Hey guys, welcome back to Top5 brought to you by DefinedTalent. We are a results driven service working with clients to connect them with quality talent as well as working to make an impact within the recruiting industry. We talk straight about today's professional world with real world professionals, experts in recruitment, job seekers and business owners alike. Have a question for us send it in and you might spur our next conversation. I'm Tara Thurber, Director of Talent Innovation.
And joining me today to discuss his "Top5 Tips for Successful Leadership" is Mike Simon, Partner at DefinedLogic. Hey, Mike, how are you today?
Hey, Tara, I'm great. How are you?
I'm doing lovely, so happy you're able to join us for this podcast.
A pleasure. Absolutely.
So Mike, I want to just kind of dive in right here and talk to you about, you know, explaining the process and strategy behind obtaining a 20 year old business, you know, what was your your leading factor in your decision?
So my leading factor was somewhat selfish, to be honest. I had worked with when I acquired DefinedLogic in 2020, I had worked with the company for about six years. I knew its founders, we all used to work together 25/30 years ago. So I was I was well acquainted with the DefinedLogic, you can borrow more acquainted, obviously, leaving the consulting practice for the six years that I did that prior to purchasing the
company. But it sounds almost cliche, but there was just instill is something very unique about the company about its culture, about how it cares for customers, how it cares for people, how it cares for quality. And again, it sounds kind of cliched, but culture is, you know, it's a set of behavioral responses that are predictable, right? So whether it's societal culture, whether it's business culture, and this company definitely had an
incredibly strong culture. As I looked to, you know, where the company was going, when the topic came up around the
opportunity to purchase it. I said, selfishly, because I didn't want to go back into the city and be somebody's CIO, again, or go work for, you know, a large corporation or anything like that, you know, I wanted to be able to stay close to home close to this, and have it be the place that I finished my career out, you know, so I hadn't contemplated purchasing a company at that time, I've owned companies throughout my career.
And was, you know, there wasn't really top of mind that I would kind of go back into that one more time. But you know, that the notion of not being a control of my destiny, and not being in control of where this company was going to go to continue to go, on the heels of the founding partners themselves looking to retire, was the motivating, motivating factor behind trying to put together you know, purchase package, which we ultimately were successful in doing it.
Right, being in the right place at the right time.
You betcha. And then COVID, hit, right. Three days after closing, COVID hit.
Oh, gosh. Well, that kind of segues into our next question on, you know, it would be a question with or without COVID. But I think it was even more challenging. But what are some tactics for keeping your team motivated through this crazy time? And where, you know, what were your thoughts when all of this kind of went down? And, you know, taking your leadership to the next level?
You know, I think, leaning into the company's culture, yeah. Kind of my initial knee jerk response, meaning, listen, listen to everybody, listen to everything, communicate over communicate, be incredibly transparent. People want that. Our team members in particular, expect that. And so and beyond that, it's it's, you know, it's a learning process and being open to it being a
learning process. So as we've talked about, many times, in fact, you know, I'm a 58 year old empty nester, my situation is very different than a team member who has two small kids at home with all the challenges through COVID For sure, but just in general, in, you know, maintaining a household and having two small kids and work life balance and so forth. So we have listening channels all over
the place in our company. We have a weekly stand up, where that's my opportunity to kind of, you know, stay connected to the team. You lead our meditation part of that, which is
Yeah.
But it's largely a one way type of communication on a weekly basis. We have a town hall every other month, where we solicit topics from team members to make sure we're always talking about the things that they want to hear about. We have a cadence design, meaning a series of internal meetings that are efficient, but they're designed to cascade one to the next to be efficient in terms of what information we're collecting, what information ultimately, we want to disseminate out to teams out to
team members and so forth. So long answer to your question, but I think communication is a number one, in terms of how to keep team members motivated, about how their company's doing, and being really transparent, good things and bad things, you know, I try to share as much as I possibly can, in terms of the health of the company, the performance of the company. Otherwise, if you don't do that, people make up their own minds.
Mm hmm.
Folklore, folklore begins to take over. And that's one of the worst possible things you can have happen from a culture perspective is when, you know, the coffee chatter is what's driving the narrative versus it coming from, from the
company itself. Beyond that empathy, as we've talked about, is everything and just just understanding what each team member might be going through, making sure we have, you know, something called The Breakfast Club, you know, kind of harkens back to the movies from that movie from 1980s, just in terms of its theme, but it's it's it's a cross section of DL's who represent different voices and different perspectives of our entire team. So there are six of
us. So that's roughly 10% of the organization that meets every other week. And each team member is able to reach out to any DefinedLogic Breakfast Club member, and say, hey, I'm interested in this or that be cool to have this initiative of that initiative, we maintain a Kanban board to keep track of
all of that. And that's really kind of the nucleus of a cross section of DL's to make sure that everything that people might be interested in has a home, it has a place to go, and then has a strong cadence around it to to maintain that momentum.
