Speaker 0 | 00:09.668
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have a return, kind of a big deal, Platinum IT Director, John Santee. Welcome back to the show, man. Really happy to have you back. For anyone that doesn’t know John, please search, find, look for him up. Look him up. Look for him up. I can speak English on LinkedIn because he’s very active. And the reason why I’m so happy to have you back on the show is you provide so much valuable general leadership, general management leadership information for IT directors that is honestly a work in progress for all of us. So thanks, man. I’m very happy to have you back. I appreciate it. Yeah. So we were kind of spitballing back and forth on ideas and what we could talk about. And you said you have an unapologetic personal life. Now, this unapologetic word gets thrown around a lot lately, but why don’t we just start there, man? You know, let’s go there. What does that mean?
Speaker 1 | 01:22.742
So for me, one of the things that I kind of came across, and this is so much of a work in progress, but through my career and work and at home, that I was giving my work the better me. It was getting the better pieces of who I was. You know, it was getting that morning energy, the clear head, the patience, the logic, the thinking, all of that was being… given and poured into my work. But then when I came home, I was tired and mentally tired, physically tired. I wasn’t giving the best of me back to my family once I got here. And several years ago, I realized that was something that just needed to change. I needed to figure out a way to flip that script where everybody was getting the good from me.
Speaker 0 | 02:25.416
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 02:25.836
But it wasn’t allowing any piece of it to completely exhaust and drain me in the process.
Speaker 0 | 02:32.037
Yeah. It’s almost like you have to detach. I’ve had that problem on numerous days, numerous days. And I work from home. Okay. But sometimes it’s just about coming out of the cave and I guess leaving work when you leave work. What’s the, so what was the, there could be numerous reasons for that. It could just be. Maybe, I don’t know what the reasons are, but what do you think they are?
Speaker 1 | 02:58.785
Around why, you know, our work selves get the better selves?
Speaker 0 | 03:03.327
Yeah, I mean, why would you come home and just be not ready to engage? Is work still churning in the background of your head? Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 | 03:13.151
That’s certainly the case. And we’ve all, you know, it’s really easy to blame the little electronic device that we all have in our pockets that allows work. to go with us wherever we may be. And some sense is that that can be a good thing because it can allow you that flexibility to work from anywhere. But on the flip side of that, it also lets you work from anywhere.
Speaker 0 | 03:37.762
You have to be disciplined mentally. Yes. You know, when they say that social media can cause depression, you know, where you’ve got this disease of constantly checking a Twitter feed or constantly checking. did someone like something or did someone comment on something that can be problematic but I love that I can respond to a customer at any moment within seconds that’s one of the reasons why people work with me is because I respond faster than anyone else so the fact that like you said I can be anywhere in the world and respond to someone immediately and escalates an issue or take care of a ticket that’s the benefit. But at the same time, like you said, yeah, so sometimes I’ve even had my older kids when they get real smart and wise, and I don’t mean wise from the perspective of huge amounts of knowledge, but when they get wise, they like to say, oh, dad, you’re just upset right now because so-and-so’s internet is down.
Speaker 1 | 04:53.150
right you’re not really mad you’re not really mad that i didn’t do this they have a good way of pointing out the obvious while trying to do the the redirection though i’ve definitely been in the same spot of well you’re just mad because that call went back you’re just upset because you had a long day and there was downtime and this outage happened this happened and that happened there’s always truth to that you And there’s little pieces and bits of the knowledge that, especially as they get older, whether they realize it or not, are sharing with us that if you take the time to listen to it, sometimes it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 0 | 05:35.403
So anyways, any tips or tricks? And it might be easy for us to say because we come home to a family, we come home to what’s going on, but other people might not be coming home to a family. They might be, I don’t know, might be going through a divorce. They might not have a family to come home to. They might be younger. They might be millennial generation. There’s numerous endless scenarios here. But what’s anything just in general as far as detaching and staying focused or anything that you’ve come across?
Speaker 1 | 06:04.649
There has to be that honesty. You have to, without going down some cliche road, you’ve got to have that in the mirror moment of, okay, what’s really important to me? One of the things that for me was a very crystal clear problem was having that phone in my hand and being able to check those work emails and work chats and all of those things all the time. And I actually picked up a really quick, easy to read book. It’s called How to Break Up with Your Phone. I read through that and it’s all these things that as you are reading it, you’re like, oh, that’s common sense. Now you look at what you’re doing yourself and you’re not doing any of those things.
Speaker 0 | 06:48.295
I love it. How to break up with your phone.
