Using Quarterly Deliverables So Technologists Can Have Fun Again ft. John Dunn
I wanna talk about performance management systems, which is a little bit of the how you can encourage your teams to do that. Before getting into it, wanna thank Doug x, and Expedia. This is a great topic. Technology is taking over our lives, and we're like the minstrels in this day and era, bringing technology to teams, people, and our culture. And I think it's important that we address the topic of leadership because it is so critical in our organizations.
Speaker 1:So I want to start a little bit with my personal leadership journey just because I think it's relevant in these conversations. And if you get bored, just put your head down and I'll take the cue. But I've always I was fortunate as a child. My parents were able to get me some computers, which I instantly took a liking to. Around the time that some federal agents showed up at my house, I decided I needed to maybe turn a different direction.
Speaker 1:Got a degree in electrical engineering but stayed technical. Did database work, programming, a lot of really cool stuff. Started getting into data and analytics. And someone's like, here, report to the CFO. And I was in their meetings and their staff meetings, and they started talking about competitive advantage and all sorts of business terms that I didn't understand.
Speaker 1:So I went back to business school to learn the language of my counterparts around that table. And then I just started supporting different functional areas of the business, from sales, marketing, service. I had a twenty seven year career at GE Healthcare and finally ran out of functions to support and said, know what? I want go into cybersecurity in about twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. My CIO at the time of GE falls out of their chair and is like, you're a CIO.
Speaker 1:You don't go do that kind of stuff. I'm like, no, I'm kind of curious. It looks like something's happening with this ransomware stuff. Fortunate, great decision. Unfortunately, right after that, the pandemic started.
Speaker 1:So we had to do everyone left their offices. So I learned from a fire hose about cybersecurity, things that I thought I understood but didn't. At the same time, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. And so going through the pandemic and learning about how to the cancer journey was something kind of unique as well. So I had a lot of personal stress and learned how to manage that.
Speaker 1:Coming out of the pandemic helped GE Healthcare spin out from GE. And then got a call from if you see my wife here, this is Accuray RadExact. I got a call from a friend who happened to work there. GE Healthcare has a lot of people here in Milwaukee. Accuray, the company that makes that Radixact, is based in Madison, got a call saying, hey, they're looking for someone to come in and help them with their IT and cybersecurity.
Speaker 1:So I jumped at the opportunity given that that was the machine that treated my wife's cancer. And one more recent thing, my father was recently diagnosed with and treated, luckily, thankfully, he's doing quite well a rare aggressive form of cancer. He also went through radiation therapy. So it has a close personal meaning to me in this business. And I don't know if you can see it, but this is the actual equipment we make, and it is so cool.
Speaker 1:We are 100% manufactured in The United States, 70% sourced with US suppliers, and we are making radiation therapy equipment. This is a what's called a linear accelerator. It's kinda like a particle accelerator. It is taking x rays, massively high voltages, and delivering that inside the body to a thing that's moving. We're using machine learning to watch where that tumor is moving and then delivering a very high power mega volt of radiation within, we say, sub millimeter, but really it's half a hair length of accuracy to maximize the dose that's delivered to the cancer cells.
Speaker 1:Radiation kills cancer cells, healthy cells can recover. And so we're able to do that with incredible accuracy, minimizing the side effects on healthy cells, maximizing the dose on the cancer tumor. So here is our product getting made. This creates a tremendous amount of heat. So you see all kinds of copper tubing.
Speaker 1:We're imaging the body while we're delivering that radiation because we want to see if you've got a cancer and it's moving in your body because we have normal bodily rhythms, we're imaging it. We have NVIDIA chips sitting there spinning on this stuff, imaging the body to see where the healthy tissue is, where the dangerous tissue is, and making sure that we're maximizing that dose, all done in real time. We have two ways of delivering it. One, where it's delivering this is what's being made here, the Radixact spinning around, body moves in and out of the device and delivers the radiation. This is called a CyberKnife.
Speaker 1:This is really a manufacturing robot with one of those linear accelerators on the end of it. It moves around the body in kind of like multiple dimensions. Our stuff is really good at what we call motion management. So it's about ten years of research is now coming out. Oftentimes, treatments will be five to 500 appointments.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of time. It's a lot of toxicity from an environmental standpoint. If you're a family member, you're driving people to and from that's disruptive. Something called hypofractionation, which is delivering higher dosages and less treatments. The evidence is coming out after some of these longer term trials, ten year like trials, is showing that you can have better equivalent, if not better outcomes through these fewer events, fewer appointments at higher dosages.
