Foundations of Leadership with Mark Templeton

We are super excited to bring you an extra special Get Amplified festive present!​

​Mark Templeton rejoins us to share his wisdom and learnings in this episode, Foundations of Leadership.​

We catch up with Mark, who continues to give back through board service and CEO mentoring. ​As former CEO of Citrix, Mark offers invaluable insights into personal growth, emphasising the importance of gratitude and self-reflection as essential components for enhancing one's role in fast-paced industries.

Mark enlightens us on the concept of strategic renewal, stressing the importance of self-disruption to stay ahead in rapidly changing industries. By sharing stories of Apple's reinvention and Intel's struggles, Mark highlights the challenges of maintaining relevance and navigating innovation.  Mark cites "The Innovator's Dilemma" revealing the crucial balance between stability and innovation.

Referring to Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Mark tell us, "It’s probably the one reading that changed the course of my career more than any other single thing"

​The books Mark covers are:

• The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
• Leaders Make the Future by Bob Johansen
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• The Growth Mindset by Dr Carol Dweck
• The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Finally, with inspiration from "The Velveteen Rabbit," we celebrate authenticity as a path to personal freedom and success, advocating for vulnerability and self-awareness as keys to growth.

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn!

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Chapters

• 0:09 Personal Development for Tech Leaders
• 13:26 Leading by Example and Strategic Renewal
• 32:26 Building High-Functioning Teams
• 47:43 Financial Literacy for Business Growth
• 58:03 Embracing Authenticity for Personal Growth

Transcript

Sam: 0:09

welcome to get amplified from the amplified group, bringing you stories to help leaders in the tech industry execute at speed through the power of working together. Well, it's a gloomy december day, but the christmas lights are on so we're cheery. What's it? Looking pretty deep, deepestock Vicky.

Vic: 0:26

It's pretty gloomy here too, I'm afraid, yeah, but we have got Christmas cheer.

Sam: 0:32

And talking of Christmas cheer, who will podcast today?

Vic: 0:36

Yeah. So, sam, when we were doing the prep for the EUC Community Forum, I think we realised that the podcast would have been going five years in January. So firstly I want to just say thank you, sam, for putting up with me for five years You're very welcome it's been a struggle at times, well, all the time.

Vic: 1:02

So the fact that it's five years. I was thinking, wow, who have we had on as a guest? That would make an incredible Christmas special for us and, as you can imagine, it didn't take a lot of thinking about to think so, um, santa, exactly, we have got Santa. Santa is coming in the form of Mr Mark Templeton. So Mark it's wonderful to have you as a guest. Thank you so much for making the time for us again.

Mark: 1:33

It's really great to be here, and especially in the Christmas season and at a time of year where everyone is, you know, reflecting on the year past but really planning for the year ahead.

Sam: 1:48

Yeah, that sounds about right. That sounds about right, brilliant. So, Mark, really you need no introduction. Everybody knows who you are and, of course, you've been on before, so that's all good, but maybe you can give us an update on what you've been up to since the last time we spoke.

Mark: 2:03

Well, wow, it's been a busy year. I'm continuing to give back is probably the theme. With board service. I'm on the board of directors of two public companies and three private companies. I am also doing a project in the CEO mentoring area. That's very, very interesting and every one of these things is rewarding, and so that's, that's been a busy part of the year. And then the other thing is, uh, you know, the family's growing. I've got three grandchildren now a three-year-old, a two-year-old and a one-year-old.

Sam: 2:45

So wow yeah, so you are gonna have the best christmas yeah the, the best spelled.

Mark: 2:54

Uh, expensive, chaotic, chaotic yeah, absolutely love it, love it yeah you know, it's just a great time of year and we, you know, we've had a great 2024 and looking forward to another great year in 25.

Sam: 3:13

Brilliant, fantastic. Well it's. You know, it's great to hear that you're you're giving back and helping other people on the path that you've been on. So we wanted to bring this podcast together, I guess as a little bit of a Christmas gift for our listeners, right?

Mark: 3:27

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I was thinking about it too, given that you all wanted to do a Christmas special, and I was thinking, you know. First of all, my gift that I try to give, not only at Christmas but every day, is, you know, the team that helped me in my career. I always tell them that my gift to them is a lifetime subscription. To me, that means anytime I can be helpful in, you know, the development of their careers and lives, et cetera. I'm here. I'm here for them, because I think we don't talk about gratitude enough and getting up every day and remembering who you have gratitude for and what you have gratitude for is important and then doing something about it.

Mark: 4:17

And then the second thing is at Christmas, we're out shopping and thinking of special gifts to give family, friends, etc. But I think this is a good time of year to also think about yourself and give yourself a gift and something that a gift that I've given myself year after year after year after year, going back to actually my first year at Citrix was to reflect on myself and figure out you know what kinds of things I would do for personal development. So the gift of personal development is something to give to yourself so you can improve and be a better leader manager. You know, whatever your role happens to be a better husband, wife, son, daughter, grandparent, whatever.

Sam: 5:11

Yeah, so this is growth mindset, right. That's what we're talking about here continuous improvement. What makes that so important?

