How to Know You’re Doing a Good Job as a Leader - Dan Blundell
As leaders get further in their career there are less formal performance indicators like career maps or formal feedback loops. This lack of clarity along with so much complexity, responsibility and organizational accountability, it’s hard for leaders to know if they’re doing a good job. They struggle to know where to improve. To share how one leader developed a system for assessing his performance, I spoke with Dan Blundell, Director of Engineering at Gymshark. (note: UK Director is equivalent to VP in the states) Dan is a former client and I was happy he was up for talking about his journey.
We talked about:
Why saying yes as a leader has a upsides and downsides
Why others’ happiness is a shallow indicator of how you’re doing
How he used to his assess his performance
The rubric he uses now
The connection between being a drummer and leadership
Obviously we know each other though we just discovered that we were both music majors. Tell me more about your musician journey.
I started playing drums when I was eight years old and learned orchestral percussion and jazz and big bands. I went to music college instead of a regular university. I studied music performance and business. I realized music was really hard and ended up traveling around in a van. We traveled around in a van playing the weirdest like little backstreet clubs and anywhere to get a gig. And at the same time, I found myself the following week playing humongous concert halls with huge concert orchestras. The contrast and dynamic of those two things – going from white shirts and bow ties and huge concert halls to ripped jeans and scraggy t -shirts in strange London pubs was a bit too much after a while but I had a lot of fun. I ended up in tech after all that to do something a bit different but there are similarities between things I learned in the music industry that I ended up applying to my tech roles.
So (music) was a lot of fun, but it was so much harder than I ever imagined it would be. I thought I was just going to be hitting things for a living.
Music is so much harder than it looks. I was a music major when I first went to college. I played five instruments at the time. I got Cs in my first semester (after graduating high school with honors). Apparently even passing that first semester was an accomplishment as it’s designed to weed people out. I’ve had several guests who are musicians, many have been software engineers though not all. It’s fascinating that there’s all these tech leaders who have been musicians.
I remember talking to someone else about this. They were like, “It’s because music is math.” And I was like, “Of course it is.” All that dynamic of notes, melody and harmony all being essentially patterns in mathematics. It’s a blend of highly logical and highly creative.
I think that's really interesting. I do think that leadership also requires some logic, but also some creativity, because the problems are not straightforward. It’s hard to know what the right answer is.
Can you share a bit more about your background for those who don’t know you?
I'm Dan Blundell. I’m an Engineering Director at Gymshark. We're a product and community brand, based in the UK. I've been here for about three and a half years. I moved into this role about 18 months ago. It was my first, what we deem a senior leadership role. Prior to that, I was Head of Core Engineering. So I was also head of backend engineering here. Before that I'd done all kinds of different roles in different industries. I'd worked with the government, healthcare, e-commerce, agencies, but always in a software engineering leadership capacity. I've always really loved it. I loved the challenge of the people, the technology, the process and trying to bring all that together to generate some value out of it. So I say I stumbled into tech after being a failed musician.
You're not the first. Zac Smith, who was on the series, went to Juilliard and calls himself a failed musician. By the way, he co-founded Packet with his twin brother (who is also a musician) which they sold to Equinix so…you’re in good company.
Can you give some more context for folks about how you got into leadership?
Very accidental. But it felt fairly natural for me. I took on a team because I was the senior most engineer. I think people thought I sounded like I knew what I was doing. I took on various roles either leading projects or leading teams and that just accumulated over a number of years.
I have a habit of saying yes to things which is a valuable skills…until it tires you out. It taught me a lot by saying yes to a lot of things and seeing how far I could get by self-direction, and figuring things out. I had really good mentors, support and people challenging me.
I worked my way to Head of Digital which was running six or seven teams of five to eight people redesigning end-to-end services in government and healthcare. That was my most significant role prior to Gymshark. So it was very accidental. And some way through that, I took on a more formal approach. So I did a masters in leadership and management because I got to the point where I needed to validate the experience I have. I needed something else to go, do I really know what I'm on about?
