Daelynn Moyer: You're Good At What You Do

I continued, I did again, what will become a recurring theme in my career, which is, I will my way into another tech job. This is Boss Ladies. Hello and welcome back to Boss Ladies. I just had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Dailin Moyer. You know, Dailin is a 25 year software engineer focused primarily in the transportation and heavy manufacturing sectors. Now she uses her deep technical background to inform her work building teams and organizations from a place of empathy, authenticity, and vulnerability. And her greatest achievement to date is teaching her cat to stand on his hind legs and turn a pirouette, which she talks a little bit more about in this episode. We also talk about management. She gives advice on how to be a good manager, how to build teams on empathy, authenticity, and vulnerability. And then also, you know, she talks a bit about evolving this concept of bringing your full self to work into bringing as much of yourself as you'd like to work at a safe workplace. And she sort of talks about, you know, where she learned about that concept and how she has, you know, incorporated that into her philosophy when managing and building teams. And she just overall is an incredible person and leader and empath. Dailin is currently a software engineering manager at indeed.com. And it just was such an amazing conversation. So I am so excited to share it with you. And with that, I bring you Dailin. All right. Hello. I am so lucky to be here today with Dailin. And I am so excited to talk a little bit about your career journey and management and building teams and all the fun things. So thank you for taking the time to be on Boss Ladies. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor. Of course. And, you know, to kick things off, why don't you start by telling us a bit about your career journey that led to your current role as software engineering manager at indeed? Well, like a lot of stories, it's colorful and convoluted. But it all starts back in the late 80s when I dropped out of college and spent about seven or eight years working restaurant and retail gigs as a single parent. I'm really just stuck in survival mode. And I was working at, eventually I found myself working at Borders Books, which is a name some of you may or may not recognize at this point. But I was shelving computer books at the time. So I had access to this huge vast wealth of information. You know, keep in mind, this is 1990, 1994, 1995. The internet barely existed. There was no stack overflow. There was no place for people to go learn online. So if you wanted to learn about technology, you bought books. Big, big books. And I had saw like I had access to all this information. And my dad had been in the tech sector or at least tech adjacent for years. So I asked him what what what can I learn to find myself a white collar job that pays better than minimum wage. Because retail is terrible. I don't want to work it anyway. Well, he suggested I learn networking. And how to build and maintain networks. And at the time, like that was a big deal. It wasn't you didn't just plug computers in and they could talk to each other. So I started reading about how computers work and how networks work. And I read and read and read. Eventually, I learned enough to convince someone to give me a job. I did not expect it to work, but it did. And I got a job as a the resident computer geek in this tiny little company where I did everything that was related to computers that wasn't spreadsheets or email, whether it was cleaning up mailing lists and doing mail merges or replacing RAM and hard drives or fixing the broken network. It was that was all me. One day, my boss came to me and said, well, we are taking on a new customer. We're going to manage their rebate program. And we need a custom database application to support them. That program starts in six weeks. And I'm like, okay, well, I don't really know what a database is. Will you buy me a book? Sure enough, they bought me a book. And six weeks later, I had written my first application and it worked. And it did what it was supposed to do. And I thought, well, this is a lot more fun than thinking around with mailing lists and fixing broken networks. I want to do more of this. So I did, I continued, I did again, what will become a recurring theme in my career, which is I bullshit my way into another tech job. This one was my was my first real like dedicated software engineering role. All I was doing was writing software and I was happy as a clam. I was learning and I was growing and I was making mistakes and learning from them. And I did that over and over and over again for the next 20 years. I would move to a new position by convincing someone to take a risk on me. I would learn what they had to offer. I would get bored and I would move on. Over the course of that time, I I wrote control software for electron and ion beam microscopes. I built a network of electric vehicle charging stations. I have software on the flight deck of every Boeing jet. And my last tech role before moving into management was a Lego mind storms dragon drop tool for freight liner for programming freight liner trucks. That's amazing. It was mostly a trade. It was never a passion project for me, but I I enjoyed coding enough to keep me busy for a while. Eventually, I felt like I was solving the same problems over and over again using the same tools over and over again and every new technology just felt like it's the old stuff with some new syntax and this isn't all that interesting anymore. And I started to become a lot more interested in how humans work than in how software works. And I really wanted to be more involved in development of people than in development of software. So management seemed the next logical