How leaders can nurture and support resilience in the workplace | with Dmitri Julius

Is it just me, or can Christmas and the end of this year just not come fast enough? It's mid December. We're coming up on the final show of the shortlist for 2022. And if you're like me and most people, I know you're just dying for this year to come to a close. But we're not done yet. We have two more episodes, including today's episodes, for you to enjoy, to make you think, to make you relax into next year and hopefully invigorate you and get you excited about what you can do next year. Today on episode 1, 2, 4 of the shortlist, my name is Johnny Campbell, by the way. I'm the host of today's show and CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And we're going to be talking today about how leaders can nurture and support resilience in the workplace. Because you know what? It's been a tough year. It's been a tough few years for the world, for many people and for different reasons. And resilience is something we've kind of had to come to terms within the last couple of years. Right. But people have been weathering all sorts of storms. And today's question is how can leaders within a company create an environment that supports resilience but without creating unrealistic expectations? Now, really, resilience doesn't mean how do you endure high levels of stress, like all the time? You know, it's more about building a sustainable, supportive environment so people have the right tools to tackle whatever challenges arise. So what does an empathetic, equitable and critically, a psychologically safe culture look like? Well, joining us on today's shortlist to talk about the strategic elements of establishing your company culture is Dimitri Julius. He's head of special projects at icon. Dimitri recently took on this new role after serving as icon's chief people officer, and he's based in Texas and joining us from the US Today, and it has a little bit more about icon for those of you who don't know us, know the business and about their, how they're helping us get to space and get to get to the moon and further on to Mars. But I'll pause on that. What we're going to discuss more broadly, the resilience of the human spirit, how to nurture that within a company culture, and the role that psychologically, psychological safety plays in meeting people where they are and working together for the best outcomes. Dimitri, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. I'm excited to have you on the show since we first met a couple of months ago in Dublin. And I was hoping perhaps you could begin by introducing yourself to our audience, but also giving them some background on the organization you work with and the amazing work that you all are doing there.

Well, thank you so much for the tremendous introduction, Johnny. It was a pleasure. And I just got to say, before we get started, my time in Dublin, my time with the Irish people that I had the opportunity to meet was amongst the most special visits that I've ever been a part of. Getting to know you and your team over the course of this last couple of weeks has been tremendous and I just thank you so much for having me. But yeah, so ICON is a large scale robotics as a service organization that exists to try to help make a meaningful dent in the global housing crisis. So we utilize our scale robots. So not small desktop 3D printers, but large scale, the same size as like the home foundation to 3D print houses. Faster, more resilient and cheaper to create housing stock that then drives down the costs and potentially creates opportunities for people to live in a dignified way at an affordable rate. And we're doing this from Austin, Texas, but we've also done some of this work internationally as well. And so we'll get into the space stuff you mentioned later, John. But yeah, just super excited to have an opportunity to talk to your audience.

So we're in Ireland, as I'm broadcasting from Dublin, Ireland, my home, as you mentioned. And the housing crisis is a big issue here in Ireland. It's a big issue in many, many parts of the world. Just tell me a little bit about, first of all, the business's mission again and just kind of walk me through what does a 3D printed home look like and tell me what are the benefits? How do you actually realize those benefits? And maybe if you could walk me through one or two examples of where the business has actually deployed this on scale, I'd love to just give our folks listening a visual kind of interpretation of what the business is doing and the meaningful work that the business is doing as well.

Absolutely, yeah. And so a 3D printed house is not too dissimilar from a traditional home. You know, it's still going to have all those things that you're used to seeing. So windows, doors, you know, countertops, cabinets, all those sorts of things. But the actual presentation of the housing envelope is going to be like a printer. Imagine a large tube of toothpaste or cake frosting is printing inch by inch, layer by layer, in support of building an entire Envelope of a home. And so the robot uses a digital design file that already has the layout for the home in its memory bank. And then we're going to utilize that file to basically trace the interior and exterior wall systems for your house until it's completely built. We pop on a roof, you add your windows and doors, and you've got yourself a 3D printed home. Now, the advantages of this technology at scale are a couple of different things. This automated robotic system allows for the minimization of the use of materials. So said another way, and we like to use this internally, we print to the drop and then we stop. That's just because it rhymes. It also means that the additional construction materials that you see oftentimes at job sites are eliminated. Exactly how much material it's going to take to print these things. And then we stop and produce no more material after that's done. And so we utilize a small batch methodology. So you've got the 3D printer itself, the Vulcan system, then you've got the material delivery system. It's basically the small batch mixer that we refer to as maga. So you're seeing the volcano through line there. And then the concrete material that we use we refer to as Lavacrete. Those systems as well as the back end and front end software allow us to 3D print houses. Now, the fun part is you can give me 200 different designs as long as they can exist in the built environment. The computer has no feelings about what you're building. So I can build a community to all the specifications of the needs of the families there. Each one of those units can be different and delivered with one machine. Now you're talking about design freedom and flexibility without adding additional cost or time. Then we can utilize these tools to, to modernize the workforce, to allow for that inroad in housing stock that you're experiencing in Dublin and we're experiencing in Austin to really start to catch up to the need so the demand is met. So yeah, that's a little bit about how we're approaching this problem.

