Episode 7 | ERIC BOWMAN | VP of Digital Foundation, Zalando

Welcome to Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. So welcome to episode 7 of Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast, where we talk to leaders about all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. We've spoken to a number of super guests over the past few months, experienced, engaging, and interesting guests from the sport, retail, finance, and tech backgrounds. And today is no different because I'm really pleased to be joined by Eric Bowman, who's VP of Digital Foundation at Zalando, the online fashion retailer. Eric, hello.

Hi Scott, how are you?

I'm well, thanks. And you're joining us almost straight from a conference platform from this morning at Scala Days in Berlin where you're based. We'll talk about that in a while. And interestingly, that as a tech conference, you weren't particularly talking about tech specifically, but more about leadership in tech. So I'm going to dive into that a wee bit more in a while, if that's okay. But just to kick off, Why don't you just tell us, give us the kind of the 2-minute overview of Eric Bowman, where you've come from and what you do in Zalando.

Sure. I grew up in the US. I grew up in Montana, which is kind of the middle of nowhere. And most of my young life, I was really interested in being a scientist, although I was really captivated by computers at a young age and taught myself how to program. When it became clear that somehow it was easier to get a job as a programmer than a scientist, I jumped wholeheartedly in. I moved to California and I got to work on what became a very successful and popular computer game called The Sims. Yeah. And this whole time I was never really a specialist in anything and went through a few different jobs. Trying different industries, always really focused on technology and always being more like a management problem than a management solution. You know, I didn't really have a lot of respect for management for a lot of my career. But I always had somehow good relations with the people that I did respect who became managers, and I kind of watched one by one is what I thought of as great technical people become managers, and I for a long time wondered why. And then I started working for Gilt Groupe, which is a New York-based fashion e-commerce company some years ago now. And that was kind of the first place where I really felt comfortable working with the management team. And so my first management job was actually quite a senior role. And I didn't have a lot of reports at first, but then that— changed pretty quickly. And so I took this sort of accelerated path to becoming a manager. And what I found was that I really enjoyed it. That on the one hand, I felt pretty bad about how I had been, I guess, a little bit disrespectful of the profession for a long time. But on the other hand, I had pretty clear opinions about what was good and what was not good about the management that I had seen. And somehow really enjoyed the responsibility of really looking after people and their welfare and how they can really be their best person at work.

Interesting. And I think, as you touched on there, you know, that whole idea of you looking at great tech people becoming managers and wondering why, I think many people, you know, I think when you're in a role, certainly in my experience, when you're in a role that is very technical, whether it is within tech or legal or accounting or HR, that jump from being almost an expert in a particular field to becoming a people manager can be tough.

Yeah, absolutely. It requires a very different set of skills than most people are developing before that in their career.

And do you think people see that type of, that people management or leadership, if you like, almost becomes and has become kind of second place to, I guess, the day job. It's not necessarily seen as a day job. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think, you know, especially in tech and kind of a tech startup culture, getting from kind of zero to profitable is, you know, very much job one for everybody. And very often, you know, you— especially in tech, you get people who are actually pretty well paid but not necessarily as senior as the money would suggest. And so there is a perception that you want to try and optimize for people who don't need real management and that you want to try to just focus on delivery. And this can work and has worked in many cases successfully to a point. But then, from my view, this tends to build up something like organizational debt that makes it hard to then keep people motivated. It makes it hard to really introduce change into an org. And somehow, at some point, people need development and they need actual leadership, not just kind of marching orders.

Agreed. And that whole idea of leadership during change is something that I'm going to come back to in a few minutes, actually, to get your views on. Before we get into that, Let me ask you about your views on what makes a leader a great leader. As you said earlier in the intro, you've worked for some good people and some not so good people. And I wonder when you were taking those bits from those experiences like you mentioned, what bits were you taking to ensure that you were a great leader yourself?

