Beyond Titles with Kendra Johnson

Okay, Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and our listeners.

Really excited to learn from you.

I think that you and I share the love for middle management and developing their growth.

So I know that you have a lot of wisdom you can pass on, especially speaking a language
that I don't fully understand, which is the language of technology and bridging those

gaps.

So before I dive into picking your brain about

technology, soft skills, and everything in between.

Can you give us a little bit of insight into your journey, who you are, and what you focus
on currently?

Sure, but I definitely agree that middle management is the worst job to have.

We can double click on that.

It is a difficult job to have because you have a lot of stakeholders that have different
demands.

It's easy being an individual contributor because you're in many ways told what to do.

And it's kind of easy to be executive because you have a team of people doing work.

It's the middle managers who have to be responsible for output, but then responsible for
taking orders and delivering it.

It's complex.

I get that.

So my journey is entirely technology.

So from high school on, I've caught

caught the technology bug, wanted to be a developer, wanted to be a technology guru, went
through university, got a degree in computer science, and started development, and found

out within, let's say, 12 months that I was a relatively mediocre programmer.

Look at this.

Right.

going to be the next 30 years being a developer.

It wasn't me.

But what I did enjoy is leadership.

So I did enjoy empowering the team.

I did enjoy inspiring and motivating.

That was more interesting to me, still in technology setting, than actual hands-on
keyboard doing work.

which is why from that point forward it's just been leadership roles.

So from product management leadership roles to CTO leadership roles, I've been a CTO now
at small, medium, and large size organizations, both from an internal CTO, POV, or a

software developer CTO, or a field CTO, or even Epithet now, kind of all of the above,
where I'm doing...

75 % internal and 75 % external.

There's a lot of 150 % worth of work there.

So get to see all of those things.

And now I've evolved from mediocre to programmer to decent leader to almost on the
educator side.

So I spend as much time on the academic side as I do on the practical IT side, which is
just as fun.

Yes, amazing.

you know what?

Kudos to you for figuring that out very early on.

There are people I'm sure that are well into their careers who are not realizing that, you
know, whatever they're doing is just not their bag and they can find something that they

will be better than mediocre at.

so I'm happy to hear you found your lane pretty quickly.

Right.

I couldn't imagine 30 years of line by line code creation.

Right, okay, so also a little bit of just enjoyment in that process too, right?

And what was the, I mean, if you have a pivotal moment, but do you have the kind of TSN
turning point where you just said, to heck with this, this is not my thing?

Was there a distinct moment that stands out to you or was it just kind of a culmination of
many things?

Certainly over that 12 to 18 month period of time, know, receiving assignments, delivering
assignments, and not poor development in the grand scheme of things.

It's not like I was, you know, producing bugs time in and time out.

But I wondered aloud.

is finishing projects, am I willing to invest another three hours today?

Am I willing to roll up my sleeve this weekend and do a little bit more work?

Do I want to read another book on syntax?

And of course, the answers to that was, no, I don't think so.

Do I enjoy technology?

Sure, but much more holistically, comparatively.

I like to see the full stack.

want to see what the physical equipment looks like.

I want to see the code, sure, but I also want to see the application.

I want to create a better environment for the business users, not necessarily a better
environment for the next developer.

Excellent.

Okay.

Okay.

That makes total sense.

And you know what?

None of that sounds interesting to me either.

So there's more alignment for us.

Kudos to the people that can do it, but that's not for me either.

So wonderful.

Now you've moved into, I mean, many leadership roles.

And as you mentioned, you've kind of dabbled in in almost every environment imaginable.

So you've worn many hats.

You've spoken many languages, let's say.

One of the things I really wanna pick your brain about today is how you manage the
relationships with other stakeholders being a CTO means that you also have to get buy-in

from CFO, CEO, COO.

You really have to be collaborating with everybody and yes, they look to you as well for
your expertise, but I would imagine that you have to go through a lot of presentations and

present your case in many different aspects of the day to day.

What are some of the strategies that you use that ensure effective communication and also
alignment with your executive counterparts?

So I am of two hats or two buckets of thoughts here.

So bucket number one, I'm a firm believer in the first team principle.

So as an individual contributor, a first level manager, your first team of the people
report to you.

Your job is to divide and conquer a task into multiple places and getting that done.

Your first team as a middle manager is.

is many of your team leaders.

You still have a divide and conquer approach.

You take orders from the above, but you still have to deliver philosophically.

As a sort of senior middle manager or an executive leader, your first team is now your
peers.

