Host Intro (Gene Kim)

So yeah, I first talked with Paul Gaffney, former head of software for The Home Depot, former CTO of Dick's Sporting Goods. He was CTO and head of supply chain at Kohl's, which is actually when I finally talked with him in 2020 after years of admiring his work. One of the things that really caught my attention was where the genesis of software modernization came at Home Depot. It wasn't the e-commerce group, it was equipment rentals. He told that story some years ago. I can't overstate just how much I've learned from him over the years in every interaction.

So I finally met him last year. He spoke at the last two conferences, and it was always some of my favorites just because of the profundity of his insights and the amazing advice he has to this community. Two months ago, he co-presented with Courtney Kistler, where he had made two startling observations. One was the observation that so many of the experience reports were focused primarily on efficiencies, as demonstrated by the value readout this morning from Matt Ring and team. His observation was that efficiency is what you can safely delegate versus effectiveness, which you can't. So if you want to be doing your boss's job, efficiency is not going to be sufficient to get you there.

That gets to the next observation, which is that so many technology leaders may actually be doing their subordinate's job instead of doing their boss's job. So, Paul, did I capture that correctly? Maybe could you also introduce yourself? It's so great to see you again. And you're muted.

Paul Gaffney

Darn that auto mute. Great to be here. I did not receive my GeneCon glasses in advance, so I went spectacle-free today.

Thanks for the reminder of those points that Courtney and I tried to drive home on stage in Vegas. I do think it is super important on a leadership journey to recognize the amount of time on your calendar that's going toward efficiency, making things maybe a little less expensive, maybe a little more reliable, versus effectiveness, which is really questioning, are we working on the right things? And if we turn some attention to some more lucrative things, would we be a more effective company and overall organization? Those are the discussions at the big tables. Boards don't generally get presentations about modest improvements in efficiency.

Gene Kim

Before we go into the role play, to set up the role play, there's actually an extension of the breakout session that you did in Vegas. I re-watched that yesterday, and I thought it was extraordinary. There was a part where I asked Jeff to role play being your boss that is not so interested in having you do my job. It was amazing to see you model how one opens up that conversation and allows room for that.

Paul, you had mentioned that there's another factor at work, which is that technology leaders sometimes need to work extra hard to get the feedback they need to actually achieve their own goals and better advance their careers. Can you tell us more about that thesis? Or do you want to jump into the role play?

Paul Gaffney

We should definitely talk more about that thesis, but the role play might set it up. I was just kind of excited today that you're going to give me a performance review in our role play.

Role Play

01Gene Kim as Paul's manager

Oh yes. I'm so excited for this performance review meeting, Paul. I'm sorry it's only 30 minutes, and that we started 15 minutes late. I have another meeting that's urgent, so we have about five minutes, tops.

Why don't we pull up the document here. I have about three bullets. Overall performance rating, as you saw in my email, you beat expectations. Your work is really good, and I would love to give you a higher score, but I'm only allowed to give those to the top 10%, and candidly speaking, you're not there.

Key responsibilities: you achieved your project goals splendidly, mostly on time, mostly on budget. The next field here is evaluate progress and system goals for next year. You mostly do what you commit, so my overall advice is keep doing what you're doing. Good job, Paul, and thank you.

02Paul Gaffney as employee

Gene, as always, I know your time's super valuable and we don't have a lot for this performance review. I get the sense that you feel kind of the same way I feel about the formal process. There's some boxes on the sheets and things, but as you know, I believe I do a good job technically, but I've been wanting to get involved in more things.

If I just keep doing what I'm doing, I don't exactly know how that's going to happen. So what might I do? I'm definitely going to keep doing the good job you just praised me for, but what can I do to get involved in some things that might advance my career?

03Gene Kim as Paul's manager

Paul, it took me about two hours to fill out your performance review, and I think my primary advice is just keep doing what you're doing. They say focus on your strengths, and I would say you're going in the right direction, Paul.

04Paul Gaffney as employee

I really appreciate the support and the feedback. I'm wondering, is there something that you're worried about, like how I might react if you told me something that maybe I don't want to hear? Because it kind of sounds like there might be something holding me back.

I imagine sometimes you give that kind of news to people and they're super defensive, and I want to make sure you know I'm really interested in knowing what's going on. What do people say about me behind my back?

05Gene Kim as Paul's manager

Since I have to leave in about five minutes, I really would just like to assure you, just keep doing what you're doing, and I think we'll have another great year together, Paul.

06Paul Gaffney as employee

I hear you, and I've really enjoyed everything we've been doing, and I'm going to keep on keeping on. But I have bigger aspirations. And so if there's really nothing more for me here, I'm going to keep doing a good job for you, Gene, but I got to start thinking about what might be next.

07Gene Kim as Paul's manager

Oh. You're not thinking about leaving?