Speaker 1 | 06:52.016
Instantly. And I did this, this was several years ago that I went through that book. Out of time that I got back in my day without it negatively affecting my work performance, I was still answering people when they needed it. I was still getting things taken care of well time, but I was getting. time back at home.
Speaker 0 | 07:15.588
Hold on, I need to pull out my phone to go to my notes section to type in how to break up with your phone.
Speaker 1 | 07:26.156
Speaking of that, I started reading physical books again. It made me put the Kindle down and the iPad down. I wasn’t reading electronic formats anymore where those other distractions were available. Even though I wasn’t changing the habit, I was still reading books. I changed how I was feeding that good habit, which had a very positive result as well.
Speaker 0 | 07:48.557
Yeah, there’s a thing with a library, a physical library. I have a problem when I go into particular bookstores of my personal liking. And my friends sometimes say, give me your wallet. Like I went to this bookstore last week. My friend was smart enough to say, give me your wallet. And I was like, no. But, um… The thing about books too is, this is one little trick I learned, which is to write the date down in the cover of the book when you started reading it. And the reason why is because I’ll be a chronic start a book, pick up another book, then pick up another book, and then pick up another book that’s a subject of versus taking that, absorbing the knowledge, taking the notes, highlighting it, going through it, and really implementing the information that I’m taking. And I’m talking about like… you know, books that are of use. I’m not talking about, you know, romance novels or whatever the heck else. I don’t know what fiction, you know, not that that’s, I used to be a fan of, you know, science fiction back in high school and stuff.
Speaker 1 | 08:53.455
We don’t get in the nerd,
Speaker 0 | 08:55.716
we don’t go to the nerd stuff right now, but although it’d be as appropriate, but you know, stuff that matters. And I’m glad you brought that up. And I remember going to an exercise years ago, back in the Starbucks years, when I took a Franklin Covey course and like, The very first part of the course is going through your mission statement and outlining your values. What are your top five values? What is a value to begin with? What even is it? And then the roles that you play in your life. You and I are a father. That’s one of the roles we play. If your parents are still alive, you’re a son. That’s a role that you play. You’re an IT director, boss, whatever it is. This is a role that you play. And then going through how do the values attach to that role. and I’m just sometimes I take these things for granted but how many of us have really outlined our top five values and character traits and ensuring that we, we are doing our best to exemplify those on a daily basis, like a knowledgeable person. How often do we seek knowledge or maybe, maybe trust is important. How often are we, you know, exemplifying, you know, trust, these various different things.
Speaker 1 | 10:11.551
Very much. One other resource that I would recommend to folks, and it’s Most people have read this from a business point of view, but the Four Disciplines of Execution book, look at that one not from a business perspective, but read it again from a whatever else is important to you in life perspective, be it your family, your artistic adventures, whatever else it is beyond just the work. And realize that this goal setting mentality and working towards that and measuring towards that. applies just as equally to those pieces of your life as it does to any business pursuit that you have.
Speaker 0 | 10:54.500
So, so does. And when it falls apart, everything falls apart. Just, I know we were talking before the phone about just so everything that’s happened this year and everyone’s going to remember 2020, you know, everyone’s going to remember this year and what they went through. And not only did I just go through the normal whole world going through some kind of crazy pandemic, but. I also went through a house move, my parents, helping my parents sell their house, my dad going through cancer, my mom going through a really bad, really dementia kicking in. So there’s no way that I will forget this. But through that whole thing, your normal, I don’t know, we get into rhythms, right? But my normal rhythm was completely shot. Everything was just done. You know, from… how we keep the house clean to starting the kids in school in the morning to, you know, and I’m sure this is, I’m sure this rings true with a lot of people. And just, I’m just now feeling like to calm down and there’d be days where I was just like, you know, screw it kids, like grab the surfboards. We’re just going to go down to the beach and go surfing. And like, you know, I feel like there was at least two or three months where it was more surfing than anything else. And I will not take that back. I will not take that back for anything.
Speaker 1 | 12:12.547
In all this insanity, it really did open up some good opportunities to do some things like that. There were days where at lunchtime, I was jumping in the pool with the kids. That doesn’t happen in real life with what’s going on right now. And days when the kids would be trying to do their homeschool. And it’s just like, nope, we’re not going to do this. We’re going to go outside and do something. Even though we can’t really go anywhere, we’re going to go outside.
Speaker 0 | 12:40.429
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 12:41.090
Create the… new opportunities and these new, I guess, and not all of it has been a negative thing.
