In this episode of the Being Human is Good For Business Podcast we meet Chief Technology Officer Mike Potter of the business intelligence technology company, Qlik. More than 50,000 companies, worldwide, depend on Qlik technology for crucial business insights. The company has more than 2,000 employees and operations in 30 countries.
“The key to being a successful leader is knowing and understanding your own strengths and limitations,” explains Mike. “Then you must surround yourself with people who not only compensate for those limitations, but challenge you to be better and then work together with them in a way that is inspiring for everyone.”
Qlik CTO Mike Potter
Mike shares some of the leadership lessons he’s learned throughout his career as a technical leader in large IT companies, especially the importance of learning to fail. He says, “We like to make new mistakes every day. We take risks and we treat failures as data. This means creating a culture that supports failure because if you make people afraid to take risks, you can't lead, you can't be the best in the industry, you can't do things that others aren't.”
Mike agrees that leading a multinational, global team brings its own challenges when it comes to developing a strong work culture. “We have a diverse group, and that brings its own set of dynamics. It's quite interesting seeing how the different countries approach challenges, problems, conflicts and such. We meet each other in a central approach culturally, while at the same time, honouring our local countries, where we come from and who we are.”
One thing that supports this central meeting is the team’s use of the Enneagram framework. It allows leaders to see their own automatic patterns of thinking and behaving and helps them become their best as a leader.
“My leadership team and I all learned how to use the Enneagram. It was an interesting exercise to put a bunch of engineers in front of a model like this, because the first thing they do is reverse engineer it!” explains Mike.
Trilogy Effect Managing Partner Heather Marasse agrees: “It's always interesting to bring the Enneagram to a highly technical team. They're rigorous both in their approach and in their thinking. It’s reaffirming that everyone is interested in learning more about themselves and about each other. Mike’s team was completely engaged and continue to use the Enneagram as a practical tool to support their ongoing leadership development.”
Listen to the full interview to gain practical leadership tips and insights. Learn:
How teams must be allowed to fail if they are going to become their best, most creative selves and do their very best work.
How supporting your team in developing self awareness and a greater understanding of each other will fuel creativity and high-performance.
Why we sometimes need to show our own vulnerabilities to become the best, most inspiring leaders and to build strong teams.
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MACHINE GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. It may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.
Being Human is Good For Business Podcast Featuring Mike Potter
Sherrilynne: Hello. I'm Sherrilynne Starkie and welcome to Being Human is Good for Business, it's the podcast for business leaders who want to build high performance teams. Today I'm joined by Trilogy Effect’s Managing Partner, Heather Marasse, hi Heather!
Heather Marasse: Hi!
Sherrilynne: So we launched this podcast to help people, who manage people, discover who they are as a leader, and as a human being, and how they can unleash the full potential of their organizations.
It's something that Heather and the team at Trilogy Effect have a lot of experience in. Among their clients are many household names, such as Johnson and Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Proctor, and Gamble, and many other Fortune 500 companies. She's also helped a lot of technology executives build their leadership capacity and build high performance teams.
That's exactly the kind of work she and her team have been involved in with today's guest, Mike Potter, who's the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at Qlik, a business intelligence technology company. Now I've done a little research and I've learned that more than 50,000 companies, worldwide, depend on Qlik technology for crucial business insights. The company has more than 2000 employees and operations in 30 countries. Now you don't get to be the top technical person at such a company without learning a few things along the way about leaders and leadership. So we are super excited about what our listeners are going to learn today from you, Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Potter: Hi, happy to be here.
Sherrilynne: So, let's start by telling us a little bit about your career background, Mike.
Mike Potter: Well, it goes back a ways, this gray hair was not earned easily. I started my career, basically, as a software developer focused on doing language builds for a company I worked for called Cognos.
So, for those who know the various types of roles, within a Research and Development (R&D) organization, being a member of the ‘build engineering team’ was a great way for me to start my career. It was a very junior position and I worked my way up from there.
Sherrilynne: Tell us a little bit more about Qlik and your current position?
Mike Potter: I've been at Qlik since 2014. I joined as the head of R&D. My whole career has been in the area of business intelligence. As I said earlier, I played various roles in Cognos, and then Cognos got acquired by IBM around 2008 and I joined IBM with Cognos. During my tenure at IBM, I had various roles including being an IBM Distinguished Engineer.
