Management Hacking 101: Leading High Performance Teams

so i'm kathleen smith yes it's kathleen on twitter i created higher ground seven years ago it is just an absolute wonderful thing to see so many people show up here to invest in themselves as far as what is going to happen with their career and why are why am i struggling and is everyone else struggling and coming here and being able to find out that everyone is struggling and thank you for those who came on wednesday the second morning early because it means you're really serious so we always make sure that we have a really serious talk on the second day if any of you follow me on twitter you know that my friend mike murray usually

has this spot but mike decided that life was too hard in april and left us so we have a memorial in the back but that is actually for everyone we've lost and so if you have someone you've lost over the last two years you're welcome to write a note about what you miss about them sorry i keep promising myself i won't cry and i do so it was really thank you so it was really hard to find someone who could talk about management because that is what we always talk about on the second day first day we really talk about sort of career search and challenges and how to make things better and how do we stand

up to the challenges that we're facing um so i was really excited when tom submitted his talk and i went yay we we have so many great managers in our community who have learned through their mistakes and through their opportunities and their challenges and are willing to put it together in a talk and share with you so tom thank you for being here this morning and really looking forward to your talk and remember to talk into the might because we have an audience at home thank you kathleen much appreciated and thank you for having me um thanks to everybody at b-sides the whole event crew everybody here has been amazing hope everybody is having a good time at

b-sides this is such a great conference and i'm just really honored to be here this is actually my first time speaking at b-sides which is uh i know sounds a little weird besides vegas that is so i'm really happy to be here so before we get started uh i want to ask how many of you are current managers okay a large large amount how many of you are new managers so like you just just got started okay all right we've got several ah okay excellent yeah because i was going to say that you know welcome to the world of spreadsheets meetings and email um yeah yeah so you know you know right well there's more to management than just

spreadsheets i assure you but uh but welcome um and how many of you are kind of aspiring managers you want to be there one day tim i know you do of course right a few of you okay awesome well don't run away scared right by some of the things i'm going to be talking about as you can see on the agenda here um there's a lot of material that i'm going to kind of cram into a 45-minute session that's why we're calling it kind of a one-on-one session um but uh you know i want to take you kind of through my management journey and some of the things that i've learned over the years some of the failures i've

made um and also just some of the concepts that i've come to learn which hopefully you can take things take something out of this talk and then you can apply it in your daily job so if you do me a favor think of like three things that you can take away as as i go through the presentation and think about how you can apply that when you get back to your job um when you get when you leave vegas so a little bit about me so my career journey started you know about 17 years ago after getting out of the military i served in the united states marine corps i was probably in the best time that you

could be in the military so from 1993 to 1997 it was between the desert desert storms the desert wars so not a whole lot going on even though i was in infantry as well my recruiter lied to me so that's how i ended up in infantry had to meet the quota i guess but um after i got in the military went to school started getting involved in i.t type work so i started out on a help desk did vulnerability management i was the server guy i was running networks and servers and all of that and i was presented with an opportunity to uh join the very first infosec team i know i say infosec i'm saying that

because i'm old right information security was before cyber security and so i got the opportunity to start this department i was the first hire and i helped build an information security policy i got to do all kinds of things identity management i was exposed to things i had never been exposed to before and i got to coordinate our first pen test of the company and this was a kind of medium-sized property management real estate company and let me tell you it was glorious right the company i hired owned everything like in 10 minutes and i loved it i loved every minute of it and of course my my manager at the time is like freaking out they can be oh

my gosh they've got access to all this data we're so vulnerable and i'm just loving every minute of them like this is what i want to do i want to be a pen tester i want to be a hacker because this is this is great so i shadowed this this gentleman i learned everything i could just from what what tools are you working are you using you know tell me more about this and that was really kind of my catalyst into you know getting into pen testing and and of course staying technical um so after that i ended up on uh at the time wasn't even called a red team it was an internal pen test team

for a large bank in cleveland where i'm from and um i started doing things like physical security assessments and physical pen tests social engineering it was kind of in the golden age and i think chris nickerson if you know who he is he kind of coined the term tiger team he had that tv show where he was like stealing cars and all that fun stuff and and that's really was kind of the at the the start of red teaming so i was kind of in the infancy of that which is pretty cool and then one day i started uh i left the bank and i um was consulting and i i left the bank because those of you that

worked in finance or a bank they're they're like dinosaurs right very slow moving takes a long time to fix and make changes to things so i went into consulting which was the complete opposite right you're seeing different networks different clients the good the bad the ugly it was very exciting until one day um my manager at the time said hey i'm taking a new position within the firm i'm going to head up like research and development and so that opens up a position in management and i said first thing i said was does it pay more money [Laughter] and he said to me no but we can change your title and i'm like okay great i'll i'll take

