 All right, hi, I'm Christine Gadsby. I'm the Vice President of Product Security at Blackberry, and I'm here today to talk to you about what we're calling the Leadership Bench Program, which is a program we created internally to focus on developing our internal talent, to create a Leadership Bench, and to make sure that we are motivating people and also following along to some of our DENI goals for the year. Before I get started, I'll go through a brief agenda, actually really quick here. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about why I am personally passionate about this topic, and I appreciate you sticking with me. I have not yet talked about sort of my history and why I'm passionate about this publicly, so this will be my first time divulging this information to anybody but my family. But then we'll talk about the mindset for developing leaders and how we think about kind of the next generation, especially in areas like product security where it's not typical, that people go to school for this area, at least they didn't, I might show my age here, but in my generation. And then we'll talk about five steps for success. And as we talk about the five steps for success, I'm actually gonna walk you through how we did this inside of our company. So we'll start with the example and then we'll work towards some of the things that we've actually done to achieve some of these things. So a little bit about me. Well first, a little bit about why open source is hard. It is hard. I love this graphic on the left. It kind of shows, you know, open source is sort of the bright future but it makes adoption really hard. And I do have a lot of growing up to do because that's how I feel about open source as well. We all know that we need to mature in it but we also know how challenging it is. And the second thing I'll say about this presentation is we did this as a security team. So the idea here is to take some of these ideas and make them your own. Because the template for how we made this program can work for any challenge, whether that's open source or if you're an accounting, it's all kind of the same sort of theory. A little bit about me. I live in Dallas. I'm a mom of four girls. I was a single mom for seven years. And I'm a breast cancer survivor and there is a method to kind of this madness. And the picture on the right hand side of the screen in the very back of that table is my, also gonna show my age, almost 30 year old daughter who lives full time in a neurodiverse housing community called 29 Acres in Dallas. They, if you're not familiar with a program like that, it's a residential program where they actually teach adults who have neurodiverse challenges to actually live independently. One of the very few in the country. So she's getting ready to graduate from there. And then on the left side of the screen is my youngest daughter who's now 10. In the middle there, I'm actually holding her in, I got pregnant with her and I was diagnosed with breast cancer right after. And I'm actually not even holding her in that bottom picture. Someone else is holding her because I don't have any pictures holding her because I was in treatment for most of that. And there's a reason I'm telling you all this. The second part of this is how I grew up. So I grew up really poor. This is a picture of my dad and the bottom right of this screen. He actually served at the Unigusful Mission in Seattle, his entire, basically his entire career. So when I was a kid and I grew up, we were serving others for, you know, that's what our family did. So I didn't know any different. But the important part of this is I didn't grow up with money for college. So when I got to be an adult, I kind of had to figure it out for myself. And I ended up going back to school and that taught me a lot. So, you know, I learned that the value sometimes in working hard and adapting to overcome was the entire challenge. And, you know, you kind of had to be scrappy to figure it out. There was no handing of some, you know, information to figure it out. So those were really valuable lessons. And I really learned that my greatest strength in that was my ability to empower myself and to solve big challenges. And I knew that I wanted to sort of, as I got older and became a leader myself, that I wanted to give back to that community. But it wasn't always really obvious for me how. So then I realized that that is the truth. The value is the encouragement and the empowerment towards the journey of success, not necessarily having a specific outcome. And I also realized very quickly that not everybody at the leadership table always thinks like I do. And I didn't really realize that until about 10 years ago. And I started getting into the boardroom and having these discussions with other executives. And then I realized I was the only one at the table that grew up like I did. And I realized some of the viewpoints that I brought were really valuable because they didn't think like I did. And so I had one of those kind of moments. I don't know if you've had them, but you know that you bring something, but you're just not really sure what it is. There was one day, and I'll never forget it, where I realized, okay, it's because I grew up like I did and I have all these challenges in my life. How am I gonna empower others like me? Because I'm definitely not the only one. So I thought to myself, all right, there's something here and I went out and I happened to be really blessed to know a lot of people in the industry growing up in this industry. So I went out to some of my leadership friends and I said, hey, I'm gonna, this is a non-official survey, not people that work internally at our company, but I just started making some phone calls. And I'm gonna say, in general, what would you say about developing and retaining your talent, especially encouraging your women and minorities? And leaders would tell me, hiring and retaining talent, especially our DE and I focused talent, supporting women in their careers, number one priority for me. It's one of my top priorities. But leaders would also tell me that they spent less than 5% of their time working towards that. And of course, I wanna know, so why is this such a hard thing to make a priority? I began to wonder if there might be value in an actual mind shift of things that I grew up and the values that I brought. And leaders would see, this was a common answer. Have you seen the list of my insert priorities here, my budget requests, my board meetings, my travel calendar? And I would say, yes. Well, our HR team doesn't support this. Okay, well, have you asked them? I would see, we don't have