Salesforce Hiring Edge

Is Leadership Right for You? The Truth About Moving Up (And Why Many Fail)

• Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire • Season 3 • Episode 66

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Are you ready to step into a leadership role—or are you being pushed into one for the wrong reasons? In this episode of The Salesforce Career Show, we uncover the reality of leadership and whether it’s the right path for you.

Join host Josh Matthews, co-host Josh LaQuire, and leadership expert Whitney Faires as they dive deep into the challenges of Salesforce leadership, career progression myths, and how to thrive as a people leader. Learn the key skills that separate great leaders from struggling managers and how AI is reshaping business, hiring, and career development.

We also break down highlights from the Salesforce Spring 2025 Release Notes and introduce our new segment: AI Spotlight, where we explore the latest in AI for leadership and career growth.

🎧 Subscribe now to stay ahead in your Salesforce career!

(Relevant topics: Salesforce leadership, career growth, people leadership skills, becoming a manager, Salesforce career advice, AI in business, AI in leadership, Salesforce Spring 2025 Release.)

Josh Matthews:

Are you ready to uncover the truth about people leadership? Many aspiring leaders step into the role for all the wrong reasons. It could be money, it could be career progression or simply being asked to. But what truly defines exceptional leadership and how do we know if it's right for us? Whitney Farris, an internationally recognized coach, keynote speaker and leadership expert, will deep dive with us into the leadership dilemma with insights that could redefine your career path. Today, we're also going to be joined by co-host Josh LaQuire. Everybody hopefully by now already knows Josh. He's pretty freaking awesome and he's going to help us break down some not all some of the Salesforce Spring Release Notes for 2025. And we introduce a new segment to our show, the AI Spotlight. So stay tuned till the end and be sure to like and subscribe.

Josh LeQuire:

And now it's the Salesforce Career Show.

Josh Matthews:

Okay, well, welcome Whitney and welcome Josh. Josh, congratulations, you won the big spot, the hot seat, here on the Salesforce Career Show. For those who might be listening to us for the very first time, maybe you can just give us a quick 15-second bio. Who are you, how long have you been in the ecosystem and why are you even here on the show, buddy?

Josh LeQuire:

on the show, buddy. Well, josh, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate all the nice things you said about me. The checks in the mail. I am the founder and operator of C-Currents. We're a Salesforce consulting partner. This is the second Salesforce consulting partner I founded and led. I had the coterie before. We're a product development outsourcing organization. I've been working in Salesforce since 2011. I've been building apps since 2003. And I'm excited to be here to talk about Salesforce and how we can help you beef up your career and get you going in the ecosystem.

Josh Matthews:

I love it. And then we've got Whitney. Whitney, we're so excited to have you here today because you have had an exceptional career so far as an executive, working in HR, working in healthcare, and you've got a pretty interesting relationship indirectly with the Salesforce ecosystem as well. So welcome to the show. I gave a little bit of a mini bio, but why don't you share the audience a little bit about what you're most passionate about and why you do what you do helping people as a coach and a keynote speaker?

Whitney Faires:

Yeah Well, first of all, thanks for having me, and I feel like I'm sort of part of making history here with the new co-host, so I appreciate. I will try not to mess up. The first episode for you, josh.

Josh LeQuire:

I think you're going to be fine, you're already making me look a lot better. Thank you, I appreciate that.

Whitney Faires:

Of course, but what I'm most passionate about is helping people reach their maximum potential, and I spent gosh 10 years in sales and sales leadership and I just saw so many people that were hungry for development. They had big goals for their career but sometimes getting there is just really hard to do and it can be very uncertain and difficult to navigate. And so, after sales leadership, I hopped into an operations role, launched a finance function and then I moved into what I was really passionate about was people, and I led an org health team and then was also chief of staff to the CFO of a fortune 500 company. So I've kind of hopped around and I actually think that my experience has always been do the work that inspires you You're passionate about. Obviously, we all need to make money, but the two can coexist, but it takes a little bit of vision and intentionality to to see your career where you want to go.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I mean you can't just hope for the best. Crossing your fingers isn't the way to approach your career and no one should approach their career like that. Some of us have been really lucky at certain stages in our life where things fell in our lap. There are all these stories of the accidental admin who worked at an organization and maybe they were doing customer service and someone asked them to help out with Salesforce and they jumped in and they kind of wrapped their arms around it, fell in love with the product, fell in love with the kind of role and did that for years. They never intended to get into product ownership or Salesforce administration or anything like that. But then years go by and all of a sudden they're thinking what comes next? Because maybe the next thing is not going to fall in their lap right, they're going to have to actually do something about it.

