Side Mirror: Mark Slater on putting old heads on young shoulders whilst teaching old dogs new tricks.

In this Side Mirror episode I’ve introduced you to a good friend of mind, Mark Slater and we’ve discussed some of the challenges that he’s been dealing with in his IT environment, things like coping with a maturing team, integrating young talent, to some extent putting old heads on young shoulders but also taking advantage of their different approach to learning on the go. We also talked about the importance of trust, giving team members space to fail fast and iterate and creating an environment in which they feel safe to share what they are doing, especially if it’s a bit unusual and help each other.  

I hope you found some ideas to reflect on in this episode and I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. 

This episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR is brought to you by Aquilae. 

Could you use some additional experienced resources who can work alongside you and your team on a flexible basis to help you achieve your priorities? 

I started Aquilae in 2016 and since then we have worked internationally with established automotive OEMs, EV start ups, FinTechs and insurance companies to achieve their unique mobility goals. 

Aquilae team members are highly experienced senior leaders with complementary areas of expertise who have run businesses and divisions internationally in our industry. Because we have all had many years experience of operating in the industry ourselves, we don't just advise our clients on what to do. Instead, we tend to work alongside them, delivering their specific projects. We are happy to help develop strategy and we're equally happy to then get involved delivering the plan. 

Mobility businesses are all about people, processes and technology. We leverage our Aquilae Academy for people development and Aquilae Consulting for those wider business topics. 

If you're looking for some help with people or business topics and you like the idea of having some additional very experienced, resources who can work flexibly alongside you. Please get in touch with me for a conversation. You can email me directly at andy@aquilae.co.uk 

For details of our forthcoming guests follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror 

Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk 

Episode recorded on 22 November 2022 

Transcript

Ed Eppley: 0:00

I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key Florida.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 0:03

I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand

Daniel von Treeck: 0:05

Prague in the Czech Republic

Osman Abdelmoneim: 0:07

Cairo in Egypt

Holger Drott: 0:08

Auckland, New Zealand

Shannon Faulkner: 0:09

London, England.

Andy: 0:10

Welcome to Career-view Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, Andy follows Hello, listeners and welcome. You'll quickly notice we've adopted a slightly different format for this episode. It's another of our side mirror episodes. So it's not a full length Career-view Mirror biography of a colleague in our industry, but I have invited a guest along for the ride. Perhaps I should call it a passenger mirror where I'm the passenger, and my guest is driving the topic of conversation. Or perhaps you've had enough of car mirror derived puns already. Mark Slater is a senior leader in his field, which is telecoms. He's also a good friend of mine, whom I've known since our kids met at school over 20 years ago. He and I were having coffee recently, and the conversation turned to the topic of cultural transformation, and specifically people development across multigenerational teams. At one end of the spectrum, we found ourselves thinking about how to put old heads on young shoulders, and at the other end, how to teach old dogs new tricks. So we had some fun with it, and we thought it would make an interesting side mirror episode. So I invite you to dive into our conversation and let Mark and I know what resonates with you. Hello, Mark. Thanks for joining me today.

Mark Slater: 1:46

Hi, Andy. lovely to be here.

Andy: 1:48

So listeners, this is a side mirror, it's one of our side mirror episodes though you might notice the beginning is slightly different. I haven't asked Mark where he's coming from, and I'm not going to dive into his career story. Although trust me, that would be an adventure if we get chance to do that one day. Mark's a friend of mine I've known for 20 plus years. So it's bit of a different episode, we're gonna dive into a topic that we were discussing recently. Before we do that, what was the topic that we were chatting about Mark that we thought, do you know what, this could turn into an interesting side mirror episode?

Mark Slater: 2:20

This is a work conundrum I've had for a very long time. And it really centres around how do you engage your whole workforce, not only in daily activities, but also through periods of transition or change, or the strife and trouble, and ensure that everybody is on page and enabled. I've had a number of opportunities running very big teams. And it's great having a headline vision and strategy that you share with everybody and you all have a once a year rah rah at the start of the year, but how do you live with it on a daily basis? And one of the things that I've noticed as I've become older and certainly balder, is the language and way in which you engage with your early years people is becoming more and more mysterious to me, as the balder I've got.

Andy: 3:29

So the question is around how to engage everybody all of the time, especially when there's a growing divide between your older associates and team members and the youngest recruits on the team. So we're going to dive into that. I think is it fair to say we don't know the answer?