a company high potential development program. And it's the DE and I goals are always in our goals, but we don't even ever have a program to get there. So what I started wondering is, as we go through the rest of this presentation, my mindset is always, what is the actual strategy for developing and retaining people? I don't wanna talk about DE and I goals. I mean, I'll talk about them, but that's not a strategy. That's a goal, right? How do you define problem solving? Are you encouraging your leaders to actually solve problems? Or are you asking them to go find a tool? Because that's not the same thing. And are you getting to success with that empowerment? What does success look like? So in order to do there, where do we start? So we start by changing the narrative. And I'm gonna now go through, when we went through this as a team, and I've actually got one of my team members here who went through this with me. This was where we started understanding that we had a narrative to redefine and that we needed to really think differently. So focusing on developing those leaders with potential. We use experiences and talents to have people expose outside of their day to day. So it is very possible you're rock stars in finance and you just don't know it. And this happens to us all the time. When we find those high potential people and we expose them to things outside of their comfort zone, and they are encouraged to grow, they grow, right? And we see that, and we definitely saw this with this project. Use challenges to force critical thinking and solve tough problems. Avoid the buy another tool and hire another resource. We certainly come to those conclusions. And we certainly did go into this program, but that wasn't the first thing we went to ever. In fact, we discouraged that because we really wanted to focus on thinking differently. And then bringing all the levels of leadership together. And this was a really, really, really critical thing to think about is one or two levels of leadership above you or one or two level leadership below you. They can all, they really can inspire each other. And one single leader can carry and cascade and mentor other groups of leaders to mentor other groups of leaders. And that definitely, we definitely saw a lot of that. Okay, so I decided then to kind of go and test the water. So I found my favorite C level employee at my company who shall remain nameless. So I'm just gonna say, we'll name him Bob for this conversation. But I went to him and I said, so we're having a conversation and I'm looking for a stretch goal. And that was kind of how I approached it. I'm looking for, I have these things that I believe and I think it's gonna be really helpful. So what is your plan to develop and retain your leaders and encourage your women and minority talent pool this year? And his answer was, well, HR and the company programs. And I said, but what about for you as a leader? Not programs because those are designed to support it, but what is your plan as a leader? Well, lots of HR and company programs. And I said, okay, what would you do if I told you I would sponsor your business to create what I'm gonna call a leadership bench program where I would group your high potential people together and I would bring the diverse employees with me. And I would work towards those DEI goals to solve a couple of big challenges that you got to choose. So that conversation said, interesting, how long will this run? And I said the rest of the year because we made it a year and I need two hours of resource time per employee. But my leadership team will pick up the rest. And he said, how is this zero dollars? Because that was the other thing I wasn't gonna spend any money, right? How is this free? And I said, this group is gonna focus on outcomes. We are gonna use the current resources we have and their goal is to work together and empower each other to think more critically. Success will be in the conclusions we bring you and you can choose what you do with them. So he said, tell me more, I'm listening. And he said, well, what do I have to do? And I said, you just show up at the end, that's about it. Maybe you buy a meal, a lot of thank yous, definitely a lot of listening and a lot of learning and a lot of encouragement. And he said seriously and I said, yes, if we're gonna impact growth in this area, we have to empower people with potential and that mission has to be critical. And it was a great conversation. And he said, I'm a fan, I can't wait to see this in action and what else can I do to help? Which was a great open door. So the number two thing in here is to find your internal sponsors, right? I had what I call my Taylor Swift moment and I went to the rest of a couple of leaders and found some more internal sponsors. And when I approached them, I said, because security is typically always a speed bump. And I said, hi, it's me, I'm the problem, it's me, I know that. And this is a typical response. Yes, you cost me money and bring me problems. And then this one in particular C level that I talked to, I said, okay, but you give me great review feedback. I always have awesome review feedback. Why? And he said, because you solve those business problems, you bring to me the problems, but you solve them for my business. So I need that mindset was how we translate that into. So how we built our executive support team for this project. I cast a really wide net, including externals, right? We know a lot of people, I went internal and external and said, I wanna do this program where we're gonna bring all these people together and try and solve some tough problems where we're not gonna spend any money, we're gonna worry about solutioning, we're gonna think critically, will you support me? I had 100% participation, I did not get any no's. Actually, everybody thought it was a great idea. And then I asked them to sponsor my initiative and that was really key. Sponsorship was free. I wanted to be able to use them as backers for what we internally knew was the right thing to do and to grow all of this talent. And they all agreed and also reminded them that this was my stretch leadership goal. So this was something that I wanted to do in the year outside of my normal job to stretch as a leader myself. I brought them my initial list of challenges. So we had put together an initial list of things we thought we should work on. But I asked them to add to the list and this was really a critical step because what I got back was a really long list, wish list of things that I think lots of leaders would probably agree on. But I really did this for a reason. I wanted them to get on board