In this episode, host James Mackey discusses talent acquisition, leadership, and company culture with industry expert Tim Betry, VP of People & Places at GoPro. They dive into the connection between hiring and building an inclusive culture, while also discussing the challenges of adapting to the post-pandemic workplace. Discover how personal experiences and recruiting practices intersect to shape leadership, culture, and adaptability in today's changing work environment.
0:36 Tim Betry's background
4:08 Talent acquisition and tech industry challenges
9:17 Agency insights on talent acquisition
14:06 Recruitment background and its impact on success in HR
19:17 Building a great company culture
24:50 Empathy and mental health in the workplace
28:12 Authentic leadership and building relationships
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
In this episode, host James Mackey discusses talent acquisition, leadership, and company culture with industry expert Tim Betry, VP of People & Places at GoPro. They dive into the connection between hiring and building an inclusive culture, while also discussing the challenges of adapting to the post-pandemic workplace. Discover how personal experiences and recruiting practices intersect to shape leadership, culture, and adaptability in today's changing work environment.
0:36 Tim Betry's background
4:08 Talent acquisition and tech industry challenges
9:17 Agency insights on talent acquisition
14:06 Recruitment background and its impact on success in HR
19:17 Building a great company culture
24:50 Empathy and mental health in the workplace
28:12 Authentic leadership and building relationships
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackie, very excited for today's episode. We're joined by Tim Betry. Tim, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me Stoked to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're stoked to have you, and let's start with your background. Could you share a little bit about yourself with everyone?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So my name is Tim Betry. I'm the vice president of People and Places at GoPro, so I run everything from talent acquisition, talent development, culture development strategy, as well as workplace services, so inclusive of real estate, office management and security operations. A lot of my background is grounded in recruiting, so happy to share more about that. But started on the agency side, moved into the startup world.
Speaker 2:I was employee 50 and 75 at two separate companies. I grew both of those organizations to right around 400 or just north of before I moved on to GoPro and I like it because it gave me a good lens of startup hyper growth, exciting growth, but really when I lacking systems, process technology to do. And then GoPro, which is 900 employees. We're globally distributed we have about 450 in the US and then 450 across international landscape and GoPro is very organized, process oriented, has really robust and, in my opinion, enterprise level systems. So it's been really cool to see how both companies, or both types of companies, have approached talent strategy and talent development. And yeah, I've been here five years. I love it. I'm not going to know any time soon.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I think the two companies that you start with pretty early on that you referenced, they're just well known names, so I just wanted to mention real quick. It was demand based and Panda Doc right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then prior to that too, was Rhythm One, which had a bunch of subsidiaries on it as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then they were acquired. It looks like.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, they were acquired after my departure and demand based. I went on four years. I would say that was the depth of my hyper growth experience in the startup. But they're a B2B mark type company. And then Panda Doc was a little shorter but they're growing, doing really well. I keep in contact with the CEO occasionally as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember demand based. Weren't they growing like crazy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:They still are, but they were back in the day I remember they were like everywhere Job openings were like constantly being published and I remember the hiring managers actually being pretty vocal, I think, because they were popping up everywhere. We weren't a customer, but for whatever reason, they were constantly seeing their name.
Speaker 2:Well, it was definitely the hot thing If you back up to 2012 to 2014,. Retargeting so having ad based retargeting was like a big tech advancement in the ad space. But then there was really lacking support on the business to business side. So Chris Goloch was the founder and CEO, created this algorithm to support businesses to target other businesses. So, looking at really structured B2B targeting efforts and they coined it account based marketing so demand based were the pioneers in that space. So it's definitely a really hot thing at the time and it still is. It's just a lot more well known now. But yeah, we grew like crazy. It was pretty exciting from about 2014 to 2017.
