Gordon Tobin - Vice President, Commercial Sales @G2 (Formerly @Headspace, @LinkedIn) - Prioritization and Methodology of Building Your Culture Standard, Talent Management Mindset - Interview, Hire, Coach, Monthly Management Cadence, Stakeholder Management

Guest:

Gordon Tobin - Vice President, Commercial Sales @G2

(Formerly @Headspace, @LinkedIn)

Guest Background:

Gordon Tobin is the Vice President, Commercial Sales at G2. Prior to joining G2, Gordong was the Director of Enterprise Sales at Headspace. Before joining Headspace, Gordon was at LinkedIn for about nine years. He had six roles in four different offices spanning three different continents. Two of his most recent roles were, one is the Global Head of the Business Leadership Program, and most recently he was a sales leader in the Sales Solutions Business. About a year and a half after Gordon joined LinkedIn, they IPO'd in 2011, and then they were purchased by Microsoft for $27 billion in 2016.

Gordon is based in San Francisco, California, originally from Dublin, Ireland.

Guest Links:

LinkedIn

Episode Summary:

In this episode, we cover:

- The Prioritization, Mindset and Methodology of Building Your Culture Standard (Set, Demo, Hold)

- The Talent Management Mindset - Interview, Hire, Coach

- Leadership Cadence - Priorities, Time Spend, Meetings

- Best Practices for Stakeholder Management

 

Full Interview Transcript:

Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to the Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest growing companies. Enjoy!

Naber:  Hey there, team. Today we have my good buddy Gordon Tobin on the show out of San Francisco, California, originally from Dublin, Ireland. Gordon is the Director of Enterprise Sales at Headspace. Headspace has a $320 million valuation, they've raised $75 million in capital. Before joining Headspace, Gordon was at LinkedIn for about nine years. He had six roles in four different offices spanning three different continents. Two of his most recent roles were, one is the Global Head of the Business Leadership Program, and most recently he was a sales leader in the Sales Solutions Business. About a year and a half after Gordon joined LinkedIn, they IPO'd in 2011, and then they were purchased by Microsoft for $27 billion in 2016.

Naber:  Gordon Tobin, awesome to have you on the show. Very privileged.

Gordon Tobin:  The pleasure is all mine. The pleasure is all mine, I can assure you.

Naber:  Cheers Buddy. The pleasantries are not just surface level, one of my favorite people. So what I want to do today is run through a bunch of different stuff. One of the more insightful business minds I've been around, had the privilege to work with, both on a few different projects, but also observe from both close and afar. What I want to do is probably start going through a little bit of your background, your personal journey. You've got a really cool, interesting family background. You've been all over the world, traveled all over the world. I've got an insert in here where one of the conversations you and I had long time ago helped change my life for the better, which is great. And we'll talk about all that stuff, but why don't we start maybe five, seven minutes around what Gordon Tobin was growing up. Maybe what you were like growing up as a kid, in school, then we can get into some interesting things you were interested in, or some jobs you had, etc.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, for sure, and thanks again for having me on. I think, where should I start? Dickens - "I Am Born."? I think, for me the first, well my early memories, if you want to go back that far, are very, very happy ones up until about the age of about six or seven. Six or seven, won't go into all the drama, but parents parted ways, things financially didn't go so good, and I think at that age, very early on, I had to learn how to be self reliant, and self sufficient, and also had to learn how to adjust quite a bit because there was a lot of change in my life, because of the personal circumstances outside of my control over the next 10 years. So if I was in characterized Gordon, up to seven as very happy go lucky little child, from seven to 17, 18, I was a wild child, not a great academic...And so for all the folks who maybe didn't get an a plus plus in applied mathematics or economics, I can assure you that that's not the be all and end all. Whilst I was not a great academic, I think I thoroughly enjoyed my education. I had so much fun in school, when I chose to attend. And I think the turning point for me, was when I had just finished up the equivalent of my leaving cert in Ireland - by the way, I'm an Irishman, so if there's a difference between what you you hear and what you see on my LinkedIn profile, it's because my mother is from Trinidad and Tobago, which I'll touch on in a minute. I think for me, at 17, it was a turning point where I could have gone down one road, which was not a good one. That was the road of I have not achieved academically, I will go into or down a trajectory or a path that's not the most bright or inspiring. Or I could double down and really try, for the first time in my life, hard at studying and then just putting in my effort. And I probably, retrospectively looking back at it, put in about 80% effort, did pretty good. Got into the second best university, best I should like to say, but apparently according to rankings is number two, in the country, University College Dublin, studied English and Sociology, then I did a Master's there in Business. And what was a big turning point for me there was growing up, particularly during that turbulent period, being intellectual or academic or anything of the kind was not something that was celebrated. As a matter of fact, quite the opposite. And so I was a closet reader and intellectual. I read every single girls children's book there is because up until the period of seven we had a big library of girls children's books, and then after seven we didn't buy too many more books. Like I read every Enid Blyton - The Famous Five, The Adventures of Babysitting Club - I could tell you them all. Everything in the shop. And I used to remember reading veraciously under my covers. But the reason why I say this is because I hit that until I was 17 when I got to University, suddenly education was something to be celebrated. Suddenly people were not talking about jobs, they were talking in the context of a career, and they were talking about meaning and purpose. And the upbringing I had post-seven years old was very much, a little bit further down the Maslow hierarchy of needs, as far as just making sure the ship was steady. And so it opened up a whole new world for me. And after some time there I went, did some travel around the world is, which I think you might be aware. I lived in a 10 for nine months in Australia. I surfed all throughout the worlds, from right through Southeast Asia, Australia. I lived in a commune, I was in New Zealand, I was in the States, I was in Central America. Came home 2008, big recession, Lehmann brothers failed around that time, you might remember, Ireland fell off the side of a cliff, and lucky little old me I got plucked out of that recession by what was at the time a little known start up called LinkedIn. I was employee number six in the Dublin office. I think they're are like two and a half thousand now or something. So, I won the lottery ticket, and I was invested in by that company, and over the next eight and a half years, I spent time in Dublin and moved down to Australia. I opened offices there. I came to San Francisco, started-up that training program globally for all of our graduates. And then went back in around the Sales Solutions business for a few years. And then most recently to present day, in my last six months I'm in my new role leading Sales at Headspace, which is a mindfulness meditation app company. So, I'll pause there. That's the brief history of time. Hopefully that was brief enough and not two verbose, but gives you kind of a flavour for my journey.

