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341- Transforming Soul Crushing IT into Inspiring Leadership by Peter Seliga · You've Been Heard

• 0:03
  Speaker A: Today on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, the we're talking about Soul Crushing it with Peter Saliga. Did I do it right? Oh, yeah. Did it right? I got the last name right there. Peter Saliga. And that's, that's the sound of soul crushing it. How do we get out of it? How we, how are you in? How are you ever a part of soul crushing it and maintained? What do you learn from that? And I think what we learn is how to not get involved in soul crushing it. And the more that we persist and fight through life and take on. I'm a big fan of responsibility and I have this, this. The thing that carries, that carries the most stress with me in my life is the fact that I feel really responsible for not letting people down. I don't know, it's very, very. Maybe it's because I have eight kids and I've just, you know, I just, I have this. And you can't, you can't do everything for everybody all at once. So if you have this really high level of responsibility where you feel you, you need to, you need to do everything right all the time. It's, it's a, it's a, I don't know, there's some kind of word for it like a stress overload or something when, when you give your people too much responsibility that they can't handle. There's some, I think Toyota, like, you know, Japanese, you know, term for it, you know, something like that, you know, and there's got to be some kind of like level of balance or something like this. Okay.
• 1:33
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:34
  Speaker A: So I think soul crushing it comes with a lot in the mid market space when an IT leader has so many responsibilities and so many things to balance in this feeling of, of real imposter syndrome that no one can avoid. You end up in the soul crushing it zone. And then if you also have a politically broken driven pecking up to the hierarchy, C level organization, then you add an extra layer of, to the exponential power of soul crushing and somehow you're still here. Maybe, maybe you can tell us a story.
• 2:16
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 2:17
  Speaker A: I mean, we're starting off with the glass, definitely glass half full, like positive mindset today.
• 2:24
  Speaker B: Well, well, I'll say that. You know what, what I've learned in my career is, is definitely more positive than, than that start. Because you know, when, when you start with that, you can only go up, you can only improve from there.
• 2:41
  Speaker A: Oh, that's a good point there. See, there's the positivity. See, this is why you have been successful you have taken a soul crushing situation and looked at it in a way that's like, well, I can only get better. This can only get better from here. I could quit, just get another job at a better place.
• 2:59
  Speaker B: But only taken me 25 years of working in technology to figure that out.
• 3:05
  Speaker A: Oh, I'm at like year 23, so. So I have something to look forward to in two years from now when I turn 51. I make it. Yeah, keep going.
• 3:17
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I think what you just said about, you know, the feeling of wanting to try to do everything, want to try to do everything right, and you couple that with imposter syndrome and you can join that with the fact that when you are an IT leader, there's a lot of expectations put on you. And I remember seeing an Internet cartoon on one of my coworkers cubicles at a job. And it's a two frame cartoon. In the top it's a manager running into a cubicle farm yelling at everybody, saying, everything's broken. What do I pay you guys for? And in the bottom it says, everything's working fine. What do I pay you guys for? And with it, I think it's usually one or the other. There's usually not this like calm, methodical approach like, like you might see in other disciplines.
• 4:19
  Speaker A: But yeah, that's true. That's why I used to tell MSPs, like, if you actually do your job for the small business owner who's constantly trying to like, I don't know, cut your monthly bill by 10 bucks or leave you for the next MSP that, you know, like. Yeah, it's like when everything's working, what do we need it for? Right. I was like, so you guys need to break some things. Can you just break some things periodically? You know that would be unethical. Yep.
• 4:45
  Speaker B: And I've, I've seen people do it. I've seen people do it.
• 4:49
  Speaker A: So non soul crushing means you've fixed it somehow. You've, you've fixed the. Of course my phone rings in the middle of this and I forget to turn things off. I'm going to keep that live. Keep that one in there. Don't edit that out. This makes it more live.
• 5:04
  Speaker B: This is real.
• 5:05
  Speaker A: The. Here's what's real. Crowdstrike and getting killed by that and getting your soul crushed. But you don't. But it doesn't happen if you've got, I don't know. Tell me about, tell me your crowdstrike story. It's a good, it's a good. Sure.
• 5:19
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 5:20
  Speaker A: So who's CrowdStrike. But who, who is CrowdStrike anyways? What do they do Crowd?
