Emotional competency is so important to who we are and who we want to become as a leader. The show’s guest today is Dr. Keith Westman, the Chief Operating Officer at Otus. Otus is the first EdTech platform to centralize learning management, assessment, and data on one platform, reducing chaos for educators, students, and their families. Dr. Keith discusses with Melanie Parish how crucial it is to make space for the people we work with. We have to allow them to be human, have families, and have things they care about outside of work. Tune in and learn more about humanizing your workplace by expanding emotional competency.

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Emotional Competency With Dr. Keith Westman

I have been thinking about my own leadership and how emotional competency is so important to who I am as a leader and who I want to become as a leader. I’m aware of how I don’t always knock it out of the park and how much I have to learn while still seeing how I have improved since I first started leading. It’s so important to me to make space for the people that work with me in my organization to be human, have families, be important, and have the things they care about outside of work be important to me. It’s such a journey to skill up in many areas as a leader. I always feel like Emotional Competency 1 is one that I continually work at to try to be better at. What’s the area of emotional competency that you want for yourself to skill up as a leader?

Emotional Competency: We’re all human beings. Let’s be there for one another, building in some time and allowing people to be human at work.

I’m here with Dr. Keith Westman. Keith is the Chief Operating Officer at Otus. Otus is the first edtech platform to centralize learning management, assessment, and data on one platform reducing chaos for educators, students and their families. Keith is regularly tapped by major media for his expertise and commentary in education and technology. Otus serves 160 unique school districts with over one million monthly users. With a revenue increase of 300%, the future for Otus is exciting.

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Keith, it’s so great to have you on my show.

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

I want to dive right in. I want to ask you what you are up to in your work, how are you experimenting in your work, and what’s going on for you.

2020 has been a year of complete experimentation, not only for me but probably for all of your readers in some form or the other. I’m the COO of a company called Otus. We work with K-12 school systems throughout the country. What we do is essentially consolidate the myriad of technology tools that teachers, students, parents and administrators use into one platform. It helps people be more efficient and helps you understand how schools and students are doing holistically.

The experimentation, especially for what we do, kicked into high gear in the middle of March 2020 when schools were asked to essentially rethink everything they do and the ways, in which they do it overnight. It has been a lot of experimentation for us as a company, not only how do we best serve the client base who had their world turned upside down but how as an organization who has also been turned upside down because we are all human and how do we keep marching forward. A lot of experimentation, some failures, some successes but at the end of the day, we are here and we are stronger.

I have some curious questions about education. The entire education system has been turned upside down. Going online for many schools, going online and offline and I believe your product was designed not to do online school but for all classrooms, were you challenged by that? What was the impact of that online component on you?

I can’t remember the dates. I think it was on March 15, 2020, or something like that, there was one day where the usage of Otus from one day to the next increased 400% and that is not normal. That is because all of a sudden, this was the conduit by, which education was going to happen. One would think that that’s great news. We are a for-profit company. That should be good news. It’s actually heartbreaking for me and hopefully, for everyone reading, the reality is that education does not happen in the best way when you are staring at a computer screen. You can learn a lot from YouTube. We were having a nice exchange now. What it comes down to is human relationships and that’s when the best learning happens. A lot of us are longtime educators who work at Otus. We saw a huge increase in usage and that’s good for business. At the end of the day, we also know that’s not the best type of education when kids are at a computer.

I have a kid who has Zoom fatigue. He had straight A’s. He’s in tenth grade. He is one of my kids. Now, he is done. He asked me if he could drop out of school, with straight A’s because he can’t do Zoom anymore.

Who can do, though? I don’t like being on Zoom for two hours a day. Why would we expect that a nine-year-old, for example, is okay with being on Zoom for four hours a day? Again, this was weird. What do you do? Hopefully, we are on the backend of all that.

Emotional Competency: Females in leadership positions are more thorough, a little more researched, and less impulsive.

I sure hope so and I do think that it has been a horrible alternative to real in-person interaction but not a bad alternative. I actually started offering Zoom coaching in 2018. I realized I liked seeing people’s faces so I started offering it. Sometimes, I lament that I made that leap because I used to do all my coaching on the phone. I do see where that has value, too, like being stuck in one place. With a phone, you can walk around. I’m seeing more experimentation happen as people get some Zoom fatigue. What do you project? There’s the experimenting at the moment. What were the biggest challenges for you as a leader going up hundreds of percent in this?