Mark: 5:21

It makes it important? Because it makes it important because, especially in the industry, in technology et cetera that moves so fast and where you generally find people who are pretty ambitious to self-develop, because you can only manage a team, a growth team, if you can stay out ahead and not be the bottleneck to growth. And the way to avoid being the bottleneck is self-development and really prioritizing that and owning it yourself. And that philosophy comes from a couple of places. First of all, when I was appointed CEO at Citrix, I drew the short straw and as I thought about it and I loved the company from the day I joined I never wanted to be a bottleneck to growth and so in thinking about how do I avoid that, I said I have to own my own personal development so that I'm not an obstacle to growth, which then, you know, every over the New Year's weekend, I would sit down and sketch out all right, here's where I'm doing, okay, but these are my flat spots.

Mark: 6:46

And here's what I'm going to do this year. I'm going to read this book, I'm going to do a seminar, an online training course, I'm going to attend a conference, I'm going to meet some new people. That will, you know, stretch me, whatever those things are.

Mark: 7:01

So that's the first reason the second reason is, in a larger organization, where you're having to choose people to promote, et cetera whether it's a sort of an incremental direct promotion or a leapfrog promotion you're looking for those that are ambitious enough to develop themselves and do it proactively, as opposed to the person who says, well, the company needs to develop me more, and puts it on the company and I felt like no, you need to put it on yourself. And the great thing about doing that is it's a Darwinian kind of process and it's a self-selection process. So in a larger organization it's easier to sort. You know, those who are they're ambitious and are acting on it, versus those who are ambitious and waiting for the company to develop them yeah, yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense.

Sam: 8:03

People who go out there and grab it rather than waiting for it to happen to them. I, I always think about that as the anti-peter principle. Maybe I don't know whether you ever read the book a million, it's from a million years ago, I think. Yeah, I think my, my dad had it and it was the peter principle and the theory was people rise to their level of incompetence because if you're good at something, you get promoted to the level beyond. In order to ward off the Peter Principle, you have to keep developing yourself, right?

Mark: 8:32

That's right.

Sam: 8:33

Exactly.

Mark: 8:34

I don't know whether that book is still in circulation, but the principle surely holds true, and you know it requires a personal characteristic of introspection and being brutally honest about yourself. And then you know if you're managing people. One of the key questions you should be asking all the time of your team how can I be a better leader? You know, tell me where my flat spots are and not be afraid of those answers, because feedback like that is a blessing, as opposed to people being afraid to be direct and then you're all on your own. You know, and it's always better to travel in a pack and have a team and a band around you that can help you.

Sam: 9:22

Yeah, we talked about the band thing last time, didn't we?

Vic: 9:26

Yeah, it's just reminded me as you were talking there, Mark. So yesterday I was fortunate enough to be leading a challenge day at the university where I'm doing some lecturing and actually the first gosh maybe 10 slides that I had your picture was up quite a lot because we were using we were using your myths of leadership and the ones and particularly around not having all the answers yourself and being able to ask for help. But this is it's very much related to attitude, isn't it of you recognize that you need to develop and that you haven't got all the answers, and it's really fascinating working with some of the leaders that that we do. You can really we engage the best with clients that ask for help because they don't think they've got all the answers and they they need to grow, whereas it's immediate when we can have a conversation and understand. Actually, you think you've got all the answers yourself. So this is, this is it's a it's a bit like.

Sam: 10:34

It's a bit like a combination of humility and confidence versus arrogance. Those who think they know it all have arrogance. Those who understand that they still need to learn are humble in and of themselves but also have a certain confidence that they still have value even as they go through that process of developing. Does that make any?

Mark: 10:54

sense yeah, totally it's, it's. It's a fine line between having confidence and then asking for advice and saying I don't know.

Vic: 11:06

Yeah.

Mark: 11:08

And it gets down to you know, your, your attitude and understanding yourself. But I think the thing is usually you should, you should, have an opinion, at least of some kind, so that you're you're checking your opinion against the advice and thoughts of others. Yeah, and you know it sends a great message of, uh, respect for others and listen, good listener. And you know, again, as a as a leader, people want a voice, and especially sort of the younger generations. You know, I'm from the old school and think I successfully crossed the Rubicon there. But you know, millennials and X and V and all these other generations have grown up in an environment where they're born digital and it's very easy to have a voice and they want to have a voice and so it sends that message as well. And then, as a leader, you have to draw the line between where people have a voice but explain to them where they have a vote versus not have a vote, and that's a fine line in and of itself as well.

Sam: 12:31

Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder if somewhere in all of that there's what I think of it as almost sort of service through leadership. So you said about asking how I can be a better leader. I used to try and think of it as how can I better serve my people, the people that were in my group that effectively made me successful, because it wasn't me, it was the gang that I amassed that had the brains, and I quite like that sort of service through leadership or leadership through service, whichever way around you want it.

Mark: 13:04

Yeah, service through leadership or leadership through service whichever way around you want it. Yeah, well, I think the servant leader model is reasonably I'd say reasonably well documented and etc. And, um, you know, that's my very natural sort of way of leading and working with teams. So that was. You know, my dad was very much a role model for that and when I worked, you know, summers and holidays, et cetera, at his factory, I watched him, you know, sort of get everyone together, give assignments out and then tell everyone what assignment he was going to give to himself and he would typically take the worst assignment.

Vic: 13:49

Yeah.

Mark: 13:50

And set an example around, yes, being hands-on, being, you know, part of the team, part of the band, but also expressing that he would never ask anyone to do something that he wasn't willing to do himself.

Sam: 14:06

Yeah, by doing sort of the the ugliest you know, kind of running, running to the fire, picking up the heaviest load yeah, shoveling the ugliest, uh, whatever yeah and it inspires people to give more than maybe they're.

