#248 - Stop Telling Yourself You're Bad at “People Stuff” - Martijn Versteeg

[00:02:02] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today I have a maybe like a product leader slash engineering leader, right? So his name is Martijn Versteeg. He’s the founder of this community called Group Effort. It’s kind of like a peer group where leaders can learn from each other. I’ll let him share a little bit more about the peer group. But today we are going to talk a lot more about, you know, how engineering leader can become a much better, you know, leader putting aside not just the technical aspects but also the product aspects so that, you know, they can grow the organization, they can grow the team, and they get they can grow themselves much better. So Martijn thank you so much for your time, welcome to the show.

Martijn Versteeg: Thank you so much. I look forward to this a lot because I think leadership in tech, it can make such an impact on a company, right? So I love how you’re doing this. It’s what I’ve listened. It’s always like it’s both useful for aspiring leaders and for people who are in the business a long time. So congrats on that and can’t wait to see if I can contribute.

[00:03:06] Why Small Steps Matter More Than Career Turning Points

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Looking forward for this conversation as well. So Martijn, maybe if you know, right, so I always love to invite my guests first to share a little bit more about yourself, specifically by sharing career turning points that you think we can learn from you.

Martijn Versteeg: Yes. I prepared this question and I decided that the best answer to the turning points is that I prefer to name none. But I will give an intro and I will tell you exactly why. Because what I’ve found is specifically in tech leaders, there is always this need for more knowledge, more knowledge, more knowledge. But then sometimes we make things so big, just like a ticket gets too big, that we kind of don’t stop, go into action. So one of the things that I found was if I name a career turning point that I was head coach of Singapore rowing team, in 20-2013, you might think, but I haven’t been that, so this is not relevant to me. Or if I say a turning point is when I started multiple peer groups across Europe, you might think, but I haven’t done that, so maybe this doesn’t apply to me. So I would say one lesson that I think is super relevant is in code you guys are great at this. You already know it’s all about iteration and small steps. Do the same for your personal growth. So I will give you my two minute intro, but I don’t think it’s about one point that made the difference for me. It was all the steps that made the journey happen. Are you okay with that, Henry?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. This is quite unique sharing. So I love the way that you mentioned in life it’s all about small step. It’s about iteration, right? So yeah, sometimes the big career turning points or turning points achievements that people see that we see from people out there, right? It’s actually it’s kind of like culmination result of hard work, effort, and a lot of experiments that they did along the way. So I think thanks for sharing that perspective and for reminding us about this importance of, you know, finding your own ways, your own career turning points. Yeah. So…

[00:05:11] About Martijn Versteeg

Martijn Versteeg: I would be happy to still give an intro, right? Because I don’t want to remain a stranger. Shall I do that? Is that okay?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Martijn Versteeg: Cool. Okay. So my background is in organizational psychology combined with computer science as a minor. So I’m in between the middle ground of the people stuff and the tech stuff. Don’t ask me to review your code, but I’m very happy to have an in-depth discussion, whether that is about hallucinations of an LLM or whether it’s about what vectors to use in your recommender model in data science. I like the tech. I can go along quite far. But I’m not writing or reading code. I’ve been described by other people like your listeners as, over time, yeah, he speaks nerd, but he doesn’t read or write it, which I think is what you can expect from me. And this is also what I hope to contribute because I’ve led technology organizations and I find that the value I can bring is on the psychology side and the problem that is also there.

That’s why I’m super excited to be here because I see a lot of people that become a tech lead. They have this old belief that I’m just not that good at the people stuff. Let me focus on the tech and the details. But it’s a little bit of a lie because there is actually the way of doing every psychology thing people think right, they all have systems. As a tech lead, whether you’re still aspiring or already that for a long time, you were already good at using systems. So I hope that in this talk with Henry, we can talk about systems. Systems for talking, for handling conflict. I will tell you there is a Stack Overflow of psychology and how you can access it. And I’ll try to get you other insights that you can actually use. That’s my core goal. So let’s try to take it from there.

[00:07:01] How Can I Learn People Skills Systematically?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Wow, I like that your background is actually organizational psychologists, right? So because a lot of things we can learn from psychology that can be applied to organization, team building, right, and also leadership. And specifically just now you mentioned something that I find very interesting because so many tech leaders, you know, tech practitioners out there, they actually aspire to become a much better person, a much better tech leaders. Maybe growing into a more engineering leaders kind of a position but they somehow feel stuck maybe in their mindset in terms of opportunity or in terms of knowledge. So let’s just dive deep here first because you mention that this can be learned. There’s a system that everyone can find and learn from them from those resources and become better, right? But I think many people assume that dealing with people is hard. Dealing with people is abstract, ambiguous. So tell us more about this learning from these systems.

Martijn Versteeg: Let’s do this. So, first of all, I’ll finish my background because I wasn’t, I didn’t do that because I want so much to give value that I sometimes don’t shine the spotlight on myself. I had my own education technology startup, scaled it up, sold it after five years, then I started doing groups for tech and product leaders. It started as a group for myself because I felt like why am I the only one figuring it out? Which ties perfect into the question that I’m gonna answer that Henry just asked. And I also find that, after those groups, it was working so great that it became kind of a community. So currently I’m working with, let’s say 300 product and tech leaders across Europe. Some of them in conferences, some of them in training, some of them in peer groups, and even some one-on-one coaching which is very limited now. There I teach these systems.

So one of the systems I want to talk about is there’s actually a pretty good predictor of human behavior, and I can summarize it in three minutes, if you’re okay with this. There is only a certain amount of needs and this transcends culture. There’s a couple of needs that every person has. And those needs are, I’ll tell them one by one, one is people like to know what’s gonna happen next. You could call it certainty, you could call it stability. I’ll provide a link to a written out version. Then if people know what’s gonna happen next, what happens if that’s the only thing they have. You’ll get bored. So we also have a certain need for variety. Then thirdly, if we get variety and stability, right, we also all want to grow or at least perceive we’re growing. I’m assuming that you’re listening to this podcast to find something, and I’m assuming even for Henry, part of this might be I want to keep growing so I’ll just interview people. So that’s growth. After growth, you have status. It is interestingly enough, for everyone in the world, it’s a common thing. We like to have a certain amount of status. Some of us are humble and feel pretty okay with a status that is not like that fits in a normal size room. So like Elon needs so much that other people think you are pretty crazy. But it’s a need. And then there is the need for connection. We want to relate to others. And the last need is giving. That’s why it feels so good to teach a junior how to do code better.

So all of these are steered by just two things. And I’m hoping to discuss this in depth after, but I just want to give the whole model. It’s a subjective scale. It is a model. I can get more stability and less stability, but my experience could be rated from a zero to a 10. Thing is even if Henry and me compare, maybe my 10 is Henry’s five or the other way around. So this model works when you ask the perspective of the person you’re testing this with. You can ask where are you? What is your current experience? How stable do you feel? How much variety do you experience? How much growth? How much status? How much connection? How much giving?

