Your manager has a preoccupation, but do you know what it is? The answer reveals a clue about their focus and the culture this manager will foster.

Join us in episode 328 as Joseph Griffiths shares advice for making 1-1s with your manager and skip-level manager more productive, guidance for the aspiring managers listening, and observations from managing both technical and sales teams. We look at all this through the lens of a manager’s focused prioritization, the difficult part of being consistent, and the reasons we should all use boundaries and limits to improve the quality of our work.

Original Recording Date: 04-17-2025

Joseph Griffiths is a tech industry veteran with experience across technical sales, enterprise architecture, and systems administration. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Joseph, check out Episode 327 – A Passion for Growth: Storytelling and Interpersonal Skills with Joseph Griffiths (1/2).

Topics – Optimizing 1-1 Meetings with Your Manager, Priorities as a Manager, Observations from Managing Different Personas, Manager Preoccupations and Culture Indicators, Advice for Future Managers

2:55 – Optimizing 1-1 Meetings with Your Manager

• What would Joseph tell the individual contributor who isn’t used to 1-1 meetings with their manager or doesn’t know how to leverage them effectively?
  • “Everyone appreciates a human perspective…. If I as a manager come to the table and say, ‘here’s my agenda for the 1-1 that I expect you to do every week,’ it’s going to be real hard to come to me and be honest about the things you’re struggling with. It’s really, really hard to talk to someone who’s only business. As a manager it’s a lot easier if I just keep it business because then if issues happen or stuff it’s less emotional entanglement. But I think it’s the wrong way to do it. My job is to serve the people. My goal for 1-1 was to first breed trust and comfort.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • The secondary goal of Joseph’s 1-1s was to allow the individual to share items that require his help, encouraging honesty about the challenges.
  • Sometimes, a manager does need to use the 1-1 to deliver specific information that is best shared 1-1 (i.e. compensation changes, policy changes, etc.).
  • Joseph usually had 1 thing he wanted to cover with the individual per 1-1. The rest of the meeting was for the individual to control the agenda.
  • Joseph would recommend we take 5 minutes before a 1-1 with our manager to think about the overarching challenge we’re having rather than what is top of mind.
  • “It’s very easy to walk into there and come out of a bad meeting the hour before and go, ‘I just had a horrible meeting and this is why.’ But is that really the problem, or should we be talking about something that is bigger or wider or more challenging? I think spending 5 minutes preparing with a OneNote sheet or a Notepad or whatever and just writing down…these are the 3 things that I want to talk about…and I need either some guidance for them or I need you to knock down a wall. That’s another one. Ask your manager to knock down a wall.” – Joseph Griffiths, on 1-1s with your manager
    • Every manager is different, so you will need to feel things out with your manager when it comes to knocking down walls.
  • Joseph says we can also bring ideas to the 1-1 for things that might improve the health of the business.
    • If our manager agrees with our ideas, they can support the ideas and give us greater visibility within the organization.
    • Joseph mentions when we have an idea, it is unique and special. But it’s also something we are likely to spend extra energy and effort doing. Joseph consistently sought to support innovative ideas from his team members and promote them up to his leaders. This kind of thing makes both the manager and more importantly the individual contributor look good.
    • People often bring only their problems to their manager, but don’t forget to bring ideas too.
  • Nick says we could all use more practice thinking about those higher-level problems. Even front-line managers need to do this when communicating with their own managers (i.e. think a level higher).
    • Joseph tells a story about a friend of his who is a CEO. This person goes to lunch with his team each Friday. Afterward, he gets a pencil and a pad of paper, turns off his cell phone, and goes to a nearby park to think about his business for a few hours. Anything that comes to him gets written on the pad of paper. On Monday morning, the CEO begins executing on the things he thought of while at the park. This exercise allows him to be more proactive.
    • “I think we could all benefit from turning off the notifiers, turning off the noise, and spending an hour just thinking about where we are and actually making some plans. That proactivity is missing…. The notifiers in the world that we live in are very dopamine driven by trying to get you to react…. We get so busy that we’re reacting to everything that we don’t take time to think, and then we don’t prioritize the most important activities….” – Joseph Griffiths, on a CEO friend’s proactivity
    • It’s easy to be overly busy. Someone once told Joseph, “Busy is the new stupid.” While he did not understand it at the time, he certainly does now.
    • Take 5-10 minutes before 1-1s to think about what you want to say. These 1-1s are opportunities to expand your influence. Take advantage!
• What about 1-1s with a skip level leader?
  • Joseph encourages us to get a human connection with them just like you would with a customer. This could be the sports team they like or something else. A human connection opens the door to more conversations in the future.
  • “You don’t want to stand around and complain…not a good move. You want to have a conversation that leaves that person thinking, ‘this is a really smart person. This is a person who is doing really good work.’ So, the best thing you can bring to that are stories of things that are going well with your customers in sales or going well with your job function. Those stories are going to be something that they take away from that and share with other people. You’re going to be giving them value…human connection and value are the 2 things you want to provide in that skip-level.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Second-line managers have direct reports who are managers. They have heard about all the problems and know what is going on because they talk about them daily. Joseph says the skip-level 1-1 is not an opportunity to illustrate problems.

