Leading With Intent: Values-Based Leadership in Marketing Ops with Jaime López

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am I'm your host, Michael Hartman, and I am joined by neither of my co-hosts today as we're getting close to the end of 2025 when we're recording this. Today we are diving into a topic that doesn't get nearly enough attention in marketing ops. We'll call it values-based leadership. What that means, how it works in practice, why it's one of the most overlooked levers for building healthy, high-performing ops teams. And to do that is my guest, Jaime Lopez, head of marketing at Ververica. Jaime's career spans engineering, machine learning, technical marketing, and operations. And he has led teams across Europe, Asia, and the US. He brings a thoughtful, intentional approach to leadership rooted in defining clear values, adapting to team members as individuals, and cultivating cultures that align with both team identity and organizational contexts. So Jaime, thank you for staying up late. You're in Helsinki, so it's late there. That's why, for those who are watching, it's dark in the background. So welcome to the show.

Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. A longtime reader and participant in the ops community. It's such a great opportunity. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we were just talking before this about why it's so dark in your background. And it, like, I think you're one of the few people I talk to when I say, well, pretty soon it's going to be changing. Like, you know, when the solstice is.

Can't wait for it. Yeah, yeah. It's like 4 days. I can't wait to be on the other side of it.

Yeah. It's a little different here, even like, My mother-in-law is visiting right now from Northern California and even just there to Dallas, like the difference in amount of sunlight we get is significant. I can't even, I've forgotten what it's like to be in a real winter. I grew up in Minnesota, so probably maybe close to where Helsinki is. I don't know.

Yeah. Well, Helsinki is at the same latitude as Anchorage, so.

It's probably close, maybe a little bit, maybe a little farther north.

Yeah, but the kind of winters that you get in Minnesota and North Dakota, Wisconsin is pretty similar to winter we get here in Finland. Okay.

Well, yeah, like I said, it's been long enough for me. I don't think I can take a real one anymore. So, well, okay. So maybe let's start. I gave a brief overview of your career. Um, maybe that is a good place to start with some context. Yeah. So you mentioned you were in engineering, machine learning, did marketing ops. Now you're in senior leadership. Curious, like how, like maybe if there's any key moments that are important there, talk about those, but like think about how has that shaped your approach to leading and leading teams?

Yeah. I think it's a great question to start with. It definitely has shaped my approach to leading teams and to working as a whole. Sometimes at work, colleagues jokingly call me a recovering engineer. Now I work with kind of not with machines, but with people and systems, but they, in a sense, are also a very, very complex machine. Um, and I, I love getting to understand the problem at its core, at its root cause, which is what engineering in a sense teaches you to do. Um, and also to find elegant solutions for the problem. And an elegant solution typically is one that doesn't use all the resources available everywhere in the world, but as little as possible to make it work and work reliably.

And what do you know? So, so I, I often see people In my, it's an opinion thing, mix up elegant with clever. And to me, clever is not a good thing. I don't use it complimentary.

Right. It depends. Like, I think that sometimes those two are aligned and sometimes they're not. If you use like wits or a clever solution to kind of build something greater, better, awesome. If you use your wits to build something that either profits off of somebody else's work or kind of basically it's a net negative, then I don't agree with Klever in a sense.

Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I did anyway.

Don't worry. It's not at all like, this is a conversation.

Yeah. But so you were in the middle though of kind of describing that engineering experience, which I, I also have. Somewhat in the way distance passed. So it sounds like that was a way, like you've thought about that system thinking kind of model to how you think about leading too. Is that a fair way of putting it?

Yeah, that's where I was going. Like it applies in the sense that when I'm trying to think in systems on how or how to make this system work, um, I want to have a set of ground rules or principles that I can kind of fall back on. If I'm doing kind of fluid dynamics, those principles are going to be Navier-Stokes equations. If I'm working with people, those are kind of what we call principles. And in each team, they're going to be different. And that's why I put a big emphasis on values-based leadership. So values and principles of a team are, are those immutable laws in a way.

Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. It's, I never thought of it that way of kind of those engineering or science-based rules to think about the, I guess the way I've thought about it is norms within a team, right? Which I like the idea of principal ones too. Maybe we come back to that a little bit, but you mentioned values-based leadership. So if people listening, watching are like me, I probably have an idea in my head what that means. What does that mean for you and how do you think it's different than maybe other ways that people think about leading and/or leadership styles?

