The mentor path - Usman Bashir

00:00

Leadership coaching is really about fundamental leadership, like how do you build resilience? How do you make sense of the aches and pains and the difficulties that you face? How do you get to where you want to be in a very competitive world? I think that's more important. Then last bit is if they've done something similar, that'd be great.

00:31

How do we as human beings oversample those negative experiences and what impact does that have on our working life?

00:49

How does us as humans do it? It's natural to do it, because it's conservation. When something bad happens to us, there's certain sort of chemical reactions that happen. But what tends to happen is that we in ourselves, depending on how we have built ourselves, we might repeat those experiences again and again. I'll give you an example that I have a strength. My strength is that I do subconscious thinking. What does that mean? If I'm solving a problem, I'm not focusing on the problem with pen and paper or in a meeting, I'm going for a run. I am doing something else. And without thinking about it, at some point in time, I would've solved that problem. I didn't know that I used to do that until I actually reflected. You know what, people actually sit down with pen and paper, I just-

02:01

Being in the shower type thing.

02:02

Yeah, exactly. It's subconscious thinking, your brain is still solving that problem. Now that's a strength and it can work for yourself. But also what I found out that when there is ... Getting hurt is another problem. Now you can't solve it there and then. This is not an algorithm that you say, if I present a solution. Or maybe you are trying to say, what can I do better? But what you're doing is what I was doing when I had that accident was I was replaying it again and again, and again and again, and it was subconsciously happening to me.

02:40

The negative side of that positive subconscious.

02:45

Exactly. I think it's very important to know what's going on with yourself. So that negativity, so this is an explanation of how it can manifest itself. Now, what tends to happen for people is either people just power through, I'll just do it, which means what, you'll have five, six, seven, ten, eleven, another sort of number of anxious rides that you do till your brain actually starts to forget overridden by experience.

03:21

Now, but you still have a risk that some people might not be able, depending on the gravity of the accident that you have, they'll never be able to do it because every time they go out they oversample. Let's say experience is one ride for three hours and maybe three hours is replaying that sort of experience, so they're not experiencing the positivity in that ride.

03:48

The second thing is when they go home and still doing that sort of repeat, so they might actually never go over there. That's the risk of just powering through not knowing what's going on. The second, I think the most impactful thing that happened for me is that when I told one of my friends, close friends of mine, and he's not a cyclists like, "Oh, this has happened. I'm not cycling at the moment."

04:14

And just to clarify, you broke your collarbone cycling?

04:18

Yeah. I broke my collarbone cycling. A friend of mine just said, "Oh, so when are you getting back on the bike?" And he did it consciously because he's a leader and he knew that he needed to push nudge me in that direction. He's not a cyclist himself, so he doesn't have that common passion, but he knew that this is a problem that might manifest. Every week he was like, "Okay, so when are you getting back on the bike?" I think that support system needs to actually be there. So we don't actually know sometimes or value the support system enough.

04:57

It's super tricky when it's an individual journey when finding work and pursuing our best work is something that happens across different companies, sometimes even across different industries. So it's how to keep people with you who can keep you kind of in those same positive patterns or reminding you or nudging you to go in the right directions if they're not kind of along with you for the whole journey.

05:26

Yeah. I think that's why I said it's first of all that I found ... it was my responsibility to find a good environment or create that good environment regardless of what the real wild situation was, right? You join a company, you might have a good manager, you might not have a good manager. You might have a great support system. You might have a weaker support system.

05:49

I think that's why I talked about knowing what really worked for you and growing and theoretically understanding what works. I know people think about it as a manager, what makes for a great team, but individual contributors should know what makes a good team, should know what motivates a human being. I think I didn't learn about what motivates people, what a high performance team looks like till I decided to become a manager or people leader.

06:31

But I now feel that actually it would help me choose better opportunities if I knew this is what motivates people, this is what a good team or team building looked like, because then I could evaluate my managers. I think one of the things that people could do is know what's right. And maybe sometimes people think, okay, as an IC, I don't need to know, think that I'm not becoming a people person or a people manager, I don't need to know that. But you need to know what a good manager is and what makes a good manager is they know how to motivate people. They know how to build good teams and solve problems.