I found this, I started using this very intensively around COVID when I was an Agile coach for a company that just said, keep our people. That’s the most important. Take care of my people. And we used this and it was a pretty good predictor. If three of these went to a five or lower, people started looking for a job. So this is a model that explains most every behavior. And I would say your experience of one of these needs going down, you could call that very, very simplified, pain. All negative feelings. That is, it’s going back. If it’s going up, that feels like pleasure, meaning all positive emotions.

Now three more things and I, and you have a pretty grasp of basic behavior for humans. One, we do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. Sometimes we want to read, right? There’s, I have a bookcase to my right. There’s a lot of people that buy these books and then don’t read them, right? Because the pain of taking the time to read it is more real to us than the pleasure of getting the book done. That’s number one. Number two, short-term is more real to us than long-term. It’s so much easier to focus on what is at hand, whether that be that one bug that you focus on because you don’t want to have that strategic discussion at this moment. Or whether it is you wanting to be in great shape, being able to run 10 marathons. Congrats, Henry. Even if you say you want to have the body to run 10 marathons, it’s tempting to take the apple pie. Why? Because the apple pie of now is more real to us than the 42 kilometers a month or two months or three months from now.

We do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. And we have short-term is more real to us than long-term. Now this altogether is a pretty good explanation of people’s behavior. So there is a system and I just want to give you this one. I’ll make sure there’s a written out one on my website, which we can link to in the show notes. But I just wanted to start there. And I hope Henry will try to break it for me because that’s the biggest honor you could do this.

[00:13:19] Six Human Needs That Predict Behavior

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! Thank you for sharing. I feel so many things that we can peel from these so-called concepts, right? How do you predict people’s behavior? How do you predict, you know, maybe the team dynamics, right, how people behave within organizations? So maybe let’s try to, you know, go one by one. So I think you mentioned about the so-called five things that people kind of like crave, the first is like certainty. Yes, we kind of like want to know the future. Maybe not so far ahead future but at least tomorrow, next week, next year, and so on and so forth. Then we want to have variety. That’s why we all have different options, different tools, different frameworks, different tech stack, and all that. We wanna grow, we wanna learn from our craft, our career. Not just doing the same thing. We want a status at some point in time, right? Maybe career ladder, maybe in your community, whatever that is, right? Or maybe social media these days. You wanna be feel connected with other people, creating the networks, and also giving at the end, you know, like servicing to others. How does someone actually use this different, like different needs I would say. Like different needs, human parts, right? How do they use it in their, I don’t know, day-to-day life or career or even in leadership, right? So tell us more about this.

Martijn Versteeg: I, I love that you’re immediately asking me for the tactical. So we have the knowledge now, and that’s fantastic. You can use this in two ways. One, you can self-assess this because it will make it easier for yourself to understand your own behavior. How do I currently experience stability? Is it terrible being one and awesome being 10? So you could do that. But you can also do this when you are a tech lead for your devs. Because it is actually a great question to ask. It also gives them a one-on-one that is less like vague, right? Why are we having this one-on-one about my feelings? I just wanna talk about code, right? But if you make it concrete, I see most devs, even our friends that are like hesitant to even accept any one-on-ones. They like a system. Oh, this has nice boxes, right? But you will get a pretty good indication and you’d be surprised what you learn.

And as a tech lead, I think you should also focus on then looking at are there any low numbers, I would say five or lower. That would be something to work on, on the growth of your people. Because you might have this amazing senior in your team, right? If they experience no more growth and that goes down and down and down, you should better catch that before they start looking for a new job. And I think that’s the two practical ways that I immediately recommend you do this.

Pro tip: you’re gonna get the numbers, right? If people struggle, just tell them, go with your gut feeling. Don’t worry about it being seven or an eight because that’s still closer to get than a two and an eight. It’s about direction. Pro tip number two: you can ask about trends. So you can say like, okay, it’s currently a five. If we continue like this where will this be? Like ask people to project in the future ‘cause that’s super useful. And number three, if you have low numbers, instead of assuming what your 10 is is also then their 10, ask them what does a 10 on growth or a 10 on status look like for you. And I will guarantee this will immediately yield you something to improve your team. And it will keep more people in your team, definitely, but it will also deepen that sense of we are building something great together.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And I think you mentioned about one-on-one, right? I think this is one maybe tool that you can use to actually create a conversation, build conversations and even like build connections with that person itself, right? So I think one thing that I think, I assume, right, so this is not to maximize all the needs for individuals, right? Again like you mentioned about subjectivity. Different people have different priorities or different needs. And there’s a spectrum, right? So my, your 10 might not be my 10 and vice versa, right? So this is something that not for everyone to maximize all of them. But depending on their situation and the depending on the subjective preference, this could be different.

[00:17:28] How Does It Compare to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

Henry Suryawirawan: So how does this differ with, I don’t know, something else what I know is about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right, that is commonly used for assessing human needs?

Martijn Versteeg: Yeah. So Maslow starts with safety, right? So actually start with physical needs and then safety. I’m assuming that in your work, those two are not, no longer relevant. Self-actualization is at the end. One of the critiques, so it’s perfect that you notice. By the way, for everyone, there’s a pyramid, Maslow’s pyramid, we’ll probably also refer that. I, if you need a picture, I, I have those from training slides. But it says about, first you need to take care of your physiological needs. Then you need to take care of your security needs, your safety. And it rolls up all the way to the top being self-actualization. It’s a useful thing to think about humans that are in lack and where physical needs are a theme and where physical safety are a theme. Like it’s a more zoomed out picture of this. Because of course, if you have a dev that is just physically like in pain, then Maslow’s theory is more relevant. It won’t necessarily come from each of these, but it will show up still because it will show up in stability being low probably.

So I say Maslow is way more zoomed out. It’s for higher level assessment. In work, we want to go for more personal needs. And I think it’s a more zoomed in version and more practical just for the two tools I gave you. And a third way of using it, whenever you don’t understand behavior which can happen because everyone acts differently, ask yourself what need is this serving? And if you don’t know, you can even ask. Because they’re like, can I just, if we categorize it, which one of you, these are you? Because sometimes, why is this dev going in conflict? Because for them there are some rules around connection, which means you always need to be very straight. Or maybe it’s because for them I’m going into conflict because status is super important to me and the moment that you don’t listen to me, I feel that status is decreasing.

I challenge everyone who listens to this. If you find a way to break it, I’ll be very happy because I’ve been saying this for multiple years. Break it please, because we can make it better. But this is the most functional way I’ve found to systemize human behavior in a short and concise way. Just try it. If you like it, try it.

[00:19:49] Why Are Personality Tests Like MBTI Unreliable?

Henry Suryawirawan: In a way, it’s kind of like a dictionary, right? So, you know, in psychology there are so many different models and frameworks, right? Not just about, you know, this human needs but also like people’s characteristics. You know, I know something called INTJ and all that. I dunno what it’s called, the framework. Also like red, blue, green, those kind of stuff yeah.

