Please note : This transcript is automatically generated and provided for your convenience.

[00:00:00]

Matt Gjertsen: the first and primary role of any leader is to create an environment where I.

Your team trusts one another

you start with the behavior and the work backwards from there.

Rob D. Willis: welcome to superpowered with me, Rob d Willis. Each week I talk to leaders about their superpowers, how they got them, and how you can get a bit of them as well. If you are new here, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We have amazing guests every week, and today I am talking to Matt.

JSON about how to simplify leadership. Matt has this incredible talent for cutting through complexity. It's a skill he developed in the US Air Force as a pilot where you have to process multiple critical inputs all the time simultaneously, and he's taken that ability into the business world helping organizations like SpaceX transform high performing engineers.

Into high impact leaders. His approach [00:01:00] strips away all the fluff and focuses on what truly matters in management. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Gjertsen: I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rob D. Willis: For the listeners who don't know you yet, could you just tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

Matt Gjertsen: quick summary of my life. As you kind of mentioned, I spent the first half of my professional career as an Air Force instructor pilot, did that for about 10 years. I became a pilot because I wanted to. Fly the space shuttle initially, and so I've always been a space nut. So when I got out of active duty, I managed to network my way into SpaceX, which was definitely a dream job for me.

I worked there for four and a half years leading the training and development team for the company. So I got to, you know, for at one point over, over like a 12 month period, I onboarded every single new employee. Employee in the company, basically. So I was a relatively well-known face among, among the company which was amazing. And left there for another startup. Helped, helped stand up the, the learning team [00:02:00] at a fast scaling startup in la and then three years ago went out on my own with. To found better everyday studios, which is what I do now, where we really focus on helping great engineers become great managers. You know, in my time working at SpaceX and just at a lot of companies, I saw there's, there's all these amazing things being done in the world and all these amazing technologies, all these amazing solutions to problems that we have, and. We just have trouble scaling them. Like we have all these companies that are trying to solve these problems and as they start to grow, they hit various roadblocks. And one of the key roadblocks, the roadblock that I'm focusing on anyway, is, is leadership and helping the, the technical talent at those companies be, become the managers that they need in order to grow.

Rob D. Willis: It's a complex world with complex technology, and I think that people also make. Leadership a little bit more complicated than it really needs to be. [00:03:00] So for you, what would you say are the essential things that a leader or someone has to learn in order to become that high impact leader?

Matt Gjertsen: I think it boils down to three. Simple things of building trust, giving feedback, and setting goals, and you have to kind of do them in that order of the, the first and primary role of any leader is to create an environment where I.

Your team trusts one another where they have strong personal relationships with one another. In doing that, you enable kind of, you kind of unlock the next level of creating a space where feedback is a normal thing to receive, to give everybody's okay with that. And then now that you've done that, you can take the final step of setting impactful goals for people.

Rob D. Willis: . What does that process look like though? How, what are you working with cohorts and if so, how big and how long [00:04:00] do you reckon it really takes to get those three elements down? I.

Matt Gjertsen: Yeah, I, we do work, so when we work with companies, we are working with, with groups of people, so we're working with cohorts that we bring together and, and yeah, the time element is, is a really interesting one because I think most organizations aren't going to give as much time as most of these things need.

I think in a perfect world for, for, to me, you would spend, if, if you wanted to set, set up a cohort, you would spend an entire quarter. talking about trust and just practicing various methods of, of building trust. And then you'd send, spend another whole quarter just on feedback and then another whole quarter just on just on setting goals. not practical for a lot of organizations. They, they want things to move a little bit faster, and

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm.

Matt Gjertsen: for most of the organizations that we're working with, we do kind of one 90 minute workshop for each of those things, which is like [00:05:00] the primary keystone, but we space them out maybe once every two weeks or once every month with other.

Reinforcement mechanisms in between. So you're spending, you know, between two to four weeks on any given skill. so what that really means, again, to this simplifying point is when you, you know, decrease the amount of time that you're spending on something, really, you just have to decrease the scope. Of the behavior change that you're trying to make.

