Episode 27: Deep Dive - Leading Digital Teams

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Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak about what it means to lead a digital team. They focus on the interdisciplinary nature of digital teams and the challenges of leading large groups with a diverse skillset. They also speak about the different leadership challenges between so-called digital-first organizations and organizations transforming with digital technologies. Finally, they consider how a new generation of digital leaders can use their skills and intuition to turn the tides of digital development in a more positive direction.

Lisa Welchman:

One of the things that we have alluded to a lot in the podcast is design team leadership.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And you and I have talked about that a lot, obviously a lot in the near past or recent past. Which one of those is this right, near past or recent past? Who knows? Recently-

Andy Vitale:

I think they're both. They're both right.

Lisa Welchman:

They're both right. Okay. There you go. We've talked about that a lot recently, because we're making a course on digital team leadership. And so I thought maybe it would be good to do a deep dive on that. And you agreed obviously because here we are doing it. So why? Why?

Lisa Welchman:

I mean, we've talked a lot about design leadership. And when we started the podcast, I think because you have a design background and because my hands-on background as a team leader is so far ago in the past. The last time I was a digital team lead of any sort was in 1999. So I had a staff when I had a consulting firm, but that, we weren't building digital products and services. We were management consultants. So that was really different. That experience for me is really a long, quite a long time ago. And I was a pretty decent team lead actually. I got good rankings from my team members, which was really a point of pride for me.

Lisa Welchman:

So we haven't really been talking a lot about leading a digital team. And I think for some people, leading a digital team and leading a design team can sometimes seem like it's the same thing. That's why I thought maybe it would be a good thing to not only build a course around leading those teams, but also maybe to differentiate that. I mean, what do you think? Maybe that's something good to talk about today? Like what's the difference between those things?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I think so often whether you are leading a design team or an engineering team or a product team or any team that works in the digital space, I think you feel like your team is the driver of the digital experience. And I think that what we've seen over the years, and I'll speak to just the design side to start, is design where it's positioned in the organization varies. Design can be in a marketing organization, or it could be under technology, or it could be under product, or it could be its own thing. And over time, it's like the teams that are building these digital products, we've learned that it needs to be multidisciplinary, cross-functional.

Andy Vitale:

So it's really interesting when you pull these different groups together to work on teams and collaborate. Like there's a little bit of attention over who the decision maker is, who the true leader is, who drives the outcomes the most. And oftentimes now, based on that approach, we're starting to see. So maybe not oftentimes, but we're starting to see when there might be a product ... There might actually be multidisciplinary teams only.

Andy Vitale:

So you might be a technology trained person or a design trained person who's only led design teams before that are now responsible for areas larger than design or larger than technology. So I think that causes a lot of uncertainty at first, for some of these leaders, a little bit of imposter syndrome of I've worked with these teams, I understand what they've done, but I've never led that work. And when we think about that, I think it's just as we mature as digital makers and teams, we're going to see more of that. And I think that our thought was how do we help people prepare for that and make sure that they're on the right track?

Lisa Welchman:

One of the things that's really resonating with me about what you're saying is the multidisciplinary nature of digital. And when you marry that to the relative newness of digital functionality in some organizations, now, if you're a digital-first company, you're all digital. And so let's just take digital-first organizations or ones that have been completely transformed by digital and push them aside for a second. Not to ignore them and not that's not significant, but let's just push that aside for a second, because I don't believe that's the majority use case. The majority use case is an organization, big, small, down multiple vertical markets, and spaces, higher education, governmental, quasi-governmental, who existed prior to the internet and the World Wide Web who are trying to literally fricking back themselves up and retrofit what they do into a digital space and figure out how to use those technologies to meet the goal, to meet the mission, to do whatever it is that they're trying to do.

Lisa Welchman:

And they're still trying to do this 25 years later. They can't figure it out. Either they're very communication centered or marketing centered, and they're thinking, "This is a marketing device. This is a tool that we use to tell people about ourselves." Or they're grudgingly trying to transform some of their processes or products and services and features like governments using this new technology, but they're always pushing against this huge dynamic of what existed before.

Lisa Welchman:

And so I think for leaders, and in particular for digital team leaders of all shapes and sizes and functions, so UX people, content strategy people, technologists, whatever it may be, information architects, data centered people, the challenge is , how do you integrate and lead all of these functions that existed prior to the web had a certain amount of autonomy and had meaning prior to the internet and the web. But that meaning's been transformed because the placement of that data stream, the placement of that content, the placement of that information is now integrated with all of these other things. Whereas before they were interrelated, but they could be alone, they could be discreet in these certain ways. And now it's all pulled together.

