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Consult and Build Trust: Influence the Business and the People with Richard Russell (1/2)

11 days ago 48:21

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Have you ever felt a work task was boring or a waste of time? It might be because you didn’t understand why you were asked to do it in the first place. Richard Russell, our guest this week in episode 318, struggled with this in his early role as a programmer. All he wanted was to understand more about the business problem his work was intended to solve. In that role, however, Richard never got those answers, and he would later move into systems administration.

Richard has developed a pattern of pursuing the things which he finds interesting – a pattern that began in college and has continued over the course of his career as a programmer, a systems administrator, and as a consultant. Each of these roles combined with his interest in the business prepared Richard for the role of team lead in the banking industry. Join us as we explore the team lead role and why Richard progressed to it, how he built trust as a consultant and as a sales engineer, and his genuine interest in people. Listen closely to learn strategies that will increase your ability to influence others, ask the right questions, and build strong working relationships with colleagues and customers.

Original Recording Date: 02-17-2025

Topics – Meet Richard Russell, An Interest in Mathematics and Computer Science, Moving from Programming to Systems Administration, Consulting and an Interest in the Business, Combatting Ego and Building Trust, Sharing Your Priorities, Progressing to Team Lead

2:43 – Meet Richard Russell

Richard Russell spends most of his time coaching leaders who work in scale-ups, big tech, and other corporate environments.
- Most of Richard’s clients have some executive responsibilities and come from a product or technology background. Many times, these clients are transitioning into product / tech leadership roles or CEO / founder roles.
- Richard made the relatively recent transition from doing consulting work to focusing on coaching.
- Richard resides in Luxembourg with his family.

3:29 – An Interest in Mathematics and Computer Science

What prompted Richard to study math and computer science in school?
- Richard’s father was an electrical engineer and was very enthusiastic about that career path.
- Richard had a Commodore 64 as his first computer and tinkered with various others over time, even getting into programming.
- In high school, Richard did very well in the hard sciences – math, physics, and chemistry. When forced to choose a non-science course during his senior year, he chose economics because it seemed the most mathematical.
- Though he did start out studying engineering in college, Richard made some changes to focus on the things he found most interesting – mathematics, computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, theology, etc.
- Richard found applied mathematics quite boring at first (just solving differential equations, for example). It was more interesting to him when physics and engineering teachers taught mathematics because there was a need to solve a problem.
  - Richard later went into pure mathematics and found it the most interesting of all.
  - Richard says computer science was something he got into primarily because of his talent in mathematics.
- Nick remembers hearing physics majors in college echo the same sentiment as Richard. They learned more mathematics in physics courses than in their respective calculus courses.
  - To Richard, initial learnings in calculus seemed to be solving complicated problems that were not applied to anything, and it was a sharp contrast to the way problems were presented in physics or engineering.
  - In the sciences, Richard had an interest in the practical need. In pure mathematics, he had the interest in learning anything within that discipline.
Richard started wanting to learn more about the applications of mathematics and became really interested in the abstract concepts of mathematics. Was it a similar pattern when Richard learned programming?
- Richard says he gets interested in topics, and he wasn’t interested in the complications of applied mathematics (i.e. doing integrals, for example).
- When it came to computer science, Richard was interested in how things worked and some of the theory behind it. He also liked the ability to express creativity and control what appeared on the screen through programming (which required no artistic talent).
- Richard later became interested in businesses and how products are built. He had no background in product management and wanted to build games.
  - “The mathematics behind, especially graphics, was very complex, and it was exactly the stuff I didn’t like doing. Whereas the business games and business side of applications or programs or websites and so on…they are quite simple in many ways. The complexity is really about…what do I actually want to achieve as opposed to how do I achieve it. And so that became much more interesting to me. A lot of that is related to my interest in product management as I went on further and in business generally. I have this habit of obsessing over topics, whatever they are, whatever I’m interested in…so I got deep in whatever topic it is.” – Richard Russell

