Tom Clark

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining me here this morning. And thank you also to Gene and the team at IT Revolution for having me. It's my third year speaking at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and I'm honored to be invited back.

You're in for a very rare treat today: 30 minutes of high-quality content from a commercial broadcaster, and I promise you, there's not going to be a single commercial break in the middle of this presentation.

So I should introduce myself. I'm Tom Clark, and I've been in technology now for about 17 years. I went straight out of school into my first job as a Windows administrator, Windows sysadmin, for Jaguar Cars. Now, one of those things is quite cool. One of those things is not so much. And actually, listening to Chris Hill's presentation earlier, it seems Jaguar has changed a lot since I was last there, and I quite fancy going back.

After leaving Jaguar, I became a Perl developer, which I know is a kind of strange transition, and that career took me through lots of different companies, large and small, across a whole load of different fields. So I've worked for the BBC. I've worked for Siemens. I've worked for Global Radio. I've worked for three startup companies, two of which were my own, all of which failed because, of course, they're startup companies.

And then in 2011, I joined ITV, and I joined as an individual contributor. I've worked my way up into the heady heights of management, where I'm now head of Common Platform there.

You can see my Twitter handle is up there. Please tweet me. It actually makes my mother really, really proud when you do that.

I should talk a little bit about my employer, ITV. ITV is an integrated producer broadcaster, which basically means we get to make content and then distribute it around the world, around the airwaves as well. It was originally founded in 1955. The British people in the audience will probably remember it as Channel 3 as you were growing up. I, however, didn't, because my parents thought it was far too common, and I wasn't allowed to watch it.

But we make some absolutely fantastic content, and we are one of the members of the FTSE 100, so it's the Fortune 100 in the UK. We turn over about 3 billion pounds a year. And like I said, we are a commercial broadcaster, which means we have to make a lot of really popular content, and we do: scripted dramas, unscripted reality, and all these kinds of different things. They mean that we have millions of people watching our content every single evening. And actually, 75% of the ABC1 demographic watches an ITV program every night, and those are the ones the advertisers really care about because they're the ones with the money.

But actually, we do a lot with very little. We have a 3 billion pound turnover, but only 5,500 employees. So actually, we do a lot with very little.

At ITV, I report to the director of infrastructure, and he reports to the CTO, and the CTO reports to the board. So actually, it's quite a flat management structure, which generally means if you have a good idea or you have the right incriminating photographs, you can get a lot done quite quickly.

So I'm here to talk about happy people. And I know what you're thinking: "Tom, how am I going to sell people on happy people? That's a nice thing. That's a laudable thing. But how am I actually going to take that into my business? Why is that a good thing?"

Well, I have a theory that happy people and high performers, there's a link between the two. And I know you could go to your boss and say, "I know how to make my team more high-performing. And I know it's a bit weird, but it's by making people happy."

I also think as well that high performers generally become happy people, and you get into a virtuous infinite loop.

So if we agree on that, I think we should probably refresh ourselves on what is good about a high-performing team. And when I researched this, I looked, and I found no one really has a single definition. Everyone has their own hand-rolled, artisanal, bespoke definition of what a high-performing team does.

But there are some common traits. So what I did, and like the thousands of people before me, I boiled them down and I came up with my own definition of what a high-performing team is, which I'll take you through now.

So aspects. A high-performing team should be safe. And by that I mean, generally, when you go to the office, you shouldn't be eaten by a lion, a tiger, or a bear, obviously. But it should be more than that. It's this psychological safety, the term we've heard mentioned a few times today.

It means you should be able to say, "I don't know." And the response should be, "Let me teach you," not, "Ha ha, you're so stupid for not knowing something." It's also being able to admit that you made a mistake, that you screwed up, and not actually feel that you might get fired as a result of that.

I'm sure many of you have, after an incident, you run a root cause analysis. And how often at the end of that root cause analysis does it say, "This person screwed up. This person made a mistake. This person pressed the wrong button"? And how often is that person fired?

So let's flip that around. Think about that mistake as very expensive training. And if you fire that person, you don't get to capitalize on that training, and it's not very good. So you should be thinking more about postmortems. You should be thinking about what went well, what didn't go so well. Where did we get lucky? How can we change the argument away from actually firing people and actually learning from those things as well?

And it's something the medical industry has got really, really well. They have the whole concept of a near miss. If you're about to inject a patient and you realize at the last minute you're about to make a mistake, you're encouraged to actually talk about that and say, "I almost made the mistake. How can we make sure it never gets that far again?"

