S05E36 · Sortir de sa zone de confort et écouter ses équipes

0:02 One of the key lessons in my career was go with the opportunities that make you a little uncomfortable. It's so easy to stay where you are. Change is hard. And so I think people avoid change until it becomes more painful to not change. What people really want is access to you as a leader, and you have to create that space. Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast. I'm Olivier Bonnet, I'm the CTO of BlaBlaCar and today I'm very happy to welcome Dawn Baker on the call. Dawn will be speaking at our Tech.Rocks summit on December 7th and 8th and today I'm going to interview her for the next 25 minutes. Dawn, can you maybe start by introducing yourself?

1:04 Sure. Thanks, Olivier. It's great to be here with you today. My name is Dawn Baker. I'm the CTO at Back Market. At Back Market, our company is around 600 people and about 250 of them are in the engineering work. I moved to France about a year ago, so I'm really enjoying living in Paris and all of the things that the great history and food that's in Paris. So I'm excited to be here. Cool. Awesome. Maybe to get started, I'm super curious about what's been your career path to get there and how did you land in your current position? Sure. So I've worked in all aspects, I think, of internet technology in my career, starting out in the dot-com boom and... Managed hosting and managed services companies, switching into software after about eight years. Life in managed hosting and managed services is 24 by seven on call. After eight years of that, I was hired and the software was better.

2:04 I think quality of life shift for me. And I did consulting for a little bit after that, working in process management consulting and a little bit of management coaching there as well. Then I worked in SRE. Some of the companies that I started out in, no one would ever have heard of, but I worked in the SRE org at LinkedIn. Learned quite a lot there. Was part of launching China, part of the IPv6 migration, some really interesting initiatives. At LinkedIn. Then I moved on to Fitbit. I was at Fitbit for six and a half years. The last year and a half of that, we had been acquired by Google. So I spent a year and a half at Google as well. And then they got this really interesting opportunity to come and work in Paris for Back Market with a mission that is really compelling to me. I really love the mission of Back Market around keeping electronics out of the landfill, doing more with what we have. I think that's a really important objective in the time we're living in today.

3:08 And coming along with that was the opportunity to work and live in France. That's how I've come to lead here. And it's been a great year and a few months so far. Busy last 12 months, I guess. Indeed. Moving internationally is not for the faint of heart, as you know. Exactly. I had a short experience in California. and I enjoyed it. But yeah, indeed, it adds to the professional challenges. For sure. Are there specific moments in your career that has been like defining moments or key encounters, key people that you've met? There's one person I would say who had the largest impact on my career. His name is Dawn Barlow, and I worked with him in two companies. And I think the biggest leaps in my professional growth were while working with him. And his approach to teams, his approach to work really changed how I think about leadership.

4:08 And I worked with him in one of the managed services companies, managed hosting companies I worked at, and in the consulting firm. And so I had no idea how to do consulting and how to do process consulting on top of that. He asked me to come and join him. And I decided to go and do that because always take the opportunity where you're going to get to do something that makes you really uncomfortable. And it was made better by doing it with someone that I trusted already. So that's one of the key lessons in my career was go with the opportunities that make you a little uncomfortable. You're not quite sure that you fit in it, you know, because your experience doesn't match. And it's where you learn the most. So that I think is one of the pivotal moments in my career was having a great mentor. tour like Dawn and then being able to work with him multiple times and continue to learn from him even when we weren't working together. Stretch yourself and get out of your comfort zone.

5:12 Indeed. There's the other side of that, which I think all of us in our career at some point have the opposite experience where we Dawn't have some great management above us or around us. Those experiences for me have been equally as important because I learned a lot about how I Dawn't want to be and who I Dawn't want to be. It makes you really think about how you want to show up in life and especially in your work life. And I spent a lot of time in roles where maybe my manager wasn't so great and it was really hard for me to come to work every day in some cases. And I stayed a little too long in some cases, but I learned a lot about how to know when is the right time to change. And I think that's an equally important skill to have picked up because it's so easy to stay where you are. Change is hard. And so I think people avoid change until it becomes more painful to not change.