Yeah. Well, I think one basic difference that I find is that most leaders default to rules and rules tell you what not to do. And you'll see that kind of our big kind of Western working culture is full of rules of what you're not allowed to do because reasons. But I think values are kind of the opposite of that. They tell you who to be and how to act. Rules create compliance. Nobody colors outside of the lines, which is fine, but it's not sufficient. Another engineering thing, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient.

Right.

And I think the values create 2 things that are super important to me. One is ownership, which is kind of the drive for people to find problems worth solving and go and solve them. be accountable for them being solved. And when you get there and you have ownership, people start displaying, if you emphasize it, bias to action, which is like, okay, it's not just that I identify and own a problem, but I'm going to go and do it before I'm told that I need to do it.

Got it. Okay. So maybe talk a little bit about the word values, because it seems like that's an important piece of this. Like, does that Are there different, like when you think of it, what does it mean and what do you think other people think it is that are off from what you think it is?

There, yeah, there are a few ways of looking at this. I was doing a little bit of reflection before, before we started our conversation today and I, it's inevitable to encounter the thing that people hear values and they think it's soft compared to rules, compared to mandates. I think that's backwards. To give you a hypothesis or an example, I think it takes more courage to fire someone or not hire someone for values misalignment than for missing a number. It requires you to be very strong in what you believe in and why. And also some people think, or that has happened to me during my career, Um, people think that compared to mandates or directives, that values slow you down. I don't think that's the case. I think they actually speed you up because people second-guess less. They have a clear path for what I should do instead of what I should not do. Um, faster decisions, less escalation, more ownership, more bias to action.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, so it feels like, so let me run one by you. So one of the, one of the principles I like to have as a leader is, and really this is not just leadership, but in general, right? Don't assume the best intent.

Yep.

Right? I think, is that the kind of thing you would have as a value? So that way, like when there's conflict, right? You don't assume the other person's got ill intent.

That's something that I would take as a value, and that might very well be a team value or something that you intentionally, or you all agree as a team that we want to operate in this way.

Yeah.

Um, it's part of the OS, of the operating system, that when I encounter this, my default will be to assume good intent. Um, I think that there's another layer to it. Like, you can have values as a person and you can have values as a team, and those have to be aligned but don't necessarily have to overlap 100%.

Sure. The reason I brought that one up in particular is I've, I've seen this a couple of times recently. on Instagram or somewhere, I don't remember where, somebody who talked to, I haven't seen the movie Inglourious Basterds for whatever reason, I just haven't seen it. But there's, I guess the character, the German main character is German. They were interviewing him, the actor about like, how did you play someone so evil? And he was sort of stunned. And what the implication was that whoever was interviewing, it might've been Simon Sinek, was that like, The people who come across as evil, they don't think of themselves as being evil, right? So this is why assuming bad intent is a dangerous thing to do.

I think so. I think it is dangerous and it already puts you and the whole situation on the defensive, which is rarely a good frame to achieve big things.

Interesting. Okay, I like that. Okay. So when we talked before, and maybe this ties in with your idea that having a values-based team and organization leadership style doesn't slow you down, because I could see that being the perception. You mentioned that being intentional about this stuff is, and maybe is that like, How do you fit that piece into it, into like making sure that, you mentioned hiring practices and making changes and having tough conversations. Is that like, is that part of the intentionality? And do you think that's part of how you generate that ability to move quickly still?

It most certainly is. I think intentionality is the key to this. If you can just kind of let it organically happen, it might go in the direction you want. It might go in the complete opposite or in no direction particular. So intentionality is what's going to make that difference in it kind of actually going somewhere. And it comes up in those situations you mentioned when you're hiring, what do we hire for? Or what are the things that are going to be absolute no-nos for kind of somebody coming into us?

Yeah.

When we promote, when we evaluate performance, if you have values or if values are an important part of who you are as a company and a team, The question is not just going to be, did I hit the number or the objective? It's like, would I do it again in the same way?

Right?

Like, is the way I achieved or didn't achieve the goal okay or not?

Yeah. It's, um, I think the variant I have used in the past is that culture happens and it, whether you are intentional about it or not. And so if you want to—

True.

