00:00
This is the art of network engineering where technology meets the human side of IT. Whether you're scaling networks, solving problems, or shaping your career, you've got the insights, stories, and tips to keep you ahead in the ever evolving world of networking. Welcome to the art of network engineering podcast. My name is Andy Lapteff. And in this episode, I'm joined by two of my favorite business leaders in the world of awesome techness. I'm going to start with Yvonne Sharp. Hi Yvonne, how are you?

00:29
Hey, hey, hey, it is  Christmas time. I don't know when this is coming out, but we are  in the throes of wrapping and planning and buying and  preparation for the fun holiday that we are anticipating. I might have spent three hours today putting something together that still isn't complete.  So this is the time of year. Some are simply required. Those are the three worst words to hear at Christmas.  Yeah, trying to do it when the kids aren't around.

00:53
It's great to see you, Vaughn. Thanks for hopping on. And Mike Bouchon. Hi, Mike. How are you? Kind of the opposite. So it is the holidays. We've not completed our shopping. My wife's out of town. And so I'm panicking with two 14-year-old twins trying to figure out what they're going to get each other, what we're going to get my wife, and how it's going to get here before she gets back from North Carolina. Expedited shipping. They're going to get hit with the premium shipping. For $27, you can have it by Christmas. Done.

01:21
Feels like there's a supply chain joke in there somewhere, but sure. Well, thanks so much for coming on, folks. So uh this is a follow up to our last episode about learn the business. We had Scott Raban and Mike on before. And that episode was based around network engineers like me  who uh have had difficulty in their career connecting to the business. It started with me complaining about corporate, corporate Kool-Aid all hands calls and how it doesn't seem relevant to me, Mike and Scott.

01:48
laid it out there that, yes, it's very financially based in business and they're talking about numbers in the street and public. So there was a lot of good takeaways.  More importantly from that, that was like, you know, how to get your ideas, how to get buy-in from leadership, right?  Speak their language, what's important to them. So  these are all things I think that engineers in general may struggle with because they're so deep in the technical stuff.  And sometimes it's hard, at least it's been for me to translate what I do.

02:15
at my keyboard on the front lines to something, you know, three or four levels up above me in the organization and what's important to them. I've learned a lot working with Mike over the years and making friends like Yvonne on what's important to leaders and technical organizations and how I can try to translate my strengths to that. So this is our follow-up. I was fortunate enough to  see Mike and Yvonne at Autocon 4 recently in Austin, Texas, where Yvonne gave a fantastic talk  on basically what we're talking about here. So Yvonne, I'm going to kind of

02:45
throw you in the intro here, right? You're like, great, I'm here and now this is my problem to do. But um I really liked your talk. So I have a lot of questions around your talk, but do you want to give a quick summary of like what you covered and how it might be relevant to?

02:59
networking folks in a business context? Yeah. So  my pitch to the Autocon folks when I reached out about doing the talk was talking about the people side of technical projects. And I think what I've learned over the years is that most projects fail not because there's some sort of technical failure, but because there's some sort of people process, organizational failure. And so a lot of what I talked about at Autocon was how we need to first of all, think about projects  and really some of the simple

03:27
things that we can do to help our projects be successful and actually meet the needs of the business. So was really a combination of  project product management and communication skills and how we need to think about our work so that we can actually deliver something that matters. In that talk you shared that I have some notes here, 80 to 90 % of project failures aren't technical, which is kind of what you just said. What  usually goes wrong if it's not

03:57
technical, what kind of people problems do we have? I think one of the things that I realized as I got more involved in the  broader project side of things  is that there's a whole universe of problems to be solved that technical people often don't even know exists.  We talk about things like executive alignment or executive sponsorship and an executive sponsor is really a leader who can help you when you get stuck.

04:25
That's how I think of an executive sponsor. And you need to think of that person as a partner in the project, not as the big guy at the top of the award chart who's going to come around if you call him and say, or her, and say that there's a problem. So some of the problems are, you know, just executive alignment. Do we have the right sponsorship for the project to be successful? Another big one is communication. Do we know where we are in the project?

04:54
Do we know what we're doing? Like, have we clearly defined what we want to accomplish? Like, so many times, like, it was an epiphany for me. I talked about this at Autocon, the first big project that I did at Google Cloud. worked with a peer and she came in and she created one slide and put the sentence at the top, what are we partnering to achieve? And wrote a paragraph.  It was just a paragraph. Here's what we're trying to do as a group.  And then that paragraph became

05:23
sort of the guiding statement along that project. then anytime we veered off, she would be like, let's look at this and say, you know, this is what we decided we were going to do. Now, if we need to change this, we can change this, but we're not going to change it arbitrarily. We're going to change it with the buy-in of all the people who originally made the decision. So what are we trying to accomplish? What are the requirements? What's the scope? In other words, where are we going to stop? And then how are we going to get unstuck?

