An Unfiltered Masterclass for Modern Leaders

I, sorry, bro. That's just, that's not who I am. Like that's, that's not how I've gotten to where I am. And that's not how I built this amazing team. Like I built an amazing team that looks at the situation and says, you know what? We can do that. Yeah, we can do that. And agile was a major disruptor for me because it started getting me almost every decision I look in the mirror and I'm like, you know, is there a better way to do this? Or is it different way to do it?

It's should I be talking to someone else to get a better way or a different way or an idea or something like that, anything and to be more open minded. I would even disagree with myself, don't get stuck. It's really it's really a trap for leaders. there will be people that will be on the outside talking about, that's going to fail. That's going to be a mess. that's not going to work. There's no way that's going to happen. okay, cool. That's fine.

You're allowed to think that but that's not going to change the thing that we're doing because we've done everything that Bob just talked about. So Bob's doing the intro that means I gotta shut up which is hard for you to do. Hey, Metacasters, welcome to the cast today. I'm Bobby G. Galen, and I wanna introduce our topic. uh No, uh back in the 80s probably, mid to late 80s, uh I was leading, I was a software engineering manager or director.

and I was studying leadership, probably mostly because I sucked at it, and I was studying everything. I was looking for role models, et cetera. And Colin Powell, this was pre-my Agile days. This was on the cusp of traditional management to Agile. And I came upon these 18 principles from Colin Powell. Colin Powell was a general in the military, secretary of state, I think under the Bush, under one of the Bushes, and uh just someone I...

When I read his 18 keys to leadership, uh it really resonated with me. It provided some wisdom. uh And it stayed with me not that long ago. I was flashing back. So this is what 40 years ago, 40 years ago or so. And I was looking at the principles again. It's hard to find them now online or harder to find them. And they really resonated again. So I suggested Josh that we share them. So this is Colin Powell's 18 principles to highly.

effective leadership and we've picked, we've done one of our pick five. We're going to, so Josh picked his top five, I did, and we're going to run through them. Yes, we are. Are you ready? You want to go first or you want me to go first? Well, I picked lesson number one. So being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. And uh I agree with that. And I think a lot of leaders, uh they are really reluctant to have crucial conversations.

They're really reluctant to uh speak truth to power, the power being their teams in this case, that they'll obfuscate. uh They'll mislead, they'll be too subtle, they won't be clear. Because they're afraid, oh, I can't aggravate the masses, it'll undermine our roadmap, et cetera, et cetera. that fear is not leadership. So the goal of this principle is not to piss people off. The goal of this, or the point of this principle, is to not be afraid of pissing people off.

To not let that be one of your guiding principles as a leader. But to be a truth teller, it's, we, think in one of our episodes, we talked about being a truth teller up and out, but this is being a truth teller to your teams, even when the truth is gonna aggravate them. And that's something, it just resonates with me so much as to boldly go where, I need to, ah not be afraid of aggravating people, not be afraid of making them angry. Yeah, I just, so I'm a movie, TV guy, and also a sports guy.

Think of every movie you've ever seen. Remember the Titans or something like that, where there's a transformational coach. There's somebody that comes in to a team, takes that team from what they were to what they could be, and recognize all of the times. when that leader that that person says something that that group doesn't like, but it's something the group needs to hear for that group to achieve whatever they're trying to get done.

Every movie, every story, every book, everything, where there's a transformation requires that because you're just going to keep doing the same thing. and you get stuck in this rut and you're oh man, I wish we would be better, I wish we would be better, but you don't want to do the hard thing. So then someone has to come in and make you do the hard thing to evolve and transform. And it often requires saying things that people might not want to hear, but that's the job.

So I would million percent agree. Absolutely. Real quickly about a Kestrel, it's not just what you say, it's what you do as well. So let's say uh Josh is a software manager reporting to me and I'm the CTO of a company and I want to uh promote Josh and no one in the company likes Josh. And this is farfetched, but no one in the company likes Josh. Everyone thinks he's a Moronsky.

