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a minute as opposed to react to it, there's always a feedback mechanism in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer, you're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment and if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward. Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the Engineering Leadership Community. I'm Jeremy, founder of ELC and I'm Patrick Gallagher and we're
your host. Our show shares the most critical perspectives habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. This week we've got something special for you. We revisit one of our favorite episodes from the podcast archives featuring Wade Chambers, CTO and SVP of engineering at included health. This conversation is all about how to get unstuck and move your career forward.
We cover a ton of things like tools for increasing your capacity to win as an engineering leader. We get into how to apply conscious growth and neuroplasticity principles to your career growth. We'd even share stories of zone success and failure as an engineering manager. We get into best practices for how you measure success and progress in your own career and how to increase your team's performance and potential. Let me introduce you to Wade.
Wade is over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Twitter, Telepart, Yahoo, Proofpoint and Offsware. Wade is on a mission to unlock human potential through work. He's been a long time friend of the community speaking at several of our past events and conferences. In fact, Wade will actually be joining us as one of our featured speakers at ELC annual
2024. If you haven't heard that, it's our two day conference happening on August 27th and 28th. If you know Wade, then you know this will be extremely thoughtful and extremely actionable. It will be an incredible session. If you like this conversation, then I promise you you will love going to Wade's session at ELC annual. Enjoy this conversation with Wade Chambers. It's so excited to have you come for our show. You and I have been
knowing for a few years. You spoke at our events multiple times and every single one is very popular. I think this is a great opportunity for us to dab deeper into your story and also all the frameworks and approaches that other people can borrow from to help developing themselves and their teams. What makes you such a great leader? What's your story? What's the magic?
I don't know that there's magic, so to speak. I think it is the constantly making mistakes and being vulnerable around that and not trying to be perfect, but also constantly wanting to be better and wanting to accomplish more and knowing that's not me. It's the people that I work with and how we're able to focus on the same things, have a common way of getting there, and then enjoying ourselves as we go through it. I think the more that you invest in the people around you,
the more that people want to pay it back as well. I love conversations like this and the presentations that we've done because it feels like as I've come up through the ranks, it's not like there's been an abundance of people that can help both give feedback as you go through it as well as help you understand the underlying principles behind something. As a result, you learn by watching other people and go, wow, that was really dumb. That was really shitty. I don't want to do that. That was kind
of smart. I want to do that. You have to have those experiences and learn from them as opposed to, if I could just understand this at a slightly elevated level, I could go through it a lot more effectively and efficiently. I think if you can approach the world that way and try and pay it forward and help others out, people want to be around, folks that will invest in them.
One thing I have been repeatedly feel impressed when talking to you is how deep you think and how softball you are about the approaches and methodology you use and also the understanding of the human interaction, behaviors and even anthropology, like understanding the history of a organization. When you just started as a manager, were you so conscious about those or how do you form a habit of
digging deep? Because the Monarchs Poetry have, in terms of experiences, is limited and also random, but if we can go deep, then it's bigger than 10 as you can learn something more profoundly. Yeah, just a little bit of background around me came up in an extremely humble environment. No silver spoon for me or anything along those lines. Matter of fact, I didn't even go to college. I knew my parents weren't going to be able to afford it and therefore I needed to learn a lot on my own.
And so early on, there's no assumption that I am God's gift to something. Matter of fact, if anything, I'd better understand and learn from others if I wanted to dig my way out of where I was at and move forward. And so it put me on that path of curious, how does this work? I was very lucky early on to work with some amazing, amazing people. Even before I got into tech, I worked at the White House way back under Ronald Reagan and Bush senior and Colin Powell. And when you watch
those people engage with others, it's inspiring. Ronald Reagan had the ability to make you feel like his best friend within seconds. And Colin Powell was built very much the same way, right? Like it was just the insight and the depth. But if you talk to them, you were just as likely to talk about barbecue as you was world policy. And so it made me feel that they were human and if they could do something, then other people could too. And it was just like figuring out the path to be able to
get there. And so very early on, it all felt random. It felt like, well, they went to a better school or maybe they were just hungry or do they have grit or work ethic or any of those things. But like what I found is that over time, you know, it wasn't just that. It was a lot of other things that sort of contributed to making them great leaders. And so it made me want to dig deeper. And the more that you look for it and the more that you're just not trying to build up your ego or
look smart, but like you're actually looking for ground truth. It's pretty readily available. I still find it amazing still to this day that somebody can do 30 years of research, spend 18 to 24 months writing it all down and editing it. And I can buy it for 1299, right? So the ability to have access to some of the best thinkers in the world and be able to understand their history and all of the research that they put into it. It's there. You just have to go out and actually
consume it. Now applying it's a very different thing, right? And it took me a while to get to the point of where I could effectively apply it. I went deep because I had to, but I've always had that sense of, well, I can remember my mom when I was like 12, I was tearing apart radios so I could figure out how to run speakers to other parts of my bedroom and wire them up. And she was like, why are you taking apart a perfectly good radio? Because I needed to. And the access you had
early on to have those role models. And that triggers you to that deep and also being inspired. Yeah. I think that's very lucky. I was just very fortunate to be able to have that experience. When I fast-forted to being an engineer, like I had to learn a lot that way, my first time being an engineering manager, having access to those inspiring people did not help me. I was horrible
as an engineering manager the first time through. I think I made every classic mistake. And I didn't realize that the skills that made me a really good engineer at the time did not translate to making me a very good manager at the time. And that has been a long time sort of learning from others and figuring out cause and effect. You share one of those examples. The feeders you first started as a manager. Let's go there. This is going to make me cringe just how bad I was. It was the very
first company that I ever IPO'd with at that point in time. And I was a fairly good engineer. Think of me as being, you know, a staff level tech lead, driving key projects, designing new things. But I had that desire to help projects move forward. And the CEO comes to me one day and he's like, you know, Wade, you should be a manager. I'm inspired. Right. Like the CEO has recognized my greatness. I get to be a manager now. And that was it. Right. There was no training. There was no
conversation. There was no. Here's what it means to be a manager. And you should think about these things. It was come in Monday. These people now report to you. Go get it. That sounds so familiar. Right. And come to find out like that is more of the norm than the exception. So like did all of the same things I was doing as a tech lead. Like let's get the team together. Hey, I was in the chair this morning. I thought about this thing. Like we should definitely factor this in. Hey,
you know, Brian, you should be working on this, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And fast forward. And I think I'm killing it. Right. Like it is obvious that the CEO was profound in his wisdom and had challenged me to do the right thing. And about three months later, the first person quits. And then another person quits directly behind it. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, where are you quitting? Right. This is a great team. We're all doing so well. And a senior engineer, his name was Derek.