Mark: 14:25

They even understand they can give and that they have to give.

Vic: 14:28

Yeah, the other description of leadership that I really love is General Stanley McChrystal's. He talks about leading like a gardener, and so you create the environment for other people to grow, and I think the way that is absolutely that. Creating that environment for me is is is just so important yeah, well, obviously I agree with that.

Mark: 15:01

When I think of you know those years, as many years, and where my pride in that journey comes from, it really comes from seeing you know, all my pupils like you, all you know, not only growing at Citrix but then going out organizations and other organizations, etc.

Mark: 15:23

and cetera, and that's that's. That's a bit lasting, very deep in the heart kind of pride. Yeah, and that comes from a being a servant leadership, because you're trying to inspire your team to develop and learn new things, et cetera. Let them make mistakes and then find out what they've learned from them, because your scars are your best teachers and that's those are the things that you turn, you know from pain into wisdom. And the more scars you have early in your career, the more years you have to compound the benefit of having those scars. And you know, and to apply to you know new teams, new projects, new companies, where you know new teams, new projects, new companies, where you know wherever your, your career leads you yeah, so.

Vic: 16:31

So, um, mark, you have, I know, been um helping professor mark baker at crumfield business school in his ceo research that he's been doing, and I know you talked to him about the foundations of leadership, right, and so, as we've just been talking about leadership here, I know you've got four different areas and four different types of books I think that you refer to in your foundations. Are you able to share those with us?

Mark: 17:01

yeah, I love to, and the context for this is the research that they're doing is trying to build and refresh a model around strategic renewal which is a great term, by the way, but a lot of companies will call it strategic planning, et cetera but strategic renewal. And obviously, over the 16 years I was CEO at Citrix, we had multiple times when we had to really focus on strategic renewal in order to keep growing and keep moving toward our North Star, which we call the virtual workplace. I always felt required was for everyone involved in that process to have a strong foundation of understanding of a number of ideas. So the first one is called the Innovator's Dilemma. It's a great book written by a Harvard Business School professor. His name is and sadly he passed away Ray Christensen.

Mark: 18:14

The Innovator's Dilemma is all about how successful companies can make all the right incremental decisions along the way and still fail because they're disrupted by companies that have a different point of view on the problem being solved and end up being a disruptor while the company with the innovators dilemma. They just keep serving their most profitable customers and they get marginalized by the disruptor that's coming up in behind them. So the rule here is it's better to disrupt yourself than to be disrupted by, you know, an outside, a third party. And so the book and that whole idea gives you not only an intellectual sort of understanding of it but also, you know I think I want to say emotional, but a courage kind of understanding of it as well, because you do need to when it comes to strategic renewal over a long period of time. You do need to disrupt yourself in one way or another.

Sam: 19:34

Yeah, have you got any examples of companies that have got that right? I mean, you know there's well-documented examples.

Mark: 19:40

Kodak is the hackneyed one that gets trotted out all the time, but yeah, well, I'd say, generally speaking, the, uh, the number of companies that get it right are are uh, and rarefied air yes, I'm sure, yeah, yeah. So I think, um, Apple does a pretty good job of that. If you think about their journey, you know how many times the Mac has been reinvented and invalidated. You know higher generations of Macintosh, you know how the iPod got to be such a incredible product and then became a feature of an iPhone.

Mark: 20:25

Okay, yeah, and you know, so I think they they got a great track record there. I think you know a very, very recent example and sadly, I say it sadly you know I I don't don't take take joy in seeing people get disrupted, or but I think intel's an example of someone that that's uh, struggled with the innovators dilemma and um, you know, and I my guess is, uh, there's some, probably some regret that they didn't embrace ARM somewhere along the way.

Mark: 21:07

And you know what they did is they tried to give the x86 CPU, you know, arm kinds of characteristics around power consumption, etc. But when they could have really just jumped on the ARM bandwagon and done some of the things that Apple, for example, has done with ARM, they could have done it first and they could have owned the not only x86 world, they could have owned the ARM world, probably a similar idea in the area of GPUs, you know, cellular and other types of modems that we take for granted these days, and so forth. So, yeah, it's not easy, not at all, it's not an easy thing. But I remember at Citrix, along the way, we invited Professor Christensen to come down from Boston and spend a day and a half with us. He did a presentation, but then we talked with him about our business and where we should be paying attention to being disrupted and the kinds of you know things we should be doing organizationally, technologically, etc. And he really inspired us to, you know, to take that on in a much more serious way.

Sam: 22:36

Yeah you see it time and time again. You know, in the automotive industry, in the technology industry, all over the place there's always. You know I'm now involved part of my time in the craft beer industry. It's funny. You talk about serving the people who helped you in the past. I'm helping Gareth, who was my right hand man for many years at Softcat, to set up and grow us initially a micro. We call it a nano brewery at the minute we're trying to now become a micro. Well, we call it a nano brewery at the minute we're trying to now become a micro brewery. And you know that market is. It's a continual cycle because the successful, new and interesting brewers get bought up by the big companies who then make their product boring and then another one comes up. So you know we just want to be the next one coming up and making an interesting, exciting bear. Really.

Mark: 23:28

Yeah, yeah.

Sam: 23:31

Got to keep innovating.

