Interview with Jon Quigley of Value Transformation on Conscious Management

Hi, this is Ian Peterman, and I'm here with John to talk about, well, people and how working with them and how we can optimize and just your experience with it. And so I guess from here, just take it over. What are your thoughts? What's been your experience and how—

Well, I have to say that my experience is maybe a little— I'm a product development person. I have 30 years of product development work, either as an engineer or project manager or something like that, or a manager. So the perspective I'm going to talk about is mostly going to be from that, although, you know, I didn't come out of high school and go straight into that. I did a bunch of other stuff before that, worked at fast food restaurants, worked in the tobacco fields like that. So, but most of this context is going to be in a more complex scenario situation, distributed teams. And, um, like we were just talking about before we started, the whole workload and the amount of distractions, the amount of projects, the amount of things that people are supposed to focus on, focus on. These sort of things make it difficult to develop a team and not just to develop a team but successfully complete the work expediently.

Right. There's a lot of distractions.

Yeah, and there's phones in their pocket and they're self-inflicted many times. The business says, you know, hires, has this group of people to do some work and then And rather than focus them on 1 or 2 projects, they're, they're all maybe carrying 6 or 7 or even more. I know a project manager is carrying close to 10, actually more than that, and I'm pretty sure that that's not very helpful.

No.

And I imagine his team members, because I have worked at this place that he works at, the team members are probably carrying something similar in terms of what, what their workload is. And so we're struggling with opportunity costs, distractions from other projects, competing priorities. Which one of these is number one? Well, probably all of it. That's what the management may say, or your manager might say, or even if they cut it in half, okay, you have 6 priorities out of 12. That's still not really much of a prioritization.

Right.

And hardly sustainable.

No, not sustainable for very— for any long duration of time, at least with your sanity intact and clients happy with you.

And motivation too, you know. Yeah, some people like to work hard towards some goal, all long hours, they might be all right with that. But there's a difference between working long hours on a thing and making some progress on that a thing or maybe a couple of things and working long hours trying to keep all the plates in the air. And none of them may be very successful because we haven't dedicated the actual time, the requisite time to make them successful, entirely successful.

Right. I feel like that's— you mentioned the sustainability of people. There's, there's a— we have a high burnout culture, just kind of— we, we love to glorify You know, the startup, work in your garage 100 hours a week, then made it. And we kind of ignore the fact that 90+% fail, right? We never see the light of day because they didn't make it, they couldn't do it. And but even then, when you're in a startup, the one that's just one thing, you are focused on one thing, it's your thing too. So you have—

Oh yeah.

Right, there's this much higher percentage of you is like, well, this is mine, this is me, I don't have a boss telling me what to do. This isn't something I hate. Like, I love it. It's usually a passion project. That's why, that's why you're doing 100 hours.

Yes. And you're all right with it. Yeah.

And you're okay with it.

I have a friend of mine that owns Raptor Performance, and he, he works those kind of hours, but I don't think it bugs him by and large. He's like, it's, this is what I want to do this anyway.

Right. And when you cross into that space where it's something I have to do and something I love to do, and I would be doing this Outside of work hours anyway, and you found that thing like that, you can, you can put 100 hours in, that's totally fine. This other bucket though that most of us live in of, I got a job, it pays me but don't love it, it's not— you can't even compare that. The amount of burnout that you get, you can't sustain it as much as an employee working on something you don't like. Or like you're saying, split projects, like that's—

Yeah.

Singular focus is so much more Maintainable as a person.

Yeah, exactly. And there's a continuity of it, and it's like you're trying to attain a goal with that particular thing. I worked, I worked as, um, the technical project manager on it. Actually won one of these awards back here behind me. The IC05 project was for Volvo trucks, and that was a lot of hours, but it was a singular focus. It wasn't just me, it was the whole entire team. And there was something more than just the fact that we were focused on this interesting technology and software and hardware application. But it was also that it was a differentiator from the way this part of the company had worked in the past.

As in?

In the past, when this part of the company wanted something hardware or software designed, A lot of that load would be done in Europe.

Okay.

And in this case, the, all of it was done in the US. And with this group of people, we, we joked that, I don't know if just coming off the Thanksgiving holidays, you might know down here in the South, I don't know if it's everywhere, but in the South you have big family things at Thanksgiving. And you have a table where the adults sit, and you have what we call the little people's table, right?

