eBay Australia's Managing Director Tim MacKinnon on how to actually be an authentic leader

like me to cover in twenty twenty one. If you've got stuff on your mind that you would like me to dig into the science and research around for the coming year, I would love it if you could just drop me an email Amantha at inventium dot com dot au tell me what's on your mind and what you'd like me to cover and I will do my best to make sure I get onto that in twenty twenty one. So let's get on to today's show. Very excited to

introduce my guest today, who is Tim McKinnon. Tim is the Managing director and Vice President for eBay Australia, a role that he has had for the last three years.

At eBay, Tim's purpose is to help Australian retailers grow and take advantage of opportunities in online, mobile, local and global commerce and enabling businesses and entrepreneurs has been the connecting thread in Tim's career at eBay, where he's currently at, then previously at Intuit in Silicon Valley, and before that advising the Minister responsible for IT industry and as a

corporate lawyer. So I actually met Tim because eBay is a client of Inventiums and I did some work with eBay and Tim actually interviewed me for an all staff event and we got along really well, and I really liked Tim and his style as a leader, so I was very excited to have him on the show. He's been doing some super cool things with eBay Australia over the last few years. We dig into those and how he's creating this amazing culture and how I think he's

a very very interesting and inspiring leader. So on that note, let's head to Tim to hear about how he works. Tim, Welcome to the show.

we've been working predominantly from home during that period. For the last four or five months, we started easing back into the office and so people we've had around about twenty or thirty percent of the team in on some days, and teams are starting to come in. Personally, I'm working from home today and I have been going to the office two days a week, So it's.

waits class on Friday morning. And I just changed that because even though I like to exercise, I just found every morning I was wasting an hour kind of procrastinating and getting out a bit later than I should, and that started to bleed into I'm in charge of breakfast and kids lunches, so and then I was just dropping exercise too quickly. So that's been just one basic change is just scheduling it so that I can't miss it. I think something that I'd always have done is had

really started till nine thirty. So for me, as I said, like the morning routine of getting the family sought is really important to me. That I can go and work and feel like everyone else has set up for the day.

But things have picked up, like the walking meeting and the phone using old school phone, not zoom, but doing long phone calls or just phone calls on audio and really listening to people better and having that space and the conversation and doing it well working Like many people picked up a dog this year, so you know, and that dog needs to be walked twice a day otherwise it as the garden. So that's been the habit that

I love and will give up. I think I've enjoyed the deep thinking time we have some routines around scheduling deep thinking. But I've certainly had more of that and carved out more of my day without meetings, and I've got an amazing EA to make sure that I get big chunks of time to think. And that's not the people can't thrown meetings and over the top of that, Yeah.

and that can just be so exhausting. So I can really relate to that. I will always default to phone wherever possible, And my rule for myself is that unless I need to be taking copious notes about the conversation, I will always be walking if I'm having a phone meeting, possibly just doing laps of my home. But yeah, I really love that I want to know about the deep

thinking time. How much of that would you be doing in a given week, and also how are you protecting that time or how is your EA protecting that time for you.

reality of the year is that ebakerss global company. I've got the US, we can't tell them when to schedule meetings, and a lot of the team having calls with the US with the product teams and engineering teams in the morning, so we made it in the afternoon. It was actually as a consequence of my discussion with you and you're talking about the importance of leaving the morning spare to make big decisions and do deeper thinking. That we've switched

that now to a Monday morning. We have no meetings, So we have now Monday morning and Thursday afternoon and that's going really well. So that's one thing, like everyone does that, and I think it requires enforcement at the beginning to make sure because people will sneakily try to have meetings if they can't schedule any time. And I used to, Actually I try not to be a prison guy, but I used to walk around at the office and just if I saw someone in the meeting room and say,

what are you doing. It's one of the great challenges of modern is that people are just doing shallow thinking. They're constantly being interrupted, and you have to really, unfortunately be a bit like a headmaster to help everyone unlearn those behaviors and force it across the whole company. I mean breakthrough ideas and only it comes from people doing great individual thinking or having amazing conversations, and you've got to make sure that you create space for both of those.

