Bill Lapcevic: Strengths in Action #04
Welcome to the fourth episode of the Strengths in Action podcast.
In this episode, I chat to Bill Lapcevic, former VP Customer Success at New Relic and learn:
- how he learned to be a better manager
- how a failed a cappella audition led him to join New Relic
- why checking your ego at the door can make a world of difference as a leader
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Nils:
Welcome to the show. I’m joined by my guest, Bill Lapcevic, VP of Customer Success at New Relic. Bill, how are you doing?
Bill:
I’m great, Nils.
Nils:
Wonderful. It’s so good to have you on today. You’re VP of CS at New Relic. Maybe we can start by you telling us a little bit about what New Relic is and what kind of work you’re doing over there.
Bill:
Sure. New Relic is the first best place to understand your digital business. What that means is that we provide a fast solution that developers use to understand the performance of their application code and how their customers are interacting with their application code. This provides them a good view into whether or not the customer’s experience is good, bad, trending badly, trending well. It provides feedback into their application development process so they can better and more quickly and more agilely develop code. It also allows us to layer on an analytics engine that allows you to pull all sorts of great information to help you make real business decisions from performance data.
Nils:
That’s pretty impressive. All the way from application level, server level, what’s going on, up to analytics and user level, that’s a big range in the stack. Is that right?
Bill:
Yeah, that’s right. It is a very comprehensive platform.
Nils:
Wonderful. I love the tagline, the first best place to understand your digital business, certainly two of my favorite things, first and best. I like it. You’ve been at New Relic for a number of years and were one of the earliest employees. Can you give us a sense of what it was like when you joined and then, what happened as it grew and some of the various … We’ll dig into a few other roles that you played there we’d love to hear.
Bill:
Sure. As you know, New Relic is, right now, about 1,000 people and a publicly traded company for the past year and a half, two years almost. When I joined, we were literally three people in an office, in a backroom at the Benchmark Capital offices on Sand Hill Road. They were lending us space. There were three desks. Then, when we hired two more people, the game was essentially who could get into the office first. The CEO always got a desk but the other four people had to fight for the two desks.
Nils:
That’s awesome.
Bill:
Otherwise, you had to sit with their friend on a love seat in the office. Back in those days, I did everything that wasn’t building software. I did the marketing. I wrote the content for the first website, set up the first trade show, did the press releases, did a lot of the positioning and customer understanding work, did a couple of the first deals that we did. You name it. I was doing it as long as it wasn’t coding.
Nils:
Wow. That’s fascinating. How did you get hooked up with New Relic in the first place? How did you end up being the third or in that first group of four or five employees?
Bill:
It goes back actually to 1989 when I met Lew Cirne while we were both in college at Dartmouth. We had both tried out for an a capella group. Neither of us got in. We decided that we would found our own a capella group, a four-person duet a capella group. We became good friends. Eventually, he hired me into his first company called Wily Technology to help on some of the big tech alliances that they were building to create a distribution model.
Then, when it came time for him to start a new company, New Relic, it was founded on the premise of a similar partner based distribution model where partners would actually give away a freemium version of our product to customers who would then work with us and upgrade into a paid version of the product. Since I was experienced in that, he hired me on in 2008 as the vice president of business development and built out the partner channel with relationships ranging from individual consultants all the way up to Amazon and Microsoft and Rackspace. Then, in 2014, the company saw a need to have an executive who is very familiar with the inner workings of the company, take over and lead our customer success organization so they asked me to do that.
Nils:
Awesome. That’s fascinating from all the way back to 1989 Dartmouth and with Lew and then all the way through Wily and into New Relic, just a testament to the relationships that you build over time and being excellent on what you do. That’s really wonderful. Digging in a little bit more on the rest of your career path prior to Wily and then, how you came into the software world, can you give us a sense of where you started out your career? What were you doing? What were the key things that you found interesting that you really enjoyed? Then, how did that progress as you moved throughout your career?
Bill:
Again, going back to Dartmouth College in the early ‘90s, a lot of my friends went to corporate recruiting and secured corporate jobs right out of college. Lew and a number of my other friends were computer scientists at Dartmouth. They were in the CS program there, computer science program. They went on to work for Apple computer and then a variety of other technology companies from California. I actually graduated with an English major and went home and worked at a yacht club for about a year. That really had nothing to do with technology. It involved building docks and fixing engines and breaking ice in the harbor in Connecticut in the middle of February.
