Jeff Perry Author of the Intentional Engineer

Jeremy Snyder (00:02.664)
All right, welcome back to another episode of Modern Cyber. As always, I'm your host Jeremy and I am coming to you today with another episode on a topic that is pretty important when we think about kind of organizational culture and structure and leadership and all the things that go into building successful teams, teams that can achieve cybersecurity goals well and work together well.

We're joined today by Jeff Perry. Jeff is a leadership and career expert known for helping individuals, teams, and organizations unlock their potential in all facets of life. With Jeff's background in engineering business and leadership, he specializes in working with engineering and technical professionals, but the principles he shares are universal, not only applicable to those teams. Jeff is the bestselling author of a new book, The Intentional Engineer, a Guide to Purpose -Driven Life and Career for Engineers and Technical Professionals. Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Modern Cyber Today.

Jeff Perry (00:54.64)
Yeah, Jeremy, this is a pleasure. love diving into some of these things. There's just a lot of passion. And I also think opportunity when we're talking about unleashing potential in individuals and teams. And so I'm excited to dive into

Jeremy Snyder (01:06.472)
Awesome. So one of the things in cybersecurity that is really challenging for a lot of people is kind of building and maintaining the proper mindset, not only of the team, but of the individual. know, cybersecurity suffers from having kind of a burnout culture at the individual level and then kind of having a shared stress, but also shared mission culture at the organizational level. And so I'm kind of curious. One of the things that I know was cited in some of your work is this

power of yet and how that feeds into mindset. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Jeff Perry (01:41.702)
Yeah, so mindset is hugely foundational for any sort of change that we're trying to make. In fact, a number of years ago, McKinsey, a large consulting firm, also have a research arm, did a study and talking about like organizational change efforts. And they said that the organizations that address mindset at the outset of a organizational change effort are four times more likely to be successful than those who don't address mindset when they only say this is what we're going to change.

Right? So mindset has a huge factor for us making any sort of change, either individually or collectively. Now talking about mindset, there's a lot of different kinds of mindset spectrums or concepts we could talk about. One of the most famous ones that people are, people might be familiar with is the growth mindset that was popularized by Carol Dweck. And she has this fabulous tech Ted talk that talks about the power of yet. And where just to kind of

Jeremy Snyder (02:38.097)
Mm

Jeff Perry (02:40.528)
go back a little bit. When we're talking about the growth mindset, it's antithesis. It's called a fixed mindset. And when we have a fixed mindset, when I have a fixed mindset, I think that I am pretty much unchangeable. If there's something I'm not good at, there's something I'm failing at, there's something that I am not liking about the way that I'm operating, I don't think that there's much that I can change. And I also think the same thing about other people. I don't think other people or situations can change. I feel stuck, right?

On the other side, a growth mindset person would say that I can change, can grow with effort and focus and purpose and intention is a big word for me, in a way that says, there's something I wanna change, I can go do that, right? And so if I didn't get the job or if I didn't land the deal or if this project didn't go great, it's not saying like, hey, that's always gonna be how it's gonna be.

and say, I can learn from that experience and get better. And so a lot of times people have this kind of internal language to say, hey, I'm not good at insert, whatever that is. Right. And if we can use this concept of just adding yet to that, I'm not good at networking with other people yet. I'm not good at public speaking yet. I'm not good at whatever cybersecurity skills, you know,

Jeremy Snyder (03:50.405)
Right.

Jeff Perry (04:06.926)
some of your listeners might be concerned about yet. Right. And just adding that extra word of yet opens up from our mind of being fixed and closed off and feeling like we are just subject to our situations to opening us up to opportunity to say what's possible. And then we can go a little bit further and say, now what can I do to maybe get better at that? And it empowers us in a different way. So it's a really powerful

Jeremy Snyder (04:10.641)
Hmm.

Jeremy Snyder (04:33.593)
Yeah.

Jeff Perry (04:36.925)
word, simple word that can change the language and the way that we see challenges and opportunities.

Jeremy Snyder (04:44.099)
Yeah, and I think, you know, it's an especially important concept in a field like cybersecurity where honestly, the technology is changing so much from year to year, both in terms of just, you know, the things that we and our organizations are using, but also in terms of the types of attacks that we're trying to defend against, right? That stuff changes literally week to week in many, many cases. And so like bringing that kind of attitude towards it makes a ton of sense.

