Author: Alexis

Many managers hesitate to talk about careers with their team members.

Two objections come up again and again:

• “People don’t really know what they want. Why would I open that conversation?”
• “If I help them think about their long-term future, won’t I just help them leave?”

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I discussed these questions with Russ Laraway — former leader at Google and Twitter, co-founder and former COO of Candor Inc., and author of When They Win, You Win.

What emerged from our conversation is both simple and counterintuitive:
career conversations, when done seriously, increase commitment rather than reduce it.

People usually know more than we think

One of the most persistent myths in management is that people have no idea what they want to become.

Russ’s experience — working with thousands of leaders and teams — shows the opposite. Most people do have a sense of direction. What they often lack is a safe space and a skilled manager to help articulate it.

When managers invest time and attention in these conversations, people don’t suddenly become disloyal. They become clearer.

Retention at all costs is a losing strategy

Russ shared a strong conviction, shaped by both experience and data:
retention at all costs puts the company first — not the human.

He tells stories of sitting down with team members to evaluate external offers together. Sometimes the right decision is to stay. Sometimes it is to leave. What matters is that the decision is aligned with the person’s long-term vision.

Ironically, managers who behave this way tend to retain people longer. Trust grows when people feel their manager is genuinely invested in their future — not just their output.

Career conversations reduce the “grass is greener” effect

Many people leave not because their current role is bad, but because they believe the next one will magically be better.

Career conversations change that dynamic.

By working with a long-term vision and a concrete career action plan, managers can often make small but meaningful adjustments in the current role: exposure to budgeting, collaboration with another function, or responsibilities aligned with future aspirations.

Suddenly, the present becomes a place to grow — not something to escape.

Leadership behaviors can be measured — and that matters

One of the most powerful aspects of Russ’s work comes from his time at Candor Inc. and later at Qualtrics.

There, leadership was treated as an independent variable:
direction, coaching, and career behaviors were measured directly by employees and correlated with engagement and business outcomes.

This rigor matters because many organizations suffer from leadership overload:
too many frameworks, too little coherence, and no clear connection between selection, training, assessment, and coaching.

When managers don’t know what truly matters, they guess. And guessing is expensive.

Investing in people is demanding — and that’s why it works

Real career conversations take time.
They require effort, listening, and humility.

They force managers to see people not as resources to retain, but as humans to support.

And that is precisely why they work.

When people feel genuinely invested in, they take more responsibility, stay engaged longer, and deliver more meaningful impact — not because they are controlled, but because they are trusted.

That, ultimately, is what Emerging Leadership looks like in practice.

References:

• Radical Candor by Kim Scott
• When They Win, You Win by Russ Laraway

Russ’s insights provide a fresh perspective on leadership, emphasizing the importance of measurable behaviors, meaningful career conversations, and prioritization. Tune in to the full episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership to explore these concepts and learn how to implement them in your organization.

Here is the transcript:

Alexis: Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. In today’s episode, we are honored to have Russ Laraway, an accomplished leader with 30 years of operational experience. Russ has held significant roles, from being a company commander in the Marine Corps to managing positions at Google and Twitter. He co-founded Candor, Inc. with best-selling author Kim Scott, and has served as Chief People Officer at Qualtrics. Russ is also the author of the insightful book “When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think.”

Welcome to “Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership,” Russ! How do you typically introduce yourself to someone you’ve just met?

Russ: Yeah, that’s a wild question. I just say my name at this point. I don’t really say anything else. And I, and I have some reasons for that. I [00:01:00] think, Alexis, what you’ll gather from me over the next several minutes together is I’m a very intentional human being in, Ways that I think are perhaps uncommon and might seem a little bit nutty to people.

This is one such example I realized that what’s common Is that we often introduce ourselves and we sort of lead with our really our professional identity our title and company or whatever And that’s not even probably in my top five identities. I’m a dad, I’m a husband, I’m a friend.

And so I started to just become really conscious about that. Additionally, I kind of have to say that as my career has transpired, I’ve had some really, really good jobs that are, I don’t know, I think you might say objectively one might say.

They’re kind of impressive. Then I get into this problem where, gosh, I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging ever either. And so I really started to sort of subordinate [00:02:00] the professional identity in introing myself and just kind of wait. And if someone wants to talk about what do you do, I’m happy to, happy to talk about that.

Alexis: And what happens when you do that?

Russ: We have this house here in Utah in the United States. And it’s a very unusual house. It’s really neat, but it’s unusual. And when we show people the house and take them through, because. You know, some of the features and because of the size, it’s very common.

People, people think they’re being slick, but this has happened now like a hundred times, somebody will say, so what do you do? Because they’re looking at this house and they’re like, how the heck, you know, that kind of thing. And it’s funny, the first couple of times I realized, well, I finally, it took me a minute.

I’m a little slow sometimes to realize what people were, they were trying to triangulate. Like some version of how can you afford this? Right. So then that makes me even want to sort of subordinate the professional identity even more. And then I just generally will say I’ve been, I’ve been an executive in tech. So that’s kind of what I’ll say. Because that [00:03:00] is really, I know what they’re really asking and that helps explain, you know, this house. So I don’t know. It’s a really wild question. I’ve been very intentional about it over the last several years where. I’ll just let someone else, if they want to peel that onion and they want to find out what I’ve really done and ask questions out of genuine curiosity, I’ll go there with them.

But generally I just say my name and let other people kind of take the lead and see where our introductions take us. I don’t know. What do you, what do you think about that?

Alexis: That really resonates with me. For years, I introduced myself to anybody, regardless of the context, by stating what I was doing for a living. Sometimes, people were impressed, and sometimes not, but it always led the conversation to professional stuff.

While I would have loved to discuss something else. I am an avid book reader of fiction and non-fiction. I would love to hear about that or anything you are interested in, and necessarily what you are doing for a living.

In short, it really resonates with me!

Russ: Well, glad to hear that. It’s also it’s been frankly a mouthful the past few years. You know, I’m, I go from chief people officer at Qualtrics to chief people officer at Goodwater. By the way, wrote a book sort of in between those two. So I’m an author. Then switched over to operating partner at Goodwater.

So that’s kind of two titles in a little over two years and author and chief people officer of culture. And by the way, now I’m, I’m actually with some buddies. I’m writing a screenplay.

Alexis: Oh 

Russ: and, and so, you know, you just, it’s just tough to, it’s tough to fit it all, you know, say, say my name and see where it goes.

 I’m way more proud of, my sons and my marriage and my,, that I’m a good friend to people, I’m just way more proud of those things than anything else. So yeah, cool. Fun question. Great question. I’ve done a bunch of podcasts, I think, as you know, and that is the first time I’ve been asked that question and that’s really fun.

Alexis: I love it! My friend Michael Doyle, who is a great coach and a great communicator and also the co-author of my second book, wrote that question for me. I love that you liked it!
Your book, “When They Win, You Win,” proposes that being a great manager is simpler than one might think. Can you tell us more?

Russ: Yeah. Why I wrote the book, maybe I’ll start with why I wrote the book. It’s a really simple idea. I believe people deserve to be led well. You know, stop, you know, sort of that’s that idea itself is, can be unpacked for months, but the problem that I have seen and measured, by the way, is that actually people are not being led well and this is kind of hard to believe, in fact, measurably managers have not improved in 30 years.

This is like, you start to combine stuff from Gallup and some other like Qualtrics, other employee experience [00:06:00] companies, and you start to see a pattern that managers are really flailing in the world big time. I have a lot of rigor behind these statements, mathematical rigor behind these statements, as you know, in the intro and part one of the book. And then I thought, well, gee, how can that be? How can we be standing here? Employee engagement is a measurement that’s been around for 30 years. It comes from the field of IO psychology. And it is explained, by the tune of like 70 percent of employee engagement is explained by manager quality.

And employee engagement itself predicts business results. And so you’ve got this really interesting relationship, manager quality, employee engagement, business results, and engagement has not improved in 30 years. Managers have not improved in 30 years. How can that be when I can’t walk 10 steps outside without tripping over another book or podcast or article in HBR about how to be a better leader?

