Increasing Your Team's Capacity To Win with Dan Portillo and Wade Chambers | Greymatter

Welcome to Gray Matter, a series that shares entrepreneurial stories from company builders. This is the first of a two part interview. Greylock Talent partner Dan Portillo talks to Wade Chambers, the head of Revenue engineering at Twitter. In this podcast, Dan and Wade discuss the art and science of managing technical teams. Wade shares personal insight into his development as a leader and shares frameworks for structuring productive meetings, providing feedback and optimizing for a high functioning team. For more news and podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com this is Dan Portillo at Greylock Partners. I'm the talent partner working closely with portfolio companies on recruiting and development. I'm here with Wade Chambers. Wade, welcome. Thank you for being here with us.

Excited to be here.

Would love to just get the career narrative from you. Where did you start and how did you end up where you are now?

It's a long story so I'll try and keep it to the short version of it. Started back as a software engineer in 1990, was working at the White House of all places and one of the directors in the situation support staff there left to start his own company at the White House. I was actually starting to teach myself programming and doing a lot of things along those lines. I think he saw that and thought this is a young hustler. I need somebody like this inside of my company. So he gave me a break there and gave me the opportunity to actually start working in the software environment and taught me how to be an engineer. That company, unfortunately five engineers hit the ground hard. And so from there though I was able to move out to Silicon Valley, joined some startups out here, Verity being the earliest one. That's where I learned about the Internet and building large distributed systems. I was working on search engines integrated with web servers back in 1994, 1995. Along those lines it's also the place where I started getting into technical leadership and started to run projects and actually the place that I first tried to be an engineering manager and was not too successful at it there as well. From there went to Netscape, worked on a lot of large scale distributed systems to include building out shopping at AOL after the acquisition of Netscape with Ben Horowitz when Ben and Mark created Loud Cloud and then Opsware went over there and ultimately became the VP of engineering for Ben and Mark, including the time during the, you know, going public, which was a very interesting time for for Opsware. From there went to Yahoo, built out their OpenSocial platform, also ran engineering for a lot of the entertainment and lifestyle areas of Yahoo. Then went on to proofpoint where we built out Internet security and helped move from just an appliance base to actually having a cloud offering where we used big data to find anomalies and be able to quarantine them. From there, went on to Telepart, where I got to work with a very talented team and create insights based marketing for the masses and a very high performance, low latency distributed system approach.

So tell me a little bit more about the first time you started managing people. What were the circumstances, why did it happen, and what were the mistakes that you made?

Oh my God, this is going to be embarrassing. At Verity, I had learned I naturally sort of gravitated towards the front of the team. I was probably one of those engineers that was very gung ho, always tried to simplify things and I think people responded to that inside of the team. And the CEO at the time, I think recognized that there was a technical leadership ability associated with me. And the conversation was, if you're doing that, you should be an engineering manager inside of the team and actually help drive this forward. He's the CEO, he should know, right? This is awesome. I've been anointed. This is fantastic. And so I went from one day sort of being the tech lead, staff level, engineer, architect, to the next day being the engineering manager. It felt perfect. I now not only had responsibility for the project, I had responsibility for the people. Nothing could get in my way except me. And I found that about three months in, I was starting to have problems inside of the team. People were threatening to quit, people wanted to leave. And from my point of view, nothing had changed. Things were perfect four months ago.

That was the problem. Nothing had changed.

They should be awesome now. And what I found is I had one senior engineer who took me out to lunch one day and he was gracious enough to give me some just candid feedback and he was wed. Do you know how many times you say the word I or me? My design, I think we should do X. You should be doing this part and sort of doing assignment. Any sense of autonomy, any sense of like, connectedness and relationships inside of the team, any chance for anybody to exhibit competence. I was stepping all over repeatedly. I realized that I was doing everything necessary to run the team into the ground. And I was horrified. And so it's at that point I took myself out of the role and went back to being an individual contributor and realized I did not understand that role and did not want to try it again until I did.