Martijn Versteeg: This is perfect, thank you. I’m so grateful that you brought that up. Internal validity of most commercially available, sorry. I’ll also go slow on this. The internal validity of most commercially marketed personality tools suck. Can I say that? It’s like the ones that you named, the first one is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. While some people swear by it, if you look at the internal validity, it’s built on some concepts by Carl Jung. And there’s some Jung fans out there still, but they don’t hold to be true, if you try to pick them apart with the scientific method, they’re not stable enough over time. The other one you mentioned, the colors, there is a lot of popular ones, but one, for example is DiSC. There is no scientific data on that being stable over time. People have different roles in different groups, we already know that. But there’s another problem with this. If you put a sticker on someone, you also give them a way to say this is just how I am. I cannot do this because I am blue. And like, there’s a lot of moments where labels are super relevant, right? I mean, everyone likes their code to be neat and you want to know what this piece does, please, right? Because how are you gonna test it otherwise? But for people, we have this thing that whenever we are labeled, we tend to also change our behavior.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think that somehow feels true. So especially if something that doesn’t really resonate with your, I don’t know, like your value, your habit, your background, culture, and all that, right? So I think, yeah, all models, it’s good for us to be aware of. Maybe use it for our advantage. But one thing for sure like not… Like I don’t think all of them is 100% accurate. So I think it depends on how you use it and what kind of purpose. And I think one critical aspect that this is also I learned from my experience is not good for leaders to use this to compartmentalize people or to put labels on people and think, assume that they won’t change. Because what I understand at least from me as well, I tend to change over time. Depending on the, again, like experience, situations, new knowledge that comes in and all that. So thanks for highlighting that.

Martijn Versteeg: The beauty of what you just said is, that’s why I don’t believe in personality labeling. Because personality, that assumes that personality is stable over time, which if you zoom out to a big enough population is true because most people don’t change. But I think if you’re listening to a podcast, you are already looking for growth, right? Maybe you’ll even try one or two of the things that you learn, which makes you top 1%. But for those people, it’s even less efficient and it can definitely hold you back. And I want to, just because it was so close to what you were saying, when people ask me like can you summarize your psychology study? I always say, with humans, a model is better than no model, but no model is perfect. So just wanted to give that. Sorry, continue. My bad.

Henry Suryawirawan: This kind of like reminds me of this phrase the map is not the territory or something like that, right, where you can have the model but it’s not the actual depiction of the actual situation, yeah.

[00:23:20] How Do I Use Pain and Pleasure to Drive Growth?

Henry Suryawirawan: So, yeah, one thing that I find very interesting you mentioned about this which I relate very closely with personal growth, right? You mentioned people want to avoid pain as much as, you know, seeking more pleasure. That’s the thing. And the second one is the short-term is something that is more prioritized for people rather than the long-term. So I find this a very good indicators for people to always put in their back of the mind in order for them to grow, right? So tell us how do you use these two psychological insights, I would say maybe, for people to actually, you know, improve themselves.

Martijn Versteeg: Good. So you can actually manipulate or change, manipulate sounds like you’re doing something negative, but you can change what you personally for. I’m now starting with yourself by the way. You can change what you relate to something. Let’s start with the short-term versus long-term. The way you change that is to show your brain which is just a survival mechanism, so it’s just set on the now to survive. If you look like very primal, that’s how it works. In coaching, for example, I would just pull the future to the now because our brain has a beautiful viewing screen. We have a fantasy. And even if you’re saying, I’m super logical, I don’t have, well close your eyes and what is my skin color? How do you know, right? It is something you can remember. It is what our brain does.

What is interesting about that is you can tell someone, you can say like, okay, about the apple pie, let’s make it not about tech. Let’s make it about health for a second. A person says I have really hard time withstanding the apple pie. And I want to get more fit. I would ask them, can you imagine yourself keeping in that direction? What would you look like in five years? Imagine how that feels and how that looks. What would happen in 10? What would happen in 20? And the strange thing is, it’s the emotion that is there that will change your mind on this. So you can do this for yourself. If you have behaviors you haven’t been able to change. Like, for example, I know a lot of tech leads are, I’m just super stressed out about bad news conversations. Telling my dev that they’re not good enough or telling them no when they ask for a raise. So I, I’d rather just escalate it one level up, right? This is a very common theme for, yeah, I see recognition.

What you could then change for yourself is you can reframe. And you can first ask like, why is this painful? But you can also, so the conversation itself is short-term pain, right? Oh no. I need to do something that’s uncomfortable to another person. It feels like almost, for some people it feels like you’re stabbing them, right? But if you go long-term, say, if I don’t say this now to this person, what am I taking away from them? So not what I’m taking away now, but what am I taking away long-term? And I’m not saying be indelicate, right? But if a developer is underperforming in any front, not saying it in the long term will provide the whole unit with more pain. That person, you, everyone will get more pain in the long run.

So sometimes it’s just a, a matter of you change your mind by asking what does this mean long-term? And the safe thing about that question is it’s still you answering it. So you’re not, even if you ask this of a person, it’s their future. So I feel very safe. Let’s say someone else comes to me and they say like, oh, I have a hard time changing this. If I ask like, what happens long-term? I’m not steering them their behavior, right? I’m not telling them this is how you need to change your behavior. I’m just helping them make the long-term more real. And I think this is… Another one’s procrastination, right? Procrastination, it’s just that doing the work is more painful to us than not doing the work. And at one point, it reverses if you have a deadline, right? That is like, I’m gonna do it now. And then like two hours before deadline, you go crazy and you do it. That’s another one of these. You could ask for yourself, like what would be the pleasure of actually doing it now? What is the pain that I might not get if I do it now? The last minute stress.

So I think oftentimes the questions, and I’ll note a couple down as well, because I don’t want people to feel they have to remember everything now, but there’s a, there’s like four or five questions you can use to like… it’s almost like zooming out of behavior. And the beauty of this, what I like about it is, it’s always the person with the behavior making the choice. It’s never you dictating what someone else should do. Because I think that is, that’s giving advice and that’s not always the way to go, specifically when it’s about personal behavior. So I hope that was a useful answer.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, definitely. So I think it’s all about reframing how do you see, you know, pain versus pleasure, short-term versus long-term. And obviously, for you to grow, right, you always have to look it from the long-term perspective. And also for, you know, growing up yourself, right? It’s not just to avoid pain because by avoiding pain doesn’t mean you will grow necessarily in my opinion.

[00:28:30] How Do I Handle Conflict and Difficult Conversations?

Henry Suryawirawan: So using all these tools, I think tech leaders now have a certain psychological behavioral aspects that they can use. You also have these peer coaching groups with other engineering leaders. Maybe tell us, maybe top problems or top challenges that, you know, engineering leaders are facing in their career or in their day-to-day life that you can share with us so that we can also learn from that.

