How to Form a Winning Team

Through his 30 years of experience in the cable industry, Shane Portfolio has come to realize that the “C” in C-suite stands for “culture.” After serving in the U.S. Army, Portfolio rose through the corporate ranks—from the Comcast call center to senior-level leadership. Along the way, he discovered that winning teams are diverse teams. On this episode of the Voices of Experience podcast, Portfolio lists the soft skills needed to support a team that is bought in and ready to produce high-quality work. He also discusses his commitment to lifelong learning, the future of the cable industry and his new role as chief technology officer at Congruex.

Show Notes

Shane Portfolio

Shane Portfolio is the incoming chief technology officer at Congruex. He formerly held positions at Charter Communications and Comcast. He earned a master’s degree in information and communications technology with an emphasis in broadband networks from the University of Denver in 2011.

1:03 The key to climbing the org chart
3:17 Enabling your organization to thrive
4:24 The moment that changed Shane’s leadership journey
6:29 A dissertation on diversity
“Culture is defined by the worst behavior you’re willing to accept.”
10:55 “The best leaders are lifetime learners”
13:01 Knowing when it’s time to leave
15:17 Leaving your professional comfort zone
16:38 The next frontier of the cable industry
19:30 Be vulnerable, build trust
20:32 Show notes and credits

In this episode:

Light Reading: Former Comcast engineering exec Shane Portfolio heads to Charter
Voices of Experience podcast: Chris Dawson on transitioning from the military to corporate America
Congruex

Transcript

Lorne Fultonberg:
Today, on the season finale of the Voices of Experience podcast.

Shane Portfolio:
Culture is defined by the worst behavior you’re willing to accept.

Lorne Fultonberg:
How to build a winning team that jumps off the page of the job boards.

Shane Porfolio:
The hard part is creating a culture that people know about and hear about and say, “I want to work for that person or that group.”

Lorne Fultonberg:
He works in the cable industry, but “connection” means way more than internet speed for Shane Portfolio. As he’s climbed the corporate telecommunications ladder, he’s discovered that hard skills—the technical stuff—aren’t nearly as important as trust, a listening ear and a genuine compassion for the people you work with.

On this episode, Shane explains how he’s developed those skills. He also offers advice on how to make a move into a more senior role—and how to tell it’s time to leave a long-time employer. It’s fresh on his mind, as he prepares to take a new job as chief technology officer at Congruex.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Shane, thank you for stopping by.

Shane Portfolio:
Absolutely, my pleasure. Thanks you for inviting me.

Lorne Fultonberg:
For starters, I was looking at your resume and I feel like you could be the star of that musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, because you started in a call center role at Comcast and you rose all the way to the top, pretty much.

Shane Portfolio:
Yeah. Even prior to that, I served our country for about 14 years, and so a lot of the foundation of who I am I owe to my time I spent serving our country. But when I started my technology career, I did start at the very front line answering phone calls, and I think that provides a unique perspective. As you continue to move into more senior level positions, you always have a degree of empathy of what everybody that’s part of that team is doing and a great degree of respect because you had to do it

Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. So it sounds like it really informs the way that you lead even today, what 25, 26 longer years later you?

Shane Portfolio:
You can round up to 30, that’s okay. I won’t be offended.

Lorne Fultonberg:
What’s the key to rising from one role up to a more senior role?

Shane Portfolio:
What I saw pretty early on in my time was I had a lot of colleagues that were very technical. They really prefer to be individual contributors contributing technical expertise. And then I saw a lot of leaders who were really good leaders but didn’t have a strong enough technical acumen to really get the respect of the individual technical people, and so I saw a gap of being a leader that actually could get the respect of the technical teams by having some technical depth yourself.

And if you combine the two, then you can really find yourself in a position that you can accelerate through the career, and I found that niche or that gap as one that wasn’t something that a lot of people had and chose to bet on myself to be somebody who was balanced between leadership and technology, and it’s really served me well. So I always recommend people to evaluate the situation and look for the gaps that are in need and fill the gaps accordingly, and you’ll find yourself in an accelerated path because people need people to fill those positions.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Can you describe your position now, what you’ll be doing?