He and I went out to lunch one day. And he was like, you are the worst manager I think I've ever had. And I'm like, Oh, why? And he's like number one, I haven't gotten any feedback. You haven't coached me on like how I could be a better engineer. Matter of fact, there's been no chance for somebody to move up in the team and to take on some of the things that you used to do, right? Like you're still doing all of those things. And now you're still telling us what to do. But now you can
control our compensation and you can fire us and you can do all these sorts of things. You take all the oxygen out of a room, right? Like we are just workers for you, so to speak. And he had some other really, really not so nice things to say. And every one of them was just so on point. Every single one of them was just like dead on accurate. And it's hard to unhure the truth. There's a quote out there that everybody can recognize excellence in bullshit. In this case,
right? Like I could recognize the excellence in his giving me feedback. There was no bullshit in there. And so it was one of those things of like nothing that I was doing was really about being an effective manager. Everything I was doing was just around like the continuation of what I was doing before. Since then, I mean, if you want to do the reverse side of that, then Horowitz just put out a book recently and where he is talking about what you do is who you are. And inside of that
book, he talks about like shocking rules that create culture. And not that I have done this or anything like that. But imagine if the CEO at that point in time had taken me aside and said, hey, wait, we're really glad that you're thinking about being an engineering manager. But like, let me tell you how I measure engineering managers and the consequence of you not being a good engineering manager, because it's so critical to the organization. I measure engineering managers
based on the level of output of their team. How much responsibility I can give you before output suffers and the business impact that's generated by your team. And I'm going to go as far to say like your job is to win at doing that, but also increase your capacity to win behind that. If you can't figure out how to improve on all three of those dimensions, output, level of responsibility and level of business impact by at least 1.5 X over the next 12 months, I'm going
to take you out of the role. I'm going to fire you from that position. That would have been a very different conversation at that point in time, because I would have understood how important it is to him to have great competent management in each one of the roles. And like how big of a leverage point it is for the organization and how he wouldn't want somebody stepping into that role that couldn't figure out and that's not like have the team work 1.5 times as much. It is
how can you improve process? How can you invest in people? How can you use better technology? What about the tools that you can use? What about the things that you should say no to? Right? Like you can employ all of those to improve your output, your level of responsibility and your impact. But it would have been a very different conversation and I would have went looking for very different things at that point in time if we just would have had that conversation.
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my impact? What did you decide the ability to win as a team as an individual and also interest capacity behind that? That's a very clear direction where people can optimize their effort to roll. Let me back up just to take that step forward. I've interviewed thousands of people, had thousands of people in my organizations, and no one has a lock on intellect. There's a bell curve associated with it, but there's lots to get there. What I find is that there's just a whole
group of people who, like me at that point in time, were stuck. They didn't get it, and therefore they didn't even know if they wanted it or not. They absolutely could do it, but they needed to get it to decide whether they wanted it or not, and whether they were actually willing to go through it. My challenge is as you encounter folks that are in that stage, how do you help them get it in a short period of time? I started digging into why don't they get it already right now?
It took me down a path. It's really interesting in that so many of the things that limit our ability to move forward. A lot of them are biology and conditioning and behaviors, but other parts of it are just not understanding how a company works and what they value, and therefore how I can align with what great looks like if we're talking about managers and some of the things that we were just discussing. How do I map what I need to grow into what the company needs to be successful
in those sort of roles? I think it's interesting to dig into some of those, because the more that you understand it at some level of depth, the more that you can see how that prevents forward progress in some stages, unless you consciously understand it and change it. In many ways, our biology works against us. If you haven't read up on neuroplasticity, it's really fascinating, and it basically says that the structure of your brain changes throughout your life, depending on
how you use it. You can determine what areas become stronger and or weaker over time. That's a really interesting thing. At birth, every neuron has an estimated 2,500 synopsis. By the age three, it's up to 15,000. The average adult, it's about half that number. Why? Because as you focus and go through different experiences, the things that you focus on, those synops and neurons like wire together, and when they wire together, they fire together, and when you focus on those areas,
other parts of your brain weaken. That's interesting. You're telling me that whatever I spend a lot of time doing, that area of my brain is going to get a lot stronger. Other areas that I'm not focusing on are going to weaken. That makes a lot of sense, actually, when you think about it. It means that if you consciously focus on an area and getting strong in that area, it'll strengthen over time
at the cost of some other part of your brain. If you focus on computer programming, maybe the Nintendo part of your brain starts to suffer and go away over time, you can consciously reprogram your brain to do a lot of those things. If you take that and think about that, conditioning makes a lot more sense. If your parents are very focused in a particular area, the chances that they demonstrated, modeled, and quizzed you in that basic area is much higher.
