Supporting Effective Teams & Leadership Narratives with Matthew Winklestine

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Future Of Teamwork podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human- centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Have you ever wondered how the best teams are formed and led, or how top talent is attracted in today's digital world? In our upcoming episode, we explore these crucial aspects focusing on the power of social media in the digital era. Matthew Winklestine is a professional in digital strategy, specializing in harnessing the power of social media for effective talent and client acquisition. His approach centers around audience engagement and creating meaningful content, transforming how businesses connect with their communities online. Tune into first learn from Matthew's experience at Kiewit, where his leader not only gave him permission for new initiatives, but cleared the way for success. The story highlights the importance of leaders in creating a safe space for innovation, using their influence to advocate and protect team members. Second, discover Matthew's method of reverse engineering problems to create structured step- by- step processes, enhancing team performance and problem solving effectiveness. Third, Matthew discusses the power of leveraging platforms like LinkedIn to attract talent, emphasizing how leaders sharing their vision and mission connect with top talent who prefer personal engagement over traditional job postings. This approach highlights the significance of personal branding and proactive networking in the modern job market. So teamwork makes the dream work and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future Of Teamwork podcast. My name is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm joined by Matthew Winklestine. Matthew is the president of Engaging Perspectives and he's also a podcast host. His podcast is the Evolving Engineering and Construction Brands podcast. So I think I got that right.

Matthew Winklestine: Absolutely. And it's a literal name. Wasn't going for clever, wasn't going for smart. We're literally trying to evolve engineering construction brands, so I appreciate you taking the time to spit that out.

Dane Groeneveld: No, you bet. And we're working in a literal industry when it comes to engineers and construction professionals. They don't want too much sleight of hand and bunny rabbits coming out of hats do they?

Matthew Winklestine: Not at all. Not at all. If you walk onto a construction site with too nice to close, that's the first red flag.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. So Matthew, thanks for joining me. I really enjoyed being on your show earlier in the year, and we had some great conversations. But for the benefits of our listeners, maybe you could provide a little bit of a background story on how you came into what you're doing in your career and now what you're doing with the business and the podcast.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah, absolutely. So my story is a lot like other people that are in the construction industry, where they wanted to be in construction since they were a kid and they just follow that path. That's not really, I don't think anyone's story, nor is it my actual story. So I was going to college to be a high school history teacher, realized through some good counseling that I did not want to be a high school history teacher, and that wasn't in my future. And so during a time when I was just going to take a year off, someone encouraged me to, " Hey, you can go work and get experience." And so in the nuclear industry, there's junior rad techs. And to become a junior rad tech on a refuel outage, you need to be able to pass an exam. It's not terribly difficult, particularly if you study. And then once you get in there, you're good. So through that experience, I was exposed to the power industry and through construction. And so once I was exposed to that, I was extremely interested in it. It was you get to be outside, at the time you work in chunks. I liked the concept of I would work nine months out of the year and that'd be completely off three months out of the year. That really sold me. And so was fascinated with the industry, was able to go from nuclear power plants, where it was a little bit slow for me. I liked especially younger, wanted to move faster, did not want to have as many rules and regulations. And I remember the second refuel outage I was on, one of my counterparts got fired by the plant manager because they didn't wear gloves to push a cart that they needed to push to another area. And I was like, " You know what? I'm not really sure this is for me." That eventually end up being me. So moved into large construction projects as a junior safety professional, got some good experience there. That's actually where I learned human behavior, which leads to my marketing experience. And through being in environmental health and safety, superintendents and project managers gave me an opportunity to learn the work. And so I had a small stint where I ran projects, large construction projects, hydroelectric, coal- fired rebuilds, that sort of thing. Then from there ended up getting into business development. Then lastly, I joined marketing because I believe that the way that we were communicating with our customers in business development wasn't the best way to reach them from an effectiveness standpoint or from the standpoint that they wanted to communicate, consume the information. They didn't want to have to rely on me, a business development person to tell them every single piece of information they needed to know about how we would engineer and execute a project. And so I was very fortunate that at the time, I was working for Kiewit, large brand in the space. And my boss, a guy named Jon Gribble who's fantastic, and one of my customers today said, " Hey, if you think you can do this, here's a chance. Go try," and was successful. That attracted some opportunities through digital ad campaigns, which people didn't think was possible at the time in the organization, and did that for a couple different business units. And then like a normally sane person, when my wife was six months pregnant, I said now's the time I need to quit my day job and go out on my own, because otherwise I'm not going to. And luckily for me, my wife supported that decision wholeheartedly, even though every single other person in my life told me I was insane. But now 18 months later, the business is going well, my little boy growing up, and I think it was the right decision.