That quickly got boring as you might imagine. I ended up in a sales job distributing diaper bags and infant nursery décor products throughout South America. My first job as a 23, 24-year-old was to hop on a plane and go spend the month in South America building distributorships and selling giant container loads of these products. I had no idea what I was doing but it was a trial by fire. I had a lot of fun doing it. Eventually, what I realized was my heart lay in technology. I was constantly buying and playing with computers. I always had e-mail. All my friends were into technology and so we would talk extensively about what they were doing.
I tried to figure out how do you go from selling baby products to running technology businesses. Really, if you draw a square and you put one in the lower left corner and one on the upper right, how do you make that jump across the square at a long distance? There were one of two choices. I could either go into the business of running a baby products company and then go from that to running a technology company or I could go into the sale of technology and then from technology sales into the business of technology. That’s the path that I took. I circled everything in the New York Times one day that looked even mildly interesting that had to do with selling technology. I eventually got a job selling helpdesk software out at Stamford, Connecticut. That was how I got into software in general.
That gravitated with the company got acquired by Computer Associates in 1998. It changed into a channel sales role at Computer Associates and then, into a global alliances role working with the big five integrators, Ernst , Young and PwC, Accenture and et cetera. Then, Lew called. He said he needed somebody to spin up some relationships with BES Systems and with IBM. Not knowing any better, I packed my bags and flew out to California and joined his company. The rest is history.
Nils:
That’s awesome. From Dartmouth to the docks of a yacht club to South America to, first, sales and then ultimately, out to California, what an incredible ride. One question before we move on to the next one just around the transition from Dartmouth to going home and spending a year at a yacht club. Now, you’re surrounded by friends who all were getting big jobs and had degrees and jobs, everything lined up after school. What was it like and what drove you to say, “You know what, I’m not exactly sure exactly where I’m headed but I want to go and take some time”? What was going on at that point in your life that that was the correct approach for you as opposed to just going and getting a job like a lot of your friends did?
Bill:
I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. Sometimes, I find that when you don’t know what you want to do, forcing it isn’t always the best option. Sometimes, doing something that gives your brain or your subconscious some cycles to kind of just figure it out and reconfigure, that could be really important for making your next big career choice. It’s like climbing a mountain and getting to a plateau. You’re on that plateau and there are all sorts of different directions you can go so you make a basecamp there and you sit there for a little while. You weight all the different factors and you just start to get a feeling for which direction you should start climbing. That’s what I did.
Nils:
I really appreciate that point that you just said where it’s if you don’t know what it is you want to do or going to do next, don’t force it because forcing it might come up with some other unintended consequences, right?
Bill:
Yeah. If you force it, you’re going to end up doing something that intellectually, you think you should be doing but that you’re not passionate about. If I learned one thing in the 20 plus years in my software career, it’s that if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, then you’re doing something wrong. You really ought to start looking for what you can do that really, as Lew says, it makes you love your Mondays. If you don’t love your Mondays, you’re not going to be able to put everything that you need to into your job, into your career and you’re just not going to get the success that you’re looking for long term.
Nils:
I really love that quote. That’s great. Love your Mondays. Looking back at that run in your career so far, I’m curious about two things. One, where have you excelled and where did you really grow? Two, where have you struggled?
Bill:
Good question. I’ve done a lot of reflecting even in the last six or eight months about where my career is and what the next step might be. As you imagine, when you’re thinking about those things and you’re talking to other people about what they think about you and what’s valuable and maybe what you can improve, you start to understand exactly about what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses and where can I put myself in a position to apply my strengths to a problem rather than shoring up my weaknesses because really, it’s your strengths that give you passion. The things that you’re strong in are the things you’re most comfortable with and the things that you excel on.