it and in that kind of discussion with him i thought about like well do i really want to go into management when i'm a technical person i'm a pen tester i really like the technical aspect and he said well don't worry you could do both and i said all right great i'll do both and i did both for for a while for almost four years i was a principal consultant still doing pen testing still doing consulting but also managing a team of pen testers eventually though i got to the point where i felt burnout i was getting burned out and i needed to make a change and so i left the consulting gig that i

had i went to varicode and became a manager where they told me we don't want you doing any pen testing we just want you doing um you know management and so that was uh unfortunately the last time i did a pen test was those many years ago um and we'll talk about you know people ask me like do you miss it do you miss the technical aspects and i'll say sometimes i do but management to me is actually a little bit more rewarding in a lot of ways and we'll talk about that too in this talk but um but throughout that those experiences have led me to bishop fox where i was a practice director and now an avp

of consulting where i now deal with different things at the executive level so maybe one day i'll be doing a talk on executive and director level type stuff but um but yeah it's been a journey a great journey and i'm glad to share some of this with you today um and also i'm the founder and co-host of the shared security show so i've been doing that for 13 years not sure how i found time to do all that but we're one of the longest running security podcasts so check it out if you're looking for something to listen to so this presentation is i really put this together to to make us better leaders and managers

and i've kind of laid out three things you'll hear three themes in this talk and they're all about conversations and about communication so one how can we improve as managers amongst ourselves and as our peers right it's important to talk to each other about how ways we can be a better manager and this is one of the reasons is this talk we're here we're talking about it we're listening um and hopefully we're gonna be better because of it the next one is having conversations with our teams so seeking feedback of how am i as your manager what type of feedback do you have for me how can i do my job better how can i help you that's one thing that

we'll be talking about and then having more conversations with our teams about communication or i'm sorry about career conversations because that's something that i find that we forget about we get so busy in our day-to-day you know fight fighting fires and what's the next thing we need to talk about on our 101s and it's typically you know whatever the current fire is um but what i'm saying is we need to take take a step back and really start having more career conversations because our employees are asking for those they need our help they need our guidance and our coaching on how to take their careers to the next level so this is importance and there was a

really good talk yesterday wes shepard gave a talk on off failing upwards which i highly recommend you check out uh it'll be on the youtube um and great talk but um you're gonna fail your teams are gonna fail and that's okay i think we have to embrace failure at some point because that's how we learn that's how we get better and i've made lots of mistakes and lots of failures in my career and honestly early on i would get pretty upset with myself that you know especially with one thing i think a lot of hiring managers will understand if you make a bad hire if you hire somebody and you end up having to let them go say after a couple

weeks in my case it was literally a couple days that i had to let somebody go that i hired that hurts that really stings and you kind of take it personally but over time i've kind of learned to just like not take those things so personally i'm human i make mistakes we all do but i look back and i think what did i learn from that experience and how can i do my interviewing how can i do my hiring processes how can i do a better job and i will say that i think over the years i've done a better job of hiring people because of those failures and because of those those bad experiences

so um but failure is really the way that we learn and improve so who's uh grace murray hopper fans here yes yes she's she's an incredible leader i love this quote from her uh you manage things you lead people um a little little thing about uh grace murray hopper um way back in 1947 she actually kind of her and her team coined the phrase debugging um and they actually found a moth that was stuck in a relay which was stopping the operation of the computer and computers back then 1947. you can imagine it's like this entire room right um and then they took the moth out and they actually wrote a note that said first actual case of a bug being found i

thought that was like really cool so back in the 40s but what i like about her is that she's absolutely a technical powerhouse right back she she's she's done so many things for the industry but she's also an amazing leader she's an admiral in the us navy right she's managing people large teams of people um and so that's a little thing i like to call out about her that inspires me as someone that's been technical and now moving into management and managing large teams so hopefully she's someone that can also inspire you as well so let's talk about the problem with management first thing i'll say is it's it's definitely the hardest and most challenging job that i've ever had

because of all the things they have to deal with especially with people but it's also the most rewarding job that i've had i thought getting you know 50 shells on my screen from you know popping boxes and accessing sensitive data that's a huge rush but it's more of a rush in my opinion of seeing my team do amazing things seeing them grow their careers seeing them challenge and doing stuff that they told me there's no way i can do this there's no way i'm capable of doing these things and they do it and you watch them do it or you help coach them through that and that is an experience that i don't think i could ever replace

it's absolutely amazing the other thing about technical teams is that it can be a little bit different because i think as pen testers and hackers there's definitely the introverse verts for the versus the extroverts breakers versus fixers right we've got communicators and non-communicators you know pen testers and security consultants are an interesting bunch so sometimes you have to adapt your leadership style to those different personality types and we'll talk about personality types in a little bit but coming from a technical background jumping into management it can be very challenging and very difficult um and so we'll share i'll share some of the stories around that here coming up so do we all know the difference between

