Las Vegas 2022
Leading with Heart
As technology leaders, we’re trained to solve problems with our brains but it’s the heart muscle we need in today’s world. This talk is about the softer side of technology: people and culture. Adrienne will share her experience leading engineering and IT teams and how she learned to use her heart to create an environment which allowed previously siloed teams to collaborate, break their deadlock, and start shipping value.
AS
Adrienne Shulman
Founder & Executive Principal, Tenger Ways
Transcript
Okay.
Hey everybody. We're short on time, so I'm gonna get started. Um, thanks for spending time with me. Uh, I'm giving a talk on Leading With Heart. Uh, gonna share some leadership lessons I've learned over the years, particularly around a thesis I have that as technology professionals, we've all been trained to use our brains, but if we wanna be effective leaders, it's the heart muscle we need to develop.
I am Adrian Schulman. I've been building Enterprise SaaS since the early two thousands. Started as an engineer. Um, have had all sorts of management up to senior leadership roles. Um, why am I here today? It's because I'm really passionate about DevOps. Anyone else in this room? I think that's probably what we have a lot in common. Um, I've been introducing DevOps mindset and practices with all of the teams I've been working with over the last few years. In 100% of the time, team performance has gone up. As a result, I was promoted two times in two years. That's not what I'm passionate about. So I think DevOps is good for our careers, but where the passion comes from is because in all of those times as well, I've seen employee happiness go up. I've seen stress go down. Um, and that's what really got me, like weirdly passionate and super motivated for this movement we're part of. I wanna give a really big shout out to Jean Kim. All of the IT revolution authors. Um, I've gotten, I've learned so much through this community, but also the community. Um, it's not just the ivory tower, you know, the authors. I've met so many people even in this room over the years, and I've learned much from all of you. I think this community is some of the smartest people, but genuinely just like genuine people helpful. Everyone wants to help each other. So like, just round of applause for you guys.
So I'll tell you my story. Um, I was working at an enterprise task company. Um, it was a $5 billion global company and I had a new leadership opportunity come to take over it. Um, I had been in the engineering world, I got to pivot over to the enterprise IT world. So it was a hundred person department overseeing it. Um, business applications. So I think like your low-code, no-code apps like your Salesforce, NetSuite, I call it the, I call it the tech stack that runs the business. Um, data and analytics and all that seemed like a good opportunity. But here's the context. Growth had been slowing at my company for a few years.
I know you can't read that. So I'll just tell you, growth had been slowing at my company for a few years. Um, we had done a, we had acquired our biggest competitor about a year and a half before, and we integrated people in teams. So we were one company except we didn't integrate systems and technology. So we were really two companies. Everybody, the company blamed it for making their jobs hard. Um, and as a result, the CEO really said, systems integration is the number one priority for this company. Um, so why me? I was chosen for this role because I had a reputation for getting things done, for being technical. Um, this is a quote from our CEO who says, I was put in charge of this at an executive level because of my technical background and my expertise. And I had a very simple mandate, Adrian, get the systems integration work done.
And my boss, who I was reporting now to the chief administration officer, I think he thought he was doing me a favor, but he handed me a Gantt chart, <laugh>, there was already a plan. So all they needed was someone to execute, just get it done. So if there's any fans of sooner, safer, happier in the audience, you know, there were a few red flags, but I'm always up for a challenge. So what's the first thing you do? You gotta talk to people. So I was gonna talk to key stakeholders, see what I could learn. Um, I had previously been over on the right hand side of this org chart in product and engineering. And our organization, like, you know, much to my chagrin, was organized very in, in functional shils silos. Um, so I was gonna talk to my team, the three key stakeholders and talk to my team was gonna talk to all of the functional department heads over our marketing department, sales, professional services, customer support and finance.
Um, if I think about my team as owning that technology, these were the people using the technology. So whether you wanna call them our customers or our users, um, they were the ones who I had to make happy. And then of course, you talk to your executive team. So I did my meetings and here's what I heard. So when I first spoke to the department heads, these were kind of my peers at the VP SVP level. And I said, Hey, how, what's going on with this project? I heard same variation of the same thing. It sucks. You don't understand what we do in my department. Like, you don't understand marketing, you don't know what we're doing here in sales. Oh, um, I heard about recent projects that did not go well, Adrian. Pretty much every project we had to roll 'em back. It keeps getting delayed.