For me, I would say one thing that I really enjoyed is looking at the big picture. No matter what decision as a leader or as a manager or as a department head that you’re making should always be looking at what are the ripple effects of that decision across your organization, even across the industry or the market that you’re in. An example of that is if you are in customer success, re-segmenting your CSMs, enterprise, SMB and automation. If you’re not doing that in alignment with your sales organization or you haven’t notified your sales organization and even perhaps, your customer, it’s going to cause massive, massive challenges for you. People won’t understand your strategy. They will react badly. It can really just put up roadblocks in your way.
If you think from the beginning of how am I going to arrange my organization to best fit the overall corporate strategy that we’re trying to achieve and the direction that the company is trying to go, you’ll end up with a much better strategy overall and you’ll end up with a much more comprehensive understanding of how the organization works. That’s certainly a strength. Another strength is, and it’s something that I really just didn’t focus on over the last, say a year, is really being authentic and being yourself. As an executive, whether or not you’re in customer success or any other executive position, we all have a tendency to try and mimic or imitate other people who are successful executives.
What I noticed was when I was doing that, I got really frustrated with myself. I always felt kind of fake. I wasn’t really that effective. I kept wondering what was wrong, why wasn’t I able to really excel at this. I’m doing exactly what that person over there does. I’m speaking the same way and trying to act the same way. After a long time, what I came with the conclusion is what people really wanted from me as a leader was me, not this picture of the leader that I thought I needed to be. When I realized that and I went back to just being me, everything started to fit together. Everything started to click. The team jelled. The values were very clear and we really excelled. Those are some of the strengths.
From a weakness perspective, there are two things and they both have to do with what I would consider strengths of customer success managers is empathy. Sometimes, I can be too empathetic. What that does is it makes me think that when other people are having a difficult time, they’re having a bad day, they’re upset about something, then, I instantly go into this mode where I think it’s because of something that I did. The important thing there is to not take yourself too seriously because it’s not about you. Everybody has something going on. It’s important to remember that just because somebody’s upset doesn’t mean it’s focused on you. It may be something completely different that’s affecting you.
By the same token, if they do something that impacts you negatively, they probably weren’t trying to impact you negatively. It’s important then to go and have a direct conversation with that person and be very straightforward and very open about what you’re sensing or what you’re feeling. Sometimes, that hard to do especially if you’re a rather empathetic person. You can put a wall up saying, “Oh, they probably don’t want to talk to me anyway,” or, “Oh, I can just imagine what they will do,” when you do have that hard conversation. That’s something that I’m working on to overcome.
Nils:
Can you share a little bit about how you are working on overcoming that? What are some of the things that you are trying to do to be conscious of techniques you’re using to put a boundary around that empathy and make sure it’s used in the right way?
Bill:
I don’t mean to say that empathy is a bad thing, first of all, because I think empathy is a leader who’s absolutely critical. If you can’t resonate and empathize with your employee or your customer, then the news that you give them will be taken as callous or difficult. You won’t build that great relationship.
That said, it’s important to reflect on the situations where you have these feelings of, sort of an over-empathetic feeling that cause a negative reaction from yourself and to reflect on those and look back and say, “Oh, in the end analysis, that results … That was not actually the thing that that other person was thinking or feeling or doing.” The more you can remind yourself of that, the more you’re liable to be able to catch that feeling and say, “Hey, wait a minute. I have all these other examples of when I have this feeling and it was wrong.” You start to be able to recalibrate that sense or that perception. That is really important.
The other thing is to force yourself to have the tough conversations and walk into somebody’s office and say, “I don’t like what’s going on. If we’re going to solve this together, you have to tell me exactly what the situation is,” and just get down on the table. I think that really is something that, in many cases, executives or employees don’t do because they’re worried of the consequences but ultimately, the consequences are worse if you don’t just put the problem on the table. You do it in a sensitive way and in a kind way and in an upfront way, not in an angry or difficult way. You’ll find that the relationship you end up with is a lot stronger than it would have been otherwise.
Nils:
That’s really interesting. The process that you’ve been going through in working towards not being overly empathetic or assuming that there’s some reason that something happened or someone didn’t do something for you or did something to you, is to reflect on these situations and give yourself time to process them so that you can be aware of certain times when things happened and did not have the outcome that you had anticipated.
