Jeremy Duvall with Humans Optimized: Why is a generative culture critical to the tech environment?

Jeremy Duvall, 7Factor Software founder and WellEntry creator, credits much of his success to implementing a generative culture in his businesses. A generative culture entails a culture of grace, mixed together with thought leadership and a desire to consistently improve. This type of human-centric approach is refreshing to the tech industry. Jeremy is passionate about breaking the stereotype that engineers are loners in dark rooms cranking out code. Engineers are builders, communicators, advice-givers, and problem solvers.

“A generative culture, a high-performing team, a team that respects one another, creates this atmosphere where we can have conversations about what is the best top technology to use for a certain problem”, said Jeremy.

Jeremy breaks down how he programmed 7Factor with a generative culture from the beginning, and how this has led to 7Factor being a leader in the tech industry in his chat with Humans Optimized below.

Read the full transcript below:

Suzanne York:

This is Suzanne York with Humans Optimized. We specialize in change management for technology adoption by bringing together advancements in technology with elevated human skills. Our aim is to cultivate human to human and human to technology collaborations. This combination will allow us to take advantage of the immense opportunities in the future of work.

Suzanne York:

Generative culture is the holy grail of any technology-driven company and the noble quest of any CIO, well, or really for any leader of people or change for that matter. Everyone wants it, but few are able to find it. Generative culture supports smart people, the right smart people as they solve the right problems. It’s a magnet for talent that helps you recruit and retain those smart people too. It’s the essence of teams that are high-performing and innovative. Done right, it can take you into Netflix territory defining and dominating an entire sector of the economy. So what is a generative culture? Why is it especially critical to technology environments and how do you create it?

Suzanne York:

Jeremy Duvall, founder of 7factor software is committed to building a smart, flexible human-centric team of experienced software architects, engineers, and developers who obsess about quality and will give clients honest expert advice. Jeremy, welcome. And thanks for being here today.

Jeremy Duvall:

Hey Suzanne, I am excited to be here.

Suzanne York:

Well, we have had some great conversations and all of those, I wish I had already hit record. So we’re going to do our best to distill them into a single episode. And let’s start by unpacking part of that introduction and breaking down some of the core ideas behind your culture and your business. So tell me more about what it means to create a generative culture that treats engineers as first-class citizens.

Jeremy Duvall:

Yeah, I think the best place to start is to think there are three different types of cultures and this is something that’s gone around in the industry for a while now, many of you may be aware of it. There’s this taxonomy that was created on culture. And we describe those as, first, pathological which is the one you don’t want to be a part of. Two is bureaucratic, which is fairly common and not terribly difficult. It’s not a bad thing to have a bureaucratic culture in certain cases. And then finally is generative. And the big difference between those is it’s very much based on how you treat people. And there’re some words to describe each of these, for example, pathological is negative and power-oriented. Bureaucratic is seen as negative, but rule-oriented, which in many cases is better than power-oriented at least for the people who are under set power and or rules, and then finally a generative, which is a performance-oriented culture.

Jeremy Duvall:

And that’s what, when you listen to top leaders, they’re always saying we have a performance-oriented culture and we care about our people and their performance. And in many cases, they really mean that. But the difficulty is in that, how do you get this ideology of caring about people yet being a performance-oriented culture? It sounds like a bit of a dichotomy there. How do you get those two items to play nicely together? And how do you take that and trickle it into all aspects of your business and not just your subset of leaders? And it takes starting from the ground up with defining what these ideas mean. And a lot of it to be completely transparent is how you treat others. And how you treat others is very much rooted in what communication, right?

Suzanne York:

Yeah. And what, what’s so fun for me in the analogy that you’re using about ground up and rooted is when I hear the word generative culture, I think of growth and reproducing what’s good. And having it be somewhat organic. So you’re not forcing the results or the growth within the company. It’s coming from within. So when you started talking about the ground up and roots, it really matched my idea of picturing growth. And what do you do for something that’s growing? Well, you certainly don’t stifle it, you water it, you give it light. So keep going with where you were headed with that.

Jeremy Duvall:

Yeah, for sure. I think that’s a fantastic analogy. And the other thing I want to kind of point out is in your word pictures there, we were talking about this infectious sort of transfer of culture to others. Maybe too soon, given the environment that we’re in now. But I mean the picture still stands in that a generative culture is something that you want to be infectious. It’s something that you want to start by cultivating at the very ground floor, which is the people on the floor executing and getting things done on the day-to-day. And you want that to bloom out and start infecting the new folks that come into your company. Every single time I have an interview, I start with interviewing candidates myself and I describe to them what our culture looks like. And almost immediately, I have never had a bad reaction to the description of what we do and how we do it, and how we treat one another.

