The LeaderShifter Show

With millions of workers globally now working from home in the wake of #covid19, it’s important to reduce confusion and set people up for success during this new normal. That not only includes your team but also clients, vendors, cross functional partners, and any other stakeholders with whom you typically communicate. In this episode, I share 6 tips for working remotely, largely based on my nearly five years of experience as COO of an all-virtual company that had been brick and mortar for 30 years prior. Tune in for specifics on clear communication protocols, professionalizing virtual meetings, sustaining your organization’s culture online, being a coach and being coachable, and managing energy. This big shift in global context calls for new and creative ways of doing business and connecting with all the people in our professional and personal lives.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 43: 6 Best Practices for SHIFTing smoothly to #WFH

Shani Magosky: Is your team not performing well? Is morale low and turnover high? Are you falling further behind the competition? I’m here to help. I’m your host Shani, and this is The LeaderShift Show where business strategy and culture finally meet and we make the long-awaited shift from rhetoric to results. I promise I am not your typical boring leadership consultant, and I will help you get your shift together. Let’s do this.

Hey, Leadershifters. Welcome to another episode of The LeaderShift Show. Many of you have shifted to work-from-home arrangements, some of you now for close to a month since we first had COVID-19 creeping onto US soil. I have been working virtually or remotely for over 13 years now. In fact, I used to run a company that when I became the CEO of it, we transitioned from being a brick and mortar company to an all-highly distributed organization with employees all over the country, in Canada, and even a few in Europe. I’d like to share some of the wisdom that I developed during that time with those of you for whom working from home is a new thing.

Because the problem is not everybody knows what are the best practices for working from home, you’ve been used to being in the office for so long. I have come up with six tips, six tips, to make shifting to working from home hopefully, easier and as productive as it can possibly be for teams and organizations. It’s important because people are confused and maybe even ill-equipped to be productive when they’re working from home.

I know you may be thinking, “Oh, we got this covered. I know how to do this.” Well, do you? Does your entire team know? Do your clients know? Do your vendors know? Do the cross-functional colleagues with whom you work really know? I’d venture to guess that there is definitely going to be some gaps in the knowledge and how people approach the work from home situation. These six tips should be universal to help anyone have a productive dialogue about what needs to be done or done differently now that this is the new normal for the time being.

Tip number one for shifting smoothly to work from home is set a clear communication protocol with everyone you work with on a regular basis. That would be your team, your clients, your vendors, cross-functional partners, and other colleagues. First of all, you need to decide what tools are you going to use to communicate for which purposes? Frankly, we should be doing this even when we’re working in the office, but it’s even more important when we’re working remotely so that there is alignment and consistency with what communication tools are being used.

For example, when are we going to use email versus text message? For example, is text message or Slack Messenger what we’re going to use when things are timely or we want a response right away, and email is for things where people can take a little bit longer? Frankly, if it is, what is the expected response time on the team to reply to an email? When are we going to use voicemail? What about the other cloud tools that either were being used, but maybe not consistently in the office, but maybe it’s even more imperative that we use them now, and perhaps there’s even some tools that have been introduced since there’s been more proliferation of working from home?

Whatever the tools are on your team, align with everybody what tool you’re going to use, what the context is, and what the expected response time is. Importantly, don’t forget about the good old-fashioned tool, the telephone, because sometimes doing things electronically, you lose so much. If it’s going to be more than a couple of back and forths over email or instant messenger, pick up the fricking phone and talk to people. It will actually expedite the whole situation.

Some other things to think about in terms of standardizing communication. If your team isn’t already doing this, and again, you really should be, but no time like the present to button things up just a little bit for your collaboration and knowledge sharing tools, do you have very clear naming protocols and filing systems so that people can find things when you’re trying to share them remotely?

Tip number two for shifting more seamlessly to virtual work situation. Professionalize those virtual meetings. It boggles my mind how after all of these years of doing business over Google Hangouts, or Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever the platform is, how many people don’t take virtual meetings as seriously as they would take a meeting that you showed up to in a conference room. We have to make sure that these meetings are not a waste of people’s time.

First of all, do them on video. The connection that you have by at least being able to see each other and to virtually look each other in the eyes is better than over the phone and it prevents people from multitasking. If people are just on the phone and they have you on mute, you don’t know whether they’re doing dishes or walking the dog, versus if they’re on camera, they’ve got to be more present.

The second thing in terms of professionalizing virtual meetings, everyone, please take ownership of your own technology. Log in early, a few minutes early to test your audio and your video, and to install any updates because inevitably, there are updates, if not daily, at least every few days, and you don’t want to be delaying the start of the meeting because people are still running their updates and so forth.

When you’re on camera, be professional about it. Be relatively centered. Don’t have your head partially cut off or don’t be in the corner. Make it professional. Have decent lighting. The best tip I can give you for lighting is don’t be incredibly backlit. Be conscious of your environment. Is it super noisy? Do you have kids, or pets, or other distracting background noise that are going to interfere with people’s ability to focus in the meeting? If so, find a different place to have your meeting, a different place in your home.

This goes without saying for any meeting but, of course, critical to keep virtual meetings on track. Make sure you have a clear agenda, everyone knows what it is beforehand ideally, and reiterated at the beginning of the meeting so that people know what to expect and to come prepared to those virtual meetings. Encourage participation. Don’t just let the same old people talk. If you are leading a virtual meeting, solicit input from everybody on the meeting. Call on people whose voices haven’t been heard yet. That’s one way to make it engaging because making it engagement is extremely important to keep people present and focused and paying attention on these virtual meetings.

Use the features that the technology has made available to us. There’s whiteboards and there’s breakout rooms and there’s obviously pens and things that you can do to bring everybody to collaborate on screen and add. There’s no reason not to pull those tools in and to take questions in the chat room and so forth.

Do creative things. If you’ve got people calling into your video meeting from all over the world, put a map of the world upon the screen as people are answering and have people put a dot where they are in the world. Then it’s cool for everybody to see like, “Oh, we’ve got people calling in from Europe and the Middle East, and maybe Brazil, and Canada, and California.” Again, it’s engaging and it’ll make the meetings more fun than if we’re not intentionally creating engaging ways for people to show up.

Have fun, that’s part of engagement. It’s not a waste of time to give people a quick virtual tour of your home office or to show them what’s out the window if you’ve got a nice view or something like that. Although we don’t want the pets making noise, introduce your pets maybe if they happen to be around. Your cats, or your dogs, or your goldfish, introduce them to the virtual participants. It’ll just, again, create that connection that is so important and needed, especially during high-stress times like we’re going through now.

Then at the end of the meeting, make sure to corral everybody back up and verbalize, okay, what are the key takeaways of the meetings, what are the commitments that were made, and are the next steps, who’s responsible for them, and what’s the timing, so that everybody leaves with the same marching orders? That’s tip number two about virtualizing or professionalizing your virtual meetings.

Tip number three, don’t forget your corporate culture, bring it with you, to your house, and to all of your interactions with colleagues and clients. Don’t forget, what’s your mission, vision, and values. You should operate accordingly, regardless of where. Number two, in terms of bringing your culture, sometimes you’re going to need to redefine what the behaviors of the culture look like if you’re not in the office together.

It may be necessary to redesign your alliance, and what that means is to co-create the rules of the road with the folks that you’re working with most frequently. If you’re a leader, make sure you’re doing this with all of your direct reports. If you’re on a cross-functional team, somebody needs to voice this and make sure it happens when all of a sudden, the team are collaborating remotely.

The questions that you should be asking each other and coming to some conclusions about so that everybody is on the same page. What do you want to expect from each other when we’re meeting virtually? How are we going to stay accountable when we can’t just show up at someone’s desk and ask where does something stand? What obstacles do we anticipate while working from home, or in this virtual environment? How do we want to approach them when they arise?

How do we want to handle any conflict when it comes up? We can’t pull people into a conference room or take them out for coffee right now, to deal with conflict the way we might if we were still in the office, so how do we want to handle that? We certainly don’t want to delay it. Figure out, again, what are the new rules for the road there, and what are the things do people need to stay focused, engaged, as anxiety-free as possible, and as productive as possible?

Lastly, keep the team spirit high, and don’t feel you have to do that alone if you’re a leader. Solicit input from your team members and say, “Hey, folks, what are some other ways that we can maintain our esprit de corps today, this week, this month?” Because everyone can come up with great ideas along those lines.

Idea number four, for shifting smoothly to virtual work arrangements, coach and be coachable. Everyone can coach, you can coach, your directs you can coach, your peers you can coach, clients even, and you can even coach up to your managers or supervisors. If you don’t know how to coach, you can certainly ping me offline, and I am happy to teach you the formal methods that I teach people to coach in the workplace effectively. Let me just give you a quick and dirty way to coach people that I call, the four whats.

It’s essentially, hey, what’s going on? As in, what’s the situation, and/or what’s your desired outcome? You’re just establishing the topic, and what the goal is for the topic. What number two, what’s currently happening, what’s the current status? Now you’re figuring out what’s happened up until this point. The third what is, what could you do? You want to get the other person to brainstorm about what their options are, what could they do in an ideal world, what could they do if they were in charge? Get them to solve their own problems, which is essentially the definition of coaching.

What number four is to choose from the ideas they had brainstorming. What will you do, what will you commit to, and by when will you do it? What do you want to talk about or what’s your desired outcome, what’s happening, what could you do, what will you do, and by when? Those are the four whats, anybody can use them to coach anyone, pretty much on just about any topic. Try it, and let me know how it goes.

You should also be coachable. It’s more imperative than ever, to be communicating and to be giving people feedback, both positive and constructive about how we’re operating in this new normal. Let people know what’s working, what’s not working, what you’d like to see them do differently, and give it to them in a formal, professional way.

For those of you who still haven’t availed yourself of my feedback class, which is a seven module, self-paced, online school of feedback, and it’s called Feedback is the 3rd Currency, How to Turn Feedback into Profits. I’m going to offer a 50% discount, if you are listening to this podcast, to go ahead and download this class, use the discount code, Brave New World, and you’ll get 50% off of my feedback class. That’s Brave New World, and you’ll get half off.

Tip number five, manage your energy, and if you’re leading people, make sure your team are managing their energy. That means take breaks throughout the day. 90 minutes, is the conventional wisdom about how often human beings need to take a quick break. That can just be, get up from the desk, take a walk around the house, get a glass of water, use the bathroom and come back. We need to take those 90-minute breaks, short breaks every 90 minutes. Get outside and get some fresh air, it’s not healthy to be inside all day. Luckily the weather has improved for most of us, so get outside, breathe some fresh air.

You might even meditate outside, if you’re not meditating outside, meditate inside for a few minutes before you start to work, and maybe once in the afternoon when you need to reset your energy level. Meditate in a way that’s meaningful for you. If you’re not the person that’s going to sit there cross-legged, and close your eyes, and meditate, meditate in a way that resonates for you. That could just be breathing consciously for a few minutes, spending 10 minutes doing jumping jacks. I don’t care what it is but getting your brain out of the monotony of the task-focused trap that we get caught in throughout the day.