Martijn Versteeg: 100%. So the peer groups came from me personally, being a CPTO and feeling a little lonely at the top, right, at the top. I’m not taking myself too serious. I hope you feel that through my voice already. But what I discovered was, you know, there’s actually other people that have this job as well, why don’t I go looking for them? And I formed this group. We call it a peer group. You could have also called it a mastermind. And the goal was, let’s just provide multiple perspectives on our challenges. And that’s the context which sparked a whole thing of it’s become a whole community. We have like WhatsApp group format, we have live meetings form, et cetera, et cetera.

And in that, we discuss real challenges and sometimes they’re super practical, right? So I literally was like in meetings like that where we discussed, okay, ransomware happened, what actually do we do now, right? So it could be as practical and detailed as that. It could be knowledge things which is basically, hey, what do you guys pay a senior developer? Just checking.

But what I see as the bigger challenges, interestingly enough, I was expecting the CTO group groups to be extremely technical, but it’s all about people. And if you were to blindfold me and put me in a group or just read only the transcript without the names, I would’ve a hard time telling apart a group of heads of engineering from a group of heads of finance. Which is very in, I mean, the language will be slightly different, but the themes, if you just abstract it to the themes.

One of the biggest things is I’m conflict averse. Because before you are a leader, it’s pretty good tactic not to get into conflict. It’s a solid tactic. Like if an individual contributor asks me like, how often should I look for conflict? I’ll be like, no, just do what your boss says. It’s a really good strategy. But this is one of these transformations we have to go through. And as a leader, this topic comes up often, and I’ll give you the following on that. Often we make a conflict huge in our mind, and I challenge you to like peek beyond the door. Really ask yourself, what is the worst that can happen? Because oftentimes that’s already a part of the remedy. Maybe that conflict isn’t actually as hard as you thought. And if it is something else, maybe the conflict you’re averting is a bad news conversation either with a peer or somebody in your team, find a model.

So I… There’s a concept called modeling, which I call, that’s like the Stack Overflow of Psychology. You can find people who are great at this and with the disclaimer that we just talked about, that no model is perfect. There are models out there. And if you’re learning, it’s perfectly okay to just copy a model. And here’s the one for bad news, by the way. Within 10 seconds, bad news out, If you right? If it is just to be very direct, you ask for a raise, we cannot provide it right now, right? All the stuff that I do before that is actually unfair. You’re getting red. No, just kidding. But I would say like, this is the part you need to immediately go with the bad news. Hey, we’re gonna cut down. You are one of the people that’s going to be asked to leave the team. Because then there’s no walking around. And if you don’t do this, if you just skip around the topic, you’re gonna get way more stressed yourself. But the other person, their bullshit detectors are already bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Because people are really great. You’ve been maybe in this situation yourself where you’re not like, I know this is not what this is about. Just get to the real stuff, right? We know this from our families, from our private life, right?

[00:32:47] A Model for Delivering Bad News in 10 Seconds

Martijn Versteeg: So my recipe is bad news out 10 seconds, then separate it from the person as much as you can. So I would say like we cannot give a raise right now. Here’s reason A, B, and C. Then you give, I understand that this would provide feelings on your part, right? So make a space for feelings. Be like, I can understand this is not fun to hear. Or whatever the words are that you usually use, don’t copy me exactly, but just say like, I understand this is not what you wanted to hear. This is not fun. Maybe if the language you use is more, this sucks, you say that. But just then give some space for emotion and then say, I understand there might be a need to discuss this but I suggest we keep it at this for now. So we both get to sleep on it for a night first. ‘Cause then you give people the space for their emotion, not with you per se. Otherwise you’re gonna end up in endless discussions and loops.

So this is the model that I’ve, I’ve seen most people like, oh, it’s like I get emails on this model, so please, if it works for you, it’s just keeping it really short. Because there’s, now it’s, one, it’s respectful. But two, it’s also not as personal, right? It’s not like you suck, right? It is just this is the decision, this is the reasons. If you can pull it away from that person, right? If it’s like, you’re not getting a raise because we are not making enough profit, say that, right? You don’t need to be like if you can share that, by the way, of course. Be confidential with whatever is confidential.

With peers however and bosses, there’s an extra step if you wanna have frank conversations. Oftentimes it’s not this type, but it can follow a similar format, but it has to be proceeded with asking permission. Same in every culture. In my culture, you would get away. We, like we Dutch are very low power distance. So we have no issue starting this conversation with our boss and also our boss expect it. But as a global advice, knowing that the audience is global. There’s never anything wrong with asking permission. Like I would like to discuss something, can you make the time, is never wrong. And if it’s not respected and you can still ask, would there be time later? But that’s a disclaimer I would give for bosses because if you go bad news without asking permission, I would consider that mutiny.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Well, I think that speaks true to me as well, right? The people aspects and the conflict management, always kind of like the top challenges especially if you’re new to this leadership management, right? Managing people. It’s always maybe one of the first few challenges that feels very, very difficult because first, unlike learning technologies, right, you can read so many things on the internet or maybe books. You can find resources. But dealing with these situations. First, yes, there might be model out there but it’s very specifically contextual because different people is different. Different culture is different, communication patterns and all that. So I find that this is definitely one of the biggest challenges for leaders out there. And thanks for giving us the tips about how do you do this difficult conversations, right? Because yeah, again, some of us feel stressful if we have to convey these difficult conversations but for whatever reason sometimes we have to convey it, right? So be it for performance improvements, be it for, you know, like tough situations in the economy, organizations, organizations and all that.

[00:36:12] How Do I Transition from Tech Lead to Engineering Leader?

Henry Suryawirawan: So one thing that I wanna peel a little bit more further, right? Because this is always the first hurdle for tech leaders before they actually want to step up and be, you know, an engineering manager or maybe engineering leader. So what steps concretely they could do in order to kind of like be able to navigate this, if they wanna try giving it a go, you know, taking this step forward.

Martijn Versteeg: So you’re asking, just to recap, you’re asking if somebody’s aspiring, how do you make those steps?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. How do you learn these people aspect and also conflict management, right? Because like tech leaders, we always work with code. We always work with specifications and that’s about it. Kind of like less involved in those two aspects.

Martijn Versteeg: It’s a lot with, what I would immediately say is, if you wanna make a career step, you look for extra responsibility and you ask if you can get that. So it’s again a permission thing. I’m pretty heavy on permission, because I think that is very useful. And also take the no’s as okay, but also not as permanent, right? I meet people who’ve said like, I would like to become an engineering leader. And then they get a no, and maybe they get some reasons, and then they never ask ever again. And I speak to them six years later. And I would say if there is a no, it’s almost always valid, maybe not the right timing. But it’s always, always valid to ask what are the reasons, and work on that in a small way. And maybe even ask like, can I get a little like help in growing this? Or can I get a little project where I can practice this? So as long as you do that, you can ask again. Give it a reasonable time, you will feel out what it is. But I would go like, it’s about ownership.