Dane Groeneveld: Sounds like it. Sounds like it. And it's a great story Matthew. I love the fact that you started in the industry, and managed to move through these different functions and really see teams operating in different environments and different job functions. Because there's nothing like a construction, or a maintenance, or a project environment for just throwing a whole bunch of people together and making them work very effectively. We've got to look at safety, we've got to look at quality. There's a lot of different moving parts. So it's a great sort of lab for seeing what's good and bad in teamwork.

Matthew Winklestine: Absolutely. And during one of my stints, I was in charge of environmental health and safety for our construction group. And when I was the regional manager, I still say that's one of my hardest jobs. And it was so difficult, because I was the one assigning safety professionals to these projects. And being a safety professional myself and then also running projects, I knew how important that dynamic was. And people think that just because a person can do something, means they're the right person for that role. And there were multiple times where I had a safety professional that was more than proficient. There's nothing wrong with them, but they weren't the right fit for that project and that project team. And so then, I needed to figure out who the right person was to fit there to support the ultimate goal of to execute the project safely, on time, on budget. And that was a balancing act, and I found that out early and young and I'm glad that I did. Because as you and I were talking, we talk a lot about teams, we talk a lot about collaboration, and I still don't think we talk about it enough.

Dane Groeneveld: We don't. And that's a really interesting problem to solve, going past the technical competencies and finding the right fit for an individual going into a project team, because these projects are often running anything from 60 days to six months, 12 months. What was typical back then?

Matthew Winklestine: A few of them were in the 60 days. If it was an outage type situation, it was anywhere from 60 to 120, where you have probably a 60 to 90 day where you're working extended hours. And then you bookend that with mobilization and demob. But then we also had some longer duration, especially earlier in my career, environmental projects, FGD scrubbers. So that work took place over years, and that's a whole different challenge of finding the right people for those roles too.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And you find in project construction environments, some people like to go in there and really be at the peak of the project where it's chaos, and busy, and lots of stuff's going on, but they don't like to be in the pre- planning or the close out and commissioning. So you've got to manage personalities and attention spans, and all sorts of things, don't you?

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah, absolutely. And you really have to understand what drives individuals. I am laughing because I know exactly what you're describing, and I've had people that don't want to be in those situations for one of two reasons. First reason, they're just fast- paced. The time goes so slow during mobilization and demobilization, and you're most likely in a location you don't actually want to be in, and you're not working as much. And so some people don't like the pace, but then a lot of people don't like the compensation. They got in this because they want to work hours and they want to work overtime hours. And so if you say eight weeks of 40 hours in location, you want to be, they're like, " Time out. I want to be in that refinery that from the day I step foot on the facility, I'm working seven days a week, 12 hours a day."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And we see that. A lot of our projects over the years, we've had teams going in and they are, they're working seven- day weeks, lots of hours, clocking up 80 plus hours in a week. It's wild. And so yeah, earnings are big, but also you're putting a team under some real stress and strain with fatigue and complexity of operations, it's certainly interesting. So when you go back to that fit, like particularly bringing the right safety person, what drives that fit? Is it communications? Is it relationships? You and I were talking a lot about trust and relationships before the show.

Matthew Winklestine: Honestly, I based it off the project manager. So we had a minimum expectation for project managers, where you need to run a safe project, but that's a broad term. And different project managers view things differently, and the way they wanted things done, and the way that they ran their organization, the job set is essentially a little organization. And depending on the project, their budget is larger than companies. So that project manager is really the one that's driving this. And you're not going to replace the project manager, especially from a safety standpoint, unless he does something that's egregious, or she does something that's egregious, but most likely they're not in that position. And even if it does come to down to that, that is a difficult thing for you to navigate. And so it was a lot more about the way that that project manager ran their project that they need someone that... I am thinking of one project manager who he was tough for a lot of people to work with, because he would put safety professionals in situations where they would make poor choices, where he would do things like, " Hey, you know what? You don't have to work this weekend because I know you're going to do something, but the job is going to be working." And then later in the project when the person wanted to work overtime, that same project manager would say, " No, you're not working. Remember you took time off here during this, so I'm not going to let you do that." And so with that particular project manager, if I put safety professionals out there, they would allow themselves to be compromised, they wouldn't get their job done the way they needed to. And so he needed someone that was-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, because they're not there on the weekend and that's when-