So it's not about delivering for your team.

You have to trust that your team can deliver on the actions you've asked them to deliver
on.

Now it's much more about participating in the organization across departments.

So I have to consider the CMO, the CRO, the CFO, as all peers to deliver on the outcomes
for the business, which is why all of us have a shared set of MBOs.

We have a shared set of goals, which tends to be top line and bottom line financial and or
growth and or sort of success in that organization.

So.

My first bucket is first team, right?

My first team are my peers and therefore that's who I spend 60 % of my time with as a
full-on.

The other side of that is how I think of sort of transparency and empowerment.

So because a good portion of my time and energy is both external to the company.

and with my first team, I have to have good leaders and I have to have full trust in those
good leaders by providing them as much knowledge that I have so they can do their job and

enough empowerment that I'm not micromanaging.

So we're effectively going to agree every quarter on what we think the outcomes are going
to be and I leave you alone.

My assumption is that it gets done.

My assumption isn't that you need my daily input.

And if you need my input, feel free.

Like come on in.

My door's open.

I'm digitally available wherever I need to be.

But you are very good at your job.

I have faith that you'll deliver on it and we'll...

Yes, okay, I love that.

And I think that's such a healthy perspective shift, especially as you move, as you
continue to get promoted that your first team changes and you have different priorities.

And I think that's something that a lot of, mean, especially in working with middle
managers, we see that that's where they get stuck is in that transition from IC to middle

manager.

And now that...

that priority has totally shifted.

The degree of trust that they now have to give and to assume that they have in others has
also shifted.

So with that, and you mentioned empowering, which I think is great.

Empowerment and trust are two very key words in the information you just shared there.

And so talk to me a little bit about how you walk the line between empowerment and
micromanaging and perhaps

Have you always been able to do that or was there a learning curve where it looked a
little bit micromanaging and then you needed to make the transition to empowerment,

especially when you lead global teams.

mean, it's a slippery slope for many people.

I really don't think empowerment and transparency is natural.

It certainly wasn't natural for me.

That was a learned experience.

Good news is I learned it from leaders to which I looked up to, either leaders that I
directly reported to or leaders to which I have witnessed, where they were more effective

the more transparent and more empowerment that they provided.

So as you know, you experiment, right?

As a first line manager, as a middle manager, you will try a bunch of different things
until you find the ones that work.

And the ones that ultimately work for me that I have used for many years now is 100 %
transparency, with the exception of embargoed information, like we're doing at inorganic

transaction.

We're buying a company.

can't necessarily know all that.

But if there's an organizational strategy that has detail, I'm going to provide you that
detail.

We are going to come together on what we believe a set of annual and quarterly objectives
are.

Once we agree, I kind of consider that a contract.

We've agreed to this thing.

And now you're completely empowered both with authority and with information to deliver on
it.

Because, and maybe there's a little bit of uniqueness in my role, because 75 % of my job's
internal and 75 % of my job is external, that doesn't really leave a lot of time.

So it's unique in many ways that I simply can't be micromanaging because there isn't that
many hours in the day.

I can't follow up in detail, which means I have to have really good managers to which I
trust, leaders to which I trust.

And they have proven that to be true.

And they know that if they have stumbles and roadblocks and constraints, that's when we
have the conversation.

And we have one-on-ones that are frequent, but are focused less about status and more
about next steps.

So it's not about, tell me about the five projects you're working on and what the current
state is.

It honestly doesn't matter, right?

What only matters is how close are you to achieving the goal we agreed to?

Yes, very good.

Everything else can be an email or can be an update asynchronously, right?

Yeah, even better.

knowing.

Of my entire team, that would be hundreds of lines of sound.

I just don't need to know.

Yes, yeah, I don't need to know what an empowering statement for a leader to say to and
honestly, I think one that is not uttered often.

that is a huge lesson because I know that there's a number of leaders and again, it's that
the trust that is it doing well?

Are we meeting our objectives?

If not, it's my reputation on the line, right?

So I think that growth and that evolution in the learning as you said.

and understanding who you're communicating with and knowing that they feel empowered to
come to you and to bring you any issues.

And I would assume that that also requires a healthy degree of building rapport with your
team member.

Yeah, I also take that potentially to the extreme.

Because I'm the CTO, everybody in technology reports to me, one would assume that I would
have privileged access.

In other words, I have administrative access to our systems.

I absolutely do not.

In fact, I insist that I don't.

Because there's no such thing as a CTO emergency.