Jeremy Duvall:

Instead of talking to an engineer about what is an interface and why a manhole covers round, which those are fair questions. I talk about, “why do you care about coming to work every day? What excites you about being an engineer?” Because, developers, we’re special people. We have some requirements that not a lot of people know about because we’re so introverted, at least most of us are, and it takes a bit of experience managing an engineering team before you start to really kind of pick up on what they need and how to feed and care for a group of extremely smart people that just want in the end make you happy.

Suzanne York:

Yeah. Well, I had an experience in my career where I was literally the liaison between the marketing team and the technology team, because, and I think part of it is because they couldn’t be more different from the lenses through which they view the world. And so many times they would try to come together on alignment on something and just we’re missing the high-fives. And I came in to help really bridge the gap between them and saw and came to appreciate the differences and the value that each side brought. It is kind of a gross generalization about the two differences, but I can appreciate what you’re saying with the kind of nature of the technology team.

Jeremy Duvall:

I think that’s dead-on. And I find that a lot of the times when I would have a discussion, so my journey came from hardcore technical engineering working to build the T-Mobile sidekick at Danger, which not a lot of people remember what that is, onto Microsoft and other very tech-heavy companies. And then I got into consulting and I recognize that the biggest thing that’s missing in a software team is their capability to reach across the aisle and have communications and conversations with other folks in a generative fashion. And I think without that sort of core foundation of, we’re all here to solve the same problem, we’re all here to achieve the same goal. I feel like we missed the point.

Jeremy Duvall:

And in many cases, again, we have our offsites and we have our happy hours and we have all of these things that are designed to sort of team build. But again, some of those even miss the point too, because while they’re very well-meaning, they don’t necessarily facilitate better communication. Every happy hour that I went to when I worked at a specific consultancy, what would I do? I would sit next to the people that I knew how to talk to. And I would have conversations with the people that I could nerd out for whatever reason. And I think that one of the chief difficulties of developing a communicative generative culture is being able to reach across the aisle, find common ground and have conversations about real things that we’re trying to build together in a respectful way.

Suzanne York:

Well, what I want to bring forward, as you talked about in your interview process, talking about ideologies, well, your company name 7factor is about a set of ideologies. You’re welcome to share as many or as few if this is a good time for that. It just really struck me that it’s not seven factors of software design.

Jeremy Duvall:

Right? And a lot of people get confused. They say, “Oh, is that a 12-factor app? But without five factors?” That’s a nerdy joke. And I have to explain myself to some of the CIOs in the room of no, actually, maybe I picked the wrong name for my company, but it makes it a really cool logo. I’m going to go with it. We had seven ideas that we follow that are rooted in this idea of how do you create a generative, communicative culture for an engineering team.

Jeremy Duvall:

And when I train my folks, I’m going to go through them real quick. The first is to be a force multiplier. That one to me is my favorite one. And basically what you’re doing here is you’re seeking to teach elevate and strengthen the team, but do so mercifully. That’s a word that sounds awkward in our sort of corporate culture where we tend to want to use very strong, bold words that are authoritative. And mercy is a very weak word with some connotations that not a lot of people might find attractive. But to me, it’s the perfect word to describe when you’re working on a team with someone and they make a mistake, is your first inclination to go after them and blame them and point fingers, or is your first inclination to produce what’s called a blameless post-mortem and have a conversation about how do we get better from here, right? Yes, you made a mistake. And if it’s a really big mistake, there may be consequences to pay, but that doesn’t mean that we attack other people. And we create, again, this power-hungry, you shall be punished by the emperor style of culture.

Jeremy Duvall:

The second is improvement is never done. This is rooted in Kaizen and Kanban. We want to be able to fearlessly change things and not worry about people coming back to us and being upset that the status quo has been harmed. Do no harm to others, be ethically responsible, and hold each other accountable. This fits beautifully into the generative culture idea, do the right thing always in all cases. That doesn’t just apply to code. It applies to interactions as well.