Naber:  Mate, that was great. That's great. And we'll hop through a few of those jumps you made both before LinkedIn, at LinkedIn, afterwards at Headspace. Headspace, $320 million valuation, $75 million raised, a rocket ship, really fast growing, incredible product-driven company, which is really cool. LinkedIn of course, $27 billion acquisition by Microsoft - you there very early. I was actually just looking at a photo that I saw, somehow I found this on Facebook, photo of Bob Moody taking a picture, it was eight and a half years ago of you and Adrian wrapping shoe boxes...

Gordon Tobin:  Oh yes... that was a a holiday time thing. But that was back in the day when we were literally taking our laptops out of their boxes and setting them up ourselves, we didn't have IT at LinkedIn those days, if you can believe it.

Naber:  I do believe it. A tech company not having IT, incredible. But the caption was hilarious, "Gordon and Adrian wrapping shoe boxes. Non-revenue generating activity". I thought that was hilarious. Anyways, the point is really, really early getting onto the LinkedIn ship, and lucky we both were...Yeah. So cool. Such a cool ride and then, and then your jump to Headspace - very, very smart move as well. We'll talk about that in a little bit. So, along the way, you've made a couple of jumps. So let's talk first about your...You just got back from living in a tent for a long time, I think

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah man, a commune.

Naber:  Amazing. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. But was your first role BOA - Bank of America, when you came back.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, yeah. Yes it was...

Naber:  Haha. Give me a short blurb on what you're doing at Bank of America (BOA).

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. I was in collections for a delinquent credit card debts, I was a collections agent.

Naber:  Dream job, dream job.

Gordon Tobin:  Of course. And then your primary, that was your primary remit. Your secondary remit was to, and this is part of I was an unwitting cog in a larger wheel, that was the securitization of debt against people's properties. So basically making sure that their credit card that was secured against their home and if they didn't pay their debt, they would lose their home.

Naber:  Compounding effects. Compounding.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. And I mean, we all know where that led, 10, 11 years ago. But, from my point of view, the day-to-day actually was really good because I sat with a headset for nine hours, the thing we go "bunggg", a bunch of notes would pop up in front of me telling me what the person's situation was credit-wise, and what we wanted to do. And I would deal nine hours a day straight, a half hour break, in some pretty difficult conversations. And I learned how to be compassionate. I learned how to really listen and not wait to but-in while the other person is speaking. And I learned how to be resilient and that kind of environment. And I think actually working there and having some tough experiences early in life really built in me a shield of spirit that has protected me from the things that have happened throughout my life, and that has just led me to relate to those experiences differently and construct meaning around them in a positive way.

Naber:  I think it's both apparent professionally and personally and when anyone spends more than one minute with you, which is I think it's an amazing testament. Very cool. Okay. So from BOA you moved to Nomads World Hotels and you lived in Byron Bay in Australia for six months, and quote unquote on your LinkedIn profile, possibly the most fun job ever. What was your favorite part about that job?

Gordon Tobin:  The sense of community. There was 150 of us. We woke up, we shared our resources, we surfed together in the morning, the early morning, catching the most beautiful glassy waves. The backdrop was tropical jungle, one of the most beautiful beach breaks in Australia. And we would come back, we'd eat together, we'd work in the hostile. I'm a salesperson. So we'd find ways to make money, think broadly. We tell anything we could from cold cans of coke on the beach to whatever we could. But I think it was that sense that we were all pulling together in unison in pursuit of a common purpose, which was really a community that was based on nothing else other than looking at it for your fellow brother or sister and making sure they were well taken care of. And we did that through surfing. We did it through music and we did it through breaking bread together. Meal time was a very important time where we pool our resources, to come up with the best meal possible. And for me it was just amazing. I worked front of house at the hostels so I knew everybody nearby. And then a small part of my job, I think you might read on my profile was removing poisonous snakes occasionally when they came into the hostel.

Naber:  That's so scary. Brown Snakes are no joke.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, snake capturing...So if the whole sales things doesn't work out, I do have a little bit of experience there, so don't forget that if you're watching this podcast you can find me.

Naber:  Haha, so funny that I pulled the headphone jack out of my headphones. Can you hear me okay?

Gordon Tobin:  Ha, yeah, I've gotcha.

Naber:  That was at a Arts Factory, in Byron?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, the Arts Factory in Byron, which I think most people who've gone up the east coast of Australia will have heard of it, if not stayed there.

