Building Your Personal Brand with Andrea Javor and Michael Hedgpeth

Matty and Trevor talk personal brand with Andrea Javor, Senior Director of Global Digital and Media at Beam Suntory, and Michael Hedgpeth, a senior software architect at NCR in the hospitality division, whom Matty worked with to bring Chef into NCR. The episode grew out of a talk idea Matty floated, where Michael's feedback was enough that Matty said he had basically written the talk for him. The pitch is that people problems are the hard ones in any DevOps change, and a personal brand is how you get people to listen without resorting to self-aggrandizing boasts or claims of thought leadership.

What a Personal Brand Is

Michael says a personal brand is "what people say about you when they go to lunch and you're not there." You don't control it, and you can't compile it or run tests on it, but you can influence it. Andrea puts it as what colleagues would tell someone about how to get something done through you, whether you are collaborative or prefer to work alone. Asked to distinguish it from reputation, Michael says they're very similar, and Andrea adds that reputation is built from past experience and shapes how others play back your brand. Michael's point to technical people is that "everybody gets a brand," and it isn't only for sales and marketing.

Matty says it makes you a more effective change agent, and asks whether it's unfair that Matt gets listened to more because people think he's an expert. Michael's answer is a story about a colleague who dictated a policy: he complied outwardly but didn't follow. If people feel you're a jerk or that they aren't heard, the parts of the organization most resistant to change win, because they can say you live in an ivory tower. Matty ties it to compliance versus commitment, and Michael compares it to going upstream or downstream in a river.

Fitting the Culture, and the Technical Person's Blind Spot

Andrea says how you get things done is as important as what gets done, and you have to manage up, down and laterally. She stresses congruence with the company's culture, and describes Beam Suntory as fast-moving, which suits her as a fixer. Michael says technical people start out with no social expectations, get rewarded for being loud and right, and are often surrounded by managers who cover for their awkwardness, so "behind every technical person who thinks that they're immune from those things is a manager getting a big, fat bonus."

Andrea says she feels the opposite burden, leading a social media team, and tells of a Predictive Index personality test in which she was the second most extroverted person at her company, behind the woman who runs the distillery in Clermont, Kentucky. She suggests IT people might learn from marketing counterparts how much the how matters.

The Go-To Fixer and Internal Versus External Brand

Trevor asks about the person whose brand is the one you throw every problem at. Michael says they secretly like it, and "you cannot get out of your real brand without looking fake," so if that is who you are, embrace it, maybe ask for a raise, and if you don't want it, make changes at the action level. Andrea describes a colleague who broadened his role by swinging by her desk and asking what was important to her, until he was working across marketing, sales and legal.

Matty notes that he and Trevor, in consulting and customer-facing work, think about external brand more than internal, whereas for Michael a big Twitter following retweeting his Ansible opinions wouldn't help him inside NCR. Where your brand is consumed matters, though he doesn't think it is either/or.

Finding Your Brand: Data and Cake

Trevor asks how you work out your brand. Andrea says you need data: self-awareness, feedback from people you trust, and tests like the Predictive Index or the diagnostic from Sally Hogshead's How the World Sees You. Michael brings up Branding Pays by Karen Kang, where a brand is cake and icing. The cake is your rational value, like being a Chef expert who is good at sales. The icing is how people feel when you're around, and people go for both. Andrea sums it up as "the what and the how." Trevor points out you can be great at .NET and still be someone nobody wants to work with.

Michael's caution is that if you're the jerk, nobody tells you, so self-awareness has to be iterative. You find one person who will tell you and show them you'll change. Matty links to a blog post called Empathy Is CI for the Soul and tells of a colleague who asked whether he wanted direct feedback after a proof of concept. It was hard to read, and part of it was that he talks too much, which the other three on the call agreed with.

Authenticity, Results, and Humility

Matty raises imposter syndrome and the worry of seeming to brag. Michael thinks the branding metaphor is unfortunate, because people picture someone full of themselves. What he wants people to say is the truth, and "the truth only comes about by results." He has been working on going from the person who is always right and always talking to one who listens, lets others have the idea and facilitates. Andrea adds that being authentic means you needn't fear being called braggy, and describes doing a guest lecture at a university about once a quarter and not keeping separate work and personal social accounts.

Michael tells three project stories. He introduced TeamCity years ago and felt a duty to help anyone get on it, even meeting people at 2 a.m., and it became what hospitality at NCR uses for continuous integration. On another, a multi-product initiative, he ignored a lack of buy-in and pushed through on technical prowess, leaving half the people unhappy, and it felt like swimming upstream. For the configuration tool search, he wanted something people would adopt on their own merit, and when he told Matty he didn't know how they'd decide, Matty said it would be 45 days. Michael hung up thinking it was impossible. Chef has been like TeamCity, with people coming to him out of the blue with Test Kitchen questions.

The Fear of Being Wrong in Public

Trevor says what terrifies him is looking vulnerable in community Slacks and GitHub, where he is a Chef expert for a consultancy. Even at 90% certain he fears someone will say he's wrong and lose him credibility. Matty has struggled with it too. Joshua Timberman told him that Chef is too big for anyone to know everything, and that Adam gets things wrong too. If you answer only when you're 100 billion percent sure, you damage your brand because you stop talking. Andrea says being an expert means being endlessly hungry to learn, and Michael tells Trevor his value isn't only the cake.

Matty says as your knowledge grows you raise the bar for what counts as table stakes, and tells of being corrected in a Slack channel, recoiling, and then realizing it was an opportunity. There was some "writing to the lurkers" happening, and beginners won't have to say the stupid stuff later because an advanced person said it for them. Trevor says he would answer freely in a room but the public setting raises the discomfort. Michael says people "really hate a know-it-all," they feel belittled, and he has been trying to clamp down on the urge to answer every question.

Practical Tips

Matty's first tip is to share what you know and bring others along instead of reciting what you've read, so you're cemented as the person who knows about that thing. Andrea suggests guest lecturing, industry events where the real value is networking, and being the same person on and off the clock. Matty says if you don't like public speaking, that's fine, and if you do, anything you have to say is valuable, and that meetups and DevOpsDays hallway tracks can connect you with people who have done the migration you're considering. Andrea says it's okay to be deliberate about networking, for example setting a goal of three unprompted hallway conversations a week, as long as you're genuinely interested in the other person. For the virtual version, Matty suggests asking on Stack Exchange or the HangOps Slack before calling the vendor.

Thought Leaders and Opinion-Havers

Matty admits the title may sound like snake oil, and says you shouldn't decide to become the foremost authority on testing Go code so you can keynote GopherCon. You accentuate something you already believe. Michael says people know who the fakes are, and imagines the business dinner where their name comes up. Andrea says "real thought leaders don't consistently call themselves thought leaders." They are "humble enough to know that they need other thoughts to lead any thought of their own." When people call her a guru, she says she is passionate and excited to learn, and suggests looking at the data together. Matty's version: "I would say I'm an opinion-haver." Trevor closes on the difference between wanting to be a master at something and wanting to talk about being one.

Empathy is CI For The Soul by David Shackelford

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Check Outs

Andrea

• Maker’s Mark whisky
• How the World Sees You: Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination by Sally Hogshead
• Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo

Michael

• Branding Pays - a great book about personal branding
• Mr Money Mustache - frugality
• You Need a Budget - budgeting

Trevor

• Venture Brothers Season 6
• WMF 5.0 RTM again
• Hangops Slack

Matt

• How Google Works
• Visual Studio Code
• The Newsroom on HBO GO, Amazon Prime
• Someone tell me how to use OmniGraffle (future checkout?)