At Qlik my role was really about delivering and transforming the R&D organization, to go from building an on-premise software single product, to building multiple product lines across multiple geographies, both on the premise and in the Cloud. The team has more than quadrupled its size and my time with the company, and I also moved into the role of CTO about three and a half years ago.
Sherrilynne: And what do you love about being a CTO?
Mike Potter: That's a great question. I think the biggest thing is what I've learned through leadership, in general, it’s just, the skills that you have as an individual to get you to a certain point in your career. Then you really have to go through a kind of a metamorphosis to being able to understand how to make everyone around you successful and use that to actually amplify what you're good at. So, in the role that I’m in, I have the pleasure of working with some extremely smart people, and I just get honoured by them every day. So, if I can serve a role in inspiring them to do great things, then I think I consider myself successful.
Sherrilynne: What do you think makes a great leader?
Mike Potter: Well, there's a lot of things that go into that. I think, personally, it's really about understanding your strengths and limitations and being able to surround yourself with people who, not only compensate for those limitations, but challenge you, on a daily basis, to be better, yourself. Then it’s just finding a way to work with them in a way that is inspiring for everyone, and I use the word inspire a lot because there’s a huge difference between managing a team and leading a team.
The thing I get the most gratification from is just watching the ‘knock on’ effect of getting a team excited around getting something done. So, for me, leading technology is always been my strength. I have a real passion for it and I enjoy seeing how trends translate into reality and I often like to challenge the norm.
So, teams that do well, in an organization like that, are teams who like to innovate, teams who like to take risks, and teams who treat failure as data, as opposed to a catastrophe, and more importantly, like to make new mistakes every day.
Sherrilynne: What do you think about that, Heather?
Heather Marasse: Yeah, I love it, I love it, and I was just thinking, I don't know many people who would say, ‘I like to make new mistakes every day’ and what a wonderful thing it would be if that were more the case for us, that we felt safe enough for that.
Mike Potter: Well it definitely requires creating a climate and a culture that supports it. I mean it’s very easy to get locked into delivery deadlines and the pressure of the realities of what a business needs. But at the same time, you can over-rotate on that and if you make people afraid to take risks, you can't lead, you can't be the best in the industry, you can't do things that others aren't and, with that, comes failure.
Some of my greatest successes have come off the backs of failed events. You know, I've always been very inspired by WD-40, it stands for ‘Water Displacement-40th Attempt’, I mean, that to me, is the perfect summary of how innovation works. So, when people ask me when, even when they ask me about my background, I often say that I describe my careers of series of glorious failures and that's helped me get to where I am now.
Sherrilynne: Can you give us an example of a failure that's turned into something awesome for you?
Mike Potter: Well, as you know, some of my greatest inventions in my time, building product, it’s really been learning events, or based on learning events from things that didn’t work. Everyone talks about failing fast, but I also believe in this idea of failing productively. Being able to take a risk on something that you know there's a margin of error for failure but also, even in a failure, figure out what you're going to get from it.
So plan for the success, but also plan for the failure, and then use that to, to build on top of that. For me, that approach has actually turned out quite well on a few cases where I didn't get quite right the first time but, you know, in the spirit of WD-40 I got it right and when I did it worked out quite well.
Sherrilynne: When you hear someone's job title is Chief Technical Officer you don't think that it's something very creative, but it sounds to me like you're in a very creative job.
Mike Potter: Well then yes, there are lots of different breeds of people in the types of jobs I have and I think creativity is just what some bring to the job. So, nobody really owns this idea of being an innovator, or an inventor, or a creator, it's either you have that skill or you don't. So, regardless of the roles people have in the organization, personally, I try to find folks who are the most creative and give them the opportunity to be creative regardless of what their roles are.
Sherrilynne: That's a good perspective, and you and Heather, have there been working together for how long now?
Mike Potter: Well, I obviously if I say that then that dates us both.
Heather Marasse: That’s okay.