Speaker 1:We were doubling every year. Yeah, that's insane growth. I'm looking forward to getting back to some of that. Honestly, basically, I'm kind of seeing in the tech space I'm like layoffs after layoffs. I don't even need the crazy growth Like 2021 was just not sustainable. I think we all get. I was just propped up by all this free capital essentially Wow. Just thinking back to being in town acquisition from I don't know around like 2012, 13, 14 somewhere in there to 2019. What a fantastic stretch in growth market. I miss those days, man. That was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, things were buzzing. You could feel it Even walking downtown San Francisco, which is where we were based. You could just you felt the tech vibe. There was a massive influx of talent that came into the city and it was really before remote and distributed work unlocked so many opportunities for folks in other markets. But it was pretty wild and, yeah, I do look forward to getting back to that at some point. It's been a little bit different as of late, pandemic, macroeconomic pressure, stock market decline, layoffs, great migration or great resignation happened. So there's been so many different things that have come into play since then, Still exciting in their own sense, I think, for organizations like figuring out how to adopt talent strategy and how to figure out how to make the current today work for your organization is something that I think is separating companies that are struggling from companies that are thriving during the current times. But yeah, it's a different ball game for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's kind of a crazy time to be in leadership. I think a lot of great leaders are gonna be formed and what's happened over the past few years? Those of us that decide to stick with it don't just bow out, definitely, which I'm hearing a lot of people do. So I know you said you started on the agency side. My company actually sponsors this podcast. So I'm the CEO of a company called Secure Vision.
Speaker 1:We've done contract recruiting and better recruiting, rpo work for about a decade with over 200 companies in tech space. And it's crazy because I'm looking at industry counterparts and there's folks that like built companies to hundreds of people that are just like out of business or just saying like throwing in the towel, just saying no more, like they're basically selling for I don't know, they had to lay off pretty much all their recruiting teams, so I don't even they're like acquisitions, but it's more like they're probably getting like a small bonus and a little equity and rolling up the contracts into other companies. So it's crazy. We're seeing some of the best people that I know, particularly within talent acquisition, just saying I am done with tech or I'm done with talent acquisition, I'm gonna find something else to do.
Speaker 1:That's pretty wild, but I think it's like, if you can hang in there, you can stick in there just the learning opportunity in these markets. I think it's akin to lifting really heavy weights. Right, it's hard, it's painful. That resistance is what makes us stronger and it's a tough time out there for everyone. But I do think that there's also a big opportunity to grow here and to really regardless of your leader or individual contributor or wherever it might be. So, yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to getting out of this market, looking, searching for silver linings that I think you could tell. But, yeah, crazy time to be in talent acquisition and tech, right.
Speaker 2:It is indeed. Yeah, I think it is a bummer. I think with a lot of the layoffs, you get a lot of folks as well that are they're sticking around their jobs or not as willing to change as they were before, and then those that are just completely tapped and burnt. They're ready to move on and try something different, whether it's completely departing from tech or changing their job to being more of a consultant or a fractional role where they can split between different companies. So it's been a fascinating time to figure out how people change and manage the change, and I have so many of my peers who have stepped down from the roles, I think just due to the nature of just stress and anxiety and how challenging it has truly been. So you're totally right.
Speaker 1:Pretty well. Let's start off like I really want to learn a little bit more about you. I know you said you started on the agency side. So did I, and then I in the early days of security and I contracted myself out, so I was more of an in-house point of impact. We've done both, but I do think that starting on the agency side probably gave me an advantage in some ways in terms of how I think about town acquisition For me.
Speaker 1:I see businesses as too big sales or demand gen funnels. I, to some extent, I see revenue customers and then I see the people organization, town acquisition and then running people teams. That I feel like it's we have to optimize for both of those at about equal importance, maybe even people a little bit more important right, because people go to market strategy, product strategy, people are the core of everything. It's like recruiting is in a segment of your business. It's the core of your business. Like nothing great's ever been built without recruiting and empowering an incredible team of people.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think it's really framed my mindset and like I see value in running town acquisition like a revenue org and I think being very metrics driven at the beginning of my career went a long way toward doing that and, of course, there's a huge skill set that needs to be developed to go in-house and to run a talent and people organization. However, fundamentally, that metrics driven aspect, more analytical side of things and really seeing the parallels between revenue and talent organizations was a huge help. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on maybe how starting on the agency side possibly impacted how you think about running talent and people teams at GoPro and the other companies you've been in leadership roles in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, first off, the agency side is tough. Right, it wasn't easy. It could be very competitive you deal with you're not selling a product, like I have my cell phone services, a certain function for me day in and day out, but it doesn't change, right? People change, their minds change. They have different personal or professional dilemmas that they're faced with, that they can totally shift on a whim.