9:40 – Moving from Programming to Systems Administration

Was Richard still obsessed with programming once it became his job?
- Richard tells us within the last year he was diagnosed with ADHD.
- “I tend to just find things interesting and obsess over them. When it’s work it’s not necessarily interesting inherently. It could be. It might not be. The decision on whether it’s interesting or not is independent of whether it’s work.” – Richard Russell
- In his first job, Richard was doing software development but worked on a product that was very boring to him. The product was internally facing administration tool that did asset tracking for national parks. The product had only 6 users.
- Richard would be given a user story and have to build something from it (a web page, etc.).
- “I remember thinking…why are we doing this, and what problem are we actually trying to solve? Why haven’t I met any of these people who are using this thing? Why do I not understand what they’re trying to do? Is this even a good way of doing it? It’s just like we’re taking an old database system and turning it into a web application because that’s the thing you do. The whole thing…it was fundamentally…on a deep level boring because I wasn’t talking to the people who were having the problem. I didn’t know what we were solving. I didn’t know why we were doing it. I was just producing web pages.” – Richard Russell
Richard then shifted from programming to systems administration. The goal was solving problems, and there was a person who had a problem, which made it interesting.
- Sometimes Richard would need to go and talk to someone to solve a problem. But if a system was down or not performing well, Richard understood the impact to the user base. He was motivated to solve the problems because they impacted people who would then appreciate that the problems were fixed.
- Richard also worked on patching for Solaris servers (again, a problem to solve).
- Richard contrasts the work in systems administration to his work programming and building web pages. It would take a long time to create a release, and once the release was live, he would never find out if what he did was of any value to anyone. There was no feedback or ability to see the impact of work completed.
- In his role as a programmer, did Richard express his feelings to his manager that the work was not making an impact?
  - Richard says he kept his feelings to himself but also does not believe he was aware of what was specifically frustrating him.
  - In that environment, developers were basically handed something to build and told to go build it. It was not obvious that developers would have an interest in the business. This has changed over the last 25-30 years, however.
What were some of the challenges of moving from development to the systems administration side?
- Richard thinks his advice for someone looking to do that now would be well dated.
- But at the time, Richard had worked with Linux quite a bit and even ran a Linux Install Fest.
- He also tried to start a startup based on systematic remote administration and patching hundreds of Debian Linux servers.
  - Richard mentions he had played around with Linux in his spare time because it was interesting. It became a hobby.
- Richard feels that today software development is more connected to the business, while systems administration is somewhat removed from it.
  - Richard built a lot of computers earlier in his career and mentions people have moved up the stack. Doing this same thing now is an increasingly niche area (i.e. the hardware portion).
  - “From my own personal interests, I found it much more motivating to be with people and businesses influencing people and understanding how and why people buy things and what kind of things people buy. That’s much more interesting to me now…. Sysadmin type work is very much a service. If you look at any business, sysadmin or anyone doing IT infrastructure…it is a cost center. It will always be a cost center…unless you’re in a business where it is a business where it is the profit center, which is very rare. In most cases it’s a cost center. When you’re in a cost center you’re always one of the people who gets secondary importance in the organization…at best.” – Richard Russell
  - Nick clarifies that systems administration could mean hardware, software, the hypervisor layer, the virtual machine layer, the operating systems, administration of the pipelining tools that development teams use, etc.
  - Richard mentioned he’s not hands on with most of these things any longer but that levels of abstraction continue to rise. Ideally people would want to be in an area that has some demand for the specific type of work (i.e. a growth area). Think about businesses who make money from doing what you are doing as opposed to businesses where what you do would be a cost center.