So safety is a really, really important aspect of a high-performing team.

Awareness. You should know about the skills and the abilities of the members of your team. So for example, I have a background in Perl development, although I do consider myself a recovering Perl developer. And because of that, people know to come to me when they have certain questions about that thing. I'm also an expert in scalability and operability, so people know they can come to me with those kind of particular problems. And if we didn't, we'd just be reinventing the wheel and learning everything for ourselves rather than collaborating.

So collaboration. As a team, we want to be a team. We want to work together to solve problems. And we don't want to be a group of individuals, a bunch of individuals working on those problems. So when there is a Perl problem, they'll come to me and I can help and pair with them and develop them in that area.

A high-performing team should always be decisive. How many of you have sat in a meeting where you're deciding, say, some coding standards, tabs versus spaces, some important things like that, and you're all around and you come to the big decision. You've finally made it. High fives all around. You all go to the bar afterwards to celebrate. And then a week later, you're in a very similar meeting room with a very similar group of people making a very similar... no, in fact, exactly the same decision again.

It's like it's déjà vu, it's Groundhog Day. Unless the situation changes, you should stick that decision and move forward. And Amazon have this great "disagree, but commit." Commit, but disagree. You can move forward after you come to that decision. So a team should be decisive.

They should also be expert. They should produce things that satisfy the requirements really, really well, and they don't need to be redone, because rework costs at least twice as much, obviously, as the work in the first place. And it's really important that it does the right thing reliably 99.99% of the time.

But with that expertise comes efficiency. We shouldn't gold-plate things. If you can do something in six weeks instead of six months, you should. And again, one of the mottos of the Perl development community is, "You ain't going to need it." And it's really important to heed that. You ain't going to need it until you do, and when you do, it's the right time to try and add that feature. So you should be efficient.

High-performing teams should obviously be engaged, and I'm delighted to say most of you are looking at me right now. And the ones of you that are on your phones, your laptops, I'm going to pretend you're tweeting from my Twitter handle earlier on and making my mother very proud. But the team should be engaged. You're in the room, you're present.

How many meetings have you been at when someone's staring off into space, and someone hasn't even turned up at all, even though you brought donuts? That's a really sad thing, so you want the opposite of that.

And finally, they should be aligned. The individuals in the team should know how they fit into the team. The team should know where they fit into the department, the department within the group, the group within the division. And you should all be going in the same direction because there's a shared strategy. There's OKRs. There's things like that, that make things better. Pretty obvious kind of stuff.

So those kind of properties, they're great. We all want to be part of that team, and being in that team like that would obviously make you very happy. But the problem is, how? Can you just click your fingers and say, "Be high-performing. Have all of those properties"? Can you just whip your team and say, "Be happy. Be high-performing"?

Unfortunately, you can't, and I've tried. Well, not the whipping thing, the clicking fingers thing.

But I have a theory that high performance and happiness is an emergent property of three areas. And rather than trying to strive for high performance, you strive to optimize those three areas and you'll get a happier team. And as a side effect, you'll get high performance.

So I'm a bit of a geek, and so I've come up with an equation. This is Clark's patented workplace happiness equation, and that's the end of the talk. Thank you very much.

No, it's not.

So H plus E plus S plus K plus A plus M plus P. This, I believe, is the formula for happiness: environment, people, and leadership. You get those three things in the right quantities, and you get happiness, and therefore high performance as an emergent property.

So let's drill into them and talk about what we mean by these particular areas.

So environment. We're going to start with a classic hierarchy. It's a good way to do these presentations. We'll start at the bottom: hygiene, the basics, your salary. Do you feel you're fairly compensated for the work you do? Of course, none of us feel we're fairly compensated for the work we do, but still.

Job security. I don't know about you, but I find it hard to concentrate when I don't know if I'm going to have a job at the end of the month. Another one as well: your laptop. Is it modern? Does it take 15 minutes to start up in the morning? Does it, even worse, take 15 minutes to shut down at the end of the day? Do the printers work? Does the internet work in your office?

But it's more than that. It actually is the literal office environment. Do you have an open plan office? I'm sure many of you do. They're great for collaboration, but for concentration, for knowledge workers, for getting into the flow and into the zone, they're terrible. People are easily distracted.

So do you have a multimodal office environment where you can actually say, "I need to concentrate right now. I'm going to go into the quiet zone and put my head down"? Really, really key things to the office.

