Welcome to the Corvus Effect, where we take you behind the scenes to explore integrated self leadership and help ambitious family men build lasting legacies for themselves, their tribe, and their community. I'm Scott Raven, and together we'll discover how successful leaders master the delicate balance of career advancement, personal health, financial growth, and leadership.

And meaningful relationships. Get ready to soar.

And hello, everybody. Thank you once again for joining us here on the Corpus Effect. Today, we are joined by Ken Corey, a seasoned engineering leader. Who's redefining both workplace and family dynamics from leading high performance, technical teams to championing a more present role in parenting can demonstrate how traditional roles are evolving in both professional.

And personal spheres. He and his wife, Deb have done a lot of work with bad bosses, ruin lives, and it's part of their holistic commitment along with their family to redefining roles across all of life. So Ken, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. No worries. No worries at all. And, you know, this is gonna be a fantastic little chat.

And I guess where I will start is that, as I mentioned at the top, you are certainly a expert when it comes to things that are technical, but really, What you found is your evolution towards a people first approach, and I'd love for you to go in a little bit and describe that journey for us. Basically, I used to be the guy who would sit in the dark room with a very bright monitor, tapping on my keyboard happily.

For hours, for days, for weeks, maybe. Never wanted to manage people because people were squishy. You never knew what they were going to do. It was just really hard to predict and all that. I just thought I'd be an engineer working in the dark room forever. About 2014, 2015, I started working at a place and I had some ideas.

We needed to improve some things and one thing and another. Uh, I started trying to do them myself and I realized it was bigger than me. Yes, I needed to bring the people on my team with me. Yes. Fortunately for me, the ideas that I had, uh, were really conducive to that. I was working at Santander at the time.

Okay. And the team really needed to be brought together. We really needed to work as a team. Yes. Developing mobile software. And that's a big deal. You can't just do that. One on only one person basis to really be successful at the level we needed right the whole time I was coming along my wife has been convincing or trying to convince me.

You should be a manager. You should be a leader You should be

Usually the wife is extremely wise so I can see that And she was right. I started to get some success with it started to See what it's like being a manager. It's not completely dissimilar to being a father. I started to realize that I got more joy from watching my people have success. Right. Than when I was having success.

I would do something right myself. I'd be able to, yeah, I programmed it. That's nice. It works. Right. But that got boring. But when I could train my people up and watch them succeed and watch them grow, I started to get huge amounts of satisfaction. I just as a parent, the first time you figure out how to go down a slide at a playground.

Okay, big deal. I did it. It's fun. It's not that big of a deal. Right. First time your son goes down that same slide in the playground. Wow. Absolutely. Wow. Right. It's exactly the same in the office. So from there on, it just became a matter of how much can I learn? How big can my team get? Later on, I was running the Android version of the mobile app Santander here in the UK.

I had 10 people on my team, but there was about 20 people dispersed across Santander doing various things on Android. That was really gratifying, but they weren't directly on my team and that sort of thing, I was still very hands on, which took away from the time I could be a manager. When I went over the curve, I became an engineering manager and then a senior engineering manager.

I had up to 43 people in my hierarchy at any one time. I really got to see the effects of. Not just improving the lives of the people on my team, but improving their managers and watching them improve the lives of the people on my team. And I'm sure along the way that there are things that you evolved, adapted, and grew when it came to soft skills, which I know is a big focus for you in terms of influencing without authority as it comes to being able to Meet people at their point of motivation, so they're working harder for you because they not only want to succeed themselves, but they want you to succeed as their leader.

Would that be fair? Absolutely. First off, can we agree not to call them soft skills? Yes. It has a certain connotation, it has a certain implication about how they're fluffy and, and, and kind of useless and, and I, I don't agree with all that. You know what? Hey, hey, this is, this is your party. You can read behind the term how you like, sir.

I'll put it that way. Let's call them interpersonal skills. I love it. Interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills. We're going, we're going interpersonal skills from here on in. Fantastic. Thank you so much. They are critical. They are foundational and The thing that I struggled the most was to try to communicate the importance of those to the people on my team, right?

Um, the second part of the answer to your question was I realized that I needed to become a servant leader. I really needed to enable them, not to command them, but to enable them. And as soon as I could do that, as soon as people started to believe that I would stand up and say, yeah, Bob figured that out.

Bob did a good job on that one. Let's hear it for Bob. Right. But if bad stuff came down the hill, oh no, no, no, no, no. I'm the leader. It's my fault. My mistake. We'll get that sorted. Right. As soon as my people started to see that and to believe that, they could relax, they could let their hair down, they could have conversations with me, we could be open and honest and we could be far more productive.

