Welcome to this month’s comundo conversation. We’re talking to Brad Jayakody, VP of Engineering at Pleo, a Danish fintech scaleup.

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Hold on; didn’t we just talk to someone from Pleo? 

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Well remembered! We did, and that person was Jessie Scheepers, Belonging & Impact Lead. Why, you may ask, are we back in the virtual armchair with them? Well, as you might have seen from Jessie’s conversation, Pleo put a lot of focus on their people, and it’s not just in the Belonging & Impact team. 

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Engineering is no different. Brad might be a VP in the world of engineering, but he’s also heavily involved in volunteering and mental health work which gives him tools he’s able to use in his other workplace – Pleo. 

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It’s another combination we couldn’t resist – and we think you’ll like it too. Plus, if you’re looking for the best way to hone your leadership skills, you’ll find it right here. 

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Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do. 

Hello! So, I'm Brad. I’m Australian but have been in the UK for around 18 years and I've been getting paid to do tech stuff for 26 years. 

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For the first 15-16 years of my career, I was an engineer, then I moved into management and have spent the last six years or so in VP of engineering roles, helping scaleups become even more awesome and helping everyone in engineering be even more successful. 

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Volunteering was how I built a lot of my management skills.

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I also do a lot of volunteer work around mental health, and for about 12 years, I helped run a homeless shelter in my spare time.

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Has mental health volunteering been something you’ve always done?

No. I was very much an engineer and I got into engineering because I didn't like people and I’m a shy introvert. I started doing a lot more volunteering, and then my interests changed, and I started to focus on volunteering in mental health.

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I’d been doing volunteering stuff since I was a kid, but when I moved into management and leadership my focus kind of shifted. Mental health volunteering has been a focus of mine for about a decade now. 

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It’s a fascinating mix. Can you ever apply what you learn volunteering in your role at Pleo?

Oh absolutely. Volunteering was how I built a lot of my management skills – plus I got to work with a lovely bunch of other great volunteer managers and steal a bunch of things from them!

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One of the biggest crossover skills is motivation. So, everyone has intrinsic and extrinsic motivation levers and at work, you have both levers – ideally. The intrinsic of liking what you do and learning, and the extrinsic of getting paid. And because you’re getting paid, maybe you’ll put up with stuff you normally wouldn’t and maybe you’ll get a promotion at the end of it all. 

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But with volunteers, you don't have that extrinsic lever. You're not getting paid. You're giving up your time for free. So as a leader, you need to learn how to motivate people. You need to learn how to connect with them. You need to learn how to take them on the journey and sell the story about how what they’re doing really matters. And you need to find a role that suits them. What is that individual's happy place? What are they going to do? How do I find the right role for them? 

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Every time I have a manager who wants to become a better manager I tell them to go and find something they care about in the local community and volunteer.

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If you look at Daniel Pink’s theory about motivation, which is built on mastery, autonomy and purpose, when you’re doing volunteer management that’s pretty much all you can give them. 

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You don’t have salaries to give out, so if you make one mistake, that’s it; they’ll leave. And they won’t tell you why because there’s no sticking around. There’s no notice period or formal feedback loop. So you learn very, very quickly how to help people find the right purpose and how to help them grow their mastery. 

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Every time I have a manager who wants to become a better manager I tell them to go and find something they care about in the local community and volunteer. That’s how you’ll learn because sometimes, the extrinsic motivation – the pay, the promotions – they don’t work. 

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We’re all the same, right? We all want to be heard, and we all want to make a difference, especially as a professional. We could all sell our souls. I could sell my soul and go and work for a big corporate bank, but I would be miserable. I’m going to work for a nice fintech that is fun and where I like doing all the things we’re doing and where we have a culture where we can action things. I don’t like everything about my job, of course; I make a lot of spreadsheets, but if that’s the price I have to pay to keep helping to build this culture we have, then I’ll pay it.

How else do you help build your workplace culture – especially in a team of engineers?

It's an interesting misconception of engineering that it’s full of quiet, introverted types. In the old days engineering was very much a solo activity, but these days it’s a team sport. None of us succeed by ourselves. We do a lot of pairing, a lot of bouncing off each other, so it's a very much team sport and team activity, and there are a lot of human interactions around that. 

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I think you can get your job done – and share your personality. I try to show my personality and connect with people as much as I can. Sadly, I only have 40 hours a week at work to be able to do that, so it's hard to get to know everyone and every single person as an individual – and each of us as a human is a very unique individual.

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But a lot of it is trying to encourage people to share what they feel comfortable sharing and truly be themselves.

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Creating a safe space for that is a really tricky thing to do. You have to consider every single interaction you do, every single day. One of the small things I do is smoke cigars – I should cut down, I know – but I tend to do that on calls quite frequently because it also helps people realise that you can be yourself. 

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Is it harder to create these safe spaces in larger organisations?

It's both harder and easier at the same time. I’ve worked in some very large organisations, like the Australian Government, Expedia and Vodafone, and established companies sometimes have a very ingrained culture and might not be as appreciative of diversity and diversity of humans and diversity of thought.

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But that's a fun challenge. I remember Expedia was sometimes very confused about me and my dress sense and understanding that what I wear has no relation to how good I am at my job. I don’t ever want to have to pretend I’m somebody else. I like to be myself and I want other people to be able to do that. 

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How do you help your team remain open and accepting of each other?

So, that’s why I do some of the mental health stuff I do, especially at festivals. It’s one of the most privileged things I get to see when somebody you connect with to the point that they know they're not alone and they share that with you. 

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Fundamentally it's about active listening and active listening is an exhausting process. Listening and giving people the space to process is tiring and hard work, but I’m OK with that. 

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You can't control the emotions you have, we're human. How we act in those emotions and what we do is a conscious choice, but your emotions are always 100% valid. 

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It’s key to building that culture and space for people to be able to share – or not share. People, in general, are becoming a lot more willing to share, because everyone's emotion is 100% valid. 

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How does this all translate to a global and remote team?

It's much, much harder to connect as humans and individuals through screens. This was a big struggle for me when I joined Pleo because the engineering teams are primarily remote, so learning how to connect with people through screens was a challenge. 

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One lesson that I learned is that having your hands visible in a conversation makes life much easier because then people know you're not multitasking during the conversation. 

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Some people prefer to talk through screens, but for most folk – because we are tribal creatures used to reading body language – the connection is much harder to make. But once you've built up the trust, it works well.

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It’s important to remember that it’s easy to lose the context of tone in text communication, so there can be a lot of misunderstanding in tools like Slack. Avoiding this takes a lot of over-communicating to make sure messages are understood correctly. It’s a challenge, but another fun one!

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Do you have any advice for people looking to instil a more open culture in their teams?

Bring your personality. Let people recognise you as a human – including your flaws. I struggled with that one for a while when I started leading teams. I thought leaders have to be perfect and infallible, but we’re not perfect. 

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In a previous position, I used to do this thing I called ‘Brad’s fuck up of the week’ where I shared something I screwed up to help instil this culture of ‘hey, we all make mistakes’. That worked pretty well! 

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Showing your true self is hard. You’re scared about being judged and how people are going to react, which is why creating that open and safe space for people to be their true selves is about expecting, welcoming and accepting differences in neurodiversity, gender, how people think, talk and everything else. 

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And you need to do that in every single conversation and every single message, every chance you get.

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A huge thank you to Brad for this conversation. We love that awareness around intrinsic motivation is growing. It's part of the reason we have a four-day workweek; we know people want more than just good pay. What we're yet to do, however, is volunteering. It's something we're going to look into next year and try to get the whole company involved in. We're always learning!