Building a Resilient and Inclusive Engineering Culture with Matthew Card

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today I’m sitting down with Matthew Card. Matthew, welcome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Matthew Card: Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m very pleasured to be here.

Shane Hastie: Oh, my normal starting point with these conversations is who’s Matthew?

Introductions [00:40]

Matthew Card: Okay, we can start off with I’m Matthew Card. I’m an engineering manager at the BBC. The BBC is quite big, so in other terms, I would be a head of software engineering or a senior engineering manager. So, what I’m trying to get across here is that I have a department, I look after a part of the data platform, wider organization. I look after the core platform, which is the core infrastructure platform that builds out the infrastructure for the platform. So other data users can use tools that we provide through infrastructure. That means that I look after four teams, which means it’s about 32 to 35 people. We’re structuring into about four teams. I’ve got two project teams as well. So, they’re like short-lived teams and so forth. I’ve been at the BBC for 15 years, actually almost 16 years. I’ve been there for a very long time.

For a long part of that, I struggled at the BBC. So, the first 10 years, that’s the time that I struggled. I was in one team for a very, very long time. So, all the things that you’ve heard about systemic inequalities or inequities, those were the things that were kind of keeping me where I was. But what actually, and I say this to everybody, what actually changed my life is I went on a resilience course. It’s really, really interesting because I’ve sent other people on that resilience course and they didn’t get what I got from it. So, it just turns out that it was my time to go on that course.

It was my time to be there. It was a part of my journey to go on, and I literally dove into motivation and resilience from that, and I managed to build up myself. I worked on myself because when I came out of that course, I realized that hold on a minute, there’s something seriously wrong with the society and the way that things are happening here and I need to do something about that, but I also need to work on myself.

So I spent a lot of time working on myself, like I told you before, I started reading a lot of books and stuff like that and changing my perception and the way that I handled things and building up my resilience as well. So I was just to recap, I was a software engineer for 10 years and then I started moving up. I skipped senior and went straight to a team lead, and then I was a team lead for about a year and three months, and I managed to secure a role as the engineering manager or mini head of software engineering in this department, and that’s where I’ve been for the last two and a half years roughly.

Shane Hastie: Cool. Can we dig into that resilience? What does resilience mean and why does it matter in an engineering lead or in an engineering role?

Resilience and the CAPSS framework [03:17]

Matthew Card: So, resilience matters across the board. It really does. It really sets people up to handle lots of different things because what we have to realize is that resilience isn’t just about staying up, it’s about being able to bounce back. It’s about having the mechanisms and the strategies to understand where you are and say, “Right, okay, I’m not going to be here forever. I know that this is just a down point and I’m going to use my tools, my mechanisms and my toolkit or whatever we want to call it to move back up to get back to where I was or somewhere similar to where I was”. Right?

Even within that, knowing that you can bounce back is a part of the resilience. It gives you that comfort. So I broke it down in my talk as well, but resilience can be broken down in many different ways, but the way that I really like to do it is you use something that I call CAPSS just so that you can remember it.

So, it is confidence, adaptability, purposefulness, and then social support. And if you think about those things, you can actually look at which ones you have the most of and which ones you’re lacking in, and then you can actually take some time to try to work out how to build up each one of those. They all interlink. So if you have a bit of purpose, if you say if you’ve got a goal, you’ve got purpose, you know what you’re doing, you actually become more confident because you’re like, “Right, I know what I’m going to do”. And there’s a saying that I use as well, passion, which is a part of purpose is the antidote to self-doubt. I always use that one. I really like that. I heard that on a podcast or something like that. So passion is the antidote to self-doubt. So what that’s saying is that if I know what I want to do, if I’m really passionate about something, I haven’t got time to be scared, I haven’t got time to second guess myself.

And then that feeds into confidence. So purposeness feeds into confidence, and then when you have confidence, you become more adaptable. You can deal with change. Change is coming, you can deal with it. So, a saying that I’ve literally said a million times now to my teams and anybody who has been around me in the last couple of months, last six months now. I’ve said there’s a saying, I can’t remember who said it, but the pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist expects the winds to change and the realist adjusts the sails. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to adjust my sails into whatever is coming my way.

A storm is coming, stuff is always going to be coming. So that’s how you can deal with it if you think about it like that. And to me that’s adaptability, that’s being flexible, that’s understanding that things are going to change, but you can’t do that or it’s harder to do if you don’t have confidence and if you don’t have a purpose or a passion or something like that to keep you on the straight and narrow.

