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The Cloud Show with Magnus Mårtensson ft. Lenn Pryor - Ep. 6
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Nov 1, 2023
Join this live session with Magnus Mårtensson ft. Lenn Pryor for the next episode of The Cloud Show with Magnus Mårtensson on July 12, at 01:00 PM (EST). The show is about cloud leadership and all the important questions relating to cloud projects. Certainly, many matters when a company is going to and want to be successful in the cloud, are about technology. However, there are many additional matters, adjacent to technology, that we also need to tend to regarding business strategy, human resources, organizational change, planning for a technical cloud approach, and many more questions. These conversations are critical for a healthy cloud and for a swift and accurate cloud approach. GUEST SPEAKER Lenn brings together a passion for coaching and developing leaders with a 27-year career in Product Management and Design leadership roles at Facebook, Microsoft, Nokia, eBay, and Skype. To put it directly, he has been there and dealt with much of what his clients are working through personally and professionally. C# Corner - Community of Software and Data Developers https://www.c-sharpcorner.com #CSharpCorner #TheCloudShow #CSharpTV
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0:00
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Cloud Show
0:06
This is the show for cloud leadership and people who want to understand what it takes to run successful projects in the cloud
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We're going to be talking about high and low on various things. Technology, yes, for sure
0:18
And we're also going to talk to some industry-leading professionals who are working in this space of various important things like human resources
0:27
And why not leadership? Yes, let's talk about leadership. That's what we're going to do today. We're going to be talking to Len Pryor. He is an executive coach and founder of Lagom Leadership, a boutique leadership development and coaching firm focused on helping product design and engineering leaders achieve more success through a balanced approach of leading and growing people and teams
0:49
Prior to founding Logum Leadership, Len spent 27 years in design and product management leadership roles in both startups and large global and tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Nokia, eBay, and Skype
1:06
So let's see what Len has to say about leadership in the cloud context here today on The Cloud Show
1:19
Hello there, Len. Hey, Magnus. How are you? I'm very well, thank you
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It is nice to see you, my friend. How are you? I mean..
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I'm good, thanks. Yeah, it's been quite a few years since we've had a chance to cross paths together
1:38
It has indeed. So for context for the audience, we have met in the Microsoft context, of course
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you were running some sort of a team there in the cloud and AI division, right
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With supporting all of our Microsoft's developer influencer communities, right? That's right. Yeah
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No, I was just going to say, yeah, before I moved over full-time to coaching
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that was my sort of last tour at Microsoft was working with the team
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that leads all the developer influencer and community programs, the MVPs, the RDs, and
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lots of other things with cloud advocacy. So yeah, that's how we met. And I'm both an MVP and an RD. So that's how we met. And so then you decided, hey, it's
2:25
time for me to stop being an employee and then found a coaching firm and kind of transform
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your entire career into doing that. What happened? Why did you do this
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Yeah, it's a great question. Well, I would say that it's a story that a lot of people go through after 20 plus years of being in a particular career where you are very, very focused on, you know, achieving a certain set of goals and growing competencies and capabilities and climbing up into the left and to the right in your career and the jungle gym of titles and responsibilities
3:00
And I kind of, you know, after probably about 25 years in my career, began to realize I've accomplished a lot of my goals that I had set out for myself to achieve professionally and personal goals that I had set out to achieve with my own growth and skills and accomplishments
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and you know when you kind of hit your mid 40s you start to ask yourself the question well how
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am I going to keep excited and growing when I'm you know 60 65 and so for me it came down to doing
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some self-reflection and asking what am I most excited about in the work that I do of building
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software with people and what I began to realize is it wasn't about you know the size of the
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MAUs of the users using the software anymore. It wasn't about the fame or the ubiquity of the brand
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or the stock IPO you were a part of, or what sort of impact you were having with people and solving
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problems. Because I got to do so many cool things during my career that it was hard to top one after
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the other. I realized what I love to do is to actually help the people and the teams that I was
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building software with to make work less work, right? I wanted it just to be easier to show up and do what we love to do
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which is to build products that help people and help the world and spend less
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time on trying to understand how to do work and how to work with others
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And, you know, for me, that was really the thing that inspired me to pursue understanding the
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discipline of coaching and to start to pivot my career. Yeah. So that's how I got here
4:39
Yeah. Well, so we're going to dig into that. And it's a very interesting topic in the context of cloud because companies that are going to the cloud or transforming, there's a lot of transformation
4:52
There's a lot of change in an organization that kind of comes from changing from doing not cloud into doing cloud stuff
5:01
And then you might need to think about certain things in terms of leadership how to make change happen in your company So we going to dig into that in just one second because I need to ask you one more thing about your company Your company name is Logum Leadership This is awesome This is a
5:22
Swedish word. And intentionally, so I was like, what? What is that word that he's using? And then
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it turns out, yes, you are indeed, I'm Swedish. You are indeed using the Swedish word, which kind
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of, it's a very Swedish notion. It means kind of enough or like just the right amount. It's a very
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thing that is ingrained into our Swedish sort of culture. Why would you be using that word in your company name
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Yeah, no, thanks for noticing that. And it is a story indeed, because I'm not Swedish
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I'm American and I don't have any Swedish background in my family
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I just happened to, you know, during my career, get a chance to work in the Nordics through
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a couple of different companies that I was involved with. first with Skype, which was a startup in Europe that was founded by a Swede, Niklas Zinstrom
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and a Dane, Janus Ries. And, you know, they had a very Scandinavian approach to leading and
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building a company. I actually had left Microsoft and moved to Europe to be a part of this startup
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when I was, this is talking, you know, back to 2004 timeframe, right? This is when Skype was a
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little tiny startup in Europe. And having come out of Microsoft's culture of a very strong American
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Western style of leadership that was very top down, the loudest man at the table has the strongest