So how long did you go without managing people?

2 and a half years.

So what made you decide to go through that torture again?

The main difference at that point in time was people were talking to me about being an engineering manager again. And I'm like, ah, this didn't work out so well last time. Like, I know it something inside of me and I know what I did wrong, but I don't know what to do right. And I think that's a common thing, right, where, you know, people always say, well, if you join a startup and it fails, you know, at least you know what not to do. At that point in time, Ben Horowitz took me to the side and was like, why do you want to be an engineering manager and what do you think that role is and how do you want to think about it and what should you be doing? And we had a long series of discussions of where he was sort of able to correct a lot of my assumptions and my thinking about it. And then he also committed to mentoring me through some of this in the early stages, as well as connecting me to people internally. And so with that sort of oversight and guidance and knowing that somebody was actively coaching and mentoring me, I felt like it was a risk worth taking. So I did it.

And I'm assuming you made a bunch more mistakes during that time?

Repeatedly. I still make mistakes.

Did you remove the I and the me and get more to being able to use we?

I definitely did as well as I stopped telling and started asking a lot more. There was much more of I wanted everybody's voice to be heard in it. There had to be decisions made, there had to be forward progress, but it was much more about the team and less about me.

So now, all these years later, do you have a philosophy that you bring towards leadership and managing and how do you communicate that to the people that you work with?

Yeah, so there's some simplifying models or statements that I've used in the recent past. If I'm going to talk to somebody about becoming an engineering manager, I think that first it's important for them to understand their role. And I kind of put that into your job is to win and then increase your capacity to win. And what does that mean? Well, first, your job is to win. You need to figure out the things necessary to help a project succeed to anything that's blocking a project from moving forward, any technical decisions that need to be made, any dependencies that you have, any morale issues that you have inside of the team, anything that's preventing a project from winning, that's your job. So be Very much inside of the business and remove all of those obstacles, help drive things forward. So that's good, but even better is increasing your capacity to win exact same team a year later. You should be able to do 2x the amount of work that you did in the previous year. That's not working more hours. You have the ability to invest in your people. What are the things that they're really strong at? How do you help them move forward? What's their boat anchor? What's the thing that's dragging them back? How can you help them see it and then move through that in the shortest period of time possible? What are the processes and how can you help refine that? Were there a lot of missteps in the past, how can you prevent those moving forward? Can you ask the question, why a lot more? Make sure that your North Star is correctly. Make sure that you have identified the North Star correctly and therefore are able to optimize for that. What tools, what technologies do you need to use? How is the communication flow? Where's the trust at? Do you have alignment issues inside of the team? All of these things can be worked and it's working on the business. Improving those systems are necessary to be able to increase your capacity to win on a go forward basis. So I think a lot of things cleanly fit into one of those two things. When I bring new engineering managers into the role, we often talk about what the role of an engineering manager is, and I start with that. But I think ultimately the engineering manager has to feel like they are taking on the responsibility of being part technologist, part anthropologist and part psychologist. Right? You have to understand people, you have to understand the history and the systems and like how they think in very real ways. Because I think then you can actually help challenge people. You can coach people, you can help them work through the roadblocks that are preventing them from reaching optimal motivation. You can help them see themselves more clearly and therefore understand where to invest in them and how to help them grow. You can't teach somebody something, you can't make them move. But what you can do is create the conditions where if they want to, they're going to thrive. And if you realize that they can't, part of that helping your team win is removing people out of the system that are not going to help you win. And so once they understand it's not the technology, it's not how the things work, but you are now the architect of how to create that optimal team. Most of the time there's an awareness of I'M not prepared for that. And then you can start to talk about, here are the books you need to read, here's the classes you need to attend, here's the sort of mentoring that you need to do. Let's focus on the top two or three things that you need to improve on and how do we work our way backwards from where you need to be and set up very specific things that help you get there.