To have a culture that supports the values that you want to be a part of the team, then you need to intentionally reinforce the behaviors that support those values and not celebrate the ones that don't.

And I would go a bit further and you would, this is the one time probably in the whole conversation where I'm going to use the verb to punish, but punish things that are antithetic to those values.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've heard, I can't remember, there's probably multiple people who I've seen do this publicly where they say like, we have, you can call it whatever you want, but like the no assholes rule, right? So you may be meeting, to your point, right? You may be meeting your numbers, blowing it out of the water as, say, as a salesperson. I don't want to pick on sales, but just, that's an easy one to target just because it's Highly visible when people make comments or not.

Yeah. And we are always the target of everything sales has to say. So I refuse to engage in that. I'm not gonna say it's the target of any startup. Yeah.

Yeah. I, I, it's, but I think my point is like, um, I mean, I like to, to be clear, so you could have a culture that says, that's what we want. We want people to be aggressive and asshole-ish or whatever, right? I don't necessarily think that's necessarily a bad thing on its face. It's not the kind of place I want to be.

Agree. But you have a really good example in corporate literature, which is Enron. Yeah. Um, they, they have a very intentional culture, just one where probably you and I wouldn't want to work at, but plenty of people did want to work there and thrive professionally there until they didn't.

Yeah. What was that? That was the one where, what was it? They like every, like they were regularly cutting the bottom 10% performers or something like that. Didn't really matter.

Yeah. And kind of in their case, it was about aggressiveness and kind of profit above everything, which ended up rewarding corporate fraud and different kinds of financial crimes. It's a shame that it ended up like that. I'm sure that there are high-performance cultures and I hope we can build one where you can incentivize people being aggressive and taking risk.

Yeah.

Without being a criminal or an asshole to each other.

Yeah. Well, it's, and this is kind of a point I've made to people before is like, I don't necessarily believe there's a good or bad culture. I do think there's better or worse culture fits than there are like, so, yeah. I mean, that's—

You wouldn't want a high-performance aggressive culture in a nonprofit, probably.

Probably not. It depends on what the nonprofit was about. But I mean, I could see arguments either way on that. And I happen to, my wife happens to be in the nonprofit world, so I know that area well. See, my dog agrees. And, but I think that intentionality is also like, I think So for me, I'm at this point in my career where I don't want to work with assholes. I want to work with smart people who do a good thing. And so a big part of when I'm looking at opportunities or when I have in the past several years, a big part of what I'm trying to do is uncover the way that the culture, probably values is the way to put it, but what are the norms that are expected in particular things like conflict resolution and decision-making and that kind of stuff that are important to me. So I think that's like, to me, this is, there's a leadership part of it within an organization. And then I feel like the hiring process has been broken for a long time, right? I thought when you said, right, rules tell you not what not to do, I think job descriptions do the same thing.

True. I agree.

And I think there's a lot, Uh, I think there would be a lot of benefit for people focusing on not only skills and experience matches, but also the values and norms and cultural fit pieces, which don't seem to get, in a lot of places I've seen, don't, they don't really spend a lot of time on that.

That is true. Um, I think that it, it is growing a little bit. I don't know if we'll now see a little bit of a setback with how kind of HR practices have had a setback in the past couple of years, but I saw some encouraging signs back in 2021, 2022, 2023 of companies that I work at and work with having a very clear place for a values interview in their interview process. And even bigger companies to the tune of AWS are famous for having very specific values they look for in an interview and that they drill.

Yeah.

And you might be an amazing technical performer, but, you know, if you are, if your core value doesn't align with frugality, then you probably won't have a job at AWS.

Yeah, makes sense. Okay. Well, let's, so let's say we're on, I think we're on the same page, values-based, uh, cultural fits, et cetera. When you, when you join or build a team, how do you, like, walk me through the way that you think about building that set of shared values with the team from the start?

So I think it's a little bit different every time, also very different between building from scratch versus inheriting a team. But starting with kind of building from scratch, I don't walk in with answers. I walk in with questions and questions like for each of the team members or kind of the team as a whole? When was a time where you were proud how we achieved something together? What was the achievement? How did we get it done? Um, when were you disappointed or embarrassed on how you individually on a one-on-one or your team performed or missed something? And the values start to come from those stories. Um, I tend to aim to 3 or 4, or yeah, towards 3 or 4 values. More than that, probably it's an overkill.