Speaker 2:I went from sales into recruiting and that was the first aha moment for me. I was like this is much more people-centric, relationship oriented. So I think the agency piece really trained me about the value of relationship building, the value of touch points, keeping people aware of process, understanding what the companies were thinking about, what was the feedback they had. So for me I over communicated. That was something I learned. On the agency side is like over communicate. Maintain constant point of contact in a way we would call it candidate control, where it's like you, just understanding about where the candidate is in each step of the process was really valuable for me because that definitely translated internally. But then also on the client side, just understanding so many different client personas, what people are interested in, being able to see different cultures, hiring processes, what works, what doesn't work and I was shocked at how many companies have incredibly poor hiring processes where they have team plus interviewers on a panel. It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 2:So understanding what works and didn't, I think, really lent itself when I moved internal and I joined rhythm, one which was formerly known as Blinks, and we really structured our process in a way that I saw fit to keep it tight for interviewers max. We had a couple of executives on the tail end. I made sure we can maintain candidate control throughout the process. Our offer acceptance ratio was above 90% throughout demand base and beyond, and I think that was really attributed to the fact that we maintained such tight relationships with the folks that were coming in through the door.
Speaker 2:If we found somebody really good, we wanted to make sure we were going to be able to close them. So I think that was a big thing for me. And then separate from that, just understanding the customer component, like on the agency side, treating businesses as customers, understanding their wants and needs. That translated really well into having that relationship with managers carrying over the customer centric mentality, understanding the department, understanding the technology, the details of whether it's soft skills or hard skills and what they're looking for, I felt was a really easy transition for me as well. So it was a really nice platform for me, although it was very tough and hard for me to manage. Personally, I think it was a really great breeding ground for how I was able to take off internal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:I think having the opportunity to see a lot of different environments could be really helpful, particularly being in the RPO space where we're actually an embedded partner and involved in the entire lifecycle of town acquisition. Actually, when I started the company, we did contingent, so it was like fee based, and so we were limited to top of funnel in terms of our exposure to the town acquisition process. It was almost like we were sources right, we did screens and, of course, like you consult with hiring managers and these types of things, but there was a lot of blind spots. So I think we had that when we got into the embedded space and our employees basically operated as an internal recruiter would for our customers. Like developing those insights was pretty damn cool, because then it's like we could share those with other customers and we would learn each company that we worked with and I think that's like just a pretty valuable skill set to be able to take into an in house town acquisition leader role Like.
Speaker 1:One example comes to mind I don't know if you've heard of have you ever met, boris Epstein? Is that name ring a bell?
Speaker 2:I haven't met him. Yeah, I haven't met him, but I've heard his name around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so he was the founder and CEO of a RPO firm called Bink, which was around for about 20 years, I think, focused on the tech space During, I think, around the time of COVID. They ended up rolling up, I guess acquired by Robin Hood, and then he basically came in house and led like talent strategy and town acquisition and whatnot for Robin Hood and just think about how like lucky Robin Hood was to get because he's been working with tech companies for 20 years and seen like what works and what doesn't work, just like a lifetime of experience of working in all these different environments, which I think it's, if you're in the right agency environment, can be pretty impactful, right yeah?
Speaker 2:agree.
Speaker 1:So I had a question for you about that. Actually, like, when you're hiring, all recruitment town acquisition does that funnel up through you as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, currently yeah, through at Blanks or rhythm one, the man base, panda, doc, and now yeah.