Josh Matthews:

Talk, if you can, a little bit about that, because I think we all can recognize here. Because I think we all can recognize here. It's pretty obvious that usually we think to get more money to get the type of fulfillment or a claim that we want in a career. So many of us and I certainly was one of. These folks believe that the only way there is to take your boss's job at some point. Can you talk about that for a little bit?

Whitney Faires:

Yeah, for sure. I think that I often see two types of people those that are very passive about their career. They want to do more, but they don't spend a lot of time really mapping out that path. And I don't mean it has to be a 10-year plan, but just thinking about what might be the next thing or two I would look at right. Maybe that is moving up and taking my boss's job. Maybe that's taking a lateral move that offers diversity of experience that's going to help me get ready for the job to down the road right.

Whitney Faires:

So sometimes people take this passive approach where they're not sure what to do next, so they just kind of say, oh, my career will figure itself out. And then, of course, you have the opposite, where either someone has overengineered and been like I'm going to get this job by this date and this is how it's going to go, or they're getting pulled into the next role. And in all those situations the key is just really stopping to pause and say, okay, is this right for me? And just really being thoughtful about am I ready for it, is this the work that I like to do? And when you talk about getting pulled into your boss's job, or I'm just going to go do that job.

Whitney Faires:

I think about people leadership, and not all individual contributors are going to love the work of a people leader. It's totally different and, yes, there's certainly like transferable skills and a lot of similarities. But when you move to that people leadership role, your job is not to execute on a daily basis. Your job is to develop the people in your organization to drive better results, to drive the result, which means if you're the person that loves to get in there and run the meeting, you're going to have to pull back and be willing to prep the person maybe sit in the meeting, add some commentary, but not just take over and run it, because otherwise, as a leader, it's a.

Whitney Faires:

It's a. It's a slow, steady decline, because if everyone's depending on you sitting in that meeting, you can't be everywhere, and so over time your results will plateau, because I hit that.

Josh Matthews:

I mean, I can tell you right now that happened to me in my early days. You know I it was. I thought that I'd been promoted to be a leader because of a couple of things. My sales results, my numbers were great. I went the extra mile. I ran trainings. I did these sorts of things because I really desired it.

Josh Matthews:

I was in my late 20s, early 30s, chomping at the bit. I felt here we go, let's climb this ladder. I worked for a Fortune 500 company and was a manager there and I wanted to be a VP and it took some it. It actually didn't take a lot of time to figure out my failings because they were so obvious around me. You know, I still felt like I was cut out for leadership but I'd been doing it the wrong way. The idea of empowering others and helping them and putting the spotlight on them and helping them and putting the spotlight on them man, that's clearly where it was at and I felt, I think, too much of a grip around the bat. I wanted things done, but I wanted it done. My way Didn't always resonate with all of my employees and you know it's.

Josh Matthews:

It's shame on me, but lesson learned, can you talk a little bit more about what someone might need to do when, let's say, someone's already in that position and they're facing those challenges and they're doubting themselves? You're a coach, so I imagine you can coach people up and through it. But have you experienced in your time as a I mean you're a certified professional coach have you experienced in your time as a I mean, you're a certified professional coach Like I imagine, that you've run into situations where you're talking to people and it's like I got to tell you I don't know if this is the right role for you. I don't know if this is the right job. Let's look at ways of being an individual contributor again. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Whitney Faires:

Yeah, you know well, I always say there's two things that most often determine success Is someone willing to put in the work to get there is the first question, because if there's no willingness to grow and develop and grind it out to get to where you want to be, you've got nothing. And piece is is competency. There are certain times in certain roles, you're like this person they really don't have the skills and some of the skills aren't teachable, and so you have to really reevaluate, making that move maybe back to a role that's better suited for them sooner. But aside from that, they're willing and they have baseline competencies. You can develop leaders. I mean leadership is a learned skill, in fact. I won't get off on a tangent on this, but I will say I think one of the biggest Okay, you can.