And when I announced his promotion and I announced my rationale for it, my reasons before and I'm setting him up for success, but no one agrees with me. And I know that in advance because I know Josh, but I know that in advance, but I go through with it because he's the right guy. He's the right guy and I believe in him. again, it's what you say and then what you do. ah What you do is gonna piss people off. You stick to your guns. ah What's the next number in order, Josh?

So I'm going to cheat. think, I think you'll label this as cheating. I am going to do a combo platter. I'm going to do number three and number four together because I believe they kind of work together. They're kind of hand in hand. So number three is don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment and the elites become so inbred that they're that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.

And number four is don't be afraid to challenge the pros even in their own backyard. So I was looking forward to this one because I think about challenging the pros even in their own backyard. I've been having to wrestle with this Bob Galen guy for 15 years. So boy, do I believe in this one. So this is one of those things and we have talked about it a lot about Don't be afraid to challenge the pros. The thought leaders air quote that are out there oftentimes haven't done the job.

And so they're pontificating on, hey, here's how it should work. And then you scratch the surface like, well, I mean, like what happened when you did that? How did that work? And it's not, there's not much there like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. How, why should I be like hanging on every word that you're typing or sharing or whatever? And you haven't done the thing. Now it's good to get those different opinions and viewpoints, but there are no silver bullets.

Don't take anything anybody says, Bob, myself, anybody else that's out there, don't take it as gospel. You cannot. We might be considered experts or pros, but don't just take what we've done and copy and paste it into your life because your life is not the life that we... live that we're sharing our stories from Spotify is one of those major things I, you know, if you've been around the podcast for a while, you know that I like the things that Spotify did.

And in our area, I kicked off and started doing a bunch of Spotify stuff. And then I turned around and like I saw all these job postings for chapter leads and all these different spot of my things like, wait a minute, what are you people doing? You know? So yeah, it's just be careful.

Take everything with a grain of salt, including this podcast. Absolutely. I was going to add to that everyone. It's not just uh how recently have they done it is another variation. So I haven't written software in 20 years. That's just real software. I've dabbled, but real software. So you do not want to listen to me for design techniques. or design trade-offs. mean, higher level things perhaps, guidelines, et cetera. But again, it's always asked people, did you do it?

And when was the last time you did it? So just when was the last time you did it? And did you really lead it or were you part of a 100 person team that did something? And you did one line of code before you left in your one day of work or something like that.

ah Lesson number six, Josh, is my next one. Ooh, that was my next one too. All right, we'll do it. We'll do a match on this. You don't know what you can get away with until you try. And there's there's an old technique, Metacaster is called or an old thought called managers discretion. I don't know if it's still valid, but as I was growing up in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, even there was uh HR departments and leadership teams.

We talked about there was an intangible wiggle room where managers had discretion. Like I could buy something and I may or may not have the budget for it. And then I asked for forgiveness, right? I do something and then I asked for forgiveness. And that's the thing here. I think as leaders, we want to be on that hairy edge. ah We don't want to be creating insubordination. We don't want to be totally jerking our leaders around. But we want to be supporting the mission.

And we want to be stretching the things that our teams need. And I don't see enough boldness in leaders today. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it ever in leaders. This manager, I used to lean into management discretion. So I used to get, you know, just put up against the wall. It was like, well, I used my discretion. I used my judgment. What? You're not supposed to do that. ah And then I took the licking. But I was supporting the mission. I was supporting the the project.

I was supporting the business, if you will. Josh.

Yeah, this was a lesson that I learned from Gonzalo Hidalgo at Teradata. So Bob and I both worked with and for him and we didn't always agree with him, but Gonzalo was really good at understanding the rules and playing within them, but stretching them. And that was an eye opener for me. So he understood the protocols. He understood how to do the things, but he also understood that how we choose to execute under the covers, that's up to us.

