G'day everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Good to have you back. So this is a solo episode, so this time it's just me talking about some things that may be of use to you and could be useful in the way you make decisions. We're going to talk about three key things today, and they all relate to people in some way. Because if you haven't figured it out, technology is made of people. So the first thing is about getting people to care. Now, there's no ROI on getting people to care. It doesn't uh feature in any balance sheet, it doesn't show up in any metric that you can really meaningfully measure. But my goodness, you can tell when it's in place in an organization. Now, some people call this culture, some people call this uh approach or ways of working or spirits or uh team spirit, or you know, there's a variety of ways to kind of sort of talk about it, but it's kind of this squidgy concept. So, how can we unsquidgify it? Well, I have a personal view, and my personal view is that if people see that you actually care about them, they might care about you. And if they understand the why of what they're doing and that someone's actually deeply thinking about it, they'll probably give you a fair bit of commitment. So let me unpack that for you. Often in business we see uh people as resources, you know, human resources is the name of the department. It's like these fungible units, and to a great extent, we are fungible. People come, people go. It's not a family, it's a business, it's not for life, it's for a period of time. Um, there's no such thing as the gold watch and a job for life anymore. That's not a thing. So then, in the microcosm of time that you're working in a team and working together, what does it mean to actually care about someone and deliver something that's of use? Well, something I learned early on when I started leading larger teams is that people always have problems. And the larger the team you have, the more problems you'll be exposed to. And it's somewhat humbling and shocking and saddening and scary and uh enlightening to see the humanity of what people go through. And what I've found almost without exception is that when you are sensitive to those factors and respect those within bounds of realism and normality, good things happen. So, you know, I've had people in my team who have had heart attacks, who have had cancer diagnoses, who have had domestic violence incidents, who have had very ill children, who have had a raft of issues that have taken place to them of a typically an unplanned nature that have deeply affected the way they can and will operate for a period of time. And almost without exception, if they're given sensible support and meaningful support and be made to feel valued and cared for and respected, they will come back with even more vigor for what they're doing and for you as a leader and being part of the team because they feel valued and cared for and looked after. It's not a performative thing. It's not, well, we'll send you a gift basket or what have you. It's like, you know, can I get leave when I need leave? Can I not worry I'm going to lose my job because I've become ill? Um, can I take the time to deal with these legal matters I have to deal with and not have it affect my career? These are things that are important to people. That's in the macro. I think in the micro, and again, I'm not on the popular side of the conversation on this one, given where things are these days with hot desk and the like, but I'm not a fan of hot desking. I'm a fan of giving people a desk and letting them make themselves at home. Because nothing says you're not important, like being required to completely clear your desk and put it into a little box each and every day. I find that somewhat insulting. But that's the reality of many workplaces. And I understand, again, from an ROI perspective, hot desking makes nothing but sense. From an ownership perspective and a feeling of belonging, I think it makes zero sense. You know, I think that Microsoft don't always get it right, don't always get it wrong. But I think Microsoft in the early 80s when they were kicking off and they had the concept of the way they even designed their building so that everyone got an office. And the focus was the offices were on the outside with the windows and had doors closed, and their developers could just do the work. And then there were these common areas in between where you could actually share time. There's some awesome uh YouTube videos out there of people touring old, abandoned, quote unquote, or decommissioned Microsoft offices from the time, often with the decorations up and the office stuff up. And you could look at and go, yeah, I can see how a lot of good work would have been done during that time because you had time to step away from the hurly burly and just focus on deep work and you had time to communicate with people, but you always knew that you belonged. You had a place, you had a space, you had an office. So a feeling of belonging is very, very important. A feeling of security that someone knows what the hell they're doing is also really important. A very wise leader once told me, and I've really taken it on board because it really hit home to me, is he said to me, Simon, the people that work under you and the many people that report to you or report to managers who report to you, what have you, need to know that you are