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367- You Can't Boss People w/Troy Penny · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Welcome back to today's episode of Dissecting popular IT Nerds. I'm your host, Doug Kameen, and today I'm talking with Troy Penny, the global vice president of information technology at Harsco Rail. Welcome to the show, Troy.
• 0:21
  Speaker B: Thank you, Doug, and I appreciate you having me on.
• 0:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. So, Troy, before we got on the. The podcast here, we're, you know, familiarizing ourselves with some of our backgrounds and stuff like that. And you work for this place called Hardscore Rail. It's an interesting. An interesting company. And this is like one of those things where it's like a niche business for something specialized that you. You'd be like, I can't believe somebody made a whole business out of this. But, of course, when you think about it, you're like, of course there has to be a business for somebody doing it. But, you know, like, it's a. It's a company that specializes in. In. I think you described it as rail safety. I'll say a little bit and then let you kind of, like, elaborate, but in, like, the rail safety space. So these machines that you see crawling along the tracks, like maintaining things like pulling out rail ties and fixing. Fixing the rock and all this other stuff like that, and this is what this company does.
• 1:12
  Speaker B: I mean, in the old days, Doug, as you know, you had whole crews out there working the track and laying track and repairing track and replacing ties and replacing spikes, et cetera. And Horsco Rail has actually been in business for over 100 years, and we've been building machines and technologies that automate most of that stuff. There's still humans that need to be involved to read the machine, telemetry and the track geometries and validate solutions and things like that. But primarily, the machine will do everything for you. It'll measure the track. It'll determine if the track is even as it should be, if ties are missing, if spikes are missing, if the ballast under the track needs to be adjusted to support it better, et cetera. So it's really ensuring safety of transportation, not just in North America, but globally. We have customers all over the world.
• 2:17
  Speaker A: That's pretty cool. So if you think about this, I think this is probably a truism of American manufacturing in a generalized sense. This is a very technologically heavy business, when you get right down to it.
• 2:33
  Speaker B: It is, and it's becoming more so. We've had track technologies for a long time, but at first, those were safety technologies. Things like making sure that rail crossings didn't interfere with each other, that, you know, the gates came down when they're supposed to come down, that sort of thing, collision avoidance things. But it's really. With the advent of artificial intelligence and particularly machine intelligence, our engineers have developed some really clever technologies that can actually video the track as the machine's going down the track and detect if something is misaligned or if it can recognize a broken top and recognize a piece of debris on the track. And it will tell the machine exactly what it needs to do. So by the time the back end of the machine gets there, it can correct the issue.
• 3:32
  Speaker A: That's like. I just think about all the engineering that we have to put into. Into this, you know, these products in order to, like, you know, you mentioned there used to be a whole work crew that did this. Now it's probably a team of, you know, a handful, you know, of people. And between the handful of people and the machine in question, they almost certainly can accomplish more in a single day than that entire team could have done in probably multiple days.
• 4:03
  Speaker B: They can accomplish more and they can do it more safely. It's an inherently dangerous business, obviously, dealing with big machines and railroad tracks. And a lot of times the topography around the tracks can be dangerous. So the fewer human interventions you have in that process, the easier it is to protect their workforces also.
• 4:28
  Speaker A: So how long have you been in this? You know, well, at Hearts Correll, I should say it's probably the best.
• 4:35
  Speaker B: It's a new area for me in my career. I've been here for the last six years. Prior to that, my background was largely in the healthcare space, both on the. Not in the provider space, but in the. The payer space more. And benefits. And then I did a great deal of consulting in the early part of this century. That always makes me feel old when I say that.
• 5:04
  Speaker A: Refer to it as the early part of the century.
• 5:08
  Speaker B: And then prior to that, did various manufacturing jobs as well, in plants that made polyester and plants that built refrigeration units, et cetera. So really, a variety of things. You know, it's. I think spending some time, at least as a consultant is really a good move for young IT people because you see, you see so many different things, so many different angles of business. And while it's so important to become an expert or at least to be very conversational in what your company does, seeing it from different angles gives you sometimes outside perspectives that give you fresh looks on things. So that time I spent as a solutions consultant, I think was invaluable.
