Mental Health, Leadership, and Team Performance

As leaders (or want to be leaders), how do we improve our team's performance?
How does this relate to mental health?
Can we create psychological safety for our teams?

This was a fun presentation to a group of Silicon Valley leaders - thank you for the opportunity!!

Please enjoy and share.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
A bit. Okay, everyone,welcome to the May twenty twenty three.

(00:04):
So I look on Valley Engineering andLeadership meetings. We're still trying out down
to this hybrid world. And goodnews is we got everything wired up and
like last time, it took one. So how we're gonna be shorter every
time. We're handing better and wehave we have audio and so on.
So I want to thank one ofour sponsors, my employer, Varying Medical

(00:27):
Systems. They're the ones who letus use this building and the audience system
and their videos. And we've hadother sponsors in the past. Right now
today, our bank account balances aregood. Blow that's why the food offerings
here today are kind of minimal.But we've had more in the past and
maybe more in the future. Onthe new sponsors. And I'd like to

(00:51):
do is head the microphone over toolder speakers and made Bill blend and Bill,
you're going to be done. Itwas takle one. I like it
cool, Thank you, This isawesome. Okay, So just total side
note. As a recovering social anxietysuffer, the fact that I'm not freaking
out right now is amazing. Ilove it. So cool Okay, Hi,

(01:17):
my name is Bill. Hi,my name is Bill. I've worked
here in Silicon Valley in tech fortwenty five plus years. My teams have
consistently done things people said were impossible, like over and over and over again.
And I didn't know how come.I didn't know why my teams were
able to do that. I didn'thave a language, and I've had a
lot of people asking me, like, teach us how you do this.
Four years ago I met this amazingoccupational therapist who worked in mental health.

(01:40):
She was able to help me figureout how to have this conversation we're having
today. She put in language towhat I was doing. So I'd like
the point of this is to starta conversation about pragmatic tactics for enabling better
performance in your teams. Right atthe end of this, you should have
a couple was available and if Idid my job well, you'll want more.

(02:04):
I'd like to just listen to thissee if there's any skills that come
out you will resonate with. You'relike, oh I know that or I've
seen that. And at the end, if you want them to know more,
great, let's talk that. Keyboardis keyboards huge there we go.
So Pukageta, I'll give it alittle bit of backstory, kind of how
we got here, the problems thatwere addressing to do, the mental health

(02:32):
angle, and all this stuff becauseI applies everywhere all the time, the
kind of outcomes that we've been ableto generate, why this works so well,
foundational principles, and then some sampleimplementations. So all origin story,
I've just started making my dad aton of credit because when I was a

(02:53):
kid, he told me that hisjob as a leader was to make his
teams really successful. My dad's jobwas loading bombs on military airplanes and the
Old War and in Vietnam, andhe always said that his role supporting his
teams was what made them super effective, and that stuck in my head.

(03:13):
He often told stories of simple thingslike buying along underwear for his teams when
we were in the snowy North,checking on families of guys that were deployed
when we were going through storms,and delivering from coffee whenever twenty for our
operations going on. When I startedrunning teams, I was terrified because I
didn't know how to be an effectivelater and because of that, I went

(03:38):
researching and I did a lot ofresearch. At the moment, I'm someplace
passed two hundred different inputs on myeducation. I've done dozens of workshops,
and I've read hundreds of books thatkind of bubbles up into this right to
where I am today. And again, I've got to really give a shout
out to barbar and o'barro because shewas the one that was able to actually

(04:00):
but a language to the behaviors thatI was doing. Because I learned all
this stuff somewhat unconsciously and I definitelydidn't know how to talk about it.
So why this stuff matters? Right? This is a leadership group, and
so all these reasons should resonate withbooks. Whether you are currently leading or

(04:20):
you want to be a leader eitherway. Number one problem is our employee
engagement is terrible. In twenty twentytwo, only fifteen percent of employees were
actively engaged at work. The othereighty five percent were either not engaged or
they were actively disengaged, and thatmeans for productivity is horrible. That's a
problem to be solved. The nextpart is mental health costs. Conservative estimates

(04:44):
are the businesses lose more than onehundred and seventy five billion dollars a year
just in the US alone due tomental health costs. From another angle,
employees that are struggling with their mentalhealth they take five times as many days
off for mental health days as thepeople who aren't. And we're talking on
productivity problems, right when you dothat. The third thing, Team Charner.