And so when it comes to something like building trust, we focus on really simple behaviors of doing icebreakers in team meetings. You know, I, in my own time as a manager, saw massive changes in my team just through deliberately. Taking the first five to 10 minutes of our weekly meeting answering various, you could call 'em icebreaker questions that can start as simple as, what did everybody do this weekend to, you know, what's the last book you read that was really impactful? And, and [00:06:00] then as you have an environment of trust, you can start to ask kind of riskier, more high impact questions of, you know, what's something that you're hoping to achieve? This quarter, or what's a recent failure that you're kind of struggling with, and what did you learn from it? You can't do that at the beginning.

You can't do that with a brand new team that doesn't have any trust. But once you have trust, those are the kinds of, know, real kind of almost exposure questions that you, that you want to

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm.

Matt Gjertsen: get to know one another. And so it's focusing on just those really simple behaviors that, that start to create that environment.

Rob D. Willis: Let's go to your time in the. In the Air Force because I wanted to hear a little bit about the, the kind of complexity and the pressure that one's put under in that sort of environment.

Have you got an example of a moment where you were facing that kind of information overload, multiple radios, mission planning, flying, [00:07:00] the aircraft, et cetera, and how do you overcome things in those moments? How do you filter out what's important?

Matt Gjertsen: Yeah. There's so many examples. I mean, I think the, the classic one would've been when I was deployed overseas as a, as a tanker aircraft commander. So I flew the KC 10, and that's a tanker aircraft. So you're, you're flying along and you're refueling other aircraft. And as you said, we're very often listening to at least two radios at once, and we are also talking to the aircraft that is, you know that is connected to getting, getting fuel.

And so it is very normal for you to be. Talking to them, figuring out where that fighter aircraft needs to go next. So you're trying to kind of like move them where they need to be. You are talking to kind of the air traffic controllers to coordinate your next movement. 'cause after you drop them off, you are gonna fly to some other part of the country as well and [00:08:00] figure out what, what, when you need to be there and do all those calculations. And while that's happening, you're still. Flying the plane and maybe there may, maybe there's a, you know, something breaks on the plane and, and you're having to deal with, with some kind of procedure or something. And so there's always multiple things going on. I, I remember when I was before I went to pilot training, there was a year gap between graduating the Air Force Academy and starting pilot training where I was what's called a, a casual lieutenant, where I was stationed with an F 16 unit. And I'll never forget the pilot saying that you are ever having to fly the F 16, you are behind because your job as a pilot isn't to fly the F 16. Your job is to employ the F 16. You're meant to be doing something with it. The flying needs to become second nature. so I think like with. You learn to deal with that through lots of practice and experience and exposure.

And I think [00:09:00] the biggest thing that I, I didn't have language for then, but I have language for now. It really comes down to to the concept of chunking information in your brain. You know, the human brain can only store, it, can only hold onto, you know, five to seven discrete pieces of information at once. But the difference between somebody that's novice and somebody that's experienced

Yes, kind.

the size of what a chunk is, right? And so going back to to flying a plane for a new pilot. If I'm just, let's, let's just take example of, of taking off in an aircraft and there's lots of things that have to happen for a brand new pilot. Everything that has to happen is a discreet action. So they're having to remember, I have to move the throttles this way. I have to move the yoke this way. I have to, you know, push this button and do this thing, and all of those in their brain because those bits of information, the neurons that store those memories. Aren't strongly connected [00:10:00] yet. They have to remember them as de discrete bits of information. Whereas you get, as you do it more and more and you get more repetition, all of the neurons that perform those actions and remembers those actions get more tightly connected and strongly connected. And so taking off is one discreet thing in the brain of a more experienced pilot.

And so when. We then now fast forward to being in, in Afghanistan. It's not that I am having to remember the five things about working on you know, coordinating for the fighter that's getting refueled and the five things that I need to remember about coordinating the next place we need to go and the 15 things that have to go on with flying the plane. are all kind of like one thing in the brain of, of a more experienced person, and that really just happens through lots and lots of repetition.

