Get Yourself An “Awww” CTO

Unbelievable as it may sound to anyone who would have heard my Alexa basting a Spotify playlist made up almost entirely of the Mary Poppins (Returns!) soundtrack, the Trolls’ “Get Back Up Again”, or Shakira’s “Try” over the last few weeks, I can be a dark cynical soul. No surprise there. I’ve seen too many instances of clipped wings, laziness and near-greatness not to be, here at the intersection of technology and people where I live. But every once in a blue moon, something (or rather someone) comes along who makes my soul sing because by Job they get it! I speak about some of my human crushes over there often, aside from my immutable admiration for Gene Kim, John Cutler or Karen Ferris there are so many more. I suspect it is a little bit like being an antiques enthusiast - walking through bazar streets with little in the way of expectation or shuffling through trunks in charity shops open-minded but not hopeful only to at times be delighted by amazing finds. 

I feel that way about humans with Agile in their DNA and gargantuan courage, a passion for growth and massive EQs, the Agile Superheroes I sometimes brag about and weeks when I meet any are a good week. Last week was one of them.

I met (read about/exhaustively stalked all the available online work of/saw online/spoke to) a few strong contenders for the position - some of which I haven’t yet even interacted with properly but I have a sense are amazing-of late, but of them, one absolutely blew my mind. Here’s a near-verbatim record of what he said:

Superhero CTO: “I’ve had this People Practice you talk about as a personal growth epic of mine all of last year”

Me: “Ohhhh be still my beating heart! So many lush keywords in one sentence:) how do you mean?!?”

“Well I’ve done this a long time but you get to your 40s and you think “hey, this people-work, this needs REAL doing, that’s where results live”

“Right… what made you think that?”

“It started with what really struck me in the manifesto when I read it - the people and the way they interact over process bit. I never thought that was any kind of lip service but a very real conviction of these guys they arrived at through good and hard work so I vowed to focus on that myself as I build what became a few hundreds of teams.”

“So you did that? Put people first and obsessed about them?”

“No. I was so overwhelmed about even having to “run people” where I wanted to think of structures and run code that I didn’t really pop the hood of what it meant and for years I thought I was being an awesome boss just having a smile and an open door policy. Plus I was fighting organisational fires, protecting our product, making sure Agile is not just lip service as we grew and so on.”

“Right. But they must have thought you’re great”

“They did, I was that boss who never kicked them out when they had a new tool they wanted to try but got excited with them and paid for it, never said anyone’s idea was dumb but asked then to prototype it, and never said we can’t afford beers and pizzas for the teams in other countries but I knew I was just ultimately doing better process”

“Well maybe, but sounds to me like all these things were about the people, you were doing what was best for them”

“I was doing what was less bad. Pure hygiene. Did I know what they feel? Did I hear them out? Did I notice their behaviour? Did I spend every waking hour wondering about their team dynamic and how to build trust structures that last? Nah, I was tone death to all that. I wasn’t all that good at it at all. It occurred to me one Christmas break when one of our young new leads said they knew it wasn’t nice but it’s an emergency and asked if I had 30 mins for a call. It lasted 2 hours. They started by saying they were terrified about the people work to the point that they dreaded going back in January - they had read all the new studies and books in school and they knew they had to have a happy and healthy team to be hitting our exigent delivery demands but didn’t have a clue where to start. That they were diagnosed as ADHD and high functioning autistic and that they “don’t understand emotions or how to deal with that”. I was smug at first. I could help, I could mentor, I had this, I had done it for years. Then they genuinely broke down and I had a moment where I realised their level of concern was totally justified and I didn’t have much to offer myself.”

“Of course you did, all those years!”

“Like I said, those were years of pizza expense approvals not learning about emotions. Theirs or mine really. So I decided to change that and over the next year, I challenged myself to flip the script of what I do completely. I learned about the theory, I taught myself how to recognise not only emotions but behaviours, body language, patterns of dynamic and eventually triggers in the teams that worked for me directly.”

“How did you do that? Read all about it? Psychology 101?”

“More like pop Psychology 101. That too, that’s a solid start. But then I went to every meeting and been in every call and mindfully pulled myself away from listening to the content instead of the delivery and the human emotions behind it. I would register the theoretical layer and give an objective opinion if asked, but they had the tech solutions down, they didn’t really need me for it. I spent my time psychoanalysing them and deeply trying to understand each of them individually and all of them as a team. I started to see them in a completely new light and when I was offering input it seemed to land very differently now.”

“So a re-frame?”

“Yeah, I guess. I just knew that I can mentor no one while I didn’t have this EQ thing down myself. I was determined to spend a year to quietly and privately get smarter about emotions and feeling and to develop all kinds of things no one has told me I’d need: intuition, compassion, and so on. And I fell in love with it. The people.”

“How did it go?”

“It went well enough that I can sense you’re sceptical” (he teased with an air of benevolent amusement, mind!)

“Well…”

“That’s ok, so was everyone else in our shop, I get why. Thing is, I think it massively worked and I didn’t need the full year either, it’s exciting work - it’s part scholar, part detective, part good-guy (or girl) work from the heart and it’s so easy to notice in results that are exponentially better that it’s clearly self-reinforcing.”

“So you guys are set then? Your organisation has loads of mini-you’s and teams are happy, Psychologically Safe, don’t do impression management and kick Agile bottom now?”

“Am I hypersensitive about this or were you being a bit passive-aggressive with that irony there? We’re not, but that will be the case one day. Working on the mini-me part -although I hope they end up “better-than-me’s”-, the mate who called me that Christmas day and I are finding the best ways to tell our guys why this People Practice is bigger than all their other epics like you say and we’ll get there eventually.”

Awwwwwww y'all! 

Right?!? How cool is that?!? That there are humans like that out there? Tech humans. And if I told you what their “shop”s name was, you’d know them as super winners - digital elite. And this is why. 

Do you have one like that? An “Awww” CTO? Are you one like that? Come tell me a story, make my week next week, my editor doesn’t like me thinking about it yet as I’m nowhere nearly done with this one but the next book will have to be an anthropological foray into Agile and People and I’m collecting hero folklore. 

Stay awesome, stay psychologically safe, stay Superhero-y, stay Agile. 

P.S. We’re building an “EQ for Tech Leaders” workshop with the Superhero above and his “Christmas mate” for their team leaders and once done, they’re happy that we adapt the work and take it at large even for those organisations who don’t use our team solution software so give us a shout or look out for an announcement of the next online course if you wanted to know more. 

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