Sean Lane 0:02
Today's episode is sponsored by the DevOps experts at full cast with me is their Head of Customer Success. Tyler Simon's Hey Tyler, revenue efficiency, sales productivity are everything today. How does full castes go to market planning platform help Reb ops teams achieve these types of goals.
Tyler Simons 0:19
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Sean Lane 0:32
That sounds great. I do a lot of that planning and spreadsheets today. And I'm pretty happy with my spreadsheets. How is full cast any better than that? You
Tyler Simons 0:41
must get rid of the spreadsheets because spreadsheets create lag and errors with forecasts planning and updating happen automatically, all in one place. Best of all, it automates all common headache inducing planning activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So when you're faced with those go to market plan changes which you know what they happen all the time forecast has your back. Alright,
Sean Lane 1:09
you got me convinced? Where do I learn more about forecast? Our
Tyler Simons 1:12
website forecast.io.
Sean Lane 1:28
Hey, everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we live under the hood of companies and hypergrowth. My name is Sean lane. When you stop and think about it, it's pretty crazy that our entire mindset around work, where we work, how we work, what our work means to us, has been completely challenged in just a few short years. Things that people took as truth for decades was suddenly called into question and for some of us completely inverted. And now it looks like we find ourselves again, in a debate about the future of work. Do we go back to offices are remote or hybrid teams less effective? Will employees revolt if companies try? Luckily, these questions aren't for me. But for our amazing guest Denise Thomas. Denise is the CEO of Cisco Meraki, the cloud IT solutions company. If I'm being honest, I'm kind of sick of the typical in office versus remote debates. But this is not your typical post pandemic remote work conversation. Thanks, Denise. This conversation will make you think and it might even make you question how you think about work itself. In our conversation Denise and I tackle what we got better at and what we got worse at during the pandemic. We cover how her HR background makes her a better CEO today, and why teams not leaders are the units of movement in organizations. To start though, I asked the nice to set the stage for us on what work looks like at Cisco Meraki. Today,
Denise Thomas 2:58
it's hard to talk about how we're working today without kind of reflecting on how we used to work and maybe talking about the Delta in between. But before the pandemic, outside of our field sellers and folks that kind of were working with our customers on site, we were very much in office culture, it was kind of laughable, we were having a huge leadership discussion around can people work from home one day, and it was a it took like a month and James to have the conversation and to land on something, then the pandemic happened then we were all home every single day. And so how Cisco has come back to work is allowing for folks to work in a hybrid fashion in a way that works for them. So leaders really have a lot of autonomy and decision around kind of what works for their teams. And that's kind of how we have come back to work. So when we think about our offices that we tend to see like a lot of folks in and more folks in in the middle of the week. And then let's focus in on the edges of the week, which is probably not that surprising, because I think what we're doing is driving folks back into the office to collaborate in the middle of the week, and they're seeing some value out of that. And then, you know, doing individual work on the book ends of the week. So that's kind of how we're working now. And it's not without its challenges, right. Like, I think there was something, there was an ease in which we worked before when we were all just sitting there looking at each other and able to make decisions quickly, especially when you're running in an organization that runs really quickly. And then when we transition to this way of working, we had to take a step back and say how are we sharing information? Are we doing it in a way that allows you know all the people to be in the room at the right time? Are we really thoughtful about the conversations that we have? Because it's not like you can kind of immediately go back and correct yourself, especially when the meeting is over. Right? Like it's a far more thoughtful and deliberate way of working when you have to work in a hybrid fashion than when you can rely on so those collisions that you sometimes have when you're sharing space with others. So I think we're working in a more deliberate way now than maybe we had been working in the past. I
Sean Lane 5:07
think, you know, to your point, we I think everybody was nervous right at the beginning was like, Well, how can we possibly do this? And I think we all learned pretty quickly that we could. But I think your point about having to be thoughtful and deliberate, I think is probably pretty interesting. Because if you're not, then it can be a step backwards, right, in terms of how you work. And so how did you and your role kind of go about helping people to be thoughtful and deliberate? Because it was new for most people? Yeah,
Denise Thomas 5:36