• 5:25
  Speaker B: CrowdStrike is a. An EDR vendor, you know, endpoint detection and response. And they provide software and both agent based and cloud based software that keeps the bad guys away. And because of the nature of EDR software, they have all the keys to every system that they are installed on. I was on vacation. I remember it was a Thursday night because at my company we had a major launch test operation. Currently work at a rocket company. So we, we had a major operation scheduled for the following day, the following evening. And, and my boss called me up, it was I think 9:30 and he said, you need to get online right now, something major is happening. And as soon as I did I started noticing that all of our alerting was going off. And uh, my, my team was, we were all on a teams call those of us who still had functional computers. And then one by one, you know, we started losing our endpoints.
• 6:39
  Speaker A: Blip.
• 6:40
  Speaker B: Yep. Blue screen, blue screen left and right. And, and the blue screen, the blue screen was very kind to tell us that There was a CrowdStrike system file that was the cause of it. So it was obvious that it was CrowdStrike. But you know, my first thought when I see CrowdStrike is causing a blue, blue screen is CrowdStrike has been compromised and we have been compromised by some kind of attacker. So we were all kind of in panic mode of what was going to happen and we were, excuse me, very fortunately saved by the Twitter community who started posting. Hey, you know, we're in New Zealand. Is there any, anybody getting this error? Hey, we're in France. Is anybody getting this error? And so big collective sigh of relief as we realized this was a global problem and not just us, because global problem to me indicates, you know, it's, it still could be a malware thing, but it's not something that we're being targeted as.
• 7:45
  Speaker A: And so it's step one of. Yeah, so step one in security. What was that? I'm trying to think of that security imposter syndrome. We'll just call it that is check Twitter. Step one, step two, step two, step two, wait for the vendor. What's going on? I don't know. Check Twitter.
• 8:07
  Speaker B: And at some point, you know what's.
• 8:08
  Speaker A: Weird is wait for the vendor. Now we just be like 15 AI guys that would call us and or are in my LinkedIn box tomorrow. Like hey, we got an AI. We got an AI system for checking Twitter and you know, doing all that. Okay, we should do a whole. By the way, I'm taking a few minutes to just. I'm going to selfishly advertise something. We're building a new IT community specifically exclusive for mid market IT leaders. And this would be like a perfect. This would just be a perfect discussion group and like, you know, CrowdStrike stories and comments and. And who wants to write a paper on it and lead a presentation on it and all that type of stuff. This would be great. When, When. When the exclusive, when the IT brethren like yourself see this, it's. It's truly one of a kind. I'm very excited about it. You know, my whole day was very, very stressful this morning and it is. It has come. It has gotten a lot less stressful. Just, just doing the podcast and talking with. Talking with the people. The people. The people being you and, you know, just realizing that, yeah, there's a. How did we start this off? It doesn't have to be so soul crushing. We can come together. We can be together. We can be together. We don't have to be alone. I was alone. I was alone and stressed out and now I'm not alone anymore. So anyways, keep going. CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike. And how. How not to be. How. Nonsense. Yeah, how your 25 years of soul crushing. Hopefully it wasn't 25 years of soul crushing. It and all the failure and learnings and what not to do and everything led to a successful crowdstrike Failure. Failure reinvented. Flipped upside down to a success story, which I'm assuming it's a success story. Blue screens. We don't. Are we getting hacked? Is it this vendor that doesn't know what the heck they're doing? Why would they not put something in a test environment? It's all planned. And now we can go to the conspiracy theories of CrowdStrike and I don't know, it's really a BlackRock thing. I don't know. Keep going.
• 10:16
  Speaker C: Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become fairly apparent. I'm sure all of you will agree over the years that slow vendor response, vendor response times vendors in general.
• 10:35
  Speaker A: The.
• 10:35
  Speaker C: The average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I've seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there's also a direct correlation to your budget and your company's bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don't have time to address. Our back office program at dissecting popular IT nerds we've put together specifically for IT leadership and it's on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we're doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you'd like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it, and where you want to go, and how we can improve your life, your IT department, and your company's bottom line. What you're going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization's uptime and bottom line. And because you're going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you'll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you'll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you'd like, again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it's going to open your eyes to what's possible. Let our back office team provide you the high touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-GOLD-PAND for support. Now if you're wondering what does this apply to, this applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you're a Microsoft Shop or a Google shop, what you might be paying for aws, even Azure, colocation space, any of those vendors that you're paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with.