Lisa Welchman:

So that's a really hard dynamic to chop down and cut through because the whole business is structured around it.

Andy Vitale:

Right, exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

You've got the money lines are powered around it. People's careers that they've done for 25 years are built around, "I am a designer and I lead design teams and now I'm 50 years old and I'm at the pinnacle of my career, and damn it, I'm going to lead a design team. And if this person over here tries to get into my shit, no." Like, "I am leading." There's a lot of ego in it that I think is all people centered and has absolutely nothing to do with how good a designer someone is, or how good a technologist is, and more to do with pushing against these human and interactive dynamics.

Lisa Welchman:

That's me talking a lot about that, but I really just wanted to put that out there because I think as a leader in a digital space, as a leader of teams in a digital space, that's one of the hardest jobs, is trying to get through all of that. And if you're fairly senior, you also might be working for a person who's also the same way. And so their reward structure is down these silos and how they're going to reward you and your team is down these silos. And at the same time, your common sense and your expertise as a designer, or as a technologist, or as a content person, or as a product person, all of these things blended together, whatever flavor you want. You know intellectually that it's wrong, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

That the approach that the organization is taking to building this product and this experience for its customer, for its citizen, whatever it may be, you know that it's the wrong approach, but you've got to beat this whole machine. And so when I think about a digital team leader and how they could be helped, this is the space where I'm like, "How do we help them beat back that machine and actually do that?"

Lisa Welchman:

So that was a lot of talking for me, but I don't ... I saw you looking serious and taking some notes. So maybe I said a couple of things that resonated with you.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. You definitely did. And my head went into three completely different places. And I'm thinking, for the sake of the conversation, what is the natural flow. But we mentioned putting those digital product, digital native people on the side. So that leaves us really with two types of companies. There's that digital version of a physical or analog or manual process or workflow that relies on how do we digitize this experience, or at least try to, or at least build a front end where back end a lot of this process still remains manual. And then there are places where that job will always be a manual workflow, and we've got to figure out. I guess that is the digital interface of that. Some people are trying just to digitize that manual experience and others are trying to actually transform completely and become a digital-first company.

Andy Vitale:

And where that lands is, at least what I've seen in some of the companies that I've worked for in the past, they really were like companies in healthcare that were still a very manual process or even banks, that some of that process is still very manual. So the people that were responsible for those decisions, whether they were the leader or just a product manager, we'll start with product because that's a really interesting space, is they would have digital product people and they'd have legacy business or business product people. And that creates another silo in the organizations of who's kind of struggling over like, "Well, I'm the subject matter expert." Okay. That's fine. Are you actually a subject matter expert? Are you a business analyst? Or are you a product person? And a lot of companies take something like a credit card.

Andy Vitale:

There are people that are responsible for the actual credit card, the physical credit card, the decisions, the business levers that drive the decisions around that credit card, the business processes, what it's like to onboard relationships with the credit card processing companies. And then there's a digital product person who's responsible for the Apple wallet version of the card, or the ability to log in and view your transactions. So it does. There are so many layers that people have to figure out and be responsible for.

Andy Vitale:

And what I'm seeing a lot is they're creating more and more titles or areas in the organization as they carve out digital as its own thing, or digital as a transformation. You're starting to see the chief digital officer role or the chief experience officer role. And what they're doing in some of those roles is they're taking the areas, the marketing, the design, the product, whatever else they decide, and their technology. And they're actually just lumping them together under one group. And those silos are staying the same internally. They're just like, "Hey, we're just going to take these four or five parts of the organization that we think we need and lump them under one person and let them figure it out."

Andy Vitale:

So it's really interesting to see how companies are trying to wrap their head around it. But we're learning. Is it 30% of all of the digital transformations actually succeed? And these are over like three to five year period. And all of this work is redone by these large consultancies until companies either figure it out on their own, or they somehow figure out a way to do it right. And then they realize that it's through a series of reorgs and it leads to a lot of churn and a lot of just, I think, dissatisfaction among the people that are working on it, because there's so much change and pivoting of direction.

Lisa Welchman:

What I would say to that, the thing that I jotted down on my little piece of a packing paper out of a box is something that's kind of near and dear to my heart. When I think about my own sort of digital governance or digital maturity curve that I create, all the way at the end of the curb, when it kind of pauses before it falls back into chaos, is this mature moment where everything is integrated.