Josh Matthews:

Tangents are loud.

Whitney Faires:

One of the biggest misses that I think companies make is we assume great individual contributors immediately translate into great people leaders. We don't need to teach them the skill of leading people. We absolutely do. There's teaching them how to manage the business and there's teaching them how to lead people. There are two different verticals of skill sets that typically people leaders will will grow into as they get more experience in more development, and so oftentimes we say they're great, they've, they've been in business a long time Great business acumen, people like them, they can connect and they're a great IC. Okay, that that's a phenomenal foundation. I'll take that. But how do we teach them how to give feedback effectively? How do we teach them to create a vision that inspires people? You know all the, and I could go on about the skills, but you get where I'm going with it.

Whitney Faires:

And so like when I see somebody and, believe me, I've had them. I've had people that are like I was running after this job for years I get it and I'm thinking, what did I do? I hate, I hate the day-to-day of this. I'm sitting there watching people make mistakes, and so I think part of it is first understanding, okay, what was your expectation of the job, because sometimes I got to provide the harsh reality that that is not what a people leadership role is.

Whitney Faires:

You're not just brought in to run the meeting, close the deal and then out you go. You're a problem solver. I mean people leadership is basically a lot of ongoing problem solving developing your people, diagnosing the skills that they need to improve to be better at their jobs. Obviously figuring out what's going on in the business when you're not always front and center with a customer, because you have a whole team, and so helping them understand, okay, what really does people leadership look like is a great start. And then we have to assess their skills, and a lot of times I do that through getting feedback from them, from their leaders, from their direct reports, and then going you know, of course, benchmarking their level of experience and I can ask them questions to understand okay, how good are they at coaching employees? What is their strategy? Do they have a process? So then we can work on actually building those skills to be successful.

Josh Matthews:

And that makes sense. I'm just going to jump in here for a second Whitney, real quick, because everything you're sharing, I mean, it's brilliant stuff and it all makes sense. But what about those folks? I mean, how would you address our audience today so that they as individuals, like, not everybody can afford a great coach and not everybody, even if they they can afford it, they might find that they're a little bit resistant to it and it may take them months to open up, right, everyone's a little bit different. What can someone do today to kind of go through a little bit of a checklist or a process to truly understand who they are?

Josh Matthews:

I'm a huge fan Everybody who listens to this show knows that I'm a huge fan of people taking personal accountability right, like really owning their stuff and also just understanding who they are. Like, do you know who you actually are? Do you understand your behaviors, your patterns, what you like, what you don't like? So, with that in mind, what are some tactics I suppose that people can apply to figuring this out when they don't have a Whitney Ferris in in their uh, you know, on their roster of advisors?

Whitney Faires:

Yeah, yeah. So first thing I'd encourage them to do is ask I just let me narrow it down to like three questions Uh, am I energized by developing people? Is that something that I think I I'm? I'm excited about the opportunity to get on the phone every day or be in, be with my team every day and help them grow, versus take over the business? Um, am I? So? That's number one. Um, how interested am I in shifting from the star player to the team player, the supporter?

Whitney Faires:

Because that's the reality of people leadership. When your people are shining, you stand behind them, and when they are facing fire, you stand in front of them. That's your job. Ultimate accountability. They get the glory, you take the hits. How does that resonate with you?

Whitney Faires:

And then, can you redefine what success looks like when we're individual contributors? Oftentimes we have all these metrics and we can really see clearly how's it going. We can manage the business really tightly, whatever our job is, and all of a sudden, success looks like the growth of your people. It looks like the wins in their business. It isn't this one-to-one correlation.

