Ep.167 Mastering Accountability: 4-Step Guide for CIOs to Boost Team Performance & Minimize Burnout with Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer Ramsey Solutions

Joe Toste [00:00:34]:
Today we have Brendan Wotchko, chief technology officer at Ramsey Solutions. Brendan, welcome to the podcast.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:00:41]:
Hey, thanks, Joe. Great to be here.

Joe Toste [00:00:42]:
I'm super excited to have you with us today. This podcast has been a long time in the making, but as a CTO, it was great to be able to connect with you both in Orlando and Nashville. I love the presentation you gave. So we're going to talk a lot about that today. Mastering accountability and leadership, which is a big piece of what we talk about on the podcast. So when I was thinking about today's title, I don't know him personally, but love the podcast. Greg Groeschel has a great quote. When the leader gets better, everyone gets better.

Joe Toste [00:01:15]:
Thanks, Craig. And I noticed that you talk a lot about leadership, and I was thinking, as a CTO, is it weird? Like how unusual is it for a technology leader to talk about leadership?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:01:25]:
Yeah, it is weird. It probably shouldn't be weird. I like to joke and say that leadership is like a pie eating contest. The reward for winning at leadership is just eating more pie. Like, it just never ends. But at some point, if you're working on the right ideas and you're working with the right group of people, and you got a great team, when things grow and grow, you eventually find yourself in a situation where you're not just leading individual contributors, you're leading leaders, too. And that's when the game really starts to change. And I think particularly when it comes to technology leaders, engineering leaders, whatever you want to call us, talking about leadership, it's a big deal, because if you're lucky enough to play this game out long enough, for a long enough period of time, you're going to end up with responsibilities on your plate that are really difficult.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:02:19]:
And unfortunately, I don't think enough experienced technology people get out there and talk about it honestly.

Joe Toste [00:02:26]:
So, a few thoughts. Pie eating contest. The first thing I thought about was young life at Carnival night. So if anyone's been to a young life camp, if you're a leader, Carnival night is a chance, the opportunity for the kids to call your name. And last summer, two summers ago, I had some of the basketball guys at camp, and they call your name and they call you to the dunk tank. And these particular kids not only called me to the dunk tank, but there's also you got to take a pie to the face. Every time I got called to the dunk tank, I took a pie to the face every time. What you will do for kids, that's the image that was coming to my head.

Joe Toste [00:03:00]:
When you said pie contest. I'm taking pies and then going into a dunk tank.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:03:06]:
As it should be. As a youth group leader. As it should be.

Joe Toste [00:03:09]:
Yeah. Okay. Engineering technology, different type of profile. I've taken the disc profile, and mine's pretty easy because I have the traditional entrepreneurial trait, 100% d. And I just want to make a decision, and I want to go. Could you maybe just talk about the disk profile? How do you see that on the engineering technology side? And how can that maybe help you understand the team better?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:03:33]:
Yeah, if you're not familiar with the disk, it's dis. We probably don't need to get into the finer grain details of it. We can just google that. But I'm actually the same as you. I'm a high D. High. I so means highly driven, highly intuitive person. But the funny thing is, if you look at the average of probably most people that are in our field of study, you and I would probably be.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:04:00]:
We would be the outliers, for sure. Because almost everyone in our field are high c's or high s. High C's, meaning that they're like the more stabilizer driven personality, and they're very detail oriented. When I'm with business folks, they see me as an engineer, and when I'm with engineers, they see me as the business guy. As a high di engineer, it's. I don't really have a home. I'm a little foreign to everybody.

Joe Toste [00:04:28]:
I feel that way. I'm with you on the not feeling like you have a home. I just wanted to give some brief context. We can link that in the show notes for the disc profile. It's pretty great. My wife works with me, so I ended up having my wife take it and my daughter, actually, who she took it. So it's pretty fun. You get some.

Joe Toste [00:04:44]:
Just deeper understanding, but you give a presentation that I don't think is you mentioned earlier, it's just rarely talked about. And so it was titled mastering accountability. And I think this is not spoken enough. It's tough. And I think you hinted to it, like a lot of leaders just fly by the seat of their pants just trying to figure out. We're just trying to ship. We're trying to get it done. Don't know exactly how to communicate what that looks like.

