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.

In the latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of hosting Noah Max, a visionary in the realm of classical music. Noah, a composer and conductor, shares his profound insights on leadership within the creative arts.

🔹 Creative Leadership: Noah describes his role as a composer akin to being a thought leader, constantly striving to innovate and push the boundaries of classical music.

🔹 Challenges in Classical Music: He highlights the difficulties in bridging the gap between classical music and wider audiences, emphasizing the need to communicate its relevance and vitality in people’s lives.

🔹 The Power of Art: Noah passionately speaks about the personal and almost therapeutic impact of engaging with the arts, beyond intellectual understanding.

🔹 Leadership in Practice: Sharing his experience with the opera “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas,” Noah reflects on the importance of team synergy and the challenges of leading a creative project.

🔹 The Conductor’s Role: He delves into the unique dynamics of conducting, where a blend of vision, listening, and collaboration is key to creating a harmonious performance.

🔹 Immersive Leadership Workshops: Noah discusses his innovative workshops that allow individuals to experience the role of a conductor, emphasizing self-discovery and personal growth.

🔹 Personal Development: He stresses the importance of continually challenging oneself to grow as a leader, drawing parallels to physical training.

🔹 Mentorship and Inspiration: Noah shares his experiences with mentorship, both as a mentee and a mentor, highlighting the reciprocal nature of these relationships.

🔹 Future Projects: Looking ahead, Noah is excited about his upcoming compositions, including his first symphony.

🔹 Advice for Leaders: He advises emerging leaders to tune out the noise and listen to themselves, making decisions based on what truly matters to them.

Tune in this enlightening conversation with Noah Max, where music and leadership intertwine to create a symphony of insights. Tune in to this episode to be inspired, regardless of your field!

Listen now and let the music of leadership elevate your day! 🎧

References:

• Website (& newsletter signup): https://www.noahmax.net/

• The Child in a Stripped Pyjamas: https://linktr.ee/stripedpyjamas
• Latest Album: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_llt5MCJkJMI9SETVugyk22509cGtf7Xv4
• Website (& newsletter signup): www.noahmax.net
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/noahmax
• Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/noahmax
• YouTube – Noah Max: https://www.youtube.com/@noahmax6190
• YouTube – Echo Ensemble: https://www.youtube.com/@EchoEnsemble
• Publisher: https://ump.co.uk/composer/noah-max/
• A Child In Striped Pyjamas: https://linktr.ee/stripedpyjamas
• Noah recommended to listen
• Walton “Belshazzar’s Feast” – Andrew Davis conducts
• TÁR is the movie with Cate Blanchett, Noah mentioned
  TÁR – Official Trailer [HD] – In Select Theaters October 7
• Whiplash TRAILER 1 (2014) – J.K. Simmons, Miles Teller Movie HD
• Endymion Ensemble: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMkPiXbcKghBQ0jVuKNIxqQ

Transcript:

Alexis: Today, we have a truly enchanting episode lined up for you. Noah Max masterfully blends the art of music with the essence of leadership. He’s a creative artist, not only a composer and a conductor he’s an innovator in the world of classical music.

Alexis: Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, Noah. How do you typically introduce yourself to someone you just met? 

Noah: Well, it’s lovely to see you, Alexis. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I suppose I would go in with creative artist. Because that’s something everyone can relate to immediately and understand. I work specifically in the field of music. I do a number of different things within the field of music, including conducting, which I know we’re going to speak about later on.

But primarily, at heart, I’m a composer, which means I write music. And that sometimes leaves people a little bit nonplussed, because they’re not quite sure what [00:01:00] it means to create music from scratch, or You know for what context are you creating music? What does your life look like if you’re getting out of bed every morning and what writing music?

I mean, how does it work? So the way I would describe it is that I’m attempting to imagine sounds that nobody’s heard before and then notate those sounds either for existing instruments, combinations of instruments, or perhaps even inventing an instrument physically or electronically which doesn’t yet exist, in such a way, so notating it in such a way that Performers could then realize that vision for an audience.

And often for me, that’s within the context of classical music in the concert hall. Sometimes it will be for television, film, something of that description.

Alexis: Okay, that’s fantastic. So now I guess people are wondering, are, are we on a [00:02:00] podcast about leadership? And I’d say, yes, we are. And I will ask a question about how do you define leadership in that context of composing and conducting? And what are some of those unique challenges you face as a leader?

in the musical world. 

Noah: I suppose there’s two ways that you can look at a question like that. And one of them is intensely creative and one of them is intensely practical. So from the perspective of composing, I suppose it’s sort of like being a thought leader or a philosopher in that you’re trying to move things forward.

You don’t simply want to repeat things that have already been done although there’s nothing inherently wrong with that but you want to bring something original and valuable to the table, which is going to in some way move the dialogue forward during the course of your creative lifetime. And then there’s the more practical side, which I suppose Through my composing [00:03:00] through my conducting, excuse me, and my other activities one gets a little bit closer to this, which is the fact that there’s a lot of worry in the classical music world that we are in a sort of declining landscape.

It’s certainly a very confusing landscape at the moment. I think there has been a great failure in the world of classical music to communicate itself to the wider world and to build bridges with the wider world. To show people who may feel no great connection in their life with classical music, contemporary classical music, romantic classical music, baroque or renaissance music it’s felt to communicate the ways in which that can be an important, an incredibly vital and, and life giving and sustaining force in, in people’s lives. 

And so, you know, having failed to communicate that, no wonder people don’t necessarily feel as connected to it as maybe they could or should. And so, part of my mission in all the different things that I do is to connect people [00:04:00] with the arts in any which way, no matter what they spend their life.

doing. I would like them to have an inroad so that they can, you know, feel the beauty and the sometimes overwhelming power of these mediums in their own life.