Mark: 23:32

Yeah, in order to, I think, act on the learnings from the innovator's dilemma, you need to what we talked about before having a growth mindset and a growth mindset. There's a fantastic book called the Growth Mindset and the premise of the book is pretty simple and that is most people think that they're wired a certain way and they're either wired for growth or they're not wired for growth. So the growth mindset tries to break that assumption by showing that you can actually learn and teach yourself to have a growth mindset and why it's a very successful book, a very important idea book. A very important idea because you know kind of what goes on between your ears defines what it is you have the courage to do or not do. So this gives you the courage to you know, to be curious, to make assumptions.

Mark: 24:42

Check your assumptions that sort of got you here. Check your assumptions that that sort of got you here. It it gives you the uh, the wherewithal to, to question some of the fundamental ideas that a business or that even your leadership style is based upon, and it's a great way to push yourself, but it's also a great way a book that helps you introspect, because you know you really can't, you really can't develop yourself until you know yourself. And knowing yourself means introspection and looking in that mirror and being really brutally honest about you. Know where are your flat spots, where can you develop, et cetera. Develop etc.

Vic: 25:26

Yeah, and this book mindset is a great tool for getting there without that baseline, you're just paying lip service to yeah to growth mindset I know we're going to come on to it a little bit later, but one of the things that that we are able to do with the assessments that we run. So you know we're going to talk about, um, the five dysfunctions or the five behaviors. Our starting point is we get our clients to do disc, and that is a great self self-reflection, but out of disc. So that is, are you active, fast-paced, assertive and bold, or are you more moderate and calm about how you go about things? Or are you and are you open to new ideas and very empathetic and people focused, or are you more questioning and skeptical and that on that circle you then get to plot yourself which I did it even just with the students yesterday and then that, oh, that's why I'm so making decisions on things, but I'm still getting to those decisions.

Vic: 26:21

But but one of the things that comes out of it is we're able to give leaders a comparison report and it's on a spectrum of are you open minded or do you have a fixed mindset or are you open to new ideas, and it compares you to the people that you're working with and it just gives you that, oh, I didn't realize actually that I was so fixed in my ideas. I do realize that I need to do that, so having tools that help us do this as well now is so valuable.

Mark: 26:56

That exercise is powerful. It's done on a team basis because team can understand each other better. And you know great teams, not everyone is. You know it's a jigsaw puzzle, right?

Vic: 27:12

It is absolutely a jigsaw puzzle.

Mark: 27:14

Yeah, so just everyone. When they're honest and you have you do an exercise like that, you can understand, you know where flat spots are on the team. Then others can then be respectful in how they compliment people who have a flat spot here or there.

Vic: 27:35

Yeah, well, it's one of my favorite exercises to do, actually, because we get, we get the team to draw their map and guess where each other is and that self-reflection of where do I think I am versus where other people perceive that. That is a really powerful exercise to do. And then, as you say, you can see, oh, we've got nobody seeking clarity in this team. We really need to do some work there. How are we going to fill that gap that we've got?

Sam: 28:02

Yeah, guided growth mindset yeah.

Mark: 28:06

Yeah, it applies, you know. I mean you don't always like to use, uh, athletics and sports as a metaphor, but on a football field, you know that this person has a incredible left foot, you know, but not an incredible right foot and so you feed the ball to the left foot, you know, etc. You know. So it's sort of having that understanding across the team, around where the the strengths are um yeah and uh, because you need.

Mark: 28:40

You need that diversity of strengths and no one, no one is the full picture usually sadly, I think I'm the one with two left feet I'll fight you for that one, sam football was never my strong point, or soccer for our american listeners.

Sam: 28:57

Yeah, yeah. So I think you know, while we're doing books and and stocking fillers, there was a nother one we wanted to talk about, wasn't there? Leaders Make the Future. Yeah, yeah.

Mark: 29:09

This is a great book. First of all, the title Leaders Make the Future right. It basically says, just in the title, that leaders you know take ownership of the future right and take responsibility for leading into the future. And whether you're the CEO leader or you're a leader in a marketing organization or an engineering group, it doesn't matter. Leaders are all over the place in great companies. All over the place in great companies. The question is, you know, do leaders, are they proactive and do they own it, or are they waiting for guidance and instructions and so forth? So that's one of the things I love about the just the title itself, I think. The second thing is the book is written by Bob Johanson and Bob recently retired from the Institute for the Future and his reputation is he's one of the very few futurists that was a futurist for so long that he actually things started to come true, lived amazing to experience whether his predictions and all you know uh were true.

Mark: 30:37

That's brilliant and, and the fact is you know, he did an amazing, amazing job and does that make him a historian now?

Mark: 30:50

I'm not sure he would want that label, but but nevertheless, the the thing, you know, the thing that I took away from the, from the book, is not only what I just said about taking responsibility for making the future and not being a victim of circumstances, but also the way you do. That is by having an opinion about the future and having that opinion felt in such a strong way that you were willing to bet on it.

Sam: 31:27

Yeah.

Mark: 31:28

So lots of times people have an opinion but they're not willing to bet on it.

Mark: 31:35

But I think you know the great leaders that we have all either known or seen or read about, et cetera. You know they had a very clear opinion about the future and it was so strong they were willing to bet on it. You know whether you're thinking about incredible leaders like Winston Churchill, and you know Franklin Roosevelt, or other leaders like Steve Jobs, and you know, even today, Elon Musk. Elon Musk they're very, very opinionated people and almost to a fault, but you respect them because they're betting.

