In our chat, Toner delves into his long career at IBM and how building trust has allowed him to drive innovation while coordinating a large team. He highlights the role of effective communication, in particular the importance of video calls and in-person meetings for fostering a strong team culture, especially in a hybrid work environment.
Toner also shares his approach to leadership and coaching, emphasizing the difference between mentoring and coaching, and the importance of asking thoughtful questions to help teammates arrive at their own answers. We talk about ways to simplify complex projects, and close with a discussion on the future of hybrid work.
- (00:24) Introducing Toner Babovac
- (03:23) Building Trust in Business Relationships
- (08:31) Importance of In-Person Collaboration
- (11:45) Mentoring vs. Coaching
- (18:33) Simplifying Complex Problems
- (23:17) The 80/20 Rule in Manufacturing
- (25:34) Encouraging Introverts to Share Insights
- (33:04) Navigating Hybrid Work Environments
- (39:01) Final Thoughts
About Our Guest
Toner Babovac is the Technology Managing Director and Senior Location Executive at IBM. He’s had a long career at IBM, holding VP positions, and working in software leadership and sales. Previously he was Principal Account Manager at Amazon Web Services, and Vice President at PSC Group. He earned his Bachelor’s degree at Bradley University then later did grad work at Harvard Business School and at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his responsibilities at IBM, he is a musician, an active speaker, presenting “Toner Talks”, and he teaches Personal Finance at Peoria Central High School.
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Full Show Transcript
Patrick Emmons: Hello, fellow innovators. This is Patrick Emmons
Shelli Nelson: And this is Shelli Nelson.
Patrick Emmons: Welcome to the Innovation and Digital Enterprise Podcast, where we interview successful visionaries and leaders, and give you insight into how they drive and support innovation within their organizations. Today we're excited to welcome Toner Babavac, technology managing director and senior location executive at IBM. With an impressive career that spans leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and IBM, where he's driven innovation and growth across industries like financial services, insurance and manufacturing. Toner is a strategic digital leader known for crafting win-win solutions, building trusted relationships, and delivering measurable business outcomes by addressing challenges like regulatory compliance, cybersecurity and operational efficiency. Beyond his professional expertise, Toner is deeply committed to mentoring young people. As a junior achievement business consultant for over 30 years, he's inspired students with personal finance skills and real-world readiness, recently achieving exceptional success mentoring at-risk youth. When he's not leading or mentoring, you can find him performing as a musician with Three and a Half Men. With a wealth of experience, insight, and passion, we're thrilled to have Toner join us today.
Shelli Nelson: Welcome to the show, Toner.
Toner Babovac: Thank you Shelli and Patrick. Appreciate it. What an introduction. I guess I have to live up to this.
Patrick Emmons: I think you have.
Shelli Nelson: Well, Toner, your career journey is truly remarkable, blending not only leadership and technology, but a deep commitment to mentorship and innovation. So just curious, before we drive into some of these topics we prepared, can we start by you telling us a little bit more about your role at IBM and how it allows you to drive innovation?
Toner Babovac: Sure, thank you Shelli. My role at IBM is innovation for one of our largest clients in the financial services industry. And the role is everything from coordinating 55 to 60 different folks on our team to working with all the various aspects of IBM. Research is one, for example, quite a bit of innovation comes from that. IBM's led the world in patents, I believe 27 out of the last 30 years. So it's something IBM takes very seriously, but the research has to matter. It has to matter in a client's business of how they operationally perform better, reduce risk, bring in more revenue. I mean, ultimately that is the measurement of innovation for your company.
Patrick Emmons: Awesome. And we're really excited to hear more about that, but also some of the things that you and I have discussed in the past is strategic innovation as well as building trusted relationships, which are obviously, I think becoming more and more critical. They've always been important, but I think in the world of AI, relationships are even going to become even more the critical element. So do you mind diving deeper into some of the challenges and opportunities you've encountered in building trusted relationships and how to do this with your counterparts, with your co-workers at IBM, and what are your thoughts on the current state of the current business workplace?