19:15 – Consulting and an Interest in the Business

How did Richard’s early consulting experience fit into the story?
- After moving from developer to systems administration, Richard chose to go independent. He provided systems administration services to a number of small businesses in his hometown. Richard refers to it as freelancing.
- Did Richard like working with multiple customers instead of just working in systems administration full-time for a single customer?
  - One characteristic of ADHD minds is the desire to have variety. Richard likes having variety in his work and the ability to learn something new.
  - Richard knows not everyone feels this way, and he’s had numerous colleagues who would rather go deep into something, own it, and build it over the long term.
  - When consulting with small businesses, you work as a peer or expert along with the people who have the business need, and in Richard’s opinion, the conversations are more interesting. Richard was able to discuss the business problems with his consulting customers and make a recommendation for a solution only after he understood what they were trying to achieve. When working inside a large organization on a team of systems administrators, he was removed from those decisions and focused more on task completion to solve problems, but the systems administration work was still more interesting than his work as a developer when given a spec to build.
  - The human relationship aspect was also very interesting to Richard. It wasn’t just working with colleagues but meeting people who were not experts in the same area and translating their need into the right technology recommendation.
Nick feels like Richard’s move into consulting is a mirror of his move from the application of mathematics in the sciences to focusing more on the abstract concepts of pure mathematics. Solving a system problem could be thought of as the application part, and the business problems and challenges and translating back to a solution could be thought of as the more abstract part. Nick feels many people don’t naturally know how to ask the right questions to discover business problems and map them to technology solutions. Did Richard know how to do this or have to learn how to do it?
- Richard says he’s always had an innate interest in these types of things, and this is the reason for his decision to study philosophy and psychology while in college.
- It takes time to develop deep expertise in mathematics and engineering topics to be able to have an intelligent conversation about it.
- Richard also had an interest in marketing and business but felt they were magical areas he didn’t understand well, usually feeling he was the one who knew the least about them in any room. But the interest in these areas drove him to keep asking questions about them.
- “So over time I kept asking questions and learning stuff and eventually figured out that actually, it’s not that complicated. It’s not that hard…. I have a voracious appetite for reading books…and I read books about marketing and strategy and influence and psychology and management…. So, I’d read a lot of things and pick things up there…. It took me a long time to realize that…actually I do know quite a lot about this stuff now, and I don’t need to have the degree in that topic to be something of an expert in some of these topics. But I certainly learned from these books and from other people how better to go about certain types of questions….” – Richard Russell
- Richard cites reading The Mom Test as extremely helpful in learning how to understand what types of problems people really have as opposed to the problems we might want to solve.
When someone says they have a need or a problem, Nick says we often go to solutioning / presenting a solution before truly asking enough questions. Are people bothered less when asked more questions than we might think they will be in these cases?
- Richard shares a story from his time at Deutsche Bank. He had moved from Australia to London to take the job and worked with a team who was developing software for trading foreign exchange (traders in banks would use it). At the time, he had little understanding of foreign exchange, banking, or finance and sought help from co-workers to understand the terminology.
- “I did a little bit of analysis…. Looking at this…that means that every week we trade 2 Australian GDPs. That’s a lot of money…. So, I talked to my business analyst on the team…just asked him, ‘can you teach me about this stuff?’ …He just sat down and explained to me who is doing this, why they’re doing it, and so on. I remember looking at these things and thinking, ‘why does anyone want to buy that thing, this credit default swap?’ …It’s really interesting the way these things work. So, I learned all that from this guy who was a business analyst. He had been in banking for 30 years…. When I asked him, he was like, ‘cool – I get to explain my area. I get to explain what I know.’ …Most of the time…people are willing to explain to someone interested.” – Richard Russell, on learning the banking industry from an analyst colleague
  - The analyst above helped Richard understand the need for liquidity, why certain types of products and systems existed, why some customers wanted to buy specific products (i.e. balancing risk and reward, etc.), and why other companies might not be building the same thing as the bank. We should not be afraid of asking questions within our own company to better understand the business.
  - Richard says this was the exact opposite of his work building software. He remembers going to the trading floor to ask people what they do each day and why there were 9 different screens displaying information, for example.
  - Nick recently heard a personal development teacher talking about learning who recommended telling people we don’t have enough information to understand something yet when asking for clarification / explanation.
  - Richard says one of the worst things we can do is be shy about asking the seemingly dumb questions. Ask why something is being done or why people want a certain thing. These types of questions have an interesting nuance.
  - “Often, people are too shy about asking questions that sound like that. You never learn, and then you never have any idea…. The person on the other end can kind of figure out if you really don’t understand it, and what they want is for you to ask the dumb question so that they can go, ‘cool – now I get to explain the basics to you so you’ll understand. And now that I’ve explained it to you, I now trust that you understand it. Now I trust you more because you’ve asked the question.’ I often find in most of my work these days asking that question really helps.” – Richard Russell
  - Richard will sometimes ask questions he knows the answer to in order to get people to explain something to him in a way that they believe he understands. It’s a little counterintuitive, but then the person will trust him.