Mark Slater: 3:50

I have some hypothesis.

Andy: 3:51

So we'll Yeah, so we'll discuss those. Before we do that, you alluded to having run some big teams. You're not an automotive guy, Mark. So can we give our listeners just a little bit of background on the sort of line of work that you're in and some

Mark Slater: 4:10

I was always very clear in my mind from from about of the things you've done. the age of three of what I wanted to do for a career and that was to be a Royal Marine Commando, and had the pleasure of being a Royal Marine Commando for the first 10 years of my working career. That taught me a number of things that I've carried with me for the rest of my life. And that's very much around you're only as good as the people around you. And the people around you are only as good and as engaged as you are in communicating with them. After I left the military back in 1991, I managed to get a job in IT. And I very much focused my civilian career around technology in the telecommunications and IT industries, and I worked for a number of US startups and European startups, and had a phenomenally interesting career, where we've worked through building the technologies for the most part that we take for granted today. So you've probably all heard of Internet Protocol and the internet and things called Ethernet and Wi Fi, I was very much part of a select group of people in the industry that had the pleasure of creating those protocols and standards that we take for granted all day, every day today. Now, I work for a telco cult tell communications in London, we run a global telco network, and I run an international global team focused on enterprise business. And we're really going in engaging with our enterprise customers around the world to provide them with global connectivity between their offices, and the technology that empowers and connects their daily office and business lives.

Andy: 6:11

And how many people have you got in your team Mark, and how many countries are they in?

Mark Slater: 6:14

So we're in 31 countries, we call them metropolitan area network. So in normal non IT speak, your big your big cities of the world, London, Frankfurt, Berlin, Tokyo, Washington, Chicago, are the key, what we call metropolitan areas where big populous, and we've got a big, big density of businesses. And we laid fibre in the grounds there, in what we call Metro rings. And historically, we connected people onto the Metro rings. And then over time, we connected all of those rings in all of those cities around the world together. So no matter where you are, we can connect you up and establish a private commercial network for you to operate your business. I've got exactly 131 people in my organisation, and that's spread from California, going east all the way round to Tokyo, so got people everywhere.

Andy: 7:17

Thank you. So as I say, I'd love to go deeper into your career one day, we're going to keep it as a potted potted version for today, because that's not the purpose of this conversation. I love talking with you about leadership topics. Being a Royal Marine Commando, you were exposed to trained in incredible leadership skills with the real motivator there, if you got it wrong, people could lose their lives, which is, I think, quite a game changer when it comes to being focused on doing things and the level of, you know, the quality of the execution of the leadership you have to have, the quality of you mentioned communication, the quality of communication you have. When the stakes are that high, it must focus the mind.

Mark Slater: 8:06

Most definitely. And I carry that into everything I've done ever since. It all comes down to clear, concise, crisp communication on time on message. Otherwise, you get you get a misunderstanding.

Andy: 8:22

So there could be a separate line of inquiry about what can civilians, civilian leaders learn from elite forces. But let's, let's go back to our question for today, which was about keeping everybody engaged and particularly the topic that we were diving into over coffee not so long ago was the differences between those that are coming towards the end of their career and those that are just starting and how you set yourself yet you almost don't speak the language. So do you want to say a bit more about that.

Mark Slater: 8:55

It's it's a conundrum I've pondered upon ever since our kids were jointly small. As they started to grow up, I tended to notice that they did things very differently to the way I did. It wasn't until they'd grown up, gone away and I'd become a little older and balder than I suddenly realised that that's also going on around in the world around me, especially at work. And I've got a particularly difficult problem to solve in the company I work for. But that is also extended to the industry I work on we work in which is our workforce is old. If I look at the average age of my team, the average age is very, very close to 50. I've got in excess of 30% of my workforce, my team retiring in the next five years, and I've got nobody coming in at that rate in the early years to allow me to balance that and reduce the risk to the company. So I'm forced on to a escalating cost curve of having to compete with all my competitors who have got exactly the same problem, buying in old talent that's going to retire soon. So that's my problem. I have actually got over much of that, because we've got the ability to have graduate programmes and we're backfilling with, with graduates, we're looking at opening up an apprenticeship programme as well, all of which will take time, but it's the right thing to do. But as I had those people come into the business, I firstly had to sit and think about, how do I enable them? How do I train them? What they get taught in university is interesting, but it doesn't enable them for corporate life, it doesn't make them a corporate citizen. So I have to take them on a journey from the day they join. If I want to hire somebody out of industry, I have to take them on a similar journey to make them a corporate citizen and empower them and mobilise them with the with the corporate messaging and corporate enablement of not only what we do, but what our customers need from us, in a language that allows us to explain, we can help you and add value to your business, if we do these things. And that's quite a difficult journey because many, many things in the world in any industry is sold on I've got one of these, it's in blue, it's lovely, how many would you like, rather than I've got this product that is going to be a value to you. You can be more profitable, you can be more productive, you can be more agile, you can be mobile, and that will give you benefit to your business or your life or you personally, would you like