Naber:  It's a high traffic place. Okay, so you left there...What kind of, what music are you listening to at that point? You made a passing comment, but I'm, I'm interested. You said that music was connecting you.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, primarily acoustic. So I play guitar. I brought the guitar with me, and that was a big part of what we did together. Actually, I neglected to mention as a community we would just make music together. So I don't actually learn songs. My brain is not wired that way. I don't have the intelligence to do it, but I can make stuff up as I go along. And so, there's a few people in there and I don't know if you've ever had the experience of just jamming with people, and some people you can just, you start playing and they start playing along, and it's it clicks. And those people were there. And so, there was a lot of music, a lot of guitar playing going on there as well. That was a big part of our experience. And still a big part of my life to this day.

Naber:  Do you play by ear? You don't read music...you play by ear?

Gordon Tobin:  Well, no, I can, I mean I can barely read upside down tabs. And actually, to be honest with you Brandon, I don't make, I don't to like to learn songs. I'm what I would call a bedroom player. I sit in the room, and I make stuff up. Or I sit in the garden, and I make stuff up as I'm going along. And I almost get into a trance-like meditative state, where I forget how much time is going by, and I suddenly look up at us two hours, 90 minutes, or maybe half an hour, but it's a very therapeutic, private thing that the introvert in of me loves to do.

Naber:  Really cool. We're jumping ahead here, but would you view that as a form of meditation?

Gordon Tobin:  So I think, yes it can. It's a definitely a meditative practice depending on the state of mind. I mean, meditation is really just a tool to be more mindful of what you're doing in your life, and to be more present in what you're doing in your life. And so anything that requires or summons your full attention and brings you into what some people might call a flow state, or where all your Gamma, Theta, Alpha brainwaves are going in straight lines toward one thing. That's a beautiful place to be in. and I find I get close to that place either through the act of meditation itself or things like playing the guitar. Guitar's actually probably the closest after meditation, in terms of getting me to a more mindful place...in my own mind and remaining somewhat in control of it.

Naber:  Very cool. Very cool. And then, after that you went travelling for probably another six months or so, after you were in Byron?

Gordon Tobin:  Yes, so after Byron, hit the road. We went up the entire East Coast of Australia. Then we went...we met a bunch of people in Byron, so the people we met with said come stay with us. So for the latter half of the six months we just couch surfed, and surfed literally, so double surfing going on - got a combo in...And we went up the East Coast, went all through Queensland. Got up...Did Frasier Island, did the Whitsunday Islands, all that stuff - which is, by the way, if you haven't been, one of the most aesthetically beautiful places on earth. Anybody who listens to this, I would strongly recommend you take a visit there when you get a chance.

Naber:  Gorgeous.

Gordon Tobin:  Then I went to New Zealand, we have pals there. We surfed down there old school in much, much, much colder waters, in New Zealand as well. Then went from there to Los Angeles, spent time in Los Angeles and Culver City, of all places, backward and forward to Texas because I made a very good friend from Austin, while I was in Texas. And then we went straight down into Central America and continued surfing through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama as well. So pretty awesome.

Naber:  Wow. What a journey.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, I think that the funds ran out. My father was a little bit ill. He's much better, thank God now. But all the cosmic fingers, if you will, were pointing towards Ireland and returning home and that the year travel had served as purpose in terms of my wanderlust and what I was after.

Naber:  Wow. Okay. So you came back, followed the cosmic signs, and came back to work as a recruitment consultant in Dublin. Tell us, give us, give us a minute on that.

Gordon Tobin:  I'll give you a bit of back context first. So when I returned back from a year of travel, as I mentioned, in 2008 Lehman fails, I think it was October 17, if memory serves. But I came home to an Ireland that was deep in a very bad recession. So if you were male, between the age of 18 to 25 there was a 50% chance you were unemployed. I have a core group of friends who I've known since about six years old. And for a variety of reasons, I'd say seven of the ten are still long-term unemployed since then.

Naber:  Wow.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. And so there's a tale of two cities I think in the Irish economic resurgence depending on which side of that city you're on, North or South

Naber:  I was going to say North or South, yeah. The Liffey.

Gordon Tobin:  But for me, for the first six months I came back I was on social welfare. And it was a decision. It was coming from this primrose path of Dalliance of surfing, and all that good stuff I was talking about in communes to Ireland, gray, dreary. And also, a communal consciousness of...it was socially acceptable to, not give up, but to congregate with your other unemployed friends and ,drink beer or do whatever, and complain about what was going on. And I think after a few weeks of reacclimatizing to that situation, realizing that I did not going to social welfare once a week, picking up 117 euros and trying to make that stretch for my mom's house. And that was not something that I was going to tolerate. So in a previous life I boxed quite a bit, and then I decided I was going to get up every morning and getting a job was going to be my job. And so I get up, I train in the morning. I would spend several hours online, LinkedIn, lots of other places trying to find jobs and then I would go to the boxing club in the evening, as opposed to doing what other people were doing, which is the socially acceptable thing at that time which was to say, "The government messed up, and it was outside of our control. The whole country is going pitfall, so I'm going to follow that." And I'm not saying not to blow my own horn, I just made a conscious decision that I was not going to get into that mindset. And so I trained physically and mentally every day and went through some really hard times. There was 17 euros extra per month for the Internet so I could apply for jobs. And that was a real expense in our household, that my mother had complained to me about. And so for me it was the period before I went into recruitment was six months of welfare, and then when I went into recruitment, I'm trying to call people to let me work jobs that don't exist, while the whole country is being laid off. So really recruitment for me was, I'm first of all eternally grateful that they gave me that job and I learned a lot about talent, which maybe we'll touch on that a little bit. But that's where I really learned the value of resilience and also gratitude because even though that job was terribly difficult in a macro economic climate, that was the worst in the history since the start of the Irish State in 1929 and then the first draft of The Republic in 1931, I believe it was. Even for all those hardships that were part of that experience, I learned so much. And so then, I don't want to fast forward and ruin the end of the movie, but you go into a place LinkedIn and they started talking about things career and all that good stuff going on there. Culturally, for me that was a little bit of a walk in the park compared to what I had experienced in the previous few years of my life. Songs, surfing around Australia.