Lisa Welchman:

So my goal in life is for no one to say digital. There's just product, or there's just the experience. And it has every possible channel and experience. And of course that's what everyone wants. Everyone wants to ... I mean, the great use case was once I was working in a higher education environment, and we really had to think in a very comprehensive way, not only about how students sign up for things or whatever, but digital locks on doors and buildings and digital signage across the campus. And it really gave me a very good example of how rich that experience could be if you thought about it comprehensively and you thought about how to really architect that experience from the core all the way out in three dimensions for the user, which is what I think people are trying to do.

Lisa Welchman:

They're trying to create this world and this experience that makes sense and is easy to navigate for whatever it is they're trying to do, go to school, buy something, take care of your health, whatever that might be, financial services.

Lisa Welchman:

And so I think that's the goal. And when you marry that goal to leadership, some interesting things pop out to me. Questions, I guess, pop out to me, which is how many leaders are actually trying to do that inside of an organization versus what is usually the mandate particularly. And I think we can now pull back into the pile digital-first companies. We put them aside. Now we can put them back into the pile and say, "What is the mandate of a leader inside of an organization?" And I think oftentimes it's money driven. And even if you are thinking about a nonprofit or a higher education or higher educational organization, anywhere globally, NGOs, it usually kind of rolls back to money. How much budget can you get? If you're a nonprofit, you have donors. If you're in the UN sector, you have donor countries, which wield a lot of power and a lot of things that are happening in that space. And if you're a flat out for profit company, you really are on the hook to the board for making the numbers sing.

Lisa Welchman:

And so I think that's another pressure that comes into that space of being a digital leader. And I think it's also interesting that we're maybe 20 minutes into having this conversation and very little talk has been about how you do the work. Like how do you make better features? How do you do this? And I think the reason why we're not talking about it, Andy is because we know how to do that.

Lisa Welchman:

I think people know how to design and build good shit. I think people know how to do that. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I think, where it starts to get really tricky or complex is the more matrixed an organization is. Because when we look at some of these digital-first companies, and I'm not going to talk about the unicorns or the Facebooks or the Googles. Let's talk about just a small product company, something like say a Robinhood, or a Coinbase. These are not the greatest examples actually, but, or To Do or Clear that used to be a way to create to-do lists. These are-

Lisa Welchman:

Or Diet Doctor, which is my favorite keto diet website. Sweet. I mean, it's just ... It's great website, but they've got issues. Just I'm logging into this, seeing this stuff. But anyhow, go ahead.

Andy Vitale:

I think when you have one area of focus, it's easier to wrap a team, to put a team together to focus on that, and it's less of a conflict amongst different parts of the organization than when you're a company like say Honeywell or 3M that has so many different lines of business or as any organization strives to diversify a portfolio. They're adding more and more to the mix that may not be the exact same use case or user group as when they first set out. As they try to branch out, it just adds more and more complexity to the teams and the leaders that are trying to figure out, like how do I organize my teams around this? How do I cover for these different variances? How do I make sure that we have the right coverage and the right people working on the things? It just ends up creating more uncertainty for the leader.

Andy Vitale:

I think that's the difference why those digital-first companies at first were kind of left out in our conversation. But when we pull them back, when you look at a company like an Amazon or Google, they're branching out into so many areas. And I'm just curious how different it is for them because they started digital-first than some of these other organizations that are trying to adopt both digital and diversification.

Lisa Welchman:

I think I have opinions about that, and I haven't settled on any opinions, but I have thoughts. I have thoughts about that. It's a space that I actually think about a lot because in my head I differentiate. When I think about the impact of digital on an organization and this dichotomy of digital-first, which used to mean younger companies. And now it's they still are younger than many not digital-first companies, obviously. But they're not young anymore. They're 20, 25, 30 years old, some of them. But that's still relatively young.

Lisa Welchman:

And when I think about those two piles, and what's the big difference between them, I think I've said this before, maybe even on the podcast. For a digital-first company, their challenge isn't necessarily how to use digital. Although they are challenged often on how to use digital ethically and how to scale it ethically. And I'm not just talking about Facebook. I'm talking about anyone. And some of that is because of their own internal shortcomings from a management and leadership perspective. And some of it is the nature of the beast because nobody knows, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Nobody knows what happens when you do X and you give it to 200 million people. I don't know. Let's go see and find out. Oh, that happens. So sometimes that's the case. So I think that the primary challenge for these younger digital-first companies and the leadership is how do I scale in a mature, solid, and sound way? That's the challenge.

