 People have met me before. I'm surprised by that. This is my 23rd Drupal Con. This is probably my 25th presentation. So this will be interesting if you don't know anything about it. And even the people who I do know probably don't know me as well as they think I am. The sort of warning that I'll give you is that I'm going to talk about some stuff. I'm not going to give you any easy answers. I'm going to give you some introspection when you leave. And there are some topics we're trying to get into that in my draft. I offended one of my co-workers and she was very gracious enough to walk me through why I was being stupid. And so I rewrote that one. Oh, yeah. Testing one, too. Check, check. Talk about that people will sometimes refer to that as the politics. And that might get a little fraught. If you have a problem with it, that's perfectly OK. I'd love to talk to you about it. If I screw up, but I'm going to talk about why I just said that in a minute. I'm amused, by the way. We'll look at my career in a minute. And I'm amused, you know, all the fuss about trigger warnings and things. I gave trigger warnings to my college students 24 years ago because we were reading Native Sun by Richard Wright as the semester-long project. And if you've never read it, Richard Wright's Native Sun is not an easy book and features some really, really hard topics. And so I said to my freshman who at the University of Arkansas, hey, this is the book we're going to be reading. You should be prepared for these things. And then someone's mom called my boss. I'm Ken Rekard. As I said, I've been here. My 23rd Drupal Con. It's crazy. I'm now the director of innovation at Palantir. It's a Chicago-based consultancy. For those of you who live in D.C. or San Francisco, we're palantir.net. We're a web consultancy based in Chicago. I cannot comment on the other. And that was contact information. I'm going to start with some cultural appropriation, actually. I had a sabbatical last year. We went to Australia. And we went out to the Outback. And we visited both Uluru and Cata Judo, which are sacred sites to the Aboriginals. And this is some of the paintings that we brought home. And the reason I mentioned this, I had said before that one of my co-workers corrected me on some of the things I was trying to say. And the problem was that some of my co-workers' stories intersect with my stories. And the interesting thing, we were at Cata Judo. And at least three times, our Anglo tour guide said, so there's a story about this thing, but I can't tell it to you because it doesn't belong to me. And one time he said, there's a really interesting story similar about this plant that belongs to some other people at another part of Australia. So I want to be respectful of, this is going to be about my story and my experience. It's going to intersect with some other people. And I'm going to try to be respectful of that. So everything I'm going to tell you, again, comes from the sort of 20 years I've been doing this stuff. So let's talk about that real quick. I did start off as a graduate a long ago. I learned the internet in 1995 because I was afraid that they were going to be piping in lectures from Harvard and Yale and wouldn't need professors at places like the University of Arkansas. I got an internet job in 1998 when you didn't need any experience. The blue box is when Drupal comes into my career. I spent 10 years working for newspaper companies. I was an online director. I did some product management. I had the lovely title associate, vice president of research, development and partnerships, longest title, least responsibility. It was great. And I went to Palantir. And at Palantir, I've been there for 10 years, and I've literally had six different jobs. Senior engineer, team lead, that change happened within three months, actually. And then sales engineer, which I'd love to talk to people about later. And then I was the director of development. We had 27 employees and 22 of them reported to me. Then I was the director of sales and marketing for the last two years where I had three direct reports. And now I have no direct reports. As I said, I'd like to go do some other things. And we'll talk about that also. One of the points I want to make, I said that in 1998 you could get an internet job with no experience. And I always joke that I got that job at a small newspaper in my wife's hometown in Arkansas because there's the only person who interviewed for that job while wearing a tie. Now, I think that's a funny joke, but we're going to come back to why that joke is funny and why some people think it is funny and why it's not funny. I'm going to try to weave some threads through. Jokes as a manager are a very interesting and complex topic. So how did I get up here is my great question. So I'll also say, a color code in my slides, when it's in red is just a topic header. When it's in blue, you're going to be tested on it. So you should write it down and a little hint for you. So 80% of leadership is literally just showing up, particularly in an open source community like Drupal. They always need people to do things. And literally, if you just show up, you can take on a leadership position. It's not that hard because most people really don't want to do it. It's hard. Now, the other 20% is actually caring about the outcomes of that leadership and the people involved in the project. So what's really interesting to me is that you're going to make mistakes. I'm going to tell you right now. You will make lots of mistakes. I almost made a very, very bad mistake just writing this presentation. How you handle those mistakes will actually define your success. I'm here to tell you, I have made screw-ups, and I'll show you some of them. I'll talk about some of them. I have made some screw-ups. They're pretty epic. And the trick is to own them, to not deflect them, to not say, oh, but, it's to say, oh, OK. I see exactly what you're saying. And I'll talk, what I'm going to really get into in this talk, I hope, is how you as managers and perspective managers can get yourself in the frame of mind to be able to do that. And I'll talk about some resources and things. So I did have some opportunities that other folks may not have had. I had multiple college degrees. I had some economic security. When I took the newspaper job, I had also interviewed for a job at Indianapolis, at a book publisher. And I already had the job offer in hand, so I asked them for too much money, and they said, no. And I was like, OK, fine. I also deliberately took a job within 30 miles of my father's house so that if it didn't work out, I could move back in with him. And it was a nascent industry. It was 1998. I mean, I literally knew very little. But I did know how to talk business. I didn't know anything about newspapers. I didn't know anything about journalism, and I knew very little about the web. But I could speak to both sides of the audience, the business side, the print folks, well, really, the three sides, and the technical folks. And being able to translate those three things is what led to my opportunity. And then I had support. So we'll talk really briefly about imposter syndrome. So when I started, all I knew was HTML. And this is pre-CSS HTML, mind you. I didn't know how to use Control V, Control C, Control X. The guy I was basically replacing showed me that on my second day, because I was using the mouse for all my shortcuts. And he's like, there's a faster way. I didn't know anything about journalism, budgeting, or management. We're not going to talk about budgeting. That's a whole thing of its own. Key number one is fine trusted mentors. So the first time they asked me to write a budget, it wasn't a big budget. It was about a, I think I had a $70,000 