Yeah.

Um, but it has to be something that the team can feel their own and recite. So I don't select them. We workshop them. There's a structured framework for this. I'm sure there are multiple. This, I use one. And you start then, like, after you've debated this in the team, you write them on a Post-it or a piece of paper on a blackboard. You start clustering them and it's like, okay, what is common to all of these? What is one value or word that represents all of these situations? Is it trust, which is a common one, at least in my team? Is it people first? And then kind of, you basically go at it and have different discussions until you call us on those 3 or 4 things that everybody feels like they represent not just how they work, but how the team wins.

And once you do that, How, like, how do you then make sure that's shared across the team? And maybe I'm just making an assumption here that, that you do that with, say, initial set of leaders in the team as opposed to the full team, but either way.

So since the starting point is that they come organically from the team, then kind of the question becomes, is everybody in the team kind of in agreement with this or is this in contradiction with anybody's values? And often there's, the answer is no, but if the answer is yes, kind of we try to figure out, okay, is there an alternative to this that we actually all feel aligned? An example of that is abundance. I remember like at a team I led a few years ago, Um, a person was very, had a very specific view of what abundance meant for them. It was completely misaligned with what abundance meant for the rest. So we had to figure out like, okay, what, what does this mean for you and why? What is an alternative that can actually convey the same value to you without maybe being in opposition to what the team feels?

Got it. So does this kind of go from this word cloud thing down to, I mean, do you get it to where you have 4 or 5, like literally words or short phrases that represent those core values? Yeah. So I've done something like that. Uh, I think I'm with you on the 4, 3 to 4. I think when I, the one I'm thinking of in particular, I think we had 5 norms. 5 was probably about as much as I would go.

Yeah.

And we literally, this, in that case, we did it more with the leadership team and then it got cascaded out to the rest of the organization. But we literally created, uh, like a one-slide thing that people could, and we, we handed out printouts of it and people, this is when we were in the office where you could put it up at your desk. So it was kind of in front of you all the time. And I, I really liked that. And, and then on top of that, as we would have, say, all-hands meetings or something, we would, that would be one of the things that would come up every time, right? We would talk about, Here's our, our, our expected norms of how we're going to work with each other. And I think it was really, it's one of those places where I look back and I go like, I still have lots of really good friends. We had challenges. We didn't always agree, but I still would count those people as good friends.

Yeah, I understand, or I can relate to that and understand why. And in your case, the norms, which probably are very close to kind of what I, what I use as values, um, what they do is they serve as an instruction manual for like, how do I work with this team? And that eliminates a lot of friction, which allows you to actually have fun time at work or make friends at work. And also it kind of eliminates misunderstandings. Like if, if I know that this team's value is, um, speed over quality, hell, then I know how to start working with them. I'm not going to hammer them about like, why is this comma out of position? I know anybody who's—

You just hit a— you struck a chord with me, so I'm going to let that go. Come out of position. Okay. Okay, so you mentioned, you touched on this just briefly, I don't even know if you said, but you talked about kind of each team is different. So is that because, I mean, which I think I inherently agree with, but why do you think that is?

I think fundamentally the individuals are different. The leadership and leadership styles are different. Um, and that naturally will kind of make different sets of values grow. And as long as all can coexist and don't kind of oppose each other, I think it's something to celebrate, not to oppose. I wouldn't want to work with 5 clones of myself. It would be horrible.

No, I, I mean, one of the values I have is I want, uh, I really How have I put it before? I want to encourage vigorous debate, right? To a point, right? Because I think that, and that includes encouraging people to disagree with me, which I think a lot of people are not comfortable with.

I couldn't agree more.

Yeah, it's not an easy thing to do, but I, to me, it's something to celebrate. And I have celebrated that before. Okay.

I think we play a really important, sorry to interrupt, we play a really important role as leaders. in going and celebrating these things in public when people live the values and going on the Slack general channel and saying, hey everybody, I think this was a great example of how this person disagreed with me.

Yeah, I, I'm 100% in agreement there. I think that's a huge, I mean, it's, it's another exa— it's a, if that is one of your values as a team, right? You, in my opinion, you have to celebrate that when it happens. You know, otherwise if you don't, people start to not believe that the values are—

Right. It's just, it's like, yeah.