05:53
when we get stuck. Like those are some of the big decisions  and challenges that need to be navigated if you want a project to be successful.  And most technical people don't think about any of those things.  making this so easy for me. Right before we recorded, I'm like, I'm not sure how I'm going to start it. And now I have so much to say and so many notes based on what you just said.  So let me just let me give you a little bit of uh response to that. guess when when I was in the network engineering chair, it seemed to me like the

06:22
timelines were all artificial, they made us create them, and then the project manager's  whole task on the project was keeping us to the dates, right? So hey, we're gonna replace, I don't know, $2 million of infrastructure in these two data centers, and we need to know when it's gonna start, when we're gonna hit these milestones, and when it's gonna be complete. Nobody knows.  Full stop, right? Like we're all guessing on dates, and then the PM on those weekly calls.

06:50
What were at on the thing? we're, oh, now it's yellow. Now we've to send a leadership. And so the organizations I've been in, seems to be like we have to micromanage the timeline. I think I understand why they do it. But then  it's because they can send these emails to leadership, our executive sponsors weekly. Are we yellow? Are we red? Uh-oh, people are in trouble. So  my experience, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think the cultures I've worked in, the system doesn't seem set up from the beginning of the project that.

07:18
It's okay if we miss timelines on make pretend calendars that we created because they forced us to. And then it's okay to ask executive sponsors for help or more time because now the projects yellow or red and now people are upset. But it's all based on  make pretend dates that they made us give. Which then makes somebody like me cynical because I'm like, I'm busting my butt. I'm doing my best. Now people are busting my stones because we're not following this like process. So again, this is just the engineer in me that

07:48
My experience always seems different than everything you just said. And there's always seems to be that disconnect and attention. We had like a weekly tension in those calls with the project managers who were like, well,  we're not doing the thing in the time. And my first thought was always like, this is all just a made up timeline. Like things are, you know, the planning fallacy, like Mike's taught me a lot about these, different like biases and we're very humans are very bad at estimating how long things will take and how.

08:13
complicated things are and I think we under whatever the hell it is things take at least three times longer than we'd guesstimate. So I just think projects  the way they're started when they're kicked off just seems  broken to me. Is there any feedback from you as a leader who's like, well, yeah, buddy, that's great. But nobody wants to hear your whining. This is how projects work. This is what we do. And this is why we have timelines. Like it can't go forever. I get it. We need clear defined endpoints, but we always ran into complications or technical debt.

08:41
or weird stuff or bugs or just stuff happened which pushed the timeline out. And that didn't make me  seem  like I could go to my executive sponsor or go to the team and ask for help or tell them. Because another thing you said in your talk was clear communication. Well, if I don't feel like it's a safe space  to tell people we're behind because of reasons.

09:04
It always seems like, well, you we have to get this done and this is the business and we have to make money and the clients waiting to build the thing.  There's just this pressure. There's this downward pressure to do the thing monkey, right? Keyboard guy  and not an open  dialogue with leadership. Am I crazy? Yes. No. Go ahead, Mike. He's crazy. He's crazy.  There's a meta problem with a lot of the

09:29
project stuff and all. Let me frame it as  information asymmetry.  If you don't know why something's happening, that doesn't mean that there's not a reason it's happening. It does mean that you don't know. And I do think that's a failure in a lot of project leadership, by the way. I think people don't explain the why. They always start with the what. Do this thing. Let me break it down into tasks.

09:46
If a date is arbitrary, think it's actually okay to share with the team that the date is arbitrary. um the date is, sometimes  there's follow on projects and people have to roll off onto that. Sometimes there's fiscal boundaries and it turns out, you when you spend money actually matters to the company based on how they reports. Sometimes there's things like, you know, capital, uh capex  and, and, uh and op-ex and they hit kind of in different ways. All of that though,  there's a requirement.

10:12
I think from leadership generally  to make sure that the why is understood. And then when you communicate that down, if the information asymmetry is somewhat bridged, then you won't feel like it's arbitrary. You won't feel like the things that are happening  don't have reason. You won't feel like  you're surprised by something if you understand roughly what's going on and why it's going on. And  I think too many people who are involved in projects, they just, they don't do that. And I'll give you like some easy examples. Let's say that you want something done and the engineering team says no.  Frequently that

10:40
results in an escalation, right? Because you don't like the answer. So you go and say, I would like a different answer. And  usually it's not a no, I don't want to do that on principle. Usually it's a no, I'm all full up right now. I can't do that. um And  here's the, if I were to take that conversation further, I might say, well, here's  the 13 things I'm working on in priority order. I don't think that the thing you're asking me for  makes the top 13 list. I'm happy to do it after that, but I can't do it now.

11:08
And if you give that kind of answer, at least it raises a question for the other person. Maybe you disagree. Maybe the person does think that their item should be in the top 13, in which case that warrants a discussion with whoever sets priorities. Or more often, maybe they agree it's not in the top 13, in which case you can go and you can have a resource discussion, but now you know the constraint. And so I think you've got to do a better job of surfacing. What are the constraints? Yvonne already said the other one, too. What are we optimizing for?

