Hello and welcome to This Is Not What I Signed Up For, the podcast for new leaders teaching you how to swim so you don't sink with your new responsibilities in terms of management. Now today I am very happy to have Patric joining me. Patric is the CTO of D6 Group and for the last 10 years he's been leading people to build products that make an impact in the education management space, which is a very challenging space to be in. with a lot of considerations around things like security, integrity, trust, safety, how your teams do things among a whole bunch of other things. So he has been building this they've got over a million monthly active users, which I think is quite something. And I've had the pleasure of working with Patric and his team in various capacities. And I'm really happy to have him on the podcast. In fact, he's one of the beta readers of my book prior to it being published. the last edition and this one and someone I've loved bouncing ideas off for the last six, seven years. So Patric, welcome to the podcast. introduction. Thank you very much Ross. Looking forward to the next edition of the book. Coming soon, coming soon, very soon. Right, Patric, I start off every one of these podcasts with a question. What is the worst piece of management advice you've ever received? I have been fortunate enough to never have worked for any really toxic individuals. So don't have a humdinger for you. I think probably in my world, what meant the most to me is that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And I found that to be terrible advice. On the flip side, what tends to happen is when you start measuring things, they start becoming targets instead of just feedback loops. And you can inadvertently and completely by accident cause behavior that you don't actually want by measuring the wrong things. Yeah, technical environment, especially as a very nuanced environment, lot of creativity taking place. And that's very difficult to measure. So I really think you should have open communication channels with your team, really be in touch with what's going on around you and use your experience and your instincts to. to sort of guide If you've got a pulse in your team, you'll know who's performing and who's not performing. Hmm. It's bit of an art as well as a science. Cool. You speak about communications and that's going to hint on the kind of category that we're in for this, for today's topic. So today we're going to be talking about taking ownership. So as an individual contributor, you were likely responsible for a lot of tasks, getting them done and kind of the day to day deliveries. But as you move into leadership, you start getting into this accountable space where you are the one that is in the firing line, shall we say, for the deliverables being done by your teams. So you're now responsible for these deliverables as a whole. So we're going to dive into this as to how this kind of works a little bit in getting into this ownership space. So Patric. Tell me a little bit more about the world you operate in and the teams you manage. think you've hinted on some of that in your story, but tell us a little bit more. Sure. So we operate in the edTech space, as you mentioned. We are really passionate about education. You'll find throughout our company a golden thread that everybody believes that education is the key to really changing the paradigm in developing and developed countries. It's a very constrained space because a lot of the education space resources are going to... the pretty shiny observable things and not much thought or time or money goes towards the back office activities that schools have to manage in order to be effective learning institutions. So we have a lot of stakeholders that we have to involve or keep in the loop or make sure that we are catering for and that's everything from the operational staff at the school through to the decision makers at the school, the governing body, the... institutions that manage the school, through to government funding and everything in between the parents, the children, huge group of stakeholders that you have to that you have to manage. The products that we develop are utilized at the operational level at the school by the administrative staff in the back office, but it affects every one of those stakeholders in some way. The children, we need to make sure that we record all of their performance really accurately. We need to make sure that we report on it well to the parents, to the governing body, to the Department of Education. We need to make sure that the school is able to communicate with the community. We need to make sure that their financial activities are well managed, that they're managing their debt well, that they're servicing their existing clients well, that they're not using siloed systems and building a child that's actually left the school. All of these really nuanced and varied operational activities that a school undertakes that people don't really think about when they think about a school. They think about the child in the classroom being educated. But what a lot of people don't realize is the size of the business that it takes to educate a thousand children is huge. It's bigger than an SME, talking between one and 200 employees. A lot of those employees have not come from a business background. They've come up through a pedagogical background. used to be teachers, moved into administration. The headmaster is also often an ex-teacher and doesn't have serious business skills development. And he is now the CEO effectively of a business that's doing massive turnover, managing up to 200 staff members. And people don't realize that if we could get that operation to run effectively. then we can make a really big difference in the way that the school operates. Our take is that for a business to be effective in delivering a high quality product, needs to be operating effectively and efficiently. And in a school environment, the product hopefully is a well-educated, well-rounded child that goes out into the workforce and into the world. And so much effort and time and... impact funding from philanthropists ends up in how to deliver education that they don't look at the engine that's behind that maintaining the velocity of that education. So what we do is we really try to focus on helping schools to operate their daily activities as efficiently and as effectively