I'm curious about one thing though. You one challenge that I think we face in cybersecurity is that we're very often super fixated on the technical aspects. And so a lot of people that work in this field, frankly, would they hear something like, hey, we want to talk about mindset today. Their first reaction might be like, why are we talking about this touchy feely topic? This doesn't really mean a lot to me. It's not relevant for my job.

How do you talk to people in super technical professions like this about mindset and its importance?

Jeff Perry (05:43.226)
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the vast majority of people I talk to and obviously not just in cybersecurity, but across engineering and tech fields. but here's the thing. And like you just said it, like the vast majority of things that we're talking about, we're not trying to skill people up or talking about people or employee development. We're talking, we're often focused on how can we build them with more technical skills. Right. And that's great, but.

Let's use an analogy here. When we're trying to add a skill, to use a technology analogy, it's like on your phone, you add a skill, it's like adding an app to the phone, right? So you now have a new capability, something that you can do that you couldn't do previously without having that app and configuring that and everything, right? And that's great to add. Like you have a new capability that you didn't have before. Upgrading our mindset is like...

having a new operating system on a phone or computer or something like that. It's your way of operating. And if there's a bug in the system, right, then even if you're the right inputs, you might have garbage output. It's not just garbage in, garbage out. You could have the right inputs in, but because of the way that you're filtering through that, because of the way that you see the world and you see other people and things, you could have a garbage output. And negative mindsets can really degrade.

team morale, they can degrade individual productivity and really comes down to it degrades potential, right? And so when we work with mindsets, I, there's a lot of research to suggest that we actually learn quicker. So if you're trying to add another technical capability, taking the right mindset into that learning experience will actually help you do that better, right? Taking the right mindset into saying, Hey, we have these capabilities collectively as a team or organization.

Jeremy Snyder (07:23.641)
Mm

Jeff Perry (07:37.626)
That's going to help us collaborate and work together to achieve a common goal, right? Instead of just saying, this is what I care about and I'm only focused on me. So it, it, there are dollars and cents to this and we can talk about that in a number of different ways. but, but it, it has a huge impact.

Jeremy Snyder (07:55.145)
So, but along those lines, mean, I'm curious, just kind of tactically, how do you explain to somebody? I mean, I think that phone analogy is great. Like your smartphone is great, but it's better when you add apps that unlock these skills or unlock these capabilities. You know, when you're talking, let's say to an engineer one -on -one, do you use that same kind of approach and you say like, hey, Jeff, you're great, but you could be so much better if we install this, this, you know, knowledge or this.

specification or whatever it is. And then similarly, like how do you kind of balance talking to the individual versus talking to the organization? Because I imagine they're kind of two different sets of things, right? On an individual level, it might be a more technical, let's say piece of technology that they need to master. But I can imagine at a team level, it's very often going to be more about like collaboration, communication, and how the group works with each other. How do you balance that out and how do you message it?

Jeff Perry (08:51.226)
Yeah, so let's think about this on a continuum of individuals and a team or organization. So why you think about a really simple kind of quadrant model. If I had something I could draw it out, then we could could display it. But think about on the X axis, you know, from the left side would have individual to the right side. We have collective sets like our team or organizational side. OK, on the vertical axis, we think about I'll call it our being.

who we are, right? And then on the top of the vertical axis, we'd call this doing. And the way that this sets us up is to think like who we are impacts what we then do. Okay? So now we look at the intersections here. On the bottom left, the intersection of the individual and who we are, we call that mindset. And right above that, we'd call this our actions and behaviors. So we'd say that our mindset individually

drives our actions and behaviors. Okay. so what I believe, how I see the world and how I approach that impacts what I then do, right? Which then by the way, impacts the results I get in my life, right? That's, that's not too hard to, to conceptualize. Now, when we move to the right side, kind of on an organizational or team level, right? Who we are collectively, we might call that culture, right? So this is kind of this collection of mindsets.

Jeremy Snyder (10:13.518)
Okay.

Jeff Perry (10:16.476)
perhaps, as who we are, how we operate together. As we move up and say, okay, how does it influence what we do? We call this maybe systems and structure. So the processes we have in place, the structure of the organization or the team, and that includes some of the power dynamics. Now, when you look at all of these pieces put together, they all influence each other, right? Because the culture...

Jeremy Snyder (10:41.347)
Mm -hmm.