11:35
Some people are optimizing for one thing and then you find out another team's optimizing for something else  and you can't figure out why you're not aligned along the way. You just know it's a frustrating process. Like all of that to me is information asymmetry and I don't think it happens just leadership to team. I think it also happens within teams. Well, and one of the things I'm assuming when I say these things  is that you have a relatively healthy culture. In other words,  you're not in a pathologic culture where messengers are shot, right?

12:02
if you're talking about Westrom's typology,  and  that you're actually in an organization where people care that something meaningful gets done. You can end up in a situation where the tail wags the dog. And what I mean there is that we have  maniacal project managers who only care about hitting the dates and who don't understand healthy escalation.  And so what they believe is everything has to be green all the time.

12:29
Right? If you believe that everything has to be green all the time, then what that means is that everybody on the project team is going to be miserable. Or they're going to lie. Or they're going to lie. Right? Like everything always being green is not functionally realistically possible. Like it just never happens that way. We live in a world that's subject to entropy and decay. Like things are going to go wrong. Right? And the thing I heard about everything that you were saying, Andy, is like,

12:58
I'm being forced to fit this thing.  I don't know why I'm being forced to fit it, which Mike already talked about.  And also, like,  we don't have any concept of what healthy escalation is. Like, we have a leader who just wants you all to handle it and go away and not bug him  or her because they don't want to do any work, right? They don't actually want to get involved and help solve things. And I've seen that in organizations.

13:27
I think what I'm trying to paint the picture of is like,  it is possible and there is a better way, but it is harder because you've got to have a lot of buy-in from a lot of people involved in the process to keep it healthy and functional. It's really, really hard.  have omitted important information on those status calls because  I know what happens when you tell mom and dad  we're not perfectly aligned, right?

13:54
Like,  and what's interesting to me is  it kind of cascades into more and more issues and problems and, you know, it's set up that way. Like you said, the culture might not be super healthy and there isn't clear escalation. And then I'm in this seat and I know we're behind and I know if I say we're behind the shit show, I'm going to have to deal with. And it's actually going to create more work for you, not less.  Yeah. So I'm D, I'm demotivated to do everything you're saying.

14:20
Well, in the organization, you said I'm conditioned to know what happens when I tell mom and dad we're not aligned.  I would argue in that case, you don't tell mom and dad you're not aligned. You tell the person you're not aligned with,  give them a chance first.  So like  the thing that people struggle with is not usually whether the thing is is red or green. It's whether they agree on kind of the reasons behind it. And I always tell people around like escalations, I always, you know, I don't escalate some things. I don't like the outcome.

14:47
I escalate if we have a common understanding of the situation that's on the ground, meaning what are we optimizing for? What are the current set of facts? What are the current constraints? And if you agree on what the facts are, but then disagree on the decision to be made, then you can escalate. But if you don't even agree on the facts,  then when you escalate, the first thing that's going to come down is mom and dad are going to ask you a bunch of questions about facts. And then it just feels like a uh court hearing.  that actually, when you're tested that way, that...

15:15
will typically trigger a fight or flight in people because a lot of people don't want to have that  argument. then  it's not just like it's an escalation. It's a bit of a fight.  No one feels good about that exchange. And then perhaps most disastrously in that type of environment, there's a winner and loser because you have to adjudicate some outcome. Now, instead, if you went in and said, look,  projects  red, do we agree it's red? And someone says, well, no, I don't agree it's red. Then say, OK, well, then let's talk about why it's not red.

15:45
take care of that within the team. And then when you actually do have  a problem, you're actually presenting an aligned view to mom and dad, but you're saying there's a decision and here's the two or three options.  Here's the facts around those two or three options.  What do you want to do?  And I think that's more healthy and the  only way can do that, by the way, is if you have like the trust that Yvonne's talking about, like that's the cornerstone, because you have to believe that you could have a conversation with somebody with whom you disagree.

16:13
and it's not going to blow up the relationship. But if everything is transactional and if everything is like high judgment and high tension, I don't know how you ever raised that. And that's the failures I see. It's like, I agree with Yvonne, it's almost always like a people thing, right? Sometimes the process doesn't help you, but it's like when the people can't be honest with each other and with the team, then you see  crazy, crazy results that nobody can really  avoid. Can we clarify  escalations and what a good outcome of escalating

16:43
would look like. And the reason I'm asking is, as we're talking, I think I have a negative connotation for escalation. It doesn't seem good. It seems like that's what I meant by mom and dad. was trying to be like half funny. Everybody has that same view. Yeah. Like the whole idea of escalation is if you escalate on me.