Speaker 1:So when you look at hiring recruiters, I'm curious do you have do you target people with an agency background, or does that not matter? Do you even consider that? Or just more so, like they're more recent experience? Like how do you? What do you look for in a profile?
Speaker 2:I'm so biased towards agency experience I think sometimes I like to see a little bit of internal experience, but I've totally made fresh hires to give folks an opportunity. For me, there's a couple of things that are really important, like really clear communication. Are they able to respond on the fly, like? Sometimes I'll even do some mock interview type scenarios just to see how people are, how they respond in the interview process, and then, does it feel like they can connect and build relationships? Does it seem like they have a high level of VQ? And those are all tough things to obviously evaluate in an interview. But I have a series of questions that I typically ask to find if I think somebody is going to be a fit or not. But yeah, to answer your question, I'm definitely biased towards agency experience. Now I would say so even on the people side as well.
Speaker 2:When I see like a business partner, for example, who's grounded in recruiting experience, I love that.
Speaker 2:I think that's always set me up really well as a people leader is like having the town acquisition experience, being grounded and understanding, like how to connect with managers, how to work with leaders, how to present in a way that's not typically normal for HR, let's say, if you come up on the systems or the benefits side, yeah, you can probably adapt really well. But I think recruiting has a different lens, where they're understanding the inner workings of skills and development and how, what the connected tissue is between marketing and sales, or data science and engineering or product management. So there's a lot of things that I think translate really well that you get grounded in on the recruiting side. That can pass over to the HR side as well, and I shouldn't say it shouldn't separate the two, because that's not church and state, but it is. I think sometimes people look at them like, oh, you're on the recruiting side or the HR side For us as people. But I do think there's naturally like a handoff that happens between pre hire and post hire.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like almost difference between sales and customer success. Like I see those parallels like working quite well. Yeah, I think I would agree, even on the people side, having the recruitment background is. I think I feel like it's an indicator of almost like hustle, like the ability to hustle and work hard and the sense of urgency and these types of things. And I've posted about this on LinkedIn and I'll get comments like I never had an agency experience and so I'm not saying that folks can. There's obviously a lot of great successful people in recruiting and whatever, and people that don't have that. So that's not what we're saying. I just like, from a risk perspective, statistically I've seen to have more success placing internal recruiters that have an agency background overall, right, it's like the parallel that I see is think about like demand base or like a company that's hyper growth, early stage.
Speaker 1:If I'm going to hire salespeople, I'm going to hire people that have startup or scale of experience. I'm not going to hire the person from sales force probably that was doing enterprise in a very siloed part of the sales process. It's not that they couldn't do the job. There are folks that have made that transition. However, my job as a people leader town acquisition leader.
Speaker 1:Part of it, I think, should be removing risk and making sure that we can more most likely to get the best fit person in the seat, and I think that's a really important view of town acquisitions. Like how do we ensure that? Of course, offer acceptance rates important, conversion rates are important, but it's like the idea of making sure we get the best fit individual that's going to truly be a value creator and take the company to the next level and to the extent we can limit risk, is like super important. So I think what we're, or what I'm saying, and potentially to what you're saying, is like going with that agency background gives us probably a little bit more assurance, right that the person's actually going to deliver in the seat. That's how I see it, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree. I think I've hired very successful recruiters who have only been in house. So, yeah, I agree that we're not. I'm not biasing all of the candidates to agency only, but I will say agency candidates, when they have a fresh perspective on a house recruiting, can come in with a clean slate and they're totally moldable. They have a very hard work ethic, they understand the importance of relationship building, all the other components of recruiting. Then there's also this you can apply what your organization does as recruiting best practices to them because they haven't experienced it before, Whereas in your Salesforce enterprise recruiter example, like they might be grounded in process and, yeah, they might be flexible to change. But I've always felt that when you're able to groom somebody from the ground up, it's just it's a lot cleaner, easier and, in some cases, more efficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I totally agree with you, and I think one of the things we wanted to discuss too, was getting into building an amazing culture. That does start with hiring. Right, it all starts with hiring, but and then of course, it's there's the people motions and what you do once you've recruited the team. So I think we can just keep the conversation very open and broad and you can take this where you want to. When you think about building amazing cultures, for instance, at GoPro or any other organization work for what does that mean to you? Where do you start? How do you do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's a big question. Again, we're not doing, we don't have to talk hours about it.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:I love it. I'll let you should cut me off if I run too long but I have always loved companies and have been attracted to companies that have a CEO that's very open-minded for how to adapt kind of work, philosophy, culture, philosophy, and they're flexible in how we approach it. And so I would say, with demand base, chris Golek was really an amazing CEO who was always very mindful of employees wants and needs, listen to employees, allowed for raw questioning and feedback, all hands meetings where we can just ask anything and there's really no filter. I think the level of transparency and trust that leaders can build by having that dialogue and two way communication is really important, and I would say that carries to GoPro as well. We've been so focused on leading with compassion and empathy and understanding that we've really made sure that we're prioritizing the voice of the employee.