Alexis: Wow, that’s beautiful. Ah, that’s beautiful. And I hope that will trigger the interest of people to have a taste at it without the intellectual knowledge that is coming to that. I’ve, I’ve observed times and times that people don’t Listen, or don’t watch paintings or look at it because they don’t have the knowledge that is going with it.

And I’m saying that’s, that’s like tasting food. You, you don’t necessarily have all the knowledge behind it, but you can taste it and maybe you like it. Maybe you don’t, or that could be a drink, that could be food, and that could be music, or that could be painting. Maybe just have a look at it and listen to what is happening inside [00:05:00] yourself.

That would be. Maybe your first time, don’t you think? 

Noah: Oh, absolutely. And the wonderful thing with these things is that there’s no incorrect response. Including, you know, perhaps a work of art which everyone says is a great piece of genius leaves you feeling cold. And, you know, that’s fine. It’s an intensely personal thing. I think to just sit and observe a work of art or to sit in a concert hall, which feels incredibly formal and sometimes quite rigid.

And to experience a work of music over a period of time. It’s an incredibly intense experience and it’s a beautiful experience, but beauty can be terrifying. particularly if you’re not used to it, if you’re not accustomed to it immersing yourself in that beauty can be a terrifying experience, and that’s one of the reasons I’d encourage everyone to do it.

I think that’s part of the vital nature of it. But you also mentioned the intellect there, Alexis, so just to pick up on that for a minute. Often I [00:06:00] find we over intellectualize, actually, the problems in our lives, whereas accessing the creative arts is to do with intuition and the realm which is beyond the intellectual and beyond the statistical and the scientific and the measurable, although all those do come to play in their own.

special, interesting ways. But so much of what’s important is not that. And actually, I think this is the sense in which this is a life giving force. So you compared the analogy with food and in some sense that’s correct, except that we all have to eat three times a day or thereabouts in order to sustain ourselves.

So food is a life giving force in a physical sense. We need the calories in order to sustain our lives. Just like we need a roof over our heads. Et cetera, et cetera. But You might say, well, why do I need painting in my life? Why do I need theatre in my life? Why do I need cinema, for that matter, in my life?

it gives you something which is completely personal to you and which is [00:07:00] not quantifiable, no matter whether you think you’re a creative person or not. And I used to be incredibly naive and evangelical about this. I felt that everybody was creative. And I no longer think that’s True.

And I think a lot of people actually feel tremendous pressure that maybe they should be creative and actually it’s not part of their nature to produce things from scratch. And that’s completely fine. a work of art can feel as though it’s judging you, but there should be nothing judgmental about the process of appreciating art.

And I would like everybody to have their own way in, perhaps to step out of the intellect. And this is something I continually remind myself that I need to do. as well, because it’s not always the best way to solve a problem.

Alexis: I love it! Thank you for sharing that. Can you share an experience where your leadership skills were put to the test. 

Noah: Well, the obvious one which comes to mind, and there might be some listeners who are aware of this, as I know you are I’ve spent the last five [00:08:00] years bringing an operatic adaptation of John Boyne’s novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. And you know this because you were at one of the instrumental rehearsals actually in London back in early January.

Can’t believe it’s so long ago already. But every single part of that process was a struggle. Writing the music was a struggle. Doing the research in order to take the entire project with the requisite seriousness was a struggle. Digging into my own family history and my connection with the topic matter was an immense.

Uphill climb spiritually and the logistics of putting on the performance, which we did pretty much single handedly myself and the Echo Ensemble, which is my orchestra, which sort of morphed into an opera production company for that project. And everything went wrong, which could possibly have gone wrong on ways to, I mean, I would.

We could just [00:09:00] sit here for an hour talking about the litany of things which went wrong and I was working all hours in a very unhealthy way. So it’s not something I would hold up as a model of good practice per se. And it’s certainly not an experience I would like to repeat. But it was in its own way, the best of times.

And the reason for that was because of the wonderful synergy in the team. And the only thing which functioned properly on that whole project. Was my team and I told them that and I even with all the other things vying for my attention. I made my priority to Nurture the synergy of that team and fortunately that turned out to be a good investment of resources.

Alexis: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very interesting what you’re saying about the unhealthy way and all the things going wrong. I was, I was listening to the serial entrepreneur, who created several companies not all of them were [00:10:00] successful. In reality a few of them were successful and a lot were small disaster and bigger disasters.

 and he was reflecting on that and he was saying, oh, you, read on LinkedIn and you believe all those people are very highly successful and highly driven and they are really good at all what they are doing and, and everything is going well for them. in reality everything is going wrong every day. And you just need to handle it. And sometimes you do it well, and sometimes you learn something in the process of, in your experience, and sometimes you don’t. And it’s even getting worse. So, there’s just a few things that matter, and that That’s how you are doing that, not all by yourself, but building a support team, you just mentored on that.

That was your team. So what happened with that team? What, what is that team and how it works [00:11:00] for you to work with the team? 

Noah: Well, there are certain differences, I suppose in that making music is a process which is incredibly emotionally vulnerable. and very intimate and you have to be sharing of yourself whenever you’re doing it. I was conducting this project as well. So it was my own music that I was conducting with a team that I had hand picked.

So these were all musicians I deeply admired and. respected and enjoyed working with, but when you’re working on topic matter, that’s as dark as that for a sustained period of time, it’s just a great challenge. And the endurance is a challenge. I mean, on a personal level, what I kept reminding myself whenever I was fatiguing, which was often was It’s never going to get better than this.