and feel like they were a part of this mission. And in order for them to do that, they had to have say, so they did. And they left me with tons of stuff. And I also found, again, that they were very motivated to support this because they felt they had by in and that was really, really key. So number three, find an open source or another problem that will influence a strong outcome. So we went through the list and we immediately checked some things off that couldn't be solved in a year. I felt like we're kind of defying gravity. And we came up with a couple of other things and my experience is getting that by in upfront for the challenges that you work on is really critical. We let the executive team decide the challenges. We didn't pick them. We let them prioritize the things that were gonna impact their business the most. But they were also really critically chosen. We wanted to make sure that we had outcomes that we could make measurable. So it was saving people's time, saving money, something that really they could get on board and feel passionate about, $10, 152 resource hours, executives like dollars and cents. And so we really, really forced this into that function of being executive ready to have outcomes. This also, when we started working through this side of it, it really generated more ideas because then they started to see the ideas that dollars and cents were gonna be saved by this powerful group of people. And so it brought even more people on board. We started with really, really, really small things, but as we debated topics, they got bigger and bigger, which I thought was really interesting. And then again, we understood how all of these things impacted revenue to gain adoption. So that was a really, really critical step. So where do we land in this? We had a long list that we started with. We landed on two things that we were gonna work on in this group for the year, the Tiger teams we're gonna work on. Vulnerability and threat feeds, again, for us. This is where for all of you listening and all of you in the room, pick your own thing. This was just ours. This is what our executives kind of worked with me to get down to. As a software security company, we have so many threat and vulnerability feeds. Oh my gosh, every single internal team is managing either a vulnerability feed or a threat feed or they're talking about vulnerabilities that we're working on remediating something for someone. And what we really came down to was this first goal, which was how can we share vulnerability intelligence internally to benefit our company? And again, we've actually done similar things in our open source programs for this, like getting those big goals of, how are we building buckets or whatever? So again, make this your own. This was our first goal. And our second is security research. For as much vulnerability threat feeds we're watching in vulnerability management, we're also doing the same in security research. We probably have 10 or 15 groups internally researching their security widget or the outcome of the widget. Or what do we make to do X? Or what do we make to do Y? And we were sharing in some places but we weren't sharing in broad places. And the outcome was that people weren't always learning with the deep research we were doing. And sometimes not everybody even had access but we knew that there was value other places internally with the research. So our second goal was how can we use security research to benefit our product teams? Okay, so we've got our goals. The next thing in your journey, step three is to create the teams. This was one of those things where we shifted a few different areas and this was definitely some development on my part. But I really wanted to impact what I could internally. I don't always have a reach to impact externally but I know the people on my team I've been in my company a long time and so I really wanted to focus where I could make a difference. And this was here. So the high potentials that De and I, the bench leaders, the guy in finance who you know, Joe is a rock star. Joe is looking for something else to do. He's a master at something but maybe he needs to be cross-organizationally exposed to harder problems to help critical thinking. So anyway, the thing here you do for creating the Deering team is to remember people can always learn from each other. Inspired leaders absolutely inspire other leaders. I saw this through this process so much. Your powers and your collaboration in those groups ensure your leaders opportunities are stacked. So your senior S leader, you know, manage on the way down. Set them up with team members who they can mentor to make sure those results are cascaded and then be creative with your resources. And so how did we do that? That was sort of how the principle and how we tried to start out. We put two Tiger teams together. I started back at that executive leadership table that I had started with. They were all now my sponsors and I called them as such. So I went back to my sponsors and I said, sponsors, who are your nine box candidates? And I was really surprised that some of them didn't have nine box, not very many, but a few of them did not. So I helped them with our nine box exercises and went around to their teams to make sure that they had nine box exercises done. So that we all knew who needed to have stretch goals because that was the first thing is empower your unpowerful people to help others. And then I asked them, who in your leadership team can I approach? Again, this is one of those things that works externally. Go find your people in the industry. This is, I didn't reach out to one person externally who didn't support me on this. And in fact, the people that I did reach out to externally, we didn't share company information or anything private. We shared topics of challenge. They were more than thrilled to donate an hour of their time. That was, Christine, how can I help? How can I help? Do you need me on Wednesday? Can I call? It was overwhelming support. So I found that when you're reaching out and telling them that you're doing this, you know, project to help others in the industry, they're more than happy to help. And I would ask, who in your organization has untapped wizard skills? Because this is always the case. When leaders and executive leaders are looking at their nine box exercise, and I do this as well, there's always that one person in the nine box at the very top right that is like a wizard. And you know they can empower other wizards, right? But we have to connect them together. So again, Joe and Finance, who was at the top of his nine box, I made sure and those