budget, not counting salaries. That's not a huge thing. But I had to do a revenue budget, too. And the publisher said, I said, well, OK, what do you want me to do? And he said, you're a shark. If you stop moving forward, you die. By which he simply meant, you have to make more money than you did last year. And then I went to our controller, who had 30 years of industry experience. And I said, what am I supposed to put in this document? And he patiently explained it to me. So find people that you can trust. And then there's a leader syndrome, which sort of follows from the imposter syndrome. I think imposter syndrome, people get paranoid, or sort of, paranoid is a bad word, I apologize, sort of frozen, because they're afraid they have to have all the answers. And they're afraid of being exposed for not knowing the answers. And actually, one of the secrets to leadership and to, I think, success in general is to be sort of gracious and courteous when you don't know an answer. And to be able to say, hey, you're asking me to do something that I don't fully understand, can you help me with this? That can be very dangerous in some toxic organizations. But if you're in the right organization, you'll get good responses. So my sort of leadership syndrome story, I was at that newspaper, I just finished my first budget. We're doing budget review with the corporate VP who's come in from out of town. And we're presenting. And I'm kind of complaining, actually. I was young and brave, I suppose. I'm complaining that there are three competing things demanding my time. Where should I spend my focus? And I'm asking the general manager this question. And GM punts the question to the publisher. The publisher punts the question to the VP, which is a bad leadership style. But hey, it is. The VP looks at me and he goes, why don't you tell me what you should do? And I'm like, oh, crap. So then I go back to the controller and I'm like, he wants a business plan. What the heck is that? And the guy patiently explains what it is. So the VP never expected to hear from me again. He thought I was just mouthing off. And two weeks later, he's got a 40 page report on his desk. So that made my career at that company, by the way. Take on challenges and do things that people think you can. That's actually been the story of my entire career. But you have to be able to admit what you don't know. And you really have to be able to get help from people who do know more than you do. That can be a very tricky thing. Events like this are a great opportunity for that, actually. So, story number one. We are who we pretend to be. This is a quote by Kurt Vonnegut. I love Kurt Vonnegut. This is from Mother Night, a great book. Might have a chance to talk about it later, so. I think this goes to both imposter scene syndrome and leadership syndrome, as I'm describing them. And I'll come back to this quote a little bit later. That's very easy, I think, for me to say. So I'm gonna start a little bit over. What are technical leaders actually supposed to do? What are you being asked to accomplish in a technical leadership role? And the answer is that you're being asked to guide teams to successful outcomes. The biggest thing, really, I would say, is that you always have to have your focus on the outcome. Where you start from, sometimes how you get there don't necessarily matter. Especially if you're in an agency, like I am. People purchase outcomes from us, right? I tell dad jokes when I give to you talks. I just give a speech to students at the University of Michigan, so I call them dad jokes, because I'm way older than they are. There's an old sales truism that no one buys a drill, they buy a quarter inch hole. They don't care how they get a quarter inch hole, but a drill is usually the best way to do it. And I can say as a 20 year homeowner, there are reasons why there are specific tools that you should buy, like a plumber's wrench, because right tool for the right job. But people are buying these outcomes from you. And teams are too. They're buying into, if you're at the keynote, where Dries is saying, this is what we're trying to accomplish. You either buy into that and go forward with them, or you sort of go, yeah, I'm gonna go do something else. And there are people in the community right now saying, yeah, maybe I'm gonna go do something else, because I'm not quite sure about this direction. The other thing is you're supposed to guide them to success in both the short term and the long term. And that can be really, really interesting too. This is sort of my other map of your interaction trajectory with the rest of your team, right? So you might be asked to lead projects, which is pretty straightforward. You're assigning work to people. You're reviewing their work. You're making sure stuff gets done. Hey, that's great. You may also then be asked to mentor, evaluate and promote those people, right? Which is sort of a step up to the sort of difficulty and abstraction scale from day-to-day leadership. You're also gonna be asked to support and estimate and negotiate things with clients and your team. And yeah, direct, motivate, and I love this last one, discipline your team, right? I remember we were having this conversation yesterday. The last person I remember firing, we decided to fire him when he basically said, I can't accept, I can't work with that person. They don't know enough. I'm talking about someone else on our team, and we fired him the next day because that is not an appropriate attitude. So those are the sort of the big things you're gonna be facing as technical leaders and the sort of thing I want you to sort of, for those of you who are not in leadership position, now when do these things happen? They happen in big clusters. This is a sort of typical day and I've color coded by type of activity here. So yeah, I review my email first thing and then these bright orange things. I have Scrum with two different clients or Scrum with one client, a pull request review later. I got a budget meeting. I got a sales pitch with a new prospect that I've got to do. I've got an annual review that has to be done. That's gonna be interesting. I've got, I set aside more time for email. I'm gonna do some resource planning. Then I'm gonna do client check-ins with two, with one of my clients and another pull request review. Then I do my Drupal stuff. Then I'm gonna do email. This is actually fairly typical scheduling. We have people on our team and you probably do too, who have like two half hour gaps in their entire day, right? Or I've been known, when things get really busy, I have to block out time for lunch. It's like, hey, this is an hour where no one can schedule anything. That's called the don't you dare schedule a meeting in this time. That's what I call my lunch. But these things don't actually happen as scheduled. This is what actually happens, right? Hey, I'm checking email. Great, okay, I did my resource planning. Hey, I got on a phone call with client EFG and oh crap. Somebody's pull requests have been failing and someone broke the build and they're really concerned about Don's performance on this project and I have to do some followup with Don and the project manager to make sure that everything is okay and when things go really bad, you get three of these in one day, right? So you must be prepared to react to the unexpected. This is the biggest thing I wanna sort of warn people about. You must be prepared to react positively to the unexpected or at the very least, not negatively. You see all the people at the beginning scrambling to make sure the microphone worked properly. Did you see their demeanor in their behavior and my demeanor in which is I was like, okay, we'll just wait until they're done, right? That's enough of a positive