In this compilation episode, we look back on wisdom from renowned tech executives about how to build and foster great teams.Featuring insights from Fred Lee, Dan Kirsche, Jorie Sax, Steve Caudill, Christina Garcia, and Dom Scandinaro, who share their perspectives on the importance of diverse and well-structured teams. Key topics include team composition, sharing knowledge, effective scaling, fostering interpersonal relationships, and creating rich organizational culture. These leaders emphasize the significance of nurturing talent and fostering diversity to build world-class teams capable of overcoming challenges and driving innovation.
- (00:00) Introduction to Building Teams
- (01:39) Fred Lee knows that great teams will naturally build great products
- (02:42) Dan Kirsche on building teams with complementary skills
- (03:07) Jorie Sax recommends team-driven ideation
- (03:42) Steve Caudill champions diverse teams
- (04:17) Christina Garcia on owning and communicating mistakes
- (05:32) Jorie Sax discusses the balance of structure and freedom
- (06:57) Dom Scandinaro on scaling teams and workflows
- (07:59) Dan Kirsche on coaching to a teammate’s skillset
- (08:42) Jorie Sax unpacks interdepartmental communication
- (10:34) Christina Garcia on having a great culture
- (12:39) Fred Lee on cross-department connections
- (14:04) Dan Kirsche explains how he both challenges and supports his team
- (16:03) Christina Garcia reminds us to be in service of your team
About Our Guests
Fred Lee is CTO at PartsSource. Dan Kirsche is the newly promoted CTO at Chamberlain. Jorie Sax is head of United Airlines Innovation Lab. Steve Caudill is former CTO at Rand McNally. Christina Garcia is SVP of Engineering at Echo Logistics. Dom Scandinaro is CTO at Cameo.
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Full Show Transcript
Patrick Emmons: Hello, fellow innovators, Patrick Emmons here. In this episode, we're bringing you a special collection of insights from some of our past guests, all centered around a key theme. What it takes to lead great teams. Across these conversations, a common thread emerged. Successful leaders prioritize building strong, diverse, and well-structured teams.
You'll hear from industry leaders like Fred Lee, Dan Kirsche, Jorie Sax, Steve Caudill, and Christina Garcia as they share their perspectives. On what makes a great team and how to cultivate one.
We'll kick things off with Fred Lee, CTO at PartsSource, who emphasizes why team is the North Star: build a great team, and everything else we'll follow, he says.
Next, we'll dive into team composition and diversity, featuring insights from Dan Kirsche, newly promoted CTO at Chamberlain. Also, Jorie Sax, head of United Airlines Innovation Lab, and Steve Caudill, former CTO at Rand McNally.
Later in this episode, we'll explore sharing knowledge and creating team structures with Christina Garcia; she's the SVP of Engineering at Echo Logistics, and Jorie Sax of United Airlines. We'll also hear from Dom Scandinaro CTO at Cameo, Dan Kirsche again and Jorie Sax on how to grow and scale teams effectively. Finally, we'll discuss the importance of knowing your people and fostering strong interpersonal relationships with insights from Christina, Fred, and Dan.
So let's dive in.
Fred Lee: For me personally, who, you know, I lead technology and product and engineering. You know, it is always about talent. It is not only hiring, but also growing the great talent that I already have, and just constantly trying to improve the team.
A lot of times people will ask me like, Fred, what is your vision? What is your mission while you're there? And people might be a little surprised to hear me say that my goal is to build a world-class team that can build world-class products over and over again. And that's maybe a little surprising to people because they expect to hear from me something like about the product or about the technology or whatever.
But what I have learned is that the only thing that really matters is: Do you have a great team? And a great team will overcome any of those things, and a great team will adapt to any of those challenges.
Dan Kirsche: I think you want to find people that kind of round you out, but also that you're going to enjoy working with. So that’s a huge, huge piece to it. I want somebody who's passionate, I want them to have an opinion, right? When I ask questions, to really have some sort of thoughtful position behind it. It doesn't have to be the same way that I think about it, but I want them to be thoughtful and opinionated. I want them to be innovative.
Jorie Sax: No solid ideation comes from one individual, and that's where that inclusion comes into play and that diversity of thought background comes into play. So I would say that ultimately in innovation, it is much more about the culture that you're creating, the fact that you're all united behind a shared passion and purpose. So there is a sense of sharing. You can't just hand something over. There does have to be communication and collaboration at a certain point. It's just not a siloed handoff.
Steve Caudill: From my perspective, the best thing to do is get a lot of diversity, right? You want young talent. You want non-traditional educations. You want folks that came from different places. You want old school guys that have been there and done that. And bring all of those folks together gets you just a lot more interesting team.