So the business is amazing, with amazing technology, a superb mission, doing fantastic things, and up until recently you were the chief people officer in Icon. And I guess our audience would probably be forgiven for thinking, you know, in a fast scaling startup, you came in to hire, put in processes, scale things, and do all the typical things that the person in charge of HR or the people ops would be responsible for. But is it fair to say that the role of CPO in Icon was probably a little bit different to perhaps Your traditional cpo, perhaps, you know, words like progressive or more involved might be used that this wasn't a typical CPO role. Would that be fair?

I think that would be fair. The scale at which we grew our organization and the opportunity that we had to build an equitable business were kind of all in front of us. So again, our business is a missionally oriented company. We exist in service of humanity. We want to really help solve the global housing crisis. And so when you're scaling up a business like that, yes, you've got a responsibility to hire quickly and kind of put butts in seats if you will. But there's also this real opportunity to showcase that a diverse, agile and fluid thinking organization is one that belongs in the ecosystem of startups. And so we tried to make sure that we weren't hiring in a vacuum. We wanted to think very clearly and critically about where we were finding talent, making sure that we weren't creating a homogenous group of people and thinkers who weren't able to approach these very real human problems on the ground without perspective. And we also wanted to showcase that, yes, it's fantastic to have, you know, your traditional background and skill set to deliver something like this, but it would also be really great if we could find talent in other areas that aren't traditional to technology or construction and build out a world class organization. And so when I took the role of chief people officer, I think there were 29 full time employees in our building and in less than 18 months we built our organization to about 525 full time employees that were working as a government contractor. So through the pandemic we kind of scaled this thing, which is a really special thing that I'll always think fondly about. All the job opportunities we created and just the makeup of this organization which allows us to think in a really freewheeling and plastic way to solve some really challenging on ground problems.

So for folks who've never worked in an organization who scales at that pace, which is probably most of us, right. What they might just think it's exciting, right? It's amazing. This growth is fantastic, it's brilliant. But can you share with us some of the stressors that exist in an organization scaling at that pace during a pandemic just so that we can get some context as to what, what was, you know, what were the kind of background factors to the need for resilience within the leadership team in Icon at that time?

Absolutely fantastic question. I think one of the things that we foresaw being a challenge and it absolutely was, was when you're growing that fast, you've got like that core group of people, your early adopters, your believers in the thing that you were going to do, the people that kind of show up wide eyed and bushy tailed and kind of believe wholeheartedly, this is the only way to solve this problem, which is fantastic. You need that. And when you're scaling that quickly, every degree that you kind of move away from that early adopter group, you're introducing new ideas, but you're also introducing new culture. The thing that people forget is you may be expanding your culture, but you also have a responsibility to shepherd these new people along in this very fast paced building. And so at a certain point you reach this inflection moment where there are more new people in your organization than the classically trained individuals in your org and that creates some natural friction. Some friction, that's good. But it's something that you have to be aware of and be able to speak to honestly about the things that are changing. As you know, people take on less responsibility because we've hired a subject matter expert for that thing. Or there may be a new set of ideas that differ slightly from the ones that you had about how something should be built. And so I think there is a level of trust that goes into allowing the new people that enter your organization to be full fledged members of the team that take on responsibility and allowing them the freedom and flexibility to interject their talent into your business. And then I think there is this thing that I think people are aware of, but it may exist as the elephant in the room. When you're growing that fast, there is a tendency to think, well, if we've got all these people here, all the bases must be covered, we're good to go. This thing is like on track and it's just going to be successful. And I think it's important to remember that the goal of every scaling organization, the goal of every startup is to eventually grow up and grow out of that phase. And so changing in culture is like both great because you need to get there in order to be the sort of org that can nurture all of those people in the business. But it also needs to be a culture that reminds people why the business exists in the first place and how working with one another helps get you there faster as opposed to like seeing that tension is something that you, that you take personally and maybe you miss an opportunity to really get in there with your teammates and learn what their talents are and how they're bringing that.

To bear when you talk about resilience and that environment, Demetri, can you basically maybe contrast what does resilience look like versus lack of resilience, and what are the effects of not having the resilience versus somebody who perhaps does develop that resilience? Maybe. Can you just give our audience a view of what that looks like, the kind of contrasting resilience versus lack of resilience?

Yeah, I think when we talk about resilience in our building, I'll give you a brief example. I won't spend too much time on it, but. So we were. We were working on a special project contract with NASA. We're doing a CBIR Phase three, which is a private grant opportunity to be a part of Project Artemis to deliver automated robotic systems to help rebuild Moon base, to give us an opportunity to explore in extraterrestrial environments beyond the moon. And first of all, that's a really cool thing to be able to do your business every day. So I don't want to skim past that like, it's a small thing, but there is this tendency that can exist within the organization for people to be like, oh, that's the new shiny thing. I want to go chase that. And I think in my mind, a level of resilience is understanding that there may be all sorts of interesting bespoke opportunities swirling around your business. But being able to focus on the core mission and the core reason we exist as an organization means tactically, like being able to focus yourself and your team on your key items that you bring to bear for the business. So all of the other areas of your business can continue to move. And if you lacked focus or you're unable to communicate clearly what your goals and your contribution to the business are, to me, that's a lack of. Because it's going to stifle everyone else's effort. It's going to make it more difficult for your teammates to go out and win. And so there's this mindset that needs to exist. Like, yes, there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening out there in the ether, but my responsibility to my teammates and to this business is to be.