I see a lot of people that become a tech lead, they have
this old belief that I'm just not that good at the people
stuff. Let me focus on the tech and the
details. But it's a little bit of a lie.
Today's guest is Martijn Versteeg, founder of Group
Effort with a background in organizational psychology.
He's built a community of 300+ CTOs and engineering leaders
teaching them the systems behind human behavior.
Many people assume that dealing with people is hard.
So tell us more about learning from these systems.
Actually the way of doing every psychology thing, they all have
systems. As a tech lead, you were already
good at using systems. I will tell you there is a Stack
Overflow of psychology and how you can access it.
You also have peer coaching groups with other engineering
leaders. Maybe tell us top challenges
that engineering leaders are facing.
Interestingly enough, I was expecting the CTO groups to be
extremely technical. But it's all about people.
The conflict management always kind of like the top challenges,
especially if you're new to management, right?
Before you are a leader, it's pretty good tactic not to get
into conflict. But this is one of these
transformations we have to go through.
Here's the one for bad news. Within 10 seconds, bad news out.
If you just skip around the topic, the other person, their
bullshit detectors are already bing, bing, bing, bing, bing,
bing, bing. Then separate it from the person
as much as you can. One other challenge that I find
most of the tech leaders cannot let go.
“Nobody will be quicker if I just do it.”
If you ever catch yourself thinking that, no, it's always a
lie. I had a founder, CTO, who was
struggling with this very much. And at one point he just saw,
I'm the bottleneck. So his quote was also amazing,
and that was, “If only I can do it, I should not do it.”
Hey, quick pause. My goal with Tech Lead Journal
is simple. Learn from the best in tech so
we can all grow together. If this resonates with you, hit
subscribe to follow the channel. It's the biggest way for you to
support the show and help us keep bringing great guests and
insights to you. Thanks for being here, and let's
get back to it. Hello everyone.
Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal
podcast. Today I have a maybe like a
product leader slash engineering leader, right?
So his name is Martijn Versteeg. He's the founder of this
community called Group Effort. It's kind of like a peer group
where leaders can learn from each other.
I'll let him share a little bit more about the peer group.
But today we are going to talk a lot more about, you know, how
engineering leader can become a much better, you know, leader
putting aside not just the technical aspects but also the
product aspects so that, you know, they can grow the
organization, they can grow the team, and they get they can grow
themselves much better. So Martijn thank you so much for
your time, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.
I look forward to this a lot because I think leadership in
tech, it can make such an impact on a company, right?
So I love how you're doing this. It's what I've listened.
It's always like it's both useful for aspiring leaders and
for people who are in the business a long time.
So congrats on that and can't wait to see if I can contribute.
Yeah. Looking forward for this
conversation as well. So Martijn, maybe if you know,
right, so I always love to invite my guests first to share
a little bit more about yourself, specifically by
sharing career turning points that you think we can learn from
you. Yes.
I prepared this question and I decided that the best answer to
the turning points is that I prefer to name none.
But I will give an intro and I will tell you exactly why.
Because what I've found is specifically in tech leaders,
there is always this need for more knowledge, more knowledge,
more knowledge. But then sometimes we make
things so big, just like a ticket gets too big, that we
kind of don't stop, go into action.
So one of the things that I found was if I name a career
turning point that I was head coach of Singapore rowing team,
in 20-2013, you might think, but I haven't been that, so this is
not relevant to me. Or if I say a turning point is
when I started multiple peer groups across Europe, you might
think, but I haven't done that, so maybe this doesn't apply to
me. So I would say one lesson that I
think is super relevant is in code you guys are great at this.
You already know it's all about iteration and small steps.
Do the same for your personal growth.
So I will give you my two minute intro, but I don't think it's
about one point that made the difference for me.
It was all the steps that made the journey happen.
Are you okay with that, Henry? Yeah.
This is quite unique sharing. So I love the way that you
mentioned in life it's all about small step.
It's about iteration, right? So yeah, sometimes the big
career turning points or turning points achievements that people
see that we see from people out there, right?
It's actually it's kind of like culmination result of hard work,
effort, and a lot of experiments that they did along the way.
So I think thanks for sharing that perspective and for
reminding us about this importance of, you know, finding
your own ways, your own career turning points.
Yeah. So...
I would be happy to still give an intro, right?
Because I don't want to remain a stranger.
Shall I do that? Is that okay?
Yeah. Cool.
Okay. So my background is in
organizational psychology combined with computer science
as a minor. So I'm in between the middle
ground of the people stuff and the tech stuff.
Don't ask me to review your code, but I'm very happy to have
an in-depth discussion, whether that is about hallucinations of
an LLM or whether it's about what vectors to use in your
recommender model in data science.
I like the tech. I can go along quite far.
But I'm not writing or reading code.
I've been described by other people like your listeners as,
over time, yeah, he speaks nerd, but he doesn't read or write it,
which I think is what you can expect from me.
And this is also what I hope to contribute because I've led
technology organizations and I find that the value I can bring
is on the psychology side and the problem that is also there.
That's why I'm super excited to be here because I see a lot of
people that become a tech lead. They have this old belief that
I'm just not that good at the people stuff.
Let me focus on the tech and the details.
But it's a little bit of a lie because there is actually the
way of doing every psychology thing people think right, they
all have systems. As a tech lead, whether you're
still aspiring or already that for a long time, you were
already good at using systems. So I hope that in this talk with
Henry, we can talk about systems.
Systems for talking, for handling conflict.
I will tell you there is a Stack Overflow of psychology and how
you can access it. And I'll try to get you other
insights that you can actually use.
That's my core goal. So let's try to take it from
there. Yeah.
Wow, I like that your background is actually organizational
psychologists, right? So because a lot of things we
can learn from psychology that can be applied to organization,
team building, right, and also leadership.
And specifically just now you mentioned something that I find
very interesting because so many tech leaders, you know, tech
practitioners out there, they actually aspire to become a much
better person, a much better tech leaders.
Maybe growing into a more engineering leaders kind of a
position but they somehow feel stuck maybe in their mindset in
terms of opportunity or in terms of knowledge.
So let's just dive deep here first because you mention that
this can be learned. There's a system that everyone
can find and learn from them from those resources and become
better, right? But I think many people assume
that dealing with people is hard.
Dealing with people is abstract, ambiguous.
So tell us more about this learning from these systems.
Let's do this. So, first of all, I'll finish my
background because I wasn't, I didn't do that because I want so
much to give value that I sometimes don't shine the
spotlight on myself. I had my own education
technology startup, scaled it up, sold it after five years,
then I started doing groups for tech and product leaders.
It started as a group for myself because I felt like why am I the
only one figuring it out? Which ties perfect into the
question that I'm gonna answer that Henry just asked.
And I also find that, after those groups, it was working so
great that it became kind of a community.
So currently I'm working with, let's say 300 product and tech
leaders across Europe. Some of them in conferences,
some of them in training, some of them in peer groups, and even
some one-on-one coaching which is very limited now.
There I teach these systems. So one of the systems I want to
talk about is there's actually a pretty good predictor of human
behavior, and I can summarize it in three minutes, if you're okay
with this. There is only a certain amount
of needs and this transcends culture.