16:59
Like most people's perception is you're escalating on me. You're going to my boss or my boss's boss and it's about me. It's not about whatever the situation is. that's the starting. I'm going over your head, right? That's what I think of escalation. Like you're in charge. I disagree. So I'm going to your boss and I don't know if that's accurate.

17:15
The dynamic you're talking about though is me versus you. And generally speaking, if you were to get comment on the facts, it wouldn't be me versus you. It's me and you versus the problem. We're on the same team. You and I could disagree, but then we can go to the  tiebreaker or the mediator or right? Like, is that kind of what you're getting at or no? Do you and I have to agree before we escalate? No, I don't think you have to agree, but you have to agree on what the facts are.

17:36
So here's what the state of play is. I usually tell people, like, there's usually a set of facts that establish context. So, you this is the project, this is the scope, you know, this thing has happened, we're waiting on this other thing. There's a set of immutable facts that are usually not controversial. I usually document those in a bulleted list and I'll break them down sentence by sentence because I want to find out exactly where we disagree on fact. then if I assert... Super important to write it down, by the way.

18:00
super important. Because you got to be able to see it and not everybody thinks like, here's one of the challenges is some people think like they read, they process, they can't act in the moment. And one of the dumbest things that companies do is they reward the people who are really gifted at debating.  That doesn't necessarily mean they're making the right decisions. It just means they're the best on their feet. That could be horrific  in terms of like the outcomes you get. end up, it favors

18:22
Whoever the loudest is or whoever, you know, a lot of times whoever the most abusive is because they can force the introverts into their shells and then no one pushes back and they think they've won. And this is why passive aggressive cultures even  they exist. Because if I can't beat you in a head to head debate, that's fine. I'll just subvert afterwards. Like you can carry the battle. I'm going to I'm going to win the war through this other way. What I would do, I would document bullet by bullet.

18:46
right? Sentence by sentence. Do we agree? Do we agree? Do we agree? Oh, if we disagree, maybe it's not a fact. Maybe it's an opinion. That's actually good to know. Let me move it into some other place. And then I want to make sure that, you what are we optimizing for? That should be clear bullet by bullet. What are our constraints for individual teams? And then based on that, what are our options? And then of the options, what are we, you know, based on what you're optimizing for and a set of constraints and options, that gives you a couple of choices. You can usually narrow it down to two, sometimes three.

19:12
And then do we agree these are the options? If you don't agree those are the options, go back and  check your work. If you do agree those are the options, then which one do we prefer and why? Okay, I could see how you could prefer that option. If you can't understand how the other person could prefer an option, you likely don't understand either their constraints or what they're optimizing for. And then when you can represent all the sides, then you're ready to escalate. A good practical example of a time when you would need to uh escalate is when you have a resource constraint. In other words, you've got two different projects going on.

19:42
both of these projects need a resource from a third group and they're contending for time from this third group. And the third group has their own priorities. And then you've got these two other projects that have their own priorities.  And then, you know,  everybody's like, but wait,  I need that to go build this thing for me, right? That is a situation where everybody's got to go, hey,

20:11
We've got this project with these timelines and these  outcomes that we're driving for. We've got another project with these timelines and these outcomes that we're driving for. And then we've got this constrained resource.  Now  we need help  understanding  which of these two contending things should take priority, right?  That is a good example of escalation because poor Zach, like,

20:40
What happens is he ends up in this tug of war and he'll just work 80 hours to make everybody shut up and go away. But that is not good for Zach.  It's not good for the business because the leaders don't know where the constrained resources are. And then, you know,  what if he gets the flu? Right. Then nothing's getting done. Can I push back on leaders don't know where the constrained resources are? Because  all I can think of is as you're talking about it is

21:10
I'm thinking about healthy culture and I'm trying to determine if I've worked in one  and I'm being careful here, but it seems like we're always under resourced,  right? We have to maximize.  I understand financially, but technical teams to me, and I talk to a lot of people, I'm not saying my three jobs I've had in tech, but everyone seems understaffed and I don't know how projects  aren't destined to fail if we under resource  our technical staff.

21:38
and then over ask,  we ask more of them than seems reasonable and then  operate within a culture that if they fall behind and if they escalate, we yell at them and hit them with a ruler, right? Like I just, there seems to be this weird cyclical thing that happens in tech.  And I guess it all comes to culture, I think. Like if you set it up this way and then ask people later to do all the things we're saying to do, but they're operating in a system that was never meant to.

22:06
If you want projects to be on time, staff it correctly. If you need 10 engineers, don't get three and say, well, AI the rest of it.  Again, I'm being kind of half-bam. So one, not all managers are effective. And so I think a lot of times we'll read bad management and then we'll... And actually there's probably more bad managers than  truly great managers because most people just think about delegating tasks.

22:29
Average manager who views their job as kind of an arbiter of tasks. A thing comes in, I send it out. A thing comes in, I send it out. These are people who would describe management's primary job as  delegating tasks or delegation. And then typically they'll also describe, you my biggest job as a leader is to remove obstacles from my team. Like if that's fundamentally what you believe, then things come in, they go back out, and then you wait on your team to raise obstacles to you. In those situations, the leader rarely knows that their resources are  under contention.