Go out for lunch, or at least have lunch away from your computer. Hopefully, you’ve all stocked up on things if you’re quarantined, go to the kitchen, sit down without your laptop, and without your phone, have a peaceful meal, nourish your body, eat plenty of protein to keep the energy level up while you’re working from home. Stay hydrated. I know it may not be as fun to drink regular water out of your refrigerator than it is to have the fruity water or the Kombucha that are in fancy break rooms throughout corporations, but staying hydrated is a key to managing your energy.

Last but not least, tip number six, for shifting seamlessly smoothly to those work from home situations, be in a spirit of continuous improvement. You may not get this right out of the gate, so try something, see how it works, and pivot accordingly. It’s just like anything that’s new, we’re going to launch it, we’re going to get or we’re going to pivot it, we’re going to get feedback, we’re going to iterate, and launch it again, and do that until we figure out what works, which is part of the reason why feedback is so important.

Until we’ve got the right habits formed for ourselves and for our teams, we want to check in with our colleagues, with ourselves, and be super honest about what’s working about working from home, what’s not working, what do we want to try doing differently, and then relying on what that looks like.

To recap, Shani’s six best practices for working from home. Number one, set a clear communication protocol with everyone you do business with, for every mode of communication, along with response time. Please, please, please, professionalize your virtual meetings and hold people accountable to showing up prepared and in a professional way on camera. Number three, remember to incorporate your culture into the way you do business even though it seems a little unusual. Number four, coach others and be coachable yourself and that includes feedback. Number five, manage your energy. Number six, continuously improve.

Let me know how this little virtual work playbook is working for you. Of course, be sure to wash your hands frequently, and don’t touch your face, and stay away from groups larger than 10, and do all the things that our leaders and the CDC recommends to stay healthy and safe during this time of the Coronavirus. Thank you for listening to another episode of The LeaderShift Show. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, ping me at [email protected] Thanks again.

The post 43: 6 Best Practices for SHIFTing smoothly to #WFH appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

A leader with no shortage of personal and professional shifts under his belt, digital media guru Bruce Daisley astutely lobbied to lead YouTube when no other Google UK leaders seemed to care about it and subsequently brought his passion for leadership and culture to run EMEA for Twitter. While overseeing big growth there, he also launched his podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat, now the #1 business podcast in the UK. Bruce recently left Twitter to pursue these passions full-time, timed with the publication of the U.S. version of his Sunday Times best-selling book, Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job. Tune in to hear the advice he would have given his team if he were still leading them during this anxious time of covid-19, the importance of connecting via ‘analog’ means like the phone, the secret sauce of high performance teams – psychological safety, and inspiring stories of straight talk that separate the person from the problem.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 42: Shifting to cultures of straight talk with former Twitter VP for EMEA and best-selling author, Bruce Daisley

Shani Magosky: Is your team not performing well? Is morale low and turnover high? Are you falling further behind the competition? I’m here to help. I’m your host, Shani, and this is The Leader Shift Show where business strategy and culture finally meet, and we make the long-awaited shift from rhetoric to results. I promise, I’m not your typical boring leadership consultant, and I will help you get your shift together. Let’s do this.

Hello, LeaderShifters, and welcome to another episode of The Leader Shift Show with Shani. As you know, my mission is to help leaders and organizations get their shift together. Today’s guest, to me, is one of the ultimate LeaderShifters that I could be interviewing on this podcast. Let’s give a warm welcome to Bruce Daisley.

Bruce Daisley: Thank you for having me. Hello there.

Shani: Hello. It’s so awesome to have you. Guys and girls, I want to explain why I’m so excited to have Bruce on the show. Up until very recently, Bruce was the VP for EMEA, for Twitter, which as many people know is one of my very favorite clients. Bruce and I have interacted on many of the occasions that I was delivering training and consulting and leadership circle profile to the folks in EMEA, and specifically, in London.

Bruce recently left Twitter because he had shifted. Even before he left Twitter, he shifted to a podcast host. His podcast being Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, and a little birdie tells me it’s the number one business podcast in the UK. Even more recently, Bruce has published a book by the same title, Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat: Thirty Hacks for Bringing Joy to your Job which was a number one Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, and has been translated into 14 language including American.

[laughter]

We’re going to talk about a lot of those shifts and probably some more with you today, so really excited to have you on the show, Bruce. Thanks for being here.

Bruce: Thank you. Good to chat to you in a non-worky capacity. It’s great to chat to you.

Shani: Absolutely. You know what? The elephant, it’s not even in the room. The elephant in the world right now is COVID19. While I don’t want to spend the majority of our time talking about it, because I think the wisdom that you have to share is evergreen, and I don’t want to taint it with the COVID19 theme, I do think we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least touch upon it. It is the thing that has shifted the world in, at a minimum, a temporary way, and at a maximum, maybe forever. We don’t know.

Bruce: I think you’re exactly right. At times, it’s difficult to imagine returning to normalcy because so much of everyday normal life has been already upended. I think it’s a perfectly fair thing to open with. From here, I think it’s only right that a lot of us are thinking, “What on Earth comes next, and how do we persist?” I think it’s probably because we are in a shift right now. We’re in the shift stage, but no matter how long we take to transition from that, there will be a new normal.

That might be in three weeks’ time where we are now comfortable, we’re working on the kitchen table, or where we’re now comfortable, we’re sitting on the sofa answering emails and that’s become our job. I think to your regular provocation, the shift is the moment of disruption, and it presents a big opportunity.

The critical thing, I would say, is that it’s no doubt with the economic situation being so perilous, that some poor performance will be hidden. We’ll find ourselves in three months’ time, six months’ time, and some businesses will have performed far better than others. Poor performing businesses will have sat there saying, “No wonder the revenue has gone down to 25%. No wonder we’ve seen the order book empty.” There will be some businesses that have outperformed them. The old truism. The old statement is, “You never want to waste a good crisis.”

Shani: Right.

Bruce: Yes, and I think it will be a really defining point of difference that some companies, and I think specifically some leaders, will find this a moment of real connection with their team. There will be other teams where actually it will sink very quickly into a morass of disconnection. The lack of team cohesion will quickly manifest itself. People won’t feel connected to their jobs, and rightfully, they’ll blame unprecedented circumstances.

Shani: Just like in any circumstances, you can be in victim mode as an individual, or you can be in overcoming mode. “Okay. Well, what am I going to do to succeed in spite of it? The rules have changed, but I’ll play the new game.” It’s not just individuals who feel in victim mode. It can be entire organizations who stay there and then just are like, “Oh, poor us,” and blame.

As opposed to marshaling their staffs and their creativity to create something different which leads me to ask you the question, if you were still at Twitter with such a huge geographic swath under your leadership umbrella, and Europe obviously right now is the epicenter, what would you be saying to your team there?

Bruce: More than anything else, it reminds me of big things that I was really interested in. I wrote a book, and the book is largely a cookbook of recipes, of interventions that any leader, that any team member, can stage to try to reconnect their team, to try to improve their team dynamic. I became really consumed with one piece of team dynamism, the study of how teams work, which was the importance of sync, of human synchronization.

Let me give you some examples of it. There was a study back 100 years ago by a Harvard professor called Floyd Allport. He discovered that when two workers did work next to each other, even if their work was unrelated to each other, one working harder would actually influence the other one to work harder. One might be working on accounts queries, the other one might be shoveling coal, but one of them putting extra industry seemed to be, forgive the wording context, but seemed to be contagious. It seems that we catch energy from other people around us.

Then you start looking more and more into how this might manifest. Some of the ways that we might see this is we observe in athletes. If you put athletes next to each other and you get them to do athletic activity next to each other, generally, we can measure the pleasure hormones in their body, the endorphins in their body. The endorphins are twice as high amongst people who work next to each other, as the people who work alone.

There seems to be something strange about human beings, even introverts amongst us, that we catch energy from other people.

Obviously, that’s one of the things that we might lose in the course of the next three or four months. I do hope that, on reflection, me saying four months there, turns out to be wildly pessimistic. We do appear to catch energy from people. What can any of us do in the absence of having that option available? It seems that one of the things that we can do is really reverting a degree to analog communication.

I was really charmed with one piece of work that looked at couples who’d sustained long-distance relationships. The researchers wanted to understand that strange secret sauce, why do some couples who live in different cities, why does their relationship survive but then another couple living in different cities, theirs doesn’t. Here’s what they discovered. In their survey of 40,000 couples, they discovered that those who stayed together phoned each other every day to talk about trivial things.

Now, we live in an era where a quick Slack message or a Google Hangout pin, or a quick SMS feels like an adequate response. Liking and commenting on someone’s story feels like it’s a great way to stay connected. It seems that, in fact, there’s something in our DNA, there’s something in our program which is far more analog, that’s far more basic. Taking a moment to connect. Here’s what I would be saying. Back to your original question. I’d be saying leaders probably who are going to have the most impact on their team right now are going to be the ones who probably over-invest in picking up the phone and having a direct chat. There’s something about video calls, sometimes it works for some of us, sometimes it doesn’t. When there’s lots of us on a video call, it can feel that we’re sort of anonymous, that we’re lost in a sea of things.

A leader on a video call needs to be thinking about engaging people, bringing them in, animating, over-animating themselves, and finding the cadence of what each of your team members wants to do. It might be that when you’re chatting to Justine, she wants a date, a 30-minute call where she’s going for a walk, and actually just that moment of connection.

One of my old bosses used to phone me every day, shoot the breeze while he was driving to work. What it did is it sort of abbreviates, it deletes distance between you because when you find yourself talking about what you watched on Netflix last night, when you find yourself discussing these plans to take these kids to the beach in the weekend, you immediately, you sort of delete that distance that we often have when we only communicate in text means.

Look, more than anything I would say that any of us probably right now need to be thinking, how can we overcompensate to bring that– remember the Floyd Allport research? How can we try and bring some of that human connection that might be lost in three or four months of electronic communication?

Shani: You’re right. It’s that informal communication that solidifies the human bonds, it’s not the sales meeting or the all-hands meeting. Those are fun, and those can certainly be culture-carrying events, but they’re not one-on-one relationship building-

Bruce: That’s exactly right.

Shani: -the way, you’re right, picking up the phone and connecting with people are.

Bruce: Yes, that’s right and that’s what the evidence says. The evidence says that we tend to feel more connected to people when we’ve operated in this analog way. I think taking pointers for that, certainly, while we’re going through this really singular period of time, that seems to be one of the critical things.

Shani: Folks, this is not a minor recommendation from someone who has spent virtually his entire career in the digital world, to recommend analog connection.

Bruce: Exactly. I think it’s just a good reminder for all of us that just thinking about what we can do to forge connections, and that might be our mom, that might be our family, that might be our siblings, forging connections seems to be incredibly helpful.

