154 - The Importance of Team-Building, Open Communication, and Understanding in the Workplace with Crosstown Fiber's Mike Underdown

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Mike Underdown, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the president and CEO of Crosstown Fiber, which can be found at crosstownfiber.com, and you're in the telecommunications business. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Tell me a little bit about your backstory. How'd you get into this?

Ah, well, as you can tell, well, maybe not by my gray hair cuz it's falling out. The lack of your gray hair.

I get it. Yeah.

What, what hair I have is gray. I started in this industry a little over 30 years ago. I worked for a company at one of the original CLECs called Teleport Communications Group, which is based out of New York. And I had the pleasure of working with arguably one of the founders of fiber optic infrastructure, at least in the new age, a guy named Howard Brunky. And he helped me understand how fiber infrastructure was kind of the base need for what all telecommunications at that time was, was going to become. And, and what has eventually evolved into what we have today, which is, you know, obviously this massive internet Backbone, which has kind of replaced all the telco. And so I was, I started out as a small, you know, entry-level guy, you know, kind of in sales and technical sales of things and kind of became a sales engineer. And over the tenure there, we exited by an AT&T acquisition in '98. And I realized that I like the smaller companies as opposed to the big companies. When I was, when I was kind of thrown under the bus for my expense management where I didn't spend enough. They didn't really care about my revenue. They cared about the fact that I didn't spend all my money and, that made it harder for them to go back and get more. So I realized, yeah, that wasn't logical to me. And so I moved on and kind of got my entrepreneurial bug back, starting up a couple of different companies over the years, some more successful than others. But I had sold a fiber company to what became Crown Castle by way of Synesis. And, and I, I dipped my toe into data center stuff as well. Where I, I owned, I was a part owner in a data center here in Chicago, which is a small one. And I just kind of saw the, saw the vision of what was coming. And I, I became a firm believer in fiber over everything else. A lot of people at that time in the early 2000s were talking about everything's going wireless, these cellular companies. And, and I helped them understand that there's a lot of wires in wireless. And so, yeah, it's all eventually has some wireless components to it as we know. But, you know, there was a guy back in the '80s, Negroponte, he talked about the Negroponte flip, everything that was in the air now is in the ground and vice versa. And if you thought about it, your homes were wired, but the long-distance lines were, were wireless. Well, now all the long-distance lines, as we talked about, you know, sub, subterranean things are all underground wires and your house is kind of wireless. So he was right in a lot of ways. I don't think he quite got it right, but the, the concepts were there. So, and that's kind of driven me as far as, seeing ideologies and, and ideas from people and then how they kind of fit but not quite fit. You might be off by a finger or two, but they still fit. So it's our job as leaders of the technology and infra— digital infrastructure to figure out how to make those best fit going forward.

And your, your company, Crosstown Fiber, is based in Chicago, and the sense I get is that most of your work is in doing infrastructure work within Chicago?

Right now, the, the basis of the business spun out of a, a grant from the, the e-rate platform, USAC, which is the Chicago Public Schools filed for a grant back in 2018 and awarded it. And I was brought in to help create the infrastructure, design and build the infrastructure. And over the course of a couple of years, I, I, I was able to bring in another private equity group and, and we rebranded under the brand of Crosstown Fiber over the last 18 months and have taken it from a, you know, a project to now being more of a company where we're, we're driving business into more of the commercial sectors, doing business with the large cloud and hyperscale entities as well as some of the financial companies.

And is this again, is this mostly located in the Chicago area?

Yes, it's all in Chicagoland right now. We have licenses to operate in other states. I'm in conversations with other markets, with other entities to bring us to other markets, but nothing started yet.

Right. So you've been doing this for a long time, 30 years. What is it that gets you up in the morning, gets you excited to go to work?

Honestly, I get a little philosophical about it. I love being a part of this infrastructure at this time. I, I watch too much, you know, history TV and I read too many weird books about tough stuff. But what resonates with me is we're kind of the Westinghouse and Edisons of the 1906 timeframe where wires were being deployed for electricity. Well, you know, the internet, it's not getting any smaller and the best component that drives internet you as a utility is fiber optic infrastructure, right? So the more we can push that infrastructure out into any market, any, anywhere, because, you know, a lot of people think these urban markets like Chicago or New York or whatever it may be, have all these, this infrastructure and you don't need it. There's a lot of, you know, dead zones. Just like there's, you know, food deserts within these communities, there's broadband deserts as well. And I believe that through deployment of the physical infrastructure, we can not only take care of that broadband desert, but also create jobs, create economic understanding of what the digital economy looks like for communities that may not understand. And so I, I view what we do as we're, we're the enablers. We, we don't, we don't operate the internet or anything like that or, or provide that kind of a service. But we enable others to provide it at hopefully a level that will provide a better service at a better rate for these communities.

So in Chicago, if I were living in Chicago and I wanted internet access as a consumer, would I be going with a cable company or would I be able to get somebody who's using fiber optic?