Speaker 2:So we do surveys every six months and many companies do that, but we, in my opinion, have a world-class engagement survey process. Because we implement it, we get over 92% participation every single time we have a survey, because employees know that we take the feedback and we action on it. So every time we get to gather data, we say this is what you've told us. These are some of the things that we've broken out and done individual meetings on with employees. Here's the feedback we've shared with the leadership team. This is what we're going to do in response and I think by asking questions that are going to feed company culture, it allows employees to be bought in, so naturally, they're helping shape the future of GoPro the work philosophy, the culture strategy, whatever that may be and I think that is something we've been really leaning in on hard, especially since COVID hit in 2020. We asked people about their work preferences. We asked people about where they want to live. How often do they want to be in the office, what are some struggles they're having in the current remote environment? And by taking some of those feedback points, we've been able to establish a really cool, in my opinion, culture that has career. I'm sorry, in the history of GoPro, we've had the lowest attrition since COVID hit.
Speaker 2:The great migration or great recession didn't really impact us and a lot of our talent acquisition efforts have been stellar.
Speaker 2:For us, it's been really focused on our brand, our mission, which is to be a force for positivity, celebrating all things awesome and unlocking opportunities for our consumers to capture and share their experiences.
Speaker 2:Now, when the pandemic hit, we brought that internal and we said we want you to practice living your best life, live where you work where you live, move wherever you want.
Speaker 2:We're not going to change this. We're not going to ask you to come back in the office because you told us this is what you prefer and now this is going to be our strategy. We're going to create the systems, the process and the technology to support you in that and by doing so, we've been able to create a really cool, fun GoPro-centric culture which is aimed more on allowing people to go out and experience mountain biking, hiking, spending time with family, prioritizing output over time work by focusing on really key KPIs and connection points with managers and attendance to critical meetings, but being able to flexible for asynchronous work. So if you want to log on later with Asia or earlier with Europe, you can do so. It isn't this super rigid approach to work. We've tried to be a lot more flexible in our approach and I think it aligns super well with our brand and our strategy. But clearly it's been aligning with our employees as well because, from the feedback we've gotten, they've really been enjoying this new flavor of GoPro over the past three years.
Speaker 1:I love that, and I think one of the other things you mentioned while we were considering different topics for the show was some of the personal experiences that have impacted how you think about culture and just running people organizations, so I wanted to see if that's still something that they want to share and talk about and we can possibly have some personal experiences back and forth here and talk about what we've learned as a result and how that impacts how we lead.
Speaker 2:Totally yeah. So I think the biggest thing for me since the pandemic is leaning in with the founder and CEO, my boss, nick. He's been very mindful of not trying to put employees into a box in terms of how they what they should be feeling, how they should be operating. It's really a collective understanding that every employee has their own unique experience. So we've been challenged with so many different things throughout the past three years, whether it's pandemic, parenting struggles, caregiving struggles, fear of recession, war, looming war.