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah. I'm not going to say his name because this isn't going to paint him in the best light, even though I do actually like this person, especially after we were in those battles together. He would look for ways to get leverage on them. So, " Hey, I know that your boss, because he knew me, wants you here. You chose not to be here because you were going to," wherever, Vegas, wherever you were going for the weekend, " The job was working, was convenient for you, you didn't show up. So now that you want to show up and you want to have input, well we're going to have to have a conversation about how you weren't here during this time." And so people would not want to put themselves in that situation so they would make different decisions. And so this project manager would put people in that spot if he could. And some of that stuff wouldn't be accepted now. But at the same time, if you put a safety professional out there that was smart enough not to fall for that number one, but then number two would push back on him in the right ways, he would change. He would do things what you wanted, rarely the first time, and rarely without some kind of comment back and forth. But if you stood your ground, he would be more than accommodating. And in some of the most difficult situations I've ever been in as a professional, including when someone fell from 80 plus feet and unfortunately lost his life, this project manager performed better than any other project manager I'd worked with. And I'd worked with people that you would think they would handle the situation a lot better. But when it really hit the fan, they didn't handle the situation well. When things were going good, they were goo. But when things got to be where you really needed the leader, some of the people that I thought would be the best from a safety standpoint and people like this, project manager had high expectations, he was. So long- winded way of saying, I focused more on who the leader of the project was, his team, and then how do we offset his team or her team. If there's people that are safety- minded on the project, then I don't need as strong of a safety professional. If you got people that are already going to lay the law down, I could bring a junior person on here that's going to learn, right? They're going to learn underneath this person, or they can be a milder personality because the project manager isn't going to test them in that way. And so it was really looking at what they needed to round out their team. And then my job was to make sure that I found places for everyone who was competent, and then put the right people in the right spots at the right time, regardless of what they wanted. It was really what the project needed.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. I appreciate that detailed explanation. And there's a lot of nuance there, but the simplicity of it is you've got to build around the leader. There's an important role for the leader in any team. Particularly when you're in a project environment, you're throwing lots of people together that haven't always worked together. And I think that's often something that's overlooked when people do start talking about teams. They start looking at workshops and they start looking at all of these different things that the team need to do, but they're not really focusing closely on what standards is the leader setting, what is their style. So I like that you bring that into focus. So getting back to leaders, another piece of your story that I really enjoyed Matthew is where you talked about moving from BD into marketing, and it sounds like a leader had a big role to play there. You said you're at Kiewit and your leader said, " Hey, if you want to have a go at that, take it on." That's a pretty bold, exciting level of encouragement to get from a leader in a team setting.

Matthew Winklestine: Absolutely. And he not only provided the permission, he cleared the way and made sure that I was protected internally while I was developing the idea and proving that it would work. He saw the vision even though he probably didn't see it 100%, he saw where I was going directionally and really helped me cultivate and shape it to be the right thing that the organization needed. And he was extremely patient with me during times when I didn't quite see the big picture. I was too wrapped up in the small things that I was doing. So he helped me pull that out a couple times. And then he was a magnificent political advocate for me, where I could tell if people had talked to him because they spoke about the things I was doing differently. And so he was a fantastic leader from just seeing it, giving me the permission, but also giving me the space and the protection to do it. I never felt like I was in one of those really high consequence political environments, where if this doesn't work, I'm in a bad way. It was, " If this doesn't work, I'm going to learn from it, explain why it didn't work, how we're going to adjust, and that's going to be acceptable."

Dane Groeneveld: Bosses like that are so important. I've had bosses like that in my career that were really critical to shaping opportunities for growth and development. And I've also had bosses that walk in and say, " You need to sign in blood that this is going to get done by this date. And if it fails, it's on you." So I've definitely seen who I grow under and who I don't. But it's very cool. And you used a really good piece of language there, which is clearing the way. So it's not just giving you the chance to go and do it, it's then putting the time and effort into creating that safe space and championing why your project, or new approach, or new idea is important for the team.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah. And putting himself out there in a sense. By communicating about something, even though people may not view it this way, he's utilizing his political capital. People did not think positive of me at the time, because I was newer at the company. People that knew me may have liked me, but I didn't have a reputation with inside that organization as doing anything because I had just started. He had a reputation, he put his on the line time and time again, to say good things about me in situations when he didn't necessarily have to either. That was another big way he cleared the way and I'm super grateful for it.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really cool. And I like that it's a call to action for leaders that are in teams that are trying to achieve new things that, " Hey, don't just expect that the team member's going to turn up and do it all. What skin are you putting in the game?" And that's not necessarily your hours around a whiteboard or smashing the keys. It could be going and having those clear the way meetings, or seeking feedback off others so that you can bring feedback that a more junior team member wouldn't get off senior team members. There's a lot of different ways to do that.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you're familiar with the old HP commercial, or GE, maybe it is. It's called Ideas are Ugly, and so it's this little white gremlin looking thing and it's covered in trash and they bring it in and they take care of and they develop it. And the conclusion of the commercial is this beautiful looking white creature, with peacock style colors coming behind it. And I think that is the best literal example of idea cultivation that I've ever seen because it's like that, right? When you first spit out an idea, it's clumsy. It's probably not 100% there. There's things that aren't correct and you learn through these conversations. And if people don't help you get past that and you've never had to get past that, it's easy to get dejected and just say, " This isn't worth it. I'm not going to do this."

