Managing at the speed of change: How to bring your people along
Kate O’Keeffe is a ball of fire and unbridled energy.
Kate is founder and CEO of Heatseeker.ai. She and I were teammates at Cisco — where Kate created something called “C.H.I.L.L.” (Cisco Hyper-Innovation Living Labs) to audaciously challenge company leaders to see innovation through the eyes of the customer.
In short, Kate’s a rebel — and I love it.
I wanted to interview a leader who is managing a team operating at the breakneck pace of AI — and I found her at Heatseeker, an AI start-up building on-demand synthetic customer panels, trained and checked through live experiments with real audiences. Kate says panels allow teams to keep asking questions about what their customers need and why they buy.
As AI reimagines the workplace, I’m continually trying to share with readers of this newsletter how managers can adapt and grow.
What’s so interesting about Kate is she’s both a leader and a manager. It makes me wonder if she isn’t emblematic of what the future of operating a team looks like. In the days of the corporate ladder, when you became a leader you often stopped doing manager things, like checking in on the front line.
Not Kate. “I go to stand-up. I never miss a showcase. Everybody likes showing off their work,” she told me.
My takeaway from talking to Kate: the faster AI impacts your business, the more you need to be a manager and a leader at the same time.
You have to manage “shoulder-to-shoulder”
When I first got to Cisco, I learned about “socialization” — how leaders got other leaders to do something by literally “socializing” an idea across the formal and informal connections inside the company.
It could be agonizingly slow, but it’s how things got done in hierarchically organized companies.
Today’s leaders and managers can’t wait for ideas to socialize across a team like boomers did; instead they need to take people with them on the journey, as Kate says, “shoulder-to-shoulder.”
The risk is moving so fast you leave everyone behind.
“The ability to code all weekend agentically, you can wake up on a Monday and realize you’ve made a whole lot of really important decisions that you didn’t bring anyone along for,” she told me.
I loved doing hands-on work with my teams, but the more senior I got the harder it became. I think Kate’s telling us that being in the places where the hands-on work is getting done is what it means to lead today.
3 Ways to Manage at the Speed of Change
Pragmatically, the speed of change is overwhelming today. Some gurus call it “change saturation.” Kate’s got a formula for that.
1. Make a promise on day one: set expectations out of the gate
“I do solemnly swear that you will do the best work of your life right here with us. I don’t care what you’ve done before… But what you are about to do will be the most challenging, the most exciting, and it will be shoulder-to-shoulder with exclusively the most engaged, passionate people who are at the very top of their game.”
2. Put the blockers in the room: don’t socialize the decision
“It can be really hard for people to say an idea is stupid. That’s why I have this rule that everybody who could be a blocker in the decision has to be in the room and see the customers tearing [the idea] apart. If Doug from accounts could blow up what we’re doing, Doug has to be there.”
3. Show up for the rituals: listening really matters
“Making sure that I make that time for the team gives you the opportunity for all of these micro moments to celebrate the team members that are bang-on target — and ask the probing questions that help us keep on the pathway.”
Kate told me the lesson she learned at Cisco is the one she still manages by today:
“It’s not enough to have the right answer, you got to have an answer that everybody can get behind.”
At the speed of change, that means working shoulder-to-shoulder. (Thanks, Kate!)
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How to be a Great First-Time Manager: The Culture Platform
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The corporate ladder has been dismantled rung by rung by AI. For millennials and Gen Z, the predictable career path has vaporized — and most managers are navigating it alone, without any formal training.
I’ve managed about 5,000 people in my career, and I was consistently ranked in the top quartile of all managers at Cisco, one of the world’s best places to work. I’ve walked in your shoes as a manager.
I left Cisco to answer one question with research and evidence: what does the manager of the future look like?
My research — conducted with thousands of young people at companies like Amazon, Google, Disney, and DoorDash — identified Six Drivers of Consistency that separate great managers from the rest, at a 95% confidence level.
That research became The Culture Platform: a complete mentorship system — Framework, Feedback, and Tools — purpose-built for first-time managers who want to separate themselves and be a great manager of high-performance teams.
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One way to keep people with you: publish the decision criteria before the decision. When the call comes fast, the team already knows what you will weigh, so speed feels shared rather than imposed.