distributed leadership w/ george livingston

full transcript

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at tdss and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Let me go ahead and dive in. George, give the people what they want. Who are you, what are you, and then we'll dive in. Yeah, tell us in the comments what you want. My name's George.

I lead the product and the software development team at the Escape game. It's been a crazy couple of years at Escape game with COVID, but the result was the suite of digital products designed for team building experiences that have really exploded in popularity. Two products, one of them is what we call remote adventures, which utilizes capacity in our in real life game. So you actually have an avatar on the screen that's working through a physical store and you've got zoom on the other side of the screen. And then we have purely virtual games as well. That's awesome. And so I so George and I caught up a little bit ago a few months back, just about hiring and kind of some initiatives he's doing And, you know, George really said some amazing things on how he wants to build teams and whatnot.

And so the topic today is distributed leadership. And I've been fascinated because I think, I think leadership is much more difficult right now than ever before. I think you have to be more intentional than ever before, right? You know, you can't just like lean over to someone's desk and like have a quick one on one with them, right? You have to schedule a time, you have to be thoughtful in your conversation. So George, give some kind of some quick tips that you kind of live by for distributed leadership right now that we'll obviously dive into those. I think one other thing to mention too that's very different is the skills doing a presentation in person versus virtual or coaching somebody in person.

So you might be great in an in-re life setting having to relearn those skills for distributed teams and sometimes having to be master at both of those skills. That's another layer of complexity for leaders. And I think it's important also to caveat that we're less than two years into a pretty substantial change in the way that we run and operate companies. And so being healthy and patient with folks is important. But one thing that we were talking about before this call, and we talked about it on the recent National Product Meetup, was building a culture of writing. If you're in a distributed team, that's one thing that I would suggest as a tip, but I think everybody should reflect on their emails and their documents and really focus on improving their writing abilities.

I know that we've had a challenge transitioning from a fully in-person environment to fully distributed to your point Taylor where you can just tap somebody on the shoulder and share an idea. I think that's the cause probably of a lot of these Zoom meetings and Zoom fatigue is folks communicate things impartially. So I think doing a better job communicating is one big unlock for for distributed teams that I've been focused on recently. Well, and I love that. And this is why I'm so thankful I get people on like you to share different thoughts. I have talked about remote leadership a lot, but I've no one's ever said written communication.

And that I think is just huge because, you know, I've even thought about it too, about coming up with more onboarding documentation, right? We're literally- Documentation is one piece, yeah. We have more Google Docs right now in my team that we ever have before. And so I'm curious like. It's a double edged sword, yeah. Yeah, well go ahead and unpack that a little bit. Well, you mentioned we have a lot of Google Docs too. We on one of the guests on the panel last week at the product group was Chip at Eventbrite and they're a Google Docs culture. I can't imagine how many documents Eventbrite is floating around.

It's easy to lose track of things is my point. But documentation is one part of it. Emails is another part. I see a lot of emails flying back and forth that are just tidbits and snippets of things and then you get these threads going and it all just saps your focus. So written communication, that's something that Peter over at Gus, another Nashville company, shout out to him, brought up during that panel and that's what got me really thinking about, improving those skills myself and then within our team, how we communicated writing to each other. Yeah, and we did, I did talk, So, uh, uh, with him, he is a senior engineer manager at GitHub.

I had on the show and we talked about the importance of emojis and ex exclamation marks and punctuation and just tonality within messages because, okay, because I think really at the end of the day, I think the more, I think the more video and phone calls you can do with your team, I think is incredibly important, but I think the LOLs, the ha, ha is like, Listen, listen, at the end of the day, some of y'all just come across as mean through emails and text message. Like listen, like let's just call it what it is. Some of y'all are just really bad at texting. I wanna hear in the comments actually because I disagree on emojis and emails.

I don't think they have a place in emails. And I was an offender of this. Up until last week I was putting emojis in my emails and I became across some writing recently from somebody I really respect, Dr. Cornwall. Shout out to him, other Nashville guy. I love it. That talked about removing those from your business communication email. So I'd be curious if anyone has strong feelings dropped in the chat emails in her emojis and emails. Yeah. I feel like that's a holy war territory. So we'll see. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not snorting, but. Yeah, if anybody has any thoughts on that. I mean, but for me though, I think.