So just enjoy every minute, which seems counterintuitive again, given the topic matter, but, [00:12:00] but it was necessary to get through it. And actually on the team level, I think that was reflected too, because I wanted to make sure that there was enough room for. levity and a bit of risque gallows humor, you know, because you can’t just be heavy and serious all the time.

And opera making is fun. It should be fun. It’s very interesting to me what you’re saying about the, you know, the, the, the front facing is, is always incredibly. Successful. And then, you know, generally the failures are kept private. I mean, there was just such a huge litany of failures and false starts on the road to this project.

And without the support of, I mean, the whole team, but particularly certain individuals who were attached to it for, you know, right from the start years earlier. I don’t know whether I would have pushed through all of those, but it’s just interesting as well, when you zoom out. You know, if you read the daily news feed, it’s always bad news because bad news happens in the short term.

I do, I don’t do any social media. I deleted all my social media. I do a newsletter once a month and when you zoom out And you only [00:13:00] do your news once a month, generally the news is more positive over the mid and the long term. Just an interesting thing to, keep in mind. I mean, it’s wonderful that with pyjamas, I think, you know, given that I’d never put so much energy and effort into anything in my life.

And to see it rewarded and to see my team rewarded through the reviews that we got and the recognition that the project got was, was absolutely wonderful. But that’s not an accurate reflection of what was going on under the surface. You know, the duck’s legs were, were very much tangled in the weeds there.

Alexis: you mentioned the rehearsal I was amazed of a lot of different things, but things that I still have in mind, there were the composer and the conductor. And so that was your own music. But you were already comfortable with the musician to challenge a little bit the composer or to to make fun of the composer [00:14:00] in some ways about the music itself.

And I thought it was really funny to say they are, and you are making fun of yourself or Separating yourself from the composer, from the music, because now we are trying to to play the music. it’s two different times. And I was looking at that, it was really interesting.

And there was sometimes the, the explanation of the music also. What is happening? That to give the context of, okay, we are, we are starting at that particular measure and you give the context about what is going on and you you explain what is going on what you would like to hear and and there’s a dialogue with the the musician and i i saw them taking notes on the on the score about what was going on and and you give them feedback And they ask something and I was that dialogue was fantastic in a way in my mind the music is on the score.

You just play [00:15:00] it and you’re done and that’s absolutely not what is happening Which was amazing to me Do you have some some reflection about what is going on when you are doing the rehearsal with the team? 

Noah: Well, that situation was very specific. And I think being a composer who conducts creates a very specific. Scenario whereby you can offer certain insights. into the process of how something’s been created and what the thought process was behind it. Whereas if it’s somebody else’s music, you’re not necessarily in a position to do that.

Although even that only goes so far, interestingly. I often feel as British composer William Walton must have felt, there’s a possibly apocryphal story of a occasion when he was conducting his own great oratorio, huge orchestra and choir called Belshazzar’s Feast. Tremendous piece. I recommend everybody who is listening to this should go and find it on YouTube, but he was conducting a performance of it and somebody asked him a very [00:16:00] specific question of, oh, you know, you wrote this marking in this bar.

What did you mean? And he said, well, I’ve got no idea. I wrote it 20 years ago.

Not the response you’d expect or maybe hope for, but by the time we were performing that I had written the piece a year and a half ago in a frenzy of creative activity. And so much of the creative process is a mystery, even to the creator. So there were situations where people were saying, you know, what did you mean by this?

It’s like, well, you know, what did I mean then? What do I? think I might want now, and you know, are they the same thing? Possibly not, and neither of them might be right. So it’s tricky, but you know, under more normal circumstances, I, I mean, see with conducting, there are no normal circumstances. It’s an extraordinarily strange situation you find yourself in.

[00:17:00] Just to give people an idea, just the slightest idea if you’re an international conductor, say, and you are guest conducting with a series of symphony orchestras around the world, you’ll be traveling one week, one place, one week, another place, one week, another place, maybe you’ve never gone to these places before, maybe you don’t speak.

the languages in any of them, and you’re confronted with 80 people who you’ve never met before, and you’re all performing music in three days time that none of you have ever performed before, and somehow you’ve got to create a performance that is going to be spiritually valuable to the 5, 000 people who are paying to see it.

Or however many people it is. So it comes with extraordinary pressure, and it’s an extraordinarily aspirational job. There’s so much of it which is mysterious. It’s actually the mysterious elements of it which I really love. And when I’m introducing people who have no idea about conducting to it, as you know, I know you want to talk about these workshops a little bit [00:18:00] later on I think those mysterious and magical elements are the ones which are worth paying the greatest attention to, in a way.

But there is that magical synergy between the group, almost like a murmuration of birds. You know, how they know when the next one’s going to turn in that direction. It’s, it’s all just, you know, it shouldn’t be possible. It really shouldn’t be possible. According to science, it shouldn’t be possible for a string player to play their instrument in tune.

And yet everyone does. I mean, to get your finger within a nanomillimeter of whatever it is, it shouldn’t be physically possible. So, you know, what we’re doing here is the impossible. That’s what we’re talking about. And I mean that literally, not figuratively.

Alexis: and that and that’s a that’s a very interesting thing and I would like to go back to What is the level of freedom for the musicians to express themselves, express themselves when they are playing that music? [00:19:00] I thought there was a dialogue between the conductor and the musician. And so that means they have a degree of freedom in that process, individually and together.

So there’s something going on there, I believe. 

Noah: Yes, I think It’s very interesting because I think a group is looking to, the leader for the vision of the whole because everybody has their part to play in the whole. So you need to present a vision of the whole but not in a way that feels dictatorial. It’s got to start with listening and assessing what’s the player’s needs are as specialists.

