This week we’re joined by Michael Aird, an experienced Salesforce Program leader. Mick talks us through his early career and how he first came to work with the Salesforce platform, we discuss how he moved into consulting and how having a background on the business side of Salesforce projects has helped him. Mick explains his view on how close to the technology a project or program manager needs to be, details what a program manager is really responsible for, and provides some insight into his ways of leading and his approach to managing people.
We hope you enjoy the episode and make sure you’re following Mick here!
Ben:
Mick, welcome to the show.
Mick Aird:
G’day Ben, thank you, thanks for getting me on.
Ben:
I’m excited to unpick your journey and delve into the world of project delivery. Now I know you as someone that is the Head of Delivery Program Management, that kind of senior level leadership on Salesforce projects ultimately and within Salesforce consulting practices, but that’s not what you’ve always been, obviously, you’ve kind of led up to this point. So can you tell me a bit more about your background and the kind of steps that have moved you and taken you into the delivery leadership space?
Mick Aird:
Yeah, no problems. I’m a Chartered Accountant. Well, I don’t pay my fees anymore, right? So please, no lawsuits for any advice I give them. But yeah, I started off as a Chartered Accountant in Adelaide, Deloitte. It was a great thing. I then decided to go to London, which a lot of people did, for the working holiday visa. I worked for a number of organisations there and landed in IBM, which was purely in Ireland. I’d moved there to get married, worked there and started to get involved in sort of the sales sort of pricing, profit management type of thing. Came back to Australia with IBM, started to work with the sales folks. And, you know, like we’ll dig into that. Yeah, there was SAP CRM, right? But I was a bit of an output type of guy. You know, we were looking at the inputs for pricing, the outputs for profit, the inputs for sales targets, the output for sales performance. That got me the job at Australia Post. They were obviously changing from internal government post office to sales. They were selling and I had no idea the Australia Post would be selling when I used to use the service. So you get there, they’re selling letters, they’re selling parcels, they’re selling identity, they’re selling retail products. And so I headed up the sales performance there in a large group and started to use Salesforce. They were taking SAP CRM out, the team inside the operations group who were managing the original input of Salesforce, or the first part of the transformation. And ultimately getting the metrics right, how did opportunities look, loading the targets, the data side, the dashboards reporting, and that was a Salesforce piece. I didn’t know much about Salesforce then, that was probably 2012, other than it looked really cool, everyone complained about SAP CRM. So we spent that time in the full uplift of it. First they put it in, then they uplifted it. They bought the other half of StarTrack, so they paid for that. And then there was obviously a huge project of about 18 months to migrate the StarTrack business off their legacy systems into Salesforce. So again, it’s Salesforce, but it’s under my guise of sales performance. So I probably spent 60% of that year, 18 months working on the project, making sure that my stakeholders need, doing some work between the red side of Australia Post and let’s say the blue side which was StarTrack, trying to get some synergies between how they saw sales and marketing and the data they needed to sort of run and manage their business. So yeah, that was it. That was the sort of Salesforce piece. And from when I finished Australia Post, I’ve been in like, let’s call it the ecosystem, ever since Salesforce has been sort of other than one small stint exactly, which is sales performance, I’ve been in the ecosystem system, either one side or the other for the last 11 or 12 years.
Ben:
So obviously, you a lot of that time has been on the consulting side, you know, you’ve been in a range of different sized partners and but how did like if you go back to that kind of sales performance work that on the business side of a Salesforce transformation, a Salesforce engagement, and how has that experience helped you in consulting?