Andy: 12:06

So the sales process in your industry has become more to buy one? consultative.

Mark Slater: 12:12

It needs to become more consultative. We still have many people going, I've got one of these, how many would you like?

Andy: 12:19

Right. Okay. So you've got some young people coming in, what's their perspective on the sales process?

Mark Slater: 12:26

I had a really interesting lunch experience. I popped down to our what we call our hub, and it's a social area, and we've got a kitchen and a canteen down there. And I met up with a newly hired graduate that I'd taken on back in the summer. Lovely guy, very, very engaging, absolutely wants to learn. But we had the following conversation. And and I was a little bit shocked. And it went something like this. Oh, I can't wait until we can get out and see customers again. And now we've got the rules lifted, I can actually go and meet customers for the first time. Okay, explain that a little bit. And he said, Well, I've been here as a graduate and now I'm an employee and it's been 18 months and and I haven't been out to haven't met a customer yet. Okay. What do you do all day every day? Well, I you know, I'm talking to people on the phone, I'm on video. I'm on video sessions. I'm doing proposals. I'm, I'm helping the other SEs and the salespeople respond to task customer requirements. I follow up with partners and customers and quantify and qualify, any ambiguities we see within the RFPs. I said, okay, and you you, you don't consider that to be engaging with customers and meeting customers. No, no, no, I've never, I've got to go see them as part as part it's an important part of it. I said, Okay, I don't disagree with that. But I would also say, every time you speak to a customer or every time you've had a video conference with a customer, surely, that's meeting the customer, that's building a relationship with the customer, that's building trust. And they're giving you information in exchange. Yeah, I suppose you could look at it that way he said. And I said, so from that perspective, you've actually been meeting customers for the past 18 months. I suppose you're right. I've never thought of it like that. And for me, that was a bit of an epiphany moment, where I'm seeing old world new world, old old people, young people collide, and not communicate well and not understand the engagements they're actually embarking upon, and understanding the progress that those engagements have when they happen.

Andy: 15:10

Yeah, I think that's fascinating. I would have almost expected it to be the other way round if you like, that an older, traditional more traditional team member who was more used to face to face would have been thinking, you know, the same way, not someone who you would think was more used to different forms of communication

Mark Slater: 15:32

I was at first, but then I put my coach's hat on. And this is where we had a great, I had a great epiphany from our session over coffee, which is, he had a view and an opinion that a customer engagement was only face to face. Where he hadn't dropped his penny was actually any interaction is an engagement. Any interaction is an opportunity to build trust, it's also an opportunity to share information between you. I didn't quite understand this, can you elaborate? My understanding of that was that I can't quite see. Oh, no, it wasn't quite that. He hadn't realised that the interaction was happening in all of his engagements. It wasn't about only face to face.

Andy: 16:29

Yeah, that's making me think, and not just about him, but the extent to which people understand what's the, what's the end in mind? What's the what is the objective of my role, and whenever there's lack of clarity around the objective of the role, people take on board sort of busyness or no, my role is to go to meetings is to do stuff, it's to to be busy to be active. And that would be my hypothesis, if you like, for what might have been happening there, he thought his role was to be out in front of customers face to face.

Mark Slater: 17:10

Well, I find that really encouraging because that's exactly where I went.

Andy: 17:17

You're gonna tell me it wasn't that.