As a result, you probably fuse together areas that support that basic area. As you go through school, same thing. However, your teachers were, we're going to reinforce certain parts of your brain. Who you hung out with? If you had fellow engineers and training that really thought about computers and wanted to get together at night, guess what? That part of your brain is going to form more rapidly. If you were in two sports, that part of your brain is going to wire together
more rapidly. As you got into college, same thing is going to hold true. As you get into your first job, it's just going to keep reinforcing this idea that neuroplacicity is going to continue to form how your brain works and you can move forward with it. You can think about other types of conditioning, like if you have some success, right? There's going to be all sorts of dopamine rushes of somebody has recognized my greatness. Now, I need to continue to invest in that thing
that got me here. As you focus more and more on that thing that got you here, you're not going to focus on other parts that might need growth at that point in time. Get a promotion. Same thing. If your title changes, right? Like now, you feel like a lot of the things that got you there are the things that you need to continue to invest in moving forward. Accolades, other types of things will get you there, which will then start to reinforce behaviors that you're seeing. You will
start to think, this is what made me successful. And therefore, I only just need to double down on this to become even more successful moving forward. There's just going to say, Wade, as you were sharing that, I feel like you just illuminated the underlying principle of all of these really popularized sayings or quotes, like I was thinking of, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, a product of neuroplacicity, or how you do one thing is how you do everything,
a product of neuroplacicity. So I feel like I just saw the causal effects of my entire life flash before my eyes. One of my favorite quotes along those lines is you can only fight the way you practice. Same thing, right? Like if it is a well-trained thing, then in the moment that you need it, you can go back to it. Imagine if you had no training in a specific area and then we're in a position of where
you needed to try and get to recall. It's obviously not there. And so so many things are along those lines of you get into your career and it's like, oh, I wish I could do X. If you haven't consciously focused on building X, wish all you want. And so then you can see very much in the same light how you build up these strengths and how there are shadow areas associated with that. And that over time, if you've had some success, you really don't want to address the shadow areas. I'd rather focus on
where there's bright light and I look good in that situation. It's just painful to go in the other way. And so I say it a lot, but like I think people crutch on that and retreat to competence as a result. So you mentioned competence and remember one of the very useful notions you brought up at an earlier event is the difference between conscious competence and unconscious competence. There's a different combination. Yep. Let's just run through that really quick. I think it's
helpful to understand in this context. Jerry, do you know how to brew beer? No, no idea. Right. So we have just moved you from being unconsciously incompetent to now very consciously incompetent. If you wanted to, could you? Of course, but how would you do it? Well, let's just kind of walk through the process. Well, now that I'm consciously incompetent and I now want to prove Wade, like make him feel bad because like I want to learn how to brew great beer. Well, okay.
Can you go learn about how to brew beer? Can you get to declarative knowledge? All right. So I can read a book. There's tons of podcasts out there. There's lots of videos out there. There's even home brew conventions. You can't go there right now, but like you could totally go there. I'll teach you how to brew Jerry. Right. Come over to my house. But like investing time with somebody
who knows how to do it is a great way of getting to, I get the basic concept. If I break down these starches, sugars are released, I can actually then have yeast, convert sugars to alcohol, and the rest of it's around flavoring and carbonation. And like we can totally get you there. 10% of how you learn 10% is that declarative knowledge. Does that mean you know how to brew beer? Right. Like it means you know how to talk about how to brew beer. Well, how do you learn how to
brew beer? Right. We've got to do it. And so you know, we set up some weekend and you come over and you try and do it. And like as you get into that, those ideas haven't been put into practice. And it's going to be different in reality than it was in concept. And so as you start to go through there, it's like, oh, wow, I didn't realize that cleaning was such a big deal. And that this needed to be at this level and timing of all of this was very important. The first time you go
through it, you're going to struggle, right? Like it's just going to feel awkward because it's not something you've done before by the third or fourth time. Okay. I got it. Right. Like I've still got some note cards and I'm still going through it. And then you know, by your tenth time, it's just like, yeah, get out of my way. Right. Like I got this. And yeah, you know, you want my beer come over next
Saturday. You know, let's have a pint or whatever the case may be. The science is 60 to 70% of how you learn is the practice. It's that neuroplacicity. It is the synopsis forming. It is the practiced behavior. 20 to 30% of how you learn is who is that believable coach that can help you when you need it and give you the right feedback and help you understand how to take that declarative and turn it into practice or procedural. Right. So if you think about it, then you go from that unconscious
incompetence to conscious incompetence to declarative knowledge to I'm practicing it. I'm struggling with it. And about that 20-hour mark is what the research says of practicing, you can actually be competent and okay at something. If I continue to swing through that and do it for, let's say, 10,000 hours, you're not thinking about it anymore. It's probably you probably don't think about driving anymore. Right. Like you've got more than 10,000 hours of practice. And so it's just
common nature for you to go. It's because you're unconsciously competent now. And so you've went through that full cycle. Well, if you just stop and think about that process of, oh, I have to get to declarative knowledge. I need to find a mentor and a coach. And then I need an opportunity to practice almost anything you want to do can be put into that process. I want to be a better speaker. I want to be a better leader. I want to be a better listener. I want to be able to validate