A tone is important, Taylor, though, you're right. Yeah. I think people seem to be aware of how they're coming across, right? Because I think in today's world, we're so slack heavy. Microsoft Teams, whatever thing you use that I think it's so much easier to fire off a quick sentence to not think about it, but maybe that person on the other end's having a bad day, and then they took your one sentence as you hate them, and then now something's come out of it, right? And so I think always being aware of how you're coming across through written, I think is incredibly big, incredibly huge. So I wanna ask you this, George, from a distributed leadership perspective, we were talking about written, which I absolutely loved that.

What are some other things that you really try to hone in on as you're scaling your teams remotely. I think one important thing to carve out time for you alluded to it at the very start is that water cooler time that people, oh here we got somebody in the comments. I see you. Could you pan? I could hear it. Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of my thing. Like if I never met you, George, I'm not putting some emojis in the email by any means. Fair enough. Yeah, maybe not to the CEO. Correct. If you're sending emails out, maybe you don't put emojis on it. But the water cooler time that folks use that analogy, that doesn't happen at all in the distributed team.

So you have to make it happen and be intentional. That folks on the panel recently had suggested different tools. Some product people or leaders have large enough teams to justify a tool like Donut or there's even some virtual environment tools like Secoco or Gather. People have probably heard of that you can bring teams in and create unstructured time, purposeful, unstructured time. Our team is really small, so those tools don't make sense for us, but we have time carved out in our calendar where it's unstructured together time. It's trying to replicate that water cooler type of experience that you'd have at the office. It's a very challenging thing to replicate.

I think nobody's nailed it yet. Right. Also, our team, it's a happy accident that we all live in middle Tennessee because we work distributed. But because we're all in middle Tennessee, we do a monthly lunch. We gather into a monthly lunch. I think that's important. Even if your team is across the world, I know, again, probably have to be in a larger organization, but there's companies, automatic is one. They bring the whole company together once a year in person, and then each team comes together once a year in person, so twice a year. Those are some interesting tactics. I think that if you're saving money on rent, applying it towards bringing teams together in person, I still think that has a place even if you're distributed forward type culture.

So, because these, you know, when the, when those experiences happen, people come back really excited having spent a little bit of time with their colleagues. So, yeah, I mean, I, I 100% agree with that. I think, you know, for me and the conversation we had last night was interesting around like inclusion and diversity and making sure if you're putting things on the books, you know, making sure everybody's bought in, making sure you include everybody, and having events that kind of generally include everybody. And I think for me, I think team outings, I think are essential. Yeah. And I think they'll be more received, right? Because I think pre-COVID, you can correct me if I'm wrong, George.

I think pre-COVID, I think there were a ton of things, right? Come to a bar for Happy Hour, there's five of us. Or, hey, let's go to lunch. There's six of us that go. I think now, I think you're gonna get more buy-in from everybody if you just have the one lunch a month or the one two-day, three-day team building a quarter, because you've had people at home by themselves and you're gonna have people in person, and I think it's gonna be more intentional. But that's just more or more received. I think also team building doesn't just have to be in person. I think the in person is the holy grail.

like, come, mentioning companies like automatic that have been doing this for a long, long time. Yeah. That's kind of the top of the mountain. But there's ways to do team building in a distributed type way. That's the entire, you know, way I spend my focus and time thinking about how to bring people together. There's team building type of experiences that are a lot of funds. One of ours is called game show. And as soon as the game starts, you see people smiling and laughing. It's silly and it's fun and it doesn't feel like work at all, even though you're on Zoom. And so, but the point is taking time outside of work and doing things together to help build that camaraderie is important because it doesn't happen serendipiously anymore in a distributed team.

So being intentional. I love that. So we've got some comments. I don't know if maybe LinkedIn's a little late, a little laggy. I'm seeing some on the emojis and they're making me, you know, I'm gonna come out right out and say, I still use emojis. So I'm, but, and I love them in documents too. I think in documents they can go a long way. There's some really good feedback coming in the comment about replacing some, replacing some, but at the same time, I'm gonna push back a little where an emoji could help convey nonverbal communication. I also think very good writing can also convey that the right way.