Then, in the future, you can be aware that when that happens again or something similar happens, then, you can catch that and say, “You know what, there were lots of other situations for this. It wasn’t the case. This likely is one of those too I have to hold on and keep that until I find out actually what’s going on.” If it comes to it, then having a tough conversation with the individual and being very upfront and coming to agreement on what is it that’s going on and specifically, how can we address this so that we can be better together?
Bill:
Yeah, that’s right. It’s a form of visualization really. You visualize the positive outcome by recognizing when you’ve done certain things in a certain way that you’ve gotten that positive outcome, not a negative outcome. Same thing as a baseball swing or a tennis swing or a golf swing, you have to visualize the swing in a positive way. Then, your body will orient itself so that it has that positive swing, same thing with your sympathetic reaction.
Nils:
That’s really interesting. I love visual stuff to begin with but that visualizing the positive outcome first. Regardless of if it’s a conversation, regardless if it’s just an e-mail or a situation or a phone call or a customer, visualizing that positive outcome will set the stage for everything else.
Bill:
Absolutely.
Nils:
What is your philosophy around personal development?
Bill:
Number one, the simple form is you should always be learning. I find I get really bored if I’m not constantly challenging myself and constantly learning something new. That’s one of the reasons when I moved into customer success and I was given an award at a company that was about to go public, and I had never done customer success before, so I saw it as a massive challenge but something where I could really stretch myself and grow to another level as a leader, as an executive and as a person. It is constantly having on your learning cap and taking everything as a learning opportunity or a learning experience is maybe one of that.
If you can picture a sine wave where the middle line that cuts through the middle of it is status quo, when the sine wave is over the line, that’s when people are kind of in the flow of things. Things are just working smoothly. You’ve been in those situations. I’ve been in those situations where everything you seem to do turns to gold for a while. You find that quarter for the parking meter. You get home five minutes early. You find a dollar on the ground. You closed a big business deal. Whatever it is, it’s going really well.
What happens is that you eventually get out of that zone and you get into this trough which is a really difficult time. We all go through those too where suddenly, nothing is working right. You seem to step slow. You’re waking up a little late. You actually physically feel a little bit off, maybe the headache. I get headaches during those times. Headaches and I’m really tired and your eyes are bloodshot. These are times of real stress. What I realized is that that’s actually, to me, that’s when your brain is struggling to rewire itself to adjust to some new paradigm. You’ve learned something new or you’re trying to learn something new and you’re trying to push and force your brain to rewire that.
Then, what ends up happening is if you push through that, suddenly, your brain just goes back online and you’re back in the flow of things. You look back and you’re like, “Geez, I don’t know why that was such a struggle.” I look at these as stages of learning. If you take my five-year-old son, he’s learning to read and it’s a struggle but one day, he just looked up and he read the word stop on a stop sign. He read the word zoo on another sign that he’s never seen before. It just suddenly clicked in.
The key thing is you have to push through the pain. You have to push through the uncomfort or the discomfort and the difficulty or you’ll revert back to what is the status quo where you feel comfortable. What I see is people who start tapping out in their career, they get to a point where they no longer want to push through that challenge. They just go back to what they always have known and they have a very comfortable career and a very comfortable life. I find the most successful people are the ones who will push through that, who breaks through the barrier and get back into the flow at another level. Anyway, that’s how I approach learning and career development. It’s all a series of, “I know exactly what I’m doing. Wait a minute. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve got to push through this.” Then, “Oh, hey, now all of a sudden, I get it again and it all clicks into the framework and you’re all set.” This happens over and over and over again.
Nils:
That’s the really interesting point, is that … I love the sine wave visual because it is an ebb and flow. The learning is always growth and pushing through and then growth and pushing through. You get those high points and you also have the low points and that’s okay. It’s really interesting hearing that description from you that in order to get to the flow state, you have to push through the pain. For individuals out there thinking about learning and progressing in their careers and people, maybe you could share an example or two of people that have worked for you. What are some of the things that you helped them to uncover, discover, think about? How do you get the people who work in your organizations to adopt that kind of mentality and that kind of philosophy around their own personal development regardless of whether or not the company is going to support it, in other words, pay for it?
