TT: The Symphony of Leadership with Ashley Goodall, former SVP at Cisco

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans. Ashley Goodall, a senior vice president at Cisco at the time of recording, joins us in this episode to share his best advice on why a leader should act as a symphony conductor. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) I am just massively intrigued because he's got this wealth of knowledge. I wanted to be like, what did you learn? But I'm curious. You wrote this book, Nine Lies About Work, to sort of set the record straight about common misbeliefs. I think—

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:39) To help us in a way get out of our own way in the world of work. And there are many things, and of course we've written about a lot of them, although I think we could probably come up with some more. We read about a lot of them in the book, and they have this sort of characteristic that the leaders of an organization, with all the best intentions in the world, try and tidy up, if you like, the mess of work. They try and tidy up, you know, we're worried that people aren't all working on the same thing, so we're gonna have a cascaded goal system. We're worried that people don't understand what the company is for, so we're gonna talk about culture at a high level a lot.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:21) We're worried that our people need to grow and develop, so we'll tell them what a uniform ideal of performance is, and then we'll tell them where their gaps are. And there are many other examples of these sorts of things. And of course, if you're on the receiving end of those, none of them is particularly helpful. Because down in the trenches, in the teams doing the work every day, firstly, you know exactly what work you've got in front of you because your team is connected to the world, your team is connected to your customers, your team is connected to other teams inside the organization. It's not hard for smart people to figure out which things should demand their attention on any given day.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:02:02) And so when the goals come cascading down on you like toxic rain, you're sort of like, okay, what's this for and where am I in this? Where am I in this? When you are measured against a set of competencies and you get your scores, you have two reactions. First reaction is, where do those scores come from? Because that's not how I understand myself from the inside.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:02:28) And secondly, why are you all hopping on about the bits of me that are least useful to the world? Why aren't you focusing on the bits that are the most useful to the world? So I think the impetus behind writing the book was to say, look, we've designed the world of work as though certain things are true. If you push on them and you look at the evidence and you look at the research, you find that they are not true. They are lies.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:02:57) And we are gonna be hamstrung in our efforts to build workplaces that nourish and support the people in them until we can get out of our own way. What's interesting is you can measure somebody's experience of work if you know how to do it. And that experience can and does change and is changeable. But unfortunately, the way you do it is not a 360. And the way you do it is not a manager rating.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:03:31) And the way you do it is not an assessment with 53 questions. And the way you do it fundamentally is not to ask other people what they think of Joel today because you get a whole bunch of noise and not very much signal. In fact, specifically not much signal. The way to do it is to say, Joel, what's your experience at work today? And the questions I ask you to define that should be questions that I know from prior research lead to or predict your performance, predict your innovation, predict your creativity, and on the other side predict whether you're going to stay or leave a company.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:04:10) So there are ways to do this, but in a way we've massively overcomplicated the design of work and how we do these sorts of things. And there are some very simple truths in how you actually measure a human's experience at work. And when you get the simplicity right, then you can do all sorts of other interesting things. But as you've discovered, you're trying to do some good in the world and help leaders. And if what you have to do first is cut through this sort of thicket of 360 and then this and then this other thing and then this other thing, you never emerge from the thicket.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:50) Yeah. I just I don't think that people can reliably rate other people, and that should—

(Ashley Goodall at 00:04:57) Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely provable. And by the way, it's not a new—this isn't like breaking news. People can't rate other people. This is like 20-year-old news.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) But you were saying it for me. It was like when I saw that on the list, I was like, look, everyone look, it's on the list. Because we found it to be true, but then you go out in the world and everyone acts like it's not true.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:05:19) Well, I'll tell you what. I mean, everyone acts like they have a thought about other people, which is true. We all have thoughts about other people, but our thoughts about other people aren't the truth of the other people. They're only the truth of our thoughts about other people. And yet when we design our—it's almost like if you think about tennis, it's almost like our measurement systems are always us jumping over the net into the other person's court and trying to play the game for them.