• 13:00
  Speaker A: Hey, it's Greg the Frenchman, secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request a one on one call. Contact us@internetpopularit.net and remember, it will never cost you a dime.
• 13:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, so you know, we, we eventually my, my team, as soon as we saw that it was a crowdstrike thing and soon as we saw it was a global problem, we had probably 10 or so people who were online on a teams meeting at that point and people started spitballing ideas like maybe we should try this. We should try that we should restore from backup. Let's try to get this back up and running. And my suggestion, which fortunately people agreed with it was that we should just kind of pause and we should try to call crowdstrike. You know, of course they weren't responding because they knew they were having an outage. But that we, we can't, we couldn't jump the gun and try to start fixing this ourselves without any real information. You know, we knew we had a problem, we identified the source of the problem, but we had no inkling as to what the solution was. So restoring from backup. Can't, you know, who, who is to say that if we restore from backup it wouldn't happen again? And if we actually did take that course, it would have happened again. It would have gone right back to blue screen. So we made the decision to wait and we tried to do as much as we could in terms of understanding the scope of the problem. So the team, I work with an amazing team, and everybody just kind of immediately went to their piece of expertise. So the system engineers kind of went to just, you know, looking through logs and trying to find out what happened. The project managers went through like, let's start building out a plan for communications. The managers, you know, started aggregating information and everybody just kind of fell into their, their roles, which was both really helpful and really inspiring to see that people knew what they should do. And there was, you know, there were a little tweaks in direction here and there, but that was, I think that was the thing that made it immediately not soul crushing was seeing everybody just getting to their job.
• 15:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad you said that because I was going to say this is the soul inspiring aspect of it. So how do you go from soul crushing to soul inspiring it where your, your whole team comes together and supports you. And so the question to ask is, and I know the answer to this and I'm going to, but I'm asking, I'm going to ask you to be open and not worry about, I don't know if IT leaders. It's. If they, if they don't promote themselves enough. I don't think that IT leaders promote themselves enough because we come from a zero trust environment and we have trust issues and we have deep psychological, whatever the psychological issues that are going on with it around trust and imposter syndrome and needing to be, you know, exact and solve problems and all these things that it present, it prevent, prevents many of us. I don't. You would have to tell me if this is an accurate assumption or not from promoting ourselves enough. And so my guess here is that the team showed up because of you, not because the company. Right. People follow people. They don't follow, you know, logos and companies. And I guess, you know, there's probably a couple companies out there where people are like die hard Apple people or something like that that, you know, whatever it is. Like I work for Apple and I love it, you know, or Microsoft and. But I, I have a lot of friends that work for Microsoft and you know, it's, it's about like you know, the community and the team and everything and the people. So what have you learned over time to help build a team that gladly shows up and takes ownership in the IT success story? Meaning they showed up, they wanted to be successful, they all worked, they all work together because of the comradability of your team. Sounds like comrade abilities. Maybe that's. Is that the right word?
• 17:21
  Speaker B: Camaraderie? Well, I, I feel like it's a. You just made a new word. Camaraderie and compatibility.
• 17:27
  Speaker A: I, I think it works. How do you, how do you. Sorry, someone stole.
• 17:34
  Speaker B: You heard it here first.
• 17:35
  Speaker A: Everyone domain just been bought the power. Yeah. How do you do that? How do you build?
• 17:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, I will, I will give my answers that I have right now. But I want to start with saying this is something that's probably the biggest area of learning for me through my entire career.
• 17:58
  Speaker A: It's like you got to put in the time guy in the years of suffering, suffer first.