Speaker 1:And that's what this equipment does really well. We have another kind of product here, which is where you can plan it. All right, so if you have the unfortunate circumstances going through a cancer treatment, you'll be given a radiation oncologist. We'll provide a prescription for how much radiation that tumor needs to get. We'll then use this equipment which will figure out how to deliver that.
Speaker 1:What angles, What tumors or what how do we want to hit the tumor? With what different dose? On what appointment? And what tissue do we want to avoid? And it's looking at that vectors at three dimensions.
Speaker 1:Super cool stuff. Had to mention it because I think it's super fun. I love my job. I get to walk around and talk to physicists, medical doctors. The combination of skills and talents it takes to make and deliver these is just fun.
Speaker 1:So every day is kind of fascinating. Before I get into my leadership talk, I do need to credit where a lot of these ideas came from, two highly influential people in my life. As I said, I had the opportunity to work for GE for a long time. That company invested a lot in my leadership. And I had an incredible opportunity with Bob Cancellosi, who later on became a close family friend.
Speaker 1:Eventually became the chief learning officer. I went in as a very young first time early manager to convince him as the head of sales that he needed to do something. He kind of paused the meeting and sat down and gave me a lecture for about an hour about how to run a team. And so when I talk about five priorities, he's the person that really helped me learn how to run my team like that. And it was an amazing opportunity.
Speaker 1:He wrote a book called Four Loop Learning. These are all of his personal journeys that are personal journals that he's written over his career and how he's mined them essentially over time and learned how to learn from himself. An incredibly brilliant person and great educator. I really appreciate him. And then I took a class from Nick Epley, who's a super accomplished organizational psychologist and Neonormal People and how to build organizations at University of Chicago.
Speaker 1:He taught me at the same time I was learning agile and learning all these practices of different techniques and things that we do and how it's backed up by social psychology and a lot of our Western practices simply don't work, yet we continue to do them. So they helped influence a lot of my leadership style, and I appreciate both of them. So the first thing I'm going to start with is that our behavior is a function of the people and the situation that they're in. Does that make sense? All kinds of social psychology from the Milgram experiments will show that if you put people in a certain situation, will do unspeakable things.
Speaker 1:If they think that they take away their own authority, it's a great movie, great read. Go out, take a look at it. Backed up by lots and lots of social science. Yet we as humans tend to overemphasize the effect of people and underinvest in the situation that we put them in. And your role as a leader is to build that situation so that your people can be as successful as they possibly can.
Speaker 1:This is a picture I took. If you saw in the early slides, I love photography. I have hundreds of thousands of photos. I think this is a super cool photo. As an American, I take a lot of pride seeing the flag with two people being able to fly within inches of each other.
Speaker 1:If you're in a different position, you might not think that is as exciting, all right? Some people could be offended by this. So that situation of where you're at in the world, where you're living matters. And you are creating the situation for your team. And that's why being a people leader is such a great point.
Speaker 1:I love the way Doug said that at the beginning. So as I said, we tend to overemphasize the people, right? We're always managing people. We're always talking about people, evaluating people as leaders. Now you've got a performance management system out there.
Speaker 1:You're saying who's good, who's bad, all kinds of different ways. Very few, very infrequent do I see people evaluating the situation of leaders. And this is something that you've got to build for yourself because your organization probably won't do it. Of all my hundreds of thousands of photos, this is without question my favorite picture I have ever taken. I will never take a better picture in my entire life because this was the coolest thing that ever happened.
Speaker 1:These are three people, some of my closest friends and my wife, I think it demonstrates the situation so well. And I won't ask the question because I'm just going to tell you we're looking for the trailhead called the Knoll. And I saw this happening. And sometimes as a photographer, you kind of want to drift out of the scene and kind of take yourself out of it. I saw this happening.
Speaker 1:I'm like, oh my god. We have all this technology. Everyone's looking at their phones. They're setting up their watches. Everyone's confused.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, holy shit, people. Just take a step back and look up. So I think this demonstrates the point really well, all right? And these are highly accomplished, brilliant individuals. And just in a situation where they maybe, I'll say, lost some perspective I have no one's permission to share this photo, by the way.
Speaker 1:So I apologize to my close friends and my wife if anyone ever watches this. All right. So performance management, key role. You as a leader are going to be evaluating people, right? You are getting evaluated.
Speaker 1:This is actually my goals and objectives for the year. We run a fiscal year. Our year ends in June, by the way. Who has listed goals and objectives like this? Is it useful?