I think it started hard for everyone. Right? Like we had expected, oh, we're just gonna be gone for a few weeks. And, you know, folks, like grab some stuff from their desks, and they went home and everyone had a computer, thankfully, except for those folks that were on PTO that left their computer, they obviously had to figure that out. But I don't think we got clicked to the adjustment fast enough, right, because I think we were all still having this moment of hope that the precautions that we were taking across the globe, were going to make it so that way, we could kind of return to a normal, everyone except for the scientist, of course, but we could return to a normal within a short period of time. So I think people were kind of waiting before they changed the rituals around how they worked, and kind of how they were going to move their business forward, given the environment that we were in. But I think one of the first things that we did was think about the cadence that we had around communicating with our team. So we had a good cadence before sort of coming back to the team and having all hands and things of that nature. But we had to really think about like, well, what are we talking about all muzzle all hands, because all of a sudden, you were in a situation where the wrongness of people's experience was showing up in your workplace. And so I think the thing that we learned about our employees after we got sort of into the pandemic was, what great compartmentalizes they were jugglers, they were the depth of what was going on in their lives that were that was always having an impact on their ability to show up to do their job well, or was challenging their ability to do their jobs. Well, we got to learn about our employees and the ways their preferred ways of working, right. So we sent folks home and some of them were like, super psyched. They're like, Oh, I've been waiting for this my entire life. I love working in this way. And then other folks were like, wow, this is really hard for me both professionally and personally, because I'm a person that really likes to be with others when I'm doing my work. So we had to kind of think about even our communication differently, because what we knew about our employees was now really different, we spent a lot more time talking about mental health, he spends a lot more time talking about how to make sure that you are accessing the resources that you really needed in order to bring some level of sanity or some level of care to your own personal life. And it's not like we tend to talk about those things in the past, but we would kind of like it to be like, Okay, here's this thing. And then here are the resources, and we're gone. But we sat in those conversations a lot deeper and a lot longer. And I think that was one of the things that we had to shift in how we were working as a team, or how we were leading a team is that we had to think about our communication strategies differently, frequency duration, type of communications. And then we thought more about the topics that we were bringing to the team. And we wanted to make sure that they were relevant and reflective of the experience that our employees were having. So there was a communication strategy that was different. I think we started to lean on some of those things that we had been flirting with, in some instances, like how do you better plan with your team? Oh, that became real important when you weren't sort of seeing each other. Yeah. And I remember, I had the gift, I guess, of having a new job, the first thing I did was send people home. So I had a team that I never I didn't sit in a room with for like almost two years. And even just that first set of meetings that we had about kind of our team and the direction we were going in, we're virtual, and we had to kind of build relationship and trust in that environment. And it took longer. And when I think about how I would have loved to have had it happen if we didn't have those constraints. So we had to think about our rituals as teams differently. How do we connect? How do we make sure that when we go to talk about the business, we're setting aside the time to do so. But we're doing it in ways that are consumable for folks that are sitting in front of a screen, right? Like we used to have these offsets for three or four days, we just kind of get together and be in rooms and go to dinner breaks and all that stuff. If you try to do that virtually what you realize is like after about like an hour or two people are kind of done. So like how do you even take something that is routine in your organization and turn it into getting to the same outcomes but maybe just doing it in a different way. So same thing. I think the team started to think through well, like, how do you do that kind of stuff? How do you use collaboration tools like Miro, to be able to have a conversation where people can feel engaged and can do brainstorming in a different way when you can't be in the room together. So there was a lot that had to change. And some of it was around communications. And some of it was like really reshaping the rituals. And then some of it was like, Well, what tools are we using in order to make people feel effective? And how do we start to lean into some of these collaboration tools differently, in order for us to continue to drive the business forward?
Sean Lane 10:38
It's interesting to have a conversation like this with a bit more distance between now and what was the height of the pandemic. I don't know about you, but I'm able to reflect on it in a much more constructive way now than I would have even been able to a year ago. And what Denise is saying is that first and foremost, you have to acknowledge how hard it was for everyone. She and her team had to rethink routines, rituals, methods of communication, methods of collaboration. But the thing that she said that stuck out to me the most was this realization that also during that time, what we knew about our colleagues changed quite a bit too. Even if you were incredibly thoughtful and mindful of the lives that people were leading outside of the office, seeing someone's kids or pets, run through the background of your WebEx or a zoom call, really makes those lives more real. And I think that's for the better. What I take away from Denise's comments is that this time actually forced all of us to become better leaders. So does she think so too.