somebody. I want to be a better engineer. I need to get better at critical reasoning. Anything that you want to do can be learned. And it's a fairly straightforward process that you need to go through to be able to get there. I mean, it's a lot of work. I'm not trying to discount it. But the actual process and structure is fairly straightforward. Also being there, there's a dip initially being aware of that you're not competent of doing something like when you put it out,
I don't know how to prove it. That may feel bad. But the first time my director board tells me that you're a horrible manager, that hurts a lot. But that's something you have to go through. Yeah, it really does get to that point of like, I think each one of those sort of invokes a fight, flight, or freeze response. And the more that you can recognize that, oh, I feel uncomfortable. And you can just sit within a minute as opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism
in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer. You're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment. And if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward. And if I can go, it's like, oh, this isn't something I've ever been taught. This isn't something that I should know instinctually. Okay. Well, then it's just about how do I get started? You also mentioned some basic knowledge understanding about the company, the business to be a
effective leader besides knowing the people management side of it. Can you share a little bit more on those as well? A lot of the time. It's kind of a weird thing that as we go through our lives, it's a very weird thing that we can only draw from our experience. Like you're one of seven billion people. You know, we're one of, I don't know, how many species on this earth and how many planets are in this solar system and et cetera. So like in the grand scheme of things, we have this
tiny understanding of the entirety of the world. And yet that is what we can act on. And so there's a whole lot of we project onto other things that our worldview must be the accurate thing that's here instead of trying to understand what it really is and sort of fill in those memory banks for yourself. And I think around the company is one of those things. I think that a lot of people sort of vilify the company that they work at. Right. It's like my company's evil and it's working against
me as opposed to like trying to truly understand what companies do. If you can get into it, like most companies are somewhat predictable. They're about value creation, right? Like they're trying to do something for a customer base that creates value that people are willing to pay them for. And almost all of them have a mission, a vision, a strategy and they have competitors that are trying to take their market share away from them. And so they need to be aggressive in like creating
competitive differentiation in their market. Otherwise, it's very likely that that company could go away. And so there's a company that's trying to get something done. And based on, you know, the stage of company, there's going to be different characteristics around that company of where they're at and where they're trying to get to product market fit or growth and scale or what are the things.
And the more that you can understand the differences between companies at different stages, you can understand the sort of needs that they're going to have and like what's going to be important for them. If you came from Google, which is a great company and went to this startup, the expectation of the things that you saw at Google being real at this startup are pretty ill-formed.
Like the startup that's trying to get to product market fit probably doesn't have the infrastructure or the marketing cloud and they're going to have to like struggle for each and every deal. If you went in there thinking like this company is just like dumb and stupid because they're not doing it the Google way, you have to understand the context of where they're at and where they're trying to get to. If you can do that, then you can start to understand other things about the company.
You know, there's always this gap between where the company is at and where they're trying to get to. And so there's things that are missing for them to be successfully on the other side of that gap. They need leaders. They need people who can help lift where they stand and like push things forward. And they need other people who can bring other people with them and mentor and coach people. And like the CEO can't do every position in the company and he wants people to join them.
It's not like he wants to actively manage everyone in that organization. The CEO, she is going to want to attract the best people that can see the business for what it is and will demonstrate great business judgment to help it get where it needs to be.
And so inside of that, the executive staff is always trying to find employees to put them in roles that have that high output, high levels of responsibility, high levels of business impact, that feel aligned with the company so that they will demonstrate great business judgment. And that has high potential to take on ever expanding roles inside of the company.
If you can kind of understand that, then like the company is a living, breathing thing that's like trying to grow and trying to get somewhere. So if you as an employee can understand a lot of those things, it's like, okay, it's not against me. I need to understand where it's at.
And then I can figure out how my skills and my strengths map into that as well as where they have needs, how I could grow in a way that allows me to contribute to that company, but also helps my career move forward as well. Right? Like I need to find highly leveraged, highly portable areas of growth that will help the company move forward, but also help my career move forward. And then all of a sudden there's this weird thing that happens. Right? It's not me against the machine company.
It can be an AND relationship as opposed to an OR relationship. So a lot of times it's like, I find employees that see it as a black box as opposed to understanding that there are needs and strengths that map to those needs. Like can be very beneficial for both the company as well as the employee. And this is the basis of growth. And if you can do this, then of course you're going to take on ever increasing growing responsibility inside of a company as well.
So it works when you can see the company for what it is and what they value. And you can figure out like how that is also leveraged in your own career as well. I am looking back on my experience of frustrated team members who are assessing their company from, you know, the black box perspective where they have a misaligned understanding of
what they think the company is about. And just in understanding the needs of the company and how you fit within that and then projecting and mapping how you can contribute to that, it seems like it opens up a lot of different pathways for people to grow and to then align their growth with the growth of the company. And also removes and alleviates a lot of the frustration inherent with that. Yeah, I mean, I've had so many conversations with that frustrated employee.