There's a couple of needs that every person has.
And those needs are, I'll tell them one by one, one is people
like to know what's gonna happen next.
You could call it certainty, you could call it stability.
I'll provide a link to a written out version.
Then if people know what's gonna happen next, what happens if
that's the only thing they have. You'll get bored.
So we also have a certain need for variety.
Then thirdly, if we get variety and stability, right, we also
all want to grow or at least perceive we're growing.
I'm assuming that you're listening to this podcast to
find something, and I'm assuming even for Henry, part of this
might be I want to keep growing so I'll just interview people.
So that's growth. After growth, you have status.
It is interestingly enough, for everyone in the world, it's a
common thing. We like to have a certain amount
of status. Some of us are humble and feel
pretty okay with a status that is not like that fits in a
normal size room. So like Elon needs so much that
other people think you are pretty crazy.
But it's a need. And then there is the need for
connection. We want to relate to others.
And the last need is giving. That's why it feels so good to
teach a junior how to do code better.
So all of these are steered by just two things.
And I'm hoping to discuss this in depth after, but I just want
to give the whole model. It's a subjective scale.
It is a model. I can get more stability and
less stability, but my experience could be rated from a
zero to a 10. Thing is even if Henry and me
compare, maybe my 10 is Henry's five or the other way around.
So this model works when you ask the perspective of the person
you're testing this with. You can ask where are you?
What is your current experience? How stable do you feel?
How much variety do you experience?
How much growth? How much status?
How much connection? How much giving?
I found this, I started using this very intensively around
COVID when I was an Agile coach for a company that just said,
keep our people. That's the most important.
Take care of my people. And we used this and it was a
pretty good predictor. If three of these went to a five
or lower, people started looking for a job.
So this is a model that explains most every behavior.
And I would say your experience of one of these needs going
down, you could call that very, very simplified, pain.
All negative feelings. That is, it's going back.
If it's going up, that feels like pleasure, meaning all
positive emotions. Now three more things and I, and
you have a pretty grasp of basic behavior for humans.
One, we do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.
Sometimes we want to read, right?
There's, I have a bookcase to my right.
There's a lot of people that buy these books and then don't read
them, right? Because the pain of taking the
time to read it is more real to us than the pleasure of getting
the book done. That's number one.
Number two, short-term is more real to us than long-term.
It's so much easier to focus on what is at hand, whether that be
that one bug that you focus on because you don't want to have
that strategic discussion at this moment.
Or whether it is you wanting to be in great shape, being able to
run 10 marathons. Congrats, Henry.
Even if you say you want to have the body to run 10 marathons,
it's tempting to take the apple pie.
Why? Because the apple pie of now is
more real to us than the 42 kilometers a month or two months
or three months from now. We do more to avoid pain than to
gain pleasure. And we have short-term is more
real to us than long-term. Now this altogether is a pretty
good explanation of people's behavior.
So there is a system and I just want to give you this one.
I'll make sure there's a written out one on my website, which we
can link to in the show notes. But I just wanted to start
there. And I hope Henry will try to
break it for me because that's the biggest honor you could do
this. Wow!
Thank you for sharing. I feel so many things that we
can peel from these so-called concepts, right?
How do you predict people's behavior?
How do you predict, you know, maybe the team dynamics, right,
how people behave within organizations?
So maybe let's try to, you know, go one by one.
So I think you mentioned about the so-called five things that
people kind of like crave, the first is like certainty.
Yes, we kind of like want to know the future.
Maybe not so far ahead future but at least tomorrow, next
week, next year, and so on and so forth.
Then we want to have variety. That's why we all have different
options, different tools, different frameworks, different
tech stack, and all that. We wanna grow, we wanna learn
from our craft, our career. Not just doing the same thing.
We want a status at some point in time, right?
Maybe career ladder, maybe in your community, whatever that
is, right? Or maybe social media these
days. You wanna be feel connected with
other people, creating the networks, and also giving at the
end, you know, like servicing to others.
How does someone actually use this different, like different
needs I would say. Like different needs, human
parts, right? How do they use it in their, I
don't know, day-to-day life or career or even in leadership,
right? So tell us more about this.
I, I love that you're immediately asking me for the
tactical. So we have the knowledge now,
and that's fantastic. You can use this in two ways.
One, you can self-assess this because it will make it easier
for yourself to understand your own behavior.
How do I currently experience stability?
Is it terrible being one and awesome being 10?
So you could do that. But you can also do this when
you are a tech lead for your devs.
Because it is actually a great question to ask.
It also gives them a one-on-one that is less like vague, right?
Why are we having this one-on-one about my feelings?
I just wanna talk about code, right?
But if you make it concrete, I see most devs, even our friends
that are like hesitant to even accept any one-on-ones.
They like a system. Oh, this has nice boxes, right?
But you will get a pretty good indication and you'd be
surprised what you learn. And as a tech lead, I think you
should also focus on then looking at are there any low
numbers, I would say five or lower.
That would be something to work on, on the growth of your
people. Because you might have this
amazing senior in your team, right?
If they experience no more growth and that goes down and
down and down, you should better catch that before they start
looking for a new job. And I think that's the two
practical ways that I immediately recommend you do
this. Pro tip: you're gonna get the
numbers, right? If people struggle, just tell
them, go with your gut feeling. Don't worry about it being seven
or an eight because that's still closer to get than a two and an
eight. It's about direction.
Pro tip number two: you can ask about trends.
So you can say like, okay, it's currently a five.
If we continue like this where will this be?
Like ask people to project in the future 'cause that's super
useful. And number three, if you have
low numbers, instead of assuming what your 10 is is also then
their 10, ask them what does a 10 on growth or a 10 on status
look like for you. And I will guarantee this will
immediately yield you something to improve your team.
And it will keep more people in your team, definitely, but it
will also deepen that sense of we are building something great
together. Yeah.
And I think you mentioned about one-on-one, right?
I think this is one maybe tool that you can use to actually
create a conversation, build conversations and even like
build connections with that person itself, right?
So I think one thing that I think, I assume, right, so this
is not to maximize all the needs for individuals, right?
Again like you mentioned about subjectivity.
Different people have different priorities or different needs.
And there's a spectrum, right? So my, your 10 might not be my
10 and vice versa, right? So this is something that not
for everyone to maximize all of them.
But depending on their situation and the depending on the
subjective preference, this could be different.
So how does this differ with, I don't know, something else what
I know is about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, that
is commonly used for assessing human needs?
Yeah. So Maslow starts with safety,
right? So actually start with physical
needs and then safety. I'm assuming that in your work,
those two are not, no longer relevant.
Self-actualization is at the end.
One of the critiques, so it's perfect that you notice.
By the way, for everyone, there's a pyramid, Maslow's
pyramid, we'll probably also refer that.
I, if you need a picture, I, I have those from training slides.
But it says about, first you need to take care of your
physiological needs. Then you need to take care of
your security needs, your safety.
And it rolls up all the way to the top being
self-actualization. It's a useful thing to think
about humans that are in lack and where physical needs are a
theme and where physical safety are a theme.
Like it's a more zoomed out picture of this.