And I think that's a really good— okay. So another thing you touched on is maybe there's some differences when you are building a team versus inheriting a team. And maybe I would add a nuance of inheriting a team where someone else thought that they should be in the role who's now a direct report. Uh, how do you, what are some of the things you think about? Uh, do you change the general approach at all? Or are there specific things you try to do in the scenario where you're building versus inheriting?

Um, yes, there are a few things that I do differently and I've learned from my mistakes and other people's mistakes in this. Um, like looking at it as a greenfield situation where you're building from scratch is a mistake. Um, inherited teams or existing teams have a culture already, whether intentionally or unintentionally. You cannot delete that overnight.

Right.

And, and you have to live with it and adjust it. You cannot pretend that it wasn't there. You have to understand it. And especially you have to understand what worked in this team before.

Yes.

And it's like, okay, like all of these things, like how, again, how did you win together? What worked? When were you very proud? What are the things that we should keep and kind of turbocharge? And what are the things that maybe we should ditch and change?

Yeah. Okay. So it's, I think it sounds like the big thing is there, don't assume that it's gonna change quickly if there's— No.

And like how much of the strongman role you wanna play, like I'm now the guy in charge and sheriff in town. That's not gonna make it faster or better. It's just gonna Very likely alienate people.

So maybe this might lead us into a little bit of a different conversation too. So I remember a time in my career where I had a team, excuse me, and a new person from another team got moved to my team. It wasn't really his choice. And I think there was a culture difference between the team he was on and the team I had and the way we worked. So maybe how do you— sort of 2 parts to this, right? One, have you had to do that where you'd have to assimilate somebody into another team where there's already maybe a well-established set of values and norms? But also one of the things I had to do in that role, it felt like, was to adapt my approach to how he worked most effectively. So in other words, like, I think a lot of, and this is part of what I do with a lot of coaching I do with new managers is, you know, part of your job is not to, like, not to get people to change how they do things, but you have to adapt to how they work. How do you think about those 2 components?

So the first one, I have been in the situation, both kind of in the role of a leader who has somebody move from another team to mine and there's a cultural clash there, or these teams were rivals even before. Um, that's tricky. The tension tends to solve itself with time, but you don't have a lot of time also before the thing explodes or becomes untenable.

Yeah.

So my approach tends to be talking to the one person who maybe is the most aggrieved at the beginning and kind of reassure this person that I understand where you're coming from. I know that you work in a different operating system than what we run here. Like, you have my trust and my patience and, uh, like my, I, I'm committed to helping you adapt to this. I'm not going to tolerate everything, but you have an adaptation period to learn kind of how we work here. And at the same time, I'm very happy to hear how we can do it better if there are things that the other team did better.

Nice.

And I've also been in, in the very, in a very kind of uncomfortable position of being that person who gets moved from another team to report to my former coworker. Um, it isn't something that nobody likes doing. It is tough.

Yes.

I got very lucky in that the person I got to report to is a good friend nowadays, and he's an excellent person, excellent leader, but you cannot really avoid the clash and you have to also kind of take that leeway you're given and commit to adapting to the new situation, the new philosophy, whether you Yeah.

It's interesting. I also have a similar experience where, not where I moved, but I was in the mix for a promotion to lead a team that I was part of. Someone else got the job and we ended up having a very honest conversation about that. I can't remember if it was he brought it up or I brought it up, but I think we like, we had just addressed that elephant in the room, so to speak. Like, and we ended up having a great working relationship. And it was good. I still wanted the job, but I had to come to terms with that and either choose to continue to do what I could do to make the team better or not. And I'm not going to say it was easy.

It never is.

Yeah. That's interesting. So you talked about, I assume this is going to be both Part of somebody coming into an existing values set, or maybe something's going on with someone's life and they start to veer from the expected values. How do you, and you kind of touched on this a little bit, but like, how do you address that? Right? I mean, that, like what I just talked about, like this, there's, when there's, you know, regular kinds of things that are going against the set of values for the team.

Yeah.

How do you, how do you deal with that?