Shane Portfolio:
Yeah. So at the end of the day, it’s a senior level that when you’re in the C-suite, it’s about culture, it’s about people. It’s about making sure that you’re enabling your organization to thrive by listening more than you speak. I believe we have two ears in one mouth, and I don’t think that design was done by accident. And so I think if you take time to truly show an appreciation for your technical teams by listening to what they need and then prioritizing your time and making sure that you provide them what they need, they ultimately are the ones that are going to deliver the technical solutions that you need to be successful as a team. So at my level, I spend a lot of time listening, a lot of time making sure that I care for people at a human level, make sure they’re invested in appropriately. And then as a result of that, I’ve always seen that they bring their best self to work, and when we do that all boats rise.

Lorne Fultonberg:
I know you pride yourself immensely on creating a healthy culture and changing it when it’s not there. I was curious with your military background, we’ve had people on this program before who have talked about the challenges of moving from military to civilian, particularly in terms of emotional intelligence and connecting with people. What was that transition like for you?

Shane Portfolio:
It was really hard for sure. I would stand at attention when I was talking to my leader and he’s like, “What are you doing?” “I’m listening to what you’re telling me.” He’s like, “You don’t have to do that here.” I’m like, “Okay.” The thing that actually changed my entire leadership journey that was ingrained when I was in the military and was one of the more difficult things that I had to overcome, and I’m really grateful that I have because it’s really helped me become a more mature leader, was all I led in the military were male only soldiers. And so I had built an unconscious bias towards women leaders on my team when I became a civilian leader, and I would unconsciously provide women leaders the less complicated work. And one time one of the women leaders checked me on it and said, “I see what you’re doing. You’re not giving me the same level of difficult work that you’re giving my male colleagues, that needs to change.”

And she was right. And I absolutely am, to this day, grateful for the fact that she had the courage to tell me that because that changed my entire trajectory and made sure that I was more thoughtful about how I distributed work and making sure that women got as much complicated work as anybody else, and actually ended up becoming such a passion for me that my dissertation and my PhD was about women of color in the technology industry and how we need to invest and make sure that they have a greater representation. So that one was probably the greatest lesson I learned from the transition from military to civilian.

Lorne Fultonberg:
What made you want that to be a passion of yours, because it would be easy to just take the point, correct it in your own behavior, but it’s another thing to dedicate a dissertation to it.

Shane Portfolio:
Yeah. Dissertation is certainly something that if you don’t passionately really want to focus on a particular topic, it’ll exhaust you. And even if you do passionately want to focus on a topic, it still exhausts you, but you have to have the perseverance and the desire and the demand to keep going. And I knew I needed to pick a subject matter that would put me in a situation that when I was editing my paper at 1 o’clock in the morning, I wouldn’t just throw it and say that I’m done and I would keep going. I fundamentally believe my primary responsibility is to build winning teams. And every time I’ve had diversity, both racial diversity, gender diversity, youth diversity, thought leadership diversity, et cetera, my teams had a greater chance of winning.

And so when I really got to the fiber of why I was doing this, It was actually relatively selfish, and that’s because I want to build winning teams, and as I did research on building winning teams, it required that we invested in diversity. And what I saw was that we were lacking particularly women of color in the room helping us make decisions, and as a result, we weren’t winning. In my experience and all the research I’ve done from others’ experience, if you build in a diverse team, your chances of winning increase exponentially.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Everyone is made up of so many intersecting identities, many of which don’t match our own. How do you go about relating to the people that are not like you or that you haven’t studied for years in a PhD program?

Shane Portfolio:
I typically don’t use words like cultural fit. I look for cultural add. I look at what I have presently on my team, what the values of the people that I have on my team, the expertise of my team, and I look really hard at what I already have taken care of, and I make sure that when I look for a new person to join the team, that they’re not bringing the exact same thing I already have.

And by bringing something different, we become a better organization, and so I value people that are different than me. I value people who are courageous enough to disagree with me in a respectful way. I do not like organizations that when I say, “I’m thinking about this,” and then all of a sudden I see a whole team start to do it and I’m like, “Hold on. I just was thinking. I would love for you to disagree in a respectful way and let’s have iron sharpen iron. Let’s go to the whiteboard and really challenge each other’s thought processes here. Let’s get together and really do that.”

And when you can build a team where you can trust people enough to know that even if they disagree with your point, you know they’re coming from a good intention and they know that you’re coming from a place of good intentions, that’s typically when the greatest results of my career have come from or when teams are comfortable enough to do that.

Lorne Fultonberg:
What about someone who isn’t on board with your cultural vision

Shane Portfolio:
If they’re going to be a detriment to the culture, I have very low tolerance and I typically find ways for them to not be part of the organization because my culture needs to be one where everybody feels psychologically safe to be their authentic self. I believe culture is defined by the worst behavior you’re willing to accept.