Jeremy Duvall:

Curiosity is the chief architect. This one is more of a development-oriented one in that a curious person tends to find the most interesting and innovative solutions because we’re not just repeating things that we’ve done 15 times. Equality and diversity as first-class citizens. Again, fitting directly into generative culture. We do not care about where you come from or your orientation. We want to make sure that we are fair and everyone’s voice has equal weight, right? Seek consensus. Number six is our dorky little tagline, which is to build good things. That’s a big deal to me. And a lot of people are like, “well, why don’t you say, build great things and build awesome things?”

Jeremy Duvall:

And I feel like good is a very safe, it’s a great word. I think it works just fine there because it sort of, again, evokes a sense of stability. It evokes a sense of commonality and it paints a picture of ‘it’s good’. It doesn’t have to be great because great tends to come with some bravado. It’s good. It’s the things hidden in engineering and engineers are like this too, we tend to be hidden behind the scenes and doing a really good job to solve business problems and to prop up some of the most powerful companies in the world. And we rarely get credit for it.

Suzanne York:

Right? Yes. The lights are on everyone, nobody notices.

Jeremy Duvall:

Exactly. And finally, love what you do. And the reason I put this one in there is I really am passionate about software engineering. I’m a Georgia Tech grad. I went twice, got my master’s cause I enjoy pain apparently. I have always loved the process of developing software. And when I became a manager at a consultancy I was working for and eventually started 7factor, the thing I realized, even more, is I absolutely love working with people and helping them. The CIOs on our client list and the folks that I just talk to on a regular basis, I love having conversations about things like; how do you create a generative culture and how do you build us high performing engineering team that actually cares about one another and in turn cares about the goal that we’re attempting to get as a team.

Suzanne York:

Well, and it sounds funny that we have to make that claim that people who actually care about one another, there’s a bit of a misunderstanding, I think about technology organizations. And so let’s talk a little bit more about who are we talking about, about the technology professionals themselves, and why a culture like this is so attractive to them.

Jeremy Duvall:

Right. Developers are funny people. We are a peaceful people, but we definitely have some requirements. And this is something, again, a lot of people miss when they’re hiring their technology teams. Developers want to feel appreciated for what they do. Even the most type-A of type A, right? I mean, I’m a fan of the DiSC scale and we have DiSC profiles on all our incoming folks. And we talk about how DiSC is a wonderful tool for learning how to communicate with people who aren’t necessarily like you. Most of the people on my team are high Ds and high Cs. What that means is that they’re dominant i.e. they have an opinion and they’re conscientious, which means they’re very detail-oriented. So when you put a bunch of dominant people who are very detail-oriented in the same room, what do you think is going to happen?

Suzanne York:

Lots of opinions and lots of care.

Jeremy Duvall:

They’re probably going to start arguing. And that’s okay. And one of the things that we teach people, is that it’s okay to argue as long as we’re respectful. And it’s okay for us to have conversations as long as we are respectful with one another.

Jeremy Duvall:

The big thing you want to avoid here is toxic people and toxic cultures. And I hate saying that because I believe everyone in this world can have a second chance and people can get better and change and modify their behavior if given enough guidance. But there are some folks that we’ve all run into that are a bit toxic and they make it hard for anyone to work with them. And for us to build a team that goes in a certain direction. That toxicity could be for many different reasons. It could be because this individual doesn’t feel appreciated and they’ve kind of gone to a bad place psychologically. It could be because this individual really thinks that they’re smarter than everyone else in the room, which is a bad place to be as well, and at that point, you should probably move on. If you think you’re smarter than everybody else, you’re not being challenged or it could just be that person had a bad day, who knows.

Jeremy Duvall:

So going back to that mercy, and sort of the idea of grace, we do want to give people enough shots, but we also have to be very strict guardians of our culture. And the second we see something that’s starting to lean towards toxic. I challenge every leader that’s listening to this, to just attack that. Again don’t be mean about it. And don’t cause that person angst and or get yourself into a lawsuit situation, but certainly you, we as leaders, it’s up to us to protect our culture. And it’s up to us to make sure that the folks that are on our teams are adhering to the direction that we are setting at a higher level.

Suzanne York:

That really brings to mind for me setting the playing field for the right work to get done and the work to get done in the right way. And I say playing field because there is a degree where the technology professionals are athletes and there’s also a part where they’re artists. So let’s talk about both the artists and the athletes.