Mike Potter: I’ll just say that I’ve had the pleasure of learning from Heather for many years. Frankly, I would credit her and the leadership training I've received to help influence how I approach things today. So it’s been, for me, a very, very good Investment. I’ve been very fortunate to work for employers who saw the importance of investing in leadership and leadership development, and it definitely helped me.
Sherrilynne: I know that one of the tools that Heather and her team work with is Enneagram, did you have any exposure to that?
Mike Potter: As a matter of fact, myself, and my leadership team both went through the Enneagram and it's quite an interesting exercise because when you put a bunch of engineers in front of a model like this, the first thing they do is reverse engineer it.
So they try to figure out how it works, how, to game it, and how to figure it out. I think the fun part about the Enneagram is that it's not a label, it's a tool, and so you need to use it in that context. I think that what it serves to do is it helps point things out that might not be obvious to you, the blind spots, things you take for granted, and things that others may take for granted of you. I think it has more perspective.
Sherrilynne: Heather, can you give us some reflections on the Enneagram work that you've done with Mike and his team?
Heather Marasse: We introduced it a while ago, actually, and it's always fun and interesting, to me, to bring the Enneagram to a highly technical team. Like Mike said, people who are oriented towards analysis and precision and things have to hold together. They're rigorous in their approach on things and thinking, in particular.
What was wonderful and, ultimately, reaffirming is at the end of the day we're dealing with human beings and all human beings are interested in learning more about themselves and each other. Mike’s team, very much, was completely engaged in that and we've continued to use the information as a way to support people's self-reflection and their own development and find ways to… it's very practical things.
Like if I'm approaching a situation that I think might have some conflict, ‘What's my best way to, first of all, keep myself in a place where I'm centered and open and effective. What are the ways that I might be able to navigate the likely resistance than I might meet here and appreciate why it's there and find a way through it constructively.’
So, yeah, it's been well received and like Mike said it was rigorously tested intellectually for sure, including by Mike, but, ultimately, it's been really helpful. .
Mike Potter: One thing I would add if I may is I think a device like this really benefits from a dynamic where there's lots of trusts and willingness to be open. I think that it just allows everybody to engage better, and not see it as a threatening thing, and it requires a level of leadership maturity as well.
Heather Marasse: Yes, that’s very true.
Sherrilynne: Are you working differently now that you have this knowledge as a team?
Mike Potter: I think the short answer is that a number of folks on my leadership team are actually engaged with leadership development in a number of different ways. Heather is coaching some of the folks on my team and we're trying to continue on it and maintain that momentum of what we've been doing.
I think that it is a practice, it's not a perfection, and so you’ve got to do it every day, and you got to catch yourself when you're not doing it and you’ve got to be open up to catch your colleagues, when they're slipping. It is definitely something that you have to push yourself into in the beginning, because sometimes these muscles aren't obvious. But, I’d like to say that we're getting better, every day.
Sherrilynne: Good, and now from your company's profile, I'm assuming that your leadership team is fairly multicultural.
Mike Potter: We have a very, very dynamic and diverse group, culturally, and that brings its own set of interesting dynamics. It's quite interesting seeing how the different countries approach, challenges, problems, conflicts and things like that.
We're sort of reaching each other into more of a central approach, culturally, while obviously honouring our local countries, where we come from and who we are.
Sherrilynne: That's inspiring, really.
Mike Potter: It's also a practice because, I‘ve got to say that, if one is at one end of the extreme, and the others are at the other end of the extreme, I'm not going to mention which ones, but if you do any research, you can see, I have a very interesting cultural challenge inside my team, given the locations.
Sherrilynne: And over the last, what is it now, 18 months we've been in a pandemic. Has the pandemic situation brought any new leadership challenges?
Mike Potter: I have to say I've been very fortunate because our team discipline has been multi- location anyways, and the way we've led them is to collaborate across locations. So, over my career, I’ve been in situations where I’ve had more effective leadership and communication across oceans than I've had across floors. It has nothing to do with where you sit, it has more to do with who you are, and how you work with other people. So, a big part of what we do is we try to really force that collaboration and that invariably takes you virtual. I have a simple philosophy, ‘you recharge your relationship batteries in person and you deplete them virtually.’ So, what you do is, you recognize the fact that there is a virtual element to the job, no matter what you do, and you just keep opportunities for people to get face-to-face.
