Speaker 0 | 00:00.160
They have a thing called the confidence course built into the military. It’s basically to build your self-confidence that you can do more than you think you can. And it’s a really complicated obstacle course. But when you complete it, it works the way you would expect it to.
Speaker 1 | 00:21.696
Everybody listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’re going into this without any preparation whatsoever or, you know, and do we call you Tom or Thomas? Do you go by Thomas? What do people call you at work? Do they call you level 76? They call you Tom. Okay. Just want to make sure.
Speaker 0 | 00:40.576
Level 76. Yeah. Leader. Yeah. That’s network magician.
Speaker 1 | 00:46.619
Yes. Thank you. I mean, it really is. And the reason why I’m bringing this up is I. got cold called i don’t know if it was cold called it was kind of a cold call it was like a second cold call what do you call that when someone calls calls you and you tell them oh my gosh really like you didn’t ask me about you know it was now a good time you didn’t ask me you know if i’m living the dream or the nightmare you just went right into you know how your product is giving me a benefit and can we set up a time to talk and this is where my this is where my i’m just letting you know where my brain is at today and if you just did a little research you would see that tom is a herder of cats a former network magician which is not really a real thing it’s it’s a metaphor for i’m able to deal with stupid stuff and fix broken and uh deal with other things that are i don’t know i’m able to make things happen yeah Father, husband, a forever learner. I almost said former learner. That would have been funnier. And I guess my point is, is when we talk with people, let’s connect, discover and respond. And I think it’s important to plug myself completely selfishly here and ask you how we met.
Speaker 0 | 02:19.035
Well, that’s it.
Speaker 1 | 02:20.736
I just got to start it off. I don’t usually do this, you know, but let’s do it.
Speaker 0 | 02:25.660
I got I got a what we’ll call it a cold call by LinkedIn. Right.
Speaker 1 | 02:30.444
Cold DM.
Speaker 0 | 02:31.285
But it was. Yeah, it was a it was different. So it attracted my attention and I went ahead and did my research, added added a LinkedIn person that was, you know, it’s definitely some sort of vendor. something or definitely helps people do that they want they want to help people but they look like a vendor to me so then i go to their website and i do some research and it’s got some it’s got some stuff that i’m looking to do so i’m super excited and then i read through it and i don’t really get anything out of it and i get kind of frustrated so for the first time ever i respond back to one of these cold dms and i’m a little ruthless little uh little army sergeant uh showed up in that method you want me to read it
Speaker 1 | 03:19.156
Maybe we should read this. Can I find it? Oh, come on, LinkedIn. Keep going. Keep going. Don’t stop. I’m going to try and find this.
Speaker 0 | 03:30.362
So you responded and you gave me a little more info. We decided I decided to go ahead and take a call with you and not with any of my network people or any of my systems people. I was just going to placate your call, probably listen to what I considered BS and then just and then just hang up on you and be done with it. And instead, it was actually helpful. And I felt bad. And I referred you to my network engineer. And then we ended up using your service to help implement our team’s voice migration, which is a huge deal. And it went way smoother than it ever could have. And everything worked out perfectly. And I kind of had to eat crow and say, that’s wrong.
Speaker 1 | 04:06.250
Man, I wish. LinkedIn is, they’re not allowing me to search back to old messages from now on. They must be afraid of like data scrapers. Something like that. I’ll have to go to my database, a.k.a. email, which everyone, which of course, everyone in your that’s your database and your company, of course, has got to be email. But yeah, I think what it started off with is, hi, I know you wanted to connect with another bearded telecom. I mean, another bearded technology guru. So here I am. And you, of course, having a, I hope you still have this amazing beard. You know, that’s, that just helped. You know, that just helped. Grave before shave. I’ve never heard that. Oh. So, um, moving on, will you, yes, basically said, you know, Phil, uh, I’m not, you know, I’m really not bragging here, but I am a big deal at this company. And, um, I don’t usually respond to these things, but because you did something that was different, this is just coaching. Now we’re coaching. You got everyone listening to the show, like really sad, pitiful people that are really bad at sales or something. you know, when you get really successful after listening to the show, you can send me five bucks. Um, the, um, uh, regardless, he responded because we were human beings. And this is kind of what I was talking about this morning because people just call and they just start talking. And at the end of the day, people really don’t care about, you know, your, they, they do care about the blinky lights and all that stuff, but really people don’t care. They just want to talk. They were all trying to do the same thing, which is. I guess maybe free ourselves from the man or make money and try and like live a better life somehow. So it’s, it’s always nice to have someone that recognizes that before they try to sell you something that, you know, if it is going to make my life better, fine. But thank you. Thank you for that testimonial. Anyone out there listening? Yeah. Anyone out there looking to migrate to Microsoft Teams that wants to avoid PowerShell nightmare work, and you want to make it as smooth as possible, call me. That’s, that was the point of this, point of this first thing. And I don’t usually do this.
Speaker 0 | 06:25.127
A little commercial. And you know what? And I’ll back you up. It went really smooth. We’re using the system. We migrated. I am calling you on my team’s number right now. So we migrated. It’s useful. We’re doing our piece. It’s huge. And all of that conversation reminded me of what prep work did exist for this. I remember what we were going to talk about.
Speaker 1 | 06:48.338
Great.
Speaker 0 | 06:49.338
It was Teams.