Rob D. Willis: You are reminding me of something that I've heard said about all the great Formula One drivers 'cause they're driving these [00:11:00] incredibly complex cars and what journalists. Engineers have all say, they say the great, the ones that separate the greats from everyone else is spare capacity in that they could be doing all of this stuff and they're keeping an eye on where everyone else is in the race, what they're gonna do, what the tires are doing, and so on.

And I feel like talent does that, experience, does this, I felt. More spare capacity in my own mind, coming with the job that I do as well, just through experience.

Matt Gjertsen: Yes,

Rob D. Willis: I think training must be part of it. 'cause the US Air Force has to get thousands, maybe tens of thousands of pilots to a good enough stage.

Could you tell us a little bit about what the training looks like to get people to a stage where they can handle that level of complexity?

Matt Gjertsen: Yeah, and again, this I is language that I didn't have before, but it is de the definition of deliberate practice [00:12:00] by from Anders Erickson. So you know, let's contrast you know, kind of the private pilot. Story versus the military pilot story. 'cause I think they are two good examples in, in many ways of what Anders Erickson would call novice practice versus deliberate practice.

So, so novice practice is, you're just kind of going out and, and you're doing stuff and, and for your average. Getting your own private pilot's license, that's kind of what you do. You know, maybe you're, it's expensive, so you go out to the airfield once every couple weeks. You fly for a couple hours.

You're kind of working on this thing, you're trying to practice that thing. But generally you're just kind of building experience over time. And the hope that is, you know, after 40, 50, 60 hours, you kind of cobble together enough of these skills so that you're safe in, in, in the plane, the military. Is, it is, couldn't be more opposite of, it's a year long program where you learn to fly two different aircraft and each flight is [00:13:00] targeting very specific things.

So you start off in the T six, which is this really amazing uh, high performance prop aircraft. And so you, you know, learn on the ground. You spend a bunch of time doing academics, learning all the systems, and then you go into the cockpit and you learn how to fly and you, you. Each flight gets progressively kind of more complex, and then you go onto either the T 38 or in my case, the T one if you're gonna fly fighters versus heavies. Every thing that you do, whether it's time in the classroom or time in the simulator, or time in the cockpit, is targeting a very specific skill whether that's how to you know, how to plan the navigational route. Or, or just how to take off the plane. You know, you're, you're, you're working on very specific skills. You are building those skills in a pathway that is known to work, right? That's another element of deliberate practice. This is something that has been that, you know, pilot training is a [00:14:00] program that has been developed over decades. And so there's a very specific path that we know works. And so that's basically the path that you follow. And then there's also. Tons of repetition and immediate feedback. So you're flying, you know, every day, sometimes twice a day, or maybe you'll fly and then do a simulator, or you'll certainly fly and then do a classroom event. And then the final element beyond the repetition is that you're getting lots and lots of feedback because you're always flying with an instructor. so you pre-brief the mission where you say, this is what we're gonna focus on, this is what we're gonna do. You go on that, you know, hour, hour and a half long flight. And then you come back and immediately debrief, how did that go? What do I need to do differently? And so it's through that very specific model and just the robustness of that deliberate practice model that outputs these people who are capable of just handling lots of information, handling these complex aircraft.

I'm always amazed [00:15:00] when I think about, you know, so the KC 10 that I flew it is. It, it's unique. It is actually retired now, so it doesn't exist anymore, but it was relatively unique in that it not only refueled other planes, but it could be refueled itself. And so it was very common for 10, which weighs 500,000 pounds to be literally touching another KC 10, which weighs 500,000 pounds. They're moving through the air at 250 miles an hour at 25,000 feet, is a routine thing that happens. the time, like I, I can almost guarantee you that at this very moment there is refueling happening somewhere, and yet magically it. Virtually always works out. Like, I honestly can't remember the last time there was like an incident that meant, you know, people

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm.