In private, always. Like, I'm a big proponent of public praise, private criticism. Yeah. In any situation. Yeah. And, and kind of being very clear about like, this is not my feelings that were hurt. This goes against the charter that we all agreed together and that you agreed to. Um, why, what did, what prompted this action or this reaction is something more important than the values. If it is, tell me, we'll figure out why and whether the values need to be changed. But that exercise of reflection most of the time is enough. And if it isn't, then it's a continued conversation that we're going to have in our one-on-ones. And that might come up in a performance review, like, great, like you did your deliverables, but you also kind of hindered the team in this and this way. Please adjust your way of working.

So it's interesting to me, there's been a theme, I think, in what you, the way you've described things, and you even used one of the words, which is, I think a lot of this depends on trust, right? I think, you know, trust that people are gonna support each other, that you are gonna support the values, you're gonna hold people accountable, but you're gonna do it in a respectful way. The other, and this is a really, really, I think, an important skill for people to learn is asking good questions and then shutting up and listening. You talked about that, right? Because what went off in my head when you were describing a scenario like that is, I think we all believe that people have this wall between work and personal life, right? Especially a very Western thing. Maybe it's even more More so in other parts of the world. But I think one of the things that COVID and all the lockdowns revealed is that is absolutely not true. It's never been true, probably ever, but it really revealed it, I think, and put a light on it. And so one of the things I've found is that sometimes there's stuff going on in someone's outside of work and it's, they, they can't help but bring it into work. And it's really that and providing that opportunity to bring that out. Not everybody's comfortable with it, but you, they've got to trust you to share that.

I think there are ways that we can do, uh, or things that we can do as leaders to, to ease that. Um, and this I learned from like an old colleague who's now doing something completely different. Matty, brilliant person. Um, he always told us, uh, and his team that first, take care of yourself. Second, you take care of your loved ones. And only then you take care of work. If 1 and 2 are not in order, there's no way you can do number 3. So he created an environment of trust where we could say, hey, this is wrong. Or he would even say like, I don't need to know what is wrong. Just tell me like something in my personal life, my health, my loved one's health, my dog, and I cannot perform. We'll find a way to give you the space to deliver since you have shown commitment and because I know you'll show commitment. And when the team needs you, you are there. When you need it, the team is there for you.

I've even had scenarios, I'm all with that, like letting people be honest with you. And one of the things I also tell them is, particularly if I think it's going to have maybe even moderately short-term, moderately long-term impacts to the team or ability to execute or whatever, is, let's say it's a health thing, you know, I will ask them, you know, are you okay with me? Like, I will explicitly ask them, are you okay with me sharing this with my boss or with Angel or with like, right? And if they say no, I will do my best to honor that. If I don't think I can do it, do that without saying no, I will tell them, I will do what I can. I may not be able to, right? And I don't like, I, and I think— I've, you know, there's one in particular I think of, which was somebody in a country that, somebody worked for me internationally in a country where mental health issues were looked down upon. And this person's spouse was going through something This person was having it, like checking out of work regularly. And we, and finally, I think we had built enough trust that that person was comfortable sharing that with me, but asking me explicitly, don't say anything. And so I did. And I never told anyone what was going on because I didn't think it was my right. If he was comfortable, if that person was comfortable, then I would, I mean, Then it might've been different. But like, that's one of those things, like, there's very few people get prepared for that kind of challenge as leaders.

And it's something yet that most of us have to go through at one point or another with a team member, with ourselves, with our families, that they are going through a really tough situation and we have to make it work for them and for us and for the team. So yeah, I think that's an excellent simplification of values. Like trust is really important in that environment for you and for your team. And you honor and commit to honoring that. And when you cannot commit to it, you're also open about how you cannot commit to it.

Yeah. I mean, and in that, and thinking in this position, in that position, I was like, I'm not going to tell my boss or the CEO, right? I'm just not. Yeah, I will tell 'em as much as they need to know about what the impact is and what we're gonna do to try to address it, but otherwise they don't need to know.

They don't need to know. And, and that's fair. Like we, we don't need to know in a sense, kind of, it sounds very transactional, but when we work and when we build a team, in most of the situations, we are renting somebody's brain for 8 hours a day, not for the rest. Um, so I like, I feel like we need to let our people have their life and their whole complete persons. As you said, COVID showed that to us that, you know, their family members, their pet, their delivery driver comes through. It's a complete person and we only have a share of that. We cannot monopolize everything in the life of our team members. It won't be good for them for sure, but it also won't be good for us.