reaction in my book, right? I wasn't yelling at them because the microphone was broken, right? That's not gonna help anybody. So some real world examples of things that happen. These are all conversations I have had. Names have been changed to protect people who are not me but these have all happened. Why did Paul get promoted? I've been here longer. Someone came into my office one day. I think the client's product owner doesn't respect my opinion. Parentheses, because I'm a young woman, I don't wanna get into that part of the discussion but that was the parentheses. Why does this code not work the way I think it should? This is usually me but I'm leaving to take another job with a better salary. Actually, we have someone who's here with us today who's on our team, who's leaving because she doesn't like working remotely and wants to go work in an office because she's not getting enough human interaction on a remote team. Well, she's in sales and I totally get it and we support that but as a manager it's like, crap. Now I gotta jettison these priorities and go find a replacement for that. And we actually had to go through a process of thinking like what do we really need in this position now? It's not something we had planned for. It's not something we really wanted to do but now, boom, it's a high priority for us. In fact, we're hiring for a sales lead if anyone is interested. This is another good one. I was harassed at last weekend's meetup and nothing was done about it at the time. Those are fun. The client asked us to start working nights and weekends to hit their deadline. We don't work nights and weekends by the way. That's a good one. How many of these scenarios have you prepared for in your professional career? How many of them have you been through in your professional career? I think when each of these came up for me they had never happened before. Just never happened before. It's like, okay, how do I deal with this? And typically I would say you, I mean, we fall back to well, how did I handle it before? How have I seen it handled before? From a management perspective, my default position and probably many of yours is how would I like my manager to handle this for me? Which isn't always the right answer. So confession. Judas Priest put out a new album and they came up with the Judas Priest logo generator. Yeah, this is not what I signed up to do, right? This is a quote from my mother when I was about 25. Every time, every, I have an older brother so my mother has no daughter so she likes my wife better than she likes me. It's a joke, it's true. So every time we get together with my mother, my mother and my wife disappear for like four hours and talk about me and I've been married for 18 years and they still do it. It's fine. People are not my primary interest but I also pulled this off Twitter because I love this. There's no good engineers who only pay attention to code or no good engineers who think about technologies. No good engineers who ignore social issues. It's the human context of your work. The actual biggest piece of advice that I would go back and tell someone, myself in my 20s is that people matter and you have to pay attention to them which I did not realize until I was about 35. I thought I could just, if I just put my nose down and worked hard, I would get things and that's why I ended up getting a new job in 1998 instead of becoming a college professor because I did not attack my graduate studies in a collaborative and collegial manner. That's a painful thing to say. So you have to care about the people. You have to understand their hopes and fears. So here's where I get into some actual advice. I like this book. I'm gonna give you a list of books that I like. Daniel Pink's Drive which is just about hey, what motivates people. His surprising conclusion was it's not money. It's usually the idea of working towards some greater good or something that they value. It could just be leveling up skills. It could be learning new things. It could be helping organizations that they think are important. But everyone's gonna have different drives and you have to be aware of that. It's a good sort of meditative book. It's real short. It's easy to read. I like this one too. The seven hidden reasons employees leave. Why do people quit their jobs? And I will just tell you reason number one is because the actual job expectations do not match what they thought it was going to be. You hired someone to, I don't know, go to marketing conferences three days a month and they only go three days a year. They're gonna quit because that's not what they signed up for. Good book. Difficult Conversations. Empathy. Back to empathy. Empathy can be learned but not faked. This is a good book that sort of walks you through some of those really tough conversations. The example I always use with a client is I basically had a conversation with a woman who was pretty convinced but would not say that if the project didn't finish on time and on budget, she was gonna get fired. And I had to convince her that I cared about that. Which is harder than it sounds, right? There's a dad joke number two. If you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, they always say the chicken contributed but the pig is committed, right? Because the pig is dead, right? Yeah, so I'm the chicken in that scenario. I win. So yeah, this difficult, and I'm gonna come back to this issue, getting people to trust you. I have a whole other talk on how do you build trust with teams. And then managing, the biggest mistake I think I made when I had 22 people reporting to me, this was under the Bush administration, the second Bush administration. And the joke was that I was the decider. If you had a problem, you'd come to me and I would tell you what to do. Which is the wrong thing to do in most managerial situations. This is another great book, Liz Weisman's Multipliers, where she was studying high performing teams across Fortune 500 companies. And she found that the best managers were the ones who were good at taking their teams' ideas or concepts or passions and encouraging them and sort of redoubling the ideas that their team had rather than forcing ideas down on them or telling them what to do, things like that. So another good book. And then I like this one too. Reading is actually the quickest way to get more stuff. This is Managing Humans, written by a former Apple engineer and engineering manager. It's just a lot of anecdotes about managing through tough situations. And there's lots of other books. And this is again where I say, a lot of these books, I actually went through my list and was like, how many of these were written by women? And the answer was enough, right? It's not a quota, but I did want to make sure. I was like, hey, good. But I was asking around and I was like, and someone recommended a book that was written by an African-American woman, female executive at some company. I'm like, yeah, I can't really recommend that because I don't have time to read it, but I'll make note of it. And so I will encourage you to, there are two things you should do. You should find books that speak to you and help you refine your message. But you should also read books that are not about you or about a wide array of stories. We did some great training with the Harvard Business Review folks that was about communication across international teams. Quick example, met a woman yesterday from Iceland who's participating in some of the Drupal Conversations and they don't have a nice landing word for governance and so she doesn't know how to participate in those conversations because she doesn't understand the core concept well enough to feel confident contributing. How do you smooth that over? That's another great question. This