That was, for me, the biggest secret of all, is to say, all credit gets passed on to my people, all blame stops with me. It seems so simple and we've heard it so many times, but as you and your wife, Deb, have really driven it home with bad bosses, ruined lives, the unintentionally bad bosses who lack these interpersonal skills.

That they can cause a lot of damage to a lot of folk, and I'd love for you to go deeper in terms of now how this has been y'all's purpose and passion to rectify something that we all know goes on in the workplace, but we really don't put a lot of effort in terms of stopping it or curtailing it. It's a tough one.

Really? The first part of your comment there, a manager can have up to 70 percent variance on an employee's performance. One way to say that is a bad manager can ruin and take away 70 percent of a team's performance. That's huge. A good manager can improve a team's performance by 70%. A huge gain. Just it's massive.

A boss has the same impact on an employee's life as the employee's spouse. More than the employee's doctor, more than the employee's therapist, more than anybody else in the employee's life. A boss is, has the same impact as their spouse. I mean, that's stunning. Yes. Our spouse. We do not pick a boss. Mm hmm.

Not directly anyway, right? No, it's very hard. I mean, there are people who follow bosses in their career for exactly that reason, but it's never guaranteed. That relationship is never a guaranteed one. Absolutely. So bosses have a huge impact on the teams and the people within the team. Right. Okay. Now, remind me, the second part of your question, second part of the question is when we talk about these unintentional bad bosses who through their lack of interpersonal skills can influence and employees performance by up to 70%.

Right. Why are we not putting more focus on stopping curtailing educating against the bad behaviors that are so common in the workplace? Yeah. This is a real problem about the way we create managers. The very first lesson is as you rise through the ranks, you become a junior and then you're a mid level and then you're a senior and people start going, Oh, he's really good at that.

We're going to promote him to be a manager. We must know what he's doing. You can explain that to the people or she can explain that to her people. And we're going to make him a manager. But almost nobody will tell you is that you have now changed careers. Although you are adjacent to the people that you used to do the same job as, you are now somebody else.

You are now a different person. Right. It requires a different set of skills and nobody tells you this. Right. So that's the first mistake. Yep. The second mistake is that very few people who make that first step in management, uh, get the training, the real training, get training that's appropriate for what they're doing and the people that they're supporting.

Agreed. So that's the second thing. The third thing. When we're coming up, it's very easy as an employee to look at your boss and go, Oh, no, good boss. I'm going to put him into this box over here called bad boss. Right. Right. Right. And we don't really think about the behaviors much. We just think, okay, that person is bad.

I'm going to put him over here in this box. I'm never going to do that. Right. Are you, is that really the case? What happens, I think, is that we internalize those behaviors. If that's the only kind of behavior we have seen of a bot. Right. In a stressful situation, in a tough situation, in a high pressure situation.

Right. When we ourselves are a bot, and we find ourselves in one of those situations, We don't have time to think, and what's the right approach, and what should I do, and we're just, we only have time to react. Yes. And the only behavior that we have internalized up to that point is the bad behavior. Yes. So.

That's how we get where we are. That's, I think, how it continues. Let me, let me continue that thought process. There's the old adage that the number one failure of leadership is lack of self awareness. So, to your point, in terms of being in a completely reactive mode, focusing on the environments that you've come through and the bad trainings that you've had, Picked up that I've got to imagine that the blind spots that leaders who need help, but just aren't receiving it, that they've got to be massive, that they've got to be something which has got to be addressed.

Absolutely. I started that last bit by talking about the boxes, the good box and the bad box. I think that we as humans, I feel that we as humans like to categorize. We like to say, Oh, that person is an expert. This person is a beginner. This person over here is somebody I can teach. Labels give us comfort.

Absolutely. They do. Okay. My t shirt here. So you are not a label. So you are not a label. A label is not an excuse. Do it anyway. Now this all came about because I heard too many people going, well, I'm an introvert. Well, I'm an extrovert, you know, I'm an Android developer. I couldn't possibly look at that kind of code.

I couldn't, everybody finds excuses and reasons why they can't. Right. Right. They put themselves into a box and then treat themselves as the box, not as themselves. Right. And I think the same thing happens to our bosses. And bosses, the way bosses think of themselves as well. We put ourselves into a box and say, I'm a good boss.