08Paul Gaffney as employee

Oh, no. I'm thinking about how I might expand my career, and I sure hope the answer isn't that I should be thinking about leaving.

09Gene Kim as Paul's manager

Thank goodness, because recruiting is really, really tough, and the last thing I want to be doing is a bunch of interviews. Let me share with you something, Paul.

I'm not sure if this is useful to you, but I've actually had a bunch of people tell me on your team that they've actually come to me instead of you, and they say that when this project is over, they would really like to leave your team. In fact, one of them said that they would, quote, "Never want to work with you again."

I don't exactly know what to do with that, Paul, but maybe that would be an area of improvement that might be very useful. I'll tell you right now that you need to have people that can not only get the job done, but you also need to create a team that is going to continue to do bigger and better things.

10Paul Gaffney as employee

Man, it must be hard to share that because it's hard to hear it, but I actually really appreciate knowing that. That gives me something new to think about and focus on, and you've got my commitment. I'll do something with that.

11Gene Kim

What would that something look like, Paul? Or we can end the role play here. Whatever best serves the learning objective.

12Paul Gaffney

We can end with, I don't know, but let me go think about that, and when we can find another five minutes, let's... That was a joke.

Debrief

13Gene Kim

Fantastic. I'll let you take over from here, and maybe we can reflect upon what was actually happening here. Is it uncommon?

14Paul Gaffney

Yeah. We teed this up, and I suspect that most people in the audience would notice some similarities to the performance appraisal process that they go through. It is often very perfunctory. It is sometimes challenging to get a genuine discussion about improvement, and it's because of a lot of things that we've talked about over the past year or so.

One is, in many cases, the boss's reaction to a job not getting done well isn't to attempt to get their subordinate to perform better. It's to step in themselves and do the job. Then that leads to, all right, the job got done, so performance improvement meets expectations.

The second thing is, this certainly happened to me. Gene, I think it happened to you. I suspect it happens to a lot. Early career technology folks often accelerate their career because of their technical competence. Some, but not all, over-leverage that technical competence and don't develop the personal connections toolkit that needs to complement competence. Success is a balance between competence and connections.

Sometimes people are in assignments where they view, and their manager doesn't tell them anything differently, they view their contribution largely as one of competence. I had someone working for me once. I had to deliver similar performance feedback. Basically, I said to this person, "Nobody likes you." And this person said, "I understand that. No one's ever liked me. That's why I was a math major in college. I didn't want teachers to be able to take out their dislike on gray answers. In math, the answers were right or wrong." This is the perfect illustration of an over-rotation to competence.

I think people find it's a lot easier to give competence feedback. It's a lot easier to say, "You introduced too many bugs into production. Here are some tangible things to do that's measurable." These discussions about people having a bad emotional reaction to you, they're icky discussions, and people don't like to have them. They're much more challenging to action than, how do you put that in your performance goals? Please increase the percentage of people who like you by 20%. There isn't even necessarily a baseline, but these are often the issues.

15Gene Kim

Just to reflect, I thought there were two kind of startling things that you did. By the way, this is just one of a dozen that you'll see in the role play of the breakout session that you did in Vegas, which we will find a way to get published.

One is a way to overcome the reticence of the manager to actually talk about these uncomfortable questions was to reiterate that you have these career goals. Two is your continual desire to try to get that difficult feedback that you needed. By the way, that was actually based on my own performance review. "No one likes you" was actually my boss at Tripwire, the remarkable leader Jim Johnson.

Anyway, could you just maybe concretize that those are two techniques you're using? Also, what is more unpleasant than having a difficult conversation? Having to replace you and all the hiring and the work that you're going to create for me. Can you validate that those were some of the techniques you were modeling?

16Paul Gaffney

Yes. Those who saw the talk I did with Courtney saw that one of the key takeaways was gracious perseverance. In the realm that we're in today, which is advocating for your own career, I encourage everyone: you have to be your own career advocate. You're really the only one that you can rely on.

But you have to find a way to do that graciously. You have to persevere. You have to be your advocate. You have to do that continuously. But you have to be gracious about it and recognize when you're in a potentially uncomfortable conversation where you're going to be uncomfortable, but it's the other party's discomfort that probably requires a little bit more attention in the moment. So I tried to role model that in this.

But there is that line. I threatened my boss, right? I hope I did it in a very cautious way and avoided the line of, "If you don't give me opportunities, I'm leaving." That's always a little bit risky. But in advocating for yourself, sometimes you have to put the trade-off in front of the other party in a way that gets them to recognize, "Oh, there is a trade-off here. I can't just keep stonewalling." We've all worked for a lot of managers who would rather stonewall than have the hard discussion.

