TECH TITANS: Navigating Turbulent Waters and Building Strong Relationships with Anthony Scriffignano, SVP and Chief Data Scientist at Dun & Bradstreet

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans. It features our greatest leadership advice distilled in these shorter summary episodes. Anthony from Dun & Bradstreet joins us in this episode to share his best advice on how to keep your head above water as a leader. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Anthony at 00:00:22) When I was in my early twenties, I was having a rough time. Somebody that I was close to at the time said it's clear that you're drowning and you need to, instead of fighting the waves and drowning out there and splashing around, you need to learn how to flow with it. And instead of drowning, you need to ride the waves and figure out where that's going to be and position yourself there. And then you'll have a much smoother experience than right now. Things are just coming at you out of nowhere.

(Anthony at 00:00:51) If you watch Olympic swimmers, they don't make a lot of splash except for butterfly. But, you know, in general, even in butterfly, if you watch Olympic swimmers, there's not a lot of wasted water. Right? You don't see their arms flailing around. It's very efficient.

(Anthony at 00:01:10) And a lot of wasted energy of, you know, pontificating and fomenting about how important you are and making people fear your next words. And, alright, fine. You can win. You want to win? You can win. But we have a bigger problem here than making you win. We're trying to do something. And obviously, you can't say those words because you can be right and dead. Right? So you have to find the way to get that advice in there in a way that can be received by the other when you're in those situations. Not always easy. And it, you know, since this is a tech audience, very often these things happen when the thing broke or the thing didn't do what the thing was supposed to do. Or you're trying to replace the thing with another thing, and the other thing doesn't do the thing that the first thing did. And you got a lot of experts running around trying to out-think each other and out-expert each other.

(Anthony at 00:02:06) And very often, they are sort of—I use the analogy of trying to push the rock up the hill. Right? If you all get behind the rock and push, the rock goes up the hill as efficiently as a rock can go up a hill. But if you start—even if you're all pushing up, but you're pushing at vectored angles—you're wasting a lot of that energy, and that tends to happen. And then somebody will come along and yell at the rock, or somebody will come along and say, lead harder. You know, these ridiculous—clearly, you're not effective in pushing that rock. So I'm going to ask you to push the rock and a bigger rock, you know. That happens in tech all the time because it's a constantly changing environment. And you thought you were responding to this thing, and then that other thing happened, and you never finished this thing. So you get into this state of hyper-disruption is what I call it. Disrupted disruption.

(Anthony at 00:02:59) Peter Vaill, amazing man, wrote a book called Learning as a Way of Being. And he talks about organizational white water. When organizations are in this state of constant frenzy, you do different things when you're in white water than you do when you have time to patch the holes in the boat and so forth. So as a leader in tech, if you're always in white water, you know, you have to reflect on how much of that white water is being caused by your attempts to deal with the white water. To use your example of, you're trying to swim so hard that you're creating a lot of splash and waves. And sometimes the easier way to move forward is to not push as hard and to push more efficiently. It's easy to say, not so easy to do when there's, you know, 17 priorities and four people trying to address them. It's hard because it's also a little bit abstract. It's a little ambiguous, right, to try to figure it out. And it's not a quick thing either. For me, it took years.

(Anthony at 00:03:56) One of my first moments growing as a leader was, you know, I was individual contributor, software engineer, and I'd sit there and write test-driven development. I'd command the computer to do things all day. A hundred times a day, thousand times a day, I'd send commands, and if anything failed, it would give me a debug log output. Right? So I know exactly what you told it to do, whether that was what you intended or not.

(Anthony at 00:04:16) Yeah. And then I'd go interact with people in my life, whether it's a relationship I was in or, you know, work thing. And they don't do any of that. Nope. No. Somebody had said something to me because I was getting frustrated. And they said, you know, you can win the conversation. You can win the argument, but lose the relationship. Yeah. And I was like, oh, wow. That—you can be right and lose the relationship. So having that self-awareness of how hard do you push and where do you push? Those things are actually really important.

(Anthony at 00:04:50) There is the concept of overt intentionality. Doing what you do on purpose. We can't always do everything we do on purpose because we get tired. We're human beings. We have, you know, egos. We have history. We attach that history to people that don't even know us and say, oh, they're like that person. They don't know they're like that person. Right? I can't work with him. I worked with him two years ago, and he was a jerk. Well, are you the same person you were two years ago? Of course not. Well, why don't you let him not be who he was two years ago? Why don't you, you know, at least start from the premise that life has put you back together for some reason?