• 6:00
  Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I too, have a background in Mine was more, maybe a little different than yours in terms of the scope of what I was working on because I was in the small, medium business consulting space. So geographically working with businesses, but still everything from manufacturers to healthcare to legal services and all this stuff. So you get to see all these different things where you're like, okay, I have this exposure. I get some level of understanding. I have to know a little bit about their business in order to do the consulting work that goes with it. So, yeah, the breadth of knowledge that you pick up as you go along is really. Is really super helpful.
• 6:37
  Speaker B: And you learn to listen because you have to understand the landscape of that organization. And I think that's a critical segue into leadership is learning be a listener, learning to. The less you talk, the more you listen, the more prepared you're going to be to assist the stakeholder and to develop the best solutions. So if nothing else, it helped me learn to keep my mouth shut and listen a little bit.
• 7:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. So now just explore your leadership journey here on the podcast. Going back, you didn't start in IT or how did you get into it?
• 7:22
  Speaker B: Well, I got into IT almost by default. I was in the United States Air Force. I was an electronic warfare systems programmer. So electronic warfare is our capability to command the electromagnetic space in the air, meaning radar and all that sort of thing, so we could employ technologies which would jam or deceive enemy radar so they couldn't track our aircraft. And those machines, devices that we used to do that had to be programmed for different mission profiles, different scenarios, different enemies, et cetera. So maintaining and programming those machines gave me a set of skills that was really useless in terms of a mission as a civilian when I got out, because no one in the civilian world wants to jam radar.
• 8:23
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 8:24
  Speaker B: And I could use the programming piece. So it at the time, and this is back in late 80s, early 90s, was still pretty tied up with engineering in most places. It had only just began to become its own thing. And the whole IT evolution revolution that occurred in the 90s leading up to watch UK and all of that fun we had was really just picking up. So I caught the curve at just the right time. Getting out after the Gulf War when I did.
• 8:58
  Speaker A: Okay, yeah, thank you. Thank you for your service, by the way. And even through and through war service too. Like, it's a lot there, but my pleasure to serve.
• 9:11
  Speaker B: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, IT Leaders. Before we move ahead, this podcast is not just a stream, it's a stage. And if you are an IT leader, with something to say. We want to hear it. Join us live, interact with the host and guest, and if you've got the insight and courage to step up, we promote you to the mic. Apply now@popularitnerds.com waitlist if you have what it takes, join our growing network of over 160 senior IT leaders, where real voices shape real conversations.
• 9:45
  Speaker A: So I think that that's a really great thing to explore a little bit here. And you touched on it a bit, which is what are the translatable skills? You know, you come in from a military background and, and a military, certainly tons of important and interesting stuff you learn of the military, but a lot of it doesn't necessarily translate out directly into, you know, into the private sector and the commercial space. So, yeah, I'll just let you elaborate more there.
• 10:12
  Speaker B: You learn, as well as the technical skills, you also obviously learn a lot of soft skills in terms of leadership, personnel development, teamwork, all that sort of good stuff. But it's different because you can't issue an order under constraint of law in the civilian world. You have to shake hands and kiss babies a little bit to get people on board. So learning stakeholder management, and I even hate to say management, it's stakeholder engagement, really, you never manage a stakeholder. But learning that skill took a lot of effort and it was trial by fire. I made a lot of mistakes early on because of that directive mindset that the military gives you. You have to learn to be a little more of a politician and a much better communicator and persuader in the civilian world.
• 11:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think about, I know on the podcast with other guests, I've shared this kind of like, thought before, but I share it as 46 year old me looks back on 26 year old me as a leader and I'm like, ooh, what were you thinking?
• 11:33
  Speaker B: I tell you, Doug, I had the same thoughts. And I know everyone in our place probably does, but I have some stories from my early years in it that are just cautionary tales that I even relay to my team, even to this day. Here's what I did and I don't want you to make that same mistake.