executives got to make their list of their wizards. And I reached out to them personally and I said, I've got this project. Do you wanna be on board? It was 100%, again, 100% success rate. And then I distributed a wide announcement to those final targets. Like everybody knew the, it was a very public internal project we were working on. Everybody was very excited. And I'll say that I don't have this in the slide, but for us internally, 75% of our participants are in some minority category. That's incredible. And I didn't go out expecting that result. But that just shows that there's an underserved, you know, part of every company that definitely will volunteer for these opportunities if they're put in front of them. And I asked for nominations. Who's not on my list? Again, is there a wizard? Is there somebody that didn't volunteer? Executives, tell me who's not on the list. And I went back and got that second wave of people. And then we asked for volunteers and we got even more volunteers. But again, 75% ended up being minorities. So how do you solution from that group? This was kind of the, it's really easy to get the people together, but then when you get the people together, how do you actually come up with the solutions? And this was really, I had to, I made the model and then came back and remade the model and came back and remade the model again. But there were some principles that I stood by, and this is really critical. And in reflection on this program in the first year, I would stick with these. Make sure it's a fail safe working zone. The power and those people inspiring others, there's gonna be a lot of wrong answers. That's okay, right? Coming up with the answers and talking and really working together, they're learning through the process. So while the answer might be wrong, they're still learning. Focus on the outcome of the problem solving and let the big challenges be what they are. Don't focus on implementation yet. And that was another real thing that we really had to take off the table. Don't worry about the end. Because in this leadership bench program, your outcomes are going back to the executives. You're not making any decisions. You're simply trying to solve problems and you're trying to expose the people to the work to solve the problems. And you wanna come up with good outcomes, but you don't need to worry about whatever the executives gonna decide, right? That was kind of the beauty of that. And then get stuck and rework. Like let your inspiring leaders who are running the teams or the groups, the working groups that have broken off, let them go back and help get them unstuck. That's inspiring leaders that wanna inspire others. Love teaching that. That's what we found out. And I see you're smiling. One of the things with the, I see two of you smiling. One of the things these working groups I loved was dialing in and listening to this brainstorm that was like, I have never heard anything like it before. Well, that will work. You know, that won't work because we gotta do this. Have we thought about this? I mean, let that be the focus because what's happening is you're underserved people like me, they're firing and they're learning and they're listening and they're feeling like they're included and they're feeling like they're contributing, which is kind of half the process, right? And then leaders ask hard questions. So we brought in some inspiring leaders who really forced these people out of their comfort zone and to rework stuff often, which was again, one of the biggest points of feedback that I got from running this program was the underserved people who felt like they had a chance and a voice and a chance to actually prove that they could work on something harder, which was really cool. So what did we do? We focused our program and you don't have to do this. You can take this template and do whatever you want. We focused ours on using our own resources more efficiently. I really wanted to focus people on problem solving. That was by design. We did not focus again on implementing anything. We literally wanted to solution stuff. We didn't want to actually say, okay, but that's impossible. We wanted to bring, and so I think I have this in a later slide, but I focused on three solutions for each group. They brought their three solutions. They focused those on current resources and how to use those more efficiently, but there were other ideas. The value again was in the challenge and how to think differently and the wins came from changing conclusions. The cross organizational working groups brought light on how resources were being used, which was one of the big takeaways. We didn't realize that the finance team was doing something that another team was doing and then we would bring HR in and we all had commonalities of challenges that we were working through and we benefited from the cross organizational views for sure. People breaking down silos and encouraging knowledge sharing, again, was super powerful. We paired up senior and junior resources to take on specific problem statements. Where there was a big challenge and you come across parts in some of these working groups where it's like, well, we can't solve for X. We would pull the senior leaders to work with the junior leaders to really form the smaller Tiger teams to figure out those problem statements and that was definitely really powerful. And then we brought them together to share their findings in these power sessions, which was absolutely amazing to watch, amazing. And one of the things that I took as a personal goal in this, aside from it just being a stretch goal, was I really wanted to call on some leaders to present their passionate findings to more senior leaders, because as this is a personal bench goal for me right now, presenting this, there are other leaders below me who need exposure to me. And then down the line, there are people that are too down for me that need exposure to their leader. And so during this, when we had present findings, we really stacked, we'd get together and say, okay, this person should present on this and we would give them a slide. And just having them be exposed to senior leaders was actually pretty incredible. And then we would definitely pair them up with their appropriate level of mentorship to present, to create slide decks. And for some of these people, they'd never presented anything before. So what it delivered. Again, we used creative ways and broke down those silos. We also found out that there were things we were paying for in closets. That was pretty awesome. Hey, we have this tool. Really, who's paying for that? They are paying for that? Why