The other thing we do is we also are very strict about emails and any kind of work contact after seven pm and on the weekend. So you're allowed to work if you want to work at night or on the weekend, you can, but you have to not send it to somebody else, so you just go in offline mode and schedule your emails to come during the working days.

So that's really important to create that boundary, particularly for the more senior pace, because junior people feel like they have to respond to an email if they get it at night.

and they're firing off emails to people and thoughts. And I've been guilty of that in the past. And as much as you could write in the email, hey, do not look at this until tomorrow or you don't respond, people would and it would just fire up their brain and it disrupts people's sleep. And so it's I think it's been really effective. These sort of sound like rules that you'd set at school, but I think we all

need help collectively. I think we're all going through this massive experiment with mobile phones and our work with us all the time, and sometimes someone else creating a rule can help us all create a better practice.

So we have the one scheduled, but aa DEVI also carves out another one for me, and of those two of those, I'm actually typically two out of three, I'm doing proper deep work where I've got my note book out and I'm writing down and thinking through things, and the other one I use on email or kind of reading stuff online and there's no particular day, that's just

typically how it works out. And then on top of that, one morning a week, for whatever reason, I'll wake up a bit earlier, like sometimes because I've because this damn scheduled exercise, I'm quite tired, and I fall asleep putting the kids to bed, like at eight, and so I'll wake up the next morning at four. And then that's you know, where I would have some really kind of

powerful thinking time. And I find that for me either like just writing it helps, like that helps to generate ideas or obviously talking to other people, like I'm extroverted and riff off other people. But writing with handwriting stuff, you know, and I do a little bit of journaling. I'm trying to do more of that, but that that helped. It's clarify I think you want.

part of the brain. My biggest enemy is as as I said, like, you solve problems either from deep thinking or from great conversations. And I'm an extrovert and I love having great conversations. So sometimes I get excited about an idea and I'll write something down and I'll come up with something like I want to call someone to chat through this. So I think that's one of the challenges for me is I can kind of interrupt myself.

But yeah, so typically it's like it's the laptop down and using a notebook, and that's kind of a signify to me that that I'm doing something that there's a different kind of thinking.

goes into places and I think of different things. But you know, I mean I said, like the free writing is probably one of the most effective techniques when I'm really stuck, and then otherwise, like it is, I do get a lot from talking through problems with other people and bouncing stuff off people that helps clarify my thinking.

how many changes had actually happened. And I feel like so often when companies get a keynote speaker in, people will get excited and revd up if it's a decent speaker, but nothing will actually change fundamentally. And to me that's such a depressing thought. But I feel like the degree of change that you were then able to influence was really quite on the extreme end based on what I've seen.

And I want to know for you, what are those strategies that you are aware of using as a leader to create that change on mass because I think that that is something that makes you very unique as a leader from the leaders that I've worked with.

and your keynote we're both great. I mean, one of the advantages we have is we only we have one hundred hundred and fifty people in your organization, and we pride ourselves on having a very flat structure that all of the leadership team, including me, are very accessible to everyone, that we all know each other and so we don't need to kind of cascade down as much. We have very direct communication methods.

all I mean just basic stuff. It's got in it, hey, all the comings and goings of people, you know, a new starter, the photo of them, and then someone who's leaving. Because before those emails used to go out sporadically and sometimes you wouldn't have good routines around it, and they forget to get some a new start. I would start without that email going out, And so it's all of that. It's personal things are going off for people on the team, Like you know, we have a lot of people on

the team had kids. I think we've had about fifteen twenty percent of the team out opportunity to leave. We have both maternity and primary care and secondary care leave, so lots of kids. And then business updates like what did we achieve last week, what are the big releases, what are the things we're really proud of, and we want to shout out to people about. And then at the beginning, I like I write and I try to