• 11:57
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think about, we talk about the power of how persuasion works as opposed to the hierarchical. You will do it because I told you you'll do it slightly. At my first, one of my first leadership jobs, you know, so I was, this is when I was 26, I remember sitting with, sitting in a meeting and, you know, so I had my team and I had sort of like fallen into the leadership role of it. You know, I had, you know, I'll toot my own horn and say I had some natural leadership skills, but I also, you know, they were, they were unpolished. And I'm sitting here in a room with the, you know, people are my team. Some people are older than me because I'm, you know, in my mid-20s. And you know, this one guy, he just decides he wants to challenge me. He doesn't, you know, he doesn't like what I have to say or something like that. And he's like, oh, well, what if we, you know, what if I don't want to do that? And I'm like, oh, well, you'll do it because I'm in charge, you know, like, you know, I'm like, you know, like, like that's the answer here. And I'm like, you know, and so this is like back and forth ensues and you know, I mean, eventually it didn't really amount to anything. He just, you know, we kind of like frustratingly just, you know, left parted ways, if you will, and moved on. But you know, I think about how much differently I would have responded to that type of situation today, you know, and like the framing that I would use about like, no, you're not going to do it because I said so. You're going to do it because like, look, I occupy this position in the organization and you occupy this, you know, this, this. Well, that position, this role. I should say this, you know, my role is to be the one making these decisions. And your role is to, you know, to carry out the things that we've decided on. I'm not doing this to be, you know, like, this is, they'll have a conversation. I'm not doing it to be, you know, this isn't a personal thing. This isn't anything else. My job is to make the decision and I welcome your input and you can be heard. But you have to realize that just because you're heard doesn't mean I'm going to make the decision you want.
• 13:51
  Speaker B: Right? Absolutely right. It's difficult. And especially again, early in my career, a lot of the people I had to influence were at a much higher level than I was. And it, you know, you can't live off an eternal path of escalation through your boss and across to his boss. That, that wears everyone out and you're not being effective and you're wasting people's time. If you're constantly doing that, you become the boy that cried wolf. And no one pays attention to you. So you really have to learn early on how to navigate stakeholders, how to categorize them, and get some sort of method as to how you're going to approach different types of stakeholders. I mean, the example you gave of this sort of devil's advocate that wants to challenge everything and there's always a reason it won't work. You know, we learn over time that you can use that person when you're doing risk identification and categorization, that that guy is going to tell you everything that could possibly go wrong.
• 15:02
  Speaker A: I love having a good contrarian on the team. That's always pretty use.
• 15:05
  Speaker B: You need that, you need that there's value there as long as they understand that once we've identified the risk and, and we have a good response to it and we, we've planned for that with some contingency budget or time, that it's time to step away and worry about the next one. We monitor and control that. But you don't have to keep talking about it. We've got it documented so, you know, document the concerns and move on. But yeah, even the ones that seem like they're hindering you are really helping you. And once you, I guess, you mature enough as a leader, you start seeing that and even seeking those people out. You want to hear the contrarian?
• 15:47
  Speaker A: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Like, I, I have a. There's a couple of, you know, boards that I serve on. And so one of them, I'm the chair of the audit committee for a large credit union. And, you know, the group is very congenial, which is great, but I always want. And if we get one, I'm like, you know, to people be like, oh, you know, so and so challenges, you know, he's asking all these extra questions and all this stuff like, no, no, I want that guy or that woman, I want that person on this team. Because I don't want all of us to just like, get in universal agreement and essentially we lose perspective because we're all vigorously agreeing, like, oh, this doesn't sound like a problem at all. I want somebody in the room that's like, are you sure about that, man?
• 16:33
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that. I'm sure you're familiar with a lot of the generative AI technologies like chat gpp and they had made a change to that programming at some point. I'm sure you've heard about this to make it more affable and agreeable and even flattering to you so that no matter what idea you suggested to it, looking for input, it would just make you think it was the best idea in the world. Yeah, it became a useless tool. I was trying to figure out a configuration for some music equipment for putting a native microphone receiver in line with a compressor and a mixer and a power amplifier and all the ins and outs and various connections, and asked Chat GPT to help me put these things together. And literally, no matter what configuration I suggested, it just kept telling me it was brilliant and that would work just great. So, yes, men become useless at some point.
• 17:45
  Speaker A: ChatGPT was giving you a participation trophy.