Jeff Perry (10:42.36)
of an organization can influence or invite particular mindsets in me. But also as an individual, I still have a choice to say, this is the mindset I'm going to take to whatever situation that comes my way. Right? our systems and structure influence our culture and vice versa. Like the culture that we create influences how we decide to set up our systems and our processes. And then also, influences the actions that we take because of the processes and the systems and

are reporting structures and all that. So all of these things intertwine together. But when you're trying to solve a problem, you can use this concept to say, hmm, OK, instead of looking at just like the surface layer, we had this issue in cybersecurity or something, maybe, hey, we had a vulnerability issue. Like, whose fault is it? Let's point around and say you didn't do your job to say, is this an individual thing? Is this a collective thing? Is this a

process system structure is our culture not bring this up where someone maybe didn't feel safe to bring up an issue or vulnerability that they saw and and feel safe to share that because of the power dynamic or something like that, right? So you can look in and at all the different pieces and say, how do we look at this at the whole system where everyone as an individual says, I have a part to play to make this great. And also collectively, we need to

to solve this together, right? So that kind of gives us the big picture of how we look at this from an individual to to an organizational level. Does that make sense?

Jeremy Snyder (12:10.465)
Gotcha.

Jeremy Snyder (12:18.342)
It does make sense. again, I'm I keep coming back to the tactics about it, because again, I think like that the way you message it and the way you present it is probably going to make a huge difference to how well the organization takes it or how receptive they are to hearing about it. I'm curious, just like on one little vocabulary question, and I'll be curious if you've got an experience around this. When you're talking organizationally, do you see a different response?

Jeff Perry (12:37.755)
Yes.

Jeremy Snyder (12:45.683)
when you talk about it as mindset versus when you talk about it as organizational culture.

Jeff Perry (12:51.44)
Yeah, and so I do, yes, I do. And that's why I actually split those up in terms of let's characterize a mindset as an individual mindset and the collective side as an organizational culture, which we might characterize as a collection of mindsets and who we are collectively and how we operate and how we think. But it is kind of who we are on the collection of us rather than an individual. can say this is my mindset.

Jeremy Snyder (13:07.785)
Make sense.

Jeff Perry (13:21.905)
and how they can influence each other, but they are independent.

Jeremy Snyder (13:25.952)
Gotcha, gotcha. Coming back to the mindset thing for a second, I noticed there was something else I think from your work and your research, something called an outward mindset. Talk to us about what that is and how that's different from let's say the growth or the fixed mindset that we've already talked about.

Jeff Perry (13:41.552)
Yeah, so this is kind of another kind of spectrum or concept of mindset. And this is actually one of my first forays into learning about concept of mindset. This is about seven years ago. And this comes from an organization called the Arbinger Institute based out of Utah. They're culture consulting firm, written a number of books. So I always cite their fabulous work. But...

Jeremy Snyder (13:56.03)
Okay.

Jeff Perry (14:06.842)
The outward mindset is a mindset that's really focused on our orientation towards other people. Right. And me learning about this has had a huge impact on me earlier in my career, where the antithesis of an outward mindset is what they call an inward mindset. And to really quickly characterize that, an inward mindset, when I'm inward, I'm focused primarily on myself, what my goals, what my challenges, what my opportunities are, and the things I'm trying to...

to accomplish. And because of that, I will see others as primarily looking at them as objects, right? And we can objectify people in terms of thinking of them as vehicles to try and achieve our own ends, obstacles in our way to trying to achieve what we're trying to achieve, or as just completely irrelevant, like we just don't care about them, right? So when we objectify people, we're not really seeing them. We're just kind of in our own little world, and we're just objectified.

people. The outward mindset suggests then when people are in an outward mindset that we actually see people as people that matter like we matter. And so we actually see and are aware of and care about other people's goals, objectives, challenges, and opportunities. And we take that into account into how we go about doing our work or taking the actions that we take.

Jeremy Snyder (15:15.121)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Perry (15:36.314)
Right? So when we think about, trying to improve collaboration, right? If I'm only, if I'm in kind of the inward state and I'm only focused on what I want to look good on this project. And so I'm going to look like the all star and I want to hoard the best parts of the project so that I can look like I achieve so much. That's not going to be great in terms of collaboration compared to someone who says what I really care about as a team being successful.

I think that there's maybe an opportunity to share this learning with someone else instead of only putting myself above. These sorts of dynamics that people are trying to protect themselves and stuff start to go away and we're more focused on the collective success than our individual success when we have that outward mindset.