Awesome. I feel like something like that, too, can really unite a company, because everybody is coming from so many different worlds, so to speak, are so many different ways of living and ways of working. That having something like that really can strengthen and build that culture. Even stronger. Now, you know, I know for DefinedLogic, DefinedLogic was heavily an on site company
before COVID. And then shifting to a 100% remote company, what were some of the difficulties that you may be faced to keep that bond? growing stronger, even as we all transitioned to being remote?
I think that there are two facets of it. And again, going back to the culture.
Yeah.
I really didn't have to do anything relative to facet one meaning, how do we continue working productively all all of our competency leads. So the way we're structured, we have practice leads that are client facing relationship management, and so forth. They're kind of on the vertical, if you will, and then horizontally, we have competency leads. So for creative for development, for user experience, and so forth.
And each of those competency leads is responsible for their competency and for delivering strong practices, or strong capabilities to our clients. And the competency leads stepped in immediately, and said, now we're going to be remote. Our culture has always been one of kind of face to face collaboration, visualization workshops, as a function of how it is that we engage with clients and so
forth. And through that high degree of visualization and interactivity, how are we going to replace that even temporarily, right? So the team members leaned in, they adapted all of their frameworks to Miro, which is online, whiteboarding, capability and Mural, which we've already been using. So I feel like we actually turned a challenge into a significant opportunity for us as it relates to facet one, if you will,
right. We actually improved upon many of the ways that we were interacting with our clients in the way that we were able to move our practices to these virtual whiteboards. You know, sort of create templates and preparation for workshops in advance, have customers log into those virtual whiteboard sessions from their own laptops, and and in doing so, become highly engaged in how it is that we work with them. So that facet, I feel like, the team did
a great job of pivoting. But the other facet is the the actual face to face probe portion of it, which is very difficult to measure the impact over a short term period of time, it becomes a long term, you know, type of an impact that you have to be mindful of. And so, it's not just a DefinedLogic statement. It's a it's a societal statement.
Yeah.
How do you measure that? Think about schools, you know, your, your, your two, two girls in school, for example?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
How do you measure the long term societal impact of not being face to face with people and not having human to human interaction, right. So that's something we're mindful of, it's not something that we're, you know, I would say doing anything in particular about minus getting prepared to go back into our new office space, which is designed for purposeful collaboration, it's an experience center versus a traditional office. So this will continue to work from home as
our main work site. But our new space called Studio Red Bank, is designed specifically to address that facet to specifically where we have purposeful collaboration, meaning a reason to get together. That could be a design session, it could be a product concept development workshop, it could be a stand up, it could be a meetup, it could be any number of events, and so forth, a reason to get back together. That's what that that space is intended for. So we open that about a month from
now. And I'm just super excited to see how it is that the team takes facet one, right takes all of those great things that we did in going virtual and using tools in a creative way, and bring them into a physical space that will cater for both physical and virtual, because not everyone is going to come back. We'll have some team members that are now in different states, right? Hard because of the ability to do so during COVID.
And then also customers who either, you know, may not yet be comfortable with, or may just be in a location because our business has expanded beyond the confines of New Jersey as well by virtue of COVID. So yeah, so long answer your question, but that that, that space will allow us to kind of reengage in a personal way, in a purposeful way, but not leave behind the incredible things that we learned about how to work really productively in a virtual way.
Fantastic. And I know, just from talking some of the team members, everybody's really excited to be able to be given, I think what's huge, is they're given the opportunity to make a choice on it, you know, their comfort levels where they're at. And it starts with leadership, giving that, that I guess you could say that grace to saying, listen, whatever works for you, as long as we can still be collaborative and productive. It doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
And I, it's so huge for people right now. And in the past, it's huge, but even I feel now with job seekers and people that are currently employed having that, that sense of freedom, or even just a different quality of work life balance.
Exactly. Right. Yeah, exactly.
So as a leader, Mike, who do you personally consider your mentor or your inspiration? What do you go to for inspiration?
So a couple things there. I look to inspirational leaders, like a Simon Sinek, for example, when we've talked about,
I've gotten the book, and I'm reading it, I'm pumped.