So I think an emoji is almost like a little shortcut. It's like try to use your words and explain that. And that'll make you a better writer. So I'm still gonna push back on limited emojis. I love it Elliot. So and again, as I've been seeing coffee. Like I said, it's holy war, emojis, I knew it would pick it up. It is, it is. I've been seeing coffee chats at virtual companies where people show their expertise on code. It's even better when it's not code of the business. Yeah, I mean, again, I think it's, I think it's just trying to be creative. And I think- I like the coffee chat as well because it's, especially if it's on a Thursday or Friday morning something at the end of the week.

I've we had some funny horror stories at the panel last week about virtual happy hours and things like that that just fall totally flat. It's the end of the day you want to be with your buddies, not necessarily your work colleagues, but I love the coffee because a lot of us that work on our computers all day enjoy coffee, especially software and product people. So I do. I do. Take 15, 20 minutes, half coffee, show, show and tell, especially if you're You're in a big company, that's easy. Product and development team show and tell what you're working on. I love that idea from Elliot. I hope I'm pronouncing your name right, but that's a great idea.

Yeah, and Pia, I dropped in right time. Great team, we're about team building. I love it. LinkedIn user love emojis. Sounds like the emoji police. You're hilarious. Now, and I think to, and coming back to kind of team building, and I talked about this last sound on the panel I did, but talk about how to structure one on ones, Because I think, well actually before that, I lost my question. You're going back, so we'll get that in a second. Going back, I feel like organizations have tried to lift and move what they were doing in person to virtual and it doesn't work. Like I think you have, I think leaders with an organization right now have to think critically and not be like, okay, we did a happy hour on Fridays at five at our bar or A bar.

You can't, it doesn't work virtually. translate. Yeah, we mentioned that earlier in the call. I mean, the social stuff you do doesn't translate the work stuff as well. And I think education was a great example. And great teachers struggle on Zoom because it's not the same set of skills. You're still teaching people. But it's a different set of skills and it's the same in the workplace too. You can't just copy and paste what you've done in person. Yeah Yeah, I mean for me. I've kind of thought of all the things we've done I've burned everything down per se and then like I'm kind of like alright.

We did this What is close to this? Virtually and let's try it and then as you've got the right mindset though see where you know, you've got to be flexible and things what things will fail and that's part of the fun, but But that's an important attitude that everybody needs to have. Again, we're less than two years into a massive transition in the fabric of our work culture and society at large. So we have to be patient, we have to try things, be willing to fail, and make incremental improvements. You mentioned how to structure one-on-ones. That's actually something I really struggle with. I've got all of my one-on-ones.

I'm curious if anybody has comments, drop them, folks that have figured this out. But this afternoon, Friday afternoons, we have our one on ones, weekly one on ones with everybody on the team. Sometimes they go well, sometimes they seem to fall flat. It's a challenging thing to get right and I'm not sure the right answer. Checking in every week about longer term goals with people's careers and their work kind of gets old. It feels like you're being a dead horse if every week has tailored. Are we, you know, tell me again about your career goals. It's like, well, we covered that. I know it is goals are where he's going.

So how do we spend this half hour? I'm thinking maybe making them shorter, maybe. Maybe 20 minutes is enough for 15. I'm still struggling with that. And that's one area I want to learn more about and do better is the weekly one and ones. And I originally used to try to do them every two weeks, but the team said do them every week. So I think people want that weekly check-in with their leadership. I'm just trying to figure out from other leaders, what's the best things to bring to that meeting for the team to help them. And so that's how you have a learning. And I think, yeah, and I love that.

So I saw this on TikTok, believe it or not. So I am trying to apply this. And I thought it was really good. It's a third, a third, a third. So the first 10 minutes is just chit chatting. And this is the last one I do. Like I was like, hey, how you doing? Like how's life like, you know, and if you do this enough, you start to remember what people are going through. Right. So like one of my guys is having a second kid and like less than 30 days, right? So it's like, hey, hey, how are you feeling, right? How's the wife, right?