Sam: 32:15

They're putting it all on the line on that opinion, and by doing that, they're literally bending the future to their will.

Mark: 32:26

Correct, and I think that the book is where I learned this term called VUCA.

Mark: 32:42

VUCA is a term that was developed in a think tank of government high-level government planners, where they had to lay down a set of assumptions about the future, to then understand, you know, how to plan for that future. And VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And so they basically said the future was going to be defined by these characteristics. So, and then you know they they added some, obviously, some definitions in each one of them, and the book does outline those, our messaging and the value that we would deliver as a company in a world, in a VUCA world, where our customers would be dealing with that. And it allowed us to not only have a message for today in terms of helping them deal with a VUCA world, but also allowed us to show the level of empathy that would help them navigate that world in the future and anticipate the needs that they would have when you had geophysical, geopolitical, generational and other kinds of disruptions that businesses, let's just say, would not have control over.

Sam: 34:26

It doesn't feel to me like we're in any less of a VUCA world than we were in 1989. But I guess that stuff is a constant and will always be a constant. So you absolutely need to prepare yourself and your business for the unexpected.

Mark: 34:43

Yes.

Sam: 34:44

Or try and expect the unexpected as much as possible.

Mark: 34:47

Yeah, for sure. And so you know how do you plan. You know for a maximum level of flexibility around the things that are outside viewer control. Right, and I think that was the spirit of reading that book and internalizing it, to understand there are things that are outside of our control, that when you know events outside of our own control happen, that we flex to them and you know, either go around them or actually use them as tailwind in some cases.

Sam: 35:38

Some fab stocking fillers that we're coming up with here. Vicky, yours is probably the Five Behaviours, is it?

Vic: 35:44

It was my stocking filler gosh seven years ago now when we started the Amplified Group and I absolutely consumed all Patrick Lencioni's books that summer and just learned so much from all his fables. But, Mark, I know you and I had an exchange about whether it was the Five Behaviours or the Five Dysfunctions, because you know it as the Five Dysfunctions of a team. I still remember the conversation of you telling me about you reading it on your plane on a red eye over to iForum.

Mark: 36:18

Yes, yeah, it's probably the one reading that changed the course of my career you know more than any other single thing.

Mark: 36:28

Wow, yeah. So a very good friend of mine still a great friend the executive headhunter, and he came to see me and he very sheepishly reached into his briefcase and handed me this book. And I looked at it and it the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And I looked up and I said, Eric, are you telling me that my team is screwed up? Mark, I'm not telling you anything, I'm just telling you to read the book.

Mark: 37:01

Yeah, so it was within the next two weeks we were holding our iForum in Edinburgh and you know I had to it's a red eye to Heathrow and then change planes to then head up to Edinburgh. So I started reading the book and typically on a red eye, I'm trying to sleep, so I've got enough. The next day, but I got into this book and it captured me because I identified with all the characters in the book and putting the CEO and the kinds of problems the CEO was struggling with, and so it just grabbed me and I couldn't put it down. By the time I got to Edinburgh and checked into the Sheraton that was a walking distance from the Edinburgh Conference Centre, in those days it was still dial up.

Vic: 38:04

Yeah, yeah.

Mark: 38:06

So I dialed up and I got on Amazon and Amazon was primarily still a bookseller and I ordered a copy of the book for each of my execs and sent them a note and told them that they were would be receiving this book and that in the book there's an exercise for teams to do and that we would be finding a time to do the exercise as a team. And so that set us on the path of really understanding how we could build a functional team.

Vic: 38:43

Yes.

Mark: 38:44

And you know, allowed us to adopt the language of functional teams and also the characteristics of functional teams. And you know, in thinking about the exchange we had, you know you at Amplified Group are actually helping teams solve this problem. So you're defining these things as best practice behaviors and the book is written in such a way to help you identify dysfunctions and diagnose them as dysfunctions, so that you actually undertake change in behavior or change in the team yes, really changing out.

Vic: 39:28

you know people on the team yeah, yeah, I mean we've, we've absolutely built a business off it.

Vic: 39:33

I mean we've extended it because, funnily enough, the Five Dysfunctions on its own, if you just try and try and get organizations to realize that they need to do that, that if they don't have that growth mindset which, I have to say, a lot of sales leaders we struggle with don't necessarily have that naturally um, we've extended it and we realized that actually what we needed to do was help organizations and actually this was working with the Chasm Group as well, because we had Paul Wiefles from the Chasm Group on and he was talking about speed to market and it wasn't just about tech, it's about how you organize your troops and so putting the two together. We've actually incorporated the methodology behind the five dysfunctions of a team into uh, how do we measure speed of execution, and we've actually got a metric on that and we've been benchmarking the tech industry. But the cornerstone of everything that we do is through the, the five behaviors. But that comes in. So we have four pillars that we we measure, which is purpose, trust, clarity and simplicity. And you know that the simplicity one absolutely comes from you.

Vic: 40:49

Um, with the, the podcast that we did last time, which was the. The simpler you keep things, the faster that you can go, and I think I've told you many times that we've quoted you on that, if you had royalties on that. But the the trust one is where we go deep into the, into the five behaviors, because that's really that if you don't have that piece right, yeah, it's the keystone that holds it all together.