And above the hygiene factors, we've got the extras, the value-add, the plus-plus. These are the things that may or don't appear to benefit the bottom line in the next quarter, but you know they're a good thing to do anyway.

So these are things like blogging and open sourcing and being able to mentor, maybe even actually taking part in a code club and giving back to the community. These things may not help the bottom line, like I say, but they do help with recruitment and retention, and they are really, really positive things to involve.

And then at the top, we have balance. You want to have a work-life balance. It can't be 100% about work. Obviously, it can't be 100% about home. But you need to have that balance. And any kind of tech hierarchy wouldn't be the same without the internet at the bottom. And obviously we know actually beneath all of that is coffee. Very, very important.

So if you've got all of those kind of things ticked off, if you've got your free lunches, you've got your masseuses, you've got your on-site crèche, brilliant. Wow. And if you do, please let me know where you are because I'd love to come and work with you, because ITV hasn't got all of those yet.

But it's important. So environment ticked off.

On to the next one, people. Everything is a people problem.

So the middle part of the equation: S and K. S and K are my hiring criteria for ITV on my team. You need to have these qualities to even get past the gate, and it's two very, very simple things. The only musts on the team. So I boil it down to two simple things: you've got to be smart, okay, and you've got to be kind.

So what do I mean by these? Smart, I say, is the ability to adapt to change. I think you'll be hearing over the next two days that technology is constantly changing. What a surprise. And you need to be pretty smart to keep up. And it's really, really important to be able to do that. And change has never been as slow as it is today.

And then kind boils down to the ability to fit into a team. Essentially, don't be a dick. It's pretty obvious, but it's true.

And I know you want to hire a rockstar ninja, but sometimes those people land on the team, and they become the focus of the team, and everyone else leaves. It's a deleterious kind of effect. So you want to be thinking, how can I get people on the team that have these two absolute key qualities?

And so now we're going to play a little game to illustrate quite what we mean by these. It's going to be new on ITV this summer, so stay tuned. This is going to be a trial version of it. It's called Guess the Emoji.

So here's a matrix. We can see down this axis here we have smartness, and down this axis here we have kindness.

So we're going to start on the bottom left-hand corner. So think about someone, and I hope you don't have to work with them, who's not at all smart, and they're not at all kind. Any ideas about which emoji is hiding behind door number one? Any ideas?

It's the poo emoji. No one wants to work with this person because they're literally shit. They're not very good to work with. I'm really sorry if you do.

So we're going to head up the axis now. We're going to head up the kindness axis. So they're very kind, but they're not at all smart. I'm sure they have a use, I just haven't worked out what it is yet. Any ideas for this one, door number two? Anyone?

It's the puppy dog emoji. It's an easy one, come on. I know it's early, but come on. So they are useful on the team for some purposes, but actually, generally, they aren't where you want to be going to.

So along this axis here, we have smartness. They are very smart, but they're not at all kind. Any idea what's in door number three?

Robot. There we go. Robot emoji. And historically, the technology area has been filled with a lot of people that exhibit these kind of particular qualities, and it's not ideal.

And then finally, top right quadrant, door number four: smartness and kindness. Again, these are both qualities that are on a Gaussian distribution, like a bell curve. So it's something that's very rare, multiplied by something that's very rare, that makes something that is extraordinarily rare. In fact, you could say it's mythical.

It is. Unicorn emoji. And that's it.

They are rare, but they're hard to find. But it is really critical and key.

And so as a manager, one of your most important jobs is to build your team. That's going to be your legacy when you move on, the team and the structure you leave behind. And it's very easy to put bums on seats. And I'm sure you'll all have pressure to put bums on seats. Tick it off. It's easy, but it's also weak.

You need to actually do it properly, and it took me two and a half, three years to grow my team. I have a team of about 20 people now. I had three when I started.

So it's important. We should all be more unicorn.

So that's great. The people bit ticked off as well.

So now on to leadership. For the Dan Pink fans in the audience, they'll probably know where I'm going with this one. They might be able to help me out.

H equals A plus M plus P. Any idea what A and M and P may stand for?

Okay, so there's a guy called Dan Pink, and he talks about a theory of motivation. And he says if you give people autonomy, mastery, and purpose, then they'll feel motivated, and they'll want to succeed in your organization.

So I want to drill into a little bit now about what I actually mean by those three properties.