a boss and a leader so a boss is i'd say more on the negative side of things right and i kind of put together just some some differentiators just so you can see but a boss really is about driving employees rights and a leader is more about coaching and we'll talk more about coaching a little bit but i did want to call out one thing in this um who's ever had a manager take uh credit for work that you did isn't that the worst absolute backstabbing thing anybody could do to you i've had happen to me too and it's absolutely awful um so i take i kind of look at these these uh these differences

you know a boss uses people they take credits but a leader develops people and gives credit and i think that's the one thing to take away from like this slide and just think about the bosses and the managers you on that bosses maybe bosses you've had in the past we all remember the good ones but we also remember the bad ones that that maybe we even left an organization because we had a really bad manager so what is your role as a leader um and speaking of kind of bad bosses i know there's a funny movie about that too but um how many of you had a micromanager oh another one that's really bad right

just horrible i've had those two i had i had one manager that hovered over me back when we were working in offices and you know make sure are you done yet are you done yet are you done yet and like stuff that drives you crazy um but we don't want to be micromanagers right as a leader you're really there to guide and facilitate your employees you're not there to hover over them and you know thinking about how often we're talking to our direct reports so we'll talk about one-on-ones and the importance of that in a minute but we really need to be keep having those conversations about their jobs about their role and really encouraging them

to do the best they can in their job and a lot of that comes down to setting the right expectations so i find that employees don't like to ask what's expected of me they want to hear from you typically so we'll talk about expectations in a little bit but i found some ways of how you can communicate those expectations a little bit better where you're not sounding maybe so forceful or you know like a dictator right but um there's things that we can do to to help that and then we're talking about career conversations um it's true employees are responsible for their career they're responsible for managing that but you as a leader you're there to meet

those goals help them meet their goals and coach them through that so um i i find this funny too it's like i've got employees like that just won't say anything of like you ask them hey so what do you want to do for training or where do you want to take your career and they just say that they say well i'm not really sure so that's your job then is to encourage them like have you thought about this have you thought about that have you thought about this and then they come back and say okay yeah i haven't thought about that that's what i mean by coaching you know giving them those ideas not telling them but giving them

the encouragement so setting expectations so this is probably one of the most important aspects um of managing in my opinion um and i asked too like all of you if you ever had managers that just never set any expectations with you right you're just kind of left to figure that out on your own and honestly it just never goes well because you don't know if you're doing the right thing or not because no one has told you otherwise so um and this can also vary right so depending on your job title or level so i put in here you know different expectations for a senior member of the team versus junior team expectations will be a lot different so

we have to communicate those expectations at all times because we don't want our employees trying to figure that out on their own it just never ends well so let's talk about respect so respect is interesting because it's one of those things that i you know when i like when i came to varacode uh and some people in the audience uh that were on that team probably know um you're coming into a brand new team you don't know anybody and of course they're like who the heck is this guy like he's our new manager you know because you inherited all these people you don't know them they don't know you so you have to earn respect as a leader

um and that goes both ways um and so a lot of times we think as leaders like i'm gonna do all these things to get their respect but employees need to do the same thing to you as well so i always say that respect goes both ways and a lot of that comes down to listening we'll talk about the art of listening here shortly and that's the first thing i did when i came to that team was i wanted to hear about all the problems i wanted to hear about what's going on i didn't change anything i was there to listen and take that feedback and then you start talking about with the team about what you're going to do

to make things better and all that so don't come in there like a bull in the china shop right just making all these changes they will not respect you if you do that so the art of listening this is something that has taken me quite a while and i still have to work at this because it's it's tough um but i think it's really important and especially in a world of remotes where we're using teams and zoom for everything still where like things like eye contact and body language you may not think are important but they still are even in a virtual world so um one of the things i do is um with video chat so

ever going to a meeting and nobody's got their video on but as soon as one person turns that video on a lot of people start doing the same thing it's like the lemming effect right that's one technique i use i don't force people to put their cameras on but i really feel that it's valuable to at least have some kind of eye to eye contact with that other person when you're having those conversations um put the camera literally like you know so you're looking into the camera move your hands i mean those types of things i think are very important in active listening so what we what do we mean by active listening so we're talking about

clarifying what the other person just said so it tells the other person oh you are listening to me you understood what i just told you and the way you do that is by asking questions so your your direct report will say something like oh yeah i did this blah blah so what i heard you say was or you can say are you saying that or did you mean that and that clarifies that you are indeed listening to them and you understand what they're saying and that goes a long way just by changing the conversation a bit but the general ground rule i found with with any conversation and this applies to not just the business world but your personal life in