Shani: Since I alluded to your career, let’s go back. You would spend some time on the agency side, and then went to Google?

Bruce: That’s right.

Shani: What was it like going from Google, which even at that point was a monolithic, multi, multi, tens of thousands of employees, to Twitter, which when you joined eight or nine years ago was still very much a company trying to figure out what it was, and with far fewer people. What was that shift like for you, and what wisdom were you able to bring from Google to help develop the culture at Twitter?

Bruce: Yes, you make a fair point. When I joined Twitter, they were just a few hundred people, so in comparison to Google, which I think when I left, there were 80,000 people. There’s probably 150,000 people now, so they were very different. I think the first thing was, at Google, I set about trying to find something that I could work on that I was responsible for. It will astonish you and your audience to know that the thing that I was able to put my hand up and asked to work on because no one else wanted to work on it, was YouTube.

At the time, no one wants to work on YouTube because it accounted for zero revenue, and they were all ambitious and wanted to be associated with the most lucrative things. A lot of people at the time felt that YouTube would fail. Anyway, it didn’t feel that way to me, I adored it, and so I put my hand up and volunteered to work on that. Thankfully, that went remarkably well, it was sort of a good project, it was open-ended, and I found a lot of enjoyment in being able to work on that.

In fact, it was the work I was doing there that led Twitter to contact me saying, “Would you like to come to work there?” I was very fortunate that I was able to really play a part in building the culture at the London office for Twitter, and then, subsequently, our offices across Europe and the Middle East. Critically, it was really helpful for me to try to take some of the instinctive things that I felt and trying to bring them to bear on the culture.

I think what I’ve learned subsequently, and why I ended up writing a book, was that I realized that some of the things that we might feel instinctively when it comes to building culture, aren’t always the holy, the right decisions that probably– I’ll give you one perfect example. I remember meeting a business, and they said to me, “When we hire new recruits, when we hire new starters, we have something called the van test.” They were a smoothie manufacturing firm that was delivering smoothies initially in a van themselves, and it often involved long delivery holds.

They said, “The test when we hire someone is, could you sit in a van for three hours with this person?” Actually, it sounds fun, it sounds like the van test feels like sort of really nice heuristic that any of us could get our heads around. Yes, there’s some truth in it. If you or I were stuck on a plane somewhere, we wouldn’t necessarily want to find ourselves next to someone intent on talking who was very, very different to us. It’s human nature, it’s called homophily. We like being around people who are similar to us.

The challenge, of course, when it comes to building a curious and divergent and diverse organization, actually, those sort of things like van tests are just about the worst thing that we can do. I think, from my point of view, I was honored to be able to build the Twitter culture based on my instincts, but probably, the most interesting thing for me was men being able to mark my homework.

As I set about writing this book and there’s probably a hundred academic papers that are referenced along the way, and they’re playfully hidden behind stories, but there’s a lot of evidence. I think that was the interesting thing for me, witnessing that a lot of us find ourselves, as leaders, going on instinct and hunch, but more often than not, there is some academic rigor that has been done in those areas, and so I was really curious to delve into it and find it really.

Shani: Yes, and so did it frustrate you that you knew all the things, both from your instinct and from your research that would actually make the culture even more productive, yet, it’s so hard to get people to see that? For example, not being on email, late night and weekends, trying to convince people that that’s not good for their longevity and their creativity. People in EMEA, from my experience of tweeps in EMEA, they’re answering emails around the clock.

Bruce: Yes, well, that was sort of part of working in a company that woke up just as we were finishing our working day. It was an unfortunate consequence of that. The really interesting thing for me is there’s often no shortage of evidence that really can point us in a direction. I had one boss in a former job who implemented a Sunday afternoon meeting. The company was having hard times and I think this was a way to signal that the company was in a difficult place and we needed to do something radical. He implemented a two-hour meeting in Sunday afternoon.

It was really just to try– I mean, it was a slow meeting. I would hope that, as a meeting, if you were going to have one at that time, maybe there’d be a meeting right now about the virus task force, that you would try and get the meeting done as productively as possible, but there was a meandering pace to this, almost like we were serving our time. It was like there was penance involved in us doing this in as really a sacrificial way as possible. I was really interested, what you discover is that–

Let me give you one of the things that neuroscience is almost emphatic about. There’s a quote by a guy called Gregory Berns from Emory University and he says that one of the most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is when the fear system of the brain is activated, all creative activity is turned off. That’s really interesting.

All of us probably, you’re in a job where we might not be labeled as creative, but we were asked to do and to achieve more this year than we did last year. To achieve more this year than we did last year requires inventiveness, ingenuity, quick thinking, “Hang on, I’ve got an idea.” We might be reluctant to say that that’s creativity, but it is creativity, it’s inventiveness. If you discover that you’ve got a meeting that’s two hours on a Sunday, and we’re serving this penance on it, and the very consequence of that, the stress that that creates–

Stress and fear in the brain are almost indistinguishable for the brain. The fear and the stress that that creates, is actually preventing all of the team being creative, then immediately, it feels like a self-own, it feels like a massive mistake that, unfortunately, is self-defeating. I think I found myself in situations where bosses tried to create stressful environments or in situations where the–

One boss once told me, “Now is not the time to be seen laughing.” That immediately tells you that when it comes to workplace culture, laughter is really unnecessary, it’s wasteful, and we should try and eliminate laughter. That goes into your head. What you discover very quickly is that there’s lots of evidence that that’s decidedly not the case. I think, for me, finding some of the proofs, finding some of the evidence on these things was a really important part of my own journey of understanding.

Shani: What you say resonates with me a lot and it’s why I love the Leadership Circle Profile assessment so much. It distinguishes between reactive behaviors that are always driven by fear and anxiety and are intuitive to humans. They’re not wrong, they’re actually part of our DNA, but we also have the choice to turn those reactive behaviors into creative behaviors instead by flipping the mental switch a little bit.

What tends to happen is when people are under stress, or in fear of something, it can be fear of not making their sales quota, or fear of losing their job, which obviously lots of companies have gone through that ebb and flow of the business cycle where that fear has been pervasive. They’re always in that mode of reactive. Some people comply, some people get protective, some people get controlling, and none of them result in the easiest path to success, and driving collective productivity and performance.

What I love about LCP is that framework because it is based so much on not just neuroscience, but organizational behavior, and psychology, and all the related research that goes in to show why people behave the way they do and that we are also responsible enough to choose something different when we realize that we’ve been triggered into that space.

Bruce: Yes, absolutely. I think as you say there, so often, we can inform our understanding of these things with no shortage of evidence and pointers from these tools that are incredibly powerful for us.

Shani: It’s like, how can we in tough times like we’re in now, take the fear and the impulse to control, or micromanage, or to fade, or whatever someone’s individual fear response is, and turn that into innovation, collaboration, vision, community concern, and make lemonade out of the lemons or as some of my friends have been saying lately to honor Italy, like how do we make limoncello? [laughs]

Bruce: Nice. I think for me, the challenge for most businesses is they want everything and everything. One of the things that I was really interested in is an understanding that human cognition, that human energy is rather more finite than we might give it credit. There’s some evidence that if you look at the working week that people put in, that working longer and longer seems actually to produce less.

What happens is that unless we actually find ourselves being honest about this, and we can create a situation where as bosses, companies, leaders, we give teams more to do. We want everyone to complete the survey, it’s going to be six hours’ worth. We want everyone to go through this learning, and it’s going to be this amount of work. All of this seems immensely valuable, but we don’t instruct them what they should stop doing instead. I think the more we are honest about how work is zero-sum. We want you to do this, but we’re going to free you up to do this.

Shani: That’s a leadership responsibility to reprioritize. When the deck gets shuffled, which cards can you put aside? Absolutely. That’s a failure of leadership to be communicative about what the current priorities are. It just seems like it adds and adds as opposed to keeping it the same and discarding some of the deliverables.

Bruce: Very much so, very much so. One of the I think the fundamental challenges, probably the big differentiators. Everyone who’s running a team right now will be going through a decision, which will be, if I’m sustaining the same volume of meetings that I was when people were in the office, now that everyone’s on Zoom calls, or Google Hangouts, or Skype. If I’m sustaining the same volume of meetings, they’ll discover very quickly, that their teams are exhausted. Why? Because just staring statically at 20 hours of video calls a week is just unproductive and exhausting.

Shani: Yes, and no ability to go to the break room and get some cashews and kombucha.

[laughter]

Bruce: Exactly.

Shani: I know, I miss that. I’d love to shift, switch gears a little bit and talk about, what was your decision-making process for ultimately leaving a wonderful job and a great company to strike out on your own with the message that is in your book, and that you deliver on your podcast because you obviously have such a passion for it? It sounds like it was a little bit of a side hustle that you chose at some point to say, “You know what, I want this to be it now.” How did that happen for you?

Bruce: For me, I had such a fascination with trying to make a workplace that was everyone’s favorite job, by that I mean, not necessarily is an interesting thing. You’re probably aware of the idea that you need to stumble into happiness, in the sense that if you believe that by getting a new suit, or a new car, or going on a certain holiday, it’s going to make you happy, what you discover is the happiness that you actually get from those things is less than what you expect it’s going to be.

When we find ourselves stumbling to a restaurant that we love, or we find ourselves doing something unexpected, it seems to create a delight. For me, it wasn’t trying to create a great workplace that had more perks or benefits than anywhere else. It was, how can I create a workplace that enables people to feel like they’re empowered to do their best work, that they feel the rounding is inspiring them to do maybe more risky stuff than they’ve ever done before. I was really enchanted with that, fascinated with that.

I guess the book came out, it was the best-selling business hardback last year in the UK. I was thrilled with the success of that. Obviously, now, it’s come to US and it’s doing well there. I was thrilled with those things that had gone so well. The question in my head became, “Are you ever going to take the chance to jump the leap and maybe try and turn that into something more concrete?” Not necessarily the best year to launch a work culture.

Shani: Well, who knows, right? There’s a parable out there that comes from Taoism about an old farmer and his neighbor. The old farmer has this prize-winning horse and it gets stolen by thieves. The neighbor comes over and says, “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry to hear about your horse. It’s just so terrible.” The farmer’s like, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.”

There’s a sequence of things that happen to the farmer, some are good, and some are bad, and the neighbor keeps coming over with either condolences or congratulations. Every time the farmer says, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.” Then, the last iteration of it, one of the bad things that had happened was his son had broken his leg. The last thing was the army came through their village conscripting all young men for the army, and they didn’t take his son because he couldn’t walk. Finally, the neighbor doesn’t go over to the farmer because he’s like, “Oh, now I get it. Who knows what is good and what is bad.”

[laughter]

Bruce: Who knows? That’s it. To be honest, I’ve just been focused on promoting the book right now. I’ve not necessarily set a business up but who knows?