So autonomy: the freedom to make your own decisions. Shocking. So obviously, as a manager, I want you to take all of your work to me and get me to sign off on every single thing you want to do. You should be bringing me your emails. I should be reading them through before you actually send them out. And heaven forbid you use Slack without actually confirming the message you're about to send is appropriate.

So no, the opposite. That's the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

You should give your team the autonomy to make their own decisions, and you should give them the trust to do it. And you earn trust by giving trust as a leader.

So don't give someone a set of directions. You give them the destination, to use a metaphor, and give them the rules of the road. Tell them the principles on which you should make decisions through. But give them the destination, give them a map, and give them a compass.

Because if you do give them a set of directions, maybe they'll run into some roadworks which you couldn't have predicted, and they get stuck, and maybe they'll just find a better route than you could do anyway. So it's really important. You give people autonomy, and they'll start to flourish.

Next up, mastery: the opportunity to become brilliant at something through training and practice. And so this is training. This is conferences. It's being able to come to events like this. But it's much more than that. It's actually allowing people to develop and to grow.

So it's about career development. It's about professional development. It's about personal development. And as a leader and a manager, it's your job to say to people, "Where do you want to be in a year's time? Three years' time? Five years' time? Who do you want to be in that time as well?"

Ask those questions and make sure that you are assigning work and training and assignments to those people that take them in that direction, and they will feel that they are growing with you.

And it's more than that as well. Your power is the work and the assignments you give to your team. So once you have that list of where they want to be and you look at the work that you've got, you work out how you can try and marry up the two.

And this is something called the Goldilocks principle. So when you're assigning this work, you shouldn't be thinking to yourself, give them easy tasks. They can just churn through loads of easy tasks and they'll be fine. Because the problem with smart people is they get bored. And an easy task, they'll leave and they'll move on somewhere else.

But conversely, don't give them something so hard that they get frustrated because they'll drive themselves into a wall, they'll burn themselves out, they'll get increasingly frustrated at the level of the work.

You want to find that Goldilocks zone, that sweet spot in the middle where it's just hard enough and they feel that they've stretched and they've learned and they've developed.

So maybe they have to make a new connection. Maybe they have to make a new connection with someone at the office. Maybe they have to learn a new skill. But ultimately, as a result, they've developed as an individual and you've got your work done.

So it's not a zero-sum game. You can actually both benefit from the transaction. So mastery is key.

And then purpose: the belief that what you do actually matters.

So Dan Pink says this is the most important one, and I'd agree entirely as well. And so, again, I work for ITV. We are a very large broadcaster in the UK. We make a lot of really popular television, and hundreds of millions of people around the world watch our content. Tens of millions of people in the UK watch our content.

And so that's the thing I try to convey to my team, actually, that whichever team you're in, whether you're in the broadcast scheduling team, the content delivery team, the airtime sales team, ultimately, you are helping to entertain the country. We're not saving lives, but we are entertaining them, and I think that's the next best thing.

But it's really key that you get that. So you get the purpose that what you believe, or sorry, what you do actually matters.

So to recap, and we're going to do it through another Venn diagram. The three areas of a happiness equation.

At the top, you have environment. So again, this is your office environment. This is your salary. This is your job security. This is your ability to progress in your role, your ability to mentor people, your ability to receive training, a laptop that actually works, margarita Fridays when you have a good thing. The environment is really key, and the coffee and the internet.

People. People are key. Everything is a people problem. So the people you add to your team, you add the S and K, try and find and hire smart and kind people onto your team, and you'll find they'll excel. And also the other thing, smart and kind people attract smart and kind people, actually. So again, it's a virtuous cycle there as well.

And then finally, add onto that leadership. So I spoke before about autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And you get those three, and you combine them together, and over the top, you get happy people. And as I said before, happy people generally are high performers, and high performers become happy people.

So thank you all very much.

Cool.

And Gene asked us to actually say if we needed help with anything. And I think my big question is going to be: does that make sense to you? Does that resonate with you? Do you think I'm totally crazy? Because this is how I manage my team at ITV, and they seem to like it.

And I'm not going to say that no one ever leaves my team. I wish that was possible. But actually, the people I do retain say, "I've really enjoyed my time with you. It's been absolutely fantastic."

So please, you saw my Twitter handle, it's up there as well. If you want to tweet me and say, "Tom, I think you're crazy," I'm happy to grab a coffee with you afterwards and actually explain a bit more. Or if you think it's a great idea as well, happy to hear that as well.

So thank you all very much. Cool. Thank you. Cheers.