Dane Groeneveld: I love that. I'm going to get Alicia to work with me in tracking that advertisement down. We might share that when we publish the show. It's so much aligned with a former guest we had on the show, Luke Williams who wrote the book Disrupt, and he talks about ideas get better as you share them. He actually put a really good post out the other week he was talking about a chair. He is like, " If there's a chair in the room, only one person can use that chair at any time. But if there's an idea in the room, everyone can take that idea. There can be 50 people in the room and everyone can touch that idea, and think about it in the context of what they're trying to do at work or what they might do differently in that situation." So ideas are so not only valuable in the way that you can spread them, but they're so easily cultivated, it actually takes a team to sharpen the best ideas.

Matthew Winklestine: Absolutely. And we talked a lot about construction projects. That has to happen at so much quicker of a pace on a construction project. And some people probably heard what I said originally, and they didn't understand why I would match the people that I was selecting on the project because of the project manager, and what I think of as trust. If you don't know someone, you don't inherently trust them. And so it takes time to develop that trust. And if you're not able to develop that trust, any idea is going to have to go through another filter before people really listen to it. And so if you're in a big project, and someone's scope isn't going well, and an adjacent superintendent chimes in and says, " Hey, what if you did it like this?" How is that received? And if it's not received with trust, and that they believe it's coming from a place of, " Hey, we want to see this get better," the person's not going to receive it well, and it's going to take a long time for that idea to really gain enough traction to use versus where you have that trust, you know that this person wants what's best for the project. And you're like, " You know what? I hadn't thought of that. Let's get the whiteboard out. Let's look at the drawings." And it has to happen in a shift, a half a shift. This has to be going, going, going. And some of these problems, they may only last two days. Well, that's four shifts. And four shifts, and an outage that may have 90 or 180, that's not a lot of time. It's not the same thing as when you have quarters and calendar years, and it's different. And so that teamwork environment is so important to get those ideas out, and to get what's best for the client and for the company.

Dane Groeneveld: I'd never thought of it in shifts. And I guess that shows about your level of expertise experience in particularly those outages, turnaround environments. So for our listeners that don't know, a turnaround environment, there's an active refinery or power station that needs maintenance work, and they plan all of the work, they shut the facility down, which means they're getting electricity or fuel from other facilities for that time period. And while it's shut down, you've got crews working around the clock to get all of the work done. So what's fascinating about that is like you say, running two shifts or three shifts of time, there's a lot of labor on thousands of people and pieces of equipment on some of these sites. So a couple of shifts really puts you back. It's not only the cost and focus of the team doing the work, but then if the outage goes longer, that's more days of lost revenue. It's high pressure, high stakes environment.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you could have a crew of 200 people that you don't know what the solution is and you don't have them on something productive. There's not one outage schedule that gets developed with that much dead time. So when you start to get into those delays, those shifts add up so quickly, and then it makes the rest of the project so much harder because you're trying to make that up the rest of the time.

Dane Groeneveld: And I wonder then if you take that as an exercise, the impact of a couple of shifts where people don't know how to be productive, I wonder how much that just seeps into the background in organizations doing more corporate work, that's more like continuous, that isn't boxed off. How much leakage and fallout is happening there in those teams, because there isn't clarity? I mean, I don't know where the data is, but I bet it's a scary number.

Matthew Winklestine: Oh yeah. I think about that often too, particularly... And I've noticed people's reluctance to go to remote or hybrid environments. And when I listen to their reasons, I understand the team component, I understand the collaboration component. But the thing that I see is a majority of leaders, especially in this industry, they don't define objectives. And so much of what people do is still based on FaceTime. So if they're not in their cubicle, if they're not in this area, if they're not responding to this email, they must not be working. But conversely, if they are doing those things, they must be working. And that's such a fallacy. But it makes people feel better that they're there and instead of just saying, " Hey, you know what, it would actually be better if we did objective based work period, then we would actually be able to see who's performing and who's not performing. And it would make it a lot simpler," but I know it's not simple to develop that work process. But I see a lot of that. And I think from a corporate standpoint and a large company standpoint, at some level, you don't want to know the answer, right? It's show up. Budget's okay, just keep going.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting, because I think in a project environment where you do have a schedule, you reference the schedule there earlier, and the schedule's being checked against and reported on every day, that is a granular level of detail that a lot of teams don't have. And so sometimes, I think leaders can get a little bit too lofty and too exclusive in setting their strategy and objectives, and then not really cascading it down to the team that's doing the work in what is really more simply the tactics behind the strategy. " Hey, we need to achieve these three things in this format by this time." Sometimes, that codification is missing too, but I guess that's one of the best practices you can take from construction and engineering world into any team or business.

Matthew Winklestine: Absolutely. I believe in this even more now that I have my own business. I believed in it before too, but even more now. If you can take a problem and try and reverse engineer it, even if it's not 100% accurate and get the steps, it's a whole heck of a lot of easier to start to tackle that problem. One of the things that we pride ourselves on when we work with customers, particularly large customers, is we create a process. So that way at the end of this, you're going to have step- by- step instructions of how to do what we taught you to do. That way you can follow those. And one of the things that I talk to my clients about is it normalizes your performance. There's a smaller or small, I would say, number of people that can look at a problem ambiguously and say, " Okay, I'm going to figure this out. Here's how I'm going to figure this out." Most people need some direction, they need some steps, and they'll get really wrapped around the axle if there isn't that. And so if you can create a process and then people follow the process for people that aren't able to look at problems that way, they can still solve the problem. And for even people that are listening to this, they're saying, " I know how to solve those problems, because I'm one of those people." When you have a process and you start to get the process, your work product starts to go up too because you're not thinking about what you're doing next. You already know what the process is, you just got to do the process well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that. Actually, one of my team members, Andrew Uprichard, he called me out... Not called me out. He challenged me the other day on how we were running a certain type of meeting in the team and he said, " I love the kind of facilitate on the run approach. It keeps it fresh and interesting for the team, but it also takes a lot of work for the team to follow. And actually, if we had a better set out agenda and we all knew how many minutes we were going to talk to each piece, then we might lose a little bit of the excitement, but we might see a lift in productivity and contribution." So it was a really good challenge and good reframe of an opportunity there to help the team sort of play better.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah, I'll be interested to hear how that goes in the future. I feel like team meetings are tough to solve, because they're necessary for a lot of reasons. And you get one, right, and you get a process right, and you get an agenda right. And four months later it's rubber- stamped and it's like, " Wait a second, this meeting's not working anymore. We need to change it again." It's like, oh, all right, let's revisit this. But maybe it's our human condition. We need novelty.

Dane Groeneveld: I had, Matthew, another question. Going back to your intro, you said that the first job you took in the nuclear outage world was appealing, because you worked for nine months and you had three months off. So what'd you get to do in the three months that you're not at work?

Matthew Winklestine: Oh man. That summer I did a lot. A lot of things that you would expect a 20- something year old to do. I think I went to Vegas. I went out west. I did a lot with that. And actually, so when I went to work in the construction industry, I went to work for a company called Babcock& Wilcox, and the first project I got put on was one of those large environmental projects that was over a year long. And I was in the middle of nowhere Indiana. And the project was getting ready to get done and I had developed somewhat of a reputation and the regional manager said, " Hey, they need some help out west in Long Beach, California. I don't know if you want to even go out." I'm like, " Yes, yes, please. I would love to be able to take that." And so I got out there and they wanted me to stay, and one of their pitches is, " Hey, we mostly do turnaround work." I'm like, "So I'll be back in this where I'm off in the summer." And so I did that. And I'll never forget, I did that for... I had one summer. It was incredible. The next summer, which from a professional standpoint, it was great. From a personal standpoint, it did not work out so well. So we were wrapping up a project that I really lobbied hard to get on, so proud that I was able to get on there. The PM gave me a chance, it went well and I was getting ready to go to New Zealand. I was like, " I'm going, you know what? I didn't get to snowboard at all this winter." I was on all these turns. " I'm going to go to New Zealand. I'm go to Mount Ruapehu." I don't even know if I'm saying that correct, " And I'm going to snowboard and try and become a ski instructor." And so I was down the process of trying to get my temporary work visa and all that stuff. And the area construction manager at the time, he used to call me sweet pea. He said, " What are your summer plans sweet pea?" I said, " I'm going to be in New Zealand." He said, " You're going to be in Napa," which is where the office was. I said, " No, I'm going to New Zealand. As soon as this project is done, I'm going to New Zealand." He said, " Hey, we've got this regional meeting and then we'll be able to keep you busy in the office." I said, " No, I'm going to New Zealand." Then he circled back and in very direct terms told me that, " If you want to move up in this company and you want to maintain the momentum you have, your ass is not going to New Zealand. You're going to be in Napa and you're going to be doing this here in the summer." And he said, " It's your call." He said, " But don't think when you get back to New Zealand, you're going to be in the same spot you're in now." And I can look at it one of two ways. I can say, " Hey, I missed an opportunity to go to New Zealand." But from a career standpoint, and I still had a great time that summer being at my house in Sacramento, it was great, because I didn't live in Napa because it's ridiculously expensive. But it was one of those things where I liked that idea. I didn't get to live it as much as I would like to, and fortunately, I think I made the correct grownup decision when I was faced with the reality of, " Hey, this childhood thing you want to do is great, but you're not going to be in charge when you get back."

Dane Groeneveld: No, it sounds like sounds another good leader placing trust in you and you placing trust in them.

Matthew Winklestine: Yes. This particular leader, he was extremely hard on me. To this day, I've never had anyone that... I played sports my whole life and had hard basketball coaches, hard football coaches. I never had anyone that was this hard on me in my life and never had anyone that was so much about the details. It was painful at times, but I learned so much. And he was a no- nonsense guy. I remember one time we had to make these turnover binders, so I'm aging myself. So when you turn over to the customer, there were no digital files. You had to print all the Word documents off, and then put it into a QA package, and you have a safety package, and so you got to get this thing done. So one of the things, he had a great idea, he'd templatize it, and so then you would build it all before. And he wanted this done by an arbitrary date, and so I didn't get it done by the arbitrary date, and it was Friday. And he said, " You're not leaving here until this is done." I was like, " It's Friday at 3: 00. I'm going to Midtown Sacramento right now. Actually, I am going to leave here." He's like, " If you walk out that door," gave me the whole ride act. And I had to stay in that office. He didn't stay with me of course. I stayed in that office until 10:00 at night on a Friday fixing that. And some people will say, " That's ridiculous and you missed a Friday." But it taught me a valuable lesson about procrastination. And so once again, I've been so fortunate to have the leaders, but not only have the right leaders, I've had the right leaders for the right season. The leader that I described at Kiewit, if he was my leader in the beginning, I wouldn't have grown as much. First of all, he probably wouldn't have the patience to deal with me, but then he also wouldn't have been as hard and as rigorous on me and would've probably let some more things go, thinking that I was going to get out of it right, where this leader was not. I learned detail from him, and that allowed me to be successful underneath the leaders that followed in a way that I don't think I wouldn't have been if I wouldn't have had that interaction.

Dane Groeneveld: I really, really think it's powerful the way that you say right leader for the right season. And I think even earlier, I heard you talk about the right leader for the right project. So season project, I guess you can interchange depending on what industry or business line you're in, but it is, it's important. And it adds a nuance to any individual or team that when you are making a decision about which job to take or which company to join, is the leader of that team or project going to be best serving you, the growth that you are looking for? It's a really interesting question. And I guess that ties very heavily into the work that you are doing with engaging perspectives in helping to build more of that leader's profile and story for the team and for prospective team members.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I believed early on, and has proved out to be true, and continues to be more true is people care and they pay more attention to the leaders they work with. If you've had an experience like mine, the difference in working for a really great company and a really poor company is no different depending on how the leader is. You might have more difficulty getting raises in a company that's more challenged, but you can be in a company that is booming and doing really well, it's still tough for you to get a raise. It's still tough for you to get support doing this. The company can be multi- billion dollars and you're still getting$ 5, 000 to try and execute your idea that you just told them was going to cost 80. That stuff still happens depending on who the leader is. And I think people for a long time overemphasized on the brand, and I still see young people do that. " I want to work for Apple, I want to work for this company, I want to work for that company." Even our space. " I want to work for a company like Kiewit." Kiewit's great, but there are leaders in Kiewit that aren't great and they wouldn't be good to work for, even though most of them are good, some of them aren't. And conversely, Babcock& Wilcox not as great of a company where just from a market standpoint, they're challenged, mostly focused on fossil fuel generation, mostly coal- fired until 10 years ago. Not as good of an environment necessarily, but I know leaders in there that if you work for them, you would learn a lot more than you would working for other leaders in an extremely successful company. And so what we do for particularly these VPs and above is you don't want to rely just in HR to attract talent. And the leaders that are really good at attracting talent are constantly doing it. And I experienced that, where people would have meetings with me for no reason. They were just trying to get to know who I was. Can I be of value to them later? And so what we do through people's LinkedIn profile is it started out as attracting customers and we still have that aim, but we ghostwrite content on their behalf to also attract talent. So you're not just attracting talent that sees a job opening, you're getting that talent that they see this leader, they're interested in working for the leader. And then what happens 90% of the time is that person that's a star employee is upset, frustrated, wants to make a change for whatever reason. They do not go on the open job market. They reach out to these leaders and they say, " Hey, I'm thinking of making a change." And then all of a sudden that person that was never actually on the market is now in your organization. And so that has been the power of posting from people's account and putting that point of view out there, and attracting the right people. And people get hung up on that term the right people. The right people means a lot of different things. The right people changes depending on who you're working for, what the season is. So when you use that word, you could be the right person for one leader and not for another. It says nothing about you. It's just not what you need in that time. And so when leaders put their perspective out there, and put their mission out there, and talk about it, they get a lot more like- minded people. They get a lot more people that fit in the season that they're in now and with the team that they're trying to grow.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, I think that's super powerful. And it's a power play, in fact, both for the candidate... Because if you're a candidate, we all know how soul- destroying it can be to be out doing a job search, putting your digital resume up on all of these different job platforms, applying for these jobs, interacting with bots. It's one of the worst customer experiences ever being a job candidate. And then that doesn't matter what level you're at. I've got a lot of friends right now who are 20, 30 years deep into their career and really experts, and they're still struggling in some of those elements just the same as some graduates might be. But it's a power play if you can be as a candidate constantly scanning for the leaders in your industry, market segment, geography that appeal to you, that talk a language that excites you, that are working on cool projects or cool products that you can then reach out to them and say, " Hey, I've been following you. I like this about what I see in the way you and your teams are doing work, and I'd love to be a part of it." You can start that conversation even when you're not job hunting. It's super I think freeing, and it's a very mature way to go about job security, job protection, career development on the candidate side.

Matthew Winklestine: Absolutely. I see people leverage it two different ways. A majority of the time, it is more accidental in nature. And I don't mean it's an accident they reached out, but I have a great clip that I like to post every so often. It's from one of our clients and he's a runner in gunner. He runs projects and he also talks to customers and goes out and gets to work. And he tells this great story about how he had been consuming my customer's content, and then he had a couple drinks on a beach on vacation, looked over to his wife and said, " I want to go work for this guy." And she said, " Do it then." And he reached out and two weeks later, three weeks later, he's at that company. That's what I hear a lot more of people. It hits them. People that are clever and motivated, they use it the way that you're describing. That is the most powerful way where you're constantly... This is the way I used it when I was in business development. I'm connecting with everyone who I think could be a customer or everyone I think could be a good boss. And then that way they have exposure to me, but I have exposure to them. And then depending on what surfaces in my newsfeed, depends on how much more of their stuff I want to see or not want to see. And so I try and try and people still use that as, " Hey, just connect with people. Don't spam people," but just by connecting with them, if you post, they're likely to see your content. And conversely, if they're posting something, you're going to see their content.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's really neat. And I guess on the flip side, for that hiring manager that you're helping build profile for, they've got an opportunity by being out there in the way that they are, to catch that individual that you referenced who's on the beach thinking about something new and just has a spark. But they also, if they've got someone in an interview process, let's say I've been working with you to build a profile, a candidate comes in. Candidate can go and look and learn a lot about me as a hiring manager based on what I've been putting out there on LinkedIn. And that's powerful too, because we've been living in a talent short market for a long time. And most of the good candidates, if you can't get them from that sort of beach light bulb moment, and it's just one- on- one, if you are interviewing a candidate as one of four or five potential jobs that they could be getting right now, how are you differentiating? We don't get a lot of time together in an interview.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah. And I believe this firmly. Great candidates don't make it on the market very often. They look more than they actually make it onto the market. And so if you're not out there, you're missing a lot of those people. And conversely, I feel the same way about jobs, where if you see a job posting on LinkedIn, not don't apply to it. But if you think you're in a good position to get that job, no matter what your experience is, you're fooling yourself. You have to get through the artificial intelligence screen, then you have to get through the human that doesn't know a lot about what you do screen. Then before you finally get to the person that might be the hiring manager. So that process, it can weed out the right people too, because maybe they don't have this particular line in their post, but if that same candidate was able to get in contact with the hiring manager, the hiring manager would offer them a job on the spot.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, exactly. I like that. I can see a poster of the different stages of pain dealing with the AI, and then the less than fully informed human screen.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah. That's why I love talking to you about recruiting and talent, because you get the importance of the dynamic and how big of a role people play, and how big of a role an individual can play in a project. And I've met, fortunately done a lot, and so I've met people that do what you do, and they don't have the same passion, the same care, and deliver the same result. That also pushes people to do different things and to try new things. One of my favorite stories at Kiewit was there was a great gal in HR and she's like, " I love what you're doing." She ended up taking, she developed her own little system to be able to do this, and then she left and does it somewhere else now. And I love when we can come together like that, and people take new ideas and reshape them. When I started doing this, I did not understand that that's what people needed. So my focus was to attract customers, attract customers, attract customers, and time and time again it was, " I don't need more customers. I don't need more customers, I need more people. I need more people, I need more people." And people say they don't need new customers until they do. And so that proves not to be true over time. But there's a much bigger market being able to demonstrate that you can attract those type of people. The client, the smaller client that I talked about, we've added two people to his headcount that are leaders running millions of dollars worth of work. What's that mean to them? What does that mean to their business that they can chase that much more work? And when they're the right people like these two individuals are, they're attracting people in their local geography that they'd never have access to unless they had these people.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And I actually love that as a closing point, which is that in today's age, I saw a really good post the other day about a tech company that it's been spending hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars on its BDRs just to try and build top of funnel. And it's just like, hey, it's so much more about word of mouth. Now go and hire the right team members, and the right team members are going to bring you into the right conversations with customers. And often, it's the capability and the capacity of your team that's going to sell to customers in today's information age, not how sharp your marketing story is. It gets back to the humans who do the real work. So I think that's a really cool add to what you are doing. It's not just helping them find talent, it's helping them build their business through bringing great people in.

Matthew Winklestine: Yeah, absolutely. And if you're not telling your story, someone else is. And you want to be able to take control of that narrative and you want to be able to tell the story, and people want to hear those. It sounds dumb, but people want to hear those stories. They want to know who they're working with. And no matter what capacity is, if you're a little vendor, if you're a big vendor, if you're a partner, people, they want to know who they're working with.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's super cool. Well, it's been a great conversation, Matthew. I've got a few points that I summarized here that you touched on and just really popped. So I love the way at the beginning you talked about fitting the right team members around the leader, that it's very important that the leader is there to set the standards, but you also need to make sure that you're serving them with the right sort of throttling rate of different people, different styles, different skills. Staying with the leader theme, I love the story about the leader that supported you to move from BD into marketing, and the way that you specifically called out the role of leaders clearing a path and leveraging, deploying some of their political currency to build trust and build feedback for the new idea. Tying into that, the cultivating of ideas, I love the little white creature story that you shared. But just in general, the importance of ideas in teams, and that tied into your call- out on trust and trust being an accelerator for the adoption of ideas, particularly in a high- paced construction environment. So all of those were just super cool call- outs in the early part of the conversation. And then obviously, closing out with just the importance of telling the story of a leader. We talked a lot about those leadership behaviors. But if you really want to build teams, then as a leader, you need to be out there telling your story so you can connect with the right employees and customers. I really love the way that you're bringing that all together for teams, particularly in the engineering construction world. That going back to some of our opening statements, it's always been a lot about the work, and I think it can continue to be about the work and about the people with this new sort of framework.

Matthew Winklestine: There is no work without the people. At some point when you're in this industry, somebody has to put their hands on something to make it happen, whether you're the GC and you're subbing it, and they're subbing it, and they're subbing it, at some point people have to actually do the work. And it takes people to lead people. It takes people to organize people. It doesn't matter what technology you have if you don't have the right people, and that's also what you do, a fantastic job of finding those right people and getting the right fit people for the project. And I hope my passion comes through for that because I believe it's, once again, an underrated thing that people talk about, and that people don't understand how important that dynamic is on projects.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. All about the people. Well Matthew, people want to, listeners out there want to talk to you about the work that you do with Engaging Perspectives in building profile and building audience there, or if they want to follow the podcast, how do they best find you and your best work?

Matthew Winklestine: Simply follow me on LinkedIn. I'm on other channels, I do different things. We have a company page, all that stuff, but the best thing to do is just connect with me. I have a small team that we continue to grow, but my LinkedIn profile acts like our branding mouthpiece, not only for me but for my team. So if you're interested in seeing what I do, you want to have a conversation with me or you want to understand what the team's doing, connect with me on LinkedIn.

Dane Groeneveld: I look forward to connecting and doing some work together in the future.

Matthew Winklestine: Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition, and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future we're collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to thefutureofteamwork.com. There you can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together we can build The Future Of Teamwork. Until next time.