Toner Babovac: Well, the current business workplace, if you look at trust, trust is very difficult to earn as we all know. It has to be earned over time and it has to be earned with the reputation of putting the client first, understanding their needs and requirements, understanding their politics and finding the right way to communicate, "Here's an opportunity for us to improve your business."
Trust can be lost overnight. Trust can be lost with an email with the wrong tone or the wrong message, or believing that you're the smartest person in the room and it gets communicated through an email. Trust can be ruined by something as simple as you had one executive shared something with you that wasn't public knowledge and you shared it with another executive at that company. Those sorts of things, of being very thoughtful about what to share, what not to share. At the end of the day, trust is all about a common interest of caring in the other company, the other person's best interest for their organization. That's where it starts.
And I always think back to Zig Ziglar, you all are probably very familiar with him and Zig Ziglar said, "You can get everything you want in life, but the other person has to get it first."
And that's how I really look at building trust of, have I listened, have I asked the right questions? Am I curious enough? At Amazon, one of the leadership principles was learn and be curious. And that I find is a great way of building trust here, because your client, for example, they spend their entire life, 60 hours a week thinking about their business. You're thinking about their business maybe 20 hours a week. So they're always going to be the experts. So it's easy to be learned, to be curious, knowing that they've got a lot more expertise. You can always learn something from a really great caring question about their business or their challenges and what they're trying to get accomplished.
Patrick Emmons: You know, you mentioned Zig Ziglar and I think a lot of us understand and appreciate that first person, direct communication, things get lost. And what do you see as some of the challenges with the future generations as they, I've got kids in high school and college, and they don't seem as communicative, right? And even like some of the younger professionals are, so email or Slack, Teams kind of centric communications. Are you seeing challenges, opportunities? Are those things that you're coaching people on to like think phone first? Because that's some of the things that I do is like, "So this is when you pick up the phone."
And they're like, "Do you mean physically pick up a handset?"
And I'm like, "No, but yes." What's your take?
Toner Babovac: That is a loaded question, given my wife and I have two daughters that are in their 20s, and it is a different generation. I gave the example to our staff the other day, said, "When our executive team gets together, what percentage of us do you think are on video?"
Probably 95%, 98%, and it might be 30 or 40 people. If you've got a multi-generational video call, what percentage do you think are on video? It's usually less than 50%. That's something that we're trying to get changed. We're trying to help folks understand that you communicate better by looking at people, talking to people, asking good questions, showing up on video and paying attention to them shows that you care about them. So I'd say that's an area that we're coaching right now. And one of the things I've done is starting to have one-on-ones with every single person on my staff. There's a lot. So if you look at, there's probably 45 or 50 that I'm really responsible as we rally them to our client, bringing more and more one-on-ones on, and understanding what they want to get out of their career, and then helping them understand there's some simple ways to get there.
And the video is important to picking up the phone is important, because you look at communication, the smallest part of communication are the words that we say. The next two pieces of communication are body language. Are we paying attention? Are we engaged? And then the tone, are we saying it in a friendly tone? Are we saying authoritative? Are we upset? Are we embarrassed? Whatever it may be, all of those things are easier to pick up when you're actually doing a video call with somebody. That you can't always pick up on a text. Think of how many times you or Shelli, or myself have sent a text to somebody and it came off as not as we intended it, because the only thing they had was those little words that went in a text box, probably in a hurried situation too.
Patrick Emmons: So what are some of the things that you're doing to encourage, reinforce, understand? Because it sounds like you're spending time trying to understand where they're at and how they feel about it. Are any interesting lessons learned in that, like things that maybe we could be doing differently?