And so if you have behavior on your team that’s not acceptable and you don’t do anything about it, that’s your culture and everyone’s watching that. But if you have high expectations and you have people that understand what those are and they deliver it every day, you tend to have a better team If they’re just people who are just not going to get over themselves and are just not going to be team players, I typically find an alternative path.

if there’s others who are just aren’t there, I ask for them to be open and honest and come tell me and be courageous enough to say, “I just don’t think that made sense to me or that really made me uncomfortable.” And most of the times when people do that, they’re usually right. I did something or I said something that had an intention of being something else, but it landed in a way where it didn’t land the way I wanted it to. And those who are courageous enough to come and tell me that I love that and I’ll work with them and we’ll get on the same page. But if it’s just bad behavior, I don’t have a high tolerance for that. I typically address that directly.

Lorne Fultonberg:
I want to shift to talk about your education.

Shane Portfolio:
Sure.

Lorne Fultonberg:
The education section of your LinkedIn is packed with degrees and certifications. I tried to count and I got a Bachelor’s degree, three Master’s degrees, a PhD. I might be missing some in there

Shane Portfolio:
Close enough.

Lorne Fultonberg:
… close enough. It’s everything from Engineering to Communications Technology to Organizational Leadership. What keeps you going back to school?

Shane Portfolio:
I think the best leaders are lifetime learners. I think leaders who think they have figured it out are the leaders I don’t want to be led by. I want to be led by leaders who are curious still and want to explore and learn because the way that we lead people now is so much different than we led people 20 years ago, and thank goodness for that because there’ve been so many lessons we’ve learned along the way to become better.

And I think right now in particular, the human factor of what all of us went through, there was not any culture or any community that was exempt from a global pandemic, and the impacts of what that creates, I believe, people want to be heard, they want to be seen, they want to be cared for. I think even more so after this dark period we all went through than ever before.

And I think leaders who understand that and learn how to do that are clearly going to be in a position that they can differentiate themselves because at the end of the day, winning is done through talent. What’s complicated is that these really talented men and women are talented enough to be very critical about where they work. And so the hard part is creating a culture that people know about and hear about and say, “I want to work for that person or that group,” that part requires work, but once you have that reputation, people will want to work in an organization like that a lot more than they want to work in an organization that doesn’t care for them

I think people watch their leaders, and if their leaders aren’t demonstrating that they’re personally taking action to learn how to be a better leader, then that sends a signal that you don’t want to send to your team.

Lorne Fultonberg:
You were at Comcast for 26 years, and then you decided to jump over to Charter. I was wondering, when you’re at a company for so long, how do you know that it’s time to leave that company or to leave a position?

Shane Portfolio:
I got to a place where my team was on such a autopilot type situation that I knew I wasn’t contributing to the degree that I would like to. They were fully capable of doing it. Three people got promoted the day I left because people on my team were elevated to different positions. But the dynamic in cable is interesting because, because of the government there’s franchise agreements that are made that Comcast and Charter cannot serve the same community. So while they’re competitors, they’re more like siblings because they compete with each other to see who can get the newest technology out the door first. But at the end of the day, they’re not competitors in that Comcast can’t sell into a Charter community and vice versa.

And Comcast demonstrated that they were about three years ahead of Charter on the technology deployment that they were working on, and we had Charter executives come visit us and we walked them through that technology deployment and they literally called me the next week and said, “We need you to come over to help get us caught up.” And because I felt like I had gotten to a place where I really wasn’t being challenged and fulfilled anymore, I saw an opportunity to do that. And so I did that and I did it for a couple years to the point where they got too close to parity and accomplished my objective. I knew I wasn’t going to be there for long. It was a change agent kind of assignment, and then I very recently accepted a different position that is a very interesting position because it’s a company that has bought 22 smaller companies and it’s grown really fast, and they’re bringing me in to take these 22 disparate companies and make it one. So I’m about to face one of the most fascinating leadership challenges of my career, and I’m very excited about it.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. What’s it like for you going from someplace you’re really comfortable and really experienced to one of these bigger challenges?

Shane Portfolio:
It’s scary. I don’t feel like I have it all figured out, but what I do know is that culture is the greatest influence of anything you can do. All the research I’ve done and all the experience I’ve had would suggest there’s nothing more influential than, do you have a culture that people enjoy coming to work? I am going to focus on the culture of how we work together, and if I spend time doing that, the other pieces seem to come together, but it’s really courageous to do and I just encourage people who are in leadership because it’s a lot easier to see what the goals are that you want to get done.

