I started carrying snacks with me. I'd put them in the glove box. I'd put them in the center console. I'd put them in my pants when we walk out the door. I always have a snack pack with different varying snacks in it. And every time, she would reluctantly be like, okay.

(Paul at 00:22:46) I'm taking it. That's awesome. Yeah. You know, look, we spend more time with our coworkers than our family, so we gotta get used to our coworkers' proclivity. Same thing. Right? It's like, oh yeah, Joe is hungry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:59) Bring snacks. Your coworkers will love you, bring some snacks.

(Paul at 00:23:02) Yeah. It's so simple. You know? Yeah. It's crazy simple how that works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:06) I wanna talk about coaching. You mentioned earlier, you discuss in day two, what does it mean to be a coach? What does that mean?

(Paul at 00:23:13) So I like to use the sports analogy a bit. Right? Because I think it's sort of the right metaphor, honestly. Right? I mean, so there's lots of directions we can go with this, but you know, fundamentally there's two things. The coach, first of all, their only concern is with the success of their player. Right? So that's the big difference between management. Right? I sometimes say, look, as a manager, do you wanna think of yourself as the coach of a sports team, not—and this is the trap—as the example I give is the evaluator at the DMV.

(Paul at 00:23:47) So your job, imagine how crazy, you think about a basketball game and there's a, the coach calls a timeout. I tell people, you think the coach in the timeout in the huddle is saying things like, hey, Joel, on that last play, I'm gonna rate you meets expectations. And Jim, you were a four out of—no. Of course not. Right?

(Paul at 00:24:06) The huddle is all about okay, here's what I see. Right? Because I'm the coach. I'm on the sidelines. This is what I'm observing. I'm observing that the other team is doing this and this to us. We gotta adjust that because—right. So you're offering a perspective that you see from the sidelines. Right?

(Paul at 00:24:22) And then you're also in addition to that, you know, concerned with the personal development of your players. So this is the other reason I think the sports analogy really, really works. There are a lot of leaders. Maybe you're one of them listening to this that I think only do what I call in-game coaching. Right?

(Paul at 00:24:40) So again, let's use the basketball team example. Right? When you call a timeout, the discussion is 100% focused on what's happening right now in this game. How can we win this game? And I actually think there's a lot of coaches, Joel, that are actually pretty decent at that. They'll say things to me like, well, I don't have an issue, Paul. I'm a good coach. I meet with my employees once a week, and we just talk about what's going on that week, and I help them through it. I say, yeah. That's an in-game huddle. That's what you're doing there. Right? It's like, what's going on this week? How can we get through this firefight, et cetera? The question is, do you have the practice?

(Paul at 00:25:13) Think about how different the relationship is when the basketball team goes to a practice. That's a different conversation. We're not talking about a particular game. We're talking about what are the long-term trends, right? What are new systems we want to deploy? What are skill gaps that we observe? What's feedback that we can give each other? Right? That's what a coach does in a practice. They're developing those techniques. And I think that's what I see in tech is a lot of that's what's missing is the long-term arc and how to work with people. So one recommendation I give is you need to meet with your employees once a month. And the rule is no project talk and people look at me like, what do you mean? No project talk. I mean, you can't talk about current deadlines.

(Paul at 00:25:56) You can't talk about the fire that's burning with the customer. You can't talk about that nasty bug du jour. Right? It has to be all about the employee's personal development. Where are they going? What are the goals they're making for themselves? What is the feedback they're getting? So a lot of what I talk about is how to get the feedback angle. So that sort of element, one of coaching is folding in, you know, personnel development. The trick of it is, and we could talk more about this, is how to do it in a way that's not evaluating, because that's always the other trap people fall into.

(Paul at 00:26:31) It's like, well, I'm your boss. So there's this power relationship that's there. How do we diffuse that? And that's what really ultimately enables true coaching relationship is getting that sort of power structure out of the way. And there are ways to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) Yes. And for me, I focus on trying to figure out how to grow them because what I've learned is if I wanna keep talent, by default, employees are not really great. I'm gonna put a blanket statement out there. I don't care. They're not really great at understanding the fact that if you're bored or if you're worn out or if you feel like you're not growing, how to solve that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:17) And the default instinct is new job, new project. And that'll be my growth. And you don't need that. And in fact, that thinking prevents you from doing 10 times more than you're even currently capable of.