31:11 – Combatting Ego and Building Trust

Do most people have to get past their own ego when asking these questions?
- Richard says yes, especially if you come from an intellectual / academic kind of background. He came from an environment where it was important to be right.
- This comes out in two specific ways for Richard – 1) when someone asks him a question and he doesn’t know the answer and 2) asking seemingly silly questions to get more information on certain topics.
  - In the early days when asked something for which Richard did not know the answer he might try to improvise or make something up (which did not add value).
  - Richard tells the story of getting some coaching from his manager when he was a sales engineer at Google. The advice was to admit he did not know but commit to finding the right answer for the customer. Also, Richard would share with the customer that his company has solved the problem for organizations with similar setups in the past.
  - “What I was doing in that situation as a sales engineer…is first of all acknowledging that I don’t know…but then also building their trust in our organization and my ability to navigate our organization and our ability as an organization to serve people like them…that they will get the result that they want…. I realized my job in that role is not necessarily to even answer the questions. It’s not to give information. It’s to create trust. That was my role. Some of it was about influencing and getting data and changing things…but most of it was about creating trust. Part of that was about learning that I have to create trust in my client…when I don’t know the answer…. There’s a great deal of pride in not knowing and saying you don’t know…very hard to come to terms with ‘I don’t know but trust me.’ But in a sense that actually does make a difference and it does help people, and it’s not misleading because we will figure it out and we have done it.” – Richard Russell
  - Richard recalls a different scenario not so long ago when he was speaking to a group of business and marketing leaders. At that speaking session, someone introduced Richard as one of Europe’s leading marketers just as he walked up on stage. He initially did not consider himself an expert and had to get over the impostor syndrome in that moment. Much of the knowledge gained for that talk came from asking those questions that seemed silly at first.
  - “When you do ask the dumb questions about whatever they are, you’re just getting people to talk about stuff that’s their expertise…. I don’t have much fear of asking silly questions anymore at all. I used to have a massive fear of it. I think just these various experiences of realizing that most of the things that are going on are not about whether I know or not. It’s about can I figure out the answer or can we find the answer or can someone find the answer…what do we need to move forward in whatever we’re doing? And how do we get that thing?” – Richard Russell

34:44 – Sharing Your Priorities

Nick says when you tell someone you will find the answer and you go find it, you are developing a reputation that others can count on you to find answers.
- “Funny enough also…a lot of these questions…they don’t actually need the answer…. Sometimes the question is a mechanism to find out ‘can I trust you?’ Sometimes they’re worried about something that they don’t actually need to worry about, and they learn something else along the way – they don’t need to worry about it. This is especially the case with e-mails. You have these e-mail requests that come in, and sometimes some of them come in and they’re urgent…. And sometimes, you ignore them, and they go away, and it doesn’t matter. Judging which ones are the right ones to do that with can be hard…. There’s a lot of things that come in that aren’t actually important.” – Richard Russell
- Another aspect of getting back to someone with an answer is understanding why they need the answer.
- Richard likes to share the list of things he’s been working on to get answers for with someone and then ask if the person still needs them. Sometimes the answer is no because trust has been developed.
  - This can be applied to e-mails by responding to ask if something is still needed (usually after a decent amount of time has passed since the request came in). It might save you time spent on something which is not necessary any longer.
- By asking if someone still needs something we are showing that we care, that we remembered, and that we were listening to what the person had to say.
- When something is deemed as still important, you can let the requestor know where it ranks on your priority list and then ask again how important it is / whether it is more important than other items.
  - “Having that active conversation about ‘how important is this’ is a really useful tool to figure out what the most important thing actually is.” – Richard Russell
  - This can work with managers, directors, customers, or other stakeholders. These individuals may have many requests but actually only care about a few of them.
  - We can do the prioritization and bring it back to them to help us decide if something should take prioritization.
Nick says we need input on priorities from others and that we should not be ashamed when we ask for guidance.
- “What I recommend doing, especially as you get more senior, is literally just maintain your own priority list…whatever you think is right. Use your own judgement on that. You might be wrong. And then share it with your managers or your stakeholders and say ‘here’s my priority list, and here’s my capacity. I’ll draw a line under what I think I can get done this week….’ And, have a conversation about it. It’s an opportunity for at least a good manager to educate you on how to make priority decisions…or for your stakeholders to explain ‘this is way more important than that because of…’” – Richard Russell
- Sometimes the conversations about priorities and how long something will take can be very helpful.
  - Richard tells the story of a project he felt would take him 2 weeks just to develop a plan. Someone coached Richard that 2 weeks might be enough to finish the entire project and coached him on the way in which he was approaching the project. Richard said it helped him realize the project was not as challenging as originally expected.
  - Something similar happened on a large project when Richard worked at Amazon. Something that was expected to take 6 months only needed 2 weeks of time to complete, but the team only came to the realization after truly understanding what they needed to accomplish without letting the scope creep too much.
  - “But having that conversation and clarifying what the real need is, why it’s important, how you’re going about doing it…it was a bit of coaching, a bit of context setting, a bit of…just brainstorming together, a bit of collaboration…and presto – 6 months of work turned into 2 weeks…of a team of 4 or 5 engineers.” – Richard Russell