(05:06):
In twenty twenty two, a nationalsurvey found that fifty six percent of
employees we're looking for a new job. And that means that half of you
in this room, plus how manypeople are online, are actively looking,
and that kind of reduces your productivityat work because you're focused on something else.
The other thing is when you leave, the team loses institutional knowledge and

(05:28):
that really hurts for the people tostay behind, right, and also the
training ramp up time for the newpeople to come in. And again we're
talking productivity, and all those thingsare friction. I'm a serious pragmatist.
I want highly productive teams. Iwant teams to work effectively. I want
consistent, repeatable processes. Good leadershipshould both improve team performance and make the

(05:51):
CFO smile. That's the other driver, right, I want to check both
of those boxes. Whenever I goand talk to the execs because I can,
they will say yes to whatever whatdid I ask for? And it
has to be more than just anemotional thing, right, team's got to
be happy. So the mental healthside of this, I didn't start off

(06:13):
thinking about mental health. It reallydidn't even realize the mental health implications of
this until Barbara kind of dropped iton me. Right. I didn't know
that language and understand that world.Didn't understand that what I was doing was
actually helping my teams out. Thegoal that I had was to just improve
the team performance, and I didn'trealize they overlap. What's interesting is shared

(06:35):
problems. So most mental health problemsstart off when we feel powerless to create
change. We feel powerless because wedon't know what to do, like that's
the very core of it. Iknow this sounds really simple, but there's
a small amountain of research spanning decadesaround mental health problems with people feeling powerless
and the skills get right for themto become effective. What's interesting is that

(07:02):
there's always something available to do ina given context. It's just that we
don't know it right, and wedon't know to go hunt him for somebody
who actually knows how to solve aproblem and can teach us how to do
it ourselves. I've coached people rangingfrom vps of Google and Tesla all the
way down to fresh college grads,and the thing that I saw was a

(07:24):
pattern match across all of them wasthey all lacked the same skills. So
this is this consistent, repeatable problemthat I saw didn't matter where people were
in the York chart. Let's talkabout stigma for a minute, because people
tend to freak out about mental healthof it, and we'd like to solve
that problem. The first thing isresearch is showing that more and more mental

(07:46):
health challenges are not genetic in origin. They are a learned response to something,
not something you're born with. Right. I had social anxiety because I
never learned growing up how to bereally comfortable in the social context, and
my parents never didn't. First ofall, they didn't recognize that in the
second wall. They didn't know howto teach me how to have a skills

(08:07):
based approach to being comfortable talking ona microphone in front of her. Right.
The attached to that is that theemotional struggles again, it's when we
lack a consistent, repeatable process,and this is something it probably needs to
be repeated multiple times. Emotional strugglesare always a direct result of lacking skills

(08:33):
and consistent, repeatable processes. Thething that Barbara was doing was she was
helping people struggling with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse and self harm.
And the process that they got peopleout of those dark holes was literally teaching
them skills and processes to get backin the wrold their life. And her
big how was I was using thesame skills for performance that she was using

(08:54):
to give people out of whole humansthrived on consistent, petable processes and we
take them for granted, right,But we don't look at our mental health
through the process of well, whatdo I need to learn to switch this
thing from being hard to being easy. We don't look at it. We
don't ask that question. Clinical programsstarted using skills training about thirty years ago

(09:16):
to help people that we're struggling withdepression, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder.
Since then, that skills approach hasexpanded into PTSD, complex PTSD,
ADHD, bipolar, and pretty muchevery other aspect of mental health problems.
Now, the sad thing is eventhough clinical programs are all focused in this,
it has not trickled down to thestandard therapist yet. I talked to

(09:39):
therapist all the time about this asit does Barbara, and people are like,
I had no idea. I didn'tknow you could do that. Again,
I struggled for deactive to social anxiety. The reason I can do this
presentation right now is I started learningskills, and I baby stepped through the
skills, and I did them inlayers. It's I started off just starting

(10:01):
conversations for two minutes, and thenI moved into ten minutes, and then
half an hour, and then doingsmall presentations. It's just it's layers of
recipes, one on top of theother. The last thing about mental health
is that we radically underestimate how muchinterpersonal communication is a core part of our

(10:22):
mental health. Humans are pack animalsand we need to communicate effectively with each
other. And what you'll notice iswe're going through this is I'll be continually
talking about the communication aspects of howdo you get your team to perform better?
Right, It's all about communication,so outcomes using this framework and skills.
Here's some of the things my teamshave done. I took a ten