bring the personal. I try to talk about what's going on in my life, what's going on in my head. But we also talk a lot about how we work together and the culture and the changes we make. So after your session, we all we had a few conversations between us. We're like, oh, that's great, we should think about some changes based on manthis suggested, let's think about changing, you know, the our meeting free time and using mornings. Let's move our team meeting to the afternoon. And so

we had this kind of forcing functions. Okay, we'll get that out for the next hot desk notes or home desk notes. That's one I didn't feel like we made that super quickly. We had. We actually had a few meetings as a leadership team about this, like post COVID, how we're going to work it, and through that process we're like, we have got to get back together in person because these zoom meetings where we're discussing this SID, we're just not getting deep enough and we're not making

decisions as well as we used to. So we made that decision. I think it took like a bunch of changes. It took three or four weeks, which normally we'd like

to move a bit faster than that. I think the other crook I've got an amazing leadership team and a really strong extended leadership team, and the process with these things is is just we empower one person to take this and go Okay, who's thinking through our ways of working this case as Katie, who's our people leader, and she worked closely with Sophie and they developed the plan

and they come back to us. So speed and getting decisions made is about just empowering good people, giving them some principles or guardrails with which to make the decisions to guide them, Like the brief is really important and with decision making, that's something we've done a lot of work on this year, is how we create guardrails or

guidelines and push decisions down the team. And we just gave it to Katie and then she came back and presented and people ask questions and have additional thoughts and then we've got Okay, we're good with this, let's go.

I mean, we have like a quarterly engagement survey and which we use to measure how we're going on lots of key dimensions and one that has always been bad globally, and I understand actually in the tech industry is decision making, particularly like platform companies like eBay, we have buyers and sellers. You know, we have over forty thousand Australian small businesses on the platform. We have two in three Australian shopping

through the platform. And our role as as a platform and the extent to which we manage the marketplace is great, and so it's like a complex thing just making decisions about well, how much should we be involved in this, how much should we influence the experience, how much do we intermediate experience at buyers and sellers. So that's one of the things about being tech company that decision makers had plus global plus highly matrix. So decision making has

always been something that we have scored. Has been one of our lower scores, if not the lowest score, and we spent a lot of time working on it over the last eighteen months and we are good at making decisions. We've raised that thirteen points and so we're now just just close to world class but not quite there, and we're still working on it.

for how we approach decisions? And they came up with a proposal which we iterated on and tried it out and see what resonated. I think the most important principle, as I said, is is like is how do you push down decisions? How do you empower people to make decisions? Too often we feel like as leaders, well like my job is to make all the hard decisions. And it's true, there are some decisions that you want a really complex and you want your most experienced people to make. But

that's the minority of decisions. Most of the decisions that can be made by people down the organization. But what they need to make those decisions is clarity on what other things they should weigh up. And so we tried to document better and documentations. I was listening to your GitHub podcasts recently. Yeah, with Darren Murk, documentation and process really does give people leverage. It's so hard that we're just so not used to doing that, and so we

started to write down what we call guardrails for the decision. So, what are the few principles that you weigh up to decide what asset, what marketing or advertising asset you should put on the homepage? You know, how do you prioritize those sort of things? They used to require a lot of meetings and debate. But if you just give some clear guardrails to people and say now you make the decision and you have the discretion to make it, that

helps a lot. I really like Ray Dalio's principles and how he tries to write down, you know, the principles for everything, every value, every decision. And we're not quite at that level, but I just think actually providing a little bit of clarity to people. I mean, obviously the other thing is a lot of things don't require a decision, you know, they can just be tested and so just saying, hey, are we actually really making a decision here? Are we

going to try something out and works? And if it's the latter, then you don't need to debate it as much. Things that need decisions the most, the hardest generally relate to people because you can't ab test them and go, we're going to give you this role and then we'll see how you go take it off you in three months.