Yeah, I think this is something I have thought about a lot and think about a lot, and it's difficult question to answer. And even, you know, a different day might be a different answer. But there are a few themes that really emerge. I think, you know, fundamentally great leaders are very human. And even though, you know, businesses must be profitable and we have to be extremely responsible on the accounting side and, you know, when it's other people's money in particular, Still, this can't be the driving concern. Humanist and respect for the extent to which employees have their own lives, they have their own purpose, and they intersect with our companies for some period of their life. It's not a family relationship. It's not even such a great commitment, but it does end up being a lot of time. A lot of their time and, you know, what, you know, maybe their one shot on this planet. And so really being respectful of the humanist, I've seen, I think, time and again as an essential trait of great leadership. I think great leaders are also always very, very good at simplifying things for people. When people are really close to the details, becomes harder and harder for them to do the sort of extra work to refine, you know, the descriptions and understanding of what they're doing into terms that others who are not so close can understand. And leaders, great leaders, are somehow almost always very gifted at sort of being able to see the details and the big picture and put it into terms that people can really understand and internalize. And then that becomes sort of like a compass as they go on and make decisions hour by hour, day by day, week by week that makes sense in terms of the big picture. And then this is somehow connected to great leaders have to be able to communicate well. And really, you know, when they communicate, get people to listen and make sure that what they're saying or writing is really worth internalizing. So that's kind of my simple breakdown.

And there's nothing there that I would disagree with at all. And in fact, a lot of what you just said is what I talk about when I'm running courses, when I'm doing leadership development. That whole idea of the leader— in fact, I was only at a meeting this morning and I said the role for me, the role of an internal comms team is to help leaders get better communicating because ultimately they're the best communicators. Your CEO could stand up in front of 2 or 5 or 10,000 people and explain what the company strategy is, but actually it's not until your team leader, your manager, sits down with your team and explains what that means for you as a team and you as an individual that really makes sense.

Absolutely. And most people in a company are managed by pretty junior leaders. And so, you know, the really kind of the impact of making sure that junior leaders have these basic skills is much higher than intuition would suggest.

Yeah, agreed. I love the way that you talk about purpose. And I think for me, that is the one thing that a lot of organizations miss, having a really emotional, human purpose that people can see and that they can go for. And then, as you say, through that leadership role, they feel more connected to that. And I think one of the things, one of the examples that I loved, which is up on your Twitter feed and also on your LinkedIn, was this whole idea of the tech constitution that you created. I know that you're currently in the process of having a look at that at the moment, but what is the tech constitution and why did you create that?

Sure. So just over 3 years ago, we initiated quite a large organizational change process. We basically tried to break away from how we've been organizing teams and how we've been building tech solutions from the very beginning of the company something that we thought first of all would scale better as we hired the next, say, 1,000 or 2,000 tech employees. And one that would really kind of strengthen our tech culture and be useful in attracting and then retaining the best tech people that we could. And we wanted to try to capture a set of guidelines for how we thought people should behave, how we thought teams should behave, and then how we thought the company should behave. And so we came up with this idea of a tech constitution. To be honest, it's more like a tech bill of rights in some sense. But we broke down for individuals, teams, and the company what we saw as the fundamental rights and responsibilities for each entity. And it was a very hard exercise and I think we did a pretty good job. I think there are some shortcomings. It's kind of overly complex and it's hard for people to use day to day, but it really captured I think quite well some of the fundamental and in some cases kind of radical ideas that we had around how to make a company like this both more human and more engaging.

And radical is a great word because I think the first one, the first example here that I was going to just throw over to you, from the individual's perspective, you have the responsibility to do the right thing when your boss is wrong. Tell me a bit about that and how that works in practice.