(10:45):
year old team. They were verywell baked and got a forty percent improvement
in coding through foot in six months. This was the worst team in the
company, and six months later theywere the best team in the company.
And the VP of engineering you said, I have no clue how you did
that, but I need more andI didn't know how to explain to what
I'd done at a software service company. They gave me the customer service team.
This approach works a variety of context. Right, they had zero referenceable

(11:09):
customers. In three months, wehad forty percent of the customers were referenceable,
and these were these were large householdname kind of companies. I went
to another company and in four monthsbuilt a cash cow data product. We
started with a one sentence idea andit took us two months to recoup all
the investment money up front. Sixyears later, it was still running at

(11:31):
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars amonth in revenue. When knowing had ever
touched the code. We did asoftware development project. We got it out
in eight months. Everybody said itwould take us at least a year.
It was really a good thing wegot it out because the guys that benefited

(11:52):
from it. That's a company ifI heard up called Walmart, and on
Black Friday, a month and ahalf after we got this out, their
systems all crash because they were overloaded, and we were able to handle all
their social media traffic. And againthe exactly wanted me to teach everybody else
how I had done it, andI didn't have the words to explain what
I've been doing. Right. WhenI was at Google, we had a

(12:13):
hundred people tell us that we couldn'tsolve this problem, that technically and legally
it was impossible. We did itanyway and turned out it was both technically
and legally possible. And all thistime, my teams have had roughly zero
turn which is one of the hugevalue points for me in having high performing

(12:33):
teams. Right, I like thatconsistency. So why is this work?
There's one huge thing about why thisworks. It's psychological safety. And people
undervalue psychological safety and how to getmore of it in teams because they don't
know how to do it right.This is one of those things where you
might want to be able to domore of it, but if you don't
know how to make it happen.You're stuck, right, you're powerless.

(12:56):
It would seem kind of obvious thatwhen teams perform well, it's because they're
willing to share wild ideas. Abunch of the reasons of my teams have
done so well is because they werewilling to speak and say things, and
they knew going forward that they wouldhave ownership of solutions and they would be
empowered and that I would take careof them. The other thing is they

(13:16):
collaborated incredibly well. Again, psychologicalsafety allows this to happen. If you
don't have psychological safety, then you'renot going to share your thoughts with somebody,
and that's a slow right when teamsaren't performing well. But the number
one reason they're afraid of criticism andthat it seems like there's a simple thing,

(13:37):
but people just won't talk, andit's a really insidious thing where you
know they're like, oh, thisis two wild an idea until one day
it's a really conservative idea and they'restill afraid to set And Last, but
not least, I don't feel likewe've ever been abused in our teams.
We really haven't had free litters,which has been amazing because that's a thing

(13:58):
to go the impacts teams if ifthey think that, you know, we're
doing all the hard work and thoseguys aren't doing anything. We've never had
that problem. So here's the twentythousand foot view of the principles to make
all this stuff work right, thisis kind of how I operate. First
of all, don't be staying inthe machine. Leaders have an incredible amount

(14:24):
of power for how their teams operate, and they oftentimes don't recognize that.
And my model was, I've gotto take a hundred percent responsibility for the
team's success. And starting with that, I had to make sure that I
wasn't the one causing the problems,which meant I've got to underline my own
insecurities. I've got to solve myskills gaps. I've got to learn how

(14:46):
to present and really improve my communicationbecause otherwise otherwise I'm actually causing slowdowns and
the productivity of the team. Theother thing is i have to give the
team all the credit, so Ihave all the responsibility that they get all
the credit. The second thing isI've got to get super curious. There

(15:07):
are thousands of books and courses onself awareness, distress, tolerance, scritical
thinking and interpersonal effectiveness. As Imentioned before, I'm well passed the two
hundred mark on this stuff, andI'm always looking for new models, new
techniques, new perspectives on how tomake this stuff work better because it's so
poor. Every time I find abetter idea, I adopt it. Right.

(15:30):
Baby steps, everything's incremental and they'retiny steps to make things move forward.
We overestimate what we can do ina day, but we underestimate we
have what we can do in ayear. I remember who said that quote,
but it's always in the back ofmy head. My team has never
changed overnight. It was just allthese baby steps and all of a sudden

(15:50):
one day, you know, theylook back and the like hold the cow,
How do we do that? Right? I spent a lot of time
getting to know the individuals on myteam because I'm on another strengths irrespective of
what we're all, they're in.I want to listen to their stories.
I want to understand the points offriction, because different people have different points
of friction. And it's a lotlike killing an onion. You know,
you just got to work your waydown through the layers. There's no magic

(16:12):
thing where everything's going to be outsuddenly in front of you on a boarder.
Also, you need to get comfortablebeing uncomfortable. As I mentioned I
was. I was a shy,introvert, really bad social anxiety, and
I realized that being uncomfortable in serviceof my team was actually really really valuable.