course. So I did what I always did. I bought some books. I started reading and I convinced someone to take a risk on me and give me a couple of teams to manage. I've been doing that now for about seven or eight years, honing my my new craft and continuing to learn how to build high performing high performing software development communities that are founded on a basis of trust and authenticity and connection and community building inclusive spaces where people feel safe choosing how much of themselves they want to bring to work and delivering fantastic product. I was so lucky to meet you through actually a women in tech event. And I remember when you were speaking and talking about how you lead with empathy and how you build teams really focused on people and meeting people where they are and caring for their needs and their interests and their passions. And I was so sort of like struck by everything you had to say. I was like, I have to have her on the podcast. So I'm so excited that I get to talk to you a little bit more in detail on building teams, management, etc. So my first sort of non-career journey question for you is just right off the bat. What do you think are some of the most important qualities in a good manager and something a good manager should work on improving maybe those skills? I think that question becomes interestingly intersectional in the context of a podcast called Boss Ladies. There's this question of like what does a good manager need? And there's this question of how is that different for women than it is for men. Generally speaking, you know, putting the construct of gender aside and saying, well, what does a good manager need? A good manager needs humility. A good manager needs the ability to let go and to I think most people, especially in their first management role, are deeply challenged to stop being individual contributors because they to them that first management role, they approach as being an extension of their contributory career. And I think it's underplayed and under represented what a foundational shift it is really to step into that first management role. People don't realize that you're starting out all over again. You don't like yes, you will benefit from your individual career as an individual contributor because it will grant you insight into what your reports are doing. But being a manager is something else altogether. It is not what you were doing before, but at a higher level. That's such an important distinction to call out. Yeah, yeah. And like that. So I think that ability to come at it with a beginner's mind. Know that you're just starting out. That you're going to make some mistakes and allow that for yourself is really critical to success. Think about mixing back in this variable of gender. Like I want to. I think there's an interesting balance to strike here in that. It is critically important that a good manager have humility. And have that recognition of an interest of the people who report to them. And I want to acknowledge too that for professional women more often than not. They don't need exercise and muscle tone around humility. They already have that. Right. So I think. For depending on like I mean every woman is different, just like every human being is different, but. Don't use that as an excuse to make yourself smaller. I think is what I'm trying to get at. It is an opportunity for you. To get bigger. It is license for you to take up more space as you see fit. And I think that's the way that makes the space bigger so that everybody can get bigger. Not in a way that consumes limited space. I'm not sure how much more I can abuse that metaphor. I think I think it's important that. That women allow themselves to get big. Especially as they move into leadership humility isn't necessarily about not taking up space. It's about doing it in a way that also creates space for others. I love that. And especially in spaces where there is less repress, less female representation. I think it's very important that. We take up that space so that we can help the next generation of boss ladies continue to fill that space. Right. If. If women are getting to their first management role, having never seen another woman manager and having never seen another woman manager. Really. And so, it's important that as we step into those first management roles and as we take on the mantle of leadership. And so, we do it from that perspective, not just of, yeah, I'm getting paid more and that's great. Yeah, I have more administrative privilege and that's great. But also I can, I can be the role model I never had. I can be the sensitive empathetic community building manager that I never had. And I can show other people how to do that. By figuring it out and doing it also. And I want to go back to the other sort of comment you made when I first, you know, asked this question and ask, do you approach it differently when managing women versus men? Or do you have the same approach? Do you find there are differences? I think that's a very oniony and layered kind of question. Yeah. And I'm interacting with a team. As in a group of people, I don't know that I necessarily. All turn my delivery or my interaction patterns based on the gender composition of that team. When interacting with individuals, I interact with them as whole intersectional complex human beings of which gender is a part. I work really hard to build unique relationships that are the alchemy of my intersectionality and their intersectionality in a room together. Relationship. Of course, their gender is part of how they show up. And of course, their gender is part of how I choose to interact with them. But I base that delivery on a more holistic question of what does this person need from me? As it turns, women often come to the table at a demographic level. Ten