Lisa Welchman:

For the other companies, the ones that existed before, their challenge is what we were describing earlier, which is we do know how to scale in a mature way. We have so many processes in place that sometimes we can choke ourselves when it comes to innovation, because we know the risks of doing things correctly, or we're in a space that's heavily regulated. So we can't ... Or no, we know the risks of doing things quickly and doing things in a way that's not measured or considered. So culturally, they maybe don't want to do that. But they really don't know as effectively or as creatively. And this is a very broad kick me in the shin statement from me, how to use digital in innovative ways.

Lisa Welchman:

As that's coming out of my mouth, I know it's not entirely true. I'm making a broad generalization between digital-first, which is, let's say the consummate digital innovator versus not digital-first, which is I know how to be a mature and safe company, but I don't really know how to rock digital hard. So to me, those are the two things, how to be safe and mature, how to innovate. And each side of that equation does one of those two things better. And honestly the sweet spot, and I think the job of leadership, digital or otherwise, is how do you strike that balance and how do you find the balance between those things? How hard and fast can we scale, meet those numbers that we want to meet from a board perspective, and be ethical and be good and create value for the customer and hold our own values like finding ...

Lisa Welchman:

And that balance is really different from every company. And the leader has to not only, the digital leader has to not only bring this diverse set of people along. And if you're in a not digital-first company who are deeply, functionally and organizationally and geographically siloed, not only do you have to drag them along on one ride. You're oftentimes having to convince your leadership up, one level up, two levels up, however you are from the top, that this integration, this integrated experience and way of doing things actually makes sense, is going to be good business.

Lisa Welchman:

And on the other side, you've got digital-first companies going like, "Innovate, innovate, innovate at all cost, innovate. This is our identity." And so if you're inside that mechanism and you're a digital leader and you're like, "Oh my God, I think we're getting ready to break the law," or maybe that's not going to come out to be a great experience for the user, then you're like, "How do I say that? How do I do that? How do I turn down the fire on the fun pit so that we don't burn ourselves?"

Lisa Welchman:

And so in either of those cases, that's a really difficult job. And I'm wondering, just sort of looking at your face, whether or not the way that I'm describing this, because I think you've been in both environments.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Whether or not what I'm saying sings true to you or what I'm missing in this dynamic.

Andy Vitale:

Well, where my brain went first is thinking about innovation since you touched on that and thinking about how digital companies seem to scale innovation a little bit faster because of the nature in which they're innovating.

Andy Vitale:

I think some of the more physical companies, just by the nature of how long it takes to develop things in a lab or ergonomics or materials like manufacturing, that tends to take a little bit longer. And digital really allows, like we know, to accelerate. Like I've got a product that I can actually iterate on in a couple of weeks, in a couple of months, where physical products are like, I've got to make a million of these or 500 million of these. So I can't actually-

Lisa Welchman:

What about when they're the same?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

What about when they're the same?

Andy Vitale:

Right. When they're the same, it really makes me wonder, like at some point, yes, companies have to innovate because no matter if you're digital-first or digital components, or even a company that hasn't yet delved into digital, digital is allowing the acceleration of ... or just technology today that the pace of the world is looking for more rapid acceleration and patents only last so long. And there's a lot we could go into around intellectual property and digital intellectual property and design intellectual property and how long that actually remains intellectual property for the company that creates it. But there's just this more ... There's a push for companies to find that next thing, because no matter what, we know that whatever you have out as a product today, even if it's the leader in the industry, at some point everyone else is going to have it. It's going to be a me too product or a me too offering. So there's this like desire to, how do we keep the lead? How do we catch up? How do we leapfrog?

Andy Vitale:

And digital's really allowed that. But the balance there, like you were mentioning, is how do the leaders really think about, yes, I've got to focus on innovating, I've got to focus on leapfrogging my competition in areas. But I also have to make sure that my offering stays on top, that my products are best in class. So there's this constant flow of iteration, plus innovation, and really focusing, doubling down on experience. And it goes back to just the different areas that digital leaders have to be, have to think about, that they're responsible for. So I'm not ...

