Take an Honest Look at What You Can Do Better: Interview with Nathaniel Barnes, CTO of MeridianLink
I recently went one-on-one with Nathaniel Barnes, CTO of MeridianLink.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Nathaniel: I’m a software engineer at my core, it’s what I do. I started writing code when I was 10 years old to get around some content controls on a computer at my school so I could play video games during class. When one of my teachers discovered what I had done, instead of punishing me they gave me a book on the BASIC programming language, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Over time, I’ve fallen in love with software engineering and the act of creation that’s inherently involved in the field.
In 2004, I joined the United States Air Force and spent six years serving as a software engineer for a variety of Air Force intelligence applications. When I was discharged in 2010, I shifted over to defense contracting for a few years before starting a career in the private sector.
Even as I gained experience and more senior leadership roles over the years, my biggest passion continued to be front-line development work. In fact, I actually resisted leadership opportunities early in my career because, in software engineering, the more you take on a leadership role, the less you actually get to write code.
However, when I was still in the Air Force, I had a direct supervisor who didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of software engineering that are necessary to succeed in a development leadership role. When I had the opportunity to meet with his boss, I asked him why the department was promoting people who didn’t understand the basics and he said, “Most great engineers don’t want a leadership role and those that do often aren’t as talented. So if you want to see real change and create a better environment for the people that you work with, when your opportunity comes, take it.” That really resonated with me and was the beginning of my technology leadership journey.
While people management and the things that came with it weren’t the part of my work I was most passionate about, my early Air Force leadership experiences taught me a really important lesson: leadership roles aren’t conducive to instant gratification. The fruits of your labor don’t often pay off immediately like they might for a front-line developer who successfully solves a coding problem. Instead, leadership is more about problem-solving, people development, communication, and logistics – all things that make a product or organization better and can be rewarding when they come to fruition, but they pay off over a much longer term.
I think people learn best through failure. Personally, there have been a ton of failures that were valuable for my personal and professional development. To name one specifically, I worked on the development team for an app early in my career that had the goal of launching four months after we first started building it. It was an absolute mad dash to launch day, and while we met that ambitious timeline, the app crashed the weekend after we published it due to a coding mistake. The marketing team had dedicated a lot of time to promoting the launch, which meant this failure was incredibly visible and disruptive to the business. That experience taught me that even if you do everything right – work hard, write quality code, test it rigorously, etc. – an unrealistic timeline or unreasonable outside pressures on the development team will likely produce a poor outcome. Since then, I’ve focused on developing an incentive structure and support system around my development teams that allow them to do high-quality work at a sustainable pace.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Nathaniel: There’s a concept in computer science called Conway’s Law. The general idea is that two systems will be as linked as the teams that build them. That is, if two teams designing different products work closely together, those products will grow more similar to one another over time, and if the teams never communicate, the products will grow apart over time. Engineering leaders use this idea to structure their development teams in a way that mirrors how they want their technology to connect.
I think this same principle applies to scaling a business – if you have an organization structured in such a way that two people spend a lot of time together, they’ll naturally start creating things that are very similar or convergent. When leveraged correctly, this can force employees in counter-functional disciplines to spend more time together and work closely together. The more you can encourage these regular touch points across teams, especially as your organization grows, the more cohesive your company and work will become.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Nathaniel: One of the best leadership tips I’ve ever received is that leaders are servants first. Leaders are servants to many different people, groups, and stakeholders, so ultimately the job is an act of service. This can occasionally require sacrifice – for me, it was giving up roles that allowed me to code regularly – but the opportunities you get in return are so much greater. Leaders get to set and meet big goals, learn new skills, and make an impact in the lives of their employees and customers, to name just a few.
I think leaders sometimes get too preoccupied in the trappings of the day-to-day and don’t center their role around front-line staff and the company’s overall goals. It’s easy to focus on financial objectives and it’s easy to focus on your staff, but it’s often not easy to focus on both. However that’s the nature of the role, you are inherently a servant to both. You need to optimize for the experience of line-level staff so they are as productive and engaged as possible. But at the same time, you have to optimize your decision-making for what’s best for the long-term financial goals of the company.
In order to appropriately strike this balance, you need to be thoughtful about how and where you invest your time. For example, I make time to attend as many weekly product demos as possible because that’s one of the best opportunities I have to connect with my front-line staff and gain insight into what they’re working on. I also regularly inspect company financial information to ensure we’re on the right track, but reviewing and managing finances is naturally a much larger part of my responsibilities as a CTO. So, I have to be more intentional about seeking out opportunities to connect with line-level staff now than I did when I was in middle management and vice versa. In short, being an effective team leader is about recognizing your blind spots and investing time into those areas whenever possible.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Nathaniel: As a CTO, I spend a lot of my time learning about emerging technologies and working to identify trends that could impact the financial services industry. While there are a number of technologies I’m excited about, I think the most important trends that leaders should be aware of right now are, unsurprisingly, related to artificial intelligence.
I believe that artificial intelligence will rewrite the rules around what kind of tasks are automatable over the next few decades. I certainly don’t think AI technology will be able to replace everyone – we’re a long way off from models that can serve as a reliable substitute for human judgment and oversight. But, I do believe AI will lead to significant increases in productivity and capacity that will be a major, game-changing benefit for the individuals and organizations who are at the forefront of innovation in this area.