22:57
Because it costs me nothing to go like if I'm not tracking everything, if I don't really pay attention, if I don't have regular one on ones, if my teams are not surfacing all of this, I'm not really if I'm not really connected to the people, if it's very transactional, then I'm not going to know that poor Zach in this case is like the one that's bearing all of the load of, you know, this two separate projects all coming down to his contribution. So what you got to do there, you got to surface the constraint and then presume I mean, like I know assume positive intent is one of these things that people hate because it because it feels kind of fluffy. But like,

23:28
Like most managers are not trying  to make everybody miserable. Like, look, if you laid it out, here's what's happening. You have this project hits this resource. You have this project that hits this resource. And by the way, both project teams agree that's the scenario and there's no pushback on that. And that is the fact. Now they may raise a goal, you know, what if you did this or what if we did that? Maybe,  maybe instead of  putting Zach on the hook, maybe there's somebody else that we could be there. They may ask those types of questions, but at that point they're not working against the team. They're working against the problem. And that's actually an okay outcome.

23:58
But I would not assume by default that  most leaders know when there's contention because I think probably the average leader just is literally delegating a bunch of stuff and then they sit high enough up over the top of projects. They don't always know the day to day in ways that we could argue they should, but it doesn't mean that they do.  Mike is absolutely right. like there are fewer  great managers than there are average to poor managers. I think the other thing though that

24:27
ICs don't see  is the scale of all the different things that managers have to be aware of,  especially as they move up in an organization. If you're a manager of uh a team of 10 ICs, you can stay pretty connected  with how busy those people are, the work that they're doing,  and know deeply kind of  what each of their contributions are. But you go up a level and you've got five of those teams.

24:56
there's no way you can have context  for how busy all 50 of those people are or exactly what they're doing on every project  or how constrained they are. Then go up one more level. Now you've got five people, all who have 50, which is what 250 people, I try not to do math in public. uh

25:21
It's a scaling problem, just like we do route  summarization and networking and you lose state every time you summarize routes.  The same thing happens every layer of management you go up. You lose state because you can't crack it all.  And so whereas as an IC,  you know, all the minutia of everything you're doing inside of your domain, it's easy to miss  that there are

25:47
of the people on your team who know all that minutia and a bunch of other teams who have their own minutia and all of that gets filtered up the org. Even with a good leader, it's not so much that they're morons, it's that nobody can  track all that.  They may be moron.  That's absolutely  possible. That can happen at any layer, right? But it's more likely that they're a decent human who's managing their own set of

26:17
constraints and challenges, many of which are just invisible to you. The other  piece of that, like some decisions need to be made in different places in the org. And when people default and then they presume that the leader makes the decision, I think that  you create problems.  So if a decision requires great context, then it needs to be made by the people who hold that context.  If the decision requires coordination across multiple contexts,

26:43
Oh, should we use like an ABR reference? Then you have to make that decision at the nexus where those two, where the different contexts come together. And I think when people don't make the distinction of what kind of decision it is, I think sometimes you'll see teams move slowly because they're raising things that ought not be raised. And then where you see conflict, sometimes they're trying to resolve issues within a team that has no standing to make that decision.

27:07
because they don't have all of the context that's there. The right decision at the right place in the org, it'll unlock people. The  org gets very, very fast. If you can push a lot of those decisions out to the edge, then  the issue where you have your  technical resources toiling away, they get more autonomy over the things that they ought to have autonomy over, and you'll get a faster performing team that's happier about it.  And at every stage, we're dealing with people who are imperfect  and who have their own  neuroses.

27:36
You know, their own  physical, emotional backgrounds that they bring into their work  and their own assumptions about relationships and former work histories that color  all of these things.  So  we are talking about it in kind of a utopian way, but the reason it's hard is because it's hard.  It's just really hard.

28:02
There's like three different places I want to go here. don't have the time. So I'm to get away from what does a healthy culture look like? Cause I think that could be its whole own show. So I'm going to try to steer us out of this place. I've taken this. How can you frame bad news  to leaders in a way? And maybe bad news is even the wrong framing, but you know, it's, hard to communicate to leadership. We're behind or we're, you know, this isn't going to work or the original plan needs to change. And so  is there as leaders and organizations,  you too,

28:32
Is there a certain tone or frame or if I have to deliver news to you that the thing that you've given me responsibility over isn't going well and  we might need to refactor the plan or  whatever. Is there a way you'd like to receive that, that even if you're having a bad day,  how can I approach you and how can I speak to you in a way that gets us where we need to be without it being like awful for you? I usually want the smallest number of words possible.