39:48 – Progressing to Team Lead

One step between an individual contributor and manager can be team lead or technical lead. What would Richard say the team lead role really is and is not based on his experience as team lead for the bank early in his career?
- The team Richard was on was somewhat like a DevOps type of team today, but at that time it was a mix of DevOps, 3rd level support, and systems administration.
- There was a team of 6-7 people with variable levels of skill. Richard was among the most skilled on the team but in his opinion not the best.
- “The reason why I got that role was because the people who were more skilled than me or better than me were number 1 not interested in it, number 2 quite difficult to deal with…and demanding and critical of other people when they didn’t get it right. And then thirdly, they weren’t that interested in the business, the customer. …My counterpart at the bank would say…the reason why they wanted me to be the team lead was because I’m the only one in the group that really cared about the business and asked questions about their business…. Everyone else was just doing work, whereas I was interested in understanding it.” – Richard Russell
- Being a team lead isn’t just about rallying other employees, helping them focus, or coaching them. This is only a part of it. All of this is for one purpose – delivering value to the business or the customer.
- “To me the difference between a team lead and a manager is probably more about the formal responsibility of performance reviews and the administrative kind of people stuff. The team lead is kind of like that person who is…doing the leading part and getting people in the right direction without necessarily assessing individuals’ performance or hiring and firing and doing performance reviews and so on. That was what my role was anyway.” – Richard Russell, on being a team lead
- Richard was the person they felt they could trust for the business. His manager and others felt like the team respected him. Richard would coach the junior people and get the senior people working in the right direction. He calls the job “an influencing thing.”
- Richard thinks being placed in this role kind of happened naturally. A specific dynamic formed, and then there were conversations about formalizing the role at some stage. Richard calls it more of a practical role more so than a formal role.
  - It was about caring for the client’s needs (the business) and being able to influence / coach people.
  - “It had nothing to do with me having the best technical skills. I was good, and I was able to teach people…able to coach people…. It had nothing to do with me being the best technical decision maker.” – Richard Russell
  - Richard mentions a member of the team who was extremely technical (more so than Richard) and was developing an architecture to solve a problem. Richard would help him understand the need for simplicity and getting things completed faster rather than engineering the perfect solution. It was about delivering short-term value.
- What was Richard’s interaction with his manager like when he was a team lead?
  - Their conversations were more about how well the team was working, how individuals were doing, and if they were the right kind of people to put in a client-facing role. Richard had input on hiring / firing decisions as well.
  - Richard also acted as the main point of contact with the client to stay aligned on what the team was trying to achieve and why, communicating this in both directions (to / from client and to / from the team).
  - “The conversations in that role became much more interesting because I’m interested in the business and the people.” – Richard Russell

Mentioned in the Outro

We talked about Richard’s progression to team lead in this episode. As a late celebration of International Women’s Day, go back and listen to advice from some of the ladies of Nerd Journey to get different perspectives on the role of team lead.
- Episode 279 – Change Management: The Hardest Leap and Developing People with Marni Coffey (2/3)
- Episode 246 – Learning to Lead and a Culture of Excellence with Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi (2/3)
Admitting we don’t know is something we can learn to do. It’s learning humility, just like when you ask those seemingly dumb questions about things you don’t understand.
Do you still need this?
- This can certainly be great to help manage priorities. It could be a way to get someone to say they don’t need something as Richard mentioned. Asking this question could also be a way to discuss urgency and deadline if those have changed or just were not communicated.
To learn more about what Richard does in his coaching business:
- Visit his website
- Visit his YouTube Channel – @richardarussell

Contact the Hosts

The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte.
- E-mail: [email protected]
- DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney
- Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman
- Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_
If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page.

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Consult and Build Trust: Influence the Business and the People with Richard Russell (1/2)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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published 11 days ago