The Importance of ‘Belonging’ with David Parry-Jones, VP Twilio

With his vast experience at iconic companies like IBM, Microsoft and VMware we are delighted  to have  David Parry-Jones (DPJ) now VP of EMEA & APAC at Twilio Inc,  join the Get Amplified team to share his experience of building a high-performance team that can scale at a rate to match its growth and why it is important that Twilio’s new hires feel like they belong and oh ...so much more....!

You can access the report DPJ refers to related to on how COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation here:
https://www.twilio.com/covid-19-digital-engagement-report

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn! 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Transcript

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Sam 0:10

Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast for tech industry leaders and aspiring leaders focusing on extraordinary teams. I say this every time, but of course we're doing this virtually. I'm at home in Bucks. Vicky, as usual, is in Deepest Darkest Oxfordshire, and Shah's over in the Netherlands. So, Sia, who have we got on the show today?

Sia 0:29

Well, we've got, and I know you'll hate me saying this, David Parry Jones, but everybody knows him as DPJ. And our topic today is building great cultures, which then in turn delivers great results through teams. So, you know, how do you get the entire organisation working as one team and going in the same direction? Now, Vicky and I met DPJ at VMware. I think Vicky had more of the pleasure of working with him closer than I did. Um, so with that, Sam, in our usual format, I'm going to ask you, DPJ, just to give us a little bit of a potted history of your career and maybe just tell us where you are now before we go into uh some questions.

Speaker 3 1:13

Sure. Thank you, Sharon and Vicky and Sam. So it's a pleasure to be on the uh podcast this time. I think the first thing I'd say is what I didn't end up doing. So I did a physics degree and um I found out I wasn't cut out for teaching. Um I wasn't cut out for working in the North Sea on the oil rigs either. And I I happened across kind of IT selling in where is it, where was that called? The late 1980s. It seems like a lifetime ago, because it probably is. And um, you know, I've I've enjoyed every moment of it. I've worked for some you know iconic large companies over that period, but also some smaller companies. Um, I used to sell a lot of Lotus Notes in the days before they were acquired by IBM, worked through the IBM piece. I then spent several years at Microsoft, um, and then another seven years at VMware, where I met um both Vicky and Sharon. And then the last two years, um, I've joined a company called Twilio, which I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit more about in a second. And I joined to run EMIA, and for the last nine months, I've also been standing in to uh run the Asia Pacific business while we're searching for a new leader there.

Sam 2:17

Any chance of that going permanent? Or is that too big a geography for you to cover?

Speaker 3 2:22

It's not so much that. I think um what I've learned, particularly in COVID times, is that the overlap of the Asian business days is about two hours, and they're the two hours before nine. Therefore, if I want to run a business day in EMIA, deal with my American boss in the evening and do APJ in the morning, particularly in this uh non-traveling environment, it's just it's not something I'd wish upon an enemy.

Sam 2:47

You you get about 12 minutes sleep.

Speaker 3 2:49

Yeah, correct.

Sam 2:50

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. So, Vicky, perhaps you could tell us why we've chosen this particular topic, focus on building a great culture and leading to great results.

Vic 3:00

Thanks, Sam. And I think this is probably going to be my easiest answer to when you've asked me this question in the past. This is why we created the Amplified Group. So, very, very near and dear to our hearts is organizations as they grow, building the culture and retaining the culture as they grow, and knowing how to retain it as they scale is so critical because when things are going well, it's it's great and it's easy, but when you hit a bump in the road, which inevitably you will, you need to make sure that you've got that strong, solid foundation of the culture and having that trust in place to ensure that when you hit a bump in the road, you are all still working in the same direction, and it's it's why we do what we do. And I just want to give a very quick um example of a CEO that I was speaking to not so long ago, and um, in preparation for my meeting with him, I'd had a look at their company report, and I could tell from the company report, and don't get me wrong, the results were awesome, they are really going places. However, you could tell from reading it, they resulted from brandishing a big whip versus really having the culture in place which has resulted in those results. And in my conversation with him, he said, I know this isn't sustainable, we need to overcome this, and we need to go right back to the roots to do this. And why, when we came up with this topic, it was DPJ came to mind immediately because having worked with him at VMware and seen the trust that he builds and the loyalty that he bring builds in the teams that he works with and how he supports everyone and people first. I'm just so thrilled, DPJ, that you're on here to share this with us. So thank you for joining us.