Yeah. I find that a lot of people view management as a career progression and don't fully understand the responsibility that you take on when you become responsible for other people, not just people, but the goals of the organization. And so helping people frame, what does that really mean is incredibly important to them.

So true. And I wish there was just one style of person that you could optimize for. There are so many people walking to the room with very different views, very different history. And you need to work your way into their style of thinking, not force them to constantly work their way into your style of thinking thinking. So it just creates a lot more complexity on how you actually achieve it.

And I imagine people tend to fall back on technology because that's where they're strongest. And so how do you get them to move into becoming that anthropologist for the team?

I think part of it is if you can help somebody understand what they're motivated by and what they truly value and it gets beyond their ego. If somebody likes the creation process and it's the how do I get something from a spark, an idea into something that the customers are actually working with, then you can work backwards from that motivation to be able to say, like, how do you best achieve that? Right. It's not the technology. You have to go out and engage with users, you have to engage with customers. You need to get your people to think that way as well. Your team needs to embrace that. So you are ultimately not going to be able to satisfy that, that creation need in a way that, that's profound and that you're going to enjoy until you can be that anthropologist, until you can pull other people in to a system that, that works. If you've got people that are more people oriented, right. They're going to get that intuitively. But you have to help them understand the technology side of it and like, why that needs to remain a part of their portfolio for moving forward as well. So I think that if you can tap into everybody's motivations and values and help them align with what the organization needs, then you've got a path to be able to help them grow In a way that helps the team get where it needs to be.

As you're picking leaders or managers so you have 1 to 10 scale for technology or technical ability and then 1 to 10 on people. Where are you willing to trade off when you're looking for a new manager?

I feel like I'm going to say it depends a lot today, but what I would say is that I think it's you have different roles inside of the team and as long as the requirements are being met in some way, you can shift those responsibilities around somewhat. For example, if I had a super strong staff level engineer who is really good on the technology and was able to cover a lot of that, then I would not put as much emphasis on that. Now I believe that a manager has to be able to give task relevant feedback and they have to be able to double click into any specific issue and help drive it forward. But if you've got somebody strong that you can depend on and you can create that system of other people being able to step into that role, that's less of an issue if you don't have that inside of the team. I look for people with strong chops because they're going to have to be the player coach until they can get somebody into that role. So it depends if you've got somebody that you can rely on for that it's less important. If you don't have that, then until you can find that, it's very important. Job 1 Win. Job 2 Increase your capacity to win.

How do you structure your time? What are the things that you do every day, every week, every month, every quarter to make sure that you maintain that capacity to win?

