TL;DR
This roundtable explored how to intentionally shape culture during rapid growth, especially in remote-first environments. The conversation focused on psychological safety, feedback loops, leadership modeling, and empowering individuals to bring their authentic selves to work—without pressure to bring their whole selves.
- Culture Is Built, Not Found: Culture is shaped by intentional decisions, defaults, and design. It’s not magic—it’s a system that must be actively cultivated and measured.
- Psychological Safety Is Foundational: Safety enables feedback, experimentation, and growth. Without it, people won’t speak up, and culture stagnates or becomes toxic.
- Remote Work Requires New Rituals: In distributed teams, skip-level meetings, asynchronous communication, and developer experience surveys help leaders stay connected and responsive.
- Feedback Must Be Actionable and Reciprocal: Leaders must invite, receive, and act on feedback. Performance reviews at Zapier include upward feedback, with accountability for implementing changes.
- Empathy Over Ego: Zapier uses core values like “grow through feedback” and “default to transparency” create a culture where people feel empowered to challenge and support each other.
- Authenticity ≠ Oversharing: Bringing your authentic self doesn’t have to mean bringing everything. People should feel free to share what they choose, not be forced to reveal what they’d rather keep private.
- Middle Management Is Culture’s Fulcrum: Middle managers often shape culture more than executives or individual contributors, yet are rarely given the growth support they need.
- Trust Enables Healthy Conflict: Conflict is necessary for progress. When trust is present, feedback becomes a tool for growth rather than a source of fear.
Guest Links
Johanna: eponymous website, CreateAdaptableLife.com, LinkedIn
Jordan Stone: email
Autotranscript
This transcript was autocreated by AI (I know, right?) and has not been edited by a human. Errors may exist.
Michael Hunter
I am your host, Michael Hunter, with uncommon teams, and joining me today are Johanna Rothman, aka the pragmatic manager, who offers Frank, practical advice that you can immediately apply to your product development challenges. Johanna helps leaders and teams uncover effective alternatives to their current product development practices, since one size never fits all. She works with her clients to explore options for what and how to change this results in leaders and teams who learn to collaborate and focus on outcomes that matter. Explore all her books and writing at J rothman.com, and create adaptable life.com. Johanna, what puzzles you about culture?
Johanna Rothman
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I realizing that culture impacts the entire system of work, and I think that too often we ignore the fact of how the rewards impact the entire system, and how various rewards and recognition affect the culture in the small and the culture in the large.
Michael Hunter
Yes, so puzzling. I doing. Also joining us today is Jordan Stone, who is the Vice President of Engineering at patient, a growth stage startup focused on making healthcare more accessible and affordable. Prior to patient, Jordan has LED product and engineering teams and across industries, at large, publicly traded companies, digital agencies and startups. Jordan, what is something about culture that puzzles you?
Jordan Stone
That’s a great question, I think you know, especially today, post postcode, in a world where we’re all working very remotely, how? How are we driving culture in a world where we don’t have a lot of those in person touch points quite like we used to, to kind of reinforce the culture that we’ve been able to historically build, something that I think puzzles me and that we’re obviously always, always working to try to do, do better.
Michael Hunter
Yes, so much to get into that. Thank you. And also joining us is Jay Floyd, who is a data engineering leader, life coach and podcaster. Jay is also the curator of the what’s good brand, dedicated to finding the good in all of life scenarios, or, as he calls it, feeding our good wolf. Jay, something that puzzles you about culture.
Jay 
Floyd
First of all, I want to say that that is such a dope question. I love this question. It. I think when I think about culture, it takes me back to high school, right, to science class, right? We were putting things inside of test tubes and petri dishes and see what grows, right? Like you put it into certain conditions and you see what grows. I feel like that’s essentially what culture is. We’re all kind of just adapting to certain conditions. I think when it comes to when it comes to work and industry, it’s all just really a system, right? Like this. It’s a system of defaults, decisions, design, and I think because it can feel invisible, a lot of organizations or companies kind of treat it like it’s magic until, until it’s broken, right like until it’s not working, and then try to figure out what’s going on when, honestly, I think the best approach is to be proactive. We are culture builders, even when we don’t realize it right, intentionally and unintentionally. So a lot of the great culture that I’ve been a part of or helped to build has been intentionally thinking about, how do our decisions processes reinforce certain things in culture, what is it actually reinforcing, right? And not just, what does it intend to reinforce, but what is how we can we measure it, and did we did it work, right? So that’s how I think about it.