It's just not a thing.

You're not going to wake me up at 3 AM, because that's what am I going to do?

I can't do anything.

I neither have the authority, nor the information, nor the access to do anything about it.

the authority, the access to the right people who have the right content to which have the
right context, that matters to me, right?

And also don't make me part of the decision matrix.

So if we're onboarding people or we have to make purchasing decisions, will you have
authority within a certain dollar mark?

And you go ahead and do that, right?

It doesn't require me just to check the box.

I don't need to just click the button.

Because if my only added value to that is it just happened to come to me because I'm in
the triangle hierarchy, that's not a good use of anybody's time.

No, no, exactly, exactly.

I wish more organizations and more leaders took on that mindset.

I don't need to have oversight.

I can't do anything.

And that, if you don't have that, it creates a reliance on you, right?

It's like a trained behavior that people will then come to you to check the box.

And if you don't give them the opportunity to, well then that's on them to problem solve,
to figure it out and to come to you at the absolute, you know, final moment if they do

need something.

Sometimes it comes with an expectation of perfection.

So there are many CIOs and CDOs and CISOs and CTOs that say, I will live a perfect IT
environment.

I will never have any outages.

I will never have any bugs.

That's just not realistic.

That is not the real world.

And therefore, if you believe it's not the real world and stumbles will occur, bugs will
happen, there might be an unscheduled outage, and you just have the processes and people

and empowering place to handle it, that's a way better situation.

It's a way less stressful experience.

Yes, yes, exactly.

You have to account for contingencies.

I mean, as a past event planner, I learned that very quickly that if you don't have a
contingency plan for everything, you will most certainly not have a perfect event because

you won't be prepared for, you know, the time that a water main breaks and the ceiling
leaks, all of those types of things.

So yeah, knowing what your plan B and plan C is, and I think you said it perfectly, the
processes and the people in place, who knows how to...

put out those so to speak fires, then you're set up for success no matter what comes down
the pike.

In fairness, some of this come from my experience of being IT and OT.

So 17 years in banking, IT, classic IT, right?

5,000 were closed, 29 data centers.

Outages make a difference to whether somebody can get to their bank account.

And then 10 years of OT, where we're talking about nuclear power plants and bullet trains
and MRI machines.

In the OT world, quality makes a much bigger difference.

This plane has to land.

This train has to stop.

This MRI has to be

So when you move from a high intense lives matter back to a services world where, let's be
honest, lives don't matter.

You become way less edgy in terms of acceptability, of potential failure.

It's okay to fail in a cloud services organization, data services organization, as
compared to landing a plane.

Yes.

Context matters.

Context absolutely matters.

Yes.

And the old adage, we're not saving lives here.

In one instance, you absolutely are.

Yeah.

So fair enough.

Fair enough.

I mean, I just want to go back to what you said about, you know, you don't have simply the
capacity to micromanage, which makes sense.

And again, makes it easier to...

be able to trust by default if that wasn't already baked into your leadership style.

For those that move into a larger or global organization, means that by proxy, you will
have to do that.

But I know that you have experience in smaller organizations that are around 30 people,
which means that there is more touch points, or sorry, there are more touch points,

there's more opportunity for people to come to you, and perhaps the organization's a bit
flatter.

From your experience, the difference between leading a team with thousands of people
versus 30 people, how does that or how has that impacted your leadership style and the way

you lead and communicate?

So a couple boxes there.

So in a big team, you have big budgets.

You have an ability to try different things because the likelihood you can try and fail is
easier when you have more people to support that.

There's more R &D in a larger organization in the grand scheme of things.

In a small organization, you don't have that kind of

monetary scale nor do you really have that people scale.

So everybody's rolling up their sleeves.

There's a little bit of Jack and Jill of all trades.

There's a lot of figuring it out when we don't have the team or the budget to make that
happen.

But the positive to that is a jilt.

I can change on a dime, especially a services organization.

I can introduce a new version of a service in the week versus a product organization
measuring in thousands of people that takes a year.

Right.

is a large adventure requiring not just R &D, but potentially invention, potentially
physical equipment creation or silicon to mainframe implementation.

It's a large complex invention process.

So there's that.

You also have multiple levels within larger organizations versus smaller organizations.

So succession is easier.

Mm-hmm.

lots of people and lots of people can try different roles, which means they can experience
a lot of different things where in a 30 person company you have less ability.

I can't easily move people around to a different job because there's only so many jobs to
go around.

But the biggest difference between the two is relationships you build.