relationships and other things as well uh ninety percent of that conversation should be you listening um so you should be talking less and listening more and that's really hard um for a lot just a lot of reasons right so think about all your personal relationships and other things sometimes we just want to start talking and and we just inadvertently not that we're being malicious but sometimes it comes across like we don't care about what the other person's saying when we really do but if you stop pause and just let them talk sometimes that's all you need to do to improve the relationship and and the conversation so this is a big one that i instill on on all of my managers

throughout my career that it took me a while to learn this but the the really the importance of the one-on-one meeting because this is really your only opportunity to connect with your team and you have to make these meetings a priority i've moved meetings cancelled meetings this to me is one of the most important things that a manager can do to connect with their teams and this is where you need to talk about things outside of work as well so these don't have to be like they don't have to be your best friend you have to like you know really connect with them but you do need to ask them personal questions like how are things going at you know with

your family how are your kids how are things at home because you know as well as i do personal problems and things going on at home will affect the the workplace they just do they've affected me i've needed time away for personal things everybody does so you have to ask those questions you have to show that you care about that person on a personal level because you do you're their leader that's what they expect of you so definitely have those conversations um if you're still in an office i recommend going for a walk going get coffee they don't always have to be at your desk virtual coffee i guess if you're using zoom and then if there's nothing on the

agenda i mean just talk you can cut the meeting short if you need to but just check in and say hey how is everything going anything you want to talk about and then keep the meeting short but just the fact that you prioritize that for that employee goes a long way they may not say it but they really really appreciate that time with their boss um i've talked to people that have said that they've worked in organizations where they haven't talked to their their manager in months or weeks and and that's really scary so don't be one of those leaders where you're never talking to your teams the last thing i'll say about one-on-ones is this is also where you

have those career conversations so you can talk about hey so what you've been thinking about training or you know what do you think in the next couple years you want to do and or hey i saw that there's a an opening on in another department that you might be a good fit for you know these are the times to have those conversations and don't do it during like the annual review or the mid-year review i mean you could certainly do that but you should be doing that outside of those those times as well so the skip level so for those of you that are managing managers or you have a manager in between this is something that i also

recommend doing and i personally like to see more executives doing this type of thing this means to skip over somebody's manager and it's that opportunity to find out what's really going on the grounds so those of you that know general james mattis he's the former secretary of defense a four-star marine general in afghanistan iraq incredible leader he had a book called call sign chaos which is a great read but he talked about how he would talk to the junior um the junior ranks the lance corporals the privates um quite frequently asking them questions how are things going how are you feeling um and this is a four-star general like this guy is busy right i

mean he's got things to do but he took the time to meet with the juniors the junior people to really find out what's going on and um and since i've been doing this especially in a director in an executive position i've actually found out things that my managers didn't even know like i had a case of like you know a bunch of people were having laptop issues like they weren't telling anybody that we had this patch that was rolled out and nobody knew but they told me and i was able to fix it and i wouldn't have known that and my managers probably were oblivious to it but because i had that skip level i

found that out so um the last thing i'll say about this too is set expectations on why you're meeting with them because sometimes when they get an invite from you know somebody higher up they're like oh i'm in trouble what did i do the executive or director wants to meet with me uh um but literally put a sentence like hey i just want to meet with you see how things are going you know you're not in trouble it's cool but set that expectation with them it really means a lot so what makes a great team let's talk about these four things these are four areas that i found in my career that make a incredible team

and the first is diversity so this has been proven there's tons of studies you could probably google and find on this but diverse teams are the best teams they really are for lots of reasons but mainly because different backgrounds different cultures um varied personalities and different skills brings a whole lot to the holistic team to solve problems to work on things together um it really is is the best i i've i've been honored to be worked working with so many diverse teams in my career and i can tell you that all of them have eventually been high-performing teams and i really believe it's because of the diversity that we had um on that team one thing one thing that's interesting

i'll share a quick story um and some of you that have worked on this team may realize um we were very open about things like politics and i know politics is a big hot button and other things going on in the world and so we had a chat you know going on just talking about world events and things like that and i found it amazing that despite political differences and different opinions everybody could come together and have respect for everybody else's views and i thought that was really really cool of course we had ground rules right like be respectful you know be kind all these things but it amazed me that this team very diverse

team could still talk and i and i thought to myself like could we why can't we do this in the real world right like with politicians and why can't people come together and and i really believe that's because of the diversity and the respect that everybody on this team had with one another it was really amazing to see so challenge so your team members have to be challenged and they may not ask you to be challenged but what they're but they're they're secretly knowing they're secretly saying they do want to be challenged so i think it's kind of a myth that you get quiet more introverted people that say i just want to do my job

like i don't want to do anything else and i found that they actually want to be challenged but no one has actually challenged them in the past they probably never had a a manager or a leader that said hey you know i want you to do this project because i think you can do it i know you don't think you can but i know you can um and so i've always challenged individuals that were more on the introverted side and kind of brought them out of their shell and and they appreciated that i had people thank me it's like hey thanks for putting on that project i really like that i learned a ton and can i do another one