What I try and do is look at it every single quarter and say if I am going to be. So start with the end in mind. A year from now, where do we need to be and how does the organization product need to look and feel? If I can do that, then I can back up to okay, what's the first step that I need to take towards that and what's the next three months need to look like to be able to accomplish that. And I look at it both from the product perspective, the team perspective and the organization perspective. And then I'm constantly looking at what's the highest impact, what's the highest leverage thing that I can be focused on as well as my leaders inside of the organization can be focused on. And then I try and make sure that there are very clear objectives for the quarter that are shared that everybody's committing to so that we can drive towards that end. So if we do that every quarter along quarter boundaries in some way, where do we want to be four quarters from now? What do I need to do in a crawl, walk, run fashion, the crawl version being this quarter, to be able to get there and we sort of lock into objectives for the quarter along those lines. Then I will look at it and say, okay, how are we going to measure that? Whether it's qualitatively or quantitatively, let's be very precise on what we're trying to achieve and what do we need to do to break down inside of the quarter to make sure that we're making constant progress towards that endpoint? And that may be measured on a monthly boundary, it may be measured on a weekly boundary, it may be measured on a daily boundary. But understanding where you want to be at the end of the quarter and being able to break that down into smaller chunks allows you to measure progress against that endpoint. I then want to make sure that we have check ins on a monthly basis. Just hey, scorecard. How are we doing against this? What do we need to take away from this? What did we learn? How do we want to adjust priorities moving forward so that we have a way of actually giving voice to it and being able to work through it? There should be nothing that's sort of hidden or tucked away. I then have sort of weekly cadence meetings of what's going on inside of the organization, what are the key projects that are behind or that we've had some unexpected learnings from or wins from. And so that there's a heartbeat of how do you communicate those things tactically and help move through those sorts of things. Every other week I have an engineering manager staff meeting of where we're constantly talking about what we need to do to make progress on the business on an ongoing basis as well. I meet with every one of my leaders, whether it's a staff engineer or an engineering manager or a director of engineering on a regular basis. Those that report directly to me, I try and do every week. Those that are indirectly to me, I try and do on a regular basis, like every two or three weeks along those lines for me personally. Then every single week I sort of stopped and make sure that I'm looking at the week ahead of me and saying, what do I need to be optimizing for this week? I have a mnemonic that I use. I borrowed it from somewhere, I don't remember where, but I call it Oats. What's the objective for the week? What do I want to achieve inside of the week, what are the activities that I need to do to achieve that objective and try and be very clear on what success looks like for each one of those activities? And then how much time do I think it's going to take the T in this? How much time is it going to take for me to be able to achieve each one of these things? And then I s schedule it right. So I block off things inside of my calendar for the week that allow me to say, oh, Thursday from 8 to 10, I'm going to be focused on X. And that creates a forcing function and forces me to engage with those activities to help things move forward. I will introduce random things into that oats process of where I'll be thinking. I force myself to think like what's the one thing that I could be doing that would make everything easier or eliminated? I then think about it as like what's the one strategic thing that we're not doing? What's the thing that's keeping me awake at night Now I'll randomly run through different types of things to make sure that nothing's hopefully escaping my focal plane.

Is your calendar pretty scheduled even thinking time is scheduled into there?

Or do you do it ad hoc even thinking time? Like if you were to go in and look at my calendar, I'm sure that after listening to this, some of my team is going to do that. You'll see that on Sunday nights at I think it's 6 o'. Clock. I have my initial plan for the week session of where what's my oats for this week? Even to the point where each day of the week I'm focused on a different part of the organization and I'll be thinking about like what are the oats for that organization? And that's scheduled. It's from 9 to 9:30. As an example, your one on one.

So your individual meetings with team members, how do you structure those?

What I found is in the past early mistake was that I tried to use those as status meetings. Right, okay, so give me an update on this. Give me an update on that. And what I found is that they're actually largely redundant with cadence meetings or staff meetings that I have. And what I wasn't doing was investing enough in the people and helping coach and help their career move forward. And so I structured one on ones very differently after that realization, which there's a story there. But now on the first one on one I say like look, this meeting is about you. You get to ask any question you want. You Think of it as this is your responsibility of tasking Wade. How to help your career move forward, how to help your organization moving forward, anything. There's nothing off limits. There are some things that I may not be able to answer, um, because of government regulations or things along those lines. But I will not back away from any subject. So come with the thing that you think is going to most improve your career, help you to win or increase your capacity to win. And I am committing that I will focus on that for whatever time that we have allocated. And since this is going to be reoccurring, this is not your only shot.

So the actual structural part, well, with development for individuals, how much of it is driven by you versus driven by them?

It's hopefully initially a joint conversation of where we try and make sure that we understand exactly what their self view is, what their self awareness is, how I see them, and then how the organization sees them. So try and get to a360 as quickly as possible, both in the technical competencies, personal competencies and social competencies. And if they can have an accurate self view. And I find that some of the time there's a little bit of early, they're posturing or they're being way too hard on themselves and that's not how the rest of the organization sees them. So syncing up and getting to that common baseline is important. Then starting to set up what are the areas that I need to focus on and grow on. A lot of times it's not clear to them how they do that. And so giving them a path forward. Here's the books that you should be reading. Here's the online courses that you can invest in. Here's the mentoring that you need. Here's a mentor that I can help connect you with. Here are the things that I can help you grow with. Sort of sets that plan in motion and everybody can engage in. I understand where I'm at, I understand why this is important to me moving forward and, and I understand the path for me to be able to grow and execute after that. I find that it's much more them coming and asking questions. If it's constantly me pushing down, it's the wrong model. They need to be pulling more than I need to be pushing.