Denise Thomas 11:39
I have a personal philosophy that I hope that every single day we get better at leadership, right? So like, we have experiences and those experiences, hopefully give us a feedback loop that says, Hey, did I do that right? Or can I do that better, or whatever. But I think you're right, the trajectory of growth was different. I think folks had to get better faster, or make those improvements faster, in order for their teams to stay with them, as we tried to do this new thing, or tried to do something hard in a different way. I do think, though, that there is this idea, sometimes when you look at teams, that the most important person in that is the leader. And what I think I noticed during the pandemic is how teams got better. Like without the consideration of the leader, I mean, the leader is hopeful. And I don't want this to then end up being like she said, leaders don't. That's not it at all. But when I think about the messaging that you hear within a corporation, and it is always like that, leaders, leaders, leaders, leaders, do those leaders do that leaders do those other living, but like they're really, leaders are the curators of an experience, right. And if we're doing it, right, it's about people beginning to make those connections with each other. It's about people deeply investing in the team. It's about people feeling like, I'm surrounded by folks that share my values. It's about people making those intimate connections, it's about people having clarity of direction, it is about the team. And the leader, I always think is a little bit of a facilitator of that team. But it's not the like, a leader isn't the most important component of it. The team is and what I saw during the pandemic, is the team stepping up to be a better team, right? Like people taking the time to say, Hey, how are you doing? How's that going with you? Now granted, the leader has to make that okay to do by modeling that behavior by creating the space for those informal connections to happen by making sure that direction is clear, all that good stuff. But the power of driving to outcome is the team. Yeah. And when you look at where businesses tend to fail, is the ability to get the mass of the people in the middle of the organization to move or to believe or to dare to be different. And I think that powerful unit of movement when you get there is around team. And so when I go into something, I'm always asking myself the question, what's the team? Is it these 20 VPS? Or these 10 directors? Or is it these three individual contributors that have to really believe in the direction and be committed to and in order for us to drive the change that we need to have? And then we go to focus on that unit of team and it is where things move? It does require some level of skill in leaders. I just don't think it requires perfect leadership.
Sean Lane 14:45
I told you this conversation was going to make you question things. This distinction between leadership and teams, or more broadly between a company and its individual people is incredibly thought provoking. And while Denise acknowledges that leaders need to be skilled facilitators of teams, the unit, the movement, the organism, that is that the team is actually what she has seen improve. And I love this distinction because everyone's knee jerk reaction is often well, the company didn't communicate this well, or the company didn't do that well, or our culture isn't great. But she's putting the onus on all of us to move things forward and improve. And to me, that's not passing the buck. It's empowering. So with that lens in mind, we arrive at the question that every company is asking right now, what's next for how we work? Back in 2020, there was a massive upheaval, and it said about a lot of questions and decisions about how we work. And it seems like that debate is raging again, only in the opposite direction. For Denise as the person who had to tell everyone to go home back in 2020. I wonder what she's saying now to her teams that Cisco Meraki how i
Denise Thomas 15:58
i personally have been thinking about it. And the words that I think I have been using when I've been talking to folks is, what are we trying to do and what are we optimizing for. And there is this general sentiment, sometimes it says, If you optimize 100% of the time for the people in your organization, their individual needs, and whatever, you get the best work out of those folks, they feel connected, engaged, and you get better business outcomes as a result. I'm not sure if I buy that all the way. And here's the reason why. I have two kids. And they're small ones, I guess, between and the other ones in elementary school. And if I was optimizing for my role as a mother, and it's a wife, and all of those things, they'd never go to the office. Right? I live really close to my kids school, I would be able to pop in there every single time and to be able to be with them in these moments that really matter to them. Now, I try to do that as much as possible. But if you asked me what would make me feel most fulfilled in my life, based on the hierarchy of importance of the things that I do, and sort of being a parent being at the top of that, I would optimize for that every single time if given the opportunity to choose, I happen to have a job. So and my job is about trying to make sure that we get to our business outcomes. And occasionally, in order to do that I have to optimize for the team. I think it's important to optimize for the team