So they're the ones where that requires the most debate and discussion of the leadership team and different perspectives and occasionally require me to make that decision when I'm able to figure it out.

the world. And so it's an incredibly fast growing startup based in San fran and I think he's got about forty staff now, and he said he thinks a lot about decision making as well, and he says, basically, if the decision is irreversible, he will make it, but any decision that is reversible, he delegates. And it was just such a clear way and simple way of I thought thinking about decision making as the leader of a company. So I'm intrigued that you're using a similar process there.

I imagine something I know that you've been like very focused on it. eBay is creating I think what you call a one team culture, and I know that you've had quite a lot of initiatives that were in my mind quite unusual things that I hadn't heard of before to help drive that one team culture, which is obviously even more critical with hybrid teams and people working from

all over the place. Can you talk about some of the more kind of unusual or unique things that you've done to help create that one team culture.

brings in the personal. Like I say, it starts off the meeting we have we rotate across the leadership team the host, so it's not me hosting it. It's delegated, and every leadership team member brings a different personal flavor or story or shows a video or tells a personal story. It could be funny, it could be you know, they

share some vulnerability. And then then we have a new starter has to get up and do their get to know in front of the whole company, and they're they're just always amazing in different ways because people share about them in their lives and so that sets a tone of hey, like your own personal self and work together in this room, like we're a bit more like family. And I always say it's a bit it's a bit like a wedding kind of crowd. People always nervous about

the guitar. I say, it's like doing your wedding speech, like people will laugh at the lamess jokes that you ever make. And then we go through and do content from different teams, and then I wrap up at the end, and we've actually been able to replicate that well virtually the meetings. We were worried about that, but the meetings are still being great. You can't hear the laughter, which is a bit weird, but the comments is this a

new dimension. So like everyone's in there making comments and giving feedback and making jokes and so I think that's like really critical. The other one that it's hard to replicate. We have this this amazing guy who suffers from a disability, and eBay has employed for over ten years and he does the mail and facilities and he comes around every day and he just is the happiest, most engaging guy and he chats to everybody and he plays Christmas music

at Christmas Tone. He's got his little trolley with his tinselon and Andy his name is, and he's like, he's kind of our mascot. And I think he sets something in the team because he talks to everyone and engage everyone. He kind of creates this in the team that that's a norm, so people connect across other teams. And on top of that, we did lots of forced activity to try to force teams to connect. So we're hot desks, which a lot of companies do, but that real people

love their desks. So we actually forced on Wednesday and we would mix it up and you would get allocated at a desk a random lottery and you'd sit next to someone different to force those spontaneous connections and make sure that everyone still knows each other. And we have lots of other activities, family days, and you know, we're

our Christmas party this year. We can't obviously all get together for that, but we've organized six or seven different activities, so Harbor Cruz and a show at the Opera House, and people are picking different activities, but they're all from different teams and we're trying to mix them up and make sure we've got different teams connecting.

connect people, like Sophie runs his amazing trivia. We've had cooking classes just we've tried lots of different stuff, and gin tasting or afternoons like de sent out like all these gin packs to everybody who had wine tasting with wine, everybody, and all these things to just try to get people to connect with people that otherwise weren't connecting with.

that I work with. And I want to know, and I don't know if you sort of given this conscious thought or if it just is something that just comes naturally, in which case, please give it some conscious thought. Now, how do you do that in practical terms for people that are listening, that are aware that, you know, maybe they've been given the feedback or the advice, you know,

be an authentic leader because they get better results. How else do you go about doing that aside from from the hot desk and then the idea of you and your leadership team sharing those personal anecdotes to kick off the all hands meeting every fortnight.