And we are the ones that are closest to the problem and we can figure out the best way to unlock our team and their capabilities. And you can't just be, again, a carbon copy. And so as I saw him do that, it was an eye opener because we had some real struggles with hiring, because we worked at a big company and they had all these procedures and... all these levels before a resume would show up on a manager's desk.

So he figured out a way to work around that and get people that he could find in quickly and making a difference and work them through the system. And that was an eye opener for me. So I've, again, looked at that very, very similar to what Bob said is you, you you understand the things you have to do and then you understand the ways you can work around them or through them and be comfortable. you know, the number of times I said, Hey, we're going to do this.

And like a member of my team, like, can we do that? Like, has anybody said we can't, you like there's nothing that says we can't do it. We're just choosing to do it differently. Like there's no, we don't have to, we only have to do this.

You know, one of the things that was a pretty large moment was when we chose to change the way that we figured out a bonus and the, and the company, all I had to do as a leader was send an Excel file to HR of every person on my team and what the bonus was that they were going to get. There was no edict on how I calculated that. And so we chose to discuss it as a team and allocate it to ourselves as a team and take that a person was like, well, you know, we're to get in trouble.

Like, what are we going to get in trouble for? We're not going to get there. Like we are doing the thing we've been asked to do. We've been given a bucket of money. And it's my responsibility to allocate it amongst this group. And as long as the number adds up to the number that I have, I'm good. It doesn't matter. We can choose to operate however we want. Okay.

You are a bold man. I like listening to your Challenge HR stories, Josh. I do. It warms my heart. My next number's 13, so do you have anything? I have two before that. I get to double dip here. So this will align with that. Number 11, fit no stereotypes. Don't chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team's mission. So you may have heard me say some words that sounds like this is the thing that I'm pretty passionate about.

um This has really been a driver. for me because of my anti-mentor approach or anti-mentor history that I had where I never had this pattern or practice laid in front of me that I believed in that I knew worked. I never had a blueprint, a roadmap for this is what being a great leader looks like. So I just felt like I had to figure it out.

And I leaned on my agile background and I just started trying things and discarding them if they didn't work, trying them quickly, failing fast, failing, like all of those things so that I could find the thing that worked because I didn't know what the answer was. So I felt my only path out of this was, Hey, let's just try stuff and see what works. And that often meant doing things that people weren't really thinking about. In fact, agile was one of those things.

one of the teams I was working with. We just didn't like the way things were going. So we started changing stuff. We started doing things differently. And we had been doing this for close to a year. And then one of my lead, lead devs, sent me a message like, Hey, here's a link to this web page. And there's this thing called agile. And I think we're doing it. And that and so that wasn't unlocked for us like, holy cow, there's other people doing this. That's so exciting.

But we wouldn't have gotten there if we weren't willing to Just try and do something different. Try and find the thing that works and not accept that what you're doing now isn't working.

All right, Bob. of the biggest dangers for leaders is you fall into a sense of comfort with your ways of doing work, ah with your strategies, with your tactics, with your habits. ah I try to challenge myself. I don't do it enough. I've learned over the years, decades, to do it more and more because I'm a comfort zone guy. So historically, I'm a comfort zone guy. If it works, then it works. I can easily fall into a habit.

And agile was a major disruptor for me because it started getting me almost every decision I look in the mirror and I'm like, you know, is there a better way to do this? Or is it different way to do it? It's should I be talking to someone else to get a better way or a different way or an idea or something like that, anything and to be more open minded. I would even disagree with myself, right? Overnight I think of a different, ah, that was wrong. That's two sides.

I'll wake up the next day and I'm like 180. this degree is spun on it. But it's that it's that don't get stuck. It's really it's really a trap for leaders. ah It's been a trap for me and I'm still I'm still a work in progress when it comes to that. So Josh is right on. Do you have 12, Josh? do have 12. So I have number 12, which is perpetual optimism as a force multiplier. I know. we're to talk about that. Yeah. So this was something that smacked me in the face.