is the book I'm gonna spend the most time on. I'm actually gonna check time because we're gonna run right up against time. We have a room monitor in the back that I told to wave at me when there's 10 minutes left. I really like this book and I warn you, I like it because it speaks to me. I've recommended this book to other people and they don't like it as much. Just listen by Mark Goldston. This book is sneaky. It is actually a book about the importance of emotional intelligence and emotional labor and it's written in the most macho way possible. This guy trains hostage negotiators. He trains police and fire first responders who help suicide victims and so his anecdotes are things like, yeah, you pull up in the parking lot and there's a guy with a shotgun pointed at his head. What do you say to him to build his trust and make him lower the shotgun? The answer is you don't say lower the shotgun. You say something to the effect of, hey, I bet you don't, I bet you think no one understands how you feel right now. It's an amazing book because it puts the sort of emotional labor of management, that sort of emotional skill in really interesting context that I am gonna spend some time going through. So it's funny that only a few people in here actually know me and they probably don't know this. I have an anger management problem. I can hulk out. The good news, this is why it's good. I got the internet to work. Fortunately, I usually just get mad at stuff. I don't usually get mad at people, which is nice. So I was under a deadline for some code stuff last week and I was not easy to deal with because I was getting mad at vagrant machines and aquia and a bunch of other stuff. This is, when we start talking about these things, I'm gonna sort of summarize what Golston says in his book. This is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs if you've never seen it. Psychological model for how we become our best selves and it starts at the bottom. You have to have food, health and shelter. If you don't have any of these things, none of these other things are possible. You have to be safe. You have to have a feeling of love and belonging and from that you can then have esteem and self-esteem and then from that you can be self-actualized and do the things you want to do in life. And Maslow's basic argument is if you're missing any of the lower tiers you cannot hit the higher tiers. His argument also, of course, you wanna be at the highest tier, that's how you're gonna live your best life. This is why things like poverty and education and physical security are so critically important. I'm really mad actually, I'm not from Nashville but I keep seeing the vote down the transit stuff and it just pisses me off. Cause it's like, so you want nice restaurants and things downtown but you don't want the people who work there to be able to come to work. Selfish jerks. That's just my little political opinion. The danger in models like this actually is it seems really solipsistic. It seems really personal when it's in fact interconnected which is why, again, for me to be self-actualized and to enjoy the Predators game, right? The people who work there have to be able to get to work and back, right? And so, yeah, I gotta pay a little more in taxes, people. You've seen the signs, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Anyway. Sorry, I was distracted by the clapping. This, okay, you're now officially the best audience ever. So this is sort of Golston's take on that or my interpretation of Golston's take on that. He's talking about emotions, right? So at the base, and I'll get into this sort of, he spends a little bit of time talking about neurology and neuroscience and some really fancy stuff along with psychology. And so at the top of his is what we would call ethical action which is the kind of behavior you would like to events when you're like working professionally. And the lower you go on this scale, the worse you are, right? And so this fight or flight retreat and retrench response reaction versus actual engagement. I said before, hey, if I say something bad during this presentation, like when I was talking about, I don't read books written for African-American women executives, if that made you angry, please don't ask me about it now because I will not be able to respond to it correctly. He's almost guaranteed if you ask me about that within the next half hour, I'm gonna come at you from either the yellow or the orange of like I'm gonna retreat and be defensive or I'm gonna just spit out the first thing I can think of. There's a great anecdote in Golston's book where Colin Powell is giving a speech and someone stands up and asks him some totally irrelevant question like, how are you handling your daughter's death or something like that? Something totally inappropriate. And Golston says that Powell does this. I think we should be talking about the policy and not personal matters. Can we go to the next question? It's a fascinating moment about emotional self-control. So Golston's piece and I'm sort of framing it the way Maslow does is that in order to be your best managerial self, you have to be able to understand, in order to help that guy with a shotgun, you have to be able to understand your own emotional states and sort of control them, right? Or at least identify them. There's an interesting piece of study that basically says just naming your emotions helps you calm down, right? I said I had an anger management problem. I have long said that men have this problem. I don't think it's men, I think it's me. That when I have two conflicting emotions at the same time, like anxiety and pride, I can't reconcile those two so I get angry. That's because I'm not complex enough to handle two emotions at once. And anger is easy, right? So, now imagine again, I wanna be an ethical actor and someone comes to me and says, hey, why did Paul get promoted and I didn't, I've been here longer? And this is my first response. In my head, thankfully, I'm not saying this. Number one, am I being criticized? Well, yes, I am. And rightly, it turns out rightly so. Did I screw up? Yes, I did. We'll talk about that too. How dare she? Have you ever had this response? Like, I'm in the middle of three other things. How dare this person walk into my office and drop this turd in my lap? Right? That's not, it's not their turd. It's my turd, right? It's my problem. So that response is what Galston calls amygdala hijack. So what he calls the lizard brain in you, the fight-or-flight piece, overwhelming you with adrenaline and response so that that's all you can do is, like I just said, get angry or get defensive. And his key is you have to recognize when this is happening to you and then you immediately have to step back. All right, so the way I say that, well, his book, he has a whole chapter called go from okay, I'm not gonna say the bad word. And this is his sort of model, right? Is understand where you're at. And so he would say that, in the sort of Colin Powell instance, or when this person walks into my office and says, hey, I need to talk about this. This is a problem. You'd say, monitor your reaction, do something to be able to release it, re-center, refocus and then re-engage with the person. The real trick, especially in high pressure situations, which thankfully we're normally not in, is how quickly you can do this. Now, the thing that I would say is that in understanding your state of mind and sort of responding to this, you can't react from a negative place, right? But people also must be prepared to receive this sort of criticism and feedback and that includes you, right? You are also entitled to emotional security and stability, right? So when someone drops what you think is a turd on your lap, it's okay