Because of course, if you have a dev that is just physically like
in pain, then Maslow's theory is more relevant.
It won't necessarily come from each of these, but it will show
up still because it will show up in stability being low probably.
So I say Maslow is way more zoomed out.
It's for higher level assessment.
In work, we want to go for more personal needs.
And I think it's a more zoomed in version and more practical
just for the two tools I gave you.
And a third way of using it, whenever you don't understand
behavior which can happen because everyone acts
differently, ask yourself what need is this serving?
And if you don't know, you can even ask.
Because they're like, can I just, if we categorize it, which
one of you, these are you? Because sometimes, why is this
dev going in conflict? Because for them there are some
rules around connection, which means you always need to be very
straight. Or maybe it's because for them
I'm going into conflict because status is super important to me
and the moment that you don't listen to me, I feel that status
is decreasing. I challenge everyone who listens
to this. If you find a way to break it,
I'll be very happy because I've been saying this for multiple
years. Break it please, because we can
make it better. But this is the most functional
way I've found to systemize human behavior in a short and
concise way. Just try it.
If you like it, try it. In a way, it's kind of like a
dictionary, right? So, you know, in psychology
there are so many different models and frameworks, right?
Not just about, you know, this human needs but also like
people's characteristics. You know, I know something
called INTJ and all that. I dunno what it's called, the
framework. Also like red, blue, green,
those kind of stuff yeah. This is perfect, thank you.
I'm so grateful that you brought that up.
Internal validity of most commercially available, sorry.
I'll also go slow on this. The internal validity of most
commercially marketed personality tools suck.
Can I say that? It's like the ones that you
named, the first one is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
While some people swear by it, if you look at the internal
validity, it's built on some concepts by Carl Jung.
And there's some Jung fans out there still, but they don't hold
to be true, if you try to pick them apart with the scientific
method, they're not stable enough over time.
The other one you mentioned, the colors, there is a lot of
popular ones, but one, for example is DiSC.
There is no scientific data on that being stable over time.
People have different roles in different groups, we already
know that. But there's another problem with
this. If you put a sticker on someone,
you also give them a way to say this is just how I am.
I cannot do this because I am blue.
And like, there's a lot of moments where labels are super
relevant, right? I mean, everyone likes their
code to be neat and you want to know what this piece does,
please, right? Because how are you gonna test
it otherwise? But for people, we have this
thing that whenever we are labeled, we tend to also change
our behavior. Yeah, I think that somehow feels
true. So especially if something that
doesn't really resonate with your, I don't know, like your
value, your habit, your background, culture, and all
that, right? So I think, yeah, all models,
it's good for us to be aware of. Maybe use it for our advantage.
But one thing for sure like not...
Like I don't think all of them is 100% accurate.
So I think it depends on how you use it and what kind of purpose.
And I think one critical aspect that this is also I learned from
my experience is not good for leaders to use this to
compartmentalize people or to put labels on people and think,
assume that they won't change. Because what I understand at
least from me as well, I tend to change over time.
Depending on the, again, like experience, situations, new
knowledge that comes in and all that.
So thanks for highlighting that. The beauty of what you just said
is, that's why I don't believe in personality labeling.
Because personality, that assumes that personality is
stable over time, which if you zoom out to a big enough
population is true because most people don't change.
But I think if you're listening to a podcast, you are already
looking for growth, right? Maybe you'll even try one or two
of the things that you learn, which makes you top 1%.
But for those people, it's even less efficient and it can
definitely hold you back. And I want to, just because it
was so close to what you were saying, when people ask me like
can you summarize your psychology study?
I always say, with humans, a model is better than no model,
but no model is perfect. So just wanted to give that.
Sorry, continue. My bad.
This kind of like reminds me of this phrase the map is not the
territory or something like that, right, where you can have
the model but it's not the actual depiction of the actual
situation, yeah. So, yeah, one thing that I find
very interesting you mentioned about this which I relate very
closely with personal growth, right?
You mentioned people want to avoid pain as much as, you know,
seeking more pleasure. That's the thing.
And the second one is the short-term is something that is
more prioritized for people rather than the long-term.
So I find this a very good indicators for people to always
put in their back of the mind in order for them to grow, right?
So tell us how do you use these two psychological insights, I
would say maybe, for people to actually, you know, improve
themselves. Good.
So you can actually manipulate or change, manipulate sounds
like you're doing something negative, but you can change
what you personally for. I'm now starting with yourself
by the way. You can change what you relate
to something. Let's start with the short-term
versus long-term. The way you change that is to
show your brain which is just a survival mechanism, so it's just
set on the now to survive. If you look like very primal,
that's how it works. In coaching, for example, I
would just pull the future to the now because our brain has a
beautiful viewing screen. We have a fantasy.
And even if you're saying, I'm super logical, I don't have,
well close your eyes and what is my skin color?
How do you know, right? It is something you can
remember. It is what our brain does.
What is interesting about that is you can tell someone, you can
say like, okay, about the apple pie, let's make it not about
tech. Let's make it about health for a
second. A person says I have really hard
time withstanding the apple pie. And I want to get more fit.
I would ask them, can you imagine yourself keeping in that
direction? What would you look like in five
years? Imagine how that feels and how
that looks. What would happen in 10?
What would happen in 20? And the strange thing is, it's
the emotion that is there that will change your mind on this.
So you can do this for yourself. If you have behaviors you
haven't been able to change. Like, for example, I know a lot
of tech leads are, I'm just super stressed out about bad
news conversations. Telling my dev that they're not
good enough or telling them no when they ask for a raise.
So I, I'd rather just escalate it one level up, right?
This is a very common theme for, yeah, I see recognition.
What you could then change for yourself is you can reframe.
And you can first ask like, why is this painful?
But you can also, so the conversation itself is
short-term pain, right? Oh no.
I need to do something that's uncomfortable to another person.
It feels like almost, for some people it feels like you're
stabbing them, right? But if you go long-term, say, if
I don't say this now to this person, what am I taking away
from them? So not what I'm taking away now,
but what am I taking away long-term?
And I'm not saying be indelicate, right?
But if a developer is underperforming in any front,
not saying it in the long term will provide the whole unit with
more pain. That person, you, everyone will
get more pain in the long run. So sometimes it's just a, a
matter of you change your mind by asking what does this mean
long-term? And the safe thing about that
question is it's still you answering it.
So you're not, even if you ask this of a person, it's their
future. So I feel very safe.
Let's say someone else comes to me and they say like, oh, I have
a hard time changing this. If I ask like, what happens
long-term? I'm not steering them their
behavior, right? I'm not telling them this is how
you need to change your behavior.
I'm just helping them make the long-term more real.
And I think this is... Another one's procrastination,
right? Procrastination, it's just that
doing the work is more painful to us than not doing the work.
And at one point, it reverses if you have a deadline, right?
That is like, I'm gonna do it now.
And then like two hours before deadline, you go crazy and you
do it. That's another one of these.
You could ask for yourself, like what would be the pleasure of
actually doing it now? What is the pain that I might
not get if I do it now? The last minute stress.