Sam 4:56

That company that you refer to once saw somebody come in with a t-shirt and said the floggings will continue until morale improves. Look, always made me chuckle that one. Um so, DPJ, can you give us a bit of background on Twilio? You know, you've had some some big names in your career, but this is perhaps not quite such a big name yet, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 5:20

Yeah, and I and I reflected on that when I started talking to them about the job because if I'm honest, I I've not come across Twilio, and it's not a space, it's it's a somewhat um uh a space that's I wasn't really familiar with, and and a slightly unusual uh company name as well, which I have to explain to people all the time how to spell it. Um, so Twilio was formed about 10 years ago, and you we were talking about their values and culture, and I think um 10 years ago, Jeff Lawson, our CEO, set up the company, and at the heart of the company was to become the operating system for the digital economy, but more importantly to democratize the technology that underpins the way in which we communicate. And at the heart of that was the developer. And Jeff is a developer who you know started his career, or certainly the formative part of his career at AWS, and and did a number of startups leading up to Twilio and was frustrated with the need to have to stand up all the hardware, the high cost hardware to be able to set up a communications structure and therefore wanted to democratize it. And at the time with the cloud coming along, they were we were able to do that, and we built a business from that. And I think those values and that focus on the developer that started the company with Jeff still very much exist in the company today. I think that that focus on the developer is at the heart of everything we do still, but I think those values they've morphed. You know, the company that he started more than 10 years ago, now actually 12 years ago, is not the company that it was. And we we just as I joined, actually, we revisited our magic values and and made them more appropriate for what we we have today. But there's a level of consistency and trust that Jeff has built in the organization over that time.

Sam 7:04

Culture does always change as a as an organization grows, it doesn't necessarily have to get any worse. In fact, it's great if it stays good culture, but it's got to morph over time. The operating system for digital business is interesting, Vicky. That seems to bear some relation to you what you guys at the Amplified Group talk about in terms of the operating system for teams.

Vic 7:27

Uh yes, and actually I can't take credit for that term at all. Um, Microsoft came up with the the term um that the five behaviors of a team is the operating system for teams. So, you know, there's no one better qualified on operating systems than uh than Microsoft to talk about that. So I just thought it was an interesting point, particularly as I'd read that Twilio is becoming the operating system of the digital economy, and it just made me think that you know, here at the Amplified Group, although no client is the same and we customize every client engagement, the five behaviors is at the heart of what we do, and our job is to practically apply it and bring it to life so that it becomes muscle memory and it enables the organizations that we're working with to continue to thrive as they scale. So it's great to be able to hear DPJ's story.

Sam 8:20

So, DPJ, when you when you started at Twilio, what were your priorities?

Speaker 3 8:24

Well, it's very clear that my priority in the EMIR role was to build out the the EMIR business. At the time, international represented about 20% of the overall worldwide business, which having worked in global tech companies is a disproportionate, it's too small a proportion of a mature business. So the opportunity was there to build a business at the at the rate that the overall business is growing, but to increase that percentage of the overall business and therefore grow faster than the business as a whole. And with that comes investment. And I look, yeah, I look back after two years now, and the the number of employees we have in the company is probably 7x of what we started with. So I did joke about Wow, that's some growth. Yeah, well, I joked about my first year not being um a sales leader but being a recruiter.

Sam 9:11

Yeah.

Speaker 3 9:12

We did a lot of recruitment, we learned a lot about how to onboard large quantities of salespeople and how to build markets. And the brand as well is not as recognizable in this market as it might be in some of the others. But the priorities were to build a culture. Um, I had a long debate with our COO, George Hugh, when I was joining the company about this kind of relationship between revenue and culture and which one comes first. Um, I'm very clear in my world that you know I think people and culture come first because without them you can't build revenue for the long term. And I was listening to describing that other company. And I've seen some of my leaders within EMIA optimizing for the short term, and you know, their results in the short term are very strong, but then they they they they drop away as you start getting into year two and year three because they haven't done the building blocks for that longer term. And that's that's all about hiring talent in my world. It's about hiring capable individuals who will will come either come down from where they were in the maturity of the companies they were into where we were at Twilio, and then bring the company forward to where we're taking it, knowing that destination of that that enterprise class sales organization that they may have come from historically.

Sam 10:28

So culture is your absolute priority. Most important bit.