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:05:46) Whereas what we really need to do is stay on our side of the net and go, look, my experience of you is this. Now that's good data because I know what my experience is. I'm a reliable witness, if you like, of my experience. But I don't know anything about you. I know nothing about you, and I can't come to know anything about you. All I can do is understand my own experience. Now that means we can measure, but we've got to stop measuring by jumping over the net and opining on what other people—describe our experience. What that looks like is, you know, would I always go to Joel for excellent work? That doesn't tell me anything about Joel.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:06:32) It tells me about me. But if you add that up, you now know about the people around Joel and their experience of Joel. That's not nothing. It's much more humble, but it's actionable as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:46) That is really interesting. So like, the framing is very important. I like how you—that's a small subtle difference, but it's very important.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:06:53) Well, and it connects—you know, in the book, we write about feedback as well. And of course, feedback is another case where we just keep jumping over the net. Let me come over the net and tell you what you need to do. Tell you how you should do this differently. Tell you how you should do this better.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:07:10) But of course those things are actually—they can't know how you should do something better. They can only know how I would do something better. But yet we jump over the net, we trample around in your hand for a little bit, and then we give you—and then we tell you off because you haven't done anything different. You're like—you get the feedback. And you're sitting there going, the way that you think about this stuff is completely different than the way I think about this stuff, and you have no idea how I think about this stuff.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:07:36) And you can't live a day in my head. So the most useful thing for you to do is stay on your side of the net and give me your reactions to what I did. Then I can gauge my impact in the world. Then I can figure out from my sense of who I am and what I'm trying to do how to change those reactions. But you gotta stay on your side of the net.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:57) Now I'm always trying to grow and improve as a leader. Should I be going deep into my strengths, or should I try to average out and be well-rounded?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:08:09) You can sort of take your pick. If you want to thrive as a leader, you're never gonna get there by becoming marginally better at the things that you suck at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:22) I love it.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:08:24) And the evidence for this is look at leaders in the real world. Now, again, in companies, we like to tidy up leadership, and we like to say every leader should have the following list of characteristics. And, you know, we arm and arm about whether authenticity is more important than vulnerability. And while we're sort of grinding on all of that off inside some darkened room somewhere, meanwhile, there are actual leaders out in the real world and they're leading. We know they're leading because people follow them, which is the only thing that characterizes a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) Yeah, that's my John Maxwell right there. I love that.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:08:57) No followers equals no leader, period, end of conversation. And so you look at people with followers—they're not at all well-rounded. They have colossal deficits, but they've all figured out something that they're really good at doing, uniquely good at doing in many cases. And they've understood over the course of a lifetime how to refine that, how to make it more powerful, how to make it more visible for people across the world, and how to use that to give people something to hook onto. We talk in the book about spikes, and really when you look at the best leaders, you find they are beautifully spiky.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:09:39) They have understood themselves. They have understood what they have going on with such great clarity that they know how to magnify that. And the corollary of this, by the way, which I think many listeners will recognize, is that leaders are actually slightly annoying people. Because we still see the faults and yet we follow, and we know in ourselves that we're following you despite your faults. We're forgiving your faults, if you like.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:11) Following is an act of forgiveness. It's not going around going, I'm not gonna follow until I find a perfect person. It is, however, looking at the world and looking at the people around you and going, my God, that person over there has this amazing talent. I wanna be part of that. And at the same time, they're not very good at this and I occasionally miss on this.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:31) And those things are gonna frustrate me. But for me, the trade is worth it. I'm gonna hook my wagon to yours because of what I see that is so magnificent about you, and I'll forgive you, if you like, your trespasses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:45) What are your strengths?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:49) I'm a distiller.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:54) Yeah. That's why I like you, man. That's—