You mentioned that there was something that happened that changed the way you structured your one on ones. Can you get into that story a little bit?

Yeah. It's slightly embarrassing, but one of those growth moments for me at opsware, we were going through some reduction in force and I had a particular Manager on side of the team, that we were eliminating the entire team as part of that reduction. So really bad time, really hard time. And during the conversation with him where I was telling him that his job was being eliminated, he was like, wade, I understand, and I get this. The one thing that I would like to do is to continue to have one on ones. It was a very odd request for me in that, you know, you're telling somebody their job's been eliminated and they're requesting ongoing touch points. And so I said yes. I thought it was a meaningful thing to do. So I asked that we start having just regular lunches, monthly lunches, and use that as the vehicle for doing it. And he thought that was a great idea. So we started having these lunch meetings once a month, and he got to ask me any question he wanted to, right? And he's like, why did you do that? What were you thinking when this happened? In my new job, I've got this challenge. How would you deal with that? So from that point forward, these were always great discussions. About six months in, we were sitting down, and he's like, hey, Wade, you know, the best thing that ever happened to me, I'm like, what's that? He was like, getting laid off. I'm like, wow, why? And he said, the last six months have been incredible for me. These one on ones. I get the ability to understand how you think and actually how to go improve my world based on these discussions. And before that happened, I felt like I never got that. So I never got the straight talk. I always got the, you know, the manager trying to, you know, do the right thing for the company, et cetera, as opposed to the personal, insightful advice and feedback that was very frank and candid. And I was like, oh, my God. So every single person that reports to me feels that way. How do I change the structure of interactions with everybody inside of the team so that I don't have to have that same discussion six months from today? And so I went back and from that point started changing the way that I did one on ones to make sure that it was connected. Very frank and a lot of times tense, but it was an honest articulation of where things are at, how I saw them performing, where I thought their strengths were, where I thought their weaknesses were, so that we could actually engage in making them the best version of.

Themselves that they could be in providing feedback to people on specific skills. What are the areas that you focus on?

I think that there's a lot of things that are just, like, base Level process, what's the right cadence of one on ones, team meetings, project reviews, et cetera. But when I try and get to talking about the individual and how to help them grow, I think that there are three areas that you focus on. I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but one is around just cognitive or technical skills, my base understanding of my role and what I need to be doing in that role. For example, if you're an individual contributor, everything from computer fundamentals to computer science to architecture, distributed systems to domain specific technologies, et cetera, like where's your strength? Where the areas that you haven't gotten into, like let's talk about the things that you should invest in moving forward and even getting to the point where you try and find opportunities that allow them to invest in that area and truly learn it from a hands on perspective. The second area is sort of personal skills. And Daniel Goleman wrote a bunch of books on like emotional intelligence and social intelligence. And it's pretty well documented in there based on meaningful research. And it divides into three different areas. There's self awareness, like how well do you understand yourself, your impulses? Number two is self regulation. How effective are you at being able to regulate those impulses? If there's a fight or flight response, how are you going to react inside of that? Then the third area is one around motivation, like how are you approaching your role, are you being optimistic about things, are you engaging, et cetera. So there's a lot of people that don't have that self awareness or do have the self awareness but don't have the self regulation or just have low motivation around a lot of these things. I think every one of these areas can be discussed and improved. The third area is social competence or social impact. The third area is social competence. And I think that largely divides up into two things. One is social awareness, my ability to read a room, my ability to understand how the organization works, my ability to empathize with others, to understand if there's a disruption in the force. But it's that ability to understand the group dynamic. The other side of that is social impact. It's one thing to understand things are off, it's another thing to actually go try and put them on a better path. Inspirational leadership, developing others, communication, all of those things sort of factor into can you be the change catalyst for moving something in a more positive direction. There's a huge difference from having the capacity to actually having the skill right. And I think that you need to invest in moving it from a declarative knowledge to A procedural knowledge to a skill in being able to get there. And so I focus in those those three areas because each and every one of them are important to being a leader.