Michael Hunter
Yeah. Thank you. And I also am joining today. I partner with top tech leadership teams to create extraordinary cultures. For 35 years across six continents, I’ve helped top tech leaders at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce and Tableau sustain the changes they mean to make. You might say, I’ve done this in three distinct phases. I started out debugging code, and I switched to debugging people, and now I help people debug themselves and often their cultures and yes, and this is what we are here to talk about today culture and especially shaping strong cultures during rapid growth. And the reason I brought the three of you specifically together is not that your names all start with Jay, which I didn’t even realize till about two minutes ago, it’s that you are each well practiced in the tech leadership space. You’re never quite the person ultimately in charge, and yet you are always the one person that people are listening to.
Michael Hunter
So of all the puzzlements that we brought to the square table today, what would you all like to start with? What prompts up for someone?
Johanna Rothman
Can I ask a question? Yes, okay, okay, Jay, can you talk more about the I don’t remember the words you said it was either unconscious or magic or below the surface, or maybe all of those. Can you talk some more about that? Because I think you’re onto something very important there. I think that exposing culture is sometimes really difficult. Yeah,
Jay Floyd
I think, you know, I’ve been in the corporate world for about 19 years now, and I’ve been at, I work at Zapier right now as a data engineering manager, and it’s kind of been a, it’s a remote only culture, right? This was remote only even before covid, right? So, so 14 year old company has always been remote. There’s no office, there’s no headquarters, right? And so we’ve kind of, over the course of 14 years, developed a very unique intentional culture, right? We’ve kind of found what works and what doesn’t work. And some of the things that I’ve noticed about this org that I feel are being done probably Unin, you know, unintentionally at first, right? Like it had no choice but the core values. There’s five core values, and we literally live by them every day. I’ve never worked at a company where the values were more than just like words on the wall, right? But we literally are espousing these values constantly. We are challenging ourselves. Hey, if I’m having a tough time, am I doing these five values? Because if I’m doing them, I’m probably going to get myself out of this tough time like we we have literally built an intentional way to design our culture and questioning everything that we do and what is going to be the actual What is this reinforcing? Right? It’s one thing to say, hey, this has good intention, but we challenge ourselves on biases. We challenge ourselves on things such as Chesterton’s fence, right? You bring someone great in, somebody new to the environment. A lot of times, folks will rush in. And I see problems everywhere, and I want to fix them, but not think about the the unintentional backlash of fixing a problem, right? Sometimes it is a problem, but it all. It exists the way it does. So you have to examine all sides of it, right? You can’t just rush in and change things. So we do. We do. We challenge ourselves a lot. And I found that this magic that most companies believe in, right? I think I’ve seen companies, most companies I’ve been at, they challenge the executive level really hard, right? The executives have to grow constantly, and they challenge the ICS, performance management, performance management, right? So those two levels are constantly evolving, having to prove themselves, having to grow, but middle management doesn’t. And I think, in my opinion, that is the most impactful layer when it comes to setting a culture. So when you place the emphasis for growth across the board, equally, especially at that middle management layer. Give them the resources, the opportunity and the accountability to grow, then I think you build a much better culture that’s not just reliant on magic, because so many of those decisions are coming from middle managers, right?
Jordan Stone
Jay, how do you think about measuring that in a way that helps make sure that you’re sort of moving the needle in the right, in the right direction? How are you guys doing that? Maybe at Zapier today.