I've had a lot of experience up to this point and I've had some success. And why are you not just looking at my success and going, this is a great employee? Well, if you had a lot of success at a company that had different needs, that's going to be very different than the current company and what we need. Right? And so it's not that the company can map onto your history. It's like the strengths that you have and the needs that the company has, how can those things
come together? Unfortunately, it has to be where that fit exists in between your skills and the company needs. And if you can always be on that side of looking for the company needs and figuring out how to run towards them, there's so much benefit in doing that. You also expand a little bit into the answer apology perspective if a company, especially for people that are joining a new organization,
having that perspective can be really helpful. There's a very interesting thing, right? Like, oftentimes you look at a company and you think about it as being static and in a point in time, right? And the truth is, if you're a successful company, the company is growing and it's changing and the thing that got you to a certain level is not the thing that's going to take you to the next level. And so you have to be looking at what's the stage of the company and how is it best going to be
organized for the goal or the challenge that's directly in front of it? For example, if you're getting to product market fit, you are going to go out and try and discover customers and figure out like how to build something that they're going to want to buy and that you're going to want to find
another customer that will buy the same thing that you just built. And if you're somewhat successful and you figure out how to get multiple customers buying the same thing, well, then all of a sudden it shifts from we just need to figure out how to get the next feature to, okay, how do we reduce the cost of operating of this thing that we just built? How do we get it to grow? How do we get it to scale? How do we take and make it where we get closer and closer to profitability? Well, as you
sort of look at that, the needs that the organization has is going to change. We're at one point, we wanted cowboys that could just like develop the next new feature. Now all of a sudden we need to look at it and say like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we need stability in certain parts of our organization. And so you have to look at the organization and work backwards from what do we want to be true two years from now? What's the design of the machine that would have the highest probability of
being able to produce that result that we want? What's the organizational structure need to look like? What do the leaders need to look like? What do the team members need to look like? What are the right processes, the right architecture, the right technology, the right communication styles? Like how do we reduce cognitive load for teams doing X and move that down to platforms, the separation
concerns and responsibilities? If you don't look at it through that anthropological lens of like how is the system going to mature and grow, then it will start to feel like, this isn't the company that I joined. It's something way different. And you're right, right? That's not a bad thing. It is
understanding what they need and like why they're going through that. And if you can look at it through that anthropology lens, you can actually start to predict what's next and you can start to move towards that because in most companies, if you can continue to grow, it means that you can provide more value to your end customers and to all the employees that work there as well. There are cases where people that are not to predict what's going to happen in the future, but trying to understand
what happened in the past as a way to solve a problem we have right now. I think that the more that you can understand and dig into issues or challenges that you've had and go through the five-wise and try and make sure that you understand causally what created the issue that you're dealing with. Then you can figure out how to actually work around it or remove it from future patterns that
are similar. And so most engineering organizations, if you haven't outed, you're going to go through and look at what caused it and go through the five-wise and how did we communicate and what should have been different and how could we have prevented this and work it in? You kind of want to replicate
that in a lot of different ways. If the team structure would have been different, if the communication paths would have been different, if we had had the right seam in place between different teams and organizations, would have prevented this communication snafu, how could we have been centered the right behavior in the first place? I think that sort of digging into incidents and occurrences of things help you better understand and then help you figure out how to diagnose
what would be a better answer for moving forward. I think that leads back to what you mentioned very early on. It's about seeking truth. There's an old quote of like it's amazing what you can do if you don't need to get credit. Well, I think that's very true and that if you can just focus on like what needs to be true and getting to ground truth, and it might be your mistake that's okay, right? Like just constantly focus on what is blocking us from moving forward and getting to the
core of it and finding a better answer. The entire organization is better off in the long term as a result. A common question for a lot of your own leaders even at more mature companies are how do we know we're doing good job? How do we measure the success of a manager? And a lot of people and companies don't have a clear idea. So that creates a problem for evaluating performance. If you don't know how to evaluate consistently and have a clear understanding, it's going to be problem.
Something you shared earlier in past events is your goal is to win in Chris capacity. Can you share more on that so that the audience can have a common understanding of what great looks like? We touched on it earlier and I do think you're right. I know you're right. I have had leaders at multiple levels and like you asked the very simple
question of like how do you measure success or what do you think success looks like? And it is wildly different from common things that I hear is my job is to make my team happy or my job is to create a good culture or my job is to be a shit umbrella. You hear all of these things and I kind of understand why people say a lot of those things that may be an attribute or a thing that you focus on to help your success and your team success. But like that's not the primary motivation.
I like when and increase your capacity to win just because it's pretty simple and memorable. But if you're not executing, are you creating business impact for your company? Is your company better off because of the results that you're shipping and are you able to successfully ship repeatedly? It's like can you GSD on the stuff that matters? And there's a lot of things around just like execution, engagement, coaching team members, all of those things that just lead to winning.
That's not good enough. If you had the same team a year later, should they be able to do 100% of what they did the previous year or significantly more? And of course my opinion is that they should be able to do significantly more. I like that idea of in 12 months you should be able to do 1.5X and probably even more. But like how? Like what does that mean? And I think that you have to help people understand like how to break that down. And I think that most time people come into
engineering manager roles as a senior IC, like how have I experienced the world? And you kind of think about things like there are individuals that are part of teams that ship things for the company. And in reality, that's how most engineering managers proceed with their role. Who are the people on my team? Who are the individuals? Let me understand them. Okay, is the team functioning? Can we do stand-ups?