You are essentially a generalist as a conductor and you are there to help a group of specialists achieve something together, which perhaps they hadn’t even dreamed of possible was possible when they were just individuals in their practice room or, or, you know, whatever it was [00:20:00] sometimes an individual will have an idea which is incredibly valuable.

Sometimes the hive mind will just come out with something which, you know, you never would have thought of. Much better than anything you could have thought of. And so rather than feeling as though you’ve got to impose your vision, I think there’s always got to be a dialogue between the two. And if you are trying to convince people to do something your way then first of all, you really need to be sure about it.

But also, you know, just telling people to do it isn’t enough. You sort of need to coax them to, to sort of, to try it and explore it and, and to maybe feel as though they thought of it themselves. And there’s a little bit of You know, magic about that as well. Maybe misdirection, but

Alexis: I love that because now I can see the parallel with the world of business and all the teams that needs or so the to assemble the creativity of specialists to accomplish something bigger. [00:21:00] and speaking of that, you offer. Immersive sessions with musicians for people to understand what happens behind the scenes.

And so what inspired you to start those sessions? 

Noah: that’s right. It’s an incredibly exciting journey, sort of honing these sessions into what they are now. I think I was inspired by the figure of the conductor itself, which looms large over the popular culture in a very strange way, because nobody really knows how it works. Conducting. Sort of this person who stands up on a podium and waves a magic wand, and there is that image there, that archetype of the magician, the wise old sage, and you’re sort of harnessing that power.

And that’s been an incredibly powerful icon, I mean all these films coming out now, there’s a film just coming out very soon about Leonard Bernstein who was a big force in the culture. There was a film with Cate Blanchett, the name of which I forget. [00:22:00] And you know, there was a film about 10 years ago now called Whiplash, which is an extraordinary movie with a great performance from J.

K. Simmons in that. So people sort of have these preformed ideas of what a conductor might be. What I’m very interested in is the fact that when one steps onto the conducting podium, your personality transforms. this is as true of me as it is of anyone else, and it’s as true of as it is of non musicians.

that self transformation can be, I mean, it’s incredibly volatile. But I think it can be a great vehicle for self discovery and for self actualization. And in that space where you can no longer verbalize, going back to this thing of intellectualizing, you know, when you’re confronted with a bunch of specialists who do something that you know, nothing about.

And all you can do is wave your arms at them and communicate yourself physically. Suddenly you strip away all the nonsense and you’ve got a space in which there’s this [00:23:00] embodied learning experience. And you can, oh, you can discover things through this, which I promise you, you could not discover any other way, given years and endless streams of cash.

It’s a unique experience and I recommend it to everyone. So this is part of my mission to sort of coax everyone into trying it, I suppose, and to see what it can offer them.

Alexis: you describe a little bit how it works? 

What people are supposed to be doing? 

Noah: So we have an ensemble and we have some music and the participants and I will do a little crash course on how you hold the stick, what the basic moves are, just get a little bit comfortable with that. And then we throw people in the deep end and we invite you up to stand in front of the group and We see what happens and whatever your starting point is, we work from there and it’s quite extraordinary because I’ve never [00:24:00] had a situation where we’re unable to make progress.

I mean, even somebody who’s never listened to a piece of classical music in their life. Sometimes people who have that actually have no foreknowledge. Often end up being the best at it, strangely. But you can make a lot of progress. And once you sort of got used to the very strange sensory overload, all these different things coming at you at once things start happening.

It’s very hard to verbalize. You know, I struggle to verbalize it. All I do in my situation as sort of mentor is I just try and again, just sort of lead people along and see if I can get them to notice the sensations within themselves and how they can modify what they’re doing to get a better more vibrant response from the musicians.

And we get the musicians feedback as well, which is It’s incredibly exciting because obviously they’ve played for many, many conductors. And I’ve heard behind closed doors from some of my players that actually some of the conducting they witness in these sessions is better than [00:25:00] some of the conducting they witness in their professional lives as performers.

So you’d be surprised at what you’re capable of, man. I mean, I don’t know. You should.

Alexis: really love that idea that people who know nothing about it able to feel it in a way. So, basically Listen to what is going on in themselves. Listen to what is the feedback they have from the team and adjust their behavior so that the result will be different. And basically that’s what we are trying to tell leaders in other fields to really understand.

How they should.

adjust what they are doing to have a different response. And that’s not, that’s not changing the others, that’s changing yourself. and look at what is going on, what is really going on. And it’s it’s very interesting that the parallel is so obvious. I am, and I’m now really excited and I would like to try that. 

Noah: [00:26:00] You should.

Alexis: When the people are going through that immersive experience what do you believe they take away from that? 

Noah: they won’t necessarily take away What they want, but I believe they will take away what they need. And it may not be something that they’re capable of verbalizing at the time. It will start off as a felt difference in the way they operate. And then maybe when you step away from that slightly remarkable experience and go back to your life, which is also remarkable.

I mean, everyone’s life is remarkable in its own way, but you know, it’s, it’s also repetitive and it’s the world that you know. You take the treasure back from the cave into the world that you know, and you see if there’s things you can do, optimize, streamline in order that you can find that sensation again you find out what [00:27:00] that embodied knowledge means to you.

I’m hesitant to say too much because. I don’t want people to come along thinking that they should. I mean, you might come to the session thing. Oh, I really just want to increase my confidence in front of a crowd. And, and, you know, my, my presentation skills, it could be something as simple as that, but that’s not, I mean, you’ll get that.

Don’t get me wrong. You will get that. And then some, but. it goes much deeper. There’s almost something therapeutic about it. And I’m very interested in the depth psychologists and their writings. And I’ve also, because of my, my Viennese heritage, my ancestors escaped from Vienna at the same time as the Freuds. 