Speaker 2:There's so many different things that are going on in this world where it's really taxing on an employee. So for us, from a GoPro philosophy and a culture standpoint, we've been creating open space for people to have conversations, mental health programs to create more awareness, for managers to ask how employees are doing. We've been leading neurodiversity trainings, change management trainings. There's so many different things that we've done to be able to support employees and what we consider a holistic review of all the different challenges that we feel employees are going through and then trying to tackle them one by one to really be able to support. But then I think the biggest thing is just leading with empathy and understanding that, no matter how hard we try, people might just be struggling and they just need the support, and for me personally, I grew up I was in a really what I would consider a privileged lifestyle.
Speaker 2:I took off to college, though, and I completely went haywire.
Speaker 2:I was challenged.
Speaker 2:I got into the workforce, I was anxious, I was struggling, and I realized one of my biggest struggles with that was I was an alcoholic and an addict, so I struggled with addiction, I struggled with mental health, I struggled with anxiety, and it was something that I had to learn to cope with over time and I'm happy to report, I'm 12 years sober I struggled a lot in my career early on and then completely changed and turned things around through the support and the structure that I was able to create for myself, and so I think, as a people leader, understanding that everybody has their own unique situation, everybody has their own challenges, their own life stories, and not trying to create a one size fits all approach for our employees, has been really critical in how we show up for mental health and just support in general, and that's been, I think, really pivotal, not only for me as a people leader, but just personally, and I try to share my story as much as I can, and I've connected a lot with employees one on one just to talk to them because I think if I can have an impact on one or two people, naturally there's a web effect.
Speaker 2:I like for folks to pay it forward and I think that by being open and honest about the experiences we have and being able to share those experiences in an effective way to impact others, hopefully it has a ripple effect to make better change in the world.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting. Is this actually similar to a conversation I actually had earlier this morning did a recording with Amit Yiran, and he's the CEO of a publicly traded cybersecurity company called Tenable and he talks about when he's doing leadership hires. He wants to know, or even board members, so he's asking questions what are some of the biggest challenges you've had in your life, or even potentially like a failure, or just some of the harder things that you've been through, and just tell me about it. Like he does, I don't even think he really guides it in terms of what people have learned as a result. It was just more of he's looking for like the vulnerability, the self-awareness, right, because he knows that if somebody has those things, he basically it seemed like what he was saying is he knows they're going to have learned from it and that's one of the reasons why they're successful in their career and have gotten to the point where they are today Executive leaders that have an impressive background, that are in a position to be on the board or being a leadership role, and he really looks for somebody that's like willing to put themselves out there. And he says that he's heard all sorts of stuff, right, all sorts of stuff and there's really been nothing that he's everything that he's heard that's like truly authentic. He's like totally been okay with. He's heard, apparently, some really crazy stuff over the years and I think it's just. That is something that's really important in terms of culture to build it.
Speaker 1:So you almost want people that are, first of all, you want to help people right Like everybody's going through life's hard. Life is just hard. It doesn't matter what circumstance like you might have even come from or whatever else. It's just it's brutal. You stick around long enough. Some things are going to happen. You're going to have to work through it, so you want to do that. But I also think it's like getting people on your team that are comfortable with being open about those things are also going to be people maybe aren't necessarily people pleasers that just are going to tell you what you want to hear.
Speaker 1:And he was saying that he basically feels more likely that those people that are vulnerable are more likely to speak up. And when he says we should go right, he feels like those people are more likely to say, no, you're wrong, we should go left. And this is why because they're not in this mindset of I always have to appeal and please and make somebody feel good or agree. So it was interesting because I'd actually never really thought about it from that perspective as well. But I think it's. It not only does a lot for culture but in terms of effective leadership and building high performing teams, I think there's a lot of value in it from that perspective too.