• 18:04
  Speaker B: I think it's just, it's all about the context that you get and you have to be humble through each step in your career and you have to, you have to learn from your mistakes at your previous jobs. Anybody who doesn't do that is never going to improve. And I have had, when I look back, I've had long sections of my career where I did not do that. And I think that the tendency is. I started my career on the technical side. I was building network cables, I was troubleshooting printers. I was in all the quote unquote frontline work, the GRIP work. And because of that I still have that knowledge and I still know what it's like to do that. Whereas some leaders never have that, I think doing the work that you are leading people to do. When you do that yourself, you don't have to, but it gives you so much more credibility and it gives you so much more context that you wouldn't otherwise have. So for IT leaders out there who have not done that, you can't say Go back in time and build network cables for five years.
• 19:19
  Speaker A: Well, it's also unrealistic to be an expert in every area. One of the themes that comes up on the show a lot is it leaders are generalists. They're not the pen tester and they're not the data center builder, and they're not the Windows. Every version and Mac and Linux. I don't know, whatever, you know, operating system expert, it's just, it's an impossibility. But the fact that you've done any sort of time in the trenches anywhere means something.
• 19:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I think that the challenge as a leader is that you might start being the expert of something or some set of things. And as you grow, especially if you like being a generalist. I loved being a generalist. I worked at an MSP for a while. That was a huge boost in technical knowledge in my career because I got to work on everything. And I think I developed a lot of confidence that when I got promoted into higher and higher leadership positions, that turned into arrogance. You know, I thought that what people needed as a leader was for me to come in there and show them how smart I was at everything so that they would want to be, you know, quote, unquote, be as smart as me. And that was the worst thing I could have done.
• 20:54
  Speaker A: The arrogance curve. The arrogance curve exists for a lot of people that grow in their career and gain success. So you've got this, like, I grow, I grow, I grow. Oh, I think I'm awesome. I'm at the top. I think I'm awesome. Wait, no one's telling me what they really think about me. Oh, wait, I just found out what everyone really thinks about me. Oh, I got used by this company. Oh, they, oh, then I got fired. Oh, I gotta start over at another. Oh, I'm not that awesome. Oh, right, the arrogance curve. But I still have the knowledge that I learned and you re. I don't. Is that sound something familiar like that? I mean, you know, you know, it could be any number of scenarios, but yeah, we should call it the ego arrogance curve or something.
• 21:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, I, I, the, I think the biggest indicator to me was when I started noticing, kind of talking to myself and saying at the end of every kind of meeting or coaching engagement, I would just have this thought of, why can't this person be more like me? And when I look back at that, I just think, man, no wonder people didn't like me at the job.
• 22:09
  Speaker A: Wow, that's actually pretty insightful. That's pretty Crazy. Why can't they be more like me? Why can't everyone be like me? Then you. That's pretty scary, actually. We're going to clone everybody, grow the Matrix.
• 22:25
  Speaker B: And. And I think that as I progressed and as I realized that and as I got feedback from, you know, people like my wife of, you know, stop treating people like that, I. I realize that, you know, that's. It is not your job as a leader to make people more like you. It is your job as a leader to make people themselves and. And to help bring out more of that and develop them on where they want to go. So I think that that was my biggest breakthrough, which was, you know, relatively recently, unfortunately, as I've got another two years.
• 23:09
  Speaker A: Like we said, I'm 40. My 40. Once I hit 50, I might have that break.
• 23:15
  Speaker B: I mean, I.
• 23:16
  Speaker A: Why don't you have a beard? I'm. Honey.
• 23:22
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 23:23
  Speaker A: Aren't you 49 with a beard? Why aren't you the. Okay, let's break this down.
• 23:29
  Speaker B: And it's hard.
• 23:30
  Speaker A: Let's.
• 23:30
  Speaker B: Let's break it down. Yeah.
• 23:32
  Speaker A: What are some. Let's help some people not have to go through 23 years of. Of soul crushing. Let's help some people. Let's help some people. Let's help, help, help, help me. Okay, so give me. What do you think the big deal is? What do you think it is? And when I think of my own team, I think of some people that are the complete opposite of me, that are, like, really good at what they do. And I. I've had. And I've got some people that do the same job in some aspects. Like sometimes we owe. Your jobs overlap, and you're like. You, like, share responsibilities or something like that. And you might be doing literally the same exact job. And you are the completely opposite personalities, everything. And then when I look at how they do the job, I'm like, oh, man, that's why they were successful with this person and I wasn't. Because it's a different personality. It's a different dynamic. The outcome might. The outcome that's being achieved might take a completely different route. The outcome's still the same success. So I'm really a huge, huge believer in teamwork. Makes the dream work. But how do we do it? Give me something.