And because we're in the good Boston box, I don't really need to listen to a lesson on feedback or communication. Or might make me go to training, but I'm not actually going to pay attention. I've got real work to be doing. You know, how I jump. I mean,

That's the problem. You use the word yourself, self awareness. In our approach, we begin by explaining 10 types of ad hoc behaviors. Now, there are more, but we focus on 10 specific areas, avoiders and ignores and coercers and blamers and so on. Right. We talk about the impact those types of bad bosses have on the people.

Right. We talk about specific strategies that people can use as a manager to not be a firefighter and to not be a protector or any of the others, right? Right. So the important thing here is being aware of, first off, how big the problem is. Yep. Secondly, what the behaviors look like. Yep, certainly we have to start to accept.

Yeah, I might have done that once or twice. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that we've talked about this parallel in a lot of respects to the lineage of optimizing code to optimizing leadership to optimizing teams. The code may work. But it may be fraught with things that quite honestly could be improved. And if you do work to improve the code, it produces more results, more reliably.

Same thing with leaders, same things with teams that you can be the quote unquote good boss, but have bad behaviors that can be improved. Oh, you hit it right on my head. Talk about set me up. Thank you so much. You're welcome. You use the word earlier, you use the word unintentional. Yes, and right then you've expressed the idea that everybody can.

Right. Into a little bit of bad boss, but I think that's so fundamental. And there, there is no perfect boss in life. Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. One of our bad boss types is an avoidable in my last role. The company was remote and therefore I was in meetings, back to back meetings from the moment I logged in until the moment I logged out every single day.

Oh my God. Really hard to get any other work done beyond being in the meetings. But it also meant it was really difficult for me to be present for my people. Right. So I was unintentionally an avoider boss. I didn't try to hide from them. I didn't run away from them. And I didn't, you know, blow smoke up their skirts and try to tell them anything that wasn't true.

Right. But they found it difficult to get any answers from me. So I was also a hoarder boss. I kept the information for myself, but I really should have done a better job of communicating. Now, all of that was not intentional. I didn't mean for that to happen. It just did. And as you say, we all get it wrong from time to time.

Nobody's a perfect box. There is nobody in the good box, box. And nobody in the bad box, box. We're all somewhere in the middle. Depending on our skill set, depending on our experiences and depending on our situations, and I think that this plays beautifully into something that I know you and Deb strive for, which is to help bring simplicity to the complex people problems that arise, both in terms of what intrinsically is going on with that leader who needs to improve in some element, but also into the team dynamic of how do the influence the Conversations and communications between team members evolved positively.

So you get past those unintentional bad behaviors to improve the team as a whole. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think the simplicity aspect of it is really fundamental. If you can't decide today, this is the thing I'm working on. Then you're not really working on anything. You can't focus on six things at once.

You know, you focus on one thing. Today I'm going to be working on my feedback. Today I'm going to be working on my communication. You know, in this situation, I really want to express appreciation and make sure that the employee knows that they were seemingly to have done a good job. And it's not just a pat on the back.

It's not just a pat on the head. It's a I saw you. You did this thing and this is the positive impact that you brought to the company. Right when I say that was a good job. That's what I mean. It's a serious attaboy. You see where I'm coming from. Absolutely. And authenticity is key in that. And I want to play that into something you alluded to earlier in terms of that initial jump up the ranks from key individual contributor or technical expert to.

First time people leader, all of these skills that we're talking about, it almost seems like there needs to be a people leader boot camp, for lack of better term of getting people to the requisite plane of knowledge to enable them to make that advancement in their career. There should be. Um. It's more and more difficult to make that space, to make that time, to make that time to course these days.

All businesses are under pressure. All businesses are squeezed right now. Right. So every shop I've ever been in and every shop I hear about on LinkedIn, everybody is stressed. They're all working 60 hours and trying to glorify working on weekends and all. None of this is healthy. None of this is truly going to be good, right?

No, just perpetuating the problem. You're right. I'm interested as we shift the focus a little bit in terms of how y'all, you and Deb take these lessons. That you are portraying to others and be able to apply it at home and incorporating these practices to the home front and the family front for y'all.

It is a truly interesting thing. Um, when we would be in an office situation, we could, um, it's easy to separate yourself from, uh, your emotions from the situation. Yes. Uh, at my office, I, I, I could always just hang up the phone. I didn't have to deal with that person anymore. When you're working at home, that's not the case when you're working with your wife, you have to be, you have to be aware of making sure that your conversations are about what the conversation is actually about, if you see them in the A conversation about a particular project or work shouldn't have an undercurrent of resentment that the dishes were put away, or that I didn't, I don't know, clean the car, probably, or whatever it is.