People that just have great, you know, on target message messaging, great frameworks, great mindsets. I certainly look there. I have a I have a couple of professional mentors, who have become personal mentors as well. So one is a fella by the name of Dwayne Ingram, who was my mentor when I was at IBM, many, many years
ago. And one of the things that he taught me was that it's interesting when you think of it that mentoring relationships have to be when when they're they they can't be just a more senior person guiding a more junior person there are there are those relationships, and they have their place for sure. But but a true mentoring relationship should be a win win relationship, meaning that it's designed to such that each person, the mentor and the protege, get something out of it.
Yeah.
And that that becomes a function of perspective. So if I'm mentoring a kid, I'll just make it up but a a more junior team member, and there's something I can convey to them relative to my experience, just by virtue of being older than they are. And that's one path for sure. But I'm looking for something from that person. And what can they teach me? What can they help me with? And how can we ensure that that mentoring relationship is going to sustain itself over a
long period of time? Because if it's only one way, but at some point, it begins to just sort of, you know, wither on the vine, if you will?
Right.
So from that perspective, I have, I wouldn't say that the formal mentoring relationships, but a number of younger team members within DefinedLogic, for example, you know, we're a very creative company, I'm more of a, an analytical thinker, a logical thinker, a programmer by trade, a mathematician, you know, from,
from training, and so forth. I'm not a creative person, I look to some of our creative team members who want to learn for me about how to run a business at some point how to own a business at some point. But the gift to get is to say, you know, help me understand your perspective helped me understand how do we marry up, the things that we do is to DefinedLogic that are the logical side, we're incredibly great engineers, for example, we're great analysts and
consultants. But you know, the uniqueness of our companies, we do all of that with a creative flair, right. And that's what allows us to be a digital product agency, focused on product focus on agency creative, technical, all blending together. So I look to
have, right. And that's the other thing about about mentoring is that oftentimes, people think that it is sort of a senior person to a junior person, but everybody has something that they can offer to everybody else, if you're willing to look for it.
Yeah.
If you are willing to kind of lower your guard, if you will, if you're really willing to, you know, sort of have sort of a self effacing view of the world, meaning you can learn from anybody and everybody, then that opens your doors, you know, pretty wide open in terms of the people that you can have mentoring relationships with. Does that make sense?
It makes total sense. And it kind of, I like that idea of, you know, giving and getting at the same time, because, you know, you're not only mentoring or teaching somebody, but allowing that other individual to share their knowledge and their experiences is going to also better you as a human as well as them, because you're in two totally different pairs of shoes. Right?
It's a different perspective. Sure, right.
Yeah. Yeah. I think one of my biggest questions here is, you know, everything from a spelling error or a broken website, or you know, anything that can blow up within a business, you know, how do you handle mistakes? Or how do you handle errors as a leader, whether it's something that you've done, or something that somebody else on the team has done?
Yeah, I think my philosophy has always been that it's a, you know, sort of an error freeze, I shouldn't say error freeze, it's, you know, having an environment where people feel completely comfortable raising their hand and saying, you know, I made a mistake, or, you know, where the conversation can be a natural one, as a function of the higher goal, around quality around process consistency, and things like that, right. So that's,
that's sort of step one. And just making sure that if somebody makes a mistake, they feel completely comfortable, recognizing it owning it. But then the second facet of it is symptom versus root cause. So my DNA and one of the things I try to instill within our team is that if something happens, try to understand the root cause of why why it happened? And what do you what can you do to fix that,
so it never happens again. So that always takes me to process to systems, capital S. Systems being you know, behaviors and procedures and things of that nature. And versus the the symptom, the symptom is a misspelling error, it's easy to just come down on somebody and say, Come on, I mean, how easy is it to you know, that doesn't necessarily solve the problem. It doesn't necessarily make for a great culture either, but it doesn't necessarily solve the
problem. So in that case, my DNA would take me to, do we have a quality function in place? If not, could we put one in place? And what did it would it have prevented that error from from occurring? Let's go there, you know, that type of thing. And so we spent a lot of time as a company, looking at our quality looking but looking at it through the lens of root cause versus symptom.
Right?
Only doing both at the same time. And just ensuring that we have super tight processes and everything that we do. We have tools to support those. We have cadences we have races, you know, roles and responsibility charts so that everybody is absolutely clear. But then also that we can test those and we can make sure that we have gates from one process step to another that are measurable and that are enforceable, so to speak. And I don't want it to sound like it's
it's so arcane. You know, our processes are very efficient in the way that we design them.
Yeah.
But They are designed in that particular way to make sure that they address the root causes and that they are visible in terms of ensuring that, you know, quality ultimately is at the heart of everything we do.