Whitney Faires:

So am I good with that? Do I feel like I'm in a place where that is something? That challenge inspires me and so that, I think, tells you a little bit more about is this something that's right for me right now and I say right now, because it might not be that today is where you feel like making that shift. You love what you do Fine, but in the future, kind of use that as a bit of your compass, if you will. And then once you jump into that role, there are core skills in people leadership right, being able to coach people so you see them do something. They're talking about going into a meeting. How do you coach and guide them right? Coaching, giving feedback. We've all had someone that gives us really harsh feedback or that doesn't feel good and we're resistant, and we have someone that knows how to give it to us. So it's specific, it's it's actionable and we know what behavior we're going to do differently.

Josh Matthews:

It's very hard to to to be able to coach others If you've never been coached right. It's really difficult. Anyone can become a manager and anyone can be promoted to leadership, but they can't necessarily be effective in either role if they haven't had the right behaviors modeled for them. So do you recommend people who are sort of on that cusp of like, wow, I really want to go for it, they've answered. I'm want to go for it, I've. They've answered. You know, I'm happy to redefine my success. I'm energized by helping people. I'm I don't need to be the star player, I'm happy to be the supporter. Now I need to get there Right. Do you think that getting involved with a personal coach is the, you know, one of the best ways to go if they don't have that mentor on site with their organization?

Whitney Faires:

Yeah, um, I would say as much as I'd love you know to say coaching is the number one thing. You don't have to have that Um, it's helpful. But there's two things that you can easily do. We all have seen great leaders in our organizations or organizations we've previously worked for. I rarely see leaders that when someone comes and says I'm stepping into this job and I need to learn a few things from you, can I get 30 minutes every you know month or so to ask you some questions.

Whitney Faires:

That's, that's number one. Um, I also I encourage people if they're thinking about a people leadership role or they've just stepped into one, look on the. You know, you know who the top performers are. Or you can ask somebody in your organization and just call those people up. We all are, have drive time to work. We're, you know, taking a walk, where we have dead time during between meetings. You can pick up the phone and say hey look, I'm new to this role and I want to be excellent at it. And I hear you're great. Can I learn from you? And I always say just come with some specific questions Like what's been, what has been the top two skills that have helped you be successful as a people leader? Great, how do you do that? And you can start a knowledge that way. And then, of course, like you can, on LinkedIn learning, you can Google it. You find all these thought leaders. There's a lot of-.

Josh Matthews:

Or perplexity. I'm going to strongly recommend people do this. On perplexityai, it has been for me and many people that I've kind of turned them onto it like such a game changer and I'm going to drop a little bit. I'm sorry I'm interrupting Whitney, but I want to drop a little thing that I learned just yesterday from the. He's an amazing guy. It's David Giller. He was on our show two years ago. He's a friend. He's recently moved to Tel Aviv this last summer. Most people will know him through his organization, brainiate, and as a thought leader on Salesforce and AI. We were catching up.

Josh Matthews:

Yesterday. I was on a little walk and I thought I'm going to give David a call and he was talking about building a GPT where you're basically uploading anything that you can find for free around one specific thought leader If they've got PDFs of transcripts, if they've got eBooks that you can upload and you can put them all into the AI and you just give it instructions Anytime. I prompt inside here. I want you to act as the person who wrote all of this information and you can have this body of knowledge where people can go again. I'm sorry this is AI spotlight oriented stuff, but I think it's apropos when we're thinking about really creative ways to capture information and have it readily available. You can say today, someone raised their voice. I didn't know what to do. Blah, blah, blah, blah. What would you have done? And you might be shocked at how clear and successful the response is if you actually take that advice.

Josh LeQuire:

So I'm going to back you up on that, actually, because you did ask the question to Whitney earlier. How do folks help themselves at home if they don't have a Whitney Ferris? And, honestly, this technology is so prevalent and available. That's an excellent idea to get an outside perspective, I think. Whitney, I want to call out something you had mentioned before.