Joe Toste [00:05:10]:
And I really loved. And I really love this presentation a lot. I was curious if you could talk about your definition of accountability. And why do you think leaders struggle to define accountability and set clear expectations, too?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:05:22]:
Yeah, let me take those in reverse order a little bit. I think one of the things that is just hard about leadership in general, but I do think it's even more difficult if you work in the world of software, is, I think the most difficult part of leadership is modeling for others what was never modeled for you. Right. Particularly for me. I'm in my mid forty s and so I was like that first generation of people where their first job was the Internet, right? And I had a bunch of great people that influenced me along the way. But specifically, when it came to leading the development of software on the Internet, I did not have a lot of great people to model behaviors for me. Or maybe another way to say it, the tough thing about leadership is to give to other people what you were never given, if that's your starting point. Not only is learning the craft of engineering difficult enough, but when you go into leadership, what a lot of people don't realize is that leadership is not an extension of engineering, it is a completely different job.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:06:33]:
Not only do you have to keep your engineering chops up, which is arguably one of the most difficult professions, to stay on top of the latest stuff, but you also have to add this completely second job. You may or may not really be predisposed to do well, which is leadership. And so when it comes to so many basic leadership skills, I can only speak for myself. I don't want to play in the stereotypes too much. But when I was coming up through the ranks and moved from engineer into engineering leader, I was definitely in a situation where I didn't have a lot of great modeling of behavior. I had to figure things out by the school of hard knocks. And when it comes to the topic of accountability, it's really not any different than any other basic leadership topic, which is unless you were smart enough to go out and buy a book, which I was not, to learn about it, you had to figure things out on your own. So how I define accountability, I take the word accountability and kind of dial it down a couple of notches, because when people think about accountability in their heads, they almost instantly think of consequences.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:07:44]:
Right? Like an accountability conversation is where you're imposing consequences. And I don't think that's what accountability is at all. I think accountability is just the repeated pattern of verifying that the expectations that you have of somebody are turning into results. And maybe to say that a little bit differently, when you're creating accountability with somebody, all it really means is you're just asking them how things are going. Like you've set expectations, you have goals that you're aligned to. Accountability is just that repeated pattern of checking in with somebody and seeing, hey, how are those expectations going? It doesn't have to be this high stakes conversation where you're, like, imposing consequences, because if your accountability conversations are really tightly coupled to consequence based conversations, you are waiting way too long to have accountability conversations.

Joe Toste [00:08:42]:
Yeah. So you said school of hard knocks didn't buy a book. What was, like, the impetus for you to want to go to the next level or evolve as a leader?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:08:54]:
I was failing at it. I turned out to be a pretty decent software engineer. And how I ended up in a leadership position was the leaders that my team was working with, none of them were engineering people. And so I don't know whether the team elected me or maybe it was hubris on my part, but I just started to be the person in the room that when unrealistic expectations would pop up between the team and leadership, I would be the person that would go and talk to them. Right. So I'd go have conversations with leadership, and I'd walk out of those conversations just thinking, man, it's not that hard to get this right. Maybe this is something that I should go do. So I kept on embracing leadership opportunities, and I guess one day, I finally got the official nod and got a formal leadership role.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:09:47]:
But the funny thing, all the things that I had, the things that I had criticized leaders for doing, when I actually had the responsibility of leadership, I found myself doing a lot of the same things, which was embarrassing. It was horrifying, honestly. I joke about that stage of my life, and I say that chaos was my methodology and the death march was my framework, right? I was becoming that classic leadership personality where I was terrible at planning, I was terrible at communication. I was terrible at organizing people, putting together plans. The only thing really left to do when you're bad at all those things is work harder and work longer and get other people to do it with you. I guess the gift in all of that, despite the fact I was doing the job really poorly, the gift in it is that I did have just enough self awareness to realize that I was doing the things that I was criticizing other people to do. And so at that inflection point, I got really serious, and I was like, I need to go buy some books. And so, this was a long time ago.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:10:53]:
So I just went to Barnes and Noble and bought just a bunch of different books on management and leadership and software development methodologies and immersed myself in that. And frankly, I read just as many bad books as I did good ones. And it took a little bit of time to figure out up from down the stuff that I wanted to continue with versus some of the stuff I needed to part ways with.