as possible so that they can spend as much time and money and effort and energy and love as they can in the classroom. Yeah. thinking of that, that is a large operating environment that you are in with all those stakeholders, the functionality that must be there, thinking in a business sense, just all those departments and all of that. It is not just like siloed and it's all over the show. Delivering on that where you've got so many different stakeholders, so many different streams that you must be delivering in. Taking this back internally to what you're doing to put it out to that customer and to the schools, how do you set expectations in your team for getting this out with all of these different nuances coming in? expectations are horrible, terrible things. Don't do it. We've been through a journey of learning and realized that expectations are setting people up either to just perform in a mediocre expected way, as it says, an expectation, or to fail. And it doesn't really create any kind of buy-in and it doesn't really open a conversation and a negotiation to meet on good terms and to create something positive. And so we rely much more heavily on agreements. And there's a subtle difference and expectation is what it sounds like. I have an idea in my mind of what should happen. And when you don't meet that expectation of what I have in my mind, then you failed. And if you do meet it, then great. That was the expectation and we count on our lives. But when you have an agreement with somebody, then it's a discussion. It's communication. It's a negotiation between two people to say, this is what I would like. Can you deliver that for me? Then the other person has an opportunity to say, oh, yes, absolutely. Or given my current circumstances, there's no way I'll be able to do it. I can either give it to you a little bit later, or if you can get me some more people, I can give it to you in that timeframe. And then you come to a place where you have a mutually beneficial agreement. and you say, we both commit to this agreement and we can hold each other accountable to that. And then if there's ever performance issues, it's much easier to manage because it's now no longer an expectation that somebody didn't agree to or didn't buy into or wasn't a part of the decision making. It's an agreement that they committed to themselves. And so if they cannot make that commitment, then you now have a trust issue. And a trust issue is much easier to manage from a performance perspective to say, you had an opportunity to weigh in and give us your opinion of what was reasonable. And the fact that you weren't able to meet what you agreed to as reasonable means that either you're unable to perform due to the skills issue or you are unwilling to perform due to a attitude issue. And so it really clears up a lot of the assumptions and uncertainty around delivery in a very dynamic environment that's changing all the time. There's so many things that can come in from left field unexpectedly and change the timeline of the delivery. And they're valid. It's not that anybody in the team wasn't doing their job or wasn't working really hard. It's that life hit you in the face and you had to adjust. And so the biggest part of that whole thing is communication in managing the agreement that has been made. So in these agreements, just with that, and I quite like this and expectations, I think can be very subjective and very one-sided and not as deliberate as coming through what you're describing as an agreement. often silent expectations that you find out after the fact, I didn't meet this unknown benchmark. Yeah. And I think also you can create like there's the phrase that money is not a great motivator, but it's a great demotivator. And if you've got performance bonuses and things like that above expectations, what is above expectations that that can be vague too. you know, one of the things I'd like to ask around the agreements is, is, know, you're having someone agree to the deliverables they can do and all of that. What happens if they're just terrible at estimating their time and agreement, does that come into an ongoing communication within that? How does that? Absolutely. So generally in the team, right back to the beginning comments that we made is you should be using your experience and your instincts to figure out whether the person that's entering into the agreement with you is being realistic. And if they are pushing back and saying that that's completely unreasonable, I can't do it in that timeframe, I need much longer. And they are a let's say a developer of a certain skill level, a senior developer with 10 years of experience and the manager has some experience either dealing with other developers of the same experience range or themselves came up as a developer, which is very often the case in the technical team. Then they should have a reasonable idea of how long it would take them or somebody else in the team to deliver the same amount of work. And if there's a massive misalignment in capability or expectation or. perceived capability that starts opening up a discussion to say, look, if we have a look at as objectively as possible across the team, given the different skills, we expect that you should be able to deliver this kind of work in this timeframe. And if you're not able to do that, then we need to talk about either skills development or performance. And again, that then comes back to a much more objective. It's not about the person, it's about the role and saying that this role requires this kind of performance. And if you're not able to deliver that performance for that role, then this might not be the right role for you. And then you can identify a development plan for that person to say, do you want to stay in this role, knowing that these are the expectations? If so, these are the things we can work on to get you there. Otherwise, where do you think your skills would be better suited? And that can be inside the company. Perhaps there are other roles that can be filled there, or it can be outside the company, which... People often tend to shy away from that discussion, but I think it's short-sighted. I think having a very open discussion with somebody about whether they want to stay in the company they're in with you or whether they would be interested in moving out is a very healthy one to have. And firstly, holding against anybody the