If you've ever felt that knot in your stomach, wondering whether your urgency crossed a line, or if you've pushed for.

Short term results that might actually be damaging your long term success, you're going to connect deeply with this episode. Too many leaders push for speed only to watch their culture, execution and people crumble under pressure.

My biggest barrier was my own impatience with results. The guy who promoted me, he had to yank me out of leadership after 2/4.

And today's guest knows exactly what it feels like. Josh Epstein, now the President and Chief Business Officer Coder, didn't start out as the calm, aligned leader he is today.

I was treating sales leadership like I was a seller and I was too impatient. If you're seeing people working 80 hours a week, I think weak leadership is letting that happen.

First, you'll scare the leadership failure that.

Forced Josh to rethink how speed actually works. Then the mindset shift that helps him lead people doing work that he's actually never done before, himself as the expert. And finally, the practical habits and systems that any leader can use to create clarity, protect their team from burnout, and still move fast. Faster than ever.

Working harder, stupider is the dumbest thing I've ever heard and I see it all the time. We can move faster now because I understand them, they understand me. Instead of breaking stuff over here, I can move us faster over here.

If you want to drive results without burning your people out, let's get into it. Welcome back to Lead the Team. I'm your host Ben Fanning, and this conversation that you're going to hear is meant to challenge, inspire and ripple out. It's not just a podcast. It's a positive movement to build better leaders. And you can help by taking just 10 seconds to rate and follow on Apple, Spotify and YouTube and drop a quick review over on Apple. This helps more bold leaders discover the show and keeps the mission alive. Enjoy.

What's been your biggest barrier to effective leadership?

My biggest barrier when I was getting into leadership about 15 years ago was my own impatience with results. And so I, you know, I came from a, I, I started out as a seller, moved into leadership. The guy who promoted me, who I love, still close with, he had to yank me out of leadership after two quarters because I was, I was treating lead sales leadership like it was a, like I was a seller and I was too impatient and I was, you know, it wasn't very effective. We, we had two good quarters and he demoted me back to, back to being an IC because I was a little too Impatient with everybody. So I think that that's, over time, I've been able to turn that into a bit of a superpower. Right. I've learned my lesson. I've learned that everybody, everybody has to move at their own pace. But if I could move them a little faster, if I can give them a little bit more of a sense of impatience with themselves and with their customers. We'Ll all benefit from that.

So a lot of executives might say, well, impatience is a good thing because we got to get results around here. We've got investors to think about, we got results to hit. I want the most impatient person I can think of as president of my, of this company.

I think there's a, there's a balance between moving fast and breaking things and getting what you need done done. And you know, you know, I'm, I'm brand new in this. So, you know, I've got, I've got three teams that I'm running that I've never done the job right, so I've never been in their shoes. I've never, you know, I've never carried the shovel and, and scooped the, the dirt, which, you know, is I think, really what we're doing. And so I have to, I, I can't, I can't exercise my impatience like I can with a sales team or I can with a, you know, with a go to market team, because I don't understand what I don't understand. And so that's been one of my, you know, one of the, one of the things that I've been enjoying about this is moving as quickly as possible without scaring the, out of people.

What's the worst of, the worst of your impatient, your impatience? Greatest hits in terms of how it broke earlier and then maybe give us like the, the flip side of when it, when impatience turns good. But like when, when earlier, did it, did it break things?

I think the thing that's been most impactful for me in, in not in being impatient, but not breaking things is being impatient with the idea of being explicit versus implicit. So I'll move really quickly. I'll get people to understand where we need to go faster than they're comfortable with, because I can be very clear on what we're trying to do and why. And I think a lot of times leaders, myself included, we assume everybody knows what we're thinking and we assume everybody knows what we're trying to get done. It's obvious to us, don't, this is stupid. This is easy. And so we're running 100 miles an hour. And we're literally running people over and they have no idea why, versus saying, hey, let's, you know, we all know Simon Sinek. We all know, start with Y. We all know all the leadership principles in the world. But if you don't do that stuff, if you skip those steps, you end up being less effective, less efficient. And so I've been able to move very quickly. And so, you know, when I'm, when I'm talking to a bunch of engineers or I've never written a line of code, if I explain to them what I'm trying to get done and why, they will then come back to me and go, hey, that thing you want to do, it's going to be. It's going to break because of these three factors. Cool. How do I solve two of those three? I don't care about the third one. That sort of thing. So they then come back to me and they're coaching me, but I'm doing it from the point of view of we can move faster now because I understand them, they understand me, and I understand why they were moving slowly. They're still moving too slowly. But I can, Instead of, instead of breaking stuff over here, I can move us faster over here. So I think that's. The explicit versus implicit conversation is the thing that has been most valuable for me, both as a new leader here and just in general. Once I figured out that step, it makes everything else easier and people skip it all the time.

That's not about speed. It's like not working harder, but working smarter. And I've heard from leaders, hey, it's a lot easier to push people to think smarter than it is to push people to work harder. But what's your perspective on that?

People generally default to working harder. And I think that they burn themselves out if they're. Because they're trying to make. I believe in Maslov's hierarchy, too. So people are trying to get. People want to make their leadership happy. They want to feel that safety in that conversation. And so they'll do stupid things to make their leadership happy. And so if you're, if you're on the other side of that and you're seeing people that are just, they're working 80 hours a week. They're, they're skipping weddings, they're doing whatever they need to do to get the job done. I think weak leadership is letting that happen. And strong leadership is stepping in front of that and saying, hey, I, I don't need you doing 80, 100 hours a week. The 90 90, 60 day or 996 thing is, is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And I will argue all day long how ineffective and inefficient that model is for, for companies of our size. Where I, where I think you, where I think you. This. The superpower that you unlock is when you get people that are working at their, at their strongest level with the most passion, the most emotion, the most collaboration. And you can extend that period of time to, you know, 50, whatever hours a week. But I think working harder, stupider, is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And I see it all the time. It's a lot about not wasting time and not getting distracted by things that are outside of the strategy. And so when I moved into the revenue role of coder, one of the first things I did was I sort of forced everybody to write down in revenue what they were doing and why. The role that I'm in now, I took all four of my new leaders and I basically said, hey, write a TED Talk for me. Teach me what you're doing and why. And what I learned very quickly was that nobody knew what anybody else was doing and why. And so then I took them to an off site for a day and I said, okay, get up on stage and, and do the TED Talk. And so everybody, you know, we spent a day together, everybody sort of teaching everybody else what they're doing and why. And then we all figured out very quickly, myself included, that we didn't have an aligned strategy. The product strategy, the go to market strategy, and the marketing strategy were all one or two degrees off from each other. And so, and that sounds like no big deal, but it's a huge deal because what would happen is somebody in marketing would have a great idea. They would go to sales and they would, they would, they would talk about it. The person would think they understood what they were doing, and so they would partner together and the thing would be a mess and we would lose time. I create a space every week for my leaders to fight with each other. And so, and I mean fight in terms of debate, you know, debate on uncomfortable things. Now that they understand where they're coming from, when somebody does something that somebody else disagrees with, they're just disagreeing about that topic as opposed to the 20 other things that pissed them off in the past. Because we've resolved all those things.

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You're working from some very demanding customers who are in a very demanding industry. Slash, AI tech. It's not, it's not. It's one of the fastest, if not the fastest moving, industry changing industry.

Yeah.

And you're saying, hey, you know, guys, I don't want you to work harder. I don't want you going beyond 50 hours normally, but I want you to get more done than you've ever gotten done before in those 50 hours. Are you helping them? Like, what are you to foster that culture and maybe you're having to change, help them change how they work. What are the challenges that you see ahead and what's the leadership perspective that you're bringing to this?

I think the challenges are that nobody, nobody but a very, very select few people truly understand what's coming. I put myself in the, in the bucket of. I don't truly understand what's coming either. I come, I come into most things from, from an optimistic and growth perspective. And so I see the value of what, what AI from, especially in the tech space, what's coming. I think at the end of the day, you either are afraid of something or you embrace it. And if it turns out to be like, I was here for the dot com bust, I was here for the cloud bust, there's going to be an AI bubble that bursts. I don't think that. I'm not even remotely worried about it because I know it's coming. The other side of the bubble is going to be where real ROI and real problem solving starts to show up. Right now people are ideating and, you know, coming up with ideas of what they think is real. But there's so much money being thrown after this thing that I think it has to sort of settle down. So my leadership style that I'm taking is I'm very comfortable being uncomfortable. Right. Change is inevitable. You don't do series B, series A, series B companies without that comfort level, or if you do, you're gonna, you're gonna drive yourself crazy. I think we have to assume it's gonna work and I think we have to assume it's gonna become part of the day to day of what we, what we all Do I think the economic. I heard a guy talking about this yesterday. I think the economic impact of AI is the thing I'm most concerned about. Because if we don't think like socialists when it comes to AI economically, I think we, we could be putting ourselves at a lot of risk ourselves as humans. Right. Because if there's only a couple thousand humans that benefit from, from AI, then there's millions and millions of humans that don't benefit financially. I mean, so what I'm hoping is that AI. Allows people to get onboarded faster, to add value faster, to get creative faster. I don't want to rely on AI to be sort of the bulk of what happens in life. I like people, I want to keep people healthy and wealthy and doing their thing. But if we don't watch out, there's going to be a dozen people that, that are benefiting from this and the rest of us are going to be in a lot of trouble.

Yeah. So what are the guardrails that you think we should be considering right now on that?

I think the guardrails need to be that, that protecting humanity and protecting humans needs to be as high a priority as making money. And I know that sounds socialistic and I'm not in any way, but when I look at, when I look at what social media is done, when I look at the way our kids are reacting to this, you know, the sort of mass indoctrination, I worry about that I want Anthropic to win, let me put it that way. I want Anthropic to win because Anthropic is actually looking at things from the perspective of what's good for the long term humanity. They want to make a lot of money, but they want to make a lot of money in a way that doesn't disable the rest of the economy. And that's what I'm looking for.

The workforce will change. They're going to have to keep skills sharp and upskilling and all this other stuff. But it makes a big difference if the leaders are talking about it enabling.

Human possibilities versus completely replacing them.

And if you're in the replacement category, your team's going to feel that even if for a while they feel like they're part of it and they're winning.

Through that eventually they're looking over their shoulder. The smart ones are looking over their shoulder too early on and I, and I think their productivity goes down. But you have to worry about the middle. Right. So senior leaders are going to be fine. Right? The, the, the, the, the early, early Career folks who embrace AI are going to be fine. It's the people who are in their, in their late 20s to early 40s right now that are stuck in the middle that, that if they embrace AI, they potentially replace themselves right over time. And if they ignore AI, they're going to get moved out because they're not productive. And that's where I, where what I want to figure out is how AI can empower middle management and the middle tier, because that, that, those, that 25 year gap between the kids right now and you and I, I think I'm older than you, but the, the, the people my age, that's where I'm most concerned about. And I want to figure out how we can empower them. I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, just give them, give money away. I want to figure out how AI can empower them to be more valuable, more effective. And so it's that middle management that I think we need to worry about.

And then I would say give me my recommendation, if I may be so bold. I'm assuming you're already doing this is invite those, those people in the middle into the conversation, harness their creativity, you know, let them propose their own TED talk on how they're going to add value here. And layered in with lots of impatience.

I like that. Layered in with impatience.

Josh, thank you for joining us on the show, my friend. It was a fun one.

Yeah, I appreciate it, Ben, thanks for having me.

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