Josh LeQuire:

I'm thinking about leadership from all these different dimensions. Right, it's the subject matter, expertise, it's the passion, it's the ability to develop talent, to recognize talent as well, to bring that into the organization and retain talent. It's the ability to enable people we work in our world, in Salesforce development. You're either an employee inside of a company that's providing business analysis, solution, architecture, development type solutions very kind of technical solutions that meet business needs or requirements or you're working for a consultancy and that could be a smaller business like mine you know that's not an Accenture or KPMG or Capgemini, or could be one of those or something in between, right? So I do think you know there are all these different kinds of dimensions. What company am I working in? What kind of opportunities do those present? Is leadership right for me, is it not? But I do think you hit on the right, right notes here. That leadership and I really learned this when I started getting into leadership roles in my career and, of course, now going into business and kind of more of the entrepreneurial lens and kind of smaller business lens you have to really love what you're doing and you have to really understand how to put people in places to succeed, how to build systems for them to succeed, and you have to be a good listener, right, when you want people. You talked about great leaders and modeling their behavior and learning a lot from them. The greatest leaders I've ever worked for were compassionate, humble. You know. How are you doing? What can I do to help you? You know kind of servant leaders to an extent, and I don't yeah, I'm not familiar with the latest terminology and not sure if that's kind of, you know, sort of out of date. My kids tell me all the time I use all the wrong language and wrong lingo. So I'm sure I'm doing it here, but, yeah, exactly, but that growth mentality, I think you know that's, you know, personally important to me, right, like when I have teams that I'm working with, whether it's my, even my client teams or even the teams that work here at C-Currents or we work with in partnership. It's hey, you know, how can we find what we're passionate about, what objective we can rally around, how can we set the path forward for everybody to succeed, how can we look ahead and know what we're trying to achieve and make sure we're tracking progress and also giving each other honest feedback about what's working, what's not working, right? So I really do like that.

Josh LeQuire:

You called that out because I think that's in our business, you know, when you have, especially on the technical side, you know you've got people developing applications or maybe even people on the sales side, it's I have to, you know, get into a management role and succeed. Josh and I were talking about this earlier and a lot of people I work with will recognize this, because we talk about this all the time. The best way to ruin a developer's, promote him or her, to manage your position right, like I've seen. I've seen this happen countless times where we've taken a really good technical expert, put them in a people role and it's like oh, how do what do? What do I do? Like I got to manage performance, I've got to help enable people, I've got to do all this. So really just calling out, I do think you know what. What you've called out here is very wise, sage advice and for folks who are listening in the work that we do, you know, take that into consideration because it does take passion, it does take looking around the corners.

Josh Matthews:

It does take, take. How can I help my team and enable it to succeed? You're going to have a lot more energy for for the work when you actually care about it. Like, just, it's as simple as that. I wanted to ask you, whitney, most people are familiar with the peter principle and I always botch it, right. I. I always botch um what it is. So I pulled it up and it is uh, um what it is. So I pulled it up and it is uh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Josh Matthews:

Basically, people are are promoted right to their um, to a level of incompetence, right. I mean, you're familiar with that. I'm assuming, like, can you talk a little bit about that? I know you've seen it, right, you were, you were an executive. Of course you've seen it, and I think about a lot of the folks that I saw back when I was working in corporate America. It's like someone did well in sales, now they're a manager. This person did well on sales, now they're a manager. This one person did good operationally in technology, now they're an architect or they're running a PMO, and nobody liked them anyway, but they were just really good because they saved time and they were on budget Right, but then people start bailing under them.

Josh Matthews:

Can you talk a little bit about the Peter principle so that everybody really understands, and maybe a story or something of where you've seen it and how you know? This shows for people who are thinking about being leaders, but it's also for leaders. You know we have a lot of people who are leaders, who listen to this program and they're ultimately the ones responsible for the promotions. It's on them, to an extent, to have done a quality evaluation of these employees. I it's not like I'm going to be a leader now and now I'm a leader. You know someone has to give you the thumbs up. What can leaders do to protect these people's careers and ensure that they're actually engaged in the right kind of work for their personality, their behavioral style, their skill set and where they are in life?

Whitney Faires:

would say, first of all, the biggest risk is that we promote people that we like, uh, or we promote them because they have this track record and we're like they're. They're just a winner. They're just a winner. They're going to win at the next job. They will and they may win, and they may win by doing it well and they may win by, like you said, they, they. They aren't somebody that people want to work for, or sometimes there's a bias involved in there and you have to watch out for that too.