The pandemic has made that harder, the face-to-face part, but because we've got such good virtual habits and behaviours, it really hasn't affected us that much from a productivity standpoint, a team development standpoint, and even culturally. We've been able to still do our jobs and still interact both, professionally, socially and otherwise.
Sherrilynne: That's good news.
Heather Marasse: I love he way you describe the relationship you recharge in person and you deplete it, what virtually, I love it.
Sherrilynne: I thought it was incredibly apt, I hadn't heard it articulated quite that way, but I've certainly felt it.
Mike Potter: I mean nothing beats two people at a whiteboard, but at the same time, if you're trusting and you have a relationship with that person, you can get pretty far Virtually. The only thing that works against you ultimately is time.
Heather Marasse: It's so true. So the pandemic has.
Sherrilynne: So the pandemic has put in a lot of time into that equation.
Mike Potter: It has.
Heather Marasse: So you must find that people are starting to get a bit hungry to reconnect in person. Is that what you're noticing?
Mike Potter: I would say that leading an engineering team, I have a fair share of introverts in my team who are quite happy working from home, doing their part. So I think other types of functions would probably feel it more, but we've been able to adjust
Sherrilynne: Heather, what do you love about working with technology teams, technology companies?
Heather Marasse: Mike actually touched on it. What I really like and, actually, what I deeply respect is the kind of innovation required, especially in the field that Mike's in, and his company, in software development. It takes a lot to continuously innovate and invent what doesn't exist yet, on a timeline, and that’s what they do over and over again.
That takes a lot of courage. I know Mike and his team, for sure, over the years consistently have to commit to deliverables that they don't quite know how to build over and over and over again and sometimes they fail. So, all of that stuff you talked about, having a culture that, where there's permission to fail and all cultures, even when you have permission to fail, no human being enjoys it. Except maybe Mike?
Mike Potter: I'm not sure enjoy is the right word, but I see the value in it.
Heather Marasse: Yeah. There you go, to put yourself out there over and over and over again, I just have nothing but respect for that. I think that’s probably the biggest thing I enjoy about working with the people in technology and, actually, people in an R&D function in general. Such as drug development and even product development, manufacturing, development, anything that requires invention and innovation. That takes guts and I have a lot of admiration for that.
Sherrilynne: And resilience too. It sounds like.
Mike Potter: Yeah, I think that comes with the job.
Heather Marasse: Yeah.
Sherrilynne: Mike, I understand this. Isn't your first podcast appearance and that you recently participated on an internal podcast at Qlik. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Mike Potter: Well, it was a bit of a fireside chat, it was really geared around just the promotion of mental health. The timing of it was, in conjunction with the pandemic, and one thing we were very cognizant of is that different people are having different journeys and going through different experiences, dealing with the change in their lives. Whether it be working remotely from home, or they added pressure of trying to work and having kids and getting them through school or being constrained to a small living space. There's all kinds of different manifestations of those challenges and obviously different countries at different stages and going through waves and things.
So, we felt it was important to just sort of connect with them and let them know that we are all going through it. The chat was really focused on me kind of providing some perspective of my own in terms of my own personal experience, and I think it went over pretty well.
Sherrilynne: What did you learn about yourself, as a leader, from being so honest?
Mike Potter: I think I'm at a point now where I'm really not afraid of opening up and sharing who I am, and what I'm not and my limitations, I think, if anything, one of my skills is that I know where my limits are.
I have kind of an early warning system, so I know when I'm under a certain amount of stress, or I'm feeling Isolated or whatever, too much into my head, whatever it is. That early warning system is a good opportunity for me to catch myself and to make a correction.
I've really come to appreciate the value of physical fitness and exercising. It is extremely therapeutic, when you're sitting at a desk all day long and you get out and just do something like, you can go for a walk. In my case, I like to exercise as much as I can, and I think that the benefit of that is just to just to help. It helps you physically, it helps you emotionally, and it helps you mentally. Then last, but not least, is just surrounding yourselves with colleagues and mentors, regardless of who they are.