I'm definitely— I was definitely sat at that table as a kid.

Okay, so it's maybe it's not just a Southern thing. It's a, it's a, it's a thing, period. It's a thing. Maybe it's even Canadian. Okay, so we had this analogy that up until this point, we had been sitting effectively at the little boy table. We would— little guys' table, little people's table. We would write the specs for what was going to go on. We would guide the hardware, and we would talk about what we wanted in the software and how it needed to work, but we didn't actually do the work, right? That was all headed to some other part of the company, and that part of the company did the work. And we would take and get that product from them, and we would test it, make sure it actually worked like we thought it was. And in this case, none of that was going to be the case. It was going to be we design the hardware, send it off to someplace to design it, um, we set the stipulations on the hardware, not necessarily designed it nuts and bolts, but stipulations on the hardware, and then also did the software. Here's, here's what the software should look like, and here's what we're going to write to make it work like we want it to work uniquely for us, because we don't have the same product as that other part of the company.

Hmm.

So In this case, the compelling reason, the compelling part of the project was, in addition to the technology engagement, was the, you know what, we're doing something really cool here that has not been done on this site.

Right, you're a bit of a trailblazer and also like almost a rite of passage. Like, all right, we're gonna— we get to play with the big boys now. We're allowed to— we're allowed in the big boys' sandbox. And we get to do it ourselves.

Yes, yeah, exactly. It had moved away from spec writing and that, that kind of level of work to we're just gonna do it and we can do it. Of course, we weren't all that sure because we'd done— that group of people had not done this kind of work together before, right? We've done that kind of work separately other places, but not here and not this way.

And there were some significant differences I think that plays into the ownership part because you guys got to own it because it meant something for the team. It didn't just, oh, we're making another product today, cool. It was when you own it, it means something more than just check a box, completed my project, get a paycheck, right?

Yes.

Added this level of ownership which lets you work more.

Right. It connects you to the outcome in a different way, even if it wasn't necessarily monetary. Let me rephrase, even though it was not monetary, right, other than, right, do this, don't do this, do something else, we still would have a job there doing another— working on another project. We probably still have a job there, just wouldn't be this thing. But the thing itself was engaging, that differentiator from how it had been in the past.

And when you— and when we think about like sustainability of people, there's, there's only a certain financial Number, and like used to be $70,000. I'm sure it's up now thanks to inflation, all that. But there's, there's a number where after that point, it just— you have all your food, you have your needs, your rent is paid, you have some savings, there's retirement going on, you're not worried about any of your kids, you can take care of your dog or your cat. Like, your basic human needs are all taken care of. And so after that, There's like this diminishing return for the majority of population on like money as a motivator. It doesn't really— like, as you're talking about, oh, huge amounts, but still it's like that point where you then need an additional motivator. How do you get your team to work more? You've already crossed that like minimum threshold of all your basics are taken care of. There has to be some other motivator. Money isn't just— gonna be as easy as easy as it could be, because you can throw money at people and they go, well—

And you'd see this big improvement, but that's not what happens.

It's not. It's— it does to a certain point and then it stops. It just—

And then it just does that. Yeah. And it's— and it's often what I— from the studies I've read, it's been a while now, but those things are temporary too when they do happen, right? Throw money at it, motivation goes up, and then, you know, a few months later, maybe 6 months later, we're back to Essentially where we are, that it's a transitory motivation at best. Yeah, transitory. Yeah, motivation at best. Probably not even that.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, exactly, maybe.

6 months, especially in product development where it can be an 18-month life cycle. Yeah, 6 months of motivation doesn't even get you halfway there.

I don't know, I don't want to do raises every 6 months just to Company will go out of business with that kind of cycle.

Exactly.

So I think there's this whole—

there is this whole science to like, how do you get your team motivated? How do you not burn them out so they still have energy to be motivated about?

And they're not worn at the end so that they need about a year off or a year taking soft work to kind of heal up from Hundreds of thousands, hundreds of hours of overtime in the course of a year, right? Often uncompensated because you're an engineer in this case.

So yeah, when you're, when you're the, uh, was it salary? There's a type of salary, there's a salary that doesn't get overtime and the one that does, and most people don't get the overtime.

