Scale Like a CEO

Continuous Improvement & Leadership Insights with John Papazian - Scale Like a CEO

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 12

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What makes a leader truly effective in today's complex business landscape? For John Papazian, Chief Business Officer at InnerSources Inc., the answer lies in approaching management as a coaching opportunity rather than a series of transactions.

During our enlightening conversation, Papazian revealed how Dr. Deming's principles of continuous improvement became the foundation for his leadership philosophy. "This idea of continuous improvements, doing things better, not leaving things at the status quo became the guiding principles," he shared, explaining how this mindset applies not just to business processes, but to developing people as well.

Papazian's approach to team building is refreshingly human-centered. He empowers employees at all levels to communicate directly with leadership, breaking down hierarchical barriers that often stifle growth and innovation. "I am empowering you, even as line individuals, to speak to anybody in the organization," he tells his team, fostering an environment where questions are encouraged and personal growth is prioritized. This philosophy extends to his hiring practices, where he looks beyond technical skills to find candidates who demonstrate individualism, engagement, and cultural alignment.

Perhaps most fascinating is Papazian's organic approach to leadership development. Rather than simply appointing team leaders, he sometimes allows teams to self-identify their natural leaders, then methodically develops these individuals through incremental responsibilities and consistent feedback. "The delegation happens in small pieces and there's a feedback loop," he explained, highlighting how this builds confidence and competence simultaneously. As InnerSources continues to scale, this thoughtful approach to organizational structure and talent development ensures consistent messaging and clear employee roles throughout the company.

Whether you're leading a small team or a large organization, Papazian's insights offer valuable strategies for nurturing talent, fostering open communication, and building a culture of continuous improvement. Connect with John on LinkedIn to continue the conversation about leadership that truly empowers people to reach their full potential.

Speaker 1:

This idea of continuous improvements, doing things better, not leaving things at the status quo and saying how can it be better, more efficient? Became the guiding principles.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO, the podcast where we explore leadership strategies and growth insights from today's most innovative business leaders. In today's episode, we're sitting down with John Papazian, the Chief Business Officer at Intersources Inc. We'll dive deep into John's unique approach to leadership, his coaching-focused management style and the strategies he uses for building and scaling high-performing teams. Get ready for an insightful conversation about organizational growth and effective team building.

Speaker 3:

John, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO To get us started. Could you just give us a 90-second overview of yourself, your business, a little bit of your background?

Speaker 1:

Sure, sure. My name is John Papazian. I am the Chief Business Officer at InnerSources Inc. Innersources Inc is a up-and-coming managed security services provider. We began as a retail business intelligence development firm about 15 years ago, moved into cybersecurity and we've grown into more of a security provider as well as providing audit services. My background is from university forward, has always enjoyed technology and, in particular, matching that with interacting with people and eventually managing people. So over the course of the years I have gone up the corporate ladder, reaching CIO level in the early 2000s and working there for a number of years, and through relationships, met with Ankit Shah, the CEO of InnerSources, who recruited me to join his firm and lead the operational part of the business.

Speaker 3:

What makes you unique in the way that you're helping others?

Speaker 1:

I am more of a this is a question that has come up a number I am much more of a coach typetype manager than a transactional-style manager.

Speaker 1:

I find it of interest to nurture and bring the people forward on the teams rather than simply saying they don't work.

Speaker 1:

This is a lesson I learned in the early 90s, when I was starting out consulting. There was a trend that had come forward and it was about continuous improvements. The person at the epicenter of that is Dr Deming, and with him I read the books and found them extremely important, especially in the early days of consulting, where there was always challenges to be dealt with and trying to figure out ways to make the customer relationship stable and secure. And so this idea of continuous improvements, doing things better, not leaving things at the status quo and saying how can it be better, more efficient became the guiding principles. In that that became the same mantra as when I look to people. You know how we are at some place and how do we take it from there to the next level in our corporate position, and usually we require that same type of coaching approach rather than just being told strategically, make this adjustment. That's why I approach the management of teams from a more coaching perspective rather than a transactional perspective.

Speaker 3:

That's really great. I love that you have that focus. I'm curious, as you grew in that journey, the style of management. What are some challenges that you faced in that approach?