when things are really hard, or we're starting something new, or we're sitting in an ambiguous situation that maybe requires a bit more energy than the regular run the business motions. And that balance between an individual in this equation being able to optimize for themselves. And that same individual, recognizing that the business and the team is in a moment where they may need to optimize for the team. And that is kind of the balance that I'm trying to think about. When we think about when teams come in what they come in to do, and what drives them to want to be together. I don't know, like I think we have to leave this idea behind, at least in my perspective, I can't, in my mind make it work yet. That if I'm optimizing for myself every single day, that that is going to be the right outcomes for our business. I guess in Texas, we felt like that dog don't count, at least not in my head. So maybe other people have better ideas around it. But I think it's different. And so when we are asking people to come back in the best possible way, what we are doing, what we should be doing is sharing why optimizing for the team in the activities that we are doing really better. And so that way people when they're making that decision to say, hey, maybe it would have been better for me to work from home today. Or it would have been better for me to do XYZ, they can sort of do that calculus that many of us are doing every single day when they when we're trying to integrate our lives, whether it's we're getting play and all that stuff, we're making those decisions and saying, Hey, sometimes I'm gonna give in this way. And other times, I'm gonna give them the other way. But the collection of those times, those decisions allow me to be successful in multiple parts of my life. And that's the different balance that we need to be able to get to. So I know there's a camp of folks that say anyone that asks anyone to come back into the office two days over, you're crazy, and then nobody's gonna do that, whatever. But I think if organizations can truly articulate the power that happens with togetherness, and have these clear understanding of value, and coming together in person, then I think they have to do those things in order to do the right thing by their business and their customers. But it's got to be meaningful and it's got to be right. And
Sean Lane 19:52
something I think that maybe was true before and whether we realize it or not was like that sense of community or that sense of optimizing for the company was kind of built in, right? Because like, you were already there, and you might not have recognized that about yourself. But one of the reasons you went every day was because, yeah, you got a paycheck and everything like that. But you also, were contributing to the advancement or growth or whatever of that particular company. One of the things I think about now is in trying to make that compelling argument that you're making to help people balance optimizing for themselves and for the company or the team is things are getting hard right now, right? Like, the economy is rough. It's particularly if you're in tech and you sell the tech things are difficult right now. And so I feel like it's hard to make that compelling, optimized for the team for the outcomes, when the outcomes might not be what people have been used to. How do we think
Denise Thomas 20:51
about that? This is a really great point. Because here's kind of how you could go crazy with this, you can say, like you just described, it's really hard. If it's really hard, everybody's gonna come in, we got to be in the room, looking at each other to try to figure out what the answers are. Right? And that's, in my opinion, the wrong answer as well, right? I think in a moment like this, we have to be asking ourselves hard questions about our business, right. So if you sell it like we do, and we sell to the IT buyer, this is not the moment where the it buyer is flush with budget. And that's just the reality of the situation. At the beginning of the pandemic, when people were trying to solve for hybrid warfare, and all of that stuff. I think, folks were running around to try to say, hey, I need the infrastructure that I need. And people started to get on this digital journey and the IT budgets grew. And you know, you kind of see it, people bought things, and now they're buying less. And I think what this gives us as a business is an opportunity to ask real different questions about our relationship with our customers. So how are they adopting our products? How are they really extracting all of the value of the technology that they bought? How are we being a trusted partner to them? And what are the ways that we can evaluate that impact differently than maybe the focus that we had before? And I think coming out of the pandemic, I think we have a better scorecard, especially in fast growing businesses where that scorecard might have just been okay, well, what's your arr? Growth? What are those sorts of measures that say you're going up and to the right and an accelerated path, that path, but in moments like this, you can really take a step back and say, what is the impact that I'm having with the relationship that I'm building with my customers? What am I doing to deepen that relationship? How am I seeing what I bring to the equation really being a part, an integral part about how they run their businesses, it's given us an opportunity to really rethink our relationship with our partners, like