The Dashboard Trap: When Technology Doesn’t Change the Business

Donna P. Mitchell (27:36): Yeah, you do. And it's a systems way of thinking, which technology people like you and me tend to think about.

Kurt Uhlir (27:42): That's part of it. Because if they're not capable of that — the people side — that's an outcome of: they weren't able to think through the short-term decisions and how those impact things. We're seeing this right now in AI. Amazon, in the last 45 days from when you and I are recording, has taken away an internal dashboard at the whole-company level and the individual division level — two levels down — that was tracking a leaderboard about who is using the most tokens. What do we know as people teams? People will do whatever you compensate them to do or track. Amazon was forcing both — saying you had to be using so many tokens or your job was at risk — and giving spot bonuses, and this leaderboard like an attaboy/attagirl to people using the most tokens.

Kurt Uhlir (28:34): What happened? It came out that Amazon people had written software to just use as many tokens as possible and push themselves to the top. They were spending all this money on GPUs and not getting the outcome, because you went to a bunch of people you were already paying $200,000 to $700,000 a year — good software architects are expensive — and said, "I'll give you more money if you're using more tokens than he or she is." Those people figured out how to game the system. So they've had to take away that whole dashboard. I'm sure they still have it, they're just not making it public within the company. It concerns me that leadership, the CPOs, the division leaders ever thought that was a good idea — because they looked at technology usage as what's going to solve things, as opposed to "I care about outcomes."

Kurt Uhlir (29:34): I hire somebody to do social media for a company in our portfolio — am I hiring that person, giving them tens of thousands of dollars quarterly, to write tweets and social media posts and repurpose content? No. Those are things I expect them to do, but I'm hiring them for a business outcome. At every level — social media manager, chief architect, chief product officer — I should be able to come from the outside and ask: what business outcomes are they giving you money and benefits for? And how do those business outcomes tie to the company's outcomes? That usually starts to answer the tasks they're doing — jobs to be done — which is not the same thing as the business outcome.

Kurt Uhlir (30:33): That's how people teams can help. But they have to help by going back to the people building the company and saying: you say you're hiring a software engineer — what outcomes do you want from them? Then help with the interviewing process, and how do we actually reward people for that? I'm the weird person who puts things on job descriptions and the company website that say I want people who thrive in healthy conflict, who have strong opinions held loosely, who have a bias toward action — all three things you'd see in someone's actions. But healthy conflict doesn't feel great all the time. When they come back and challenge you and say "you said we're supposed to have strong opinions, but when I came with a strong differing opinion, you smacked me down, you shut me down — so what do I do?"

Kurt Uhlir (31:33): This is where people teams need to bring me along and support me, because so many people in the C-suite don't want to do this. When I fail at this, or my peers fail, we need to not get our hands smacked, but be rewarded when we come out publicly to our teams and say, "here's where I failed." I don't bring up where my teams have failed at those things — but I'll bring up "here's where Kurt failed at healthy conflict." I've done this at lots of companies, because then a wonderful thing happens: the people who have PTSD from how your company used to be, or the bad companies they worked for, go, "maybe he or she actually believes this thing — they actually want healthy conflict, they want differing opinions." Then I do spot bonuses. In some cases, "you confronted me" — you confronted Donna on something — we have a pool of money for that.

Kurt Uhlir (32:01): This was three years before you could get custom cutting boards anywhere: somebody had to have a strong, healthy conflict with their manager or somebody else's. We basically had this service where, among other things, I would say that's the only way you'd get this huge custom-etched family cutting board with your family's name engraved. The only way you got that was challenging one of your managers in a strong, healthy-conflict way that came back to us — and not from you — because we wanted to reward that behavior. Most HR and people teams, if I go to them and say I want to reward people for challenging their boss, they'll say "no, those are the people we get out of here." No — I want to reward that behavior when it's healthy.

Donna P. Mitchell (33:00): Let me ask you this before we wind this up. What is it that you want everyone listening to really take away with all the experience you have? There are two sides — you've got the transformation side and the scaling side, and you can give it to us on both. But what do you really want to share that you want to make sure they take away?

Kurt Uhlir (33:27): It's the same thing for both scaling and transformation. You may be a really nice, authoritative leader who tells people what to do, how you want it done, in the timeframe you want, with that threat underneath that they're fired if they don't do it. You may be really nice, but it usually means you're a micromanager too, and you think you're doing the best thing for the company and your transformation and scaling, because you're really wise and get to make all these decisions. Here's the secret: you are seeing a fraction of the information and able to weigh in on a fraction of the things, because the system you've created is set up to shield you from bad information until it's so obvious they're bad decisions that you never would have known about it.