Quality is low. So just very little trust in it. Um, when I spoke to my team, I said, what's going on? I heard a different story, Adrian. We're the real heroes. We're really good at what we do. We're super technical. We know what we're doing. Our business doesn't know what they're doing. They're dysfunctional. They, you know, know, they don't appreciate how great we are. So not a lot of accountability. And then when I spoke to the executive team nice enough, but they didn't have a lot of patience and they said, Adrian, it's not your fault you weren't here, but guess what, you gotta get this done. I've been sh they, they showed me the plans and those dates that they were promised. So they're like, just get, just get it done. Um, I diagnosed it as drama dysfunction and deadlock. Um, this is a quote from Chris who was the senior vice president over our sales operations team. Uh, and he described it as, when I took over, he said, the functional and technical teams were at each other's throat. Um, what I saw here was, yeah, it was deadlock. Nothing, nothing was actually getting done. So it didn't matter that there was a plan,
People were really, it was not in a good place. So what do you do as a leader? So I'm reminded the job of a leader is not to do work. You don't do the thing. And when you get your first job as a manager, the first thing they tell you is you don't have to do work anymore. You delegate. But leaders don't delegate. So a job of a leader is actually not to tell people what to do. The job of a modern leader is to create the environment where work can get done and create the environment is code word for create the culture.
And a lot of talk in technology these days is all about you gotta have the right culture, you gotta have the right culture. Luckily for us, we know exactly what that culture looks like. Um, we have the great Ron, we in the audience here today, <laugh>, um, this is from the book Accelerate. Um, if you're new and you haven't read this, highly, highly recommend it. It was very much like a life changing for me. Um, but Dr. Westrom talked about pathological cultures. Ones where people are driven by power. So it's a little bit of me, me, me, me first. Um, the bureaucratic organizations where people are driven by rules. So it's stay in your lane. It doesn't matter what the outcome is. If I did my job and I check my box, I'll be fine. Versus the generative organizations, which are the ones that are really mission focused, these are the ones that outperform highly collaborative, no such thing as failure. And these organizations only learning. Um, because of my experience leading DevOps transformations in the engineering org, it was very easy for me to identify pathological and bureaucratic like aspects of both of those cultures in this situation. So even though I was on the hook for this IT project, I knew I had to kind of lead a culture change before any work could get done.
And that is where, this is where I, my thesis about brain versus heart. So my definition of brain is this, if you lead with brain, you're putting the logical, analytical, like the most correct solution or technology solution above anything else. That's the only thing that's important. Sorry, that's the first thing that's important. Other things come second. If you lead, we're, uh, this computer's shutting down, so I'll just keep chatting and we'll go with the flow. But so if you lead with heart, people come first and brain will come second. And the reason this is important, I think for us as technology leaders is we were trained to lead with our brain. And guess what? It made us really successful. So like all my past success is because of my analytical brain. Um, but we like to say, what got you here won't get you there. So when you get into a leadership role, like it doesn't matter how smart you are, 'cause guess what, everyone's pretty smart. Um, and it doesn't matter when you're in these complex dynamic orgs, it doesn't really matter what your, that you have the right technology
If someone over here isn't ready to listen to it. And that's actually what I saw because, and, and I was guilty of this 'cause I came in and I was like, rolled up my sleeves and I said, oh, this is actually a really hard problem. Like, I've got two of everything, two Salesforce, two NetSuites. We had like a 20 application tech stack. And there's, how do you do this? This is a complex system and we need to do a complex migration. So I, I admit, I got with my team and I whiteboarded it, and I was only asking about like, what's the strategy? How are we gonna do this? This is gonna be so fun. And then I realized that I had three different opinions on the right way to do it. And people had beef with each other. So the one person who proposed one solution, we were not really at the place where you could have this like, honest debate over what was right. It was just my ego needs to win, so my solution, and because you're pissed at me, you're gonna go tell someone down the hallway why mine doesn't work, and then you're gonna kind of whisper and it was just nothing, nothing was gonna get done. Um,
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So that's my, okay, so that's the, so that's the heart. It was how do you actually get people to a place where, where work can get done? Um, so this is what it looked like. I first worked with my, my peer, I call it my peers that's like at the leadership level, but not in my department. Um, and I recognized that they all saw this as something for me to do for them. They wanted to be treated like customer, I'm gonna sit back and you do all the work. So the first thing I did was having to change the perception of this is an IT project to, I called it a business optimization initiative. Um, so all of a sudden the the senior leaders who didn't really, who were kind of waiting for me to do all the work, were very happy. I started to get in the boat with me and solve problems together.