to need different things than men tend to need. My job to say, oh, I have a new woman report. I know what she eats because she's a woman. It's my job to sit quietly and listen to her tell me what she needs. Regardless of her gender. And to do my best to give her that. And, you know, we have, I had a woman on the podcast who left her job in private equity to study why there weren't more women in leadership positions. And, you know, it, it, one of the main findings was, you know, she talks about how gender bias is a human issue. And not a women's issue. And how oftentimes when people do approach management with sort of a gender view, they may not give women the same feedback that they give men. And then women accelerate at a slower rate because they aren't getting that same critical feedback that they need to grow. And so I love that answer. And that it's so important. And I couldn't agree more to really focus on the individual and what their needs are and how you can help them grow based on their goals and not think of it through a gendered lens. I was just curious because when, when I first asked the question, you had sort of brought that up and I was wondering if there was it maybe a strategy that you use for either but I think that's a great answer. Yeah, I think the strategy really is embracing their humanity. Their whole ass complex. Difficult sticky messy humanity. Yeah. Which gender of which gender is a slice. Totally. Everybody that reports to me. Need something different. And while the team itself is sort of a unique entity unto itself that needs its own relationship with me. And I interact with that team as a unit in a particular way. It's made up of atomic individuals that are fully complete and on their own, on their own. So when I get them alone in a one on one, that's my chance to really get to know what makes this person this person. And what's going to make this person better at being this person. So when you think about how you take your management and some of those individual conversations that you have and scale that to start to actually build out a team. What are some of the strategies that you use to help keep that team. I think I want to pull up the exact words you said to build a high performing team on trust authenticity and vulnerability. Can you speak a little bit more about that? Yeah. Yeah. It's easy enough to get some talented people together and put them in a room and say go do this thing. But especially in the software engineering world. Generally speaking, people did not get into that as a trade because they just really enjoy connecting with people. And because they really get off on building community. Generally speaking, it is a career that attracts people who. Have historically had difficulty forming relationships have had difficulty feeling safe in their fullness. They've had difficulty finding places that they fit. And so just putting them in a room together is likely going to result in. And so the challenge I think for a manager in that context is that you can't just say no, no, no, no, we're a community here. And so I need you to show up as equals and I need you to validate each other. Yeah, do that because a lot of people don't know how to do that. Especially they don't know how to do it in the workplace. They've never seen it done in the workplace. And many of them have never even seen it done in their in their personal lives. So the best thing a manager can do at that point then is to begin modeling. And in the last few years they want to see and in a community like that, typically speaking, the behaviors you want to see are active empathetic listening appropriate levels of of candor and vulnerability honesty, tempered with kindness and a priority on team success over individual success. And so that's why you're doing all those behaviors. You model them by doing them. You model them by talking about them. what it is you're trying to accomplish. So, for example, you start a meeting and you want to create some opportunity for connection, especially in this post-pandemic world where we don't have a water cooler anymore. So you say, "All right, I've reserved 10 minutes at the beginning of this meeting and I just want to check in and let me tell everybody can say a few words about how they're feeling. You're just going to get crickets." But if you say that and then say, "Let me start." The way that I'm feeling today is I'm a little stressed out about the fact that my older Leon just got diagnosed with COVID and she's not doing well. And I read the news today and I saw this headline and it's kind of stressing me out. But then I saw this puppy meme and I was laughing my ass off at my desk for five minutes. So I'm in kind of a complicated place today. Hey Fred, why don't you go next? Where are you at today? Not only now have you put your own cards out on the table first, but you've shown them by example, what does it look like to balance vulnerability and candor and connection with a professional context? Now I could go off for another hour about how the idea of professionalism is an artificial construct and largely put in place to support the Cicero Patriarchy, especially the white Cicero Patriarchy. That's a whole other conversation. But I think setting that aside, there is the idea of like how do we show up in a way that is intersectional, that is validating and that is real and is appropriate for the workplace. So part of that challenge is in pushing the bounds of what is appropriate for the workplace while also acknowledging that it will never stop ye the workplace. And so it becomes incumbent I think on managers to sort of continually be sort of looking for and striving for creating that balance. And you know on this podcast we have talked a lot about the concept of bringing your full self to work. And you know I'm learning