Speaker 1 | 06:51.672
Oh, it was like, why, why? Oh no. And now I remember now, I remember you have a whiteboard, you have a whiteboard that you guys call the Bane was T what does that mean? First of all, I know what the Bane means, but it’s kind of like, if I think of, I don’t know, uh, Star Trek or something, wasn’t there like, what was that? What was that? Like one guy that showed up in every now and then the episode that lived at like the outskirts of like the universe or something like that. What was that called? It was like the. the queue or something like that. Anyhow, I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 07:22.417
That would be, that would be cute. I’m a star Wars nerd. So you’re outside my realm, but you know, there’s always that divide in IT, but yeah, so we, we had to do, we had to do it. We had to do a, basically a domain swap where we, we, cause we changed company, we rebranded. And so we had to buy our, buy out our own company and we, we had to whiteboard everything out and come up with a plan. And part of that was to implement Microsoft teams as our communication platform. and then to eventually migrate to it for voice once that was available but the um the reason why we were going to talk about that is because rolling the teams roll out and training saved us March March of 2020 because we had moved to this platform this communication platform rolled it out and trained it and never skipped a beat when we went home and had it not have we not happened have we not moved to this platform we had not integrated this platform and started using it with terraforming some other pieces we could have very well fell on our face like everybody else did during that time frame as an organization but we didn’t we woke up and it’s continued to it’s continued to save the day we had from here in Ohio we got a nice little smacking of 11 inches of snow out of nowhere nice normally that’s people trying to figure out how to work but instead they just logged in yeah their job and communicated instead of meetings and as if they were standing in the office together it’s not like it’s not a perfect switch right there’s a lot of changes and a lot of stuff that has to be adopted to that for a hybrid work environment but the ability to do that would have never existed had we not made
Speaker 1 | 09:01.362
the made some moves and did some changes i was screwing around with vpns and last minute licensing upgrades and i don’t know maybe we’ll just buy a couple hundred zoom licenses and stuff like that and Zoom was…
Speaker 0 | 09:16.984
Yeah, so it was an interesting time frame. And basically, it was just a dart at a wall. I had made a guess that we needed a communication platform. I didn’t expect it to play out the way it did.
Speaker 1 | 09:29.971
What were you guys on before? I can’t remember. Were we on like some like a Viya PBX or some Panasonic? What were you on before? I can’t remember.
Speaker 0 | 09:36.895
For phone systems, we had moved to a cloud phone system through Jive, which was… you know at the time when we did that go to connect that was that was the thing that’s how people did remote meetings it was either that or cisco the only things you saw at that time as zoom and team showed up i mean their marketing strategy was perfect but they hit right before they became big easy
Speaker 1 | 10:00.460
easy clicks right before everyone needed to go home it’s amazing how yeah i’ve been working with with zoom for at least 10 years so i knew about zoom before it was ever even a thing and it was being distributed a lot through uh white label partners so a lot of other the other um void players uh you know braview nhc um i can’t remember if i don’t think next eve uh a bunch of them basically were using zoom as their as their video platform of choice just It didn’t say Zoom. It said whatever that company was. And then they grew really fast as people started to like it. So good for them to a certain degree.
Speaker 0 | 10:41.022
And Microsoft had Skype, which was, I mean, okay, but not nearly as scalable as it needed to be. They just folded that platform and teamed.
Speaker 1 | 10:50.606
It’s amazing they didn’t develop Skype faster. I’m just thinking, you know, because I can remember years ago, people using Skype as a kind of like the free international calling type of thing, right? Like this is how we got around international calling cards and stuff. Oh, just Skype me. Right. That’s what it was. That’s what I remember. That’s kind of like my first, you know, vision of what Skype was. I was just surprised that they didn’t build that out fast enough. I think it’s mainly because Microsoft doesn’t want to be a telecom company, which I don’t think it still does. I just think it’s they have to be kind of which is. Again, back to why I’m so special and because you don’t need to pay that stupid licensing fee. So even though we did everything smooth for you and did all of that, the other flip side was you saved a ton of money.