Naber:  So, a quick question because I want to get into LinkedIn, but there's just - I mean, I wish we had 10 hours for this episode right now - so, how do you remind yourself of that experience on a daily, weekly, monthly basis now when your circumstances are vastly different from what they were back then? How do you make sure that you remind yourself, what's the mental process or peg that you put in your calendar, or whatever it is. How do you remind yourself of making sure that you're grateful, from going from where you were at that time to right now?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. there's a few ways. One I'm engaged in, I'm a bit of a meditation guy, so I meditate four times a day. And part of that is a gratitude practice. Second thing is I've very strong connection to my roots back home. I've always felt an otherness because I'm unusual no matter where I am. Even at home, I'm slightly unusual, given my mixed race background. And, I also never want to forget where I came from, and what my family did, and the sacrifice we had, to make to get me to be on this point that you can just be on top of this podcast with you. And the last thing, and this is one that I learned at LinkedIn and even had some coaching on it this morning, is the ability to zoom out. When you are in the weeds in the problem, your mind can be a school-sized prison and inprisonment can be so total that the prisoner does not even know they're locked up. And that is a very dangerous place to be. But if you have the ability to zoom out and say, okay, my momentary struggle, trouble, or strife, or turbulence, or whatever's going on at that time, if you can zoom out and say, well look on the spectrum of things in the grand scheme of life that will happen to me - like getting married or a bereavement or all the big life events - where this really stack up on a unit sense against that? And if you zoom out far enough and you think about it, you're like actually not at all. In most cases, if I asked myself, am I going to care about this in the same visceral emotional way now in a year's time, the answer to that question is always no. And part of the reason for that is, and I don't want to belabour the point, but our default settings, they live in our own heads. And our own emotions are so immediate, so available, so urgent and felt they have to be dealt with in that moment so urgently. But the reality is they, like all things in life, are passing and transient. And so your ability to step back and observe those and let that process happen, and not become the emotion, but observe it and be curious and learn from it, can help from the resilience path and bring you through almost anything in life, in my opinion. We have a choice in terms of every construct meaning around our experience. If you're aware enough to make that choice and stop.

Naber:  And everyone listening just reminded themselves of what I just said around - if your around Gordon for more than one minute, you realize this guy is enlightened and deep and amazing perspective.

Gordon Tobin:  Thank you, I appreciate it.

Naber:  So you jumped into LinkedIn at that time, and that means a whole lot of different things for you personally and professionally. When you jumped into LinkedIn, you had a whole lot of responsibility thrown at you from a sales, a new market perspective, a new boss and everything was young. As you grew up, as you grew up at LinkedIn, you met an enormous amount of fascinating people. And one of the things that LinkedIn is notorious for is building an incredible culture and hiring great people. If I'm thinking about the people that embody that and I'd to hear, talk about it, your very high on that list of people that I'd to hear. What are some of the frameworks or principles that you think about at both LinkedIn, that you took away...of a business that is just world-class at building culture, as you go into and as you're now in Headspace. How do you think about building cultures, especially as you're building new teams, taking over new teams? How do you think about that? What's the framework that you use in your mind?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. So the framework that I use is one I've learned at LinkedIn. And so for me, culture and values, if you are...it's really actually a question about integrity. So there you will have a set of cultural tenants and values, and they are things that are statements of self, both your current self and your aspirational self. And it's also a set of guiding principles, in terms of how you will govern your actions and your decisions on a daily basis. And I think, particularly in a sales context, but anywhere, I think Peter Drucker might've, I'm paraphrasing, but says "culture eats strategy" for breakfast. It's so true. And for me, it's doing business through values. Just because we're in corporate America or corporate wherever you, you can run a really good business and you can also teach people really good human values. And the right way to do it with integrity and through honesty. And so for me in building that, when I came in to the team at Headspace, I asked them those questions. We sat down, we took a full day because I wanted them to understand how important cultural, the cultural bedrock of everything we do, how that affects everything. And so we took a full day where we white-boarded it out. I was like, who are we today? I don't know exactly exactly, you guys know better than I do. Tell me who we are. Tell me who we want to be, and then let's talk about some ideas that will govern actions and decisions. And so, I mean, there's a bunch of them. I could give you examples. At LinkedIn, one of the big ones was Members First. So we're always going to put the free member before we put our customers. Because without a healthy member ecosystem, you don't have a B2B business to build on your B2C ecosystem. And so every commercial decision was not made at the expense of compromising that value. And so when I say it's an integrity thing, it's a question of - there's a list of things that we believe to be true, in terms of our current state and who we want to be. And they are things we are not going to compromise on, even if that hurts us financially in the short term. And we have to have shared agreement on what those things are. And then they manifest day-to-day in different decisions that you make, often that conversation will come up, and I will actually think about the culture and the values we've created, and is there a culture or value tenant that can drive or help at least guide the decision making process? And that for me is key. If you don't have that stuff laid down, it's it's not a very nice recipe for a very tasty dish, we'll put it that way.