how do we help them be in different business models that change kind of the value that they can bring to their partners and their end customers. So in moments like this, where the old growth company metrics start to feel demotivating, and especially if you're sort of in that beginning of your journey, as a company, the motivation of your team is one of the most important levers that you have for future success, like folks have to keep believing that the thing that you're going to do is going to change the industry that you're trying to be in or whatever you got to you just like shift the focus in ways that start bringing you back to customer centricity start bringing you back to this idea of customer engagement and relationship. And there's always something you can do in there. Even if somebody's not going to buy something new, you can tune in their willingness to adopt. And then if you do that, like when the budgets come back, you have a very different trajectory coming out of that moment, because you have now become indispensable to the way that they run their business when their business isn't doing well, and have an opportunity to ride that curve on the way out of it. And so I think that's kind of how I would think about it. So then when you think about well, what am I coming back into the office to talk about? Yeah, you may not be coming back into the office to talk about how are you going to throw this particular financial metric, but you might be coming back into the office to talk about what's stopping our customers for feeling like they can really extract all of the value, what type of programs and projects should we be putting into our strategic priorities in order to be able to show some growth in those areas as a part of our operating metrics? Where can we be more efficient? So that way, when we come out of this, we end up running a business that is a lot better from an operating metric perspective, I think that there are other things that you can come back to the office to talk about, even in moments where the thing that you want to solve feels a little bit further away. Don't get me wrong, we're still trying to chase every single day. Work is what we do. But you gotta sometimes figure out what do you do in moments like this that doesn't make people walk away and go, there's nothing for me to do here. There's no other way that I can drive value, because there's tons of stuff we can always do to tune a business.
Sean Lane 25:15
I think one of the biggest things I'll take away from my conversation with Denise is that this is a really good moment to take a hard look at and to question your pre existing motivations and your notions about work. First, like she said, if you're just choosing to purely optimize for yourself every single day, of course, we'd all rather spend time with our families or our kids or our friends than be at work. But there's a balance, we have to try to strike if you also want to be a meaningful contributor to the community of your business or the outcomes of your business. optimizing for just one part of your life all the time, isn't going to leave room for results anywhere else. And second, if you're someone that's purely motivated by the traditional growth metrics that we've enjoyed the last few years, you need to seek out meaning and motivation elsewhere. I personally have struggled with this. It's hard. But the nice just gave us a bunch of places where you can make progress happen if you're willing to look. This episode is sponsored by fool cast, the company that helps operators build better sales territories, their platform focuses the right sellers on the right opportunities, making them unstoppable. And the cherry on top forecast automates common go to market activities like territory, rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So the plan is always in sync with operations. With forecast, say goodbye to go to market planning headaches, and hello to your own personal planning assistant. Learn more about full cast today by visiting full cast.io. Okay, let's get back to the nice. Before the break, Denise challenged me to think about this dichotomy between the company and the individual. And her explanation got me thinking about the responsibilities of each group. Now, a lot of the nieces background prior to becoming the CEO o came from HR or people related roles. So she's uniquely positioned to teach us something in this conversation. And Denise, of course, pointed me back to the same unit she's been pointing to all along
Denise Thomas 27:26
the team. I think if you come back to this concept of team, and if you sit in this concept of team, that's where the balance between company and individual really kind of works itself out. I think that's why I'm always like, Okay, how is the team doing? Because that's the unit of action to me. And that's kind of when people are deciding, do I lean all the way in and make sure my team can be successful? Or what am I holding back? And so if we can kind of get that right, that that is the focus, as opposed to the company wants people to come back? Yeah, I think it's like the team needs to decide how the team can better deliver outcomes, and how the team can really balance the need for the individuals within the team and the larger objectives that the team has to deliver. And so if we stop thinking about it as a company, and we start thinking about it as a team, just even those words, I think change how people decide to trade in and out of those decisions.