Speaker 1:

One is getting rid of the baggage that comes with individuals. All of us right, it isn't so much what we know and what we don't know. It is more of trust issues and exploration of areas that the individual hasn't necessarily done before, and so breaking those barriers becomes one of the more critical tasks. To do so, as an example, actually, I was just having calls with my team In the last two weekly meetings I expressed to them I am empowering you, even as line individuals, to speak to anybody in the organization, whether it is at my level, mid-manager level. If you have a question, go to them directly, ask them the questions you want. It's not an issue whether you express it correctly or not. It's an issue that you actually go and do that. And this week was the second half of that conversation, which is this journey of feeling it's okay to ask the questions of these people that I'm nervous of talking to, and in doing so, that practice makes it much more easy for these individuals, as I went through it too in the journey and we all go through it. If I can speak to somebody and I can talk to somebody who's more superior to me and I feel okay, then during calls in my tasks, I will feel okay to clearly ask questions. Does this task include all the details you're describing? Do I need to find them somewhere else? Does the goal that you've got encompass all the things you need, or are there more things? This is why we're pushing them to feel empowered to speak. So this is an example of going further than people are used to. Breaking habits are things like?

Speaker 1:

We just actually had a sort of an interesting conversation. I look to my testers to validate the work I've done. I expressed to the team. I said okay, as an example, I picked on our graphic person who is updating our logo. We're really excited about getting the newer logo out. I said you know what, if you gave us a set of logos to look at and you've misspelled our company name, and if we notice that we turn around to you and mention it and you say, well, I didn't have a tester to validate spelling, how should we perceive you right? And so this is the kind of conversations that we have where we say you, you need to verify your work, review your work, because then you're beginning to show more thoroughness, more accountability of the work you've done, as well as build credibility as to who you are within an organization, or if you want to go somewhere else, you come with a cachet, because you now have the ability to say I can accomplish this, I can accomplish it.

Speaker 3:

I really like this idea of empowering people to ask questions and challenge things at any level. I think that's so important. I'm curious, so you've been building teams for a number of years. As you're hiring and adding people to your teams, what are some of the key qualities that you're looking for?

Speaker 1:

I look for individualism. I look for the ability to answer questions succinctly. I look for whether they're intimidated, whether they're engaged, whether they're answering in a rote way versus thinking through things, and this begins to give insight about whether the individual is capable of joining the team. I tend not to do technical interviews. I tend to have my people do the technical interview for me. So, for example, if we're hiring a graphic artist, a developer or a mid-level manager, I have the people who specialize in that work ask those questions.

Speaker 1:

I don't necessarily need to find out. They should be vetted coming through, they should be coming in with certain base qualities, right, and then from there what I'm really doing is determining if they're going to join the firm. What, based on the qualities we have in our culture, in our organization, do they bring those qualities into that organization? And therein lies the questions that I'm describing to you. Will you be able to survive on your own? Will you be able to ask questions? Are you comfortable, just who you are and open to ideas that will take you to the next level as an individual outside of the company?

Speaker 3:

That's great, that values fit is so important in making sure that someone has those core competencies to operate in the organization as you expect. I also love that you're delegating the assessment of talent down in the organization to the specialists, as you say, which brings up an interesting topic of delegation. That's something that we talk about in other episodes where oftentimes, as leaders grow and their teams get bigger, the idea of delegation can be really challenging. When do you let others take charge of things? I'd love to hear about delegation how you confidently delegate down in the organization.

Speaker 1:

That's a great question. The confidence has to be earned. The delegation happens in small pieces and there's a feedback loop. So, as an example, we have an individual who wanted to be Scrum Master. We had a project. We'd lost a Scrum Master. We were trying to figure out internally what should we? Should we hire somebody? What should we do? And as an example to the point you're raising right.

Speaker 1:

So I said to the team I need you guys to figure out who's the leader. It was a group of 10 of them on a project for upgrading our website and I said I want you guys to come and tell me who's your leader. That person's going to lead the project. I said I want you guys to come and tell me who's your leader. That person's going to lead the project. And the idea is that there is a unspoken, you know the internal hierarchy of people. People tend to be stronger, tend to be leaders, tend to be outspoken in different ways, and therein lies there can be the actual sort of leader. And then there's that more hidden leader, that in the background, that helps get things done.