• 17:48
  Speaker B: Exactly right. And I don't want that. I want the guy you talked about that'll tell me I'm crazy. If I do that, I'm going to blow the system up. So I need that feedback and I need it from my team, too, and certainly from external stakeholders that know more about what they do than, than I do.
• 18:10
  Speaker A: So I'd love to hear more about your, you know, some of the things that you engage with to, to where you are a leader. I, you know, I know you're, you're, you've been with Harsco for a number of years, you know, just because I have started your LinkedIn profile. You did some work with this, you know, the state of South Carolina and some big work there, but you have some other private, I've called private sector stuff, but volunteering is what I was looking for, you know, work that you do as well. It's so like, I, I'd love to hear, and I think our listeners would love to hear a little about how you engage as a leader in those spaces to, you know, to provide, you know, whether it's leadership even outside of the IT space, too.
• 18:49
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, I, I have done, I enjoy doing volunteer work. It's, it's the thing that allows me to touch grass and, and connect with what's real because we sometimes kind of get in our towers in business and forget about the things that are more tangible to a lot of people. We're very involved with our church, and I'm with a group called the Knights of Columbus. I'm sure you heard of that group, a charitable organization. And my involvement in that group, everything, literally from cooking pancakes at a pancake breakfast to doing things where I can exhibit more of a leadership capacity, like organizing a Catholic Men's Conference, which was. We actually organized the first Catholics Men's Conference in the Diocese of Charleston. And it was every bit as complex as some of the IT projects we do. I mean, you had stakeholders and you had deliverables that you had to figure out a way to create. You had schedules and I actually built the day of the conference just like I would an implementation plan for a go Live weekend where we had every 15 minutes something had to happen. Somebody had to leave someone of a parking lot or move some chairs around or something. So I, I try to guide people when I do activities like that the same way that that I do at work. And, and, and I mentioned it before. It starts with listening and understanding from the stakeholders perspective, seeing it through their eyes. What are their jobs, what are, what are their objectives, what's important to them so that I can speak to them in their language. Because I couldn't go in there like a vice president of IT and start talking lingo and PMP terms and stuff like that. I really had to understand it from the perspective of a priest or a deacon or a facilities manager and know what their concerns were and their constraints were. And all the same skills just applied to a different set of problems.
• 21:14
  Speaker A: So one thing I was just thinking about, I actually have two notes here, but I'm going to focus on this one first and then I'll back to the other one. I was thinking about how volunteering I asked you about kind of how you do leadership and how some of your skills are translating into there and what you pick up from there. But I think an important part of this and you touched on this is the idea about how even though you're a leader, you show up with humility when you're not the leader. And like so, so that's a, that's a really important like concept that as you get older and more mature in your leadership, the like I've, I, I feel this way about it and I, you know, I guess I'll ask if you, it's something you share but when you, the best leaders also typically are good followers because they understand what you need to do in order to be a follower and to enable a leader. So like it's almost like a leading from behind. Like I, I'm gonna, I'm gon somebody else to be a great leader even when I'm not the one leading.
• 22:16
  Speaker B: I think you're 100% spot on there, Doug. I believe very much in servant leadership to begin with that a leader's job is not to stand out. The best leader, you don't even know they're there. You build your team, you empower your team, you clear the path for your team, you help your team make key decisions. And as you said earlier, sometimes you have to make the call, make the decision Even sometimes when it's unpopular. But for the most part, make sure the team is shining, the team is standing up to get the recognition, et cetera. And that same mindset. I think that the self awareness and humbleness that comes from that type of leadership makes it very easy to empower other leaders that you're serving under or that you're. You're working on a team with because you've been there, you know how difficult it is for them and you want to certainly support them and it's okay. You know, I don't mind being number two or number three. It's like playing parts in a play. I may know how to play Macbeth, but I also know how to play Horatio. I can just switch parts and play a different actor. And now this other guy, now he's Macbeth. And I know what Macbeth's role is like and I know what his lines are and what my lines are and how I fit into that. So I think that's very important. A great leader is a great follower and they understand how to help empower the people leading them by playing the right role on the team.
• 24:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So now I'm coming back to the other thing. Cause you mentioned Knights of Columbus, the Catholic American Pope, man, we got an American Pope.