I’ll get back to confidence because I really like something that I talk about with confidence, and I drill down into that a little bit more. But then you’ve got social support and then social support is that thing where from my background, the Caribbean background, I’m sure other demographics have the same thing, but family is a very strong part of who we are, our identity. And what happened is when I moved to Manchester for a period of time working, I moved away from my family, so it was just me by myself. So that’s when that was on a low I didn’t have that social support near me. They were on the phone, but it wasn’t near me. But what I managed to do, I managed to build up some of the other things and then I started to get social support because then I was like, right, I need some social support and this is how I bring it back to work where I went and got a mentor because I thought, oh, do I need a mentor?

I went and got a mentor and they really, really helped me. I was explaining to them my issues and what I was going through, and they were like, “Well, some of this isn’t okay, what can we do to help this and how can I help you as an individual?” And then we started to grow some networks, some communities out of that. And that’s where I started really diving into DE&I, diversity, equity and inclusion. And that’s when I started to gain that passion. And then that passion took me on further. And then I managed to fuel all of the other areas, all of the other components of resilience. So, if I go back to confidence, so there’s a saying, I picked it up from Mel Robbins, she’s a motivational speaker. I listened to loads of them. And what she said about confidence, and it’s true, I believe is confidence isn’t something you just have. It’s a skill.

Don’t get me wrong, some people can have it and some people do have it, but then there are some people that are just faking it. The don’t fake it till you make it type thing, but some people are really putting on a facade, but confidence isn’t something that you have. It’s a skill that you can learn and then you can grow and that’s what skill is. But then I go on to add to that and I say you can tell how confident you are by the time that it takes you to go from thought to action and you can become more confident if you think about things and you’re like, “Right, this is what I want to do. How am I going to do it?” You do your due diligence and then you ask your friends, your social support, you talk to your social support and stuff like that, and then you make a decision and then you go and do it. That shows how confident you really are in something. So that’s really how I view resilience.

Shane Hastie: So there’s a lot there and I love that CAPSS, confidence, adaptability, purpose and social support in the way you link all of those together. This is the Engineering Culture Podcast. As a leader, how do you, I won’t say create, engender, support a great culture in your teams?

Building great engineering culture as a leader [09:06]

Matthew Card: First and foremost, it’s about using the resilience. It’s about being strong or trying to be stronger in that it’s about showing some vulnerability and it’s about being curious and asking questions. I think you mentioned it maybe, but it’s about empowering others to help them make decisions as well. But also there’s a balance between being directive as well, but as a leader, it starts off with trying to teach some of this stuff to my team leads and folks who have potential, trying to show them there’s different ways to tackle things as well. So that gives them the adaptability, the flexible nature of being more flexible in their nature and then setting a vision saying, “Hey, this is where we need to get to. How can we get there?” And then just keep pointing in the right direction. It’s setting out a north star of what you really want and then putting things in place and getting the right people in to help you drive that culture.

Leadership has slow feedback loops [10:07]

Sometimes it takes longer than it should. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and you have to stop and you have to revisit it and come back to it. And that’s why I’m saying that as a leader of multiple people, multiple teams, you have to have that resilience or it’s not going to work because you don’t get that fast feedback. I said it in my talk, you won’t get fast feedback. It’s not like doing some code and then you write the test, or should I say, you write the test first, you do the code and then you run the test and it doesn’t pass. You got that fast feedback so you’re like, “Right, okay, cool, I’m going to get this going”. And then you manage to get it sorted, say in a day or two, you have to talk to a couple of people and get it done.

With leading people, I think I said this to you before we started the recording, people have their own lives, people have their journeys, people have things going on that you don’t even know about, and you’ve got to take that all into account and know that you heading in the right direction. I’m going back to that resilience thing. For me, that is so fundamental. So practical steps I would say is, one, you need to make sure you’ve got the right team and keep working on the people that you need to step up. So one of the things that, again, I said in my talk recently is that what I discovered I was doing is I was raising the bar and what one of my colleagues said is, “Well, you are also raising the ceiling as well. So it’s like we’re generally just trying to do this”. So what I generally try to do is I work with people who are aligned with what I’m doing, have an understanding of what I’m trying to do.

Raising the ceiling of expectations [11:43]

And this works for inclusivity and also engineering culture as well. So for example, I’m working with my team leads, my technical architects within the space to help raise that ceiling of where we need to get to as an engineering culture. Are we doing the right level of documentation? Are we thinking about our AWS costs and stuff like that? Are we always thinking about security? Have we got the right mechanisms to capture things? Are we doing post-incident reviews? Are we doing them correctly? Are we asking ourselves to right “whys”? And what I’m doing is I’m making sure that people understand how to go about doing those things with the help of those folks. And then what happens is if some people are not abiding by that or buying into that, then that comes to have a conversation with me. So I then need to find out why, try to have that empathy to find out why.