You know, how are you guys balancing everything? You know, so that's one thing. The second third, the second 10 minutes is, hey, let's talk about work stuff, right? What are you struggling with? What do you think's going well? And then the third thing is kind of future state, but how can I help you, right? So like, so again, the kind of the next, The 10 to 20 minutes is what's going on? What are you struggling with? What are some things you're seeing? And then the last little bit is how can I help you kind of move barriers? I'm gonna try that out today. And I see a comment from Dr.

T, giving action items towards your career goals. That is a fantastic piece of feedback. It's something I've been doing, but I didn't really realize how I was doing it now. And seeing you write it down there and then that triangulating with you is the how can I help section at the end, those two things just going really well together. I love that framework as well. Third chit chat, a third work stuff, and then get that out of the way, and then the last words, how can I help you, you know, to grow? And then also too, I don't put pressure on the full 30. Like if we're sitting at each other 20 minutes in, it's like, you good?

And that's a great, that's a great call out too. I don't, I think meetings, I'm not a meeting guy, but developing a culture of, hey, if you're not essential to this meeting, peel off and if we're done, we're gonna, we're gonna all feel off. So I love that in general, just trying to build culture like that. And one thing I'm starting to do too, just, just some, and again, this is why I love having guests on like you, George, who are just kind of just open. And this is what this platform is. And so everybody can just learn from each other. But like for me, I've started to play in more 15 minute meetings, just in general, with my team, I still do 30, but I've started doing more 15 minute meetings, because what I've realized is a lot of people are more poignant.

and to the point in 50 because I use Cal in late with everything, right? And it's like, so I only send out 15 minute meetings, unless if I know it's a longer meeting, it needs to be. And what happens is, is things are a lot more clear and concise because people are forcing function for being clear and concise. Well, and what you said about short 15 minute meetings reminds me of this comment, Elliott just posted, which I think is a great way to kind of wrap up this thought is, is the 15 minutes is a great opportunity for folks at the highest levels of your company.

If you can convince them to jump into some of these social things, because I've noticed some folks at the leadership might be uncomfortable with technology perhaps even, or their time is very limited, but they still want to engage folks, I think the 15 minute meetings, and then trying to bring in some high level leadership in those unstructured times. That could be a really great way to help build the culture. One of the founders of the company, Johnny, jumped on our standup this morning, short 15-minute meeting that we have. And the team loves to see that. It reminds me of an analogy that Scott Belsky used at Adobe where the product people, which is really what I do most of my time, driving this bus and your development team is kind of sitting in the bus without any windows, not necessarily knowing where the bus is going.

And so bringing in those leadership folks can sometimes help paint the picture, which isn't always important no matter if you're in person or distributed. Well, and I think too, so my boss actually said he really liked something, something I said, which made me feel good. But what I realized and is the way you feel as a leader when your leaders meet with you is the way your team feels when you meet with them. I think we as leaders, I think, forget that a lot, right? We're like, we're like, oh, they're just our team. It's not, you know, they like me. I like them. Like we're vibing.

Like they don't need to see me that much, right? And it's like, listen, like your team wants to have time with you. And that's something early on in my leadership kind of journey that I realized, because I wasn't really doing one on one. I wasn't spending a lot of time with them. But every time I met with my senior leaders, like, oh yeah, this is good. I like this. I was like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Maybe this is how my team feels. Yeah. And then like when you can even cross those layers where somebody at the highest level comes in and sits with spokes that are on your junior development team, for instance, and ties what they're working on to the bigger picture the company can create a huge impact for people.

So it's a great lesson to finish. Elliott comes in again. I love, thank you again for chiming in architects and principals popping into refinement sessions for the best. It was even better when they showed back bonus stuck up for devs to the product managers. Love that. Love that. So what else? So we talked about writing. We've talked about one-on-ones, we've talked about, kind of not really doing the same thing in person as you did virtually. Is there anything else that y'all are trying to do or maybe struggling with them and we can talk about it? I guess one thought that what we were talking about before made me think about Taylor and I were joking about having a phone call recently and how it was so refreshing.

Made me think of a topic that we talked about last week about finding time when having cameras off is appropriate for folks. I think that'll really help cut down on the Zoom fatigue that people have. I don't know exactly when the right time is. I think it's very dependent on the types of meetings you have in your organization, but I've been thinking a lot recently about all of the Zoom meetings that I have, which ones do I need my camera on for? Yeah. And trying to figure that out because I got some really great feedback recently about that. I don't know if you've come across that your organization Taylor or folks in the comments What percentage of their meetings or camera on versus camera off?