Jeremy Duvall:

I love these word pictures. And there are two of my favorite things I like to talk to people about. So developers are kind of mental athletes and some folks, maybe this makes sense to you as you hear that word, or maybe you are kind of what are you talking about? Developers have to, because of, okay, so let me back up because of the number of things that we as an engineering team have to understand on a given day, it’s gotten to the point to where we’re doing everything. So when you talk about this whole dev-ops idea, maybe you’ve heard of that buzzword. The point of dev-ops was to bring agile to the operations space. And what happened in this sort of revolution that’s occurred upon the last maybe eight years or so, is that engineers have gotten a lot more responsibility towards making sure that the things that they create are getting into production.

Jeremy Duvall:

Some companies still have a segregation between the dev-ops team and an engineering team, but for a consultancy like mine and for a lot of the startups that we work for, there’s not enough budget there to segregate those ideas into two separate actual teams and create this sort of matrix between them. So engineers need to now learn, how do I get my thing into production? How do I use this thing called Terraform or cloud formation or whatever the Azure thing is? I don’t remember the name of it, but there’s a huge amount of information that’s coming into me as an engineer that I have to learn. So now let’s take that and put on top of that, layer on top of that, the idea of that, I now need to know how to write my dev ops. I know how, I need to know how to write my code in whatever framework I’m into.

Jeremy Duvall:

And if you’re starting to embrace this idea of being a polyglot shop, where there are multiple technologies that are in-house, which we subscribe to, now you have to learn additional technologies. And you have to learn what it’s like to write something in Ruby on rails versus Golang versus C-sharp. And people can alleviate this on their teams by selecting specific technologies. And that can be very helpful at times, but it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re a JavaScript developer and you go look at NPM, there are a billion packages, how do you know which one does what you want it to do? You have to go through this learning process to figure out if the thing in front of you, the hammer in front of you is even going to be able to smash in the nail that you’re trying to smash it.

Jeremy Duvall:

And so the idea of engineers being mental athletes, we always have to practice. We always have to continually sharpen our skills. Software engineering is like 80 years old, right? My wife is a structural engineer. Structural engineering has been around for thousands of years. Plus we have gravity, right? We know, with physics, know-how physics works like gravity, isn’t going to change and screw up all of our bridge equations, right?

Jeremy Duvall:

In our world, a new invention, a new language, a new framework can flip everything that we know on its head. And we now have to start over and relearning how what I do fits in this framework. And we’re in a bit of a gold rush in a sense where every technologist and all of the incredibly smart humans out there that love their skills and know-how to write code are building frameworks. And they want other people to use them. And there’s no formal way for us to figure out if this is the right thing to do. So you can just imagine Suzanne if you had to every day wake up and look at your email and see what came out today, that’s going to change how I do my job.

Suzanne York:

Exactly. And the things you know now, which you didn’t even know four years ago, and then four years from now, I’d say four, just because it’s an easy number but it is that am constantly amazed at the rate and pace, not only of technology but what people have to do to stay on top of learning it. And then that takes us to this idea of them being artists because they care. And it’s an art form. And I don’t know, tell me, take me more on the journey of a developer as an artist.

Jeremy Duvall:

If anyone listening to this thinks that a developer is someone that just sits there and Google’s code and copies and pastes, what we call in the business copypasta, that to a file and moves on to the next ticket you are very mistaken. Software engineers especially, there are two different types, there are the classically trained engineers that come out of university. And these folks are taught theory and they’re taught big connotation, like what I was taught in school. And they’re taught all kinds of really fancy sort of theoretical and kind of classical. I kind of liken it to being a classically trained musician and that you know how to play the Beethoven and the Bach and you can sight-read, and you can do all these things. A person who just comes out of a random profession decides you know what technology is cool. I want to learn how to code those folks have a totally different thought process and the two merge.

Jeremy Duvall:

I have both sides on my team and I love it because they’re two totally different takes on the same profession, and I’ve never seen that. I don’t know of any profession out there where you can have that much of a diverse view on how to do the job. Maybe I’m missing some things, but it’s incredibly cool to watch someone like Amy, who is self-taught and comparing her to someone like Ahmed who is like me, went to Georgia Tech and has sort of a theoretical grasp on how things work and how they approach solving the problems. So when I say that technologists are artists, we really sort of range on sort of a scale of heading more towards your classical engineer and your classically trained musician to heading more towards your jazz improv musician, right?