Jay Floyd
Yeah. So there’s always going to be a myriad of ways, but I think the key is letting culture reinforce itself, right? So do you build in a culture of testing decisions across the board? Right? If I come up with a good idea, and I’m kind of an idea guy, because I’m a creative right? So even as a manager, I’m always like, you know what? I got this left of center idea I want right here’s a really good example, because I’m a coach as a manager, I’m a very people centric manager. So some of my ideas can skew towards being people centric. I had a great idea a couple of months ago where I was like, You know what? We have weekly one on ones with every one of our direct reports through zoom. We’re having a synchronous one on one, but we have a global workforce. Some of my employees work in the UK or Poland or etc. It’s like, what if I changed this to where only every other week, we are meeting a we’re meeting sync. And then the off week, I just start an asynchronous kind of log where they can throughout the week, type what they’re going through. And that gives them two type of ways to communicate, because not everybody communicates great on the spot verbally, but if you give them some time to sit and think it through, they will eloquently describe what they’re going through. And I can I figured, this gives me two avenues to receive communication from all of my direct reports. This, this will raise our inclusivity. People who are neurodivergent will appreciate it. And I rolled this out, and my team loved it. Loved it. I didn’t ask for permission. Was our number one core value is default to action. So if you got a great idea, just go ahead with it, right? But you also default to transparency. So as I was rolling it out, I told all the leaders, hey, here’s what I’m trying, here’s what I’m trying, here’s why, here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish. And the first thing every manager, especially my senior director, said, how are you going to measure it, and what are the risks? And I think that is kind of what we should reinforce, right? Is it’s great to bring in ideas, but once you have a great culture, you have leaders who will challenge this. Sounds great, but how are you going to measure it, every single decision, how are you going to measure it, and what are the risks? So how I’m going to measure it is through engagement survey and through performance management, right? So I I have to know that this is a very people centric change. My directs are probably gonna love it, but the risk is that that off week, they could drop in performance, right? I don’t have to meet directly with Jay. I can just write things up. So yeah, I want to give them the trust. I am going to try it, but I am watching those off weeks, and I am carefully watching performance to ensure that this does not cause lack of accountability. It does not cause blockers and things to be raised more slowly. All of those things are what I’m watching even more carefully, because my senior director was like, This is great, but watch the flip side right. Watch that flip side.
Jay Floyd
But to answer your question, it’s always a myriad It depends, but the key is that you reinforce a culture where everybody knows that you need to measure all of the changes to ensure that you’re getting the result you want, because even the greatest ideas don’t always give you the results you want. Sure,
Michael Hunter
it’s a question for you Jay and for Jordan, Johanna, having that culture where people push back and ask these hard questions is great, maintaining that over time and especially where people lower their hierarchy feel able to do This to people hire the hierarchy. How do you maintain that now?
Jordan Stone
So I think at least for us at patient, there’s probably two things that we that we try, try to do. One is, because I am a manager of managers. Effectively, I’m also doing skip level meetings with folks that are not in my direct sort of reporting chain to better understand, like, moving, especially in a remote organization, you can’t, kind of walk the floor, like, like I would when I was in an office. So it’s an opportunity, first of all, for me to kind of better understand what those challenges that other folks have that I’m just too far away from their daily work, to understand we do developer experience surveys as well, which is obviously a helpful way to collect some of that feedback. But I think that direct engagement and asking, like, you know, one of the questions I’ll often ask is, what are we not shining a bright enough light on that you think we should be focusing on as an organization? And like, How can I help make sure that we’re shining that light? So I think the first is sort of like creating the opportunity for folks to share some of that feedback and to challenge directly. I’ve had people say, like, I don’t, I don’t think we’ve got enough diversity in our in our management team great. Like, let’s go, let’s go. Try to figure out how we can do a better job of that. The second piece is, I think, is asking for that, asking for folks to challenge you, like being open to being challenged in a public way, right? I think especially as leaders, there’s always that like praise in public and criticize in private kind of rule of thumb. But I think it’s important as leaders that we’re comfortable with being challenged publicly, not just privately, because it, I think it sets a tone for the organization. Neither of those things are particularly effective if you don’t actually do anything with that feedback, though. So I think that’s, that’s sort of the the full circle is making sure that you’re doing something. And so you know, you have that skip level, or you have that meeting where you encourage folks to challenge you. You got to take action on that. You’ve got to kind of close the loop and follow up and say, Hey, are you? Are you noticing changes from that? The last thing maybe I’ll say on this is in our developer experience survey, which we started running quarterly, the question I am probably the most focused on. There’s 50 something questions in that survey. Do you fit? Do you notice changes from your feedback from the last survey? If that’s not constantly up into the right, I don’t feel like as a as a team, as a leadership team, establishing that culture that we’re doing enough to make people feel comfortable, that they can, you know, bring those concerns or to challenge us, whether it’s directly or indirectly. So I think all of that stuff kind of plays a plays a role.