Mark: 41:19

Right, it is yeah, yeah, and that means people have to do hard things, they have to be vulnerable. Yes, you know they have to look deep into their souls and share those things, because you know we're all victims of the scars that we accumulate along the way, starting in childhood, you know. I mean, we're all parents here and when children, they're blank pieces of paper when they're born. And, yeah, we, you know we do inflict scars on our children, the things that have shaped us. And going deep on that and sharing that and being vulnerable about it to me is the essence of having people trust each other and understand each other.

Mark: 42:20

Yeah, it's a powerful exercise to do sides to do you know it's, uh, it's difficult for a lot of people to you know, get that deep and, and, yeah, level of sharing, yeah, and, and.

Vic: 42:33

then from extending on on that to learning how to have conflict and productive conflict and the conflict continuum that lencioni talks about. So it's about being able to have that really robust debate in search of the best ideas. And one of the things that we love talking about is you can't fix secrets. You have to have things out on the table to be able to fix them, and so we go hunting for those secrets and it's magic, honestly.

Mark: 43:01

Yeah.

Vic: 43:02

Really it's magic.

Mark: 43:03

Yeah, yeah, you know, I think great teams again. Going back to the sports analogy you're looking winded. You need to take a break here, for you know three minutes and et cetera and get your wind back and so forth. And great teams do talk to each other, but I think business teams, you know, can, especially in a world of remote working, yes, you know and can can fall down absolutely very easily. Yeah, that's a good point yeah, I think.

Vic: 43:53

I think that's one of the reasons our business has taken up as much as it has is is because remote working is caused, because we we've always known silos are a problem, but they have been exacerbated through, yeah, working remotely they really have.

Sam: 44:10

Yeah, they've broken those casual interactions where, you know, kind of parallel teams might just sort of bump into each other and pass the time of day and yeah, yeah, which is a shame.

Mark: 44:21

I think you have to be more deliberate and intentional about it, I think, than you had to previously yeah, and I think what's under appreciated about the casual interactions is that that's where people tend to let their you know guard down you know be more vulnerable and more sharing and you get to more understanding, and so it's not like standing around the water cooler and talking about the product launch.

Vic: 44:49

No.

Mark: 44:50

You can do that in a meeting room, you can do it on Zoom, but you know, if you're.

Vic: 44:56

It's relationships, isn't it? It's building relationships, and that doesn't happen. So a lot of what we do is encouraging people to still even if you're meeting virtually spend some time to start with, go slow, to go fast, to build those relationships, and then you can get into the business because people will walk over hot coals for you if you've got the relationship in the first place anyway, I'll get off my soapbox, sorry I feel, very passionately about it.

Mark: 45:22

It's perfect. And my guess is everyone listening to this podcast has experienced that moment when they got an insight about someone on their team that they didn't have before had that experience. So that explains why Mary comes at these problems from this direction. Yeah, so now I can have a lot more respect for what Mary's saying, because I better understand the context of what she's saying, and then maybe as a leader, you can help shape or persuade Mary or you know, if necessary, so that Mary will come around and then commit to an idea that maybe she wasn't you know originally. Yeah, exactly.

Mark: 46:17

Everyone's had that experience. Yeah, it comes from being very, very conscious of understanding, uh, others around on our team at a deeper level than just what are they responsible for on the team yes, yeah, yeah, I'm constantly saying what we do is not rocket science, but you have to be deliberate and intentional about it and actually it can be.

Vic: 46:41

To back to our point here about growth mindset it can be learned yeah it absolutely can, and the five, five dysfunctions really highlights that. So, sam, I know we've got another book to get to.

Sam: 46:53

Yes, oh, yeah, we wanted to talk about financially stuff, didn't we?

Mark: 46:58

yeah yeah.

Sam: 46:59

So this is interesting to me because when I was young and trying to be as upcoming as possible, martin our, then I guess MD, or maybe he moved to chief executive at that point, but either way, he sent me on a day's course that was entitled Finance for Non-Financial Managers Right, because you know I always pretended to be number blind. I wasn't number blind, but I was more interested in strategy and people and things than actually numbers. And you know I realize now that numbers are just a tool to help you understand that stuff better. So I'm really interested in your perspective on that, because I must say that that course really helped me.

Mark: 47:42

Yeah. So you know this comes up because you know, in business in a for-profit business, let's just say it that way you know the obligation is to grow and make a profit, and if you don't, you're not going to last long, of course. And so I think it's incumbent on everyone in a company to be financially literate. Some people will have gone to business school, either undergraduate or master's, et cetera. They're usually in pretty good shape, but, generally speaking, I think most organizations are not financially literate enough for everyone then to understand why certain decisions are being made that affect them and then, further, how they can make better decisions by having financial literacy around, knowing the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet, knowing that just because a company has a huge pile of cash on their balance sheet doesn't mean that they can spend all that money on X, y and .

Sam: 49:01

PAL. Even simple things like the difference between net profit and gross profit.

Mark: 49:05

Sure, and things like contribution margins and taxes at a high level and some of the basic terminologies necessary. Because I think that if you think about all the things that we've talked about having a functional team, seizing the future and making it happen, understanding the old notion of disrupting oneself to avoid being disrupted from the outside, having a growth mindset all of these things they're all directed at a better business, a business that grows, a business that makes a profit. Once you have that basic financial literacy, you can't map all that other stuff to the outcome you're looking for, and that is business growth, the profitable growth. So I always encouraged this idea of financial literacy and at Citrix we did have a course called finance for non-financial managers and I learned that, you know, when I was, when I went to business school and got my master's. The school I went to is one of the best, has one of the best executive education programs in the world, and that's one of the most popular courses that they have, and so you can take this online.