taking the time to think deeply and carefully about what it is they're doing and what the organization is doing. You need to be thinking about strategy. You need to be thinking about what's coming down the road, you need to be looking ahead. This is your responsibility to be thinking about these things because those people working for you need to know that you think about these things. And it really hit home for me because firstly, it hit home for the times that I'd worked for folks where I had no visibility of that. They may have been doing it, I didn't know. But also, it gave me permission and the right, if you like, and moreover, the requirement to carve out time in my diary to just think and to just consider. And you'll hear it given different names, executive time is a bit of a sort of, you know, show-offy type title or thinking time or blocked out time, etc. And a lot of senior leaders struggle with this because, like, well, if I'm not doing something every second of the day, I'm not extracting value. I would argue if you're not spending multiple hours a week just sitting and thinking and drawing with a pen and doing some research and considering some options and flagging some ideas and these days interacting with AI to test those ideas, what have you? If you're not spending that time thinking ahead, who is? Who is? Who's driving the bus? And if you're running an organization of any size, someone better be driving the bus or it's going off the rails. So give yourself permission to that. And even if you're not leading a team, well, what do you think about yourself? Are you thinking about your career? Are you thinking about what you do? Are you taking that time to not just react, but to think about what's going on? So I've touched on culture, and I want to share a culture story that really is, I think, the best culture experience I ever had in my career. And I've had lots of different cultural experiences, good and bad. That's called life and a career. Um, but the best teacher of culture I ever had was a man by the name of Shane Owen B. And Shane Owen B, when I met him at the time, was running uh AWS for um APAC. And he was based in Singapore. And this is the time where I first joined AWS way back in 2011. Yes, there was a 2011, uh, for those of you who are younger. And I just joined Amazon. I was the third employee in Australia, I was a first solution architect, all that good stuff. So there was no one around to learn culture from. There was literally, you know, Mark Brown and I in a serviced office in Melbourne and uh Nick Walton in Sydney at his kitchen table. So it was glamorous. Um, and there were the three of us, and here we've joined this you know global company called Amazon that had no presence here. Um, and our boss was in Singapore, and I'd never even seen him physically, I'd only talked to him on conference calls and through the interview process. And so you'd wonder, well, okay, how's how's he going to teach culture? How are you gonna learn the Amazon way? And he had an amazing technique of this, is he was what I would call Captain Obvious when it came to culture. He didn't talk about culture, he didn't discuss culture, he lived culture. And what I mean by that is, you know, we had the at the Amazon, we had the leadership principles, they're the foundational thinking processes that we would use. And he wouldn't say, Well, let me teach you about the leadership principles. He would talk about things in emails and phone calls and what have you. And in his emails, I always remember he used to use XML tags. And he'd open the XML tag and specify the leadership principle he was about to leverage. You know, maybe it was dive deep, then close the XML tag, then write his sentence, then slash dive deep. You know, that classic XML style. He was explicit about it in his emails to us saying, hey, thinking this, da da da da, you know, dive deep, invent and simplify, vocally self-critic, or whatever it was, he called it out. And it was really, really effective. Like it really caught on for us because we used it ourselves in our emails and the way we spoke to each other, because it was just the way we did it. And it was interesting how people would often comment about how uh Amazonian we were in the way we operated, yet we're so far away from Seattle. And it's because we had an excellent leader who taught us that way of thinking and made it his day-to-day and our day-to-day. And it really tied into something that I've always held true, which is if you walk into an organization and see what's written on the walls, almost without exception, the opposite will be done. And if someone writes stuff on the walls about culture, it's probably not a great thing to do. It feels, again, feels like the right thing to do. I think it actually makes it noise. I think the better thing is, are you talking about it in the way you operate normally? So it doesn't have to be taught because it's lived. So think about your own cultural norms, values, mission statement, what have you. Like, how often does it even get said? I can tell you that at Amazon, you know, world's most customer-obsessed company gets said a hell of a lot. A hell of a lot. The word customer obsession gets said a hell of a lot. You can argue the toss about whether it's effective or not effective, but we at least recognize it, talked about it, and discussed it and dived deep deep on it and use those terms. All that