07:16

I think that this is again about that support system. How do you build it? How do you build it with knowledge? And then how you build it across different companies. And getting mentors is the best way of doing it across different companies. Basically somebody who's been through certain experience, somebody who's a big believer in themselves. So mentors sometimes are ... you don't want a mentor basically that says, "I want to train a super accomplished human being," and that's really great, "To another different level." Somebody who knows your level knows your challenges and a strong believer in yourself. When I did that for myself, a coach, that really helped me make better decisions and create that, okay, this doesn't make sense, this makes sense.

08:11

Interesting that the coach isn't specific to the company.

08:17

Absolutely. I think it's important to actually have an outside view. And it's also because what that really disconnects for the mentor is any sort of incentives. The best mentor is incentivized to do good. Whenever they mentor someone, they get that good feeling and that's their award. But within organization, if somebody's doing it because they're ticking some box, which basically, oh, I'm a supporter of women in technology, or I am this, I'm that. The people might be incentivized to doing that.

09:01

Let's say there are categories of people. You're trying to find a tribe that really understands you and you understands them. They value you, you value them. And so if you are whatever you want to say, type two or type whatever category, you go into a company, you find out you're now in a company which is type one and you're a type two. And then if you have a mentor, that's type one, that might be trying to make you into something that you're not. So having an outside view actually helps you realize that, okay, this is not the right place. And how do we update the model to actually learn from, why did you join this company? Or so what was the gap in the model? How do you update that and how do you go to those type two sort of people?

09:55

How do you find a mentor?

09:59

Oh, okay. That is a hard thing. I don't think you can find a mentor without doing a little bit of a discovery yourself. You need to start reflecting on yourself, knowing what your needs are, knowing what your passions are. It can't be like a generic, oh, another leader that you got or some experienced person that you got. Somebody that can understand your journey.

10:33

It could be, for example, for me, I needed a highly empathetic person. I was born and raised in Pakistan. I was an immigrant here from a very humble background. Initially my years of looking for work was just purely not passion, was like, "Oh my God, I need to sort of make ends meet and be successful in that." And luckily by byproduct, I got great companies. It wasn't a thoughtful thing. I was trying to solve other problems, just by pure luck I got good roles.

11:13

Somebody that gets that, somebody that appreciates that, because a part of mentoring journey, a great part, because one of my weakness is that sometimes I over index, I forget what my journey looks like. And I think it's very important for a mentor to be able to understand. For example, if you and I both take a journey and you are carrying heavier bags, and we get to the same place at the same time, a mentor really helps you think, look, you've been carrying these bags, so you've got to be kind to yourself.

11:56

There are certain aspects, especially tailored that your needs are, that a mentor needs to look for. Then for example, I need someone, given these growth areas, given where my journey is, where my destination is, you need to then choose almost several mentors and see what pans out, see what relationship sticks. Because my experience has been that ... I picked mentors which were superstars. I really respected them and really high flying type of CTOs managing thousands of people. And then I had someone who's super respected, but not to have that thousands of people journey. But that person made a lot more impact on me because it was very ... He was doing coaching as a byproduct, that's his passion.

13:22

Isn't there a part to it too where you need a mentor who's not too far away in the future, but it's kind of the version of yourself but in two years time. Because practically speaking you can only go at, I mean, a certain pace. And you want to grow into the next version of yourself, but it's hard to jump from a person who's for example managing 20 people to a team of a thousand people. The problems that those two types of people are presented with are very different. And is there an argument to say that actually what I want to do is try and find someone who's just that two years older than me or ... That's a terrible way of phrasing it, who's just that step ahead from where I am.

14:15

I think my experience it makes sense what you're saying, somebody who's quite empathetic, recent experience. But I think I really believe somebody who has seen it all would not ... I'd reflect on myself in my 20 year journey. What I found really important when I was 20 something to 20 years later, it's completely different. And sometimes people with all that experience actually have not just done two years of reflection gone through it. They've actually done several, maybe decades of reflection. They've gone through several different aspects of those experiences.

15:16

And then they've gone and so they've then come to a better conclusion. You see what I'm saying? If somebody goes through one experience and makes some biases about and makes some sort of, doesn't have the complete data, hasn't grown that much. Whereas somebody who's done that whole holistic journey would be able to make better decisions. But more important than all of that experience.