Yeah, well, you know, that's attracted some attention. From time to time. And to be honest, boss is a regrettable word to use there. Because it isn't just your boss. And in fact, we don't really like to think in terms of boss so much. But I think there are some really interesting examples where, especially at scale, on the one hand, incentives can become very either misaligned or very confusing, leading to, you know, the worst case things like loss of life. The Ford Pinto is an example where, you know, people were incentivized to make this thing cheap and light and somebody forgot to include safe. And somehow, you know, what you like in that situation is that someone feels empowered to say, hold on, you know, I understand that we're all aligned in this direction, but there's something fundamentally wrong. About this, and that there's the right mindset and mechanism for people to be able to escalate that and feel good about it and be rewarded for that. So that was part of the thinking. I think another example that I've always found really fascinating is the case of Intel, which is a very big company in the United States. And in the 1970s, they owned the memory chip business, and then bit by bit, that business was taken away by competitors, mostly in Japan. And in the early 1980s, they had this huge corporate pivot to becoming a microprocessor company, and that was the microprocessor in the IBM PC, and they really became a big company on the back of that. But the journey that they took to get there was sort of tortuous, but it started with kind of lower-level, middle-level lower-level employees and middle managers who saw that there was this market demand for microprocessors. And many of them in parallel did things which were a little bit against the corporate line in terms of, well, obviously, you know, this is what our customers want, so let's just sort of do this. And meanwhile, the senior leadership team, you know, there was a lot of kind of identity built up in being a memory chip company, and they were a little bit slow in making this high-level pivot. And when they finally made the pivot, it was a very successful change process for them. It happened very quickly, and it was extremely good for their business.

Yeah, because people were ahead of the curve already.

Yeah, and that was only possible because there was this mindset somehow in their company. It wasn't quite formally stated that was biased toward doing the right thing.

Yeah. And it's great to have the culture— sorry, Scott McInnes— it's great to have a culture where that's okay, where actually speaking to your boss or speaking to a colleague and saying, "That doesn't feel right," or, "That's not okay," or, "It's wrong," to have that culture is very impressive because not many organizations do. I think they say they do. I think they talk about failing fast and learning from failure, I think big bosses say it's okay to learn from failure. And in the keynote speeches at the town halls, everyone's nodding, but in their heads they're going, "Absolutely no way am I doing that," because we don't have the culture that supports it.

Yeah. Well, and it's always perilous. There have to be enough non-failures to succeed as a business. The thing is, people really do learn from experience. One of my favorite lines is that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. And you have to be able to create this environment where people can make sort of constrained poor judgment calls and then learn from them. And that's a cultural issue, but it's also a structural issue. And it's hard.

Yeah. And that ties— it's interesting that whole idea of failure as being more of a positive is then enshrined in one of your team lines. "The team has the right to take reasonable risks to achieve greatness." I love that word, greatness.

Yeah, well, you know, we recognized that the success of the company up until that point was directly attributable to people taking the right risks and with the goal of achieving greatness and really achieving, you know, something on behalf of our customers.. And we put that in very specifically to try to preserve, couched in the right language, this mindset that we really do need people to take these risks. If you think about— there's sort of a story I heard once about a CEO and 10 VPs or something. And each one of them was thinking about some opportunity that had sort of a 50/50 chance of success. Succeeding. And each one of them, in terms of their own career, was sort of not sure they wanted to take that risk. But from the CEO's point of view, he wanted every one of them to take the risk because a 50/50 shot at big opportunities like that is great overall. And somehow, as a leader, you have to provide this environment where people are able to balance their own kind of career goals with this kind of corporate karma where they're not going to be unfairly or excessively penalized for these failures, but that we all see, okay, what can we learn from this? And one thing that we've done that I really am kind of proud of is that when— we have a pretty big website. It's in operation 24/7. It makes money 24/7. And when it's not working, we're not making money and it's kind of a big deal. And sometimes, you know, it comes down to, you know, the human error of one human that causes it to not work and that's very stressful for that person and it ends up, you know, costing the company some material amount of money. But one of the— and one of the ways that we try to offset that is to say, well, you know, yes, that happened and we can't undo that, but at the same time, Let's take this as an opportunity for you to teach others about what happened and see this not as a loss, but as an investment in the education of everyone.