I love that I think that that's huge for individuals in any business to be able to learn from their mistakes, right, instead of kind of shutting down and hiding behind a screen, maybe turning their video off and feeling embarrassed, so to speak to, I think by by you opening the gates to figuring that cause the root cause out and then taking that mistake or something that's been broken and as a collaborative team to coming back to the table and saying, It's okay, here, how do we fix
it? And then how do we make it so it doesn't happen again? Or how do we make it so it's just better in the future?
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the other aspect of that, I would say is, we try to include a lot of people in our process designs in our process reviews, stakeholders, for sure. So you know, both from a design standpoint, but also from a validation and perspective perspective, right. So one of the worst things you can do as a leader is forget the fact that you can put something in place, and people will just sort of accept it, because it's coming from you, right, as a leader.
And if that process is wrong, you'll be the last one to know that it's wrong, right? Because people will just sort of go through the motions of adhering to it.
Yeah
Maybe, you know, it's, it's it's lip service, and they're not really embracing it, not really getting benefit from
it, and so forth. So unless you include people who ultimately are going to be the stakeholders, and make sure that they have ownership in what gets designed and implemented, and ultimately measured and executed, then then you know, you could be the last one to know that what you put in place is just not I learned that very early on, particularly if you're if you're unless of this way
than I used to be. But if you're a, you know, sort of command and control, top down type of a leader, and compelling and how you go about being that way, you can silence an awful lot of people that you don't want to silence.
Yeah.
Versus today, you know, by virtue of age and experience, I'm much more than this might get to your next question. I'm much more of a servant leader, type of a person. So spread myself across the organization be there to knock down almost like a scrum master, not every block that might be in front of them, ensure that I'm giving them everything they need to be successful around processes and tools, and structure and things
of that nature. And then let them do the great work that they're, they're naturally looking to do anyway.
That's you just on the heels of that I feel there's so much more individual success that comes out of that from a leader. And there's so much more learning that can happen to because then employees aren't afraid to ask questions. I know a lot of times maybe employees won't speak up, because they'll think that their their question is dumb, or, or, you know, why
didn't you know that already. So I feel as a leader, being able to open that floor up to every employee to take part and be a part of every single opportunity with their own specialties. It allows them to find that that self value and that self confidence, all while being able to you know, not only look up to you, but work with you.
Yeah, exactly.
Awesome.
It takes time to learn.
Yeah
It takes empathy, it takes being self effacing it takes being a good listener, a great listener, it takes a whole bunch of things to, you know, sort of naturally lower to a common level of, you know, inhibition. So that that, you know, that sort of magic can happen.
Yeah, I like that magic.
Yeah.
So just to wrap this up, at DefinedLogic. You value people as a whole, right, their experience, their willingness to learn their core values. Do you think more companies should treat their employees this way? And if so, what are some of the best ways to show employee appreciation?
Being able to I wouldn't, I don't like the word enforce, but being able to implement your core values with work life balance, flexible work schedules, but then to how do you kind of keep implementing that in and showing that to employees so that they can in turn have their own work life balance?
Yeah, there's a lot in there.
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah thats ok, and some some of that I think is is is nuanced. And, you know, I go back to Simon Sinek. So, you know, little things like, you know, never never call your employees employees, right? I mean, we're team members. And if people have a sense that we're all on the same team, it's a little thing, but it turns into a big thing. As soon as, as soon as somebody calls me an employee, for example, then that's a very different connotation than me being part
of the team, right? We're all in it together, we all have the same shared outcomes and so forth. If I'm an employee, I have a different yeah, I have a different sort of feeling in my core,
Yeah, a different vibe comes through that word.
Vibe comes through that way. You know, so that's part of it. organization structure is part of that as well. I'm a firm believer in, you know, very, very well designed functional organization structures that themselves can change, you know, where you look at the shape of the work that's coming up, you know, set over
some period of time. In our case, as a consulting business, as a digital product agency, we're always learning new things, we have channel partners, who are always providing new capabilities for us to be able to, to leverage
and so forth. So to design an organization structure for today, and expect that it should be what you have forever, just doesn't make any sense versus looking at the shape of work, looking at your customers looking at the market, looking at, you know, kind of the pro forma of projects you're going to do in the coming six months to a year looking at your channel partners, and saying, Are we best are we organized properly to be able to handle
that capability? If not, let's let's let's make changes and being willing to make those changes. And, and then, you know, by virtue of a functional organization, it's less about hierarchy. It's more about going to market by customer going to market by project. And having that centricity as the main thing that sort of binds us together. Certainly, for our type of organization, that's, that's, that's, that's critical.