And they were very much in that scene, which was filled with you know, these great thinkers and artists and stuff. So I, I’m very interested in all that literature and all that thought. You know, I’m hesitant to say too much because I think it’s something deep I don’t want people to have too many preconceptions.

Alexis: But I love it. I believe that we discussed [00:28:00] enough so that people can understand that that’s an experience that you need to live and something will happen. And I, I love what you are saying about, that’s not necessarily what you want, but that’s what you need. And that’s a kind of Nanny McPhee experience.

So, sorry, 

Noah: it’s funny you say that, because I, I often think of the Nanny McPhee thing, that when you, you want me, but you, sorry, you need me, but you don’t want me, I have to stay. Is this right? And when you want me, but you no longer need me, I have to go. It’s one of the tragic truths of, of life, I think.

Alexis: that’s, that’s a, that’s a very interesting, interesting one. So, how do you continue to, to grow and develop yourself as a leader? 

Noah: Well, you have to do things which are going to stress you and stretch you regularly. Anybody who goes to the gym knows this. It’s, you know, relaxation is no good, and pure tension is no good. It’s a [00:29:00] cycle of tension and relaxation which creates hypertrophy. And I think the same is true in terms of the challenges one needs to take on.

So I’ve recently completed this huge challenge and I spent some time after that feeling slightly listless with a big striped pajamas shaped hole in my life. But now I’ve got myriad new challenges which are really stretching me in completely unexpected and completely different directions. So I’m flexing muscles that I hadn’t used before and I hadn’t maybe even known were there.

And I think that’s, that’s crucial. 

Alexis: Excellent. I, I, I love the stress and stretch and the part with the, the gym that will really help to, to understand that. Do you have any mentors or role models who have influenced you? 

Noah: Well, I, I did. In some sense I still do. But I had a mentor called [00:30:00] John Whitfield, who was a bassoonist and a conductor. He founded his own ensemble, just as I have my echo ensemble. He founded Endymion Ensemble, which was a jewel in the crown of British chamber music making in the 80s if anyone’s interested in Endymion, again, you can find their recordings on Spotify, YouTube tremendous stuff to be found there.

I met John in the last years of his life. He was very unwell. He died quite young. He was in his mid sixties when he died. He’d had health problems throughout his life, but he was a tremendous mentor and support to me. We met completely by chance at a concert. So, go to concerts, you never know who you’ll meet. it’s strange to me now, because it’s been several years since he passed away. And Stripe Pyjamas originally was his idea, actually, we, we, it came up in a conversation that we had. he would have loved to have seen it realised. And, and that made [00:31:00] me think, you know, that he was investing all this time and energy in me, knowing that he wouldn’t live to see me fulfil my potential.

But it was what he wanted to do, and actually I’m convinced that, I mean, I, I supported him with his endeavours as well, and those were life giving for him in his state. But the ability to engage with. musicians and players to arrange and orchestrate music, which he’d always loved doing. And he did some of his best work in those last few years of his life.

So he was an incredibly inspiring man, a difficult man as well. And I think he wanted me to avoid some of the pitfalls that he felt he’d fallen into. when he was my age, particularly regarding the vicissitudes of a creative lifestyle, which maybe are more volatile than if one were working in a different, slightly more stable field.

Alexis: Do you have other people now? that are that are inspiring [00:32:00] you? And the second question that is coming just after is are you are you mentoring other people yourself? 

Noah: Hmm. Well, there are plenty of people I find inspiring. I find you inspiring, Alexis. But in terms of mentorship, you know, John was my mentor and I was very, very fortunate. Nowadays, I keep my own counsel and I do my own thing. So life has changed in that regard over the last few years. And yes, I do try my best to be a support to my own colleagues and to my students of whom I have a few and they’re tremendously bright and, you know, many of them conductors, some of them composers.

And so I try to just nudge them in the direction of interesting things. in order that they might shape themselves, which I think is what John did for me. And I mean, also [00:33:00] in funny sort of ways, I was a mentor to John as well, in that I encouraged him to remain musically active despite his ill health. I have a lot of friends of mine who are of older generations as well, and I occasionally try to provoke them and poke them into some kind of creative activity, which I think might be good for them and usually I’m right, so.

Alexis: Yeah, I love it. I love it. So, What are some upcoming projects you’re excited about? 

Noah: Oh, well, it’s mostly writing at the moment. I’m very deeply involved in writing projects. I’m currently writing my first symphony, which is a huge undertaking, very, very different from the first opera. And that is a commission for the London Mozart players, which is a chamber orchestra here in London, tremendous group, really lovely, lovely people as well, which is a wonderful thing.

I feel very fortunate to be doing that. And that will be premiered [00:34:00] in the summer as the opening concert of the Thaxted Festival, which was the birthplace of a composer called Gustav Holst. So if you’re new to classical music, you’re getting loads of names here today. Gustav Holst is one to stick into your browser, particularly because next year will be 150 years since he was born.

So it’s sort of commemorating that happy occasion, that milestone. So, so it’s all, it’s a great honor to be doing that. And I’ve got a number of Very exciting composing projects, which are lined up for the new year as well. So it’s going to be busy for the next bit. But at some stage, I look forward to getting back to some, some carving, some conducting as well.

Alexis: Love it! there will be a lot of references to add to the companion blog post And, and finally do you have any advice for emerging leaders, regardless of their 

Noah: See, I’m always just hyper aware of how specific my field is and in giving general advice. I never want to, you know, I’m just so [00:35:00] conscious of the fact that. Music can feel like an alien world, so could I really give advice more, more generally? Well, you know, maybe, maybe I can. At the risk of sounding blithe and clichéd, I think you’ve really got to learn to tune out the noise and listen to yourself. It’s very easy to expend a lot of energy on stuff that you do not care about and which you’re not really interested in pursuing for whatever reason. And there is so much static and noise out there now.

