A Culture of Empowerment: Interview with Kurtis McBride of Miovision
Recently, Tim Jackson and I have been conducting interviews with leaders in the tech community about their thoughts on leadership and talent management. Check out The Leadership Pad if you’d like to see the past interviews.
Continuing in this series, I spoke to Kurtis McBride, co-founder and CEO of Miovision. Miovision’s traffic data platform allows transportation professionals to collect and analyze traffic data and manage traffic operations. Miovision was one of the first companies to graduate from Waterloo region’s Accelerator Centre.
Kurtis’ key piece of advice? Establish your organizational culture from day one. This makes decision-making a lot easier.
More insights from Kurtis are in the interview below.
Q: What characteristics do you look for when identifying leaders at Miovision?
A: We have four core values that help us make every decision in the business, whether it’s product decisions, hiring decisions, or organizational structure decisions. They steer decisions on who end up being leaders here.
We also believe that leaders are people who others want to follow as opposed to the traditional model where leaders are people who get appointed to their positions. We think it’s a better way to manage an organization.
Q: What are some of the ways you develop talent at Miovision?
A: I’ve been told that our model is ‘sink or swim’. Our whole philosophy is that the organization is best off if you find the perfect intersection of peoples’ passions, the business need, and their skills. This applies to our org structure and what job people do or the project they work on. That means that we encourage a lot of movement inside the organization. It’s largely a ‘choose your own adventure’ situation, where it’s up to you to seek out the mentorship you need or want.
Q: Do you have plans for ideas you want to implement when it comes to developing talent?
A: We are currently doing some things to steer people toward the right mentorship and career growth opportunities. Over the last year or so, we have grown from about 75 to 120 people. We crossed a threshold from it being easy for everyone to know what’s going on in the business to it being more challenging to know what’s going on.
Running an org structure that is somewhat distributed or nodal works really well locally. People have a really good sense of team and what the goals are at a local level. But it’s difficult to make visible to everyone what the rest of the business is doing and how goals are being distributed.
In terms of career pathing, it makes it difficult for people to understand what opportunities exist in other parts of the business, so we have started to build a piece of software that helps to provide that visibility. The idea of the software is that if every individual contributes to the overall view of the business from their own local perspective, then we can build a picture of what’s happening inside the business.
One feature of the software is a role board. It lists all the roles that are currently open within the business that are linked to a goal we are trying to achieve. People can go to the role board and add new roles to their own job. This is a way to allow them to explore their career and also take one hat off and put another one on if they decide they want to.
Q: How has your talent management strategy changed as Miovision has grown?
A: It’s changed fairly considerably. When we first started, we were literally three guys in a basement. Then we grew. All the books said to do recruiting, org structure, and decision-making a certain way. We followed the usual path and got to a certain size, but decided that it didn’t really fit our culture or what we wanted to do.
So, we made some changes. I talked earlier about core values. That was one of the first steps. We laid down a foundation that allowed us to communicate internally and externally what it meant to work here.
Even performance management is largely employee-led. The punchline of our culture is empowerment, but the subtext of empowerment is accountability. If you want to be empowered, then you need to be accountable to yourself. So we look for people who are passionate and self-driven. If you want to get better, you need to tell me what you need to work on, then the company will help facilitate the mentorship and career path growth.
We also have this concept we call ‘being on the bench’. Sometimes, someone decides that the role they are doing isn’t really for them anymore. So we came up with this concept of ‘the bench’ where people can have zero roles for a period of time. The ideas is that it allows them to go through a period of self-discovery. They can move through the business and try different things so that they can ultimately settle into a role that exists or sometimes even create a new role.
We’ve realized that if you give people things to work on that they want to work on, then they tend to be more passionate about it. Ultimately it’s not just about everybody feeling good — there’s a productivity benefit that comes from it. You aren’t going to work as hard as you would if you were working on something you love. We decided to build our business around that principle.
Q: During Miovision’s growth, how has your own leadership style changed and evolved?
A: I don’t know if my style has changed as much as the culture that we have built has allowed me to be more myself. We went through a phase where we ran a more traditional, hierarchical organization. That is incongruent with my personality, so I always found it harder to be the CEO when the company ran like that. But I think I just had to learn what it meant to be a CEO and what it meant to build culture.
Now, we don’t have the traditional structures. We don’t micromanage. If you fill the company up with people that are empowerable, empower them, and give them a vision of where we are trying to go, you can let them fill the blanks in. This has made my job easier. I can do more things than I used to because I have a lighter touch on all of them.
Q: Are there any challenges that come with your unique culture from a talent standpoint?
A: The biggest challenge is that with a distributed structure, as you grow it makes it harder to know who makes each decision. In traditional hierarchies, you just look up to your boss to make all the decisions. With our culture, when you want a decision made and the decision is within your team, it’s very efficient. If the decision is outside your team, it’s not always obvious who makes that decision. That’s been one of the things that we have had to figure out how to manage. We spend a lot more time on communication, to align different stakeholders or even just to figure out who makes the decision. Part of the vision of the software we are developing is that you can essentially search and find out who would make that decision within the business.
Another challenge is with onboarding. We find that if we hire new grads out of school who don’t have preconceptions about how structure should run, they onboard quite quickly. For the people who have worked in larger companies for 10–15 years, the culture can be a bit of a shock. They have to adapt to how it works. Generally we find that they ride it out for a number of weeks, and once they get their head around it, they prefer it. It’s more natural than the more traditional structure.
Q: If you could go back to the start of your journey with Miovision and talk to yourself, what advice would you give yourself about leading an organization?
A: Set your core values on day one. We have four core values that provide a framework for how we make all decisions. We waited until we were six years in and at about 75 people before we set them. Now, they have become such a guiding star in terms of how we make decisions, ranging from how we structure capital to raise money to hiring decisions.