And the other part is, all the people things, it comes down to communication. And I think that is not something you can learn from a book. It’s something you do by practicing. And one advice that I personally got recently from somebody that was coming in for my podcast, he said, if I could give people one action, it was find the person that you have the hardest time connecting with in your company and go for a coffee with the intention to learn and listen. Not to push anything but that I think it’s a pretty wise advice. If that relationship is totally broken, of course, right? Don’t, don’t overdo this. You can do one little less, right? But I think going out of your bubble is great.

And I think as an aspiring tech leader, the more you go outside the bubble of code. It will be a very fun stretch for you, but it will also improve the value because in the end, you’re in a business. There is sales, there’s marketing, and you might currently think I dislike all of that. My thing is, I have found that most of the times when I dislike or I’m uninterested in something, I don’t know enough about it. So I’ll pull a book from my, from my bookcase right now. I thought molds and mushrooms were incredibly boring. And then I read a whole book on it and it’s great. It’s a fantastic world. And I would say like, developers know this rabbit hole concept, right? You go down a rabbit hole, whether you’re a mod for a certain game, right? Or whether you just went extremely deep into this obscure framework because it was somewhere in your old code. You probably get more appreciation when you dive deeper.

I recommend you do it outside of tech as well. And the first I would recommend you start is anything related to money and profit. Because in the end, most everyone is working for a business. There’s also people working for government that is it works a little bit differently. But that’s the fuel of that vehicle, right? So yes, you are the one building the vehicle, but realize that that’s the synergy between the two. If the fuel runs out, you could have built the best thing ever, it’s still a problem. Or a no bueno is a good summary.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So yeah I think learning outside of tech is definitely very important, right? And communication. So I think when you step up as a leader, as a manager, right? You need to communicate. You cannot just, you know, maybe chat only through, you know, Slack or something like that. You need to communicate. You need to somehow make a sense of the situation maybe from people’s behavior, habit, communication patterns. So all this you need to learn, right? You need to maybe pick up a book or go into peer group, mastermind, those kind of things. And always pique curiosity. I think like, um, just to have interest in this kind of subject, in this kind of a knowledge, so that you can get equipped once you step up on the role, right?

[00:41:12] How Do I Let Go of Coding as a Leader?

Henry Suryawirawan: One other challenge that I find most of the tech leaders because we come from like a very deep hands-on, right? We sometimes can be a very good IC. But obviously stepping up as a leader as a manager, we need to let other people be in the limelight, so to speak, right? And this is also another challenge that I feel many people cannot let go. They still feel itchy to, I dunno, do the hands-on coding or be the person to decide on anything very important like architecture, system design, and all that. So how do you advise people to start, you know, taking off this mindset?

Martijn Versteeg: I have a story because I take personally a lot of inspiration from nature. First disclaimer about the story. If you want to get great at communication, people are always like, Martijn, you have so many stories and you have, you are quite advanced in your use of language and, and levels of abstraction that I get from reading fiction, actually, not necessarily. So people often focus, I see a lot of people start focusing on the businesses sides, right? And I love those, like I have a bookcase full, but the storytelling, which is really relevant because somehow, I’ll give you this as well. In most businesses and most professional relationships, logic is overused and emotion is underused. And the thing is, I haven’t seen logic change many people’s minds. So that’s why with the, with the, how do you let go? I will then answer with a story. And it’s the story of the vanilla orchid.

[00:42:49] The Vanilla Orchid Story: Why Leaders Must Let Go

Martijn Versteeg: A vanilla orchid starts as a seed and it falls very deeply, pop onto the ground of the jungle. There it sprouts. It’s a viney plant, and it uses its ground roots actually to crawl a little bit. It’s really cool. It finds a young jungle tree and it crawls up into the jungle tree and it like hitches a ride. And it stretches and stretches and stretch and it keeps its roots that were so important in the soil. But at one point, it runs into a little thing called the scaling problem, or actually physics, because since it is a leafy plant, it doesn’t have the physics to actually push up water high enough. And the canopy of the leaves of the jungle are sometimes 30 meters, sometimes even 60 meters high. I can’t believe it, but that’s the real number. So the orchid has a problem and it solves it in the most elegant way you can imagine. It drops its ground roots. It lets go. And then it forms new aerial roots. And to me that is the perfect descriptor of, in order to grow you need to let things go.

And I know there was also something you might have been fishing for, which I’ll also give you. I had a founder CTO who was struggling with this very much. It was his baby, right? This was a founder. He was deep into this code. It was all his. And at one point, he just saw, I’m the bottleneck. I’m the bottleneck. And know that if you’re not gonna let things go, you are gonna become the bottleneck. So his quote was also amazing. And that was, if only I can do it, I should not do it. Pair program, yes, right? Teach, yes. But you cannot be the sole owner. Some people use that as a tactic, right? I’ve seen developers or maybe then they come into architects like, haha, I’m the only one who knows this old code, so they can never let go of me. But that will make you sour. I will tell you that. I think a lot of businesses and companies, talk about value. And I think it’s interesting how we never talk about virtue. And I think for yourself the virtue is what gives you… Like I have not seen a developer that used that strategy to become unmissable that didn’t turn sour in the end. It’s very interesting.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow. Thank you for sharing such a very unique science, knowledge, right? I didn’t know about the vanilla orchid, definitely.

Martijn Versteeg: It’s cool, right? Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. But I think it’s kind of like very insightful because for it to grow to the next level, right? You need to let go the one of the most important thing for itself, right, which is the root, how it grew in the first place, right? So I think I feel this is the same thing for leaders out there, right? You cannot just be good in being an IC, writing the code. But you have to grow in some other aspects that, you know, where you can grow your roots as well, right? So I think that’s a very good, I dunno, analogy from science so I think that’s, thanks for sharing that.

And about that story of the CTO I think that phrasing is kind of like uh important as well I find. So if only I can do it, I should not do it. I really love that. And I think for leaders out there who feels that you have too much to do, you are the bottleneck, you have too many too much knowledge in your head, I think this phrase can be kind of like a mantra for you to decide whether you should be the one doing it or it’s time for you to let go and teach other people.

Martijn Versteeg: And there your brain might immediately go, nobody will be quicker if I just do it. If you ever catch yourself thinking that, no, it’s always a lie. Because again that’s the short-term brain. Circling all the way back, right, the short-term brain says, no, but I’ll just, I know how these permissions work. Let me just quickly, right? No, no. It’s the long-term solution and if that takes a little bit more time now, it’s a huge yield.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And also kind of like avoiding pain of having to teach somebody, you know, from, you know, spending the time and all that. So I think again like these two psychological thing can be used in so many different scenarios I feel.

Martijn Versteeg: Fantastic.

[00:46:55] How Can Engineers Develop a Product Mindset?