No, they don't. No, it's, uh, but there's more to it than the product too. It's also the team, the environment that the people which the people are working. Um, I think that has a— and that's going to always depend on who's on the team, right? Right. Personality has—

What is your— if you think of like a team, team dynamics that you've been involved with where there was the most longevity or the most sustainability to the team, where there was low burnout, what would you, what would you describe that kind of dynamic and how management looked at it and how the team looked at it and worked together? What is that from your experience?

Well, I'd say that one of the first things is going to be that there's a certain measure of fun in the work, right? I can think of the teams that I've been on And there've been very few in 30 years. There might be 3, right? In those, in those teams, there was a level of jokery going on, a little bit of tomfoolery, and a lot of hard work, right? Yeah. And it was an open environment to allow that. Nobody got— nothing, nothing was taken personal. It was— that's just how it was. No, nobody was out to be mean-spirited to anybody, but we We would joke with each other, um, quite frequently. Not immediately, don't get me wrong. We didn't sort of throw each other together and all of a sudden start calling each other, you know, uh, pointing out each other's foibles. Not calling each other names, but pointing out each other's foibles. That didn't happen like that. It was more of a work together, get to a point where you can kind of trust what you look for, the other person's opinion or perspective, and try to do something with that. Um, openly do these things. And I think you kind of tie people and connect people together to the point where they start to feel comfortable actually cutting up a little bit and exposing some part of themselves— not literally— that, that, that helps in driving a team or that group of people into a team in my mind.

Right. So there's definitely the, the lightheartedness, which Which is always good. Less, less stressful.

Um, but you have to balance that with the demands of the job. Not everything can be, uh, you know, not everything can be catastrophic, taken like it's catastrophic, right? If it's like that, that's just oppressive. You, you can't go the extra mile. Working all those extra hours is not going to work when you think it's all doom and gloom.

Yeah, there needs to be, uh, you need to have some, some amount of duck's back, just let it roll off. Uh, you can't sweat every little thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Which, having a, having a good team that can, that is all at least mostly that way all the time, or most of the time, then there's always at least a certain percentage that are always feeling good at that point, that can help balance the rest of the team who might take that particular event that day a little worse and balance it out. How— you mentioned the structure being a lot more open. Is that something that the team itself, in your experience, cultivates, or is that like a management down, a management— keeps it loose and open, or the team just says, ah, we're going to be this way anyway, but we're so good at it, management's going to be okay with this.

No, I think in general management might say those words, but following up and actually acting in accordance with that's not necessarily— it's really tough to be consistent with that message, I think. And it didn't— it happened within the team kind of organically. It starts off a little more tense.

Right.

Don't really know how to talk to each other and kind of maybe a little bit afraid to say something blatant or abrupt, thinking that it might be interpreted poorly. I think part of it is getting past that, that, that lump. And then I think the person who's got the most contact away from the team, my role was, was, um, with some technical pieces, but also the project part of it, right? So I help structure the— build the team, create the team, structure the timeline, work with the team to estimate, perform the estimates. And these are things we're going to build now for the first iteration for the developer, for the, um, test guys to put it on the vehicle and, and, you know, explore it. And this is the next chunk, and this is the next step. We work together to produce those things. But there are times when When something happens external to the company that actually intrudes in this space and can set this space a little bit on fire. And you have to know when you need to let them burn a little bit, as in vent this. You can't just say, this is another opportunity. This is an opportunity for us to work long hours, or this is an opportunity for us to go up on the mountain and reprogram vehicles in the rain on a cold day. These aren't opportunities. We all know what these are. We have to do them, but they are not necessarily opportunities.

Right.

And, and so you have— in my mind, you have to let that, let that heat off from the team, maybe even start it. As in, I know, you know that they're angry, but they're not going to pop off. And maybe they need to have a safe space to let that— to say what they really think about this rather than put on the, the face, right? Hurry up, get past it. This sucks. Now you, now your turn. Tell me what you think about this situation, right?

Right.

10 minutes later, we've all voiced our thing. All right, now what are we gonna do? Because it's not going away and we need And we need to do this, right?

Right.

And I think conventional wisdom is that we don't do those things. Now, I, I find that that works, but maybe it's anecdotal that it works. Rather than suppress or get people to— rather than spin something as good when we all know that it's not.

Um, I don't know.

I am—

I'm very much in your camp when When, when it smells like crap, it is.