Speaker 1:Sometimes. I think it's good. It shows everything that you're doing. I tried to redact a little bit to this so that I've got some other things in here. You'll see some blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:But I find it somewhat helpful to explain all the things that you're doing. What it doesn't do is provide focus, though. And almost anyone in a leadership position is playing two different perspectives between all their inputs and their outputs. And you're controlling that situation for your team. The chaos that you might be experiencing of changing functions, changing priorities, different things on different days, if I wake up in the morning and look at this, I'm not sure what my next best action would be.
Speaker 1:And that's where I differentiate. Yes, we are accountable for a large number of things. I like to say that I don't need to worry about these because my team is doing some of them, and I'll use that as an example. This is my actual priorities. This is from our Q2, So it would have been ending in December.
Speaker 1:And I just try to simplify things and saying, hey, what am I trying to change? As a leader, I am trying to give back to my team. I am also trying to move the organization forward, and I want absolute clarity around that. This is the thing that Bob Cancelloriously taught me. It simplifies things and allows me to also have the conversation with my team that I'm not rolling up everything that you're working on because you're the one taking care of this.
Speaker 1:You won't see things on here like network uptime, server availability. And I'm very clear with my team that that's because I'm not worrying about that. I have a monthly op review. We'll look at the metric. If it's going well, I'm going move on.
Speaker 1:That's as much time as I'm going to give that topic in the course of the month. And that's because that's your responsibility and you should be waking up and figuring out how to improve those metrics. I'm not going to because I'm working on these five things. Each of these columns is especially important. The priority just says what you're trying to do.
Speaker 1:I find oftentimes people across our orgs really struggle with this idea of the measure of success. We don't have that conversation off enough. And it's an uncomfortable one to have at first. A lot of times people think that in IT, your measure of success is deliver on time, on schedule, and on budget. That triple constraint, really important.
Speaker 1:But if you didn't deliver an outcome, what's the point? And I would rather have a project run a month over. Maybe it's a little bit late, but actually get to that outcome. And then let's talk about what that outcome is and make sure the people and the people leader are on the same page about how we're going to measure the success of this program. And it is amazing how often I find disconnects on it because people just make assumptions on how they're getting measured.
Speaker 1:And oftentimes, that alignment conversation is more valuable than anything that happens in the program. I love this last column as well, line of sight. Line of sight is different than red, yellow, green or saying, hey, are we on track, on schedule, on budget? Those types of questions come out in other forms. Line of sight just simply means do you have the resources, talent, and skills to deliver this?
Speaker 1:We put a flag at the top of a hill and said this is the objective we're trying to achieve. We've agreed how we're going to measure the success of that. Are you now capable of delivering that? And it's that simple. And these things change.
Speaker 1:So these were my goals. I did roll being at a small company, coming from a big company, was super fun. And I'm like, I don't see the point of having annual performance reviews. It's too long. I never know what I'm going be working eight, nine months ago.
Speaker 1:I'm going go to quarterly. I went to my boss. She's like, yeah, that's fine. You can switch that. I went to HR.
Speaker 1:I'm like, hey, I'm going do this. They're like, yeah, Okay. And then I made it my goal and took three months and did it. And so we changed our whole performance management system. It's kind of fun to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:This didn't transition well, but I want to share one goal on here that's kind of unique. These are all typical goals you might see on the different CIOs things. This one is not the typical goal for an IT leader. I was trying to build a partnership. Remember that equipment that I showed earlier?
Speaker 1:That treatment planning time or that treatment planning usually happens within the four walls of a hospital. And thought we could build a product that would extend that beyond the hospital walls and make it easier and more transparent and more secure to open up that platform to do treatment planning in a remote fashion. And worked closely with the team, had some plans. For a bunch of different reasons, won't get into it, fell through. And I realized I was no longer going to be able to deliver this goal.
Speaker 1:That happened in December. I was at a meeting with my boss. I said to her, hey, this isn't going to happen. There's no way that this is going to ever deliver. We've learned some things.
Speaker 1:I've made sure the organization learns from that. But I'm going take it off my priorities. I'm not going to work on this anymore. And I am washing my hands with it and I'm done. And she's like, Okay.
Speaker 1:And it was done. That doesn't happen enough. All right? So the other thing that's unique here is that this was what was sometimes we I think earlier we were talking about passion projects and Fridays off. I think a lot more people have the ability to do that.
Speaker 1:This is what I call or what is called a hard goal. Technology is ultimately a creative practice, in my opinion. And the best technologists are creative. And for some people, coming up with a SMART goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic time bound is boring. If I know how to get something done, if I can decompose it and see every single step and know what's going to be well, how to do it, I don't want to work on it, to be completely frank.