In terms of appreciation, we have a variety of things, and some of them are just, they're kind of fun and stupid. You know, we have like our, our skull of excellence, you know, that were at least while we were in the office, and we'll bring it back now that we're, you know, you're kind of thinking in that way, but when somebody does something really good, anybody in the organization can nominate them for the skull of
excellence. And it's this crazy little trinket that you know, somebody would march into somebody's office and drop it on their desk, but they'd send out a broadcast email and say, Hey, I, I just recognized Tara are nominated, I'm looking for a second to nominate Tara for this great thing that she did and bestow upon her the skull of
excellence. The other end of the spectrum, we have the silver camel, so the silver camel recipients that do something really dumb, you know, my first day at DefinedLogic, eight years ago, I was awarded the silver camel. I somehow pushed the wrong buttons on the telephone system. And I lit up everybody's phone in the entire company, and they just rang incessantly. Second half of the company was standing at my door with the
with the silver camel. Took me it took me probably a year before somebody else made a dumb mistake, you know, before I can hand it off to them. But it goes back to your question earlier about making mistakes, right?
Yeah.
Something like that. To turn a mistake into something fun, you know.
Yup.
I guarantee you, I wasn't going to push those buttons again. turning into something fun, we have something we call night on the town. That also everything we do is a pure reward. Right? So everybody can record recognize everybody in anybody. So if somebody does something really cool, then we'll recognize them with a night on the town award. Right? And so it tends to be a small group. So whomever is part of
that, right? So it's it's, it could be Hey, the guys worked over the weekend and got a release on you know, take your family out this coming weekend for a night on the town on on DefinedLogic. One of the things we're working on right now is a swag store, and a swag store. We'll be married up with what we'll call a thanks program. And the thanks program. Each of us will have a number of tokens so to speak. We can recognize other DefinedLogic team members peer to peer up down doesn't matter,
right? You see something that somebody did that you really appreciate? You have the opportunity to award them a token thanks award. And then they can take that token they can take their thanks award to the DL swag store, and they can get a sweatshirt or a notebook
or something like that. It's a little thing but that just the notion of being cognizant of what good looks like being cognizant of having a Little systems to be able to have people recognize those things and have it tied to some kind of little award, you know, a notebook or sweatshirt, who cares. But I mean, at the end of the day, people care, I like getting things like that, you know, he recognizes that even in my role I like when somebody's reading, you know, Hey, Mike,
you did a really good job. And I mean, you're never too old to be thankful. Or too high up in an organization, so to speak, to be thankful for somebody just recognizing that you did something. So, so that's what we do at DefinedLogic. And to your question, I, I see customers that don't do this. I see other companies that don't do this. And we have zero turnover at DefinedLogic. Yeah. And, you know, all of it goes to our
strong culture. And these little things that are part of that, I believe, you know, again, somewhat cliche, but I believe it ultimately leads us to a point where people just love working here, you know?
Yeah.
And if they do love working here, and I love working here, I don't have any reason to go look someplace else for a job, right?
Yep.
And if I see a customer organization, or a partner organization, that doesn't live our values, for example, it can it's crystal clear, you see it pretty immediately, right?
Yeah.
So yeah, there we are.
Fantastic. And one last thing that I know that I've really recognized in you as a leader is you sharing your life with the entire team and sharing that you're taking time off to kind of reset or you're getting up or you're taking a walk at lunch, and you bring that to the
entire company. And I think for you know, the entire team at DefinedLogic, it's it's recognized, it's notice and it's appreciated, that it does come from you and everything comes from that leader and being able to be like, okay, it is okay, if I take half an hour and go take a walk. And I think by being able to see that in you, it allows a lot of the team to walking in those footsteps as well and, and feel confident that they are following an amazing leader at the end of the day. And...
I learned that during COVID.
Yeah,
I learned that from our own team members. Yeah, I learned, frankly, the value of the tiny little things that go to work life balance. I learned that, you know, pausing our weekly stand up on a beautiful day, like we have today, in lieu of getting out and just spending 30 minutes with your family on a walk. There's something there I learned meditation. You know, when we added that, thanks to you, when we added that to our
Yep
And reflection and decompression. And I was never a weekly stand up. And we started to see this flood of responses meditator before. But I turned my screen off. I turned on, you and people saying, I really like this, you know, I like having know, I close my eyes. I listened to you. And, you know, somebody lead me through five minutes of mindfulness. it's it's one of those little things when you add them all up.
It makes it makes a big difference in a big impact. Totally. You bet. Well, listen, Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. Really awesome just to be able to sit and chat with you and learn more about where your mindsets at as being a successful leader. We are DefinedTalent coming to you at Top5. Make it a great day.