Speaker 3 10:32

I think if you if you build the right culture in your company or your organization, because remember, I'm running the European piece of a of a large global company. You can't build a good culture within a bad culture, but you can certainly optimize a culture for a geographical region. And I think that culture is, I'll come back to the point about hiring the right people and having a diverse mix at a very high level around how people, how people create ideas, how they pee, how they think, how they communicate, and it allows and allow people to be like that, then you build a culture of inclusiveness. And I think you know what's really important around that, and you know, I hark back to my days at VMware, is really making people feel like they have a voice and that their voice counts. And it doesn't matter where you are in the organization or what you do, but really feeling that you really care for those individuals and care and understand and want to hear what they have to say, and that at the same time they can see the ability, the ability to develop and progress over the time they're in the company, but also, you know, frankly, in our world, the ability to earn the money in a sales organization that's associated with that success and development. Of course.

Sam 11:48

And clearly, you well, and and we, you know, the IT industry generally, having spent 20 years, 20 odd years in it, it's a very fast-moving uh arena, and probably even more so at the minute. You know, there's there's a lot of talk of the current COVID situation, accelerating digitization, whatever that that means to an individual business. How do you maintain that trust and empowerment, staying ahead of that pace of change?

Speaker 3 12:16

Well, the first reflection I'd make is you know, what we've seen through that that COVID environment, and what we've seen is an acceleration of organizations embracing digital communications with their customers.

Sam 12:28

Thanks to reason.

Speaker 3 12:29

Yeah, and we we've we've done some you know, we've surveyed, I think it was 5,000 um customers on the basis of you know their experiences um through this period, and over 90% of them said that they'd accelerated by an average of five years their decisions around digital deployments of technologies like ours to enable them to communicate with their consumers or their customers in the way the consumer wants to be communicated with. And the the platform that we sell, the API that we sell, allows those organizations to choose the means with which they communicate to their customers, whether that's text, email, voice, video.

Sam 13:06

In the current climate, that sounds pretty much critical, I think.

Speaker 3 13:09

Yeah, and and we've seen that, you know, it's been reflected in our financial results, but it's also just been in reflected on the in the interest we're seeing in the market. And um that there are, you know, there's there's plenty of organizations who do bits of what we do, certainly on a domestic basis in various countries throughout EMIA. And each country we go into in EMIA because of the nature of our regulatory relationship, is like opening up the whole of North America again. So the complexity and the diversity of EMEA is a challenge for organizations like ours, because not only is the the tech industry and life, COVID life, very dynamic, but the regulatory landscape within which we operate is a very dynamic world as well. As governments look to protect um their consumers from bad actors.

Sam 14:00

Clearly, EMIA is not one single country, whatever the Americans might say.

Speaker 3 14:06

No comment, but I think you're factually correct.

Sam 14:12

It's true, it's true. So, how important is hiring, and I guess also, although you're you're relatively early into your tenure, retaining that talent that you bring into the organization.

Speaker 3 14:26

I think hiring and um retention or you know, reducing attrition is a critical kind of KPI within that cultural spec. And I think if you can create an environment as I just described earlier, where people feel like the organization or their leadership really cares about them and wants to develop them, um, and particularly as we're going through this period, then you know those things kind of look after themselves. And um, I I was talking to my boss the other day, and you know, I admitted to him, which I'm not sure was the right thing to do, that I cared more about the employee effectiveness survey than I did about my revenue performance. And we'll see how that goes over the uh the next few months. But it's genuine, and you know, if I I feel that if we if we have a community of people who are the right people who are doing the right work and we celebrate a lot of the how as opposed to the what, then you build a culture that feels like it has a direction and a meaning, and purpose gets overused at the moment, but it really is all about purpose and feeling like you're making a difference and that you're part of something that you can you can attach to. And you know, that for us has been you know hugely successful, and the hiring piece has been a lot of effort at the front end, but obviously, then to some extent the hard work starts in making sure you get them to become effective as fast as possible, but then you retain them for as long as possible once they're effective, and that's a huge focus for me.

Vic 15:52

You did a post on LinkedIn when you hadn't been there very long about purpose and the importance of it, and how having been in other organizations, the difference that you have at Twilio now, the difference you're experiencing, and and the interpretation to the customer. Can you can you talk to that a little bit for us?