• 24:22
  Speaker B: We do. We'll see how that goes. It's interesting. The Catholic Church is such a large organization that it can't help but become a little political at times. And you have different groups of Catholics that, you know, like this Pope or didn't like that Pope. And a lot of Catholics are wondering now what's going to happen? Is this guy going to be more liberal, more conservative? Is he going to reinstitute the Latin Mass or stay with the Novus Orda? So, yeah, there's a lot of, I guess, uncertainty or wait and see sort of to see what sort of pontificate this is going to be. But yeah, it's an American Pope. And that's a first.
• 25:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, it was pretty crazy. And so just to full disclosure, while I'm not a deeply religious person, I have also come from a Cath Catholic family as well.
• 25:25
  Speaker B: Right.
• 25:26
  Speaker A: And so the, the, the, you know, this is, this is our, this will be our rabbit hole for this episode, I guess. But like, you know, you think about how going into the Papal conclave, they like, like, I cannot remember the gentleman's name before he was Pope Leo at the moment. But the, you know, the gentleman there was like, he was like the, like the fifth string on, you know, if people were kind of like, call it like, who was potentially going to be pope and something. They're like, they'll never pick an American. Never do this. And then afterwards, there's some folks. I saw some various analysis, and they were like, well, the herd mentality about this consensus, they'll never choose an American, caused a lot of those folks who kind of were looking from the outside to overlook what seemed like, if you look in retrospect and you look back, you're like, that guy was actually set up in a way to really be, you know, he. He was the. The most likely candidate, if you looked at it objectively.
• 26:29
  Speaker B: Right, right. Yeah. It's. We spent weeks prior to the Conclave, and everyone was throwing names out there and debating this person over that one. And, you know, almost became like, I'm sure some casino out in Las Vegas probably had.
• 26:46
  Speaker A: Oh, there's definitely betting that. Yes, 100% were betting.
• 26:51
  Speaker B: And I saw the movie Conclave recently, which is, you know, if you suspend the fact that the Catholic Church is not nearly as mysterious and diabolical as some of these movies make it out to be, if you suspend that and just look at it as a drama, it's an entertaining movie, and I think at least gives some insight to a lot of the. How the coalitions are kind of formed during the conclave. And it's almost a microcosm of a larger election, like the American election, where you can't just be this kind of candidate. You've got to form broad coalitions and appeal to enough people to get a majority, which that's probably a good thing because it keeps fringe candidates and maybe even extremist candidates at bay because they have to appeal to a broader group to have a chance to be elected. And I'm sure there's a lot of that going on, even in the College of Cardinals, that it's either the least objectionable person or everyone's number two vote or whatever it is that that person bubbles up as the right person at the right time. So I'm sure there's divine guidance pushing all of this, so I'll leave that to them. But. But it is interesting how long. How all that comes together.
• 28:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think the things you highlighted, I think, are really, like, almost microcosm of some of the leadership skills that we talked about, like, how do you build coalitions? How do you get people to, you know, you can't be the extreme person here. You can't do this. So, like. Like, these leadership lessons that we talk about and we share apply almost universally across. So Many different things. Like just because we're in an IT leadership space and we're working in a corporation doesn't mean that the skills that we have aren't the same skills that are used by the individuals angling to beat the Pope of the Catholic Church or any other number of things in this world.
• 29:05
  Speaker B: I mean, the core of all of it is communication and listening and understanding and seeing problems through others eyes. And I know you talked a great deal about this in your writings and philosophies, and I agree with you wholeheartedly that leaders have to be solution makers. They have to be politicians in a way. And I don't mean that in the negative context, but in the Aristotelian context of being political and understanding how to negotiate and develop. Not always the perfect solution, but the best solution across the board.
• 29:57
  Speaker A: We'll call that small P politics, not big P politics. Right?