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voice. The person with the biggest title in the room has the final say. This was ingrained in me
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throughout my indoctrination as a young leader at Microsoft. And Microsoft has changed a lot
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to be fair to it, but back during the Bill and Steve era, it was a pretty Darwinian management
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style, shall we say. So when I showed up in this group of Europeans and a lot of Scandinavians and
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Estonians, and I really stood out like a sore thumb. And during one particular meeting that we
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had as a leadership team, where all of the directs and the founders were in a room trying to work on
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a very hard problem. I actually got really frustrated and told the CEO, Nicholas, why don't
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you just make a decision, man? You know, you're the CEO. We've wasted hours in this room talking
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Just make a decision and we all go home, right? What kind of CEO are you that we have to sit here
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talking, talking endlessly? And I got sort of during, got some funny looks at me and during a
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break and pause to have some coffee. We sat outside in the hallway and one of my co-workers
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came over to me and he said, hey, you seem pretty upset. I said, yeah. He said, there's something
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about the way we work that I don't think you understand. And I want to teach you about it
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And I said, okay. And he said, have you ever heard of Lagom? And I said, no, I've never heard
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of Lagom. What does that mean? And he said, well, it's kind of a Swedish way of looking at the world
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and it means just enough, as you said. And the way we lead here is not about top-down
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hammer people over the head, tell them what to do. We take time to listen to others
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We take time to hear different perspectives. We take time to process and make balanced decisions
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And I was really humbled in that moment. And I realized, wow, I had never seen or considered
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that there were other ways to lead that may have had a different approach and may have achieved the same result
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And you know what? The decision got made, but it got made in a way that stuck
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in which everybody around the table came to a place where they could make a decision
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And for me, that moment of learning that you can lead through a balanced approach
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of listening and making decisions, leading and learning, was the first time I had been exposed to this
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And it really shaped me as a leader for the rest of my career. And the way I coach is really through that lens of balance
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How do we balance the traits of action and compassion, listening and learning
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That's the reason for it. It's actually beautiful. I really like that
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Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I really, really, really enjoy that because Sweden is very consensus-driven
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in terms of making decisions. And there's a ton of jokes floating around the internet about how Swedish people can't make a decision on their own
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And it's actually often pretty spot on. Yeah. All right. Brilliant, mate
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So let's take this approach into the upheaval that is the company has decided to go to the cloud
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We used to do IT in this way but now somebody was in a room with some Microsoft salesperson and some of the suits bought an enterprise agreement for a million dollars Now we supposed to use the cloud and everything has just changed
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This is a very interesting leadership situation, right? Yeah, it is. It is
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And it's one that I think a lot of people are facing right now in the industry
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and there's a lot of resistance in pockets and places. In some places, there's joyous exuberance
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and in some places, there's a lot of resistance. Yeah. Yeah. So what this is really about is about understanding change
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understanding the nature of how us as human beings change. I like to think about people who
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in a way sometimes that makes it simpler for engineers to talk about
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which is to think about us as having an API. And human beings have an operating system
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We have a brain and a central nervous system and patterns and behaviors that are hardwired into us
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And one of those senses of behavior is based on a subsystem that is really, really simple
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And every animal has it. It's our nervous system's way of managing threats and danger
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and this is all rooted in a part of your neurology and your brain and the back of your brain and the
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brainstem area and in particular to a mechanism and a pattern known as fight or flight which is
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really about your reaction to stress and survival so what does fight or flight have to do with moving
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to the cloud well it's a change and whenever there's a change you're going to either feel
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threatened or excited by the change. And in the case of leading, we have to constantly have that lens that there are always going
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to be some people who are going to be threatened by a change and some people who are going
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to be excited. The ones who are excited are easy, right? You tell them we're going to do this
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They're excited to use new technology and try new things. They come along for the ride
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The ones who are the most challenging are the ones who are resistant and they can do
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incredible damage even and slow down the success of projects because of fear. What's the fear
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right? The fear is irrelevancy. The fear is losing their job. The fear is I don't have the skills
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where I don't know what to do. So when I work with my clients around these big shifts and changes
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and what I would encourage everybody who's in a role of leading and making these decisions to
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start to do is to really understand the nature of change and change management and how to
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systemically lead people through change without scaring them to death. Because that's what you're
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dealing with here is not, you know, people being jerks or people being difficult or people being
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you know, insubordinate to your wishes and demands as a leader. You're dealing with fear
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at that SIV system. So how do you combat fear? One, you help them understand change is coming
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and this is why it's necessary. And you get people to come together around understanding that
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And then you've got to, once they accept that change is necessary and why it's happening, you've got to help them embrace that
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and get the skills to be able to then move with that change. And then to also enroll others in helping them spread