Jeremy Duvall:

Someone who can just go over a scale and play all kinds of crazy notes and it kind of sounds cool if you’re into jazz, right? So being an artist means that there is opinion inserted into what you do, right? When an artist paints a picture, you could paint a picture of a house and it’d be the exact house in front of you, right? You could do, I don’t know the word for it, but a portrait of something that’s in front of you, or you can just reach into the depths of your imagination and come up with some interesting abstract thing to paint and to throw up on your canvas. And those could be equally appreciated by people and folks don’t get that in engineering space. We’ve tried to codify it and make it more like a structural engineering discipline where there are only five ways of doing it, right?

Jeremy Duvall:

The fact of the matter is there’s not. That’s why we have so many frameworks and languages and, and packages and methodologies and solutions. I mean, granted there’s a toolbox, there’s a basic set of skills that everybody needs. I liken it to being able to mix colors on your palette. Sorry, being able to mix colors on your palette. That’s a basic skill that every artist needs to know how to do or perception or lighting. There’s plenty of ideas in art that map well to fundamental skills. But when it comes to, I tell you, “I want you to solve this problem for me.” And I give you a blank canvas. You are going to paint what makes the most sense to you? And you may bring in some ideas that you’ve seen from other artists i.e. your colleagues i.e. developers that have mentored you or engineers that are better than you, or that you respect and follow on Twitter or something of that nature.

Jeremy Duvall:

But at the end of the day, this thing that you’re creating is yours. And it’s of paramount importance to understand that. But there’s one last facet that is not at all like artistry, that painting is not finished. So when you go and you do your work and you create this beautiful framework and you build this awesome code and you use test-driven development, or you use automated testing and you have this glorious test suite and the product works, guess what? You’re going to move onto the next thing. And there’s going to be someone come along behind you that has to then take over your project. This is called support engineering. And this is another podcast all in of itself, writing clean code and developing architectures that make sense is part of a generative culture.

Jeremy Duvall:

And as an artist, it is your job to build in support and maintainability into the thing that you just created for the person that comes after you. And that fits into our world because it is generative. You’re looking after the person that’s coming next to support and maintain this software. And you’re not just thinking about ‘Oh yeah, I’m a Hottie artist. And I did this awesome thing and look at me and it’s so cool.’ You’re still thinking in the back of your head. Well, I know someone’s going to come along and have to continue this painting. So I’m going to leave you lines. I’m going to leave you to paint by color [crosstalk 00:24:29].

Suzanne York:

Well, this has really been great to talk about this idea of the right culture and getting the right people in it to do the right work. So I picture we’ve set the stage. We’ve created the atmosphere for the performers to come in and give their greatest performance. So what does the greatest performance look like? We’ve talked about everything from unicorn rescues to the apps that you’ve been building. So what are the results of having put in place a culture like this?

Jeremy Duvall:

It’s the results are that I can go to sleep at night and know that my team will get it done. And if they don’t or they have a problem, they will come to me and we’ll have a conversation and we’ll sort it, or they’ll talk to their customer. So let’s talk about my context, right? In my context, a generative culture, a high-performing team, a team that respects one another, creates this atmosphere where we can have conversations about what is the best top technology to use for a certain problem. Right?

Jeremy Duvall:

We can have a conversation about what are the pros and cons of functional programming and object-oriented programming. When might we want to use Golang for a specific problem, and when might we want to use Java for a specific problem.

Jeremy Duvall:

I have a really silly phrase in my organization and it’s basically using the right tool for the right job. If you want to dig a hole, use a shovel. If you want to cut a tree down, use a chainsaw, don’t dig a hole with a chainsaw. You probably can, but you don’t want to do that. You might lose a leg or something in the process. Generative culture fuels the freedom to use the right tool for the right job. If you have set up sort of an oppressive culture where you’ve forced people into lanes, and you’re kind of pounding them to conform to a corporate idea that sounds really good underneath the covers, but it stifles that creativity that a generative and communicative culture creates, you’re going to find that your people are not going to innovate, and they’re not going to bring their all to work. They’re going to say, I’m here to do my job. I’m here to punch the clock and do my 40. I’ll do my 40 and I’ll get out. Trust me. I’ve hired these people away from companies and they come and work for me.