Speaker 0 | 11:38.966
Yeah. Actually, implementation cost and total overall cost is definitely lower than it would have been if we attempted to do it ourselves. And that’s just like literally out of pocket cost. No. opportunity cost and a project flip cost and all it would have taken to actually roll this out um it was it was it was moving fast and it flicked yeah so again thank you for placating
Speaker 1 | 12:07.128
me i don’t even know what that means i’m hoping i’m using the right definition there the the bane let’s talk about some leadership though in general and i and again to go back to your harshness of me just to coach people out there a little bit he um tom read an article that is on my website that i have yet to update which i am going to update based on this podcast he read my article on microsoft teams which i thought was a masterpiece i mean really i thought this was like here’s the three different You can, you know, implement teams. You can go directly to Microsoft. You can go get your own SBCs. You can use a direct routing partner. You can do all this. Here’s blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my masterpiece got trashed by him. He basically said, you know, thanks for telling me nothing that I didn’t already know. Have a nice day. And I’m used to getting pretty much beat up my entire life. That’s why I don’t know. We don’t have time for the psychology of that. But. I was just like, cool, you know, thanks. I guess it was terrible. But here’s, you know, what did I not tell you? And I guess that’s what I just want to say. Well, most people, because I think most people don’t know that you can implement Teams three different ways. I think everyone knows you can go to Microsoft and pay the stupid $12 per the phone system cost, which is $8. So $12. Calling for each user in the United States and then if you want to make international calls you gotta add another $12 So that’s 30 bucks a license for each person at a bare minimum What a 12 plus 20 at a bare minimum 20 bucks per person Which is ridiculous if you have an organization of a thousand people or more It’s just ridiculous for anyone if you have an organization of 200 or 100 people Here’s my question. And then, so the other option would be is like, well, we don’t want to do that. We’re going to use SIP trunking and let’s bring in our own SBCs and let’s, you know, let’s, you know, manage this all of ourselves. And if you’re a mid-market company, you don’t have the IT. It’s not a matter of whether you have the knowledge or expertise. It’s a matter of, do you have the time and the. the justification for the capex costs of the spcs and managing it and all that type of stuff while at the end of the day it might be cheaper because you’re just paying for a few zip trunks why would you do that and then you have of course uh the direct routing partner route which is what we ended up doing which is let the direct routing partner do the spc piece and all of that and and let’s you know avoid the the powershell stuff and do the migrating through using a tool and that’s what we ended up using you So what did I forget to mention or what was not beneficial in that article that I need to add in? Was it? Was it the PowerShell piece? Because I didn’t put that in the article. I didn’t put the PowerShell in. I didn’t put the tools in. What were we missing that when you actually saw it, you were like, holy crap, this is better than I thought. Or this is not what I was expecting to see. What did you see that you were not expecting to see?
Speaker 0 | 15:20.391
It’s interesting. I don’t think that it was. I think that I wanted, when I read the article, I wanted. some insight into what I already knew just a little bit deeper. And I was hoping that even if at the end of it, it turned me towards a, and if you want to go further with this option, please contact me. I was hoping to get greater insight into those three, like the three, because the known paths were there. You introduced the path that was new to me, but I didn’t feel like it had bells and whistles. I’m like, aha, this is the one. Like, I just was like the, okay. So This might be a little bit different, but I don’t, I don’t see, I’m not seeing this as like an end all be all aha moment for me. I just, I feel like I just read everything I’ve Googled for the last week in one spot instead of in six different spots. And, um,
Speaker 1 | 16:14.118
Well, that’s gotta be helpful. That’s gotta be at least helpful if you had just, you know, I mean, you don’t have to Google much. Thanks. I’m a Google, I’m a Google alternative. That’s what, that’s as good. And I’m going to put that down as a bullet point for myself. Google alternative.
Speaker 0 | 16:29.658
We talk about, we say, why didn’t it work? But maybe, like I said, maybe your blog posted exactly what it was supposed to because it may have angered me. But did we end up talking and using you? Yeah, so maybe it did exactly what it was supposed to. I mean, I’m not a marketing guru. That’s not my field. I’m not a… If I was a social influencer, well, then I’d be.
Speaker 1 | 16:55.951
Well, I can tell you one thing. I don’t have all the angry people calling me. All the angry people that read the article aren’t calling me and saying, Phil, what the heck? You know, I don’t have that happening. So, you know, I have a feeling that that, you know, there’s maybe something wrong with it. But
Speaker 0 | 17:11.800
Google. It could very well be me. I mean, let’s be honest here. Maybe I’m maybe I maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. But then again, everybody in IT should. definitely question their existence in that job field at least seven times a day because that is exactly what happens like you hit this point of like and you should if you were ever sitting around to me anyways you’re sitting behind the desk you’re like i got all this i know everything that’s going on um then you don’t and you’re at the beginning of your dunning cougar curve and hang on for the roller coaster because you’re going the other way you’re going to end up feeling like you don’t know anything in a few months um because that that that reminds me a lot of the entry-level people you bring in they just they seem like they they just got it and you’re like you you you don’t you don’t know what you don’t know yet give it a second you’re gonna question your existence daily because that’s that is that’s that’s i.t um there’s that’s problem solving though really just constantly why why why did i think this would work where was my thought process let’s solve this out again because maybe i didn’t think this through as much as i thought i did And in this instance, I responded to you because I read the article. I didn’t feel like I got anything out of it. And then you hit me. You just happened to hit me. The timing couldn’t have been better. You hit me with another message right as I was reading the article, which caused me to respond more than I probably would have just ignored you. Later on, I’d be like, ah, it’s what? But instead, I was reading the article. I didn’t feel like I was getting it. You messaged me again. Maybe you are a real person and not some bot feeding me info all the time. And, uh, and it, like I said, it dived into a conversation in, in, in, in, into this conversation.
Speaker 1 | 18:53.806
I don’t even know how I did it either, because to be honest with you, the whole reason why I use LinkedIn is to find, uh, it leaders to interview on my podcast. So I don’t even know how we, how we got to that. Oh, I think you just, I think I asked you to be on the show or something. So you went to the website and read the Microsoft teams article just all on your own. I think that that’s how it happened. And you’re like, Hey, yeah, yeah. You’re like, I read this lame article on your website. And I was like, Oh. Well, since we’re on that subject, I can.