I mean, I'll just—

that's how it is. Like, don't tell me it's a gift. Like, yes, this is just accepted.

It's—

this is not ideal. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this really terrible thing, muck in the mud to go get to a stuck vehicle to try to fix it.

Yeah, or work through the Thanksgiving holidays because of some poor decision Not in our team. So over that way, they made a really bad decision.

Being on call because that group— that group—

yes, bad.

And now I get to be on call while they're on break.

Yes.

Don't sell that to me as a good thing.

Yeah, this is not an opportunity.

Maybe there will be some benefit, but tell me that like 2 weeks after, right? Once, once we've done it and I can maybe see some benefit. But as of right now, like, this is just—

let me deal with it. So yeah, I'm not sure repressing these things or suppressing these things are all that— they're all that great.

There— I mean, there's whole studies. There's, there's therapists that deal with people just on repressed anger and emotions. Like, it's, it's a— it's not good. There's no, there's no part of repressing it your emotions that is ever— it doesn't work out. And whether, you know, not everybody ends up going to see a therapist later, but the fact that therapists do that work means that there is something. So maybe you should just avoid it, let it out. If you can just do it in a controlled, safe— like what you're saying, create like a 10-minute small— don't eat up your whole day.

Yep.

But instead of walking around simmering anger for 2 days, maybe just spend 2 minutes This sucks so much. I don't want to do this. This is terrible.

In truth tell, I would use the F-bomb in those events. I would, I would lead it off with, uh, just, just set it, set it.

Yes, you can follow.

And maybe here's the tone. Boom.

You can be more gentle if you want, but yep, just—

You can also dogpile. I understand.

Well, there's— I, I just watched, uh, Oh, what is it? The hist— I— we watched part of The History of Swear Words on Netflix, which is great because they brought on some people. You should watch it. I see you taking notes. Um, and one of the things they, they talked to some people like psychologists and linguists and all kinds of people like the history of the word and all that stuff, but they also talked about the— there's proven If you're cussing and like serious, it needs to be a real cuss word. It can't just be, oh darn, like you've got to actually mean it. Your grip strength goes up by like 20%. If you're cussing while you're gripping, your pain tolerance goes up some crazy like 20, 30, 50%. And they do it like people stick their hands in ice bowls and they're— you're not allowed to cuss.

Oh, that's crazy.

I do that, and there's people that go from like 1 minute to 2 minutes long before they pull their hand out. Just if you're cussing, you're gonna go twice.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I need to watch these.

There's this whole— is it interesting? Because apparently this whole psychology, there's like specialist people that study swear words and how it works with people. And so it's just this emotion, your body, there's like a specific part of the brain Yeah, that it has to do with like part of your reptile brain somewhere, and it fires off and it, it helps your nervous system just like work better a little bit.

So nice.

This whole— your whole thing of, oh, maybe it'll— it probably will work for everyone. You just set the pace and be like, here, just let it out.

Yeah, just let it out, man. Just do it. I think the key is to know when those— when it's those events and not the little ones. You can't be popping off every time some little Correct. Like you said earlier, water off a duck's back. But some of these more egregious ones, we should not try to stuff it in a sack.

When it's a boulder, just call it a boulder.

Call it, call it what it is. It's a steaming pile of something not great.

That's right.

And just let it go.

Then we can let it go. Then we can walk by it and leave it.

And go pick up our shovels and go to work.

That's right.

Yeah. And I think the other part, probably lastly, Whoever is facing, you know, that's the inward part of the team facing, but somebody has to face outward and say what the truth is of that team so that, okay, y'all know that this is the situation we find ourselves in. We don't— this is not desirable, this is not helpful, but, you know, and articulate that, um, even if you know it's not going to be received well by the executives, rather than cover the circumstances up. You honestly hit, honestly attack that or make that known.

Right. Well, there's something definitely always to be said about self-advocacy, whether it's an individual saying, hey, this sucks. You just told me to do a really terrible crappy job.

I hate—

or as a group saying, hey, management, or hey, client, hey, customer, You, you've just requested or created this event. Doesn't— you don't have to do it in an attacking way, but just in a, hey, hey guys, this is like the actual picture of reality right now. We're gonna take care of it, don't worry, but this is a mess. Yep, we have to point it out so we don't go here.

Can we do less of this, for example?