So I think oftentimes the questions, and I'll note a
couple down as well, because I don't want people to feel they
have to remember everything now, but there's a, there's like four
or five questions you can use to like... it's almost like zooming
out of behavior. And the beauty of this, what I
like about it is, it's always the person with the behavior
making the choice. It's never you dictating what
someone else should do. Because I think that is, that's
giving advice and that's not always the way to go,
specifically when it's about personal behavior.
So I hope that was a useful answer.
Yeah, definitely. So I think it's all about
reframing how do you see, you know, pain versus pleasure,
short-term versus long-term. And obviously, for you to grow,
right, you always have to look it from the long-term
perspective. And also for, you know, growing
up yourself, right? It's not just to avoid pain
because by avoiding pain doesn't mean you will grow necessarily
in my opinion. So using all these tools, I
think tech leaders now have a certain psychological behavioral
aspects that they can use. You also have these peer
coaching groups with other engineering leaders.
Maybe tell us, maybe top problems or top challenges that,
you know, engineering leaders are facing in their career or in
their day-to-day life that you can share with us so that we can
also learn from that. 100%. So the peer groups came from me
personally, being a CPTO and feeling a little lonely at the
top, right, at the top. I'm not taking myself too
serious. I hope you feel that through my
voice already. But what I discovered was, you
know, there's actually other people that have this job as
well, why don't I go looking for them?
And I formed this group. We call it a peer group.
You could have also called it a mastermind.
And the goal was, let's just provide multiple perspectives on
our challenges. And that's the context which
sparked a whole thing of it's become a whole community.
We have like WhatsApp group format, we have live meetings
form, et cetera, et cetera. And in that, we discuss real
challenges and sometimes they're super practical, right?
So I literally was like in meetings like that where we
discussed, okay, ransomware happened, what actually do we do
now, right? So it could be as practical and
detailed as that. It could be knowledge things
which is basically, hey, what do you guys pay a senior developer?
Just checking. But what I see as the bigger
challenges, interestingly enough, I was expecting the CTO
group groups to be extremely technical, but it's all about
people. And if you were to blindfold me
and put me in a group or just read only the transcript without
the names, I would've a hard time telling apart a group of
heads of engineering from a group of heads of finance.
Which is very in, I mean, the language will be slightly
different, but the themes, if you just abstract it to the
themes. One of the biggest things is I'm
conflict averse. Because before you are a leader,
it's pretty good tactic not to get into conflict.
It's a solid tactic. Like if an individual
contributor asks me like, how often should I look for
conflict? I'll be like, no, just do what
your boss says. It's a really good strategy.
But this is one of these transformations we have to go
through. And as a leader, this topic
comes up often, and I'll give you the following on that.
Often we make a conflict huge in our mind, and I challenge you to
like peek beyond the door. Really ask yourself, what is the
worst that can happen? Because oftentimes that's
already a part of the remedy. Maybe that conflict isn't
actually as hard as you thought. And if it is something else,
maybe the conflict you're averting is a bad news
conversation either with a peer or somebody in your team, find a
model. So I...
There's a concept called modeling, which I call, that's
like the Stack Overflow of Psychology.
You can find people who are great at this and with the
disclaimer that we just talked about, that no model is perfect.
There are models out there. And if you're learning, it's
perfectly okay to just copy a model.
And here's the one for bad news, by the way.
Within 10 seconds, bad news out, If you right?
If it is just to be very direct, you ask for a raise, we cannot
provide it right now, right? All the stuff that I do before
that is actually unfair. You're getting red.
No, just kidding. But I would say like, this is
the part you need to immediately go with the bad news.
Hey, we're gonna cut down. You are one of the people that's
going to be asked to leave the team.
Because then there's no walking around.
And if you don't do this, if you just skip around the topic,
you're gonna get way more stressed yourself.
But the other person, their bullshit detectors are already
bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
Because people are really great. You've been maybe in this
situation yourself where you're not like, I know this is not
what this is about. Just get to the real stuff,
right? We know this from our families,
from our private life, right? So my recipe is bad news out 10
seconds, then separate it from the person as much as you can.
So I would say like we cannot give a raise right now.
Here's reason A, B, and C. Then you give, I understand that
this would provide feelings on your part, right?
So make a space for feelings. Be like, I can understand this
is not fun to hear. Or whatever the words are that
you usually use, don't copy me exactly, but just say like, I
understand this is not what you wanted to hear.
This is not fun. Maybe if the language you use is
more, this sucks, you say that. But just then give some space
for emotion and then say, I understand there might be a need
to discuss this but I suggest we keep it at this for now.
So we both get to sleep on it for a night first.
'Cause then you give people the space for their emotion, not
with you per se. Otherwise you're gonna end up in
endless discussions and loops. So this is the model that I've,
I've seen most people like, oh, it's like I get emails on this
model, so please, if it works for you, it's just keeping it
really short. Because there's, now it's, one,
it's respectful. But two, it's also not as
personal, right? It's not like you suck, right?
It is just this is the decision, this is the reasons.
If you can pull it away from that person, right?
If it's like, you're not getting a raise because we are not
making enough profit, say that, right?
You don't need to be like if you can share that, by the way, of
course. Be confidential with whatever is
confidential. With peers however and bosses,
there's an extra step if you wanna have frank conversations.
Oftentimes it's not this type, but it can follow a similar
format, but it has to be proceeded with asking
permission. Same in every culture.
In my culture, you would get away.
We, like we Dutch are very low power distance.
So we have no issue starting this conversation with our boss
and also our boss expect it. But as a global advice, knowing
that the audience is global. There's never anything wrong
with asking permission. Like I would like to discuss
something, can you make the time, is never wrong.
And if it's not respected and you can still ask, would there
be time later? But that's a disclaimer I would
give for bosses because if you go bad news without asking
permission, I would consider that mutiny.
Yeah. Well, I think that speaks true
to me as well, right? The people aspects and the
conflict management, always kind of like the top challenges
especially if you're new to this leadership management, right?
Managing people. It's always maybe one of the
first few challenges that feels very, very difficult because
first, unlike learning technologies, right, you can
read so many things on the internet or maybe books.
You can find resources. But dealing with these
situations. First, yes, there might be model
out there but it's very specifically contextual because
different people is different. Different culture is different,
communication patterns and all that.
So I find that this is definitely one of the biggest
challenges for leaders out there.
And thanks for giving us the tips about how do you do this
difficult conversations, right? Because yeah, again, some of us
feel stressful if we have to convey these difficult
conversations but for whatever reason sometimes we have to
convey it, right? So be it for performance
improvements, be it for, you know, like tough situations in
the economy, organizations, organizations and all that.
So one thing that I wanna peel a little bit more further, right?
Because this is always the first hurdle for tech leaders before
they actually want to step up and be, you know, an engineering
manager or maybe engineering leader.
So what steps concretely they could do in order to kind of
like be able to navigate this, if they wanna try giving it a
go, you know, taking this step forward.
So you're asking, just to recap, you're asking if somebody's
aspiring, how do you make those steps?
Yeah. How do you learn these people
aspect and also conflict management, right?
Because like tech leaders, we always work with code.
We always work with specifications and that's about
it. Kind of like less involved in
those two aspects. It's a lot with, what I would
immediately say is, if you wanna make a career step, you look for
extra responsibility and you ask if you can get that.