Speaker 0 | 19:21.624
Wait, I want to talk to you as an IT leader. Oh, cool. Let me check out your website. Oh, we’re getting ready to do a team’s migration. Oh, I feel like I was tricked. I’m going to respond. And maybe it was one of those days. And maybe, you know, this happens a lot. This happens a lot in organizations. Maybe it was one of those days where I had an argument with somebody above me, a CEO, a CFO, that I couldn’t win and I knew I couldn’t. But maybe this argument I could win. So maybe I turned some anger in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1 | 19:50.082
Well, I mean, we’re all here to at the end of the day, it’s a little bit of a trick. I mean, we’re all here to make money and put food on the table. But let me ask you this. Would you rather have Somebody, would you rather work with somebody, and I’m again selfishly plugging myself, would you rather work with somebody that has dedicated their life to really understanding you and your job and your leadership principles and how you make decisions and the interworkings of an IT director or a direct sales rep that was hired out of college that is just trying to meet quota?
Speaker 0 | 20:26.933
Man, it’s just a hard choice.
Speaker 1 | 20:28.994
I know when you put it that way, Phil, you know, I mean, but seriously, how many people I don’t understand it. I don’t get it. I think the world should be changing and I think it is very fast. And I think that’s why you don’t find, at least in technology, you don’t find. I don’t know, is it the entry-level sales? I don’t know from the security products. Like, how do you choose your security products? Is it, do I go to a website and do the research my own? Are you getting cold called by guys? I mean, we have to have people that really understand and have knowledge behind it. And that’s why I like, I had a software developer call me the other day. His name’s Dawood Shah. Everyone out there, Dawood Shah. I’m plugging him because he’s looking for a job. Oh, am I probably, can I say this? Well, anyways, he’s, um. currently happily employed he’s good and but but the point is is he he’s in software because he’s like a nerd he’s good at software right he’s good at programming he’s good at coding and all this stuff and he’s very very smart but at the same time he has a high level of empathy and i guess what would you call it um he has emotional iq is that it emotional q anyways whatever you emotional intelligence and he’s very outgoing and he has all these things going for him i’m like dude you know most software guys are like sitting in a back room like don’t talk to them again slide pizzas under the door and like you know leave them alone and don’t have an actual conversation with them i was like you have all this going for you should be you’re the guy that we need in technology sales and we should call it technology solutions and solution finding and uh you know vendor agnostic all the stuff helping to find a solution not just make a transaction right um but you’re the type of guy that we should have in that space smart can speak the same language can speak the language of business and technology at the same time you and you’ve hit the nail on the head but i i’ll caution one small piece that’s most of it right
Speaker 0 | 22:36.895
most it people they’re not people people it’s a it’s a rare breed to run into an it person that is able like the old snl skit of move like that that’s it like they’re just not good with people they’re they don’t want they don’t want uh they’re not a big social interaction person they’re not good with confrontation or or or even with bringing up ideas like openly and and and you know it that that’s a that is a commonality in it like even in so my experience is a lot of it is from being in the army and i was in a field in the army that is basically nerds in the army and it was the same principle they They didn’t transition into large-scale leaders. They came in and got out and went and bit IT people because they weren’t good at speaking with people about the technology. Or if they were, they said it in such a way that a normal person is not going to grasp it and then seem confused when the normal people ask questions. Like, I don’t know what you mean. Like, what do you mean you don’t know what I mean? I just told you the exact answer. The answer was two. Why do you not get this? Like, that’s a common IT thing. And that’s really, I think that’s where you’re, to me, that’s where that gap is. And you’re absolutely correct because the salespeople that are contacting me, that are cold calling me a hundred times a day, you know, I opened up LinkedIn here. There’s, you know, 90 different things in here that are just people trying to sell me a product and they don’t know, they’re either a salesperson or they don’t know the technology or if they are, they’ll get me on a call and it sounds great. And we may even decide to purchase it by the sales. And as soon as you talk to an engineer, it’s not anything like what they said it was. And it’s, you know, and then IT professionals, they get to where you, at least at my level, where you start to learn like, okay, well, this is a salesperson. So the first call is for me to call them and say, can I please speak to an engineer? Like,
Speaker 1 | 24:31.341
so the same guy was asking me like, what’s the, you know what he asked me? He said, well, I’m in software right now. What’s the difference between. a sales engineer and a sales rep and i laughed i was like we have the sales rep to speak to the people so the engineer doesn’t have to and we have the engineer i was like and we have the engineer there to make sure the salesperson doesn’t say a bunch of stupid stuff that’s not true So you see, that’s why we have the sales engineer and the IT guy. I can see these conversations. I told you, enter the default router IP address. Like, what did you not hear about what I said? Right.
Speaker 0 | 25:16.598
Like, and that, you know, but so you can take that. So taking what you just applied, you can apply that to business. It’s IP reading. struggle with this all the time. Either the leadership of IT is either a business major who has somehow learned some IT stuff and lingo and is now sitting in the seat, but maybe not understanding entirely how the division works, or they’re a technical person who got, you know, you know, slight side tangent, right? We’re really bad as a, or at least as a, at least as in every organization I’ve ever been in, you’re really bad about promoting your best workers and not your best leaders. So you end up with a really good worker and to a point to where they’re actually not a good worker and you got them slated in a position where they can’t communicate it. And then that’s your director of IT. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 26:05.415
You just took me back to Jim’s wings. You just took me back to Jim’s wings in college when my boss looked at me and he said, Phil, I don’t know if you noticed, but on the schedule, you got promoted. Like you’re now a team. Did I have any leadership experience? No. I just knew how to dump a bunch of wings and pop. pop out orders real fast. So I immediately learned via trial by fire that leadership is not yelling at people as to why they can’t make wings fast enough. Anywho. Right.