right and this is coming from introverted people um but you want to kind of divvy things up in terms of like giving people work that's different work that pushes their limits um and of course work that has a purpose like we all want to do a job that has a purpose it's really important to our our human well-being and then communication right big theme about this this talk is communication and and communication is really consistent it has to be consistent it has to go both ways so it can't be one way right can't be all you communicating your team has to communicate back to you as well it has to be there has to be

feedback around that that communication lessons learned and follow-up is really important um you know i've seen you know communication go really good and really bad and i think a good example of that is like data breach notifications right it's the good and the bad and the ugly um so if you want to see like you know how a company responds to a data breach and you do you know hopefully you're you're in full disclosure and you're responding you're talking about what really happened and all those things but there are some companies that don't say anything or they don't do anything until later so keeping that in mind just for how you communicate with your team uh can go a

long way respect i mentioned respect already um but this is also i think one of the most important aspects of a great team and i think respect starts with empathy as well um we'll talk about empathy in a minute but um this is empathy for your team members um and making sure that they have empathy with each other as well um and so that's part of building that culture within your team um and so that also includes kindness as well um you know i think we all would say we have a no rule right on the team of like who we hire um but we need people to be kind and we also need people to be self-aware of of

who they are what they're bringing to the table how they respond to angry customers angry employees from other departments all of that is is about generating respect and i like this quote it's it's really like a mirror so the more you show it to others the more that they will show it to you so i wanted to quickly talk about a team charter and there's lots of information on the internet about team charters and you can do them in different ways i've got a link at the end that you can check out if you're looking for like kind of a template like a general template for a team charter but i really find a lot of value in this

because it kind of levels the playing field in terms of making sure everybody is on the same page on your team so it defines the mission a vision for your team like what are we doing what is the purpose of our work what are our goals what are we trying to accomplish because you'd be surprised a lot of people they don't know they know they're doing a job but they don't know why they're doing that job so as leaders we're here to define that for them and and set them in the right direction right it also outlines expectations so outlining what's the expectation of your role so like in my world what's the expectation of a senior consultant

compared to a consultant three there's very different expectations but that those are not communicated and documented they're again left to figure that out for themselves and that never ends well um the other thing i'll mention about a team charter it's a living document it's not meant to be set in stone it's not meant to be you know this is this is it this is and we're never changing it um i actually revise mine every couple months um six months what i recommend twice a year is good um and you meet with the team meet with your leaders and talk about like what's working what's not and where do we need to make changes but um

i found this is a great way to just put everybody on the same page so just some examples and i'll just take bishop fox as an example um what do we mean by like a mission statement and a vision statement so for bishop fox mission so it's defending forward to safeguard our digital world it's very straightforward very simple easy to understand these things don't have to be complex i know there's some companies out there that put a lot of time and marketing effort into that vision that mission and vision statement there's tons out there you could probably google but make it very simple you know why are we here what is it that we're doing

and then the vision so to be the most advanced admirer defensive cyber operations team and then for your own team so if you're in a smaller team or a department break that down into what what are you trying to do so in my area of the business it's to have the best defensive security offerings in the industry it's very clear concise and sets everybody in the same path that's all it needs to be so here's an example just some rules and responsibilities and at least how i d i've done it over the years um so this is defining and setting uh expectations for each role within your team and what i've done is i've broken those out into

very specific categories so some of those categories could be you know professional development communication mentoring business development just depends on your business and and what categories of those roles that you're trying to define and that's really going to vary on your business but you need to document it and you need to communicate it so don't leave this like on your desktop or you know somewhere where nobody can find it i recommend using like an internal internet or a wiki or some other place that everybody can see it it's pinned everybody understands where it's at and then it's updated so it's very important to also reference this in your one-on-ones so when someone is thinking about hey how do i get promoted to be a

senior consultant as an example i show them this we talk about it and now they have clear expectations of okay so i need to be working towards this role and doing these things and showing you know that i'm capable of being promoted into this role it makes it really clear right because it's documented and it's understood so let's jump into hiring what a great conversation right we love hiring because you know there's so many jobs we need to fill right in this industry not enough people i know there's a lot of debate about that some people say it's more about lack of skills versus lack of people and you know we won't have that debate here but

um we need to ask ourselves like who do we hire and how do we hire correctly or at least as best as we can so we're making the best decisions uh on who's we're bringing on to our team um and a lot of this comes down to you know looking at who you have on your team looking at their skills looking at yourself and you know what are my weaknesses like what do i what do i need to fill in maybe what are some things i don't do as well as i should and where could i bring someone in to help with that so i'm not sure if anyone knows or heard of sarah blakely um yes