Mick Aird:
Yeah, that’s a good question. Being an accountant, you know, IT spend was always capex, right? So I was in Australia Post, it was a significant amount of money put aside to invest. You turn up with your accountant’s hat on, yeah, here’s capex, you know, everyone’s asking the right questions, they pay the money upfront, use consultancy. But ultimately it had the business case behind it. So it wasn’t fully just investment. You know, there were efficiencies that need to be made through the sales folks. And obviously with my clients or customers product sales people inside Australia Post. My job was to work with them to ensure they were able to relate what benefits they were expecting to get out of the system. So it might’ve been a smoother pipeline, might’ve been different sales stages, might’ve been different percentages, might’ve been different ways to input notes. “I’ve been out to a client, how do I put my notes in, how do I put my next steps in?” And so there was the sort of efficiency process side of that. And then there were some, out, right? So, or some revenue uplift in this case. So, theory would be Salesforce would be able to make the selling process more efficient. So therefore, opportunities would close earlier. So sort of my role there was really just working with the sales GMs. There was two at that point and the sales managers and sellers as I guess the customers, what benefits are they putting into the business case? And then ensuring that as we were doing stage release, those stakeholders were getting their value. And ultimately then that translates to being able to report back up inside Australia Post that X dollars was invested, these are the milestones that were hit. Clearly yes, the efficiencies are there. Under some of its future, so you’re going from a baseline of what we expect, to future. But yeah, just really representing the stakeholders sitting in meetings where there was clearly but soon they’re representing the client side. So very much the parcels and lettuce business and retail business, sales and product folks were my clients. I felt like I represented them because my job was to manage sales performance with the team and we were trying to give them the information they needed. So yeah, the spend was there, but my job was sort of represent them and communicate to them.
Ben:
So then when you are on the consulting side, do you have like a better appreciation now for your customer and the person sat in the chair that you were sat in?
Mick Aird:
Yeah, 100%. Having spent 20 plus years in business as a Chartered Accountant pricing profit, a lot of commercial roles, and then you spend the last 10 or 11 in a Salesforce ecosystem between client and consulting, you then understand that, yep, it’s the same process. There’s a capex spend there, clients are either working out, do they have in-house technical capability to do it, or is it fully consulting, or is it a hybrid model? There’s a business case behind it, right? Very rarely, I mean, we can read about CBA, blowing their budget by 130 million. There’s always a cost impact, but there’s the time and the quality. So just fully trying to understand that when you’re sitting there as a consulting, whether you’re a partner or you want to have multiple partners there, the process happens the same on the client side. So there will be a business case, there will be benefits. It could be efficiency, it could be revenue, it could be cost out, it could be people out. So sort of ensuring that those steps really clear up front and understanding as a consulting partner what the client’s gonna get, what they’re giving up, what they’re expecting to achieve when they pay the bill. And I’ll talk really simply today. Like when the client pays the bill and the invoice, they’ve got to be getting what they believe they were getting and what they were giving up. So ultimately you’re giving up something here. and the dynamics have changed. Some organisations are happy to invest, but you’re unlikely to see a lot of clients these days, just turning up with significant capital because it’s scarce and they need it for multiple places to just put into a CRM fully sunk cost without any expected benefit uplift, et cetera. So that’s what I sort of try and do. Generally, most of the people you work with in the consulting landscape are aligned, but the job feels like, and I wear two hats, which I know is a bit of a coin phrase, but I wear that client hat, trying to just put myself in the position of if we share that information with the client, how they’re going to respond, or how does that align to their expectation.
Ben:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, I think there’s this debate whether or not, like if you look at a Project Manager delivering a Salesforce project, there’s a debate as to how much they need to know about Salesforce. Do they need to understand the technology? Do they need to get it? Do they need to have come from a Salesforce background? Obviously, you have. You’ve been on the project of a Salesforce implementation prior to being a delivery-focused person. So obviously now you’ve gone up, you’re not a project manager, you’re more senior than that. So the question I guess is still relevant. But do you feel a project manager does need to know the technology and a program manager doesn’t? Or do you think they both should? Or do you think they both don’t need the sales of technology experience, they just need to know how to deliver a project?