Toner Babovac: Well, the lessons learned for me, we have a tendency, many times we just do a video call, we don't want to travel people in, we want to save travel expense, et cetera. But I'll tell you what, when I get the team together, and it's a multi-generational, we're very diverse. Let's say I get a team of 15 people together, we meet in person, we get in the office, whiteboard, converse, maybe we'll use stickies, maybe we'll do an exercise. Everybody regardless of age and experience comes to me the next day after that meeting or the next week after that meeting. And they said, "I am so glad that you wanted us here in person, because I got a chance to meet the team, get to know them better, have some one-on-ones. Maybe I went out and got a cup of coffee with somebody or somebody offered a ride."
You build culture through a shared understanding of how we're going to work together with the client and a shared understanding of what does the client expect from us. So I just find that in-person is the greatest collaborative opportunity to change the game on culture. And that's really the dial. If you think about what am I trying to do every day, the first thing I had to establish coming back to IBM and being a managing director is establish a culture. That's how we're going to behave, how we're going to show up, how we're going to communicate, how we're going to think about the client's business. Very difficult to do over phone calls, text, Slack, et cetera. It's the in the room, in person, here's how we show up, here's how we're going to work together.
And then, quite a bit of one-on-one coaching. And I'm one who believes in coaching in the moment. So if we had a miscommunication or maybe some words came out wrong, I would take that person to the side and say, "Look, I care about you and your career. I think you care about you and your career. Here's something, here's a behavior or here's an activity that I witnessed and here's my impression. What were you thinking at that moment and how can we get a different outcome? And that'll help you along your career path or help us with the client, or help us with whatever you're working on."
So I don't wait for a weekly call, where I've got to take a note and remind myself I need to coach. Yes, I do coach on the one-on-ones that are set, but I do a lot of coaching in the moment and picking that time of being very caring and empathetic about it.
Patrick Emmons: Now do you think that's like on the coaching side, because I see a lot of people struggle with this leadership coaching, and then when I would say correcting, right? I think people get into this trap of like it's a negative thing to provide feedback or correction, right? Because I think this is a challenge that some people are, they're more comfortable with conflict, right? And some people, they shy away from it. So in that real time coaching moment, is that something you feel like you've always been able to do? Is there something you've had to change about the way that you do that? Or how do you think if you were dealing with somebody who reports to you that maybe is hesitant to do that, what are some of the things that you're doing to encourage that similar behavior?
Toner Babovac: Great question and insightful. One of the items that I always try to separate is, am I going to be mentoring or am I coaching? And there's a huge difference. Mentoring is, I'm the expert I'm going to show you, tell you how to do it. Coaching is I've got to ask skillful questions to get you to think and come up with your own answer, which will be an answer that changes behavior. So coaching, always asking questions, coming from a caring, empathetic side, mentoring, "Hey, I'm going to tell you how to do it."
So for example, I have mentors. I have mentors that have been in my position many years and perhaps I'm challenged with how do I handle an escalation process? Meaning I've got to go above somebody's head to get something done. How do I do that? What's the most appropriate way? Is there a protocol I need to go through? That's mentoring, I'm going for someone for a direct answer and they're going to tell me what to do, and I'm going to go execute it. That's a mentor relationship.
Coaching is thoughtful questions. Here's what I observed using empathy and take any steam off of it, but here's what I observed. Tell me about this moment. Tell me about what was said or tell me about what you're trying to get accomplished. Why are you trying to get it accomplished? What does it mean to get it accomplished? Coaching is questioning and coaching is you also remind people, "I'm not coaching you because you have to improve. I'm coaching you because I care about you and I'm trying to help you along your path." Big difference.
Shelli Nelson: Toner, I have to say, it just feels like this is part of your DNA, who you are, that you enjoy coaching, mentoring, you care deeply about your employees. Maybe what's some feedback for other new leaders that haven't had that experience, maybe that's not part of their DNA. And I guess another follow-up question, do you feel like this is just you as who you are, or did you learn over time to develop into this leader?