aren't we using it? We don't know. That wasn't generally that disconnected, but we did find things that other teams had that we could be using that we just didn't know existed. So that was really great. We actually solved a lot of problems just by sharing things. And then here's some things that I heard on the way. And I think you'll probably recognize a lot of this. And this was the power in the room. And things I wrote down. I actually have a notebook where I took paper notes when people in these teams, and you guys probably didn't even know I was doing this, both of you that were in this team, I wrote down things that people would say that were really powerful that I wanted to take back to our executive team just to say, this is the power when you harness these people and their energy, right? I didn't know we had access to that again. Okay, yes, we do, we can use it. Wow, can I read that report? There's a report here on this whole thing that I've been working on for 12 hours to try and figure out, I didn't realize that. This would be very valuable to named team who is currently doing this thing and they're having a really hard time with it. Wow, we could save massive dollars if we just did this differently. This needs to be shared, this is a huge win for this team and this team. So it was amazing to watch these bench leaders, our next level of leadership be inspired to solve problems bigger than their smaller team and across the company. So this is probably one of the more important parts of this project and it was at the end. So one of the things that I really, I really, really strongly recognize was a really powerful, powerful part here was presenting the findings. So the goal was at the end of this for these two Tiger teams to come up with three solutions to present back to the executive leadership. And again, by the time we got to these solutions they didn't end up being zero dollars. Some of them did have small cost impacts but because we started looking at resource efficiency from what we already had. And the championship was to brainstorm solutions. We brought these executive leaders back to listen and this was so amazing to watch. We scheduled a call, a virtual meeting with all of these C levels at the table. All of these group members got to partner with their mentors and they all had a slide to present what they found. They showed what they learned, they got to make recommendations to these executive leaders and that graduation ceremony was really critical. And another thing I found, the executive assistants in the team who were trying to schedule for the C levels for this call actually got other leaders. It was really great. You know who should be in this call Christine? This leader is super passionate about this kind of stuff. You shouldn't fight this leader. And we showed up and had all of these C levels on a call and these employees read out all this work they'd been working on for months and it was just absolutely, it totally empowered all these people and then all these executives were completely impressed that was the other thing. We read out the three suggestions and I didn't put this in the slide either but we've implemented two, three things out of the six. So we put together six things, we've implemented three and we're working on V2 to implement a couple of more but the end result of this program was we have three programs running that have impacted the way our products get to market. Very, very cool. The research one is awesome. We have a research, internal research community of practice. When new topics come up, we task the community with it and then they go to all the research and they share it with all of the executives. It's absolutely wild to watch it, very fun. Okay, so a summary and then, this was only gonna be a 15 minute talk so I'll have time for questions. The summary of the learnings in this program, there was a lot of value in again just focusing on the challenge, right? While we implemented the solutions and we brought those solutions back to those executives and the executives decided what they did or didn't do, we really, really, really focused on the mentoring value, empowering the people to know that they could do more than they're doing, that they're in, you know, Bob's in finance, you can work in security, Bob. We've actually created ongoing mentoring relationships with people we will try to offer internal moves to eventually, so we've identified bench leaders that will pull out of other organizations because they've also found, as I was exposed early on to things that I'm really passionate about, it's allowed them to potentially have career moves which has been very cool. Fail safe and fail often, we failed a lot. I mean, we came up with a lot of ridiculous ideas that never made it to the end, but the beautiful part was, in the very beginning, because we've failed safe, we allowed them to come up with their own conclusions. We only took three forward, but the group decided which three they took forward, so that was pretty cool to watch. Thank you has a dollar value. So, when I was thinking about presenting this, I wanted to bring up my own story here, and it's really quick, but it says a lot. I had a, I won a prize for an award for something that I did a while ago, it might have been for this program, and it was published in a external media, a PR article, and I was on vacation, and I got a note from my CEO, and he said, thank you. So, this is awesome, I love reading this. It made my world, I was blown away, and I realized when I read that email, and how it impacted my whole, I mean, it just impacted everything. I wanted to work harder, I wanted to do more of it, and I realized that value of thank you, and again, the real win for this program was bringing all those C levels together to actually acknowledge that these people had done all this hard work, it was really cool. Everyone is junior to someone, right? So, just taking a leader, even if you're a small company and you have to go external and go find a friend, call me, everybody is junior to somebody, and everybody has that power to be able to lead other people, and again, if you're a small company, you don't have those leaders, and you're an open source, and you've got open source challenges, there's a lot of people here that would jump on board with you and help you think through that. We had a couple of leaders we signed NDAs with, they were happy to do it, they came and spoke to some of our groups, it was super empowering, okay. And I have time for questions, I think, that's pretty much it, yeah, 10 minutes, if there's any questions? I think he's got, let me take