Whitney Faires:

So I think one of the things I always suggest for leaders is, before you look at who do I want to put in this role, define the person you need. Uh, and typically we're talking about if you're moving into a management role, the person above you is leading a lot of other people leaders so they should be stopping and looking at what actually does my team need? Because my team needs diversity of thought and experience at some level. I'm not saying there isn't a bunch of core skills, right, but what does my team need as far as the people leader, community? And then, in this role, what is really needed, and that's the skills, that's maybe the attributes, things like the level of energy or the perspective or the experience that that person brings.

Whitney Faires:

And so when you define that first, without immediately jumping and going, oh hey, this person, that woman, this guy, they're all high performers, we're going to see if they want the role and we're going to tap them on the shoulder, then we have some relatively objective as objective as you can be criteria that we said these are important and then, hey, let's, let's go talk to people, but we need to compare them against those criteria, versus letting our emotions or the pressure that sometimes comes even higher or sideways from people saying you got to put this person in the role. They're amazing, right, um so that's awesome Like this.

Josh Matthews:

This is wisdom. People need to hear this stuff. I mean, I hope this, I hope this episode blows up and that that thing you just said right now, because the two things, my biggest two takeaways right now and there's a lot, cause you're you're. You're very experienced, very wise, very smart. But if I'm going to synthesize the main thing, it's think before you act. Right, it's like put a little bit of. It's fine to have a roadmap, but you've got to have a destination first and you have to understand what you want it to be like when you get there. You don't do that. You're screwed Like you really are, or at least you're rolling the dice, and you're playing against the house too. The odds are not in your favor. The statistics show. What is it? 48% of people aren't at the job that they started 18 months later. That's a horrendous record, right? Yeah, horrendous record right.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, whitney, I've got a question for you With that in mind. There's obviously the strategic look ahead for the company, the position, the role, the capability for leadership. How much is it incumbent upon the organization to develop the leader if they're promoting them into the role, versus finding the leader with that skill set? I'm really curious to get your perspective on that, because I think a lot of times when we promote people because of relationships or for other factors, we kind of ignore the fact that this person will need development, just like the people on my team that I need to develop in their roles. So any thoughts on that?

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, let's hear that.

Whitney Faires:

Yeah, so uh, well, I think as an organization, we always have the core responsibility for making sure when we change somebody's career path and hey, that means their life, because most of us are making money, like we love our work, but we're making money to support somebody or do something that's important to us too, we owe it to that person to create some sort of structure to foster their success. Now, absolutely not every company, especially small companies, are going to have some beautiful development program that holds everyone's hand through all the skills that they need. That's not realistic and I get that. But we as a hiring manager should be able to have an outline of a plan for the skills we're going to develop. But first we have to assess those skills, because they might have some of those skills. But the diagnosis of skills, our plan for how we're going to develop them in their role. So if it's not a program, it should be a group of mentors with specific guidances to skills they should help them through. It should be the leader always, even if the program's in place, it should still be the leader, and so I would say that the one thing I say, too, is what's really tough about leaders hiring other people.

Whitney Faires:

Leaders. Is that the best way you can coach and guide people that work for you, whether an IC or a leader, is to observe them doing whatever you're trying to coach them on right? Is that the best way you can coach and guide people that work for you, whether an IC or a leader, is to observe them doing whatever you're trying to coach them on right? So if I want to see how good somebody is at hiring top talent, I mean, yeah, I look at their track record, but I actually want to look at things like I want to do an interview with them. I want to watch them, do an interview and co-interview somebody so I can see how they're thinking and what they're asking.

Whitney Faires:

And that's what can make it really hard when you're hiring people leaders is you don't have the ability to necessarily see them and all those skill sets to judge their readiness. But what that means is when they join your team, how do you find little opportunities If you can't observe directly? You're kind of breaking down how they've done things in their day-to-day in a way that's inquisitive, not micromanagement, because I know it's probably where people's heads go is like I don't need someone asking me all about my day, but there's a way that good leaders can do it, so they can figure out how competent are they in doing this, because I want them to be successful, and so that's one thing I would add in for all the leaders out there. How do you know people are good at the aspects of people leadership unless you're understanding how they're doing it or seeing it?