Some of the cable companies have fiber optic systems. Many of them don't. There's really only two, RCN and Comcast are the dominant players here. AT&T has a little bit of a niche and there's some independents. But for the most part, it's a mixed hybrid of fiber and copper or, you know, coax. So it, it, it's still suspect and they truncated down and it's not really well deployed. The way we'll, we are trying to enable people and we're working with some fiber to home providers now, we want to bring them to the data center faster in shorter paths so they can have, we can push that bandwidth closer to the home and keep those pings low and the broadband high.

And, and so as you see the growth in Chicagoland, more and more fiber optic deployed, eventually more and more homes and businesses get the advantage of the super high speeds that fiber optic provides in the bandwidth.

Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's what we want to really enable. And, and honestly, I'm not against, uh, you know, some of these 5G and 5G+ type Infrastructure plays, you put, if you can put the node in the alley, you can drive real capacity into those homes and it might be better, but you have to have fiber in the alley.

Right.

You, you know, and that's where we, we have a high capacity system that's all underground. I don't do anything aerial. And that creates reliability and, and sustainability to be honest for, for everybody's infrastructure. Wow.

So what is it that's unique about you that you bring to the table that has made this all so successful?

At the end of the day, I'm kind of a team guy. I love, I love building teams. And, you know, as somebody who's on the tail end of their career, you know, maybe I got another 10 years in me, probably. But, you know, I really enjoy building teams. And one of the things that I've found that I recognized early on in this project was there's not a lot of young people who know how to build stuff. They all know how to operate the laptop better than I'll ever know, and they know how to do all kinds of technical things with soft keys and, and all that. But, you know, there's a famous movie out there called Caddyshack, and the quote is, the world needs ditch diggers too. And the reality is they do. And some of the best paying jobs are, you know, some of the wealthiest people I know are, own, own companies that build underground.

Mm-hmm.

And, and so I like creating situations where I've got 30-year veterans of the industry working side by side with somebody who's been in, in here for months, weeks, or maybe a few years. And what I've been watching and, and try to facilitate is just because the guy's 30 years old doesn't mean he's right. Because that naive little mind can stumble on a different angle and see something that, you know, well, we don't do it that way because it's never been done that way. That's just the way we do it. And as opposed to, yeah, but this is better and faster and easier, just do this. And I've watched it happen time and time again where some young person who doesn't know any better and goes, well, why don't we just bore down the alley? Oh, you can't do that. Well, why not? Next thing we know, we're born down the alley because we went and asked the city if we could. And yeah, okay, go ahead. Nobody's ever asked that before. So it's, it's that kind of simple, simple, I, ideas where it's like, boy, I, they don't know what they don't know. And sometimes it works out. And then on the flip side, they get the experience of an older person who has a lot of lifetime experiences about, you know, In this case, a lot of times there's dead gas pipes and things like that. And you're like, yeah, it says it's dead. It's not dead. There could be latent stuff in there. Don't get close. Stay back. You know?

Right, exactly.

There's a lot of different, um, experiences. Those are just a few examples, but, um, some are not that extreme and there's a lot of in between.

Um, right.

The challenge with it is communication, right? That's trying to get everybody to talk with and to each other. Um, is kind of where I try to insert myself and try to bring more of an open mind to things as best I can.

That is the, the, the main topic of this show, listening with leaders. And it all starts with communication. How do you get people to open up and talk? You've got a 30-year-old or a 28-year-old talking to somebody who's been around for 20, 30, 40 years, who's more likely than not to dismiss the ideas of the young person. How do you, how do you foster an environment where people are listening to each other and they are communicating clearly?

Well, honestly, I try to grab stuff from relevant media. And the last couple years I've been throwing out a lot of Ted Lasso quotes. And so the one that, the one that's resonated and hit home for, for everybody here, and they get a little tired of me saying it, is be curious, not judgmental. And absolutely, to me, that, that phrase has really resonated with me and I've taken it kind of a little bit differently to not only to use it as a communication tool, but also to help people when I start to see the frustration, it's like, why, why do you think you're frustrated? And let them think about that for a second. Where's that coming from? And when you realize that it's some kind of a internal issue that you have with why you're feeling this way. And if you can flip it by being curious about it, because you're, you're feeling like you're, you know, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a thing. And if you can take the second, breathe it out and go, hmm, why am I really pissed off? And that's silly. I'm being judgmental. Almost without exception, the person is being judgmental in a way that's destructive to the overall communication. And if they step back and go, hmm, Is it possible that that guy who's being doing this, that, or the other thing, there could be something else causing that. And that's really kind of the, the, the step that I think has helped some of my team and, and, and the young people as well as the old people. You know, the young people don't want to think that an old person could ever have a problem. And, you know, and, and old people are like, you know, you know, energy's wasted on the young. They don't know what they're doing.

So, you know, so I try to, try to enable that as best I Um, so when you see people who are upset or there's disagreement going on, how do you, how do you facilitate that?