Speaker 3 16:11

Yeah, I think I think the post was something about that I belong at Twilio, and I think that feeling of belonging is maybe a better articulation of what I was trying to say a minute ago. And you know, if you feel like you belong at an or genuinely belong at an organization, then I think you know work becomes so much easier and you naturally stay at the organization because it feels like a family. But I think you know, working on that, I I I over my career have worked in some very large companies, and I think when organizations get very large, you know, they may well on the outside um be perceived as inclusive and diverse, but the reality is once you get onto the inside, there's a way of working that's very narrow. And I found myself in that situation earlier in my career, and the the culture that was that narrow sliver of working did not suit my work style. Now you can survive and you can be moderately successful, but you'll never be as happy or as successful as you could be if you're in a culture where either, best case, you know, anything goes from a cultural approach, and there's one of everything, and therefore, you know, there is no monoculture, or at least a culture where your natural style and the way in which you operate is better recognized than part of that broader culture. And I think with Twilio, I wrote that article because I'd spent you know the better part of my interview cycle with Twilio questioning the culture because I knew what it was like to work in what I perceived to be a bad culture, and I knew from VMware what it was like to work in a good culture, and I didn't want to make that mistake. And um, what I found then within the first three months is that I'd got it right, and you know, what I'd been told um around the questioning around the culture was you know what I perceived it to be.

Sia 17:57

Yeah, we had a funny podcast discussion uh earlier this week. We were talking to Jane Rimmer, who I used to work for, and I was saying when she hired me that um she said she wanted me to meet the rest of the crew to make sure that I wasn't crazy because my CV looked really good. And Sam said something really interesting. He said, Yeah, you probably were crazy, but you were the right kind of crazy for them. And and I think that was really important because they made it very clear to me the type of organization and the culture that there was. Now, I could have chosen to say that culture isn't for me, but to be clear to the person that you are hiring what the culture of the company is, then they can make that decision themselves as well, can't they? Because it's important both ways.

Speaker 3 18:42

Yeah, and I've I've been doing a lot of interviewing recently of people to join Twilio, to be clear. Um I've referred um to our magic values, and they're up on our website, they're very clear. And you know, the way I refer to them is that you know, if you want to understand how Twilio operates, read those magic values. And if you're able to relate to them and um you know be able to deliver around them, you will be successful. And I think it's a good it's a good signpost to you know what we expect from people and just a number of them, you know, they're kind of they're they're serious, but no shenanigans is one of them. Anyway, that's basically no bullshit. You know, say say say it straight, don't don't mess around and and no no um no dodgy dealings, but yeah, things like be an owner, and that's designed to you know behave like you're a startup still on the basis of how you look after your budgets and your money and how you spend. Um, be inclusive. That's something I I related to very strongly when I came into the organization. Write it down is a new one to me. And um, we're very big on memos and documents prior to meetings that are pre-reads, as opposed to PowerPoint and delivering the message verbally in the meeting.

Sam 20:00

Oh man, I wish I wish more people would do that.

Speaker 3 20:03

Well, I did you know it's it was new to me. Um not the concept of writing things down, but so driving through exoptions.

Sam 20:11

Circulating pre-reading. Yeah, it used to used to frustrate me no end when you know you'd walk into an hour's meeting and 50 minutes of it would be broadcast, and I'd be thinking, you know, I I can read and digest this in probably a quarter of the time that it takes you to present it, and then we could have had a half-hour discussion and all go out by half past instead of instead of on the next hour. So it does make sense.

Vic 20:38

And it's about meetings, is effective meetings, is about should be about that debate.

Sam 20:43

And yeah, yeah, not about not about broadcast.

Vic 20:47

I just wanted to um to pick up on the fact that you call it magic values. When we do workshops, very often I take my magic wand. I steal my daughter's Harry Potter magic wand and take that in. Because if you can get that right, it is magic. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 21:03

Um, you know, I I they they were as I say, they were they were already established um before I joined, um, but they were redone just as I joined. And I think you know, the behind the magic is exactly what you just described. I mean, if you get them right, it's that that's where the twilio magic happens. One of the one of the kind of formative ones is drawing the owl. So basically, and again, it's all about basically, and we're not going to tell you what to do, you're gonna have to work it out. So here's two round circles, you put the the ears, the beak, the eyes, and everything else on it. And um, yeah, that's definitely our our embedded culture as a builder and building, taking initiative, small take, small teams, agility, innovation, and that's a foundational value of those twiliomagic values of drawing the owl.