One exception, if that's the cultural norm that everyone agrees to, then that's okay.

Yeah. Hell, you have like, I work with colleagues in India where like the 996 work life is very common and adhered to. And now you see that popping up in the West Coast again. Uh, yeah, if that's the norm and if, if it works for everybody there, it self-selects for people who want to do that.

Absolutely. Yep. I, I'm a big believer in that. Let's see, you and I both have worked with teams internationally. Maybe this is, are there generalizations that you can find, you can see that you've seen across, say, the Americas versus Europe versus Asia?

It's always, it's such a dangerous game to play, the generalization one. Okay. I'll start by saying like, I don't see, and I don't honestly, in the deep of my heart, I don't think that any of the cultures is superior to the other.

Agree.

Um, nor trying to impose your culture onto somebody else's culture is a good idea.

Also agree.

Um, I think that they, they are better or like more suited to specific situations. Uh, something that I find often with my East Asian colleagues, they're very much not short-term oriented. They're quality and long-term oriented.

Yeah.

Uh, which makes them really good at building a strategy for how to grow this company in the next 10 years. But there's probably not the same skillset you want if your whole focus is delivering the next quarter earnings. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. So for me, Asia, what I think about is how important relationships are.

Yeah.

You know, I think about a time where I, 2 different times, 2 different companies where I worked with a lot of people and I'll just, Japan happens to come to mind and how our relationship, our ability to work together changed after we had met in person.

I would agree. Like it, it's a step change.

Yeah. And I think that's, I think that generally is true across cultures, but it feels like that's a culture. Those are cultures, you know, I'm, I'm overgeneralizing because I think there's a lot of nuance to all the different Asian countries. But I think in general, like that, like relationships are, are critical there, um, in understanding They're, you know, how they're connected and all that. And so that's, that's been interesting from my standpoint, because to your point, like, I don't know that there's a culture that's better or worse, but it's, I think it's good to recognize the differences.

Yeah, I completely agree. And as you said, that managers have to adjust to their people, which I 100% kind of submit to. Um, we also have to sign to the cultures that we work with, or sorry, have to adjust to the cultures that we work with. And for example, kind of working with Asian colleagues, you can see that you might think that in our Western European American culture, you meet somebody at a conference or have a dinner, it's one more person, one more potential customer. That is not true in reverse. They like, you will be a big thing for them that this person has sat down with me for dinner, an investor, their precious little time. into hearing me out and having a conversation carries a lot of weight. So we have to respect that and we have to kind of give it the weight that it has for people who have grown in those cultures.

Yeah, it's really, that's an interesting nuance. Yeah. Well, I think the point here for everybody who's watching or listening is that if you are, particularly if you're in a leadership role and you have people in Multiple cultural, globally, right? You'd be cognizant of that and probably like, don't do it. I made generalizations about teams that I worked with, um, in certain areas. And once I got to know them, I found that many of my assumptions were not valid, which I think this is another Like key point for all this, right? I think this is a subtle thing, but I'm noticing it in our conversation here very regularly is that you got to be open to changing your mind, which is funny because, well, like I think about the US political scenario, right? Where people are criticized widely for changing their positions on topics. And I'm like, I actually think that's a sign of Uh, maturity.

Yeah. I absolutely agree with that. It's maturity. It's kind of emotional intelligence. Um, that brings me back to a situation at a company I used to work where they tried to basically copy paste the values of a very large company. And one of those was being right or being right often. And I remember having a very lively discussion that in my opinion and that of other leaders, being right is not a value. I don't care if my people are wrong as long as they say like, hey, you're right, I got it wrong. And this is the data that says why I'm wrong. I'm gonna pivot. I'd much prefer that than people getting kind of calcified and like, this is the way that things should be done. So yeah, this is politics.

I mean, my, I tell people my goal is to be, 'cause I think I'm a, generally smart person and make good decisions. But I, so I, my goal is to be confident but humble, right? In other words, humble, not so much like downplaying my, but being open to the idea that I could be wrong about something.

Strong opinions, loosely held.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I've heard that. So I need to remember that to describe it better, more succinctly at least. All right, well, let's, maybe let's wrap up here. So because our audience is primarily ops people, marketing ops, how, yeah, I think a lot of people listening go, this all sounds great, but we're so busy, you know, ops isn't like, we've got to deliver so much stuff, you know, we already don't have enough time. How do you bring, how do you think this would, a values-based approach would help them in terms of morale, performance? You know, reputation, pick the variant there. Yeah.

