Disagreement, Trust, and Building High-Performing Teams with Dan Kirsche

Innovation and the Digital Enterprise

Joining a new company and being tasked with adding value and building high-performing teams starts with one key question: what is the organizational structure? Experienced technology leader Dan Kirsche has recently joined Chamberlain Group as the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering after a robust career of leading software engineers. With innovation and team building on his mind, Dan shares key lessons in culture-creating behaviors, embracing disagreement, and successful leadership.

In this episode, Dan discusses the importance of properly structured autonomous teams. He reflects on how leadership on these small teams can smoothly operate and their recommended size. Dan shares how these teams are the fundamental building blocks and that creating the right culture at the team level is essential. As a leader, Dan reveals that a continued focus on quality means that he is looped in when production issues are being discussed (Leaders, join the Slack channel!) and how strong leaders must be familiar with the severity and frequency of these issues.

Beyond focusing on quality, Dan dives into additional values he seeks to find in team members growing into leadership positions. He shares how pushing into an area of discomfort is key while sharing actionable mentorship strategies for providing those challenging and meaningful growth opportunities. Acknowledging how difficult tech leadership can be, Dan discusses the role of accountability and ownership, including how leaders must demonstrate the ability to receive feedback. Dan shares how opinionated, strategically disagreeable team members add value and, alongside other qualities that make them enjoyable to work with, are key members of teams that quickly find the right answers.

• (01:40) – Leading software engineering at Chamberlain Group
• (04:20) – Driving better practices
• (06:57) – Culture-creating behaviors
• (09:52) – A focus on quality
• (13:28) – Organization culture vs. team culture
• (16:05) – Accountability and ownership
• (19:47) – Embracing discomfort
• (23:42) – Building opinionated and innovative teams
• (29:14) – A willingness to disagree
• (30:57) – On leadership

Dan Kirsche is an experienced technology executive and Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Chamberlain Group. Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer at CURO Financial Technologies Corp and lead software engineering at Enova International, project44, and Groupon. Dan earned his MBA from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.