Mick Aird:
I think it helps, right? So if I take myself back very briefly, if you can indulge me to when I went to a period, and I was asked to go and manage a squad, right? To get back, let’s call it on the tools, down into the detail, you know, to help me with my delivery sort of journey and like education, and it helped, right? Back being backed out. So I think as a Project Manager, and some have come through a development lifecycle and worked out they’re not there, or a tester, or a scrum master. So I think if you, you know, as a project manager, understanding the technology, I think is really, really important because what it does is helps you relate. Like your clients are your delivery team, your developers, your functionals, your consultants, right? So being able to be more in tune with them, I think is really key. So my advice to Project Managers out there, yeah, there’s Agile and there’s Scrum and there is a couple of base Salesforce certifications, I think helps, right? Because the people you’re going to talk with every day, that’s the way they talk, right? They’re thinking tech. Then I think as you move to program, having a base understanding of it helps. I mean, you’ve got to understand all your clouds. Clearly you rename the Communities, et cetera. There’s product changes, but I think in knowing it, I think you’ve got to know what it is going to do, right? You don’t have to specifically know the speeds and feeds and that you don’t have to understand the intricacies of a data model. But you’ve got to understand the data model is a core principle when you’re looking to take data out of one system. and perhaps put it into Salesforce, maybe it’s one or two way integration, you do need to understand what the sort of components and the aspects are there. Now that’s not to say like I’m one of hundreds and hundreds of sort of program delivery folks out there, there’ll be some really good, cool folks out there that are really technical, right? And they may have come from architecture through strategy, now they sit there. And I think the way it is, most programs, projects, right? What staff do I have or what team do I put together to be able to get the best outcome? So if you had a project manager, I guess, who was non-technical, then you’d probably want someone in program or delivery that was technical. Or you have a number of Architects who are perhaps on the project full-time who are a little bit more advisory. So I guess in a roundabout way, it’s definitely going to help. But then, if I’m sitting in front of COO, Chief Customer Officer, maybe the CIO, probably not. Like they’re probably less interested in the specifics of what the product is technically delivering as they are, you know, what outcomes is it going to be for my business. So yeah, in a way I think it helps. It certainly, you know, wouldn’t dissuade anyone from it, but yeah, it’s all about putting complimentary resources together to deliver a program.
Ben:
And you obviously mentioned 2012-ish was when you were doing that work with AusPost. Since then, and since you’ve kind of been further embedded into the ecosystem working with partners, what have you noticed about the scale, the complexity, the challenges of a Salesforce project now compared to back then when you first started delivering projects?
Mick Aird:
Yeah, I think the scale for a large enterprise like Australia Post, there’s multiple enterprises out there that are still doing it at that level. I think it’s more transformational now, more uplift. I think the enterprises out there that, you know, are looking for Salesforce have Salesforce, or they put it in for a specific piece and now they’re adding or transforming. So I think the scales there, and again, it’s often very client specific and how big is their business and what the value of the tool will be. I think the way the projects are changed is certainly, is certainly different. COVID’s clearly and- being remote has had a force change there. But the other governance is there, the steering committees are there. It used to be 30, Australia Post, I reckon once every two weeks, it was 30 people sitting in a boardroom on level 10, lots of slides, that’s still there. But it might be eight o’clock in the morning and at half an hour, 20 people on a Zoom or some level of media. I think what has changed though, ultimately is the communications, back then, we’ll call it pre-COVID, right, for the interests of the podcast. Comms sort of seemed to be in office hours. And there was a bit of a, we start the week with a lot of comms about what we do and we finish the week, which is, you know, somewhere yet we’re going to close it down and let everyone go. And plus a little bit of a, “oh God, I forgot to do that. So I better send that email, right, because my boss may be checking.” I think now definitely delivery is 6 a.m. in the morning. until 12 o’clock at night because a lot of people are remote and hybrid working as well. So email seems to be the preferred channel to get a lot more information out. And that sort of has its challenges because ultimately if you are that way inclined and there’s that much technology around, you know, you can be sitting there at 6.15 in the morning and just having a cup of coffee and, you know, working or responding to emails. So I think that side of delivery has definitely changed but that’s Salesforce delivery. Every work has changed, our lives have changed post COVID. But yeah, what used to be that great Friday afternoon, sit down, everyone in the office, we’ve had a great week, we’ve just knocked out a really big piece of work or we’re prepped for next week, we’ve passed our testing, let’s have a cheese and biscuits and a beer or a glass of wine, is not there, right? So I think that side has changed. And actually, I think that side was truly undervalued because there’s a whole heap of camaraderie that comes from both clients and partners. Yeah, and I think, you know, I’ll talk about posting when multi-partners in there, at Uni Melbourne, multi-partners in there. So the ability to sit there on Friday afternoon and representing a period of having a beer with someone from Deloitte and someone else from a Marketing Cloud consultancy and about we’re delivering this really cool project for Uni Melbourne. You just don’t get when it’s remote, right? Yeah, virtual drinks, I’ve participated, but I wouldn’t say they’re a hit. So that’s certainly the top and tail of the week and how you’d set up, I think has definitely changed.