It was a very early sign of the conversation we’ve had numerous times, which is how do I get an understanding if what I’m doing is a good thing and am I doing a good job? How do I know?
You carry all those sorts of tiny lessons with you. Leaders are just this accumulation of their experiences.
I love that you talk about being an accidental leader. I think lots of people get into leadership because they step into what I call a leadership void. Something isn’t happening so we step into it. That sounds like it was true for you too, just by noticing things that needed work.
Yeah, when I think about it, in my teenage years I was on stage a lot. Musicianship played a really big part in how I lead because there were times when people play the wrong part – they come in at the wrong time, they play too loud, they play too quiet. There's these adjustments that you have to make to be able to get things back on track. As the person who was in a percussive role, I played the drums, I had to keep people’s time. I had to be the person who guided people back along the right path when things went wrong.
You learn an awful lot when you sit in front of thousands of people in an auditorium and you're the one that people look up and go, what are we doing here? This doesn’t sound the way it’s supposed to. Helping keep people on track helped me to no end because I was thrown into the deep end really early on in a completely unrelated field but it feels so familiar when it comes to leadership because you just have to figure out an awful lot and it gave me the skills to do so.
It’s so true as a musician, there’s so much about teamwork. It’s a system of people and coordination. I could see being on percussion as a big leadership role because you have to have a really good rhythm because if you don’t we’re all over the place.
Yeah, everyone goes in different directions at that point. You can (also) be the person that throws everything off by playing at the wrong, playing the wrong thing. Everyone takes the lead from that. I was taught subtle ways of adjusting how you play, where you put emphasis in a piece of music to subtly guide people back to the rhythm or the pace and the time and the texture you want to create in music.
You carry all those sorts of tiny lessons with you. Leaders are just this accumulation of their experiences.
And then seeing some of those play out is wonderful because you realize that some of things you didn’t pay attention to at the time you had no idea how important they were going to be later in your career.
Let’s talk about the downside of say yes too much in leadership.
The most obvious one for me has been saying yes to things that aren't my responsibility. We’ve talked a lot about me having a great sense of responsibility over anything I’m near.
(Having a great sense of responsibility) is a massive strength in so many ways but saying yes to too many things means I can get caught in trying to solve problems that aren’t mine to solve. It distracts me from the real focus and impact of what I can do or my main strengths. I want us to succeed as a team and company so saying yes too often and too freely on too many things and can lead to absorbing too much responsibility, too many tasks and too many things to do.
A lot of leaders struggle with the yes thing but we don’t talk about it enough. It’s hard to know where our responsibility ends. There’s a real downside if we say yes too much. It’s related to how do we know if we’re doing a good job? We’ve spent a lot of time talking about that. Many leaders wonder about it so I’m grateful you’re willing to share your journey for figuring out your measures for knowing if you’re doing a good job.
It was very simply, are other people happy with me? It makes me kind of cringe now but it’s also helped me in so many ways, just understanding whether people were happy with me. It wasn’t so much, did they like me, but that was a proxy for if they had a good experience working with me, were they happy with what I’d done or what my team had done?
That manifested with things like being able to ask people for feedback about how they felt about the work we’d done or how we’d approached something or how I’d led a team. It was all based on someone else’s feedback on that. Thinking back, I could have done a really good job of certain things but felt terrible about them just because someone was upset about something or didn’t meet their expectations. I never challenged if their expectations were correct. I lived and died by the whole, “Oh no, they’re really upset. This is crushing!”
(Having a great sense of responsibility) is a massive strength in so many ways but saying yes to too many things means I can get caught in trying to solve problems that aren’t mine to solve. It distracts me from the real focus and impact of what I can do or my main strengths. I want us to succeed as a team and company so saying yes too often and too freely on too many things and can lead to absorbing too much responsibility, too many tasks and too many things to do.
Yeah, that’s a hard way to live as a leader. We all know this but we sort of forget it when we get in the role. We can’t make people happy all the time. Sometimes we have to make people unhappy because it’s the right thing overall for the business or organization. I think it’s interesting – it was other people's feedback and external was outside of yourself.