Joe Toste [00:11:17]:
Are there two to three of the good books that you would recommend to the audience?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:11:22]:
Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh, yeah. There's so many good books, I would say on the leadership front or just becoming like a more self aware, empathetic human being. There is no better book than Dale Carnegie's how to win Friends and influence people. If you're a leader and you haven't read that book, you're missing something big. I would say a big part of leadership is really getting clear that the buck stops with you. And there's a great book by an author named Andy Andrews called the Traveler's gift. And it's not like one of those top business books.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:11:59]:
But I will tell you probably that book more than anything else, had a dramatic impact on how I saw myself as a leader and then putting my toe into the water of software development methodology and things along those lines. I've been fortunate now over the years to become friends with a couple of people that I started out by reading their books. But Mike Cohn, one of his early books called succeeding with Agile is a fantastic book. Of course you've got David J. Anderson having written any number of different books on Kanban, Klaus Leopold, but I think it's important to feed the ideal team player by Patrick Lencioni we could talk five dysfunctions of the team by Patrick Lencioni pretty much anything by. It's just, it's as important to feed the business side of your brain as a chief technology officer as it is to feed the engineering part of your brain. And then there's like the gap between those two hemispheres, which is actually getting good at management and process oriented tasks. How do you manage things? And both the management side of things and the leadership side of things stereotypically get ignored by a lot of engineering leaders.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:13:16]:
And it's important to immerse yourself in all of those things. I guess another way to say it is you're never going to transform an organization with just your engineering knowledge. If you want to create a better organization, it has to come through your ability to manage things well and to lead. And no amount of writing code or becoming familiar with more and more technology is going to lead to those skills. You still have to do those things, but those things alone will not make you a successful technology leader because as.

Joe Toste [00:13:46]:
You start to scale, you need people, you need a team. It's just not going to be you sitting behind a computer quarterbacking everything by yourself.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:13:55]:
Yeah, I'm in a situation now. I've got 50 individual contributors and 50 leaders that I'm responsible for. It's a totally different game than when it's you and four of your buddies in a garage working in the startup, which I did that too, and loved that phase of my life. But when you start to become responsible for more and more things, yeah, the demands on your skill set really begin to change.

Joe Toste [00:14:20]:
That's great. Moving from the garage to 250 plus on the team is a great segue to talk about some of the practical steps for setting expectations and creating accountability. I love the four part framework that you created for establishing expectations that stick. I love it. So what is it and how can leaders improve at it?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:14:42]:
Accountability is the repeated pattern of verifying that expectations are turning into results. We said that just a little bit ago. But the point here is that if you want to be an effective leader, accountability is important. You got to be checking in with people to make sure that the expectations that have been set are actually happening. But the other part of that is expectations. Like, okay, so we know what accountability is. What is an expectation? Most leaders, when they think about expectations, they just think, oh, I'm going to bark a command at somebody in terms of what I expect them to do. And therefore it's an expectation.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:15:19]:
And that's not really how expectations work in the real world. I mean, maybe how it works on tv, but in the real world, an expectation is a two way commitment, right? So I might want someone to do something, but I need to make sure that they understand it and they actually commit to it. It's a two way commitment. So you got to set the expectations, have that two way commitment conversation, and then you got to be willing to hold people accountable. What we're talking about there is, we're just talking about, like, expectations that stick. If you're going to set an expectation, if you're going to go through the trouble of setting an expectation, what are the qualities of a great expectation? So the first thing that I'd say there, before we get to frame, empower, measure, and commit, the first thing I got to say about expectations is we don't want ious. And let me talk about what I mean by that. Ious are expectations that are imagined outside or unspoken.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:16:18]:
And let me walk through those real quick. So imagined expectations are like the things as an individual contributor that I just assume that are my job, right. I've made them up and I take ownership for them. Whether anybody has asked me to or not. We got to be careful about those kinds of expectations, those imagined expectations. Then you've got outside expectations. So outside expectations are things that people ask you to do or ask you to focus on that are coming outside of your leadership structure. If our HR director just walked in the room and was like, hey, Brendan, I need help planning our Christmas party, that would be an outside expectation.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:16:59]:
And then the last one, which is an unspoken expectation. And frankly, the unspoken expectations are probably the most common and the most problematic, which is when a leader has an expectation of somebody that they've never said out loud. And unfortunately, they will still attempt to hold a person accountable to expectations that they've never spoken out loud. Right. So you don't want those ious. You don't want imagined, outside, or unspoken expectations. What you want is you want very clearly expressed expectations. And so how do you do that? How do you get to a point where your expectations are very clearly expressed as a leader? So there's four things I talk about.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:17:42]:
Frame, empower, measure, and commit. And when I think about an expectation, I got to do a really good job framing the expectation. I got to clarify what it is, why it's important, why I picked you to do it, why you're uniquely qualified, how it connects to your growth journey. When I set an expectation with you, I need to frame it up so that you understand why it is important. The other thing that you got to do is you got to make sure that you're properly empowering not only the individual, but everybody else. Right? So when I set an expectation with a team member, the team member needs to know what authority they have to carry out that expectation, right. And there's another side of that coin, which is the team that they're going to need to be collaborating with also needs to hear from me that I have empowered that person to carry out the expectation. So that's frame and empower.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:18:33]:
And the last two are just measure and commit. A healthy expectation, an explicit expectation. A person needs to know how they can measure it. Like, how do they determine whether or not they're winning at that expectation? It's my job as the leader to clarify that. And the last thing which is committing an expectation is a two way commitment. I need to make sure that when I am in one of those commitment conversations where I am vocalizing an expectation and somebody is, we're having a two way conversation, the other person's committing to it. I need to actually inspect their understanding of what they're committing to. I got to make eye contact with them.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:19:12]:
I got to ask them to teach it back to me. I got to make sure that they have clarity, because one thing that you'll find in a leadership position is sometimes people will just nod their heads and you will read that as, oh, they understand me. They understand what they need to do, and that's not really what's happening in real life. What's happening in real life is they are acknowledging that you're speaking and they're giving you a sign of respect, but that doesn't actually mean that they understand what it is that you're asking them to do. You got to understand with expectations that you cannot create a scenario where it's easy to fail and it's hard to win, which a lot of leaders do, that they foster an environment where it's easy to fail and hard to win. And my job as a leader is to do the exact opposite. I've got to get so clear about expectations, where it's easy to win and.