Speaker 0 | 26:33.534
And the other, the other piece of that is what do you end up doing? That’s how you accidentally, in some instances, it’s not at all, but that’s how, that’s how organizations create a micromanager because I’m trying to teach you how to do the job and you’re not doing it as fast as I could. So, you know what, I’m just going to tell you every step you need to do to do it at my speed. speed and I’m going to judge you by how I would do it. And that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s not what you want. You want them, if you’re, if I change my own leadership again, if you’re, if you’re a correct leader, even in an IT department, right? I don’t want, I don’t want my systems engineer to come to me and ask me what he should do. I want him, the expert in the field to know what he wants to do and come ask me if like, do you agree or not agree? And in most instances, my answer is going to be, what would you do? And he’s going to go, well, I would do B. And I’d be like, well, Do be. Sounds good to me. Yeah, until he’s empowered to make those decisions, or he is empowered to make those decisions without coming to me. As long as they’re inside of the rules that I’ve set up for the goals of what I want the department to do based on the business, by all means, do your job. Don’t let me hinder you. I’m here to protect you and help you, not to tell you what to do.
Speaker 1 | 27:42.664
There’s one problem. There’s one problem with all of that. First of all. Side tangent. Well, no, first let’s state the problem. The problem is what about people that are entry level and need training? Find another company that’s not us. You know, that’s just one thing. That’s just a side thing. It just as a thought that popped up. But the I love if I could just write headlines for a living, I would do that. And one of the headlines that came out of that was the creating of the micromanager. I just, I loved that. Like we’re, when we’re hiring people, we’re really just, we’re creating micromanagers. That’s just such an, it’s such an amazing topic that I don’t think I’ve ever seen addressed. I mean, we talk about micromanagement. We talk about how we hate micromanagement. We don’t talk about how we did it to ourselves.
Speaker 0 | 28:42.585
Right. And it’s. Yeah, exactly. Like if you’re not paying attention, you create your own problem that you’re then therefore angry about it. And then you’re just living inside of this like little dome that you can’t see outside of. But to address your first point, I wouldn’t expect an entry level person to be able to make. You have to have reasonable expectations that entry level person shouldn’t shouldn’t be able to be able to make decisions outside of their lane. But. They should be empowered to be able to make decisions on what they do and do not know. Now, back to my start of the conversation, right? You got that Dunning-Kugelkirb. Sometimes they think they know more, but what is that opportunity? So if they go out and do something 100% wrong, there’s two opportunities here. You can get mad at them for doing it, or you can take that and go, you know what? Here’s where I screwed up as a leader, and here’s how we’re going to practice in the future. And this is a learning point. As long as we didn’t. cost the company millions in revenue. Let’s correct it. Let’s learn from it. And then now I have just created, you now know how to do this process. So the next time. I don’t have to worry about it.
Speaker 1 | 29:57.081
That’s good advice to parents with children. Don’t just yell at them like, you did the dishes wrong. You did the dishes wrong. You packed it wrong. What are you doing? That’s not how you mop a floor. Give me the mop.
Speaker 0 | 30:09.390
It’s interesting. I feel like I try really hard with leadership, and I don’t know if I was the best parent, but I think there’s a little bit of a difference there in that as with your kids. Sometimes you hold them to the expectation of what you, you want them to be better than what you were.
Speaker 1 | 30:28.622
But. Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 30:29.963
What are you doing? What are you doing differently than your parents did to you to help them achieve that goal? Are you still doing exactly what your parents did to you? Because if so, then how do you expect them to be better than what you were?
Speaker 1 | 30:42.254
Oh, yeah. I might cry. I might cry. Let me tell you how my dad did it. And this is why I’m not going to do it with you. But then I look in the mirror at the end of the day and I’m like, I’m my father.
Speaker 0 | 30:54.229
Yeah, I try so hard to reflect on it because there’s things that, you know, like, why would I do that? Like, what did I do differently to help you understand? And again, you can take those things back into the old dial it back into leadership. How could I ever expect, like, if I’m preparing to leave my current position and they’re going to promote somebody in my department to director of IT. So what did I do to help them understand that role? Like, it’s pretty obvious who’s the smart one. So am I helping them? And am I doing any, or am I setting them up for the same way that I learned? Or did I help them prepare for the future?
Speaker 1 | 31:31.603
No, it’s a great, it’s a good point.
Speaker 0 | 31:34.425
Look in the mirror, right?
Speaker 1 | 31:35.905
One of, and nothing, and I’m, you know, may the Lord above, you know, bless my father and, you know, guide him and give him everything that he needs. Because I would have. could have been left on the side of the street starving to death. Okay. So that’s another, just so everyone understands where I’m coming from. Right. My parents could have left me on the side of the street starving and I’m here today. So thank you, dad. I worked for a very interesting, successful company at one point. And there was a lot, it grew very fast. It was kind of like, kind of like what happened with zoom, like just blowing up real quick. Right. Like you could, there was nothing but success. There was nothing but success and failure. If you succeeded, great. If you failed, you’re out. There was no like, there wasn’t much in between, but there was a lot of promotions. And I remember many people saying, you’re ready to get promoted. You need to fill your replacement. You basically need to train your replacement. Like you need to find your replacement. Like whenever you’re ready, you’re ready. But I need you to train your replacement. That’s just what I thought of when we were having that conversation. Train your replacement. And some other, go ahead.