6:14 I learned how to identify earlier. When that was happening and really learned that if I have a values conflict going on or I've stopped learning, those are two triggers for me that say, okay, it's time to go on. on. Usually if I'm in a situation where I'm not getting on super well, or I don't agree with the approach of my manager, and I can't resolve that, it comes down to personal values. It's time to shift. Those would be kind of like your advice. On when to know that it's time to move on and not just try more of the same. And I hear once you try to resolve it, if this is not working or there's no significant progress, then it's a sign that it's time to move on, even though indeed, like, Change is hard and it takes, again, like a bit of a kick in the ass to leave a position and find a new one.

7:15 Yeah, because it's even more than that conflict, because I think you learn a lot from conflict. And it's when... The things that you're learning are no longer worth the stress and pain that you get from the conflict. Because I think there's a lot of good that can come out of it. Because I don't want to agree all the time. With the people that I'm working with. I want to have debate and I want to disagree, still be able to move past that and work together because I think the best things come out of those debates. But sometimes it becomes intractable and you're not able to learn and move forward. And when that happens, It's best for everyone for a change to happen. I want to double down on what you just said, because I fully agree. Like some people end up being completely risk averse, sorry, conflict averse, which is not the goal here. And obviously, as you pointed out, like there's a ton of good thing that can come from like disagreement and not being initially aligned.

8:24 What I would call like constructive disagreement. And indeed, it's like, it's not about like, no, I always want to be fully aligned with everyone and we should never disagree. It's really about like, as we disagree and we will disagree, we will, this will reinforce our collaboration. This will emerge victorious from that disagreement and stronger. And sometimes it doesn't happen. You mentioned like values conflict, which indeed, like if they can be resolved, like I think that's a heartbreaker. And there are other cases. But yeah, like it's not like no conflict. It's like no constructive conflict or no useful conflict, which would be the signal. Maybe one last question. What are the most important qualities as tech leaders? What are the things that you're in your day-to-day job, you're trying to demonstrate or you're bringing with you at the back market? One thing I really focus on now, and I learned a few roles.

9:30 go was how important it is to listen, which sounds like an obvious thing to say, but more than that, it's about going and seeking out people and making time to listen to what's going on with them in their teams, what's happening. And so to do that and i i found this that as i have increased my scope of leadership over the years that what people really want is access to you as a leader. And you have to create that space and give time, listen to what people are saying. And I've also found that nearly all of the problems that come up, people know how to solve them if you just listen. They don't need you to solve them for them. They know how to solve them. They mostly just need permission or they need to know that they already know. Because sometimes they know the answer, but they don't have confidence that it's the right one.

10:32 Or they don't think they know it and they think they need you to tell them. It's mostly not the case. Mostly they know and you just point it out. And or you're the helpful here that will help them articulate and realize that they definitely know the answer, even though they did not realize it. I couldn't agree more. We could go on for hours, but I want to make sure we keep some time to talk about your upcoming session at the Tech.Rocks Summit. Can you tell us what you're going to talk about? Sure. I'm going to be talking about leading through change. Because we're right now in one of the pivotal shifts, I think, that is happening in technology. We're super fortunate that in our lifetimes we've seen a number of these, but they really aren't that common. It's their years apart. The rise of access to AI has really been a disruption in technology. general in technology teams and the pressures that are coming towards them.

11:36 And how do we as leaders, I use leaders in a broad term because I feel like anyone in an org at any level can have a leadership role in topics, especially topics like this. And so how do we really embrace those kinds of changes and lead well in the context of such disruption. Okay, so what are we going to learn? About looking at the disruption as an opportunity. I think it's human nature to focus on not always the positive impact of disruption. The discomfort? Yes, the discomfort indeed. How do you create leverage around it? Because if you can recognize that there's an opportunity there and you can then figure out how you get the most out of it, what are the things you have to do as a leader in such a context? How do you step in and lead? Because disruption causes chaos. Sometimes the best we can do is find ways to operate in controlled chaos.

12:37 And I think that's a skill that we learn over time and how to do that well. Embrace and accept the chaos as opposed to trying to fight it. Exactly. If you fight it, you just get really tired. Yes, it's not going away. Right. It will just come back and probably even harder when it comes back. That's right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dawn. It was great having you and very much looking forward to your session on December 7th. Great. Thank you, Olivier. It was great talking with you today. Thanks, everyone. And we'll see you at the Tech.Rocks Summit 2023, December 7th and December 8th. It will be both live in Paris. It will be streamed remotely for the ones that can come to Paris. Very much looking forward. Thank you, Dawn. Thanks, Olivier.