As a software company, we have a product roadmap. What are the things that we are going to be doing to help make our software platform provide the best service we can for our users? The product roadmap, the projects and the initiatives that we had did not know about COVID. Our biggest challenge is where people needed certain features about maybe communication, the way things were organized or the workflow of how things happen because they were doing everything from their computer and through Otus.

Otus, in our mind, was this thing that you went and did stuff in but what you spent most of your time doing was face-to-face out in your classroom and have nothing to do with electricity or technology. It’s like, “We need to hit pause on what we thought we were prepared to do and very quickly prepare to do something else.” That, to us, was the biggest challenge aside from all of the personal and interpersonal challenges that go along with it. Now you don’t see people, you miss people and who knows the life situations of people during 2020. Different types of challenges but again, they are all important and all a priority for us to handle.

I had to chuckle when you said, “Our biggest challenge was we are a software company and its features,” because I have coached a lot in software startups and things like that. It always features. Isn’t it always features? Whatever you envision their product to be on the ground, the more people that use it, the more everybody wants their own feature.

You give a mouse a cookie. I totally get that. What we try to do is make sure, as we do our roadmap, what’s the problem we are trying to solve and does it need to be done by a feature? Maybe it can be done by a UI tweak or training. You are right. It does seem that features. We never want to get into that feature whack-a-mole where you do this and now, we’ve got to do that and this. It’s some logical way to make that happen.

I have noticed that you talk a lot about the people in your organization. How did you frame the individual needs as a leader? People have been suffering. How did you think about that yourself as a leader during 2020?

First of all, I genuinely care about how people are doing. Fortunately, I don’t have to learn how to do that and figure out what do leaders do to show that they care about people. I would try to be myself and we would check in with people. I would tell them that how they feel is important and talk about how they were feeling. We, as a company, agreed to set aside. If you have a meeting scheduled, build in some time so that you can spend the first time seeing how everyone is doing, and then discuss what you’ve got to discuss. For me, it was allowing everyone to understand that we are all human beings. Let’s be there for one another, building in some time and allowing people to be human at work.

That piece of building in time and also getting a directive from the leader in an organization that it’s okay to build on that time is so important. In my work with teams, I talk about productivity and positivity. Positivity is the people’s side of it. If you go too far in either direction, either people are having burnout or nothing is getting done and so holding that balance is important. When the external forces are challenging people, you can add in some extra time on that human piece, compassion piece and empathy piece just seeing people. It’s not even that you have to do something super powerful or meaningful. It’s like, “Human, how are you doing?”

The other thing, from a leadership perspective, is shutting up, watching and listening. What are some other ideas that people may have? We had one of our teams who were firing up Zoom meetings to work. If they had another person on their screen, they would work and talk. There are different ways to recreate what it’s like to actually be with one another.

I particularly like to ask men and women in leadership how they think about their organizations. I would love to have you talk about how you think about that in your organization as a leader.

We have made sure, in recent years, to put a priority that our leadership team was comprised of people that don’t look like me. I’m a white male. I only speak English. I’m Joe average. We realized, as we were growing and I was either bringing in folks or talking to folks in my own network, that we were starting to have a leadership team that looked a lot like me. What we decided to do is change that. We have made some growth over the past couple of years, specifically to females in leadership positions. It’s my role, given white male, to make sure that we do everything we can to bring all sorts of voices into leadership roles, specific to women.

I find that if you want to have some questions that when they are given, they are going to sting because there’s going to be ground in so much fact, brutal and harsh reality, have a woman on your leadership team. That’s what you are going to get. To me, men have the whole ego thing, the pumping of the chest thing, “I don’t want to be wrong.” What I have found is females in leadership positions are more thorough, a little more researched and less impulsive.

Before working in software, I worked as a principal of a school but my superintendent was a female superintendent. I have had experience being managed and supervised by females in my career. One of the things that I noticed is those female leaders who exhibit some of the same qualities that their male counterparts exhibited are seen differently. Whereas the perception of a male leader who exhibits certain qualities to be strong and decisive, the female counterpart is seen negatively with those same traits. As far as ensuring that female voices are heard and female leaders are seen in the same context that male counterparts have been historical, that’s the responsibility of the white male to identify that this is a thing, we want to somehow overcome that and make sure all the voices are represented.