So I was working for a CTO, you know, uh 10, 12 years ago, and I was the VP of software engineering and we had a V VP of it and we were in there and we were talking about something and

the CTO like pounded the desk. He's like, I cannot live in a world where my leader of software engineering is an optimist. That is just not gonna work. I need you to be a pessimist. I need you to think the world's gonna end and like be defensive about everything. I, sorry, bro. That's just, that's not who I am. Like that's, that's not how I've gotten to where I am. And that's not how I built this amazing team. Like I built an amazing team that looks at the situation and says, you know what?

We can do that. Yeah, we can do that. Now, I of course wrapped processes and communication protocols around that so that we weren't over promising, right? That was something that we didn't do. There's a difference between over promising and getting yourself in trouble with publishing dates and being an optimist, right? You have to believe that you can do a thing because...

One of my favorite things that I tell my kids all the time that I know they are absolutely sick of is whether you think you can, whether you think you can't, you're right. So I try and lean into we can and we're gonna figure it out. So that is one of those things that just to me is wired into who I am and will be wired into the teams that I build forever. I mean, uh I can't agree more, Josh. I'm a can-do kind of guy.

I mean, I've always been... uh You remember that story where the first time I did public speaking, I paired with someone at a conference in San Diego, and uh the author of the thing we were speaking about was sitting in the front row. was like God. uh sort of Eric and I did the talk. I don't even remember it. I think I brain dead. Yeah. time. Seriously, I don't remember what happened or anything. Eric has never spoken in public again. He was scarred. was he was physically damaged as a result.

And I took that as I can do that. It's a it's a challenge to me. It's it's and it's a big challenge. The bigger the challenge of writing a book was another child. My writing sucked. And my first book, I challenged myself. I I I think that can do spirit.

uh, permeates my leadership journey. It's done me a good service. And I think anyone that I've seen with can do spirits versus can't do spirits, they can do is Trump. can't do's, unless the can't do's are in QA. was a joke. Everyone, you want, you want can't do's in QA. I've just, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I have 13 and it's pals rules for picking people. P Peter pumpkin.

picking people, look for intelligence and judgment and most critically a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners. Also look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego and the drive to get things done. I don't know if I'm, if all of them are equal in my mind, like get think, getting things done is a high power, but they're all soft skills, metacasters.

And the point I was going to make is we very often, we look at hard skills for people and I think hard skills are more trainable. We need you need training trainable folks for hard skills. But these soft skills, these character skills, these character attributes, which is what he's talking about. Like someone who can look around corners is curious. my gosh. If you get a few of those folks in your team, that can that can be a godsend. If everyone is balanced egos.

ah Another way of saying that is you don't you don't hire assholes, but you're you're hiring balanced egos. I think those are the critical things that I've learned to focus on in building great teams. ah And it's all about picking people. The reason I picked it as part of my top five, it's one of the most critical things we do as leaders, as we compose, we orchestrate, we conduct. We conduct great teams. That's what we do. And you have to take that.

I know I'm joking with my metaphor in a silly way, but I'm being absolutely dead serious. We need to be crisp and clean and visioned about how we put teams together. There's so many variations there and to be artful about it. Josh? Yeah, the challenge there is these are harder to detect. And so oftentimes people opt out of trying to figure that out. They look for the easy quicker way out of give me a checklist of technical skills and experience.

need five years of this and six of that and seven of that. And if they have those things cool, them. that's going to end up blowing up in your face. So you have to really invest in your hiring process to understand these soft skills, which ones are most important to you. And then you have to devise a way and it's hard. It's very difficult to be able to figure that out in a hiring process.

But when you do, when you develop patterns and practices that allow you to figure that out, your team will accelerate faster than you can ever imagine. Because what I found is that when When you stack up a bunch of people like this together, just get out of the freaking way, right? And just let them go. that, I agree a million percent.