How we do this stuff at home, it's, first off, the, writing the book was cathartic. It was, it was autobiographical. I have experience, I have experiences that I can list for every last one of the bad boss types. My wife has a few of those as well, but I think I probably edged it out a little bit. And so our journey through writing the book was becoming aware of the problems in ourselves.

Right. As well as writing it down for other people. Accepting that we might have done that once or twice or a lot. Right. So that when my wife turns to me and she goes, you're blaming me for this, aren't you? Mm hmm. I have to stop and think, well, am I? Yeah. I might be. Take that pause reflective step.

Absolutely. That's the only way. It's not easy. Yep. There is no easy to it. And then, how do you portray that to your kids in terms of helping them learn in advance the lessons you've already learned so that they hopefully don't have to relearn it for themselves. I wish we had written this book 10 years ago.

My kids are now 22 and 23. Yes. And my daughter has a son. And they've got bigger fish to fry. Mm hmm. Between the time I was 18 and the time I was 30, my dad really learned a lot. Right. I'm hoping that by the time my kids are 30, they'll think that Dev and I have learned a lot. That is to say, right now, we make space for them, we talk to them, we appreciate them, we use the tools that we've discussed in our book.

Right. I don't think they're really on the other side of that conversation right now. They're going through what they're going through. Right. They're going through their own situations, and we have to wait for them to come and lead us in that conversation. Right. We all, as our kids age, mine are now 10 and almost 14, and there's a certain degree of laying the breadcrumbs, knowing that they're not ready for this concept or conversation yet, but you want to lay the breadcrumbs so that when they're ready, They're like, Oh, I see what you were doing now.

And I presume that's the philosophy that you've carried, not only through the book, but through the conversation with children. Absolutely. We focus on making sure that they understand we are available. We're not going to blow smoke up their skirts. We're not going to lie to them. We're not going to BS them.

We're going to tell them the truth. Right. Whether that's talking about family finances, or whether that's talking about the pluses or minuses of being with a particular person, or having this relationship, or getting that kind of car insurance, or whatever it is. We make ourselves available, and then we have to let them go.

At 22 and 23, they're on their own. Yes. They're on their own. Agreed. They've got to make their own mistakes, realize that they've bumped their knee, and when they come back to us, then we can have a conversation and say, oh, great, this is where you are, okay, great, now how do we move forward? Yes, yes know right now.

Yeah, it's a beautiful segue as we move to the traditional close of these episodes. I always do a tip of the cap to Randy Posh and his book, the Last Lecture where he described as he was nearing the end of his life in the book, that the head fake was the lecture was actually. kids. So your kids are now listening to this podcast episode at the appropriate time where they're ready to pick up the breadcrumbs.

What are the key things you want them to take away? None of us are perfect. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. That's okay. That's called life. That's called learning. The only way you can grow is by making a mistake, going, oh, that's a mistake. I'm not going to do that again. I'll go do something else.

Right. So, accept that you can make mistakes. Accept that your boss can make mistakes. Right. Accept that your colleagues and the people working for you can all make mistakes. Excellent. Excellent. And I know that as we wrap up for people who want to find out more about you all and what you guys do, that there are a number of free resources that you have available for people.

Is that right? Absolutely. If they want to learn more about the book, about the philosophy behind it, or get some of the free resources, like our survey tool, there's a free self assessment for managers to see how you rank, uh, in correlation with the bad boss strategies that we've talked about. All of that can be found at Step Up Your greatness.com.

Mm-hmm . Or Bad Bosses Ruin lives com. It's the same website. We just thought that bad bosses ruin lives. There's a little bit of a negative. Makes sense, makes sense. Approach it both ways. A positive angle and a not so positive angle. But we will make sure in the show notes to have those links available for people.

And if they wanted to reach out to you directly, I assume that there's ways through the website that they can do that. Absolutely. There's a contact us form on the website. Uh, I'm Ken at step up your greatness. com Deborah, Deb at step up your greatness. com or we're both available on LinkedIn. Very nice.

Very nice. Well, Ken, this has been a phenomenal chat. Thank you so much. Any final words before we part here? Love each other, life hard, love each other. Let's give each other some space and some forgiveness. Absolutely. Great words to end on. I hope that you feel the love from this episode. Thank you so much, Ken, to everybody who's listened to this episode.

Thank you so much. Love you all for listening. Please feel free to subscribe and share with those who you feel would find value out of this chat. And we'll see you next time on The Corvus Effect.

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