to go, hold on a second. I'm sorry, but I'm not prepared to discuss this right now. Can we meet in an hour? This is a delaying tactic, but it's a legitimate delaying tactic. It is an honest statement in some cases. And literally what I said to this person who came in was like, can we schedule some time later today to review your concerns? And then coming out of that meeting, the answer was, great. Within, by the end of the week, I'm gonna have a three month evaluation plan for you by which I will let you know if you've hit the qualifications for promotion. Because it turns out that we hadn't as a company expressly stated what it took to be promoted. Also turns out that I come again out of this newspaper background, I come from a sort of very traditional background. The skills that I think of as leadership skills, decisiveness, right? Speed, kind of. This person is a very deep thinker and a very slow thinker and likes to mull on things, right? There was my leadership style for those of you who have spent any time with me. I will fill all gaps in conversations in a setting like this, right? I am more than happy to, oh, there's a lull in the conversation. I got opinions. I'm not shy about those opinions. But this person that I'm dealing with, that's not her style, right? It was the style of the person who got promoted and I recognized, it's like, oh yeah, I understand your leadership style and I recognize it and I privilege it. There's a great word. As opposed to this other leadership style which is actually more effective but not something that I naturally recognize. It's not my platonic ideal of leadership and I might get back to that platonic ideal in a bit. So you have to be able to start from someplace in any conflict. This goes back to the difficult conversations. You have to be able to start from a place of agreement. Even if that agreement is on basic facts or even if that agreement is that you screwed up. And so yeah, when I go back to this later meeting I have to be able to say, you're right, we have not put clear definitions in front of you for what it takes to get promoted. That is my job to do that and I will make that happen. And then, you know, and that's what happened and they got promoted and now they're like peers with me. It's great. So your goal as a manager in crisis situations is to move forward together. I will say, there are instances where the crisis are so bad where you have an employee who says something like I can't work with that person, they don't know enough where you shouldn't move forward together. You should sever the relationship and get rid of the cancerous thing, right? Every once in a while that happens with clients and sometimes happens with personnel. It does happen, but in most cases you wanna find that common ground and move forward. And my point from Golston is you always wanna be moving up the chain, right? You move up, you never drag down. Really bad managers get in these bad emotional states and then they drag people into them, right? And you get into these spirals of blame and shame and crap and don't do that, okay? But in order to be able to do that you again have to be able to understand and regulate your own emotional response. Like I said, I love this book, I love this technique. When I did this to my wife a couple of times and she got mad, cause she's like, you're booking me, aren't you? Because my wife actually has better training in these sort of emotional intelligence matters and so she can see how transparent it is, right? So my lesson here, of course, is you can only do it for others if you can do it for yourself. And it sounds easy, however, it's not. And this is again where things can get a little dicey in my talk. We still have half an hour though, so I'm good. Don't think we're gonna have time for Q&A. I am gonna be here in all week and have you to talk about these things. So this all sounds really easy to do, but it entirely depends on your perspective. So everything in your experience shapes your leadership style and that is for good or for ill. I worked in newspapers. The two most sort of high pressure points in my life, I worked in a newspaper in Florida on the night of the Bush-Gor election. We prepared three headlines that night. We didn't publish the final story until three o'clock in the morning. And I worked in the same newsroom on 9-11, which now we're not in New York City. However, it wasn't all hand scramble and I was so busy it was one o'clock in the afternoon before I realized the towers had fallen down. Because I was just scrambling to do stuff. That was like a 16 hour day, right? And that's expected in the newsroom. It's funny, we had a hurricane come through and I was like literally the last car out of downtown St. Augustine. And I couldn't get home, but I did get home and I had an identical work lap in my work work station. I had mirrored at my house. So I was able to do my job from my house and I came in to work the next day at like two in the afternoon instead of eight in the morning and I'm talking to the publisher. I'm like, hey, yeah, I got my job done even though I didn't come in. And he goes, yeah, the circulation director was here at four this morning. Like, okay, he just like cut all the pride. His point was we do whatever it takes and you have to know what you're, now in my defense, I was also prepared to do my job even if I wasn't in the office. And the CERC director, whose job is to deliver papers had like a four by four jacked up on, so he could get through St. Augustine downtown, St. Augustine's below sea level, so it floods. And so there's like two feet of water and his car will go through that. My car got taken, it wouldn't start the next day because I flooded the starter. Anyway, this is the Palantir team. Not everyone on this team is the same as me. We don't have the same backgrounds. The one fun story, one of these people grew up in Tanzania. You would never guess which one by looking at them. I love that story. And so his experience is very, very different than many of the rest of us. And particularly because he thinks everything is negotiable because that's part of the culture he grew up in. So we did a negotiating seminar and he just crushed us all, it was great. So everyone's experiences are very, very different. And the point, of course, is why does this matter? And here's my simple example, and actually some of the people I work with are here now. In my most recent team, there were four of us, me and three women, and we frequently met on video conference, like once a day or so. And so we made lots of Charlie's Angels jokes, right? Two of us, of course, are Jen Axers and we were born in the 60s. And so this is what we think of. And the other two were millennials and they thought of this. And so once a month or so, we'd have one of these cultural moments where the two Xers, we'd be talking about something that happened in the 70s and the millennials would be like, what? We don't know what that is, and vice versa. And it was a fun little game that we played. And this is kind of harmless, but it illustrates my point. It's like, okay, we're gonna talk about Charlie's Angels and suddenly you're thinking about two different things. That's pretty innocuous. But we'll go back to our Icelandic friend who doesn't know what the word governance means. That's a bigger problem. So here's my thought experiment. I really like this part of it. Because I wanted to get out of my zone and I did some research, it was fun. So here's another confession. I cry at movies during airplanes, or cry during movies on airplanes. It turns out that when you're at altitude, something happens to the physiology of your brain and you're more susceptible to emotional manipulation. That and I'm getting older and I'm turning