Joe Toste [00:19:57]:
It'S hard to fail for your team. Is this a weekly conversation? How do you make sure that you get out ahead of problems before they really blow up big time?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:20:10]:
A lot of leaders have, and it's an unfortunate thing to admit, but a lot of leaders actually have difficulty keeping track of prior conversations they have with their direct reports, which is, we can talk about it later. But that's one of the big signs of a scattered leader. And I would say stereotypically, a lot of engineering leaders do tend to be scattered leaders. And so when you're having expectations conversations with people, you got to make sure to actually write this stuff down and on a regular basis. So I'm a pretty busy guy, just like anybody else who does a job like mine, but I have a weekly 30 minutes meeting with every single one of my direct reports every week. And part of that conversation is asking them, hey, of the expectations that you've got on your plate right now, what's going well? What could be going better? Is there any way I can help? Offering help and assistance, and by the way, by me bringing it up, I think a lot of people are worried that your team members are going to feel like you're interrogating them. When you bring an expectation back up to somebody, it's actually a signal to that person that what they're doing is important and that their efforts are appreciated. So that is what accountability ends up looking.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:21:27]:
You have a weekly one on one with somebody, or you have some other methods of communicating with people, and you're just asking. You just got to ask hey, those expectations that we talked about, how's it going?

Joe Toste [00:21:38]:
Yeah. On the kind of business side of the aisle and the kind of entrepreneur leadership platform. I love the green, yellow, red makes it really easy to visually, and I know, like, in the engineering world, you have that, too. But just get a real clear gut check of, okay, either if it's red or green or yellow, you want to know, hey, what's going on? Just starts to ask the probing questions a little bit, which I really like. So do you use a system like that during the one on one, or is it like at scale, you can just see a spreadsheet or something of everything that's going on?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:22:17]:
I think there are different kinds of expectations. Right. I'm in a situation where my direct reports are very senior people, right. I basically have six or seven folks that are at a vice president level or above, whether that's engineering, product, or project. Those are the three disciplines that I oversee. And the method of creating accountability with those folks is a little bit different than maybe at a different point in my career. With a lot of the folks that I'm leading, there's like the everyday stuff, and then there's the bigger visionary stuff. The different leaders that report to me, they're driving entire channels of our business.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:23:03]:
And so some of the will put together what we call desired future dashboards, which are basically just a template that talks about, hey, what's my desired future for the year? And what are the defining objectives that are going to tell me whether I'm on track or off track. And those defining objectives actually are red, yellow, or green. And we use that kind of system, that color system, for those bigger long term goals. But I do make a little bit of a distinction between a goal and an expectation, maybe not an important distinction, but when I think about expectations, I'm typically thinking about things that maybe are a little bit more operational or a little bit smaller scale. For example, hey, when we have an outage of some kind, it's my expectation that no matter what team, that outage happens on, that if we're offline for longer than five minutes, I'm getting either a text message or a phone call. That would be an expectation right now. Hopefully, that's backed up with a little bit of a documented process, too. But that's a very real example of an expectation.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:24:16]:
With expectations like that, there's probably a small pond of many expectations like that. You can't constantly be checking in on them all the time. But I will say I do keep a visualized list of all those things. Honestly, it's not a sophisticated system. I just keep it on my phone. I got a note on my phone with each one of my direct reports, and I just keep track of the expectations. And if we bump into an issue where if we do have an outage and I don't hear about it, I can bring it up and just say, hey, that wasn't meeting my expectations. But I do keep a list of, I'm a deep believer in visualizing all of the expectations so that we can revisit them, my direct reports, and I can revisit them and make sure that I'm maintaining a pretty deep understanding of them, that they don't have too many expectations on their plate, and that those expectations are pretty clearly prioritized.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:25:13]:
So we do go through a rhythm about a quarterly rhythm of going back through that visualized list and making sure that everything is up to date and that we're on the same page. Some of those lower gear expectations, maybe you might want to call them the small parts department compared to the big parts department. The small part stuff we don't do red, yellow, green. It's just we're making sure that we're looking over them a handful of times a year and that everybody's on the same page with what the expectations still are. And just talking through it. That's accountability right there.

Joe Toste [00:25:46]:
There's a five part one of creating accountability that lasts as we turn the corner. I really liked visualize, understand, prune, prioritize, limit. I know you've touched upon a lot of this already. Any kind of lasting thoughts on creating accountability that lasts?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:26:04]:
Yeah, I think the biggest high point is if you're not visualizing all the expectations where you and the other person can both see it, the likelihood that you're creating effective accountability is pretty low. And the other really important key thing is it can't just be like a bullet pointed list of a bunch of stuff. It can be that, but what's important is that your direct report actually knows that you understand what that is. And if it's off track, you're going to know and you're going to ask about it. So understanding is a really big part of that. And then you mentioned the other parts, the limiting, the pruning and the prioritizing. And that's basically limiting prioritizing and pruning basically is just creating clarity that the person doesn't get overloaded. Because I've got some direct reports that have been, actually, the majority of my direct reports have reported to me for seven years.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:27:06]:
And if all I'm ever doing is just adding expectations, it's not guaranteed I'm going to flood the person out. There's only so many things a person can do. So as part of the accountability process, limiting the number of expectations, prioritizing the expectations. A lot of times when we go back over these lists, we might make some delegation decisions like, hey, you've got too many things that you're overlooking or that you're responsible for on your plate. We might need to delegate this down the organization a little bit. And so that is an active process that you have to walk through with your direct reports.