As generative AI technology continues to develop and become more integrated into professional workflows, it’s important to remember the asset that makes all of these models possible: large amounts of high-quality training data. In computer science, there’s a principle known as “garbage in, garbage out,” often shortened to GIGO. The basic idea of GIGO is that in any system, the quality of output is determined by the quality of the input. So even if you build the world’s most cutting-edge AI model, if it’s trained on a selection of low-quality data, you’re likely to get low-quality outputs. So companies and individuals that are truly interested in playing a leading role in the development of useful AI technologies should invest significantly into a methodology for cleaning and making sense of the underlying data.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Nathaniel: Responsibility. As a person, you take responsibility for what you do. As a leader, you have to take responsibility for a lot more, including the decisions of others. Are you making the right strategic decisions for your team? Are you optimizing workflows for line-level staff so they can work most efficiently? You have to maintain a constant reflection process that allows you to take responsibility for the output of what you and your team have done in order to adjust and be better the next time.
Constant Learning. The best leaders are in a constant learning process. They are autodidacts; they teach themselves things, and they reach out to others to teach them more things. You’ll never be able to know everything; in fact, as a leader you shouldn’t want to know everything or be seen as a monolith of knowledge. You should work to attract and retain smart, driven employees who are experts in their area and empower them to provide input that helps you make smarter, more strategic decisions for the organization.
Strategic Decision Making. It’s so important that leaders have a strong sense of their organization’s long-term goals and center every decision they make around a strategy to achieve and exceed those goals. Especially in more senior leadership positions, for every decision you make, your line-level staff make 1,000 decisions to help push the organization in the direction you’ve set, many of which you’ll never have an insight into. This means it is critical to ensure that at every opportunity, you’re making the right strategic choice and setting the example for your staff to follow as they work to move the organization closer to its goals on a day-to-day basis.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Nathaniel: I’m a voracious reader, so every time I get asked a question like this, I always start by encouraging people to read everything they can get their hands on. Don’t just read today’s trending business book, you should also read the books that inspired that book and helped the author develop the underlying theory they’re explaining or argument that they’re making. For example, about a decade ago, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries was very popular in my professional circles. The book’s central premise is inspired by the lean manufacturing process, which was itself inspired by the theory of constraints. So when I would recommend The Lean Startup to people, I would also encourage them to read about lean manufacturing and the theory of constraints, because if you understand the underlying theory, you’ll better understand where and why these concepts work and how they can be best applied to your situation. There are no panaceas in life, it’s all about examining the situation you’re in and picking the tools that are best suited to help rather than saying, “I got a new hammer, so everything’s a nail.”
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Nathaniel:
1. Leaders are inherently servants first. As I mentioned previously, one of the most important responsibilities of a leader is to empower their line-level staff to do their best work. As you attain more senior leadership roles, you grow increasingly detached from the actual day-to-day execution of the priorities you set. Your strategic vision is important, but it’s not worth much purely in theory, so focus on the people who execute against that strategy and do your best to add value to their work and lives.
2. Hold a mirror to yourself and your decision-making. As you work to set strategy for your organization or team, make sure the decision-making process you’re using is the best that it can possibly be. Solicit feedback from colleagues at all levels of the organization about what you can be doing to improve as a strategic leader and decision-maker. Being in a constant growth and improvement mindset is both a great way to develop as a professional and sets a great example for your peers and line-level staff. If your colleagues see you regularly looking within and working on yourself, that habit will rub off on them as well.
3. Take an honest look at what you can do better. In everything that you do – triumphs and defeats, large and small – you should take an honest, thoughtful look at how you can do a better job next time. Whether that’s finding strategies for completing work more efficiently, exceeding your metrics by 1% more, or anything in between, there are always opportunities to learn and grow if you hold the space to seek them out. That’s not to say you shouldn’t celebrate victories – you should absolutely recognize great work and push that recognition down to line-level staff, but also make sure your team knows that positive outcomes and looking for opportunities to improve are not mutually exclusive, in fact, they’re often linked together.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Nathaniel: The number one most important thing sales, marketing, and branding teams need to do to succeed is understand the fundamental data underlying your sales pipeline and the strategy for driving prospects through each part of the sales journey. You can’t improve something that you don’t understand, and the focus of those teams should be on improving that pipeline each and every day.
Additionally, be prepared to confront the reality that, despite your best efforts, a certain initiative or product just isn’t working. The go-to-market process is often overly optimistic out of necessity, but it's incumbent on these teams to adjust their aspirations to the realities on the ground, or else you’ll never fix the problem. Instead of investing resources into something that you know won’t achieve its goals, dig into why it didn’t succeed, share those learnings widely, and work to better next time.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Nathaniel: Be in a constant state of being slightly uncomfortable. I’m not saying you should always feel like you’re underwater, but I’ve found that life’s greatest moments and opportunities – both personally and professionally – are often found just outside of your comfort zone. Being totally comfortable with a situation can often lead to complacency, which isn’t in the best interest of you, your team, or your organization. Complacency can lead to carelessness and apathy, which can be contagious and fester. On the other hand, pushing yourself to reach just outside the bounds of what’s familiar each day will open the door to all kinds of personal and professional growth that will benefit you for the rest of your life.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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