Adam Torres and Francis Lacoste discuss leadership.
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Show Notes:
The VPE Coach helps leaders become enablers of their team’s fullest potential. In this episode, Adam Torres and Francis Lacoste, Founder of The VPE Coach, explore what it takes to create high-performing teams.
About Francis Lacoste
Francis works 1-1 with VP of Engineering, CTOs, Head of Engineering and other engineering leaders as well as with their teams. He assists them in growing into becoming leaders who foster a culture centered around collaboration and technical excellence. He also works directly with the team through coaching and workshops.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Francis Lacoste, and he is founder over at the VPE Coach.
Francis, welcome to the show. Welcome. Thank you for having me, Adam. So Francis, just diving into today’s topic really getting more into the challenges of leading tech organizations and scaling. We, you know, large tech audience that listen to our show, all business owners, entrepreneurs and executives. So this is a great a great topic to bring to them.
I guess just to get us kicked off here. what got you on this panel? Pathway, what got you obsessed to helping other entrepreneurs and executives out there scale light? how’d you start in this? Well, this is really coming from my personal experience. I work for a great companies and saw firsthand the impact of having a great engineering culture.
I can add like on engagement, quality of products all of that. And to my experience found out that. Actually, this is what I had the most fun at, you know, helping build type of environment. So that’s when I recently moved as a professional coach to, I’ll train CTO, VP of engineering to, to become these leaders who create the culture necessary for greatness, you know.
Hmm. Now, have you always wanted to kind of go this entrepreneurial path? Was that always in you? No. You know, this is something, it’s scary, right? I’m like, whoa, wasn’t in me either, by the way. I’m just asking because I’m like, , this is not easy. Go ahead. Go ahead. I’m just saying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I’m a kind of.
In a way, somebody who has been very fortunate to follow what was interesting to me every time. And then that always brought me to challenges that I didn’t know , where I would end up. I mean, the first example of that was, I mean, I actually studied as a in social, in cinema, you know, I started in cinema, film production, then In the art philosophy classes.
This was interesting. Then went to sociology, but I was working in tech and then as a software engineer. And at some point, somebody asked me to become a team lead. said, yes, not knowing what would entail different career. And then like now it’s coaching, you know, so 25 years later, so kind of, to be a coach, it meant like, okay, now I need to start my own business, which is, which is great.
You know, so yeah. Rising to the challenges that life throws at me. What do you like about coaching or like helping us or that, relationship of coaching? What do you like about that? Cause it’s hard, it’s hard, especially in the tech, any space, right? Entrepreneurs dealing with entrepreneurs, like what do you like about coaching?
Well, I mean, it’s the, I mean, the greatest benefit is seeing the unfolding of people. It’s like, gardening to a certain extent. I think that my effort is not because I don’t think the coach is a gardener, but there is something around. Like, you know, there’s things that are growing by themselves and seeing the growth these leaders.
That’s really what is the most fulfilling kind of because most of the people who are looking to coaching. I mean, I work with people. It’s not like. I’m not a coach who comes in because, like, your CEO told you that you needed coaching. Those are not the type of engagement do. So people who come to coaching are kind of self driven, wants to improve, and working with such people is just a joy, you know, because I’m there to support their their growth and makes it easy.
And then it kind of, they just, you know, Can go even beyond what they were thinking. yeah, it’s , and it’s the, the relationship also, you know, the, the working I mean, there’s something intimate and coaching because you’re talking with someone and you get to know them over a long time.
So that is also very rewarding. makes things very meaningful. Yeah. I know your niche is definitely the tech space according to what I’m reading. what are some of the challenges that, some of the individuals that you coach have when they come to you?
Like cause they’re coming for something. Like what are they normally coming for? what are those challenges they’re having or those things they want to overcome? I mean, often they don’t come necessarily for a particular, I thought they would, but actually most of the time it’s more, there might be a little thing, but really it’s like I said, the desire to be better, to improve, to kind of, and often like if you are like a CTO VP of engineering, it’s kind of a lonely world.
You know, you’re kind of, it’s not like you have a huge support network in your organization. I mean, some people will. Build that externally, you know, true networking organization, things like that or coaching and so they come and then what they’re faced with is a lot of ambiguity growing teams, all the people problems.