Like, How, how, could it possibly [00:07:00] be the case managers aren’t getting better when there’s a pile of content that’s taller than Mount Everest out there trying to help them be better. So I dug in on, on that and I had this realization. I learned this in my time at Radical Candor this probably my biggest insight I have from my time with Kim there, which I think might be on our agenda to talk about a little later.

So I can come back to that, but I had this realization that One of the reasons managers are failing is because all this content out there, including their training programs in their company, there’s too much stuff. That’s number number one problem is too much. We’re asking managers to pay attention to too many things.

It does not hang together, so there’s not a common system. Let’s say that is pervasive. There’s a lot of like, well, what worked for me, the problem with that is the person you’re learning from isn’t necessarily conscious of exactly why that worked. What was their business context? What was the team context?

What were their executive relationships? Like, what are the things that [00:08:00] contributed to you having success with that leadership advice you’re giving? By the way, worse, the manager who’s receiving the advice is extremely biased in what they choose to opt into or not. They grab for the things that sound familiar, the things there may be even already good at things that sound perhaps easier.

So there’s too much stuff. It doesn’t hang together. And worst of all, none of it is held to measurable account, like whatever leadership, you know, prescription you’re offering. What’s your proof that it’s worth paying attention to? There isn’t any out there. So I said, you know, there’s no wonder people aren’t being led well, systematically or the managers have not improved.

And by the way, like you’ve heard the cliches, people don’t leave bad jobs. They leave bad managers. Like I’m not exactly saying the most controversial idea in the planet. I just was, I was just like, how is it possible? They haven’t actually improved. That seems impossible. Well, that’s how too much stuff doesn’t hang together.

held a measurable account. And so I realized, Oh, you know, the world does not need another person’s opinion about what it [00:09:00] takes to be a great manager. What we need is to measure, measure a set of leadership behaviors, small in number, ideally, that measurably and predictably lead to more engaged employees and better business outcome.

And so my really talented team of quants at Qualtrics and I set about running that. Experiment, you know, we were lucky Qualtrics has an employee experience platform that, you know, it was very natural for us to measure a number of these aspects of the employee experience. And all it took was some cleverness from our people analytics team to mix these things together in a giant stats package with things like ratings and quota attainment and contract renewal rate and in engineering, like lines of code checked in, like any measurement you could find that would indicate business performance.

We could measure the frequency with which managers were showing these behaviors. And of course we could measure employee engagement. And by the way, several other aspects of the employee experience. And so we were able to tease out about a dozen or so. Leadership behaviors that predicted [00:10:00] engaged employees and better business outcomes.

That’s extraordinary. That’s never existed before. That’s the book I wrote and why I wrote it in the books organized by the way, direction, coaching, career. Those are the three buckets, let’s say. Of behaviors direction is a set of behaviors, set of behaviors, their coaching, set of behaviors, career, set of behaviors.

So that’s kind of why I wrote it. That’s the impact we’re hoping to have is let’s demystify this. Let’s take out a bunch of the bias. And let’s focus on a really small number of behaviors that actually work that matter. And, and by the way, in almost any context that these behaviors work.

Alexis: So you are telling us that the leadership behaviors you organized into the three buckets, direction, coaching, and career, are direct predictors of employee engagement and business performance. I have to admit, I’m a big fan of your career conversation approach, and I’ve used it more than a hundred times in coaching or mentoring session.

Could you explain this concept to our audience and share why it’s so [00:11:00] effective in managing and developing teams? 

Russ: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So part four of the book career this is something very original in the book. A model that I’ve invented over, got to be coming up on 20 years now, invented and refined. It’s called career conversations. And it’s three distinct conversations.

The first conversation is called the life story conversation, which is really about having people tell you their life story and then really taking the time to understand their pivots. Even at young ages, by the way, the pivots they’ve made and why they’ve made them. And through that process you learn sort of what people deeply value in their work.

It’s fascinating. And it’s important, I think, to do it just that way, rather than just to ask them what they value, because I think people accidentally frequently lie. They don’t mean to but they’re not actually generally conscious of what they value. But when you start, when you have them tell you their life story, And you help them probe the pivots that they’ve made.

You learn actually sort of a show don’t tell [00:12:00] version of learning what they value. So that’s the first conversation. And that really helps me understand things that in the, that are subsequent in the subsequent two conversations, things we should do, things we shouldn’t do, because we know what this person values.

The second conversation, which is the most important by far, is helping to get to what I call a career vision statement, which is basically like, what’s your dream job? What do you want to be when you grow up? And a lot of people, by the way, have skepticism that this is feasible for our young Gen Z employees or whatever, you know, like, People our age will say things like, I don’t even know what I want to be when I grow up.

I’m just going to tell you like, and I give a really strong prescription in the book for how to do this well, because it’s, it’s not, most people are kind of come into the room convinced they’re not sure. But you can facilitate them into the vision, and I teach how to do that in the book. I won’t get into it here.

It takes a little, a minute. And I’ll say for myself, I’ve done, I’ve done this a thousand times [00:13:00] and I have successfully facilitated every single one of those people into a, into a working vision statement. The reason this is so important is because it puts someone’s development into the context of what they want to be.

And by the way, those vision statements will generally be, and should be outside the four walls of this company. And this is one of the first powerful ideas is I have just acknowledged that you are a human being with a life well beyond. What we’re doing here in this office right now. And I’m interested in that.

And I think it’s my job to participate in your growth and development toward that. But perhaps more important is, you know, you know, question I’ve been asked Alexis a million times is should I get an MBA?

I’m like, man, I don’t know. What do you want to be? What do you, like, if you want to be the CFO at Disney as your, one of your, your career visions, then yeah, you better get one and you better get it from like three places, you know, that kind of thing.

But if you want to be a you know, if you ultimately want to write a screenplay. No, don’t do not go get an MBA. It won’t help you at all. The people who finance movies, I think [00:14:00] oftentimes wouldn’t recognize. A good financial discipline if it fell out of the sky and hit him on the head. And then last is the last conversation is really about the career action plan, which is now that we know what you want to be when you grow up conversation to now that we know what you deeply value, let’s put together a short term plan that helps you take tangible steps toward the longterm vision right now.

Let’s take some steps right now. You want CFO at Disney. Clearly I cannot make that happen, but I can help you think about ways to that you can take small steps in that direction and that creation plans it’s four parts. There’s four discrete aspects will follow we’ll set up action items who will do what by when that’s how you know, you have a, a good action item.

And so and now this employee and I are both actively working on their long term career vision, what they want to be when they grow up together while they’re reporting to me, it doesn’t mean. We don’t focus on the day to day work that has to get done. It doesn’t mean any of that. And, you know, it’s funny, one of the most [00:15:00] common push, I get to two sources of pushback most often.

One is people don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. So why would I bother with this? That’s. I’m telling you, they do. You just have to make it safe and skillfully facilitate that conversation. And the second is, wait a minute. Why on this company’s dime, should I be helping a person think about their longterm?

Am I not just lose, am I just greasing the skids for them to leave? And what’s fascinating about this model, and I give retentive. People tend to stay with a manager who invests in them like this for longer for a number of reasons. One is they’re saying, well, this is unusual. I’ve never had a manager invest in me this way.

I think I’ll hang out here for a bit. The other is like a lot of people leave a current job because they have this grass is greener problem. They think the next job is better. And what you learn. Is that you can potentially make small [00:16:00] adjustments to your job right now in your career action plan. The first thing we do is evaluate what can we change in your current role, given your longterm vision.

So for example, if you want to be the CFO at Disney, I can have you run my team’s budget. Now that might seem a little silly or trite. But, you work with FP& A now, and you see, you start to see from the inside, what does the CFO’s organization look like, right? It’s, it’s actually powerful. So now you’re not necessarily as inclined to say the grass is greener because we make small adjustments that are in my, as your manager, within my power to make.

We can make small changes to your current role. We can chart a next job for you. That’s maybe on my team or maybe on another team inside this company that makes sense, given your long term vision. Right. We bring to bear and people in our networks that can help inform and influence these decisions you need to make.

That’s a part of the career action plan. So it’s robust and it really helps a person feel invested in, in a very unique way. And [00:17:00] so counter intuitively. Whereas it feels like you’re greasing the skids for somebody to go sliding out the door. The reality is they tend to stay longer when the manager goes through the full career action plan model with them.