yeah sarah blakely is awesome she founded spanx which is actually a billion dollar business now i definitely recommend you like kind of reading more about her because she has an incredible background with she had tons of failures in her career she had um lots of experiences that set her back but she could overcome a lot all those and a lot of it was because of the people she hired and the people that she's surrounded herself with so she's very inspiring from that and uh really is an example of of uh hiring for your weakness and something we should all think about too so with that it kind of leads us into emotional intelligence and one of the

arguments that maybe not really arguments but i've had with uh some other leaders is should we prioritize emotional intelligence over technical ability that's a good debate right because we need people with technical skills to do the technical jobs but we also need those people to have well people skills right they need to be able to communicate they need to have empathy they need to know you know they're not going to get angry at every little thing right they had to have self-control all those things so in my eyes i kind of value eq a little bit over technical skills because i look at technical skills you're coming in the door with those and those can probably learn and adapted and

that's great um but i'll value the the eq a little bit more and it's something that i focus more on during my interviews that tells me a lot about a person and if they're capable of doing the job and doing the work even from a technical ability because of those those people skills they're still very important the other thing you'll find about emotional intelligence is it actually increases with experience so as you kind of grow your career as a leader you'll kind of find that you'll be more empathetic you'll develop better social skills um i found that myself um especially with empathy that was something very hard for me early on in my career and now i can say

that i'm doing it much more i'm doing a lot better than i used to because it's something that can be learned and improved on so you may think like you don't have a lot of self-awareness as an example right now but that can change if you put some effort and time into it so let's talk about self-awareness so this is about recognizing how our emotions affect our performance so uh you know do you let your emotions get the better of you right do you get angry and then kind of freak out and then need to go away and you know think about what you just did right go into the corner right you've done something bad

but think about your team do they know their limits and their abilities this is hard right everybody has a different level of self-awareness so we have to think about that and we have to coach our team through that as well one thing i know we talk about a lot about on our teams is burnout how do you know when you're burned out yourself but also how do you know and identify when one of your employees is burned out and a lot of that again is about asking questions right don't assume that your employee is going to come to you and say i'm burned out i need time off i need to do something different nine out of 10 times they're

not going to say that to you it's you that has to ask that question you have to phrase it in a way where you're coming across with kindness with caring and really understanding um you know where they're at so there's some things that we could you know think about when you consider burnouts and some identifiers of that but it really comes down to asking questions self-regulation so this is about controlling or redirecting one's disruptive impulses so especially in a professional setting so have anybody ever seen someone completely freak out on the job and start yelling screaming just totally unprofessional behavior i've seen it on like conference calls i remember this one conference call i was

on where a customer literally started swearing at a sales person and just going completely off and the sales person was just like i'm sorry but that is inappropriate i'm pretty offended by this you know i think you should give me an apology and the customer is like i'm sorry you're right i freaked out i'm sorry i didn't mean to swear at you but those types of moments somebody has lost self-control um and for whatever reason and so we have to think about that of could our own team members do that right um and so one thing i want to mention too is like change who likes change some people thrive on change but most of

us as humans hate change right that's just in our nature we don't like change well guess what when changes happen in the organization you and your team members are going to go through change as well and so there's some techniques that you can do to kind of help help your employees through that change one thing i recommend is this uh change cycle i had some training on this a couple years ago and i thought it was amazing so you know thinking about lost doubt discomfort discovery understanding and integration those are the stages that everybody goes through with any kind of change personal business whatever it is but check that out and think about how your team and you handle change in your

organization social skill so this is about managing relationships so how do your team communicate and interact with others um can they influence and persuade in a positive way right maybe not social engineering for manipulation but actually persuading people um so this is a skill that people can learn um do they delegate um do they support others on the team um this is all about social skill um this is another one where i think introverts kind of get a bad rap here um just because someone is quiet or a little more introverted doesn't mean they have no social skills um you know sometimes they just need a little bit of push sometimes they just need communicated to and talk to

and uh and they'll start communicating so and this is the big one i think empathy um this is something that we all struggle with at some at some level um but how often do you put yourself in somebody else's shoes do your employees take an active interest in the concerns of their other teammates their other employees others outside of your team i know in the consulting world there's kind of a you know oh the sales people we don't like talking to them we don't want to be part of sales right and so and some of that comes from lack of empathy we don't really understand their job we don't understand what they do maybe we didn't

even take the time to ask or understand their job so we need to think about that of like how can we have more empathy with each other and um that can make a huge difference but it's hard it's something that everybody needs to work on and frankly i think that lack of empathy is a huge problem in the world in general and it's probably a big reason why we have so many issues going on with politics and all these other things because of that lack of empathy and we need to change that motivation so we're going to talk about motivators here in the next couple slides but um this is important right so being driven uh to achieve for the sake

