A few months ago we had a leadership offsite about an hour out of town in a small hunting cabin (and no, we don’t actually go hunting). It’s a great place for an offsite, big comfy furniture, lots of space to spread out all of the kit (for me that’s two laptops, ipad, phone and a camera that I never use ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), fast internet, great kitchen, big hot tub on the deck and a very nice pool table. We typically have way too many agenda items and leadership exercises that we cram into a couple of extremely long days - like start rolling at 8 or 8:30am and just keep going until the wee hours of the morning. Of course, we try to get the serious work done earlier in the day and then, as the day wears on, and the beers start coming out, we spend more time on our team dynamics. Of all the teams I have worked with, this one is easily the tightest and most transparent - there’s a lot of mutual respect that goes around the table. An example of one of our “favorite” exercises is where we go around the table on openly assess how well we think each person is doing - The prompt goes something like: I think you do x well and I think that that you do, y, z, z1, z2, etc poorly - brutal honesty is the goal here (and a huge challenge for my inherent passive aggressive tendencies). One criticism I got shortly after being moved into the CTO slot was that I was not taking command of the role and that I needed to be “the CTO that I wanted to be” - she was right, I was having a hard time getting my bearings and it made me reset the way I was approaching the job. You take stuff like that to heart and it sticks with you, especially when it comes from someone you have a ton of respect for. Sometimes it’s awesome and sometimes we all want to strangle each other - it’s cool though, we are all still alive and like each other (for the most part 🙃). There are a number of reasons this team works so well, we each bring something to the table that no one else can do, we work tirelessly with extreme optimism, we listen carefully to each other and we all believe in what we are doing. Do we do everything perfectly? no. Do we make dumb mistakes? absolutely. Can we do anything we put our minds to accomplishing? Yes, we always figure out a way to make it work out. It’s a great team and I’d like to think these quarterly offsite meetings are a big part of what makes us tick.
That was a pretty long intro into the point of this post. As the day wore on, we moved the discussion up to the pool table. This team has had a few interesting pool table events - for example, I played and beat the former CTO for the CTO title. He’s CEO now, so it was not llke he lost anything but will always be a favorite story. We take playing pool very seriously, even though none of us is all that great at it we really enjoy the game and all the trash talk that goes along with it. On this particular evening, we were on the downward/right side of Ballmer’s peak (https://xkcd.com/323/), we had tunes blasting on Spotify and somehow we got into a groove where each of us would request a song when it was our turn - kind of like when they introduce players at a baseball, game, each player has their own theme song. If you actually sank a ball, the song would continue to play, this would continue until you missed a shot or the song was over (BTW, the later never happened). We dubbed it JukeBox pool and we played like this for a few hours.
Eventually, we got more into a general discussion about theme songs, as in “What is your theme song?”. You don’t have to be seriously into music to realize that you probably have a theme song. A song that describes you or your state of mind. A song that someone else might use to describe you. It could also be a song that reveals a side of yourself that most people never see or don’t know about. It could be a song that pumps you up in the morning or that you relax to at night. Revealing your theme song to your colleagues can give them more insight into who you really are, having your colleagues tell you what they think your theme song is can give you insight into how you are perceived by your peers.
So, I’ll set this up a bit. If I ask people that know me well what they think my theme song is, they will usually go for something by Talking Heads, like ‘Once In a Lifetime’ (just in case, here’s the vid: https://youtu.be/aXqt-10pWpw?si=rhEJravuU8nTJgj5). Pretty good pick on the band, and while that is one of my favorite songs by them and I even sang a couple of verses from it, a cappella no less, at a friend’s wedding (“and you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife”) - it’s not really a song a resonate with at a personal level. But notice that even though I have not revealed what I actually consider to be my actual theme song (which is also on that album), you already have a sense of who I’m am a bit. Obviously nerdy, awkward dancing guy but then when you think about it, serious but not serious, fun, experimental, different, and maybe even smart (well at least in theory) and likely somewhat self deprecating. If I said my theme song was ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC, you’d form a very different impression of me, right?
I really like this as a team exercise though as you can use it in a number of different ways. You can ask a new team member to reveal their theme song and have the rest of the team share theirs. You can ask the team to identify each other’s theme song in which case the person who’s theme is being identified gets some ideas about how they are perceived by the other members in their team . It’s also possible for people to have whole soundtracks if they want (today I am '‘Back in Black’, so get the fuck out of my way), there is no reason why your theme song can’t change over the years, you mellow out or some life event happens that changes your perspective on yourself. A couple of things to watch out for though with an exercise like this. One is that everyone has their own interpretation to song meanings. Some people may do a lot of research about the lyrics and have much more perspective about the songs meaning than the rest of the team so the conversation about why they chose a song is important - for example, we had a long debate about whether it was ok to like a song where the artist was a total jerk. The idea is not to judge someone about the song they picked but to get that conversation going, to explore ideas that the song surfaces. Also important to remember that just because someone identifies with a song, it does not mean they are trying to live the song or have the lifestyle depicted in the song - like sometimes there is one verse that a person really identifies with but the rest of the song is not quite right. Again, it’s really important to ask questions and not make assumptions. The other thing to watch is when someone decides to change their theme song. Often not a big deal, but can also be an indication that something is going on that you need to be aware of. Not everyone is comfortable asking for help when they need it so a change could also be a quiet signal and this is something that might come up in their next one-on-one.
Give it a shot! Think about what your theme song is and tell me why you chose it. What song should we play when you step up to your computer in the morning, ready to slay some bits and bytes?
Thanks for reading!!