Naber:  Nice. Good analogy. I've heard you talk about set, demo, and hold the culture from the perspective of how to apply this from a leadership, management, and ground-up perspective. What does that mean when you say set, demo, and hold?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. So culture in a lot of companies can just be a didactic little parable that sits on a polished thing on a wall that people don't know that it is. An awareness of something is different than commitment to it. And so for me, it's, it all starts, everything from a cultural standpoint starts at the top. And so if I as a leader say that, precision in execution on something is important, or compassion in how we collaborate with our cross functional partners and some of the more complex deals we're involved with is important, and we expect folks to live by those things, you know. And so I think, if you don't have that common set of rules in place, it can be really difficult and challenging down the road to manage the business. But if you do have it in place, you're setting yourself up for the right foundation. But that is after talent, that's the starting point.

Naber:  Got It. And how do you, how do you bring that into measuring engagement and performance based on culture? How does that proliferate throughout the organization, both from a leadership and management perspective, and then trickle down? Because you mentioned it's top down.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. So I think, on the top down it's, to your point, I'll just use the parlance, set the standard, demonstrate the standard, hold others accountable. Whatever cultural tenants that we agree to, it starts with me, or the CEO, or whomever is setting the culture. But if she says x is important, she's got to live that, and she's got to demonstrate them. And she can't live it and demonstrate it, then she's not in a position to hold other people accountable to it. That's where I think I'd round-out that answer. I think on the second part, can you remind me of part B of the question?

Naber:  Yeah, sure. So how are you making sure that that comes out when you're thinking about measuring engagement and measuring performance of people? And then how does it, how do you make sure that proliferates throughout the business through leadership and management as well as bottom up - acting that out?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. So I think, from an engagement standpoint, it's rewarding those behaviors that are befitting the culture and helping perpetuate, and grow, an inculcate the culture.

Naber:  Can you give me a couple of examples? Can you give me a couple of examples of that on, how that would happen? What's the setting, what are you saying? What you doing?

Gordon Tobin:  I can give you a really good example, only came up yesterday. So someone who was quite junior-level, not junior, wrong word, but a little bit earlier in career we'll say, wrote a direct email to the executive staff pointing out some things that she felt we could be doing a better job on. And there's a value within Headspace that I really love, which is courageous heart, and it's having the ability to step up and speak your mind if something feels a bit weird, even if you don't fully understand it, just flag it and have the courage to do that. I think, this particular individual was very brave in doing that. And just because, it's a normal human social hierarchical thing to raise the flag on something that, it takes a lot of guts, and I had a huge amount of respect. And it was called out at the all hands as something to be celebrated. And I also think then there's rituals and celebration around that. And so how do you reward that? And I do it through our staff meetings. I do it through all hands. And so if people are living out the cultural tenants of the company, I call it out first actually ahead of the results, because I believe the results follow the culture.

Naber:  Culture breeds results, result doesn't breed culture. It's not chicken and egg. Fully believe it. Okay. So that was gold. That was excellent. And thank you for the examples as well.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, thanks for reminding me of part B of that question when I trailed off.

Naber:  Yeah, no worries. No worries. I reminded myself after you asked. So, you had a lot of interesting cool, gigs at LinkedIn. You went from Sales Development where you're building pipeline, you were in Account Executive roles, you were in Team Lead roles and temporary management roles when were in Sales Development, then you moved to the account executive roles. You're in Dublin, you were in Perth, you moved to San Francisco leading Business Leadership Program there - which was an amazing global program that you had set up. And then ultimately moving into a sales leader role in Sales Solutions. during that time, you have both me, a lot of amazing people, interviewed a lot of amazing people, spoken to a lot of very, very smart, influential people, and hired a lot of people as well. Let's talk about talent. Let's talk about talent. So when you're thinking about hiring great teams and a set of, maybe a framework or a set of principles you use as you're going through that process, how does that play itself out for you? What are the, what's the framework? What are the set of principles that you use when you think about making sure you bring the right person in, engage that person, and retained them?

Gordon Tobin:  Well, let me say this first. If there's anything that anybody takes away from this podcast that talent should be the most important thing you're always thinking about it in your business. No matter if your CEO or Sales Dev Rep, and you're making referrals, or you're making big time hires, or whatever. Throughout your entire career, your ability to have the nose to pick talent is going to be the most important thing you do. Making the right hiring decision is P-1 in Gordon's opinion. And there's a lot of energy coming through now in my voice, but please, please, please believe me that talent is number number one. And in terms of frameworks and philosophies, how do I go about Brandon? There's loads of, I've hired probably in the region of about I think 400+ people directly or indirectly, and maybe 30+ directly. Anyway, point being, you need to align on a set of beliefs and competencies that you believe that if someone possessed these, that they will be successful in this role. That's actually really hard because the taxonomy of skills versus job titles, as I'm sure some of your listeners will be aware, is not exactly a perfect system. And so I think you have, that's the first challenge. But I would say getting really clear on what are the three to five things that this person must be able to do? And then it becomes how do we objectively test for those things in a consistent manner, which is extremely important. I also think you want to give yourself as diverse a candidate slate as possible, so you can hear a multitude of different perspectives asking the same consistent answers to questions. That will really inform the gaps you can and cannot fill. And I think, the other big thing on the hiring front, after you've agreed to those things and you have ways of testing for them, and I'll give you an example. So let's say you're hiring a salesperson - one of my core beliefs, with sales people or any people actually, anybody for that moderate is coachability. And whether you're running a huge big company and you're the CEO, or no matter who you are, you have to be able to coach people around you or else you're just going to end up doing their job for them. And so the way we would test for coachability is give you a scenario and say, "Hey Brandon, you're a an account executive, you got an inbound lead coming in, qualify this person - BANT, pick your thing - and then we'll listen to the call. And so we go through, we do a 20 minute thing, you give the call and then I'll give you feedback - immediately, I give you feedback on that call. And then what I say is, okay, I'm going to ask you to come back in a week and we're going to try the same or similar role play again. And what I'd to see is demonstrable improvement in the areas of giving you feedback. Does that sound reasonable? Okay, great. So now I've given them a week to prepare and recalibrate against some of those things. First thing I do when they walk into the second round is say, "What was the feedback I gave you?" And if they don't know the answer to that question close to verbatim, that's not a good thing - put it that way. But thankfully 99 times out of 100 they do. And it's really a question for me to say - how quickly and with what level of dexterity was this person able to adapt to the coaching I gave them, and what was their emotional reaction to that coaching? Because in the interview process when someone's trying to get a role is different from when someone's in role, and you're giving coaching and feedback on a weekly basis. So coachabiliity for me is key, and I think he can test that going week over week by just keeping it quite simple - that's one thing I would test for, as an example.