Vic 21:50

Right, and that goes back to what you were saying at the beginning about the di focus on the developer.

Speaker 3 21:54

Yeah, oh absolutely, yeah, and our our company logo is an L.

Sam 21:58

I wonder with the retention thing. Does retention help to drive culture, or does culture help to drive retention? I mean, clearly it cuts both ways, but what's the balance there, do you think?

Speaker 3 22:09

Well, I think, I think, yeah, absolutely. There are circular relationships. But I think when you're when you're initially starting out and building a team, I think your your emphasis on the culture, because you haven't got to the retention yet. And I've been in companies when I joined VMware, um, I'd come out of Microsoft and I'd seen how a company that had never failed had to cope with failure and reinvent itself. And this is pre-Satya, by the way. I'll say you know they've done it again now. But um, when I came into VMware, VMware, from a growth perspective, was further further back down down the kind of uh growth side of things. So I could see things coming. And VMware had never had um never had a nutrition problem either, because it was really easy to sell, the stock was going gangbusters, and people were earning a load of money. Nobody leaves. But I you know, when I came in there, I went, let's be a little bit careful, because as soon as those things slow down, which they will, you know, we will we better have been doing a good job backwards with looking after our employees, or they will all go on to the next place where the stock price is going gangbusters and they can earn a load of money because they they're mercenaries and they'll feel no attachment to anything more than that. And I think not just because of that, but I I was reflecting when I was at VMware. In the first two years, we churned 80% of the sales force in in the UK business, and that you know, it was because the sales force needed to morph into a new way of working, which was much more competitive, it was much more about selling rather than auditing. Auditing, yes, and it was a different way of working, and you know, we needed different people. I was shocked by how how big the churn was, if I'm really honest, because I always talk about a third, a third, a third, where a third are you know, high performers, a third of people you can make high performers, and a third are probably people who aren't going to make it. But for that third to be 80% was you know pretty shocking, but it was reflective of where VMware were in their growth cycle at the time.

Vic 24:09

Yeah, I can relate to that. I used to help with new starter training, and um, I used to deliver the end user computing piece, and I remember even just the hiring to start with wasn't right because we'd I'd asked them to look at a case study and say how they would address the case study, and it was an end-user computing case study, and they would read it and say, We need to sell view to them. I didn't ask you that, I just asked you to pull out where where are the problems? What tell me where the customers' pain points were, and they couldn't get to them at all. I think it took took about two years to get to the to the right hiring of solution sellers versus the auditators that they were still hiring.

Speaker 3 24:47

We talk a lot about this at the moment, and it's to do with our technology as well, because our technology, in a vanilla sense, is a bag of bits. Um, and those bits, that's probably not a technical term, Sam, by the way. Um, that that that those bag of bits only really come alive when you've asked enough discovery questions and done enough research to understand what the customer's business does and how you can apply that technology to a use case, and only then does the thing come alive, and you see the value in doing it, and and people buy that. You know, people do not buy our API, they buy the ability to be able to deploy, you know, ways of retaining or driving customer acquisition through technology, and it's it's you know, that's been very similar across my career. I've always enjoyed working in organizations, and Lotus and Microsoft are definitely examples of this, and the EUC piece at VMware, where you could have a direct connect with either a consumer or an end user, so where the technology kind of came alive, and um that that that's what's always kind of interested me. And I think maybe I'm naturally curious as well, which are things we look for, by the way, in candidates. You know, people are naturally curious because they'll learn quicker internally and they'll ask customers questions.

Sam 26:02

Curiosity is an underrated hiring point, actually. I haven't thought about.

Speaker 3 26:07

Yeah, well, it's one of our key ones. Another one's resilience.

Sam 26:10

What we do is yeah, resilience is really important. I have the I have this vision of a sales guy phoning up and saying, hi, Mr. Customer, would you like to buy an API? And you're slapping it around the back of the hand.

Speaker 3 26:22

Well, there is a famous quote from one of our customers asking what a twilio was. What's a twilio?

Sam 26:28

So much are they?

Speaker 2 26:32

How much are they each?

Sam 26:34

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Funny. Um, so in in previous episodes of Get Amplified last season, um, we talk a lot about well-being of employees. Um, where would you stand on the importance of mental health to your organization, but also also personally, I suppose, when you're when you've got a big tough job.