Are we shipping? Is the quality where it needs to be? Do we need to adjust some process, etc? Are we shipping? Are we getting things done for the company? Good. Hopefully it hits some key company metric. And the reality is is like managers want to think the other way. Why does the company exist? What are we trying to do? What are the results that would most significantly improve our ability to do that thing that the company is needing to do? If we wanted to reliably produce those results,
what would the team need to look like? What cultural norms would need to be inside of this team? What type of individuals would we want on this team? What would be the optimal process? What would be the interaction styles with other teams in the organization? Because then I know the coaching and the mentoring and the hiring that I would want to do inside of that team. And so if you start to think about it, it is like I need to increase my capacity to win. You've got all these tools at
your disposal. You can improve on the execution side of things. Can I make the process more streamlined? Can I do all of these types of things around engagement or helping to coach people? Or you can look at the increasing the potential of your team? Are we working on the right things? Do we have the right mission vision strategy? Do we have the right principles for what we're focused on? Prioritization,
objectives, key results? Do we have the right team structure, team types, technologies, all of those things in place? Have we attracted the right people? Do I have the right talent level inside of my team? Are they top performers? Are they aligned with what we're trying to do? Can they use critical reasoning better than most? Do they have the needed strengths? Do they have growth mindset? If you find that you've got a limitation on the potential of your team, that's your job to figure out how to
move through that. You may have to move somebody out of your team to pull somebody into your team that will unlock the potential of your team. If you think about it as an x-by-y matrix of war on one side of it, it's potential on the other side of its performance. You have to figure out where you're at on that and how you're going to move it up into the right. It may be that the team's executing super strong for what you've got. You've just got a low ceiling because the potential is low.
Then you have to go deal with the potential. If you've got a high potential team that's just not executing, then you have to actually work on the execution side of things and getting the performance where it needs to go. You're constantly almost like an etch-a-sketch trying to figure out how to move
the performance of the team to the right and the potential up consistently. If you're not actively engaged in figuring out what part of the team that you need to be helping with, you're probably not doing your job successfully as an engineering manager. With the limiting potential, what's the input to increase a team's potential? Is it related to some of the things you've mentioned about EGO and Blindspots? Is it coaching people to see those
things that increase their potential? I really think about it as like three categories of things in like potential. Number one is the what and the why. You can imagine like you've got high potential people and they're super great, but there's no vision for what they need to do. Well, shit. Okay, like we need to create an orthostar. We need to make sure that everybody understands what success looks like and how we prioritize things. The what and the why needs to be really good.
In the middle, you've kind of got the how. You can imagine amazing people. We've got this very lofty idea of what we want to, but there's no structure. There's no how we're going to do this. Like how are we going to interface with other people? What are the tools that we're going to use? What are the norms that we're going to do inside of this? And so that can be a very limiting thing.
And the third area is the who and by far it is where you've got the most leverage, right? Like you get amazing people on your team and amazing things can happen, assuming that you've helped with the what and the why and the how. There are three things that I normally think about with each and every person on the team. Do they get it? Do they want it? Can they do it? A good friend, a client constantly talks about those things. The challenge with that is probably at least 60% of the
people that you meet with can do it. They have the base potential. The IQ is there. They understand technology. They understand all of these things. And yes, they could do it. What I really find is the challenges they don't get it, right? It's like they don't understand alignment with the company and like how to get to better business judgment or the thing that's holding them back. Their ego is getting in the way. They've got blind spots that they can't get around. You can help try and break
that up so that they do get it. You need to do that in a way that it's a gift, not punitive, right? If you can establish a deep connection with another human being and actually built up good, credible trust with them, then hopefully they don't see it as like I'm trying to feel good about myself by telling you something negative about you. But instead, this is the thing, right? Like if we can work through this, your career, even beyond the company that you're currently at is going to
continue to unfold. If you can help people see both their strengths and like where they're really awesome and where their growth areas are and like how we could go through that brewing beer exercise to like help them get on the other side of things, then they can hopefully get it. The real challenge though is if you get it, there's always a price tag. There's always a gap between where you are
and where you want to be. The real thing is like, can your ego handle that or are you willing to go through the discomfort of stepping into an area of incompetence and actually building out new strengths? That's going to suck. Imagine if you've got a decade or more of experience and you're super good at what you do. And the thing that's holding you back is something you've never focused on, right? Like as soon as you start to focus on that area, you are going to feel immediately
incompetent. You're going to feel like this is bullshit, right? Like I just need to go back to doing what I was doing. And like that thought will set you back. As a manager, if you can help people both feel competent as they're going through that in other areas, but help coach and mentor them
through that area of growth, then hopefully they can get from the, I get it, I want it. I'm going to do it and their manager is alongside of them to actually give them feedback, set up the structure, help them get to declarative knowledge, help give them an opportunity to practice in that area that they need to grow in and then measure and give feedback as they go through it. Hopefully, and like one-on-ones in behind closed doors, but in a way that actually unlocks their forward
progression. Along that line, when people in their career are stuck, how do they apply some the learnings you mentioned earlier to consciously look through those? Yeah, that's super hard. I like the quote that's attributed to Einstein of a problem cannot be solved at the level it was created or the level of consciousness that created it. And so oftentimes you find individuals that are stuck because they don't get it. If they got it, they would move forward. And so they're stuck as a result
of not getting it. If you are listening to this and you feel like I should be further along, I feel like I've been repeating the same thing just in a slightly different company for last few years and gotten a little bit of a pay bump every time I've went, right? Like the real underlying competencies haven't changed. My hope would be is that you can find somebody who actually cares about you and that you can have this discussion that helps move through it. And I think that they would
largely look like, let's try and be very conscious about what we want to be true. Like, what do you want to accomplish out in front of you? What do you want to be true that isn't currently? Do you want to be the VP of engineering? Do you want to be a staff engineer? And maybe it's not titled driven. Maybe it's like, I want to be able to accomplish this. I want to be able to build this type of a solution. I want to be able to influence executives. I want to be capable of
leading a team in this new way. If you can identify what you want to be true, then I think that you can step back from that and say, who do you know that exemplifies what you wish was true? And not from the standpoint of measuring yourself against them necessarily, but what we're trying to do is look outside of yourself and say, what causally makes them successful
in that role? And if you can get to, they've got really good leadership skills or they're very good at cognitive reasoning or they have the ability to inspire others or whatever that case is. If you can kind of go through that and break that down, then you can start to identify, is there a gap between where I'm at and that truth that gives them competitive advantage in that role? If you can identify that gap, then you can start to break it down and say, oh, neuroplasticity is the thing.