 At the end of the day, I think a person that you’re working with on this feels invested in uniquely and in a way that contemplates their humanity. Not just their sort of economic value to this company. And that’s, that just doesn’t happen. I don’t care. You know, it’s hard to pull off actually, as a manager, it’s hard to find those moments to invest in a person like that.

Given the core nature of our job is manager directs employee, Employer, you know, so I think that’s why it’s so powerful. I think that’s maybe, I mean, you could tell me you’re the one who says you love it. You could tell me why you think it’s powerful, but I, but I feel like maybe those are a couple of the reasons.

Would you, would you add or subtract anything

Alexis: That’s exactly what I believe. When we truly invest in people, and I’m truly that, like you say, I’m truly investing in you, we [00:18:00] take the time to make it work. And it’s a lot of effort. It sounds very simple. Yeah, there are three big conversations, but please don’t believe you will be done in half an hour.

It’s, it’s not true. That requires a lot more work, a little bit from you and a lot from the other person, by the way. That’s very powerful. And I had people targeted by recruiters outside of the companies. And sometimes you have people who are leaving or taking a new job in another company and you realize that, yeah, you basically were not there at the right time.

And when they are back in your company two years later, okay that means they should have stayed maybe, or probably they were not taken care of at that moment. That was a big mistake. And what I realized is once you have those conversations, they listen to the recruiter or even not listen to the recruiter, because those arguments don’t resonate with them because they have their development plan.

They have their action plan. Those things don’t fit their action plan. They don’t care. [00:19:00] They have a plan. They are working towards it. And that’s very cool.

Russ: That’s right. Yeah. A woman who worked for me at Twitter named Anne I had gone through the career conversations model with her and I knew what her vision was. And she had come to me one day with an external offer. This is exactly what you’re describing. And we sat down and we evaluated the offer together.

And we’ve reached the conclusion together that this wasn’t it. This isn’t the right move for you. I appreciate that. Maybe there’s a couple of things that might be missing here for you now. I get it. We’ll change. What would I change? We can, there’s things we can’t change. She was an all star, you know, she was going places and she has gone places, she’s the CEO now of Gretchen Rubin media.

Like she’s, she’s an all star. I’ve heard of Gretchen Rubin. And what’s, what’s interesting about that is given her. Long term vision , we were able to say objectively wrong step. Nine months later, she came in with another offer. And I was like, yo, you got to take this one.

And I, you know, so retention at [00:20:00] all costs is a bad practice. It’s not, it doesn’t put the human first. It puts the company first. And people feel that I had, I had a manager one time who. She talked me into staying at Google. I had a pretty good offer to leave my manager. She talked me into staying. I highly regarded this manager and the company that I was going to join ended up getting bought by Google would have been not only a huge payday.

I would ended up back at Google in a, in a good role, you know, and After it happened, I actually, when the announcement happened that we were buying this company, I happened to be in the air traveling to Asia Pacific, and I landed and I saw this news and it was, I dunno, it was a little bit of a gut punch, you know?

Because yeah, I was still trying to make a, a career here and I care about my financial outcomes like anybody. And when I got back to the states, she, our one-on-one, all she did was apologize because, she just tried to keep me on her team. She wasn’t really thinking about what was best for me.

I forgave [00:21:00] her, you know, in fact, that person’s Kim Scott, actually, who wrote Radical Candor, like, I forgave her so much, I’ve worked with her again, and this is what makes her amazing, she probably lost a lot of sleep that weekend, waiting for me to come in Monday, to put that one on one on the first calendar, first thing in the morning, so she could apologize, so I know what it feels like, when someone engages in retention at all costs and it feels bad, like don’t do it, you know, and it put our relationship in jeopardy for a minute.

 I don’t have a better relationship maybe anywhere in my work life. And she’s a friend, but you know, retention, all costs of losing strategy. So with, with Ann, we hung on to her because things she was thinking about, like you said, it was the wrong thing when the right thing came, I was like, Hey, Like Sting says, you know, if you love someone, set them free.

And so we did, we set her free and she’s had this, she became a CMO. She became a COO after that. And now she’s a CEO she’s so good. And she’s earned all of this. But we were able to help make sure she took the right next step given her vision.

Alexis: I love the All Stars story, but I definitely love the story of [00:22:00] retention at All Costs. I was about to interrupt you to mention that the manager was very good at realizing that they made a mistake and needed to apologize. And then you mentioned Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor.

I love that book and I did an episode about the four quadrants of Radical Candor. Co founding Candor Inc with Kim Scott must have been a remarkable experience. What key insights did you gain from that venture? 

Russ: Yeah, I don’t mean to make everything about my book, but by a, by a mile, the theory for my book came from my time at Candor Inc. So let me explain that. So Kim and I co founded the company and, and basically I took on all of our go to market activities. We had a ton of demand for just what can you do for us with radical candor?

You know, like we had so much demand. The job was really about keeping out things that would waste our time. On the phone, I talked to like, I’m not even, this is not an exaggeration, a thousand [00:23:00] companies. 

As the chief operating officer, and, you know, basically that meant I managed our marketing person, Elise, who was amazing. And I handled all of the, all of the market based calls. I was selling our stuff, you know, workshops or talks and stuff like that. And so I would get on the phone and I would always start with a simple discovery question.

It was either or both, what problem are you trying to solve? And, or how do you think we can be helpful? And honestly, I’m just trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible if we can’t be helpful. If they want something we don’t do, you know? And so what I heard though, from a thousand companies was.

An alarmingly similar answer that I’ll summarize almost nobody said these exact words, but everybody said this exact idea, which was, we have an engagement problem related to low manager skill. Now, one group did say that specifically. And I [00:24:00] said, that’s the headline that everyone’s been telling me anyway.

So, so, and what they were looking for from us was some radical candor coaching stuff. That’s what they wanted, you know, cause radical candor. You know, direction, coaching, career, coaching is really, Radical Candor is really about improvement coaching more than anything else, right? Chapter 8, I think, of my book. And so, when people would say to me, we have an engagement problem related to low manager skill, I asked, To further clarify, if we were a fit for them, I asked, what’s the nature of your manager’s skill gap?

Alexis: Hmm.

Russ: And so they, they said a lot of things, but you know, you’ve seen a word cloud before.

So imagine a word cloud of all the words they said to me, but three jumped out in the center of the page, three words. Direction, coaching and career. And so that those are part two, part three and part four of my book. [00:25:00] Now that wasn’t sufficient. That was not real research. It was, you know, it was a back of the napkin research, but I took that research and I created a theory that we took, I took to Qualtrics and we measured.

Whether those were the right groupings or whether those were the most pervasive groupings. And I think that’s important because one of the questions I get asked a lot about this leadership prescription is, is that just for tech? Well, no, our customers at radical candor came from every industry, including by the way, government, including education, including finance, consulting, you name it.

I mean, I talked to every kind of company on the planet, big, small, it didn’t matter. And they all had the same exact problem with their managers. That’s a, that’s shocking to me. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. Like it didn’t, it’s almost when I tell the story, I bet listeners are like, boy, that sounds lucky.

But we, so then anyway, we took that theory and we tested it, tested it over four years, rigorously, measurably. And that’s how we just, we learned that these direction coaching and [00:26:00] career, they break down into about a dozen or so behaviors that when managers regularly practice them as measured. By their employees saying that they regularly demonstrate those behaviors, we saw that then employees became more engaged and delivered better business outcomes.

And so by a mile. The most important thing I learned is, Oh, everybody still has the same problems. Nobody who’s out there running their jib about or, you know, yapping about what leaders should be doing. No one’s listened to one customer on the planet because otherwise it’s the answer is so obvious.

And then I was able to kind of take that and study that very rigorously over four years. And learn that, Oh my gosh, these behaviors strongly, the marketplace was correct, these behaviors do strongly correlate with happier employees and better business results.

Alexis: Yeah, that’s very impressive. Reading about your experience, measuring precisely the impact of leadership behaviors in the book convinced me [00:27:00] to try the approach you outlined. By the way, thank you for the tools that are available online. That’s very convenient, very cool, and thank you for that. I should put a link to those.