And often like technical leaders are usually more about, they’re at because of their technical skills, you know, and their technical and success brings like new challenges. And then these are not technical challenges anymore.
You know, I mean, we technology. It’s all we focus a lot on the technology, but most of the. The problems or the issues are actually like, I mean, there’s a thing that it’s never like all problems are people problem. So, and this is not what the, set of skills or, which is not the strong suit of most technical leaders.
So that’s, that’s why they come to, they want to grow, to be, become, better people, leaders, organizational leaders, work on their relationship with the CEO, with the exec team, build their Leadership teams. Yeah, it’s those are the types of issues that that comes that the people work on. You know, how does culture play a role in this?
Like, in this in this scenario? How does culture impact this? Right? So the culture to me is one of the. most important aspect of an organization, I think it’s Patrick and the advantage is book, which sums out a lot of his initial books. I mean, the advantage, it’s kind of the organization culture. and culture is, I mean, what you value, how you do things.
All of that, and and what I’ve discovered is that the culture is kind of capped by its leaders. You know, even though there’s a lot, especially in large organization, you can influence culture in your teams and your local areas. but really, you know, at the organization at large, it will be the, the level of development of the leaders that will establish the baseline of the culture.
So the, the, the, the CTOs, the VP of engineering and the CEOs, they have like a great mean, the greatest impact in shaping. The culture. So that’s and the culture means how people are going to join. Are they going to thrive? And the overall organization success long term will depend on the type of culture you create.
So one of the things I’ve always liked about whether it’s coaches, consultants, or otherwise, is that a lot, a lot of times, because you’re working, especially when you have a defined niche, like you do, is that you get to see, you have a unique vantage point because even if you’re, even if a, you know, a CEO or a team is doing really well, There’s still within their, you know, on a day to day, they’re still within their own company, right?
Maybe they go to some conferences, maybe they get some other like dissemination of ideas here and there, but this is all you do. So like, what are some of those key attributes that you find that like, just, you know, Make these high, make high performing teams in general work in these scenarios. Like what are some of those things?
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because there’s kind of a bubble effect and often you, I mean, you, you find that, okay, here we’re doing well, but you don’t know. I mean, you don’t have a benchmark of comparison. Yeah. It feels like you’re doing well, but you don’t know that there’s more potential to reach and that sort of thing.
And, and you’re right, you know as coaches who have like a lot of different clients and lots of different points, they’re kind of, Hey, actually, there are other things that are not on your roadmap. But to, to actually answer your question, you know, I think, you the one to me there are two pillars really to I performance team or, and the two pillars are kind of or they’re orthogonal that the geek in me.
So that means that they’re independent dimension, you can execute very well on 1 and that has no bearing on how you’re going to execute on the other, but you actually need both. And these two are. So the one that many have, you know, it’s a clear mission. You know, you really need to have a clear purpose for your organization.
And with your purpose, then you can have accountability, you know, kind of people are there to you know, Make self driving cars or you know, a new way for customer and these patients to file their medical records or whatever it is you’re transforming L for and then people join. To and know that’s what the company is about and can hold each other accountable to that.
You know, this is kind of there’s a purpose. We’re not there to to chill out or there’s actually something that mission, you know, mission matter. Yeah, your slogan is super important. And the other aspect is. we often call psychological safety, you know, and this is how people are going to work together to achieve that mission.
And if you have, like, a great mission, but like, no psychological safety, and basically often will result in a toxic environment where, okay, you need everybody feels like they’re, it’s a death march toward the mission. Then, I mean, you would get some results, but it won’t be long lasting for sure. and you will miss out on a lot of potential.
And if you have like a great, psychological safety, great way of working, very collaborative, but there’s no kind of clear mission and accountability to the mission, then you have like a great environment, but you’re not going to get progress or results either. So you really need these two pillars to achieve like The condition of performance. Where do you find like, and obviously this is going to be different from, you know, company to company organization to organization. But where do you find sometimes people are blindsided or fall short? Like, where do you see that happen? So often, I mean, one of the biggest stumbling block, it would be kind of paying too much attention to what others are doing.
You know, or the best practices out there. and that kind of the shortfall here is that you’re kind of not paying attention to your own context and your own possibilities and greatness in your organization. you’re kind of trying to copy what others are doing, because, hey, this worked at Spotify, you know, there was a couple of years ago, everybody was doing the Spotify model, you know, but Spotify model was.