(16:34):
At the first start that I wasat, despite my social anxiety,
I became the demo guy because everybodyelse in the team had more securities than
I did, which kind of blewmy mind. But that's just the way
it worked out, right. Ialso had to get uncomfortable and advocate for
my team with the executives. Andwhen I first started doing this it was

(16:56):
it was rough because I hadn't hadpractice, I didn't have consistent, repeated
process that I've done over and overand over again. I knew I could
change the exact minds. The benefitof doing this and going to back for
the team. It raises they'll settheir self confidence. It raises their confidence
in each other, and I raisetheir confidence in me. And again,
this is all about building up psychologicalsite. You've got to be able to

(17:18):
that's the core of everything. Right. The other thing is that my big
one to be uncomfortable. Man.There's a lot of doors that open for
my teams because my peers just wouldn'tgo and have those conversations, and all
of a sudden people were like,Oh, can your team out with whatever
crazy projects somebody came up with.And so that meant the team actually got
to feed their own curiosity and dothe interesting projects in the company. And

(17:45):
that's but not least by far.We talk about recipes a lot. Everything
we do is based on these stacksof small skills and we put them together
into a recipe to solve a specifickind of a problem we oftentimes have ingredy,
they run across a bunch of recipes. Just like you can use eggs
and all kinds of things. Youknow, you can use it in cake,
you can use it in hamburgers,so you can make an almelove with

(18:07):
it. Right, it's still anegg. It just depends on the context
you want to you want to useit in. It's like using lego also,
right, But the recipes are reallythe contextual place of hope. Here's
where I want to do here,here's the recipe that I need to use.
The beautiful thing about it is afteryou go through learning some number of
recipes. You start being able to, just like a chef, put together

(18:30):
your own recipes to solve your ownproblems. One of the ways that I
think about this is abductor oriented mentalhealth. And because you're instantiating these skills
in different ways, and I expectthat that makes sense to everybody here.
Nobody's shaking your head, going,I don't know what that is. Okay,
good, awesome, So recipes alittle bit more of a deep dive.

(18:53):
These are consistent, repeatable processes.Right. The recipe for breaking a
chocolate cake, it's always will lookthe same if I take it out of
the Betty Crockerd cook. Look right, I'm always going to do the exact
same thing to make that chocolate cake. Humans thrive on consistent, repeatable processes.
We don't talk about this is verymuch, but this is how we
operate. Right. You expect thecontrols in your car will always work the

(19:15):
same. You can go from aToyota to a Honda, to a Mercedes
to a Ferrari, and they allhave a steering wheel and a gas pedal
and a brake pedal, and agearshifter of some kind or other, and
light switches and windshield wipers, andyou know you can figure it out when
you go from vehicle to vehicle becausethere's a consistency, right, you expect
the light switches to all work thesame or even the zoom watcasts. As

(19:38):
a side note, by the way, if if you have if you or
people on your team have a moreadventures or what's called a scout mindset.
This is specific like way people's headswork. Scout mindsets are available because those
people have a different fuzzy pattern matching. This is a fairly new in terms

(19:59):
of a lot of psychology world areaof research where there's people who just they
see the world a bit differently.They do fuzzy pattern matches, and they're
very happy with problem solving, andthey're consistent repeople processes or at twenty thousand
foot view, not necessarily ground level, and if you have them on your
team, they're awesome for problem solving. They will give you very creative thoughts

(20:19):
and they will put things together forthe rest of team. Won't necessarily see
some examples of consistent re people processesthat you guys will probably recognize. TCPI
P stack is an engineered great consistentrepeople process that get data packets from here
to there, even when there's problemsout on the network. Right, that's

(20:40):
super consistent oral hygiene. Right,You guys probably all brush your teeth and
philosophy exact same way every day,and you don't have to think about it
because you've done twenty thirty thousand reps. Right, it doesn't change. You
do the same thing every day.When I brush my teeth, I put
at garbonzo bean sized bit a toothbased on a toothbrush, and it's the
same every single day. I haveno idea commercial consistent VC pitches that win