Speaker 0 | 12:50.341
No, no. So with that being said, to segue, I’m looking at the Scotch thermal laminator right now with lamination pads, and I am making the morning to-do list. I’m going to put this on my, back on my phone, the morning to-do list, the nightly to-do list, and all these things with the disciplines of execution, I guess. you could save for the household so that I can get things back on track because so many things, so many things just got thrown off. So, so yeah. Okay. So we’ve got, we’ve got how to break up with your phone, the four disciplines of execution. What do you think? And that, you know, some of our other talking points were, you know, we talked about the dad thing and what was so unapologetic. What was so unapologetic? I don’t know if we really knew. What’s been so unapologetic about your personal life? The fact that you’re jumping in the pool and I don’t care, like get mad at me for jumping.
Speaker 1 | 13:48.264
I used to, anytime that I was taking away from the professional side, I felt like I needed to apologize because it took me 10 minutes instead of two to answer an email. I need to apologize because I was going to the soccer game instead of being at something else. And I realized, no, that you can be an incredible, incredibly effective leader technical person whatever the professional aspects are you can be incredibly successful with that and we’ll do these other things that are important to you and you don’t have to apologize for those things being right
Speaker 0 | 14:27.558
you just got to delegate i’m the king delegator uh um but no uh being seriously of course and So, I mean, but it does come down to, I mean, how do you delegate? Do you feel like, do you think that’s an important task? Like, obviously for any leader to learn to let go and delegate things?
Speaker 1 | 14:49.924
It’s critical, and I was awful at it earlier in my career. I was so into, I like doing things. I want to be the one who does it. I’m a control freak. I’m willing to admit that. Giving that away and realizing that I’m now part of these teams with amazing talent on them, I need to be letting them do what they’re really good at.
Speaker 0 | 15:13.670
It’s such a trait of a good IT leader, too, because most IT leaders… You know, it could be like, I’ll just shut down the firewall if you fire me and take all the passwords.
Speaker 1 | 15:22.335
Oh, goodness. That’d be.
Speaker 0 | 15:24.596
That’s the opposite extreme of the other, right? But a good IT leader should be to the point where it’s like, it doesn’t matter if I leave. It doesn’t matter if I just, you know, whatever, die in a fiery inferno someday.
Speaker 1 | 15:37.025
I had a great leader on one of my teams who he gave me a great reminder. It was just a few weeks ago. He’s like, hey, just as a reminder. You don’t need to be in the weeds. We need you to see the whole field. Let us worry about the weeds. I’m like, oh my God, I’m supposed to be the guy with the analogies. And you just killed it with that one.
Speaker 0 | 15:57.300
Thank you. You’re like, thank you. I don’t know. That was like, that’s back to like one of your kids saying, you know, dad,
Speaker 1 | 16:04.804
you’re just mad because he was like,
Speaker 0 | 16:08.867
he was doing the right thing. He was like, you know, first praise, then give feedback and then end it with praise again. Oh, one of the things that’s very hard for leadership to do, and mainly because you’re a human, is to acknowledge other people for a job well done or to acknowledge people that is something you might take for granted. Look, they’re just doing their job every day. They’re doing it well. They do this very, very, very well. And what’s the key to that? Because I think acknowledging people, praising them, giving awards out, just in general, smiling at someone saying, thank you. All of these things we forget to do because it’s like, get up and execute, do the best job that we can. Americans in general are about execution and success and this crazy, endless hamster wheel of success that a lot of times, we would get more out of life by just helping other people get what they want. So maybe I said too much, but what about the acknowledgement? What are we doing to acknowledge our people?
Speaker 1 | 17:29.279
I’m so fortunate. I can’t take any of the credit for this skill. This I got directly from both of my parents because both of them modeled this behavior the entire time I was growing up. And it was exactly that. It was giving the credit where the work was done. And. That included, you know, if you did the work, it was okay for you to have the credit. But when somebody does something good, when somebody does something that’s noteworthy, worth a good accomplishment, give them that feedback, give them that credit. And having that modeled for me growing up made transitioning that piece whenever I became a leader, one of the more effective early tools I had in my toolbox. I gave out that praise and it really… helped energize and engage the teams.
Speaker 0 | 18:17.595
So how did your parents do it?
Speaker 1 | 18:22.900
That’s a great question. Maybe I need to sit down and ask them how they found that, what led them.
Speaker 0 | 18:29.045
That’s a perfect example of me asking the wrong question. If you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong type of answer or something. So now we’re exemplifying. Sorry, what did your parents do? how did they give praise? Can you remember specifically a time like that you were just like, wow, that felt so good that dad or mom said that to me?
Speaker 1 | 18:52.925
So my mother was a teacher, and I can recall.