Bill:
That’s a good question. I think number one, what people need, what your employees need during the times when they’re struggling is confidence from their leaders, somebody who’s going to say, “Look, here’s where you’re going and when you get there, it’s going to be wonderful and you got to keep pushing.” When you don’t get that, it’s sometimes hard to push on your own when it feels like the company is not backing you. Most of the time, it’s not that the company is not backing you. It’s just they’re not paying that much attention to what you’re going through. It’s up to a good leader to recognize that and guide them through that slough, if you will, so that they come out the other side a better, more effective, happier employee.
The other thing, a good example of something that a leader can provide to an employee in terms of if an employee wants to be promoted, for example … I had a number of employees in recent times that wanted to become managers, that wanted to become directors at the company. That was the title was their career goal. They just wanted me to promote them based on the amount of time they’d been on the company. In reality, that’s the last thing that a company will do. They don’t want to promote you just because you’ve been there a long time. They want to promote you when you’re doing the work of that role.
My philosophy on management and director of VP level stuff is that if you’re an individual contributor, you’re focused on your work. A manager is focused on their team’s work. A director is focused on making sure that the teams under them are interacting with other teams across the company in a cohesive way. They start to form the connective tissue of the company. Somebody who wants to go from being a manager to director, what you might say to them is do you know how the sales organization works? Do you know how they assign leads or how they assign territories? Do you understand how we handle support tickets? Do you understand how marketing decides which trade shows to go to or which ones not to go to or how they build their marketing automation?
Invariably, the manager will say, “No, I have no idea. I just know that that happens.” What a director needs to know is he needs to know how the company works across all functions at least at a [inaudible 00:28:55]. I ask them to go on and build those relationships and have those discussions and learn. When they come back, typically they will come back at least knowing a lot more but often in a position where it’s easy to promote them into a director so they can become the connective tissue of the company.
Nils:
That’s really great. You orchestrate their learning from going from flow where they knew everything about their world to the trough where they might go through some pain because they have to build new relationships. They have to learn new industries sometimes and completely new teams. Then, they can come back into the flow and hopefully be ready then in order to step into a bigger role.
Bill:
Yep, that’s right.
Nils:
Cool. I like it. That’s very succinct and easy for people to grasp and understand. I have no doubt that so many of your employees followed your advice. I’m curious, as you look back over your career, what would you say makes you unique?
Bill:
In the United States, if I’m one in a million, there are 350 people just like me. What does make me unique? I think it’s a blend of things. I think the collective experiences that you’ve had throughout your career makes you unique because it shapes your reactions to different situations. We are the sum of all the experiences that we’ve lived. We should be glad about that because nobody have the same past. Nobody have the same set of experiences.
Another thing that I think makes me unique is the people that I know and the interactions that I’ve had with others, whether they’re in our firm or outside our firm. If you take LinkedIn as an example, LinkedIn actually shows you some of the uniqueness that is you. It’s your network of people. It turns out that that network of people, the longer you’re in an industry, gets more and more and more valuable. It’s those people that you have positive relationships with that will be willing to help you or that you will be willing to help. It’s like a fingerprint for everyone.
The last couple of things that I would say make me unique … I don’t know that this is unique but it’s unique in that I bring my personality into the company and it’s my personality. For example, I was interviewing somebody the other day and they asked me the same question that you did which was, how did you come up with joining New Relic? I told them the story about Lew, the founder, and me in college singing a capella and they didn’t believe me. I whipped out my cellphone. We spent the next 10 minutes listening to my college a capella group singing a capella.
Nils:
Nice.
Bill:
Who does that in an interview? Later on, that person who accepted the offer, she came back to me and she said, “I just wanted you to know, that was the most unusual and awesome interview I’ve ever had because you could see how passionate you were about what you did. You weren’t taking yourself too seriously and you were willing to let me see who you were. I resonated with you as a person and it’s why I wanted to join the company.” I think that’s uniqueness at its best, when somebody is resonating with who you are as a person. The trick, of course, is making sure that they see that in a work acceptable way.
Nils:
In a work acceptable way, yeah, I like that qualifier in the end. There’s a really interesting point you made there about you are the sum of all your experiences and no two people ever have the same set of experiences. Regardless of what roles people have been in or what industries or departments or companies, et cetera, you’re still unique regardless because everyone has their own unique set of experiences. That brings the network of people that is unique to you as LinkedIn points out, as you said, and then bringing your personality to the company, that’s really a wonderful way to sum up how you are unique. Where do you get the most satisfaction in your work?