• 24:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, like I said, I'm still. I'm definitely not an expert at this, but I. I can share what I have, I guess.
• 25:03
  Speaker A: Yeah. Share. How do we. How do we step out of that? Why can't other people be more like me? Step one.
• 25:09
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I, I think step one is, maybe steps one and two are. Remember that everybody's, Remember that everybody's a person. For one, you know, take, take away all the work and everything. It's very easy to forget that when somebody leaves work, they go home to their friends, their family, their hobbies, their things that don't define them at work. And that is who they are. Some people choose to make their career their life, but not everybody does that. And regardless, when they were five years old, they weren't, they weren't born a system administrator, they weren't born a network engineer. They, they have a humanity under them. And, and I think that when you, when you don't recognize that, like truly internalize that, that is when you start to treat people like tools and not like people. And no matter what, no matter what words you use or what tone you use, if you really think that your employees are a tool, you will not treat them with respect and they will feel that.
• 26:23
  Speaker A: And then you will experience soul crushing on a team.
• 26:27
  Speaker B: They will not be there for you.
• 26:28
  Speaker A: Soul crushing leadership. Here's some tips and let's just kind of. What do we call this brain not working? Spitball some ideas around this. Here's some things that I've done that are help me not self destruct and implode crashing into the ground. Remind people to remind you. Tell people, please help me help myself. I'm a crazy person, often add running a million miles of a second. I have just the same stresses and anxieties and I realize that you do as well and that we're all trying to do the same thing in life, which is maybe not live to work, but work to live and go back to our families and we all have different competing priorities and passions and everything. Maybe sit down and actually ask them why they do this job to begin with. Connect, to discover, respond and find out what they really love and want and what really drives them. Some people want money, some people want recognition, some people want to be a part of something. You know, some people just love. They just. Some people love just being this, the system admin. And they're like, I don't ever want to be the IT director. And it's probably important to know that. And I have to remind my team constantly, please just tell me when I'm being a jerk. Like for real, like, you just got to let me know when I'm too crazy. Talk me off the cliff. Please remind me. And then write down little cards that are in the mirror, like, please, you know, just thank your People for being there today. Thank your people. Because you'd never be anywhere without the people that surround you. Yep. You wouldn't have clean laundry. This sounds very chauvinistic. You wouldn't have clean laundry, Phil, if your wife didn't do it for you and fold it. I tried folding and she doesn't allow that. She doesn't allow anyone else to fold. I'm like, let me like, we ship that stuff out. Let someone else do the laundry. I'll pay for it. No, I must hold this way. You mentioned it's when we were like, you know, chit chatting earlier, weeks ago that it's important to be non threatening. And I think sometimes the leader or the boss, it's like, I'm not threatening. What are you talking about? I'm like, I'm easy going man. You can come talk to me anytime you want. Open door policy, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the, but the reality is a lot of people are walking around wanting to do a good job. They want to get promoted or they want it. They don't want to do their job bad or anything. And as leaders, sometimes we walk around like, hey, we got to get this done, we got to blah, blah, blah, KPIs and this, that and everything else. And I think we might not realize that we're being threatening. And you mentioned it's important to be non threatening. How do you do that? Yeah, point two, bullet point two. Well, I guess, you know, be non threatening.
• 29:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I, I think that part of that is recognizing that there, there's part, part of the aspect of being threatening is just inherent in your title. And that's something that no matter how many times you tell people so in recent jobs, people have told me, well, you're a director, so people are going to be uncomfortable around you. And that just was baffling to me. But I think that that's something that you just have to acknowledge somebody who maybe just started in their career, if they're meeting or talking with a director, they might think, oh well, it's a director because they don't know any differently. So just acknowledging that there may be that starting point of no matter.