Toner Babovac: Another insightful question. I would say it's from me personally, it's probably some DNA and it's probably coaching, quite a bit of coaching from people. And my personality has changed a bit, or the way I show up has changed a bit as I've progressed through my career. So this is where I'd say DNA, yes DNA, but changing. When you start out in sales, a lot of time, especially I'll say the older days, we said that in my older days, but things were all relationship and you didn't need to be as technical, as analytical, et cetera.
Nowadays, what's changed is I'm an analytical first and not so much an accommodating, easy to get along with personality. I'm more analytical and that analytical is what makes me curious. What are you trying to get done in your business? What are your challenges? What are your competitors doing? Et cetera. So I believe it's some DNA and I believe it's you seeing yourself as, "If I'm going to have this different role, this higher, more elevated role in the future than what I have today, my skillset needs to change."
And that's where I would go to the coaches and mentors over time of, "What do I need to do in order to put myself in a position to have more responsibility, to lead and get greater outcomes for my company? What do I have to do?"
And I got really great advice over the years and some challenging advice. And many times you get it from your peers. I had a person one time when I was in management, and he came to me and said, "You need to stop sugarcoating things. We're big boys and girls. We can handle you being a little more direct."
And I nodded my head like you are right now. I thought, "You're right."
Sugarcoating sometimes feels good. Maybe you think it feels good to you, because you don't feel as direct about it, but direct and candid as you get further and further into roles that take more responsibility, the ability to be direct and candid respectfully is really a skill that's required. You don't see it a hundred percent of the time.
Patrick Emmons: Yeah, there is a lot of softening the blow and missing the opportunity to actually help somebody improve. Some of the transitions that you mentioned, would you say that you, moving from like the analytical side, is that really like giving you like, I see anything you can break down into metrics, you can count, you can coach, you can coach people to, you can make... Is that part of where you go with that from the analytical side of like, "Hey, let's work it from the outcomes backwards," or like, "Here's what we're trying to achieve. We all agree that's more of a scoreboard kind of concept versus do this, because I said so?"
Toner Babovac: Right. And it's more around, I think you hit the wording a hundred percent on it, which is start with business outcomes and work backwards. We're in the technology business. So I asked my team, well, earlier this year, I asked my team, "Are we in a people business or are we in a technology business? What are we in?"
Technology doesn't make a decision. So we're in a people business and we happen to utilize technology for business improvement. So the analytical side comes in around starting with business outcomes and trying to work backwards. What's the value of doing something versus the value of doing nothing, and the value of doing nothing? Client doesn't have to spend money on the outside, don't have to bring in new technology, don't have to re-skill their people. Doing nothing is easy. It's an easy value equation. Doing something, that's where the skills of analytical comes in of how does this improve your business? What does it mean in your business? How does it make you more competitive than you are today versus your competition, for example? Or maybe you're going after a new market. So I think the analytical is how you put value into terms that's aligned with what a client is trying to accomplish, working backwards from their outcomes.
Patrick Emmons: You describe leadership on a previous call as solving a Rubik's cube, right? It's complex. A lot of team dynamics, a lot of organizational changes. Again, I think everybody knows what a Rubik's Cube is now, just because everybody loves the '80s as much. Like, my kids know more '80s music than I do. Like, when kids were listening to music, they're like, "That's Pantera."
I'm like, "There's no way you know Pantera," right? Like, I don't even know Pantera, but the Rubik's Cube comment has always kind of stuck with me of like, you can't focus on just one thing. It is an organism of its own sorts. So is there an example where you can share, like you use this complex cube.
Toner Babovac: The Rubik's Cube was giving a dynamic of how complicated things are. And an example might be, you know what needs to get done from a business outcome. You've got complexity in your organization, you have complexity in the large organization that's your client. The challenge is boiling it down to the simplest things. I mean, I struggle with this too. I'm going through it right now with something that has become, we made it more complicated than it needed to, because we didn't have some key answers. And what we learned through this process was, we don't need to solve every puzzle piece of the Rubik's Cube. What we need to do is eliminate options, alternatives and scale it back to something that's, back in the '80s you'd call it keep it simple, right?