Speaker 2:Couldn't agree more. I think there's a it's an overused term, but it's creating psychological safety and then a space where employees can feel, or managers or other leaders can feel, safe to be more raw and authentic. That doesn't create itself. There needs to be someone that takes the step to open up that opportunity, and so if yourself or myself, we come forward first and share something raw and real, it opens up an opportunity for others to do the same.
Speaker 2:We were chatting earlier about the challenges of parenthood right, having you have a four year old, I have a three year old. Having to navigate that in a workspace and not having a ton of support, like it's naturally challenging, like my. So for me, being able to have just cool, fun, raw conversations that are just real and not just transactional and work appropriate, is something that I really pride myself in. I think there's a lot of people are like, oh, that's not appropriate for work, don't talk about that at work. I'm like, no, that doesn't make any sense. Let's be real with each other, let's help each other, let's show up. Naturally we're going to be more connected, we'll be a relationship oriented organization and people are more loyal when they feel that sense of safety.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'll be honest. That's something that I had to learn over the past 10 years. I feel like earlier on in my career, I felt like I needed to always present strength and just couldn't talk about struggles, things that I struggled with. I was very closed off, and so I always had this facade of just sheer confidence, strength, success. I felt like I needed to project that to the world, and, of course, we need to have an inner confidence. That's not what I'm referring to, though. It's like this concept of constantly projecting strength and success, and what I noticed is that I felt like some people I don't know why this was just innately how I thought that I was supposed to behave. It's not like I was trying to pull one over on people. I just thought this is what you just do, like you have to always be this way, and what I realized is that, yeah, some people they might respect you, they might respect what you're building or whatever else, but they're not going to relate to you, they're not necessarily going to develop a personal relationship with you, because you're almost out of reach. Even if they believe or just see that side of you. Then you're like how could I ever be that? And that's not what you want to be as a leader.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting. It's like when you start to talk about your own struggles and these types of things, it does open up and it's a lot more human. This is a lot of what life has to offer us. When we go through it is pretty much everything's like a shared experience. We all go through health issues, whether it's addiction or maybe it's like a family member's addiction that does touch a lot of families and that's something that I've had to assist family members with and it's tough, right. People go through divorces, they're going through partners losing jobs. There's always stuff going on and everybody has their own different struggles and I do think it's the human side of it.
Speaker 1:It's yeah, we're here to run a high performing team and to achieve our goals as a company, but I honestly I just feel like, fundamentally, relationships are the most important thing in life, right, more than success or anything else. Quite honestly, it's like our health and our relationships, which are actually very closely linked. But even like a clinical psychologist will tell you the importance of relationships, it's usually at the top when it comes to mental health and happiness and ability to overcome different things, and it just seems like such a waste if not only is it more effective from a business perspective, but it just seems like such a waste of life to not genuinely connect with people. Why would you want to spend so much time with people, working with them all the time, and relationships are so incredibly important to all of us, whether maybe we even realize it or not, and to not take the time to genuinely connect and get to know people, I just think it makes life a lot richer. In addition to just like the concepts like culture and business, it just makes life so much better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree with you and don't get me wrong, there are many professionals out there that stick to the script, stay focused on output, don't try to beat around the bush and build relationships. And I think it really just comes down to what type of leadership or leader do you want to be. Do you want to be somebody that's compassionate and understanding and opens up opportunity for relationship building, or are you going to be a leader that's just going to be more focused on KPIs? And I think sometimes there's a balance for both, but I think the best leaders, in my opinion, are those that balance and really focus on the relationship building and then the output behind it, and it's so. We do a lot of that. Training with performance management, training inclusive performance management is one that we have going on right now GoPro, and so there's just a lot of nuggets there of insight and for how leaders can really lead with compassion but still drive highly effective organizations or departments. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1:And Tim. This has been a really fun conversation. We're coming up on time here. You're more than welcome to come back whenever you want. This is so much fun. But I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on the show today sharing your experience with everyone. There's a lot of value here for people tuning in, so I genuinely appreciate you. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me on Combo For sure, and for everybody else tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time. Take care.