My next one is 16, Josh. What's your next? Okay. So the commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong unless proved otherwise. And I think of this, that sounds very militaristic and it is, I mean, that's his leadership journey, the majority of it. ah But I think of it as hierarchy and hierarchical organization pushing down decision-making.

When I've had senior level uh roles, I was listening intently to folks who were in the field, like someone who's in the team writing the code, someone who's a product owner, who's talking to a customer. I mean, I can't tell you, I had a leadership role. was guiding an organization. was collaborating with product. I had all of this responsibility, all of this stuff. But when it came to sort of, you know, who's right, who's wrong or where the decision's coming from, my ears went down.

And it wasn't just, and it wasn't artificial listening. It was deep listening. It was, and I try to, I try to get different voices or different points of view from a team. Does anyone else, does everyone else agree with that? Does someone else see it a different way? And I'm trying to get those in the field or where the rubber meets the road, all of those euphemisms. That's leadership to me. And I've seen the reverse.

I had so many leaders, Josh, you probably not work this way, but leaders are getting in a room. I'm like people who haven't designed a freaking app in 10 years and they're deciding crap in a room or they haven't talked. They've talked to customer execs, but they haven't. They haven't talked to who uses the damn product that they're building, right? Their product owners have, but they're acting like, well, I talked to, you know, the CEO, the blah, blah, blah, blah. And I know what they want.

No, you don't have the humility, have the humility, have the wherewithal to go low. to go low. And what is it that hippo thing or whatever the highest paid person in the org or in the room? Yeah. And that the whole notion of that is the hippo controls the room. No, I would say what's up? What's the reverse? The baby hippo. No, not the not the biggest, fattest person in the room, but the baby hippos or the whatever the worker bees, maybe the worker bees are what you should be listening to.

Yeah, I, this one is on my list as well. And I agree with everything Bob said, but I want to put a slightly different spin on this. So this evoked a feeling of me very similar to the story of the person in the, the, the arena, right? So the story of the person actually out there doing the thing. is living it is trying to do things that others aren't.

But there's a ton of folks that are up in the stands, watching having opinions, talking to each other about what the person in the arena is doing wrong, and how they would do better if they were there. Well, you know what, then get in the freaking arena and make it happen. But don't sit up on the stands and chirp about somebody's doing something wrong without actually getting it done. Right?

This is is the thing that happens a lot, especially when you're pushing the envelope and trying things is there will be people that will be on the outside talking about, that's going to fail. That's going to be a mess. that's not going to work. There's no way that's going to happen. okay, cool. That's fine. You're allowed to think that but that's not going to change the thing that we're doing because we've done everything that Bob just talked about.

There are members of our team that have talked to people doing the work and they have said if you build this we will we will fork over so much money because it will change our lives and we are going to be so much happier. We're going to be able to accomplish more for our customers, which means we can accomplish more.

That's because we've done the work because we've invested just like Bob said, we have the confidence and willingness to go left when there's a whole group of people over there saying, hey, you should go right. But to Bob's point, they are the ones that are living it and have actually talked to the people. So I agree with this. I get fired up about this. But yeah, okay. I'll stop. what's your, do you have any more Josh?

I have number 17 and I bet you have number 18. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. don't we do it this way? Why don't I, I was torn, I'll defer 17 and I'll take 18. talked about number 18 enough, right? We've covered that. So number 18 for everybody, if you haven't clicked on the link that's in the description, it's... 17, have fun in your command. Don't always run at a breakneck pace. Take a leave when you've earned it. Spend time with your families.

Corollary, surround yourself with people who take the work seriously, but not themselves. Those who work hard and play hard. I love it until that last part, the work hard and play hard is one of those things just kind of gives me the willies. I agree with it, that's fine, but I just, that saying drives me crazy. But this is something that is important to me because I've not always been good at this.