You want to get X amount of these things done, Y amount of these things done, Z amount of things of this done. And so you spend your time as a leader focused on how do you make that happen and I think that’s not the right way to focus on things.

When you focus on just how many of this and how many of that and the people see that you don’t really care about them, they’ll do the work because they want to pay rent and they want to pay mortgage and they want a car and all that stuff, but they’re not going to give you your best, and if you want their best, you create an environment like that. It’s amazing what that does.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Let’s zoom out and talk about the communications and cable industry as a whole. I don’t really know much about cable other than how to turn it on the TV. What is the next big frontier that you see in communications and cable?

Shane Portfolio:
Yeah. So right now it’s a race condition for fiber. Everybody is trying to build fiber because fiber provides reliability, it provides bandwidth and it provides speed that people want and need, and quite honestly, more than anybody really could use right now, but I know there are people that are my children’s age or even younger, my children are in their late teens, that are going to develop product and technology that’s going to require a ton of bandwidth to be able to use it. And so if we can get ahead of that by building out the future networks so that when those technologies come to fruition, there’s the capacity that’s needed for them to see all this beautiful new technology that needs to come and change people’s lives.

I think a lot of other things are we’ve been very manual and very focused on humans doing work that if you take the time to develop software and automation by leveraging AI and leveraging machine learning and leveraging next generation technology, a lot of people get concerned because they look at that as a loss of work because they were doing the work that now a system’s doing, and I look at it as a way for them to do actually more interesting work and that’s where I think we’re heading is we may not need as many people doing manual work, but we’re going to need more interesting, more creative, more curious, more depth in terms of the people that are really helping us solve the next generation challenges.

Lorne Fultonberg:
No place is immune from AI, huh?

Shane Portfolio:
Exactly. Yeah, we have an ability to use it in a way that, an example is today, if we have a customer impact, let’s say a car runs into a pole over here and that pole has cables that connect to that community, and now that pole has been torn down and the cable’s ripped and we have to fix it because customers are out. Before I would have to send technicians out to try to figure out exactly where it was, and they would spend up to 60 minutes to 90 minutes trying to discover, “Okay, where did this happen? Okay, it’s over here.” I now have intelligence from artificial intelligence that tells me, “No, it’s at this corner, exactly right here. Here’s the exact coordinates of where it’s at.” They drive, they reduce the time of customers are down by an hour. Those are fun things to show what the power of allowing systems to help you with something that used to be a very manual task, and you become a better company because of it.

Lorne Fultonberg:
That’s a great example. Really puts it in perspective. Last thing I have for you is a question we ask all of our guests, as a voice of experience here on the podcast that bears that name, what else would you want to share with our listeners?

Shane Portfolio:
I would say the first thing you have to do if you want a strong relationship with anybody, but particularly a team, is you’ve got to be vulnerable enough to let people know about yourself and you have to listen about who they are, and you get to know somebody. When you get to know somebody, then you can start to trust somebody. If you can trust somebody, you can rely on somebody. If you can rely on somebody, you can commit to somebody that you’re going to get something done. And then if you commit to something and somebody and you actually see it happen, then there’s a true connection. And everybody should focus on, “How do we get to connection?” Because when you get to connection, beautiful things happen.

Lorne Fultonberg:
That is Shane Portfolio, PhD, Chief Technology Officer at Congruex. Shane, that was really insightful. Thank you.

Shane Portfolio:
You’re welcome. Thank you for your time.

Lorne Fultonberg:
As we mentioned near the top of the episode, Shane isn’t the first veteran who has talked about adjusting his interpersonal approach as he moved from the military to the corporate world. Our first guest of the season, Chris Dawson of Arcimoto, explained the pivotal moment that shifted his thinking, all the way back in our season premiere. You’ll find that linked on our show notes at daniels.du.edu/voe-podcast.

And that’s a wrap on Season 3 of the Voices of Experience podcast. Sophia Holt and Patrick Orr have been our outstanding sound engineers. Nick Greenhalgh has been a fantastic host. And Randi Eskanos has been a huge help making these episodes sing. And a thank you to Kate Dillon and Aimee Mandolini for helping us identify and book our guests. I’m Lorne Fultonberg. Check out our past episodes on your favorite streaming platform, and we’ll see you before long.

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