In a 30 person organization, I can build a relationship somewhat with everybody.

In a thousands of person organization, you still only know about the same amount of people
you do in the 30 person.

Yes.

at that level, hundreds of people are being displaced every year.

So there's hundreds of new people.

There's hundreds of people leaving.

You just don't have that ability.

But you have a hierarchy.

And you're going to likely spend time with the 30 to 50 people in your hierarchy, to which
they have to deliver on large, complex initiatives anyway.

So kind of good news and bad news either way.

I still use the same leadership philosophy either way.

I think it's still helpful.

think people react to that in the same way.

So I still use styles consistently between the two.

Yes, that makes sense.

And then that allows you to show up as an authentic leader as well, because you've tried
on a style that suits you and you can, you can, as you mentioned, mold and be agile based

on the person you're speaking with.

But that doesn't change how you operate and the things you value either, which I think is
important.

It doesn't work always in fairness.

So I have definitely had leaders working for me that preferred a different style.

They preferred a style that wasn't micromanaging but was more involved in the detail
maybe, or was more available to have conversations, or wanted more sort of pitching

conversations versus just building an objective and delivering objective conversations.

And over time, my style probably wasn't changed to support that because I had larger
teams.

But I've had to displace people to support the style in the same way that I wouldn't be
able to in a smaller organization.

So it's not perfect.

I'm not saying my style is the style.

And it has its pros and cons.

And I have encountered the cons part of it.

Yes.

And you know what, that's life.

And I think no matter what, there needs to be alignment and it could very well be your
leadership style, but it could be what that particular role involves or requires, right?

That person might need to have more autonomy and perhaps they're not quite there yet.

And therefore your leadership style was a reflection of what they might not have been
prepared for at that time.

So there are...

We're always trialing and erroring as humans, which is fun and exciting and stressful and
overwhelming all at the same time, but we'll focus on the positives here.

So with that in mind, I think one of the things that I hear frequently in your industry is
on the technology side, everybody's overworked, they're overwhelmed.

You know, they're stressed and they're running a million miles a minute, especially for
the smaller organization.

So focusing on that kind of 30 people, 30 person ecosystem.

As a leader, what are some of the tools that you use to really safeguard capacity for your
team members?

think that's something that a lot of leaders ask questions about is like when the work
needs to get done, what can we do if we don't have the human capital or the people to be

able to execute on things?

It is true that especially in the technology industry, we ask more than what sometimes is
humanly possible from it.

True statement.

It's also true in fairness that those are ups and downs.

There's hills and valleys to that.

It's rarely constant, especially since the business is rarely constant.

The business has cycles not unlike anything would have cycles.

I have a pretty strict philosophy when it comes to, let's say, taking time off.

So I have zero expectation that you respond to me after 5 p.m., zero.

I might send you dozens of emails at 9 p.m.

I have zero expectations that you respond to any of them until the next day.

Sometimes it's just when I think of this thing, I'm going to send you this thing, or I'm
going to forget this thing.

But it's honestly because of my habit, not because of your habit.

So I have zero expectation.

I'm very clear in that expectation.

Don't wait.

I don't want you to pick up your phone.

In fact, I learned this because I travel a lot.

I've traveled millions of miles.

Yeah.

at the OT side of Tachi, 400 miles, 400,000 miles, a lot.

There were times where I was only home a weekend a month.

So there was a lot of trouble.

So because of that, we agreed as a family, home life, was when I'm away, I'm offline.

When I'm home, I'm online.

Phone's not on my person, laptop's not open.

We certainly don't have a digital dinner.

We're in-person dinner.

You get 100 % of my attention because you have zero of my attention everywhere else.

And therefore, that's the philosophy I take with the rest of the team.

Because listen, if I can do this binary change, then you can do this binary change.

And sometimes it's not easy.

There are some people in technology who are perfectly fine putting in the 80 hours.

Not that it's 100 % 80 hours, but they're working past the Lancer emails.

They'll do things on the weekend.

And I'll push back and say, I don't need you to do that.

And when you're on vacation, don't bring your phone.

And if you have four or five weeks, take four or five weeks.

Nobody's patting you on the back for taking two.

I'm not going to reward you for taking two.

I want you to take five.

If anything, I'll reward you for taking five.

You need the downtime.

You need the family.

You need the binary interpretation of this world.

These are good things.

It'll make you happier.

Yeah, it'll make you happier.

And if you need help with prioritization when you get back, I wonder sometimes if that's
part of the hurdle, right?