• 30:08
  Speaker A: They would be stupid not to treat you with, they would be stupid not to treat you with respect. It would be like meeting the President of the United States. If you meet the President of the United States, you're not just like, hey, what's up bro? But if the, but it's the President's job. Kind of like, you know, from a leadership standpoint to make you Feel comfortable and kind of dissolve that. Right. Like you wouldn't, like you wouldn't go up to. You might be. You might greet, you know, I don't know, Kim Jong Un a little bit different than, you know, the normal, I don't know, other person. Now, I'm, I'm not saying I don't, I'm not making any judgments on any of this. Maybe I'm being. Maybe someone's gonna like psychologically analyze this now. I don't know. But yeah, it's kind of the leader's job to lower the curtain or whatever that is. Yep. Yeah.
• 30:53
  Speaker B: I mean, I, Some of the things that I've tried that maybe have worked, maybe they haven't, but they, they haven't made things worse.
• 31:01
  Speaker A: Look, crowd. They showed up for crowdstrike, by the way. They showed up for crowdstrike, so they worked. Okay. Again, we, as IT leaders, we need to, you know, because we get stuck kind of in the middle sometimes. We get stuck between the boardroom table and IT team that we manage. And it's lonely at the top. And, you know, that's why you got to come to the community and all get together and not be alone, but not be afraid to say, yeah, no, yeah, my team was awesome. It was all about them. And yeah, I have put in 25 years of pain and suffering, but yeah, I know what I'm talking about. So. Yep, go, keep going.
• 31:39
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 31:40
  Speaker A: So asking for. You were about to say, like, do this and that this works or asking for input or something like that.
• 31:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think small things like starting out meetings with just asking people how they're doing and talking to people about, what'd you do this weekend? How are your kids doing? Did you do anything fun for Labor Day? And then if people are uncomfortable with that, sharing stuff about you, people will not feel comfortable being open and vulnerable with you unless you show that to them first. So, you know, I'll sometimes start a meeting with, hey, here's a silly picture of one of my kids, of what they did this weekend, you know, Cause that says, you know, I'm not just an IT director, I'm a parent, I'm a partner. I love my kids. You know, these are things that are not work related about me doing one on one meetings outside of the office. This is something that I've really embraced in the last year. Go for a walk somewhere. Yeah, go for a walk with one of your employees and you know, pick. There's. There's always going to be times when you need to talk about work, but Pick a one on one here and there where you just don't talk about work, where you leave it completely unstructured. There's no meeting agenda. Just go for a walk, get a coffee, and the conversation goes.
• 33:04
  Speaker A: It's not an old idea, but it's great.
• 33:06
  Speaker B: It's true.
• 33:07
  Speaker C: No, yeah.
• 33:07
  Speaker B: And, and it's taking both of you out of the work scenario immediately will remove a stressor and an obstacle between two people connecting.
• 33:20
  Speaker A: You just made me think we should do some crazy. Like, I'm my nickname. And I've told walking podcasts, well, my friends call me Pot Phil. Over the top. Like, so they're like, oh, why is it always these extreme examples, Phil? Why are you so extreme? You know, because like, you immediately made me think of, yeah, we should do Outward Bound and like, you know, we should, you know, scale like down this thing and swim across here and what, you know, I'm thinking like, crazy outside of work, you know, team building extreme. I mean, that's good. And let's go, you know, this, that and everything else, you know, let's take it to the next level. Over the top.
• 33:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 33:59
  Speaker A: Yep. Sylvester Stallone.
• 34:02
  Speaker B: And then the last, I think the, the, the last thing that I can think of off the top of my head is when, when you ask people, it's usually not enough to ask people for feedback. Like it's tons of leaders say, hey, I'm open to feedback. Give me some feedback. Tell me how I could I have.
• 34:21
  Speaker A: Done Palsy man anytime.
• 34:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, people, people who are already feel threatened or nervous around you for whatever reason are not going to respond to that. They're not going to treat that as an invitation. So I found that when you ask more pointed questions, asking for feedback, that you're more likely to get a response. So rather than saying, hey, I felt like when we had our last one on one, I was telling you, I was trying to tell you what to do. Did you like that, you know, people, or did that work for you? People might just say, well, yeah, sort of. I guess it worked. But asking the question of, hey, when I came into that meeting, I was stressed and I was stressed about this and that, and I feel like I kind of put that stress on you when we were talking. Is that how you felt? Cause that's how I felt. Or if you say, hey, I was trying to guide you on how to troubleshoot this wireless network and it seemed like you weren't really that interested in what I had to say. If I had asked you what you had tried first, would that have been a better approach there because I was thinking about that, but maybe, you know, I decided not to do that. Would that have been better or would that have been worse? Yeah, because you're kind of kick, you're kickstarting the feedback process. You're kickstarting the, the ability for them to give you the feedback and that can open the floodgates.