The hiring data bears that out. Without any intentionality behind it, we are likely to hire people like us. They make us feel good in interviews, affirm us, sound like us and feel familiar. I was working with a software team one time and it was like, “Everybody’s personality profile is identical.” Not even that they were all cisgender white men, they also had exactly the same personality profile. Software tends to do that but I do think there has to be some intentionality. I’m super curious who the other voices are. We talked about women but as you were talking, I realized that wasn’t the only diversity you were looking for. What else do you look for in terms of diversity on your leadership team?

Diversity of gender, race and ethnicity are all important. Those are the ones that most people when they think of diversity focus on as they should. What’s also important is the diversity of thoughts, life experiences and backgrounds. One of the things I learned as a third-grade teacher, I will never forget this day, we were doing a Math problem. It was one of those horrible word problems you do when you are in third grade. They were talking about building an ice cream sundae.

I look across my classroom of 23 students and none of them looked like me. They are confused. I was like, “What is going on here?” I said, “How many people in here have ever had an ice cream sundae?” Three hands went up. I realized their life experience is not mine. What was nice about that experience is it made me realize that the way I experience and see the world is the way I see and experienced the world. It’s not the way that everyone has. When we think about diversity, I like to think about it beyond what we typically think of.

I heard once that privilege is the ability to define normal. That’s such a true statement. We have power if we get to define the normal. That’s the unspoken piece that diversity brings to our teams. We allow that normal is wider and broader. It also opens up our customer base. If our normal is wider and broader and we are selling a product, then we are not only speaking to people who fit one demographic.

Emotional Competency: Diversity of gender, race, and ethnicity are all important, as are diversity of thoughts, life experiences, and backgrounds.

My goal is for the team at Otus to be a reflection of the students for whom we serve and we are not there yet, but that is where we want to be.

Since this is a leadership show, what do you think your strengths and challenges are as a leader?

One of the strengths that I have is my ability to be genuine, empathetic, a good listener and a good observer. That helps me, I hope, understand how people are feeling about their work and how we are doing as an organization but from the general satisfaction of how people are doing. My challenges are anything to do with numbers. If it’s growth projections, I can do the basic things. I can look at green arrows up, red arrows down and do all that stuff. Anything with numbers, I rely on trusted colleagues to help me figure out like, “I want to know X, Y, Z. How do I get there?” That’s why I taught third grade. I could do the Math.

I can do business Math. I love business Math but the other Math gets a little crazy in the realm that you are talking about. Keith, what do you do for self-care for yourself as a leader?

I ride the Peloton bike every day, see a therapist every week and eat pizza at least once a week. Some people might think that that’s not self-care but for me, it is because I love eating pizza. I enjoy time with my family and walk our dogs.

You see a therapist once a week. Frame it in leadership, what does that bring to you as a leader?

It’s an understanding of how external experiences impact me as a human and how to handle those in a helpful way. I’m one guy. Back to life experiences, everyone has their journey. Seeing and getting treatment for mental health or counseling, everyone should get it. I didn’t believe that all the time but it’s nice to have someone who can walk you through what’s going on so that you can again be the best version of yourself for your family and your colleagues as possible.

Where can people find you?

You can find me in my home office. Hopefully, you will be finding me at a real office in the not too distant future. Otus is the company that I work for, Otus.com. My name is Keith Westman and you can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, all those things. For right now, the most important thing is you are finding me right here with you. I have appreciated this opportunity.

Emotional Competency: It’s nice to have someone who can walk you through what’s going on so that you can be the best version of yourself for your family and colleagues.

It has been amazing talking with you. I have enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for being here with me.

Thanks for the opportunity as well. It’s great to be with you.

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I enjoyed being here with Dr. Keith Westman. I love hearing him talk about how he sees himself as naturally good with people that it’s easy for him to care about them. It’s so powerful when somebody uses their strengths and turns them into a business strength. It’s interesting how he’s intentionally looking to put diverse voices on his leadership team. I do believe that’s the way that we start to change organizations and change tech organizations so that we have diversity throughout the company. It has been great being here with you. Go experiment.

 Important Links:

• Otus
• Keith Westman
• LinkedIn – Keith Westman
• Twitter – Keith Westman

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