Johanna Rothman
And if I can add something, back when I was a manager inside organizations, I always made it a point to go visit the people who are not in in the Cambridge, Massachusetts office where I was working. This is, this is before we had zoom. This is before we had reliable FTP and TCP. So I’m old, that’s fine, great. Gray hair. And so I actually went, Yeah, I have more. I actually went to California to visit the other people that with whom we worked. A lot I did not do at the time. I did not do skip level one on ones, and that’s because I too often work for managers who are not sufficiently relaxed about my my abilities to support them, they were always in a state of paranoia. So the more I looked good, they often thought, the more they looked bad. So the safety that you two are describing, I don’t think is common to a lot of other organizations, and safety is a part of that, of that culture in between, right? I my practice has changed. My management style has changed. Thank God. I’m a little bit more mature than I was, you know, all those years ago, maybe a little bit more. I’m not I’m not planning on a lot, but I do find that I have to be very intentional when I suggest to one of my trusted advisor clients that they do skip level meetings and I asked them a lot of questions. First, how, how? How does the manager in the middle feel about your potential meetings? How have you supported the manager in the middle’s career in the past? What are you hoping to gain from this? And I mean, I, I used to always ask for rumors in my team meetings, because people didn’t always tell me, right? So I I’m always looking for the not quite, not always objective data, um, that I can use, but subjective data also, if people understand about the rumors that are going around, the more we can expose those rumors, the better it is for the culture, the less paranoia. There is engine right? There’s there’s always exceptions to that rule, but I find that really being intentional about how I want, how I want to be seen, where, the where, where is the value I add to the organization? How do I support the people in the various levels between me and I’m not going to call them ICS Jay, I’m going to call them team members, because I don’t really like people working alone, so I see, for all of you, is individual contributor. So I refer team member. That’s a different conversation, or maybe it’s the same, I don’t know, but I really want to make sure people see me as supporting everybody’s career from wherever I am to wherever they are, right? And that’s up, down and sideways.
Jay Floyd
I think, I think as far as I love, first of all, I love that team member reflection, that’s really good for us, again, I think the core values are, what, how we enforce that’s the baseline, right? So I mentioned default to action, default to transparency. The other three are empathy over ego. Build the robot. Don’t be the robot. And the last one is, grow through feedback. And that is something that we kind of plant in everything, right? So every single person has a manager, and every single person is able to give direct upward manager feedback, right? On a by by annual basis. So every six months, we all receive feedback from all of our direct reports, and we are challenged to put actions in place, to grow in that feedback that we received, and we’re graded on how we receive that feedback and put actions in place. So my performance, per se is, how did I achieve doing the actions that I put in place based on what my team members are saying directly about me. Also, I think we use some org principles that I think are good. One that I really love is called say the hard truth, and we really reinforce that. You know that as a manager, there’s a lot of times you have a one on one, and you’ll get some feedback from one of your team members. Hey, I’m I want to, I want to tell you something about another colleague, or you’ll get a message from another colleague or their manager about one of your team members, right? And one of the things that we always across the board start with is you should give that feedback to them directly and reinforcing that culture. I’m here to support you if you need support in how to say it. We have resources that will not only train you on powerful and effective communication, having hard conversations, delivering good feedback, but I will also be here with you to support you in writing