Ben:
Yeah, it’s interesting you say all of those things because I think for everyone, and like, you know, work-life balance through COVID has been a challenge and kind of continues to be like Slack constantly pinging. But if you consider yourself on a project, if you’re the Program Manager or Program Director, like, what are you responsible for aside from delivery? Like, is it you’re delivering to a scope, right? There’s a predefined scope, a budget. Like, there’s certain things that you need to meet and stay within. Is it your responsibility also to enforce standards around how the product is delivered? Could a Program Manager say, “right, we’re not going to work past 6 p.m. like these are the hours that people work between?” Or is ultimately that kind of counter intuitive in terms of being able to deliver something?
Mick Aird:
No, it’s all counterintuitive. I’m probably going tap a little bit into a bit of my sort of leadership DNA here. Like I feel like as a, like a delivery leader, you know, a leader in general, I’ve got a innate responsibility to ensure all people in the project have some work life balance. And that is the staff and the consultancy that I’m directly referring to, but the same as the client side is, you know, if you’ve got a schedule in place and you understand, no one’s doing schedules on 50 hour weeks, 60 hour weeks. So things go wrong. But I think if you top and tail each day, you top and tail each ceremony to make sure people are okay. My job is generally trying to get the work done at the start of the week so you can get to the end of the week without the scramble. And if you do that once, it’s okay. If your people trust you, they’ll do the work. The client will trust you because you’re doing over and above, but if that becomes a repeated thing, then my view, I’d rather dig in a little bit more. Are we making the incorrect assumptions you know, push or there’s the, you know, other forces that are coming to force that because, you know, most of the, whether it be Devs and Techs and Tech BAs, they’re the experts, right? They do the certifications, they get their badges, they’re working through the Salesforce capability. So they know what they’re doing. So if they’re suddenly having to continually spend more time in there, just go back to the basics. Are the requirements wrong? Do we underestimate the stories? And so having spent time as a, you get to know that, you know, a lot of Execs perhaps don’t care for that bit of that information, but I think having that information and understanding how it impacts the delivery, but yeah, like I’m pretty keen. You don’t have to have a family to have work-life balance. And I think the world has completely changed, right? And working from home doesn’t mean your eight hour day is now 11 hours. Some people naturally will always want do a little bit more and that’s okay as long as they’re doing it willingly and not forced. But yeah, I do think, you know, some, because you’re going to have those weekends at work. So there will be those, those sprints, as an example, that are literally 14 days in a row, right? Because the plan means you need to be working Saturday, Sunday, but that’s generally known upfront, right? And yet you’ve always got break, fix, you’ve always got emergencies, you’ve always got SEV 1s and SEV 2s, you know, if you’re in managed services, you’re always going to do that work. But yeah, like it’s almost like permanent overtime, right? I mean, the successor programs and delivery and consultancy firms and career pathing is really about people being engaged, right? Through COVID, I think people had no choice. They stayed. And then, you know, post-COVID, you probably saw on your side, right? There’s a lot of activity, a lot of people moving, right? They felt like, “oh, like I had to stay where I was”. Now it might be coming back the other way and people are looking to get some change, but yeah, I think you want people to be turning up. Like you don’t want to send them home Friday at seven o’clock, such that the first thing they’re fearing when they go home, log off, chat to their partner is “I’m not looking forward to coming in Monday.” You know, that’s a horrible cycle. But that has other challenges, right? We probably don’t have time to talk about that today, but that has challenges about you got to rotate people through, got to give them opportunity, right? You got to give them variety. And ultimately sometimes in a big consulting firm we can’t cycle people off. Client loves Ben, “we’ve always had Ben”. “Yeah, but Ben’s been on the client for nine months and he really doesn’t like it”. So it’s a bit like, “how do I get to Ben after three months?” Or where’s the natural position where I can have a chat to Ben about, “hey mate, what do you wanna do next?” And then start to have that conversation and Ben would like to move to Marketing Cloud or Ben would like to go to FSC, he’s been in comm for ages, you know. So that’s the dynamics, right? That may be how my brain’s wired, right? Like, you know, “I’m looking for a role now, as you know, right, and that’s how we’ve been back in contact pretty regularly is, that’s how my brain thinks, right?” And so it’s hard to move away from that. Call me a little bit old school, but yeah. I think the people are the assets, right? You know, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they are the magic, they are the people that get it done. You know, delivery leadership in a way is probably about 100%, 100% supporting the team and then the other 20%, you know, over and above is sort of keeping the comms in tune so everyone understands that the team are turning up to do the right job and they’re the experts. So let’s give them time, let’s give them the space, let’s give them the support to do that work, right? Because it’s not always going to work, right? You know, there’s no project out there that goes from start to finish that doesn’t have hiccups, right? So set up for success and you know, support the team and then you’ll get the extra, right? That’s my view, people are going to disagree which is absolutely cool, but that’s my view, set them up for success and they’ll do the extra mile for you as and when you need to, but these days you’ve got to be able to reward them for that, too. It’s not that you can’t keep going to the well or people will go “stuff that, I’ll call Ben” and I’m out right and the cost of replacing people’s huge, right? Clients say every day about the cost of replacing people.