Exactly. And I, I think that was something we talked about A couple weeks ago before the holidays was the whole repeating, like making sure that people know and understand how did we get here, why are we doing this thing that nobody wants to do.

Yep.

And how do we, how do we make sure that our clients, our management, our team members, our other team over there, well, whoever it is, make sure we don't repeat, repeat that and In that self-advocacy way, like, hey, this is impacting this whole group of people. We have 10 people that are all going to not have a Thanksgiving now because of that.

Of that, right? So what can we do to not do this again come Christmas?

Exactly.

Or whatever the next one is going to be. Yeah.

My team would really like to have Christmas break. Can we?

Especially since Thanksgiving is what it is. Exactly.

So can we avoid— like, how do we not repeat this in 30 days?

Yeah, and you're right, that has to be somewhat kind of diplomatic about that because, you know, we can't get into this finger-pointing contest with folks, but neither can the organization, um, organization's management fix what they do not know or unaware of.

Right, if there's no feedback loop, there can be no improvement.

There can be no improvement. Yeah, exactly.

The whole— one of, one of the things that I've I really— everybody points out in everything, it's like being aware, awareness. If nobody knows that the oceans are full of plastic, nobody can do anything about it. If nobody knows your team is burned out because everyone's afraid to or they don't feel like they can, well, you can't manage. The manager could be really, really nice and just doesn't know. They're like, oh, they keep saying yes to everything. This is fine. This is fine.

Yeah.

Reality of the team is dying and they're like, they're just not, there's no feedback loop. There's nothing. And without that feedback loop, you can't change anything. Client doesn't know anything. Customer doesn't, nobody knows anything.

Yeah. Everybody thinks we're on a nice slide glide path because nobody says we're not. So the assumption is unless we see evidence otherwise or hear something Otherwise, everything's golden.

Right.

In general, I think humans are, for the most part, optimistic creatures, and they suffer from a little bit of optimism bias. Yeah, I think we do. Yeah. So unless it's in their face, they probably— we don't notice it as a— as it's an issue until somebody actually points it out. And even then, we're probably like, is this really an issue? I want to— show me how this becomes a problem.

Um, can you confirm that?

Do you have a— Yeah, walk me through how this is an issue because I can't really see how it should bother anybody, right? That kind of thing, right?

Which is— that's a good point on like communicating and how, how to do so is making sure that it's understandable. Like, oh well, because you got to make sure the other person understands. Like, maybe it's a problem for you, but for them it's not. They're like, oh, that's easy. Like, well, but I'm not you and neither is my team, right?

Yeah, right. Or maybe they're missing some— what I find is that if you're in an organization where they're usually called functional organizations, many people call them siloed organizations, you build something and you're going to hand that to me. Maybe you write a spec, customer spec, and you give that to me, and then we turn that into a detailed technical spec and the actual product. So what you hand to us has some bearing on what we can build. It influences what we build, and the quality of that input has some impact on the quality of the outcome in those kind of organizations.

You can only, you can only do so much to, you know, whatever you're given. You can't make, you can't make gold out of a pig's ear, right?

I mean, yeah, I tried. Yeah, me too. I thought that might be the fast forward to financial independence.

Yeah, it didn't work out.

Subtext, no, it didn't work.

Exactly.

But in fact, I had a story when I worked on another project and there was a senior engineer who was writing some technical specs for the product and then my team was going to actually do the work turning that technical spec into the product. And he wrote the first technical spec, and I'm like, well, this is not really going to work for us. I don't know what you're saying here, and you're missing a lot of stuff. So I said, here are the questions we need you to answer when it comes to the spec. Tell us what this does. Tell us what this subsystem does. Who who he interacts with, what the messages are, what various configurations we can expect, and what those outputs should look like. And I actually built an outline for him to work from, and that didn't work out either. So we ended up having to have yet a third part of the company do the work, and I would work with them too, because he could— he tried twice and he couldn't do it. And it just wasn't there. And the first time I hand that to the software folks, you start working at it with the software folks, we're like, we can't do anything with this. I mean, I don't know what this means. Um, I'm not sure how to structure the software. I'm not sure what parameters need to be involved, you know. And, and so we couldn't even start. Hmm.