So it's again a permission thing.
I'm pretty heavy on permission, because I think that is very
useful. And also take the no's as okay,
but also not as permanent, right?
I meet people who've said like, I would like to become an
engineering leader. And then they get a no, and
maybe they get some reasons, and then they never ask ever again.
And I speak to them six years later.
And I would say if there is a no, it's almost always valid,
maybe not the right timing. But it's always, always valid to
ask what are the reasons, and work on that in a small way.
And maybe even ask like, can I get a little like help in
growing this? Or can I get a little project
where I can practice this? So as long as you do that, you
can ask again. Give it a reasonable time, you
will feel out what it is. But I would go like, it's about
ownership. And the other part is, all the
people things, it comes down to communication.
And I think that is not something you can learn from a
book. It's something you do by
practicing. And one advice that I personally
got recently from somebody that was coming in for my podcast, he
said, if I could give people one action, it was find the person
that you have the hardest time connecting with in your company
and go for a coffee with the intention to learn and listen.
Not to push anything but that I think it's a pretty wise advice.
If that relationship is totally broken, of course, right?
Don't, don't overdo this. You can do one little less,
right? But I think going out of your
bubble is great. And I think as an aspiring tech
leader, the more you go outside the bubble of code.
It will be a very fun stretch for you, but it will also
improve the value because in the end, you're in a business.
There is sales, there's marketing, and you might
currently think I dislike all of that.
My thing is, I have found that most of the times when I dislike
or I'm uninterested in something, I don't know enough
about it. So I'll pull a book from my,
from my bookcase right now. I thought molds and mushrooms
were incredibly boring. And then I read a whole book on
it and it's great. It's a fantastic world.
And I would say like, developers know this rabbit hole concept,
right? You go down a rabbit hole,
whether you're a mod for a certain game, right?
Or whether you just went extremely deep into this obscure
framework because it was somewhere in your old code.
You probably get more appreciation when you dive
deeper. I recommend you do it outside of
tech as well. And the first I would recommend
you start is anything related to money and profit.
Because in the end, most everyone is working for a
business. There's also people working for
government that is it works a little bit differently.
But that's the fuel of that vehicle, right?
So yes, you are the one building the vehicle, but realize that
that's the synergy between the two.
If the fuel runs out, you could have built the best thing ever,
it's still a problem. Or a no bueno is a good summary.
Right. So yeah I think learning outside
of tech is definitely very important, right?
And communication. So I think when you step up as a
leader, as a manager, right? You need to communicate.
You cannot just, you know, maybe chat only through, you know,
Slack or something like that. You need to communicate.
You need to somehow make a sense of the situation maybe from
people's behavior, habit, communication patterns.
So all this you need to learn, right?
You need to maybe pick up a book or go into peer group,
mastermind, those kind of things.
And always pique curiosity. I think like, um, just to have
interest in this kind of subject, in this kind of a
knowledge, so that you can get equipped once you step up on the
role, right? One other challenge that I find
most of the tech leaders because we come from like a very deep
hands-on, right? We sometimes can be a very good
IC. But obviously stepping up as a
leader as a manager, we need to let other people be in the
limelight, so to speak, right? And this is also another
challenge that I feel many people cannot let go.
They still feel itchy to, I dunno, do the hands-on coding or
be the person to decide on anything very important like
architecture, system design, and all that.
So how do you advise people to start, you know, taking off this
mindset? I have a story because I take
personally a lot of inspiration from nature.
First disclaimer about the story.
If you want to get great at communication, people are always
like, Martijn, you have so many stories and you have, you are
quite advanced in your use of language and, and levels of
abstraction that I get from reading fiction, actually, not
necessarily. So people often focus, I see a
lot of people start focusing on the businesses sides, right?
And I love those, like I have a bookcase full, but the
storytelling, which is really relevant because somehow, I'll
give you this as well. In most businesses and most
professional relationships, logic is overused and emotion is
underused. And the thing is, I haven't seen
logic change many people's minds.
So that's why with the, with the, how do you let go?
I will then answer with a story. And it's the story of the
vanilla orchid. A vanilla orchid starts as a
seed and it falls very deeply, pop onto the ground of the
jungle. There it sprouts.
It's a viney plant, and it uses its ground roots actually to
crawl a little bit. It's really cool.
It finds a young jungle tree and it crawls up into the jungle
tree and it like hitches a ride. And it stretches and stretches
and stretch and it keeps its roots that were so important in
the soil. But at one point, it runs into a
little thing called the scaling problem, or actually physics,
because since it is a leafy plant, it doesn't have the
physics to actually push up water high enough.
And the canopy of the leaves of the jungle are sometimes 30
meters, sometimes even 60 meters high.
I can't believe it, but that's the real number.
So the orchid has a problem and it solves it in the most elegant
way you can imagine. It drops its ground roots.
It lets go. And then it forms new aerial
roots. And to me that is the perfect
descriptor of, in order to grow you need to let things go.
And I know there was also something you might have been
fishing for, which I'll also give you.
I had a founder CTO who was struggling with this very much.
It was his baby, right? This was a founder.
He was deep into this code. It was all his.
And at one point, he just saw, I'm the bottleneck.
And know that if you're not
gonna let things go, you are gonna become the bottleneck.
So his quote was also amazing. And that was, if only I can do
it, I should not do it. Pair program, yes, right?
Teach, yes. But you cannot be the sole
owner. Some people use that as a
tactic, right? I've seen developers or maybe
then they come into architects like, haha, I'm the only one who
knows this old code, so they can never let go of me.
But that will make you sour. I will tell you that.
I think a lot of businesses and companies, talk about value.
And I think it's interesting how we never talk about virtue.
And I think for yourself the virtue is what gives you...
Like I have not seen a developer that used that strategy to
become unmissable that didn't turn sour in the end.
It's very interesting. Wow.
Thank you for sharing such a very unique science, knowledge,
right? I didn't know about the vanilla
orchid, definitely. It's cool, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
But I think it's kind of like very insightful because for it
to grow to the next level, right?
You need to let go the one of the most important thing for
itself, right, which is the root, how it grew in the first
place, right? So I think I feel this is the
same thing for leaders out there, right?
You cannot just be good in being an IC, writing the code.
But you have to grow in some other aspects that, you know,
where you can grow your roots as well, right?
So I think that's a very good, I dunno, analogy from science so I
think that's, thanks for sharing that.
And about that story of the CTO I think that phrasing is kind of
like uh important as well I find.
So if only I can do it, I should not do it.
I really love that. And I think for leaders out
there who feels that you have too much to do, you are the
bottleneck, you have too many too much knowledge in your head,
I think this phrase can be kind of like a mantra for you to
decide whether you should be the one doing it or it's time for
you to let go and teach other people.
And there your brain might immediately go, nobody will be
quicker if I just do it. If you ever catch yourself
thinking that, no, it's always a lie.
Because again that's the short-term brain.
Circling all the way back, right, the short-term brain
says, no, but I'll just, I know how these permissions work.
Let me just quickly, right? No, no.