29:00
Like what people do is they give you this like avalanche and like, OK, so I just listen to 3000 words. I think you just said relate. Like, it's like, let me put that into an AI and have it summarized for me, right? Give me three bullets of what they just said. But you understand why they're ever explaining, right? They're telling dad that they messed up. It's a lack of confidence. So if you knew, like if you don't understand what matters to the.

29:28
whoever it is you're talking to, it doesn't even have to be your manager. Anybody, up, down, sideways in your work. If you don't know what's important to them, you give them an avalanche of words, because you want to prove yourself. You want to establish credibility. You want to soften the blow. Sometimes you want to punish yourself with the words, because it prevents them from punishing you. You're like, oh, I already beat myself up. I actually did it with my mom. It was effective. I'm going to self-flagellate so that maybe you'll take it easy on me, right? Exactly. I don't need all of that. In the moment,

29:58
What I want to know is, OK, how bad is it? OK, do we know what we're doing next? Yes or no? And so if you said, look, the project's tracking three weeks behind. We don't have a plan for how to get it back on track, but we're meeting tomorrow to start working through the issues. That's a great update. I actually don't need all the background on everything. like, OK, I might ask you questions then. So you give the person, your audience, a chance to kind of, you know, to.

30:28
to look in more deeply, that's fine. Okay, so why are we behind three weeks? Okay, let me summarize for you. I don't need to give you the story, just give me the two or three reasons why. Be concise and have a plan. That's good advice. There's that great quote that brevity is the soul of wit. Yes, I'm 100 % down with few words. I think the other thing, and I touched on this in my talk, and I think it applies to everybody in every situation, but I think it's really important to be calm.

30:56
Like when you deliver the news,  like you don't want to come in with your hair on fire, all harried and hand ringing and, you know,  angry. You really, really, really don't want to come in angry. You want to avoid blame and you want to focus on the facts, which are  here's the goal. Here's the specific way in which we're falling short of the goal.  If there's a specific, we know we're stuck here. That's a good piece of information.

31:25
Here's our next steps.  And then also be prepared with this is what we need from leadership or these are some things that we need. These are how we need you to lean in  to help us move forward. Either can you help us clear people's calendars tomorrow so that we can have a couple hours sync to get this done? Or can you answer these questions for us?  Or, you know, we've had a vendor that's

31:53
not shown up for us on time. Is there somebody else that we've worked with  or we've hit the budget? You know,  we're having budget overruns. Like this is where we are. Is there another bucket of money? Like  those things. But I think  the most important thing is stay calm. Yes, few words. Plan what you're going to say before you go in it. Keep it succinct and let them ask for more detail. And then be  prepared if you need something to make a request. I hate using ask as a uh

32:23
As a noun. Ask is a verb. But yeah, so make a request if you need something. The being calm part, like if you can separate yourself from the consequence  and you can separate yourself from  the judgment, then you can be calm. Separating from the judgment's hard. That's like a big piece of trust. On the consequence side, look,  I've built my entire career around um going in,  rebooting teams and strategies, and then trying to change things.

32:49
What you learn when you do that is that no matter how bad the situation is, there's someone who's going to come in new  and that's going to be their job and they're going to be able to clean it up, whatever it is. If you know that every problem is  roughly fixable, that there's at least some action that somebody would take, you just got to find a little bit of mental calmness, mental quiet, and then make yourself that person. So  here's where we are. If they ask the question, why are we there? We're not saying we should be where we are, but we are where we are. And the next step.

33:17
is to do whatever. And one of the things that's useful, sometimes your audience  will have a little bit of emotion. you know, they're looking for judgment and blame and  like, we should absolutely do a post-mortem when we're through this.  Right now,  what we need to do in the next 24 hours is this. And I mean, very pragmatically, panic never made a situation better. Like,  it just doesn't help, right? So  whatever you need to do, if you need to take a couple deep breaths,

33:45
If you need to step to the side a little bit and just whatever you need to do. for me, the knowledge that losing it never makes the situation better. If you want to have a little mini breakdown that night in your car on the way home or whatever. But if your goal really is success, then you got to find a way to approach it.

34:15
factually and calmly. Well, the people who own those moments,  they come off, you know, two or three levels higher than they than they might be already. Like,  when you see someone who can just kind of calmly talk fact,  leave all the embellishment out. If there's a problem, say, you know what, that's on me.