it, if you would like. And so given that feedback directly, and having folks work on building that muscle of, hey, I don’t I think this can change. I think you can do that better and learning how to say it right of when you do this, this happens. And because of that, this is how I’m feeling, and here’s what I like for you to do better, challenging that other person to get better, and making it not really an unhealthy conflict, but a healthy conflict, because you need conflict to move forward, right? Even cars need friction to drive up the road is literally where the rubber meets the road. So we love to make that conflict healthy and to make it widespread everyone from from our CEO all the way down, all of our communications, we’d like to lace them with welcoming feedback. We want feedback. We want feedback. And you have to also. We constantly remind ourselves that we are holding some gravity based on your role. You know you can’t. You may invite feedback, but you’re not going to always get all of it. So then having the wherewithal to know that and seek out either whether listening tours or finding feedback in other ways, I love skip levels. Skip levels are some of my favorite meetings. I just had one yesterday with our senior director, which was a double skip level. It was really great. I love those. Those are my favorite ones. But yeah, I think again, leaning into those core values and trying to set that tone across the board. Nobody’s nobody or no organization is perfect. You just have to really be intentional to try to build fertile ground for what you’re looking for, specifically when it comes to psychological safety,
Michael Hunter
for people working in teams who don’t have or don’t feel they have psychological safety and don’t feel they have power to just go out and start changing things. What can we do to give ourselves and our teammates a little more safety, a little more power to make things the way we wish they were?
Jay Floyd
Empower? Empowerment coaching, right? You we have to empower folks. You know, sometimes that feedback, you have to nudge it along, right? Sometimes I’m in a one on one with a direct report, and they’re like, Hey, I would I really have some ideas about this that could really benefit, I don’t know, directors, senior directors, hey, how about you pitch it in in the right setting, right? And I’ll be there to support you, right? It doesn’t have to be me. You can do it right. And empowering, I think is great. And giving folks the opportunity to stretch and grow and not have to be perfect again. That’s why we start with default to action, because we don’t prioritize perfect action, just action.
Johanna Rothman
I want to take a little bit of a different perspective Jay, because I find that in my I mean, people only bring me in when there are problems, right? I’m a consultant. People never bring me in when everything is going well. So and when I meet with various other humans in the organization, I almost always get the JR can you? Can you come with me for a minute? I need to tell you something, and I need you to bring it to senior management, to adminal management, to the scrum master, to somebody. And that’s when I will often say, How have how have you tried to bring this information already to this other person or these other people, and sometimes they say, I haven’t tried it all, and that’s when I do the informal coaching. But often I find that they say I’ve tried and it didn’t work. And they always, they only tried once. They tried, possibly with a too blunt and direct approach. I excel at those so I can recognize them. And sometimes they say, I need this job, I need to pay my mortgage, I need to pay I need the health care. I’m not going to make any ripples, because even though I see this as a problem, I cannot afford to take the chance that that I will stick my head up and somebody will lock it off, and that’s when I say, Okay, if I, if I do this for you, how will you change Then, right? How will you reinforce the thing, the actions that I take? And I’m assuming that this is in the purview of my consulting, because if not, then I won’t, I won’t take that. And I will say, here’s how you can talk to your manager. But change always starts with us. Right? The person who sees the need for change, and if, if it’s so unsafe that they really cannot imagine how to change, then I wonder if that’s really a reasonable place for them to work at all.