Patrick Emmons: Simplify.
Toner Babovac: Simplify. And that's where I get tripped up a lot of times on the complexity and bringing more values into the equation than I need to sometimes. And it's what can we eliminate that are areas of variability that really aren't that important to get something done? That's where we spent time over the last 48 hours. We had a call internally last week that didn't go really to my liking and a lot of it was because I was still in the Rubik's Cube portion of it, trying to solve more variables than we needed to solve for. And the outcome was we're going to go back, work with our client and determine what elements we really need to solve for. And then it's a much different equation. Now it's no longer a Rubik's Cube, it's more of a simple math formula.
Patrick Emmons: Is there a certain like, I don't know, because I think I fall into the oversimplifier, right? And then, you kind of have to go through that cycle of like complexing things, right? Opening the aperture, right? Considering all options, looking at all the impacts to come up with what is the one thing we need to get right. And I do think my natural behavior is to reduce things down too soon. And I think that leads to a little bit instead of like a long strategic arc or setting yourselves up for the second or third move, right? You're just knocking things off one at a time. And so, is that something you've seen as well? More of that evolution of thinking like it's never one, it's never the other.
Toner Babovac: It is a constant evolution of back and forth on the pendulum. Things can never be too simple. They are too complex. There's no doubt for that. And I think really narrowing things down to there's two or three strategic alternatives. What's the investment? What's the cycle time? What's our return? And in the back of my head, I used to work with a vice president of Caterpillar, actually the first female vice president of Caterpillar, Cheryl West. And she said, "Toner, here's the things you need to think about. Every project, you're going to overestimate the benefits, you're going to underestimate the costs and you're going to underestimate the risk. That's why so many projects fail."
And so, it's trying to tighten the variability in each of those three elements. How do I reduce the risk on the investment side that I actually have it pinpointed? Have I taken enough time in the process to understand what the investment's going to be? Have I taken enough time in the process to understand what the expense and investment is for the return I think I'm going to get? And where's the risk in this that maybe I'm not looking at? And that's the old simple adage of okay, what could go wrong? The best way to run that exercise is you take turns around a desk and ask people. Shelli, what could go wrong with this? Patrick, what do you think could go wrong? And you'll find kind of back to the Rubik's Cube example, people are looking at it from different ways.
And I found out on one of our projects, Patrick, the long pole in the tent was the smallest component of the deal. And that came back to bite us, because we were looking at the larger components of the deal structure that we had to manage, which were higher investments. And yet, the lowest investment item was actually the long pole in the tent, meaning it took longer to get through legal and thought process, and licensing, et cetera. And we never had really planned on our timeline of getting it wrapped up, that that small item was actually the long pole in the tent. And we didn't catch it until we caught it, which was later than we would've liked it to be.
Shelli Nelson: So you're both reminding me, I'm in manufacturing, right? So we use the 80-20 process, the Pareto Principle. So thinking about customizing products over the years, you're adding dozens of, if not hundreds of SKUs, right? So a few years ago we implemented 80-20 across the business. And it's so interesting when you look at it from that lens.
Toner Babovac: That's a good example, right? Very good example. The 80-20 rule and the last 20, unfortunately, there's always a piece in there that's going to come bite you. Determining what you believe that is or where is the risk as soon as possible certainly helps things. As you think about manufacturing, if you manufacture as one too, where things change, and the systems and ability to predict are really important, because those SKUs, a lot of times the SKUs are sizes right? And too many of one, too little of another. You leave revenue on the table and then you pick up expense. You didn't expect to have either. Big challenge out there.