of achievement right um i like this uh this motivational poster right work harder or will fire you i like the motivational ones better yeah definitely um but when hiring people we have to ask and think about what's going to motivate them um and i will tell you that it's not always about money that's always the first thing people say it was like we'll just pay you more we'll give you a big bonus and that's all you're going to need well people want a lot more than just money and it comes down to what motivates them and we'll talk about some different ways that people like to be motivated that hopefully you can look at back at your

team on your teams and help them get motivated so talking about interviewing so um i wanted to share a couple of my favorite questions that i like to ask to kind of call out eq and see what level at they're at in terms of their their level of eq um and this starts with things like asking about what they're what's their passion so how do you define success um define an environment which you would not thrive in that's always a good one right and usually they'll talk about like maybe their current environment or their current job role and ask them we'll talk more about that you know what would you like to see in this new role

what are you most proud of i love that question and a lot of times it doesn't have anything to do with work it's like you know i'm most proud of my kids or i'm most proud of i got this trophy when i was on this baseball team i mean like it could be anything but it gets them talking and you really get to understand a person and their personality by just asking questions like that but my favorite question of all is kind of a twist on the you know what's your weakness question because everybody hates that right what's my weakness oh yeah well ask this next time is what's the biggest misperception that people have of you

and every time i ask that question they'll say that's interesting i haven't thought about that and you will get some very creative answers to that that kind of pull out some weakness right but also gives them a chance to really think about how they're going to answer that question so it's not a trick question it's not meant to stump them or anything but really meant to get them to think and i always love the answers that i get from that question so old macdonald had a farm e-i-e-i-o right yes um i will not quit my day job being a singer but old macdonald had a farm this is an acronym that you can use um

which stands for e is energy and enthusiasm so thinking about these things when you're doing the interview are they passionate excited energized about your work i mean there's no the worst interviews in the world or when someone comes in just like they look bored they don't want to be there i think we've all experienced that you want someone that's energized ready to go they're excited about the job that's the first thing you look for intelligence are they smart you can usually figure this out pretty quickly just in like five minutes of a conversation you're not giving them a test right of course there may be things they'll be doing on a technical aptitude test or they're

doing like a mini pen test in our world or something like that the show technical skill but you want to look for intelligent right do they know what they're talking about is is the bottom line experience um have they been in similar roles um what have they learned so ask them questions like what did you learn in your next role how is that role going to help you in this role um and seeing how they answer integrity this is an absolute requirement if you have a candidate that doesn't show integrity is either you catch them lying you catch them cheating it's an instant no right you cannot have people with a lack of integrity on your

team and then organizational fit so this is about culture so everybody should hopefully know the the culture of your organization um and are they gonna fit um personality wise it's really important you don't want to bring someone in there that's gonna just like a bull in the china shop going to start you know wrecking havoc you've got to keep that culture so we have to keep that together so the other thing i'll mention here pretty quickly is this thing called the 20 60 20 rule has anyone heard of this before this is this is a pretty cool technique to kind of identify where your team is at um so for example the top 20 drive 80 of the results which

is your positives and the bottom 20 fall under two categories of negatives so they're either skill based issues or there's attitude behavior issues but 60 make up most of your staff um and so we'll talk about in a minute here about where you need to spend your time in terms of your team so the top 20 they're already self-motivated you probably know who these people are in your team they're your high performers you should you know you still need to spend time with them but not as much as you would expect because they're already doing the job that you want them to do and more you should spend the least amount of time with the bottom 20 and we'll get to

why in a minute but that's the least effective your time but the best use of your time is to spend time on that middle 60 because they have the most potential they can grow into that top 20 and really makes up the bulk of your team so how do you identify the top 20 well like i said these are your stars you know who they are they're self-motivated they're always coming to you with you know situations that they want to be involved with they're solving problems they're just on it right they know what they're doing you love hanging on the team you can give them any project they excel at it and these are the people that we

obviously want to keep around right they're your high performers the middle 60 these are your kind of good loyal workers right um they just need to know they're doing a good job they need sometimes a little bit more feedback um they're more of your followers than your leaders in an organization and that's totally okay um sometimes they avoid taking risks and they just want to play about the rules um what's interesting about the middle 60 is that they're kind of torn between following the top 20 and listening to the bottom 20. so um we'll talk about that in a second so your bottom 20. this should be pretty clear as well right they're the ones

questioning authority they complain about the company and what the company is doing um they uh enjoy playing the victim right um and they have really just a poor attitude about everything um and then they're just difficult to engage in in in dialogue um what i find interesting about this is that there sometimes these are the high performers that have a bad attitude um and these are the ones that kind of become i'll call it a cancer here in the next slide but in your organization um and they kind of need to be removed eventually um if they don't change so what you do with the top 20. so you challenge them give them interesting assignments um