What made you realize that this measure – are other people happy with me, my team, what we're doing – wasn’t working?
I got really good at keeping people happy. Even when it was bad news and someone was going to lose, I got really good at helping people stay happy. It was exhausting. I was tired all the time. I carried a lot. I just worked more hours for the longest time. I would look at situations and go, everyone can get what they want if I do X or Y, if I work a little longer.
It got to the point where I couldn’t keep everyone happy anymore but worried that it directly affected my reputation because I’d attached so much to it. I just got incredibly stretched to the point of there were no more hours left to give, no more energy left to give.
I've stressed myself so far that that tension just couldn't be pulled any thinner before it broke. It was conversations with you – I needed external help because the people around me all have a stake in what I do – to have someone to work with through that kind of problem that helped. It wasn’t the problem we initially addressed. We worked through a whole bunch of different problems. All the symptoms were there – I just couldn’t keep everyone happy anymore. I thought I needed to change something. I came to you with a bunch of isolated problems, How do I fix this? Can we work through this? I’ve got this situation. What do we do? You said, “It seems like you’re worried about whether you’re doing a good job or not. And that’s how affecting how you make decisions.” We unpacked that together.
It felt like a really nice turning point in the work. What I also noticed from my angle was that you seemed like you were really hard on yourself if you said something wrong or didn't have a conversation right. I'm a recovering perfectionist so I’ve been there. Another way it manifested was doubting yourself and spending a lot of time and energy thinking about it.
I remember one of the first challenges I brought to you was I don't think I'm communicating effectively. When people weren’t happy I thought it was clearly a problem with how I communicated. But when we talked through it and you helped me see I was communicating fine, they just weren’t happy. I was looking at the wrong problem for the longest time until we unpacked it. I just spiraled and spiraled and spiraled on the same things.
It got to the point where I couldn’t keep everyone happy anymore but worried that it directly affected my reputation because I’d attached so much to it. I just got incredibly stretched to the point of there were no more hours left to give, no more energy left to give.
There’s been this movement around making our employees happy. It’s incredible and the right direction but we can overcompensate and lose sight of the full picture. I think it’s easy fall into. Leadership will teach you that you can’t do that or it will burn you out.
It will indeed. First hand experience.
If we’re focused on a narrow measure we won’t be able to meet our objective. We need a wider perspective of the role. You changed your rubric. You can talk about what changed and the new rubric?
When talking about effectiveness in the role, you asked about other things you’d measure, how you’d measure if someone was good in the role? That changed the conversation. We’d done a lot of work to that point so it was a very relevant question for us to spend time on.
The first thing I talked through was narrowing the scope of whose happiness was relevant. Accepting the fact that I can't keep everyone happy because it is going to burn through all my energy very quickly and consistently. So I narrowed my focus on whose happiness matters. There’s like five people on the list, not everyone I meet. It’s not that I’m not going to be kind and supportive and human to those people but if I upset them inadvertently for other reasons, it’s not going to ruin my day. It’s incredibly healthy for me now.
That reduced version was a great way to begin. Then you pulled a few others that started to understand my effectiveness in my role. The next one was whether the people that report to me are progressing. I might have oversight and responsibility for all the software engineering work we do but it's important those people are progressing. How I’m building leadership capacity in those people to make sure that they're getting better was incredibly important to me. So that was number two. That really helped.
Then we got into a conversation that stemmed from my frustrations over where I felt I’d made mistakes, things I’d been blind to or not paying as much attention to. It was around being proactive. Am I being proactive about how we’re improving what we do? Am I making plans ahead of where we need to get to? Can I demonstrate how impactful we’re being and how we’re collectively getting better?
Then there were two left over. They were practical approaches to making sure we’re working on and building the right things. If we're not working on and building the right things that are super valuable to the company, then I'm probably not doing a very good job objectively. And are the things we’ve built running well? This was effectively the engineering operations side of things. Once we built something, are we optimizing it? Is it running effectively? Can we debug it and fix it? Can we handle incidents well?