Bill:
The people. There’s no doubt about it. The people that I can interact with and making sure that all my interactions are quality interactions. It doesn’t mean they’re positive but it means that they’re quality. I want to make sure that at the end of the day, somebody comes back to me and says, “You know, the thing I like about you is you were straightforward. You told it like it was and you didn’t bring a lot of baggage into any of the conversations. You were just trying to get the job done in the best way possible for the company.”
When I hear that, it means I’m doing something right when I get that feedback. That’s what really gives me satisfaction, is being able to take my ego … We all have very strong egos or we wouldn’t be where we are in our careers but turning it into a team oriented ego or applying it in a team manner and building a cohesive group of people who recognize that working together, they’re going to be far, far stronger than working individually.
Nils:
That’s wonderful, the quality interactions, taking the ego out of it and turning it into a team oriented ego. That comes up all the time as a challenge. Was there a particular point in your career when you realized that taking your personal ego needed to go to check and it needed to be turned into a team oriented ego? How did that belief evolve over time?
Bill:
I think when you realize that the best leaders often have the least ego, the least personal ego. If you study great leaders, most of them are background … They’re not the ones that are leading the charge. They’re the ones that are making sure that people who are leading the charge are awesome at doing that. If you can find a couple of those leaders to study, I think you’ll find that they get the satisfaction from the ultimate result rather than the personal accolades.
There’s a story in a book that’s called The Art of Possibility, Zander and Zander. It’s my favorite book I ever read in business school. The story, it’s called rule number six. The short form of the story is that two heads of state were talking to each other. While they were talking to each other, a staffer comes barging in and is extremely upset, very irate at something that’s just happened that somebody has done. He’s almost foaming at the mouth. The home head of state looks at him and says, “David, remember rule number six.” The man instantly calms down, apologizes and leaves.
Then, a woman comes in. She’s upset. She’s griping about somebody who slighted her and the man looks at her and says, “Linda, rule number six.” She instantly has calmed and leaves. After this happened several more times, the visiting head of state says, “This is the most amazing management technique I’ve ever seen in my life. I have to know, what is rule number six?” The home head of state looks at him and says, “Rule number six is really very simple. Don’t take yourself so goddamn serious.” He says, “Well, what are the other rules?” He says there aren’t any other rules.
When I think about that, every time I start to get upset at something and when I think about rule number six, when I remember to think about it, you realize that this isn’t about you. Whatever just happened is not about you. It allows you to check your ego at the door and focus on solving the problem instead of bringing your own ego and baggage into the equation. I recommend that book to anybody who is developing as a leader or if you’re just interested in a really good read but that’s a story that I tell all my employees and I try and live by. It’s not always easy but I try.
Nils:
What an awesome way to check yourself, your ego at the door just by remembering rule number six. That can be so powerful as it was in those people’s case to completely jolt them out of their head and get them into a completely different mindset and look at things from a different perspective. That, oftentimes, especially in customer success when dealing with customers and internal clients as well, things don’t go right most of the time and being able to get back, that’s huge. I love the rule number six. That’s awesome. What are you most talented to do, Bill?
Bill:
Gosh. I suspect it’s leading organizations. I can do a lot of things. I used to say I was really good in math but I never liked doing math. I’m really good in English. I can do a lot of things well. I sing. I play the piano. I do a lot of things well but the thing that … Again, I think it goes back to what we talked about before, where do you get the most satisfaction. Developing teams seems to be where I get the most satisfaction, developing organizations that addresses strategic problem, that do it in a cohesive, holistic way and work together to solve that problem. I think that I’m particularly adept to that and I think even more important, I’m very passionate about doing that. That’s what I have a lot of fun building up and have a lot of fun building, the customer success team and painting the three-year vision and the direction and getting people to buy in and develop along that path. That’s been a very rewarding experience for me.