Speaker 1:I want to work on the thing that I don't know how to solve. That is where I came up with this kind of paradigm here where I separate SMART goals from hard goals. You need SMART goals because they will keep you employed. All right? I need to keep that network running.
Speaker 1:I need to keep our servers available. If email isn't working, even though I think people might be more productive without it, the reality is my boss would probably be pretty mad at me. So you need those SMART goals. But if you want to get promoted, getting a hard goal in place is something that will differentiate you from others in the organization. How can you make a 10x improvement?
Speaker 1:And then the metrics change for it. If you don't deliver it this quarter, next quarter, or three quarters, who cares? All right? It's not time bound. If it's not going well, that's Okay.
Speaker 1:It's a little bit of a risk free project. And you're giving the employee the freedom to do something creative and create a passion project for themselves. It doesn't work with everyone. Some program managers I'd have this conversation like, I don't
Speaker 2:get it. I don't get it. Don't get it.
Speaker 1:I'm like, great. You know what? You're awesome at delivering programs. You can deliver huge programs. Just do program management.
Speaker 1:This isn't important for you, Okay? For other people, incredibly motivating because now they have the opportunity to solve a problem that's going to create a 10x improvement in the business, which and it's a unique thing in technology that you can deliver an order of magnitude change in the capabilities of your organization. Not many other functions can really do that. So giving people that autonomy to do that and the freedom and the safety has an unbelievable effect on the chemicals in people's brains. They get de stressed.
Speaker 1:They get motivated. They deliver on the SMART goals better because all of a sudden they have something else that can really tickle that other part of their brain and the other sociological needs that they have. So this is something that I've done with my teams and had great success with. Happy to take any questions. I think it's my last slide.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Super simple. Five priorities. As a human, you can't focus on more than five things that you're trying to change. So limit it down.
Speaker 1:Make sure your measure of success is aligned both up with your manager and down to your teams. Ask people if they have line of sight to solving. And if they don't, you as the manager need to step in and help them. That's really what that is about. And then think about a hard goal.
Speaker 1:That's my leadership lesson for the day. What I've learned and what's worked. Happy to take questions.
Speaker 2:John, the business often thinks that security is the opposite of convenience. We talked a little bit about this when we first spoke. Do you think you've had an impact on that with your time at Accu Ray?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I would be I should be fired if I say no. I don't know if I'm going get philosophical on that answer then. I don't think the world has helped with these binary questions, all right? And I think so many times we turn to this absolutism, And oftentimes, it's in the middle.
Speaker 1:There are times when I think there and the way I like to think of it I think Gartner gets the credit for this I think security is terms of friction. And I want to make the proper, most secure path the lowest friction method of getting something done as possible within reason and put high friction in the high risk areas. And as much as I can control that, that's where I never thought the security role and the CIO role could be combined. I'm like, oh, you've got the fox and the hen hound issue. And what I found is actually I get a little bit more foresight on the CIO side of the value add, right?
Speaker 1:And then you've got the security side that you mentioned where it's like, well, you've got to control it and increase that friction or make it more difficult. When you combine the two and say, hey, you know what? People are going be looking for AI. I need to develop a secure way that people can go and do things in AI. I need to help them with their productivity.
Speaker 1:I need to help our developers and engineers be able to leverage it. I need to put a place together where that can be done in a secure fashion and make it so easy to use that that it's actually more difficult to go out and buy some random free tool that's going to have a data privacy issue.
Speaker 3:Would it be fair to say that security is also a spectrum?
Speaker 1:Oh, for sure. I mean, you're constantly in a mode of assessing risks and mitigating that risk. And there are areas where you need to be absolutely secure. And there are other areas that aren't as important. And I do a NIST CSF and I score really low in my application security.
Speaker 1:And the reason for that is I don't have any applications that I manage. So I don't have an AppSec program. But it is apps, yes.
Speaker 2:You kind of have the luxury of
Speaker 4:saying, hey, I don't want to take this massive spreadsheet and recreate it. I want kind of boil things down and get those approvals. If your organization is not in that position at the moment and still needs to you know, kinda I like I like your comment about how leaders control the inputs and the outputs. So what may you recommend to others to kinda yeah. I know all this detail needs to happen, but for our teams, I want them prioritizing and focused on this.
Speaker 4:How do you how might you resolve that tension?
Speaker 1:That's that's the real goal. I mean, call it a you know, he's called middle manager. I don't really love the term, but I think to answer this question, it's helpful. You're getting chaos. In today's world, your inputs are absolute chaos in almost any company today.