from this podcast always and my goal for the podcast is that it will continuously evolve and as I learn and as we learn as the community of listeners through Boss Ladies Learn, you had brought sort of a new approach to the table which I love and I feel like this is a very defining moment of evolution in the podcast which is hey maybe it's not just bringing your full self to work, maybe it's in to quote you and you can I want you to stay at yourself because I'm probably not going to paraphrase it correctly but evolving bringing your full self to work to bringing as much of yourself as you'd like to work out of safe workplace. So can you speak a little bit more about that and maybe correct if I didn't paraphrase that correctly? Sure. Yeah. And to be clear, like I can't I can't claim full credit for this as an approach but I was one of the one of the bloggers I follow relatively regularly is Bernadette Smith who publishes the five things weekly newsletter and one of the headlines in her newsletter one week last year was the full self fallacy which I was what is this about? This sounds interesting. I'm all about full selves. Why is that a fallacy? And in that in that article she sort of broke down some things are really resonated for me which is that like it is not realistic and maybe not even desirable to create a world where the expectation is that you are bringing your full self to work because our full selves are messy and they are confusing and they're complicated. They're not conducive to productivity. They're not conducive to building community. They're not conducive to all of the things that we're trying to build in the workplace. Parts of ourselves are. The other thing is that there's an aspect of hypocrisy there because I have no intention of bringing my full self to work. I will always be bringing a subset of my full self to work. That subset will always be authentic and it will be true and it will be an absolute an accurate representation of some parts of myself but there are parts of myself that I will never bring to work. I'm never going to talk at work about my sex life. I'm never going to talk at work about my medical history. I'm never going to talk at work about complex family politics. I'm never going to talk at work about all kinds of things. I'm running out of generic. Those are good ones though. The fact is, no matter how much we talk about bringing full safety for full selves at work, nobody is ever going to bring their full selves to work. I think it makes a lot more sense just to acknowledge that and say that that's okay. What we want to create instead maybe is the opportunity for people to make conscious choices about which subset of themselves they want to bring to work because they're already making those choices anyway. We may as well bring some intentionality to that and to create safety for those choices to be okay. We can acknowledge that people might show up a little differently from one day to the next and still be authentic. We can acknowledge that people have all kinds of crap going on outside of work that they're not going to talk about at work and that's okay. We can acknowledge that people come from different cultural backgrounds and that might show up in how they present at work and that's okay. There's often talk, especially within the black and people of color community about code switching. Right. Feeling like they have to hide their culture at work. I'm never going to tell anybody you have to bring your culture to work. But I am going to tell people on my team, you are safe bringing as much of your culture to work as you want. And if you feel like you haven't been bringing enough, I encourage you to bring one. And if anybody ever makes you feel uncomfortable about you bringing some aspect of yourself to work, you tell me about it because there's a disconnect there. There's a core value disconnect in how we are building this community. So when we get to this idea of like full self versus chosen self, like that's really what I'm getting at is this idea of just embracing the fact that nobody will ever bring their full selves to work, but that we have an opportunity to be intentional community building and safe around how we encourage people to show up at work. That was amazing. I had the same about that. You know, I encourage any leader that's listening, any future leader that's listening to really consider taking this approach and being upfront about that with your team. I mean, is that something you vocalize or do you think that's something that you demonstrate with action or both? What are your thoughts on that? Yes. Well, I'm very clear with my team that this I spend time talking with my team about the meta business of the team. I spend time with the team talking about what it is I'm trying to accomplish and how I'm in how I want to enroll them as accomplices in accomplishing it. Because I need their cooperation, B, I need them all aligned on the same set of expectations and C, they may have things that they want to see at work that I think are fantastic ideas that never occurred to me. So I want to continue to like have ongoing periodic discussion about the community of the team. So that it becomes a place where everybody is invested in its success, where everybody is invested in the team as an entity. And I think oftentimes in couples counseling, there's discussion around the idea of the relationship as a third party in the conversation. And how as a third party, it needs care, it needs feeding, it needs tending, it needs love, it needs discipline, it needs boundaries, it needs expectations. And I think we can have the same kind of conversation about the team, capital, the capital team, like as an entity and the kinds of input, boundaries and maintenance that it needs in order to thrive and to be healthy. I can't do