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, 100%. You said something in a previous conversation that stuck with me. You said “no one ever turns up to here to do a bad job.”
Mick Aird:
Yeah, I believe that.
Ben:
But have you always had that view? I’m sure you’ve had experiences in the past where you have felt let down by someone in the team. So how have you been able to see through that and see there must be more to it than them just turning up and not wanting a function in the way that they should.
Mick Aird:
Yeah, look, probably before I was a people leader, you know, I didn’t have that view, you know, because you’re working in a team and you know, seven or eight of you, you know, as Chartered Accountants, we’re all trying to push work together and you think, “oh, old mate over there or, you know, that’s just taking the p***,” right? Like it’s just, then you become a people leader and I think you have an obligation to understand there’s a little bit more going on. And this is a non COVID conversation, right? So COVID has probably changed it for a lot of people, but I think it’s changed it for a positive for a lot of people because maybe going into work every day and the office was putting so much stressors on them with their own thing. So I think there’s people that are probably more efficient. But yeah, I have this view and people can say it’s folly, but I actually believe it’s true. If you’re spending your time doing your certifications and whatever, you’re turning up to do a good job. Now, whether you fully execute that day because there’s other things going on, right? Or you just don’t feel great, or you got a cold, or you got a headache, or you didn’t sleep well, but I think it’s easy to perform manage someone now because most people turn up to do the right thing and then you can see through the engagement, you see through the buy-in, right? And you see with how people working and in a way you’ve got metrics around story points and architecture sign-offs and you know everyone in a role in a Salesforce project has a professional role to play. You know, Scrum Masters doing story points working through the board, Architects got to get documents signed off you know etc from the client. Devs are deving stories that are getting tested. So, you know, I do believe there’s so many processes in Salesforce delivery that you can sort of, I would say catch bad work. You know, like that probably sounds a horrible thing to say, but you know, Friday is you catch the work, right? But the actual delivery process catches the work, which allows you to go back and go, “ah, okay, so we’re putting three, you know, this will be me as tech, I get, right? We’re putting three branches in, you know, this afternoon to the QA environment, and Ben’s branch has a lot of quality issues.” You know, you shouldn’t know that after a three week sprint where you’ve been deving 30 stories, right? Yeah, so I do think, I do think people turn up to do the right job, right? And, you know, but maybe that’s me as a leader. Maybe that’s me, you know, maybe people say, which is fine for me, is that’s a gap in my technical knowledge. So I’m putting full trust into the technical folks. So in a way, it’s sink or swim, right? If I go in with that mindset, I’m setting myself up, but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take, right? We’ve all got to be vulnerable. So I’d rather be vulnerable, I guess, you know, in a way with taking the position that everyone turns up to do a good job and then getting advice. Otherwise, all outcomes show otherwise, but then that’s it. You just flip to your other side of your leadership dimension, which is, you know, you’re having regular one-on-ones, and if you’re not aware of something going on then you pick up your socks and you deal with it. So, I guess I form that view Ben, because I’m probably delivery leader and leadership management and technical practice leader. So I get to work with, I’ve been lucky enough in the last couple of jobs to get to work with the folks that are delivering and get to work with the folks from a practice point of view. So you’re spending time, even if you’re not on their projects, with them, with their one-on-ones. So, yeah, I’m going to hold that view. I’ve got plenty of years left to work. I’ll hold that view and I’m happy to be challenged otherwise people aren’t, because I think if they aren’t these days, they don’t enjoy it, right? If you get a lot of people, good people in a squad, is that the people that don’t want to do the job probably opt out anyway or tap out, right? Because like, “oh God, Ben’s annoying me God, every day. He’s so upbeat and you know, I don’t really like the job, that enthusiasm, I can’t deal with it.” It’s true, like it is true, your bigger practices you get, right, the numbers and the number of staff and the variations between sort of what folks you get in there, it is true. People get left behind and they sort of opt out.