Henry Suryawirawan: One other aspect that I feel tech leaders, engineering leaders kind of like have a challenge is actually to put their product thinking mindset, right? Because they are all into the tech, they’re all into the geeky aspect of you know building the code, building the systems, deploying it, how fantastic the, you know, the tech stack and all that. But actually the product thinking mindset is actually equally important if not more important these days because I can see so many people already start thinking about CPTO, CTPO. You know, not just having T, technology itself. But actually having the product together as well. So tell us about this challenge. What do you see in your peer group and how can someone improve?

Martijn Versteeg: So everyone will recognize, but the requirements weren’t clear enough, right? That to me is like a red flag. Like not even yellow, red, because that means that you are focusing on features. And in product, we talk about this thing called a feature factory. What I think is the moment that you are focusing on requirements, you have a big problem. Because it doesn’t matter how fantastic your, what shall we call it, PBI or it was product backlog item or feature or what is it called? In the other ticket or whatever you system you use. It will always be a representation of something bigger.

Like let’s talk about documentation for a second. Documentation is like a holiday picture of someone else. So let’s say I now pull up my photos app and show Henry a random holiday picture and just say like, now go have fun in Valencia and do exactly that. He’ll be like, what? I don’t understand. But the documentation is not there to show you everything. I understand that you feel, no, but I need to produce as much as possible, so I’ll focus on what is given to me. If you wanna be excellent, you figure out what this holiday picture is about.

So the product mindset that you can also have as a tech person, even an IC, is to understand why. Why are we doing this? Because it is also you that is able to innovate better than anyone else because you are so close to the tech. It is your downfall if you focus only on that. It is your biggest gift if you leverage it.

I’ve heard a story which is beautiful. Here in the Netherlands, we have a marketplace for second-hand stuff. Let’s call it the Dutch Craigslist, because most people from pop culture are familiar with Craigslist. There was a head of product working there. And he actually took the time to investigate what is the real problem we’re solving here. Because if you’re listening to users, they’ll say, your filters suck. And before you know it, you have 20,000 tickets on better filters, right? But he was talking to users really smart, by the way. And he figured out. He said, no, the actual thing is I have a thing in my hand and I want to sell it. And he made this vision type, like an animated thing of a concept. This was way before like any AI, et cetera. Like computer vision was just starting to be a thing. And he made this concept animation of what if a customer could just point their phone and would immediately recognize it. And then that would be listed automatically taking away all the pain for the customer to have to type and find the right category and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the requirement and clear stuff. When they showed that to the devs, the devs got it. And one of them over the weekend with a new computer vision tool said something like this. And there was a pretty solid recognition thing just running. Because no one in the rest of the company knew this was technically possible. You might know. So I challenge you if you really want to…. Also, and this is super enjoyable, right? Because you’re then not no longer a ticket producer, right? But you’re becoming a value adder and I think that’s, it’s incredibly cool.

So I would also ask it more importantly, of course, the details are important and specifications are relevant. But I think if we go all the way back to the concept of the Agile Manifesto, by the way, if you’re doing Scrum but you haven’t visited the website of the Agile Manifesto, I’m surprised how often I find that. Just go to agilemanifesto.org. It says working solutions over comprehensive documentation. That part. If you wanna do that, well, you need to broaden your view.

So I think that’s the product part. Of course, there’s a product owner, manager, et cetera, that can help you. But I would highly recommend if you can include that in your technical skills. It will be, one, more fun even if as an IC. But it will be incredibly helpful in your career, even if it’s not gonna be your job, right? You still have a product owner or manager that talks to customers and comes up with the list. Maybe at one point you say like, hey, when you decide that this is going on the roadmap, can I join with one of these calls to customers? It will be unexpected, but you will learn so much because you know what is technically possible. So the product part in tech leaders, that’s like, one, incredibly fun. But two, that’s where that’s like where your company really goes crazy. And it’s interesting, by the way, how I map this to the, that Agile, right?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I find every engineers out there, right? You need to have this product mindset right Some people actually already calling these role product engineers, right? And especially with the, you know, the advancement of AI, right? Writing code might not be the pure bottleneck anymore, right? So it’s more about, you know, solving the problems.

Martijn Versteeg: It was never the bottleneck. Okay.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Understanding the why, and also so many other different aspects, right? And I think the interest of the domain is also something that you need to pick up, right? Because you could just think that awaiting for requirements is one thing that you do. But I think understanding the domain could actually pick a lot of, I don’t know, new invention, new innovation. I spoke with Marty Cagan a long time ago. He’s saying that if your developers are just producing code, I think you kind of like under utilize them. So I think, yeah, because engineers know the different possibilities of what technology can offer to do things. So I think this is very important sharing for you.

[00:53:17] What Are the Hidden Risks of AI for Mental Health?

Henry Suryawirawan: Speaking about AI, right. So I think it might be a miss If we don’t talk about AI in an episode these days. So I saw one of your recent LinkedIn posts about AI which I find very interesting that we can discuss, right? You’re saying that the direction we are going with AI is actually going to the wrong direction. So tell us what’s your, what’s leading you to this opinion?

Martijn Versteeg: So I think where we are right now, if we zoom out all the way, right? We are gonna look at this time of the time before digital hygiene, right? Physical hygiene, we have done. Almost everyone in the world knows you separate poop water from drinking water, you wash your hands, you take showers. Like basic hygiene, even though we’re still teaching some like minor groups, it’s doing pretty well. Digital hygiene and including with that mental and AI hygiene is a big topic. And I think one of the problems is we can learn from history, right? Because at the time of industrialism, we had the entrepreneurs were going crazy, this is gonna change the world. Hey, wait, that’s Sam Altman. This is gonna revolutionize, we never have to do these menial tasks anymore. Hey, that’s Elon, right? So I think there’s parallels because these were great inventions, and I wouldn’t say it would be better if we didn’t have them, but they were absolutely polluting the river at the same time.

The river at this moment is our mind, I believe. Currently one of the things that I’m seriously worried about is I watched the video that I linked on that post, so you can find it on my LinkedIn by the Healthy Gamer. I’m very interested in psychology. I’m nerdy, so of course I’ll land at the Healthy Gamer. He cites the first research that has now found that use of AI can actually induce psychosis in healthy adults. That means not in people that are already have a tendency for it. Because we know for some substances, for example, there are some drugs and even certain qualities of alcohol that can induce psychosis in people who have a tendency for it. But this can induce it in healthy adults. Well, if that isn’t polluting the river, right, do we want to risk this happening without any guardrails for our teams?

So I don’t say don’t use it. I say we need kind of guardrails. I called it for now the AI Manifesto. I’ll spend the first attempt on my next conference in March on this. I’ll publish it as well by that time. But maybe it’s not a manifesto. I think it it’s gonna be more like hygiene. There are certain tasks that it’s and by the way, it’s so easy to say the word AI, but I really want to really make clear that let’s talk about LLMs right now because this was about LLMs. Large Language Models have some structural problems. There is quite some discussion between the experts on whether throwing more capacity at it will get rid of hallucinations. The problem with hallucinations, I need to just differentiate between a human hallucination and a LLM hallucination.