Speaker 0 | 32:47.354
I was going to say, also, it’s one of the things, again, we go back to that micromanager thing, right? We have a tendency, even if we know that we have a tendency to do it, we still look at who is our best worker and then start training them as our replacement. When instead, I did this exercise, we had a leader leave and the department was kind of in a flurry. And I wish I could have took the exercise further because I would have liked to have seen where it went. But I asked somebody like. hey you’re all in a room and and there’s an emergency happening and everyone is dreaming the the what they think could be done and and your current leader isn’t there who do you listen to of the entire department and and and leadership doesn’t matter just who who would you listen to and what ended up happening was i ended up getting an answer i had a i didn’t know who the person they were naming was i didn’t know them from the department so here’s this here’s this unsung leader this person who has People are naturally listening to them. Why would you not take that person and start immediately training them to be that next leader? Because they already carry the natural leadership technique. So now foster it. Make it better. Make them what they could be.
Speaker 1 | 34:00.669
Just blew my mind. How many good people do we lose? We don’t even know who they are.
Speaker 0 | 34:07.414
Right.
Speaker 1 | 34:07.974
Don’t even know.
Speaker 0 | 34:09.904
And I think one of the big things, and I see this mistake a lot, leadership isn’t telling people what to do. I mean, there’s a piece of that, like you have to have that. You have to be able, a good leader in a chaos crisis moment can step in and start directing and people will follow them. But outside of chaos moments, a good leader is a person who is just a human that talks to everybody and figures out pieces. If you don’t know that Jimmy Smith, one of your 50 employees. who’s really attached to their cat and their cat passed away and you have no clue that that happened and and all you’re looking at is their performance is down for the week like if you’re not connecting with them as a human like humans understand their performance like oh you’re taking a performance step because you’re going through something Let me lighten your load, help you through this. And on the other side, you’re going to remember I did that. And I’ll be able to put more on your plate if I need to. And you’re going to, we have a relationship now, a working relationship that is more than just work. It’s outside of work. It’s an expression of love, like true love that helps cause trust to push everything forward. And then success becomes easy. As long as you’re just pointing, you’re just pointing a massive group of people. and they will do the right thing and and your your job becomes just guiding the step that’s amazing blacked out what happened speechless really good really good um really good like i like i like my quote from uh i uh what is that what movie is that uh old school i i blacked out what just happened i don’t know what’s like but sometimes i feel like i get on changes because It, it, it, it’s so, it’s so easy. And I will say that it is very easy to say these things. They’re much harder to apply, but once you start to apply them, man, they just become like, why would I not do this stuff before? Like, why did I make my life harder?
Speaker 1 | 36:06.966
Yeah. Why am I trying to do it on my own? Why am I trying to do it on my own? Why am I acting like a, just in alone period? Who wants to be alone? Right.
Speaker 0 | 36:16.553
Why am I, why am I trying to tell everybody how to do their job? Like, why, why, why would I think that works? And why would I think that’s faster? Like.
Speaker 1 | 36:26.835
It’s not. Because at the end of the day, we are all alone. Which is another reason to be empathetic towards other people. At the end of the day, you know, like if we go to bed staring at the ceiling, it’s just us with our thoughts alone. Even if there is a loved one, you know, right next to us. And I just had this deep conversation with my wife the other day. I was like, look, at the end of the day, we’re all alone. That’s why we need to, you know, you got to do for your, you know. Like a, be secure with yourself first, and then you can help other people. Then you can empathize with other people and stuff. I was, you know, deep parenting, talking about coaching kids and stuff. Other amazing topics that came up in the last, I don’t know, five, 10 minutes. Nerds in the army. Uh, I think we need to bring back Pauly Shore and do nerds in the army now too. And, um, the youth won’t understand that we need to, uh, You mentioned a lot of IT guys are not good with confrontations and bringing up ideas openly. What is it about confrontations? Like, what is that? Like, clearly, I’m fine with confrontations because you fired me like you tried to fire me like five times. So I don’t get it. I don’t get it.
Speaker 0 | 37:45.598
I’m a little heavy handed sometimes with confrontations. Sometimes I feed off of it, which is a dangerous scenario.
Speaker 1 | 37:52.422
like please fight me i was in berk i was in five guys the other day i was in five guys that it was a drunk dude and five guys right and he was like harassing some like um i don’t know hispanic people or something like what’s your name where are you at why don’t you go back to your country and stuff right and like i was like oh this is it i’m ready i was like um you know like my kids are like look at dad look at dad he’s just ready to use jujitsu he’s just been waiting for this moment his whole life you know like the and then the manager behind the couch she’s like so you need to leave now or i’m calling the cops i was like i’ll remove them for you i was ready for confrontation honestly anyways go ahead um in my in my in my experience a lot of i.t people they
Speaker 0 | 38:35.611
um they they will avoid avoid meetings and avoid people and avoid talking and attempt to attempt to subvert the issue, whatever the issue is, in some way and dodge it. Or because I see people, so there’s two sides, right? You want to help. What are we at base level? I see as customer service, which is weird that we’re really bad with people because that’s one of the things I preach to people who are starting a help desk. I get it. You want to be a systems guy someday. Do you want to be that guy, man in a chair, dark room, matrix, techno blaring, I want metal legs, like that type of scenario. But you must start with that customer service side because that’s that help desk. And even though you may never do it again, that’s where you learn how to deal with people and how to explain to people these really overly complex scenarios that do help you later on to break it down. But some IT people. They want to just go to that man in the chair. They want to be that person in the chair that doesn’t deal with anybody anymore and just avoid. Yeah. The conflict, like, oh, man, this person’s asking for something that is a horrible idea. But instead, we’re just going to send the project up instead of going back and being like, hey, you know, respectfully, no, we need to look at a different way. Like this is just going to cause more issues.