Mark: 50:34

There are lots of them out there. Again, going back to self-development, this would be something that I hope that everyone that's listening to this podcast, if they aren't financially literate, that they put on their gift list to themselves for this holiday season that they'll take that course and become financially literate and they'll be so much more valuable to their businesses. They'll be so much more valuable to their businesses. They'll have so much more understanding of decisions that are being made that have impact on their part of the business and it'll bring their anxiety down quite a bit by having that financial literacy we at some point, uh, put in a commercial finance function at softcap.

Sam: 51:33

I sort of started off seeing them as the enemy, because they wanted to run the numbers and block something that my intuition told me was the right thing to do. And actually, after working with them for a little while, I worked out that actually they were an ally, because if they could prove you know so far as you can through modeling that my the thing that I intuited was the right thing to invest in would produce a return, we would invest in it because we'd be silly not to. So actually getting that understanding is really important. That was certainly. I've probably forgotten it all now, but that was certainly something that was immensely useful to me at a relatively early stage in my senior career, if you will.

Mark: 52:36

Yeah, and that literacy doesn't mean that you shut down ideas that don't have a short-term payback. And I have to set expectations with the organization, with shareholders, whoever, in such a way that they understand what the trajectory is. So you know, public investors hate when companies do acquisitions that are dilutive, which means you know you do a transaction and it actually dilutes your earnings, your value, yeah, dilute your growth rate. It could dilute a lot of things. Right, it could dilute shareholders from an ownership perspective. In some cases you do that because it's strategically the right thing to do and therefore you prepare everyone that we're going to do this. We're going to take a hit in the short term, but in the long term this is going to power the business forward.

Mark: 53:36

And I can point to, like in the Citrix journey, a number of acquisitions we did that were dilutive, where we were punished by investors. We did that were dilutive, where we were punished by investors, but we were able to explain to them that, yes, this is dilutive in the short term, but this is the value that it's adding to the business in the long term. And when we bought a little company called Expert City that turned into GoToMeeting, all of a know years later, people said, well, this was a brilliant thing to do. When we bought a company called NetScaler, which was very dilutive Again, it didn't take long before everyone understood. You know what the financial sort of value was to the company, so you know. That's another. That's a key aspect of financial literacy.

Sam: 54:32

Yeah, I liken it a bit to music theory. So there's a school of thought out there that if you're a musician you know you're sort of you're intuitive and you're playing by ear and you know you kind of go with the flow and you get into that flow state and actually actually if you learn musical theory, that might restrict you in your creativity and I mean I am by no means a fantastic musician, I know I know just enough musical theory to get by. But gloom and heck, it helps me get that faster when I'm writing bass lines for songs, because I, you know, you, you know what stuff to choose from. I think it does make sense.

Vic: 55:09

It's more informed decisions, isn't it?

Sam: 55:10

Yeah, informed decisions. That's exactly the way it should be. Yeah, so we normally ask our guests for a book recommendation, but I think we've kind of done that Our three or four Christmas executive stocking fillers shall we call them something like that? I don't know whether we need to be talking about executive stockings, but there we go. So, in lieu of that, perhaps you could help us to wrap up by taking us through three key takeaways, or as many key takeaways as you want. You are our esteemed and probably our most listened to guest, so you can have as few or as many takeaways as you choose.

Mark: 55:48

Let's talk about takeaways, but you know I do have one more book that.

Sam: 55:52

I want to talk about.

Mark: 55:57

And it's a children's book actually and the name of the book and perhaps many parents that are listening to this podcast will know this book it's called the Velveteen Rabbit.

Sam: 56:13

Oh wow, I remember that from when I was a kid.

Mark: 56:15

It was written in 1932 by Margery Williams and, as is the case in a lot of children's books, there's an adult message to it that has a lesson in the posh rabbit that is given as a gift through the course of the book and not to be a spoiler here, you know becomes real, know becomes real. So there's a sort of a whimsical fantasy sort of dimension to this book and it's a super important book because the most powerful thing you can be is authentic and real, which means a whole set of things about vulnerability, being honest, you know a lot of the things that we've already talked about, and this book in some ways is the takeaway, all right, and the interesting short story. You know my introduction to the book is short story. You know my introduction to the book is I had a professor early in my college time in college who thought our class, everyone in it that we were full of crap, that we were all plastic and not being real, right.

Mark: 58:03

So one class he didn't show up and he left an excerpt from the Velveteen Rabbit on everybody's chair and you know, we went in and we looked at it and read it and we decided his name was Bill Mitchell. Someone said Bill's finally gone over the edge, he's probably run off to join the circus. And some of us said, no, bill's trying to tell us something, we just don't know what he's trying to tell us. So that would have been 1971. My oldest son was born in 1983. So literally was born in 1983. So literally 12, 13 years later, when he was gifted this book, the Velveteen Rabbit, and I had him sitting on my lap and I was reading it to him because I was reading the entire book. All right, it finally registered what Bill Mitchell?

Mark: 59:10

was trying to tell us. He was trying to tell us that we were being plastic and superficial and not being real and authentic. It made a huge impact on me and I always used it to help develop others that had very high potential but were afraid to be vulnerable and be authentic, et cetera, and thought that authenticity was a sign of weakness. So I highly recommend that book and I think so many people who are probably listening to this podcast will say, yeah, I read that book but I didn't internalize it to myself the message yeah.