Naber:  That's great. And as you go through that process of interviewing thousands of people, thousands and thousands of people to hire hundreds and hundreds of people, do you have a way of...what is the method that you use for calibrating with other people, and who do you include in that process for calibrating the candidates that you're interviewing?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, first person is definitely the Talent Acqsuition (TA) partner, and then secondary spherical is all my cross functional partners will be involved. So I think anybody they would be involved in working with, we would want them to again and go through a score card of what the things that this person would need to be able to have already done and be expected to do in that job. And that'll be different for each cross functional stakeholder. And so making sure I calibrate each one of those. First port of call is always my TA leader. Then we speak to the people that interact with most frequently in a cross functional basis, have the things you want to test for, think through how we test for them objectively so we remain compliant and all that kind of stuff. And then it's a a matter of rolling out the process. And I think the big thing there is really, really the good candidate management. I think a lot of companies get applications - I think LinkedIn got somewhere in the region a million applications last year, which is a lot of applications, and it creates a management issue. And I think a lot of companies are quite good at sourcing and finding people that they think are good, but different things happen internally or competing stuff comes up, and they push an interview or they do something like that - that's terrible, from a candidate experience point of view. I go down and I meet people down in the lobby, and I shake their hand, and I walked them him up, and I walked them out, and I talk to them. And I actually asked people in the lobby - did they interact with you? I'm curious to hear how they interact normally when not under supervision in a contrived environment.

Naber:  I love that. I love that nugget. I love it. Any one to two specific interview questions, or types of questions that you ask that are very telling in the interview process for what you look for? And I don't mean against specific competencies, but a Gordon Tobin special question, where I asked this all the time because it tells me something that no other questions or very few other questions will be able to answer for me.

Gordon Tobin:  I'll give you two examples. One is a Gordon Tobin, one is not a Gordon Tobin one. So the not Gordon Tobin one, which I always find very interesting to learn about people's early motivations. and a lot of this stuff happens before the age of seven - you're programmed, or so they say. But I asked people, what's the, particularly in a sales context, what's the first thing that you did in life to make money? What was the first job you had?

Naber:  That is a good question.

Gordon Tobin:  And I'm curious to know, was that job a function of necessity? Curiosity? Just natural innate a entrepreneurial-ism? Was it something they absorbed from the environment around them, like osmosis? So that's one. And I think their motivations for that can be quite telling in the kind of work they did. That's one big one. And I think the other one, for me, if I think about it...Just a general framework or philosophy, I think when I bring anybody in that I'll share, that it's a little bit off topic, but I think is important is this idea of near perfect autonomy and accountability when you have the talent in the door. And so this is probably my main one. And this is...early in a role, people need direction because they don't know what they don't know, and then they get to stage two and they're like okay, now I know what I don't know, and they need more guidance. And then you bring them through the guidance period, and then they know what they're doing, and they're in the flow zone. Well, most managers, and I've made this mistake myself - oh that person's crushing it, they don't need my help anymore. And then they get bored and they become an attrition risk, and you don't know about it. And so for me it's being able to recognize where people are in that curve and developing their talent along the way. And paying hyper-attention to everybody, because everybody's in a different place in the competency curve. And so when you think about autonomy and accountability, I aspire to get people near perfect autonomy to make decisions as they want and consciously trying to divorce myself from as many decisions as possible. And the reason why I do that is I cannot hold sales people or anybody accountable for the end result or the output, if I have too much meddlesome interaction in the inputs. They are free to come ask for my advice, for my counsel, for me to remove barriers, resources, or get on deals, I don't mind. But I won't insert myself directively in doing that, unless of course there's a performance thing going on. But generally how do I give this person as much autonomy to do what they need? But also let them know that with the autonomy, will come accountability at the end. And where I've seen people thrive in those environments. But it's hard. The little analogy I'll give to explain it is, it's like if you had your kid and your teaching it how to ride the bicycle. And you've got the - what do you call them, stabilizers? The little wheels? Training wheels. And their on their training wheels, and you take the training wheels off, and they start to wobble maybe just a little bit. If they're in a park and there's some nice soft ground, and some grass, you might actually let them wobble for a little bit longer so they learn the lesson of balance. You may even let them have a little spill so they learn what happens if you don't keep balance, if you don't keep the wheels straight. But if on the other hand you saw your child veering dangerously towards some oncoming traffic, you would of course jump in and step in. And the challenge with the autonomy and accountability model is knowing difference between when to step in, when to allow the person learn from the mistake. And that's really dependent on how existential the risk is of the learning lesson relative to the mistake. But that's a hard one, and I'm still a student of that and will be until my last breath.

