A Passion for Growth: Storytelling and Interpersonal Skills with Joseph Griffiths (1/2)

How well do your personal and professional life align to your passion areas? For returning guest Joseph Griffiths, seeking mentorship helped uncover his core passions (service, honesty, faith, and growth) and fueled the decision to pursue people management.

This week in Episode 327, Joseph details his transition from solutions architect to business solution strategist and why he sought mentorship along the way. You’ll hear about the impact of storytelling in executive conversations and job interviews as well as the concept of a value hypothesis. Joseph shares a perspective on management interviews, leading seasoned teams, and the critical nature of interpersonal skills for career advancement.

Original Recording Date: 04-17-2025

Topics – Joseph Griffiths Returns, Storytelling and Conversations with Executives, Discovering Passion Areas, Management Interviews and Interpersonal Challenges, A Passion for Growth over Technology, Leading a Familiar Team and Progressing as a Manager

2:15 – Joseph Griffiths Returns

• Joseph Griffiths has worked in technical sales in some form for the last 10 years. Before that, he worked for a multi-tenant service provider and the state of Ohio as a systems administrator and enterprise architect.
• Joseph last joined us as a guest in Episode 18a and Episode 18b. At that time, we spoke to Joseph about his experience as a solutions architect. We wanted to learn more about what made Joseph want to pursue people leadership within technical sales.
• Full disclosure – Joseph was Nick’s manager up until about 4-5 months before this recording took place. But Joseph and Nick knew each other for many years before Joseph became Nick’s manager. Nick invited him to speak at Spiceworks user group events, for example.

3:55 – Storytelling and Conversations with Executives

• Going back to when Joseph was a solutions architect, his role was focused on understanding the pain and gain from a business perspective for customers.
  • He would often run workshops to understand the current state (pains that exist) and build the future state (the gains a customer could get).
  • As the company changed over time, Joseph’s role changed to business solution strategist. While the role was similar, it had a greater focus on speaking to C-level executives.
  • Joseph recalls meeting some wonderful people on this team who taught him how to talk to executives and how to do value management.
• What was the biggest lesson Joseph had to learn in order to communicate effectively with executives?
  • “You have about 30 seconds, and you better be talking about money. That’s the short version of it.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • A good friend of Joseph’s is an assistant CFO at a large corporation, and Joseph decided to pick his brain on how and why certain IT purchases get approved, and others do not.
  • “And he said, ‘it’s really simple – story and a spreadsheet…. You had better tell me a story that makes sense to my accounting brain, and you better have a spreadsheet that shows me how we’re going to make money, save money, or reduce risk with the spreadsheet…. Those two things put together…if the numbers make sense on the spreadsheet…I’m going to approve it. You come to me with a story about how you’re going to install some new widget, go find the money in your budget. You come to me with a spreadsheet, but the story doesn’t make sense, go find it in your budget. You want money outside of your budget? They better make sense in the form of dollars.’ And so, for me, the biggest thing to learn was I had 30 seconds wi