Matt Gjertsen: through air refueling.

And it's because of just how robust [00:16:00] the training programs are for the, for these people because of the stakes of what they're doing.

Rob D. Willis: You are making me think of that bit in Air Force One where Harrison Ford is flying the plane and they have to refuel it in the air and it looks like really dangerous. But you're saying, okay, this is literally an everyday occurrence.

Matt Gjertsen: Is an everyday occurrence, but it is very dangerous 'cause that was a KC Ted in that movie and it exploded.

Rob D. Willis: You said that you get a debrief after each of your trading flights. Can you put me in the room of what happens in a debrief?

Matt Gjertsen: So it's always a little bit different. And, you know, before we jumped on here, we did talk a little bit about, you know, I was the, I was in the, the heavy community, which is these, you know, tankers and, and cargo aircraft. We, and everybody does debriefs. We did lots of debriefs in pilot training. And then there's also the fighter community, which kind of takes debriefs to the, to the whole next level. Debriefs. They are exactly what you would expect. Typically, since you're flying together, the instructor in real time is taking notes because you have a [00:17:00] plan going into the flight of like, what's gonna happen? And so then the instructor pilot is taking notes throughout of this went well. This didn't go well.

I. so then in the debriefs, you're kind of recreating the flight of your going, you're, you're just going through it again, which does tons of stuff for anybody that's ever studied. You know, how the brain works and how you learn. Just the simple act of reliving that event. It. It's like doing, it's another round of repetition where you can really cement some of those things.

Only this time as you go through it, you're giving notes of, oh, this didn't go well. This, this went really well. What were you thinking here? Asking, asking some of those kinds of questions. I. And so you just kind of, you, you kind of recreate that event, but, but taking note of all the things and then planning out, okay, so based on this, this is what you're gonna do differently.

Next time. This is what you wanna focus on next time. And. Like I, yeah, like I said, in in the fighter community, like there's big exercises that the US Air Force does. Things [00:18:00] like Red Flag, where, I mean, their debriefs will last a day, you know, so they'll go fly for an hour and then they are going frame by frame.

For anybody that's ever watched Top Gun, I. You see a couple moments of their debriefs where they go fly, then they're sitting in kinda this auditorium with these big video screens up and you see these icons of where the planes are. And it is exactly like that. You know, I've heard from my friends where, you know, there'll be two planes, one here, one here, and they'll like move one frame and they'll spend 15 minutes talking about that. And then they'll move one frame and they'll spend 15 minutes talking about that. So it can get really intense.

Rob D. Willis: But that is how you create excellence, I guess.

Matt Gjertsen: Exactly.

Rob D. Willis: And we've spoken about deliberate practice and debriefing and. I'm wondering what aspects of this are you already incorporating into the training that you're delivering, and what aspects would you really love to incorporate, which you haven't done yet?

Matt Gjertsen: I think all of these elements I. Really form the [00:19:00] foundation. You know, whenever I talk about the training that I do, I always say it's very behavior based, because I think that's the first step that you have to think about is think about not the knowledge that you're trying to impart, but the behavior that you're trying to change.

And so you start with the behavior and the work backwards from there. And so again, to go to this idea of, of trust, we center on the behavior being, we want you to have these kind of icebreaker conversations during, during your team meetings. just. Continuously come at it from different angles.

So maybe we start with the research that talks about how important that is, and then we get them to think back to times where they have done that before. And then we ask them, okay, so what are some questions that you could use? And then and then, you know, brainstorm a whole bunch of these questions.

And then, okay, now we're gonna say, what are some of the reasons why this might not work? And then we say,

Okay.

now we have this list [00:20:00] of questions. We, we know some ways that it might not work, but you have some tools at your disposal to get past that. Okay, now go do it. And then the next week when we come back for the, you know, the next workshop that we're moving on to a new topic, we make sure to take a minute and say like, how did that go?