Jordan Stone
Yeah, I think there’s. And I’ve seen these, these teams before, also where it’s so unhealthy that that Johanna, like, like you’re saying, you can’t even raise, raise your hand. But I think in in teams, or in cultures where you’ve got, like, this inkling of we can get there, I just don’t really know how I think it starts with trust, sort of as the underlying foundation of this. So like even, even in our teams, when we’ve got folks, you know, leaving leaving the company or joining the company, we encourage all of our teams to have these ways of working workshops, right? And the first piece of that is get to know who these people are as actual people, because there’s this idea of, like, bring your whole self to work, right? Like, like, we’re, we’re people here and outside of work is it’s the same person. It’s not two halves. Like, I don’t, I don’t leave this small office and turn into a different person. My wife might disagree, but I don’t turn into a different person when I leave, right? So what we’ve what I’ve found, at least, is that if you don’t have that, that trust that underpins this idea of like, Hey, I’m raising my hand because I want the same thing that you want, or I want the best possible outcome for for the team or for you as an individual. If, like, Jay, like you were saying, If I challenge you directly, it becomes really hard for someone not to kind of take that personally, or to feel like, like your incentives are misaligned with theirs. And so that tends to be where we where we start. Or if you know, if someone is asking me, like, how can I feel more comfortable raising my hand or saying something? It tends to start there, right? Like, make sure that people know where you’re coming from and who you’re coming as that tends to start the conversation on a better foot.
Jay Floyd
Yeah, I agree with that. And to touch on one thing that I think you both kind of talked about, when you’re in that situation where you feel like it’s unhealthy and you can’t speak up in the way that you want to, right? And I’ve I coach a number of people through those situations, because I tend to coach other data leaders, right? That’s kind of who gets assigned to me. But what I found is, and I think you touched on this a little bit, also, Jr, if I can call you Jr, it is. It starts with with self, so many leaders I know say, hey, you know what? I’m frustrated. It feels like I’m always the problem. I say, I give the feedback. Nobody takes it the right way, and what we end up coming to is understanding and learning how to communicate right? There’s a there is an effective way to communicate that you can be the sharpest engineer, you can be the sharpest leader and still need those teaching mechanisms to learn how to overcome the weight that you’re pressing. And it almost feels like the sharper the engineer or the sharper the leader, the more pressing they can be, right, the more damage can be done when they are not eloquent or effective with their communication, and they need to learn how. And you know, honestly, in my opinion, I’m not a big the first thing everybody tells me, like, Jay, I get it. I love your coaching, but I don’t want to apologize, right? I feel like I’m having to sanitize what I’m saying. I gotta, I gotta erase my messages 50 times and rewrite them, and by the end of the day, by the by the time I publish it, it’s not me anymore. And I’m always flipping that around because I’m like, Listen, what I’m trying to get to is even more of you, not less of you. If you know you are an abrasive person. Lead with that. Lead with that. I’m working on it. I got a coach, and my coach told me to say this, that’s default to transparency. Transparency is bigger than honesty, right? When you lead with transparency, you set the most clear table possible, right? This is something, you know what? Usually when I say this, people get pissed off, but so I’m working on it. Please let me know if this is going the wrong way. Look, you’re going to piss people off anyway. You might as well let them know I’m working on this. I’m trying. Oh, welcome that feedback that can set a better table for people to say, You know what? Actually, that was pretty and what you find is nine times out of 10. If you start that way, most people are like, No, that was fine, but if you don’t include that, they will get pissed off. It’s amazing how it works.
Michael Hunter
That reminds me of one of the classic coaching techniques of before you tell them the thing that may be hard to hear, you tell them you’re going to tell them something that may be hard to hear, and even if you’re especially clever, ask them, Is it okay if I Tell you something that may be hard to hear? I interesting
Johanna Rothman
we are. We are so clever in this industry. We we are sometimes our own worst enemies. And what, what people cannot see. I put something in the chat. I said the whole self is totally overrated. So I Jordan, I think you talked about the whole self, or maybe it was Jay. I remember which one of you, but I I find that I would much rather discuss my authentic self, and I can still constrain my authentic self. I’m just finishing a book now called effective public speaking, and then that I gave, I give an example. I never swear with a microphone on, right? Never, because that’s not part of the persona I want to project. Um, microphones off, yeah, I swear all the time. I’m an old sailor, right? I learned how to swear in my teens. I think that swearing is a great technique for releasing some tension at the appropriate times and never with a microphone on, and probably never as a manager, I have been known to swear about situations where, especially with cascading defects, where you, you uncover one thing, and then that causes something else, and then that causes something else, and it runs away from you. I have been known to swear at that situation and never at the people. So that’s, I think the only time I’ve ever sworn at work, I should probably check with people. But I think it’s really important to bring who we are, but not all of us. We can constrain who we are and still be authentic.