Ben:
So is your job really on a project, a big project, to know every day where everything is at? Like, you should know, kind of not to the minute, but like you need to be across everything basically. So if something is going to go wrong, you can kind of see that early enough.
Mick Aird:
Yeah, I’d say that’s true right now. That’s a choice I make, you know, some roles is clear, but that’s a choice I make. By through working with the team, working with the squad to understand what we’re looking to get, because ultimately that allows us to plan out the week. You get an illness, you get an unexpected event, you’ve got to be able to plan for that. And it’s all about options, you know, client might change something, client might come to you later in the week, something might go wrong. So I think, you know, I think in a, you know, as a senior delivery, you know, individual, I’ve got to be thinking about options and understanding all the data points and all the sort of, I guess, working elements inside the project allow me to think about that. And then some weeks you just go through and you don’t ever have to think about the options because it works as you expect, right? Which is tick, that’s great, let’s move on. And generally it does work more often than not, right? And depending on the sort of folks you’ve got and what their bent is to sort of jump in and fix things early, you often get some really good leaders inside there and they but someone who works out that it was an architectural decision made that it’s now going to impact you know a future, you know, I guess development cycle and then understanding the requirements are out that comes to you with,” hey, we found this on Tuesday, it’s Thursday, this is what we’ve done to fix it.” Now they don’t, they’re not probably thinking they’re leading, but they’re leading, right? Other people might let that all the way go through to me and it’ll be like, “right, okay, this is, this isn’t the first time this has happened. What did I do last time?” You know? You grab the team, right? That’s perhaps a little bit circular to why I think everyone turns up to do a job. First thing to do is grab the team. Okay, it’s not why did we get here? It’s how are we going to go forward?
Ben:
With that though, obviously someone’s coming to you on the Thursday and saying, “look, this happened on Tuesday”. What about the people that bury that? Not because they’re wanting to, but they’re worried about giving you bad news. And I guess the sooner you hear the bad news, the better, right, as a delivery leader.
Mick Aird:
Yeah, no, I mean, you get that though. That’s it. And I don’t think, you know, I don’t think that’s people not wanting to do a good job, right? That’s people’s fear of “my God, you know, something’s gone wrong, right?” I would hate to think people have worked with me in the last sort of eight to 12 years and thought that they can’t come to me with bad news. Now that’s not to say people haven’t, right? They clearly have in the past. But I think then it’s just about how you react. If someone waits the two days, it’s how you react. I’m all about solutions, right? I’m all about what happens next and how do we go forward. And ultimately, sometimes you don’t have a solution then and there. So, you know, my job, you’ve got to ante up to the client and say, this, we’ve come across this and right now I don’t have an answer. Never be, you know, you never blame the team really. I think that’s a cop out. Right? I front into it, I’m accountable for it. You take it on the chin and you make a commitment to get it resolved, right? If you don’t know then you don’t say, it’ll be done Friday. Right? You’d say, I need an hour, I need two hours. I’m not sure. And it is one, look, you know, if it’s about a major go live and whatever, clearly everyone understands that the work day stretches because the deadline can’t change. But if you’re mid sprints, you know, mid stage, even if you’re in waterfall, right, there’s time, there’s time to course correct. You know, very rarely do you get to that situation. But you know, sometimes the deadlines don’t change. And that’s when you scale up the work, right? And if you’ve got the, if you’ve got the relationship with the team, you know, most people will happen to scale up or do the extra to get it. on track.