Speaker 3 26:55

Yeah, well, I think the first thing to to say around this is it's something that as a leader, I true, I I really strongly believe that you need to be um you need to be thinking about this right now in COVID explicitly, but you know, I started operationalizing this, if you like, in in my work life um at VMware. Um, and it was on the back of a drunken conversation in a car park at a center point charity event where we were sleeping out in the car park overnight, and that two or three of us um were chatting about life experiences. And I I'd had you know, I'd gone through CPT CBT, so cognitive-based therapy, in my life in God, early 2000s, and it had really helped me around a difficult period in my life. And I I'd I'd kind of always had that with me. And I think, you know, in the earlier parts of my career, I'd have considered that to be a bit of a stigmatized, and I wouldn't necessarily have talked about it particularly openly. And chatting to these other individuals, um, we basically said that we need to do something about this instead of talking about it drunkardly in the car park and kind of you know putting our arms around each other around various challenges in our lives. Let's go do something about it. And that kicked off the um the mental health campaigns within VMware, which have still, you know, they've generated a life of their own long since I left. Um, and that was when I first started realizing that people really, really gravitated towards it, and it was a lot more widespread than I'd ever imagined. And the concept of mental health as well, it just saying the two words together have a negative stigma, which they shouldn't. I mean, when you talk about your physical health, you don't go, oh my god, physical health. You know, and they're the two the same things. You have you need to look after both in the same way, and um you you they ebb and flow over time through your life, through the challenges you might have. And I can guarantee, right now, in COVID, people's mental health, regardless of their situation, is is being eroded because the monotony of what we're doing, despite the fact of maybe you know enjoying being at home a bit more often and not doing the commutes, the the monotony and the the zoom gloom of doing this, no offense, guys. No, but the the companies have been good. Look, Twilio, Twilio's been fantastic, and the leadership at Twilio through this period and through other periods in my career with them have just shown their real cultural caring side, and you know, and that isn't unique by any means, and you know, I've seen the same from other companies in the industry, but they've given us incremental leave. Um, the the two weeks of incremental leave that people are done and they're kind of that nobody's for Twilio doesn't have a culture of forcing anybody to do anything, um, but we're definitely you know proactively encouraging people to use their holiday allowances. Um, the other thing that we're we we're empowered to do locally is the Friday after quarter end, we're now getting into the habit of having a mental health day so that the whole of the sales organization stops working on that Friday after the quarter end just because of the hiatus at the quarter end, but also people were worried in taking days off because they're like, if I come back, my inbox has got 150 emails in it. So if we take the whole Salesforce out, that worry kind of goes away a little bit. And you know, the company's very empowering in you know, giving me and the individuals the ability to look after themselves. And somebody said earlier on about you know, there's people who are fearful of going into the office, and there's people who can't wait to go back, and every flavor of grey in between shade of grey in between, and we have to cater for that individuality around what it is that we provide, and it's hard. Um, and we can't we can't think that you know everybody wants to go back or nobody wants to go back, it's a mix.

Sam 30:44

That's interesting. I I was talking to somebody about the I can't quite remember how he referred to it, but it's it was something like uh an organization having a sort of a cultural bank or a cultural store, as in you know, if if you've had a great positive working together, coming together culture, you've built up a certain store of that. And the COVID situation has gradually been depleting that, and you'll get back towards zero. And at some point, you've got to get people back together to rebuild that that bank or that store again. I guess the you know, the downside of that that analogy is that those maybe who didn't have that great culture probably didn't have the buffer, the the the resilience in their model to enable that long term, and that's gonna sadly cause them some challenges, I think.

Speaker 3 31:35

That's a great metaphor, and that that metaphor is why I worry about our new starters.

Sam 31:42

Yes, because they exactly that, they haven't built that up.

Speaker 3 31:45

Correct. We haven't built the bank with them, and we're we're gradually eating into negative territory with each of them. And you know, I don't over-exaggerate the problem, but that metaphor nicely explains the difference between you've had that time with and somebody whose level set at zero, basically.

Sam 32:00

That's it. They're almost coming in with an overdraft. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So would you mind DPJ just giving us your three key takeaways on building culture?