This is something that I've had to work really hard at because I have a bit of workaholism and it's a thing where I just, when things go bad, when life gets tough, my answer is put my head down and work harder. And I have not been good enough throughout my career at allowing myself to take a break, take a pause, refresh and recharge. My answer has always been work harder, work faster, do all that stuff. And that has ground me into the ground.

And it has done the same thing for some of my teams and my family at times. So this is one of those things that is very important to me uh because I have to work really hard. to make this happen. And I've seen what happens when I don't do it. And I see what happens when I do make it happen. So it's always at the front of my mind of, hey, slow down, take a step back. It's gonna be okay. The work's not going anywhere. It'll be there tomorrow. You know, all those things that are out there.

So this is the thing that cuts me deep because I've not always been great at it. So this is an important one. that I want to make sure if you made it this far into the podcast that you make sure this is when you take home with you. I mean, I don't think, I think very few leaders are inherently good at this right out of the gate, Josh. I mean, it's, I think it's something that they have to, unfortunately we have to learn. The thing I want to, it's a little different than your spin.

I just want to drill in on the first sentence. Have fun in your command. And so I think one of my superpowers as a leader and don't burst my bubble Josh. So just let me believe this is a super superpower. I have a sense of humor. When the pressure is on, one of my pressure relief is joking. And I almost become more of a smarty pants and irreverent and just finding the fun in things and high fiving with folks and trying to de-stress situation. It's just part of who I am.

And over time, I'm just like, even the toughest job, Have fun with it. Just look for the fun. Create fun. Maybe if you can't find any, then your job is to create the fun. Be an observer. And the fun starts with making fun of yourself. Making fun of you. Not taking myself too seriously. And that's really hard to do when the shit is hitting the fan and the pressure's on or there's bugs in the field and customers yelling. But at the same time, that is a...

That is a phase shift that to get things done, that you can de-stress things. So I don't get flustered with stuff. If I'm joking, you sometimes people misinterpret me, you know, when the stress is really up, I sound almost like a clown to some degree. It's like, do you not care? And I'm like, I certainly care. I grabbed the red nose. So, but in all seriousness, have fun in your command. MediCasters ask yourself, are you having fun? Are you creating fun? Are you the igniter of fun? Right?

Are you the role model of fun, of joy, of happiness? And if you want to scale one, where are you? And then think deeply to yourself, how do I lean into more fun? And it's not just a Bob Galen thing. I think your results, your impact will increase. I've seen so many sour leaders and they get sourer when the pressure's on. Right? It's like, you can, you can tell it's like, you know, I want to take them, put them in a bathroom and just say, in there until you get happier.

You know, come on, relieve yourself. They look awful. And that's not And it's not good for them and it's not good for everyone around them. So really lean into fun. I don't know how to top that. I don't need to top that, right? I think Bob did what Bob does. Bob nailed it. I think the fork has been stuck. And Medicare is a final final forkage is that command is lonely thing.

Go back and review some of our older episodes when we done have talked about that because it is a thing and it's a real thing and it's central to your leadership. And the better you are at it, the more lonely it is. Amen brother, right? So it's hard. It's a real challenge and it's a personal challenge. It's not so much an outside challenges. It's an inside out challenge for you. And it's one that you have to come to grips with.

with that, hope Colin Powell, let's have a moment of silence for the great general and statesman, Colin Powell. Five seconds. He was a great man. All right, Metacasters, from beautiful downtown Cary, North Carolina. know, I feel bad because I couldn't do that without a smile on my face. We're trying to honor somebody. I could just, just because we go back to the fun of Bob, right? The fun of Bob. I'm sitting there and like, what a jerk I am. I'm trying to, trying to be quiet.

got a smirk on my face. Cause I'm laughing about Bob in my brain. Oh my gosh. Okay. So yes. Okay. So from So, so for beautiful down that carry North Carolina. And for beautiful downtown Fuqua Verena, North Carolina. I'm Bob the Hitman Galen. And I'm Josh the anvil Anderson. Fake. Oh, gosh.