all that by myself. and I won't be successful if I try. Because I'm. I won't have the full investment of my partners in team. Right. So it requires conversation to develop that partnership. It requires conversation and candid connection to invest people in that process. And get them as excited about the idea, or at least maybe not as excited as me, just because I get a little bit of a burgeekey about this kind of stuff. But to get them excited about the idea of maintaining and loving their team. Yeah. No, I love that. And yeah, honestly, everything you've said so far has deeply resonated. So I just appreciate you coming on the show and talking through this with me. I have another question for you about management, which is, how do you handle a situation where you know the right decision and it's the decision you have to make. But it may upset someone on your team because it's not the decision they want. How do you balance sort of communicating with them and doing the making that decision that you have to make while also helping to manage them feeling heard and represented and help getting them OK with maybe that decision if they weren't at first. Hopefully by the time you're making that decision, you've given them the opportunity to talk about their thoughts and their feelings and their input because otherwise you're missing the foundation on which you need to build your house. Right, by the time you reach your decision point, you should have already enrolled your partners in that decision making process. And you already gathered input as part of your collection of variables that will be the equation that outputs your decision. So it's critical then that as you read your beginning to enter a decision making process that you you invite people's input early on. And that you gather input from every interested party. So that by the time you make that decision, everybody has had a chance that you can point to and say actually we talked about this on this day that you can point to as evidence that they had their opportunity to give input. Then as you're delivering your that decision, just be straight up front about it. Don't hem and ha don't program you late. Don't try to soften the blow. Don't try to apologize for it. It's your decision to make so make it and stand it in it and be proud of your decision and acknowledge that there might be hurt that comes from that decision. And acknowledge that some people might be angry about it with the people that are upset about it. Talk to them, especially individually. Talk about how you weighed their input. Talk about your process in such a way that isn't justifying. And it describes why their input was outweighed by another input. Right. And sometimes that input is well, honestly, it's because my director made me do it. I'm really sorry, but this is reality of the situation. I did my best to represent your viewpoint. And ultimately, as a weighed everything, this is how it turned out. But if it's not a decision that was forced on you, then just take ownership of that and say, I recognize that this decision isn't how you wanted it to turn out. And I understand that your your input was valid, your concerns were valid. I understand why you object to this. And I made this decision for these reasons. Can you understand why I made that decision? And you understand why I came to the point that I did. And you are never going to convince them to stop being unhappy. You're never going to convince them to get behind your decision to like, OK, I'm on it. I got it. You're never going to get them excited necessarily about that. But you can get them to accept that decision in a way that they're not taking personally. Yeah. You can get them to accept that decision in a way that allows them to disagree and commit. Right. And I think I think that can be one sign, one sign of a very healthy team culture is the ability for people to disagree, but commit. I'm not going to disagree with this decision, but I know that I was heard. I know that my input was weighed. And I trust that my manager made the best decision that they could at the time with the information that they had. So I'm going to commit to this. And if you can get to that point where you've built enough trust with your reports that they believe you when you tell them that you weighed their input. That is just being honest, open, transparent, and unapologetic. I think it's a lot like relationships in that way. It's, I mean, it is relationships. Right. Obviously we mean something different when we say relationships, but ultimately that's what a team is. It's a collection of relationships. I think nearly every relationship of every kind benefits from Frank open. Kindness based communication. I think that was a really great answer in a very thoughtful approach of how to sometimes do the thing you have to do, but do it in a way where you're informing people they're not going to be surprised by this thing and also help them better understand the decision so that at least they know like you said almost like where you're coming from. And making that decision, whether it's someone above you says you have to or whether it's these are the reasons that as a leader, I feel very strongly and I'm going to end up going with this decision. Let's talk through it. Make sure you have your time to share. If you disagree with that decision, etc before it becomes final. So I think that was a great answer. And I think to like one of the things that I had to get over as a manager is not allowing who's going to be pissed off by this to be one of the variables in your decision making process. Because ultimately the more you make decisions, the more people you're going to upset, the more you strive for pleasing the greatest number of people, the less effective your decision making is going to be. And the more