Jeremy Snyder (16:22.971)
That's really interesting. You know, there's a concept from organizational psychology that I remember learning when I was getting my MBA, which is around something called the fundamental attribution error. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept, probably. You know, it's this kind of idea that if you have a negative view towards somebody, you will attribute their success to being, you know, right place, right time, but to none of their individual actions, whereas you'll attribute their failure to them.

Jeff Perry (16:32.592)
Yeah.

Jeremy Snyder (16:50.616)
You know, it was them that made such and such fail, but if they succeed, it's just, you know, right place, right time. And it kind of feels like that's a, by the way, I think that's like a pretty universal concept inside an organization or outside an organization. I mean, even just thinking about kind of friend groups in social settings, I think that you kind of very often see this natural human tendency in people. So it's interesting to hear this kind of inward outward mindset. seems strikes me as very parallel.

Jeff Perry (17:19.61)
Yeah. Yeah. And you can actually get on the other side of a fundamental attribution error when you have an outward mindset is to see the good in other people and to celebrate their successes instead of only, you know, looking at some of that negative stuff. Right. and,

Jeremy Snyder (17:35.151)
Yeah, yeah. And similarly, you know, when there is a failure to understand that there's a lot of context and there might have been a lot of circumstances and conditions that made success either, you know, impossible or borderline impossible. And there may have been a set of kind of organizational errors as well as many people who contributed to why things didn't work out. And then sometimes it's just macro climate, you know, it's sometimes it's 100 % external as to why something doesn't work out.

There's another concept that came up that I saw in kind of the notes here, something called genius zones. Talk to us about those. What is that? What are those?

Jeff Perry (18:10.908)
Yeah, genius zones are really exciting when we think about unlocking potential in individuals and teams. There's a number of places that we can reference. One of the best books that I'm aware of comes from someone by the name of Gay Hendrix, wrote The Big Leap, is a book that talks a lot about it. And really it's a separation, thinking about these different zones that we can get into in terms of the type of work or activities that we can get into. Think about like, hey,

zone of incompetence, like, I'm just not good at this. Zone of competence is like, hey, I can do this, but maybe not better than anyone else. Zone of excellence, which is great, where it's like, hey, I'm significantly better at performing this activity or exercise or skill than most people. But to get to a genius zone is to be on a different level.

And one of the ways that you can kind of look at and say, like, what might be my genius zones is to think about the concept of flow, which was characterized by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, passed away a couple of years ago. But flow is when you kind of get in that state of being in the zone or it feels like time is kind of standing still. You're kind of losing track of time and you're just in the. Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Snyder (19:27.52)
Yeah, your work's coming easy to you. You're knocking things out. Everything's kind of working.

Jeff Perry (19:32.406)
Exactly. And when we are in flow and acting in our genius zones, there's a high level of joy and satisfaction that takes place when we're in that state. And we're doing some of our absolute best work. So in terms of delivering impact and enjoying that experience, that's great, which means that people are going to want to do more of that. And as a leader, you certainly want your teams doing more of that.

because they're going to really deliver a lot of results in doing so. So looking at where do you get into a state of flow in terms of what activities you're doing, what's the environment that creates the conditions that helps it easier for you to get in that state? And it's not only at work, which is great to do, but also in your personal life. The more that you can find hobbies or activities or things that you can get into flow and be in genius zones in your personal life, that will help you enjoy your work more as well.

anyway, so it's one way to look at there are other ways to kind of uncover maybe combinations of innate talents and learned and learned skills and experiences that you've had over the course of your life that when combined make you uniquely qualified to do something in a particular way different than virtually anyone else because you are unique in the way that you approach things. part of the reason why I uniquely do, coaching and training work.

Jeremy Snyder (20:42.887)
Yeah.

Jeremy Snyder (20:53.928)
Yeah.

Jeff Perry (20:59.548)
for engineers and tech professionals because of some of the experiences that I had. There's not a whole lot of us, right? And so I do that in a unique way. It's part of my genius zones and some of the things that I really enjoy.