Andy Vitale:

My thoughts are like, there's just so much. It's a lot. It's juggling products and deadlines and people and relationships, and it's an interesting space to be in. And it's just wild to see how it's transformed over time and will continue to.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I mean, what you're saying, I just want to stick this in, and then we can continue down this deeply capitalist route that we're going in, which is all of this presupposes that the goal of the organization is to be the most.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? And so you know just philosophically talking to me that I believe in enough, not the most. Right? And so I think that there are some arguments to be made, and I don't know that I'm intellectually prepared to make them today and at this time, but I really just want to stick this or in. There's some arguments to be made that about how businesses and organizations define success, and how fiscally focused they are, right, which for some people might be, "Well, what else is there?" It's like, "Well, actually, there's a lot of things." There are a lot of other things.

Lisa Welchman:

So there's a lot of different ways to describe abundance that are more human centered. And there's a way for a company or a business to be profitable, maybe not the most profitable, but profitable and successful. And also maybe mitigating some of these speed oriented innovation disasters that we see happening.

Lisa Welchman:

I think that's an entirely different topic, but I just want to stick that in there, mostly because it came up in my head. It's like, "Well, that's only a problem if the most is the answer." If what we're looking for is the most, and for most profit businesses, that's what people want. That's what the board's asking for. That's what the stock price is demanding is the most. But I think all of us know intuitively that maybe that's not always necessary.

Andy Vitale:

Right. And I think it depends heavily on industry also. It's funny. I had of friend whose sister lives in Charlotte that I haven't seen in many years, that I've had different business ventures with and he's gone off and started a company that was VC backed by a very famous person that launched a physical product, a subscription product.

Andy Vitale:

So having gone from digital stuff, like an Amazon inventor award to that physical space, now he's involved in a nonprofit. Originally they bought a bunch of land in California, outside Yosemite, and were trying to build an electric vehicle like playground and resort. And it turned into just with zoning and the way the world is, it's turned into like regenerative farming and carbon neutral farming. And I don't know all of that world, but he's got a nonprofit goat farm that is leveraging a lot of the new technology around communities that we're seeing in Web 3 and NFTs to join this community and have a mix of virtual and physical spaces.

Andy Vitale:

And I know for him, what success looks like is a lot of impact on the environment, impact on our food, impact on people, which is a lot different than market share for a lot of companies, or like you said, being the most and having that profit. So it does really vary on industry. So it's really interesting, but it's another example of how a company that didn't start out with a digital mindset is being able to lead in some digital spaces to still leverage those channels for their goals as a company.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, I mean, let's stay in this space a little bit just because you're inspiring me. When the web and the internet first came out, everyone was like, "This is going to save the world." In fact, I just recently came back from one of my many times a year silent meditation retreats. And it wasn't all the way silent. We were actually doing some reading and some conversation, and we're talking over meals and I was talking to one of the instructors.

Lisa Welchman:

And one of the reasons why I do work in the digital governance space is very early on I like to watch human nature and I understand a lot how people work and work together and just how human beings are. I like to observe human behavior. And it always was very clear to me that whatever the web and the internet were going to become, it was never going to be anything more than what we are. It wasn't going to out invent us. Because we were creating it. So whatever harm we have in our world, whatever bias we have in our world, whatever fault, whatever strengths we have in our community of human beings, it would all manifest online. And it has.

Lisa Welchman:

I mean, that really inspired me to say like, "Hey, we should be a little bit careful about what we're doing," which is why I was so early to talk about digital governance. People used to make fun of me and call me governance girl. And now all of a sudden a couple times a week, someone's like, "Oh, you were a genius. You knew." And it's like, well, because it's just people.

Lisa Welchman:

But in the very beginning, people were so optimistic about what it was that this technology was going to help bring to humanity. And when you even talk to Tim Berners-Lee about it, that was his hope, that was his rationale for giving the World Wide Web away and not trying to monetize it in some really significant way which could have happened and things would've looked very, very different, of creating these open standards that are the W3C, so that we could all use this. And it was a tremendous gift.

Lisa Welchman:

And so maybe, she said, maybe what we're seeing in this first 30 years is just an inevitable reaction of what's going to happen when you marry that type of open, easy to scale technology to the deeply capitalistic aggressive model that we had in our business world. And maybe one of the opportunities that digital leaders have, particularly the coming up into next generation of digital leadership is to turn that card, to use those technologies in a different way, to move from being a chief digital officer to being a CEO, to actually manifest different types of outcomes because of what we can do with the technology, as opposed to just sort of leaning back and going, "Oh my God, we've just created a shit show." And this is the only thing that can happen, is this complete mess.