Managing individuals is interesting and I imagine you get a lot of people coming to you with new projects or ideas or new things that they want to build. How do you make sure you stay focused on the most important priorities while still allowing a culture of innovation?

So what I try to do is to always focus on the most high impact, high leveraged thing in my organization. And I also try and spend much more of my time with the high potential leaders in the organization. I found that everybody needs that sort of input and coaching. But as far as increasing my capacity to win, doubling down on the high potential leaders inside the organization produces much more visible, dramatic results inside of the organization as well. In so doing, I try and make sure that each and every one of the leaders and engineering managers in my organization also feels like it's their responsibility to do that inside of their team. So we create this cascading investment in people where I'm focusing on trying to build leaders and those leaders are trying to focus on building leaders inside of their team and focus on winning, increasing their capacity to win inside of the team. So hopefully that continues to scale up into larger and larger organizations. So far, so good.

If there's a new project that's coming on and you're trying to decide if you should do it or not, how do you actually help people decide what's important?

I tend to focus in three areas. Number one, first and foremost, I think that you have to be connected to what's the value that you're creating for your customers and users and can you do that in a proprietary, differentiating way? Why are people going to want to use your products or services? And I need to make sure that everything actually goes through that filter. And so if you can explain why this is valuable and helps with that competitive differentiation, then we have a conversation to follow up on. And so I tend to think of it as in three swim lanes, what's going to create immediate impact. So in the next three months, are you doing something that significantly moves the needle, whether that be revenue, whether that be market adoption, some other things, like I want to see something demonstrable inside of those three months and you need to give me something that shows me that you understand the problem, you understand the solution, and we can actually show it in that period of time, even if it's just there is a theory behind what you're suggesting, what's the simplest version that we can engage in that sort of proves that theory. And I want to do it in a very, very short period of time. So it's either in that bucket or bucket number two is, it's a slightly bigger bet but much more significant return. And so I think of it as like a six month horizon, but I expect it to have more than double what I would get in a single quarter. So for example, if I was talking about 2 or 3% revenue increase in this quarter, I would want IT to have 10% revenue increase in the following two quarters. Again, I would want to back up from that and say, okay, you have a theory. How do I prove it in the next month? And then we continue to invest in it for the next five months afterwards. But like show me proof signs of life that this has merit for moving forward if it's going to be longer than that. I wanted to understand like how it significantly differentiates or creates a whole new market that we can go after, creates a whole new beachhead that we can attack. And I want again to back up from that and say, okay, there's a theory behind it. What's the easiest thing that we can do to prove that it's got legs, that it's going to move forward? So I think around those three time horizons and trying to make sure that we can prove it as early as possible that it's actually got merit for continuing to work on it.

How do you manage performance issues?