Mark Slater: 17:20

So where we, where we actually went with that was to explore why he didn't consider telephone calls, emails, video sessions, an interaction with a customer. We also then once we kind of got over that, and he started to think about it, it was like, well, actually, it is, you're right. And I said, Well, what are you trying to achieve? What What's your bigger objective when you're when you're doing that? You might have a question, which is the reason you asked for the call. But ultimately, what's the objective that's coming out of the engagement? And we started to then explore well, actually, sales process isn't about, you asked for this, I'll give you that, close. That's a closed engagement. What we're looking for is a more open engagement. You asked for this, well, I could give you this, but I've got these options as well. Now, these options would open up other avenues. So what I, what we then started to explore was, outside of two very binary points in the sales cycle, which is the start and the end, every objective of everything in between is to get another meeting. If I give you this little bit of information, you'll give me an answer. And that's going to be ah let me get back to you on that. Let me come back. Because you'll want, what you're trying to build up is free access to the customer. And the free access then starts to build up trust. Now with that, you get to a point where the customer says I don't want to talk to anyone, I like you Andy, I, I'm vested in you. I like your answers. I like your advice. So that's where you're trying to get to. So taking this back now to is video and voice better than physical? How hard is it to get a meeting someone, physical? It's a nightmare to plough through someone's diary for a start, just to get time in my diary as an example, is a nightmare. Can I slip in a quick a quick telephone call when I don't have to worry about travelling time or getting changed into a business suit and, and travelling back and public transport or any of the other things? I can just go let me get on a quick let's jump on a quick zoom call and hey, presto, we've got access to each other. Your customers are going to be a lot more responsive to that as well. Now, would three or four zoom calls be as good or better or worse than one face to face that might take you a month to get? I'll go with the Zoom calls every day. Because I can get I can get multiple ones of those in. And when we've built enough trust, it's much easier to find time to go hey, it would be great to meet up. Can we just when we get to the final stage, and we're locking this down, can we do, if I pop round, can we do that? That's a much easier ask,

Andy: 20:25

That's almost reversing the way it might be thought of to happen really. I'm just thinking, can imagine meeting someone face to face, and then have a series of follow up calls or video calls. But building it up virtually, and then meeting at some point sounds efficient. Do you think he's typical in this or do you think he's a one off?

Mark Slater: 20:48

I think in certainly in my industry, it's a very typical response I'm seeing, not only from young people, but from older people across the board, where everyone's really hung up on, I've physically got to see you, because I haven't been out, I haven't been out the house for the past two years, I've got to come and see you otherwise, it's not going to count. So that's kind of one challenge. But out of that whole thing came another really, really interesting problem. I went on, I went on a coaching training course. And we were talking about the change in b2b communications for the millennial and generation Z communities. They don't talk to each other. They sit there on their phones with their thumbs going 50 characters to the second. And they communicate through social media, and through messaging, and they absorb information in a very different way. And if I look at the way my graduates work now, they're online and they take snippets of information. And they make assumptions on the snippets of information they get, and they make decisions in real time. And they update those decisions, the more snippets of information they get. Rather than redo all of your research before you come up with a hypothesis. The way the younger, early years of working now is, they're creating their hypotheses on the fly. They kind of they kind of learn the apprentice way, which is I'll try a bit, learn a bit, try a bit more, learn a bit more and work along in that fashion.

Andy: 22:45

Do you think that's a good development?

Mark Slater: 22:47

I'm not sure I think it's good or bad. It's, it's where they are. What I've got to so coming back to my my challenge here is we're almost at binary ends, where I am and where they are. I'm at a very, let me read the book. Let me read three books, and then I'll think about it and I'll come back with a big answer and you can have it all at once. And they're at a give me snippets so I can get going. How do I recognise that and change the way in which I communicate, and I function and work and the business functions and works, as well as enable them and coach them to go as much as I can try and work your way, you've also got to meet me in the middle a little bit and understand that actually, there is knowledge and expertise over here. And we're going to try and deliver it in a form that you can understand. But you have to also be open to some of it is in a form you're not going to enjoy quite so much because it's in our form. And the only way we can accelerate change and accelerate transformation in our businesses, is by enabling them more effectively and efficiently over a shorter period of time. Because at the moment, the way we learn, I look back on my life, I gained my wisdom by making my mistakes. I didn't really have anybody coaching me or helping me or mentoring me through actually tread warily around doing these things in this way. Have you tried thinking about other options? So I can accelerate my path. What would the world be like if we accelerated these young people by acknowledging that we need to communicate with them better? Getting them to understand through our better communication with them, that there's knowledge and wisdom over here that they want? They know that it's almost like it's in a different language?