(Paul at 00:27:30) I think that's completely right, Joel. Thanks for pointing that out. In fact, and I think the opposite is also true. The flip side of that coin is if you are able to create a coaching environment where people feel like they're growing, they don't wanna leave, and they don't even realize. Right? It's the number one retention tool. So this gets to when I, some of the stuff I do on LinkedIn and I tell people, look, the reason you should do—one reason leadership development pays for itself is once you have leaders that coach their employees, guess what? They're not gonna wanna leave those managers. Right? People don't quit jobs. They quit managers. And so when we have true coaches, people won't leave. It's such a positive environment. I've seen it firsthand where retention numbers just improve dramatically because, you know, people are growing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16) So you have this employee team meeting once per month, no project or customer talk. What topics are we discussing in that?

(Paul at 00:28:24) So the thing I think we should fold in that's important is I like to flip the script a little bit on this because the thing we have to get out of the way is the question of feedback. So if you come to that meeting and it's just the manager saying, well, this is what I see, you know, X, Y, Z, then it becomes, again, it's a fail. So what we want to do, and this is kind of one of the things I teach in my training as well, is I teach a system called the Five Minute Feedback System. And without, you know, going to all the details, the fundamental thing here, Joel, is we flip the script. So what we wanna do is have environments where people ask for feedback all the time, not from their manager necessarily, but from everybody.

(Paul at 00:29:12) So let's say, Joel, I'm gonna go into a code review tomorrow. I've got—I could be a senior engineer, individual contributor. What I'm gonna do is before that code review, I'm gonna ask all the participants, which could be my peers, people with the same experience as me, could be my boss, whoever's in the review. I'm gonna say afterwards, I'd like some feedback on how I did here. Right?

(Paul at 00:29:34) And then I collect the feedback. So I think it's really healthy when people own their own feedback. In fact, it's incredibly healthy. It actually, again, I've deployed the system myself. It's not just theory.

(Paul at 00:29:46) I've rolled it out. It really works. So then to your question about what happens in the monthly kind of one-on-one coaching meeting, well, we flip the script. So now the manager says, "Hey, Paul, what feedback have you gotten this month?"

(Paul at 00:30:00) And then I say, "Oh, well, actually, I did this code review, and here's some feedback I got. Joel said this, and Bill said that," et cetera, et cetera. And now it's like the coach is there. "Oh, that's interesting feedback. Why do you think you got that?" Right? So I think that, to me, is the first key. The player has to own their own feedback and their own growth. Now, of course, the manager is also one of many that also has feedback to give, but that's where it starts.

(Paul at 00:30:30) And what we can do is we can start building on that. We can say, "Alright, well, I see some patterns here. It seems like in these code reviews, you're consistently hearing X. What are we gonna do about X?" And then the manager's job is then to have, probably be armed with best practices or his or her own personal experience that they can help relate. And, of course, all coaching is situational. Right? Some lower level individual contributors, they may need straight mentoring.

(Paul at 00:30:56) But then as you grow, it's not so much mentoring or how-to you're looking for. It's more of a thought partnership. Right? So we have to kind of adapt to that in the situation. But really, I think the cornerstone of a lot of the coaching meeting is about how we collect feedback and what we're getting.

(Paul at 00:31:12) Most companies, I think there's just not enough feedback. And if you don't have feedback, you're not gonna succeed in coaching, actually. It's not gonna work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) I like that, creating the culture of people asking for it. I have found historically, just off of my own experience going around, that there are times that I am shy to ask for feedback because there is a general reluctance for people to want to give feedback. Because they'll have given it a couple times, people will explode at them, and then they don't give feedback anymore. And so it's up to you to talk with people and say, "Hey, I am trying to improve. I want this feedback. I'm not gonna get upset."

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:56) Until the culture is established. Right? Because when you first start that transition and turning that ship around, it's real hard.

(Paul at 00:32:01) That is such a great point. Feedback is a social landmine. Right? It's scary. Right? It's like, "Am I gonna really tell Joel, who's my boss, I didn't agree with his decision?" And so I think there are ways to diffuse the landmine. So, for example, just training people on how to give feedback, creating what I call a social contract. So a very simple thing you could do in your team—just give me a gift for practical advice in this podcast—is you could say, "Hey, team. Let's create a social contract that says the following. If person A gives person B feedback, the person receiving it shall respond with two words: Thank you. That's it."

(Paul at 00:32:44) So we create this a priori contract that says feedback is not an opportunity for an argument. That's just the going-in social contract. All of a sudden, people kind of relax. "Okay, I know I'm not gonna get retaliated against." Number two, you actually teach people how to give objective feedback.