9:42 – Priorities as a Manager

• How do you optimize your tasks as a manager and focus on the right things? This is something from Nick’s perspective, Joseph did very well as a manager.
  • “It is really easy to get engaged in lots of things and doing lots of things ok. It’s much harder to be engaged in a few things and do them spectacularly. In any company we work for we will have millions of opportunities to do things. We need to choose to do the things that are, number 1, aligned with the role that we have…what we’re getting paid to do…and secondarily the things that have the highest overall payoff for the effort.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • As a technical sales manager, Joseph had a key performance metric – the quota. It’s the only measurement that matters in sales.
    • Joseph also had a team, and he had customers (the company’s customers).
    • He often had to ask how what he was doing helped him hit the quota.
    • There is a natural quarterly cadence in sales. There are a number of activities which happen automatically as a part of this cadence.
    • “It can get very easy to just follow the cadence like you’re riding up and down a hill. And cadence is actually good. What you need to do is understand what you have to insert into the cadence to achieve the results of your KPI.” – Joseph Griffiths
    • If Joseph knew his team would need 60 days to perform a necessary task in the sales cycle, he would plan for them to start those activities 180 days in advance, so everything is complete before it’s time for deal management.
    • Sales can be somewhat unpredictable, so you then focus on what’s most important.
  • “For me, my first job as a manager is the people that report to me. They are the most important thing.” – Joseph Griffiths
    • Joseph shares the story of a former manager named Josh. Anytime Joseph would call Josh, he would pick up the phone and tell Joseph “I have as much time as you need.” It wasn’t that Josh wasn’t busy. He just made time for the most important things.
    • We should prioritize things by importance and let other things slide by. Joseph could vacuum his floor every day, but he doesn’t. He puts up with dirt for a couple of days and then vacuums. That is prioritization.
    • Prioritize by importance within your job function. This principle does not change regardless of your job level (individual contributor, manager, vice president, owner of the company, etc.). Delegate to others if it is their job, and let them fail if needed.
• Do we lose sight of what the priorities are because of having too many tasks?
  • Joseph says it’s negative aversion. We don’t like to say no and are afraid we will be perceived negatively if we do.
  • We can lose sight of priorities at times, but it’s challenging to say no to things.
  • Joseph once had a manager named Adam who told him, “You need to learn the great art of no, however…. You need to learn that because everything to you is, ‘yes and I’ll do it myself.’”
  • Joseph doesn’t suggest we directly say no. We can be helpful without taking on things as a personal challenge. People don’t want to be seen as the one who says no or that they can’t do something. People also don’t want to be seen as someone who is overloaded. Both are triggers to people telling themselves they are unreliable.
  • “As a society, Americans are people pleasers.” – Joseph Griffiths