Nils:
I can certainly hear it in your voice and back to the passion and love in doing things that you love your Mondays. I can certainly hear that. Where in your professional career did you make the transition from being an individual contributor to managing a team? Can you tell me a little bit about what that transition was like and how did you adjust and shift your mindset and learn to be a great leader when you went through that?
Bill:
Yes. The first time I ever had to manage anybody formally was at Wily Technology in the early 2000s. I was in the business development organization and we were fortunate over a six-year period but BD organization grew to a point where the head of BD, the vice president of BD couldn’t manage day-to-day all the people and all the different functions of business development. I had a couple of people that I ended up hiring to do inside business development work, building relationships with end users and end users at our partners. I had a team of three or four people. That was an interesting experience because I really didn’t know what I was doing frankly. I did okay but it was a lot of trial and error.
I think there was a seminal moment for how to be a better manager and that actually happened at New Relic early on. Again, I had been building up the business development organization. What I realized was I’d added five or six people and they were all coming to me and asking me questions. Because I’m good at business development, I was telling them what to do. They’d come in and say, “The partner said this, this and this. What do I do?” I’d say, “Well, you go and say this, this and this and then write this down and then, go to talk to that person.” They would do it and they’d come back to me and say, “Hey, Bill. That worked. Now, what do I do?” Then, I’d answer it again.
I was getting really frustrated because I wasn’t getting my work done. Even as a leader, you have work for other people that you’re trying to do as well. I went to the head of HR and I said, “Steve, I’m really frustrated. I’m not getting any of my own work done. The team is operating but I feel like I’m getting more and more stressed. I’m not managing them effectively. What do you think is going on?” He said, “Well, it sounds to me, Bill, that you are answering all their questions and you are doing all of their work for them. If you let them continue to let you do their work, they will because it’s easy for them.” He said, “You’d gone from being the individual contributor to being the person that hires and trains the individual contributors.”
It clicked at that moment that I have to shift my mindset from doing the job of a business development person to running business development people and teaching them and putting frameworks in place so that they could make decisions that I would have if I had been an individual contributor. It was at that moment that I really became a manager and a leader. There you go.
Nils:
That’s awesome story and it’s indicative of most people when they go through that transition which is one of the more difficult ones in a professional career of going from that individual contributor where you are the expert, you know how to do this, you literally did the job from day one at New Relic and then, all of a sudden, you could do it almost as well or you know more about it than all your people. The natural inclination is to answer all those questions. As you took a step back and said, “Wait a second. I’m not getting any of my work done,” then you built the frameworks and the things to help educate them to do things how you would do with how they would do it or how you would do it without you having to actually do it.
Bill:
Yeah. When you think about how you scale a company, that’s the only way to scale a company. I was advising a young CEO of a small startup and through our conversation, he said, “I’ve now started like five or six companies and they always get to two million dollars of revenue and just stall out right there.” After a little more conversation, what we realized was it was because he was better at doing all the jobs than any of the people he was hiring and so he would just do it.
When it came to building the website, he’d just do it. He’d let his marketing guy off the hook. He’d do it. He’d go out and sell the product. He’d develop the code and he would do the publicity and the press and raise money. I said to him, “You have to figure out how to let them do their job.” He said, “But I’m better at it than they are.” “Yes, you are. You’re absolutely better at it than they are. That’s probably why you’re in the position you’re in but you can’t do all that work. You have to let others do it. You have to teach them so they become better and better.”
One analogy that I will picture for you, since you like pictures, is as a manager, as a leader, you are the bumpers in the gutters of the bowling alley. Your job is to make sure that no one ever throws a gutter ball. Your individual contributor’s job is to get better and better at throwing strikes.
Nils:
Nice. Love it. That is perfectly visual and to that CEO, it’s just a great highlight of yes, technically, you can be better at everything but it doesn’t mean you’ll be successful depending on what it was you were trying to achieve which, in this case, he was trying to get beyond two million in [inaudible 00:45:19]. That’s really interesting.
Bill:
That’s right. He did come back to me about six months later and said he tried this and that it was remarkable how much more they were getting done. I just smiled and nodded and I said, “Yeah, good lesson to learn, man. Well done.”
Nils:
Am I correct in saying that the advice that you would give out there for people going through the transition in customer success or in any field from individual contributor to manager is to be the bumpers in the bowling alley where your job is to never let your team bowl in the gutter and to get them to continuously improve on their ability to throw strikes?