(Paul at 00:32:56) So there's, again, things we can teach. One obvious thing is when you're giving feedback, don't review the person, review the work. Right? Which I think is a powerful concept. So instead of saying, "I think Joel is lazy," which is now reviewing Joel, I could say, "My observation is Joel is fifteen minutes late to the staff meeting." That's just a statement of fact. I'm not making any judgment. I'm just stating what I observe. Right?

(Paul at 00:33:26) And so if we teach people how to do that, we can actually make the flow of feedback be frictionless, and that's the engine that creates improvement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) Yeah. I learned a lot about that when you do the premarital counseling. Years ago when my wife and I, before we got married, we had to go to several weeks of premarital counseling with the pastors. And they teach you how to disassociate me saying "you always do this" or "you, you, you, you, you." Right?

(Paul at 00:33:57) I love that example. What you're getting at too is this concept of empathy. I love Chris Voss's book. I don't know if you read that one, Never Split the Difference, which is good both for marriage advice and at work and in negotiation. And if, for those that don't know, Chris Voss is the former head FBI hostage negotiator, and he teaches people, "Look, the first step to negotiation, in marriage, at work, is empathy."

(Paul at 00:34:18) Right. And I actually do this thing when I train people on this, I actually play a game with them where we need to have more conversations where you're trying to get the other person to say "that's right." Not "you're right." Like, if you're talking to your wife and you go on a rant and she eventually says, "Yeah, you're right." Guess what?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:47) She lost.

(Paul at 00:34:48) You lost. Yeah. Exactly. Like, that's a fail. Right? You know that's a conversation ender. "Yeah, you're right." Like, "Just get out of my face." Right?

(Paul at 00:34:56) But if she says, "That's right," it means that you've been able to express to your spouse how she feels better than maybe she even knows herself. And so your question about what, like, bring it back to work for a sec. People ask me, "What do I talk about in a coaching conversation?" I say, "If you don't know what to talk about, play a game."

(Paul at 00:35:17) You can actually do this in your conversation. Try today with somebody you work with. Try to get them to say "that's right." Right? So if they say, "Man, this schedule is brutal. I don't know if we're gonna make it. I don't know if we're gonna make this delivery," it's like, "And you think that maybe the schedule is too tight?" Sometimes you really have to go for five minutes, and finally, you'll get them to say, "Yeah. That's right." And then, you know, you've established empathy, and that's kind of how you build relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) That makes sense because how can you possibly negotiate with someone if you don't understand how they're going to perceive your offer?

(Paul at 00:35:52) That's exactly it. Right? Also, right, that empathy establishes trust. It's like, as soon as, if you were to explain to me my problem, Joel, so well that I say, "Joel, that's right. You understand me," I'm gonna trust you more because I have this understanding that you know where I'm coming from. Right? And all of this goodness, ultimately, I think what this boils down to is, at work, what we're trying to do is create high-trust, feedback-rich environments.

(Paul at 00:36:27) Let's make this about work for a second. If you study high-performance organizations, every single high-performance organization—you can talk about the Navy SEALs, you can talk about the top tech companies—they all have this in common. They are high-trust, feedback-rich environments. And it's obvious why. Right?

(Paul at 00:36:36) Because if you have high trust, people will bring up the sensitive topics and they will get fixed. So that's why you need trust. Feedback-rich. Of course, we need feedback. We don't improve without feedback.

(Paul at 00:36:48) So it's sort of like if you can create that engine at work where you have high-trust and feedback-rich environment, you will win. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:55) Well, you have to have higher quality people to do that.

(Paul at 00:36:58) Well, yeah, you have to have high-quality people. Yeah. You have to have high-quality people, but you have to—I'm a big believer that that's a necessary but not sufficient condition. I mean, we see this, for example, in the military. Like, why is the—the army has the Rangers. Like, why are the Navy SEALs generally the best of the best special ops team? Right? It's not just that they have the best individuals. Right?

(Paul at 00:37:22) Because there's lots of great individuals. Or the other example I give to bring it back to sports is the Brooklyn Nets are in the news. Right? They had the super team, the super team experiment. Right? The Durant, Kyrie Irving super team that was supposed to win. Why didn't they win? You know, there has to be, there's more to the sauce than just the best contributors. It's necessary.

