#174 Working in Flat Cultures and With Strong Leaders

Notes:

Do you enjoy going to work every day? If so, then perhaps you are part of a great culture within your organization. Or you really enjoy working with your SE manager. If you’re an SE manager, what should you be your number 1 role and function aside from overseeing the team’s tasks, projects, and roles? How important is it to foster a good culture within your team?

This episode was a really fun and insightful conversation on SE leadership as we chat with Sonu Sahi, the Senior Manager of Solutions Engineering at DocuSign. Sonu has worked with both business and technical teams and individuals in the computer software industry.

Sonu talks about how he was thrust into the leadership role as an SE manager, what it’s like managing a remote team, and what he finds so fun about guiding and empowering his sales engineers, building a great culture of feeling joy at work within an organization, and why he disagrees with Ramzi’s statement that the SE’s role is to make the SE manager’s job easier.

Eight Ignored Skills That Sales Engineers Should Have:

Sonu shares his journey from wanting to be a developer to now leading SE teams
Being in charge of the entire Canadian social engineering business across all the market segments for DocuSign
Why Toronto is unofficially the mecca of the SE world within Canada
Differences and similarities between Canadian and American sales engineers and the sales cycles
What’s it like being a Canadian presales leader working for an American company?
How Sonu was convinced by his former colleagues to take on the SE leadership role.
Why going out for pizza and beer can be a great start to foster relationships with your colleagues or teammates
Why he has always benefited from having really strong leaders who had flat cultures.
Cultivating that culture of building relationships and friendships with your colleagues and team
What is culture and who should be responsible for creating that within an organization?
How Sonu handles conflict or when something negative happens within his team
Why it should never be about attacking a person but attacking the problem
Getting the technical win, becoming a better business partner with your AE, and becoming a better business value driver for your customer
Why Sonu’s leadership style is a lot different from a lot of styles you can see in other organizations
Sonu shares his first encounter with Chris White

Quotes:

“I think a lot of us, especially if you’re working with technology, or you’re working with a customer or a use case or business problem that you’re really passionate about, that enthusiasm just comes naturally.” – Sonu Sahi

“When the culture is flat, and everybody’s voice counts, regardless of your title or role, it’s so much more fun to go to work every day.” – Sonu Sahi

“You go the extra mile for friends, and I have always loved working alongside my friends. And that is the culture I wanted.” – Sonu Sahi

“Culture is the sum of all of the connections and transactions between people on that organization or within that team. So, if you think about that every conversation you have, whether you’re a leader, or whether your team individual contributor is contributing to the culture, right. And if you run a flat style of an organization where everybody’s voice counts, everybody is contributing just as much as the leader towards building that culture that they all want to work in. I think that’s so important.” – Sonu Sahi

“I think that the need and the space to be created for a healthy dialogue is something that all leaders should create if they want a culture, where the results surpassed everybody’s expectations.” – Sonu Sahi

“Our job is to create space for other people to do their best work. And that comes from culture. From winning deals to learning something to developing themselves as leaders.”. – Sonu Sahi

“Anything you can do to contribute more to the organization, as long as it’s fun for you, and it’s delivering value, absolutely do it.” – Sonu Sahi