Profile: Shawn Neumann
Our founder and CEO shares how Domain7 evolved, what he believes true leadership is all about, and why solutions are not the answer.
So tell me a bit about your childhood years: your family was overseas for a while?
Shawn: I was born in Kathmandu, Nepal. My parents worked in rural Nepal for a non-profit in the late 60s/early 70’s. I was only there until I was about three or four and then we moved back to Canada — Abbotsford. This is the height of the hippy years, so we ended up living in a straw hut, tent, and little trailer on the five acres while they worked to build the house. They wanted to be out of town. So we grew up there, with a sense of being born somewhere else, of some strangeness. As a kid that has an impact on the way you feel about yourself. Sort of being outsiders in the sense of being fine with not being in the midst of the hustle and bustle. Living 20 minutes out of town was a nice place to be.
And then you went on to study History and Economics in university. Were you interested in tech at that point?
My dad was always sort of tech-curious. In the 80’s he came home with this 40-lb Osborne portable computer, and he’s like, “this will revolutionize our lives.” So I try to figure out how this thing works, and spent endless hours playing on it, learning basic programming. I built this little program to categorize all of our National Geographics. We had hundreds of them, and I had a little database where I could search the articles and dates.
For me technology was a hobby, but I was always interested with change and impact and things with a broader scope. I was thinking about university in the late 80’s early 90’s: the fall of the Berlin Wall, and collapse of the Soviet Union was all happening then. So the world was reshaping in front of our eyes at that time. We were emerging from 70 years of a polarized world and that was unraveling.
In many ways, the world looked like a Wild West, a blank slate that could be written into an amazingly positive future…or into anything.
How — and why — did you start Domain7?
I was intrigued with the challenges of global disparity. I came from Nepal, with this sort of strange dynamic of being born in that place but not of it, so to speak. And I was thinking about the randomness of being born into the luxury of a life here, as well as questions around how as a community we address these kinds of issues of disparity. I got involved with a microcredit organization: I really liked this idea of enabling people in the developing world, not telling them what to do but just saying, “what are you doing and how can we support and help you do that?” The internet was emerging, and I joined the organization in Kansas City to take the passion I had around technology and connect it with my interest in development.
We moved back to BC in 1996 to be closer to family, and that’s when I began the web agency, with this microcredit organization as my first client. So the founding story of Domain7 wasn’t as much the establishment of a grand vision, as following things that were flowing and interesting. It was contextual and evolutionary.
Do you think Domain7 has stayed true to its roots? There seem to be elements of a people-first, co-creation ethos in the founding story.
Totally. There is a lot of things that are just in the DNA. I look back even on some of our early stuff that we did, and some of it’s actually pretty close to our thinking right now. We were creating a platform-sharing dynamic for non-profits back then, and we were talking about it as a way to come together to understand shared challenges and opportunities and act in ways that were collaborative and cooperative.
How have you seen the landscape around these values shift, or not shift, over the last 20 years?
I think that we underestimate how much organizations have changed. We set the bar high for the future, and we should. I think that we often forget how far our businesses have come, and forget what business life and expectations were like back then. It’s a whole series of nudges over a long period of time that add up to some pretty significant change.
You champion a humanized style of leadership. How would you describe your leadership learning journey?
In one word, painful.
It’s repeatedly encountering areas where you need to acknowledge that you don’t know more than you do. You have to be ready to be humbled by processes that you feel an obligation as a leader to be able to somehow manage and make happen, but you don’t know how. Especially when you start something small as one person. What you need then is very different than what you need if you have two people, or 20 people, or 50 people.
I found that to be hugely rewarding, and also hugely challenging. It requires a lot of learning and an ability to go into awkward and difficult situations that often point out one’s own shortcomings and failings. There’s a lot of learning in that.
I think it’s been one of the most surprisingly rewarding parts about it, is the ability to be changed personally by what you’re part of.
To be passionately engaged and connected to something but to try not to kill it by enclosing on it is challenging as well. There’s times when you realize that as a leader you’re the most dangerous role in the organization. The challenge is that you don’t always see the danger until you look around and say, “what’s all this mess around me?”
There’s a balance here with knowing how to hold things loosely. How do you deal with the tension of control versus intentionality?
Power in itself I don’t think is a bad thing, but power over people and making things happen because of “having power over” rather than “alongside” or “supporting” is where we get in trouble as organizations.
What does it mean to use the privileged information that I happen to have because of all I know about the organization? I can use that to control, or I can use it as a foundation under people that they can work on.
When you’re younger and you think of leadership, you think you’re acquiring privilege, you’re acquiring the ability to have say-so over a whole bunch of people…
…you’re the boss.
Exactly. As a leader and business owner, the painful part of that journey is to realize it’s not something I hold or own. It isn’t mine. If it is mine it’s nothing.
If it’s “mine” it’s like building a puppet — the organization has no life in it of itself. It won’t have any value.