How many of you did. The icebreakers, how, how did those conversations go? What would you change? And so there's always elements of repetition and, and I think that's where the, the number one mistake that I think happens in training. Is people think they can, they, they try to do too much, and they think that, you know, once somebody knows something, that means it's, it's done now and they're gonna do it.

And as Tony Robbins is known to say, knowledge isn't power, knowledge is just potential power. And it's only powerful if you go enact it. That means it's the behavior. And so it's the repetition of thinking about it, of doing it, of reflecting on it. That's a, that's a big thing that we really focus a lot on the. Next [00:21:00] step that I really want to move to, other than what I said, of getting even more time from, from organizations where we can say, Hey, we're just gonna do an entire quarter on trust, and an entire quarter on feedback really building in some more deliberate kind of coaching follow up sessions. Where, you know, kind of what we already do at the beginning of the next workshop where, but we only get to spend five, 10 minutes on it because we have a whole other topic that we want to cover. I'd really love to explore like what if we take that five to 10 minute conversation and make it 30 minutes and really have a much more deeper dive now that people have gone out and tried to do it and this kind of.

Brings back that segment of, of the debrief is what if we space that debrief out a little bit now that they've had a chance to try out these behaviors in the real world let, let's really get in and, and talk about it.

Rob D. Willis: When you are working with a company, let's say SpaceX, how did you identify [00:22:00] the gap between, where they were and where they needed to be?

What were you looking at? Who are you talking to and what were you asking?

Matt Gjertsen: Yeah. I mean, and at SpaceX it was, I, I often reflect, I, I wish I could go back to SpaceX right now with what I know, you know? 'cause I was so early in my time, especially in especially my time in, in. Learning and in corporate learning and development. So I didn't have any of the, so many of the tools and language that I, that I have to this now. But maybe that was a good thing because ultimately what I had to do was I had to listen to the business. It's. funny. I think one thing that learning and development professionals spend too much time doing is trying to convince the business that learning matters and that they should focus on, on training and development. really, especially in a larger organization, you don't need to do that. There's always gonna be people out there who need your help, and it's just about. Finding them. And so it would be going [00:23:00] to the director of avionics and asking them, you know, what are the things that you're struggling with? What are the challenges that you're having?

And re and very often that that consulting aspect all comes down to drilling things down to what is the behavior. You're trying to change. 'cause very often people will, will talk very big picture. I was actually on a call just a few weeks ago with a potential client where we were talking to the engineering leadership and we, we went into the discussion thinking that we were gonna be talking about training that was about very tactical, you know, presentation skills, the new engineers. Weren't delivering presentations in a concise enough way. They had too much information. They weren't factoring in, you know, the, the people that they were gonna be talking to, and they were just using Jar, lots of jargon and showing, you know, lots of Excel sheets and they weren't distilling the information down.

And that's how we started the talk. [00:24:00] But the more we discussed, we really realized that what it was was it was more of a cultural thing of these new engineers didn't feel comfortable asking questions early or in the process. And so they were coming into these meetings with certain assumptions. Simply because they weren't asking questions.

They were new there, and they didn't have enough of a, a culture within this engineering team where, you know, the, the new engineer felt like they were trying to prove themselves and thus they were kind of falling on their face because they weren't asking the right questions. And so we really quickly pivoted the conversation to, I hate to, I hate to always bring it back to trust, but I think that's just. A big thing, especially in the world today of what are some things that we can do specific to your team to help make those new engineers feel more comfortable asking questions early on. And so it, it starts with people who believe. Development is a thing and leadership is a thing that can really move the needle. And [00:25:00] then working them through that conversation of, okay, what does this practically mean for your team on a day-to-day basis, what do you want your managers to do differently?

Rob D. Willis: That's I love the way you've broken it down. It's all down to behaviors. It's remarkably simple, isn't it? Like there, there's all this complexity. We are overloaded with data, KPIs and so on, but sometimes it's just, you know, what do you want to be different? And it's the people who can ask the simple but the right questions, who get to the heart of things.

If you were to write a business book about your journey, what do you think you'd call it?