Patrick Emmons: Well, I come from more of an engineering kind of mindset of everything's going to fail, nothing's going to work, right? I refer to myself as Chicken Little. The sky's not falling, but I'm getting ready for it anyways. And so, I do think that 80-20 rule of like, I jokingly say all software projects spend 80% of their time being 80% done, right? You get to that 80, everyone's like, "We're at 80%."
It's like, "No, we're not. We're just through the easy part."
And there was a lot of easy part, but now we're in the swamp, right? Now we're in the place that we're going to find out who's got the ability to finish, right? Can you pick up the ball and finish the last five yards on this run? Because that's really where the money's made. But to your point, finding those landmines as we call them and then spotting them out, and asking everybody on the team. Because it's amazing how many people do have concerns and worries or fears, and when you ask them to... Of course it doesn't come out until there's like five minutes left in the meeting, where you're like, "So what are you guys worried about?"
Like, "Well, I think this all could blow up in our face," like don't bring that up earlier, right?
Toner Babovac: And it's usually when you talk about the meetings, it's usually the person, the more introverted, introspective person is the one sitting on the greatest piece of data. But they may or may not have the courage to share it. And that's where reading a room, you had mentioned one of the topics we were going to talk about is hybrid. And I think having people in the room is really beneficial, because they've got a trust that if I've got some insight and if they're introspective, that means they've been listening for the first 45 minutes of the meeting, their wheels have been spinning and they need someone to say, "What do you think, Shelli? You've been really quiet, you look like you're really thinking on this. What do you think could go wrong?"
And then when they feel confident, they can share. And it's that introvert that many times is going to give you the key piece of data that everyone else, the excited type A's are like, "Hey, I got to 80%, I'm good, let's rock and roll."
But someone in that room is holding onto a key piece of data that they have to have the emotional trust and then some internal fortitude to share it.
Shelli Nelson: Completely agree with you.
Patrick Emmons: Here's my take on, not that this is about me, but I'll make it about me.
Shelli Nelson: Sure.
Patrick Emmons: The person who doesn't speak in the meeting, right? Like, my goal with leading any of my meetings is, I need to talk last, right? The longer I can go without speaking, the more I'm winning, right? And I think that's a challenge for a lot of leaders. They feel like they got to come in and set everything, and it's like your read backs are critical, right? Did they get the message? Do they understand the objectives? Do they know what the problem is that we're solving? If they don't, then we're just pushing things around, you know? But I do keep track of who's talked and then I will call on people, because I do know some people need permission to speak, right? Because of whatever their wiring is.
But I also know, there's a healthy balance from like what I call the early talkers. Like to your point, the folks that really love the sound of their own voice, I'm included. I love the sound of my own voice. I'm an early talker. But see, I think we're the party starters, right? Like, we're going to get things... If we didn't have the early talkers, nothing's getting said, the meeting's 15 minutes, see you later, right? So if you get the early talkers, they can get the movement.
Now the processors, right? The people who are just think and process, and process, and process, and process. Our job is to feed them stuff, right? Just keep the motion going. But then the missed opportunity is after they've had time to process, say, "Okay, what gold did you mine out of this," right? And being deliberate in like, "Hey, I understand."
And I'll tell the story about my uncle who is an amazing smart guy. Everybody, he would sit at family parties, he'd never talk and we got a lot of talkers in my family. So he kind of stood out, and then it's like, "Okay, uncle Dick, what do you got?"
And then he just dropped just gold on you, right? Where you're like, "That guy is just so smart."
So I started to realize like, "Listen, I'm just going to talk a lot in front of him and then see what I get out of him," right?
And I think when you get a healthy team, if you're leading a team, it's really understanding. You don't want to stop the early talkers, you just want to rein them in. They can't just keep going forever. So calling on other people and making sure other people share what they've got out of it. And then, there's some people who are quiet, who don't have gold, they're just kind of there and not participating at all. But you'll figure that part out, right? But there are a lot of, those processors are so critical.