(21:04):
often are also very much the samekind of a pattern. If you if
you've noticed those, you'll see there'sthis consistency across especially when you go into
a given a given investor. Sowhat are the parks of a recipe?
Somebody might be asking, right,so everything, there's a very consistent set
of things to go into recipes.In terms of objects, the starting point

(21:27):
is always a lie. Why isthis recipe matter? Simon Sinek does a
great job of talking about why I'meach fan of his work. We call
this values and priorities. And ifyou're doing something or if you want to
do something, there's always going tobe values and priorities involved, Otherwise you're
just not going to do with itright. If you find you're not executing
one recipes, then check the valuesand priorities right. The next one is

(21:51):
selfwarness and emotional regulation. This isthe get comfortable being uncomfortable. You have
to be able to understand your bodyand you have to learn how manage when
stuff's uncomfortable. Because the first timeyou do a recipe, it's going to
feel awkward. Like the first timeyou take at chocolate cake, it is
probably gonna feel awkward. I'm nota chef. I interest the imagination,
but I know when I cook.The first time I do something, I'm

(22:14):
always like, oh my god,hop just comes out well, you know,
if it tastes horrible, that's mybackup plan. Distress tolerance is one
of those foundational skills that you haveto have the beginning of a recipe,
and as time goes on and youget more and more and more used to
it, then you don't need itnearly as much. Kind Of like for
me when I learned to drive,right when I first started driving with terrifying,
Now I don't even think about ityou're gonna need to learn some skills,

(22:40):
need to be able to talk aboutthem, just like you would ingredients
in cooking or APIs in something you'reconnected to the software, right, you
need to understand the skill. There'stwo reasons. One so you can use
it yourself and know what's going on. And too, you can help coach
other people in whatever it is.Right. It's just like anything else in
tech, you're coaching other people,how do they get ahead? Since we're

(23:03):
talking about communication, probably also benefitsfrom a script. I script things in
advance all the time, and Imean this presentation is script right, even
though I'm not following exactly my speakernotes. I wrote these notes, thought
about them, edited them, practicethem, and it gives me a foundation
to work with right. Every timeI've ever done a presentation for an executive,

(23:26):
I've had a scripted in advance,even if I walked in cold and
I didn't have a computer with me. There's a couple of optional ingredients also
in recipes. It depends on context. The first one is the time bos
how long to do this thing?For? When I started working on my
social anxiety, I literally started atstarting conversations in a two minute timebos and

(23:48):
I used the baristas at Starbucks asmy foil. I went in, ordered
coffee, got the coffee, andthen so how's your day going? And
they would tell me whatever, andI would say thank you and leaves and
that was the two in a window. But that after two weeks I was
comfortable was starting conversations and I stilluse that opener all the time today.

(24:10):
The second optional is critical thinking skills. And the reason that at Google my
team was able to do this impossiblething was we used their critical thinking steals
to research all the other big companiesand figure out that they were doing this
thing that people and said Google didn'tknow it was possible, right. No
one had bothered to go look outsideand go how do those big guys do

(24:32):
it? Right? We happen togo look outside to figure it out because
we thought somebody hadn't be doing it. So here's a sample recipe that I
use my teams all the time.People want to be heard. This is
how I found friction first of allin my teams, and I think that
from a leadership perspective, if youcan find a remove friction that'll get you

(24:55):
the fastest ROI your time will bemost effectively spent right. One on ones
are a perfect time to be curiousabout team members, learn what makes them
tick, find out their desires.It's also a really way to get data
on behaviors so you can understand behavioraldiscrepancies. I noticed that I had people

(25:15):
that would be really vulnerable with me, and they would talk about anything.
When you put them in front ofthe team, they totally clam up.
And so I wanted to undo theirclam up in front of the team because
I knew that they were really smart, and I wanted to get their thinking
out in front of everybody else.That was incredibly valuable. Right, There's

(25:36):
an untapped potential in those shy peoplethat you need the rest of the team
to be able to have access toit. This is behavioral espionage, is
really a way to think about it. The other thing that I do in
this particular recipe do I call thereverse open door. HB used to call
it management by walking around and everyweek I purposely interrupt someone for a few

(25:57):
minutes to ask their perspective on eithera current or a future feature in something
re building. Right, and Iwant to understand their thought process in this
context, and I want to makesure in this conversation that I let them
know that their inputs valuable and I'mreally grateful for it. I've got to
actually thank them profusely. And also, just in case somebody was curious,