Shani: Let’s talk about the book for just a second. You talk about, so it’s 30 hacks for bringing joy to your job and they’re divided up into three categories, recharging to unplug, and getting involved in self-care, thinking to build relationships offline, which is a bit of that, the informal interactions that we’ve already talked about, and creating buzz to encourage a sense of engagement and positive energy that will inspire the team. Of the 30 hacks, are there a couple favorites you’d like to share right now?

Bruce: Yes. For me, I was really taken with, I’ve mentioned there some of the benefits that we seem to get when we can energize each other and when we can find ourselves building that. I think the thing I was really taken with was the science behind something called psychological safety. Psychological safety has become a bit of a buzz phrase amongst those who know these things and study these things. Psychological safety seems to be the secret source of all great high-performing teams.

That is psychological safety is the ability to speak candidly, the ability to be frank. There have been times in certain of the interactions around coronavirus around the world, where it seems like some of the leaders that we’ve got have been more intent on being praised for what they are doing, rather than necessarily hearing uncomfortable truths.

Normally, whether it’s the VW diesel affair, whether it’s the Boeing Air Max scandal, whether it’s– and, and, and probably a litany of corporate disasters through time, almost without exception. When we look back at the ingredients that led to these disasters, there was an absence of straight talk, there was an absence of candor in the way that people were talking.

Why? Because normally, because the leader had demonstrated that he or she favored those who were just supportive, just went along with it. They just agreed with it. When we find ourselves without that straight talk, when we find ourselves without absence of honesty, it generally precedes a decision failure.

Understanding that psychological safety for me was so important because you might read, there was a wonderful article by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times about five years ago, talking about how Google had identified that their best performing teams in the melange of hundreds and thousands of teams across 160,000 workers, they had some teams that seemed to be wonderful, high performing teams, and others that were performing less well.

They set some academics to work to try and understand why would some teams perform so well and others less so. Psychological safety was the secret ingredient. We’ve worked out what the magic is. Here’s the confounding thing about psychological safety is it’s incredibly elusive. You can’t mandate that your team is now psychologically safe because it works on a combination of leaders’ behaviors, it works on a combination of things that we emote.

If we find ourselves in a situation where we feel that the boss is rewarding people who suck up to him, then very quickly, we either adopt that behavior ourselves, or we disengage. Psychological safety can be incredibly difficult. In the book, I recount talking to a member of the British Special Forces, that’s the equivalent of Navy SEALs in the UK. He explained to me how they set about trying to systematize psychological safety in their organization. Fascinating. He gave me some tips.

One of the things they do at the end of every day’s military deployment is they will do a hot debrief. This you’ve got to imagine that you’ve got service people literally sweating in the combat khakis that they’ve worn that day. Very quickly, in the moment, they’ll say, “I want us to talk about what happened today. I’m going to describe what I saw, then I’m going to describe what we did, and then I’m going to describe firstly, what I did wrong, then what I did right, then I want us all to go around.”

That simple act of the leader modeling their own fallibilities has a remarkable effect because it invites others to be candid. I think, over time, when others aren’t coming up with the same degree of candor, it permits others to say, “I’m not sure that’s how I saw what happened today.” It separates the person from the problem.

We’re no longer looking at this thing being a collection of blame and responsibility, but more we’re looking at the work as a problem that we’re solving together. If a mistake has been made, it’s part of our solution. We made a mistake and collectively, we own that. I give countless other examples sort of stories because, for me, it was so fascinating to hear this magical soup of ingredients to try and build amazing workplace cultures.

Shani: I love that. I talk a lot about psychological safety, too. You’re right, it’s more of a buzzword, and people don’t really know how to create it, but the ability to be honest without repercussion is definitely a big part of it. The ability to voice different ideas from whoever’s in charge and have them honored instead of blown off, that is something tangible that people pick up on.

People feeling safe to bring their entire self to work, whether that’s their sexuality, or the way they dress, or their religion or whatever it is, and that they won’t be discriminated against or not given the same amount of inclusive opportunity that other folks will. Those are all elements of psychological safety that are really important. I want to take a timeout to address all the LeaderShifters who are listening and watching, give yourself a grade on that.

How do you really think you do in creating the circumstances on your team because it is the secret sauce, and we do need to figure it out. In this time of uncertainty, we need to invite the straight talk, or else, we will not know what the fuck is happening out there. [chuckles] If not now, when? Let’s create psychological safety because it’s challenging to create it when we’re all together. It’s probably even more challenging to create it over Zoom and Slack and all that. You know what? Now’s the time.

Bruce: What I’ll say is the challenge for a lot of bosses is it goes to the heart of your own fallibilities and vulnerabilities because if you create a truly psychologically safe environment, you will find that people tell you things you don’t want to hear and they will provide criticisms you don’t want to hear. How you respond to that will determine whether you’ve really built a psychologically safe environment because if you say, “Hey, guys, it’s been a really difficult week, here’s what we did,” and you’re looking for everyone to pat you on the back.

If you’re saying, “How have we done on this Coronavirus,” and you’re expecting the audience to say 10 out of 10, then what you’re going to find is you’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to find that very quickly, you destroyed the psychological safety. It goes to the heart of us thinking, you’ve almost got to disconnect from your own vanities and ego because if someone tells you, “Hey, I think actually what we did this week was 4 out of 10.”

Then understanding that what they’re doing there is they’re giving you something that although it hurts, the little child inside of you is a really important thing for you to get to a seven, collectively get to an eight. I think that’s the challenge. A lot of us think we just want our team to say, “You’re the best boss I’ve ever had.” Why? Because in the moment, it makes us feel happy but they quickly–

Shani: In the long run, we’re not learning and growing if we are never getting any constructive feedback or differences of opinion.

Bruce: Exactly right. These things, the reason why I spent so long trying to see, there’s never a secret formula, but it’s trying to give some examples. I gave an example of when open-heart surgery was being introduced. When open-heart surgery was being introduced, the latest version that we use now, it was at one stage about 20 years ago, it was a brand new system.

What previously had happened to be briefly graphic, but what previously happened was a rib cage was cracked open and spread open. It was such a remarkably invasive surgery that the survival rates were perilously low. What happened was a new company, actually, a private company came up with a solution, which was a tiny incision was made in the chest. The most of the work was done through an artery in your leg, the work was sort of centered there. The survival rates were through the roof, it was remarkable, transformative.

Here’s the challenge, new teams learning it, it was a terrifying piece of technology to apply. It wasn’t helped by the fact that aside from the lead surgeon, aside from the lead practitioner, no one in the operating theatre could see at all what was happening. Now, I described at length how the best teams navigated that. What you discover is the best teams are the ones where the lead surgeon, he or she, built a climate of psychological safety.

They would say, “Guys, if you can’t see what’s going on, tell me what questions you’ve got. Anyone else uncertain here how we’re getting on?

Should we have a pause, should we chat about what we think we’re learning?” They would form breakouts. There was descriptions in the original work by Amy Edmondson of how the best practitioners would be surgeons who their door was metaphorically regarded as always open. If a anesthetist, if a nurse, if a junior doctor felt that they had some concerns, there was a dialogue to have it.

What you discover is that as you go through this, the teams who had these infallible leaders who had clear ideas of the way they wanted to do it, they often found that after doing about four or five of the operations, they abandoned the procedure. They decided it wasn’t for them. It was flawed. “This is just nonsense. Why have they asked us to do this?”

The teams that had the psychological safety, where they often projected vulnerability, where they talked about things that were going wrong, very quickly, they got to the level of competency far quicker than anyone anticipated. They started requesting more difficult patients. They started requesting patients who’d been ruled out, who open heart surgery was too risky for them. They started working their way down through these cases that were regarded to some extent as inoperable.

Now, this is what I love, when we see these examples of psychological safety, what do we get? Firstly, we get these tiny little breadcrumbs on the path, which show us, here’s the way to get there. Then, we see that actually what you can accomplish is by an order of magnitude far better than anything that we might normally believe we’re capable of.

Shani: Absolutely. Terrific pearls of wisdom and I encourage everybody to go out and order this book, Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. Where can they get this?

Bruce: If you go to my website, it’s got links to your neighborhood bookshop, it’s got links to some of the biggest retailers, and so you can find that. You can find it at booksellers big and small. Also, if you go to, so my website is eatsleepworkrepeat.com, and there’s about 100 episodes. If you are interested in workplace culture, there’s episodes where we really go into the workplace culture of sports teams, we go into workplace culture of hospitals, we go into the workplace culture of all manner of different places. I think you’ll find something in that for everyone.

Shani: Fabulous. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was so much fun to catch up with you and talk about all these topics that we’re both so passionate about. LeaderShifters, I just want to remind you of a couple of the key takeaways from today, the first of which is don’t be afraid of analog. We might be in the digital age, but sometimes the best way to empower your team is to actually just pick up the phone and have a regular old conversation with them. Don’t discount that at all.

The entire back half of the conversation that we had today about psychological safety, if you’re not convinced yet, read more about it, listen to this podcast again, look at the research that Google produced, I believe it’s Project Aristotle, read. There’s a Harvard researcher who coined the term psychological safety. Get smart on this concept because it really is the secret sauce to high-performing teams.

Frankly, the only way that I can think of to get through times like we’re in now, which are very much VUCA times volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and Coronavirus is yet just another example of something that came out of left field to disrupt our normal. The way to get our teams to shift their mentality and to shift their mindset and to shift the way they’re performing is to have a psychologically safe environment. Thank you so much for the emphasis that you were able to place on that with me today, Bruce. It was so much fun to have you on the show.

Bruce: Great to catch up and you’ve witnessed a London sunset.

Shani: Yes, I noticed that. We started off bright and now it’s gotten dark. I guess right now the difference with spring ahead because we have and you haven’t or something, we’re only four hours different than five, which is normal, I think.

Bruce: It’s good. I get my New York Times daily podcast an hour early at the moment.

Shani: LeaderShifters, thank you again for joining us. You know how to reach me, [email protected] and on all the various social media. Until next time, Mwah.

The post 42: Shifting to cultures of straight talk with former Twitter VP for EMEA and best-selling author, Bruce Daisley appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

In an impromptu and open-hearted discussion of the leadership issues to consider during this unprecedented time of Covid-19, I’m joined by valued collaborator and fellow leadership development enthusiast, Daniel Kimble, CEO of Resonance Executive Coaching and co-host of the Unshakable Influence podcast. In many ways, our discussion took us  back to basics: communicate clearly, frequently and throughout every part of the org – especially about current priorities, upcoming changes, and revised accountabilities; lean into your own and your org’s mission, vision, and values when making tough decisions; be compassionate and take a “we” stance; and pay attention to your own self-care and gratitude practice. And of course, continue to mine the lessons in the experiences. As rough as circumstances are, there are silver linings in reconnecting to the purposes, people, and interests that matter most.