Speaker 3 32:12

Well, I think I talked about um some of them earlier on. I I haven't written this down, so I'm gonna kind of do this you know, real time. I think the first one is you know, lead by example. Um, you can't expect people to behave in a certain way or do a certain thing if you're not willing to do it yourself, or you don't you don't genuinely uh expose those values. And I've you know I've got to a stage in my career, frankly, where if I can't be myself, then I'm not interested in you know what whatever has to offer. It's I'm too late in my career. And I think I learned early in my career that I probably compromised too much on that as an individual around some of the culture I was with. So I think that's the first that's the first thing. Um I think building trust, and I it's a bit cliched, but I think listening and then and then acting on it, and most importantly, doing what you say you're gonna do. Um, so you build that again. That's by the way, that's equally applicable to customers. And you know, certainly early in my career as a salesman, the foundational way you build a relationship with customers is through your initial interactions, delivering on what you say you're going to deliver. You can't always give them what they want out of the gate, but you can give them, you know, set expectations, and as long as you deliver against those, so being being able to deliver. And I think that there's something in the third piece around diversity and inclusion, and it's not uh this isn't cliche, this is all about you know hiring hiring people and letting them be themselves, um, and trying not to to hire you know uh stereotypes of yourself. And I think you know it's instinctive to do that, you know, through culture, but I think you learn very quickly that actually when you do an insights profile or a disc profile of your team, and it looks like a dartboard with a bunch of bunch of darts all around it, that's a good thing.

Speaker 2 34:07

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 34:08

Knowing it's like that is important because that explains maybe the dynamic you're getting in the team. You know, having a cluster of people all together in a in a mono way of working is extremely lacks, it lacks any creativity, and frankly, it's much less fun. And I think you know, for me, it I used to say um at VMware actually that my job was to make sure that people walked in the office on in the morning smiling and wanting to be there, and that kind of encapsulates those three things. I think if you deliver on those three things, then people will want to be there and they'll feel trusted and they'll have that purpose and that connection.

Sam 34:48

So you you want your your disk profile to look like a bad dartboard, yeah, correct. As opposed to a good dartboard where everything's treble 20.

Speaker 3 34:57

Yeah, probably my dartboard, maybe. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sia 35:01

It's so important to do that at the at that hiring stage as well, because uh I had a very funny conversation the other day. I'm working with a leadership team at the moment, and they are very much all in one part of that dartboard, right? And then when I spoke to the recruiter who I know very well, guess what? She hired them all. That's what she did. She hired people like her. So um having that information up front and knowing that having different perspectives and having that you know scattered approach in your team and the diversity, it actually helps um a great deal.

Speaker 3 35:39

So up front, here's a funny anecdote, and I think Vicky, you know the individual better than I do, but we did this when I was at VMware in the UK, and the facilitator basically said everybody wants to be like Phil Thorin. So yeah, everybody wanted charisma and um uh personality, and so everybody was in certain places on the thing, but they were all heading towards trying to go, yeah, yeah.

Vic 36:06

Well, we we talk about diversity of thought, that's what we're looking for. So you've got diversity of thought and opinion, and actually that's what the code of governance says for boards. That's exactly what they're looking for, because then you get diverse debate, and then you can hopefully get to the right outcome because you've had all of the different perspectives considered, so so it's good from a business perspective as well. I'm working with uh an organization at the minute, and we've just done a survey for them. And what has come out, we weren't looking for it, but what has come out is the absolute correlation between trust and well-being. There's a line across the grid for both of them, and where trust is low, well-being is low. So when you said about trust in it being cliche, this this was we were looking at 13 different elements across an entire organization, and those are the two lines that stood out against each other. So it's it's absolutely fascinating. And the fact that the way that you talk about building trust and the vulnerability behind it, it just shows you know the confidence that you must have at building the organization that you have, it's gonna have such a massive impact.

Speaker 3 37:12

Yeah, that the one thing I'd reflect on there, Vicky, is and I didn't get this at Microsoft, is it takes time, yeah? You you you know, and I've I've hired a couple of leaders recently who are going into organizations or teams where it's not great and they're gonna have to do a bit of a turnaround. And you know, I I'm really, really uh I'm um I'm patient on that stuff, but organizations aren't, and particularly sales organizations, yeah. They suddenly forget you and you joined six months ago, and you know, where are the results? And you know, I'm coaching the people in that situation to kind of have two you know two parallel paths, one of which is get the numbers on track as soon as you can, but the other one is please do not build just for that, build for the future, make the right decisions, keep the right people, you know, and and take your time hiring, particularly around key roles and and try and hire diverse. And if you have to hang out there a bit longer, then it's worth it. Find a way of doing that.