I need to start working on this. Let me identify some of the most leveraged, portable areas of growth and focus there first. Can I find a coach? Can I find an opportunity to practice and just start chipping away at it? Another thing that I think is helpful inside of all of this is starting to think in buckets of areas that are helpful. Daniel Goldman, the famous for his books around emotional intelligence, put out a book called Social Intelligence and like you can
go read through that and it breaks things down into basically three big clusters. Number one, cognitive skills. Do I understand problem solving? Do I understand critical reasoning? Can I apply that to a particular domain? Can I learn how to do programming in this language, etc., etc? Like, can I apply my intellect to a problem and create a solution that's out there? Area number two is personal skills. Are you self-aware? Can you truly understand where you're at? Do
you understand what gets you to fight or flight responses? That's very different. I mean, like you can get to a place where you're aware, but you're not modulating yourself. So the second thing in there is self-modulation. I can choose a different response based on some stimuli. I can choose to not react to Jerry saying I don't know how to brew beer or I don't know how to run a podcast. And I can
instead of being defensive, like I can immediately go, wow, he's right. Okay, well this is cool. This is something new for me to learn. That can be a chosen response and you can choose to self-modulate in a lot of different ways. The third area on the personal side is achievement drive. You can choose to be optimistic. You can choose to actually get up at each and every morning and put your shoulder
to the harness and try and move it forward. Achievement drive is the thing that you can consciously choose to do and replace this to the again, right? Like the more that you focus on it, the more that it will become true. So cognitive skills and then personal skills. The third bucket is social skills. And that is social awareness. Can I read a room? Do I understand how decisions are made? Can I listen empathetically? Can I understand, you know, I offended Jerry when I talked about his
beer making skills? Can I understand like when somebody shut up and in some way I triggered them in a way that I didn't understand? All of the social awareness allows you to have empathy for other people and be able to engage better with them. That's very different than social impact. Can I move the team? Can I move the room? Can I provide inspiration to others? Can I communicate effectively?
Can I invest in other people? Can I develop them? Any time that you kind of think through some limitation on output, level of responsibility, business impact, you will probably be able to go to one of those three buckets and say, ah, here's the limiting factor. Because I'm not doing this, this isn't probably proceeding. And so that's a lot, right? But the more you can consciously sort of look at yourself first and say, this is in my area to control and let me make sure that I understand
consciously what is important to me where I want to be. If I can do that, then I can try and find the gaps that prevent me from being there. I can find mentors and opportunities to practice in that. And then I can also start to diagnose specific competencies and areas that will help me move forward along those lines by just looking cognitive, personal, interpersonal, and you know, different types of behaviors that use combination of those things. And you can get on a path where I can actually
do introspection and reflect and find areas that I think are very valuable to me. I get it, I want it. Now I can actually start to move through it. That's a very comprehensive framework to reasoning about a lot of things. I think people can play that in many different places and using the spirit of seeking truth and not letting the ego or other things or the protection to the world coming to play and prevent you from seeing what's real versus what is not. There's some
I learned from the conversation and I think it's profoundly impactful. We skipped over a lot of things, but like I think that if you just start to look at this, you'll start to discover a lot inside of this. Yeah, I think the biggest thing I struggle with is oftentimes I don't know where to look. And so just even talking about cognitive skills, personal skills, self-modulation, achievement, and social impact, now I know where to look. That's the part that I feel like I'm always challenged
with is what are the right questions to even ask? I wouldn't outsource my judgment to anyone author or anything along those lines, but if you read two or three things and there's some overlap in there, then you can start to look for the underlying principles that are behind that and decide for yourself whether that's actually true or not. And just that getting to that core truth of like,
yeah, that's a real thing. Then can help bolster the strength to actually move through it. And it's just like how conscious can you be about breaking it down and deciding what's most important for you? The thing about reading books is that I think you mentioned a really important word, which is try to understand, because if you just take what the books are saying and you read enough number books, you start to get conflicting opinions and it's really hard to reconcile.