Jay Floyd
I love that. I love that, and that is a topic that’s really kind of central to my coaching. I’m a strengths based life coach, so I’m constantly helping folks really identify their authentic self. I think it’s correct, right? We don’t, you don’t. It’s up to you how much of yourself you want to bring, right? It doesn’t have to be your whole self. You can still constrain that. I think the bigger thing, in my opinion, and I think where that sentiment probably got its fuel, is, you know, there’s just so many people, and I’m one of them, right? So when I started in the corporate world, I didn’t come from the traditional background, and I didn’t have the what I considered traditional, right? I grew to learn that there is no traditional but for what in my mind was traditional educational background or upbringing. And when I started in the corporate world, I kind of like, if people would make small talk with me, I wouldn’t tell my whole life story, right? I would, I would, you know, fictionalize it or just leave a ton of it out, or, you know, make up some stuff that sounded like some TV things that I saw, and what I’ve learned is that was to my detriment, because once I gained the courage to really tell me and be authentically me, there was a lot of strength that came out of my story that I can use in the corporate world, right? The way that I got there and what I learned, it took me about 35 years to learn everybody’s like that, right? We’re all so unique, and we been through so many different things and challenges that almost kept us from getting where we wanted to go and when you finally get there, sometimes we hide it, but if we bring that strength and those chat, the things that we learned going through those challenges, that is a unique resource in our employment, right? And that unique shape is tough to replace when you really maximize all of it. And so that’s kind of where I center all of my coaching. That’s what my latest book called, rare on purpose is all about making yourself a different shape than just that, that rectangle of your job description, right? Be all of the things that. How did you get here? What brings you here? Bring that strength and let that form a unique shape that nobody else has. And there’s always value in uniqueness.
Michael Hunter
And I in the freedom to bring the parts of us we want to bring to work, not necessarily, and especially not being forced to bring all the rest is a critical piece of safety. Yes, there, if there are parts of me I don’t want to bring to work, then inquiring as to why that is is really useful. Is it because I’m afraid of how people at work will react? Is it because it’s not relevant? Is it because I explicitly don’t want to for some reason, and all of those really useful and very growth inducing, if I’m ever forced to bring things I don’t want to bring. That’s maybe worse than not being able to bring parts I do want to bring. I right,
Johanna Rothman
and has a very detrimental effect on the culture. Do you have an example of one of those?
Michael Hunter
I know people who read genres of books that they would never admit to the people they work with. Ethan Thoreau, probably many of the other people on the team read the same books.
Jay Floyd
You know, you know I can, I can relate to specifically that first part that you said, I know when I when I was growing up, I grew up in a really rough neighborhood, and I was like, this nerdy, straight a kid that got made fun of all the time, and my teachers and guidance counselors were like, Hey, you should apply to Ivy League schools. And I’m like, I don’t even understand what you mean by that, right? And unfortunately, when I was 16 and right, in the midst of having to make those decisions for college, my only brother, who was my father figure, was murdered, and I just tailspun, right? I didn’t have any enthusiasm for school anymore. I didn’t care about which college I wanted to go to, and I was completely off track. And I would just went to a community college and got a job there fixing computers. And, you know, just wanted to exist. And, you know, it’s interesting how life works, and I ended up being receiving the same opportunities I would have gotten otherwise, and being right back on track, right and but when I got there, I didn’t want to talk about where, what had happened. I didn’t, you know, when people talked about, where’d you go to college, and why I didn’t that’s not a story I wanted to lead with. I didn’t want to be the black guy that everybody felt sorry for. That was not what I wanted, right? I was already, you know, I got a I started in the corporate world before I even graduated college. The last thing I wanted was pity, and I just so for years, probably about 10 or 12 years, I just never talked about my life or my upbringing or anything, right? So I can understand, for me, it was a hiding, a hiding, and it was but it was based around a lie, right? It was the lie that everybody else is normal, and I’m not, and what I learned is everybody’s just unique. There is no normal.