• 30:00
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 30:02
  Speaker A: Yeah. So turned into a slightly different subject, but one of the things I always ask guests of the show is to. Well, there's a couple of different topics that I always kind of pick. I choose from my grab bag, if you will. But I'd love to know, to share with listeners something about you that they wouldn't. People might not know. And I almost have a couple things I'm interested to hear what you bring up without me prompting. But I have two things that I just heard you say as we were talking and I wanted to ask you a little bit more about those. But I'll wait for you to share what you like. If you were Sharewood listeners, something that would be something about you, whether it's your history, something in history, or something like that. Like for instance, I DJed a wedding when I was like, you know, I've DJed a wedding before. I'm not a DJ, but I've DJed a wedding.
• 30:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, I guess the thing that people wouldn't immediately know about me probably would be that when I started college 100 years ago, I actually went to college on a music scholarship. Had very little to do with it. But a year or two into college I had the epiphany that with a degree in music, if that's my focus of study, I'm either going to be Eddie Van Halen or a high school choir director. And there's very little in between there. And I probably wasn't going to be Eddie Van Halen. So I made the decision that there's not a huge future in this, at least not one that I felt comfortable navigating. So when I left the music department, I lost my scholarship, and that's what led me directly to join the Air Force to complete my college. And of course, I went into more technical studies at that point, but. But yeah, I still, to this day enjoy music. I enjoy playing. I play a little piano and I play the guitar. I used to sing, but that. Those days are probably gone. Your voice, I think, deteriorates with age. But it's interesting how music theory in particular, when you play music well, when you study music, it's not so different than programming, than it. I mean, there are a set of rules, and if you look at a set of musical notation, it's a programming language. I mean, a note on the first open bar of the treble clef means you play an act. And you have to be able to translate that the same way a computer translates a one or a zero. Just as humans, we're not binary. We've got a little more capacity, so we can look at eight different semitones in the major scale, but it's still programming. When you write music, when you read music, you have to have, at least for me, almost mathematical approach to it. I'm not talented or creative enough to play by ear and to write music just because I hear it in my head, I have to think in terms of whole tones and half tones. And this is the perfect fourth, and this is the perfect fifth, and that's why it sounds that way. And this is why this harmonizes and this doesn't. I have to go back to the math of music. So it actually maybe in some strange way, even prepared me to get into programming at some point. And I think a lot of it people, if you talk to them, probably had some musical leans. I think a plurality of IT people seemed to, at least in my experience, play an instrument.
• 34:01
  Speaker A: I played trumpet in high school and band and stuff like that. I didn't carry it beyond that, but I did do that. And on my teams, it's not uncommon for me to have like, the last couple places I've worked, there'll be like one person who's like, oh, yeah, I'm in a band that plays like weekends at the bar. Like that, you know, and so that was. You did. You touched on one of the things that I. Because you were mentioning about asking ChatGPT about all the musical stuff, and I was like, okay, I bet you you're into music things. The other thing was you mentioned you dropped a Shakespeare reference in there. So I wasn't sure if that's. Is that a hobby? A Passion or something. Just. Or was that just.
• 34:40
  Speaker B: I guess not Shakespeare specifically, but I love reading classics. I studied philosophy in college and I've never regretted doing it because I think it gives you a foundation of thinking that translates to so many different parts of your life. It gives you a way of structuring your understanding of your own values, of how logic and reasoning work. And because of that, I think I've just always enjoyed reading classics. Plato's allegories and Aristotle's Ethics, you know, works by Homer, obviously. Everyone's read the Iliad and the Odyssey, I guess, but even a lot of the social contractors, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. I've just enjoyed reading it and it's my own intellectual curiosity, I guess. I just want to know about it. So, yeah, I like to read and I like to read not, not the latest pop stuff, but I like to read the old stuff.
• 36:03
  Speaker A: Nice. I appreciate you sharing that background. And I mean, of course that aligns with somebody who came from a philosophy degree in some ways too. So I wanted to ask you a little bit, going back to your, I guess I would call it your career and how you've come up and one of the questions I sometimes ask folks, especially folks who've got a really long career in leadership, is when a lot of us, you can usually put it, put our finger on that time when we realized that I was transitioning from being the, you know, the team member to being the leader and how kind of like the profoundness of it and what, you know, how I, how I responded to that moment. So I was curious how that, what if you could put your finger on that and how you responded to it.