Sean Lane 28:33
You basically said, like, look, this is a business problem and a people problem, right? And you could argue that both of them are interchangeable, and one of the same no matter what, right. But I think that's what's interesting, just from talking to you about the business side of what you're currently facing, and the fact that you have this HR people background that you bring to this business CEO role that you have now, do you think that that HR background in that experience is helping to make you a better CEO now, as you have to balance these business and people problems?
Denise Thomas 29:08
Well, better? I don't know. You'll have to ask the people that work with here. Here's, here's kinda how I, when I walk into a hard problem. Most times, I think the thing that I'm noticing is that we have some kind of people problem we have sometimes hurt feelings. We have people like talking across each other. You have fundamental beliefs, what I like to call religions that people have built up over the course of years based on experiences that they've had, they are sitting in those religions, which make it hard for them to even see the problem in the same way, much less of a solution. We haven't even gotten to that. And when I'm thinking about like the thorniest things that we're trying to work through inside of enterprise networking for Cisco something because that's what I think I'm looking at. I'm like, Oh, you see the world one way, and this other person sees the world the other way. And before we even get to solutioning, we've got to get everyone to a view of the world where there's some shared understanding and some shared assumptions. And what being an HR business partner did for me, is to take some of the natural tendencies that I have to start with some questions. But there is a practice for folks that are really good at this job, the HR business partner job, there is a practice around listening, that helps move leader sometimes to better versions of themselves helps move team dynamics to better team outcomes, because you pay more attention to what people are saying, and sometimes not saying, and you have to ask questions, because it allows him to sit in a situation where you're not a subject matter expert on the technology problem that they're trying to solve where you're not, you know, that's not how you get to show up in a conversation, you have to show up in a conversation to say, hey, what's stopping folks from being able to do the thing that they really shouldn't be doing what they really want to be doing? And like, what are the types of things that they need to talk about? or unlock in order to get there? And maybe that's a part of the sauce, if you will, because a lot of times when I'm sitting there, and people are like, Oh, this is a prioritization problem. Like, is it though, it's really like if we just did the ROI, and I'm like, Oh, really, I believe, let's pull out the ROI. Because I think we've already done them. And we still don't have the sentence here. And I think we want to think of ourselves as highly objective, rational, data driven, you know, like, that's the story we tell ourselves and all these books about high performing teams and organizations. But at the end of the day, we're just people, sometimes trying to do something that feels hard with folks that we may not know everything about where we may have some preconceived notions of which make it hard to just come to the table and do something together. And if we just take a moment to acknowledge that when we go to work together, I think it helps us get to our business outcomes faster. Like, our staff meetings are crazy. We start with a checking question that's like, what kind of socks do you wear? I get it. And it's, it's more because I just think that there is something fundamental about that human connection that when you turn around to try to do something different or hard, it gets easier. Yeah.
Sean Lane 32:39
Do you think that those thorny situations or those kind of missed understandings have been magnified or exacerbated by the hybrid environment?
Denise Thomas 32:51
That's a great question. In some instances, yes. Especially if you don't have any sort of working relationship with the individual before, right. What you see is kind of how they present themselves. And WebEx, for instance. And there's a lot going on in a WebEx interaction that has nothing to do with whether this person is having a positive or negative reaction with what you're saying, right? Did
Sean Lane 33:17
they have before can even see them? If you can even see them?