It's the long-term solution and if that takes a little bit more
time now, it's a huge yield. Yeah.
And also kind of like avoiding pain of having to teach
somebody, you know, from, you know, spending the time and all
that. So I think again like these two
psychological thing can be used in so many different scenarios I
feel. Fantastic.
One other aspect that I feel tech leaders, engineering
leaders kind of like have a challenge is actually to put
their product thinking mindset, right?
Because they are all into the tech, they're all into the geeky
aspect of you know building the code, building the systems,
deploying it, how fantastic the, you know, the tech stack and all
that. But actually the product
thinking mindset is actually equally important if not more
important these days because I can see so many people already
start thinking about CPTO, CTPO. You know, not just having T,
technology itself. But actually having the product
together as well. So tell us about this challenge.
What do you see in your peer group and how can someone
improve? So everyone will recognize, but
the requirements weren't clear enough, right?
That to me is like a red flag. Like not even yellow, red,
because that means that you are focusing on features.
And in product, we talk about this thing called a feature
factory. What I think is the moment that
you are focusing on requirements, you have a big
problem. Because it doesn't matter how
fantastic your, what shall we call it, PBI or it was product
backlog item or feature or what is it called?
In the other ticket or whatever you system you use.
It will always be a representation of something
bigger. Like let's talk about
documentation for a second. Documentation is like a holiday
picture of someone else. So let's say I now pull up my
photos app and show Henry a random holiday picture and just
say like, now go have fun in Valencia and do exactly that.
He'll be like, what? I don't understand.
But the documentation is not there to show you everything.
I understand that you feel, no, but I need to produce as much as
possible, so I'll focus on what is given to me.
If you wanna be excellent, you figure out what this holiday
picture is about. So the product mindset that you
can also have as a tech person, even an IC, is to understand
why. Why are we doing this?
Because it is also you that is able to innovate better than
anyone else because you are so close to the tech.
It is your downfall if you focus only on that.
It is your biggest gift if you leverage it.
I've heard a story which is beautiful.
Here in the Netherlands, we have a marketplace for second-hand
stuff. Let's call it the Dutch
Craigslist, because most people from pop culture are familiar
with Craigslist. There was a head of product
working there. And he actually took the time to
investigate what is the real problem we're solving here.
Because if you're listening to users, they'll say, your filters
suck. And before you know it, you have
20,000 tickets on better filters, right?
But he was talking to users really smart, by the way.
And he figured out. He said, no, the actual thing is
I have a thing in my hand and I want to sell it.
And he made this vision type, like an animated thing of a
concept. This was way before like any AI,
et cetera. Like computer vision was just
starting to be a thing. And he made this concept
animation of what if a customer could just point their phone and
would immediately recognize it. And then that would be listed
automatically taking away all the pain for the customer to
have to type and find the right category and blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah. All the requirement and clear
stuff. When they showed that to the
devs, the devs got it. And one of them over the weekend
with a new computer vision tool said something like this.
And there was a pretty solid recognition thing just running.
Because no one in the rest of the company knew this was
technically possible. You might know.
So I challenge you if you really want to....
Also, and this is super enjoyable, right?
Because you're then not no longer a ticket producer, right?
But you're becoming a value adder and I think that's, it's
incredibly cool. So I would also ask it more
importantly, of course, the details are important and
specifications are relevant. But I think if we go all the way
back to the concept of the Agile Manifesto, by the way, if you're
doing Scrum but you haven't visited the website of the Agile
Manifesto, I'm surprised how often I find that.
Just go to agilemanifesto.org. It says working solutions over
comprehensive documentation. That part.
If you wanna do that, well, you need to broaden your view.
So I think that's the product part.
Of course, there's a product owner, manager, et cetera, that
can help you. But I would highly recommend if
you can include that in your technical skills.
It will be, one, more fun even if as an IC.
But it will be incredibly helpful in your career, even if
it's not gonna be your job, right?
You still have a product owner or manager that talks to
customers and comes up with the list.
Maybe at one point you say like, hey, when you decide that this
is going on the roadmap, can I join with one of these calls to
customers? It will be unexpected, but you
will learn so much because you know what is technically
possible. So the product part in tech
leaders, that's like, one, incredibly fun.
But two, that's where that's like where your company really
goes crazy. And it's interesting, by the
way, how I map this to the, that Agile, right?
Yeah. So I find every engineers out
there, right? You need to have this product
mindset right Some people actually already calling these
role product engineers, right? And especially with the, you
know, the advancement of AI, right?
Writing code might not be the pure bottleneck anymore, right?
So it's more about, you know, solving the problems.
It was never the bottleneck. Okay.
Yeah. Understanding the why, and also
so many other different aspects, right?
And I think the interest of the domain is also something that
you need to pick up, right? Because you could just think
that awaiting for requirements is one thing that you do.
But I think understanding the domain could actually pick a lot
of, I don't know, new invention, new innovation.
I spoke with Marty Cagan a long time ago.
He's saying that if your developers are just producing
code, I think you kind of like under utilize them.
So I think, yeah, because engineers know the different
possibilities of what technology can offer to do things.
So I think this is very important sharing for you.
Speaking about AI, right. So I think it might be a miss If
we don't talk about AI in an episode these days.
So I saw one of your recent LinkedIn posts about AI which I
find very interesting that we can discuss, right?
You're saying that the direction we are going with AI is actually
going to the wrong direction. So tell us what's your, what's
leading you to this opinion? So I think where we are right
now, if we zoom out all the way, right?
We are gonna look at this time of the time before digital
hygiene, right? Physical hygiene, we have done.
Almost everyone in the world knows you separate poop water
from drinking water, you wash your hands, you take showers.
Like basic hygiene, even though we're still teaching some like
minor groups, it's doing pretty well.
Digital hygiene and including with that mental and AI hygiene
is a big topic. And I think one of the problems
is we can learn from history, right?
Because at the time of industrialism, we had the
entrepreneurs were going crazy, this is gonna change the world.
Hey, wait, that's Sam Altman. This is gonna revolutionize, we
never have to do these menial tasks anymore.
Hey, that's Elon, right? So I think there's parallels
because these were great inventions, and I wouldn't say
it would be better if we didn't have them, but they were
absolutely polluting the river at the same time.
The river at this moment is our mind, I believe.
Currently one of the things that I'm seriously worried about is I
watched the video that I linked on that post, so you can find it
on my LinkedIn by the Healthy Gamer.
I'm very interested in psychology.
I'm nerdy, so of course I'll land at the Healthy Gamer.
He cites the first research that has now found that use of AI can
actually induce psychosis in healthy adults.
That means not in people that are already have a tendency for
it. Because we know for some
substances, for example, there are some drugs and even certain
qualities of alcohol that can induce psychosis in people who
have a tendency for it. But this can induce it in
healthy adults. Well, if that isn't polluting
the river, right, do we want to risk this happening without any
guardrails for our teams? So I don't say don't use it.
I say we need kind of guardrails.
I called it for now the AI Manifesto.
I'll spend the first attempt on my next conference in March on
this. I'll publish it as well by that
time. But maybe it's not a manifesto.
I think it it's gonna be more like hygiene.