34:35
we have to do next is I had a mentor, Spencer Green, once he used to, he used to go into meetings and he'd say, if there was a problem, he would say, that's my fault, even if he had nothing to do with it.  Because he would just take the blame out of the room. And then once the blame was there, like, there's nothing, like, there's nothing else to do. like, okay, now that we've taken care of the blame, then what are we going to do about it? And so he would literally, he'd put his hands in the air and say, that's, that's my fault. And people would look at him and be like, Spencer, I mean, that's my fault. And then he would

35:03
recenter around what are we going to go do next? It's it's it's crazy hard to do that, by the way.  But watching him do it masterfully, like it just it sapped all the energy out of the room. Once the energy is gone, everybody can kind of just get back to doing their jobs. And for the most part, people are pretty good at their jobs. That's why companies, companies are not failing all over the place. And once you give people time to  kind of pause to think, to do the thing that they've been trained to do, especially if you're working as a team, then then I think good things can at least they can happen.  love the Spencer guy. I've been

35:32
I've been working on a retort to everything you're saying because of this and that, but removing the blame just undermined everything I was going to push back on. I was going to talk about pushing yourself and not having confidence yet because you're surrounded by smarter than people and imposter syndrome and your fight or flight you mentioned earlier, right? We operate in a world of rampant layoffs. AI is going to replace like, so  it feels like a stressful job. And if something goes wrong, that blame

36:02
And it gets back to the narrative, to the story that we tell ourselves. But unfortunately for me in the past, the blame is going to make the bad thing happen. So here comes a huge narrative at Mike or here comes a bunch of anxiety and I'm not calm. I'm going to think of Spencer because I think once you him doing that removes  all of that for me, it's gone. And now I'm like, oh, OK, a thing happened. I don't have to save my job and my career, which for some reason

36:30
I think is happening when it's not, which then calms me down and then I can communicate clearly. I love- Right in your family. like when there's a heated moment with your family, know, your kids  are fighting over something or, know, something isn't going right. For whatever reason, something has kind of escalated and it's moved from two people fighting to like the family is now tense. Put your hands up and say, you guys, this is my fault. And you will be amazed like just how quickly the energy, like, wait, what? You guys, it's my fault.

36:59
You know, and then what we do at home, by the way, is we do  we have if  somebody says redo, then everybody says redo and then like just resets the whole thing. So we'll go redo and then everyone goes redo. And then you  start over. what that redo moment is doing is like saying, look, take the blame out of the situation. Yeah, it's not necessarily vulnerability, but I think it's on the spectrum because if I'm having a heated discussion with someone and then they open up and we're no longer adversaries, but we're two people having an experience.

37:26
seeing it differently and they get vulnerable with me, it dissipates all the tension that there was and then we can meet up just like, you it's my fault. Like there's there's no more. There's no more tension.  Spencer would do this. You can't say it's cropped in here, but  Spencer would his hands would go up. He'd be like very open. He'd be like,  it's my fault. And almost immediately it's like everything  just the fights almost always end. Because what do you do when someone says it's their fault? What do you

37:54
Yeah, it is totally your fault. You can't really keep coming at them. When you said that, I felt the tension  leave my body because I had tension building as you were talking because I was going to refute it all.  When you said Spencer said it's my fault, it all left. It was very magical. I'm to try to remember that and use that. I know that we have 100 places we could go, but I don't want to keep you guys on forever. And, you know, it's almost Christmas. So let's let's go do. ah

38:18
the Christmas thing. There's one more thing that I wanted to mention  and then we can wrap. This came from Yvonne's talk as well. And I think it's worth mentioning in this context. Yvonne, you said something about working and creating strong and formal relationships.  You were talking about it in the context of outages. I'll let you tell the story. But I have a note here saying how strong and formal relationships reduce friction during issues.  And then I have dash, dash, dash cheesecake.

38:46
Yes.  So can you tell the story? Yeah, the story that I gave in my talk was this was back when I was  a IC, kind of a team lead in a healthcare IT company and we had a major security incident. So the CISO is relatively new to our organization. He was running it. I was on call, so my ticket came up. And so I get on the phone. I realize what's going on.  I've been there long enough that I know quite a few people and  you know how on call is.

39:12
Like, you know, various different skill levels and knowledge of the folks that are on call. And I knew the people who could fix this thing the fastest weren't on call, but I knew them all. And so I would say, I sent a quick text message to, who was a friend, it was like, hey, I started with, hey, I know you're not on call, but we have a major security incident going on. If you're not busy, could you take a few moments to hop on the call?

39:41
And I did that to about three different people. They all happened to be available.  They pulled out their laptops, they hopped on the call, and in 30 minutes we had this major security incident resolved.  And,  you know, once it was all wrapped up, the CISO was even making a joke that he needed my Rolodex, right? He's like, I need your Rolodex.  And what I was talking about is the power of those informal communication networks.

40:05
Well, what I had done, I'd done this for a year, and this was back when everybody still worked in the office. And anytime anybody on my direct team had a birthday, I would bring them in a cheesecake. And then it would be Cheesecake Day, right? Because I would bring in two or three. And so the whole floor, if they wanted it, we'd get cheesecake with homemade raspberry topping and chocolate drizzle. I used that to build this informal communication network. These people knew me. They knew that I was like,

40:32
trying to do the right thing. And so I reached out to them and said, hey,  if you're not busy,  could you take a look at this? They're like, yes, sure, I'll do that for Yvonne, right? You have to be genuine in that, right? It's not like, oh, I'm going to get everybody to like me so I can get them to do what I need them to do when I want them to, right? It's not like that.  But it's those informal communication networks that exist outside of the formal hierarchy.