One is, I think early on you tend to not like the confrontation or the tenseness that comes from giving somebody feedback. And what I found is that actually if it's done in the right way, it's a gift people want. They love the feedback and the point is to make it feel safe and then to give them the evidence that suggests it and then also help them understand that you're there to try and help work through it as quickly as possible. But it has to be pretty blunt and frank about like what the actual issue is and that you're there to help it move forward. And so I try and get as much evidence as I can to make sure that I can give stories, I can give examples, I can give the impact of what they did and how they did it. So that when we get in, there's not a lot of wiggle room. It's not like you're going to need to go back and collect data to have the conversation. You want to be able for it to be an impactful conversation on the first go around anytime that there's you can see them in a crouch position. Like I try and move it back into a safe conversation of here's what I'm trying to do, here's where why I'm also here to be part of the solution moving forward. And if I can get them back into where they can engage comfortably in the content, then you go back to it. Once you have a common understanding of what the problem is, then I try and move it towards what we can do to actually remedy things. So from that point forward though, is you want to set up very tactical things that you can do inside of a week of where you are overly involved in that feedback. It's almost prescriptive in many ways, but get them to a point where they feel like it's not an issue that's going away, it's not an issue that you're going to shy away from and you are willing to invest in them to help them get through it. There has to be mile markers where you can actually see progress or not. At some point you need to, if it's not working, you need to be able to say, you know, is it a motivational thing or is it a capacity thing? Either way, you owe it to the rest of the team to remove that, that issue if you can't resolve it. And you need to do that as quickly as possible, not only for the employee who would be leaving, but for the health of the team that's there there behind. In the positive case, there is progress and you're able to help an employee move through that. I've had a fair amount of success of that. When you're able to move an employee through that, you get a very different employee on the other side. Right? They saw somebody invest in them, they saw somebody unlock a shadow area for themselves where they were able to be a better version of themselves. And then as a result they feel more inclined to actually invest in other people as well.

At what point do you decide you need to let someone go? Is it a certain amount of time or is it when you've decided that you're just not going to be able to get them to where you need them to be? And one last part is, do you do a performance improvement plan or given all the things that you've already done, you kind of figured that you did the plan already.

In smaller companies, it generally moves faster. In larger companies, obviously, I think you, you, you look for a lot more evidence and documentation in smaller. Actually, it doesn't matter whether it's small or large. The, the main thing Is, is if you feel they are unaligned, right, like they can't hear your feedback, they don't believe the situation, they don't believe that's important to them or their desire to actually correct their things isn't there, it's not going to happen. And so for those cases where I feel like somebody's not engaged, don't believe it, don't want to engage, et cetera, I move as quickly as possible. Same day, same conversation if necessary, for the health of the team as well as for that individual. You're not doing anybody a favor to keep them in a role where they're not going to be successful, help them move on to find something that they are going to be a fit for and will thrive inside of. If I find that there's a genuine desire to improve and they see it as valuable as well, then I'm more than willing to invest a little bit longer. But I feel like you have to be able to look at this and say what is a reasonable time for this person to achieve their goal. And a lot of times it can be like a week, it can be two weeks and you can see if they're going to engage or if they're going to sort of nibble around the edges. If they're not going to engage, you can have a more direct conversation with them. But ultimately they have to decide that this is something that they want to engage in and move through. Otherwise you need to move them out of the organization as well. I'm willing to invest in more junior people along these lines, probably more than more senior people because the more senior people have a, a deeper groove to get out of if they're willing to do it, invest. But I found that over time they have found something that has worked for them in their career and they're less likely to actually engage in, in the self development necessary to, to improve things. And it's kind of sad because what got you here is not necessarily what helps you move forward. And, and a lot of times people reach that, that level of incompetence or stagnation that they just get stuck in and don't continue to move through.

And Marshall Goldsmith, the Peter Principal, talks a lot about promotion to a position of incompetence.

Yes, exactly.

Wade, we've talked a lot about managing individuals. What do you think are the components of a high functioning team?

I think there's a few components of a high functioning team. One is I think that you've got a set of people in the team that hold each other and themselves mutually accountable and are highly engaged. So they care about the results, they understand what it takes to get there and they hold they are willing to go the extra mile because it's not business is business, it's business is personal. This is very personal to them and they want to help things succeed. I think that there is a strong strategic narrative associated with high functioning teams. They understand why they're trying to do something and why it's important to the business and why it's important to the team. I think that another aspect is there's a strong sense of how we're going to do this. The cadence, the common way of achieving those results. This sort of crawl walk run mentality of let's not believe our own bs, let's actually go prove it as quickly as possible and learn from that process as quickly as possible and fold that back into the project on a go forward basis. I think it's also a high functioning team is one that's constantly looking for how do we learn and be more efficient as we go through this? Why are we doing that? Why does this process add value to to what we're achieving? And they're not afraid to actually put more process in place or carve process out if it's not actually improving the work product or the capacity to win inside of the team. I think a high functioning, high performance team is also has a growth mindset. They're constantly not looking to defend turf, they're looking to expand how they think about things and can grow. They're largely egoless along those lines as well. They're confident, but they don't have a lot of ego. I found that if you can get a lot of those characteristics into a team, you've got a good foundation for a team moving forward. As an engineering manager, you're responsible for creating the conditions that help facilitate that. So do you have the right set of team members? Are you keeping the quality bar where it's at? Where are their inefficiencies in the organization? Is the purpose unclear? Is the process unclear of how they're all going to engage in that? Do people feel committed to both the end result and the way in which they're going to achieve that? Find those things, uncover those things as quickly as possible and help people move through it?