There are certain tasks that it's and by the way, it's so
easy to say the word AI, but I really want to really make clear
that let's talk about LLMs right now because this was about LLMs.
Large Language Models have some structural problems.
There is quite some discussion between the experts on whether
throwing more capacity at it will get rid of hallucinations.
The problem with hallucinations, I need to just differentiate
between a human hallucination and a LLM hallucination.
Silicon Valley has very well branded the word hallucination,
but it's basically screw ups, right?
That the AI just has what it does, anyone that dove into
this, I'm gonna oversimplify. Again, it's a model so it won't
be perfect, but it's just guessing the next word, right?
That's what it does. It opens a very interesting
philosophical discussion if we also do that as humans, by the
way. But let's park that for a
second. If the AI is doing guessing
words and it can spiral off, that's pretty problematic on its
own. But what we've seen now since it
has been trained for you to stay on, just like YouTube algorithms
were trained to have you stay on, had nothing to do - that was
a recommender model, had nothing to do with an LLM.
Recommender models have now gotten us hooked on those
things. By the way, also, a great book
on that is Hooked by Nir Eyal. But what it does is it simply
hacks your brain to stay on longer.
The big problem with this is if you keep a human hooked in a
text conversation, we feel bonded with it.
So whatever it suggests, we will take into account because at one
point it gets a certain status in our mind.
We don't feel per se that that is a machine.
Some of us, that was very early on, there was a developer that
said like, no, it's conscious, right?
It was like very, very early on. But that's an experience.
And, and I mean, I talk to ChatGPT or Gemini.
I've experienced this. But the problem with a human
hallucination, we call that when somebody loses touch with
reality and it starts hurting their environment.
Now the problem is if you're being fed something that is
incorrect and then you have a reinforcement cycle, which is
actually what is happening, that is pretty dangerous.
And I think we are adopting the technology without too many
guardrails. I'm not saying we shouldn't
adopt it. I think it's great for certain
tasks. And then again, I'm talking
about LLMs. Recommender models I think have made our lives
already better. Astronomy without AI couldn't
have learned all the crazy cool things about the universe that
we know. So there is no world where we
will have no AI, I'm just a little worried about the LLM
part and I'm worried about will we have guardrails in time.
On the other hand, this is gonna sound really cynical, I hope
it's not. It might cost us a generation to
figure that out, but we, I also trust that we always figure it
out. I like the term that you
mentioned digital hygiene, right?
Because, you know, I kind of like associate this with the
problem of social media back then, right?
So when we started to have like social, media, you know,
Facebook and all that, right? We also have this challenge,
right? We have the mental health
problem, right, always comparing.
And also kind of like the algorithms feeding out into,
feeding us into just one perspective or one aspect,
right? Yes.
So not knowing that actually it is maybe not true, fake news,
and, all that. And now we seem to have a
different new challenge with AI, right?
And something that is different to me is about the natural
language conversational aspects with AI, right?
Which I found your article as well that you pointed it out,
right? So it can induce some kind of
psychosis to people, right, and thinking that everything that AI
talks might be true, right? And building a relationship,
bonding with them. And sometimes, right, because AI
is very obedient to us, I think this kind of like creates a very
complex kind of mindset psychology in your mind, right?
So I think I hope that you can figure it out within your
conference about how to put proper guardrails, right?
Because I feel the advancement on the technology and the
capability, the capacity is very rapid, right?
We can see it month over month, week over week.
But putting the guardrails is something that we are still
keeping up behind, right? So I think thanks for sharing
your perspective on this. And I'll add to this one more
thing that the problem is the feedback loop.
Because that positive feedback loop, the end results, right?
I don't think the hallucinations that people will get are
unbreakable. There's some prob, some
problematic cases, but I don't see that as the major thing.
But if I wanna tie this into an interesting psychological fact,
there are five things that on a population basis stay pretty
stable. And that is the amount of
openness, consistency, extroversion, agreeableness, and
neuroticism. Those five are pretty good, like
stable things over time in personalities when you zoom out
of a population. Neuroticism has grown.
Because if you always get, if everything you do the computer
says, yes, everyone thinks this. When you hit into a little bit
of a conflict, you're gonna go tense up because you never
practiced for it, right? You ignore, you are not
habituated to having these mini conflicts.
So there's a real effect. We measurably see this.
And because of this same thing, you're always right, you don't
have to try, I think that's why the consistency is also
decreasing. So the consistency decreasing
meaning discipline is also decreasing.
People have a harder time following through with what they
said. So the problems I say wouldn't
be only in that hallucination part, but that feedback loop,
that's a huge part. Sorry, I just want to elaborate.
I can say as well it comes back to what you shared earlier,
right? So AI seems to be like kind of
like a short-term solution for a lot of problems, right?
Because we might avoid reading books, we might avoid doing the
hard work. We might avoid so many things
because AI can just give us, you know, seemingly pretty good
solution in the short term. But over the long term probably,
you know, you won't grow. You won't have your critical
thinking. And probably it will also change
the way you build relationships with other people.
So Martijn, I think it's been a great pleasure to have you in
the show. Anything else that you wanna
share with us before we go to our last question?
I have one question for you because I think it's relevant.
I wanna know, but I also think it's relevant for the audience.
You have been doing this podcast for a while now.
That is quite some effort to put in.
I mean, I've made podcasts, I've made content before, so I know
this is a huge effort. What's the value for you?
Yeah, so I think interesting enough that you mentioned in the
beginning about growing, right? So one aspect that I use this
podcast is actually for me to grow.
Like having this conversation with so many great, you know,
thought leaders. You know, people like you and
exchanging information, I think it's really, really important
for my growth. And being a podcaster, something
that is very unique is that it depends on the style of
podcaster you are, right? Some are a bit more extremist
and more opinionated. For me, I try and I try to be
more neutral, meaning that I can hear different extreme
perspectives from different people.
And it kind of like give me a different perspectives of on how
I see things and tackle problems, right?
I can see the positive things on both sides and negative things
on both sides. And that's how I use it to
actually grow myself, right, and I can share it with other people
as well. So, so far the community of
listeners that who feel benefited from the sharing that
I do, that's also one need that I feel very good for me which is
to serve others, right? To give values for other people.
So yeah, those are probably the two main things that I use doing
this podcast, yeah. If there would've been less
effort and you could have gotten a summary of all the episodes
without the work, do you think it would've been the same value?
Well, one aspect, even not just talking about podcasting, I feel
it during my work as well. I'm still doing a lot of
hands-on work in engineering, right?
These days, it's almost very easy for everyone to start
solving a certain problem just by asking AI, right?
For me, someone who have done differently before in the
earlier career, right, where you have to struggle, you know,
figure out from Stack Overflow, try, you know, and didn't work
and struggle, right? And compared to now which is
like you can just ask different AI different solution, keep
banging, you know, the questions, the prompts, and
somehow it could figure it out. I think there's a big challenge
of, you know, how do you actually learn and how do you
actually, I don't know, build that brain connection to
innovate new things, understand how fundamentally things work,
right? I think that that part, that
muscle might atrophy. And this is something that I
worry of myself as well. And same thing when you ask
about this podcast, if all the knowledge out there you can just
easily search and query, maybe it will be good for short term
to answer specific question that you have.