I can see that And there were some things that I was doing and others that I was absolutely not doing. For example, I was not doing the live conversation. I was trying to get people to tell me about their values, but I was not doing that by listening to their stories. 

And that suddenly changed everything because, first, I needed to pay a lot of attention and do a lot of work to really try to extract that.

And, uh, and the first time it was very difficult. I learned to discover people that I, thought I knew, and I did not. 

Russ: I knew almost nothing about what they really care about. I thought, and I think the super human, I’m like a human leader. I, I try to know my people. I ask about what they do on weekends. I ask about their families. I ask about their health. You know, I, I do these activities that [00:28:00] we’ve been.

Incorrectly taught help us know someone and we don’t know him in a way that really is helps us to help, to help them grow in a, in a relevant way. It’s the big insight. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You know, by the way, I just, I’ll say if I did, if I had to offer one criticism of the book, one thing I noticed is you’re probably an anomaly.

In that you’ve clearly read the book quite carefully. That’s just not common. And I’m not just for my book. I could tell I’d go do a radical candor talk back in the day. This is one of the most popular business books in the last decade. Right. And I would ask people who read the book and, you know, every hand would go up and then, then I’d get to Q and a, and based on the Q and a, I could tell.

That I’d been lied to because if you’d really read the book carefully, you wouldn’t have been asking the question you just asked me. Right. Same’s true of my book. And so the criticism that I have is I have noticed [00:29:00] that with a lot of people listening, not maybe carefully, let’s say you’re listening on two X speed and you’re, that’s during your commute or two X speed while you’re gardening, you know, let’s just say like that. What has happened is a lot of people have missed part one that talks about the rigor of the model. You know, it’s important to me to give the why, and part one gives the why. Most people that have the books, the book, it’s 4. 0, you know, it’s highly rated book. I’m not, but like people tend to be very appreciative of the how and what of parts two, three, and four, and they skip, they skip the the why.

And what’s, what’s extraordinary about that is that’s what, that’s what I actually invented that in career conversations in part four is fully, but the rest of it is a little bit kind of just cobbled together behaviors that help to bring the wider life and the actual invention. Is leadership as an independent variable statistically in a regression model, like the math of this leadership’s an independent [00:30:00] variable with engagement.

And business results as dependent variables. Nobody has ever done that before. Like it’s not that I’d like even want credit or something for it. It’s just like the reason you should pay attention to this book is because it’s the only book that has bothered to try to measure how leadership behaviors produce what we want.

Happier employees that stick around when they should and better business outcomes, which is all point. We’re all in the job to do, you know? So anyway, just a little, little bit on that, that I’ve noticed now a couple of years out regularly gets missed. Even, even among very intellectual types who I, you know, I thought, boy, boy, the intellectual types I know from Silicon Valley are going to love this.

You know, a lot of people miss it. A lot of people miss it because they’re not really reading it carefully. So I wish I wrote it a little better. To make that idea more obvious or make it more accessible for people with contemplating that people don’t read books very carefully. Very often. Does that make [00:31:00] sense?

Alexis: Yeah, it is very funny. If you ask people what they need, they need results. And for a lot of them, they understood that people engagement, employee engagement is linked to results. I usually describe this with impact and satisfaction. You cannot have one without the other, at least sustainably. And they have some common sense or street wisdom about how the manager role is important and related to employee engagement.

But when asked what they are doing about that, they tell you about incentives, without any proof that it’s working. 

Russ: Always. Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of that, you know, what leadership approach we follow suffers badly from like chief executive officer flavor of the month. I went to this thing with other CEOs and they were talking about, you know, I don’t know, situational leadership. And so now that’s what we’re doing.

And what ends up happening is then the people who do leadership development in some company. Now have [00:32:00] to pay attention. This is a new thing they teach their managers with, with, by the way, and I don’t mean, I’m not picking on situational leadership. It’s very popular for a reason, but I also can say it’s not been held to any rigor now we’re telling managers to focus on this thing and then the CMO, let’s say, or the CFO goes to some conference and they come back with some new leadership idea, framework, and they say to the, And then there’s the chief human research and nevermind what the leadership development person learned in their PhD and everybody wants that to get into the leadership model.

None of it has any rigor. It’s too much stuff. It doesn’t hang together and none of it has held a measurable count. Now our managers are confused about what they’re supposed to do. And, and, and on and on it goes over and over. And you mentioned like proof. The most important thing that that we did at Qualtrics to learn that this, to prove this was the model we used, I call STAC, select, teach, assess, [00:33:00] coach, all with that leadership standard.

The same leadership standard and the assessment was the key, a measurement for every manager in the company from their employees on whether they’re demonstrating these behaviors, not 360, not from the boss, the boss gets plenty of opportunity to assess that manager in other ways, you know, and so now managers even who thought they were demonstrating certain behaviors, their employees were saying, we didn’t see it, you know, and it had confidentiality, so they didn’t know who said what, you know, we had a very Because of who we were, people, the managers were inclined to look at these measurements and pay attention to them.

And so suddenly we could show a manager every quarter how their team was experiencing their leadership. We didn’t use a punitively. That’s the fastest way to get employees to stop telling the truth. You fire someone. We used it to coach, assess, coach, assess, coach, assess. Every quarter, a manager got an assessment from their employees [00:34:00] anonymously that was by the way.

Organized and prioritized around the things that were correlating very strongly with employee engagement on their team. So it was custom what they should focus on. And we gave them measurements of why they should focus on, you know, nobody’s doing that. And that’s why managers. They, they pick and choose what they’re going to focus on based on, I don’t know what way the wind’s blowing half the time.

There’s, you know, and, and the, what companies choose to teach, select, teach, assess, cause they’re teaching too many things and they’re confusing their managers. What should you focus on is not a question a manager can answer. Managers are, what I think I should focus on is they don’t know because they don’t have any sort of connection between the teaching and the assessment.

And there’s no connection between the selection for the job. The teaching, the assessment and the coaching, the coaching should, they should all be done around a coherent, concise leadership standard that we know works measurably predictably leads to more engagement and [00:35:00] better business outcomes.

Alexis: Yeah, I love it. I have one last question that I like to ask. Looking back at your career, what is the one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?

Russ: say, Hey, you had a good instinct. It was well executed. Do that again. And here’s what it was. I was in the U S Marines and I loved it. I really loved it. There’s a number of things in that culture that I miss. I’ve never seen again in corporate America, probably do another whole episode on that someday, but I loved it.

But I got out after four years because I realized that the tempo. Of the Marine Corps, the deployment schedule, for example, was not conducive to me being the kind of husband and father I would one day want to be. I wasn’t married yet. I had a couple other small complaints about the Marines too, but this was probably biggest for me.

We deployed a number of times. And I saw how it wreaked havoc on my, you [00:36:00] know, my Marines and other officers and things like that. So that’s the first time. Then when I was graduating business school, so, you know, let’s, I think I’m 33, 20 years ago. I was interviewing with like McKinsey and Bain and, you know, big, big consulting houses. And I came home one night and my wife said, and I had two sons already. I eventually had a third. I came home one night and my wife said, you know, She goes with like sarcastic air quotes. She goes, you know, now that you’re getting this fancy degree, does this mean you’re going to get a job where we’ll never see you anymore?

Alexis: Hmm

Russ: You know? And I, and so we sat down and talked that through and I made a promise and the promise was that I would never allow my career to get to a point where I was no longer being a good dad or a good husband and further agreed that she and the kids were the ones who got to evaluate that, not me, it was, you know, they’re the ones who are receiving.

My husband ship [00:37:00] receiving my fatherhood. It’s very similar to the assessment of the manager. I don’t really care what the manager’s manager thinks about how that manager’s leading. I care what the employees think people are fighting to attract, develop and retain my opinion of how good of a father I am or how good, you know, I got to look myself in the mirror, but I really want to know what my wife thinks about that and what my kids think.

Right. So we, we sort of stacked hands and said, Never let, never let the career get in the way of being a good dad. Good husband. What’s interesting about that, by the way, is I, as a result, I became a really good prioritizer. And, and I, you’ve heard, you know, I know you’ve read the book. I say the book prioritization is an exercise in subtraction, not addition, but it’s, it’s like, it’s like one of the most misused words in business.