Speaker 1 | 40:02.426
Do you think it’s fair? And do you think it’s just fear and insecurity just to put it out there? Do you think it’s do you think it’s an inability to step out of our comfort zone?
Speaker 0 | 40:15.315
Maybe. And not this is, you know. It’s a stereotype, but it’s not. It’s true, but it’s not true. I have a lot of friends in IT because that was my friend group in high school and college. We weren’t on the football team. We weren’t on the… Yeah. You played four games in the basement.
Speaker 1 | 40:37.172
You weren’t dating the cheerleader. You weren’t dating the cheerleader. Here’s me in high school. Didn’t talk to anybody. Scared out of his mind. Walking down the hall with his head down, afraid to get a wedgie. Okay. That was me. Um, and I don’t know what happened. I think I listened to like a Tony Robbins CD. I’m just being honest. I think it was that. And there is this idea of stepping out of your comfort zone. And if you really want to grow and you really want to like achieve like things that are, that you might’ve not ever thought possible. And I needed someone to tell me that there’s more, there’s like something, you know, like awaken the giant within. I think that’s what it was, you know, that there’s like a giant inside everybody. Right. And you need to like awaken that like giant. But in order to do that, you have to take massive action and you have to be afraid, you know, not be afraid of failure and all these things. And then the more I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, the more I think, I don’t know. I just, I am where I am now. I think people would, I don’t think people would believe. I don’t think people would believe me. If they saw who I was in high school and if they saw what I was in college, because a lot of people I’m real, I’m real straight edge now. But if they saw what I was in college, like, no, it’s not the same person. So there is this aspect of stepping out of your comfort zone. I actually liked a lot of the act. I think there’s a lot of activities you can do to make confrontation better or easier. Or as we say, get comfortable being uncomfortable. There’s a lot of activities you can do to do that. Some of them were in. I think it was Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which also just the idea of a four-hour workweek is amazing. That’s why that book was so successful. It’s a total fallacy and not true. I mean, I guess there’s a four-hour workweek. Maybe a four-day workweek or four hours every day. Four hours a day is possible because the rest of the time, a lot of times people are twiddling their thumbs and drinking coffee and, you know, I don’t know, searching something else on the Internet that you should have a, what do we call that, content filter for? Um,
Speaker 0 | 42:45.526
yeah,
Speaker 1 | 42:46.387
the, uh, yeah, but I think there’s things that you can do to, what would your suggestion be for, for people that are, don’t like confrontations or, you know, what’s, what’s your piece of advice there?
Speaker 0 | 43:01.037
I think, I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s stepping outside your comfort zone. Now, for me, I was the same way, but my comfort zone was when I panicked and joined the army because I didn’t know how to pay student loans back. And. They didn’t have a job yet. Nobody teaches you in college or high school that when you start interviewing for higher, like you’re not interviewing for a $10, like the fast food jobs, you’re going to get a callback pretty quick. But when you’re interviewing for higher level jobs, it can be a few weeks or months before they go through everything they want to look at before they call you. So nobody tells you that, though. Your experience tells you that, oh, well, I should have got a callback today, and I didn’t. So now I’m panicked, and I have bills, and I don’t know what to do, so I joined the Army. But… And that actually, so here I was joining the Army thinking I’d be a nerd, and I was. But I don’t know why part of my brain didn’t realize that myself and an infantry person and that person driving a truck over there, we’re all going to do the same nine-week basic training course that has a lot in it that I would have never tried to do on my own. Like that is nuts.
Speaker 1 | 44:07.226
For example,
Speaker 0 | 44:08.126
what?
Speaker 1 | 44:09.087
Like go ahead.
Speaker 0 | 44:09.748
Rockets, grenades. They have a thing called the confidence course. building into the military. It’s basically to build your self-confidence that you can do more than you think you can. And it’s a really complicated obstacle course, but when you complete it, it works the way you would expect it to. Like I would have never thought I could do that. I have some family in the military and when we came back together, it was like, yeah, there’s some stuff that you learn to do. But that was my piece. But what you’re saying is true, it’s that comfort zone break.
Speaker 1 | 44:36.140
That sounds like fun. We should do a confidence course for IT guys. Let’s do a confidence course. It just sounds like,
Speaker 0 | 44:41.735
yeah, I think we just found a new business opportunity. Spin it up. Let’s do it.
Speaker 1 | 44:45.341
I mean, like seriously, let’s just go to like, I don’t know. We’ll have like a, we’ll have something in like. Death Valley in Arizona. We’ll have something in the mountains of Montana. We’ll do, you know, and just all this crazy stuff that we make people go through and like, look, you’re still alive. Now go back to IT.