(Paul at 00:37:44) We need people with that kind of empathy, but it's also trainable, and it's also a question of what environment does the leader create. Right? That's often what I say, definition of leadership: create those environments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) Exactly. No, I don't know much about sports. I played basketball. I played baseball for eight years. I played football in high school, but I never got into watching and following them. That being said, when I was working on my second book, I was working with a writer who was from England, and he shared this short story with me about this professional soccer coach, football coach. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:25) And he won the championship through the concept that he just got the best people. Like, when they got together, this group of people, the way they play, they weren't no-names or anything like that and huge brands, but he choreographed the people, the correct people together with the right strengths so that the whole was greater than the individual.

(Paul at 00:38:46) Yeah. You're exactly right. And, actually, to your point, this is the big failure we see in hiring. Right? By the way, my three-day program, that's what I teach on day three. We go from leading one-on-one to building teams. Right? So the big fail in hiring is we treat each individual hire typically as a siloed event. We're just looking for the best candidate we can find, which, again, if you want to use a sports analogy, is like saying, "Okay, every hire, I'm just gonna look for the player with the best numbers."

(Paul at 00:39:15) "Who's got the best—every hire, I'm just gonna find the home run hitter." Right? It's like, no. We should be doing, like, the Moneyball thing, which you're kind of referring to. We should be thinking about hiring as this more holistic thing. Like, what are the skill gaps? What strategies do we need to employ? What's the team mix that we need? Right? And then once we hire people, then, yeah, how do we set them up to succeed and to win? And you're right.

(Paul at 00:39:40) The, it's much more about how we set up the team than how good our individuals are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) I look at it as if this were a movie, which character is missing?

(Paul at 00:39:49) Yeah. I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:50) And which character do I need next? Because I want to balance the team's spirit. I don't know. I don't have a good word for it. But you just know when you look at it. Right? And every team's gonna be different, and every team has a purpose. And that's why I always have trouble having the conversations about quotas and people because I'm always thinking, what's gonna be the best to make that team work?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) And there have been times at my company, Paul, where it's been all women and just me, and there have been times at the company where it's been all men and just women. Right now, I don't know the ratio. We're probably fairly split, but I never once was trying to pick someone other than who I think would complete that team. And those teams, they change as people come and go. So it's always this moving target. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) And that's the tough part. Right? Getting those right people at the right time.

(Paul at 00:40:43) It absolutely is. And creating, keeping that chemistry, and it's a never-ending kind of project. And I think, Joel, one of the things I see is we need technical leaders to have the same passion about this kind of topic—how to build the team, how to organize a team. That same energy they have about building tech needs to be applied to building teams.

(Paul at 00:41:08) Right? We need to see it. Often, I think, look. Because let's face it. If you're a technical person, like, I am an engineer at heart. Right? My comfort zone, and I think for CTOs as well, this is generally true, the comfort zone is working on the product. That's the easy part. It's what you're comfortable with and it's what you train for.

(Paul at 00:41:25) But we need to sort of balance that energy with everything else we're talking about, which is, how am I gonna build the team? How's the team organized? What are the frictions in the team? It's funny. I tell people, I ask people in my training, I said, "What do you do when you have a bug in your product?" They kind of look at me like, yeah. Like, it's obvious. We have a bug tracking system, and we prioritize. And, oh, by the way, if it's a really high-priority bug, we create a little tiger team, and that team works day and night until that thing gets resolved.

(Paul at 00:41:50) Let's say it's a customer P1. Right? I'm like, "Great. Where's your bug tracking system, quote-unquote, for organizational issues?" And they look at me like, "Well, we don't have one."

(Paul at 00:42:01) It's like, you need to have one. So this is what I mean by we can tailor leadership for technical people. People actually love this idea. I introduced the idea of an organizational backlog. So it's just like we have a backlog of features and bugs we need to fix. We need to have the same thing. I mean, literally the same thing for our organizational challenges. Right? So we can just start writing them down. We can have bugs, quote-unquote, in the org where, like, Team A and Team B don't work well together.

(Paul at 00:42:28) That's a bug. Let's go fix that. Let's go spend time on it. Let's call meetings on it. Let's have status reporting. Let's have the CTO care about that as much as they do the product. And that's when you get sort of these balanced organizations that start to perform well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:43) Have you had a client actually implement that and run it?

(Paul at 00:42:46) I have. And it's transformational. Right? They're like, "Oh, yeah. We get it." Not only that, they start to version. This is where it gets really kind of cool. I had one customer start to version how they work. So it's almost like they do sprints. They're longer sprints. It was like a six-month sprint.