Jeremy Snyder (21:12.588)
That's super interesting. I want to ask a question because I think there's a an organizational challenge that a lot of us are facing as we've kind of transitioned away from honestly, you the before times and the way that we used to work in offices with a lot of our colleagues right around us. And we had kind of these natural organic human to human interactions that usually could give you some spark, some energy go kind of

quickly talk through a problem that you're facing maybe in your own work with somebody close to you. And now most organizations that I talk to nowadays, remote work is the norm. And so people are working much more in these kind of isolated environments. And I feel like there may be a challenge that we're not thinking about, which is, know, coming out of one of those brainstorming sessions, or maybe even just a natural kind of hallway conversation where

you and I talked out a problem and now I get back to my desk and I've got some insight from our conversation. I know how to tackle something. How do you encourage organizations to create conditions that get people into that flow state while they're working remotely? Because it feels like that's got to be pretty challenging.

Jeff Perry (22:27.856)
Yeah. And so part of that is approaching that from approaching everyone as an individual, because how I get into a flow state and the conditions that create that opportunity is going to be different than you is going to be different than the next person. Some people are just absolutely fantastic at facilitating a group discussion and they're just masterful at it. They can sense the energy in the room and they can pull out different

strengths from people in those conversations. They can make sure that no one's hogging the conversation. They can make sure to pull out insights from the people who might normally be really quiet in a group setting. And they're just masterful at that. Some people are really, really dialed into when they're in that deep work, but mostly on their own. But they have a challenge that they're really working on, a really fun problem to them. But their skill and their abilities

has the ability to meet that challenge. And that's one of the models in the concept of flow, where if we have our skills are too high, but the challenge is too low, then that gets us bored. If the challenge is too high and our skills are too low, then that gets into a state of anxiety and frustration, because we feel like we can't rise that challenge. So there's a balance there in trying to treat everyone like an individual for where they at in terms of their current skill level.

Jeremy Snyder (23:29.285)
Yeah.

Jeremy Snyder (23:42.382)
that gets us frustrated and yeah.

Jeff Perry (23:54.332)
and what we assign to them as a responsibility. We're all still saying, you know, the opportunity for them to grow into things and rising through that. And also, where do they want to go? And so how can we utilize where they're at now and help them get where they want to go, which is going to create more of that intrinsic motivation and flow as they are engaged in that sort of work, if that makes sense. But remote experiences, it obviously...

Jeremy Snyder (24:17.198)
Gotcha.

Jeff Perry (24:22.182)
takes a whole lot more energy and focus and intention to create the collaborative connections there that might sometimes happen naturally when we're in the office. And we have to maybe have some more meetings where the only agenda item, whether it's a one -on -one or a group meeting, is just to connect personally with people instead of only be working transactionally on what do we need to accomplish and get done.

Jeremy Snyder (24:44.642)
Yeah.

Jeremy Snyder (24:50.57)
Yeah, I think that's really important, but also super tough to maintain in a remote context. know, every conversation is kind of scheduled on the calendar and you hear all of this talk about how important it is to maintain meeting discipline and have effective meetings that have, you know, bullet point agenda items and only the people strictly required for the meeting are involved. And, you know, anybody who doesn't feel like they're going to be a significant contributor to the meeting should just opt out of it.

Jeff Perry (24:56.174)
Sure.

Jeremy Snyder (25:19.554)
And all of these kind of like ruthless, ruthless sounding rules for how we manage our time and our meetings and our interactions actually cut out a lot of the opportunity to build personal connection when everything is super tactical and just focused on a problem at hand. Yeah, it's, it's something that I know, you know, for ourselves and our organization, we're a small team of about 12 people distributed across four countries. And we find it a little bit challenging and

I know we've actually resorted to, you know what, we're all gonna get together once a year and we're gonna do stuff that's, you know, not work focused. We're gonna go do escape rooms together. We're gonna just go get pizza one night and play board games or whatever it is that kind of helps to build the human connection. And I think the studies are pretty clear that the teams that actually have an affinity for each other perform better, right?

Jeff Perry (25:52.966)
Great, perfect.

Jeff Perry (26:10.232)
Absolutely, absolutely. Because if I, because when we get into the concept of like employee engagement, which helps on so many different levels and productivity and everything, there's a lot of studies around that. Gallup does a lot of great work around that. But I would define the concept of engagement as people caring about what they're working on and who they're doing it with. Right.

So if I care about the work itself and that gets me excited, that's great. But if I don't care about who I'm doing it with or for, right, in terms of the team that I'm collaborating with and maybe the end users who are going to be impacted by my work, then that's not going to bring me up in a level of engagement in my work either. So absolutely when there's an affinity, there's a connection. When I see, like, when I care about the people that I'm working with and for.