Toner Babovac: I completely agree with you. And I'm usually that early talker that sets the stage. And I do, one of the things I'm working on is trying to be more aware. If I take too much oxygen at the beginning, I need to make sure I'm leaving oxygen for everybody else. And we have on the videos, because we'll do hybrid, we'll have people in the office, we'll have people working from home, et cetera. And some folks raise a little hand icon on the Zoom meetings or the Teams meetings, or whatever it may be, and they'll wait. So if no one says, "Oh, hey, Shelli's had her hand up for five minutes, let's come to her."
Don't wait. They're very polite people. That's their nature. And it's making sure you capture that in the moment while the thought is there and have enough control of the meeting or the oxygen in the room, so to speak, to say, "You know, Shelli's had her hand up here for a couple of minutes. I want to make sure your voice is heard."
And those are always great words to say to somebody, make sure your voice is heard. That brings the introvert out. And those are usually the people that'll push the hand icon, other than the folks like myself, that come off a mute and say, "Hey, here's something I want to come back to. We jumped over this too quickly," because I won't raise my hand, especially if I want to kind of corral the conversation, take it back another direction, or maybe where it started, or somebody had a point that was really critical that we just blushed over and went on to something else. I'll interrupt, I won't raise a hand, but a lot of people have much better etiquette than I, and they'll do that little hand raise.
Patrick Emmons: I think it's a family thing, honestly. Like, I was in college and we went out for like Chinese food, and there's like seven of us and they put the food right in the middle of the table, and me, this kid Ethan went, we just attacked, right? And these other kids are like, waiting for permission and I'm like, "It must be nice in your house," right? All I can think of is in my family it's two people, the quick and the hungry, right? If the food hits the table, my brothers and I are, you're going to fight for that egg roll.
Toner Babovac: Yeah. Ours is a little different coming from a family of predominantly women. My wife and I have two daughters, and the daughters will have friends over. I come from that school of, I'm usually the hungriest one to eat and I'll wait until the ladies go first, or the kids go like, it's got to be ladies first, guests, etc. And sometimes I'll nudge them a little bit, "Hey, are you going to pick that? Like, come on, we're eating here," because I'm that old school.
My dad was in the military, so maybe that was it, of the man sits and waits. You eat last. In the army, there's that reel, where the general always says, "Generals eat last."
And that means make sure your team is taken care of. And your team, family, team, same concept, they've got to come first. And it's those subtle little things that most people don't pick up on, but you're being subtle in the way you're thinking about your team and guests, and whomever it may be.
Patrick Emmons: Well, when they do eat, my dad was a Navy pilot too. When they do eat, it's full on assault. It's like, five, I don't think they taste the food. It's like, done. I was always amazed my dad could finish a meal in like three minutes. I'm like, what is, it's not a race brother, right? But you know, had this thing about sit, something attack, was how he looked at his food. So I'm like, okay. I'm curious just talking about the, I do think there's some bridging here that still has to happen.
And again, we're moving into the hybrid situation. I don't hear anybody enjoying hybrid. I don't think there's an easy answer to any of this. And Shelli, you guys deal with a lot of in-person work. Is this the hybrid situation? What are some of the things that you see that you can do to improve that situation? Is there anything that you're, I don't know, I don't think there's a week that goes by, I don't have this conversation with a couple of people about like, obviously the culture and getting people to performance, and plenty of distractions when you're working out of your home, and then the missing of like some of these relationships. But what do you guys think is in the future for a hybrid return to work, that kind of stuff.
Shelli Nelson: I love everything that Toner shared earlier. It's about building trust. You know, even if people aren't in the office or even in the same state, or country that you are, and really personalizing how they're managed and knowing what motivates them, right? It's hard to say in the future. I mean, I think there's so many people, especially of the younger generation that really enjoy the remote and the hybrid. So I think it's up to us to come up with ways that make that the most effective, right? Instead of thinking we need to go back to how it was.