(26:22):
I was really respectful of their time. I didn't just barge in when they
were just flow. I made surethat it was someplace where they weren't madly
typing on the keyboard. So whatdoes this recipe look like? Well,
so here's the skill stack that goesinto there. So first of all,
we've got values and priorities. Forme, improving my team performance is huge,
right, that's the whole game forme. One of my first executives,

(26:47):
I went to them and I waslike, I don't have time to
lead this team and write code atthe same time, at the same level
that I used to How do Iprioritize? And he said, stop writing
code. Your job is to makethe team effective. If you never write
code ever again, I'll be reallyhappy because your team will be super effective.
And I said, holy god,that's I never thought about that.
And so I made the team reallyeffective. You've got to understand why you're

(27:11):
what your drivers. You're moving forwardThe second one is distress tolerance. Again,
in this one, you might benervous hearing and asking your people on
your team questions, and so you'vegot to be able to control that.
There's a bunch of knobs and leversfor distressed tolerance, so you can use.
One of the things I do isI make sure I get a good,

(27:32):
nice sleep before and I do it'scalled long exhale breath before every meeting.
Long extail breath is inhale for kindof four exhale for account at page
to twelve, as sole as yourheart right down. And if you do
that five or six times before themeeting, you're really calm, you're really
laughed, you're really relaxed, andyou have relaxed body language. The next

(27:52):
thing to do, and this isagainst motion, self warness and motion regulations.
The next one is a cluster ofskills. About of communication is at
least fifty five percent nonverbal, andagain that's a big lever to either use
or two or not use right incommunication. It's one of those name skills
that I use repeatedly in any kindof a communication. And it's an acronym

(28:17):
for be gentle. You want tobe aware of your body language, and
you want to communicate gently so thatother people aren't intimidated. You want to
be interested in the people and curiousand learn from their experience, their perspective,
their history. Right. V isfor validate. You want to validate
their emotions. People that this isempathy with a different name attached to it.

(28:41):
Right, whatever is going on,You want to be able to Yeah,
that sounds awesome, or if thatsounds horrible, imagine I'd feel terrible
if I was in that situation.Right, and then a reminder to be
gentle is have an easy manner.Again, it's about your body language.
You don't want to come off aseither threatening or aloof and conversation. You
want to be curious and interested,not critical. Right, very supportive.

(29:04):
Doing this repeatedly, I learned aton about my people and that that gave
me the insights to help optimize theteams. Right. The last stack is
something called dear man. This isan acronym for for cluster of skills that
I don't really want to explain allof right now. But it's about presenting

(29:26):
information in a way that the otherpeople get it and find it interesting,
useful, actionable. Right, It'skind of another version of Einstein's quote that
if you can't explain something to asix year old, you don't really understand
it well enough yourself. And sothis is really the the application of that
in a business or whatever context.Right, there's another recipe. So the

(29:51):
backstory on this one is I hada software team that hated their computers.
There are three years old. Theysaid they were too slow, and I
said, well, when I wake, why don't we get new ones?
It was new on the team,and they said, well, because we
keep being told ella. And soI said, well, you know,
I'll go in and all to seewhat we can do. And I went
with the VP and Avantage and said, hey, you know the team's complaining
because their laptops or slove. Wewant new ones. And he said,
you know they've all asked we can'tget them to him because we just don't

(30:15):
have the budget. And I said, oh, okay, thank you,
and I went talked to the teamfor a bit, did some math,
paying the VP back and said,hey, I've got some new information,
but I think he'll change your mindabout the laptops. And he said,
well you have nerve, I'll giveyou that. Come in talk to me,
and fifteen minutes later he said,you'll have laptops first thing in the
morning. I'll come. Nobody toldme this before, and I said,

(30:37):
because I have a different communication skillset, you know, I don't know.
What I had done was I hadfigured out how much man hours are
being lost and man hours are moneyby the slow computers. And I was
able to do the math and showhim that in three months they'd recoup the
expenses and everything after that obviously isgreat, right, And what he saw
was this is a cheap way toget software out the door faster, which

(30:59):
makes every team, the company,and the customers happier. So I was
the slow computers was the initial problemthat was really frustrating my team. Right,
Almost always, the argument against anew technis budget, because people going
with an emotional conversation to somebody whosemental model is money, it's not emotions,

(31:22):
right, You've got to give thema financial argument. So when I
flipped it around to losing person hours, all of a sudden, now they
got money, and that's a wholedifferent com