Jeremy Duvall:

And they’re like, “holy crap. I can choose what I want to use. That’s awesome.” So you’re building a group of humans who want to solve problems for you and who genuinely are invested in the direction that your company is going in. And that is the huge difference that I’ve seen from the folks that work for us and the companies that we come in and help. I see pathological and bureaucratic cultures every day. And for, with, unfortunately, some of the folks that we’re working with

Suzanne York:

Well, and this produces results. So tell us about the app that you’ve been doing and how amazing, I will tell you how amazing the app is, and how the team really came together to do that.

Jeremy Duvall:

Yeah. We have this thing called WellEntry, and it was an application that we were partners with a local healthcare firm, and they do pediatric home care for 30,000 caregivers across the entire United States. And so we’re partners with them. We are their technology partner. They came to us and said, “Hey, we have a problem. We have all these children that we work with that are at risk. Some of them much more at risk than others, depending on the ailment. And we need a way to make sure that the caregivers,” this is during the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, “that the caregivers that are walking into those homes are screened. And that we have a way to sort of put some checks and balances in place to ensure that we’re not potentially damaging that home, that household.”

Jeremy Duvall:

And so we worked with them and two of my engineers, and about two months who were very excited and invested in this idea, developed an entire platform called WellEntry, which is a COVID-19 slash infectious disease screening platform that was recently rolled out to these 30,000 caregivers. We also have a few schools that have been interested in it. We have a nonprofit in Brunswick, Georgia, that we gave a free license to. It’s a Morningstar Children’s Home, very much care about the kids that that home looks after. We were like, “Hey, have a license for free. And don’t care.”

Jeremy Duvall:

Those are the kind of things that really get me excited is when I can help other people, with the technology that we built. But back to the team, they were invested in what they wanted to do. And guess what? I didn’t tell them how to do it. I said, “guys, here’s the requirements. You select the technology. You select how you’re going to solve these problems. Here’s the, here’s a few tickets in clubhouse, and here are some screenshots from our UX folks. You guys go make this happen.” And within no time flat, we had an entire working platform that we were rolling out as a production platform to again, one of the largest home healthcare providers in the United States, if not the largest. Culture matters and these whole team about what they were building.

Suzanne York:

They had two people in two months, given the freedom to do the work that they do best, to have such a profound impact. And that to me it really brings this home that, yes, the culture sounds great. It’s not only in theory, it’s also in practice and in the results.

Jeremy Duvall:

For sure. And I also want to say those two people were never burned out. A lot of the times when people hear, ‘Oh yeah. Two people.’ Yeah. I bet they worked like 60 hour weeks. They didn’t. I know, I know because they’re friends of mine and they didn’t 60 hour weeks, they worked their best and maybe 45 on the occasion, depending on a feature we really needed to get out. But they worked because they care about what they were doing and they were given the freedom to execute and to get it done on their own terms.

Suzanne York:

Yeah. Well, let us sort of wrap up our conversation by bringing their voice into this. So we did ask a couple of your team members, what’s the difference in culture? And if there’s anything that came out of that conversation, that’d be worth sharing. I’d love to bring their voice into this too.

Jeremy Duvall:

Yeah, for sure. I think probably some of my favorites was I had an engineer that came from a very large pharmaceutical benefits management firm, and he felt that the company and management just kind of latched onto the buzz words in the industry, again, going back to knowing your engineers, and this is important for business folks too. So if you’re a business person listening to this, I would, again, challenge you to learn what it’s like to be a developer. You don’t have to know how to code, or maybe you’re like in all those, those guys or gals like, “oh my God, they’re so cool.” They just write code. Or maybe you’re like, I don’t know what they do. And I don’t care what they do. It’s important to understand the culture that engineers have to manage and deal with every day. And not only do we have 15 things coming at us daily that we have to deal with and a new security bulletin that we have to fix in an NPM package, or a new gym that’s got a security vulnerability, and we have to roll back a patch number.

Jeremy Duvall:

There are so many operational day-to-day things that we’re worried about when management comes to us and says, “Hey, I want to implement this new fancy buzzword called DevSecOps.” We’re just going to roll our eyes and be like, okay, another one, this guy came from a world like that. And he came into 7factor where he’s given the freedom to choose things. And he’s given the freedom to influence how his team solves problems and the huge difference that he finds is that’s open. And it’s so open that I don’t really know what to do with it even staging. I’m not, I love working here because I can choose things, but there are times where I’m just overwhelmed because I’m like, “I don’t know what to choose.” And it’s a good situation. And it’s, it’s going back to that mental athlete, he’s being stretched right now. And he’s been given a chance to kind of develop those muscles of being able to make his own decisions and not being sort of slammed into a mold of you have to do it this way.