(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:57) Sounds like I spend my time in an inebriated state. But actually I'm not so much talking about that. But I've learned that what I can do is I can look out into the world and I can see patterns and I can make them simple and clear for people. And that if I keep doing that and keep doing that and keep doing that, that clarity is useful to other people. So a lot of my spikiness as a leader, if you like, comes from being able to say this not this, this not this, this not this, and do so over time with a heightened sense of contrast and a greater sense of clarity.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:11:42) So what I do is I distill things, and in the distillation, I serve others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:49) I love it. I have this thing I call the three R's: reduce, refine, repeat. Because I'm just—I noticed that I constantly—I used to build large software applications. And so I'd go into an industry I knew nothing about. I would consume everything in the world about insurance or financial products, build out this entire system, solve all these problems, make everything really, really, really simple, and then go do that in a whole other industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) And I found out that my superpower is just consuming large amounts of data, simplifying it down as basic as possible, and everyone's always like, oh.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:12:23) And that sort of clarity is very hard won. I mean, it's not—you know, I think many of us at work crave for greater simplicity. And very few people run around going, you know, it would be great if things were a little more complicated because things are more than complicated enough. But the simplicity is hard won. It's not a trivial matter to be able to go, you know what, folks, it's not feedback, it's attention.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:12:54) That one thought, don't give people feedback, give them attention. Don't give people feedback, give them reactions. Those are—you know, the beautiful thing about anything that's simple, that's well done, is when you encounter it, you go, oh my goodness. I mean, that makes perfect sense. But you couldn't have thought of it for yourself.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:13:16) And the you couldn't have thought of it for yourself bit means that somebody has really been grinding on what are the differences in detail? What is the essence of something? And then how can we clarify that essence?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:33) What are some of the patterns that you're noticing between your best teams and your best leaders?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:13:37) The best teams seem to be able to solve for two things. They seem to be able to solve—at least this is according to all the research I've ever looked at, including research I've done at Cisco. They have figured out, their leaders have figured out and the team together has figured out how to see and value the uniqueness of each person. Teams are actually great individualizers.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:14:04) There's a beautiful paradox there, by the way. In order to be seen as an individual for who you are, the best way to do that is to group with a bunch of other people who see you for what you are. So first thing is teams are individualizers. And then secondly, teams create a common understanding of how we support one another and what matters most to us, which is a universal thing. So teams manage to live in the—they manage to make powerful the tension between an individual and a group.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:14:39) They manage to make that not friction, but amplification. They manage to make that something where individuals can thrive because the team thrives and the team thrives because individuals thrive. And the best leaders know they have a role to play in that, that it's a significant role, and that it's not an exhaustive role. In other words, the team has to solve certain things for itself and the leader can help, but the leader can't get people all the way there by themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) Starting to remind me of the conductor, right? You can't play all these instruments, right?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:15:15) Yeah. And you know, the thing that I learned conducting a symphony orchestra—I mean, the thing that's sort of glaringly obvious if you think about it for a second is the product of the orchestra is sound, and the conductor is the one person who doesn't make any by definition. So the product of a leader and a team isn't made by the leader. The space to make it is made by the leader. The possibility to make it is made by the leader.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:15:46) The environment to make it is made by the leader, but the making is done by the team. And there's a moment in conducting at the beginning of a piece where you stand either in rehearsal or in performance. You stand in front of the orchestra and you give the downbeat. And of course, at the bottom of the downbeat, you don't actually know for sure that anything is gonna happen. And, you know, they might all not play.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:16) Now you've practiced it and there's a sort of general agreement that you're gonna do this and they're gonna play. But it reminds you in that nanosecond that the doing of the work isn't the leader. The doing of the work is the team. The making of the space for the work is the leader. And I think you can translate that all the way through to what we know about teams at work.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:39) The leader can certainly give attention to each team member to what it is that's unique about them. That leader can certainly bring the team together and say, let's make sure we understand what we're confronting together. Let's make sure we talk about what matters to us. Let's make sure we have a conversation about excellence. Let's make sure that we support one another.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:57) But the team leader can't actually do any of that. They can frame it and emphasize it and point to it. But then it's for the others to do it or not.