reward learning and encouragement and then these are great for mentorships right pair them with other high performers in the company company executives even pair them with people from outside the organization what do you do with the middle 60 so these are the backbone of your team so you want to create an environment you know where they feel valued you're rewarding them for learning um and again thinking about mentorship you know pair them with other high performers as well maybe some of your top 20 and see how they can be developed bottom 20 they can be a cancer right they need to be removed if they don't change i kind of go with the three strike rule right you give them three

chances to improve come to you with solutions or they're out right um unfortunately people in the bottom 20 just negatively influence the organization we've all had them um in fact we had a few individuals that we've had to let go i've had other people in the team actually thank me are like we're glad so-and-so is no longer here because they're such a drain on our energy and they're so negative and really brought the team down so consider all that when you're looking at your team so real quick i know we only got a couple minutes left here so i'll talk about motivation so what motivates the team there's different types of motivators so there's intrinsic and

extrinsic motivators and we all fall into these categories so these are intrinsic means you know you like belonging you have a curiosity you love what you're doing you're not necessarily looking for rewards like money or badges or other types of things but on the other side some people like that some people like badges some people like um fear of punishment right that's why those burn boot camps and other things are very popular because some people like getting yelled at to lose weight right that's just something of a motivator to them so we kind of have to put our team into these two different categories and think about how do they like being motivated and the way to do

this is just to ask them how do you like being motivated is it money is it rewards is it public thanks ask them those um questions will talk a little about this because i know we're running out of time but mccullen's human motivation theory is something that's pretty cool um that you can uh find more about but everybody falls into these three categories you're either achievement affiliation and power and you have a dominant category um with like kind of a sub category but uh this is something you can check out and um i found a lot of value in it and how i categorize my team in terms of who's a high achiever versus who's more power

hungry and those types of things personality types so i'm a big proponent of multiple personality tests so we've all heard of the enneagram the myers-briggs disc my favorite though is the process communication model um which is something used by nasa to to figure out the personality types of astronauts and astronauts obviously have to be of a certain personality type if you're going to space which is kind of neat so the thing i'll say on personality types is just remember that there is no one good personality test i would say take multiple of them and they all have an aspect of who you are and that's what i'll say about that um so no matter take the different tests and you'll find

out you know the type of person that you are um lastly communication um the one thing i'll mention about this is always create an agenda for meetings hopefully all of you are thinking about that because i hate it when i get a meeting a meeting invite and there's no agenda like why am i here um what you know what am i doing right so as a leader always create a meeting agenda encourage your team to do the same and one thing i'll mention the last thing i'll mention about communication is well it takes seven times to get people to remember something so if you're not getting questions about what you just said then they probably

didn't understand you and you probably didn't communicate it correctly so over communication if you can is really important coaching so let's jump right to we all know is a good coach but asking questions right so when you're in a coaching session you want to focus on questions of inquiry and curiosity so what could you have done differently what well or worked tell me more about that help me understand those are all phrases that you can use in a coaching session but first start with your observations invite their response to reactions don't interrupt always listen when you're coaching and then share your personal thoughts and reactions and then you work together on the solution that's the most

important thing and then summarize right so sometimes that's in an email of hey this is what we talked about this is maybe a goal that we set for something to be accomplished and you have it on record right so an email follow-up is really important in any type of coaching session and just want to touch on career developments so i talked about career conversations early on but this is important right so we have to have these conversations to help develop our our team's skills and where they want to go in their careers but it's not about like completing forms like in an annual review these are about quality conversations we're having about about career so we want to explore

possibilities and opportunities with our teams we want to get responses from them and we want to help and guide them through that but like i mentioned before employees really have to own that conversation but you need to guide them because a lot of times they're not going to tell you of like this is what i want to do in my career so you as a leader need to identify that for them so just to conclude hopefully we're right on time here um you know be very clear about your expectations like i said spend more time listening versus talking look for emotional intelligence in your hires prioritize one-on-one meetings apply that 2060 rule that i mentioned

understand your team members talk to them work on your own communication style and who you are um and just let your team do great things right and they're gonna do great things if you're a great leader and you're inspiring them they're gonna do awesome things so here's a couple things just to finish up a couple books i recommend especially for new managers this book called the making of a manager i highly recommend if you're just getting into management existing managers hopefully you've heard of the five dysfunctions of the team this is a great book as well and then one thing around career conversations is help them grow or watch them go great title also a very good book on how to have

better career conversations and just some other links and i will post this by the way if you follow me on twitter agent0x0 i'll post this for you and i don't know if we have time for questions probably not but i apologize we have to keep on a strict schedule because we have we have a virtual audience so thank you tom this you're welcome i'll be around so if you want to talk ask questions feel free to come up thanks everyone