And then if it still doesn’t change, then the conversation will change and that’s when it comes a bit more directive. Do you see? And that’s how we do things or that’s how I try to work. Also within that, I’m trying to get my team needs to grow and develop and think for themselves as well. I gave an example in the talk where I can’t remember what it was, but I needed to walk back a decision that my team lead made. So what I did, I said, “Hey, do you mind if I walked back this decision? And I gave them the reasons why because there’s no point in saying I’m going to walk back your decision and then not give them an explanation. So I gave them the explanation and they were like, “Oh yes, cool, I get that. I understand”. But then they said, “Okay, but next time what I’m going to do, I’m just going to wait for you to make a decision”.

I was like, “No, no, no, no, let’s not do that. Let’s keep working on our alignment so that you know what I’m looking for and then you can make a decision around that”. And then that seems to have worked really well with another one of my team leads, but I need to obviously dig in a little bit deeper and work with this person. So I get challenged by one of my team leads, not really harshly, but they’ll give their point of view, I’ll give my point of view and I go, “Actually, no, you are right. Yes, let’s go with that idea. Let’s see how it pans out”. And then also giving them some trust and never forget where one time some team leads came to me and said, “They want you to pitch an idea”. And it was about changing the structure of what we were doing within the team topology.

I would say just slightly, it’s like they had a script ready and I was like, “Don’t worry”. I like to stop them. “Let me stop you there. Sounds like a good idea. Let’s go with it. I trust you. Let’s go, let’s try it out”. And we still have that in play today. So, it is those types of things. It’s challenging bad behavior because I’ve got a saying on culture is defined by the worst behavior that is tolerated and then how we make decisions shapes culture. And I use those two to define how I go about doing things.

So, making the decisions together, trusting my folks to come in to make a decision on how the team is structured. Yes, that’s great. We can move forward with that way and hopefully that will work. And the interesting thing, it’s really working with one person and I have to go back and tweak it with another person, but we are moving forward and then you’ve got challenging bad behaviour and doing the things before it becomes a different type of conversation as well. That’s how I like to challenge it. I like to challenge it upfront, if that makes sense.

Shane Hastie: Challenging bad behavior. And I love the idea of challenge it before it becomes that other type of conversation. How do you recognize that? What are the early signs that you’re looking for?

Recognizing and challenging bad behaviour early [15:24]

Matthew Card: Oh, that’s a really good question. The early signs. I guess it might sound a bit weird, but like in code, there’s smells, there’s the smells in code. I look for the smells, not in people, but in the people culture. Do you know what I mean? I look for those smells, I’m like, that’s a bit of a smell there. And just like the early signs and it’s those small moments, it’s those small moments that can pass you by and you won’t realize it. But that example I gave you where I walked back that decision, if I then said, “Yes, yes, no, just wait for me and make a decision and then we make that decision together when you wait for me”. That’s a smell. So, I tried to reverse it to go the other way. I don’t know if it’s fully worked yet, but that’s what I’m talking about. It’s those early signs is the behaviour.

So you’ve got to outline the behaviours that you think are right and what you want. And that’s where reading those books came into play because you can’t always just read a book and this, hey, apply it straight away. And I was talking to one of my peers about this, it’s like you read a selection of books, a selection of things, you try things out and you build up your own kind of methodology on how you are going to go about doing things. But as I think you said it before, the book gives you a language to convey what’s in the back of your mind. But it also gives you things to think about and to spot as well. I can’t remember who said it. I’ve got lots of quotes in my head now. For some reason it’s like all I’ve learned is from books or something like that.

And the other thing that I say as well is, I can’t remember who said this again, but I learned from everybody even if it’s not what to do. So, I’m looking at examples from the books, from what I’ve seen, from how I’ve been led before and other stuff. And I’ve seen those little, I don’t know if this is the right word, those inflection points or those small little points where things could go this way or that way. I love those films. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those types of films where I think one of them was sliding doors. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that where just by missing the tube, your whole life could be different. And I love those kinds of things. So that’s what I’m always looking for. So, if you don’t do something upfront, things could escalate and go in another way.

You’re not going to capture them all. But one thing from Simon Sinek, I’m a massive Simon Sinek fan, and he asked the question about when do you know that you’ve got healthy teeth? Like you brush your teeth every single day, when do you know that you’ve got healthy teeth? You never know. But you have to keep brushing your teeth every single day to keep making sure that you’ve got good dental hygiene and stuff like that. So, you’re never going to know which one is going to be the one. It’s continually doing it. And I think that goes back to the slow feedback because you don’t get fast feedback on brushing your teeth. You get really slow feedback over the years of continuing to brush your teeth. I don’t know how I got to brushing your teeth.

Shane Hastie: And I’m sure that there’s a number of our audience who are just going, “Hmm, yes. Hmm”. Let’s dig into, if we can, DE&I. You made the point of long-term systemic inequalities that still exist today. How are we tackling them and how do we get better?