I think only strategic is more misused than, than prioritization. People think it means a task list. It doesn’t. And so what I became very, very good at. Is subtracting work. It’s, it’s way easier to say than do by the way. And and [00:38:00] so when I subtracted work, that meant I tended to have usually a better work life balance, but you know, like I want people sometimes hear that and they think, oh, don’t work hard, you know, I won an award at Google for being a great manager.

You, the way you win that is one, you have to be. Not a dick, you know, so your employees are the ones who recommend you. And so if you’re a dick, you’ll never get recommended. And then you get chosen by the CEO’s team and they don’t pick people who don’t have like a reputation or track record of getting meaningful things done.

So I’m, I’m by far most proud of that award for that reason. So I say that just cause sometimes when I say I became good at managing my time, I became good at prioritization. I became good at subtracting work. Sometimes people hear the wrong thing. Sometimes when people hear work life balance, mine tended to be pretty good sometimes people hear doesn’t work hard.

And that’s just wrong. That’s a bad conclusion to reach. So anyway, what I would go back to my younger self and say is, this instinct that you had, [00:39:00] that you weren’t sure about, that by the way shows up again, In another 10 years in your early thirties when you’re graduating business school go with that What when you’re at the end of your career, which by the way, I pretty much am now.

I just i’m retired I do some speaking. I do some coaching when you’re at the end of the career All that will matter is you’re looking at your three sons you know, you’re looking at, you look at your wife, are we still happily married? Yes, we are. You’re looking at your three sons, how they doing? Do you know about them?

Do you know about their lives? Are you involved in their lives? And that I can’t, I can’t think of one other thing that gets anywhere near as important in my career as those things. So I would go back and encourage myself to follow that instinct that I, that I had. And, and maybe especially graduating Wharton wasn’t totally sure about it was, it was the right, it was the right instinct.

Alexis: I love it. And, , and thank you for sharing that. I hope it will inspire a lot of people to think and reflect on what they are currently doing. [00:40:00] Thank you very much for joining the podcast. I hope we will have another opportunity to discuss all the other things that we were not able to discuss today. 

Russ: Anytime you want, anytime you want. Thank you so much for having me. 

Engineering leadership lessons from Bruce Wang (Netflix)

Some leadership philosophies sound good on a slide and collapse the moment reality arrives.

Bruce Wang’s doesn’t. It is simple, grounded, and demanding. In our conversation, Bruce, Director of Engineering at Netflix, describes the three pillars he tries to balance every day:

• build a trusting team
• seek excellence and mastery
• drive customer delight and value

The tension is the point. You cannot maximize all three at once. Leadership is the ongoing practice of balancing them without drifting into extremes.

Trust is not given, even inside the same company

Bruce joins a new team at Netflix and starts with a clear assumption: people will not automatically trust him.

Yes, reputation helps. But trust still has to be earned. He talks about building what he calls vulnerability-based trust: showing you are a person, not a role, and creating space for honest questions and challenge.

One practice I loved: asking people who worked with him before to share “what’s wrong with Bruce” in front of the new team. It is a direct way to make psychological safety concrete. Not as a slogan, but as a lived behavior.

Vision first, then structure

Bruce describes a sequence that is easy to underestimate.

First, get clear on what the team is here to do. Not the tech. The purpose. The customer value. The essence.

Then, and only then, decide the team structure: the balance of managers and ICs, the domains, the diversity of the group, the shape needed for where you are going.

If you start with structure before direction, you end up optimizing for today and paying for it later.

The leader’s growth edge: letting go

Bruce makes a point that shows up again and again when leaders scale.

At first, you lead individual contributors. You are close to the work. You can shape direction through direct interaction.

Then you grow managers. And that changes everything. You have to scale yourself through others. The hard part is emotional, not intellectual: letting go of being the center of the system you helped build.

In his words: sometimes growing the team means letting go.

Process is not the enemy

Netflix is famous for “people over process,” and Bruce names a subtle trap: teams sometimes treat process like a dirty word.

But deploying code is a process. Offsites are a process. Coordination is a process. The real question is not “process or no process.” It is: what is the lightest structure that helps the team do better work?

Bruce’s approach is principle-based. Try something. Keep what works. Throw away what doesn’t. Do not force a framework just because it is fashionable, or because another successful company used it.

He adds a useful warning: copying Netflix practices without Netflix context is risky. What works in one environment may fail completely in another.

A failure mode worth remembering: the shortcut that breaks trust

Near the end, Bruce answers the question I wish more leaders asked themselves: what are your failure modes?

He shares a clear example: he moved too fast to present a vision, collaborating with one strong supporter but not building shared alignment across the broader senior engineering group. The result: pushback, confusion, and a hit to trust.

The lesson is sharp: speed can look like leadership, but shortcuts often bypass the very collaboration that makes strategy real.

If you take one line from this episode, let it be this: before you go fast, check whether what you are doing is a shortcut.

Leadership as a humble gardener

Bruce references Team of Teams and the image of the leader as a “humble gardener.”

It fits this conversation perfectly. The job is not to be the hero. It is to cultivate the conditions where people can grow, do excellent work, and deliver customer value.

Humility, curiosity, and continuous learning are not soft traits. They are operational requirements.

References mentioned in the episode

• Winning Now, Winning Later by David M. Cote
• Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal

Here is the transcript of the episode:

Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast on emerging leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. Today, we are diving into the art of leadership in tech, building and sustaining excellence with our distinguished guest, Bruce Wang, director of engineering at Netflix. Bruce brings a wealth of experience from the intersection of tech, business, and team culture.

His journey from a hands on developer to a leader focused on people leadership, culture cultivation, and mentoring offers invaluable insights into the evolving landscape of tech leadership.

Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership Bruce.How do o you typically introduce yourself to someone you just 

Bruce: I’ll probably just say, Hey, I’m Bruce Wang. I’ve been an engineering leader for about 20 plus years two time founder. And currently I’m a director at Netflix.

Alexis: Excellent. Thank you. can you tell me about your key principles [00:01:00] and how they are essential to, to build an engineering 

culture? 

Bruce: Yeah, I have sort of this guiding leadership philosophy, right? I call it trusting team seeking excellence, driving customer delight. And so what I’m trying to kind of convey is sort of these three pillars for that. That every leader needs to balance, right? So how do you build a trusting team? How do you seek excellence and drive mastery? And how do you make sure you’re delivering customer value, right? And usually the challenges of engineering is keeping those in balance, right? And what I’ve learned over time as a leader is it’s all about the balance. You can’t get all of everything. You got to figure out how do you balance between these three?

Because sometimes maybe like you would break trust with a team if you have to do something on the seeking excellence side. Right. And so how do you balance that and make sure that you’re doing it well. And so all of [00:02:00] my sort of sub values and things I think about is under that principle.

Alexis: can you share your approach growing? A team of really starting something and, and help that team grow. 

Bruce: Yeah. You know, it’s funny. Cause I was like trying to think, do I have a formula and you know, it’s, and it’s interesting because just so you know, I’m actually taking on a new team in a week. And so I’m switching roles

and so I’m trying to think like, what do I do? Right. So this is, so I used to run a team called product platform systems. I’m sure by the time this releases, I will have the new job, which is a games platform and you know, it’s within Netflix, but it’s a totally different group. Right. And so I’ve been thinking about like, how do I, what do I do with this new team? Right? Like people know me but you know, not everyone right on the team. And so I think the first one I typically do with any team is. Set a vision first for [00:03:00] myself. So what what is this thing? I’m leading like what does this team do? What’s the essence their core, right? I think a lot of people think oh, this is the technology we build It’s like no no, but what’s the thing we’re driving at this goes back to the customer delight, right? Are we here for? Like our purpose, right? And 

I actually wrote this memo for myself to figure out Why are we doing what we do? And in this particular team right in the games platform team, right and it’s a newer team You know, I don’t I don’t know if people know but netflix actually have games and that’s a growth area for us, you know over the next several years. And so it’s very Interesting. Kind of a little bit like a startup, right? And so I think for me, it starts with sort of that vision of what the team is and could be. And then from that, the next is who do you have? Who’s there? What are you building? Like, [00:04:00] what’s your team structure, right? The other anchor point you know, building trusting teams is really around the makeup and diversity of your team. Who do you have? Do you have the right parts? Do I have enough managers? Do I have enough ICs? Are they focused on the right areas? And so here’s the thing is like, if you think about a leader, how do you decide the right team structure if you don’t know where you’re going? Right. And so that’s why for me, it’s like know where you’re going and then figure out the team makeup. Right. And then the last part,