Andy: 24:56

Is there a minimum level of knowledge in your industry that they need to have before they can almost be safe or effective to go out and do something,

Mark Slater: 25:07

Not only in my industry, but many industries, you can be let loose at pretty much any level. It's the support, mentoring and coaching and training that you get that makes you better. And certainly the way I work with my team is go is to give them a very concise controlled start point. But in that way, I very much enable the team by going we'll start here, once you're comfortable with that we can build on that to give you more knowledge and more depth. But we can broaden then into other things as well, without overwhelming them.

Andy: 25:44

I quite like I've sort of feel favourably disposed towards the methodology that you're describing that they're taking, because we've worked with teams, and there's always an element of classroom, where you convey, okay, here's the concepts that we're going to introduce you to. And then you really hope that people are going to go out and practice and apply them. And only by practising and having some experience and getting some feedback, are they actually going to internalise the learnings, and those are going to become habits, hopefully, eventually. And I think anything done in some kind of classroom seems to really struggle to get out of the classroom. So if they're able to learn on the job, as it were, with support with somebody close by or some regular check ins to say, Okay, did this, this happened. I wasn't expecting that, actually not quite sure what to do now. So yeah, could you give me boss can you just give me a little bit of guidance? That sounds like a very, quite a good, good approach for now. The average, you said, the average age is about 50. I think when I was at Tesla, the average age was about 25. And that was with me there probably having a bit of a an impact on it. And we found there were lots of highly energetic, bright, motivated, young people rushing around getting stuff done. Sometimes, from my perspective, I would look and think, Well, that's not gonna work. You know, that is not the best way of doing that. However, there was also an awareness that this company is not going to succeed if a load of people like me go around stopping people from doing new things. The whole point is that if you give somebody an inexperienced person a problem, there's a fairly good chance, they're going to come up with a novel way of solving it, because they haven't got anything else to fall back on. So they come up with well here's a way you can solve it. And, and maybe a lot of times, that solution won't be as good as some other solutions that have already been refined and polished over recent years. But also, they might come up with something really, really good, that's better and isn't held back by legacy thinking or just people's experience. So that was a that was a balance that sounds a little bit related to this

Mark Slater: 28:12

I think so I think it's it is very closely related. topic. And something I've observed, certainly in my industry, and I can't believe it doesn't exist elsewhere is, there's a reluctance to let people fail. Because it's deemed and considered negative and unproductive. I actually don't subscribe to that way of thinking, I actually subscribe to the other way of thinking, which is, the more you fail, the better you're gonna get at failing early. And what we've got to do is, is acknowledge that not everything's successful, not everybody you meet you're gonna like, not every engagement is going to result in a sale. Success is a pinnacle experience, not a guarantee. Therefore, by definition, you have to go through a process of failure. You know, in the world of any sales, we don't close every deal. But we work on qualifying hard and early. So we get our our success rate to whatever ratio we try and have as a metric. In our world, qualified deals, we probably win one in three. That's what we kind of measure success by and whether we're doing things right. Now we can improve that further, if we qualify harder and faster. Now, success rate and closed rate is also then applied to a timeline. So if I can do one in three over a unit of one, wouldn't it be nice if I could do one in three over a unit of half because I'm working more efficiently on the things I'm losing, not the things I'm winning,

Andy: 30:01

okay, so you work more efficiently on the deals you're not going to get so that they take up less time and you get through, get through deals more quickly.

Mark Slater: 30:12

Because ultimately where we all want to be in business is to be spending our time on things that are making us money, and not spending our time on things that are burning money. To get to that point, you have to foster a culture of failure is good. So this dovetails quite nicely back to where I'm seeing the millennials and Gen Z kids being different to us, because they're very open to test quick fail early.

Andy: 30:41

Yeah, I'd have thought that that would be my impression.

Mark Slater: 30:45

So this then starts to kind of feed me in my with my coach's hat on, how can I encourage that? What can I do to help them focus that attribute that I don't have by the way, I'm not, I grew up not learning that not working that way. And consequently, most of my team don't, because they're all my age. How can I focus that and bring that as a value attribute that feeds in as new blood into my team? And really, it kind of comes down to how do you help them make better decisions? How do you help them have knowledge and wisdom that they're learning and acquiring still to make better decisions? They've got a skill that I don't have, which is try quick fail early. And if we look at all of the all of the kids today, it's all it's all about quick, quick, quick, oh no, that didn't work, onto the next thing. So how do you challenge that narrow attention span into what it is you're look what what it is we're looking for in business? And it all comes down for me to communication.