40:59
that are both a source of information and a powerful ability to get things done when nothing else will work. That's such a good story. That is so good. Oh my God. Andy, that is a whole podcast, by the way, moving from transactional to sincere. Imagine if you actually cared about the person you were talking to. Imagine. the person you're working with. It's crazy, right?

41:24
Mike's been saying that for years, like since I've known Mike, he's been talking about do not have transactional, you know, relationships,  get authentic, connect deeply. If you actually care, then you do things like you actually recognize their birthday, you do things like you actually help them out. And then  shocker, like when you need help, they're like, hey, I would love to reciprocate. Like we see it in community. I don't know why we don't do it at work, but like it's

41:48
It's hard to imagine even living in a community. mean, like, you know, places of worship where it's like kind of a point of emphasis. Imagine if you had that kind of genuine care about the people that you're on this like giant mission with. Oh, my gosh. That's you should. And that's like a whole a whole thing about how you should nurture relationships. You know, because most people, the last friend they made was when they were in school. It really can be a superpower because it will allow you to get things done.

42:13
that you cannot get done even with hierarchical power place, right? It'll get you promoted. I'll give you like, here's the thing, when people get promoted at large companies, everyone's like, oh, I got to get to know my boss and I got to get to know my boss's boss. It's not your boss. It's your boss's peers  that are in the room when they're like discussing stuff. And so you don't need to work up the chain. You have to work sideways  and you have to build those relationships.

42:41
then you have to do it before you need them. can't be like, oh, I'm gonna get promoted in six weeks. Let me quickly get those relationships in place. You gotta be like always like building those relationships up. Like, oh my gosh. So cheesecake for everyone. Yes. Now I can't eat dairy anymore, so I don't get to eat the cheesecake. oh So, but I'll still make it. Speaking of the holidays, I'm not allowed to show up to Christmas without it, even though I can't eat it.

43:02
As usual, that's a perfect ending, but I have to ask because cheesecake is my favorite dessert in the world and my wife makes the best homemade cheesecake I've ever had in my life. And I don't get many of them. I don't know what I have to do to get these cheesecakes made, they're very special when they happen. So are yours homemade or were yours homemade? Yes, I Did you have graham cracker crust? Yes, but I do the cheap crust. I do the store bought.

43:24
I've to fancy restaurants that don't have crust on them and I don't understand what they're trying to do. So there are two options.  One is an Oreo cookie crust  and one is graham cracker crust. So I usually do both because I have  family members who have different preferences. So I will get different crust to take to different families. And tell me about the homemade raspberry thing. What were you drizzling? Yeah. So  it's just raspberry.  You create what's called basically a simple syrup, which is you put

43:53
You have to boil the water to get the sugar to dissolve.  And then you  cook some raspberries in that and then you turn your stove off and then you put a few more whole raspberries in there. So you've got this great mix of cooked down raspberries and a few whole raspberries. You put that on top of the cheesecake and then you top it off with Hershey chocolate drizzle.

44:17
I apologize to the listeners, but that last minute was for me and it was worth it. Thank you,  I can't wait to have some of your cheesecake.  Yeah. Cheesecake is the answer to solving major security incidents. Who knew?  I learned a lot here.  We talked about a lot of different awesome things about culture and how to operate within a culture and how to build relationships. Removing blame was magical. think being concise, think knowing what escalation looks like, having clear goals, which we didn't get too into, but the fact that we can

44:47
start a project worth a bunch of money with a huge outcome we need and not be clear upfront about what  the actual goals are. happens all the time. It's happened on projects I've worked on too. And I wanted to go down that rabbit hole, but  you know, in the interest of us going to bed before midnight, I think there was a lot here. So thank you. I'm hoping to continue the series and just keep digging into how we can be more effective  as engineers working within a business.

45:13
Thank you so much, Ivan and Mike. It's always awesome to see you. I hope you have a wonderful holiday for all things Art of NetEng. You can check out our link tree at linktree forward slash art of neteng. uh What I'd like to call out there is our Discord server called It's All About the Journey. We have 3000-ish people.  People are studying, new folks come in, HomeLabs being given away, folks struggling with things like subnetting or EVPN headers and brilliant other folks helping them. So if you don't have a community,

45:42
You do not have to trudge this road alone. Check us out if you're looking for a community.  As always, thank you so much for listening and watching, and we'll catch you next time on the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

45:55
Hey folks,  if you like what you heard today, please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher.  You can find us on socials at Art of NetEng, and you can visit linktree.com slash art of net eng  for links to all of our content, including the A1 merch store and our virtual community on Discord called It's All About the Journey.  You can see our pretty faces on our YouTube channel named the Art of Network Engineering.  That's youtube.com forward slash art of net eng.  Thanks for listening.