Mark: 59:48

Myself right. So go back and read it, Get it from the bookshelf from your children and read it again.

Sam: 59:57

I remember reading or being read that when I was a kid. Now I wonder if it's more of an American. So I spent five years of my childhood, between about the age of five to ten, in Southern California. Yeah, and I presume I know it from there.

Mark: 1:00:12

My recollection is that Margery Williams is British.

Sam: 1:00:16

Well, maybe, maybe, but you know, it definitely feels like you know, something that is popular in America Could be, but maybe not so much over here, so it's probably an even better recommendation.

Vic: 1:00:31

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Mark: 1:00:32

The movie blues were a british man that actually was more popular in the united states.

Vic: 1:00:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah true, true, but when you first um told me that story mark, I think you know, when we were prepping for this, the whole story of being authentic. I think I have learned that myself more over the last, maybe since Covid, in the last four, four years, and and it it actually feels like it's set me free and the more authentic I am and the more myself I am and the more honest I am about how I'm feeling.

Vic: 1:01:09

So I'll kick off an exec meeting for the first time and I'll tell the person I'm speaking to that I've got sweaty palms, that I'm feeling nervous about it right and it feels like it set me free, because the more I'm like that, the more confidence I get to be more, more me and the more successful we seem, we seem to be being as a, as a team. So it's, it's such a powerful story yeah.

Sam: 1:01:35

Do you think you get more confidence to be authentic, the sort of the older you you get or the more experienced you get, and maybe the less you start to care about what other people think about you?

Mark: 1:01:45

yeah, well, for some people it manifests itself in that way. It's like I don't care what someone thinks about me. I don't like to think of it that way, I just like to think of it that you know you get first of all, as you get older, you get to understand yourself better.

Vic: 1:02:03

Yes.

Mark: 1:02:05

And you're more accepting of yourself, yes, and, and therefore you're more comfortable in your own skin that's it, yeah, and yeah, and in order to, you know, achieve the level of authenticity and to do that earlier in your career, you know you have to, you have to set out to know yourself and be honest with yourself, and that's why some of the things we talked about, you know, as a, as a leader, ask your team. You know what. How can I be better? You know, evaluate yourself on an annual basis and then decide what it is you're going to do to improve. All of those things are acts of authenticity that then you just get more comfortable, um, in your own skin, because in order to be yourself, you have to understand and accept yourself. Yes, yeah, and it's a very natural thing later in your career and, um, you know, know, it's the old compound interest message the earlier you can get there, the more years you have to compound interest on that understanding.

Sam: 1:03:16

Yes, makes sense. It goes all the way back to Socrates. That Nosce te ipsum know thyself.

Mark: 1:03:22

Yes, yeah, amen, yes, yeah, amen. And then I think you know the takeaways of the conversation we've had.

Mark: 1:03:49

You know it starts with the whole idea of owning your development and that comes from having a deep understanding of yourself and where your flat spots are and being honest with yourself about them and being authentic about that and sharing those things with others. Secondly, it's about you know, having an attitude, that you're going to be a lifelong learner, that you know you have to keep pushing yourself and developing yourself. And that means you know having the mind of a student and always having that. You know innocence that students have for the most part and being curious about learning more and more and pushing yourself, and then you know. The third sort of thing is it underscores, then this whole notion of having a growth mindset, because it can be learned.

Mark: 1:04:33

These are not yeah things that, necessarily, you have to be wired for right. Yeah, and so they are skills that you can learn brilliant.

Sam: 1:04:44

Well, what a christmas gift for our listeners that is yeah, and give the gift to yourself yeah, absolutely yeah one of my gifts to myself was this uh christmas sport coat.

Mark: 1:04:57

I love it I absolutely love it.

Sam: 1:04:58

I want one I.

Mark: 1:05:00

I kind of like it, but I'm I'm still on the on the edge, so I left the tag on, in case I need to return now.

Sam: 1:05:06

I think I think it's magnificent. I think you should absolutely wear it until you wear holes in the elbows or whatever over this christmas period. It's fabulous, all right, and I'll take that.

Mark: 1:05:17

I'll take that compliment and that advice. I just, I just hope we can find a way of publishing a photo when we, when we uh, we will we publish this because, uh, it's absolutely magnificent, the most festive thing I've seen this year well, well, with that, you know, I want to say that you know, um, uh, it's, it's been a joy to to be uh on amplified um podcast again. Uh, especially the Christmas special. I love Christmas specials, by the way, and it's always special to talk to you all.

Sam: 1:05:52

And.

Mark: 1:05:52

I wish you, your families and everyone you know a very, very happy holiday. Merry Christmas. You know, whatever you celebrate this time of year, a time for reflection and renewal, and joy and hope for the future. I wish everyone just a wonderful, wonderful year end time.

Vic: 1:06:16

Thank you, thank you.

Sam: 1:06:17

Thank you. You know we really appreciate it. It's just wonderful to have you on, especially at this busy time of year. It's so good of you to join us and share some pearls of wisdom. For us and for our listeners, that would absolutely be fantastic.

Vic: 1:06:31

Thank you.

Sam: 1:06:32

Thank you. Well, it just remains for me to say, first of all, a very Merry Christmas indeed to all our listeners. We hope you have a great festive period. Thank you, as always, for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. Your comments, your subscriptions are gratefully received.