Toner Babovac: Yeah, this is certainly one that is a flashpot for conversation on the hybrid piece. Every company has an absolute right to their culture and what they feel they need to do to accomplish their objectives. And every employee has a right to decide if this is a company they want to work for.
And I love that juxtaposition, because it's not an either/or. In many cases it's an and. I personally believe hybrid, if you want to instill a company culture that's felt through your staff and felt through your clients, there has to be a strong interpersonal relationship. And when our team does get together, some of us are more local, some are kind of spread out. But when we get together in person with a client or in person with ourselves, the feedback is always, "We need to do more of this."
So part of it is on us as leaders to make sure that we've got a welcoming environment, one that they're excited to come to, one that they're going to learn something, they're going to learn something about themselves. They're going to learn something about their teammates, their client, products, whatever it may be. And we always have group exercises, like to put people with folks that they don't know all that well. Work together, present to the team, do an exercise with stickies, what have you. Those sorts of things really bring you together. So I think it's really difficult. I've seen some companies be pretty mandatory. It's a hundred percent you're in person. And for certain things that we have at our company and certain things at Amazon where I came from, it's a hundred percent you need to be there.
There are other companies I saw, was it Spotify or a company the other day by the New York Stock Exchange said, "Hey, we trust our employees aren't children. They can work from home a hundred percent of the time if they want."
And that's the company's choice of what they want to do. I'm not sure in my experience, how you build team culture if everyone's working from home. And working from home has its distractions, working from home has the benefit of you're not commuting, you can live wherever you want to live. And those are the privileges. Some of those that happened because of COVID and the pandemic. Well, okay, we don't want you in our building, because we don't want people to get sick or we don't want the liability of it, or we want you healthy, whatever it was, it started in a good place.
And I think the either/or is just really, really difficult situation to have folks, you're a hundred percent remote or you're a hundred percent you have to come into the office. That's challenging. For certain roles, it just does make sense to have people in the office. And I just think from a hybrid perspective, not think, I believe because I've seen it, hybrid perspective, sometimes you got to be together. And if I look at, think about people individually. If I'm a hundred percent remote, how would my boss really know me? How would my boss really know how I behave, how I think, the value that I bring to the company. Let's say I want a promotion in the next year or so. Am I going to speed up my promotion by working remotely or am I going to speed up my promotion by getting them to know me, trust me, coach me, mentor me, whatever it may be?
I think the bonds of taking your career forward are better, most times, in some type of hybrid environment. But again, that's my opinion.
Patrick Emmons: No, totally.
Toner Babovac: And I have right to my opinion, just like an employer has a right to their opinion and an employee has a right to say, "Hey, you hired me. I was remote. That was my understanding, it'd never changed."
Well, that's an opinion. Like I say, some jobs a hundred percent remote work out absolutely great. I just believe from a culture, from a career growth standpoint, from getting to know your client, I mean, think about would you take a hundred percent of your meetings with your top client? Would you take a hundred percent of those remotely? If you want to build trust, I bet you could build trust in four or five meetings in person a lot faster than probably the same speed as a hundred meetings remotely, maybe. I don't know. That's my opinion. That's my opinion. I'm not going to debate others that have a different opinion. That's theirs.
Patrick Emmons: To your point, I think it's all, there's different ways to skin a cat, but the easiest, right? The humanity of it says something very clearly, that this is how humanity has worked for tens, a hundred, thousands of years, right? Anyways, Toner, I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your perspective. Really love your perspective. Really love all the things you had to say. Tremendously enjoyed all of it. So thank you again for taking the time.
Shelli Nelson: Thank you, Toner.
Toner Babovac: You're welcome. This has been fun, my first experience, so thank you.
Patrick Emmons: Awesome. We also wanted to thank our listeners. We appreciate everybody joining us.
Shelli Nelson: If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, you can subscribe by visiting our website at dragonspears.com/podcast or find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Emmons: This episode was sponsored by Dragon Spears and produced by Dante 32.