Denise Thomas 33:20
Do they have a workspace that's conducive to having the type of focus that is required sometimes to have these conversations? And to your point? Are they like me like I am bit of an introvert. So after about four hours WebEx is and kind of cooked I have to take like a little bit of a break, I take one meeting or so without it on or you know, I need something in order to kind of recharge and come back at it again. Like if you don't know me, and I show up to a meeting and I don't turn on my camera. And I don't take a moment to say, Hey, I needed a moment or I'm having lunch. And it'll be easier for me at least if I don't does that work for you? If you don't do those things, which I don't think are the defaults that we have, and work environments. And that person walks away and says, Oh, does she not care about this problem? Is she even paying attention to me or she I don't know, doing her laundry or whatever. I mean, like people kind of make stories up about what's really going on. So because we are human and working together, unfortunately, until we have those chips implanted in our heads is still a human, still a human endeavor. I do think that not being able to maybe share space with someone and to be able to take in everything about them sometimes makes it harder. So that's one side of the equation. Now, the other thing that I will say is being in a hybrid environment has made us far more conscious about the different needs that people have in order to participate. Right. I think about all of the leaps and bounds and accessibility that have happened Over the course of the pandemic, because maybe someone needs to be able to read lips, in order to work really well in their work environment, I turn off my camera that doesn't really work for them. But transcripts inside of WebEx do like could be helpful to someone. So I think hybrid has made some aspects of building relationship harder. But it has also forced us to get to a place to think about what do different individuals need in order to feel like they can show up and be their best and forced a lot of companies to move on that journey to deliver those things a lot faster. I don't know, maybe I'm, again, there's something intangible about spending time and space with folks. Yeah, that I think is hard to get away from as much as we'd like to think that that we can. But I think that's
Sean Lane 36:06
an optimistic way to look at it, though, too. For every one of these challenges, that hybrid remote, whatever environment might present, it also, probably is teaching us something that we wouldn't have otherwise had an appreciation for, right. And I think we probably all got better off as a result of that. But you have to be willing to take that step, right. If you just assume like Denise's camera's off again, today, like she must be not be paying attention. Like she doesn't care about my presentation. Like, if that's gonna be your assumption, then it's never gonna get better, right? And the team is experienced, never gonna get better. But I think if you can cross that bridge between, Okay, I gotta figure out how to best work with this person or have a better understanding of how they work, why they work the way they do. If you go in, I think with that type of mindset and open mind, then then the sky's the limit.
Denise Thomas 36:52
Yeah, this experience hopefully makes us better on all fronts. I don't know, I feel like the pandemic has improved my capabilities as a human. Just to your point, you can get in a habit of working and going so fast that you're not stopping to really pay attention to, you know, the folks that are coming along with you on that journey, this experience that we've just come through, forced us to do that. And if we can learn from that, we can take a piece of that and take it back to Excel, you know, it's velocity with thoughtfulness and care. Imagine the better companies that we will build if we can not only move fast, but we can be thoughtful about how we bring people along on that birth journey. Right. So I think there's a and there that I have been really excited about both personally for me, and then for our business, I even think about how we show up as a leadership team far more authentic than we did before. And we thought we were sitting in a high level of authenticity, right? Like, come as you are, and never wear fancy clothes. You know, we were like, look at how authentic we are. But, you know, we've had to sit in some real conversations about our tea. We've had folks that worked in our building and helped to support our team pass away as a part of the pandemic. That's a very different experience for a team, right? We've had to think about being in people's homes and learning about their families in ways that didn't always make everyone feel comfortable. That was something that we had to go through as a team. And what I'm hoping has happened is that as leaders and as team members, we can manifest experience with a higher self awareness around what we need, and a higher awareness of what others need. And I'm hoping also a much more engaged relationship with our customers because we've kind of navigated this moment with them. And that depth of intimacy of self and team and business got it should make us better companies coming out of this if we're willing to learn from the experience.
Sean Lane 39:17
Before we go at the end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready. There we go. Best book you've read in the last six months?
Denise Thomas 39:27
That's a good question. I'm reading a book right now scaling people. I don't know if you've seen that one by CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON. And
Sean Lane 39:35
oh, there you go. Within arm's reach. Denise
Denise Thomas 39:39
Yeah, within arm's reach. And what I have, I read a lot of books. I'm in like two book clubs. I'm like a crazy person. But what I really enjoy about this book right now for me is that I'm thinking about new operating motions for our business, and it's giving me a good like Hey, let me lay out ours, let me think about what Claire's saying based on the experiences that she's had. And where is it that we should be tuning and it's just been such a great, I don't know, she says not to read it from front to back, but I'm like, I'm gonna go for that this time, and then maybe come back to in a different way. But that has been great. I think
Sean Lane 40:18
thought starter is probably the right descriptor, right? It's like, that's exactly what it is, I just, it forces you to look in the mirror a little bit. So, okay, favorite part about working in OPS, connections,
Denise Thomas 40:30
connections, connections, right? Like you sit in the middle of a business. And if you do this, right, you should not be a silo thinker when you're dumb. Because you have to operate in the middle, you operate in the adjacencies. And when you operate in the adjacencies, it's incredibly fascinating, because you get to learn so much about the business. And then you have these aha moments where you see those connections that are hard for other people to see, because they're so focused on their functional area. And I think there's a lot of value that an operations team can drive to a business by virtue of having that type of understanding and breadth of understanding of how the business operates.