you'll end up making bad decisions, honestly, that's part of why you are a manager is to make difficult decisions and not to get people to like you get people to like you because you're a person who shows up in in their truth and in their authenticity and because they can respect you. It's not about making friends. It's about garnering respect. And I think that can be that can be a difficult distinction. I think for people early in their management career. Definitely. I mean, I, I know that that's something I will personally struggle with and I do struggle with it now, even without any, you know, official direct reports. It's, it's hard wanting to be friends and also needing to do the thing that you're paid to do, you know. Yeah, and you know, realistically speaking, front line management is one of the loneliest jobs you'll ever have. Because you do your team and your team members a disservice by being their friends. Of course, you want to be friendly. Of course, you want to have strong respect based relationships with them, but friendship becomes very sticky within that context. And so like line managers, depending on the organization can be very lonely in their work because they're peers, the people they can be most candid with. They don't generally work with. It might work adjacent to in parallel down lines, but they don't usually work together. And so reconciling yourself to that before saying yes to the role is important. Understanding that. You are relationship with especially if you're being promoted to manage a team that you've been a member of. Your relationship with those people is going to have to shift. It doesn't mean you're going to have to suddenly start alienating them and keeping them at arm's length. But it does mean. That. not necessarily going to be able to kavech with them about decisions that leadership is making. You're not going to be able to connect with them in that, like, yeah, we're down here together against the man kind of way. Maybe you might have been accustomed to, because now you're the man. >> Mm-hmm. >> Capital T, capital M. >> [LAUGH] >> I think it's official that you need to start a podcast on management, and I will be your first subscriber. [LAUGH] Because this is amazing, and I just love your approach and your strategy with all of these topics we've covered so far. >> Thank you so much. >> My last question for you, and I ask this in every episode, is what do you feel is one of your greatest accomplishments? >> Well, I can't talk about my greatest accomplishments without mentioning my cat, because I have to, I trained my cat to stand on his hind legs and turn in a pure wet. And- >> No way. >> I did, yeah. If he were in here, I would show you, but he's not in here. >> [LAUGH] >> And I have not trained him to come when I call, but. So that certainly ranks among my life's greatest achievements. But, real more grounded, like topical kind of way. I think that some of my, I think the accomplishment I'm most proud of and also have a complicated relationship with is. Having built the career that I built, having never graduated from college. I did like two and a half years of college and baby shows up, relationships get complicated. I never went back. And that has been a heavy albatross for me. As I have thought about, well, what value am I bringing when I'm working with people who have bachelor's and master's and even some PhDs, like who the hell am I to call myself an equal of these people? Who the hell am I to say that I'm as strong a contributor on the team as these other folks? >> I think not only are you an equal and as strong of a contributor, but you're also an inspiration to so many other people out there who also might not have that degree. And also may face those same concerns with that. And I think that's incredible. You're a trailblazer, you know, and shaping, no, but shaping the future so that you don't need those things to have an amazing successful career. >> And I think what I would say to those people are things that I wish someone had said to me 20 years ago, which is stop listening to yourself about that. Listen to what people tell you. Are you getting raises? Are you getting promotions? Are you continuing to get new opportunities and positive feedback? Because I guarantee you, you are the worst possible assessor of your own input. You are inevitably going to see your own input and your own contributions through the lens of whatever trauma it is that you carry in life. And we all do. We all carry our trauma. And we all have our bruises and scars and bandages that color how we see our impact on the world. And that prevent us from seeing how others see our impact on the world. And we are the worst possible judge of that impact. So believe people when they tell you you do good work, believe people when they give you raises or promotions or new opportunities. It is not because you have fooled it anybody. It is not because you are tricking them or hiding something and it is not because you are a fraud. It is because you are good at what you do. And your lack of a college degree, your non-traditional background, your career switch, whatever it is that got you there. That is your superpower, not your anchor. That is what I would say to those people. And that is what I wish someone had said to me a long time ago. That was so beautiful and so inspirational. And I just, I can't thank you enough again for for coming on Boss Ladies. This has been so wonderful. Thank you for the opportunity. It was great speaking with you today. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Boss Ladies. Check back next week for a new episode. Visit us at www.bossladiespodcast.com for more information about the show or follow us at Boss Ladies Podcasts on Instagram. Rate, like, and follow the show on all of your favorite podcast platforms.