And so then when somebody comes in to interview, you know, assuming you can get them to at least take your call, the folks that they're talking to is a wide assortment of people with a bunch of different perspectives and not just, okay, everybody's gotta be a cookie cutter and you have to fit in a certain way.
Christina Garcia: Communicate out to all of your peers in the org the lessons you learn, so that someone else can avoid that in the future because things do fail. We're human, we're imperfect, but as long as we're able to change the way we work to mitigate that and learn from those mistakes and bring that forward across everything and share those learnings, those lessons, the better.
So some of the hurdle is, you know, trying to go too fast and not having spent the time on the why, in silos of communication. When those failures happen, the team solves it, but they're not then taking the time to let the rest of the org know to learn and share from those lessons.
Because they're valuable. Even if that failure was specific to that one incident, like the replications of it and like the pattern of why it failed could be very applicable to other things. So really take that to heart. And I think the other thing is just also being clear and holding accountability.
What you allow to manifest in your org is seen as, okay, that's the bar: we, you know, we talked about earlier. And if your bar is: we want quality and “done” means this. And then holding people accountable to that, like that becomes the de facto standard for great and good and done in your solutions.
Jorie Sax: You want enough structure and framework so that the way you're operating is consistent. You're able to assign value metrics or return metrics on, you know, the time spent by a team or the dollar spent. There are ways to create structure within innovation, and I think it's absolutely necessary and needed.
It's just a matter of where do you add structure? And being thoughtful about it. How do you create structure that still allows for flexibility, spontaneity? And I think as long as you have the right, I would say intake funnel prioritization, and kind of scope of where you are going to innovate and on what, and you have processes in place for those types of handoffs.
If it's something that you're building within a team or you're conceiving in a team, and it’s not going to scale within that same team, you're going to need some form of process for that. And then ultimately metrics to show that you're growing. Because if you can't compare year over year, whether it's based on number of ideas, number of scaled outcomes, number of new ways of working, or processes or growth within a team, again, you're not going to be able to prove the worth and the value.
And that's still something that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what team you're on or what you're doing to better serve a company: you have to prove that.
Dom Scandinaro: Well, I think one that you just have to learn firsthand, which seems really obvious in retrospect, is just that the same processes and procedures that you have for one team of engineers with a team of three engineers at the whole company, won't work when you have 10 teams of engineers with a hundred engineers at the whole company.
It isn't immediately obvious when you're in the thick of it, that if things are going super well and you're hiring and hiring and hiring and building more and more teams, that you actually need to change anything, right? Because things are going well. People are deploying code, more customers are coming, revenue's increasing. You won't always take a step back and think about: what efficiencies are we missing out on by not adjusting our processes or you know, kind of the opposite. Like, what problems are we causing by maybe moving too fast when we've got a growing team and need to just take a step and slow down and make sure that we've got work siloed off in a way that's causing people not to step all over each other all the time.
Dan Kirsche: There's different ways that you coach folks depending on how much skill they have, right? Where they are in their development of a specific skill. And so you just have to identify that.
And maybe it's ask them questions. Maybe it's give them a project plan, right? Give them ideas on the steps along the way. Maybe it's give them the steps and maybe you talk through the specific implementation, whatever it is. Maybe it's give them a partner to work with...
But it's work. It's a lot of work as a leader to give somebody else something that's a stretch. You have to be really engaged to make sure that they're successful and ultimately, you know, that's what makes you successful. Growing leaders really expedites your own career growth.
Jorie Sax: Well, I would say when it comes to cross-functional or interdepartmental relationships, and that's really what we're talking about. It's about understanding your colleagues, what their needs are, what their motivations are, what their styles are, and honestly, communication is so key and understanding the way you communicate and how they're going to receive it.
Because if you can find common ground in a conversation, conversation can be so powerful because it can unlock questions or answers that can really start to guide you down a path that you'd never thought of. And that's when it gets really fun and really exciting. And you see light bulbs go off and both parties are getting energy from it.
And that's what's really exciting. So I definitely agree that when it comes to the pairings and the yin and yangs, I mean, there's, there's always a happy medium, but you don't want the extremes. You need the extremes, right, in order to build the right team. But you also need to understand how those extremes can come together and work well and augment and supplement and compliment one another.
I've found that as much as I might love to pull on the one that's pushing the gas and the other one that's pushing the brakes, you know, sometimes you need a little bit of that opposite in your life, but you're never going to really succeed, at least from an innovation standpoint, unless you have all of those extremes.
If you're thinking completely outside the box and then you're thinking about how to scale and be operationalized because nine times out of 10, it's not going to scale and be operationalized in the original ideation phase. And so you can't just have one extreme or the other. And that's when teams come together. It's a lot harder than it sounds, but when you can unlock it, it's really powerful and magnetic too.