15:12 – Observations from Managing Different Personas

• At technology vendors, there is normally a team of salespeople managed by a sales leader and a team of sales engineers managed by a technical leader. At times in his career, Joseph as the technical leader has needed to help manage both teams. What were some of the nuances of managing the technical side and the sales side that Joseph learned?
  • Joseph has needed to do this 4 times as a manager, and in every case, his business partners had incredible sales teams.
  • “The people I was working with were really good, really mature, and knew what they were doing. For the most part, I don’t know that they needed that much management.” – Joseph Griffiths, on filling in to manage a team of salespeople
  • Joseph says salespeople are often more willing to express emotion, frustration, and challenge. Contrast this with technical people Joseph worked with who would bottle it up and go take it out some other way.
  • “It was not unusual for one of the salespeople to call me up and yell at me. I never had that experience with my technical sales team…. They would yell at me and just need to vent the emotion. And after they’d get that venting of emotion out, then we could have a conversation about what the problem is and how we can fix it.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Joseph observed that when salespeople came to him, they had already tried a number of avenues to solve a problem with no luck, and they expected immediate action. His technical team, by contrast, would usually give more advance notice of a problem.
    • What salespeople needed was for Joseph to understand the problem, assure them he would help figure out a solution, and then get them to a solution.
  • Joseph also noticed salespeople were experts at using manipulation and emotion to get what they need. They approached conversations as a negotiation, which was not something Joseph’s technical team did. It took him a little time to get used to this approach.
  • “That’s just my limited experience observations. I loved working with sellers. I have so much respect for them because they do some of the hardest jobs. They find 999 noes before they find a yes, yet they get up every morning and go find that yes. And they get up every morning and keep pushing…. I couldn’t be more proud of the people I’ve worked with and how hard that is to do every day because I can’t do it every day, but they did it. They are amazing, amazing people. Probably the most resilient people we’ll meet on this earth are salespeople. I don’t know anybody else who can get beat up that much on a regular basis from both directions, both their management and their customers, and still keep getting up every morning. But they do it.” – Joseph Griffiths
• How does this differ from the technical team Joseph managed?
  • The technical team didn’t normally bring problems in an emotional state. It was more about communicating the logical problem and sharing a potential solution.
  • “Technical people want to learn skills. Salespeople want to be inspired…. It’s interesting to see the difference in development models. What I really need to do is just inspire people that it’s possible and give them the tools to go inspire their customers. That’s what salespeople need. Technical people…they need to feel confident about the solution. They need to feel confident about the capabilities that we’re offering and how we’re doing it.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • A salesperson practices their craft most of the time by doing their job. A technical person might practice their craft by tinkering in a lab environment, reading a book, or something else.
  • Suppose you provide a great sales pitch to a salesperson. They can repeat it and sell it. A technical person will, after hearing a great sales pitch, want to know how the solution works.