Michael Hunter
Is no normal is maybe a great way to summarize fantastic culture. Yeah, as we wrap up here today, Jordan, what are you taking away and to experiment with today?
Jordan Stone
I think Jay sort of opened with it and his idea around one on ones with folks, and kind of like different ways to engage with people that isn’t always Hey, Let’s stare at each other through a screen for 30 minutes once a week and talk about what’s on your mind. I think giving folks that opportunity to feel more comfortable in ways to that communicate, that align with with how they best express themselves, is something that I think we can all probably experiment with more, and that’s something I’ll definitely take away from today.
Michael Hunter
I am excited to hear what you discover with that. Jay, what are you taking away from today to experiment with?
Jay Floyd
We all need to hire Johanna Rothman as a consultant to come in and fix things. Because, man, I can see she has a wealth of knowledge in this area. There was a point that she made about certain environments where things may be toxic. I don’t know if she used the word toxic, but they’re around, right? And as a highly sought after, and I’m sure highly paid consultant, Jay has seen they, she gets called into those type of environments a lot, and I think it’s really important. One of the things that that sparked in me is that even when you can be proud of the culture that you’re building, not everybody comes from or is going to a culture like that. So it’s key to keep that in mind, especially empathy wise, as I’m just meeting folks, coaching folks, all of those things, I thought I got a lot from that.
Michael Hunter
Great thank you, and I’m sure Johanna will be happy to come work for you. I would,
Johanna Rothman
I would. So if I can, I got a whole bunch out of this, especially a different appreciation for those skip level meetings and how to make them even better for the people who I work with. Because I think, I think finding, finding all of the ways to get information in any organization, but especially a distributed organization, is really important. And I, as Jay, I think, I think you said we’re all unique, that that’s how we how we work, who we are, how we manage all of that we can we can take the general culture, and we all put our own unique stamp on that culture, and part of that culture is, how do we find the undercurrent in the organization positive and negative, right? There’s, there’s always positive undercurrents also. And then how do we use all of that information and make everything better? I really like to think about helping everyone succeed, right? This rising tide business really totally works in product development. The more we think about that, the more we we increase our capacity and make our organizations even better. So that’s where I am. Michael,
Michael Hunter
thank you, Johanna. What I am taking away today, one of the many things I talk all the time about, I help people bring their whole selves to work, and I hadn’t considered till this conversation that I know that I mean the parts of you that you want to and you don’t feel afraid to bring any of the parts. And so I will experiment with different ways of describing that. To make that clear, this isn’t a imposition, it’s a offering. Thank you Jay Jordan and Johanna for a fabulous conversation today.
Jordan Stone
Thank you. This is fun. Yeah, this is great. You.
Michael Hunter
And we’re done recording. Thank you all. Any thing else you’d like to say? I’ll connect you on LinkedIn after we get off. Good.
Johanna Rothman
Jay, gonna look you up. Find your books. Please do.
Jay Floyd
Apparently
Jordan Stone
I need to write a book. I didn’t realize that, Jordan, I’m sorry, everybody,
Michael Hunter
that is one way you can stay unique. Jordan is because you’re the one tech leader who doesn’t know. Yeah,
Johanna Rothman
yeah. It’s okay. It’s all right. All right. Speaking of writing and I have more Go ahead. Both Johanna
Michael Hunter
and Jay have been on my podcast, so if you’d like more of either of them, can go to uncommon teams.com and look at the podcast. Johanna was my very first one, I think one or two, and Jay was later on,
Jordan Stone
awesome. I’ll check it out.
Michael Hunter
to see Johanna. I
Johanna Rothman
was in the same, I have more writing. To do so, I’m gonna, I’m going to thank everybody, and take off, and, and see you on LinkedIn. All right,
Michael Hunter
that’s okay, that’s good, thanks.
Johanna Rothman
Yeah, bye.