Speaker 1:They're dynamic. The markets are changing. Does anyone know what tariffs have done in the last hour? I don't. I've been here.
Speaker 1:But I guarantee they probably changed somewhere in the world. That stuff, that noise, all right, can paralyze an organization. And if your organization is sharing information with you, you're getting all these different inputs. Your role ultimately is to create value for the organization. In order for your employees to create value, you've got to help them get momentum.
Speaker 1:And that momentum can only be got through focus. And so your role in and all of us are middleman. I don't care if you're a CEO. You've a board. You've got shareholders.
Speaker 1:You've got investors who are asking you questions. We're all getting madness, all right, coming at us. You've got to help your team understand and disseminate what's important And helping them be able to distinguish that which is important from that which is not is the best thing a leader can do. And so I think I use that as an example, I'm glad you picked up on it because I wanted to mention this. I think you owe it to your teams.
Speaker 1:If they're going to perform and they are task switching every day or you're coming to them with other different tasks constantly, you've got recognize that you're doing that and correct your leadership to be able to make your team more effective. Because to, I think, the points earlier, once your teams get more effective, then it's easier for the whole organization to get more effective and it becomes a little bit of a flywheel of innovation there. Does that answer it? Or I can talk about this one for a long time.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I come from a small organization too. So I just think it's an interesting conversation.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, that's relevant for all people. I mean, I think it's everyone has execution struggles. And oftentimes, probably I would guess I don't have data on this, but lack of focus is probably the number one inhibitor of execution. If constantly task switching and trying to do too much, if you're trying to move 500 balls up a hill, they're all just rolling down, but you can move one at a time. And I think that's something our organizations get wrong a lot, big or small.
Speaker 3:Any other questions? Just a comment. I think part of building that situation just an instance just yesterday of my teams preparing a briefing to one of Kyle's teams. I'm I'm on the info sec side. And so first of all, building structure, I think, is a big part of building that situation.
Speaker 3:You know, our subordinates are looking for us for direction, and I think structure helps us have systems basically in place, whether it's common meetings, priority listing, stuff like that. And what I was gonna comment on, and this will resonate to Kyle because I'm guilty of it sometimes. Many of us technologists focus too many too much on the details. What made me think of this, John, is your second goal slide, the way you summarized that. I really like that.
Speaker 3:And it's one of the comments that I just summarizing what are we essentially focusing. What do we need to get done in the next month? Is this gonna resonate to the IT manager tomorrow? Today, we're giving this briefing. And the guy in my team leading this was gonna go through our entire priorities of, like, eighteen eighteen things.
Speaker 3:Said We'll give him a minute to talk. And well, that's the reality. It's a it's a little bit more below Kyle's level. But anyway, I said focus on three to six things. We need to get Tiffany's attention understanding what a what a priority this is.
Speaker 3:So, anyway, it that those thoughts came out of I really like the way you focus on breaking down the essentials, whether it's up or down.
Speaker 1:I love that point. First, Tiffany's awesome. Tell her I said hi. I miss her. The other thing that I didn't touch on here that I think you brought up at the end as a lot of times we think of our goals as being a conversation between you and your manager.
Speaker 1:As a people leader, I think it's important that you're accountable to your teams as well. And I bust my butt. I'm not sure how much my I work for the CEO. She sees data showings up in presentations, all right? And that's good.
Speaker 1:Our organization is getting better. We're doing predictive analytics. We're doing preventative maintenance. We got rid of our on center data warehouse. We moved it all to Databricks.
Speaker 1:We combine operational data with structured data from enterprise systems. And now we're able to predict machine performance in the field. All that's super cool for us. She just sees the outcome here of, hey, all of a sudden, we can replace a $50 a part in the field before it breaks instead of spending $50,000 to replace it. Alright?
Speaker 1:I love this because I want my team to feel that I'm accountable. And I show them this at the beginning of the quarter and say, these the things I should be working on? Are there things here that are gonna make you more effective? And then at the end of the quarter, not only do I ask them how they performed, but I share back on how did I perform? Are we actually doing quarterly deliverables?
Speaker 1:Are we talking about this on a quarterly basis? And are we shifting our performance management system to something that is more effective than what we used in the past? I'm accountable for that now because I put this on here. How are we doing on security? Are we actually building analytics muscle?
Speaker 1:Am I too cheap? Am I not bringing in the right people? Are we not spending enough? All the times I ask about budget and the very cost effective Microsoft credits that we're using and the concern about that, is that hampering us? Or are these healthy conversations?
Speaker 1:And I think how I think the organization appreciates that.
Speaker 2:John, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