Kurt Uhlir (34:29): The only way to make wise decisions and be involved in more of the decisions affecting your company is to shift to this outcomes-based servant-leadership approach: the moment you hire people, you're hiring them for business outcomes, or to do tasks you don't want to do. At which point every day you should wake up and go: how can I help Donna better reach the outcomes I've hired her and am paying her tens of thousands of dollars to do? How can I serve her? That may mean coaching her, getting her training, working alongside her, saying "this is how I write social media posts." Your job is to serve the people you've hired and help them give you the outcomes you want. Because the authoritative leader is failing your company, and you don't realize it.

Kurt Uhlir (35:27): The authoritative leader probably doesn't have a lot of trust in that organization either. They say they want this done, and their people do it, and they think, "I'm a really nice person." That's what people tell themselves: "my teams like me, I get these 360 reviews, I'm nice." Well, yeah — you pay people thousands of dollars, you give them medical, they feel secure, and you're nice. But that's different than being trusted. You're trusted when I can come to you and confront you in a way that says I think we're going in the wrong direction, and I do not have the data to prove it yet — but I know you're comfortable hearing my opinion.

Donna P. Mitchell (35:57): Do you think leadership ever thinks about the culture of the organization and balancing the needs between people and the ROI and the systems and processes — balancing it all? Or is it always the outcomes, the ROI, and the business? Do many companies and leaders think about the people and the culture?

Kurt Uhlir (36:27): What I'll often notice is how the CEO and the rest of the C-suite — which includes the people team — consider the people team. I'm friends with a lot of chief people officers, a lot of CHROs, and they don't like it when I say this, but I think it's toxic when the people team owns culture. I say that because people teams are like the accounting team — I would never expect the finance team to own culture. They're supporting organizations. It's just like companies that say "we have a no-asshole policy" — you've already screwed up at that point. To have a good culture, I have to have a people team that supports me, but it starts with my chief product officer, my CTO, my CEO, my CMO. The people team comes alongside to say, "I see the people you're hiring, I hear what you want to do — how can we better help implement that?"

Kurt Uhlir (37:25): They bring in a 15Five, a Lattice — those are great. The problem is Lattice and 15Five, which are huge HR products right now, are primarily selling into the people team. So you have people teams coming in and forcing a culture change, where we already have people here — we're not trying to change who's here and how you interact. As opposed to: as the CEO or CMO, I bring in Lattice and 15Five, and I go to my people team first and say, "here's the problem I'm having, here's what I need, help me with this — and by the way, it's going to be my budget, not yours; you're going to help me implement this." That's how I want my people team to interact. But too often I hear the CEO say, "our people team owns culture." No — wonderful admins, you all can monitor things in ways the rest of the organization can't. But who do I want on stage talking about culture? I want the senior product manager we hired from Verizon who's here because of our people.

Kurt Uhlir (38:23): I had this at a public company — he was one of my two, and I had a senior product marketer. Those were the two people in this public company who were the leading faces of our culture. Me and the rest of the C-suite were helping support them with some of those tools. As opposed to companies being like, "well, HR helps, they do happy hours" — no, that's not how culture runs. Culture runs in the day-to-day meetings.

Donna P. Mitchell (38:48): So how can somebody reach you?

Kurt Uhlir (38:50): My personal website is the best thing.

Donna P. Mitchell (38:52): What's your website?

Kurt Uhlir (38:54): KurtUhlir.com — K-U-R-T-U-H-L-I-R dot com.

Donna P. Mitchell (39:00): Any other parting words?

Kurt Uhlir (39:02): You can do this. If you're the authoritative leader — as somebody who was that and changed, and was very toxic — you can change. And by all means, you will make more money than you ever imagined if you actually make that transformation.

Donna P. Mitchell (39:18): Okay, then. Well, I'm glad you came on Pivoting to Technology Adoption, and I'm sure somebody's going to be reaching out to you, because you've got a lot of experience and you gave us a lot of insight. I'd like to thank you, Kurt Uhlir, for being here — and we're shaping tomorrow together. Thank you.

Donna P. Mitchell (39:22): Thank you for listening to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. If this episode gave you something to think about, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a colleague who needs to hear it. My new book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap, is available now on Amazon. Visit pivotingportal.com to work with me directly. I'm Donna P. Mitchell, the Transformation Authority. Until next time — Mind the Gap.