into a softy. But so you can share this, keep this to yourself. But what movies make you cry? And I'm gonna show you a couple of movies that make me cry. There's some spoiler alerts, but at least these are all at least five years old. So I don't feel guilty. The first 10 minutes of JJ Adram's Star Trek, this is Thor, this is James T. Kurt's dad, sacrificing himself so everyone else can escape. He saves like 800 people in the 10 minutes he ships captain and I am tearing up explaining this to you. Seriously. Okay. This is the first one my wife caught me crying at. This is Fury, this is a Brad Pitt movie about a US tank commander in World War II who is basically asked to hold off an entire German division with one tank crew. It's five guys facing about 1500 guys. You know from 20 men's into the movie that everyone's going to die and if they don't hold their position, the war is gonna go in a very bad way. So you have Brad Pitt and his team in a horrible position where Brad Pitt, the manager, has to make horrible decisions in order to get good outcomes. My third example is Toy Story 3 because I am not a monster. And because I'm not a monster I'm not gonna explain that scene. If you've seen Toy Story 3, yeah, everyone cries at that. Actually that's not true. Not everyone cries at that. I shouldn't make that statement. That's a false statement. Not everyone has that same sort of thing what I would point out if you didn't see a pattern. The third movie I wanted to put on this list or the fourth movie was AI, have you ever seen Steven Spielberg's AI? About a little like 12 year old robot child and there's no good pictures of this. At the end of the movie he gets trapped, sort of like trapped in amber reaching for a figure of his mother. I bawled for like 15 minutes because all this, it's a robot. He'd been programmed to love unconditionally. All he wants is his mother's love and affection and he's frozen for all time. He's this close to it and he can't reach it. It's the most gut wrenching thing I've seen in a long time. The commonality that I wanted to get to is what I'm gonna call the empathy trap. People often make the claim and some of the books that I point out make the claim. Empathy is a good thing. Empathy is always a good thing because it helps you in negotiating and I would say that is not necessarily true. Empathy is very important. It is a great tool but empathy frequently asks you to choose sides and empathy frequently plays into prejudicial notices and things. Now I'm gonna go back to my movies. Did you notice something in those people all had in common? Yes, they were strong heterosexual white men in leadership positions forced to make horrible choices for the betterment of others. I can very easily project myself into these fantasies. These are fantasies that resonate with my sense of self identity and self worth, right? They don't work for other people, right? But they are in fact dominant narratives in most of our culture and I'll get to that here in the next piece. So the example I use for this is have you ever heard the phrase Minnesota nice? Similar to Southern House but like people say that folks in Minnesota are really, really nice. We did a project in South Dakota and I make the joke that South Dakotans are nicer than Minnesotans. The reason is that South Dakota is a sparsely populated state with violent weather where your nearest neighbor might be three miles away and you might always need them to help save your life. So you have to be really polite to them. I think this is a funny, funny story, right? So I told this story as a joke to two of my colleagues. We were visiting MIT to kick off a project. They had just been to South Dakota and I told them this story and I was like, everyone I met in my 16 hours in South Dakota was super nice and this and that because I didn't arrive until like two in the morning and it was crazy. And they were like, both of them went immediately. That was not my experience at all. And demographically, they come from different backgrounds than I do, right? And I went and again, I said, I'd come back to the side of jokes, right? Jokes work because we share common experience, right? This joke fell totally flat. And I was like, wait, what just happened? And then I listened to them. I said, okay, what was your experience in South Dakota? And I talked to someone about this recently and it was essentially like, yeah, and the guy running the project was a 40-ish white man who likes sports and football and things that we don't care about and we had nothing to connect to and resonate with. Oh, okay. So it's really, really eye-opening experience for me. So I asked you this question, when things go wrong, what's your first reaction gonna be? Whose side are you gonna take? Where does your empathy naturally flow, right? So for a thought experiment, I wanted to be aware of judgments based on superficial things. You have to listen to people who are not like you. So I'm gonna go back to movies and say, read widely and get out of your comfort zone or watch movies on plane. Now I cried at this movie on a plane too. Hidden Figures has some different motives for crying on planes. Leadership models in Hidden Figures, how many people have seen this movie? It's awesome, love this movie. Hidden Figures' true story about three women who broke both color and gender barriers at NASA in the 60s. Brilliant women and the two stars, I apologize, I haven't memorized character names. I have them written on another slide. Tragedy P. Henson and Kevin Costner, two main leads in this story. Octavia Spencer plays another main character. I love her character in this movie. I'll talk about her in a minute. And then there's the Kirsten Dunst character who we all despise, I'll talk about that in a minute. So the three distinct leadership styles, they're actually more than three styles. But we're gonna talk about the Kevin Costner character, the Octavia Spencer character and the Kirsten Dunst. Setting goals and removing obstacles, predicting and preparing your team to fill needs and normalizing and enforcing. So let's start with the bad one. If you remember this movie, Octavia Spencer and the rest of the team report to this horrible racist woman. She really is, that's the way she's characterized. Whose entire job is to enforce and normalize behaviors and dress codes and she says things like, don't speak unless spoken to, right? She's giving explicit micromanaging nasty instructions to these women who are clearly better than she is on any scale of human measurement. All I will say about this leadership style, which you have probably seen before, is please, dear God, no. Your job is not to normalize and enforce things. If you, at least not in the industry that we're in. I have a guy who's like, he manages bus drivers for a school district. His job is in fact to normalize and enforce because that's the work they're doing, right? It's low skill and it's critical and it's safety related. We're doing knowledge work for, you know, it's a different thing. But, so don't even do this one. Kevin Costner, his basic leadership styles to set goals and remove obstacles. That's great. It's a very, very solid model for leaders, especially if you're working on project stuff. And then Octavia Spencer's character is predicting, there's this great moment where they, because all of her team are like mathematicians who calculate stuff by hand and they start bringing in these IBM computers and the team's like, what is this stuff? What's gonna happen? And she can see that her entire team's gonna get replaced. So what does she do? She sneaks in and learns how to program the computers and then she teaches her whole team how to do computer programming, right? This is a beautiful long-term leadership