I think this is the seeking excellence piece, which is, all right, what do we need to do now and do well, right. To deliver value. Right. And so it’s kind of like the vision, the team structure and our goals, right? What are we trying to do? And for me, I have a philosophy that I’ve written in my github page. And this is from a book called when now, when later, but winning now, winning later, which is like, you have to do tactical as strategic at the same time. Right. And so the goals that we have set is like, we have to deliver on 2024 goals. [00:05:00] We also have to prepare. For 25 and 26 and beyond. And so I think that that’s like kind of the, for me to get a team in a good place, you’re kind of building those sort of three things together. Now underneath all of that, you know, foundation to everything is trust. How do you build trust with the team? How do they trust you as a leader? Right? All this stuff does not work without trust, right? So that’s why trusting teams is so, is the first thing for me, is because, you know, I think you know this, if you don’t have a trusting team the vision is not going to make sense, they’re not going to trust you, right? The goals, they’re not going to push, and definitely hiring and conveying what the team structure is they’re not going to believe you. So I think that’s So, you know, like underneath that is constantly building trust with the team.

Alexis: help me understand that. So I’m a, I’m one of the engineers on your team, hypothetically, not I don’t know. You, you, you are the new [00:06:00] of that team. Do you believe, I will trust you like 

this. 

Bruce: So in this particular, no, you won’t, I have to earn your trust. Now I do have a slight advantage in the sense that I have been here for four years, so I’m not some random person coming in from the outside, you already have seen. Multiple outputs of what I do and how I think at the company. And, and so the good thing is my reputation precedes me. I hope in a good way. I think people, you know, I have team members who actually used to work for me who actually advocated for me. Which is always nice to hear. Honestly, as a leader, like that’s the only criteria, do they actually want to work with you again? And so that comes with some level of credibility, right?

So I’m not starting from scratch. But I’m doing actually something very early. I believe in vulnerability based trust, right? And so here’s what I’m doing. One is, you know, setting that vision doc early is to say, Hey, I want to learn more about the business, right? And I want to learn and [00:07:00] define a future that’s exciting for all of us to pursue. But the second is, The day I start, I have a town hall where it’s about me, right? Like, Hey, learn about me, read, read my leadership philosophy doc. You know, here’s my intro to me as a person, right? I live in San Francisco, you know, I have wife and kids, but, you know, like these are the things I like. I love food, right?

I love travel, all that stuff. Right. And then something I’m doing is have the people who used to work for me, that’s on that team now giving. Verbalize critical feedback. They’ve given me in the past. What’s wrong with Bruce? Right? And you now as a leader, you have to be careful because coming in new vulnerability also has to be earned over time, right?

If you just be like, I don’t know anything that’s not going to instill confidence, right? And so you kind of balance the like, I know what I’m doing, I think, but also I’m not perfect. You know, [00:08:00] I’m not infallible. I have, you know, I have weaknesses just like anyone else. So that’s how I’m doing it is right away. Try to build through that closeness of, Hey, I’m a person. And you know, I have flaws and then ask any questions and actually. I continue to encourage people, ask the spicier question the better, challenge me, question why I’m in this role, question what are we doing here push me hard, because what I’m trying to convey to the team is, I want the openness to discuss problems, I want us to be open about where our challenges are, you know, inside the memo that I wrote, actually I list out all the things I heard that is difficult for us as a team, And just wrote it out, like verbalized it and said, yeah, I know it’s really hard to be a startup in this giant company who’s been around for 25 years. Let’s not underestimate how hard that is, right? So that’s an example of [00:09:00] like, this is a difficult thing to do. And so that’s kind of like tactically what I’m doing as well is just introducing myself, but not not just, oh, here’s who I am, but like, kind of learn a little more deeply about me. 

Alexis: I have to admit I loved I, I would love to hear the segments wrong about Bruce. There are people that know you. I love the idea. I need to do that. The, the other thing is when you said you write the memo about the vision. Why are we doing what we do? That means you’re not doing that in isolation.

You’re, you are interviewing a lot of people probably the team and in the 

Bruce: well, and that’s the thing is I wanted to be careful, right? Because when I originally wrote when I started writing the doc It was for me to like write down what I thought this team was doing and I’m like, I don’t know enough so instead the memo became more like embrace hard mode It went from, like, specific, tactical, here’s the technologies we need to work on, to, [00:10:00] we need to embrace the challenges ahead of us.

So it became more of an inspirational, yeah I know it’s hard, but we’re going to have to do it. Because if we want to do, you know, I wrote something in the memo, I said, if we want to do extraordinary things, we need to overcome extraordinary obstacles. So. Anything worth doing is hard, right? Like, that’s just how things are. And so, the memo became more like, let’s embrace the hardness. Not overwork, but just like, yeah, it’s difficult. You know, you’re trying to build a new system, trying to establish product market fit, but you still need to integrate with Netflix. So how do you do it well? Right? That’s not an easy thing, right?

You got systems built for SVOD, not for games. How do you integrate with those systems? And there’s real technical challenge of that. And so I sort of shifted from like, here’s what I know what we want to do to like, I know how hard it is to be in the situation. [00:11:00] And then look, I still need to collect a bunch of feedback and, and figure out, you know, what’s wrong with it.

And, you know, I’m, I readily admit, like, look, I don’t know what should be in this doc. You know, I just kind of wrote. My initial version. But the, the good thing is, you know, the first few people I shared it with were like, Oh, this really resonates. So then I’m like, okay, I’m on the right track. Right. At least I didn’t write something and people were like, this makes no sense.

Why did you write it? Right. And so I think that’s also how I work too, is that I think a leader will put out a vision memo and they think it’s like written in stone, dude, we can completely change this however we want. Right. And actually more information I have will help us make this memo and this. Vision better, right? So that’s kind of how I’m thinking about it. And so yeah, definitely inviting people you know being transparent of what you’re trying to do. I think is really important You know, you kind of want to show I don’t know. I’m kind of like a show and doer at the same time You know what?

I mean? Like I you know, I don’t want you to just trust [00:12:00] me that I Am a trusting leader. I want to be transparent. I want to be open I want to be vulnerable like i’m just gonna like, you know Do it, not just say it. Right. And so I think that’s also important as well.

Alexis: Excellent. And the next question is also about doing and saying or doing and helping others. It’s about growing people. And I know growing people starts often with oneself. So help me understand how you. What is your philosophy about growing people?

Bruce: Yeah, I I think everything is about growth mindset, right? Which is just the idea is just because you don’t know something now doesn’t mean you can’t learn it. Like, right. The idea that you can get better and be better. Right. And so I think you said you start with yourself, right? You realize where your challenges are. You realize is where, where you, maybe your weaknesses are. And, and you, you want to like get better, [00:13:00] but the second thing about growing, which is also recognizing what you’re really good at, what you’re like exceptional at, right? Like what’s my superpower and how do I like do that more? Right. So I’ll give you an example. One of my superpowers is like connecting with people and networking within the company. And one of the challenges of games is that it’s sort of insulated and ice, you know, isolated. And so my job is using the connections I already have to start doing road shows, right? So that’s an example of like, how do I also use my own strengths to my own advantage, right?

And so that’s for me. And then, then about to the team, that’s where it goes back to earlier. I mentioned figuring out what you have, where the strengths are, you know, what can you push, right? Where can you help support and coach where there’s weakness or, or, you know, somewhere to improve. And so I think.

Growing people, I like what you said earlier is like, first it starts with yourself, right? [00:14:00] You have to be humble enough to know that, you know, you don’t know everything. And then I think when you work with people then you, you got to figure out as they. Build that trust, then they can open up to, here’s what I’m good at, here’s what I’m not, here’s where I want to grow. Now, also as a leader, the challenge is that, you know, I’ve had the benefit of leading ICs, but as I build up the team, I don’t directly lead ICs anymore, right? And usually I have managers who then lead ICs, so then how do you grow people when you’re not directly interacting? With the ICs, right? And so you have to grow your leaders, right?