Christina Garcia: I think that the culture of the organization is first and foremost. If you have a great culture in an organization, then great people are just naturally there because they're driven to being in a culture. And Echo's culture is like: we carry the load together. We do hard stuff, but we do it together. And I think that becomes part of the reason that this team is so great.
Because they're always willing to lend a hand and to learn from each other. And no one is shy to say, I got your back, I’ll help you, which is absolutely incredible. And there's none of this: It's me and I was the reason and the superhero this got done. It was, Hey, here's the team, and kudos to this group over here who helped us and our partners over in DevOps.
So it's absolutely incredible to see that, and that's the culture.
I think the other thing is when I came into the org, I met with everyone. I think it's important as a leader. To meet with everyone on the team and have a personal relationship. So even if it's a 15 minute coffee, talk with them just to say, tell me your story. I want to know why you're here. I want to know what your goals are.
And that connection allows me to reach out to them and say, how are you doing? Even on Slack or see them on a team call and say, how's this looking? This issue seemed hairy. What did you find? Right? And then when I send my weekend review emails and I talk about things like accountability or our need to do a better job of communicating or documentation. And I do send emails every week just about what's going on in the org and what are the themes I saw about opportunities that we have.
They'll read it because now they know that what I'm saying, it's succinct and it's there, but it's there for a reason, because it's tied to our strategy and our technology goals. So a lot of it has to do with the leader putting in the effort to build a lot of the relationships and the communication channels, so that they can feel like you got their back and therefore they'll go out and they'll tackle that next task. And when you say, I know this is hard, but I believe you can do it. And they trust you. Because you know them, you see them, you recognize that they're there and, and the hard work that they're doing.
Fred Lee: I had heard from the product and engineering team that, you know, we just have like lots of production issues, right? And so I had the team sit with customer service and listen in, and I kind of thought the goal was to identify the problems, right? That's what I wanted.
Out of that, what ended up happening was you certainly do some of that, but as I mentioned, you just get inspired by the work that's happening and the value you're creating. Because often as people who build product and do software, you're still disconnected to the end user. But the surprising thing, and this is what I would suggest everyone do, is it actually created an improvement in team morale because now you're sitting with this person that kind of sits in the customer service team, but you see them, you have coffee with them, you have lunch with them. You say hi to them. How was your weekend? You realize that this is a person who's trying to do their job and you realize, oh, like I what I built, the software I built, in some ways helps them, but in some ways causes them problems and there's empathy that's built and the team comes back with a lot of connections and energy around the company and what we're doing to try to help each other.
Dan Kirsche: It's important to get to know people. You can't get to know them in big groups, and I'm an introvert, so I prefer one-on-ones as opposed to large groups, but I also find that you just learn so much more about people.
And it allows you, as you're kind of constructing the org structure making sort of tweaks where people fit in, right? Because we really, it's somewhat of an art; understanding everyone has their strengths that we want to make sure we're focusing on, right? We're giving them the opportunity to focus on their strengths.
And so finding the right place for people is super important. And that's just listening, right? That's the conversations. And I'm also a big proponent of you really have to understand the level that they're at in terms of their leadership capabilities and always give them a stretch opportunity, right?
That is the number one way that I grow folks, is. Give them the stretch opportunity and then support them through it, right? You don't want to give them too large of a stretch where they're struggling and you have to essentially do it for them. Or if you don't, they're going to fail. You want to give them just enough so that they can come back to you and ask questions.
And you can observe and see where you need to kind of catch them right before they start going in the wrong place. But it's the stretch opportunities that I think are so important, and then being there for your team to support them, right? Ensuring that they're successful, give them the confidence. I have found that to be super successful.
I've seen a lot of people have really strong career growth as I kind of give them more and more and more slowly give them larger teams, more complex projects. Leadership, not just direction. People leadership, but influential, right?
But when they're not directly reporting to you, that’s one of the hardest things to do, right? To drive a project with a lot of people that aren't reporting directly into you. So trying to kind of slowly grow them and give them more stretch goals, is super effective. So I'd say that's probably my number one secret weapon.
Christina Garcia: Remembering that it is my choice for how I respond to situations, right? And remembering why I'm here, and that is to be of service and the vehicle of service and success for all of my team.
Patrick Emmons: Christina leaves us with a powerful reminder, a leader's primary role is to nurture and foster the success of their team. Throughout this episode, we've heard incredible insights on building strong teams, fostering diversity, sharing knowledge, and growing as a team and as individuals and as leaders. I loved revisiting these conversations. It's always so much fun, and I hope they've sparked some ideas for you as well. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