So learning how to tune your radio set so that you can figure out a good principle on which to make decisions so that you know what it is you want to do and where it is you want to go. I think, you know, whatever kind of entrepreneur you might be. That’s useful because you could [00:36:00] invest a huge amount of your time, energy, money, other people’s money into creating something that you don’t really believe in.

And I know people who’ve done that and, you know, they always learn from it, but never ends well. if you can avoid it, then perhaps that’s a good thing too.

Alexis: that’s beautiful. love it. I will add a few links about where the people can find your work, follow your work and get in touch with you. And I’m very thankful for having you join the podcast today. So thank you very much, Noah. 

Noah: Oh, well, Alexis, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, and if anybody wants to know more about what I do, they can go to www. noahmax. net. That’s n o a h m a x dot net. That has my music, my paintings as well and various other things. It has a place where you can get in touch. You can also find my music on YouTube, on Vimeo, on [00:37:00] SoundCloud, and you can also, through the website, you can sign up to my monthly newsletter that I mentioned earlier.

And that’s just a monthly burst of creative energy from my part of the world. And you can find out what I’m doing. And if you want to come be a groupie then you can find out where I’m performing, what’s going on. And nine times out of 10, I will be there. So if you want to say hello, that is also really the best way to do it.

Alexis: Thank you very much, Noah. 

Noah: Thanks. Bye.

In our latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I am honored to feature Ioanna Mantzouridou, Co-founder & CEO of Dextego. Join us as we delve into Ioanna’s inspiring journey from her roots in HR to leading an innovative AI coaching platform.

Key Highlights of the Episode:

1. Journey to Dextego: Ioanna shares her transition from considering a PhD in organizational psychology to spearheading an AI-driven talent development platform.
2. Dextego’s Mission: Learn about her vision for reducing talent attrition through personalized soft skills training and the role of AI in democratizing leadership development.
3. Overcoming Remote Work Challenges: Insights into the challenges of developing talent in remote settings, especially during the COVID era.
4. Empathy in Leadership: Discover Ioanna’s emphasis on empathy, discipline, and a continuous learning mindset when building her team.
5. Addressing CEO Challenges: Ioanna discusses balancing fundraising, sales, and maintaining vision in the early stages of a startup.
6. Innovation Culture: How employee-driven innovation and aligning with company strategy can revolutionize workplaces.
7. Success Metrics at Dextego: The focus on top talent retention and the transformative impact of personalized development tools.
8. AI Tailoring for Career Stages: Exploring how Dextego’s AI coach adapts to individual skill levels and career phases.
9. Ioanna’s Leadership Evolution: Her personal growth since starting Dextego and embracing ambiguity and vulnerability.
10. Advice to Her Younger Self: Ioanna reflects on the virtues of patience and enjoying the journey.
11. Upcoming Events: Get a sneak peek into Dextego’s future events, including LinkedIn Audio and LinkedIn Live sessions, and the exclusive ‘Dextagon’ event for HR leaders.

Don’t miss this episode if you’re interested in how AI is transforming leadership and talent development. Tune in to gain invaluable insights from a visionary leader in the tech world.

References

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannemantzouridou/
• https://dextego.com/

Transcript

Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. Today, we are thrilled to bring you insights from a distinguished guest whose dedication to enhancing leadership through technology sets her apart. Ioana Mantzouridou, a community builder, talent development strategist, and fervent advocate for applied AI, join us to share her groundbreaking journey. As the co-founder and CEO of Dextego Ioana is pioneering and AI coaching platform dedicated to revolutionizing talent development. Johanna, how do you introduce yourself to someone you just met?

Ioanna: Awesome. That’s a great question. So I would say that my name is Ioana, I’m the co founder and CEO of Dextego, an AI coaching platform for reducing top talent attrition by half. I’m from Greece, so I’ve been living in the U. S. for seven years now, [00:01:00] and really focused on leveraging technology to push human capital further.

That’s my quick intro.

Alexis: Excellent, I love it. What inspired you to start Dextego?

Ioanna: So, my background is in HR I actually thought I was going to pursue my PhD for a second on organizational psychology, but then I ended up working in startups. I was the VP of people and chief of staff at the, at the end of another B2B SaaS startup here in New York. And I quickly realized, you know, the importance of developing talent and also the challenges.

that come with this development when it is in a remote setting, because especially during COVID, you know, everyone started working from home and I saw how hard it was for us to develop entry and mid level managers. And that’s primarily because [00:02:00] soft skills like communication, collaboration and leadership take time to be developed, right?

You need life experience. You need to go through situations where you talk to multiple people, you negotiate, you handle conflict between colleagues. And so it was very hard for us to do this and talking to other, you know, HR leaders and learning and development experts. I quickly realized it was not just a struggle we faced, but the whole industry, and that the current organizational tools we had, e learning tools, learning management tools, were not sufficient enough, because they lacked the personalization needed to develop such skills and also the interaction with the learner and the experiential learning, if you wish.

Alexis: hmm,

Ioanna: That is the moment when I realized that I had to do something and I created the team around [00:03:00] Dextego to develop an AI coach that can democratize access to such skills across the organization, especially for anyone outside of the C suite that couldn’t afford an executive coach or didn’t have access to an executive coach.