Suzanne York:

Wow. Well, that’s fantastic. I think we’ve told a compelling story about the what the why and the who. So if someone’s thinking I might not exactly have this culture, but I do want to take strides and getting there. What do you recommend? How do they start?

Jeremy Duvall:

I recommend that everyone start by getting to know the people that do the work on the floor. And this goes from a small startup to a ginormous company, and this may not be feasible for the CEO of T and T or something like that, or some massive corporation where you’re just so inundated within the clouds, high-level stuff that it’s impossible for you to break free and go find what these folks do. But a developer reports to someone. In 99.999% of cases, I would challenge that person, if you have an engineer that reports to you get to know exactly why they think what they think, not what they’re thinking. It’s easy to ask someone for their opinion, right? And they’ll happily tell you, “Oh, this is how I feel.”

Jeremy Duvall:

And what I’ve learned in my 15 years of doing this and in five years of developing this company, or four, almost five of building this company from the ground up, is that empathy is one of the most paramount and important skills that you can have as a human, not just as a leader, but as a person, because when you hear someone and they say something and there’s frustration in their voice, you need to pick up on that and say, okay, let’s go talk. Let’s find out why you’re frustrated. What’s going on? Why are you feeling the way you’re feeling? Not you aren’t allowed to feel that way, don’t feel that way or we don’t allow that type of feelings here at Acme Corp. It’s why, what happened? Did I do something? Did someone on the team do something? And you know, maybe HR professionals are going like, “oh my God, don’t do that.” Right? Cause you’ll get sued, but I’ve not been sued yet.

Jeremy Duvall:

And I have phenomenal relationships with all of the 20 engineers on my team. They know me, they knew who I am. I know their names, I know their spouse’s name. I know their dog’s name in some cases. And I think it’s important. I learned that from a guy that I used to work for a consultancy here in town. And he actually, as a challenge at one of our quarterlies and it left a huge impact on me. They did a game where they threw a picture up of one of the people. There were 200 people that had consultancy at the time and he rattled off the name and the spouse’s name. And he did this like zero time flat. I was ‘wow, that’s so cool.’I want to be like that.

Jeremy Duvall:

I want to be able to say the name and the spouse, and something fun about every person on my team and getting to know those folks, you understand, and you get in their head and you can become empathetic and you can start working on managing the emotions of your team. This is what I tell all my leaders and I’ve done, management and leadership are not telling other people what to do. Leadership to me is managing the emotions of your team and driving people towards a positive place to get positive outcomes.

Jeremy Duvall:

If you leave emotions on the wayside and you say emotions don’t belong at work, and it’s just a thing that we should never have to worry about. You are cutting out 90% of the human experience because we are emotional creatures at heart. Whether you show it or you don’t. We are emotional creatures. Ignoring that and cutting that out of your management strategy is a huge issue at least in my experience. It’s a huge problem that you will miss out on 90% of chances to increase the effectiveness of your team by making them feel accepted and their voice was heard and you actually give a crap about what they have to say.

Suzanne York:

And I couldn’t agree more. I mean, if we aren’t asking the why behind the what either the what they’re doing or what they’re thinking, then we’ll fill in the blanks with our own story and not theirs.

Jeremy Duvall:

Correct.

Suzanne York:

So with that said, this has been such a great conversation, and I’m sure people will have more questions or be excited to talk with you. How can people reach out to you and getting in touch with you?

Jeremy Duvall:

Yeah, for sure. Just my email address, right, is the best place to get ahold of me. It’s a jduv@7factor.io. You can also find us on the internet at 7factor, the number 7factor.io. Check us out on the Well Entry product page. That’s wellentry.io or just hit me up on LinkedIn, Jeremy Duvall, pretty easy to find. I love talking to people so more than happy to have a chat with anybody that agrees or even disagrees with what I’m saying. Because again, we’re Kaizen culture. I want to get better. If there’s anything I’ve said that kind of feels a little of love to have a conversation.

Suzanne York:

Oh, what a great invitation. So, well, thank you so much for your time, Jeremy. It has been a true pleasure to talk with you

Jeremy Duvall:

Today. Thank you so much for having me.

Suzanne York:

Thanks for listening to this episode for more information and to contact us, visit www.humansoptimized.com.