The post 41: LeaderShifting in the midst of Covid-19 appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

On today’s episode, learn how startup founder and CEO Jared Broad left his native New Zealand on a cargo ship to do humanitarian work in Asia and ultimately founded QuantConnect, an algorithmic trading platform that is SHIFTing the way hedge funds generate “alpha,” or active return on investment against an index or benchmark. Their platform is open-source, which is unique in that business, and the corporate culture mirrors this approach with corresponding radical openness. Inspiration for the culture tenets he established at the company came from his experience on humanitarian missions and includes collaboration, trust, doing the hard things the right way, no excuses, and discipline over pedigree. I love this example of blending the do well and do good business model!

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 40: Open-source software and culture SHIFTS with QuantConnect CEO Jared Broad

Shani Magosky: Hey, Leadershifters and welcome to another episode of the Leadershift Show with Shani. My guest today is Jared Broad, the CEO, and founder of QuantConnect. Jared, say a quick hello before I introduce you.

Jared Broad: Hi, everyone. I’m Jared, nice to meet you.

Shani: Guys and gals, Jared has so many cool shifting stories to share with us today. I don’t even know where to start but let me plant some seeds for your interest. As you may have already heard from Jared’s accent, he is not American. He is from New Zealand so he’s a Kiwi and between leaving New Zealand and now where he sits in Seattle, the journey has included humanitarian work, a cargo ship to Asia, New York City, being part of two guys in a garage starting a business all the way through raising capital and getting married to his wife who he met on Tinder, and maybe we’ll talk about that later, and now is the successful CEO of QuantConnect seven years in business now. We have a lot to talk about. Welcome to the show, Jared.

Jared: Thanks very much, Shani. It’s good to be here. It’s been quite the journey. Literally, all over the world at this point.

Shani: You’ve got a degree in biomedical engineering. Why didn’t you set up shop designing artificial limbs or whatever you’re supposed to do with that degree?

Jared: That was the plan. In college, university, I worked in a company where we were working on LVADs, they were mechanical hearts and designing wireless power systems. It would be like a belt that you would wear and transmit power into your body. Then when a prototype was built it was going to be five or 10 years before it was ever used or seen or in production. That lead time didn’t work for me. I’m much more of an entrepreneur and I really wanted to see something built and shipped and into use.

Shani: More immediate gratification, I get it.

Jared: All of those approvals took so long and all of the testings. I transitioned and went through a period of searching after that.

Shani: I really want to hear about that. QuantConnect is smack dab in the middle of finance. You work with hedge funds and a lot of assholes in some people’s terminology, but at the end of the day, you’ve got a great heart and you want to do good in the world and the idea for your company was born while you were on a humanitarian mission. I really want to have you share that story with the listeners here. Take it from here.

Jared: Firstly, I’m sure they get a bad rep. Quantitative hedge funds these days are much more computer geeks, much more softies interested in data, in math. I think the old days of the ’90s hedge fund have changed. After I graduated, I worked in New Zealand for a while and did about a year there as a consulting engineer and then really wanted to travel and I didn’t want to make any excuses for not traveling. I sold everything I had, put it all into my student loans and left with like $900 and a backpack.

It was terrifying, but I jumped on a cargo ship as an electrician and worked on this boat full of cables. It’s like 300 feet long. It’s a huge ship. It would carry masses of aluminum. I rode that up to Asia and was exploring Asia for a while. There I realized that I wanted to use that same approach of don’t make any excuses. I wanted to work and modernize humanitarian work. The humanitarian industry basically hasn’t changed. They’re still using paper logistics, they’re not doing anything different from what they’ve done 20-30 years ago.

Shani: When we say humanitarian work, let’s just clarify for our listeners, you mean non-profits and NGOs, essentially?

Jared: Yes. I didn’t have a specific idea at that point but I knew it was in that non-profit sector and the systems of helping people after a disaster and such. I was in deep China and there just happened to have been a massive tropical cyclone in the nearby country, Myanmar, so I hacked my way through the border and was able to get into the country just a week after the disaster and was in the first month of responders working with locals on the ground to get supplies in. It was a really weird situation because there was a military hunter, it’s like a dictatorship and they didn’t want the world to know how bad it was. There was no press getting out and nobody was allowed into the country. It was weird.

Shani: At the same time, they needed help, right?

Jared: They absolutely, yes.

Shani: You just show up? How do you get assigned some help to give? How does that even work there?

Jared: It was very ad-lib. I just showed up and started meeting people, started talking, started learning about the different organizations that were there and went and just knocked on their doors and looked to where I could help. Eventually, I found a local group who were doing runs down the rivers and loading up boats full of supplies. We were loading these boats and smuggling it down the rivers. It was crazy. Eventually, that turned into a full-time job and they did a UN-Habitat and a German organization called Malteser and worked there for about a year working with the organizations and doing runs from Bangkok across to get supplies.

Really got to learn the NGOs, how they worked, how logistics worked and see where they needed help. My immediate supervisor was Argentine, he had a very hot temper and we were working for a very rigid organization. He was incredibly frustrated with it and I was a Kiwi who’s very blunt and always looking for a very pragmatic solution. The two of us gelled super and we started an organization that did services for these NGOs and tried to modernize them. That became my focus of work for the next couple of years.

Shani: That was your first entrepreneurial venture.

Jared: Yes, and effectively and on the global scale I always dreamed of being an entrepreneur but it just happened. I knew that I wanted to work in the space and then after working in the organization and meeting the right people we just worked really well together and I was this engineer that preferred coding and he was a people person who had a lot of contacts with NGOs and so we worked together to build software for these organizations to cut down the amount of overhead and put everything into digital records so they had a perfect paper trail.

Shani: So money that they can have can go further, that’s so important.

Jared: And they know exactly where it goes and they have it all order and recordable. That was great. We did work all over the world for a number of different organizations but it was essentially a disaster-focused project. When you first have a natural disaster or something happens, there’s no systems in place and we were really good at getting systems set up very quickly because it’s all computerized and automated and just instantly set up an NGO as soon as something’s needed.

Shani: I love it. Even if that’s the only major thing you accomplished in your lifetime, you’ve done more than most people do in a decade. That’s amazing.

Jared: No, it was just a stumbling. Things just happened. I always try to take the view of what’s the worst thing that could happen. We’re saying that you get your arm cut off, that’s fine. [laughs] I don’t know.

Shani: You’ve got another one.

Jared: Yes. What are the chances of that? It’s never the worst thing.

Shani: As a biomedical engineer, you know you can go get one that works pretty well.

Jared: Right, right. It’ll be okay. Especially where I was working, it was pretty safe. There weren’t any real risks. It was a great couple of years, and the only problem was I had a lot of downtime. There were projects that were three to six months apart, and so I would spend three months preparing for the next one, or just doing nothing, or waiting, or finishing up other work. I really got interested in applying biomedical engineering math, the modeling of complex systems to the financial markets because it’s this infinitely hard problem. The financial markets are just millions of numbers influenced by billions of different factors and people all over the world, and so it’s this awesome math problem. I just started spending my downtime doing that, programming algorithms, giving thought to– [crosstalk]

Shani: Awesome math problem, that’s a new perspective. I like it.

Jared: I think for computer geeks, that’s exactly how they see it. It’s just lots of numbers and awesome to play with and put it into models. That was 2010. It became a full-time obsession. I eventually bootstrapped capital from friends and family and started doing it full-time, and running these models live in the markets full-time. For about two years, I was living in Chile with a super cheap rent and great technology and running this bootstrapped fund running these models. It was an awesome learning experience, again. It was this foundation to learning about all the challenges that Quants face, learning how there’s nothing like it in the world. At that point, it was 2010.

If you’d go on the internet by then, there was nothing about quantitative finance and algorithmic trading. At the end of that two-year period, I finally had an algorithm that was working and I was just thinking, “What do I do? Do I go and raise capital and try to scale this up or do I apply the system that I built to try and help all of these other engineers who are in the same boat, anybody who wants to do this?” It took me two years full-time, and I was working my ass off, 12 hours a day in my apartment hacking away and building systems. I decided to build the system and open it up to the world, and that became the foundation. In the middle of an apartment in Santiago, Chile, that was the beginning of QuantConnect.

Shani: Awesome, so the Linux of Quant software.

Jared: Right. To run Quant software, there’s a massive amount of technology that you need, and that’s just like Linux. Linux is this operational foundation to the entire internet. We see QuantConnect as this foundation to the entire quantitative algorithmic trading movement.

Shani: I love that. I remember when Red Hat was first out and doing all the open-source stuff because first, they were small-cap stuff back when I was at Goldman. People were like, “How are they going to make money if it’s open-source?” I think they figured it out.

Jared: Right. Red Hat is a nice icon in the open-source world. There’s always a way, and I think the business coaches are evolving so that the value isn’t so much in locking things in and making them private, it’s about getting more people to use your work by making them open and easily accessible, and then other business models come out of there.

Shani: Yes. Again, here’s another analogy. You’re bringing the shared economy to a space that used to be, protecting things with his life. No, no, no, you have to pay a lot of money for this.

Jared: Yes. Algorithmic trading is one of the most secretive areas. Everybody’s super paranoid about their code and about sharing it, and so we decided that we will try and take this open-source ecos that Linux has bootstrapped and started off and try and apply that to the finance world. All of the core algorithmic trading technology that QuantConnect’s made is all open-source. There’s thousands of people that download it, run their own algorithms with it. Hedge funds, they start up and use Lean technology to do what they need to do.

Shani: What does Lean stand for? Because that’s your acronym and it isn’t Six Sigma Lean, it’s something else.

Jared: Right, sorry, sorry, so QuantConnect is the company that we made, and it’s got an open-source project called Lean, which is the engine that runs the algorithms. It’s like Red Hat is the company and Linux is the engine. 

Shani: Totally. I know that. I just want to make sure listeners got that.

Jared: The Lean engine, that algorithmic trading engine, is completely open and people can go and download it and use it as they wish.

Shani: Yes, got it. Okay, so the culture or your philosophy on developing your platform in terms of it being open-source and collaborative has also been the cultural philosophy that you’ve instituted in your company culture, so talk to us a little bit about what are the fundamental tenets of your corporate culture that you’ve insisted on since you’ve gone from you and another guy to the size you are now.

Jared: Sure, sure. One of the things I learned in NGO work was that it’s very important for you to work with the community that you’re serving. It’s no different with financial technology too. Because we’re serving almost a hundred thousand Quants now from all over the world. We work very closely with them to design the features, to design the API, how’s it going to work, what do you need. We set some ideas and we see some ideas, but a lot of it is quite eye-opening in terms of, “We think you want this,” and then once we really go and get people’s buy-in, they say, “It’s not quite there, it’s something slightly different.” It’s shaped a lot of our core decisions as a company and the technology that we build and the design of it.