That everybody says, I need a vacation once I get back from my vacation because I have so
much work.

Well, what is urgent?

What's important and what can you either delegate?

What's just sheer volume and updates?

What do you actually need to focus on now?

Right.

Or do it at 80%.

Sometimes it's internalized to the person, need to be 100 % good.

It needs to be bug free.

I need to do all the things on my checklist.

All of these have to be true when my response to is, I'm good at I'm good at it.

Get through the meat.

Once we get through the meat, that's a checkmark to me.

Right, right.

And you know what?

Half the time, I'd say more than half the time, the client is none the wiser because your
80 % is their 110.

You're solving their problem.

Yes.

Oh gosh.

Okay.

So you have traveled all over the world.

You obviously have seen a lot of things.

You've been able to experience different cultures and different ways of doing things.

And in that time,

I hope that you were able to identify some of your personal hobbies and interests and
things like that, that I'm a firm believer whatever we learn outside of work also is a

transferable skill to help us in the workplace.

So can you share anything that's maybe a personal passion or interests that you've picked
up along the way that you translate into your work now?

I have been to every Disney park in the world.

I've also been to every Disney park in the world in a single year.

wow.

By far Shanghai, Disney.

Mostly because it's the newest, But also because it always has an interesting angle on a
traditional ride.

So Pirates of the Caribbean is a traditional boat ride.

So you're in a boat, you're going through a pirate theme set of scenes.

But they're able to take that and say, absolutely, I'll give you the traditional ride.

But then I'm to give you IMAX screens at the same time.

So you're deep into this battle between the good and bad pirate ships.

They just go that extra mile, which is just so much history.

The only thing you need to be comfortable with in the

the Disney world is that there's very little English, right?

So, you know, appreciate that none of the narration you'll be able to appreciate.

The songs will be the same, but, you know, don't go into a show thinking you're going to
fully understand what's happening.

Yeah.

The rides are fine.

The rides are fine.

So why it's a passion for me, it's because I, so two things.

I like the Disney hug, right?

So I like that it's an immersive experience.

I get to shed work for the day, I get to sort of live childlike dreams while I'm there.

But mostly it's the detail, right?

So.

Being a technologist, the detail matters, right?

This calculation needs to be right, or it's going to have a fundamental problem with the
organization, right?

So when they put a billion dollars into the Star Wars or a billion and half into the
Pandora, and you see the details of the trees and the cement and the payments and the

paint on the mountain, this is intriguing.

Like, I've spent days at parks just looking at the detail, the detail within the lines.

not just the rides themselves.

It's amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

I love that.

I mean, that's a lot of detail to take in.

So your capacity for detail must be much higher than most, because I feel like even just
going and looking at the kind of superficial graphics and rides and design is

overwhelming.

That's why you have to do it multiple times.

See, that's the...

That's true.

That's true.

Do you have some kind of special membership or do you get like, do you get rewarded for
that?

Yeah.

definitely travel a lot.

So I have a high status in, let's say, Star Alliance, or Canada, and Marriott.

They know my name when I walk into establishments, But Disney doesn't have a loyalty
program, right?

So of the potentially hundreds of times that I've gone to a Disney program, still no
loyalty program.

just the next guy coming in.

Yeah, that's surprising they don't have a loyalty program.

We'll make sure this gets in front of a Disney team member and we should pitch that.

That's true.

to.

Even in the, we'll call them the low times, right, during COVID, they were still capacity.

They were still, they're still 99 % occupancy.

So they just don't need it.

Yeah, yeah, very true.

Well, talk about building a brand, eh?

They've done it right.

Yeah.

Very cool.

Very cool.

Okay, Paul, I have one maybe heavy weighted question for you to cap off our conversation
here.

And obviously you have the distinct pleasure of being able to help create and have, should
say.

over the course of your career as well to develop technology leaders.

And so you've seen different styles of leadership training, you've evolved your own
leadership styles and teachings, and you've moved more into the education side of teaching

and coaching as well as you mentioned.

So if you were to implement kind of one sweeping change across the way leadership is
rolled out or taught in the technology space specifically for technology leaders, what

would it be?

and obviously what.

I'm going to give you two things.

So thing number one is more of a pet peeve.

So thing number one, the hardest thing you can do as a leader, technology leadership, but
I would argue all leadership, is add a headcount.

Hardest thing you can do.

The CFO has a very hard time adding an FTE because that's 10 years.

It's a 10 years cost versus a software cost.