the, I have a question because there is a lot of time in this situation, when there is somebody in a team that's not speaking a lot, but he's kind of a wizard, so how would you make these people be more talkative and more participate into the team effort so that we match our goals together? Oh, I love that question, that is so spot on, and those are kind of sometimes the wizards that are hiding and they don't really do public speaking and they don't really speak up and calls, those are the people that I would call myself and I would say, you're valuable, and sometimes what I really found out is those people, and I was that person once too, I didn't think I had any value, right, because I didn't, I mean again, I grew up really poor and so that just taught me that when I got to the boardroom it was really hard for me to know that I had value, and when I saw it, I went after it, but they need to see it, so I would call that person, I would encourage them, and then I would pair them with a mentor that was maybe, because I can also make people nervous, I don't mean to, but I'm loud and I talk a lot, and so if I am with a more junior person who I might make uncomfortable, I'm gonna go find someone else on my team who maybe is, maybe more friends with them or in a different peer group or something like that where I really feel like they'd bond, and then their job would be to present a slide. We start really small, that was really hard. Folks, friends, that was hard. Some of these people who don't speak a lot would be, I can't do this, I have one slide. We would give them two bullets, and you know what would happen? They would read the two bullets, and then the next time they're like, okay, I can take the slide, because sometimes you just have to start somewhere, but they were definitely rewarded, and we made sure as leaders, myself included, when we get on those calls, and I always knew who hadn't presented before, I would go out of my way to recognize them. That was amazing, that work that you just did, absolutely fantastic, and hopefully my teams that's sitting here knows, I really try to go out of my way to make sure that I recognize those people. So I think mentoring them with an appropriate mentor, acknowledging that hard work and starting really small, able at point on a slide in front of others, and then just keep kind of encouraging that level. And you had a question? Go ahead. The hard is, Sorry, can you repeat that? So people on the phone, can you answer? Thanks. What can be sometimes hard is making sure you include everybody that needs to be appreciated. For example, I could say to you, thank you for this presentation, but now I'm missing out on everybody who just passed me the microphone and so on, right? So, and sometimes that can be hurtful to people as well. So I find that very tricky. Yeah, agreed. So one thing that I do, and this can, you can again take this for however you wanna implement it. I do keep track of that, actually. You guys listening to this, we're gonna laugh. I have a calendar and I keep track. So for example, I'll give you an exact example that I just did this morning. We have an internal email that goes out that tracks some of our accomplishments, like I don't remember what it's called, but it's like a PR kind of thing. And one of the things that came out yesterday was we had a bunch of women that were recognized for channel sales. I think they got some award. On my calendar this week is for me to recognize all the people in those emails and send them personal emails thanking them. And I did that. And the entire list and said this is awesome, great job. This is awesome, great job. I really try to be intentional. And if you're not intentional, it won't happen. And being intentional like that with others has cost me my time. I mean, and I don't mean costs like ours. I mean, there are other things I'm not doing for myself because I'm trying to do that for others. I want to do that. But I have different lists going of different things to remind myself of to make sure that I am intentional. And with this group of people, I did keep lists of everybody. And I kept lists to make sure that I recognized everybody at some point. Everybody got a personal recognition. And then for our executive leaderships, there were a few leaders in these programs that went out of their way, way out of their way. They were inspired, they were passionate, they worked weekends. They themselves made sure they recognized every single person on their smaller group because we did break in smaller groups to bring them back together. I made sure that the C levels went out of their way to go thank those people because those tended to be the stronger leaders. And remember those strong leaders sometimes don't get thank yous, right? I mean, sometimes they're the ones giving them out and they're not receiving a lot. So I went back to three of the C levels and gave them all lists of names and said, hey, can you make sure you say thank you? This person did this thing. And I highlighted one thing that I saw that they did. They called this person and spent six hours. This is true. This person spent six hours working on this presentation with this one person because they'd never presented before or whatever. So, you know, there's no easy answer for that, but you definitely have to be intentional. And I hear you very much about the person that gets forgotten. I am constantly thinking through who did I forget? Who have I not said thank you to lately? You know, who do I need to remember to recognize? Because that is the bigger takeaway. The powers and the recognition for this. I just can't stress that enough. I couldn't believe to watch these people blossom. It was absolutely phenomenal. So that was a great question. Thanks. Great presentation, by the way. So I think we see the playbook of how to start this up and use your goodness and adapt it for our own purposes. What's one or two things you would do differently after the fact of standing this up? Wow, what would I do differently? I think probably the way that I went about trying to organize the groups I would do differently. I, when I first went about this, I didn't see the value in the cascading of levels of leadership. I really needed a call on my stronger leaders that are in my own organization to do more in the beginning because we kind of floundered in the very beginning with the working groups. You guys were in the working group. So like I really needed to harness them right away so that they didn't kind of go off into their own. And if I did it differently, I would actually take more leaders with me in the very beginning. I would bring, you