We are a strong technology company, it’s in our DNA, it’s in the way we work and everything. The Lean engine, the design, and the philosophies, they reflect our corporate philosophy as well, which is it’s open, and pluggable, and extendable, and it can fit the different needs that you need as a Quant, and so that reflects how we went and we got community feedback and we said, what do you need to do. We’re trying to gel 10,000 different opinions and build it in this technology. That’s how Lean’s evolved and become such an open-flexible engine that can be used in so many different contexts. As you know, the finance world is so varied. Everybody’s doing different strategies, different time horizons, and trading in different markets. It’s almost impossible to build a single piece of technology that can serve them all.

Shani: What do you say to the people who hear that your platform is open-source and say, “You’re crazy. You’ve got a valuable asset, you should be charging for it. You can’t control the quality if it’s open-source.”

Jared: We think we’re making a very long-term bit that the network effect of having everybody use our platform will be far more valuable than the short-term revenues that we can generate by charging people for using the platform. Being the operating system, being that standard that people can converse with, the two people on the other side of the world can say, “I know that Lean algorithm. I know what the standards you’re using and talking about.” That becomes the winning standard, that then people choose to go forward to use. Because if you’re a project manager, you’re trying to make the smart choice, how should I build this algorithm in my fund, how should I design the system? It should be the one where you can recruit talent that knows how to use it. There is a familiar open standard that you can manipulate and fix and modify. That’s the benefit of open-source, is that everybody knows the standard. If they don’t like it, they can change it. So the specific corporate thing they need to do, they can go and change it. It’s a riskier long-term bit.

Shani: Yes. Well, and that’s the key that I was trying to suss out of you is like, in the short-term, there’s some things that you’re compromising but in the long-term, you think it’s the right thing. That’s the point I really want to drive home is, how many of you are also thinking about the long-term consequences and benefits of the decisions that you’re making from as high as your strategy, and into little execution decisions. That’s really where the world’s going.

Jared, you’re a millennial, right? The proverbial they say all these terrible things about millennials, how they’re lazy and entitled and all they care about is saving the world. Well, I think you prove them wrong, right? Because you’re the furthest thing from lazy and entitled. You’ve worked your ass off, you’ve taken big risks, there’s zero entitlement with you and you’re putting all of that to work for a greater good, and with long-term thinking and honestly, it’s leaders like you who are the future of the world. Bravo.

Jared: [laughs] We’ll see. They are big words, but we definitely have, we’ve realized that finance doesn’t move quickly. It’s a slow-moving industry relative to the rest of the world and that if we were to make real change here, it would be a 10-year endeavor. It wouldn’t be a three-year startup where we make an app and exit in three years. We settled in for the long haul and made plans and philosophies for that vision, that long ball. All the way down to when we were, it was myself and Gustavo, and we were bootstrapping, in the very early days in Chile, and it was literally in a concrete room in a house. A garage is a nice term for it; it wasn’t a garage. It was a concrete room. A storage room in a kitchen, even smaller than the garage.

Shani: As long as you had Wi-Fi, who cares?

Jared: Yes, exactly. It was basically climate control because of the concrete walls. It was like a nice family insulated room. Yes, it was building and designing this tech with this idea that we love what we’re doing and it’s not that it’s a lot of, of course, it’s hard work but we’re loving every minute of it too. We are building and doing hard technology that nobody else has done and we’re opening up to people who are just blown away by the love of what we’re doing. It’s very rewarding work to even doing it on a very non traditional route.

Shani: Excellent. Talk to me a little bit more. We talked a little offline before we started a bit about the Bill Gates philosophy of philanthropy which it sounds like you share. Let’s just talk about how you, what you’re doing dovetails with that in the long-term.

Jared: Yes, I hope I didn’t misquote him but I believe it was Gates who said that it’s better to work on becoming wealthy, and then donate to humanitarian causes. When I was younger, I wanted to try and mix the two. I actually got into algorithmic trading because my idea was that a lot of these humanitarian issues are caused by funding. Say, for example, there’s restrictions on how the donations can be used, or as artificial restrictions based on politics or things that are going on. If we just would solve a funding issue, but NGOs then I could make an algorithm, it would make lots of money in markets, and we could donate that all to NGOs. It’s very tricky to mix that business and donation path, and you’re starting to see more but now with the B corporations, yes, certified B, corps.

Shani: Yes, certified B corporations or 10% for the world. Yes.

Jared: You are starting to see more of that. That’s great and it’s awesome that the world has come to this point where we can mix the two. I think at the moment, we’re on a trajectory where we will probably do the more Bill Gates philosophy, which is it might be two separate entities, we will use the culture of openness, transparency, honesty, integrity, and build all those things into FinTech and the vehicle that we’re doing, but it might not necessarily be a financial relationship; it’ll be a separate one. It’s a challenging shift in my mindset. As I grew up, I was always working on these businesses that were trying to mix business and humanitarian projects. We’ll see. We will see what I do next. Maybe now the world has moved.

Shani: Yes. Well, that’s the thing is, we can’t be fixed and attached to the way things used to be and when the time is right, you’ll do what you’re compelled to do with the time with the resources, and the expertise that you have. I love it. We didn’t finish on the culture piece, and you just thread it, threaded it back in. I want to pick it back up because there’s another piece of your culture that you shared with me that I think is worth talking about, which is to do the hard things. Tell us what that means to you and how it plays out in the behaviors of folks in your company.

Jared: Yes. The technology that we’re building is hard, order of magnitude hard. It’s always tempting to make shortcuts in those buildings that will make it easier for the short-term but in the long-term, you’ll pay a heavy debt. The idea that if you invest today to solve the challenges that you’re working in business and in your life and in the technology, you invest today to do them the right way, that it will pay off with a much more solid foundation for the future. I try and direct the team in that way. Like, oh, but if we just put this line of code here, we can have it working today. It’s like, no, come on. Let’s do it. Right. Otherwise, we’ll pay this debt later.

Shani: Right. No band-aids.

Jared: Right. The short version of it is do the hard things. Don’t take that shortcut. Do the hard thing.

Shani: Yes. Well, it sounds like it’s another way to not get caught in short-term thinking and to think about the long-term even at the expense of time or whatever in the short term, I think it’s great. I think we probably can’t talk about your geographic shift from New York where you ended up after Chile, right? You got your funding instead of your business in New York, and then ended up within the past year moving to Seattle, with your wife. I was joking about it in the intro, and maybe this is a shift for some people that you can marry the person you met on Tinder. [laughter]

Jared: Yes, it was in New York and she tells me that I was her very first Tinder date. She was looking for some more stories and all of her friends had bad Tinder dates, and she was really looking forward to some cool stories to share with them. I met her and I was her first and I thought, this one’s too amazing. I have to marry her. I have to get off Tinder. Then immediately after the date, it was like 20 minutes later, I was like, “What are you doing tomorrow? You want coffee? What are you doing the day after?” I’m not going to give you a chance. I’m going to lock down every minute of your day. Yes, we got married pretty quick.

Shani: What was it that made you just know that she was the one? It sounds like on your first date.

Jared: We’re both ’80s babies. How we grew up with a lot of the same cultural phenomenon, but her personality and her just light, she has a lot of light. We’re just a perfect partnership because we balance each other out and when she goes away to visit family for a week, I end up working 16 hours a day and destroying myself and she comes back and I’m back in balance again. It’s just a really nice partnership and she brings a lot of light into the relationship. 

Shani: It’s such a delightful little online love story. Online dating love story rather, and so why the move to Seattle?

Jared: I think it was part of that they have a multi-generational plan again. New York is awesome and I love it and it was the right time for the company, but we are a heavy technology company that needs quiet and space to think and we solve hard problems that require hours and hours of uploading to your brain to get all the information in and when the siren goes by all the foghorn honks on the river, whatever it is that the New York has this way of interrupting you. It was I think like in 10 years where we will be, what the team will look like then and it doesn’t matter where we are. It didn’t need to be New York. It needed to be somewhere green, beautiful, high-tech with a great economy, like a great workforce that we can draw from to join the team in Seattle for the buildings.

Shani: Love it. Again, looking forward and figuring out, okay, no excuses for us not focusing as well as we need to focus to create this highly complex coding. Yes, I love it. Any last words of wisdom for listeners from the perspective of a young CEO?

Jared: Read more. I learn so much from reading these days and it’s so hard to make the time, but I have a 20-minute commute every day and so I try my best to read.

Shani: And listen to podcasts.

Jared: And listen to podcasts, exactly. Even better than learning and experiencing things on your own is learning by a secondhand experience. If you can learn it in a podcast or a book, awesome, you’ll set yourself.

Shani: Yes, exactly. We can never stop learning. If we stop learning, we’re going to stop growing and just wither away.

Jared: Yes, and I think one thing that was vital to us is that the worst consequences are never as bad as you think, so just do it. What’s the worst that can happen when you go broke? You end up on the street. That sucks, but you can get up, you can do it again. It’ll never be as bad as you know. Especially while you’re young. It’s a little harder to say that now that I have a family, but still in your 20s and 30s before you have heavy commitments, just go for it. Don’t be afraid.

Shani: Yes, I love it. Then after your kids are grown and out of college, I work with a lot of clients who are at that stage in their careers and they can amp up their risk profile again.

Jared: Yes, I have a lot of respect. I don’t know those people who start businesses when they’ve got kids and a family and that’s a different risk altogether rather than just taking personal risks, but the core of it is that people are just too afraid that there’s no reason to be and then they should just jump up.

Shani: Yes, I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been so fun to hear your story and lots of really wise pieces of advice from a relatively young leader. Leadershifters, I hope you caught all of these things and can learn some lessons from this. No excuses philosophy, no excuses not to travel, no excuses not to get to Asia, no excuses not to do something open-source, even though conventional wisdom would tell me otherwise, no excuses not to marry the woman I met on Tinder. So many of the decisions have been like, you know what? Let’s just figure it out, let’s just do it, which is oddly aligned with the large message that was crafted today around long-term thinking.

It’s like we’ve got to make these short-term sometimes tough decisions in service of what we want long-term. I love how beautifully, you have already woven those two together and our role model for the people in your business as well as now anybody who has joined us today on the podcast. Again, thank you so much for joining us and if people have questions or want to reach you or are interested in contributing to lead, how would they reach you?

Jared: Yes, absolutely. Please, you can pretty email me personally. It’s Jared, J-A-R-E-D @quantconnect.com or they can come take me through the QuantConnect website. If you’re an engineer and passionate about your consults you can find lean@github/QuantConnect/lien and I will send through the link.

Shani: Excellent, okay. Leadershifters, thanks for tuning in again today. We will see you next time. In the meantime, if you need to reach me, you know how [email protected] if you need help getting your shift together until next time.