You got to grow your people leaders and make sure your people leaders are reflecting sort of the vision and the ideals and pushing you as well, right? Cause my, my people managers pushed me all the time to get me to think, rethink and learn. And so I think that’s the other thing is as you move up, it’s really about scaling yourself, right?

You can’t meet everyone. You need to make sure you’re building [00:15:00] the scalable structures. So that the, your managers and their managers can like build strong teams. Right. So I think the growing also is about scaling out beyond just you personally, you know, one on one growing someone.

Alexis: Yeah, love that and it’s funny because I’m starting working with a new customer this week. And I always love when I’m able to meet with everybody on the team. And during the first call before we started, he told me, Okay, so there’s 800 developers on the team. And I said, okay, so that will not happen. I will not meet with all of them.

That’s for sure. So now we need to have a really good strategy to scale myself because I will not have 800 meetings during the first week. That, that not even during the first year, 

Track 1: it will probably not 

Alexis: happen. So, yeah, I am saying, and it’s, it’s really different to be directly managing the team of individual contributors.

And [00:16:00] starting to have managers will do that with you. ,

Bruce: By the way, that’s actually a really great tactical example of growing my team. If you look at my previous team, I, when I led Netflix, first team I led at Netflix was API systems, right. And it was just ICS, right. And the whole point was me coming in

to help. Establish like a team structure, but it was all ICs. And actually that was a real growth area for me is when I started getting, you know, man, engineering managers, it was this weird, like I had, you know, worked with a team to build out this vision, but then now I have managers who’s. Pushing that vision and changing the vision. How do I let go right? And so growing the team sometimes is letting you letting go Like you not being in it with you know, like because you feel like I felt obligation.

I felt like hey This is my you know, this is the team we built together I don’t want to let go and actually growing the team sometimes means letting [00:17:00] go

Alexis: Oh, I feel that’s important. Letting go. Okay. We’ll put bold at some point. So can, can you share a challenging project that really, really stretched your skills?

Bruce: Oh, man, they’re all challenging I mean When I first started, so I always tell my story of when I started Netflix because it was the hardest job I’ve ever done in my life, right? Times two, because here’s what happened first. I come into a dream company. Right where you you know, i’ve been following the culture for years I’ve designed my engineering culture based on the culture So you have an aura like I have no idea how it really is in the company I’m, just like oh my god They must know everything and they must be right on everything and they must be the best company everywhere, right? So you already have that first off you have deep imposter syndrome coming in then you have a memo that says

Keeper test dream team [00:18:00] a players, right? So then you’re always constantly worried. Am I gonna get fired like at any point? Right to then you come in and, you know, I’ve been mostly startup founder and, you know, worked at startups leading teams.

And this is a order is multiple orders of magnitude, higher traffic, you know, services much more complicated systems architecture, right? The technology is way harder than I’ve ever seen before. Right? So you got that. And it mixed all that together. COVID hits in March of 2020, right? So I start Jan of 2020, I get two months in the office and then it’s locked down. So you also are facing with an existential crisis within the world and Netflix. Cause Netflix was built to be a in person company, right? I still remember early on attending meetings with you know, we had this major API migration project, [00:19:00] right. Dot next to edge pass. So NEXT is this, you know, API platform that we built over many, many years, and EdgePass was kind of the new GraphQL like graph language API, and it’s been already going on for multiple years, right? And in the check in meeting, everyone was in the room. Right. Like literally all the engineers and I’ve never seen that before. I was like, Oh my gosh, everyone’s here. This is amazing. I’ve never, you know, like mostly work for startups where it’s all remote and distributed. It’s like everyone’s in the room and we’re talking about this project. And so you go and lock down everyone’s remote. So you’re also dealing with like the companies aren’t even prepared for that, right? Like, like we’ve never done that before. And so to me, that combination of just, do I know what I’m doing? Am I going to get fired at any time? Plus. You know learning an environment that like, you know, everyone was dealing with right?

Not just us was just super super hard and I don’t know how I got through it Honestly you know [00:20:00] i’m like I tell people it took me Nine months to really understand nine months to a year to really understand what the team did right? And then took me really two years to feel comfortable. And so that journey Here’s what’s interesting.

It’s not one difficult thing, right? It’s like 10 20 difficult things. And actually what was really hard about that situation was even after I built up, you know, good rapport, I actually fell down like a year and a half in where it’s like, Oh, I felt good. And then like I made a huge mistake with the team and lost some trust. Right. And so like, you have to then rebuild that and figure out, Oh my gosh, what did I do wrong here? And so the building out API team to be this more scalable team So the vision that I came up with was hourglass to turbine So hourglass is what everyone tells API is right? It’s in the middle layer between two huge [00:21:00] groups like UI and back end teams So, you know, we’re the middle layer that like a hourglass right that that That choke point. And we want to become more of a turbine or engine for innovation. So it took many, many years to figure out how to do this thing, right? This really complicated piece of the ecosystem and moving it to a more scalable architecture and team structure. And not everyone was happy about the move. Right. And so it that’s another

example of trusting teams and seeking excellence conflict with each other. Right. And so, so this journey was really a multi year journey that had come with many difficult up and down. Right. And so it’s not a single event that I can say, Oh, that one thing was really hard. It was just like the whole journey. Was really hard. 

Alexis: I love it. And the context was definitely how say, interesting or really challenging. When when I listened to what you said [00:22:00] about your, your leadership philosophy, I was wondering how the, how the system, how the, I understand the organization is really important, but I owe the system, the processes, the tools, are they, are they important in what you are doing or?

Let me understand how you you deal with that.

Bruce: Yeah. So when you say systems tools, do you mean like technical tools or do you mean like pro like JIRAs and Kanban boards? Like, I’m just kind of curious, how do you mean?

Alexis: I I mean everything I I want to leave it as much open That’s up. That’s all the things you you know that there’s a deming We’re saying always that a bad system will beat each time The system is really everything That people will interact with. And so I’m, I’m curious about what is in the system you and what you feel you are to 

Bruce: Right. So, so here’s, what’s really interesting about Netflix is that Netflix is well known for a culture [00:23:00] aspect called people over process. Right. And so actually, we’re like very shall we say, like, not anti process, but just like, oh, process is bad. And like, that’s actually a culture meme we have to break, right?

Like, process is not bad. I mean, deploying code, CICD, that’s a process, right? Like, you know, running offsite is a process. Like, you need processes, right? Like, and so you can’t treat it as a dirty word. And so actually, the thing I had to fight was how do we introduce some lightweight processes? Right. Can we just use Jira’s to track what we’re working on? Right. Can we have like a lightweight Kanban board, you know, to just see what the team was working on. So what’s interesting is what I’ve learned over time is that everything you learn, all the tools you learn, you have to apply for the situation and the problem on the ground that time. So what I had built before of like building Kanban, for instance, I, you know, [00:24:00] built Kanban processes.

And I, I, I’m kind of like. That’s kind of a strength of mine is when I read something about a process, I can kind of synthesize it pretty quickly and get to the core of why you do it, like OKRs or Kanban boards or whatever, right? And so those are easy for me to implement in a good way. Like Kanban is all about limited WIP, right?

Work in progress. Right. And you’re trying to stop the line when you’re having a problem, right? It’s not about filling it with a billion things. It’s about actually filling it with less things and

doing Right. And so those things I can do and so implementing some lightweight process when there was no process or very little, because at Netflix process was actually considered bad. Right. And so that was actually, the challenge is that you have to kind of take into account the team you have, the org structure and culture you have. And then figure out how to like integrate into that. I actually got feedback early on. It’s like You [00:25:00] know, I was trying a bunch of different things I read and they were like, Oh, my team was worried.

Like, Oh my God, this is some like guy who read a bunch of blogs and I was trying everything. And, and, and it was funny because, you know, I was doing that. That’s what I was doing. I was like, Oh, I read, this is a good structure. Let me try that. And it’s like, I had to adapt, right. And what happened, what helped. What helped the team realize is, look, I’m a startup person. If something’s not working, I’ll just throw it away. I’ll try a different thing. Right. I’m not going to try to force feed some process down your throat until I make it work. Right. And so that was my process is like seeing what worked with the team. Trying, what were the things that resonated? Didn’t, you know, I try to put stuff in air table. That didn’t work. Okay. Throw it away. Do Kanban boards. Okay. That worked. Cause we’re mostly using JIRA. We were doing sprint planning and we’re switching over. And so that’s the example of just. adapting to who you have and the company you’re in and being able to implement some things to put more structure [00:26:00] to just organize you know, the team a little bit.

