John Miles
speaker
649 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 18 Jun
John Miles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
a long time at that point who was talking to me about things that were so different and foreign about what Microsoft could be if they would start doing things differently. And that was Satya Nadella. And this was three and a half years before he took over the role that he has now.
The reason I'm bringing this all up is I didn't end up taking that position because I thought I was walking into a toxic culture at the time, which it would have been. But if you look at what he has brought into that company, He has really brought in a culture of growth, of constant learning, where he really rewards people for being curious about how to do things differently.
But there's also a culture of deliberate action. And when you combine those things, meaning you're choosing growth time and time again, whether it's in your personal life or in a business setting, And then you're constantly taking actions that go in concert with that growth you're trying to creating. It's a perfect recipe for greatness.
We think that in order to achieve these monumental things in life. It comes down to these grandiose moments. And what I have learned from talking to 50-plus behavior scientists and reading hundreds of books is that's not how things work. We as humans are the ultimate learning machine.
And coupling that with intentional actions that get either you or the organization that you're working for closer to the long-term aspirations and the shorter-term ambitions that you're trying to accomplish.
So I think one of the leading causes of disengagement and people feeling unfulfilled in work is we're dehumanizing work, meaning it is so much about the spreadsheets and top line and bottom line growth that we're taking out the human and we're trying to maximize profits by micromanaging or robotizing or institutionalizing the work that people do.
What that approach is doing is it is helping with top and bottom line growth, in the short term, but it also weeds out creativity and innovation because people are so conditioned to doing the tasks that they're not really given the white space to have breaks to be creative, to think differently, etc.
And so one of the things I am really calling for is that we need a change in the way we're leading people. And so you can think of a gardener leader approach is being very much the metaphor of a gardener. And just as a gardener needs to be there to plant the seeds and give nourishment, them sitting over the plants day in and night isn't going to make plants grow any better.
And so they really need to have this philosophy of being eyes on, but hands off. And I first heard about this concept from General Stan McChrystal. And as Stan was talking to me about it, we were discussing his role when he was in charge of all forces in Afghanistan. And there was no way that him in a situation room or the president back in D.C. could understand this.
what a Green Beret team was doing in a mountainside in Afghanistan and tried to micromanage their everyone movement. So what he could do is he could make sure that those people who were fighting understood the mission. He could give them the best training that he possibly could. He could give them the best leadership he could.
But when it came to them executing their mission, he had to be hands off and trust that the tools learning experiences, leadership that they had been given, they would make their appropriate decisions in the fight.
And the way we can look at that in the business world today is we can do the same thing, whether it's a project manager leading a team or a software developer who might be an individual contributor. You could give them what the destination is you're trying to achieve and let them be creative in taking a completely different approach to getting there.
But if you do this in an agile way, they're checkpoints. So if they're off course, you can quickly get them back on. And it really humanizes the individuals in the process.
Like anything, it's a both and situation. You're going to have individuals who require more oversight and more handholding than others. And you're going to have your breakthrough performers typically who require a lot less of that handholding because they're free thinking and innovating and
inventing new ways of doing things so to me typically what i have found is those employees end up winding up on a chart as either c performers b performers or a performers sure and i find more of the a performers are able to operate more autonomously where more of your c or b what we used to call as plotters tend to need more structure in the way that they're doing things
The other problem I see, we tend to see a person in their current role not understanding and really taking the time to understand their backstory. And a great example of this is I remember I had this really talented woman who worked for me at Lowe's, and I saw her and her current position of being a director underneath me at the time.
But what I didn't understand, she had prior to that been a CIO at a smaller company. She had a lot of data experience. Not only that, she had started her career in the business side before transitioning into the IT side and really had this wealth of knowledge. And I think we don't spend enough time getting to understand who the individual is. Yeah, absolutely.
That just is they have career aspirations. They also have life aspirations. And so if you would know that that developer who's working for you is trying to save money to buy a house for his family and they're expecting a child and you somehow bring that into how you're leading them and being more understanding of that and acknowledging it.
A hundred times out of a hundred, you're going to get better performance out of the person because they see you treating them as a human and interested in them both at work and in their larger success in life.
One of my favorite questions that I've always gotten in an interview is tell me about your strengths and your biggest weakness. And to me, when someone answers that question saying they don't have weaknesses or trying to lessen them, I always know that they're not a good fit because they're not being authentic with their answers.
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