What you mentioned is try to understand so that based on your own understanding how the word works, you take pieces incorporating that, building your own framework. I think that's the part a lot of people may miss, like they read a lot of books, but the key part is how much they actually understand on their own. Yeah, there's an interesting thing in that like I will oftentimes watch somebody tweet of I'm going to read a hundred books this year. And so the real question that
I have behind that is like why? If you're trying to get to declarative knowledge, then a hundred books is fine, right? Like it can fill you in on the details of how leader X might have thought about subject Y, etc, etc. And like it's just good for, you know, like you'll recall it at some point in time. But if it's around growth and skill development, as soon as you read it, if you're picking up the next one, you're actually not trying to convert it to action. Like you're not giving
neuroplasticity a chance to actually have any impact on this. And so then the question becomes is like, okay, did you write a book report for the book that you wrote? How are you trying to put it into action? What's your opportunity to practice on that book that you just read? Every book that I read along those lines, I'm constantly trying to figure out what are the key points and how am I
going to put it into practice? Otherwise, I shouldn't read the book in the first place. And I actually mean that to some degree because what's the last book that you read that you were like, oh wow, that was really profound. That was really interesting. Are you using it? Well, you know, I tried it once and it didn't work out, but like it's still cool. As soon as you make that statement, you've got
scar tissue. And you've started to discount the principles in the book as opposed to your application of those principles, right? And so then you're much less likely to revisit. Oftentimes you can build up scar tissue and not go back and actually try and drive the real value of the content that you were looking at. Instead, you look for the next thing. And that's sad that you've invested hours
spinning up on something and didn't figure out how to get full value out of it. And I guess the definition of dumb, like we talk a lot in your ring for learning is you get unconsciously competent. Like you have a massive memory, you can do something without any effort. Yeah, I mixed on some of those things. Like if it is core and extremely high leverage, yeah, I think you have to get to the point where you're unconsciously competent. Yeah, get your 10,000 hours. And
if it is a sometimes food, right? Like it might be okay to get to 30, 40 hours and like know that, okay, I understand it. I know how to do it. And if I need to, I can go back and refresh real quick and probably spend backup on it. I've gotten it far enough along that I know how to do this, like writing a bike. For me, it is like, is this a sometimes food or is it an all-the-time food? If it's an all-the-time thing, swing all the way through. Just get to the point where you
are that top 10 percent. Get to competitive advantage. If it's something that you need to do every now and then, get to declarative knowledge, get to procedural knowledge. But like, don't waste that time that you could be spending on things that will have higher impact to your career and life. What are the other tools you can recommend for people to learn and develop themselves? Oftentimes, I think about it's learning the net new thing, the thing that you're missing.
Other times, I think it's almost about exploring what you currently believe in and figuring out whether that's true or not. I love the old quote that losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth. There's something profound in that of like, because you've never had access to somebody who challenged your belief system or you've never read anything along those lines, you continue to build on this false idea and then it comes out in really awkward ways. I think
just the reflecting and listen to understand as opposed to respond. If you're constantly listening to be wrong, it will help you understand why do I believe that? What are the assumptions behind that? What are my biases? Do I have recency bias because of the place that I just work? So I think constantly reflecting and inspecting your own motives and ideas is a great way for growth. Along the same lines, though, is for example, what is leadership? Boy, that is a wide open
question, isn't it? But how would you answer that? Like, how would somebody personalize that to say, okay, here's what I believe. And the more that you can come up with, well, what does it mean to be a great manager or what does it mean to be a great leader? Answering those questions for yourself and actually getting to the point where you have confidence and are willing to stand behind it because it's well-reasoned and like it's a principled point of view will help you improve.
Right? Like for me, it's a combination of two things. I think leadership is all about influence. Right? Like, can you influence somebody else? And how many people can you influence? And like, having a compelling message and inspiring people and helping them see the same truth that you see, and there's like a lot of that. But everything that I just said, car salesmen can do too. Are they a leader? Okay. For the thing that you're influencing around, who benefits? Okay. So if you benefit,
that's not really leadership, right? That's manipulation. If you think about the team, the company, the industry, the United States, the world, etc., benefits from your actions and your high influence, to me, that's leadership. If you're high in influence, but only you're benefiting that's manipulation, if you are low on influence, but the team benefits, that's like a great team player. And if you are low on influence and low on who benefits, well, you suck. Okay. That's not right. Like, it's a
different answer there. But like, that's not a leadership thing along those lines. And so then you can start to think about that. And it's like, whoa, it's really hard to influence people. But then how do I do that in a way that I'm constantly thinking about what's the right thing for the company or my
team or those around me or my family? It puts it through a different filter as a result. And so the more that you go back and address some of those basic questions that you have, unlike what does it mean to be a great leader or a great manager or a great partner or a great executive, it will force you to go deep and actually get to the core principles that are going to drive your behavior. Wait, we have covered so much together. We've talked about neuroplasticity. We've talked about
coaching and learning and getting past the clarity of knowledge to unconscious competence. We've dug into the anthropology of a company, how to measure success. And ultimately how to get people unstuck with their career. Before we closed, do you have any final words of wisdom to help people get unstuck with their career or to help them close that gap between what they know and where their current abilities are? The only thing else that I would say is that oftentimes you don't know
how to start and no one said, here's how you should process this. Here's how you should think about this. The only thing that I would offer out there is every profound lesson that I've learned has been because there has been somebody who is incredibly gifted and very generous with their ideas in their time. And you think you're bothering somebody. But the truth is that if you ask probably most of the time somebody is going to respond in a way that helps you. So there's a
ton of great people out there that very much want to contribute to making you successful. Be vulnerable, reach out, ask. And that's essentially how this community was built by asking for help. There are so many people like yourself, I've been able to spend a time in a shared learning and that's essentially how we are connected. I wish this had been around back in the 90s. I could have definitely benefited. I can't really imagine myself in that position. I feel this existed when
I first became a manager. I probably make less mistakes. Cool. Thanks very much for spending time with us. Always enjoy it. If you like this episode, make sure you subscribe to our new podcast series engineering founders. The leap from engineering leader to founder can be terrifying, filled with unknowns and requires a completely different skill set. We're going to be diving into the stories, the pivotal moments and critical insights from former engineering leaders turned founders that
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