Speaker 0 | 45:01.702
Right. Now you realize that you can do more than you think you can. So now in that meeting, speak up and say, hey, I know you want to do that, but did you think about all of this? Like this is a problem and you’re not thinking these actions like that’s the stuff that. You know, a lot of people, if IT is in a meeting, so that’s a whole different conversation. A lot of times meetings happen without IT ever being in the room. But if you’re in the room, that ability to speak up also, to dial right back to what I just said, the ability to go to the people making the meetings and be like, hey, put me in. Like, I need to be in there. Like, you’re making decisions without me, and then you wonder why I can’t do it. Like, talk to me.
Speaker 1 | 45:42.002
Yeah, maybe having that, just approaching the C-level executives and asking some poignant questions. Like, how are we doing? What’s your goals? What’s your vision? What keeps you up at night? When it comes to IT, i.e. me, what’s your single biggest frustration, problem, or concern right now? I’m going to fix it.
Speaker 0 | 46:05.657
Right. And if you’re not asking those questions, how are you expecting to work with the business? Everything you just said is absolutely correct.
Speaker 1 | 46:12.640
You definitely got shadow IT happening because some other guy is going to cold call them. He’s going to say, hey, I know you wanted to connect with another bearded telecom or another bearded technology guru, so here I am. Some guy’s going to do that.
Speaker 0 | 46:28.446
It might work even.
Speaker 1 | 46:30.288
Yeah. Bringing up ideas openly. So I think we hit bringing up ideas openly. That’s pretty much it. Why would you not want to bring up an idea? You’re afraid it’s going to get shot down?
Speaker 0 | 46:41.217
I’m afraid it’s going to get shut down. Again, the further you are in your career, the more, actually, at least in the middle of your career, the less confident you are in your decisions, which can play double down on somebody who their entire life, they just kind of hid in computers. And that’s where they spent, you know, my friends are in the computers type thing. That’s where they spent their life. And now you want them in a room full of people and you want them to express their ideas freely. And. they’re not used to doing it like that’s just not that’s not how they came up that’s not what they did and even not as a failure of the education system but i let me see i just i i’m finishing up my i’m actually doing my bachelor’s degree in computer science uh might as well get a piece of paper and says i know this stuff and um i don’t see too many classes about how we should break the how we should talk there’s no how do you talk to the c-suite how do you ask the right questions how do you take this technology that you’re learning and you break it up you know here’s how to lead a project here’s how to do this where’s my class on my sphere of my sphere of influence where’s my class on business acumen where is this stuff like part of this so that i understand it instead i got to learn it on the outside so many great ideas that we could do that i’m
Speaker 1 | 48:00.773
probably not going to do just such courses confidence course business acumen how to sell i.t to executive management and not look stupid What other things that we could do? How to sell your plan and not get laughed off the, not get laughed out of the tape, out of the room or something like that. We need a new server. No, we’re migrating to the cloud. Get out of here. We’re migrating to the clouds, the public clouds. I know it’s clouds, but it’s, people say cloud. So much, so much. This actually went into a realm of significant awesomeness, and I am very thankful for having you on the show. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about or a piece of advice or biggest learning moment, failure that you would like to share with the audience?
Speaker 0 | 49:09.858
that always gets everyone it and then it would um every you know it applies to everything so every failure should be turned into a learning opportunity and you’re you know it leader to it junior person you’re running projects and you’re doing things and stuff is happening And at the end of whatever you’re doing, ticket, project, concern, comment, you need to review it. What’d you do? How could you do it different? How could you have done it better? And what can you learn from the experience that you just did? And how can you apply it to the next one? And if you do those things, if you are constantly trying to be better, then you will constantly get better and you will become what you wish you would have had as a leader when you started.
Speaker 1 | 50:07.328
So at your lowest, darkest, worst moment ever that you experience, you can just remember that we can learn from this. As long as you’re still breathing and alive, because there are people that have come back from some ridiculously horrible situations, which is and we’ll be happy to put you into that situation at our new confidence course where we bring you down to the lowest possible level that a human could possibly get. And then we will leave you there to find your way out.
Speaker 0 | 50:38.969
It won’t break you down,
Speaker 1 | 50:39.850
build you up.
Speaker 0 | 50:45.413
It’s huge. I see so many people that take a failure to heart so hard, and everyone screws up. There’s no perfect person. They all screw up, and you’re not different than anybody else. Everyone’s screwed up. We’re all humans. Understand that. And also understand when you’re working with somebody who screws up, that’s just the same thing. Let’s learn from it. Let’s not beat people up about it. Let’s get better, not worse.
Speaker 1 | 51:16.410
Thank you so much. Appreciate you being on the show.
Speaker 0 | 51:20.112
Hey, thanks for having me on. I really thought that this would never happen, and it did.
Speaker 1 | 51:26.675
Yeah, we actually thought it was going to be a failure. We even talked about it. This is probably going to be a failure, but I think it was a success. I mean, I think it’s safe to say.
Speaker 0 | 51:35.280
I mean, only time can tell, right? And if not, we’ll just address that failure and learn from it next time.
Speaker 1 | 51:40.023
Let’s do another show. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember, when it comes to IT, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing, and improving.