Ben:
I think that’s really refreshing your approach to that. And I think that’s what everyone that is reporting to someone would want to hear. Like, I can go to them with problems. It can’t all be, you know, rainbows and whatnot. Sometimes we’re on projects, things go wrong. I need someone that I can go to for that support and not get told off ultimately. But do you think the stereotypical leader on IT projects has changed? Like, if you look over the last kind of… know, 10, 15 years, do you think like that approachable leader is something that’s more kind of modern than historic?
Mick Aird:
Yeah, I do. Yeah, I generally do. I think you’re here. I think you have choice, right? You know, we talked 20 minutes ago about how I ended up in Salesforce, right? This is no stereotypical path to delivery leadership. And in fact, probably 10 years ago, I’m happy to be corrected. There were probably no delivery leader roles in Salesforce, right? You know, what’s it been 20 plus years? So there was no, so you’ve become a leader and you’ve either come through the technology arm or you’ve come through the business arm, but you’re a leader. So I think it has changed, still there’s still a time and place for Technical Project Managers that just purely transactional but as I said you can compensate them with someone who has the ability to paint the message. I think you know one of my old bosses, and it was actually interestingly mirrored by Paulette Hogan at a time, is you’ve got to be thinking what’s my boss’s boss going want to hear. So that’s the way I phrase that is like, you know, it’s not necessarily my boss, what’s my boss’s boss? What can I want to hear here? “Oh my god, you know panic panic”, but you think about he or she that they’re just people, they’re running a business, so what it be the information do you have to give them? So it’ll be people that watch this and think there’s a little bit of just me. So I’ll stand firm to that. That’s the way I roll and that’s why I’ll continue to roll. I’m not selling anyone down the river and yeah, you got to take one every now and again. But I think it’s the way you communicate too. So if you go to them and say you stuffed it, but this is what I’m going to do to fix it. Yeah, but I think there’s still, you know, like depending on where I am in the ecosystem, there still are people that are fully transactional, right? But I think it takes all parties to go around.
Ben:
Now interestingly, like we’ve mentioned, you’ve worked in different consulting firms, big, a period of massive global teams everywhere, huge teams, and then you’ve recently been engaged for a smaller partner. Ultimately, are they doing the same thing? Is it the same working in those different environments or are there major differences you notice?
Mick Aird:
I think they are. I think what I found in the smaller partner is the age, right? Like a smaller partner, been going for four or five years, average age, you know, I put the average up a lot, right, when I joined. But the average age is a lot younger, because that’s perhaps on the growth trajectory, right? But they’re doing the same thing, right? They’re just doing it at a different scale. but that allows them to be able to be a little bit more nimble, feel they’ll be able to be changed. Perhaps less relying on backend systems is a big with pro which is global and thousands and thousands of people entering time. Entries and thousands of invoices and a lot of that process, if it’s out by 5% the magnitude of the impact at the other end is huge. But for the 20 people consulting firm, if one or two people don’t get their time in, you’ve got time on Monday morning, right, before you can just do the follow up and say, time sheet in, we’ve got to close the books, you know, at the 11 o’clock contains to 1130, cause you’re invoicing maybe 10 customers, right? As opposed to, you know, 500, 5,000 customers. So yeah, I think that what everyone’s trying to do is pretty much the same. I think just the age demographics there, which is sort of slightly different and being smaller, everyone’s in, you know, I was the one person in Melbourne, one lady in Bali, everyone else in Sydney. So being smaller allows you to sort of co-locate a lot more. But yeah, everyone’s turning up to do the right job and do a good job.
Ben:
What about delivery then, does that change into the different scales? Do you approach your delivery management role in the same way if you’re delivering for a small business and let’s say 50 users compared to delivering for Uni of Melbourne hundreds of users?