know, and when we do V2 of this, we're about ready to start the second version of this. I'm gonna have a few leaders around me to help me really guide those working groups and how they're set up. Because once they get going, I mean, friends in the room, like when they get going, they're going. I mean, they are like off and you're like, wow, what is happening? So that's definitely one thing I would do. I will strategize those working groups and get senior leaders to really focus on the mentoring pairs. That's the other thing. Second thing, mentoring pairs. Really, really, really be specific about who's got what skill. So you mentioned, you know, people that might be more shy. I next time will find a single mentor that can just work with the Tiger Team groups on, and this is for V2, this is true. The second, which we haven't done is public presentation. So when I do it this time, I will pair mentors up based on the skills that they want to develop, right? Not everybody wants to be a public speaker. This is the truth. People are terrified of it, right? I mean, I actually am too. So it's just one of those things where, but there's always somebody in the room who wants to try it, right? They're like, what do I do? So I want to be really intentional about pairing those people up. You're a really great public speaker. You can mentor the six people that raise their hand and say, I would like to present at PSIDES or whatever, like a local or on a video conference or whatever. So those will be the two. Intentional about using senior leaders to help strategize how those groups go and then mentoring by what the mentees want to learn. Like what are their top three or four things that they don't feel like they're, what did they feel like is holding them back in their career or their internal movement? I want to do more asking of those questions first so that I can, because there's people passionate about developing all that, we're just going to ask them, right? So yeah, those are the two things I do differently. That's a great question. Go ahead. Thank you. Wait for the mic. Thank you. First of all, I really appreciate the presentation and your story about yourself and your kids. You're a very great mom. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And regarding my questions, actually I have a couple of them. First one is you mentioned about, you do need to mentor them about critically thinking. So I'm wondering what is critical thinking? That's one thing. Second one is it's only, I think it's a possible, but still I want to ask that, is there any conflict between, for example, if you have multiple teams, multiple projects, and then eventually you're an executive, there are no, one or two of them are, when they're considered a project, when they're, however, actually the real leader, high potential leader is in other teams, then in this case, how do you kind of move forward? You really want to promote this high potential leader, but other less potential leaders are kind of, what do you think of, how do you kind of, I would say, make them accept that, yeah, we win, but you're not going to be promoted as a leader. Right, okay, so two questions. So when we did the critical thinking, and I know there's many definitions for critical thinking, so one of the things I think about as a leader in critical thinking, I want them to think differently, right, because there isn't one answer for everything, that is the truth, right, especially if you're an executive and you're writing checks. I wanted them to think outside of normal answers. Sometimes we just accept that that's not efficient or we accept that we're going to have to spend a lot of money here. I wanted to get them into a group to think differently and critically means to me, means they're willing to accept that their answer might not be the right one, because sometimes they're not, right, I'm wrong a lot, I'm just going to say that, I'm wrong a ton and I think what's been really powerful for me is knowing what I don't know sometimes and asking, all right, I came up with a solution, it might not end well, what do you think? And then let the brainstorm happen. So critically thinking to me is really being able to be wrong and being not okay. Now you mentioned leadership and high potential leaders, so and I mean, I go through this myself, right, there is always going to be a bench of leadership, right, at some point and what we're trying to encourage here is for that bench to grow. Part of how we avoid getting into the dilemma is the bench is transparent. If you're on this bench leadership program, you know you're on it, right, so that's good. We all know we're in it, we know what we're trying to work for, we know we're trying to be developed. The second thing is, is not every leadership role is right for every leader. There are a lot of things I can't do, right? I am good with business and so one of the things I bring might not be something that you bring or something that you bring. So I think realizing if you don't have a potential in one area, you have potentials in other areas, I really feel like programs like this really help that because while I have a high potential leader on a bench over here, they might not get that job but there might be jobs over here for them that they can get or that maybe they might want more but they're not gonna understand that until they're exposed to areas of opportunity in other parts of the business and that's the reality. We don't in general as an industry laterally move very well, right? This is just the truth, I see it all the time. There are a lot of career opportunities and sometimes, especially in things like open source and securities also, we're very closed off to what we're willing to look at as a potential leader from another area. What we're trying to do is encourage that lateral movement so that, again, I'm just gonna say Bob general name. If Bob didn't get that job that he applied for, Bob might be able to cross over into my organization though and take a different role. But if I don't do things like this bench leadership program, I'm never gonna know that. As a leader, I'm never gonna see the downstream. I'm never gonna see the high potentials. I might know their name, but I might not know what they do or I might not know what they're capable of. I might not see the wizards, they're everywhere. Crazy, we've found so many high potential people in this program. And now, again, they're on a list and we can pull the different business units but definitely realizing that some high potential leaders miss out on opportunities while they could have others. So really just creating that