(Paul at 00:43:04) It's like, okay. For example, let's say you don't like your performance review. I had a team that didn't like their performance review process. Very common problem. So what they did is they took the engineer's mentality. They said, "Alright. Let's just call what we have right now Version 1 because it's just sort of like this performance review process that we've had for years." Then they said, "We're gonna try Version 2, and we're gonna do it for a year."

(Paul at 00:43:33) And what that did in the team is actually created a lot of positive culture because the thing about versioning is you acknowledge that you're never done. Right? So, yeah, there'll be a Performance Review 2.0. It should be better. Right? I mean, hopefully, it's better.

(Paul at 00:43:39) But if it's not, there'll be a 3.0, and we will fix this thing, and we will stick to it. And so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:45) Can I catch it in the middle of the year?

(Paul at 00:43:48) Right? So, well, you gotta be careful. But, yeah, like, I think there's no reason we can't use the same muscle we use to build great products towards building great teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:59) A hundred percent agree. So that's day three, how to build teams.

(Paul at 00:44:03) I like that you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:04) You brought that up, actually, this year when I was doing planning, end of December, beginning of January for my company from an entrepreneur perspective, not necessarily a tech stack perspective, is I went through this exercise where—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:17) I built out an org chart of the company that I wanted and how I wanted everything to operate so smoothly, and everything we learned from the last year about customer problems. Because all of these things, I said, okay, this would be the most perfect organization. It would solve everything I currently know about. And then I took a map of mine, and I overlaid it, and I made it very, very clear what roles I needed to hire or move or adjust or responsibilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) And then when I started to introduce that to people, like, for example, Josh, we got a second producer for my show specifically. And when we started to introduce these things, it just made everybody's life so much easier. One, because they were actually outlined and bullet pointed so people knew better how to have success. But two, because people are looking forward to things. For example, everyone at my company right now is very much looking forward to us hitting our sales goal because if we hit our sales goal in May, we're gonna hire a full-time financial person. So right now, we have about 20 people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:19) We use a part-time financial person, but we don't have that HR function. There's always a question. Okay, you go to this person when you need to know about your days off or this system when you—there's not a solid person you can go to. So everybody's looking forward to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:34) They're like, hey, we're gonna get this person, and then we're not gonna have to chase payment anymore. Sales team can always sell and not chase payment. The payment person can. And so we took all the frustrations from all the different teams, and we found that there was this group of them that we could call, like, a finance person and then justify the hire because it helps sales get more time.

(Paul at 00:45:54) So that's awesome. So you basically aligned a goal with, you know, you aligned the frustrations with some higher level goal. And now when everyone's aligned, they just go for it. Right? That's the awesome thing.

(Paul at 00:46:07) Right? Yeah. In fact, a lot of leaders ask me, how do I get more out of my team? I feel like they could be working harder. You know, that's very common these days, especially with, you know, what's going on with, like, Elon and all that.

(Paul at 00:46:20) We can talk about that, but, you know, I always tell people, well, to what extent are you actually creating a sense of mission for your people? What is the mission of the company? Do people understand what they're working for? Right? If you have a strong sense of mission, people will work hard because they understand that there's a goal that they're working toward.

(Paul at 00:46:39) Right? I always tell people, you know, the Apollo space program, janitors worked all night long, keeping the bathrooms clean for the engineers that were designing and working on the spacecraft. Nobody told them to do that. Right? There's no manager.

(Paul at 00:46:55) There's just, like, everybody got sucked into the mission of the company. And, you know, people say, oh, well, we're not going to the moon. We're just building a SaaS product. Well, it doesn't matter. I mean, people want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

(Paul at 00:47:09) Right? They wanna contribute to the success of the group. We're very social animals. That's how we're wired. And so you have to kind of create that for people. You have to have that sense of mission.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:20) 100%. And it's hard to compete with putting people on Mars. I mean, that's a—I also heard about it to your point. I heard about it with the Apollo mission. I also heard some other great examples during World War I with the people making the fabrics for the soldier's uniform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:38) They would, it just drove them, and the amount of, you know, the gun manufacturers, and these, we had all of these facilities essentially operating around the clock to produce the materials needed for war. And, you know, there was like you said, there was no manager needing to tell them to do that.

(Paul at 00:47:56) No. It's not what management is. It's not what leadership is. Right? And so it's what we need to do. We need to create this. We have to create these environments, then you'll find that it's actually a fun place to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:07) How can people work with you? They wanna work with you. Where do they go?

(Paul at 00:48:10) Find me on leadership.dev, and they can also follow me on LinkedIn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:15) Boom. Nailed it. Dude, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Paul at 00:48:18) It was fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:10) 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 would 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.