Right. You don’t want to copy the model, which was a point in time strategy at Spotify, because, like, when they published it, actually, they had moved on and we’re not operating exactly like that, but people were kind of copying this, you know, and so copying what others are doing without understanding the context in which it evolved, why it made sense in that context and then, like, okay, Does it make sense in my context now or not, you know, it’s kind of, if you’re a 30 people team copying what the meta is doing, it’s probably a good idea, you know, it’s kind of, yeah, that’s funny, because I always say that, like, I’m always when people are looking at trends or something else like that, I’m like, what, like, so one of ours, I don’t even call them competitors, because this is media, whatever, but if you were to say what space we’re big in, you’d say, I’d say one of our main things we’re known for is podcasting, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, who are the biggest ones? You know, I heart radio, they have over 4, 000 employees. So I’m like, so sometimes my team would bring me some things. I’m like, there’s only a little over 30 of us here. Like, what are you talking about? I’m glad that’s a big trend and something that they’re chasing, but, but, but we don’t got 4, 000 employees to go chasing stuff, you know, we don’t even, we don’t even really know they’re big enough to where we don’t even really know what they’re doing is working.
We just know what we see, that’s it. Like, so who knows, but I’m glad you bring that up. That is true. Like you got it. and then even if it is working, it’s still about execution. Like who’s the team that’s actually executing on X, Y, Z strategy or what they’re doing. Right. Like, it doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Yeah. so it’s context. Context is always a great, I mean, it’s king. If you are able to really understand the context, then. The moves come naturally because they’re tied to the context, but if you look at it in the abstract, then you’re, I mean, you’re military. You might be in trouble is what you might be.
Yeah. Oh, that’s great. How does this this concept of like inner game, like, how does that play into things? like to talk about the inner game. So the inner game is the. These are like the personal, you know, there’s the outer game, which is what we’re playing, the moves we’re making.
Mm-Hmm how we’re showing up in the organization. But for this to be effective, there’s also need to be an inner game, which is kind of a mastery of our own. I mean, emotions, thoughts those sorts of things. And, and the, the most salient example of that is that in, in startup, there’s a lot of uncertainty, you know, always there’s kind of what, you know, do we have our, is our market going to, to, To respond well to our product is what’s going to happen.
Is this going to work? And so a lot of part of the inner game is what’s your relationship with them? Certainty, you know, that’s 1 place. It’s manifest, you know, or, or, you know, in conflicts. If you have, like you, if you want high performance, you need to be able to deal with conflicts because you want to draw most different opinions to get it.
Yeah. The best thing the best one going forward. And so if you have like issues through dealing with conflict, then this is also part of the, the inner game kind of, how do I react? What are my reactions when there are like somebody who disagrees with me or two people disagreeing with each other?
Am I still able to stay calm? I, you know, be, not go into reaction. So these are, these are the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The aspects of the inner game, which are key to be a successful leader, you know, it’s much more how you are and your own capacity than knowing, you know, what are the correct moves?
Because it’s a little bit like the context. if you are. If you have a good inner game, then the moves come naturally in a way based on the situation. And because you’re, you’re kind of, you stay in touch with the situation instead of going out into like your patterns that are, have been, yeah.
Okay. This is how I react in conflict. And this is not what’s appropriate here, but that’s. You know, we’re on autopilot. Basically, it’s awesome. Well, Francis just have to say it has been great having you on the show today. I definitely explored checking out what it takes to, you know, on some of the challenges of leading tech organizations and scaling and from your unique vantage point as a coach.
Thank you for that. That being said, if somebody is listening or watching this and they want to follow up and they want to connect with you and your team, how do they do that? Easiest way is to connect with me on LinkedIn Francis Lacoste on LinkedIn, the VPE coach, I’m always happy to meet people through that, or they can also go to my website, thevpe.
coach, and they’ll have my info there. Awesome. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put that information in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over and speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with us, this is a daily show each and every day, we’re bringing on new guests, new thought leaders.
New insights. If you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, we encourage you hit that subscribe button. We have many more mission based individuals coming up and we don’t want you to miss a thing. So again, hit that subscribe button and Francis, thank you again so much for coming on the show. My pleasure, Adam.
Thank you.