Sean Lane 41:09
All right, Flipside least favorite part about working in OPS, probably that
Denise Thomas 41:13
too. I'm sure most of your guests say that like thing that they love is really hard. Because we see so many opportunities, you've got to really hold yourself accountable to the priorities of the business, there are tons of things I would love to change every single day, there are tons of ways I'd love to save money for the business and the team. But there's a hierarchy of needs. And there's a prioritization motion that really puts our customers and employees at the center. And we have to solve those problems first. So I'm a person that doesn't like to leave some stuff not addressed. And so that feels hard to hold myself to some discipline around prioritization and attacking the things that matter
Sean Lane 42:00
most. When you figure that out, we'll have you back, we can do a whole nother episode.
Denise Thomas 42:06
Read a book together.
Sean Lane 42:09
Someone who impacted you getting to the job you have today.
Denise Thomas 42:12
Oh, can I answer it? Someone's is that unfair? You're gonna make? Yes. Okay. So I have a leadership mentor, who actually just recently passed away and his name was milking. And very early in my career, he was a community activist ended up being a professor at MIT and a bunch of other things in between, he asked me to really think about the impact that I wanted to have, not just on my life, but on the life of others. And I've kind of taken that with me throughout my career. And I think my move to leadership and thinking about the types of teams that I wanted to work with, and the size of teams that I wanted to work with, was really always a function of now asking, like, in the back of my mind, and always hearing him like, well, what's the impact you want to have on others? And so there's like a leadership guidepost, if you will, where, where he's concerned. And then I had an amazing boss, whose name is Todd Nightingale. And he took the time to really ask me what I wanted out of my career, and then was really helpful in making sure that I could get there, say, Hey, I have some work that might be aligned with helping you gain that skill set that you think that you're looking for. And so like, when you have when you have a boss that will ask you what your aspirations are going to put you in the grave? What are the things that would make you feel like, I'm so glad I did that. And then going through it and saying, I don't know if I can help you with this, but maybe I can help you with these things, and really committing like, there were times when I was like, I think I'm gonna leave. And he's like, okay, great. I want to do, and I be like, Oh, I think it's this. And he's like, Okay, go, go take a look at that. And he took, like, I met with CEOs, when I was thinking about being the head of people that other companies, and he took the calls. And he not only gave them feedback about me, but then he would come back and say, here's what I think about this person. And here's where I think you all will work really well together. And here's where I think you might be challenged, like to really have someone in your corner that really is thinking about you, and the skills that you have is kind of amazing. And so I'm pretty thankful for having spent some time working with them.
Sean Lane 44:13
That is amazing. All right. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday.
Denise Thomas 44:18
I guess there's like a whole thing about curiosity to me, I think folks that want this job. sometimes think that like the power of this job is that default action and Solutioning solution and Solutioning and efficiency and efficiency. And yes, that is important. But the most important part of this job is a willingness to be curious, ask a few questions, and then just shut up and listen, and really try to understand the problem that people are trying to solve before you show up believing that you have an answer for that solution. And I think it is hard for folks who think that this is the job that they want because they want to be able to drive drive drive and sometimes the most important thing that we can do as operations leaders is to ask some questions. And listen, make sure the problem is clear and then act. And I see that in myself when I see that and others and if we can kind of curb that I think we can all be better at driving to that gap between strategy and execution.
Sean Lane 45:25
Thank you so much to Denise for joining us on this week's episode of operations and thanks to Kinsey, Courtney Leila and Stephanie for all their work to help make the conversation happen. If you liked what you heard from Denise today, or from any of our episodes, make sure you are subscribe to our show. So you get a new episode drops every other Friday. Also, if you learned something, make sure you leave us a review six star reviews only. Alright, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
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