strategy. You have to be able to predict and prepare. If anyone saw like David Wong's thread about his concerns about Drupal on Twitter, he's like, we need to be going sort of API first so we can do headless things, otherwise we're gonna be obsolete in five years. That's that kind of leadership. So this predict and prepare, other great leadership model. Now here's the thing. Dorothy Vaughn, real person. Katherine Johnson, real person. Mary Jackson, who I don't talk about because she doesn't have a team to lead. Real person. This guy, not a real person. I didn't know this, I started doing research. This is not an actual individual. John Glenn's in the movie, he's a real person. There's like a German scientist in the movie. He's a real person. Kevin Costner, not a real person. But he gets to do this, which also did not happen. The whole thing about having to go to the colored woman's restroom half a mile away, not true. But it makes a real good dramatic impact for people who like to watch James T. Kirk's dad blow up on the enterprise. Me, right? So we're centering the narrative around empathy targeted to a certain group who is not actually the subject of the movie. And there are a number of reasons that have been put forward for why this happens, for marketing purposes, right? Black Panther, of course, has destroyed this argument. So has, what was it, Girl Strip, right? Girl Strip, yeah. It's like the two biggest movies in the last six months. There are white people in Black Panther and they're all just villains. It's really funny. Yeah, marketing, audience appeal, expectation, studio pressure. Studio pressure's actually probably the most legitimate one because people want successful outcomes. And they're like, oh, Kevin Costner's been in successful movies. What has Taraji P. Henson ever done? Well, she's done a lot of things, but she hasn't done like, you know, she wasn't what? Well, she wasn't in Waterworld, right? She's got that for her, right? But she hasn't proven broad appeal to a huge audience. So we've got to anchor it in something we know and trust. So they make this composite character, right? Who gets to do these big grand gestures that I can feel good about to validate my role in this story rather than just make me think about, like, what's the legacy of racism in the industry that I work in and the country that I live in, right? So they're trying to make me feel good and that's kind of weird. There's a word for this. It's a new word. It's called empathy. I've been reading the book Down Girl by Kate Mann. Empathy is the excessive or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male agent, particularly in cases of wrongdoing. Male agent, she extends this, I'm actually truncating, particularly in cases where sexual assault, presidential elections, things like that, where a woman is wronged by the man's actions, but we seek to explain the man's actions. And her argument, essentially, we'll get into a little bit. He's an ethical philosophy argument that gets to my idea that you have to be acting from an ethical space, right? Hold on, this is a tough one to get into. So why do I, this is the slide I'm looking for. Why does this matter? How does this stuff surface, right? So if my natural inclination is that I want to be Kevin Costner and I don't quite understand or empathize with, I forgot everyone's name, the tragic P. Henson character, for instance, right? But I'm asked to evaluate and promote her. And I have, I told you this story, I have done this and I have done it incorrectly, right? So these things surface all the time whether you like them to or not, and you have to be aware of them. The piece that I was, I'm looking for this, this is the slide I'm looking for. In Kate Mann's book, I just finished it yesterday. So it's top of mind. She uses the term, that's a fun term, I have to remember it correctly, epistemic injustice. She also uses the related term, darn it, testimony imbalance or testimony, we call it testimony imbalance. The argument that in the structures of our culture which have a legacy of colonialism and racism and patriarchy and all those things where people expect me to be in leadership positions, right? I can walk into a room and people don't really blink when I start talking about stuff. There are these epistemic, what did I say, epistemic injustice is the idea that certain people who fit certain profiles have their word trusted more than other people, right? There's a joke, I was at the diversity and inclusion booth yesterday, we were joking. And does anyone know Fatima? Fatima is like a 24-year-old Muslim woman, she's about yay big with a high squeaky voice and then there's me and I'm six foot three and yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was joking because we were trying to decide who was in charge of something and Fatima, she was volunteering and someone else was sitting there like yeah, it's either her or me and the other woman goes, yeah, you were never really a choice. But that's a real subversion or inversion of the way it normally is. And so there's this thing and I've seen it happen, right? And I've had people who work with me come to me and be like, what did you say to the client because they believe it when you say it but they don't believe it when I say it and that's epistemic injustice. That's this idea that when Kevin Costner says it, it has more weight than when Octavia Spencer says it and that is awful and we all do it if we're really not careful. And so be very, very careful when you get into that sort of amygdala hijack, who is coming at you, who is bringing it to you and are your responses different based on who they are and your sort of superficial assessments of their character, that's where it gets really ugly. That's what Kate Mann's book is about, right? The basic argument is like if I screw up, I made a mistake but if Fatima screws up, that's a flaw in her fundamental character, right? And she can't recover from that, whereas I can't because empathy, it's a great book. Anyway, yeah, so who said Dave Impulse is, moderate your response, who delivered that, when did they do it, how did they do it, were you prepared for it, right? And that's why I say beware of this amygdala hijack, don't come at it from a place of defensiveness. If you catch yourself saying, well yes, but you should stop and ask a question like, can you restate that? Because I'm not sure I understand what you're telling me, right? Just buy yourself a little time if you have to. Yeah, understand your biases. Again, this was the part that I rewrote after doing some early drafts. Are you holding onto the sort of platonic ideal of what leadership looks like? Again, that's why they put Kevin Costner in the stupid movie, right? Because that's what they think the audience expects, right? So I also ask you to understand your goals as I look at time, we're over time, aren't we? No, we're not, we've got seven minutes. I misread that. What are you trying to accomplish in the short term, in the long term? You have to know about what are your team's goals, what are your client's goals. You have to balance all this stuff. Anyway, that is the end of the formal stuff, but I'm gonna come back to this one. Yeah, we are who we pretend to be, so we must be very, very careful what we pretend or who we pretend to be. This book is Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. It's about a spy in World War II pretends to be a Nazi agent and then no one believes him when he says he's not. It's a great book. So this is the reading list that I have here. Drive, set in Hidden Reasons, Why Employees Leave. Difficult conversations, multipliers, managing humans, just listen. Down Girl, the subtitle of Down Girl is The Logic of Misogyny. It's a fascinating book. And then