It has a huge impact on, cause I have this level of responsibility and accountability that it's doesn't feel like a duty. feels like this is, or it doesn't feel like an obligation. feels like the right thing to do in a duty. Cause I want to deliver for people that I care about.

Jeremy Snyder (27:10.708)
Yeah.

Jeremy Snyder (27:23.217)
Yeah, yeah, makes a ton of sense. I want to change gears a little bit and talk about kind of career clarity. And I saw here this kind of question about, what do you want to be when you grow up? And it's this, it's really funny to me because I just think about my own life and how many versions of that I went through when I was a child. And, you know, I happened to be a very kind of silly kid in my early years and

Jeff Perry (27:29.125)
Mm

Jeremy Snyder (27:48.037)
I wanted to be a part -time firefighter and a part -time pilot and a part -time this and a part -time that. And I wanted to try a gazillion things. And my parents recorded some of that in some of their scrapbooks of me from my early years. But I think that like a lot of us, kind of maybe set out with an aspiration and then our careers start. And we don't really check in along the way to ask, are we actually heading down the career path that we want? Are we actually

you know, on the way towards the thing that we want to be when we grow up. And I don't think that many of us, by the way, are very grown up by the time that we start our careers at age, you know, 22, 23, whatever it might be. How do you think about that? What's been some of the learnings or observations that you would share with people from your own work or from work that you've done with organizations?

Jeff Perry (28:30.287)
Yeah.

Jeff Perry (28:38.948)
Yeah, so this is super fun. And most of this work is, we're trying to work with individuals. And in an organizational context, you might say, hey, a leader might be trying to work with the people on their team and say, where are you trying to get to? Like, what are the things that are important to you? And how can we match the opportunities and things and situations and the things we assign to you, the responsibilities that you get in a way that will help you get where you want to go?

Jeremy Snyder (28:44.613)
Okay.

Jeff Perry (29:06.66)
right? And the things you want to learn. But usually I'm doing this in the coaching individual context. But it's fine. Just to give you a couple examples of where people are coming to me from and kind of their current state at. One person came to me and she was a few years into her career, but after getting a PhD. So she had a PhD level engineer. She'd worked in a number of different places. She was multidisciplinary, but she said, you know what? I

realized that I've been just kind of chasing education and work and all this stuff, but I really don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Right. I'm trying to figure that out. And so that's one example. Another person came to me. He was like 15, 20 years into his technology career. I a number of different things within the military, been in a number of different companies and roles. And he said, you know what? I just want to find my happy place in my

Jeremy Snyder (30:04.942)
Mm -hmm.

Jeff Perry (30:05.062)
You know, and all that sounds really kind of wishy washy and like, what does that mean? And what, what is the end state? It's not a very clear goal, but I said, okay. But when I hear that stuff, I like, okay, well I get excited because we can, we can work with this because it's not just the state or the situation or the role that we're in. It's also, we go back to mindset. how we view where we are at now and the process and the things that we're learning.

In my own experience, I got a mechanical engineering degree in my undergrad. I actually then right out of undergrad was writing software. And it actually became pretty clear to me because of my proclivities and my personality that writing software all day wasn't that exciting for me. Right. And I didn't and I didn't love it. And for the first year or so, I was like, I got to get out of here. I am bored out of my mind.

This is not fun. This is not what I thought I signed up for. And then I started shifting my own mindset about that experience and said, you know what? What can I learn from this? Can I find some mentors to help me chart a path? And I started engaging in employee resource groups to connect with other people. I joined the company Toastmasters Club that connect with people outside of my own group. So I found ways to say, hey, what can I learn from this experience?

It still wasn't necessarily my favorite role, but I found then ways to pivot towards what was next. And I'm still, and I now look back and I'm extremely grateful for that experience, even though it wasn't perfect. And so, thinking about career clarity, it is not going to be this perfect answer to a question. Where do you want to be in five or 10 years in your career?

and we're gonna have this magical treasure map where X marks the spot. And like, boom, I'm gonna be able to get there. This is a perfect plan. It's more about thinking like we do in engineering and technology where we move through iterative releases and prototypes and products that we're creating to continually improve. And so looking at every stage and opportunity of your career and your life as a prototype, as an experiment and say, hey,