• 36:55
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, I don't know that I've ever thought about it, but it's probably not too hard to isolate. I was working on an ERP solution for Nortel back in the 90s. It was the old Bond software at the time. Now it's owned by Infor, it's called LN Now. But it was sort of the little sister of the Oracles and saps of the world, a full blown ERP system. And I was the system administrator. I was doing the all of the field updates and updating the trim on the screens and setting up all of the master data and setting up all of the hierarchies within the system, et cetera, what typical system administrators do. And we lost the project manager. And this was actually before the days really of a professional project manager. The project manager was normally just a lead developer or Sometimes it was someone from the business side. And when that person left the company, I sort of got thrust into that role, I think, simply because I had the most technical knowledge of the system. But I had to kind of then go back and lean on skills. I learned again in the military about team building and leading teams. The team we had at that point wasn't very mature, either in the technology or in how to work together. And we kind of had to learn as a group the classic forming, storming, norming, performing progression of team building. And we spent a whole lot of time storming to get there. But by the end of that project, I think I understood much better how team dynamics work, that you have to set ground rules for teams within a project, just as you would in an organization. They're all teams. They're just teams focused on different things. So it really helped me understand it's not about the technology, it's about the people. That if you have good people and a good culture, technology is just a tool. And a carpenter can use one tool as well as another tool. But you have to be a good carpenter. You have to have that engine of people and that interaction and communication and engagement of the people to make any technology successful. And I learned that the hard way. School of hard knocks, if you will. It's a great school, but the tuition's pretty steep.
• 39:59
  Speaker A: It could be higher. So as we're coming up to the end of this episode on the podcast, one of the things I always make sure I ask our guests is what advice do you have for folks that are maybe earlier in their careers, whether they're in leadership or not? But if they're coming up, let's say they're either coming up and looking for that first leadership opportunity, or they're just in it and they now need to. They're starting off in leadership. What advice do you have for them?
• 40:31
  Speaker B: Well, I would say, first of all, if you're a technologist and you want to become a true leader, learn to be a business person. Learn the why of your business. So if you think about why are we in business at Horsco, and the easy answer is to make money, but that's not really it. That's a side effect. Right? The real why we're in business is to provide safe infrastructure for transportation of people and goods and services. You know, the why of a restaurant is to provide nutritional meals at an affordable price. So understand your company's why and make that your North Star. Start seeing the business through the lens of your stakeholders. Understand what's important to them. And understand that every. Everything you do as a technologist, every deliverable you create is only there to create some sort of new function which provides a new capability, which provides new functional abilities for the company, which ultimately supports some objective, either tactical or strategic. And learn to connect that chain that you're not working in a vacuum. And if what you do doesn't trace back up to that strategic objective, then you have to question if you're aligned. And you can only understand that alignment by learning to engage the business and see it through their eyes. Be a business person. Don't think of yourself as well, technology business.
• 42:19
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I love the part of this where you're talking about very early on in that, you know, appreciate all the things you said. I 100% agree with it. Early on you mentioned about how you know what the business, it's a side effect that we make money, if you will. And in a lot of ways, the goal of the business, I would maybe even add slightly to your, your statement about, like, take Harsco, you know, your job is to create this rail safety equipment, but internally, if you will, the job is to provide like a meaningful, you know, I call it like a meaningful output or a meaningful connection for all the people that are there that you need to do the work, too.
• 43:00
  Speaker B: That's the, that's the other side of the why. Yeah. There's an internal Y and an external.
• 43:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So like, you know, and, and so like. But both of those are the opposite of we're here to make money. Right. Yeah.
• 43:15
  Speaker B: Now, a lot of the stockholders may disagree or the board members.
• 43:20
  Speaker A: Absolutely. For sure. And they have a different perspective. And that perspective is weathered and understood.
• 43:27
  Speaker B: It makes your work meaningful. It helps you understand, again, the why we're doing what we're doing.
• 43:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, Troy, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
• 43:40
  Speaker B: It's been a pleasure, Doug. I've really enjoyed talking with you and hearing your perspective back on some of these things. Great questions and definitely thought provoking. I appreciate the opportunity.
• 43:52
  Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. So that's a wrap on today's episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I'm Doug Kameen and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.
• 44:05
  Speaker B: It.