But philosophically how you want to think big in bigger picture,
right? How do you wanna build a bit
better world, you know, solve bigger problems, I think it's
something that might be a challenge if we always continue
on this path, yeah. Or we rely AI that grows super
smart that it can solve everything for us.
What I'm hearing, so thanks for sharing by the way.
This is great. What I'm hearing is what I'm
pondering myself lately. I think almost everyone's
looking for a quick fix and also a binary world of ones and
zeros. Well, that is not the world,
right? I think nuance is where it is.
I think the wisdom is not in the book summary.
I think the value that you just explained you got of seeing both
sides, I think that's wisdom. but that might be me, but maybe
I, yeah, that's a thing that I'm think...
Yeah I learned from some, someone as as well last time,
you know maybe in a book or a podcast or something.
Even reading a book, right, you might have the same texts.
You might have the same pages, right?
But different people will interpret the things that is
shared in the book, maybe it could be stories, it could be
the concepts, it could be whatever that is, differently,
right? And they learn from those
aspects. So people's learning path is
different even though maybe the gist of the summary is kind of
like the same, you have the same bullet points.
But how people get there actually is something that is
unique to them. And I find this is the same for,
you know, maybe podcast, right, building conversations.
Everyone will take different takeaways from different parts
of this conversation. And but somehow they could learn
something new from this, yeah. Sorry, you were saying something
as well. That's exactly, well, I'm just
gonna drop that and go for what you just said is exactly what
happens in the peer groups. I end every peer group so that's
three hours of going around the table and asking what challenge
do you have, that you would like some input on.
And in the end I ask, what insight did you get and what one
action are you going to take? Everyone is always different.
That's so cool. And by the way, it can also
happen within a person, because I have a weird practice that
there is a book that I reread every year or so, Seven Habits
of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
I get something else from that every year, which is very weird,
but also cool, right? Yeah.
And what I think lastly, because that's the last part I would
like to give to your listeners. Reading, consuming is not the
same as producing. And I understand that it's the
easy way, but you know how satisfying producing is because
you know how it feels when you write a piece of code and it
does what you do. I recommend if something
resonates of a podcast and a book, why not write something
small about it? Ask someone else about an
opinion on some. But because I think the nuance,
that's where you really get become a master, right?
I think that's the beautiful, like I do transformations for
companies as well, and I have some weird habits.
I'm just sharing them. At the end, I write everyone
that I work intensively with a letter.
I do it for myself actually. I ask them in the end, do you
want it? If not, also fine.
But I do it for myself. And I find writing, but also
creating, like even preparing for this podcast, right?
I needed to think about, oh, I knew the first and the last
question, so I needed to think, what's the best way I can do.
I will give it my go. I'm not saying it will make me
like excellent, right? But just that reflection.
Sometimes it's not about that magic new piece of knowledge,
but sometimes it's about turning it into like yeah, digesting it
and producing something of yourself.
I don't know. Yeah.
As a final thought. So yeah this reminds me of the
quote by Richard Feynman, right? So teaching others is the next
level of learning kind of, uh, you know....
Yeah. Yes, absolutely.
If you consume a lot, you think you know.
But take that chance to actually explain it to others even
someone who is beginner or maybe juniors or whatever that is.
And if you can't explain it well such that they would understand
that kind of like shows that maybe you don't understand
things in the first place. Yeah, absolutely.
So Martijn, it's been a great conversation I have only one
last question which is like a tradition in my podcast.
I call this the three technical leadership wisdom.
Think of them just like advice. Maybe you can share your version
today, that will be great. Yes.
The three pieces. I will give the very first is in
order to speed up, you sometimes need to slow down, meaning
exactly what I say. But I see people have no problem
speeding up. I have a lot of problems slowing
down. This can mean really block that
hour for yourself and don't accept other people planning
over it, because you call it focus time by mistake and people
know, oh, focus time. I can just plan a meeting.
Really take time for reflection. The second is knowledge
uninvested in action is useless. So if there's anything that I
have said that resonates slightly, my personal request,
just try it. And if it doesn't work or does
work, you will learn something. And in both cases, let me know
because that's fucking cool. The third is learn to speak
business. And if it is not interesting to
you, you might not know enough about it yet.
Cool. I think those are really
powerful sharing that you just gave to us, right?
I really love the kind of like the second one, right?
So you have all the knowledge, you have listened to a lot of
podcasts, reading a lot of books.
But if you never take the action, actually it's kind of
like useless in the end. So...
Can you give, you, can, can I give you, I'm sorry.
Yeah. Go ahead.
Can I give you this story that made this land by me?
Because I love telling stories. I was rowing competitively, when
I was still before my studies. And at one point, I was coaching
competitively. I lived in Singapore for a year
at being the national head coach, so I was like, fit all
the time. Until one point when I stopped
rowing competitively but I kept eating like I was still rowing
competitively. And I got pretty fat.
Now that happens. And at one point, I said to
myself, I'm 20 something. I don't know, 24.
So I need to lose this weight. So I moved more and I lost that
weight. And being a 20 something year
old, non polished, let's call it, maybe this is also a little
bit Dutch, but I was very impolitely loudly calling a
friend on the phone while in the tram in Amsterdam saying, yeah,
I lost all this weight. I regret that part of the story
but there was a lesson there that was fantastic because the
opposite of me, there was a person that could not fit in the
seat. Like hugely obese which was
taken an interest into this story of me losing 20 kilograms.
And when I hung up, she asked, did I just hear that you lost
over 20 kilograms? And I said, very proud, yeah.
Can you tell me how you did it? I said, well, I started eating
less and moving more. And she went like this.
And this is the lesson. Oh man, I hoped you would have
the magic formula. Wow, that's a very powerful
story. It's kind of like, I think it's
a good reflection for us. We, I think most of us know kind
of like the solutions, the answers.
You know, we, have the internet, we have the books with resources
available to us. If only we could just pick a
small part of those, take an action, experiment, do small
things and iterate, and improve your lives.
I think that would be, that would bring us to somewhere that
probably we'll never know before and hopefully to the positive
side of your life. So thanks for sharing that
powerful story, Martijn. If people would love to connect
with you, you know, hear more stories from you or join your
peer groups, is there a place where they can find you online?
So first, I have a little gift. I have a free training on taking
action because it's easy to say. But then how do you do it?
On my website, groupeffort.nl/action, there's a
free training on action. It's four times five minutes.
It's just quick, but it will help you if you're like, okay,
but where do I begin? So that's a little gift.
If you wanna stay in touch, I have a newsletter
groupeffort.nl/newsletter, also not that hard.
And if you wanna say hi on LinkedIn, I'm called Martijn
Versteeg, but you can also go to linkedin.com/in/versteeg,
V-E-R-S-T-E-E-G, and I'd be very happy to hear if anything that I
said had a positive or negative effect.
I hope not, but that will be fantastic.
Henry, thank you so much for having me, man.
Yeah, cool. I'll put all those links into
the show notes. Thanks for the gift as well.
I hope people learn something a thing or two from today's
conversations. And yeah, thank you so much for
your time today, Martijn.