Mother Night. These are all books that I like. We have time for a few questions. I'd be happy to take some if you speak into the microphone. Otherwise, we happen to have ongoing conversations with folks. I really appreciate your time and your attention and your brief mattering of applause and the one lady who thought my joke was funny. Thank you. My question is kind of around the Michael Hijack idea and you talked about a lot of one of my classifiers in ways to intellectually think about avoiding that and things like mindfulness and meditation are things that are very important in gaining traction in the appropriate world for practices to avoid that as opposed to, like what Colin Howe did is very impressive from a display of emotional restraint that some people have to have a practice to help them learn that as opposed to just thinking about it. So this is where I say that is not really a question. That is a very great and valid point that I am totally not prepared to discuss because I am, as my mother would also say, stuck in my head all the time. So that intellectual approach to it is what actually resonates for me, right? I said this before, that idea of naming the emotions helps you conquer it. It's actually true. They've done studies on it. It's fascinating, but you're absolutely right. This idea of mindfulness or meditation is very, very helpful for people, but again, I've never found it useful. There's some breathing stuff that I've done before that's kind of useful, but I'd love to see, and we do have, I think, some sessions on this and I'd love to see a bop on it, but he is very, this is again, back to my point. This is all coming out of my perspective, what works for me might not work for you. What I'm saying is you're gonna have the same common problems. You might not use the same coping mechanisms or solutions, but you should be searching out what those are and what works for you and be able to, I will say this, as a manager starting out, the best thing you can have is a supportive leadership team that you report to so that when you say, hey, these are the kind of things that I'm dealing with that I'm not quite ready for. What resources do I have? What kind of, I'll give you a simple example. The woman who's leaving us, unfortunately, in the sales department, has to do a lot of cold calling and talking to strangers, so we sent her to an improv class for six weeks. She literally went to a second city, we're in Chicago, a second city improv class for six weeks to get comfortable interacting in unusual situations and she loved it, it was great. But yeah, the same thing with meditation and mindfulness. Anything that helps you is perfectly okay so long as, again, it's not harmful to other people, right, so. You're gonna come to all my talks from now on? I'll just send you a ticket and you can come in. So you mentioned that your wife caught you booking and got something to do with love, people just wanted to earn, wanted to earn that. And that can be gained, you're a suit. There's some other strategies, there's factors that you say if you don't get caught are really helpful to sort of diffuse those tense situations. I always use a move that I call the judo throw. You see, in judo, I don't know, actually, no judo, I just know that in judo it's all about using your opponent's momentum against them, right? And so, particularly in tech situations where people never expect you to say I don't know, that's usually, to diffuse those kinds of tense situations, I will frequently go to a place that people don't expect, right? And so you might say, like, oh, what about mindfulness and meditation? I don't know, damn thing about those things. They sound fascinating and if they work for you, that's great. That's a perfectly appropriate response. Also would be something like I don't, I would love to know more about that. Why does, how does that work for you? Which is a much better response than, ah, that crap doesn't work, right? You can't, you can't do that to people. So, yeah, so literally when people come to you, there's those stompers. A lot of times, I was at a session yesterday and they were saying, you know, knowledge is power and people often use that to their advantage and so they'll like try to bully people in meetings and things. And I'll admit that I don't know stuff. I'll be like, hey, that's really an interesting question. Let me get back to you. I got to do some research. We're doing a great project right now. The guy called me up and said, can we do this? I'm like, I don't know. Give me two days, I'll call you back. And that works in many cases. And you know, honestly, if it doesn't work with the people you're working with, you should get a different job, right? I'll tell you this one other showing then. Come on, that's fine. I have an ex-colleague and he's in his mid-50s. Brilliant, brilliant guy. Software engineer, photographer, self-trained, self-made, really good logical reasoner and excellent arguer. And he'd come into meetings and he'd be prepared and he'd have like eight bullet points and boom, boom, boom. And no one could really ever argue him out of a position. And he took me to lunch once and he's like, why don't people seem to like my ideas? And I was like, John, you don't give them room to breathe. You don't give room for any input because you think you've solved all the problems already. So there's nothing for anyone else to do. So that's a big lesson too. I once admired people who are funny and can disarm situations with humor. I think that's one time where that quote doesn't work. So do you have any advice along those lines? How do you mean it doesn't work? I don't, because I was like, I thought it worked. So now I'm confused. I don't think that can be funny. Oh, so I don't think you should. So I, now I know where you, okay. Here's what's funny. I was about to say, I believe you misunderstood me. That's not true. I believe I misrepresented my position. There's humor in my talk because people like humor. So like my little joke about Toy Story 3, I'm not a monster. Like people like that and that's a way to get empathy so people will stick around and listen to my talk and respect what I'm saying. Humor use in management situations is a horrible idea in most cases. Because of these, not the biggest pickles I've gotten myself into, but one of the, two of the five biggest pickles I've gotten into as a manager is because of telling jokes. I once told the following joke after hours at a company gathering when I was managing 22 people. And I was joking, right? It's like, hey, I appreciate all the hard work you folks do. You guys don't know what I do. It's my job to keep you all employed, right? That's not fucking funny. And somebody reported me to HR the next day and they were right to do so. It's okay. We're gonna continue this discussion the rest of the week. I really appreciate everybody's time. It was fucking true. Yes, I said a bad word. I apologize. Try the feel, yeah. I will say, since they didn't shut my mic off, yeah, humor might work, but actually, your goal is to find your authentic self and be honest about it. And people respect that. What you can do when you have people some time and direction? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they record everything and so they'll be posting things. I just, you know, I have slides. The slides aren't that great by themselves. Just a few of the quotes in the break. The last one is very interesting though. Which last one? Yeah. I mean, one. Well, it's true, but it's impolite to say. Why? Well, because it makes people uncomfortable because it lays bare-powered relationships. I mean, if I have a employee, if I get paid for what I'm doing, it's supposedly I do it out. And because I need those money to like to...