Naber:  That's a really good one. Do you have any tips for that evaluation process?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, I think for me, you've got to think about...usually this comes up where someone says, "Hey, I want to try this thing." Whatever new way they want to sell something, or go to market, or some new thing. And for me, it's like, I've probably seen this movie before and have an idea, an inkling of how I think it's going to play out. And kind of most of the time it plays out that, not always, I'm wrong - we're only human. And the question I always ask myself is, is this a one way door or a two way door? So if they're walking into a one way door and there's no way of backing out, I try and make sure I highlight that for them. If it's a two way door, and they can walk in and be "Ooh", this might not have been the right room, let's moonwalk back out, back through door number two. And the analogy I use. And this is where it goes back to autonomy. I'm not going to make that decision for the rep, I'll provide the frameworks to allow them think through the process. But I won't tell people the answer because that's not my job. My job is to hire really smart people and coach them and bring out the potential in them, not provide all the answers. And I couldn't if I wanted to, even if...I'm just not capable of providing all the answers. Very few people are, and anybody who tells you they are - I would veer very, very far away from them. That's just Gordon's opinion.

Naber:  So, you've got all these smart, coachable, brilliant people that you bring in into business. You're building culture - set, demo, hold the standard. And you've got to bring these folks into a structured environment that they're going to be able to succeed. What is your - let's start with something simple. What is your meeting structure or your cadence, whether it be daily, weekly, monthly look like? Some of the meetings that you have, conversations you have, what's your cadence?

Gordon Tobin:  For sure. So I think, maybe I'll speak about it just from the front line manager perspective, which might be helpful. I think, first of all, in my opinion, the two core operating priorities for anybody is hiring and coaching. I'll repeat that again, talent and coaching. 40% of your time as a frontline managers should be spent coaching. And I would, espouse folks on the call, if you haven't, maybe Google the GROW model - there's a bunch of them, but it's a way of asking questions to get the answer as opposed to just giving the answer. So you want to teach someone had to fish as opposed to just hand them fresh fish, every day - that's the idea there.

Naber:  Love Fish.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. Who doesn't love a good fishing. The other ways you've got to bring people along these curves is helping them...I see myself almost like a Sherpa that doesn't carry the bags. And so I can point the direction of up the mountain because I've climbed a bit of it, and I've seen where the pitfalls are, and I can tell people that. But I ain't going to carry your bags, and you got to walk up that mountain yourself. And you gotta be motivated to do so. I think if you find the right people and you give them the right set of direction, and you set the right cultural foundations, you're in a really good spot for people to thrive. But you must create the necessary conditions for success, which all begins with culture.

Naber:  Got It. Awesome. And what percentage of your week would you bucket into each major thing that you're doing? Let's use the frontline sales manager example. What percentage of your time are you spending doing each particular thing? Either per week or per month, however you've thought about it.

Gordon Tobin:  So, hour-long staff meeting once a week. That's where everyone through our operating priorities, our OKR's, and how we're pacing against them. We'll have a forecast meeting, which is your typical upside, downside, outlook - how we're pacing against that, any things we need to do to accelerate or decelerate what's going on. And then, I'll have an hour long, ideally one to one with every rep, where five minutes might just be spent, just double checking if anything changed in the forecast, if any swings happen in deals. But most of that time should be spent coaching. And then maybe toward the end of the quarter, with a couple of people, I put on my non-qualified therapist hat and support people through those moments that we all have in sales where we're like "Ooh, where's my, where's my number coming from? And the reality is nobody goes through a sales career unscarred. And so as a manager you need to be compassionate to that, and help support and guide people to those moments when it happens.

Naber:  Awesome. Favourite or most impactful monthly or quarterly meetings that you have?

Gordon Tobin:  Favourite, most impactful monthly or quarterly meetings we have. The All Hands meeting for sure that Rics owns. I think that gives the air traffic control point of view of what's going on. I think it's really important for a leader to, from a stakeholder management point of view, obviously up, down, and across, but down is so important. And for me, clarity and transparency are really important. And for a CEO, like Rich to build trust with 230 people, that happens with consistency over time. And so I think you get the same set of operating priorities, the same set of values or culture is consistent, and every month you're CEO, she or he is coming out and talking to those, and reminding people with reputation, reputation, reputation. Steve Gergen once said, former press secretary, "You got to repeat something until people are sick of hearing it." I'm a big believer in that. I'm a big believer in. And Rich comes out once a month, and has that meeting. And I think it's really, transparent. It's really informative, and it builds trust.

Gordon Tobin:  Awesome. I think, Jeff Weiner used to say, "Only after you've said something a hundred times, people will have full of heard you." Then, after 99 times, they still may not have heard you, after the a hundred times, they may have heard you. So saying something over and over, it'll sink in. I subscribe to that. And then one of the other things, with your example - the all hands meetings - is the transparency that it applies to the entire employee base that allows those employees to go then be autonomous and make decisions because they know what's important and what are the highest priorities within the organization, all within the vein of the cultural and value tenants that, that are so important to the organization - well defined. I think that's a makes sense. It's really valuable as well.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. Typically, the operating priorities, whether it's my staff meeting, all hands, whatever, it needs to be consistent across the board or else you're just be all over the map.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Okay. And as you're, as you're going through some of the different roles that you've had both at LinkedIn and the Global Program that you ran. Actually, just give a one minute summary on the business leadership program that you ran because it was a mammoth. And I feel you skipped over that quite quickly. Give us the 30 to 60 seconds on what you did there, and then we can jump into what my question was.