I— was it, was it just a communication level, just speaking 2 different languages basically, of I think it was, I think it was more of an experience-based—

his experience was not in this exact area. He was an engineer more in maybe how facing out to the customer, and then it was into the minutia of how to make things, how to make systems work, which is a little bit different. It's a little more maybe hardcore at the systems level.

Yeah, the people, the people that sit in between that, that translate, they really are translators. Like, you know, the customer, the customer isn't going to know every— sometimes they do, right? But usually the reason they're coming to you is because you're the expert and can do all the minutiae. And they say, I want outcome X, and you go, well, I'll, you know, A through Z over here will get you there. And they go, well, we don't know that alphabet. We know X.

Yeah, yes.

X.

Yep.

Got one thing, that's, that's it. Go do, go do whatever you got to do. Pick whatever alphabet over there. We speak X.

Yeah, we speak X. Yeah, exactly. And, and in fact, though, they might even put something together. A lot of times I have seen this where the— there are contradictions in their, even in their customer ease. You probably don't pick it out when you're saying it as a customer, but when you start to translate that into, into engineering stuff, you're like, well, it can't simultaneously be lightweight, for example, and have a battery life that means you have this kind of duration of system availability. You're going to have to have a heavy battery to have that amount of duration of time.

They really want anti-gravity. Just figure that out there.

Yeah, exactly. But they don't know where the limits are. It's not their expertise, of Yeah, right.

And that's, that's that, that balance of communication and scope and expectation setting and accountability and feedback loop of—

And asking questions and keeping asking questions.

Ask the questions, give the feedback. No, it can't be lightweight and last for 3 days. We can do half a day, we can get you 12 hours.

We can find some middle ground where you can get maybe 2 days, but it's going to be a little bit heavy. Right, exactly.

So where's the balance point?

Right, where's the balance point? What are the trade-offs? What, what, what is the most important? What is the next most important? Right. And, and that's helpful to tie the team together too when you find out what the most important things are to get. And you kind of— this is part of that whole duck water off the duck back. When you know what's most important, the other parts can kind of— they're not focused on. Right, they fall off to the side a little bit.

Well, that will help— that helps your, your poor project manager with 12 projects.

Yes, my guess is that that guy has got— I have one important thing in half of them and nothing in the others.

Yeah, exactly. That was probably the only way to manage that.

Hey, I need to, I need to touch base with him again because I was complaining about the 6 or 7 rows. I have. And he said he had that many. I'm like, oh, that doesn't sound like fun.

I think I've managed 5, 5, well, 6 maybe at most, but definitely not the best place to be.

No.

Yeah, I can't imagine 12. 12 would be— there's balls being dropped somewhere. Yeah, I don't even know where the balls are being dropped.

Without a, without a doubt. Yeah, because at 6, I'm like, which one is Yeah, exactly, exactly.

When you have to refamiliarize yourself with the project that's actively going on right now, it's, it's a little overload.

Yeah, the tools kind of help. Like, what is that notebook? I keep a separate virtual notebook for each one of them, so that's helpful. So once I figure out what we're talking about, I can go to my virtual notebook and get my, get my Downright, you know, I could, I could start to figure out what we're talking about. But yeah, ambush me in the hall and try to catch me, I'm like, which one is that?

Wait, who are you? Yes, it's been, it's been too long. I've talked to 20 other people just in the last hour.

Yeah, exactly.

Remind me who you are. Need name badges and your project listed on your name badge.

Yes, you know, project name and project number.

That way I can look it up as you're saying hi.

That's right. Oh, awesome.

Well, this has been great. Uh, there's— we've talked about a lot of fun things with people, and, uh, I, I think I'd like to kind of, as a last question, what would be— if you were to pick the 3 things that you've, you've experienced, top 3 things that help teams and not be that poor burned-out person. What are the 3 that you would pick as like the best top things that really would make the most impact from what you've seen?

Okay. I'd say one of them has to be get to a place with your team where you can be open with the way things are. And that means in yourself as well. You know, you get to the— you want to be able to tell the rest of the folks, I'm really not where I'd like to be today, or I don't believe the team is where it should be today, or something like that. You got to get that dialogue where you can say things like that. And I think that's going to be part of that open atmosphere, that joking around, that working hard together. that recognizing the contribution of each team member. And if the team member is not able to contribute, then you have to find some other way. And that might include removing that team member from the, from the team and finding a new team member that can do this part of the work.

Right.