And so I think for me, it’s not about a set thing, like implement these 10 things and it will work. Right. It’s about like, it’s kind of like that growth mindset mentality of like, what are we trying to do right now? And how do we make it better? So it’s more of a philosophy of how we get better. That’s seeking excellence. Making the system work better rather than a specific thing. So I’m more principle based on that than like a formula of things.

Alexis: I love it. I, I would love more people to answer that question with a more base. I just think that way would be more probably interesting for them to, to realize that implementing a framework or adopting best practices is not necessarily the best option they can pick. That really are reflecting on the core principles is probably 

more important to adjust and adapt.[00:27:00] 

The current 

Bruce: Yeah. I’ll get, I’ll give you a quick example here. Is whether we like it or not, I think Netflix has influenced the industry on like graph QL, right? Because my team, my team’s actually wrote blogs about sort of our federation technology and stuff like that. And I always find it very interesting when teams say, Oh, Netflix is doing it.

So we must do it, but why Netflix has very specific reasons why they’re doing it. You know it, it’s not just. Like because we want to you know, and I think that’s also very important like where I find it people like want to copy success Right, like oh this company’s doing this. Let’s just copy what they’re doing without recognizing what they actually need.

Alexis: Yeah. It’s a very, very dangerous do. It’s harder to really understand the core principles. So it can be off. Ah, that’s a, that’s good. You, you went from being an individual contributor to a [00:28:00] higher level leader in a, in a new large organization. And as you said, a dream company what, what is your perspective of what makes, what makes a good, a good people leader?

Bruce: Man, that’s so so there’s, there’s a book I read called Team of Teams by General McChrystal.

And he, he had one of the best lines. He said he looks at himself as a humble gardener. And it’s like one of my favorite images. Is like being a humble gardener, right? So one is being humble. Like don’t assume, you know, everything and the gardener piece is more about for me It’s the image of in the dirt with the team figure out what needs to be done clearing the brushes Making the environment in which everyone can grow right?

So I like that mentality of like Your job as a leader is to make sure everyone else grows and gets better [00:29:00] and sometimes it depends on what the situation sometimes you have to take a much more hands on approach Right given the you know the current team Structure or current experience of the team and other times you just need to let go and let let it shine Right, and so it’s it’s very dynamic, right?

It’s based on the situation so I think those those two things really speak to me like if I think about what kind of leader I want to be. It’s that it’s like that humble gardener approach of like being, you know, able to work closely with the team, but also knowing what you don’t know. Right. And honestly, I think comes down to just curiosity as a leader. Like, you have a lot of experience, right? Great, but maybe you don’t know everything, and that’s okay, and being okay with not knowing everything, and learning, and that drive and thirst for learning, and being better, like just being wanting to learn more and [00:30:00] get better, incorporate more concepts. Don’t think you know everything I think is just like a key attribute of any leader whether you’re a people leader.

IC leader

Alexis: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And a really good reference. I love that book. And I was about to say that there’s a, there’s a lot about curiosity, but you said it. That’s perfect. I will put the link the comments we are about to, to be at the end the episode.

What is the question I should have asked you?

Bruce: Well, that’s a good question. you kind of addressed it which I think you could have pushed more is the failure modes Right? Like you asked, like, Hey, what was the hardest thing? So I think that was good. But maybe even digging deeper on like, what were the failure modes and like, what did you learn from them? Because I feel like it’s not about the success that defines us as a leader. It’s about how we dealt with the failures that defines us. And so I think if [00:31:00] like, maybe it’s more like drilling down into where are some of those points that you learn from a failure or some situation like, you know, I mentioned to you like I had a problem with the team that I thought I lost some trust.

I had another one letting go right to my managers. I think those are always the, what I don’t like about the world of, you know, whatever you want to call influencing leadership, you know, talks is it’s, it paints too rosy of a picture sometimes, right. You’re, and you’re actually seeing a lot more practical discussions of like, what’s hard about leadership, not what’s easy everyone could talk about being a leader, but it’s actually pretty hard to actually be one.

Right. And so I think that would probably be, you know, a good question is to drill down in some of the failures more deeply

Alexis: do you want to, try the for us? 

Bruce: Sure, sure, sure. Many. I can’t, I can’t even pick all the mistakes I made. Let, let, let’s [00:32:00] pick the failure mode where I think this one is important because this is where I had built some confidence with the team. So this is when I lost some trust with the team. I had already built some confidence on like knowing what I was doing. And that’s actually, it’s funny because that’s kind of where hubris kicks in, right, where as a leader, you’re not being humble anymore, and you’re sort of like, Oh, I know what I’m doing. I’m just gonna push forward. And so the situation was that we had a new VP and we want to present our strategy for Consumer Edge, right?

So Consumer Edge was our new federated GraphQL API for the consumer product. We already established it for our internal enterprise within the studio applications. But we want to move towards consumer, which is the Netflix app, right? The product itself. And so I spent time with one IC who is a big proponent of that vision, right?

And we wrote the vision doc together and it was great. And I actually even said, let’s write it without even using the word GraphQL in it. [00:33:00] Because what are we trying to do, right? The vision is unified API, democratized edge, right? So what that means is you unify all the APIs together. Because, you know, before we used to have like per UI based APIs. With BFS or backends for frontends. And we want to unify on a single GraphQL API, but then democratize in the way that it’s unified. But the people that own it are actually the domain owners, right? So the identity graph is owned by the identity team. Not managed by an API team. So really excited. And we presented to the VP and, you know, I think it went okay.

And it was fine, but my team was like, what are you doing? Like, why are you talking about this? Like, we’re not even sure if this is going to work. And it was like, like multiple senior engineers in the team really pushed back on the concept. It’s like, we don’t even know if this thing will work. And why are you talking about this thing?

And, [00:34:00] you know, what are you trying to do? Like, it was almost like, are you trying to like dismantle the team on this new vision? Right. And I was like, whoa, what, you know, because of my push for speed and push for like, Hey, I want to get this in front of this leader. Who’s new. I actually didn’t take the time, right.

I used. My confidence hurt me here, right? I thought I built the trust of the team. I pushed fast and I didn’t collect enough information. And so when I presented it, it wasn’t a cohesive vision that the whole team supported, right? And then I had to go back and

really work with you know, the more senior leaders to define a more cohe I mean, I remember, I even remember us, cause it was lockdown, and we had to like find a room outside to like meet the four of us, right? To just like talk through the vision and be like, okay, what is really underneath this? What’s the meat of it? How do we really make it happen? [00:35:00] Not just write a doc. Right. And I still remember sitting with the four of us like outside discussing, you know, in person, cause you know, it was also remote. Right.

So that didn’t help. And we were like social distancing and trying to discuss this vision together. So that was, that was a key moment for me because I felt really bad and the team was just like, you know, we’re like, I’m really disappointed. You know, I was like, Oh my gosh, how did I mess up this bad? 

Alexis: thank you for sharing because it’s, it’s very interesting and it shows the other face of that. spoke about the humility that is needed and I love the way you presented the vision doc and the fact that it was really a collaborative document that you refine each time you meet with someone.

And then, yeah, you’re confident in that vision and you want to take a shortcut and Boom, doesn’t work. And it’s very interesting. Each time you, each time we take a shortcut, [00:36:00] should think a little bit about, is it worthwhile? Is it really a shortcut?

Bruce: yeah,

Alexis: And yeah, 

Bruce: yeah, yeah, no, that’s a great one. Yeah, I liked that term. Is it a shortcut you took? And absolutely it was a shortcut because it was speed, right? Like I wanted to go fast and like present quickly. Right. 

Alexis: Thank you very much, Bruce. Thank you for, for joining me on the podcast today. I really appreciate 

Bruce: No, it was great. It was really fun. Yeah. We’ll do it again.