Lisa Welchman:

And so if you really want to think about leadership in that way, in creating a deep, deep transformation, particularly because we're so early on in this technology revolution, it's super early, that there's still incredible opportunity for a digital leader inside of an organization with the right set of attributes, the right set of skills and a little bit of luck to sort of get under the skin of that organization and force a change, force a new type of change.

Lisa Welchman:

And maybe that's overly optimistic of me, but the stuff that you were talking about made me think, "Well, why not? And who else would it be. If it weren't this person that understands how these technologies work and what they can do, and the consequences of the technologies, who else is going to turn that machine?"

Andy Vitale:

Right. And it's interesting too, because I think that the next generation of leaders are obviously out there. And I see that shift in pockets of online communities. But at the heart of it, even as we look to, and I sometimes laugh, but I know how serious a lot of people are about Web 3 and looking at crypto. And I've really immersed myself in to try to understand that space more. I'm looking in decentralized finance. There's a lot of what could be good there, but there's a little bit at the heart of it, of like, traditionally these things that we put on the internet were free. These things that I potentially made, these photos that I took. But at some point, like I own them and I could sell them. And there's a bit of a capitalistic streak behind it, of this quest to how do I monetize all of these things that I create?

Andy Vitale:

But there's a flip side of it, which is really the way we've traditionally done things is not equitable. It's not right. It's not fair. How do we start to leverage this capitalist mindset to create loans that figure out a way to pay themselves off over time? Or how do we figure out ways to leverage gaming to do things like generate funds to end homelessness?

Andy Vitale:

So I see how companies are starting to think about new ways to leverage technology for good in ways that have never been done before. But I think a lot of it relies upon the traditional structures that we have today are broken, inherently broken. And we, people are realizing that and figuring out alternatives to those. But at the same time, the deep roots of how corporations run exist. So even for the digital leader that's trying to figure out how to digitize a company to the next round of digital leaders that are trying to figure out new ways to make that company succeed by doing well for the people who it provides products and services for, and understanding that long-term that relationship will benefit the company financially, that's going to still ... that's a shift that's still probably a long way out, but it's starting to accelerate.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I mean, I think two things pop into my mind. The first one is someone who I'd love to see on this show, which is Alex Edmans' book, Grow The Pie, where he actually puts some numbers behind how over the long-term businesses do better when they do the right thing.

Lisa Welchman:

So I think there is more work in that space and more understanding of that space, which is counterintuitive for some people. I mean, there really is a sensibility in businesses that if you roll people and you roll them hard enough, you can squeeze all the money out of them and that's how you do it. Like that's business, that's it. So that kind of popped up.

Lisa Welchman:

And then the other thing that popped up in my mind was also what we need to get rid of is this sort of non ... is this binary way of thinking about things, digital or not digital, good or bad, making money or not making any money, giving it away or charging all the money in the world. There's so much space in between those things. People have always had to feed themselves, house themselves and their families, for time immemorial. So I think that's always going to happen and people are going to ... There's nothing wrong with selling things. There's nothing wrong. But the question is, when is it enough? Right? I mean, which is always really what it comes down to. And I think that's a very personal question for individuals.

Lisa Welchman:

And when we think about things like, now you've got me saying great migration, like we said, resignation. Right? When we think about the great resignation, I think that's really what's happening. In this pandemic when people have either been forced to have less or do less, or do things in a different way, even if it's not less, people are stepping off of that treadmill, those who are privileged enough to be able to feed themselves are stepping off that treadmill and going, "Wait. Maybe this is enough. Maybe I don't need two cars," or, "Maybe we don't need all of that." Or, "I feel really happy just spending time doing this," or, "I ... " There's a lot of that going on.

Lisa Welchman:

So I think, in these really churny, interesting times, both technologically and just for humanity right now with COVID-19, maybe that's an opportunity for visionary leaders who also have an understanding of the capacity of digital and are responsible about leading digital teams to actually make a huge difference. I mean, it's going to turn. I mean, there's no doubt. I won't see it in my lifetime. But it's going to turn, one way or another. It's not going to stay the same. Things never stay the same. So if those leaders can kind of help push that edge a little bit more, I think that could be a good thing.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. It's funny. As usual with our deep dives, they start in an area and go into something that's semi-related, but just as deep somewhere else, like most of our conversations. But I think we touched upon a lot of things that are valuable and top of mind for a lot of people that are leading digital teams, whether for the first time, or through their whole career, trying to figure out how to make that next impact to both people and the organization. So I think this is a good point to kind of stop this episode and figure out what's next.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I think you're right. So let's do that.

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