Um, it, it, it obviously it depends where, where we're at, you know, in the office I'll treat it one way. If we're out on the street, um, on a, on a sidewalk, it's a little bit different. Um, you know, to be frank, in Chicagoland, there's some, there's some issues on the street and we've got a little bit of a violence problem. So, We try to get, we try not to engage in that level. In the office when I see some, some of that and I'll see somebody shut down, I generally will pause the meeting for a moment and depends on how many people are in the room. I don't wanna embarrass anyone. I don't like to call people out, but I tend to try to bring it around to if we're arguing about a process or, or an outcome, I try to bring it back to we're doing things right because it's right, not because we want this specific outcome. I'm really trying to get away from the end result ideology of things over— when I started in the industry, it was all about the check. It was all about getting things done. Goal, I got it, I'm done. As I've aged a little bit and coached different sports in my life, I realized that if you, particularly in coaching, if you're coaching a team and they practice well and they go into the game, as long as they execute in the practice, or if I, I, I like to call the process, it don't ever look up the scoreboard. You don't have to trust me. If you're doing the things that we practice and you're doing it well and you're doing it right, if you will, you'll never have to look up the scoreboard. Trust me, you're doing fine. If you find yourself drifting, from the process and doing things right, trust me, don't look up the scoreboard. You don't need to look up, you're losing. And the, so it's kind of one of those things where I like to think about, try to continue to do it right because it's right. Not because of some, I want this to happen at the end. Someone once told me a story, kind of an archer's, it's a, it's a Stoic philosophy story. Where archers, you know, you can pick up a bow, pull back the arrow, let it go, and it, it hits the bullseye and, and you got your outcome. You hit the bullseye. Try and do it again. You didn't do the work. You didn't spend the time to work the back. You didn't spend the time to work the bow, work your hands, get everything going. So when it comes to trying to execute it again, you can't because you didn't do the process. You didn't do what's right for right. You were focused on the outcome and you walked away because you hit the bullseye. You got lucky. People get lucky all the time. It's great.

Right.

Happen, you know?

Right.

But you didn't learn anything. You're not gonna be able to repeat that, that outcome because you were too focused on it.

How do you deal with, how do you deal with the older people that, that think they know that because they're experienced, they think they know it all and are unwilling to, sometimes might be unwilling or a little resistant to this sort of thinking that you, that you espouse.

It, it, it is a challenge for sure. And it comes up quite a bit. What I tend to do is try to remind them of where they're at in the, in the chain of life and then get them to talk about, you know, why are they so focused on the outcome? And what they'll inevitably say is that, well, because I know how to get there. I said, you're right. You know the practice. You're doing it right because it's right. You're already doing it and you just show them, but you have to, You have to pull it back and walk them back through. Do you remember when you were 20, you know, 25 or whatever the age is, and, and bring them back around. And a lot of times you start to see the head nod and I watch the body language as much as I can. And when you see the head nod and then they get the little smirk in their face and you're like, I got them. And they, now they recognize it. On the flip side, if you don't get that head nod and you see that scrunchy face, you can see that their ego's getting in the way and they're pinched. In some way that I'm hitting them in a way that they're taking insult and they're getting defensive. And then I try to back off and try to come back around at it again in a more creative way. I go back to try to be curious, not judgmental. I don't want to assume that I've got there. I want to be creative and curious in a way that they can come out of it and say, hmm, yeah, I kind of, you're right. I'm kind of angry because this, that, and the other thing, whatever it is. Wow.

Yeah, it sounds like you stumbled onto what I teach, which is how to listen to emotions and how to, when you listen to people's emotions, you can get them de-escalated very quickly and then you can do some deep problem solving. Sounds like you got that in a really interesting way.

I've gotten lucky. So in college, I have a master's degree in psychology, specifically in neurolinguistics. So I was big into, you know, active listening and all that. And, and it's very effective at the time and, and self-hypnosis and things. You could do a lot of interesting things with people, but it doesn't really stick. It wasn't very lasting for me. And then I, I'm constantly reading. Well, I don't really read Audible, audible.com. I listen to a lot of Audible books and especially when I travel, it's a great way to travel. And I, I was invited to a leadership seminar in California that helped me open up some other ideas. And it was a great seminar, 10 days in Sausalito, and just had a spectacular moment in time where I started to realize how some of my stuff was on and I was missing some of the key parts, which is understanding the, the the emotions of, of the, the brain and the ears and the disconnect between fact and, and belief.

Right. Um, well, you're probably gonna want to then get a copy of my book on Audible called De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less.

I will do that.

You will, based on what you've told me, you will love the book and it will expand your horizons even further than it already is.

Oh, excellent.

So De-escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less. Yeah, my wife was the reader too. She was the narrator of the book, so you get to hear her voice.

Oh, okay.

Well, this is really great, Mike. One more question and I'll let you go because I know you're a busy guy. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

That I'm a far softer, generous person than anybody would ever think. You come across as a hard, hard guy. Chicago businessman. Yeah. I'm a martial artist and football player and all that. So people think I'm this, that, and the other thing. I, I've laid on nail beds, had cinder blocks broken on me, stuff like that.

Yeah.

I, I was lucky enough to train with a, with a grandmaster from China, Shaolin monk, and he taught me how to breathe.

And I totally, I'm a secondary, I'm a secondary black belt in the Northern Chinese style as well. So I totally get it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excellent.

Good for you. Well, thank you so much for your time today. This has really been fun.

Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team.

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