Sam 38:07

And it's otherwise, you only eventually end up back where you were before, anyway. Fascinating stuff. Shah, you're up. It's hero time.

Sia 38:16

So, yes, it's hero time, and as I always explain, um, the reason we have hero time is just to get a little bit into our guests' psyche, um, you know, who in their past maybe has inspired them and motivated them. DPJ, who's your hero?

Speaker 3 38:32

I think the first thing I'd say, which is very um and I'm gonna cheat because there's not really one. Um the first thing I'd I'd kind of reflect on is you know, any um working parents who've homeschooled their children in the last period, you know, they are definitely heroes. That I I could not imagine doing what I've had to do for the last six months with my children 10 years earlier. I think you know, the the resilience that they'll have shown to get that done and the tenacity to be able to work and homeschool and do all the other stuff that we've all had to do, I think deserves some recognition. I think secondly, it would, and I have before, be easy to say my father, um, you know, just from you know how he brought me up and how I I relate to him is uh it's a very stereotypical and kind of obvious thing to say. And you know, I have tremendous respect with for him and what he built from his his kind of tough childhood to where he is today, and you know, luckily he's still alive, and I'm gonna go and see him in a couple of months. But then I think that the area I'm gonna focus on is kind of it's the women in my life, and you know, I'll do them in age order on that when I met them first. So I I met my mother first, um, so she's the first woman I'd like to. Tell you that.

Sia 39:47

Yeah, I hope so.

Speaker 3 39:48

Yeah, I got that the right way around, which is good. Um, the second's my sister, and yeah, I'll talk a little bit about each of them in a second, then my wife, Claire, and then my daughter, Eve, who's 17. And it's really the the theme running through all of them is the kind of um determination, capability, and also not letting things get in the way for any of them. My mother, you know, moved to Saudi Arabia in 1977 when I was 12, my sister was 11. I had twin brothers who were four years old at the time. She went there, she couldn't drive, um, but she went there to support my father who was there in the university. But she's always had a career. And uh later in her time in Saudi Arabia, she was a teacher and she was the CIO for the Saudi Arabian school. So I I was always brought up by a woman who could could juggle things and and and cope through, you know, what were the bringing up four children, um, but also having a having a very strong career. And even when my father was a lecturer, she was running a horticultural garden when we were very young. And then my sister, my sister's the CEO of Magnox, and um, she's a nuclear physicist, so you know, nothing's held her back in a very male-dominated environment. And um, you know, she's always been, you know, whether we like it or not, we're all kind of compared with each other as children, and it's tough being one of four. And you know, she's she's had a fabulous career, and again, you know, cope with with life very easily. And and and some of this explains why I didn't really get some of the challenges around um diversity in the workplace earlier on in my career, because I'd seen these two strong women early in my life not being held back by that, and you know, working in the nuclear industry is a very explicit um piece of that. And then Claire, who's you know, I met through work, um, she used to be my SE, she hates me saying that.

Sam 41:41

Um, but you know, she's she's always you mean you were her sales guy.

Speaker 3 41:46

Yeah, well, she'll say I was only successful because she was my SE. She's she's probably one, actually. But um, you know, she's can constantly worked, and we were talking about this earlier today, actually, other than 10 months off for each of our two children, and you know, continues to have a very successful career in the tech industry, and again, has never really been held back by some of the challenges I've seen other people being held back by in the industry. And then my daughter, who you know has these strong-headed personality of my wife, and I don't think you know, I certainly won't get in her way, and um, you know, she can she can knock down walls, and I think the the world she's being brought into from a career perspective is a better world, but it's not perfect, and I think we you know we all need to to to work towards a better, a better, equal world. And I really like the um the speech that Emma Hermione from uh Harry Potter did to the UN about he for she and the fact we have to do this together, and you know, particularly with my wife, we've always partnered in how we've we've brought up the children, had our careers, and I think the four of them are probably the the heroes I'd call out for this session.

Sam 42:57

Magnificent. Very, very cool.

Sia 42:59

Thank you, DPJ. That was really lovely, and and I love that segment only because I get to know more about the guest and the real person, and uh, and so that was uh that was very interesting. Thank you. And thank you for your time.

Sam 43:14

Yeah, yeah, good man, nice one. So thanks for thanks for listening to get amplified from the amplified group. Uh, your comments and your subscriptions, of course, gratefully received, and we'll see you on the next one.