20:09 – Manager Preoccupations and Culture Indicators

• How has Joseph built a positive team culture during his time as a manager, including when he first started and during times of uncertainty (i.e. a pandemic)?
  • Joseph mentions a researcher who created a culture indicator and made the claim that “culture is set by the first-level manager and their preoccupation.” There are 3 preoccupations for front-line managers. They reflect how easily information flows within an organization.
    • Power – gaining more of it
    • Rules – following the rules
    • Mission of the company – achieving it
  • Startups, for example, are mission-based organizations. Communication is wide open from the CEO down, and employees have many different responsibilities.
  • The US military is a good example of a rules-based organization. There are rules for how much water to drink, what time you eat and sleep, and other things that make up a day’s schedule, etc. Operating on rules brings consistency of operation at a wide scale.
    • “Every captain of every boat in the sea knows exactly what they’re supposed to do and where their orders are supposed to come from. It’s a very good structure for executing the same everywhere.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • The one we see most often in corporate America is the manager pre-occupied with power / progressing up to the next level of leader.
    • “They (companies) have all these things that they do to try to promote their culture. None of that matters if your boss is pre-occupied with getting their next job because that culture does not exist for you under that structure. Yes, the rest of the company had that. You don’t. The interesting challenge is yes, CEOs can set culture, but I wish more companies would spend more time ensuring that they have healthy culture at the first-line manager level because that’s where it really matters. And the problem is the mission, the culture of the company, rarely becomes the mission of the individual managers, especially in larger corporations…. I believed that when I was a first-line manager, that was the best place to establish culture, and that culture existed in my team and couldn’t go wider than that.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Managers pre-occupied with power don’t usually want to expand their team culture wider. It is their own desire to advance.
    • Power-based culture is based on controlling the information (a selfish scenario).
    • Motivations for being pre-occupied with power could be due to fear, because it’s the only way the person has ever known, or that it’s the best way to gain the next job.
    • “Individual motivation is individual. It’s about preoccupation. If you have a manager that’s only pre-occupied with making themselves look good, it’s pretty obvious to you pretty quickly. And you’re just going to hope they go away eventually.” – Joseph Griffiths
• Was it easy for Joseph during his time as a manager to observe these preoccupations in his peers who were also managers?
  • Joseph says we can observe it in others this way, but he was fortunate to be surrounded by peers focused mostly on the mission of the company and creating great cultures for their teams.
  • “A lot of that is because our manager at the time, at that first round of hiring, was incredible at building that culture. So that was the preoccupation of that manager, and it became obvious in the people that she was hiring. This is where it does matter is the preoccupation…as a first-line manager, my boss’s preoccupation also affects my experience. Same thing just one level higher…every level creates its culture. Are we a collaborative culture that we’re working together to try to win together, or are we in competition against each other for who can do best?” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Joseph defines culture as a preoccupation with something.
  • “What are you pre-occupied with every day? That’s your real culture. We have lots of things that we profess to be culture, but when you sit down and you don’t have anything else you have to do, what do you do? You’ll figure out what your culture is pretty quick.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • The question about preoccupation is an interesting one we can ask ourselves.
  • Joseph says a lot of time is spent worrying about company culture, especially in hiring practices. Some companies have a top-level preoccupation with making money and nothing else, while others may have a top-level preoccupation with selling products and trying to do the right thing for the world in which we live.
  • “It’s very hard to be a great manager in a terrible top-level culture…. Experiencing in our local area is one thing. What do we have above us that’s creating an overarching pressure on that? It’s very hard if you’re in a highly rules-based organization…trying to build a culture of mission-based focus can be challenging.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Joseph recommends 2 books by Mike Abrashoff describing how he revolutionized the Navy (one of the worst performing ships in the Navy) through changing the culture to a mission-based culture while still following the rules:
    • It’s Our Ship: The No-Nonsense Guide to Leadership
    • It’s Your Ship
  • Joseph shares a story from one of the Mike Abrashoff books. On Sundays there would be a meal for the entire crew on the deck of the ship. The officers would cut in front of the lower ranking service people in the food line. Captain Abrashoff went to the front of the line and started handing out plates and was the last person to get his food that first Sunday on the ship.
    • This was Abrashoff’s initial step toward changing the culture from the top level, changing a rules-based organization into a mission-based organization.