I have colleagues and peers who I used to work for in other companies, and people who are in my organization, who I consider mentors. They’re people who just helped me recalibrate myself whenever I feel like I'm wobbly and all of that combined is, what I use to keep myself centered. I obviously couple that with, I’m quite disciplined about my day, I find that the, the rigor of scheduling and discipline helps out a lot as well, because it just it takes the mind wandering and keeps it in check as well.
Sherrilynne: Heather, are you seeing, with some of the other leaders that you're coaching, kind of typical strategies and, and a typical, way of communicating with their teams about coping during, I don't want to say tough times, but let's say different times or unusual times.
Heather Marasse: I think when I reflect on people in roles, like Mike's, certainly at the ‘C’ level, almost all of our clients have some sort of physical practice they need, it's a really important way of just, first of all, making a break with the constant on, having to be ‘on’ all the time.
You're always performing, you're always producing and you're always moving to the next thing. So, taking a break to actually get back into your body, actually it helps you… well, it helps your nervous system quite honestly. Pretty much all of our clients at that level have some sort of practice, and are pretty disciplined about it, and feel it when they haven't got enough room in their day. I would say the pandemic helped people, to some degree, because they weren't on airplanes as much. People were able to be a little bit more predictable in their routines, so they were able to use that to their advantage.
Mike Potter: Yeah, I spent the first part of my time here at Qlik working in Sweden and I’ve really come to appreciate their approach. They're very disciplined about when they work and when they don't work. I find in North America we're really prone to leakage. The workday leaks into the evening, and the weekends and that can actually be quite detrimental to your overall mental state. Because your office is in the same building as where you, your family is, and your life is, and it's hard to know where your day ends and your life begins. So having that kind of discipline is extremely important as well.
Sherrilynne: Mike, what do you appreciate most about Trilogy Effect’s approach to high performance teamwork and coaching?
Mike Potter: The coaches bring so much to the table in terms of their experience and what they personally bring to it. I think the ability to tune the approach, to reading the room, and understanding the dynamic of the group and understanding what they need, I think, is also a very important element of it. Obviously having a foundation of education and knowledge to help provide that basis for having a conversation, but being prepared to go where it needs to go to meet the needs of the group and the organization, I think is a critical element as well.
Sherrilynne: Heather, what have you learned the most about working with Mike and his team at Qlik?
Heather Marasse: Again, the importance of being willing to get creative. All the things we said earlier about the innovation, working with Mike and his team, required us to innovate on the fly as well, to be willing to fail and regroup, to take input, adjust, just stay with what's needed and wanted. Being willing to abandon any agenda that we might not even realize we have, because it’s about a co-creative relationship with our clients, our work only works that way.
Sherrilynne: I love the concept. Of the coach and the client working together to co-create an environment for leadership development and, of course, knowing that each environment is unique, and is as different as the people working in them. So thank you, Heather, for sharing your experiences as a coach. Thanks also to Mike Potter, Qlik’s CTO joining Heather and me on today's podcast, and so generously sharing your own knowledge and experience with out audience.
In this episode of the Being Human is Good for Business podcast, we got a lot of practical insight for leaders, or for anyone really who manages other people.
We learned that we need to allow our teams to be able to fail if we really want them to be their best, most creative selves to do their very best work.
Mike shared with us some examples of how his team uses the Enneagram to understand themselves and each other better, which also fuels creativity and high-performance.
He also told us about how he shares, with his team, stories of his own personal challenges of pandemic life and how this openness and honesty and has pulled his global team together, despite the distances that separate them.
Now, dear listener, I have a question for you. Which of Mike's lessons will you put into play with your team? Will you encourage your teams to experiment, even though they risk failure? Will you learn more about the Enneagram and how it might help your team? Will you become more open about your own trials and tribulations?
The team at Trilogy Effect would love to know what you took away from this episode and how it will change the way you work. You can reach us by visiting our website@trilogyeffect.com or by pinging us via social media.
We'll include links to our socials in the show notes. We'll also include links to other helpful information and resources to help you be your best, as a leader, including a link to our new free Leadership Guide Book. Please make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing to this podcast. Please leave a rating or review and recommend us to friends and family or anyone who wants to learn how to become a better, stronger, more effective leader.
I'm your host, Sherrilynne Starkie. And this is the Being Human is Good for Business podcast.