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the benefits of that change, right? So there's a lot of very simple, deliberate steps
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that we as leaders can take to keep resistance and fear from driving our businesses
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But we just don't take the time to think about the API of the person. We just jam these instructions through and say
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we're moving to the cloud because it's what everybody else is doing and we need to do it too
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I love that. I've been saying for some time actually
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that there tends to be a business, maybe strategy, and or a technical decision behind the cloud launch or journey
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or decision to go to the cloud. There are a lot of companies out there that, I mean
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I've been doing cloud for more than a decade, more than 12 years
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a lot of years, right? But there are a lot of companies that haven't done any cloud
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and they're maybe considering to come along now. So this is ongoing, big challenge. And for them, what I've said is that it's good to have a strategy, of course, and to have some technical considerations why going to the cloud would be a good thing
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But the most important person probably in that decision room where the decision gets made for going to the cloud and how that's going to happen is probably going to be the HR director in case you have one, right
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Because you need to understand the skill set of the people you have and how to make them feel that they are included to come along in this transformation
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Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That's a great insight. You know bringing your HR team into it bringing the people who are in the business of working and managing skilling and learning and development are going to be really critical to the success of that transition
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Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because there's a big cost involved in terms of money and change is also always costly
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because change takes time. And that also equates to money in some ways, right
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It can be transformed from one to the other. and and uh in that uh we know one thing for sure is that you're not going to have enough people
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with the right skills absolutely not given that's right awesome absolutely what else do you um do
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you teach in terms of of of managing i mean uh maybe it's a broad question but um managing change
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and and going to the cloud uh i guess it's it's a big challenge for for leadership teams that you
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our coaching. Yeah, it is. And it's just one of the, it's really hard to say that there's a single
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topic that we tend to work on in this world, just like there isn't in the technical world. But
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I think, you know, change is a big one. Working with leaders who are transitioning in terms of
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from one level of leadership to the next is something I end up spending a lot of time on
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One of the biggest challenge for product and engineering leaders as they grow in their career is that oftentimes the reason you become chosen to be a leader is that you are really excellent at what you do as an engineer or as a PM or as an admin or whatever it is that you do
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You're really great as a subject matter expert. And you've spent, you know, 10, 15 years of practicing that discipline to become great at it
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And then you get promoted and they want you to be just as good at something totally different and not to care about the details of the code or of the implementation that you used to care about at that level
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And so oftentimes I spend a lot of time helping people transition between being really great as an engineer to being really great as an engineer and at working with people
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Because there's such a need to be able to scale what you used to be good at as an individual to others so that the whole team can be as good as you were
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And nobody teaches engineers how to teach other people to be great
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so we have a big gap there that i spend a lot of time with um sometimes i spend time with
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my clients who are trying to figure out some of the soft skills that we don't also teach in an
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engineering environment that are critical to leadership like how to communicate upwards to
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people who aren't engineers who aren't technical how do you explain the value of moving to the cloud
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to a group of business people without losing them in the details at the right level, right
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We end up talking about sometimes issues with our own confidence. You know, we can have our own little voices in our head that tell us we're not good enough
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to be in the role or we're not doing a good enough job. And this often happens, especially for underrepresented minorities and women who aren't used to being
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in leadership roles and find themselves there for the first time feeling uncomfortable with
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not having a role model to look to to say, how do I lead as a woman in a technical organization
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or as a person of color in a technical organization in a predominantly European company
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So there are such a variety of topics, career planning, helping people figure out where
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they're going to be the most effective over the long term, because not all of us should
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go up and to the right on the return. So lots of topics. But those are some of the ones that I spent
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the most, spend the most time with. And change, of course, is a huge one. Yeah, change, of course
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And then there's an old joke in there, which is unfortunately too true. And that's why it's funny
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that when somebody gets promoted, you may lose a good colleague and you gain a crappy boss
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That's right. That's right. That is absolutely right. Just because one thing doesn't mean that
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you're good at another thing. So I guess for an organization, it's about finding the right
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or finding the people who could be good leaders for some good reasons
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and then seeing about promoting them and getting them to the next level
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Yeah. All right. This is something we all need to think about. Yeah, it is
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It is. But the problem is that we're out of time. I'd love to have you back sometime
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because we have tons more to talk about and that would be great
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You can find Len at lenprior.com in case you want to talk to you
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Someone here in the audience, someone to talk to you. Other than that, I just want to say thank you very much for being on the Cloud Show with me today
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This was a very insightful episode. Thank you. Thanks so much, Magnus. I really appreciate it. It's great to see you and the show's awesome. Keep it up
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Thanks. Bye-bye
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