15:45

And I've got mentorship from people who've had 30 years of experience and I've got the best coach and mentor. I'm happy to openly say it, it is Andy Skipper. I don't know if Andy's a lot older than me, but he's more passionate about coaching. It's about someone who really cares and really cares about the community will almost outrun every single person because that passion will drive a lot of different things that you need, which is listening, which is believing, which is then connecting, which is then many, many different aspects.

16:32

I think in a mentor, just like in a manager, you need to know, what are they doing this for? And that's not very obvious, you have to go through different mentors to actually find out. You might actually get that thousand person. They're maybe towards the end of their journey and in terms of professional journey, but now they're just coaching. They're really passionate about giving back to the community.

17:03

And if you get that because a lot of people might be going after that person to get coaching. But if you get that, that would be amazing. But what I would say, you have to try different coaches, different mentors, and you might outgrow certain mentors, but have a support network. You have to try them. You have to be very honest and have a difficult conversation where it's not working out.

17:33

Because what I did early in my career was I asked for a mentor, I got a mentor. I was really grateful, oh, this CTO or CIO is mentoring me better. But they were doing a really crappy job at it. They were really moving times all the time, it just didn't feel passionate. And I initially felt it very difficult to have that, like say, "Hey, you're not giving me the time, you're doing me a disservice."

18:09

But the second time around actually when this happened, I just reached out and I said, "Look, please don't become a mentor because people needing help might be in a difficult situation." You have to take this very seriously. And that made an impact. But unfortunately mentoring especially is about trying a lot and you might get 10% or less than that kind of hit rate.

18:38

On the outreach.

18:42

On the outreach and then execution. I think there's initial this time where somebody gets you or somebody doesn't. There might be even people, so there's aspects of it. One aspect is somebody who gets your journey, somebody who understand and believes that, for example, if I want to be a CTO for X, smaller org, I'm already there, so I currently manage a hundred people. And bigger orgs and bigger orgs, right?

19:19

Somebody that gets your journey, that's one. Somebody who basically has a little bit of the context. For example, there are specialization as you said, for example, my thing is building machine learning products. Somebody who's built that, done that, might be able to give you more contextualized information, but that's lower on the list.

19:48

Leadership coaching is really about fundamental leadership, like how do you build resilience? How do you make sense of the aches and pains and the difficulties that you faced? How do you get to where you want to be in a very competitive world? I think that's more important. And then last bit is if they've done something similar, that'd be great.

20:18

If you are a mentor or if you are someone who is leading people, how do you help someone understand themselves?

20:37

I think the technique that I tend to use is that first you've just got to talk about, let them describe their journey. If they were to write their story, how would they write their story? Because that kind of shows me how they view themselves, right? By the way, I'll just skip over the fact that you have to build trust for people to be really vulnerable because coaching is, at the heart of it I'm not there to just teach them Rust or Kubernetes or some deep learning algorithm or something. I'm just trying to build this whole human being that can sort of take this journey forward.

21:29

And so I think first of all, is that how would they write their story? Are they even aware of what their story is? Start building on that. If the person is a little bit unaware, you would ask them kind of challenging questions, probe them about ... If you are their manager, then you'll be able to get more data points because you're experiencing them in day to day, week to week. You can ask them really challenging questions. Are they really confident about themselves?

22:14

You can ask that, once you develop trust, what's the most difficult decisions they've made? So you're kind of getting a sense of their foundation. And then help them understand what their values are. Because values, I think if people understand their values, it gets them through a lot of difficult situations. It helps them be brave in certain situations.

22:52

How do you know what your values are?

22:57

I mean, that requires a lot of introspection. It could be described by the journey that you take and what you believe in. For example, I became a leader, a manager because I saw the impact a really great manager had on me. Taking average managers and a great manager really created a huge impact. After committing to myself, I'm going to be a great manager, so I'm going to learn all the duties for it. That meant that I didn't need some corporate or some company training. I searched out and reflected on what made great leaders, some amazing leaders, something to aspire to.

23:50

This is not software engineering. What made Mother Teresa who didn't have any position or power have so much influence or the likes of Abdul Sattar Edhi, who basically built Asia's largest private network, ambulance network. The man did not know how to read or write. What made this person who did not know how to read and write make such a huge impact? And it was foundationally, I saw that he basically really went through life and was just really sincere about certain things. And he grew and he grew and that sincerity drove him and it touched every human being.