Jeff Perry (32:28.09)
let's collect the data around what I am and I'm not enjoying and ways that I'm able to maybe leverage some of those genius zones or not. And some of those other things we've talked about and say, how can I try something different? And sometimes that may be a role change inside or external to your organization, right? And saying, hey, how can I do something? Sometimes it's a slight shift to say, hey, is there a side role? If I'm curious about leadership, can I maybe mentor an intern?

or something like that, or manage a new type of project and take on a different sort of responsibility that doesn't need to be a complete shift, but we can run a side project. Or maybe there's something we can do in our community in a volunteer assignment or something that says, hey, I can try something new over here. Or it's a side hustle that you want to try out and explore a new skill. Whatever that is, we just continue to iterate and

that actually reduces some of the stress when we're making career decisions or saying, is it going to be this or this? What if I make the wrong decision? There can be a lot of anxiety when we get to those situations. And instead we say, hey, no matter what, this is going to be a learning and growth experience. But yes, I want to be as informed as possible given some of these things. And so doing some work around genius zones and some of our intrinsic motivations and things can help inform us and maybe

provide kind of a guiding light in terms of where we're headed instead of like this perfect path. It can be a little windy, but headed in the general direction. And also maybe provide kind of a filter for, hey, this doesn't meet the criteria for the things that are important to me. I'm going to filter this out and maybe something else does. And I'll let that through and I'll explore that a little bit more. Right? So just thinking about we continue to iterate, we collect data, we run experiments, and then we learn from them. And then we

run another iteration, just like we do with the technology that we work on.

Jeremy Snyder (34:24.036)
Yeah, I think that way of kind of framing every stop along the career path as a little bit of an experiment, I always tell people don't get discouraged if you take a job and it turns out not to be the right thing. Almost no single job is going to make or break your career. You know, there may be some rare circumstances here or there where you fall into exactly the right situation with a rocket ship company that really like

teaches you a ton of stuff and it's the right role or it's the right growth opportunities or who knows what. But more often than not, just as you say, it's a set of experiments that kind of, as long as you're growing, you're moving in the right direction, things that are making you happier, where you're feeling more effective, you're feeling more fulfilled by the work that you're doing and you're performing at a high level, I think that's a great way to think about it. We've got just a couple of minutes left on today's episode and I've got two kind of last questions that I wanna get to.

One is around, and particularly in the area of cybersecurity, where we are in this kind of, for lack of a better word, thankless job 99 % of the time. When things are going right, hopefully 99 .99 % of the time, your job is just kind of do your job, it may be long hours, it can be stressful at times, et cetera. But when everything's going right, you don't get a lot of thank yous, you don't get a lot of kudos from the rest of the organization.

Jeff Perry (35:32.784)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Snyder (35:51.063)
And when things are going wrong, you get the kind of blame and finger pointing and whatnot, not typically from within the cyber team, because all cyber teams tend to understand that, this is the nature of things. And, you know, you shouldn't blame any individuals. Like I don't even think the person who pushed the code into the CrowdStrike patch that didn't really work out so well a couple of weeks back, I don't even think, you know, that person got a lot of individual finger pointing, although I can't say I wasn't inside the organization. But kind of managing the...

In particular, the retention of people inside an organization like that, that is thankless, thankless, thankless, super high stress. And turnover in cyber organizations is a real problem. What's some of the advice that you would give to leaders of those teams in order to kind of reduce churn, help them retain employees, help them make people feel valued, et cetera?

Jeff Perry (36:33.36)
Yeah.

Jeff Perry (36:46.416)
Yeah, so it goes a lot to some of that culture stuff that we were talking about earlier. And some of the concepts that you're talking about can be really helpful when we think about how do we, are we pointing fingers? know, whether, obviously there are cybersecurity teams that work external to the organizations that they're serving, or sometimes they're internal, right? And so that can be a different sort of relationship. you know, how can we say, hey, we're all on the same team?

If we start pointing fingers and saying who's wrong, right, we're not actually getting to a place of saying what's wrong. How do we solve the problem, which then can help us improve the current situation if there's a vulnerability or something that happens and improve the processes and structure and things to prevent that happening again in the future. Because if we just say you screwed up, you're fired. Well, I mean,

That's a learning opportunity for that person. I'll give you an example. I haven't worked in cybersecurity, but I worked in a manufacturing environment and I was leading a project and working with an electrical engineer and we did a redesign on a circuit board for a sensor that we created and sold a whole lot of these things. we, and you have to put in large orders, right? So it's pretty expensive when you put in a large order and

because of quantity issues and stuff like that. And we made the change. We thought it was minor. We thought we'd check things. And when we got the order and we did the testing on the boards internally, realized that there was a significant error. And this is an electrical engineer that I was working with who was relatively new in his career, maybe two or three years. Right. And we had to kind of recall and scrap this whole batch of five to ten thousand

circuit boards, an expensive lesson to learn. And so we could just say, hey, you screwed up, you're out of here. We can't have any of that. Or we can say, hey, that was an expensive lesson to learn, but by golly, he's learned that lesson and he's never going to do that again. so, you know, yes, like, and there's a huge...