Tackling systemic inequalities in DE&I [18:43]

Matthew Card: That’s a really good question. And again, it’s in part of my talk where I said, even though I said I’m raising the bar, what I actually mean is I’m changing the bar. So, it’s not about raising, it’s about opening up the industry, opening up the field, opening up so that more different types of people can come in and be really super successful. And that requires, again, resilience. It requires being able to step into some conversations that some folks who are typically, this is the most diplomatic way I can say it, where some folks typically occupy certain positions in the industry requiring them to have a look at themselves, build up their resilience so that they can step into some conversations that they’re not so accustomed to and sometimes aware of, right? So, one of the things I said is it would be very boring if every athlete who attended the Olympics did the high jump.

So, we need some variety. There’s so much documentation about how diverse teams work better and stuff like that, but it’s how do we do it? So, what we have to think about is encouraging early careers talent and then learning how to go about making them successful or making them feel like they can be successful. Because we’ve got to remember that not everybody is going to be successful, but it’s creating that environment, that space where anybody can turn up and be successful because they can get what they need based on who they are. It’s very, very difficult.

And then you’ve got a challenge where some people might think, oh, but we are lowering the bar. No, you’re not lowering the bar, you’re changing it because what you might be used to that helps you learn. For example, we all learn by association. So, if you and your colleagues who all look similar, have a shared experience and then you can say, I don’t know, this coding concept reminds me of a time back when we used to play in school and we did this.

I probably wouldn’t understand that because I don’t come from your background. So, it’s not that I’m less intelligent, I just don’t have that reference point, that anchor point. And what we have to do then is think about how are we explaining things? Should we try to explain things in different ways? Because what you will end up doing and what has happened is that you end up creating echo chambers and echo bubbles or whatever you want to call them. So that’s one way. So one simple way you can do that is by encouraging early careers talent to come in because that’s going to encourage you to think of ways of how to explain things.

And then once you start doing that, then if you then focus on getting diverse talent as well because I mean don’t get me wrong, early careers could have diverse talent in it. One of the typical things that people say is, “Hey, we don’t know where to go to get folks”. Okay, we will start off by getting the early career folks in, changing your strategies on how you upskill people, finding out how successful they are, and then start going out and getting diverse talent as well because I’m sure there’s going to be some kind of overlap. Does that make sense?

Shane Hastie: Yep. So there’s some useful concrete advice there. If I am a manager sitting in an environment that feels like it is an echo chamber, well, how do I shift that?

It takes courage to shift behaviours [22:13]

Matthew Card: How do you shift that? So what I would suggest is you can go right down to that resilience thing and it’s that social support. Who is your social support? Who is your network? Go out, and what I’ve said before is there are different demographics, there are different groups, and this is where it takes resilience and courage, right? Because courage is definitely one of the fundamental things of being a leader. You have to be courageous is to find out, have a look, do a self-assessment, look at all the demographics that are there. There’s information out there about different demographics if you don’t know, and then ask yourself, how many of these demographics do I associate with or do I know? And then you can just go out and start having conversations with people. But then some people say, “Well, oh, that’s going to be really awkward”.

How do I walk up to somebody and say, “Hey, I don’t know about you, I want to learn about you”? Well, there’s other ways you can do it. You can read books, you can read blog posts, articles because there are people now communicating and telling people their stories and this is the problem that we have. And one of the things that is very, very key, and I heard someone say it in another way yesterday, is that stories humanize people. So as soon as you start understanding people’s stories, things become a lot easier for you to take on board. So that’s what I would say, go out and look. We are all different demographics are on LinkedIn, they’re on social media. You can follow somebody and don’t even have to interact with them. What I would say then is pick up a sense from people from different perspectives.

Say like my demographic, we’re not a monolith. I’ve got completely different folks within that demographic. And that will go for all different types of demographics. And what will happen is you will then start to build a catalog or understanding that you can then go and approach and have a conversation because there is some understanding. So that person who either comes into your team or you are interacting with doesn’t have to then take the burden of teaching you everything. That’s a part of the problem is that folks will have to take on the burden of teaching standing up for themselves and others and stuff like that. And that becomes too much and can become overwhelming.

Shane Hastie: Some really solid concrete advice. We’ve covered quite a lot of ground. Thank you very much. If people do want to continue the conversation, where would they find you?

Matthew Card: You can find me on LinkedIn. I want to start a coaching course as well, or some type of network and community. So you just have to watch this space. But I guess the best place to find me is on LinkedIn at the moment.

Shane Hastie: Well, we’ll make sure that that’s included in the show notes. Matthew, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Matthew Card: It’s amazing. I hope that gives some people some insight. It inspires some people to go and do a little bit of research and stuff like that and just be courageous because that is definitely one of the points of building culture. You have to be courageous. You have to kind of shout into a vacuum and keep shouting and hope that something comes back and eventually, something will.

Shane Hastie: Thank you so much.

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