fact that they would want to leave the company is, I think... inconsiderate at best and just feel selfish. Yeah, you're selfish at worst. Exactly. And on the other side of it is if you can help somebody through your network to get somewhere that they are being really happy and effective, you've really made an impact in their lives. And as a side benefit, you have helped the handover process and the change management process of them exiting your business much more in a much more healthy way. Hmm, interesting. Now, what you've had come through here and what you've said, and you mentioned a few times is communications. Now, communications is a two-way street. We've spoken about expectations and the agreement. How does the listening side come in as far as it goes? It becomes much more apparent as you move up through the management ladder and up into a leadership position, but it's actually there all the time. And the way I like to think about it is if you want to make a difference, whether you're an executor or a manager or a leader, if you want to make a difference, then it can't be about you. It has to be about something bigger than you outside of you. And in order for you to become involved in that, you have to gather information. And in order to gather information, you need to quiet yourself and listen. So I think any real valuable action that you take in your life has to start with listening because you need to understand the problem well. And you need to understand where you're fit in and how your skills can contribute to solving that problem. When we'd spoken about this sort of prepping for this, you'd mentioned active listening. How would you describe active listening? I think the easiest way I've been able to get people to understand what I the way I see it is to compare it to reading. If you're reading a book you are doing so to obtain information and if you stop reading to speak to somebody you stop taking in information and if you read a really interesting sentence and you start thinking about I could apply that in my context somewhere you stop taking in information. So it is a very deliberate and conscious activity to read and to take in this information. And if you think about the way that humans believe that they can multitask, it's not true. Nobody can multitask. We are really good at very fast task switching. But if you've ever tried to listen to somebody and read something at the same time, you'll realize after about five seconds that you've drowned them out completely if you're actually focusing on what you're reading. Or if you don't drown them out, then somebody could ask you, what did you just read? And you wouldn't be able to tell them. It's one or the other. You cannot take in both pieces of information effectively. You might get a couple of words here and there. And I find that listening is such an active and engaging function if you are doing it properly and if you are actually interested in absorbing the information that's being shared with you. And unfortunately most people listen to respond rather than listen to understand and they've already got their or they're starting to to formulate their answer while the person is speaking and as soon as you go through that activity of formulating your answer it's the same as when you're reading and then stop to think about what you've just read if you stop listening to the person that's speaking to you. And so active listening is a technique of being very present and being intentionally open and empty when you listen. So you are listening just to listen and shelving your opinion and shelving that inner need to help and problem solve and fix and give opinion, putting it all to one side until the person has finished speaking. And some of the best listeners that I've ever seen all have the same mannerisms and behavior is that when you finish speaking, they'll take between two and 20 seconds sometimes before they say anything, because it's only when you stop speaking that they actually start formulating and processing and creating their own opinions. And then they give you feedback and that two to 10 second pause of deliberation. such a fantastic indicator of whether or not somebody actually listened to you or if they cut you off on your last two words to start answering you it's an easy way to see who was really paying attention. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to pause for like two to five seconds now. Just like what you're saying there reminds me of something that we used for problem solving as well in systems thinking. And it's also like being immersed in the as is situation and focusing there instead of moving to what we want to fix it with straight away. And you speak about that listening to respond and you're formulating that answer. that may miss the point at the end of the day as well. like the systems thinking is you've got to stay in the as is, stay in the now, wait for the entire analysis to be done, then formulate. Then you can sort of start seeing a way forward to the as it should be and that side of things. fantastic practical observation of the same activities being present. Now, going back, we spoke about having the agreements and things can come in and life happens and things can go wrong. What happens with these agreements where there are things where it doesn't go the way it's intended at all? Not necessarily just for someone not knowing how to estimate their time. what happens where it really derails? I'd say that's probably the only right, correct place to have an expectation. Expected to derail. I used to have a post on my wall above my desk that was, it was a quote that I think was attributed to Mark Tyson that says, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And strategies of war survive until first contact. There's a couple of variations of those and that is the world we operate in. At an executor level, it is easier to plan because your feedback loop between decision making and result is very short. Sometimes minutes to days, shall we say. As you move up the management ladder and you take on more responsibility and larger teams and higher levels of strategy, that feedback loop gets longer and longer and longer until eventually if you're in a senior leadership position developing strategy for the entire organization. the time that it takes between your decision being made and seeing the absolute final results of those