Speaker 0 | 18:56.627
Now we know why. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 18:59.389
I would be stuck at the back of the faculty meeting doing my homework while she was in there. And I would hear her and some of her colleagues complimenting each other for something that they did, an idea that they came up with. You know, in the education world, it’s just tough to begin with. So to hear them putting that praise onto each other was a great modeling. Then when I got a little bit older, I worked during my summers and time off at the factory where my father worked. And he was a line foreman at that factory. And he always, in the morning meetings, would give credit to his teammates who had done something. You know, like… fixed a piece faster than the book said it should have been fixed, or they found something and corrected it before it became a problem. It would have been really easy for him as the operator of that machine to take that credit, and he never did. He always gave it to the team member that deserved it. He modeled it in that way.
Speaker 0 | 20:00.443
This is reminding me of how to win friends and influence people, which was a hard book for me to get through, to be honest with you. But some certain things pop out to me.
Speaker 1 | 20:12.273
I had to stop and restart that one a couple of times as well. That’s one that I probably need to pick back up again. It’s been some time since I’ve looked through it.
Speaker 0 | 20:19.318
Yeah, I don’t know why it was. It just was. And it’s one of those ones that, you know, that and Napoleon Hill that people always throw out there that just, I don’t know. None of the Napoleon Hill stuff really did it for me. I’ll be honest with you. Any other great books you’ve read lately?
Speaker 1 | 20:34.627
Oh, my goodness. I’ve actually put my nose back down in some of the technical world. So I’ve put the… the leadership books, social and societal books kind of often. It’s been a couple of months since I picked up one of those and read it.
Speaker 0 | 20:49.495
Okay, fine. What’s the technical stuff?
Speaker 1 | 20:51.836
Oh my goodness. I have put my nose back into the security world. That just again and again and again, we’re seeing that it doesn’t matter what your role as a technical leader is. You must understand all aspects of security and how it applies. to all the different facets of IT, the development side, the infrastructure side, the customer support side. You’re already just a blanket over all of that now, and you’ve got to keep up. And I’ve made that commitment to getting myself back up to where, as a leader of those teams, I need to be so that I can converse with them at a correct technical level. And I can then translate that into business speak in a way that… Business leaders can understand those initiatives need to be taken care of.
Speaker 0 | 21:45.911
Do you listen to David Sparks’CISO series podcast?
Speaker 1 | 21:51.195
Sporadically. Unfortunately, podcast time is one of the things that I had to limit whenever I looked across the board at all the other things.
Speaker 0 | 21:58.539
No, I got you. I know security leaders say that one of the reasons why they like his podcast so much is it helps them. like learn and implement it to get different pieces the only reason why i say that you know i’m an audio guy i can read a book but i can only read so fast and i can’t reread i can reread i just don’t reread a book again i mean i guess i should is there any book that i’ve reread a bunch of times yeah there’s a couple um mostly sales books um and actually you know um you know some writing books uh just because i was an english major but but okay um yeah security you To me, I stay away from it because it’s so… I stick to telecom and internet, and yes, there’s a security piece to that, but the security world in general is an ocean of… It’s growing so fast and changing every day. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I can’t imagine the vulnerabilities and weight on your shoulders there. Do you guys have a security specialist or anyone? Do you have a spot on the team for that?
Speaker 1 | 23:06.025
I am very fortunate. Despite having a smaller team, I do have someone whose primary focus is security, which is fantastic to have. You’ve hit it. One of the key things out of all of this is you can make things really secure and completely unusable. So being usable with still not opening yourself up to vulnerabilities, it’s almost an… art form, to be honest, to get that balance where this idea of, you know, why do you lock your car when you park in a parking lot somewhere where you’re hoping that you’ll be just a little bit more of a difficult target than one of the other people who didn’t. And you have to embrace this IT security almost the same way of, I just want to be that much more difficult than everybody else so that we’re not the target. And staying that step ahead. while not making it impossible for your people to get work done.
Speaker 0 | 24:05.179
Yeah. You just reminded me of like a war movie where you’re in a submarine down below and there’s, you know, depth charges coming down and a part of the submarine’s kind of blown up and water’s going through and there’s people running through the like little like, you know, the door hatches and they’re shutting the hatch to prevent water to come into the other section. That’s my… That’s my metaphor for this.
Speaker 1 | 24:29.297
Yeah, there’s a similarity to that. You hit on one of the subsets of the entire genre, which is mitigation. If you do get compromised, how do you limit that compromise to the smallest possible footprint? That’s a whole subset of the entire conversation.