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah, totally. I'm happy to talk about it. Business Leadership Program, headline is we better, that's not the right word. We wanted to do two things. We wanted to up level the entry level sales talent across the sales organization of LinkedIn. And as a secondary, we wanted a longer term play in succession planning in potentially finding young talent and grooming it for more senior executive positions in the long-term. And so the idea was, if we had a different strategy where we went straight to the source, went straight to the universities, went all around the country, even we got to a point we were hiring people who hadn't gone to university - which is another big topic I'd love to get back on your show and talk about another day because talent and opportunity are definitely not equally distributed, for sure. But setting up that program was probably the six most difficult months of my career in that we were a startup within a very large company with high expectation. We were looking to compete with the Goldman's, and the people who already had very established university programs. And for me, I think coming from Australia, having little to no experience in anything akin to that role, and the remit of that role was, it was just a really hard climb. But I would posit to the folks listening today, if I can, from a career standpoint, I think, may be paraphrasing Richard Branson here, but sometimes you'll get an opportunity in life, which you may not feel you're ready for it, but you should jump on it. And that's what I did in that case. And I think, in building that out, we, I think we're, we've hired over 600 or something people now, which is crazy.

Naber:  Massive, massive scale.

Gordon Tobin:  The retention rate is in around 10%. You'll know millennials in college training programs going into sales, that's well below it, that's a good proxy for industry standard. And so I suppose for me it was, it was very difficult, but it was the most ultimately gratifying thing I've ever done because even now, several years later, they call me, they text me, thanking me, asking for advice, mentorship, all that good stuff. And I thrive on depth of human relationships and the quality of them, not the breath. And to have so many, which is breath, but that go so deep, it's just so gratifying. And to know that I played just a very small part in teaching them about how to go about business in a values based way. And about doing the right thing all the time, even when nobody's looking, even when it's unpopular, even maybe when it's a bad career move, doing the right thing is the right thing always. And that's what I tried to teach those folks and hopefully some of them it stuck. God knows I'm not perfect, but I'm a big believer in ethics, and values, and integrity, and sticking to those things, and that's what I tried to get across to everybody in that program. They were going to learn the skills anyway. All, most skills in almost any job are learnable, but it's the important life lessons that they'll take with them and how they'll treat their employees when they're CEOs of companies, that's what I wanted to get across. And that is when I think we had our biggest win.

Naber:  Awesome. I know you only have another few minutes here and you've been really generous with your time. That program was immense, and it had a significant number of stakeholders involved, all around the world, all over the shop. And then your next role also had a lot of stakeholders. This role you're in right now, a lot of stakeholders. Regardless of the organization, you've dealt with a number of stakeholder management, both challenges, solutions, all that fun stuff. How do you think about stakeholder management and what are some of the most important things people need to do as they're managing their stakeholders internally?

Gordon Tobin:  Yeah. I think it's typical frameworks - up, down, across. Know your audience. I think it's good to have a template, a format that again comes in the form of your operating priorities. It always starts with your vision, your values, your operating priorities, and then how your business is pacing. I think when you're going up the chain that's a little bit more brief and succinct. I think when you're going across, with your cross functional peers, is to make sure that they're aware of all the dependencies that exist, and maybe resource constraints that you have to have. Perhaps you have to have a joint OKR with them. And then when you're talking to the team, it's about rallying and inspiring them around any shared vision as it relates to your overall operating priorities and what you set out. And I think if you can do those things, you're in a really go place.

Naber:  Awesome. Thanks Gordon. Do you have time for two rapid fire questions then we'll head out.

Gordon Tobin:  Well, I have about 90 seconds left.

Naber:  Awesome. I always ask this question on people's birthdays. but I'm gonna ask it - it's not your birthday today, but I'm going to ask it to you today. What's the most valuable lesson you've learned in the last 12 months?

Gordon Tobin:  In the last 12 months? It's better to be loving than to be right.

Naber:  Wow. That's a good one. Is that a personal lesson or professional lesson?

Gordon Tobin:  Both.

Naber:  Love it. Cool. Last question...Best career navigation advice you would have for young professionals.

Gordon Tobin:  Build your professional life and your personal life, not the other way around. A lot of people take 30, 40 years to figure that one out. And by that stage in some cases, it's too late. If you've got the...I'll finish on this note, the loneliest, actually the wealthiest place in the entire planet, and I'm not going morose here, it's a graveyard. Because it's full of ideas, inventions, books, poems, people who loved other people who never tell them, and it's filled with those people. And so, I would say to anybody, it's never too early or too late to be who you want to be. And if you're listening to this call, don't join and don't increase the wealth of that graveyard. Give everything you've got, and follow what you want to do, not what others expect you to do. And I think if you do that, you'll live a very happy life. So build it around your personal objectives and make sure your professionalized supports those, and not the other way around. Which is unfortunate, I see a lot of people do that and go through too much undue suffering in their careers, and it's actually life doesn't have to be that, believe it or not.

Naber:  Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciate it and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love the Naberhood Podcast, would love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a five-star review on iTunes. Until next time, go get it.