But that's an interesting idea That I'm exploring more and learning more about me. It was funny. So it was I mentioned this because this morning My team all hopped on none of us were on video Except me and I was like I was like I can tell it's a Is that normal? Is that normal? It's not. And the thing is, is I'm trying to make it normal. Because here's the deal, for the most part, you don't need to be on video as much as your whole. Well, in the Slack, you've got the Slack huddle features, things that are coming out now that reinforce the not necessarily needing video all the time.

Yeah, so again, I mean, for me, I mean, I said today, listen, I don't care if you're on video or not. Like, just be engaged. I do think most people think you're off video, you're not engaged and that's fine. But I do think the 15 minute meetings, the quick meetings, man, you don't need to be on video. Like it's not a thing. Fridays, you know what? I should just implement Fridays, no video. No video Fridays. That could be a great start. I'm also, I also heard some of Max shout out to him, one of our product managers. He picked up an idea at the panel where some folks have like a permanent Google or Zoom chat open or session open where folks from across the company, again, probably makes sense in a little bit larger company, but anybody can go in here, camera on, camera off, work while on camera and interact.

Again, I guess it's trying to replicate the in-person environment where you'd have people around you that you could see and you could hear if you wanted to, so that's another interesting idea that we may try out. So we'll see. So the panel I had last night, a gentleman named Kyle Welch, she's an engineering manager at Eventbrite here in Nashville, He said they have a Google Meet channel or a link where they all just hang out. I think it might have been chip event bright from the panel that mentioned that actually that's been where it could be that event brights trying this out and be very curious to join in on one of those and see how many people I'm curious, how many people do what the ratio to the video and audio is and how people actually like it, you know, because it feels like it could turn kind of click you know like two or three people talking and everybody else listening, but maybe that's what people want Maybe people want like so so I love the fact that they're experimenting with it.

Yes Yes, so at so as we wrap up here I always leave the last few minutes to my guests to kind of just say anything Do you have anything on for hiring managers right now or the job seeker? We didn't cover a landing about the job seeker right now So do you have any last thoughts for hiring majors or job seekers right now in this market? I think one thing that pops immediately to mind about job seekers Kind of echoes back what we were talking about earlier Follow-up and written communication I think is so huge I go to a lot of almost every natural software school demo day and Most people don't follow up afterwards or you have interviews with people and most people don't follow up after words from a from a candidate perspective and I think that if you do follow up afterwards, it's a it's a great opportunity to show your written communication skills which if you're going to be working in a distributed environment those skills need to be owned.

It's a great opportunity to show that off and it will make you stand out and so I would say if you're the job seeker, take that extra few minutes to do that especially roles that you're interested in it will make a big difference. I think from the folks trying to hire it's the same challenges that everybody keeps having. Put the salary in the job description, don't waste people's time. That's a good start. I like to put as much information about the culture, videos, pictures, testimonial type stuff, let people know what kind of culture they're walking into just to make sure that it's a good fit.

Escape game, for instance, is a very fast moving bias to action. Things change a lot. It's not the I fit for a lot of people. So try to capture your culture and a few words and share it with people so again that you don't feel your funnel of folks that aren't a good fit and waste people's time. I don't know if there's any other secrets except being consistent and doing those things. And I love it. That's perfect. That's perfect. Cool. Well, y'all again, 30 minutes flies by like it always does. But George, thank you so much and thank y'all for hanging out. So this is this This is the last show for a week.

I'm actually up with our Cincinnati office next week, helping them with content. So we have a lot of great interviews with Cincinnati office coming up. So I'll be up there all week. So I'm completely off next week, no lives next week. But again, I want to let you all know, please go check out render, use the code GC2-0. Also listen, connect with George. George is a fantastic individual in the Nashville area. I love what he's building at the escape game. I think it's very different and very innovative. Thank you. And so George, thank you for being on the show, man. And I stay on real quick too afterwards.

My pleasure. And thanks everyone for joining us. Absolutely. Y'all have a good one. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store, I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it.

So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T.S. and on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.