My new rubric became: Am I keeping the right people happy? Are the people I lead developing themselves? Am I bring proactive? Are we working on valuable things? Are we running those things effectively? With that framework I suddenly had a whole new measurement system. These are an effective way of understanding if I’m doing this job well.
And just because on a random Tuesday in February, someone got upset about decision I made, doesn't mean I'm doing a bad job, it just means they're upset about the decision that had to be made and that can be okay.
When you get into senior leadership career maps and other supportive structures fall away. Knowing whether you’re doing a good job becomes more difficult. In my experience, we don’t invest enough in leadership development for senior leaders. Also, we often think feedback loops are just in humans. There are also feedback loops in the business, the organization and the product. There are other feedback loops than just how I’m feeling about my work.You have much more robust feedback loops now.
Yeah. When you have one metric you have a bias for that one thing. What was really great was having this set of things that had interplay, that were related, which meant that one could go up and the other could come down. And that was actually good. They weren't all going to be a 10 out of 10. They weren't all going to be a hundred percent all the time. It was being able to flex and find balance in each of those to make sure we were doing the right thing at the right time.
Gymshark is a very seasonal business so my role is seasonal depending on what time of year it is. So different dynamics need dialing up and dialing down. This (framework) gave me the opportunity to visualize it and work with it.
My new rubric became: Am I keeping the right people happy? Are the people I lead developing themselves? Am I bring proactive? Are we working on valuable things? Are we running those things effectively? With that framework I suddenly had a whole new measurement system. These are an effective way of understanding if I’m doing this job well.
How has your work and the way you lead changed with this more robust framework for understanding if you’re doing a good job?
I'm freer. I will always carry a lot of responsibility for the work I do but (the framework) has allowed me to be a more focused and effective leader. I’m freer to not feel like all of that is on my shoulders alone. When things don’t work, it’s not me who goes home and sits in a dark room. I can be a lot more rational. There’s a shared sense of responsibility from me to my peers to the people I work with. I felt isolated before that because I felt a sense of responsibility and it wasn’t anyone else’s fault but mine. Like if something didn’t work there was always more I could have done. I don’t think that’s less true, I just can understand and rationalize it more effectively which has been incredibly helpful. It’s the least anxious I’ve felt in the last five or six years. I didn't realize I'd felt so much stress and anxiety over how I was leading and carrying that for such a long period of time.
It was like someone had taken a humongous weight off my back.
I'd normalised feeling a kind of tight chest. I'd normalised feeling worn down and tired. I mean I've got two kids, I'm bound to be tired, but at the same time it was an unnecessary mental tiredness of trying to hold all of this mental model of everything moving at the same time and pinning it on myself as well. So that more than anything was the biggest change in remodelling how I thought about my own approach to what I did and that was the most liberating thing I've done in six or seven years easily.
I noticed that the conversations changed. The topics changed. You started talking about well, how am I building capacity? You were always strong in decision making but you seemed more confident.
Yeah, I feel like as a team we’re moving so much faster. It’s not that we weren’t delivering or moving on things but the time we make high quality decisions has shortened. I’m more comfortable with being direct and more directive. It’s always been one of those things I’m reluctant to do mostly because I don’t really like being told what to do. I love figuring things out and learning but that doesn’t allow me to push in making sure moving together as a team and making high quality decisions. That’s definitely improved since changing my mental model. So moving quicker, being more decisive, feel lighter and more effective for the people that I’m working with as well. They get a more precise, more concise understanding of what we're trying to do. I didn't expect to do that when we started working together.
What other advice would you give leaders who are struggling to figure out if they’re doing a good job?
Get a coach. Talk to someone. One of the biggest shifts for me was the way I lead. The story I’d been telling myself was that certain things are really important. Have some way to work through what you believe to be true and whether they’re actually helping you – whether than a coach or a peer. Holding other people’s happiness in such high regard universally got me to a certain point but it wasn’t going to help me move forward. Learning to let go of that was probably the biggest inflection point in that change. I loved it. It was hard work but having that moment to step back and reflect on whether that belief was going to help me learn or hold me back was the biggest change.