Yeah, an opportunity to learn. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And in terms of sharing those stories, we're going to talk a little bit in a sec about storytelling. In terms of sharing those stories of both success and failure, is that something that's important in Zalando?

Yeah, absolutely. And there are different forms that those stories take.. And there are kind of different rituals around the stories. And I really, you know, we actually tie the notion of the story to the word accountable and accountability. Many people think, you know, accountability is tied to somehow accountants and money. But there's also this, you know, the word can mean just give an account of what happened. And so making sure that people are really comfortable Talking about what happened, talking about what their goals are, how progress is, did they achieve those things, and, you know, what have they learned from what they've done. All of this sort of bundles together in this idea of being accountable for things. And it turns out that, you know, that accountability is this feedback loop, which without that, things don't really get better. Yeah, agreed.

So, I'm interested to go back when you talked about going back to when you created that tech constitution, that you did that around a time of change in Zalando. And that leads me into a question around the role of a leader during change, and particularly from a communications perspective, that what do you see as the role of a leader? What, in your experience, is the role of a good leader during change? During a large change?

Yeah, I think, yeah, so, you know, as you well know, change is incredibly hard. And it's hard enough just to think of what is the right change to make. And then it's significantly harder to think about how are we now going to bring all of these people on this journey. And for many of us, this was the first big change that any of us had really been through, at least as leaders. And so we had a lot to learn, but we— I think we came in with the right learner mindset as well about what it would mean to go through this change. And I think, you know, one of the most important things about this kind of change is understanding this change curve dynamic that people have where they start out excited and then they go into this sort of trough of disappointment and then they can come out. And, you know, every single person has their own personal version of this curve. And they're all shaped sort of the same way, but they, you know, some people are out of the trough in a week, some people are out of the trough in 6 months. And I think as a leader, first of all, it's really important to spend some time trying to understand just the sheer complexity of all of these different change curves of all of these different people, you know, most of whom you really need to get on board. And how much just work is required to make sure that people are moving through this change curve. And it's— It's a combination of explaining things and really repeating yourself. I think Reid Hoffman had this great line that about, around the time you get sick of saying it is about the time people start to hear you. And especially for tech people, repeating yourself is sort of considered annoying. But as a leader, you simply have to keep repeating the same most important messages again and again and again. Because people really, you know, they focus on what their leaders talk about. And so you have to keep talking about the things that really matter, especially through a change, which is all about the why. And then, you know, for many changes, just figuring out, say, new work structure or getting the right people in place or moving responsibilities around is very hard. But then to really do this well, you need to also identify who are the people who are going through this change curve faster and who are really early on, on board with the change, and then organizing them to help the others. So it's almost like a lifeboat operation, in some sense. And in this case, we were pretty scared. There was about 1,000 people. People. It was a huge change. We weren't completely sure whether people were gonna like it because it was done very top-down, very much in secret, and, you know, we kind of rolled this out with a big event. And so we didn't know what to expect. And, you know, everyone is sort of tired by the time you get to the actual change event. But Now that's just the start. It goes on much, much longer than people know. And so of course people who've been through this before are reluctant to go through these things because they know how long they take, how exhausting they are, how many details there are. But at the same time, you know, it's very, very exhilarating to see— you can almost hear the click, you know, as people make it through this change curve. And you feel the momentum build. And for a successful change, it is, you know, it's a congealing event over the course of months. It's very satisfying.

And I think absolutely, I think from a cultural perspective, it can bring, done well and done properly, it can bring so much strength and pride to an organization. We got through that, we've made a difference, and we've done it together.

Yeah.

Interesting. Let me talk a little bit.

Yeah.

Sorry, go ahead.

Go. No, I was just saying, yeah, people do feel like they've gone through something together and it ties them together. The people who were there feel this bond. Yeah.

Almost like a battle. Yeah. Let me ask you about your leadership role models. You mentioned earlier that there were people, again, that you learned from, good and bad. Who are some of the people that you look up to, whether they be people you've worked with or for or other people in your world?