The other side of the problem, which is more common, is people who are more themselves but actually don't know how to be a leader, and they don't know how to behave and to speak up and to take authority. And I'd say as a core job of my job is not just to be authentic myself, but create the conditions for everyone at work to be authentic. And I know that people can't be one hundred percent say whatever

they think, or one hundred percent themselves. I can think that idea is, you know, we all have kind of versions of ourselves that we show to people, even to the people we're closest to. But I mean, like our job is to help people in their workplace, actually their work self and their home self not be that different. Like if there's a massive dichotomy between those as a

real problem. And secondly, to help them be leaders. Like I think everyone on my team are amazing leaders, and my job is to create the conditions where they feel comfortable speaking up and expressing their view. So I guess

I'll start with it like practical tips for people. If the first case, if you're a leader and you're struggling with authenticity, been given that feedback, My first question you should ask yourself is is this an environment where I can I really feel like it supports me for who I am? Or is there just too much they're just too different? And if it's if it's not that environment, you don't feel like you can be yourself and you can see no way to being yourself because of the culture,

it might not be the best environment for you. But the other part of it is, well, how do you change the environment to make it so that people can be themselves more? And then what it starts with you? So, I mean the first thing to being authentic is being vulnerable. I think that's like the key. You know, it's just people admitting that they don't have it all under control. For people saying I don't know the answer to that.

I don't know what to do here. I'm struggling. If you start with that, people will reach out and that really builds trust. And I mean anyone who's accused of being fake or not authentic as someone who is not genuinely about what's going wrong, because nobody has got it under control, like no one. And then obviously, like as you develop that capability that's developing your self awareness is really important and generally and self reflection can help. And I'm still got to do a lot more of that.

You know, while you're getting to that, getting feedback from people, like there must be people you can trust it and just tell you, just be honest with you and say especially as you get more senior, people are less likely to tell you the truth. So you've got to seek it out and you've got to find people who give it to you straight and talk to them a lot.

Whenever someone's leaving the company, I always try to chat to them and get feedback because you know they're going to be honest in that situation because they don't have to think about working with you in the future. And then the last thing is probably just you know, creating every opportunity to fuse your personal life and your work life. So talk about your life outside of work a lot at work, so people understand that part of you and that feels natural and I think that that really helps.

And so incorporate talking about your family, or your hobbies, or your fears, or your history, or your hopes or your holidays, just obviously in a way that resonates with other people. I'm not saying go through all your holiday photos when you get back, but just bring that personal dimension to work and then you'll start to see that barrier breakdown for the second class of people that struggle to speak up to be leaders. People have imposter syndrome.

I think everyone suffers from that. I remember distinctly when I was made the managing director of EBO Australia. We had an all hands and my then boss was about to announce my name and I was sitting there and I had this overwhelming feeling of wanting to vomit on the carpet, Like I just felt nausea that I'd never

felt in my life before. And I stood up and I really really really had to had to contain myself from doing like a massive projectile vomiting everyone, which would been a really bad start because I'd never thought of myself. I'm not this guy, like, I'm not that kind of person. Off, I never had aspired to be a CEO. I grew up and my idea of who a leader is is completely different, and I had to remind myself, well, actually, like I've managed to do things and lead and achieve

notwithstanding that, notwithstanding I never fit this mold. And so to people who struggle, I'd say that you have to remember that what has got you to where you are is good like and you are a leader, and you kind of need to, you know, find people that believe in you. It might just be your parents and just reinforce you and say you can do this and start

to speak up. There was a colleague at eBay who who wasn't comfortable speaking up when he wrote down every decision that was getting made in these meetings and what he would have decided, and he went back. He wrote this over like twelve months, and he went back and found that he was actually making the right decisions eighty percent of the time, but he wasn't actually expressing his view.

And if you don't know what to speak up about, you don't know how to have impact, Like you get really good, I sort of say to people, start Bay, get really good to understand the data, or know the customers, really will talk to them more than anyone else, or really invest in the relationships across the company, and that will give you the authority and the confidence to speak up and lead in meetings. And then the way that you do that is really important, like the way I

don't know if you come across Francis Free. Yes, absolutely, and she talks about the logic wobbles and how you inverse the communication and for people, I think she nails this aspect that like the key job with authenticity is I mean, it should be starting to be authin yourself, but it's really about how you create the culture where other people can speak up and you get diverse views and you celebrate different views.

really does bring a huge smile to my face. One of the highlights of my day reading some of the amazing reviews that have come through. So thank you. So it is it for today's show, and I will see you next time.