28:57 – Advice for Future Managers

• If someone is passionate about changing the culture of a team / organization, should they become a manager?
  • “How about the inverse? If you’re considering being a manager, you should think about what kind of manager you want to be. And you should probably base it on…an investigation of the managers you’ve most liked working for and the ones you have not liked working for and figure out what those differences are…. For me, it’s do more of the positive. Don’t do any of the negative.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Joseph remembers a discussion he had with one of his first managers at VMware. Here’s what Joseph wanted to know.
    • What did all the good managers you’ve ever had have in common? It was a specific set of behaviors.
    • What did all the bad managers you’ve ever had have in common? This was also a specific set of behaviors.
  • Joseph’s daughter works at Taco Bell and is currently getting insights already into what she does and does not like in managers. The assistant managers at the store are also very young and inexperienced.
  • “Think about the times when you’ve done the most work, when you’ve grown the most. You probably connect that, generally, with a really good manager…. Sometimes it’s just a situation where you’ve been forced to grow by discomfort, which also happens. But I prefer to grow by comfort, feeling trusted. Should you think that you want to change the culture and that’s why you should become a manager, teams have their own culture with them as well. Some teams have a culture of cutthroat let’s win no matter what individually. Some of them want to help each other out…. It’s going to take time to change one culture to the other, and you can’t get too frustrated by that. Mike Abrashoff didn’t fix the boat in 1 week. It took him 9 months.” – Joseph Griffiths
• Should people be thinking about the time and effort required to become a manager before taking on the role? Should we assume it will automatically be more than being an individual contributor?
  • Joseph learned his manager Josh had many things to do but chose to give attention only to the most important things.
  • Joseph shares a story from his time at IBM working as a consultant for a large, multi-tenant service provider. His wife came to an office lunch event, and it turns out people had a huge misconception about how much work Joseph was forced to bring home as a result of the role he had. Joseph’s wife told his co-workers he didn’t bring work home outside of handling critical outage situations.
  • “We, especially since COVID, have consistently allowed our lives to blend.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Joseph would work past 5 PM as a manager only for customer events (part of working in sales) and for total meltdown problems. There were very few total meltdown problems over the course of 3 years. Most days he was finished by 5 PM.
    • Joseph would block 4-5 PM each day for administrative catch-up work, only accepting meetings during that time if they were critical.
    • “I think that we get way more done when we give ourselves limits, when we have balance…. I’m a firm believer that we’ve got to create boundaries so that we allow for the things to happen that need to happen in our lives. And when those boundaries become blurred, we produce far less. We are less sharp. We’re less available. We’re less there. We do not get more done by more hours. We get less done.” – Joseph Griffiths
    • In our previous discussions with Joseph about VCDX, he shared that 1 extra hour in his day helped him accomplish that goal over a 9-month period.
  • Much like Josh, Joseph had to spend his time on the things that were priority. Since he worked in sales, customers came first over anything else, and that priority was the same for members of Joseph’s team.
• Nick says people seeking leadership / management roles need to learn to set the limits and boundaries as Joseph said, but they should also be modeling this for their team.
  • Nick shares a story about how Joseph modeled this idea of boundaries and limits for him. You can hear more of this story in Episode 179, but there was a specific year during which Nick had to work during a holiday. Joseph told Nick there was no need for him to work on a company holiday, and if something was an emergency, he should call Joseph and let him take care of it.
  • “I do think that we will wake up after the 40 years of working and ask ourselves a question of who we’ve become, and I hope we like the answer. My answer is not going to be I’ve become a great sales leader. My answer is going to be the person, the character that I’ve developed. And part of that is learning to balance the priorities…. The challenging thing that we look at in our lives is balancing those things, and it does help when we are the same person at work as we are at home…. I think that there are times where we’re tempted to do things that are outside of our values and character in our employment in order to get ahead, and I think those are very dangerous things. Be true to yourself. I’m a big fan of character…. I encourage people to spend time thinking about the person they want to be at the end of those 40 years because you don’t want to be a 65-year-old retiree who doesn’t like yourself. It’s not a good place.” – Joseph Griffiths
• Joseph recommends everyone strongly consider their motivations before becoming a manager.
  • Being a manager is one of the most thankless jobs someone will have.
  • It’s easy to measure the impact of individual contributor actions / behaviors like a presentation, a project, etc. As a leader, it is much harder to measure these things.
  • “I measured my success as a leader in how hard it was to leave that job. If it was hard for me, that means I did it right. If it was easy for me to leave the job, I didn’t do it right. Think about that before you get into management because we need great managers who are dedicated to lifting other people up. We don’t need more managers that are dedicated to their careers.” – Joseph Griffiths
  • Joseph would love to see more managers who lift others up and celebrate the differences people on the team bring. He appreciates how different the members of his team were and appreciates getting to learn from those differences.

Mentioned in the Outro

• Are you having regular 1-1s with your manager?
  • If you are, how regular are these meetings? Are they in-person or remote?
  • Consider approaching these meetings mindfully, and put some thought into what you want to discuss during that time beforehand like Joseph recommended…especially if you are part of a large team and have limited time with your manager.
  • Could you write down 3 things you’d like to talk about with your manager in advance of your next 1-1? Spend time thinking, even if it’s 15 to 20 minutes.
  • This is also a time to bring ideas. Maybe you have an idea for how to do something differently or a project you’d like to work on. This time with your manager can help you determine the value of your idea to the team or the organization, and even if it is not, at least you know. It may just mean you haven’t clearly articulated the value of what you are proposing.
  • Consider taking notes during these meetings.
• This discussion with Joseph aligns with what we heard from Leanne Elliot in Episode 238 – Managers as Culture Keepers with Leanne Elliott (2/2) about managers being culture keepers.
• Are you considering people management? Think about the actions and behaviors of both the good and bad managers you’ve had. Then ask several people you know the same question to get a nice list of what each type of manager looks like. For some examples of the actions and behaviors of good managers, check out these episodes:
  • Episode 115 – High Flyers, Solid Players, and A Good Manager with Jeff Eberhard (1/2)
  • Episode 138 – Apprentice, Amplifier, and People Developer with Don Jones (2/2)
  • E-mail us the actions and behaviors of the best managers you’ve had, and we will read them on the air in a future episode!

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