The post 40: Open-source software and culture SHIFTS with QuantConnect CEO Jared Broad appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

Jim Downs, CEO of Chicago-based custom trading software company Connamara Systems, has had a fascinating career path. Once an avionics engineer, an Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) telemetry expert with the CIA, and market maker at the CBOT and CBOE, he founded Connamara in 1998. On today’s episode, he shares some of the lessons he has learned along the way about operating and scaling his bootstrapped company, such as adding the missing “gears” of sales and marketing to the “machine” and a SHIFT of mindset from working IN the business to working ON it. His motto is now “If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business; you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic.”

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 39: Lessons in SHIFTing gears from bootstrapped startup founder Jim Downs

Shani Magosky: Welcome Leadershifters to another episode of the Leadershift Show with Shani. Happy New Year, it’s 2020 now. 2020 which is like a Buck Rodgers year, isn’t it? You are in for a treat today on my first podcast of 2020. Let me introduce to you Jim Downs, the CEO of Connamara and we will get into explaining what his business does in just a second. First I think the best way to introduce Jim is for me to read one of his favorite quotes. “If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you have a job. It’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic.”

Jim Downs: That’s exactly right, yes.

Shani: Jim, welcome to the Leadershift Show.

Jim: Thank you, Shani.

Shani: Tell us a little bit about your background before we get into the meat of stuff because folks, this is a man who has shifted careers, several different times and has a very interesting professional history. What he started doing is not very similar to what he’s doing these days. Start us up with your engineering days and move us forward.

Jim: Sure, Shani, thank you. I was an electrical engineer graduate from Purdue University. I figured I’d be working as an electrical engineer all my life, except I wound up taking this class, my senior year about personal finance, which basically was how to balance a checkbook, how to, what’s life insurance and that sort of thing. They did cover something on investments, and at that point in time the equity options were just beginning just started trading. I kind of got the bug of saying–

Shani: You got hooked.

Jim: I did. It was like, this is really interesting. The most interesting part about it was that you could actually model it. I understood the math because I was much of an engineer. That’s where I got my first start. I didn’t work as an electrical engineer for Honeywell Avionics up in Minneapolis for a while. During that time, I started working and was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley.

Shani: Nice.

Jim: I worked as an engineer there. It’s very technical-oriented always, that business.

Shani: Can you tell us what you did or if you did, you’d have to kill us?

Jim: No, I don’t have to kill you. I worked with the telemetry. We would decode telemetry from Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in the Soviet Union. This is a while ago. That was our job. Basically, it was great, very interesting because you’re verifying the initial countries that were in place, making sure that they weren’t doing something outside the bounds of what they’re allowed to do by the treaty. There was that, but all during that time, I was trading options as a retail investor which was a bad idea. I lost lots of money that way, but I figured if someone else is making this money.

Shani: Back in the day, information was not shared equitably in the market, right? When you make the reference to retail investors back then, retail investors were the huge disadvantage to institutional investors. They are still at some extent but less so, right?

Jim: The disadvantage also was just time and place information. The second thing was that the bid-ask spread for options was a 16th or an eighth which was $6.25 or 12.50. That’s a huge edge to be giving up every time you get into the market along with the commissions being very expensive also.

Shani: TD Ameritrade, E-trade and all those low-cost brokerages back then either.

Jim: Zero commissions. I thought it was great when I was on the floor of that clearing firm only charging a buck of contracts. That was awesome. You trade up hundred thousand contracts a year that finally got crushed down.

Shani: Tell us about your days on the CBOE and the CBOT. For those of you who are not familiar with the Institute, those trading institutions in Chicago, if you could just give a two-second overview of what they both are for the listeners here.

Jim: Sure. The CBOE or the Chicago Board Options Exchange was the first exchange in the United States to list equity options or options on chairs. That started in 1973. I got the floor in 1981. It was still really young and really kind of a bit of a Wild West show in that regard. It was a place where you could go with a few thousand dollars of your own, lease a seat, become a market maker, and with any kind of luck or judgment, you could do quite well for yourself.

Shani: Sure.

Jim: The Chicago Board of Trade, which is just across the street, at the time we were in the same building, it is the old commodity exchange that traded mostly at the time grains, and then also treasury bonds. They were fortuitous contracts versus the option contracts which are traded on equities across the street. I was a local trader there. The reason why I traded both places is that the Chicago Board of Trade started the Chicago Board Options Exchange back in 1973. If you bought a Chicago Board of Trade, a membership, you could trade in both exchanges, which is what I actually ended up doing.

Shani: Nice. I can remember those buildings fondly from my days in Chicago, walking up and down Wacker.

Jim: There was a nice ebb and flow, the equities are usually busy, first half the year, first quarter of the year anyways, and then the grains will pick up with the planting season. If you wanted liquidity, you would trade those stocks in the spring and then you walk across the street, and hopefully it’d be a drought or something that caused some disruption in the grain markets, and you could trade there. Once the harvest starts coming in, you know what the harvest is then you go back to its last about September.

Shani: Let’s get out of nostalgia mode and get into Connamara mode. Tell us, first of all, what does the business do, who are its customers, and how and why did you start it, including kind of the bootstrap story. I think that is really interesting to some of the listeners because we had a lot of entrepreneurs who subscribe to the Leadershift philosophy. Most people think, oh, if I’m going to be an entrepreneur, I’ve got to go get some VC money, or at least some friends and family round or something. I’m interested in all those things.

Jim: I was lucky in a few ways. First of all, just to step back in time, one more time is that all during the time that I was trading options, I also was writing software to value options, that’s kind of a link that happened there why I kind of want to come about. Just quickly about Connamara Systems, we’ve been in business for over 20 years. We provide software engineering services to capital markets pretty much exclusively. Our clients are proprietary trading firms, brokerages, exchanges, and startup exchanges. Anyone on the front side of the trading, which is what I understand, can be and what has been a client of ours.

From there, I started Connamara though back, probably in 1998. As I said, I was writing software for myself. After 1987, the flow, it changed, the market changed, the bid-ask spreads tightened up. As an independent market maker without using anyone else’s capital, it became very competitive. This time with bigger groups, trading groups moved in and they had a different risk profile than someone like myself have. Being able to get on the trade was hard.

I owned a membership, leased it out, and thought I’d take a stab at writing software for other people. That’s how we started. At the same time in 1998, what was happening, the markets were evolving away from this open outcry, standing in the pit, yelling and screaming all day to electronic trading. I would like to think I was looking forward to it but it was one of these things that this looks like an opportunity that I can use this skill that I have learned over the last 17 years. That writing software for capital markets and maybe with the markets evolving, I won’t go the way of the floor trader and just be put out of business.

Shani: Yes, well let me pause for a second because I follow a futurist named Bob Johansen from the Institute of Future in San Francisco, they’re a think tank and they don’t predict the future. They study what’s happening and they identify trends that they think are highly likely to burgeon, right? One of the things he says is, the future is already here. It’s just not widely distributed. What you just said is a perfect example of that, like you could see the trend, things going from outcry to more electronic and you are on the leading edge of taking advantage of that trend.

Jim: Yes, and it was sort of fortuitous because it was more one of these things where it was getting harder and harder to make money trading on the floor, it was just being sucked away, the edge was being sucked away, because like I mentioned earlier information was becoming more widely available. So you lost your advantage of being in time and place advantage of being in the market for standing there and risking your own capital. So as I said, I was fortunate because at that point, I was able to see around me, this change that was coming and I also had the right skill set.

So when I did my first work as an independent consultant, what I really found was that I could write software for clients, that was not a problem, but it was a little bit different than writing it for myself. Because I was not trained as a programmer, I was trained as a circuit designer. What I did find out was I knew a lot about trading, I understood what the client was saying to me when they said they wanted to do this strategy, or they wanted to do this, some other sort of system, they wanted to build, within probably 10 minutes, I had mapped out my mind how this was actually going to work. So that was really fortunate that I kind of had that. So I found that that was really my strong suit. So rather than just writing code, I actually and that’s part of what Connemara brings to the table today is just a deep domain expertise in capital markets, and we understand what our clients are trying to do.

Shani: Sure. Take us through the trajectory of growing the business over 21 years from inception, oh, okay, I’m writing software and I can actually turn this into a business, to where you’re hiring people who are smarter than you in some areas, right? Because that’s not how all business people start, surely.

Jim: Right. Yes, I guess if there was a mini shift, if you want to talk about it was the idea early on where I said, well, yes, I can write software. But I actually know a lot about capital markets. But I can hire other people to write software better than I can. I can explain to them when they need to write the programs they need. That was the one case. Again, we were in a really fortunate place of this market evolving, kind of the right place at the right time, where there’s a pretty good demand for software engineers and that new bout capital markets, especially in Chicago, there’s a lot of demand for that. So I just one by one to start hiring people, we had projects, successful, branched down to New York, did some projects on New York Stock Exchange, and just over time, just slowly from the bootstrap just reinvested back in the business and just grew the business from there.

Shani: Okay, and so, one of the things that we talked about pre-call was four or five years ago, you had a pretty significant shift in how you look at running the business such that it’s more important to work on the business than in the business. So tell us about that journey and what changes that has led you to take in the leadership of your company.

Jim: Yes, this is the part I’m really finding interesting and what really gets me excited in the morning to come into work and do this, is that I read a blog post by a fellow by the name of Andrew Wilkinson and it’s called Lazy Leadership, I would highly recommend it to anybody.

Shani: Lazy Leadership, okay.

Jim: Lazy Leadership, Andrew Wilkinson, and there was a couple takeaways from there one of them was that I needed to stop working in my business, and then I need to start working on my business. The other point he made was that if you don’t like doing something in your business, you’re probably not that good at it you’re not doing your best. So you should probably hire somebody and leverage that person’s talent who wants to do that job to grow your business. So that to me was like, that’s kind of like a watershed moment or shift that it’s like, wait a minute, okay. I kind of had this wrong for the last 15 years or whatever.

Shani: Yes, and was it hard to let go of that stuff once you had the mindset shift? Did action follow easily?

Jim: It actually did because it just made sense to me, but there was a separate- he references a couple of things also so it wasn’t like an overnight thing. So he also references Ray Dalio principles and I went into that rabbit hole, which has, it’s highly recommended that it is a bit of a rabbit hole. But what really got added to this feeling of mine that I needed to change was that Dalio describes business as a machine. So as an engineer, that makes sense to me. It has inputs and I have desired outputs. So what I need to do is build a machine that actually takes the inputs, whatever the constraints of those inputs might be, and then build a machine that gives me the desired outputs. So it’s just a feedback mechanism If you did an engineering or whatever.

So what I ended up doing is that Looking at my business and stepping back from that business and saying, Okay, if my business is a machine and I visualize my businesses as having a box with gears in it where talent goes in, clients go in, money comes out the other side. That’s the way I look at it. But I realized there were a couple of gears that were actually missing. I never had a sales team, never ever did marketing. We were all word of mouth, and we’re really successful; we just were word of mouth. I mean, Oli used to say that we were the most important software engineering firm in the capital markets that no one has ever heard about. We did some really large scale projects. Excuse me.