So I'm going to get on my soapbox for a minute and say, like, trying to get ops people to adopt this and believe in it. Ops is the hardest job I've done and it's constant firefighting. I don't know an ops team that is like leisurely going about their day anywhere ever. And I think that that's exactly where Values matter the most when everything is burning. You need that framework to make decisions that doesn't require like a committee of 10 to make the decision that you can trust people to act based on that framework and go and do the thing because always something needs doing. A fire needs being put out.

Yeah.

So you can optimize for speed, you can optimize for sustainability, whatever is important to your company and your team. but optimize on something and do it kind of intentionally. The counterpart of that, where I've seen and where I think I and my teams have gotten it wrong, I've seen ops teams that have awesome playbooks, extremely good systems, perfect documentation, and horrible morale, or people very, very burned out.

Mm-hmm.

The difference between performing and burning out tends to be those The value alignment or having values in some sense.

And I think one of the things that I, 'cause I totally agree with you, it feels like what that having the agreement on values and the trust that we're all going to support it and that I'm not going to get burned at the stake for making the mistake as long as I was doing it with the intention of supporting the values is it gives people agency to do what they believe is the right thing within the framework of those values. And I think there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people who would, who might be stuck in a place where there's very rigid rules, like step by step, do all this and all that, but don't feel like they have any control over what their day-to-day looks like. And I think that really is hard for people to deal with.

It is. It is like ops is an environment where basically everything is important and kind of no balls can drop and we all have more balls than kind of a human can handle. So I think that this, like, ultimately when you have a set of agreed values and like the direction to act based on values, you can, with your team, answer the question, like, even if, if this causes a ball to drop, would we still do it? Is it worth sacrificing the values or the ball? Which ones of the two? And very often that allows you to say like, hey, you know, to business leader X, this feature you want to implement or this integration might be vitally important to you. But overall, this will put us in a worse place. We're gonna drop this, or we're gonna delay this, or we're gonna delegate it. And that is a much more tenable and safer position for an ops team than to say like, ah, I'm gonna try to work another 27 hours this week to deliver this integration.

Yeah. I think, I think about, uh, people who listen to this for a while, I've probably talked about, um, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Which I'm a big fan of in the whole Frank Lecovey time management system. Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the biggest things I did when I got Frank Lecovey's system is like the first thing you do, do you remember this? You do a personal mission statement.

I don't have a personal mission statement.

So I did. And to me, this is maybe an analogy in that when I did that, I don't think I really had a framework for making This is kind of general life decisions, but you talked about this, like take care of yourself, then your, in my case, like spouse and my kids and family, and then everything else, right? So when things would come up and I had to make a tough decision about how I would allocate my time, it made it very easy for me to go, I'm going to live with my values based on what I believe my personal mission is.

Yes. This is the order of things.

So I think the same thing applies here.

I would agree. I think that's kind of, it's that framework for kind of how to make tough decisions and to force yourself to actually make the decisions that a decision within this framework is always going to be better than a non-decision.

Yeah. Well, it's, I've been reminded multiple times lately about the Rush song Free Will, where it has the line that says, if you choose not to make a choice, you still have made a choice, right?

Yeah, I am on the same boat and I'm guilty too often of not making enough decisions and then putting on the back burner things that are actually very important.

Yeah, for sure. Jaime, so much fun. This is a topic I love. I'm sure it's going to come through in this episode or has come through. If folks want to continue that conversation or keep up with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

They can find me on LinkedIn. Jaime Lopez. Uh, there's like a million people with my same first name and last name, but if you enter like /jaime_lop, you'll, you'll reach my profile. Uh, always to discuss about this with any listener, any leader who wants kind of to continue the conversation. And massive thanks to you, Michael, for making this happen.

Yeah, absolutely. It was my pleasure. I enjoyed it. Um, I would love to continue the conversation. Unfortunately, we do have to end. So as we say, all the good things come to an end. So Jaime, again, thank you. Thanks to our listeners for continuing to support us. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest like Jaime, please reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling on that. Till next time. Bye everybody.

Brilliant. Thank you.

All right.