Joe Toste [00:27:41]:
I love that. So as we wrap this up, I was curious if I'm somebody who just heard this information, I'm a leader. I might be asking the question, this is amazing, but where do I begin? What's a good launch point? What are maybe some areas of encouragement? How should leaders get started if this is a whole new process for them?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:28:04]:
Where you start, I actually think is pretty straightforward. The reality is that most leaders don't actually know how to identify their strengths and weaknesses. And I think all of us as leaders on some level probably struggle with a fair amount of, call it what you will like, a lack of self awareness or self deceit or who knows what you call it. But a lot of times we have a hard time understanding how we're perceived. And so one of the things that I've done is put this four quadrant chart out there for my leaders to use to help them match themselves up a bit with a stereotype. I'll give you an example. One of those is called the blindsider. And the blindsider is somebody who struggles with setting expectations, but excels at accountability.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:28:55]:
And when you think about the blindsider, probably something that you would hear them say is, well, you should have known it's common sense. That's pretty stereotypical language that you would hear from a blindsider, right? The other one is you got a scattered leader. And I think I referenced the scattered leader a little while ago. The scattered leader really excels at setting expectations, but they don't excel at creating accountability. So they're always just talking about their expectations and they really have a hard time ever getting to accountability. In fact, a scattered leader, their version of accountability is just constantly repeating their expectations over and over again. And you'll oftentimes hear a scattered leader say something like, hey, remind me what we talked about last time. They have a difficult time.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:29:44]:
They've got lots of opinions and they're very decisive, but they have very little follow through and impulsive and lack focus. So that's a scattered leader. The absentee leader. This is trouble territory, because the absentee leader really struggles to set expectations, and they struggle with creating accountability. You might hear an absentee leader say, like, very aloof, hard to decipher phrases. Or they'll say things like, something just feels off, and they seem to be unable to give you any specifics about the thing that you need to fix. And that absentee leader, it's pretty easy to spot them. They're usually not very physically or emotionally present with the team, and they're the classic, like, premature delegator.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:30:31]:
They're a shapeshifter, and they will avoid pain at all costs. Those are the three archetypes that aren't awesome. The blindsider, the scattered leader, and the absentee leader. Where we should all aspire to go or aspire to be is that credible leader. And the credible leader is somebody who excels at both setting expectations and creating accountability. And if you spotted a credible leader in real life, the thing that you would probably hear them say is, tell me how I can help. They're just there to serve. They're that classic servant leader.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:31:07]:
And that credible leader is consistent. They show up on time, they're present, engaged during meetings. They're not distracted by electronics all the time. They're very quick to remind people, hey, this is why your job is important, and this is why you're a valued member of the team. And they're very good at digging down and mining out the truth in difficult situations. So if you've got these four kind of archetypes, the blindsider, the scattered leader, the absentee, and the credible leader, the thing that I tell leaders to do is actually sit down with your direct reports and ask them to plot you on that chart, the four quadrant part. I'm sorry, the four quadrant chart, the blindsider, the scattered leader, the absentee, or the credible leader, and get your direct reports to all plot you and put that all together in one place. And what I call when you put it all together into one place is basically like a constellation of all of your direct reports that help you understand where you are, and you will see some trends, and it will help you understand, okay, with this particular leader, I tend to be scattered, or this particular direct report, I tend to be scattered.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:32:25]:
And if that's the case, then I'm good at setting expectations, but I got to get better at accountability with this person. That kind of constellation of how your direct reports assess you is really valuable. And I guess there's just one more tip I'd give, which is a lot of times, team members can be pretty hesitant to be honest in their feedback with you. And so there's a little shortcut that I've got to shortcut that from happening, which is I'll ask somebody to rate me, hey, am I a blindsider, scattered leader, absentee leader, credible? And if they mark me down as credible, I'll ask them, hey, if credible weren't an option, how would you rate me then? And oftentimes, that's the actual truth, right? And so you get that constellation of understanding how your team perceives you, and then it gives you something very real that you can respond to, and it'll start to inform for you where you need to grow the new skills that you need to bring on, where you need to be more emotionally courageous in terms of working with your team.

Joe Toste [00:33:31]:
I love that having them rate you and the ask them if they rate you credible. Okay, if that wasn't an option, would you then choose?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:33:42]:
I'll send you a PDF of a worksheet that we use internally here at Ramsey for this very content, and it lays it all out.

Joe Toste [00:33:50]:
I love that. So we're going to link to that in the show notes you'll be able to download. Thanks. Thanks, Brandon, for should. Where's the best place to go to learn more?

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:33:58]:
If you're specifically interested in learning more about how Ramsey does leadership, we put on events multiple times a year. We provide executive coaching. We've got a whole division of our business that is dedicated to bringing out into the public eye a lot of our internal leadership practices. We got a great digital tool, too, called entree leadership elite that you can sign up for and get access to a lot of the training videos that we use internally and a lot of the other tools that we use internally to help manage our team. So if that's of any interest, I think that's a great resource. I've probably got four or five videos in there that are along the lines of topics like this. So entreeleadership.com is what you want to check out there.

Joe Toste [00:34:47]:
Entreeleadership.com. I've been to several of the events. Definitely world class. Quite the operation. Always really great. Any of the online content is pretty phenomenal. Brendan, have a happy thanksgiving and looking forward to putting this episode out.

Brendan Wovchko, Chief Technology Officer at Ramsey Solutions [00:35:04]:
Yeah, always good to see you, Joe. Thanks.