Um, I used hashtag one team all the time. I think anyone who's done any sort of m and a type work, and as I'm sure you've heard these and you know, and you kind of can roll your eyes, um, I throw it all the time and I just kind of kept following up, kept following up. Um, I was really explicit. Like I got on the phone. You might think you're collaborative, so this is, you know, it and business, but maybe it's product and engineering, maybe it's engineering and security. You might think you're being collaborative, but have you ever called someone up and said, Hey, I want to help you. How can I help you? Or what, what's going on? Like, what is important to you? And just like really being explicit and putting it out there. And, um, I found that really powerful because I was warned when I got my, when I took my job, Adrian so and so over here, they're hard to work with. And then when I went and said to them, Hey, I I wanna help you, they weren't so hard to work with. Um, and we committed to bringing problems to each other. So in the past when we were in our very much silos, when you have a problem, what do you do?
Complain to your boss. And then what do they do? They've got their own problems. So they just complain. They just tell their peer over here saying, Hey, you got a problem over here? And then it goes down and it's drama. So I just said, Hey, guess what? Our bosses are c-suite level executives. They don't wanna hear drama. How about if you have a problem, you bring it to me and if I have a problem, I'll bring it to you. And, and, and we did in this safe space and everyone was really happy working in that way. Um, and this was all about modeling behavior. Um, and again, and the reason I could do this is because I'd seen it work before. So who am I? And, and you know, and I was at a VP level. So there were SVP, there were people senior to me.
So, so who am I? It's not about title, it's just, Hey, let me offer a different way. I said to one of 'em, I said, look, right now we're in this kind of scarcity mindset. What if we're successful with this project? Promotions for everyone. So it's not about departments competing. Um, we heard, I think, uh, in the session this morning with Ron Westrom, I think one of the, one of the, the big takeaways I heard is you can choose your culture and, um, something like that. Um, okay, so what do I do with with my team now? So my direct reports, it was all about changing incentives. So in the past, I, it was incented to be technical. So I had leaders of my team who as long as they told up to their boss, I'm doing a good job because of this, they, they, we weren't really incented for outcomes.
So I set a new vision and I told them the only thing that matters is that you're creating value for our company. And I followed that up with value is defined together with your business partner. So the two things this does is one, generative organizations are mission focused. So you've got people to say, it's not about local optimization. You have to further the mission of our company. And you force this collaboration because now you have to define what that is with someone that you previously weren't collaborating with. Um, I told them, it's not me. I'm, I may be your manager, I may DD determine your promotion, but I'm actually not gonna decide. So the people over here that we called the, the business before, when they say you suck, I need them not to say that. I need them to tell you what value you're creating together.
Um, emphasize progress over perfection. Um, when you're dealing with these massive, big stakes projects like, Hey, we need all of our systems integrated. There was so much fear that it wasn't gonna get done, and everyone was trying to come up with this progress or perf perfect solution, it just would never get done. So I just had them focus on this small, I said, I'd ra what, what business value can you create in this month? Not next year, because next year or next quarter even. 'cause that actually would never happen. And then I told everyone, everyone has to be willing to try. So if you're completely stuck in like this and like, I'm doing my job, but it's everyone else's fault, it, it wasn't, I, I just, it wasn't gonna work out. Um, and this does take patience. So when you're leading with heart, you have to give it time because people have heard words before.
So you have to say the words and then you have to follow up with actions, and you really just need to consistently give people time. Um, there were some managers and leaders on my team who told me, Adrian, I I, you're the leader we needed a year ago, but I'm exhausted. Like I, I I can't do this. And, and it was okay and they left. And then there were other people who couldn't help but give excuses. It was just excuse after excuse about why things weren't getting done. Um, so ultimately as a leader, you do need to find the right people with the right mindset, um, with the executive leadership team. I, I am not gonna talk too long about this, but I just wanna say the importance of telling your story when you're doing these culture changes. Um, I like to also say, if you don't tell your story, someone else will.
