Leaders Unscripted

Conversations with leaders about the challenges they’ve faced and what they’ve learned.

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4: The Art of Leading While Managing a Chronic Health Condition with Co-Founder and CTO at 3rd Eye Robotics, Dizzy Smith

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The diagnosis of a chronic illness is often one of the most monumental events in a person’s life, but it’s done nothing to slow the relentless trajectory of Dave “Dizzy” Smith’s career.

With decades of leadership experience as a VP of Engineering at brands like Basho, DigitalOcean and Equinix, he’s learned from successes and boldly admits his missteps - signs of truly honest leadership.

Dizzy’s story is nothing short of inspirational; learn how he’s thrived in the face of his medical challenges on this week’s Leaders Unscripted…

This Episode Covers:

  • The staggering discovery of Dizzy’s chronic health condition
  • Learning first-hand the impact of culture within your team
  • Adapting to the longer feedback loops that come with management roles
  • Managing yourself before you manage your team
  • The fine balance between vulnerability, openness and strength

Episode Highlights:

“I was at Basho for about three or four months when I noticed that I have like two lumps in the back of my neck. So I went to the doctor, and they started fiddling around, and then they just went white as a sheet. Turns out, I had stage four follicular lymphoma. ” - 3:50 - Dizzy Smith
“When you're faced with this, the question becomes: ‘If there's a memorial service for me, what is it that want people saying at that point? Will I be satisfied that I have lived my life fully if people show up and say this thing?’” - 5:50 - Dizzy Smith
“Basho was complicated for me personally, it is a source of both pride and shame. I had never created a team or created a culture or anything like that before. So I just tried stuff, I tried to treat everything as an experiment and learn from it. We hired some amazing people. But I also inadvertently created a homogenous, white guy culture.” - 12:45 - Dizzy Smith
“I understand in a significant way just how critical it is to get some of this stuff right because you can really injure people as a leader if you're not paying attention to these things.” - 15:00 - Dizzy Smith
“When you move to a manager role, the feedback loop goes from hours to weeks, or maybe months. That makes it so much harder to learn.” - 18:45 - Dizzy Smith
“It's really important as a leader to have some time between things. Otherwise you wind up taking all your PTSD with you into the next thing. Then you're overlaying and using models from the previous place where those models don't always apply, especially in new environments.” - 25:00 - Dizzy Smith
“The first person you have to manage is yourself. If you are not going to be able to show up with the appropriate gravitas, with the appropriate mental balance, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But you also need to make sure that you're not forcing yourself to try and do things that you can't do well.” - 33:45 - Dizzy Smith
“There's a balancing act. You can’t constantly say ‘I'm just broken all the time’. There's a certain level of confidence and facing the scary things that you have. But I think there's also room for softness and vulnerability and I think the best leaders that I've worked with are like that.” - 39:30 - Dizzy Smith

Links & References:

Constellary: https://www.constellaryhq.com/

Suzan Bond: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanbond/

Dizzy Smith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dizzyd/