17Gene Kim

Maybe just to... Sorry, I've never told this, but as someone who was very conflict averse, there were certain conversations I couldn't have with my boss at Tripwire. Astonishingly, the person I learned this from was our VP of sales, who passed away, Bob Dunn. I would go to him and I was like, "Here's all the difficult conversations I want to have. What should I say?" He would tell me the lines, but I didn't know what to say next. I actually had him say, "All right." He gave me all the objections, and then he also gave me how to negate the objections. Just to learn what it looks like to have a difficult conversation was something I'm enormously grateful for.

What other advice would you give to technology leaders who are looking at ways, if they feel like they've hit some sort of ceiling or are not able to make meaningful advances in their own objectives and goals?

18Paul Gaffney

I think this next piece of advice will complement the discussion that you're going to have with Admiral Richardson about connections. Do a connections map. Much like if you've grown up on the technology side of enterprise technology and you've drawn technology architecture charts, you know how the components of a system connect. Know how the components of your network connect.

Do the empirical work of, "Hey, here are the 10 most significant people in my professional life, and here's the temperature of my relationship with them." That can include non-existent, like I do nothing but transactions with this person. If you have relationships that are purely transactional, you should find a way to deepen those connections outside of the context of actually just doing tasks together.

If you have warm relationships and good connections on that chart, ask those folks to help you with the connections that aren't so warm or that are purely transactional. Don't expect to get the whole map rosy. We are all people. A connection between any two people requires both people to a certain extent, and you can only work on you. But work on you. Do the map.

19Gene Kim

For a cold relationship, what does a warmer relationship even look like? Where do you start? What is the series of steps to get from here to there? What does that look like?

20Paul Gaffney

Gene, you and I have known each other now for, I think, maybe about 18 months. I think if anyone could see the way that you and I have built a relationship, they would see a nice balance between us getting to know each other as people and us doing work together.

We don't have any formal professional relationship, but we wouldn't have a personal relationship if it weren't for some shared professional content. I would like to believe, we haven't done a Gene/Paul relationship review, but I'd like to believe the performance review would be pretty good.

I think that's one key element, that warm relationships are ones where there is a good balance between paying attention to the other person as a person and doing some work together with that person. That's, to me, what a warm personal relationship looks like. I think the warmest personal relationships are ones where conflict would not be icky, where a disagreement could be discussed.

Pat Lencioni talks in a variety of his models, this kind of shows up in many of them in many different ways, but it shows up in Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which I think is the most broadly known one, as a preference for harmony over conflict. Sometimes this preference for harmony over conflict, which is a problem by the way, you should actually prefer conflict to false harmony, are people who over-invest in trying to make everything conflict-free. That actually makes it much harder to have non-emotional conflict, which often happens if you're doing serious work. There will be different points of view, and they need to get reconciled.

21Gene Kim

If I can concretize some words to what you said, just to fill out the word cloud, you have a mutually respectful relationship, a sense of a common journey, common goals, helping one another. I think those are all things that have contributed to what makes for just a fantastic working relationship. Even though, as you mentioned, there's no org chart that would actually describe that.

It's been so fun to be a fellow traveler with you, Paul. I just want to reiterate just how much I appreciate you teaching this community, and this further reinforces that there's so much in experience and advice that you have that is of such incredible value.

We did something at the end of the role play in Vegas that I'd love to reiterate again. If you have any interest in talking with Paul and contacting Paul, what did you say? Was it DM Jeff and we'll figure out some way for you to be able to connect with Paul? Is that the right guidance?

22Paul Gaffney

Yeah. To follow up on the session that we had in Vegas and this reminder, Jeff got me the list of folks who submitted their emails from Vegas. I've had that for a couple of weeks now with full intentions of doing something with that. And I will. Anyone who wasn't in that, or was in that but didn't send their email in, or is on this call and wants to be on, I'm going to do something with regular frequency with that group. So you can send me your email directly. I'm paul@gaffney.io. I promise before 2023 is over, we'll at least get the first email out to that group.

23Gene Kim

Super, super. Fantastic. Again, if you have any interest in what Paul's been talking about, I would strongly encourage you. I think you would be an idiot not to take Paul up on his offer. Paul, thank you so much, and I'm looking forward to a whole bunch of other cool stuff to work on and more adventures ahead in 2024.

24Paul Gaffney

Thanks, Gene. I'm reminded that there's some very large number of end-of-year celebrations. Some of them have already happened. I think Diwali kicked off the celebration season this year, and Hanukkah starts, I think, later this week. So whichever one of the several dozen, or ones, because it's nice to be pluralistic, I hope you and everyone here on GeneCon has a wonderful set of end-of-year celebrations. I'm personally looking forward to Festivus, but I will dip my toe in the waters of several other celebrations as well.

25Gene Kim

Right on. Hey, thank you so much, Paul, and catch you soon.

26Paul Gaffney

Thanks, Gene. Bye.