How do you manage conflict within a team?

So first and foremost I start with listening and trying to understand the actual problem. As stated. Oftentimes I feel like it's a projection of a person's view of things as opposed to how it actually is. So I try and make sure that I spend enough time with each and every person that's involved in that conflict to understand to the point where I can actually restate things from their point of view. And I'll use my own words, but I want to make sure that I can accurately describe it from their point of view. That helps them feel understood and it helps them feel heard along those lines. And a lot of times that's necessary to, to build the trust that gets the that that allows them to engage in solution inside of the team based on that ability to understand it. Then I think that you can start to bring the various people together and actually engage in conversations around what's the value that we're trying to create, what's going to most significantly increase that value. But you need to do it with a sort of heart first make sure that you're being sensitive to everybody in the room, as well as first principles, critical thinking. So let's make sure that we're doing for the things for the right reasons and people are not feeling attacked. It's all about ideas and concepts which then allow people to engage in that discussion. A metaphor that I use is like, I won't try and get everybody onto the same side of the table looking.

At the problem, a shared context or consciousness of understanding of the problem, as.

Opposed to seeing the other person as the problem. And so many times those things get conflated. And so when you can start to tease them apart and say, here are the principles that we're arguing over. I find that most of the time people are willing to engage in that intellectual debate and you actually get to a better outcome as a result. And as a result of going through it once or twice, they realize that, you know, start with good intent, assume that the person, the other person just has a different set of information or experiences than you do. Go figure it out, go engage with them to understand what's that different set of experiences. And after the first time or two, people actually engage together when they know that one, you're not going to ignore it, you're not going to avoid it, you're actually going to force people to engage in understanding what the problem is and enlist their help in understanding what the solution is. If they know it's not going to go away and they've actually seen it patterned for them, they'll go do it themselves.

And imagine that helps with interacting with other parts of the organization because invariably there's conflict with design or product management or the go to market team.

Absolutely.

So My last question I told you I would answer on management. What is your biggest weakness as a manager?

How much time do we have?

You just gotta pick one.

One. So I think that there's two things that I don't do well right now and I constantly am trying to improve on. One thing is I don't manage up well. And I've been lucky to work with a set of executives that have worked with me to understand, you know, how I'm going to do things, why I'm going to do things. And it's always produced the result they want and so they, they largely go handoff. My problem is, is I get tunnel vision, right? And I'm trying to think about like what needs to move and why it needs to move. And I'm not always the best at sort of communicating updates or status or progress against all of those sorts of things. I'm much more focused on the result than communicating upwards. And it's so very necessary to communicate upwards. I also think that written communication is not my strongest point. I big believer in the, the three V's of communication, visual, vocal and verbal. With verbal being the actual words that you're saying, generally accounting for like less than 15% of how it's emotionally received. And so I like the visual and vocal aspects of it and I tend to lean on those much more than I should. And it's a skill at a larger company, it's necessary. At smaller companies, you're able to do without it a lot more. So those are two areas that I'm very aware of are not my strengths right now and trying to actively correct.

You know, I always thought I was a pretty good manager and every time I interact with you, I realize how much I actually suck at it. So thank you very much for your time and everything that you share with us on the topic.