So luckily I did not tell the story of my own. So I used it Revolution and the DevOps Enterprise Summit community. Um, it's been, it was really, really helpful for me. 'cause so many of us are going through similar challenges. Um, and I'd met people through book clubs, through previous conferences, through Slack. So for me to be able to tell the leaders at my company, Hey, this is, we're not unique. Other people are going through these challenges too. And then following up with information I learned from books, and I was able to say, I, for this scenario, I particularly pulled from Accelerate and sooner, safer, happier. So to be able to say, Hey, there's practices, there's patterns, and what this does, it helps with my credibility because it's not my ego saying it's, it's, um, and which eventually builds leads to trust. Um, and because I focused on that, my peers across the aisle, they were all telling the same story too.
So instead of complaining about it, they would say, you know what? We're working together. I feel more optimistic about where we're going when the drama gets cut. We're not fighting about people all of a sudden. We're in a place where we're working get done. So here's what happened, um, about over a three month period. You know, my, my one team went from a corny slogan to reality. Um, as a one team group of executives United, we asked for help. That's like unheard of, right? We're so bad at asking for help. Um, love this community. One of the things the DevOps community taught me is like, I can say, I don't know how to do something or I need help. Um, we asked for help by the way. Help is code word for budget. Um, there was no money to be found when everyone's fighting. But when you come together and tell a story and agree, all of a sudden we got help, AKA money.
Um, ultimately we started working small, um, and we broke deadlock. So we were actually shipping little small things that were needed today and people were happier. Um, so this is all to say, so like, so because I led with heart and I put away the brain, we got to a place and it took time where we could follow up with brain work where I could then. So it's not that brain doesn't matter, it just means you have to start with heart. Um, the end of the quotes, um, this is that I had started with, this was a quote from my CEO who said, I might have been chosen for technical expertise, but he recognized it was ability to influence stakeholders from different departments. That becomes a superpower. So for us as technology leaders, unless you live in some like place that doesn't exist, where you can just do your work on your own and worry about other departments, maybe you don't need to need that.
But this is something at reality. And the end of the quote that Chris, who was the SVP of Global Field Operations, he talked about us being at each other's throats. Um, he finished up, but he said he understood I was asking for time, um, to build trust, to build the relat system trust so that to create a single team view so that now you could follow up and roll out a plan to get work done. Um, this was probably the hardest work I've ever done. Um, I would come home from work exhausted at the end of the day, like, just like completely depleted. Um, it was also my most proud, like the most proud I've, I've proud, proud, proud I've ever been. Um, so I think this is important. Gene Kim loves to end talks with. How can you help? I had to think about this. Um,
And here's what I'm gonna say. So I think we all know the value of DevOps. DevOps allows us to safely and deploy code quickly so that we can get faster feedback and ultimately solve customer problems better. But a lot of the DevOps stuff that I've been reading, it kind of focuses on technical constraints. Um, but clogged flow is clogged flow and deadlock is deadlock. So I think my story is just one where I, it was very obvious that culture was contributing to a blockage. Um, so I just ask you, can we further explore as a community how culture contributes to flow and what that looks like. Ultimately, my, my biggest, biggest wish is we take these soft skills and actually turn them into hard skills. Um, so when we think about, like, if you close your eyes and picture what a leader looks like and what do you picture, don't picture the person barking orders, right?
How do you picture someone who's coming up alongside you and saying, I don't know, but let's find out together. Um, so how do we normalize this behavior and make it so that it becomes just that's what leadership is. Um, so just start of a conversation and, and actually a lot of the talks this, this whole week have been about heart, have been about leadership, have been about culture. Um, so not necessarily new. I will try to finish up with two quotes. Um, I was traveling in Mongolia a few years ago, um, and I visited the, the, the oldest Buddhist temple in Mongolia at the Urin Zoo Monastery. And we met with the head llama there. Um, it's a very remote place. Took about 10 hours over land to get to. And we asked for advice, what advice do you have? This is a spiritual guide. What advice do you have for westerners? And he talked about western culture and how smart we are and productive and busy and we're inventive. But then he paused and he pointed to his head, he said, don't forget, your brain is useful, but your heart is important. And he was urging us to don't forget to really lean into your heart and connect with humanity. And I think about this quote, because I think it really resonates with what we're doing as technology leaders. We need our brains at work and it is very useful, but to, at, at least for me, where I find the most gratifying is, is really leaning into the heart muscle and understanding people and figuring out how do we work together, um, to make better software and happier people.
So that's my talk. Thanks for listening.