(Anthony at 00:05:28) These are very easy things to say, very hard things to do. People are not generally as deterministic as programming environments. And sometimes the way we see the situation is clouded by all of that context that we imagine to it that may or may not be there. Some scientists argue that that's how the human race has actually survived—is the ability to intuit context where we don't have enough data. You know, you hear a growl, you see rustling, you imagine an animal. You don't have to actually see the animal. That probably helped us not die in caves and forests, but it might get in the way in the corporate jungle. Can't believe I just said that, but yes.

(Anthony at 00:06:14) When I started, I thought there would be an answer. Like, okay. Here's your style. Take this test. Here's the type leader you need to be. And then I realized it's more like cooking a meal where you have to adjust as you go.

(Anthony at 00:06:27) Yes.

(Anthony at 00:06:27) And you have to kind of figure—there's some basic concepts that you need to understand and that work, you know, relatively well as a base. And then you sort of just have to figure it out as you go. And knowing when to inject humor versus when to be serious and understanding the energy of a team and how to raise it or lower it based off of what you need right now. All of that mixed together is what I found, according to my definition of what I consider a great leader.

(Anthony at 00:06:56) So what you're talking about in the study of leadership is called reflective leadership. Not just leading the way you lead because it feels right, but thinking about why you do what you do. And actually reflecting within yourself on the choices that you make as a leader. It is a very compelling point that reflective leaders are way more effective. Sometimes intuitive leaders who just lead, and they know what to do and they say, we're going that way, can be very effective and they can be this sort of unconscious competent. They don't know why they do what they do and they're not doing it on purpose. Those are a very rare breed.

(Anthony at 00:07:32) The folks that challenge what they did today, how effective was it? Where could I have been more effective? How could I have been more effective? Who seek feedback from others? And I'm not talking about sending out a survey or a thing. I'm talking about going in authentically, having a talk with somebody and saying, you know, let's take the stripes off. I don't feel like that went well. Tell me how you felt. You know, tell me where it came from, from your perspective. Sometimes explaining why you're about to do what you're about to do.

(Anthony at 00:08:04) And we were talking earlier that I have many years in emergency as an EMT, so emergency response. When you take incident command, one of the things they teach you is how to evacuate an area. If there's a gas leak or some not obvious danger to a large number of people, you don't have time to do what they do in the movies, you know, yell, run around, yell, you got, you know, the thing's going to blow up. That's not how it happens in real life. In real life, somebody, the incident commander makes a decision—we're going to go to the high school. You don't always know that that's the best place to go. You got to pick a direction. Because if you tell people to evacuate the area and leave immediately, half of them are going to move in the wrong direction, and they're going to move to someplace more dangerous. So you pick a place and you say, we're evacuating the area. Please make your way to the high school. Further instructions will follow. Right? And you have to say that with conviction and clarity and certainty that you may not actually have in that moment. That's not a lack of authenticity. That's called saving people's lives.

(Anthony at 00:09:05) Rarely in corporate America is somebody going to die if we don't make the decision in this instant. So that ability to stop and say, why am I doing this? Don't hit send yet. Right? Why am I doing this? What am I trying to achieve? How could this be misinterpreted? Who can help me? It doesn't mean you have to overthink everything, but it means you could probably think a little bit more about the really important decisions and probably be a little bit more effective if you just take your ego out of it a little bit.

(Anthony at 00:09:38) So that's sometimes called authentic leadership. That's sometimes referred to as reflective leadership. They're kind of cousins. They're not the same thing. And then there's another cousin of that, servant leadership, which is leading for the benefit of those you lead rather than for your own personal health. You know, just trying to get more of whatever it is you want. There's a lot of people that that is really their objective function—is to climb over the bodies of everybody else and get more of whatever it is they want. It can be very effective for some people. I don't want to be that person. So you have to decide who you want to be and why you want to be it. These are questions that have been around for thousands of years.

(Anthony at 00:10:13) But it's amazing. That's a—it's like a choose your own adventure. You can decide what type of leader you want to be. You can go hard in that direction and then realize what the balance is for it and then adjust accordingly.

(Anthony at 00:10:25) And you may not get what you want. You may get more of what you need. You may not actually get to where you thought you were going. You have to be open to that. There's, you know, in martial arts, there's a principle they call being like a reed in the wind. You see it all the time in movies and stuff. Instead of resisting whatever's happening to you, you sort of bend with it and then use that energy to go somewhere else. And then depending on the style and the epistemology, some were better for both of you or some were better for you. But a reed is not weak. A reed bends in the wind, and that's what makes it strong. You can kill somebody with a reed. Right? But if the reed were to try to oppose every breeze that blew on it and resist everything like an oak tree, it wouldn't last very long. So thinking about it like that, reacting in a—this is going to sound really weird, but reacting in a proactive way, reacting with purpose, reacting to a place that you choose to go is a very empowering thing to do as a leader.