So I think first thing is getting that environment right. I think the second is if you're the person who's I hate to use the word leader, but if you're the person that's kind of guiding that effort, you gotta know when— you have to let— know when circumstances are trending in a way that they are going to need to pop off or have some external, um, tangible demonstration of their interpretation of the circumstances.

Right, expression.

Yes. And this shouldn't cost anybody anything, you know. Go ahead and say it, right? And we're not going to hold it against you. In fact, we're feeling the same way, um, right? We're probably feeling the same way, right?

There's probably some camaraderie around your feelings, actually.

Yeah, exactly. And so, so that the communication, the environment development is important to allow the second thing to happen, right? Right. And then as the Also is you got to have their back when it comes right down to it. So if something is turbulent on the outside, you have to kind of deflect it. And if you can, you got to try to affect the change. Even I've had team members tell— I was called Don Quixote because they would be perturbed by something outside and they would believe that nothing was going to change that. They You're probably right. But you know what I would do anyway? It's bugging you. It's a valid issue. I'm going to go take it to the director.

Right.

Nothing would happen, but they knew that if they had a valid concern, that I was going to push it up the chain. I'll give you an example of this. We had a project. This project was demanding huge amounts of overtime. of the short schedule.

Mm-hmm.

And there was a mandatory meeting, uh, that the company expected everybody to attend. I told my group, don't attend. You know, it was a couple hours every, I don't know, every 2 weeks or something like that. And I— and, and there was pressure to get them to attend. And I'm thinking, I'm not telling people to work or asking people to work 60 hours a week so that they can come in here and spend 2 hours every week or so on this topic, dragging them away from their objective, that's adding another 2 hours or taking away 2 hours on the product.

Plus refocus time.

Yeah, exactly. You're 2 hours out. That's plus time, out time, plus time, back time. Right. Right. If that makes any sense. But yeah, so I'm like, no, this— I'm not— this is not going to happen. So the manager that was pushing, yeah, they will. I'm like, no, I'm not— they're not doing it. And I told them, you're not doing that. We're not— we're not working 64 hours in a week so that you can accommodate this. You know, we just keep working our regular overtime and that's out. And I took it out. And that one I won. But a lot of times you don't. But just the fact that you're willing to go to bat Um, I think tells them something about this, this thing that they're working.

Well, that's the— it's you being their advocate makes, makes you their ally, right? You become, you become someone they can actually trust. Like, oh well, hey, he hears me, he understands me, there's no confusion in translation, he actually knows what, what's bugging me. And I can't— I'm not in a position to be able to, you know, push it up as far as it could go. And he is, so— and he's doing it. He's, he's saying, oh, it's valid, I'm going to help you, I'm going to advocate for you. And no, we don't win them all.

Or many. Or many, you know.

But, but it's, it's— I think that that case, it really is the effort that counts. I'm here supporting you. I'm going to spend my time trying to help you. And yeah, despite— in that, in that case, it's really despite the success rate. Like, yeah, I'm still gonna do it even though I haven't—

yeah, even though—

exactly, 99% of the time they, they ignore everything I say, but I'm still doing it.

But we might win one this time, right?

Might win.

It's definitely not— when somebody takes a, a— takes and advocate on your behalf to the point where it might be a career— a non-career-enhancing move, you have to take that seriously, right?

Right.

You have to, you have to know that that person really probably really does have your best interest at heart, at least as much as they can, if they're willing to.

Probably if you're bugging your direct boss that much, it could go bad for your upward mobility.

Yes, it can. Yeah, exactly. What's all this boat rocking?

Right.

You know, the boat needs to be rocked.

That's because we're in stormy waters, actually. I'm just telling you about them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're in the boat. You didn't know. You didn't know. Yeah, I'm just informing you that we've been in this boat now for a while. Now, yeah, for a while. But now it's time to maybe think about turning the tiller in a different direction for a little bit. Exactly.

Oh, awesome. Well, if anybody wants to get a hold of you, where, where would you like them to go, if anywhere?

I'm on LinkedIn, John M. Quigley at LinkedIn, and you can send me an email to john.quigley@valuetransform.com. Perfect.

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. This has been entertaining and not wonderful conversation, as, as our previous conversations have been. So thanks for, for joining me on the podcast.

Thank you, Ian. It's been a pleasure to be here, and I hope we can do this again sometime.

Sounds good.