Andy: 32:06

Say a bit more about that then.

Mark Slater: 32:08

So communication in a business world centres around a line manager, a supervisor, a team leader with a group of people, and the prime focus there is I'll write your HR report the end of the year. Outside of development environments, you don't tend to do scrums or huddles where you communicate openly and regularly on the project. And certainly in the IT industry, there's a whole, let's just ignore how do we develop people to become more efficient people at work? There's no investment in training anymore, what I call soft skills, how do I communicate? How do I write? How do I exchange ideas? How do I, you know, just have the ability to do my job and interact with people. We don't teach that anymore. When I started out in IT back in the very early 90s and certainly in the military, that was the centre of what we got taught. That if you could communicate, the topic you work on becomes irrelevant. If you can't communicate, the topic never, the topic fails. So if we look at the way we build hierarchical structures in business today, it's all centred around the HR function typically. If you look at the military, however, you might think that it's similar in so much as you've got your soldiers, you've got your Lance Corporal, your corporal, your sergeant, your WO2, your lieutenants, your second lieutenants, your captains, your majors, your lieutenant generals. On paper, it looks like a normal HR hierarchy. But it's not actually built to fulfil that. It fulfils that purpose, but it's not its primary purpose. Its primary purpose is communication. So when you get down into, lets talk infantry now, into a troop configuration, you've typically got a noncommissioned officer in charge of a maximum of four people. So a lance corporal will look after half a section, a corporal will look after a full section which will include to Lance Corporals, the sergeant will look after a troop, so on so forth, and it's all about Battlefield communication. Now, what does that mean? So, Battlefield is chaos. There's lots of noise. There's lots of pops and bangs, there's lots of adrenaline running and lots of fear running. If you can't physically touch and communicate with the people you're in charge of, you can't lead them, you can't manage them. So for example, a machine gun team, they will be led by an NCO and that will be a maximum of three people. And he can't, he can't control anymore because the noise and the chaos and the importance and the coordination back up the chain to get information backwards and forwards is such that that's his communication limit. So taking that model in mind, a hierarchy should be built to control and deliver your communication limit, not the number of HR reports you've got to write the end of the year. That's just the consequence. Therein lies the difference between how a military operation can be ultra effective and efficient on the battlefield. And how we struggle in the commercial world because we haven't built a hierarchy to communicate, we've built a hierarchy based on HR need to write a report at the end of the year.

Andy: 35:50

That's very thought provoking, I can see the absolute clarity on the battlefield, the the practicalities of knowing we need to be able to communicate with this machine gun group, team squad, sorry, I don't know the language.

Mark Slater: 36:08

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Andy: 36:10

We need to be able to communicate with them therefore there can be no more than this number of people. In a corporate setting again, you don't have the focus that comes with lives will be lost if we don't communicate properly,

Mark Slater: 36:24

I'd argue a little differently. You could lose lives, depending upon the the area, if you don't communicate and function well, accidents can happen. But more importantly, is you've got the livelihoods of all of your employees. And if you're a publicly traded company, your shareholders, that you're responsible for. Now if you go and lose that, that is not far off life threatening

Andy: 36:52

Oh, it's happening all, yeah. I mean, it's happening all the time. And that's why I wasn't sort of challenging the idea, I was more really curious about the thought of putting communication so front and centre, as the most important thing we need to do to be successful is that we can communicate with every single person when what we need to communicate when we need to communicate in order for them to make the best decision, do the best thing, or take the order that we need them to take. And yeah, I've never had that conversation at work about we're structuring this team, because we they need to be able to be communicated with. We don't often enough, I'm being generous, how often do we finish a meeting at work and say, and this is such a good thing to do, say to the people in the room, okay, what are we going to collectively agree is that message that's coming out of this meeting to be cascaded within the next 48 hours, which is a Patrick Lencioni idea that you at the end of a meeting, you go around the room, you say right, this is what we're going to discuss, this is what the message the output from this meeting is. So go within the next 48 hours, tell your team, all of them verbally, if possible, not an email, what we've talked about and these these three points, so that one they know what's going on, two we look like a team that actually talks to each other because when they bump into each other in the canteen, or by the watercooler they say, Oh, my boss said this and they say yeah, my boss said that's exactly the same thing, as well. Oh, my God, they must be talking to each other. Yeah,

Mark Slater: 38:29

I take it a little more philosophically than that. I I aspire to have everybody go home at the end of the day, with a clear understanding that they know that what they did today made a difference. Because if you don't, what's the point in turning up? And how could you know you make a difference if someone hasn't told you why you're there, and why you're important, and why you doing this thing fits in the big picture.