dialogue I think is very helpful. Just one thought, so I work for Christine for context. When we say leader, we're also not specifically saying people manager, right? You have someone who's an individual contributor who is leading their function, their excellent, their function, their driving business. And I find that miscommunication with my team sometimes where I say leader and they hear people manager and I say, no, no, I'm talking about you. You're out there leading your business, your process, your whatever it is you're doing, you are a leader, you don't have to be a people manager. That is an amazing point and thank you. So V2 of this presentation, I will include that. These leaders aren't all people leaders. They were individual, a lot of them were individual contributors. Actually, there's another one in the room, knockout rock star who I won't mention his name because you can't go hire him. Kidding, kidding. But that leadership potential is what we were aspiring to inspire, right? The single focused person who might not have a team of people, but they're really trying to eventually have a team of people and they wanna know what it's like to lead. Yeah, we have a lot of really powerful individual contributors actually that showed up. So that was really cool to see. Any more questions? Thank you. You mentioned the importance of positive feedback and reinforcement. I was wondering if as part of this program you also thought about giving constructive feedback and how did you approach that? Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh, some of it is hard. I mean, it's not all good, right? And that is part of critical. So part of critical thinking and critical feedback is having hard messages. Yeah, that's actually some personal stuff that I've done a lot, you know about this. I've worked a lot on those hard messages. I always try to balance that out with what to do instead. I don't ever have a lopsided critical conversation. If it's gonna be productive, then it needs to be, okay, that was a great idea. I love that you came up with these four things, but have you thought about these five things that that's gonna challenge? And then teaching them to be critical thinking on their own, that's the beauty of a program like this. They're gonna get to that conclusion on their own, right? So I don't really have to have those really hard messages. My message in that is, we're gonna go to a C level. Would you bring that? Knowing that these other five challenges exist, would you bring that to a C level? No? Okay, let's go back and do it again, and that's failing safe. Great ideas, great concept, but we need to go back and rework that because that's not gonna, it's gonna get to the C level and the first thing the C level's gonna ask and this is where my wizard comes in, I'm gonna ask you, these eight things, oh yeah, Christian, you're right. Yeah, right? So that is part of that critical thinking is just to learn to come up with a different answer. It wasn't wrong, we just need a different one. Let's get to the top three, right? So that we can go on. So that was a great question. Is there one more? Okay. I'm wondering how you keep the focus on mentorship and leadership rather than solutionizing. I feel like that would happen in my organization. You're absolutely right. You are absolutely right. That was hard. That was a lot of the role that I played was intermediaring with the leaders themselves to remind them that you have, and I broke it up like focus areas, so these leaders had specific people that they knew they were mentoring that were either called out by an executive and there was all kinds of mentoring happening here but there are specific people in the nine boxes that we really wanted to focus on because we knew that they either needed a stretch goal they didn't have in their cross organization. That was a lot. A lot of the people that we got from the executive team that were like, oh my gosh, please work with Matt or Jim or Susie or whoever, they didn't have a stretch goal in their own organization and so they were leading on this program to really inspire them to have these stretch goals. So I really played the role as the leader of the program meeting with these people going, how's the mentoring going? Are you focusing on, how are these, what are your struggles? How can I help you help them? How can I, and I did have to make a lot of phone calls and a lot of sort of redirection because we did pivot and the thing that you think might happen in this program happened. We got stuck in a few, there were a few areas where we just got stuck. I know you're nodding your head. We just got stuck. Well, that's where I come in, not knowing and really pick it apart and try to help drive it forward. And then I'm reminding those leaders, this is about the climb, right? It's about the climb. So how are you gonna have, how are you gonna encourage these people, your mentoring to get themselves out of their box? You're not gonna answer it. Don't answer the problem. Teach them to answer the problem themselves. And so we did repivot and repivot but the beautiful part about a bench program that you're developing, there's no right or wrong answer, just repivot. And so as long as you're willing to keep showing up and keep inspiring others to think differently, eventually you get to a point where you have momentum and you get yourself out of it. So that was a really great question and that did happen quite a bit. I think again, that's part of why in the next version that we're getting ready to launch, I will strategically take my seniorest leaders much more down the path because I am only one person also. And that is the problem is that it's not scalable when those things happen and when the problem overtakes the mentoring and this is a mentoring program. The other, so again, I'll strategize that differently in the beginning this time. The other thing is I constantly went in and reminded that we're not implementing anything. No executive has bought into any of these ideas yet, right? The job is to come up with the ideas, not to write the check or make the changes yet. So I feel like when, as a leader, you re-remind that it's about the challenge, they stop focusing so much on the solution, right? So V2 of the solutioning was a whole different, but we'd already then made the decisions to do the stuff. So it wasn't as hard. Okay, any other questions? That was good. Well, thank you for your time. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer more questions. Happy to walk you through how you could do it yourself because we're gonna be launching V2 and we'll be doing it too. So thank you.