So then there’s a fine line between what responsibility does a leader have in that context? If it’s not to tell, not to draw the line that everyone has to follow, what does it mean to be in a position of leadership? And it’s not to step back and say, “Who cares, do whatever you want.” It’s not to be careless or disengaged. But it is saying “What does fully engaged look like? And what does it look like to understand my responsibility to this?”
We’ve grown a lot in the last decade. What are some areas, or stresses you’ve had to pay attention to as we’ve grown?
We’ve made some big mistakes when it comes to trying to avoid certain types of leadership roles or structures that we may have thought would be counter to collaboration and shared sense of ownership across the whole team. There are times where we have — in an attempt to create an organization where we’re valuing everyone and there’s opportunities for everyone very horizontally — created a lot of ambiguity, confusion, and lack of clarity.
I think that could come from not knowing how to balance a highly evolved and engaged team that values everyone, alongside designated, specific, and clear responsibility and roles. We’ve learned how to create a high sense of clarity and a higher level of engagement, where people really understand what leadership looks like and what they need to lead. While at the same time, ensuring people feel like voices and input can still come from everywhere, and there can be a broad and shared sense of contribution across the organization. There’s always a need to be holding some of these things loosely, by asking ourselves what’s worth working and what’s not. And asking “what are the principles that we’re trying to be true to?”
How do you balance decision-making and collaboration?
We have to be able to make decisions effectively and in a timely fashion, and we have to have a high sense of involvement and engagement across the whole team with the overall strategy. But those don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Organizations need to have structures that allow us to make decisions effectively and quickly, and at the same time have a environment in place where no one on the team will be surprised by any strategic direction our organization takes. Either they’ve been involved in it or it fits right in line with what they’re expecting their organization to be and do.
It can be frustrating for individuals: whenever you experiment it isn’t smooth. People struggle and there’s challenges. I don’t want to have a team where we don’t have people who push me for clarity. And we also need the people pushing us to not mindlessly rely on hierarchical structures.
How would you distill your leadership philosophy?
Fundamentally, leadership is about respecting and learning what it means to value people in the context of work. I do think leadership is a responsibility to the people around us. It’s about the correct order of things. The outcomes come as a result of starting from the foundation — of asking at a very simple level, “What does it mean to be humans working together?” Starting from that simple human dynamic and letting that be a constant reminder.
Underneath all of these issues is a simple human question of interaction with the people around you. You build on top of that.
It doesn’t change the fact that I feel a desire and a drive to get results, because that is another way of valuing the team effort and the individuals. It’s a multifaceted reality.
You have two teen-aged daughters, and you’re also running a growing business that you lead and own. What’s your advice to other parents in similar moments of life?
It’s awesome and challenging, and you learn the same things about humility at home as you do in a leadership role at an organization. It just is so evident that they absorb what we do and not what we say. They take in the reality of our choices. They take in the way we treat people, the types of things that we choose to spend our time or not spend our time on, how we engage with them.
I also think there’s so many overlaps between the learnings that you do in home life and work life and other sorts of community groups and social engagement. These seem like different worlds, and when we treat them differently I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice. My home life drives what I want to be doing at work, and what I want to be doing at work carries through to what I hope for my family and my kids.
You’ve been involved in the credit union space for some time now. What is it about credit unions that you find important?
I had joined the local credit union as an eight-year-old, my grandfather took me to open an account. He was one of the founding members, account number four. Growing up, it was just assumed that you came together as a community to do your banking. So I had that historic connection with it. I joined the board really not knowing what I was getting into, but it very quickly became obvious to me that this is a really unique space that I think a lot of people have no idea about.
This idea of what behaviours change when an organization is owned by its customers is an interesting question.
Your motivations are very different than when you’re owned by members rather than a limited group of shareholders. That isn’t enough for cooperative financial institutions to be successful, though. For me, part of the intrigue has been to see the historic value of what it means for a group of people to band together and say, “We can run a profitable organization that’s accountable in a different way to those people which it serves and build that from the ground up.” But then also to say “how can you also drive a deep motivation and desire to evolve and change for relevance?” How do you create some of the same potential outcomes of the big banks, or new and more interesting outcomes even, but not just by following the blueprint of a corporate context?
It’s back to that tension between autonomy and people-centricity, and innovation and achievement.
I think it’s a wonderful tension to wrestle with, and I think choosing one or the other is unsatisfying. It’s an unresolvable tension. It’s always going to be there, but I think having it, inviting it to be a tension that you’re wrestling with, has provided so much energy and fuel.
These things are really symbiotic. It’s when you give in to crystallizing, that you set yourself on the path of letting one rule the other in some fashion, and not having them hold each other to account.
You need answers for a specific time and a specific context. You always need to be using that tension to draw yourself into the moment and ask, “What sort of direction do we need right now?” That answer isn’t going to necessarily sustain you when that tension emerges again in a different time and a different context.