decisions can be months to years. So you change, completely change your strategy to pursue AI. We're only really going to know in the next two to five years how that's going to play out in any meaningful way. Although the early adopters have had some, some success and some, think the ones we haven't heard of have probably emptied the piggy bank trying to, trying to chase that. See that a lot? So I think, again, the key comes back to communication. We know that these are plans. These are not facts, they are plans. Plans are assumptions and then decisions made based on those assumptions. And the best thing that you can do is to make sure that you've got the right monitoring in place to identify when you're deviating from that plan. If it's a deliverable date, then you set milestones for... what you should have achieved by certain dates so that you can see if your velocity is correct. If it's financial, then you need to understand what the ramp up of your revenue looks like so that you can set milestones to say your sales team is not achieving target in the early days because it has a knock on effect. multiplying effect and you know that if you haven't achieved 10 % by now, you're not going to achieve 90 % by then. And to make sure that you do not stagnate and get locked up in fear of making decisions because you've committed to this, you're a top leader, you are the owner of the strategy, you committed the whole company's resources to this decision that you made and now you're going to have egg on your face if you change your mind. It's the absolute worst thing you can do. I think what the best leaders do is as soon as they realize that there was an incorrect assumption or the playing field changed, the assumption was correct but the playing field changed and things are not working, you need to pivot immediately and early. You put your ego away and you get your team around you and you make sure that you're communicating clearly and you change the plan. And I think what you're saying there, like speaking of putting that ego aside and all of that, that is that ownership that we're talking about and like taking ownership of the space and all that. As a leader you don't, a question you asked right in beginning that occurred to me now, as an executor you have a role and you have very clear obligations and responsibilities but as a leader you don't get to say that's not my job, that's not part of my responsibilities, it's all yours, you're accountable for everything. You might not be the person that needs to execute it. And I think that's where a lot of young leaders get stuck and get completely overwhelmed and burned out because they try and execute everything instead of owning everything. But there is a difference between owning a problem and being the one that does the work to solve it. Because you have a whole team around you and you've come from being an executor that is a GSD, you know, you really get things done and you take names and you get that dopamine hit because your tick list of tasks just gets crushed. And when you move to a leader, you have to rely on other people to do these things for you. And sometimes it feels like being a leader is not really work. Because you're not the one doing the coding or the firefighting or the problem solving, you're the one that's orchestrating all of this chaos and making sure that people don't forget about something in the business and following up with that person and hearing two problems in two different meetings and connecting those people because you know that they're going to clash with each other or they need each other's help. And it's all of that sort of orchestration, the conductor of the orchestra or the admiral of the army, just because he's not fighting out in the field doesn't mean he doesn't add huge value because the troops wouldn't be able to support each other if somebody wasn't overseeing everything and having everybody's back. And so you really have to have that mental shift when you move into a leadership position that you shouldn't be executing it, but you sure as hell are still responsible. Yeah. think just listening to that and, know, that, that to me is the ownership space and coming in from a very geeky side here. It just makes me think of the show Battlestar Galactica, the, the 2004 series. Admiral Adama, President Roslyn, like I think every manager should watch Battlestar Galactica because yes, it happens to be set in space, but it is such a great show about management and how to get things done and ownership and what happens. It's so real. love it. love it. Yeah, yeah, it works so well. So I mean, think Patric, this has been fantastic. And I think you've hit really well on that, like ownership. Don't be the victim when something goes wrong here. Own what's happening. Pivot quickly if, you know, these things do go wrong. Own it. work with it, get the solution happening, work with the team. I think that's great. Thank you very much for that. I think we could carry on speaking about this for ages, but we're coming up on time. Patric, what is something that's interesting you at the moment, something that you're working on? If people wanted to get in touch, could they do so? Give us a little bit about where you're at as we close off. Okay, if you want to get in touch, I'm probably most reachable on LinkedIn. You can search for me or search for D6 and you'll find me linked there. Interesting book I'm listening to at the moment is Don't Split the Difference about negotiation. I really highly recommend. I'm about halfway through now and it is not at all what I expected, but it's so much better. And I think given the content, was quite surprised by the content. I think it would be a fantastic book for anybody aspiring to leadership to read, because it really goes into one of the terms that the author uses is tactical empathy. It sounds a little cold for empathy. It's a bit strange, but it really helps to understand the difference between empathy and sympathy and how you can relate to somebody even if you don't agree with what they're doing, which I thought is such a powerful tool for anybody that has to. group of people. Yeah. Great. Thank you so much. And to our listeners, Patric's details will be in the show notes as well as a bit of a bio about him. Thank you so much for joining us, Patric. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in and till next time, keep swimming.