Speaker 1:

So that turned around and we were able to pull forward a scrum master, but he'd never done any scrumming before He'd never led a project, I said, not a problem, our goal is to make you that person and we're going to do it quietly. We'll observe some of your meetings and provide guidance for you, and we worked on the mechanics and I gave him small chunks to deal with and then each week, each week or so, we'd extend those chunks and then we'd also moved into how do you recognize people are telling the truth, how do you recognize your people interaction skills? What are you doing as a scrum master? That's in addition to just sort of task mastering or task managing tasks, and because really what we're doing is, we found an internal leader.

Speaker 1:

Now we want to mold him into really being taken on more responsibilities that are more than just simply managing tasks. We want them to become more middle management type person, and that includes the softer skills. How do you interact with people? What can you do to elicit outcomes you want? What can you do to influence individuals in a way that excites them to be successful for the outcome that you're aiming for?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and, as you say, those softer skills I like to call them professional skills that are just so important in developing your leaders, and it's an interesting approach that you're using to kind of select that leader and then grow them.

Speaker 1:

Sorry, it's a different model each time, but it is something that sometimes works sometimes doesn't about that.

Speaker 3:

Given the size of your organization, identifying and developing leaders internally has to be critical. So I'm curious how you're approaching that to continue to scale the organization.

Speaker 1:

We look to people, but it is an interesting question. So we look at people and we just simply you know, we have semi-annual reviews and we talk to them and ask them what are you aspiring to do? Where do you want to go in your life, what do you want to do in your career? What's your vision? And in those instances we begin to explore when they talk about I want to be, I want to manage, I want to start leading teams. We are lucky that we don't necessarily have a plethora of people that want to do these things. When people ask for these types of positions, it's an easier conversation of can we make it happen? Are you of the right mindset or right capability and do we have an opening coming Versus? I think of, say, a larger, large, large organizations who are fully built out. Somebody wants to move up the corporate ladder, somebody above them has to move out. Many times we don't necessarily have that restriction, which makes it a little easier.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that is the fun thing of being in smaller high growth firms is just the opportunity. Yeah, I remember I used to talk about it in one organization we worked in. Kind of like you say, in some organizations where you're not growing, somebody's got to leave. But if we could just keep growing. If you think about that hierarchy as kind of this like triangle, we keep growing, that everybody gets to rise up in the organization. Well, looking forward, what's your vision for the evolution of leadership within your organization?

Speaker 1:

We're going to be filling into the more mid-level people obviously as we grow, because the top is a bit narrower At this juncture. We're already working through structures for the organization. Which structure works easier, works easier? And should all sales be under me, all technical under my peer? Or should we have SBUs? Where I have a group, they have a group, even though there's an overlapping of skills. So, like he has my peer has sales team, I have sales team and engineers, they have sales team and engineers.

Speaker 1:

So we're working through structures like that and right now we've focused on the idea of sales being under one division marketing for the whole organization and technical people for the whole organization, as well as outbound. We're finding that seems to be a reasonable model at this juncture because it's actually tapping into the very second thing that you're asking about, which is how do I ensure messaging and cultural alignment? What we found was in the SBU version, our sales team had a different approach to products and sales processes than my counterpart. We realized bringing everybody under one umbrella for each of these operational activities ensures a consistent message going through the team and then one place to go and say this is where everything needs to be done correctly.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that alignment is critical as you grow the organization so you have that consistency of messaging.

Speaker 1:

I'll add one more thing. The other piece to that is we also work because we have a more clear understanding, because we have the whole for the company, we're able to more simply align what is your role, how you fit into the puzzle better for each of the employees, which becomes valuable, because then they understand how they contribute to the success.

Speaker 3:

That's great. Well, John, thank you so much for taking some time to chat with me today. I've really enjoyed the conversation. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's one of the best ways to reach out?

Speaker 1:

LinkedIn or my email. I think you have my email, so you can just publish it and be okay.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I can go ahead and drop that into the show notes. Well, john, thank you so much for your time today.

Speaker 1:

Sure. Thank you very much, Justin.