Matt Gjertsen: So it's, it's funny you mention that I'm writing a book right now. So I'll, I'll save that for the end though, 'cause I think I know what that one's gonna be called. But early on, I had always said that if I wrote a book about kind of whether it's my life or kind of my philosophy, it would be lean on the rudder. I. Right. Like, [00:26:00] I think so much of what you, how, how you make big changes in your life is just about the, the small pressure consistent pressure over time to get you going in, in the right direction. And now that I'm kind of getting more specifically into this leadership journey the book I'm working on the, the working title right now is Minimum Viable Manager. Because it really, really is about how do we simplify these things down? Just like we started this conversation of everybody's overwhelmed, everybody's busy, everybody has too much to do, so what are the most critical elements that you can focus on in order to really have an impact?

Rob D. Willis: Let's move on to some rapid fire questions.

Favorite tool or framework for simplifying complex decisions?

Matt Gjertsen: There's something that SpaceX has called the algorithm and I have kind of a riff on that, that I usually apply to leadership, but I always say, number one, [00:27:00] you have to identify problem you're trying to solve. So get really, really clear what is the problem we are trying to solve. Number two question every assumption you have about that problem, like why, why is this constraint there? Why do we have to use this system? You know, question as many constraints as you can to help more closely define the the problem as you now are ready to come up with a solution. Make as little as possible, like you should be making the smallest thing possible.

There was this phrase at SpaceX that was often used that said the best part is no part, right? You're trying to solve a problem, not build a system. And so you want to build the smallest system possible in order to solve that problem. then in order to help you do that, the final step is do it faster. , Putting artificial constraints on your time can help you simplify things really quickly,

Rob D. Willis: Biggest myth about military leadership.

Matt Gjertsen: That the leader has [00:28:00] all the answers.

Rob D. Willis: Best resource for learning to give good feedback.

Matt Gjertsen: I'll,

I'll go back.

to just like the tried and true SBI method from, I think it's the NeuroLeadership Institute, which stands for Situation Behavior Impact. Just a really simple framework to give good everyday feedback.

Rob D. Willis: Now we move to the listener challenge, and in this part of the pop, we ask guests to give listeners a ritual or an exercise, something they can try in the next week to get a bit of your superpower. Matt, what have you got for us?

Matt Gjertsen: So I'm gonna take the last step from an answer that I gave earlier, and that is. Putting artificial constraints on your time to do things, and this is actually something that I would do a lot at SpaceX. SpaceX is famous for asking people to work really hard and work a lot like Elon has actually. Like he's asking people work 70 or 80 hours a week. However, you know, one of the main ways you drive innovation is by constraining resources. [00:29:00] And one resource that you have at your disposal that you constrain is can constrain, is often time. And so I would go through these exercises every now and then where I would say, okay, this week I'm only going to work 40 hours.

The expectation is a lot more, but this week I'm only gonna work 40 hours. I'm not gonna tell anybody. I'm not gonna decrease my expectations. I'm still gonna expect that I get just as much done. But I'm gonna only work 40 hours. And so all of a sudden what that means I have to do is I have to, you know, figure out what's really important.

Maybe I'm not gonna go to that coffee with a friend. Maybe I'm not gonna ans let some of these emails drop. Maybe I'm gonna cancel this meeting. so the challenge would be for any particular project that you're working on, maybe it's something that you're trying to get done by the end of the month, at the end of the quarter, just kind of ask yourself like, if I had to get that done by the end of the week, how would I do it? maybe you go try that out, because I think by doing that, by decreasing the amount of time that you give to a project it really helps you [00:30:00] distill down like what are the truly critical elements that will enable this project to succeed?

Rob D. Willis: Matt, where can people go to find out more about you?

Matt Gjertsen: So definitely go to Better everyday studios.com. That is my website where you can find out more about the services that we offer. And then I am very active on LinkedIn. So you can definitely, please, please connect with me there. I love chatting with new people. I'm there every single day.

Rob D. Willis: Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Matt Gjertsen: Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.

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