And make it in a way that it can leverage also the company’s internal know how. So we can integrate with the existing systems that a company has again, whether this is a learning management system or PDFs or, you know, information they have, we can fine tune our model to that so that it can speak their language and really maximize, the value it can give to its employee to support them during their day.

So high level, that is, you know everything behind the reasoning. And for me personally, there’s another layer of equity, which [00:04:00] in my opinion, you know, people with soft skills sometimes tend to have. Access to more opportunities, whether we like it or not. Because they’re not afraid of asking for help.

They’re not afraid of meeting people. And on the contrary, you have some people, like introverts, that without the perfect pitch, they won’t go out of their way to, like, go to conferences or meet mentors. And as a result they might stay behind. And I think this is very unfair. And it shouldn’t be the case.

But the right training can equalize, you know, the playing field for, for everyone.

Alexis: Very, very, very interesting. So I love, the mission of Dextego and how it, it aligns with , your leadership philosophy. you spoke about hiring new people and growing talents. So tell me what, what qualities do you look for in team members?

Especially in those [00:05:00] early stage of of a startup.

Ioanna: Yeah, I love this question because I was just talking to a friend of mine who were talking about the fact that outside of the U. S. recruiters tend to see employee, both as a person and as a professional. But in the U S we tend to have this distinction between okay, professional versus personal, like the same thing for coaching.

Sometimes you go to a corporate coach and they just talk about how to boost your revenue. And then you go to someone that has more of the personal life coach approach and you see that the way they coach people is different. And to me, Also coming from Greece, I think the lines get blurry a little bit.

And I like to work with people, but also hire people that I can see myself spending time with outside of work. So to find this like culture [00:06:00] personal fit I think it’s very hard, but it’s the number one thing I look for. I look for people that have empathy, because when times get rough this empathy will allow us to work well together and overcome any difficulties.

I like people who are very hardworking and disciplined. So that I can count on them and I know that if they say, you know, they will be on a task, they will actually do it successfully and on time. That doesn’t mean perfectly, that just means that, you know, they, they do what they say. And I think that is something I really value, trustworthiness. 

And lastly I love to work and hire people that are always eager to learn, like they want to be developed, because if you don’t have that willingness, no matter, you know, what your employer throws at you, it won’t [00:07:00] land, right? So this, I would say, is the most important part. 

Alexis: So let’s let’s speak about a specific challenge that you faced as a CEO and how you managed it.

Ioanna: Very interesting. There is a lot I can think right now, but if I was to pick one, as a CEO, you know, for an early stage company, there are two main things you should focus on, and this is fundraising, if you are not bootstrapped, and getting sales in. I don’t think that what I’ll say is just specific to me, honestly, it’s probably something other founders of our states face, but I think there is always a difference between where you’re in now and where you want to get as a startup, right?

Like you have limited resources, so you do what you can today, but you have this grand vision. And so [00:08:00] that gap is sometimes. It’s very difficult to put in words and to be explained to someone that just is getting introduced, for instance, to your venture. So when I’m talking to investors or I’m talking to potential partners and companies that are super established and it’s, it could obviously be a risk of association for them to work with a company that’s new, that doesn’t have the brand awareness and recognition in the field.

I found myself many times, you know. Struggling to find the confidence. To persuade them that they should work with us now, because I know how far we can get, and that this might take some time, but if I, as the CEO, don’t speak into existence this vision today, right, to get to that level, then what am I doing?

So, it’s Someone gave me very good advice. [00:09:00] It’s the fear, you know, of overselling and under delivering sometimes that holds us back. Or, you know, imposter syndrome, all these things, different terminologies, but I cannot wear all the hats at the same time because I won’t move the company further.

Like I have to think, okay, right now, I’m selling, then I’m doing customer success. Then I’m doing investor relations. So I think the biggest thing I’ve learned. This last month since starting Dextego is how to split these roles. So don’t get overwhelmed and don’t act for the best, you know, of the company.

Alexis: that’s in a way balancing the, the needs of different stakeholders. By playing different personas and you know, yeah, that’s, that’s really hard when you need to do a lot of different things by yourself. Yeah.

Ioanna: You know, as a chief of staff, it’s the same thing, but now it’s, I would say, with more responsibility.

Alexis: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Yeah.[00:10:00] how do you feel, how do you believe we can really foster an innovative mindset?

Ioanna: Even a time where Suddenly, the innovation doesn’t come from the top. It comes from the bottom. I think employees have so much power today to drive innovation and to speak up about what they want to see in a company. So I think, you know, the responsibility is. Spread across organization like anyone today can bring innovation, I think, to a company because we see, and I’ll speak on the L& D side, like 70 percent of employees today say that they’re willing to leave. 

To go to a company that develops them. So, similarly, I feel like there is a lot of fear from leadership to not satisfy employees when it comes to [00:11:00] innovation, to leveraging AI in particular because the employees could easily go somewhere else. So to me, to drive innovation successfully, you just have, if I speak to an employee now, right, you have to understand how the outcome, the ROI of whatever solution you’re bringing in will help leadership achieve their goals.

So if you speak their language. They will say yes. I think most of the times employees find such cool tools they want to use, but they can’t make a case to actually implement them because they’re missing that piece of, okay, but how will it really help us achieve our, like, five year plan or, you know, our quarterly goals.

And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, the leadership cares about these things because they have to report to someone else. So I would say. It’s more [00:12:00] about understanding the strategy of the company and identifying the right type of innovation rather than a question of is the company open to innovation, yes or no?

Alexis: it’s very interesting because you are looking at some success metrics that, that could be met using something. for your company, what, what success metrics do you focus on and why?

Ioanna: Yes. So we focus on top talent retention. Because no matter who, what CEO you take from what field today they really care about their top talent, right? They care about the people that can call and they know they will get it done. these are people that they’ll do anything to keep in their company.