Silicon Valley has very well branded the word hallucination, but it’s basically screw ups, right? That the AI just has what it does, anyone that dove into this, I’m gonna oversimplify. Again, it’s a model so it won’t be perfect, but it’s just guessing the next word, right? That’s what it does. It opens a very interesting philosophical discussion if we also do that as humans, by the way. But let’s park that for a second. If the AI is doing guessing words and it can spiral off, that’s pretty problematic on its own. But what we’ve seen now since it has been trained for you to stay on, just like YouTube algorithms were trained to have you stay on, had nothing to do - that was a recommender model, had nothing to do with an LLM. Recommender models have now gotten us hooked on those things. By the way, also, a great book on that is Hooked by Nir Eyal. But what it does is it simply hacks your brain to stay on longer.

The big problem with this is if you keep a human hooked in a text conversation, we feel bonded with it. So whatever it suggests, we will take into account because at one point it gets a certain status in our mind. We don’t feel per se that that is a machine. Some of us, that was very early on, there was a developer that said like, no, it’s conscious, right? It was like very, very early on. But that’s an experience. And, and I mean, I talk to ChatGPT or Gemini. I’ve experienced this. But the problem with a human hallucination, we call that when somebody loses touch with reality and it starts hurting their environment. Now the problem is if you’re being fed something that is incorrect and then you have a reinforcement cycle, which is actually what is happening, that is pretty dangerous. And I think we are adopting the technology without too many guardrails.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t adopt it. I think it’s great for certain tasks. And then again, I’m talking about LLMs. Recommender models I think have made our lives already better. Astronomy without AI couldn’t have learned all the crazy cool things about the universe that we know. So there is no world where we will have no AI, I’m just a little worried about the LLM part and I’m worried about will we have guardrails in time. On the other hand, this is gonna sound really cynical, I hope it’s not. It might cost us a generation to figure that out, but we, I also trust that we always figure it out.

Henry Suryawirawan: I like the term that you mentioned digital hygiene, right? Because, you know, I kind of like associate this with the problem of social media back then, right? So when we started to have like social, media, you know, Facebook and all that, right? We also have this challenge, right? We have the mental health problem, right, always comparing. And also kind of like the algorithms feeding out into, feeding us into just one perspective or one aspect, right?

Martijn Versteeg: Yes.

Henry Suryawirawan: So not knowing that actually it is maybe not true, fake news, and, all that. And now we seem to have a different new challenge with AI, right? And something that is different to me is about the natural language conversational aspects with AI, right? Which I found your article as well that you pointed it out, right? So it can induce some kind of psychosis to people, right, and thinking that everything that AI talks might be true, right? And building a relationship, bonding with them. And sometimes, right, because AI is very obedient to us, I think this kind of like creates a very complex kind of mindset psychology in your mind, right? So I think I hope that you can figure it out within your conference about how to put proper guardrails, right? Because I feel the advancement on the technology and the capability, the capacity is very rapid, right? We can see it month over month, week over week. But putting the guardrails is something that we are still keeping up behind, right? So I think thanks for sharing your perspective on this.

Martijn Versteeg: And I’ll add to this one more thing that the problem is the feedback loop. Because that positive feedback loop, the end results, right? I don’t think the hallucinations that people will get are unbreakable. There’s some prob, some problematic cases, but I don’t see that as the major thing. But if I wanna tie this into an interesting psychological fact, there are five things that on a population basis stay pretty stable. And that is the amount of openness, consistency, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Those five are pretty good, like stable things over time in personalities when you zoom out of a population. Neuroticism has grown. Because if you always get, if everything you do the computer says, yes, everyone thinks this. When you hit into a little bit of a conflict, you’re gonna go tense up because you never practiced for it, right? You ignore, you are not habituated to having these mini conflicts. So there’s a real effect. We measurably see this. And because of this same thing, you’re always right, you don’t have to try, I think that’s why the consistency is also decreasing. So the consistency decreasing meaning discipline is also decreasing. People have a harder time following through with what they said. So the problems I say wouldn’t be only in that hallucination part, but that feedback loop, that’s a huge part. Sorry, I just want to elaborate.

Henry Suryawirawan: I can say as well it comes back to what you shared earlier, right? So AI seems to be like kind of like a short-term solution for a lot of problems, right? Because we might avoid reading books, we might avoid doing the hard work. We might avoid so many things because AI can just give us, you know, seemingly pretty good solution in the short term. But over the long term probably, you know, you won’t grow. You won’t have your critical thinking. And probably it will also change the way you build relationships with other people.

So Martijn, I think it’s been a great pleasure to have you in the show. Anything else that you wanna share with us before we go to our last question?

[01:02:19] What Is the Value of Learning Through Podcast Conversations?

Martijn Versteeg: I have one question for you because I think it’s relevant. I wanna know, but I also think it’s relevant for the audience. You have been doing this podcast for a while now. That is quite some effort to put in. I mean, I’ve made podcasts, I’ve made content before, so I know this is a huge effort. What’s the value for you?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think interesting enough that you mentioned in the beginning about growing, right? So one aspect that I use this podcast is actually for me to grow. Like having this conversation with so many great, you know, thought leaders. You know, people like you and exchanging information, I think it’s really, really important for my growth. And being a podcaster, something that is very unique is that it depends on the style of podcaster you are, right? Some are a bit more extremist and more opinionated. For me, I try and I try to be more neutral, meaning that I can hear different extreme perspectives from different people. And it kind of like give me a different perspectives of on how I see things and tackle problems, right? I can see the positive things on both sides and negative things on both sides. And that’s how I use it to actually grow myself, right, and I can share it with other people as well. So, so far the community of listeners that who feel benefited from the sharing that I do, that’s also one need that I feel very good for me which is to serve others, right? To give values for other people. So yeah, those are probably the two main things that I use doing this podcast, yeah.

Martijn Versteeg: If there would’ve been less effort and you could have gotten a summary of all the episodes without the work, do you think it would’ve been the same value?

Henry Suryawirawan: Well, one aspect, even not just talking about podcasting, I feel it during my work as well. I’m still doing a lot of hands-on work in engineering, right? These days, it’s almost very easy for everyone to start solving a certain problem just by asking AI, right? For me, someone who have done differently before in the earlier career, right, where you have to struggle, you know, figure out from Stack Overflow, try, you know, and didn’t work and struggle, right? And compared to now which is like you can just ask different AI different solution, keep banging, you know, the questions, the prompts, and somehow it could figure it out. I think there’s a big challenge of, you know, how do you actually learn and how do you actually, I don’t know, build that brain connection to innovate new things, understand how fundamentally things work, right? I think that that part, that muscle might atrophy. And this is something that I worry of myself as well.

And same thing when you ask about this podcast, if all the knowledge out there you can just easily search and query, maybe it will be good for short term to answer specific question that you have. But philosophically how you want to think big in bigger picture, right? How do you wanna build a bit better world, you know, solve bigger problems, I think it’s something that might be a challenge if we always continue on this path, yeah. Or we rely AI that grows super smart that it can solve everything for us.