Speaker 0 | 24:47.714
Yeah. Yeah. Outstanding. So for everyone listening out there in this, um, 2020 year that we’ve gone through for it directors, what, I mean, do you have any, any piece of advice for that? That’s been, I don’t know, heartwarming during this year or, or, uh, any, any, any piece of advice or anything that would be, you know, really helpful.
Speaker 1 | 25:17.930
It’s not so much advice as it has been a way of looking at things. This has really provided me a lot of motivation. Thinking of IT people as, and not to get too Mr. Rogers here, as the helpers through all of this chaos that we’ve been through, professional world, education world. We have the IT side of this have been there just. doing our best to be helpers. You know, we’re not frontline emergency responders, but we’re helping them. You know, we’re not frontline salespeople, but we’ve been helping them continue to do their job. And we’re not the professors in the university, but we’re doing our best to help them teach their classes. And each way and each time that we go across all of these different areas, I keep hearing people talk about, well, we were a helper. We got to be there and help them out. We were. a little speck of normal in all of this. And that has been such an engaging and energizing way to think about what we’ve been doing here in the IT universe.
Speaker 0 | 26:28.119
Well, you do have a, you do have a place when disasters hit. And when, you know, as far as business continuity goes and keeping systems up and running, and you do have a place for making everything go smoother, faster. better so from that standpoint it’s i mean you kind of are on the front line with with the telephone you know calling in the calling in the airstrike so to speak there are some certain areas yeah the telecom people specifically have been so critical in all of this to keep oh thank you thank you for that telecom what those people you kick that guy out of here. Um, no. Um, so what, so for it guys out there, should they, um, you know, we’ve got people looking for work. We’ve got people that, um, I don’t know, their, their entire atmosphere has changed in general. Um, you know, what’s their, I guess, where’s the, where’s the glimmer of hope? Not that there’s any, not that there’s any darkness around here, but you know, where’s the, where’s the glimmer of hope for network?
Speaker 1 | 27:40.937
There there’s people like you. that are out there and they’re people with much broader footprints than we can even think about having that are just looking for ways to help those that have a need we’re trying to help find the companies that we know and work with that have open positions and link them up to the individuals that we know are good talents talk to people and help her out there for you too
Speaker 0 | 28:09.166
And I’m going to say this then, and this is the first time, I’m not going to say talk to every sales guy out there, but there’s a lot of salespeople that call on you every day. And the sales guys that are calling on you, believe it or not, are technical salespeople. Well, kind of. They have sales engineers. That used to be my joke. Like, why does the sales engineer exist? The sales engineer exists because he makes sure that all the dumb things the sales guy says, he doesn’t say or he corrects. But anyways, the… They all have huge networks of technical, like you said, large networks. And you’d be surprised at how easy one of the sales guys at one of these technology companies can get you a job somewhere. The sales engineer job, I think, is vastly, the sales engineer is a pretty sweet job. So if there’s any IT directors out there that, I don’t know, maybe your company went under or you’re looking for a job or something like that, the sales engineering position is not that bad. You know, if you want to make, I don’t know. 140,000 a year and sit back and talk with other IT directors and talk about a product or something. It’s not a bad job for anyone that’s out there looking for a job right now. There are a ton of sales engineering positions out there.
Speaker 1 | 29:21.492
There are. Gosh. Yeah. I hadn’t talked about those, but they really do exist. We were chatting about it earlier. There’s so many open positions that… They think they can’t find the right people. And then there’s so many people that think they can’t find the open positions.
Speaker 0 | 29:41.592
It’s like the job. Yeah. It’s the job that you get to just talk about technology. It’s all the fun parts of technology with none, I don’t want to say none of the responsibility, but a lot less of it. John, man, thank you so much for being on the show. Been great as usual. And just to summarize for people so they can have a takeaway, right? How to break up with your phone. That that’s the book. And the other one was four disciplines of, of execution.
Speaker 1 | 30:10.552
Apply those to your personal, not just your business side of things. And you’ll get great results from them.
Speaker 0 | 30:16.336
Man, thank you so much for being on the show. Have a, well, I guess have a wonderful rest of this year here and let’s see what happens in 2021. Maybe, maybe it’s just going to be another blur and we’re just going to also, you know, it’s just going to kind of meld together, but I have a feeling we’re going to be turning the corner here.
Speaker 1 | 30:33.052
Whatever it is, normal will never be the same.
Speaker 0 | 30:35.892
That’s true. Can we come up with a new term for new normal? I’m really tired of new normal.
Speaker 1 | 30:41.373
Maybe we should just say just reality.
Speaker 0 | 30:46.215
Hey, thank you again.