• 35:51
  Speaker A: Yeah. I did an exercise years ago as I've mentioned this on a handful of shows and I'm just going to rewind it here and say it again. Because repetition and reminders breed execution. And the book that everyone should get is First Break all the Rules. The follow up books you don't really need now discover your strengths and all that stuff. First Break all the rules. And I took my staff, which back in the day when I was a young leader and probably doing all kinds of things wrong and creating, you know, gossip chains and whatever, I learned a lot. The first year was very, yeah, painful and soul crushing. But towards the end, once you go through all the soul crushing and sleepless nights and you know, you know, I don't know, questioning yourself in reality and really putting a heavy load of responsibility on yourself, you come to a clarity. And that's called growth, by the way. Yeah, no pain, no growth. No pain, no gain, all that type of stuff. Right. We can all just sit around and just keep doing things as we will. And that's what 80% of society is. But the top 20% are whatever are going to be on dissecting popular IT nerds and they're the ones that went through the pain and suffering. So congratulations. A big deal. It's a really big deal. Super big deal. Huge. Huge. The thing that I did was take that like do that on steroids, which is you come up with like the questions like feedback for Phil. Right. What's your biggest feedback for Phil? What's your biggest feedback, you know, whatever for blah blah, blah, the team. And you know, what could he do better and what are some suggestions for him to fix? And you put the team in a room with a bunch of papers and pens and you let, you put a team lead in front of it and you just let them like brainstorm and talk trash about you and all the pain and suffering and everything that you've caused them and what they could do better and where they see the improvement. And then one person types it all up into an anonymous letter of delivery, puts it in a vanilla envelope and puts it in your inbox. That's, that's an eye opening experience. Oh I'm sure that is a. No one will hold back anything. No one will hold. If you really want no one to hold back, get 12 people in a room to talk about you and have someone take notes and deliver it anonymously. I think I might need anonymous.
• 38:19
  Speaker B: Anonymous airing of grievances.
• 38:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's a festivus for the rest of us. And then they have. We need some kind of like IT poll or something. What would we have? Yeah, yeah. The hub of. The hub of grievances. This is a 10, 100 switch where we all connect your input fill is the 10 part. The. This has been, this has been beautiful. We had so many things to talk about. We didn't. But this, this is more important than what we've just talked about, which is building a team. You know we had the things like we should talk about the, you know, the, the, the, the way to see, to talk with and you know, end users is a whole nother thing. Like you know, how do we talk with these end users that have literally no technology? You know. Well, we shouldn't say that some of them are smarter than us, but we'll never admit it because of, because of whatever that was. Yeah, Imposter syndrome. Let's finish with Crowdstrike. We started with Crowdstrike. The crowd has gone on strike. The crowd. The irony is the crowd has officially gone on strike after the crowd, after the strike. After literally like the hit. Like as in hitting. Because strike has many meanings. Right. Like I struck him, they struck us, we went on strike. The crowd. It's an interesting name now that I really think about. The deep psychology of that. What happened? How do you guys beat it up? How do you come out on top? How quickly did crowd strike you guys? How quickly did the crowd strike. Strike you? And when did you decide to go on? Come off. Come off strike.
• 39:59
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 40:00
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 40:00
  Speaker B: Well I will say that we worked so you know it, it started around 9:30. We, we finished all of the remaining 9:30.
• 40:11
  Speaker A: What? Because you're on the, your PM California.
• 40:14
  Speaker B: Sorry. 9:30 Pacific. 9:30 Pacific.
• 40:18
  Speaker A: 9 30. We were just, yes.
• 40:20
  Speaker B: Just beginning our night reminded me of.
• 40:23
  Speaker A: An episode of 24. Remember that show? And then 24 just starts ticking.
• 40:27
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 40:28
  Speaker A: Crowdstrike, an episode of 24. Keep going. Sorry.