Jeff Perry (39:09.69)
you know, we want to be as fail safe as possible in a cybersecurity world. But the way that we approach working on those projects to create those fail safes and the way that we approach when there are problems, how we address that and the culture and the way that we work with each other to solve the problem instead of pointing blame has a huge impact because if people only feel stress and they don't see the reason, the connection, the engagement where they're caring about what they're doing.

and who they're doing it for and with, then they're going to say, I can't take this. I'm out. I'm going to do something else. Right. But but people burn out not just when they're working too many hours, but they burn out when they're disengaged and they don't care. But if they see a purpose behind what they're doing and they and people in cybersecurity see, hey, look at the way that I'm protecting people's information and technology and all that. And they see the purpose behind what they're doing.

Jeremy Snyder (39:44.879)
Yep.

Jeremy Snyder (39:54.268)
Yeah.

Jeff Perry (40:06.85)
Even if it doesn't get thanked because it just is expected to work until it doesn't, if they feel connected to that, well, that can sure go a long way to keeping them around and keeping them engaged and doing this extremely important.

Jeremy Snyder (40:22.147)
Yeah, I think that's great words of advice. Jeff, in just the few seconds that we have left, talk to us a little bit about your work and about the Intentional Engineer workbook and the Intentional Engineer, I guess, book as a whole, not just the workbook, but the research and the work that you've done.

Jeff Perry (40:36.602)
Yeah, great. People, if they're interested in learning a little bit more, they can go find more books available on Amazon or they can go to www .theintentionalengineer .com. The book was written primarily for individuals, but there are a lot of team concepts that we can use. And my next book will probably be more in the realm of teams and organizations and applying it in that context. But the first book I wrote was for individuals because I that everyone can take ownership for their own career and their own growth.

So there's a lot of mindset concepts to talk about genius zones and personal branding and clarity and some of the things that we talked about today, which is fun. And for anyone who gets a book, there's a free digital workbook where I want it to be extremely action oriented. Every chapter of the book has invitations to do exercise and things. And so I stripped out some of the content and the stories and said, hey, here are the activities. Let's give you space to move through those activities.

actually working on those. So the workbook's available in print on Amazon or you can get it free digitally if you buy the book. And so it's really built for people in the engineering tech space to create careers and lives with intention that are in alignment with where they want to take their careers. And it's something that companies and organizations could use to say, hey, how do we help people who are here want to stay here and create careers that they love inside of our organization?

And so my work, get to work with individuals and coaching situations and helping them grow their careers in leadership. And then on the other side, I do speaking and training and workshops for teams and organizations to help them build some of these cultures of engagement and innovation and creativity and productivity that helps them unlock the potential collectively in their team. So I love doing that. It's just so funny, so fun where I say, hey, in the engineering tech space that I came from,

Spent a lot of time building products and processes and now I build people and that's really my purpose these days.

Jeremy Snyder (42:41.569)
Awesome, awesome. Well, I think that's a great note to close today's episode on. And for anybody in the audience, we will actually link the intentional engineer as well as a couple of the other things that we talked about today, Jeff Perry's website and some of the other research and institutions that we've mentioned on today's episode. So I know this is a little bit of a different episode for the audience. Hopefully you found this interesting thinking about personal and organizational mindsets and cultures in building teams.

ways that you can maybe reduce churn and turnover in your cyber teams in these high stress environments that we all work in. Jeff Perry, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Modern Cyber Today.

Jeff Perry (43:18.234)
Yeah, thanks Jeremy. Such a fun conversation. Hope this was helpful for the audience.

Jeremy Snyder (43:23.155)
Awesome, awesome. And we will see you next time on the next episode of Modern Cyber. And remember, if you know anybody who should come on the show, please reach out, like, rate, rev, review, share, all that good stuff. You know what we're gonna say and we'll talk to you next time. Bye bye.