02:14 - Ashleigh’s Superpower: Ability To See “The Vision”

• The Queen’s Gambit

03:35 - Intentionality: “People First”

• Call Me Out: Intention vs Impact


• “This Doesn’t Make Sense” Log


• Emotional Fitness Surveys


• “Dare To Lead” Book Club

10:55 - Listen

• Digging in to Defensiveness / Uncomfortableness


• Little Things Add Up


• Building Connections and Relationships

15:10 - Building Trust – Why is vulnerability not professional?

• Alleviating Fear


• North Star: Being Excellent To Each Other


• Self Awareness & Emotional Intelligence


• Discernment


• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

21:02 - Personal Growth and Development

• Brené Brown


• Glennon Doyle


• Morning Pages


• The Holistic Psychologist: Future Self Journaling

27:24 - Intersexuality and Identity: How do you show up?

• Privilege


• Gender


• Somatics


• Safety


• Solidarity

36:37 - Making and Dealing With Mistakes

• Taking Feedback


• Lead With Gratitude


• Ego Checks

40:05 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

• Visibility and Understanding


• Health and Wellness Benefits


• Sacred vs Safe Spaces / Safe vs Brave Spaces


• Dan Price

45:52 - Fundraising & Venture Capital (VC)

• The House of Who

Reflections:

Mandy: Eating a shame sandwich in order to learn and grow.

Chanté: North Star = Being excellent to each other.

Ashleigh: Celebrating intersections of identity.

Aaron: The “This Doesn’t Make Sense” log.

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Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.

MANDY: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore, I use she/her pronouns, and I'm here with our new panelist, Aaron Aldrich.

Welcome, Aaron!

AARON: Thanks! And hey, I'm Aaron. I use they/them pronouns and I am also here with Chanté Martínez Thurmond.

CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone, Chanté here. I use she/her/ella pronouns and I am so glad to introduce our guest today, Ashleigh Wilson.

Welcome, Ashleigh.

AARON: Thank you for having me!

Hello, Ashleigh here and I use she/her pronouns.

CHANTÉ: Ashleigh is the Founder and CEO of Auditmate, the world's first elevator and escalator auditing system.

After discovering that customers were an afterthought to most companies, Ashleigh left the corporate world and founded Auditmate under a "people first" mentality. Ashleigh knows discrimination first-hand as a queer woman working in the tech industry and she aims to create a space where everyone has permission to be human.

What a great bio.

ASHLEIGH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

CHANTÉ: It's a pleasure.

Ashleigh, the first question we ask our is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

ASHLEIGH: My superpower is my ability to see the vision and it's a bit of a witchy. I don't know where it comes from, but the best visual representation I've ever seen of it as if anyone has seen The Queen’s Gambit and when she can move the chess pieces on the ceiling? When I'm in the zone, and it's often when I'm half sleep, it just connects and I'm like, “Oh, this is how it works,” and I can just see the path forward. I can't force it. [chuckles] I don't get to choose when it happens. It just happens, or it doesn't. But when I get those deep downloads on the vision and the path forward, and then I think the skill that's been learned to couple with that is then how to make a plan to execute it because the vision can be one, but that execution does not work alone. [chuckles]

AARON: That's awesome. I like that and I like that you mentioned the skill that gets paired with that. I can relate to a superpower can't exist in a vacuum; it needs some way to be harness and used. [chuckles]

ASHLEIGH: Absolutely.

CHANTÉ: I love that, too. Aaron, where you're going with that, because what it makes me think about Ashleigh, just reading your bio and kind of getting a preview of some of the things you care about, how have you been intentional about building a people first organization, or a startup in this space and using that superpower and maybe either finding people who compliment you there, or who are distinctly different? But I'd love to hear how you've been intentional about that.

ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think it starts with first of all, when you feel othered in any organization, like coming in and being able to set the culture is like, “Oh, I'm going to do all of these things.” But as Aaron mentioned earlier, it's not in a vacuum and so, I think the intentionality has been, what is the mission? What is the north star? How do we treat each other? And then at every new hire at every new customer acquisition, it then iterates, iterates, iterates, and iterates. You have to be willing to learn, to take feedback, and to eat a shame sandwich every once in a while, when you screw it all up and you have to admit it [chuckles] because it happens every single time. I've been called to the carpet.

I think one of the biggest ways that I've been intentional is being communicative about call me out, call me out. I'm never going to know all of the things all the time and I think that my team knows me well enough to know my intentions, but it comes in intentions versus impact conversation. I can only know my intentions unless you tell me how this impacts you. I can't know and so, creating a culture of my team being able to call me out and be like, “Hey, your intention was good. The impact sucked. Let's talk about it.” [chuckles]

AARON: What's that like practically to get folks like on that side and able to call you out because I know for – I'm thinking about it and I know I can to jump into any corporate culture, even startup and be like, “Yeah, I feel comfortable calling out my boss on this.” [chuckles]

ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't think we feel like we have a corporate culture at least yet.

AARON: Yeah.

ASHLEIGH: But that also took time in creating. So one way that we did it was we have something called that this doesn't make sense log so that people can just document either things in the system, or things in the culture, or things in policies that just are kind of dumb. Like why do we do this this way? This doesn't make sense. This makes my job harder than it should be. The we need to get X done, but you're making us do Y and Z that don't go toward the greater mission.

And then also we created an emotional fitness survey for every employee so that each person – and it's left in one place so each person says, “I want to receive praise publicly, or privately,” or “If I need to get feedback, I want to receive it like this,” or these just different questions on how people to be communicated to. I think setting up those conversations as people log in and it's okay to speak up, it's okay to push back, I expect you to push back on me makes people feel more comfortable, but it takes a while. It does.

CHANTÉ: I love that. I use something very similar to that for my own consulting business in my firm and it's been something that we really lean into helpful to just make sure that it's transparent and it's a nice reminder as a leader that your answers to questions can change. Giving people permission to say, “You know what, how I'm showing up today is different than how I showed up yesterday, because life.” [chuckles]

ASHLEIGH: Totally.

CHANTÉ: So I really love that.

The other sort of burning thing that I have for you is, because I read that you had been in this business so I'm guessing that you had learned from people and maybe it was a family business. I might have missed that part. I'm curious how do