Bryan Power
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Bryan Power’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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People are so much more skilled at doing really substantive conversations over video with people they don't work with. It's not that we weren't working on video before, but it tended to only be with your coworkers. But now it's just so normal to FaceTime with the grandparents or take video calls at networking meetings. This is just really proliferated on how often people are on video.
And so I think that's really opened up how people find out about new opportunities and how you get to know people because the time and place commitment is much lighter now.
My personal point of view is that the remote environment is much tougher for leaders to do their job. And in many ways, it's easier or more desirable for employees. They have more access to getting out of work quickly. But so much of what leaders do is relationship-based. It's your network internally across the company.
It's the ability to pick up signals that are nonverbal when you're in an environment. And those are much more difficult to pick up over video when you're in your house with like a fake background. And I think that's why so many leaders have pressured the system to come back into work. It's really about their needs as much as what's right for everyone.
I think what's right for everyone is a different answer. But certainly you just kind of read the headlines. More and more senior executives you know, more experienced, 20, 30 plus years of experience. The bias is clearly to working in person. And I think it's because there's so much more information at their disposal to do their job.
I also found too, one of the more interesting research, I probably can find it for you, scientific research based on how your brain remembers things, people in particular, is your brain responds to a 3D representation of a person. So in person, your brain imprints who you are. where a two-dimensional screen, like on a laptop, your brain doesn't imprint who you are as well.
This is why I always found myself, like, I feel like I've met this person before and I can't remember. I thought I was just getting old, but I think there's actually, it's more difficult to retain that in-person meeting someone. It's not the exact same thing as meeting someone on video.
And so anything that's tied to building relationships or social capital, trust, which is really rooted in those things, it's just harder to do over video. It's not that it can't be done, but it's definitely more difficult. And there's lots of studies that have showed that.
I think the classic nature versus nurture debate is kind of the jumping off point for everybody. I'm very much a nurture person. I feel like leaders are created by their environment versus the idea of a born leader. I've seen too many people who were incredibly impressive that If you had gone back 10 years before, you would not pick them as the person to really be that.
So when I'm looking for leaders just internally at the company, who's going to be promoted, who is a future CEO or something like that, I really try to just pay attention to how they're impacting the environment around them. how they get their job done as much as what they were able to accomplish. That approach tends to give you signals on what the future trajectory is going to be.
And is there how or is there why do they operate a certain way? Those are the things that give you a better point of view than just were they able to get the thing done that they were supposed to.
I tend to focus on similar to questions you asked me at the beginning. Take me back to moments of adversity and what did you get through it? And just how the person responds to what was adversity, let alone like what did they do with it, can give you a sense of the types of challenges that they've experienced. had to come across.
One of the more profound concepts I've learned really came from the Kapoor Foundation here in the Bay Area, which is this idea of the distance traveled. I don't know if you're familiar with this concept. It's really about, you should look at like how far did they have to come to get to where they are versus where are they? And so like,
The hiring metaphor would be, generally speaking, people want to hire the top person out of MIT or Stanford. But if they are like third generation Stanford and had tutors their whole life and had interns all through that their parents set up for them or their family set up for them, But the fifth best person was the first person to go to college and worked all the way through.
Would you still really want the first person knowing how far the person who came in fifth had come? So this distance traveled really means look at their journey. And so when I interview or assess, I'm trying to get a sense of what's their rate of learning in growth and achievement. By achievement, I mean, what have they been able to overcome?
Because that path is better than zooming in almost like a case study of what was this example that showed you figured something out. Like I think anyone who's interviewing has some type of prepared example of they did something good. But when you get into their journey, like the ground someone covers and what they knew and didn't know is really, I think, what stands out.
I think particularly in tech, we don't focus on this enough. We kind of look at where are they today and does that match to where I'm in today? You know, are they at a little bigger company in the same area of experience? Then they must be able to help us instead of thinking about their learning velocity and ability to overachieve whatever's in front of them.
I can't think of any one event. I'm not the only person who grew up with this tradition, but I grew up in a blue collar, lower middle class family. We didn't have everything. We certainly weren't poor. I do remember when I was 11 or 12, my dad said I couldn't have money whenever I asked for it, but anytime I wanted a book, he would pay for it.
That accelerated my love for reading, which ultimately meant learning. Throughout all phases of my life, whether I was going to high school and college and finding a job, there's just been this desire to learn more, which ends up back to what I said at the beginning of seeking environments where I don't know what to do or I'm going to be challenged.
If I was to pick a pattern of the roles I've taken, the companies I've joined, what's been really clear has been, I probably don't think I was totally qualified and I definitely didn't know what to do. You make a lot of mistakes, but ultimately, hopefully you get on top of it. And then the next challenge will be bigger.
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