Andy: 39:03

So what would be some of your guidelines for or philosophy for constructing a corporate structure that allowed for communication and what would you want to be communicated? So you'd obviously want people to know what they're supposed to be doing. And you'd want to know them how they're doing against that so that by the end of the day, they know I did good today.

Mark Slater: 39:24

So where I where I struggle, many, many corporate environments I've worked in subsequent to leaving have a concept of spans and layers. We have this many layers between an employee and the CEO and we've got this span that says you can't have more than between six and 15 direct employees. It's got nothing to do with your ability to manage those people. It's got everything to do with with the amount of paperwork and burden you've got for HR process. So where my thinking sits is it kind of throws that whole model out the window. I work on the basis of what is our objective? And what do we have to do throughout the day, the week, the month, the year to achieve that objective? Once you've figured that out, and you've got absolute clarity on what you want people to do, you then look at, what do I need to do to teach them? What do I need to do to maintain them? What do I need to do to manage them? What do I need to do to lead them to deliver those outcomes? The answer to those four things gives you your staffing ratios. And they'll be different for everybody. They'll be different within a single organisation, because different tasks have different constraints and boundaries. The difference of you know, running a section on a production line on a car production line, for example, is different to the spray booth. You need management and leadership in both, but the ratios are different. The difference of managing people on the tills in a supermarket is going to be dependent, and fluctuates based upon the dynamic load of people within the supermarket. You know, and it's that ability to ebb and flow, you can only be efficient, when you can actually coordinate people to do the right thing at the right time under the demand of now. The demand of the last minute and the demand of the next minute, are different problems. It's the classic, I have to manage demand now. And the only way I can manage demand now is to have clarity of what you're supposed to be doing, clarity of when you're supposed to be doing it. And clarity of the management team being able to invoke that in real time. So back to your example, in in when you were at Tesla, it's actually really good that you've got high energy people. But if you could help them fail early, through wisdom, through knowledge through through sharing, that high energy can be then more productive.

Andy: 42:21

That it's so hard, honestly, that is so hard. You're trying to put an old head on young shoulders, if you like without all the baggage, you want the best bits of an old head, you don't want the don't do it like that, because we've never done it like that before. That's not how we do things around here, you don't want that, you just want you want the positive bits of the fact that those older people have failed frequently over their careers and picked up wisdom. So you want that wisdom, I like that word. They were almost as soon as you start to try to convey that wisdom, it's met with resistance, because you're from the old world, and we are the new world. And you've had your chance granddad, we're doing it this way now. Did you solve this one Mark because I've got nothing for you at the moment.

Mark Slater: 43:15

So it's a work in progress. But one of the things I've realised is is this is where skills from people that are coaches and mentors become so critical. It's really difficult to impart knowledge and wisdom by telling someone. You can't teach it, you can't direct it, you can coach it. But we don't work like that at work. It's like do those things. You do it this way. ABC, ABC, ABC. What we don't do is allow people to go actually, if I skip that bit and did this, instead, we'd end up down there, way more effective.

Andy: 43:57

So a call for managers to learn really how to coach and to be better coaches.

Mark Slater: 44:04

Yeah. And I think the piece it comes back for where this all starts, is you've got to have trust in the people you hire and employ. If you don't trust them to do the right thing. And you don't allow them to try, how are you ever going to accelerate change? And change is the only guaranteed thing that we all have to live with

Andy: 44:28

Can you summarise what we have just talked about?

Mark Slater: 44:33

I think you put it well a minute ago, is how do I put my old head on somebody's somebody else's young body? And I think there's been a lot of people over time trying to solve that problem, but

Andy: 44:43

without the bad bits. Yeah, just the good bits.

Mark Slater: 44:47

I think, to summarise here is we have to culturing an absolute belief in trust in our employees. We have to believe and understand that everybody is trying to do their very best. And nobody is deliberately trying to be malicious. We must embrace when people do something different. And we must ask them and challenge them. Why did you do that differently? Why didn't you do the same old thing? Because in that we find learning. We must also cherish and encourage people to share. Don't keep it secret that you do something different. Don't keep it secret that you find that we keep doing this, I don't understand that because to me, it's, it's crazy, we should be doing this other thing instead. Because we all think differently. We all have a different view and approach to life. And nothing's perfect. Everything can be improved, even the best things. So don't take it for granted that just because it isn't broken, it doesn't need to be touched. It can be thought about it can be challenged, you don't have to change it. But you should always challenge it.