• 40:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, so we, we, we wrapped up the final checks of all of our mission critical Systems at around 10am the next day. So we were about 12 hours through the night to get to a point where we were confident that we could proceed with our, our test operations the next day.
• 40:52
  Speaker A: So give me a little, tell me a little story. Like, so what'd you guys do? What happened? How'd you bring it back up? Like, how'd we go? No blue screen. What? What happened?
• 41:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:01
  Speaker A: So.
• 41:02
  Speaker B: So as soon as I think actually somebody was playing around with a test system that had been impacted and they found that if you just deleted the file that that was identified in the blue screen that everything came back fine. And so we kind of knew that that was an option. And eventually CrowdStrike, well, combination of CrowdStrike and the Reddit Twitter community kind of came out with, hey, this works. So as soon as we found that out, that was when we just pedal to the metal, started working. So by that point we had already gotten a manifest of all of the systems that had been impacted and we had a shared spreadsheet going so that people could collaboratively be working on it. Thank God, I will say thank God for people that were on Macs and Linux systems that weren't impacted because those were our only entry points into our environment to get in remotely. So the people who fixed our domain controllers were the people that had Macs and Linux systems. So lesson learned, always have a non Windows system just in case of emergency. For those people that don't, you're. You're at risk.
• 42:16
  Speaker A: Or you could take it a step further and have no windows.
• 42:21
  Speaker B: Don't say that no windows at all.
• 42:23
  Speaker A: Kills dead the next day.
• 42:27
  Speaker B: Some places do that. They're successful.
• 42:29
  Speaker A: I marketing agencies.
• 42:32
  Speaker B: Yes, yes.
• 42:34
  Speaker A: Not rocky, maybe.
• 42:37
  Speaker B: We all split up our roles. Some of us handled communication to the organization to say, here's what's happening. Here are the updates. We communicated up to the executives to make sure that they were aware of what was happening, what our timelines were. And then we just had people working and we were all kind of. Once we all started to become zombies in the team session around 3 or 4am we started paging people to wake up. So at the beginning we had already staged here's who's going to be working and here's who's going to go to sleep right now so that they can wake up in the morning and be ready to pick up. And so we actually specifically chose these are the people that should be working. These are the people that should be sleeping right now. And so then we paged the people who were sleeping around 4am and we started doing a handoff of here's where we are, here's what needs to happen. And that was the most exciting moment to me was being part of that handoff meeting and seeing these fresh eyes, fresh brains coming on and just assimilating all this information and them saying, okay, now everybody just go to bed.
• 43:49
  Speaker A: We go, I got it. I got it. I'm out. It's like the long road trip. Switching driving seats. Where are we at? Are we in Ohio? Are we in Ohio? We're in Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. My computer's not working. Sorry. Peter, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, and I would love to start this, like, long crowd strike. I'd like to go on strike. Most people are like, people are still paying their bills and, you know, congratulations to your success of, you know, coming out of Soul crushing it to soul inspiring it. And because some people don't ever make it out and they just leave. And, you know, good for them. Maybe they're in an rv, driving around somewhere living the dream, but we're still here, and that's what matters. Yep. Any final words? Any final words of inspiration?
• 44:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I. I just. I. I'll say that the. My last job here, the. The job that I'm in right now, when I interviewed, I very specifically went into the interview saying I was not going to put on a show because I think that one of the contributors to Soul Crushing it is trying to be somebody who you're not in the interview to get the job. But then when people expect that, you end up being in a job where you feel forced to not be yourself. And if you can be bold or risky or if you want to call it reckless enough to just be yourself in an interview and not try to put on a show, if they like that, if they offer you the job, then, you know, you found a place that likes who you are and they want who you are, and then you don't have to put on a show. And it's much easier to work when you're just being yourself rather than trying to play somebody else.
• 45:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, Living an authentic, genuine life is great. And that's going to trickle down to your people, too. So then they feel comfortable being. Being authentic and genuine as well. And I think that might be the whole theme of this whole thing. I think you just nailed it. I think you nailed it. You be genuine as a leader. Being genuine and authentic and vulnerable will allow your people to feel comfortable being genuine and authentic and vulnerable so that you can all work together as one unit, which they clearly did for you. And it's a great story, man. Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popularity Nerds.
• 46:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure.