S2E8 Andy Laudato – Be a Diode

[00:00:00] Preview

[00:00:01] Andy Laudato: ​I learned kinda halfway through my career that IT departments and IT leaders need to be their own marketing departments. So sometimes no one knows what you're doing and you're doing a lot.

[00:00:12] You know, I have a joke. If I could do it all myself, I would. And so, obviously you can't. And so the key to being successful is surrounding yourself with really talented people.

[00:00:20] Any kind of compliments, praise, recognition should flow right through you easily and go to your team. So when something great happens and you were getting told by the CEO, good job. Go. Oh look, it was the team.

[00:00:32] Praise and compliments go through you. All the crap stops at you.

[00:00:35] People will ask, what's your leadership style? And mine is to hire really, really great people, be really clear about the destination. Like, here's where we're going, and then get out of their way.

[00:00:52] Show Intro

[00:00:52] Ricardo Belmar: Welcome to Blade to Greatness, the podcast where retail leaders sharpen their edge, one executive skill at a time. As we uncover the [00:01:00] essential traits every retail leader needs to thrive.

[00:01:03] I'm Ricardo Belmar.

[00:01:05] Casey Golden: And I am Casey Golden.

[00:01:06] Each episode, we are joined by a guest who brings one transformative leadership skill into focus, and today's episode is all about the human side of innovation, because let's face it, tech doesn't innovate itself. People do.

[00:01:19] Ricardo Belmar: We're joined again by Andrew Laudato, COO of The Vitamin Shoppe and author of Fostering Innovation. And this time we're talking about how to build high performance teams that don't just execute, they elevate

[00:01:34] Casey Golden: Andy, shares some powerful leadership philosophies, like why you should

[00:01:38] be a diode,

[00:01:39] How to invest in your A players, and why empathy is your most underrated innovation tool.

[00:01:46] Ricardo Belmar: If you lead a team or want to lead a better one, and who doesn't, right? This episode is packed with insights you can use right now.

[00:01:55] Before we dive in with Andy, let me tell you about our new sponsor of the Retail Razor Podcast Network. Retail [00:02:00] Club. Join 2000 retail leaders at the RetailClub AI Festival.

[00:02:04] September 22nd to 24th in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beach side venue. Decision makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more and get your ticket today.

[00:02:27] Thank you to Retail Club for helping us bring you this podcast and the other shows in our podcast network.

[00:02:32] Casey Golden: I'll be there. Ricardo will be there and pretty sure Andy will be there. So come take it with us.

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[00:02:50] Ricardo Belmar: And check out the other shows in our Retail Razor Podcast Network, The Retail Razor Show, Retail Transformers, and Data Blades. You can find them in your favorite podcast player, [00:03:00] or visit our YouTube channel and find them all.

[00:03:02] Now, let's jump in. Here's our conversation with Andy Laudato.

[00:03:06] ​

[00:03:11] Welcome, Andy Laudato!

[00:03:11] Casey Golden: Andy, welcome back to the Blade to Greatness podcast.

[00:03:15] Andy Laudato: Thank you. Thank you very much Casey.

[00:03:17] Ricardo Belmar: So today, Andy, you're joining us to talk about another critical skill that retail leaders really need to master because it's so important to remember that you're leading people, not just technology. And that skill is, you know how to foster a high performing team. In your book, Fostering Innovation, you talk about how as a leader you need to "be a diode" when leading teams and building innovation.

[00:03:36] The Be a Diode Analogy

[00:03:36] Ricardo Belmar: So tell us more about what it means to Be a Diode and your approach to fostering high performing teams.

[00:03:41] Andy Laudato: Yeah. You know, I have a joke. If I could do it all myself, I would. And so, obviously you can't. And so the key to being successful is surrounding yourself with really talented people. I've been at this retail tech thing for a long, long time, and it's constant change. And, you know, the things I learned when I started are completely irrelevant.

[00:03:58] But the leadership skills those [00:04:00] remain and, the ability to be successful with good people. So people will ask, what's your leadership style? And mine is to hire really, really great people, be really clear about the destination. Like, here's where we're going, and then get out of their way. Sometimes I'll use the analogy that we're off in the woods and we need to get to Oz. And there's like these flying monkeys and this evil witch, and, there's this yellow road and talking trees and but when we get to Oz, it's gonna be great, right? We're gonna get a bath and some food and meet the wizard. So that's what leadership is, is talk about where you're going, but then let the team figure out how to get through all the perils and find the journey on their own. I was telling the story to someone and they're just looking at me like I felt I was crazy. And apparently they'd never seen the movie, the Wizard of Oz.

[00:04:44] Casey Golden: What?

[00:04:45] Ricardo Belmar: Really?

[00:04:45] Andy Laudato: Of viewers has never seen this movie before. You won't know, but I think most people probably get that,

[00:04:50] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:04:50] Casey Golden: Yeah, I think we, I mean by now, goodness gracious.

[00:04:54] Ricardo Belmar: you would think

[00:04:54] Andy Laudato: But imagine hearing all that, not

[00:04:56] Ricardo Belmar: and not knowing.

[00:04:57] Andy Laudato: About. I was definitely getting a strange look.

[00:04:59] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. [00:05:00] And look at you like you had three heads.

[00:05:01] Andy Laudato: So, Ricardo, mentioned Be a Diode, um, so I, I'll talk about what a diode is. A diode is an electronic component that's in our computers, our phones. And it has one simple job. It lets electricity flow freely one way and it blocks it the other way. That's all it does, and it's really important to make Yes, No, On, Off switches.

[00:05:19] So without diodes we wouldn't have computers.

[00:05:22] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:23] Andy Laudato: So in my head I found that a really good analogy for leadership. Any kind of compliments, praise, recognition should flow right through you easily and go to your team. So when something great happens and you were getting told by the CEO, good job.

[00:05:38] Go. Oh look, it was the team the opposite direction. Where, where it stops is any kind of complaints, problems, frustrations. As the leader, you need to take those. You need to take responsibility, accountability, and go, it's on me, it's my team. So again, a simple analogy, but just something to think about.

[00:05:55] Praise and compliments go through you. All the crap stops at you

[00:05:58] Casey Golden: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:05:59] No, I love [00:06:00] that.

[00:06:00] Applying the Philosophy Beyond IT

[00:06:00] Casey Golden: How can leaders apply this philosophy beyond IT?

[00:06:04] Andy Laudato: Yeah, I don't think it's really an IT leadership. I mean, I run more than IT in my current job, So, it's just really about sometimes looking for things that are right, not just looking for things that are wrong. Maybe I'm visiting the warehouse, one of our distribution centers. And if I see something that I don't think is ideal, I'll say something.

[00:06:21] But do you always say something when you see something that's really running well? Right. Or when's the last time you gave a compliment? Because email hadn't gone down in a year? So never, right?

[00:06:30] So. Looking for things that are right, then gives you something to give compliments. And then I learned kinda halfway through my career that IT departments and IT leaders need to be their own marketing departments. So sometimes no one knows what you're doing and you're doing a lot.

[00:06:47] I mean, I've people on my team stayed up all night and did a big change last night, and they're really tired today. It went perfectly, but I, nobody knows.

[00:06:54] Casey Golden: Yeah.

[00:06:55] Andy Laudato: knows that happened. Right.

[00:06:56] And that's what we want it to be. They're invisible by [00:07:00] design, but definitely make sure that we recognize them or even bring it up in a, in a next time we have a company town hall call 'em out and announce and you know, say it.

[00:07:07] And one of the guys on my team is great at, at doing analogies. I think all of us in tech have, do, I already talked to a couple analogies right, about the Flying Monkeys and although that one feels kind real, but.

[00:07:19] Taking that tech thing that we did, like, it was actually DNS and we're like, imagine if you had your house, but there were no address marks on it.

[00:07:25] Nobody could find it. You know, so we use simple things like that. That way you can make it relatable, but everyone also understands that people were up all night and, and they're back at the, on the call at seven in the morning to talk about it. So. I think some of the ways you can do that or expand on credit is to be really outward of looking for things that are right and talking about it more publicly.

[00:07:46] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. That's a good, that's a good point. It's, I it's kind of interesting how it is. A lot of people think of it in terms of, because you're dealing with a lot of systems and technologies, especially in your example, when you have a team that's up all night. Either upgrading something or, [00:08:00] or doing the maintenance on something or it's a technology piece.

[00:08:03] And if all goes well right then no one should even know what happened in, in a sense, right? So, and then if anything, everyone does here, people tend to think first about, oh, well it must be such a good technology you're using that made that possible when instead what you really wanna think is it's because the team is so good at doing this.

[00:08:18] They were able to get it done that way without any incident. And

[00:08:22] Celebrating Quiet Heroes

[00:08:22] Andy Laudato: I call 'em quiet heroes

[00:08:23] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, exactly.

[00:08:24] Andy Laudato: Someone double check something and they find something that would've gone bump in the night, but it didn't, you know? And sometimes the quiet heroes don't even tell anyone,

[00:08:32] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:08:33] Yeah.

[00:08:33] Andy Laudato: When there was a big third party outage, one of our our team members found something and fixed it really, really quickly and saved us a lot of pain. And we found out about it and, and celebrated that person. But that's what you want. You want the people to double check their

[00:08:47] work or look at that, or maybe they log on the weekend to make sure it's going right or but then on projects too, you know, this is a big part of what we do, creating value building and projects and, I don't know if we always celebrate [00:09:00] enough 'cause you get it done and there's a little bit of that sigh of relief. So you gotta take some time. I'll tell you a sandwich or a cake or something goes a long way with teams and especially teams that are only together par part-time.

[00:09:11] So do a multimillion dollar project. You can afford another couple hundred bucks for some lunch and retreat for the team. And we've turned some of our at, at The Vitamin Shoppe. We turned some of our IT people into celebrities 'cause we have a call every morning. And it's just a 10 minute call on online. But everybody talks and we invited the entire corporate office voluntarily if they want to come to the call.

[00:09:31] So we got a lot of fun characters that have good humor and celebrate. So getting people more known that are normally behind the scenes is something else I like to

[00:09:40] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:09:41] Other Leadership Practices for Balanced Work

[00:09:41] Ricardo Belmar: What were some other things, other leadership practices you found are really, really successful, and help build that engagement in those teams to really keep people excited about what they're doing and maintain that performance level as a high performing team.

[00:09:54] Andy Laudato: Yeah, well first of all, you gotta make sure the work is balanced, right? I mean, you can burn people out [00:10:00] for a short period of time, but not forever. So everybody's gonna put in a lot of hours at a certain time in their career to get something over the finish line, but that, that needs to be sustainable. I worked with someone once at worked eight to midnight every single day, five days a week.

[00:10:14] As much as I sort of respected it, when it was time to give more, he had no more to give.

[00:10:19] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:10:20] Andy Laudato: Right, that that was his normal. So making sure that people are balancing their work life balance so that when we do need you to ramp it up, you're there.

[00:10:27] I think that's really important. Listening to the team, I mean, nobody understands what's going on more than the people closer to, closest to the work. So, maybe you're a general and you go, go over the hill and the soldier's like, why don't we go around it? So listening to the team and go, oh, I think I have a better way to do this.

[00:10:45] Making sure there's input. 'cause sometimes the how is decided up front,

[00:10:49] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:49] Andy Laudato: think that's super important. And even if you're not agreeing or there's a good reason, let the person know, Hey, I hear you, but we can't do that because X, Y, Z. Or, that's a great idea. Or maybe there's a compromise. I [00:11:00] think that's really important.

[00:11:01] Career Development Planning

[00:11:01] Andy Laudato: I'm really big on what I call career development planning. And this is not performance management. This is about having people individually spend time thinking about what they want outta their career and writing it down on a piece of paper.

[00:11:13] Casey Golden: Yeah.

[00:11:14] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:11:14] Andy Laudato: I was CIO at a company before, and I used to think when I was younger that every single person wanted my job in the whole department. I went from computer programmer to pro, senior to manager, to director to vp, a CIO. So I had this false assumption that everybody was on that path.

[00:11:31] So I asked the team, I did a little, email, how many of you wanna be CIO? And it was like three people out of 150.

[00:11:38] Ricardo Belmar: hmm.

[00:11:39] Andy Laudato: And there, there's only three that weren't that smart.

[00:11:41] The rest were smart and they didn't want the job. And, uh, it got me going, oh, well what do they want? Right. And start asking em, what do you want? And some just wanted to do really meaningful work. Some wanted to work on modern, cool things and keep growing their knowledge. Others just wanna make a whole bunch of money.

[00:11:58] Like how do I maximize [00:12:00] my income? And some really wanted to minimize their time at work 'cause they wanted to have more time for their hobbies in their home. So we start thinking about individuals and letting them tell you what they want, as a leader, and then writing it down, which is key is so important.

[00:12:15] If you want to achieve your goal is to write it down. Then you can start building activities and programs and career paths around that. So. And when you're doing that for people, like sometimes the answer is not at the company where they work now,

[00:12:29] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:12:29] Andy Laudato: Right,

[00:12:30] We're not all gonna have 30 year careers at the same company, but a lot of times I find when you help people figure out what they want from their career, they may end up staying longer because they know that you're investing in that.

[00:12:41] And I always say like, if you wanna be an astronaut, you better be studying math and physics and doing pushups.

[00:12:46] And but if you don't wanna be an astronaut, but you wanna be a director or a leader, a senior architect, then you better be doing the things that are gonna get you there. And our job as leaders then, is to put the people in that position. I mean, if someone came [00:13:00] to me and they worked in IT and said they really want to be an accountant, I'd be like, great. I don't really understand that, but great. Why don't you do the IT budget, right? Or why don't you go spend a couple hours a week with someone in accounting? So I could help that person get there.

[00:13:13] But had I not known about that. I would've never thought to do that because I would never thought someone would do that, but

[00:13:19] Casey Golden: No, I think that that's it's a really important aspect of being a great leader and the people really working for you. When they feel like you are their champion regardless. I always wanted to, to find out like, what do you wanna learn today? What direction do you wanna go? What can I, what do I do that I can take off my plate, that somebody else is actually dying to learn. One. But then also just being that champion for them. I had some, I had like a, a bd that worked for me and he got an amazing opportunity. He was scared and his parents said not to take this job. And I [00:14:00] said, you're gonna call them right now and you're gonna accept it, or I'm going to fire you by the end of the day and you're gonna miss both opportunities. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Go take a break, call them and accept.

[00:14:19] Andy Laudato: I love it. I

[00:14:20] love it. Yeah.

[00:14:22] Casey Golden: And he's continued down a completely different career path, 10 years later doing that thing. And I was just like, granted, if you don't get it, like, dude, I'll hire you at any point. You can have a job back, but like, you have to go try this.

[00:14:36] How to Hire the Right People

[00:14:36] Andy Laudato: Well, and I think probably the next thing we should talk about is who do you hire and how do you figure out who to hire because things are changing so rapidly. Right. I've got lots of people working on AI that wasn't even a thing when they got their jobs. And so I think that for me, we really need to move away from hiring for specific skills.

[00:14:55] And I have a list of things. And number one is integrity. You need someone that's honest and open.[00:15:00]

[00:15:00] Ricardo Belmar: Right.

[00:15:01] Andy Laudato: and then ambition. So are people gonna go get it? And the pace of change is so fast. Are people gonna put in the work to learn? One of my most hated questions is like, what are you gonna do to train me? I always said, whatcha gonna do to train yourself? Right? And there's so much free content out there, cheap content, or whether it's Udemy or so people that are always investing. And I ask a lot of questions in interviews about what are you doing to learn and keep up. And then the other thing is temperament.

[00:15:27] Can people remain calm under pressure? I always try to put people in a, in a tough situation in the interview to see if they lose their cool, but. I didn't say, five years of JavaScript or AWS administrator.

[00:15:40] I mean, these are the jobs, those will be the job titles. And those things are important.

[00:15:44] But if I hire just for skill, the skill's gonna

[00:15:48] Ricardo Belmar: That's gonna be gone. Yeah. Right.

[00:15:50] Andy Laudato: is a person willing, able, and capable. Intelligence is the other one, right?

[00:15:54] Are they able to learn these new skills? So, and, if someone's not a right fit for the team Right. You gotta do the right [00:16:00] thing for them too and move on, which is always tough, but you do someone a disservice if you keep 'em struggling in the wrong job

[00:16:06] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. If the opportunity's not with you, then it's probably somewhere else and you want to give him that chance

[00:16:13] Andy Laudato: Yeah. And I like what Casey said. The person has a, that she talked about, had a whole new career.

[00:16:17] Ricardo Belmar: Right.

[00:16:18] Andy Laudato: Yeah. So find something, you're good. Everybody's good at something.

[00:16:21] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:16:22] Andy Laudato: If you can make money doing it, then you've won

[00:16:23] Ricardo Belmar: Then you're set. Yeah, exactly.

[00:16:25] Well, Andy, this has been a fantastic discussion. Thank you so much for highlighting this really important topic. So critical to being able to lead innovation and something that every retail leader needs to understand.

[00:16:35] Andy Laudato: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

[00:16:37] Casey Golden: As always, Andy, you bring great perspective to these discussions. Thank you!

[00:16:43] And it's a wrap, Ricardo.

[00:16:46]

[00:16:46] ​

[00:16:46] Show Close

[00:16:51] Casey Golden: If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Good pods. And don't [00:17:00] forget to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube so you never miss an episode.

[00:17:06] I'm Casey Golden.

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[00:17:24] Blade to Greatness is part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network.

[00:17:28] I'm Ricardo Belmar.

[00:17:29] Casey Golden: Thanks for joining us.

[00:17:30] Ricardo Belmar: Until next time. Stay sharp. Lead boldly. Stay human.

[00:17:33] This is The Retail Razor Blade to Greatness.

[00:17:37] ​