24:36

It takes a different person to when you are in an area where gangs are fighting, but if the ambulance comes, they will stop fighting because they have this unbelievable respect for this human being. I think that made me kind of reflect on or seek out what it means to be a leader other than sort of what. And it was beyond the values of a company.

25:05

Now once I started on that journey, when a difficult situation came, like in a particular situation somebody said that one of the reports that I kind of built up as a leader, somebody said, "We don't need you because you built him as a leader." Now human instinct might kick in that I know that he's not really there. So what do I do? Do I live by my values and carry on coaching and mentoring the person? Or do I submit to my law or desire to say, "Look, I let him fail."

25:44

And there could be many different reasons for people to do this. I have a family, I've built up this organization from scratch. You might have many different reasons, but if you don't know your values, you're not going to make the right decision. Because there's always something, always an excuse outside your values that you might actually say, "No, actually I'm doing the right thing."

26:07

I carried on coaching and mentoring and then everybody said, "Okay. We really need him because, look, these are the last two weeks and these are the problems that Usman helped me solve. I think it starts with reflection. It starts with a sense of purpose and a sense of purpose actually helps you explore your values.

26:32

And as you go through your working journey, you will have made so many different decisions at different points, which mentors to take, how to make decisions based off your values, which companies to join, which jobs to take. How do you actively improve your own decision making?

26:55

I think your decision making has many different sort of input, or it has many different aspect that you use to actually make that decision, right? For example, one of my mentors actually helped me realize over the last period of years that at any stages, there was a need for approval. I had a need for approval. Now what that tension or that sort of thing that existed in me, pulled me in a different direction. Pulled me a little bit away from my values. Pulled me a little bit away from a North star, which is building great products, great teams.

27:55

That's why I became an engineer. That's why I'm still on this journey. That was constantly having an impact on my decision making. And I would've never been able to really get that without my mentor. So once I knew that, how do I kind of deal with that, right? So for example, now I have a problem, how do I solve it? I started reading up or reflecting on where that need for approval came from. So all the way from childhood, right? The language your parents use. Who are the kind of leaders that are just injecting that need for approval. Because people don't talk about it, but not everyone behaves ideally in this world. So you got to be very careful. I know we don't talk about it over interviews. We don't talk about it.

29:04

I became cognizant of the fact that every decision making, am I doing it based on values or is it the problem that I'm having? What is the purpose of that? So it's my day to day operations. Then if it was to decide on my next role, I need to be able to make sure that basically I'm making the decision for my passions and for my values. I have not fixed myself, so I don't know. I need some data points to say what I'm doing, but it's definitely helped my operations a lot more, my conversations a lot more.

29:53

I think the way that you are able to give yourself some distance from kind of your own experience there and reflect on it and monitor it is amazing and I don't think enough of us do it and find the space to be able to reflect on themselves from our top down point of view and work out what improvements we could make in order to be better.

30:28

Well, thanks. I think that I was able to do that. I think one of the things that really helped me, or one of the kind of experiences in my childhood that strengthened this, so there was an advance team in my early childhood years which made me an outsider.

30:53

What was it?

30:54

It was extended family making me feel like an outsider, always like an outsider. I embraced that outsiderness so much that basically if somebody said, "I don't know," then I leapfrogged and I had a lot more confidence, even when there was feedback. It was a bit of a double edge, the same adversity actually created a deep rooted need for approval. But also actually strengthen me in saying that I want to build products, I don't really care for approval. So it's like Jekyll and Hyde situation.

31:40

But I'm able to be retrospective is because the first step is I'm a rebel, so what? But then that opens up a book, which allows me to then read the book through a ... You have to switch gears to say, "Okay, now I'm that growth mindset and how do I get better?" Maybe get better as a rebel, but still get better. Those two identities which I have to be really careful about, not the growth, but the rebel identity. It powers me through, a lot of people don't believe in it, actually I'm going to make it work. It worked actually. Okay, everybody's on board now. But it helps me reflect, it helps me power through, I just have to be careful with that. I don't know whether that answered your question, Ben, but that's how I-

32:38

No, it does. And I've really enjoyed our conversation and I thank you for taking the time out to share it. And I hope that your rebel way of doing things continues and doesn't change. Take it easy, man.

32:57

You too.