just was the way you spoke. And I think that is an incredibly powerful thing when it comes to culture. So culture's not written on the walls, it's something that's lived. And as a leader, you have to exemplify it really, really strongly with your people. And again, one of the transitions I think from being a small L leader to a big L leader is that you need to be, again, captain obvious. You need to really be explicit about what you're doing and why you're doing it and how you're doing it. So the last part of people is data. You go, hang on, whoa, hold the phone, Simon. People, data, how does this work? Well, there's a great saying at Amazon that I always liked, which was when the data and the anecdotes don't match, that's your trigger to dive deep. Genius. Absolute genius. Because it solves for a couple of things. Firstly, it's telling you, are you collecting data? Are you collecting data about your function, what you're doing, that can indicate from a qualitative perspective if things are working okay? Sidebar, these are not averages. They should never be averages because averages are average. They should be things like what's happening at the 99th percentile of the experience for customers, be it performance, speed, revenue, delivery time, whatever. Do you have good data feeds? Because as a leader, if you don't have good data feeds, it is impossible to make any good decisions. You're just guessing. And again, you're just reacting. But the danger is you get these data feeds, you're sitting in your mission control with all your graphs and spreadsheets and numbers, and you think, yep, everything is good. But if you're going to talk to someone on the ground close to the customer or the customer themselves, preferably, and you get a very different story, the anecdote doesn't match the data. And what does that tell you? Well, is the data wrong? Maybe, maybe not. Is the anecdote wrong? Maybe, maybe not. You don't know. Hence, time to dive deep. Let's look at our data again. Let's understand where it's coming from. Is it giving us the right signal to noise? Let's dive deeper on the anecdote. Let's talk to a few more people. Let's try and triangulate. Another great Amazon thing was um three is a trend. So if I have one customer telling me something, yeah, it's a data point. It's interesting. I want to listen to it. If I have two, I'm getting interested. If I have three, that's a trend. Three are the same thing, that's enough to say, okay, there's something going on here. So as a leader, having mechanisms to go and talk to folks and get to the bottom of something effectively is really, really important. If as a leader you have not met with your end user stakeholders, its customers, staff, et cetera, on at least a regular basis in the last few weeks, you're probably not collecting anecdotes and you then cannot validate whether the data you're reading means anything at all. You're living in essentially a fabricated world of data. So being able to correlate the two of them is really, really important to being an effective leader. And again, having systems together those two things become really, really important. You know, one thing I would do at in every meeting I ever went to, again, this is a Shane Owenby one. So again, credit to you, Shane. This is the Shane show today, but clearly was a good leader. Um, was he taught me that he never left a meeting without asking, what could we do better? And he particularly I liked asking that into in meetings where the customer was super, super happy. Because firstly, it says, Well, we don't accept that we're the best that can ever be and we'll never be better. But secondly, it gave the opportunity for someone to, in a clear-headed way, say, what could you do even better? And most of the time they would pause and go, Oh, haven't been asked that question before, and actually come up with something really useful. Yeah. Maybe you could do this, or maybe you could do that, or it would be better if, you know, there's always something. And if there wasn't something, that was okay. It was just like, hey, well, at least you know if you come. And I would often get the, you know, 12 hours later email, hey, you know, you mentioned yesterday, what could we do better? Well, it came to me when I was in the shower this morning, you could do this. It's a gift, it's information that's just there for you to have, it's information to gather. If you're not getting it, you're missing out. Because you need the anecdotes and you need the data and you need to collect the two. So there's a bit to unpack there today, wasn't there? There's a lot we covered in a short period of time. That's the point of the podcast. How do you make good decisions? You make good decisions if you have good data and good anecdotes. How do you assess if they're good? You dive deep, you figure it out. How do you make sure your team is doing the right thing? Well, you want to make sure the culture is right. Well, how's a culture right? Well, you model it. You don't write it, you actually model it. How do you teach it? You teach it explicitly. And how do you bet get people to care about what they're doing? You treat them the way you'd like to be treated. It's the golden rule, isn't it? Treat others the way you'd like them to treat you. It's important. So, some food for thought today, an interview in the next uh episode, of course. And of course, until next time, keep on building.