And so when you’re able to bring them a tool that is very personalized, that it matches their needs where they are today and you help them develop for the next day. You’re able to retain [00:13:00] them, but the other part and I made a post about this is totally on the company is how the company does the right change management to explain to the company that implementing a tool like Dextego is for them.

It’s not just the checkbox. It’s something that they understand they need for their personal and professional growth, whether they’re. Working at this company or not, but as a result, the employees will become loyal because they will. be part of this company where the culture is always about personal development and moving forward and improving each other. 

But today, unfortunately for, you know, the lack of technology, technological advancements in L and D for the last years, HR leaders have had the misconception that they have no power because they can’t drive revenue. They can’t drive a significant[00:14:00] you know, metric in the company. So for us being able to deliver reduction of top talent attrition by half in just a quarter makes them the heroes they wish they were all these years. 

And now we can have a seat at the table and really have others understand that they can make or break a company. At the end of the day, we know without talent. You got nothing. No matter what strategy you have on paper, you have no one to execute. So, to me, it’s a very important metric, and we see it across industries from, like, consulting firms that are really suffering from attrition, to startups, to big enterprises, and it’s a way to impact, you know the workforce overall, and knowing that, It’s for their own development.

It’s, it’s a, to me, it’s a just cause.

Alexis: So you, you mentioned that the tool is [00:15:00] adjusted to the needs of the people. 

Ioanna: Yes.

Alexis: what kind of adjustment are, I mean If I, if I’m early in my career or if I am a little bit later in my career, like me, for example, with over 50, how does the tool with, will adjust to our needs?

Ioanna: Excellent question. So, let’s take an example of something that will not adjust first. Like you go to a learning management system and you take the same course. On leadership that everyone else in your organization takes, for instance, right? What we do with DexEgo is the AI coach is able to understand through your answers, the way you answer to scenario based challenges, your level of skills, and adjust the level of Difficulty or the types of questions it asks you, and I’ll give you an example, to really make sure you develop the right skills.

So, [00:16:00] for instance, let’s take an example of a salesperson, and the scenario could be, hey, you have this client, that they’re throwing you this objection. How would you handle it? So you record yourself through video. The coach is your facial expressions, your tone, your pits and content of what you’re saying.

And it gives you personalized feedback back on what you did great, what you can improve. And over time, by you completing some more challenges, it understands. For instance, you might lack negotiation skills so you can close the deal. So we’ll give you more feedback and more related challenges to these till it sees that you improve.

And what we have behind the scenes to track that is our proprietary coachability index framework, which shows you. Basically, how coachable you are, how fast you’re implementing that feedback and how you’re improving your [00:17:00] skills over time. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you start at, let’s say, 4 out of 10 in negotiation.

What matters is that you’re able to improve to 8 to 9 over time. And that’s, I think, what any employer cares about today because we’re moving into this skills culture. It’s not just what you have on paper. Can you actually learn on the spot and develop? And can we see you becoming an important part of Our company, you know, in years to come, I

Alexis: Excellent. So now I turn back the questions to you, to you. Have you evolved as a leader since starting Dextego?

Ioanna: think so. No, for sure. I think you know, in startups, we have talked about this before one year equals 10. If you will, you learn so much, you see so much, you meet so many people like every day [00:18:00] putting myself out of my comfort zone being in like a situation for the first time. I love it.

It’s super, Intriguing and challenging, but it allows for a lot of self reflection. I think the people that are following my journey can see that, you know, since the last time we meet, for instance, a lot has happened, or I’m improving, or the way I handle things is developing. So, I, I feel like I get feedback from others, and also from my self reflection, I can definitely see that growth.

I think the most challenging thing is to be okay with ambiguity, right? And vulnerability as a leader, whether you’re like a leader for the first time or the 10th time in your career, there will always be some ambiguity. And I’m definitely learning to, to handle that better than I did some months ago.

Alexis: [00:19:00] So if you, if you could give an advice to your younger self. Before starting Dextego what would it be?

Ioanna: that’s a great one. You know, my number one weakness, I’ve always said, is my patience. I’ve always said that. Since I was young, I feel like I’m very impatient. So, life has a way to Teach you to become patient or else, you know I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing now, but I would tell myself that it’s okay when, when things take time, there’s actually a beauty in it.

Cause you can. Be more excited when you get to the end result, and you can Develop more as a result as well. So I would tell myself to, to be patient and to Enjoy each moment, whether it’s tough or not. I think looking back, obviously every difficult moment in your life has made you right for who you are [00:20:00] today.

And if you took that away, you wouldn’t be who you are. Thanks. My little speech to my younger self.

Alexis: I love it. Thank you for that. Oh, can you tell us about an upcoming event? You’re particularly excited about?

Ioanna: Yes, a lot. We have three events in November on LinkedIn Audio and LinkedIn Live. We’re talking about leadership. We’re talking about why mentorship programs fail and how to overcome that. About flexibility. And then in 2024, I can say we’re preparing what’s called Dextagon. It’s basically an invite only event for HR leaders and C suite here in New York. But yeah, I, I won’t say much more. It will be very exciting and we’ll talk about human potential and how to drive us further as a human race.[00:21:00] 

Alexis: Excellent. I love it. So where can people learn more about Dextego and get in touch with you?

Ioanna: They can go to our website at dextego. com. That’s D E X T and ego, dextego. com as well as our LinkedIn. And mine as well, you know, Ioana Mantzouridou and check out all our events and upcoming shows.

Alexis: Excellent. Thank you very much Ioana for joining the podcast today.

Ioanna: Thank you, Alex. Thank you very much for your time.