Mick Aird:
That’s a great question. I can’t remember whether we agreed on that one. No, I don’t think so, right? I think I have a luxury in a smaller organisation of becoming a little bit more familiar with the team. you know, because there’s less scale. So, you know, I get an opportunity to be across the, you know, 12 or 14 folks who are in the technical firm, whereas at Wipro it was much bigger. And when I was, you know, delivery lead for Victoria, and it was literally 60 people based in Victoria, right? I couldn’t spend that time with them all. But I knew the Union Melbourne folks because I’d been intrinsically on that account for a year. Learned the folks from mobile lending. But that was probably, you know, to buy when we had our quarterly catch ups, spending more time with the folks who I didn’t get an opportunity to see day to day because I wasn’t on their account. I guess it was more, you know, a high level. So I think it’s how you sort of approach it Ben, I guess is the easiest answer there is, you know, the scale means you’re not going to get across everyone because there’s layers of management whose job is effectively to have that relationship.
Ben:
And my final question, do you think like someone can set out on a path of learning to be a leader or someone can teach, like can you teach someone to be a good leader or is it just something that some people will become and learn like they’ll because of the environments they’re in because of their approach and like natural skill set and beliefs and do like, what’s your view on that? Like can you take someone from A to B as a leader, or is that something they’ll find on their own path?
Mick Aird:
Well, I think you can, right? I think you can, but I think it’s more around… you can coach, like we use the words coach, write a mentor, right? Because there’s a lot of textbooks and there’s a lot of courses, but it’s not like studying accountancy where I had to understand the theory and then I got tested on it, right? There’ll be hundreds of leadership books and leadership approaches, but everyone’s gonna take that differently. So I think it’s, you know, if you are fortunate to have good coaches and mentors, and that’s what you would like to do, right? Yeah, I think you need to be a people person. I think it’s pretty clear are on leadership courses who are first time managers or they’ve had the promotion and they don’t feel like they want to be there because they’re individual contributors, which is really cool. That’s fine, like it takes everyone. But yeah, I think it’s how you approach it. If you have good people, easiest way to become a good leader is if you’ve been working under good leaders. And you don’t have to be directly under them too. I’ll put a little plug in for a bloke called Mark LeBusque. His career at Australia Post versus what he does now are chalk and cheese. Mark was a leader, right? He was, but he was an agitator to me, right? This is the whole idea. He’s a positive agitator because he was a sales manager and he wanted so much out of the system and his solutions team, you know? But he was leading by example, when he was leading his team and he was showing me that, you know, you can positively challenge, right? And walk away with some respect and you can do your job, right? You don’t have to be yelling and screaming, you know? get those leaders who you don’t directly work for, you see them operate and you think, God, they did something that worked. But I think you got to want to do it. And I think certainly for delivery leadership, you and I have talked a lot, you’re sitting on the waterline, you’re spending half your day looking up into the boat where the client is, all the stakeholders up there, you’re spending the other half, let’s call it under the water, working with the delivery team and you can rotate multiple times a day through there. You’ve got to work out which leadership to bring. And you know, no hour can be the same, no two days can be the same. But you’ve got to roll with it, right? Like I think this is the thing is, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it. I think leaders, they enjoy it, right? I think, you know, the reluctant, we all know the reluctant leader. I think there’s less of those these days. But everyone leads. Like I know that’s a little stereotypical, you carry yourself is leadership, right? You don’t have to manage people directly, you know? And there’s matrix organisations, you get a chance to lead, even though you’re directly, not directly accountable for folks. So, you know, certainly in Salesforce, you know, that role is very, you know, every day you’re either talking to people internally in consulting, or you’re talking to people with clients, or there’s maybe a project team in between, and there’s multi-vendor. So, you know, you get an, I enjoy the opportunity to lead, you know, always. both sides of the fence and I think that makes it a little bit easier for me. Certainly comfortable.
Ben:
Yeah, nice. Well, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed hearing your approach style beliefs and also background. If anyone wants to pick your brains, reach out, ask you some questions, where’s the best place to find you?
Mick Aird:
Yeah, I mean I’m in LinkedIn, absolutely. Yeah, all my details are up to date. Send me a message!
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