Andy: 46:03

That's a great message Mark. I'm a big fan of trusting people, tend to default to trusting people. At some point in my career, I learnt actually, trust intent, manage competence. So people come in with the best will in the world trying to do a good job, but they don't know what they don't know. And if you just assume and trust that they can do it, then you can come a cropper and they can come a cropper if they haven't actually got the knowledge. So how do you include that in your thoughts on trust,

Mark Slater: 46:38

this comes down to teaming them. So unless you're a startup, where you've really got to have Pinnacle expertise, that's a very different problem to solve than a more established larger corporate body where I'm currently sitting at the moment. In the corporate environment, I've got experienced employees, I've got fully enabled employees, they tend to be quite blinkered and closed minded. Partnering them up with new employees and early careers, forces them to think a little bit more open mindedly. It also allows the rapid and accelerated adoption of training without going, here's your new hire training, you're four days in the classroom, we expect you to be fully programmed at the end of that and an effective employee. And we know it never happens. You still need to do that initial kickstart bootcamp. But then buddying people up, and this is the way I work with my engineering team, budding new hires up, buddying lower grades with higher grades, enforcing mentoring, all through the layers. So you don't need to be the highest engineer to be the only person that mentors, you know, I can have a an S2 mentor a PT one, they won't give you the whole picture but they'll do some things and it starts to build that career set back to that start with a very focused area and build upon it. Working that forces a number of things. Firstly, of course, is communications. None of this works if you don't share and you don't communicate. You don't have the confidence when you do something new to share, if you haven't got an environment where it's encouraged. So if you've done a bit of a contentious deal or design, or a customer's wanted something a bit goofy, if you're not in an environment that encourages sharing, you'll sit there and go, actually, I feel I might be criticised, therefore I'm not going to share. I'd much rather people go I've done this crazy one off thing it was I'm never going to do it again. But it was brilliant. Let me share with you. You know, I really encourage that. And the team now have responded. They communicate openly all the time. They want to help each other, they want to

Andy: 49:06

Another great message and one perhaps we should end on buddy up, I'm doing something a bit goofy. Some of you new guys or younger guys come and work on this with me because you'll find it interesting. And then we do the wash up afterwards and go, you know, how does this affect our best practice and our boiler plates and our reference architectures. And that way we evolve all the time, because IT, like any other industry, is not standing still. Everything changes every day. It's the only certainty and the only way we can keep up with that change is to communicate. And people people will not naturally share because of the fear of embarrassment. And that's a human trait. So I try and I try and work on that. Share openly, the rest will come. today. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you Mark, taking some of our coffee discussions and turning them into something that we can share with our listeners. So thank you very much for joining me today to do that.

Mark Slater: 50:15

Thank you.

Andy: 50:20

You've been listening to Career-view Mirror with me, Andy follows. In this side mirror episode, I've introduced you to a good friend of mine, Mark Slater. And we've discussed some of the challenges that he's been dealing with in his IT environment. Things like coping with a maturing team, integrating young talent, to some extent putting old heads on young shoulders or trying to, but also taking advantage of their different approach to learning on the go. We also talked about the importance of trust, giving team members space to fail fast and iterate, and creating an environment in which they feel safe to share what they're doing, especially if it's a bit unusual, and to help each other. I hope you found some ideas to reflect on in this episode. If you'd like to work with me on a one to one basis, let's start with an informal conversation. My email is andy@aquilae.co.uk. If you enjoy Career-view Mirror, please do me a favour and follow us in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Osman Abdelmoneim: 51:18

No matter how hard you try, no matter how hard working you are, you're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible.

Mark Slater: 51:25

You know, at the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you, and you're seeing what you want out there, then go out there and connect.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 51:33

Don't rely on others. You you have to do it yourself. You have to take control.

Rupert Pontin: 51:39

If you've got an idea if you've got a thought about something that might be successful. If you've got a passion to do something yourself, you just haven't quite got there, do it.

Tom Stepanchak: 51:50

Take a risk. Take a chance. Stick your neck out. What's the worst that can happen? You fall down okay, you pick yourself up and try again.