Martijn Versteeg: What I’m hearing, so thanks for sharing by the way. This is great. What I’m hearing is what I’m pondering myself lately. I think almost everyone’s looking for a quick fix and also a binary world of ones and zeros. Well, that is not the world, right? I think nuance is where it is. I think the wisdom is not in the book summary. I think the value that you just explained you got of seeing both sides, I think that’s wisdom. but that might be me, but maybe I, yeah, that’s a thing that I’m think…

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah I learned from some, someone as as well last time, you know maybe in a book or a podcast or something. Even reading a book, right, you might have the same texts. You might have the same pages, right? But different people will interpret the things that is shared in the book, maybe it could be stories, it could be the concepts, it could be whatever that is, differently, right? And they learn from those aspects. So people’s learning path is different even though maybe the gist of the summary is kind of like the same, you have the same bullet points. But how people get there actually is something that is unique to them. And I find this is the same for, you know, maybe podcast, right, building conversations. Everyone will take different takeaways from different parts of this conversation. And but somehow they could learn something new from this, yeah. Sorry, you were saying something as well.

Martijn Versteeg: That’s exactly, well, I’m just gonna drop that and go for what you just said is exactly what happens in the peer groups. I end every peer group so that’s three hours of going around the table and asking what challenge do you have, that you would like some input on. And in the end I ask, what insight did you get and what one action are you going to take? Everyone is always different. That’s so cool. And by the way, it can also happen within a person, because I have a weird practice that there is a book that I reread every year or so, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I get something else from that every year, which is very weird, but also cool, right?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

[01:07:19] Why Consuming Knowledge Is Not the Same as Producing

Martijn Versteeg: And what I think lastly, because that’s the last part I would like to give to your listeners. Reading, consuming is not the same as producing. And I understand that it’s the easy way, but you know how satisfying producing is because you know how it feels when you write a piece of code and it does what you do. I recommend if something resonates of a podcast and a book, why not write something small about it? Ask someone else about an opinion on some. But because I think the nuance, that’s where you really get become a master, right?

I think that’s the beautiful, like I do transformations for companies as well, and I have some weird habits. I’m just sharing them. At the end, I write everyone that I work intensively with a letter. I do it for myself actually. I ask them in the end, do you want it? If not, also fine. But I do it for myself. And I find writing, but also creating, like even preparing for this podcast, right? I needed to think about, oh, I knew the first and the last question, so I needed to think, what’s the best way I can do. I will give it my go. I’m not saying it will make me like excellent, right? But just that reflection. Sometimes it’s not about that magic new piece of knowledge, but sometimes it’s about turning it into like yeah, digesting it and producing something of yourself. I don’t know.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Martijn Versteeg: As a final thought.

Henry Suryawirawan: So yeah this reminds me of the quote by Richard Feynman, right? So teaching others is the next level of learning kind of, uh, you know….

Martijn Versteeg: Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

Henry Suryawirawan: If you consume a lot, you think you know. But take that chance to actually explain it to others even someone who is beginner or maybe juniors or whatever that is. And if you can’t explain it well such that they would understand that kind of like shows that maybe you don’t understand things in the first place.

Martijn Versteeg: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:09:06] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So Martijn, it’s been a great conversation I have only one last question which is like a tradition in my podcast. I call this the three technical leadership wisdom. Think of them just like advice. Maybe you can share your version today, that will be great.

Martijn Versteeg: Yes. The three pieces. I will give the very first is in order to speed up, you sometimes need to slow down, meaning exactly what I say. But I see people have no problem speeding up. I have a lot of problems slowing down. This can mean really block that hour for yourself and don’t accept other people planning over it, because you call it focus time by mistake and people know, oh, focus time. I can just plan a meeting. Really take time for reflection.

The second is knowledge uninvested in action is useless. So if there’s anything that I have said that resonates slightly, my personal request, just try it. And if it doesn’t work or does work, you will learn something. And in both cases, let me know because that’s fucking cool.

The third is learn to speak business. And if it is not interesting to you, you might not know enough about it yet.

Henry Suryawirawan: Cool. I think those are really powerful sharing that you just gave to us, right? I really love the kind of like the second one, right? So you have all the knowledge, you have listened to a lot of podcasts, reading a lot of books. But if you never take the action, actually it’s kind of like useless in the end. So…

Martijn Versteeg: Can you give, you, can, can I give you, I’m sorry.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Go ahead.

Martijn Versteeg: Can I give you this story that made this land by me? Because I love telling stories. I was rowing competitively, when I was still before my studies. And at one point, I was coaching competitively. I lived in Singapore for a year at being the national head coach, so I was like, fit all the time. Until one point when I stopped rowing competitively but I kept eating like I was still rowing competitively. And I got pretty fat. Now that happens. And at one point, I said to myself, I’m 20 something. I don’t know, 24. So I need to lose this weight. So I moved more and I lost that weight. And being a 20 something year old, non polished, let’s call it, maybe this is also a little bit Dutch, but I was very impolitely loudly calling a friend on the phone while in the tram in Amsterdam saying, yeah, I lost all this weight.

I regret that part of the story but there was a lesson there that was fantastic because the opposite of me, there was a person that could not fit in the seat. Like hugely obese which was taken an interest into this story of me losing 20 kilograms. And when I hung up, she asked, did I just hear that you lost over 20 kilograms? And I said, very proud, yeah. Can you tell me how you did it? I said, well, I started eating less and moving more. And she went like this. And this is the lesson. Oh man, I hoped you would have the magic formula.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, that’s a very powerful story. It’s kind of like, I think it’s a good reflection for us. We, I think most of us know kind of like the solutions, the answers. You know, we, have the internet, we have the books with resources available to us. If only we could just pick a small part of those, take an action, experiment, do small things and iterate, and improve your lives. I think that would be, that would bring us to somewhere that probably we’ll never know before and hopefully to the positive side of your life.

So thanks for sharing that powerful story, Martijn. If people would love to connect with you, you know, hear more stories from you or join your peer groups, is there a place where they can find you online?

Martijn Versteeg: So first, I have a little gift. I have a free training on taking action because it’s easy to say. But then how do you do it? On my website, groupeffort.nl/action, there’s a free training on action. It’s four times five minutes. It’s just quick, but it will help you if you’re like, okay, but where do I begin? So that’s a little gift. If you wanna stay in touch, I have a newsletter groupeffort.nl/newsletter, also not that hard. And if you wanna say hi on LinkedIn, I’m called Martijn Versteeg, but you can also go to linkedin.com/in/versteeg, V-E-R-S-T-E-E-G, and I’d be very happy to hear if anything that I said had a positive or negative effect. I hope not, but that will be fantastic. Henry, thank you so much for having me, man.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, cool. I’ll put all those links into the show notes. Thanks for the gift as well. I hope people learn something a thing or two from today’s conversations. And yeah, thank you so much for your time today, Martijn.

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