Shani: That works until it doesn’t, right? Then you start to get nervous about the pipeline and–

Jim: The ups and downs, absolutely. Luckily, we were able to always cobble it together especially in the services business, right? I didn’t have a sales team but I said, well, I hate doing sales. I don’t actually like the sales process. I like closing deals and that’s probably because I was a trader but the sales process, I don’t like, so the first kind of shift was like, okay, I need to take 18 months here and find me a salesperson. Who can I find and I went through quite a long interviewing process. So maybe that was actually not an exact shift and maybe it did take longer than I think, but it’s about 18 months that I searched for a salesperson because it was going to be a big deal.

Shani: Yes, you were shifting your model for business development from referral to full sales, prospecting blah, blah, blah, all the way.

Jim: Yes, and I had no marketing team so I was able– after I had a sales team, I had no marketing gear that was going to put leads into my sales team that they could close so I went out and I found a crack marketing team, so that really focused just on capital markets and that was the next one. I also had never had a board of advisors or I never had a board telling me what to do because we’re bootstrapped. So I had no one- there’s a double-edged sword of having a board right and having investors. They’re pretty smart individuals that you can bounce ideas off of. I didn’t have that. This is just me sitting here thinking it might be a good idea to do that.

Shani: Yes. Did you have an informal board of directors of–

Jim: Nothing.

Shani: No, nothing. So is that something you would do differently and recommend if others are going to bootstrap and you don’t have any sort of advisory board to find some folks?

Jim: I absolutely would without question because also I and this is fairly recent. Within this last year I actually instituted the board of advisors and we’ve had a meeting too and hey it’s good ideas. I was just on the phone with one of them yesterday. Kicking around some ideas that got some good input. That’s the shift that I went through. I went from realizing that I can’t– that I should be hiring people that do things that I don’t like to do, that I should be working on the business and my business is a machine, and then look at that machine and see what parts I’m actually missing inside of it and try and design that machine to actually have those parts. That’s where we are.

Shani: That’s awesome. Let’s pause for a second. Leadershifters, as you listen to this, think about your own businesses whether they’re small or your business is a division or a niche within a larger company. What does your machine look like and are all of your gears present, and if they’re all present are they all working seamlessly? Right? Is it a well-oiled machine if you will? Be honest about it and take a look at where are you missing gears and where you maybe have the wrong gears hooked up in your machine? Because absolutely that’s super important to have everything moving and to then let the gears do their jobs. Talk to us about how you were able to step back and let the people with the expertise in marketing and sales do their jobs with your oversight but not with your day to day micromanagement which might have been more prevalent in the areas that you were interested in more of the engineering pieces of the business.

Jim: Well, on the engineering side, one of the things that I’m really proud about here at Connamara is that the engineers that we hire, when they come in we give them great latitude in their decision-making. I don’t know. Well, you’d have to ask my employees, but I don’t think I’m a micromanager. Maybe in some ways, I think about it, sometimes I am when I need to be, but what we do there with our engineers is we actually allow them to make mistakes. Writing software is not the easiest thing in the world, so you’re going to make a mistake. I’ve tried to take that approach of being able to make mistakes and not penalize someone for making mistakes and go forward with that with my salesman, he had a ramp-up of a year. You have to expect that. He was really nervous about it and I was like, “Just don’t worry about it. You’re doing the right things.”

Shani: Yes. What you’re describing is the culture that you’ve created within your organization which is one of the biggest shifts that I work with companies to make is to shift the cultures. In fact, my informal tagline for the Leadershift project is I help leaders and organizations get their shift together. Mostly, it’s around culture because a lot of times companies have not given sufficient thought to the environment that they’re creating. It’s like if instead of a machine, let’s think of the company as a greenhouse, right? Well, if we don’t have the air in the greenhouse or the right nutrients and the plants in the greenhouse, the garden in the greenhouse is not going to thrive. Same thing with culture. We can have the nicest seeds in the world, great ideas, whatever, but they will not thrive if the culture isn’t right. Number one, hearing you say that you have a culture that doesn’t punish mistakes.

Jim: That’s right.

Shani: Which is huge because how else are people going to learn?

Jim: Yes, and that’s the way we see it. Actually in 20 years, we’ve only actually let go one person.

Shani: That’s amazing.

Jim: We have a really good hiring process but we’re very careful about how we hire but besides that, we’re going to be, it’s just– we’ve also had some of my oldest or longest employees that left and come back.

Shani: That’s like a high form of compliment, isn’t it?

Jim: Yes I’m very proud of that. We call it the Rumspringa after the Amish; the Amish have a tradition where if you’re a young man or young woman you can leave the community once and come back.

Shani: I did that at Goldman Sachs but we use financial jargon. We call that a repo.

Jim: Yes, right? It goes out, it comes back overnight.

Shani: Yes. I repoed. Awesome. What other elements of your culture do you think have allowed you to attract and retain such great folks?

Jim: Well, I believe I think first and foremost I think that idea about making mistakes I think it is number one.

Shani: Yes, huge. Most companies are punitive with mistakes even if they don’t do anything actively. There’s a subtext of don’t fuck up again.

Jim: Yes, exactly. The other part when I started hiring people and having employees is that I wanted to have an environment where you could have a nice balance between your family and your outside activities in your work. A lot of people give that lip service but for me it was this idea because my wife also works. We raised two children together and that, but there was this– what I noticed was that this time at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, like a couple of hours window there is really important for families.

Shani: Sure.

Jim: It’s the school play or it’s doctor’s appointment or is that. We really instituted this idea where I need eight hours out of you for the day, but if you need to come in at 10 and leave at six that’s fine. If you want to come in at eight and leave at four that’s fine too. I need you between 10 and two, but at the office– now we’re on remote now but that’s how we started, but that just carried through.

Jim: That’s great. Treating people like responsible adults. Imagine that.

Shani: Yes. Well, the interesting thing about that is the code works or it doesn’t. If you’re not doing your work, it’s pretty evident– we haven’t really seen that. We’re on a very remote policy. I think I’ve got a couple employees out today that are remote. I think one’s going to bring his daughter in for Girl Scout cookies later to sell. 

Shani: Thin Mints for everybody.

Jim: Yes. Another round of Thin Mints for everyone.

Shani: Really, I like the ones with the coconut and the chocolate, what else was those called?

Jim: I don’t know.

Shani: They’ve got the hole in the middle but they’re like chocolate and coconut.

Jim: I like the savannas that’s what I go for.

Shani: Those are good too. All right. Any last words of wisdom to share with Leadershifters about really any of the shifts that you’ve experienced over the years in your career and leadership journey?

Jim: Well, as I look back and I think about it, we’re still shifting, I’m still trying to– my latest shift is now to get my organization away from being flat, to being hierarchical. That’s a bit of a challenge. That’s what I’m working on right now. As far as the advice, I would say is don’t be afraid to try something. I think making a decision is better than delaying a decision. Just make the decision. Have a fallback plan if you need it, but go forward, because you’re going to learn so much from that. Just for making that decision. That sounds a little overplayed, but I think proof is in the pudding here.

Shani: I couldn’t agree more. A lot of times indecision is what keeps people stuck because they’re waiting to make the perfect decision with no risk. It’s like well, the world doesn’t work that way. We don’t have a crystal ball that enables us to say, “Oh if I take that path everything will work out a hundred percent perfectly.” Yet so many people stay frozen in indecision; almost nothing is irreversible. I agree. Just try it.

Jim: I think that I learned that on the trading floor is that if I stand there and not make a trade, I’m definitely not going to make any money.

Shani: That’s right.

Jim: You’re going to make any money whatsoever. Then you’d make a trade and there’s a winner, there’s a loser.

Shani: Well, then you make another trade and another trade.

Jim: Yes. You got all the disciplines of saying, okay I’m in this position, should I sell out now or not? The discipline is, well, if I didn’t have this position on, would I buy or sell at this point? That’s the mindset you have to get yourself into. I think that goes through to any kind of decision you have to make in your life. You got here and this is the position I’m in, and I need to make another change. Should I? I didn’t have this position on what my decision would be.

Shani: That is actually one of the coaching questions in another format that I use with clients. I love the trading nuance to the way you think about it. If I didn’t have it, would I buy or sell right now? I always say, if you were starting from scratch right now, what would you do, or something like that. In a perfect world, if you didn’t have all the other factors that are clouding your decision-making process, you could just do anything. What would you do? You’re also a coach and maybe you didn’t know it.

Jim: You can’t think about the money either, right? If you have a big loser, a big winner, you can’t think about the money in your next decision. You got to take that off the table.

Shani: Yes. Not be attached, because if you stay attached to an old decision, it’s going to preclude you from making new decisions to move you forward.

Jim: Absoutely.

Shani: Thank you so much for your insight today. I think this was brilliant. I’m just going to do a couple of bullet points by recap of all the fabulous learning that we had today. First of all, I’m going to start with what you ended with, which was don’t be afraid to make a change. What I love about what Jim described was his shifts actually, while they might seem extreme, they really weren’t, because you took an inventory of things that you like to do and were good at, both things that you were already getting paid for and things you did on the side and parlayed it into a successful business. I think not enough people take the time to step back if they’re not happy doing what they’re doing and say, “Okay. You know what? I’ve got all these transferable skills and interests that I can use to make a change.” Then go for it and see what happens.

Of course, we have your recommendation about the book Lazy Leadership by Andrew Wilkinson and the related inspiration of Ray Dalio in terms of thinking of your business like a machine. I’ll ask that question again. What gears, what pieces of your machine are missing or aren’t working? Let’s start to fix those right away. Lazy Leadership, by the way, doesn’t really mean lazy, does it? It means stepping back and not doing it all your goddamn self. Hiring the people to do things and actually delegating and letting people who are good at their respective functional areas do their jobs and setting them up for success.

The third thing that I want to highlight are just the elements of culture that have allowed Jim and Connamara to be so successful over 21 years both in growing the business and retaining high-caliber loyal employees. The culture around it’s okay to fail, assuming the failure isn’t ill-intentioned. Failure in the spirit of trying new things and innovating. That’s good and should be encouraged, not punished, either actively or passively.

Then, of course, the culture of balance and appreciating that people have lives outside of work and focusing on the results. Does it work or does it not work? Did they produce the results or didn’t they? Has nothing to do with face time in the office. I think those are all amazing things that you’ve instituted. My hat is tipped to you, because I work with a lot of leaders and CEOs who have not learned some or any of these lessons, quite frankly. Thanks again for joining us today.

Jim: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Shani: If anybody has any questions for you, what’s the best way to reach you?

Jim: [email protected].

Shani: Fabulous. Jim, thanks again. Leadershifters, thanks for joining us today. We will see you next time on the Leadershift show. In the meantime, if you have any comments or suggested guests, you know how to hit me up, [email protected]. Until next time.

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