So hardest thing you can do.

That's a shame.

But at least it's understandable.

The second hardest thing to do is let an FTE go, which I'm kind of fine with in the grand
scheme of things, but sometimes it's very hard.

When this person is better suited somewhere else, I'd rather make that decision quickly
than extend it for a long period of time.

But even of those two things, the third thing is what I would refer to as the shame.

So the shame is it's reasonably difficult to promote and increase compensation for an
existing employee.

That should be the easiest thing to do.

If you see an employee that deserves a promotion, that deserves a comp increase, that will
buy you five years.

Right.

versus having them look elsewhere and leaving and then you have to go through the burden
expense of finding a new promoting or finding a new into that role.

It should be the easiest thing to do as a senior leader to promote and or.

Yes, that makes perfect sense.

So that's the first bucket.

Bit of a pet.

The second bit is about six session.

There's an expectation of definitely technology leaders.

CIO CTOs to have a different job over the last five years.

So not only have they needed to lead IT, they've also need to participate in the
executive.

They need to be participate in the digital transformation, participate in the business
decisions, participate in the &A, and they've had to do that by themselves.

Which meant all of the direct reports had to take the mantle of IT and didn't get to
participate in all those interesting activities.

which means the 30 month tenure of a CIO, CTO, CDO, CSO is now 48 months because now
there's a bigger gap between those two levels.

And I think what's missing is there's no real middle manager, senior middle manager
training.

There's no how do I be a director?

How do I be a VP?

It simply doesn't exist.

I absolutely think it should exist.

And I don't mean,

thou shalt know accounting.

I mean, what's the expectation of a VP in this organization?

What's the expectation of a director in this organization?

Who should be your first team, as an example?

What kind of empowerment should you seek and demand?

What is the expectation of communication?

What's the expectation of rolling up your sleeves?

What's the expectation of grabbing the bull by the horn?

Like all of those, I don't want to call them soft skills because I honestly think they're
still hard skills, but nobody tells you that, right?

And then we judge you without having told you what the expectations are.

That is a problem that needs to be rectified.

I wholeheartedly agree.

And you know what?

There's, think expectations are one of the most difficult things for people to understand
that if you've said it once, you haven't actually communicated it.

Um, right?

Like you can post it in an onboarding, you can post it in a roles and responsibilities,
but that's something that you need to, it's like developing a habit, right?

We don't hear it once and all of a sudden it sticks and I.

So that's really interesting.

So succession planning, that how to gap in that senior middle management, and then the
ability to promote and to offer compensation when it is due.

I think those are two really excellent changes that hopefully we will see come about in
the next five years, ideally.

And you know what?

At the venue, we're gonna get started on a specific industry, senior.

senior middle management training after our call.

Really, I try to do as much as I can when I do a promotion.

So if I promote somebody to director or VP, we will sit down and not talk about the job.

Not talk about the expectations of their new responsibility, but the expectations of their
level.

So if I promote somebody from director to VP, we're going to sit down, we're going to say,
your communication to me and your peers now looks like X instead of Y.

I now have an expectation that your

predictively telling me something that you wouldn't have before, or to offer a solution to
which you wouldn't have offered before.

And I'll give them examples so that they now see what the difference is between director
and VP, because it's not just compensation.

Right, exactly.

It certainly is not.

I love that and I think that is something that is so, so important and that's a nugget
that should be shared far and wide is that those conversations need to happen and before

they do, the leader who is explaining those expectations needs to be aware of what those
are, which is also, I would add, just to tack onto your sweeping changes.

That needs to be very, very clear with.

leadership, that's senior leadership, middle management, or even ICs that are explaining
something to a new hire, we need to make sure that those expectations are clear and

understood so that we can communicate them.

So that's brilliant.

Paul, mean, there's been so much information that you've shared, so many nuggets that I
think will help not just leaders in the technology space, but

Also, leaders universally, I think what you've shared applies to any middle manager or
senior middle manager who's looking to grow their career, grow themselves, and grow

personally and professionally.

So I just truly want to say thank you again for taking the time to join me.

And I look forward to staying in touch and following along with your journey.

With that, can you let our listeners know where they can find you and they can also follow
along with all the amazing work you're doing?

Absolutely my LinkedIn profile.

You're going to see all of my content, any interesting thoughts and perspectives, any
stagecraft.

It's all there.

Okay, fantastic.

So we will share that on the information that we put out with your episode.

But once again, thank you so, much.

Thank you.

Last part.

Bye.