Bill:
Yeah, that’s right. I’d say that’s it in a nutshell. Don’t let them throw a gutter ball and then, put them in a position where they can learn constantly, as we talked about before, so they’d get better and better at their job.
Nils:
Good. Awesome. Wonderful advice. Coming up on the last question here, if you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be and why?
Bill:
I would exist on only two hours of sleep because that will give me a whole lot more time during the day. I don’t know that I’m-
Nils:
What would you do with that time? If you only had two hours of sleep, you’d get back, let’s say another, however much you sleep minus the difference but another bunch of hours, what would you do with the additional time?
Bill:
Another five or six hours, sure. I’d do a lot of other stuff for me personally.
Nils:
What kind of stuff?
Bill:
I’d learn how to tie flies for fly fishing. I’d work on my fly fishing task. I’d read more books. I’d play more music. I’d practice the piano and work on maybe even writing some music, writing some songs and doing some recordings. I would do stuff that makes me happy that is not necessarily work related or earnings related. You have to spend a certain amount of time in a day, a week, a month, a year making money so that your family is in a good spot, that you have a home, your kids are in school, you’re putting food on the table quite literally.
In fact, when you have your first child, for those of you out there who haven’t had a kid yet, you may not understand this but I distinctly remember bringing my son home, sticking the car seat with my newborn son on the couch sitting next to him and my wife and then it hit me that I could no longer screw up at my job because before, I could go and live out of my car and eat ramen noodles for two weeks at a time while I worked on getting another job but with a baby, you can’t do that. I would do things that are the things that I would have done, say, when I have spare time in college or things that are just fun to me but don’t necessarily ultimately end up in a lot more revenue or a bigger house or better living conditions which is something that makes me happy. That’s what I would do with the time.
Nils:
Got it. You run a pretty tight schedule, I imagine, between working at New Relic during this whole tenure from the third person up to publicly traded com. There’s a lot of stuff going on all the time. During that time, how did you balance those things that are just fun and make you happy and all the other stuff that had to happen both at work and then at home once you had a family and all?
Bill:
It certainly wasn’t always easy. I know looking back, I made some mistakes in trying to balance things. I tried to learn from those mistakes. For example, when my son was born, I took a week off and then I worked part time for a week and then I was back full time. I just don’t … I couldn’t take the time off. There was so much to do at work and I couldn’t fall behind and that would affect the company. It would affect me. In retrospect, I would change that completely because I found that spending time with my kids and bonding with my kids and my family is far more important from a balance perspective. When you do have that balance, you’re much better and effective at work.
I’m fortunate too that New Relic, as a company, really has that perspective that you need to be able to take time off and you need to take parental leave. They’ll give a lot of parental leave beyond what the state of California’s required leave is. As an executive at New Relic, we made the decision long ago that we didn’t accrue vacation. It sounds kind of [inaudible 00:50:25] to balance but what we do is you take vacation whenever you need it. We’re all adults and we all get the job done but if you want to take a couple of days, you shouldn’t have to stress about whether you’ve accrued enough time.
You just take a little bit of a break so that you can be refreshed and happy. It is definitely a balancing act. If you err on the side of doing things with your family and doing things that balance you, you’ll be much more effective at work. If you’re working in a field, in a role and in a company that you’re passionate about, erring on the side of family will balance everything out perfectly.
Nils:
That’s wonderful advice and really like your perspective looking back and saying I didn’t feel like I could take time off and I’ve talked to a lot of other people who’ve said very similar things but with a little bit of time and looking back, in reality, it either didn’t matter or it made the situation worse because you couldn’t be as effective as if you had taken the break and rejuvenated and then gone back into it, totally different experience.
Bill:
It’s been said a thousand times, I know, but no one ever looks back and says, “Boy, if only I had worked a few more days.” Never.
Nils:
Nope. Yeah, nobody has ever said that yet in the history of humankind. That is an awesome quote to end on. Appreciate your time so much, Bill. Thank you and good luck to you and look forward to keeping in touch.
Bill:
Thanks for having me, Nils. It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks.
Nils:
Thanks.