Yeah, I think, so my kind of earliest leadership role model was one of my first real bosses, a guy named Jim MacRae. He hired me at Maxis, the computer company. Game company. And what I loved about Jim was that, you know, first of all, he was incredibly smart, you know, felt like he was smarter than all of us, and also incredibly human. And he was very good at making people feel sort of comfortable in this way that we now call, you know, psychological safety. But he did it in a way that where there's a very high standard. And so, you know, coming to work with Jim was definitely fun, but it was also an experience where, you know, you felt smarter at the end of every day because of the environment that he created. Now there are a ton of things, you know, and I think Jim would not rate himself as The management was his life goal. And at the end of the day, I think, you know, that he probably isn't the best manager that I ever had, but he was the first one who really had an impact. We became lifelong friends. He was the best man at my wedding. But he sort of was the first person who showed me this kind of human side, first of all. And then second of all, that this was something, that maybe someone like me might be able to get into. Even though it was almost 20 years later when I took the plunge, that was— it was— those seeds were always in the back of my mind and planted by him. And I think, you know, of the leaders that really had an impact always shared this humanness, always, you know, there was always a sense of humor. Somewhere in there. And I didn't mention it before, but I do think sense of humor is really important because we are, you know, even, you know, for me, whether I'm living to work or working to live, not always totally clear. I certainly put a lot into whatever job I'm doing, but it is just part of your life and you are there somewhat by And so, you know, it just feels like the right thing to do to make as much of that enjoyable for the people around you as you can. And I really have appreciated the humor that existed. My current boss is probably the best boss that I've ever had and the most inspirational. And he has sort of shown me a higher bar. In terms of both how to develop senior people and also how to simplify very complex things and how to sort of apply the 80/20 rule very effectively to get to the bottom of these are the things that really matter and these are the things that don't. So I feel, you know, really pretty lucky to get the opportunity to be exposed to that.

So let me ask you just the last question before we finish up, and it's a question that I ask to all of the guests on the show, which is what leadership advice would you give to your 20-year-old self knowing what you know now?

Um, yeah, I think, you know, in my own case, I think the advice would be to respect it sooner, but not necessarily to embark upon it sooner. I, you know, it's important that people when they're young become managers and aspire to be leaders, but most of the very best leaders that I've seen start a little bit later. They have more experience getting into deep topics and more access to the details of what really has to be done in an enterprise or a technical activity. And, you know, leaders always struggle for credibility on some level, or at least there's always the risk that they'll have to struggle for credibility because they're not doing all— they may be doing some of the work, but there's much more of the work that isn't done by them, and yet they are somehow representing that work and accountable for it. And so the more experience they have really with what that actually means, the impact that it has on the people that do it, the challenges of solving these problems, I think the more the better. I think the other advice that I would always give is to always make sure that you're exposing yourself to as many ideas as you can. Controversial or otherwise, and always with an open mind. In technical fields, sometimes people do something that I think of as just-in-time learning, where you're just, just learning exactly what you need to achieve the goal. And in tech especially, there's a lot of learning required all the time at every level. But for leaders, I really encourage them to take more like a just-in-case approach to learning. And try to learn as many diverse and broad things because it ends up being quite surprising the extent to which ideas from kind of all over the world and from many different fields, there are great similarities between these things that are not obvious at first. And being able to pull from a deep reservoir of what you've learned, what you've experienced, what makes us human is extremely useful and important to be a great leader.

Great stuff. Thank you. Those of you who have listened to other episodes of the podcast may have noticed that I'm not talking to Eric face-to-face today. We're doing it remotely because he is based in Berlin. It's the first time we've done one of these, so I will hope you'll forgive a couple of blips in the audio. I promise that I'll get those straightened out as we go. But for now, I'd just like to say thank you very much to Eric Bowman for being a guest on the show. It's been really, really nice talking to you.

Pleasure's been all mine, Scott. Thank you.

Thanks, Eric. Thanks for listening. For more on Inspiring Change and to read our blog, please visit inspiringchange.ie.