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, it's so smart. I mean, you've got to. We used to just say, like look under the covers, like see what's going on, right, and they're actually you know the education system, a lot of the you know grade schools and even high school and even college. Now, system a lot of the grade schools and even high school and even college. Now they want to see your work right.

Josh Matthews:

When I jumped on this little AI dev project which, if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe, but you can check it out I built a little website for one of my sons and when I was in there and getting things done, you know you can ask, like, can you explain this? Like explain the logic behind this decision, and it'll show you. And that's what they're doing in the schools nowadays. It's like two plus two is four. It's like, okay, there's rote memory, but I want to see if you can actually synthesize the algorithm and break it down, why, why two plus two actually equals four, right? So they're doing more and more of that.

Josh Matthews:

Of course, you know we all have calculators, so we don't need that anymore, but you know it's still this idea of like, how are they coming to this? Because we can see and I see it when I interview people, like I see it all the time they have a great answer, but when you press, there's more great information and you press again and it's still pretty good, and then you press again and it all falls apart. It's like the five whys and actually when you were talking just now, you know, talking about observation, it made me think of this book, is it? What? Is it the five dysfunctions of a team?

Whitney Faires:

Yes.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, so you so. Okay, so you've read that and I don't remember the entire. I don't remember the entire book, but I do remember at the beginning. Basically this you know person gets hired and goes in for two weeks, keeps his trap shut and he just watches and there's, you know the bad apple in the corner messing around and grumbling and he just wanted to see how it all worked before he even put his foot down. So critical.

Josh Matthews:

I I just been promoted to national director of of, uh, the Bayside groups, um tech staff down in Australia, and I went down and I you know it wasn't huge but I had three offices of of scientific recruiters, right, chemists and this sort of stuff. And I went in and I met with one, one of the owners, and he gave me specific instructions move this guy here, do this, do that, do this, do that. And it was my first time. They didn't know me from Adam. They'd seen some emails from me Cause I'd only been with the company maybe a month up in Brisbane. And I went in and I did what my boss told me. I didn't know to push back.

Josh Matthews:

And I went in and I started making changes and boy, that was a rough start. I got through it, but I lost everyone's respect very quickly. They had already lost mine. No offense to some of them, but they'd already lost mine. Their numbers were terrible, their work habits weren't good Sorry guys, but it wasn't good and so I went in with my sledgehammer and it took a while to bring it all back.

Josh Matthews:

So when you're a new leader settling in, taking a breath, blow it down, figure it out, observe and don't rush the results. Generally, in my experience, painful experience is more likely how you're going to bear the most fruit from that specific team. I'm kind of wondering if you'd like to share with everybody, whitney, where they can find out more information about you. And then also some final words People. This show is not over, right. We're going to keep going, but we are going to dive a little bit into some of the Salesforce Spring Release and some AI Spotlight stuff and, whitney, I hope that you'll stick around and love to get your perspective on some of these things. But do you have some? Is there something that we haven't covered so far that you believe would be really super important for people who've been sitting with us for this long to take away and do something with?

Whitney Faires:

Yeah, well, I was actually gonna say to, in response to the point that you just made, that you highlight something really important that you are going to make mistakes as a people leader. We all do. Uh, I, I, like you, I went into my first people leadership role and I I didn't do it right in it. It was it stung, but you can recover. And so, uh, we've talked about all the challenges of people leadership. I'll leave you with this If you are motivated to do it and willing to learn, you can do it.

Whitney Faires:

We make it sound hard, because it is. It is really hard. There's no formula for success, because you're leading human beings in a dynamic environment and so you, you have to be able to flex and adjust. But the reality is, if you're tapped on the shoulder for that job and you want to do it, or it's something you're working towards, you're building your skills, believe in yourself and and be committed to just grinding it out, and so you get to a place where you feel as confident as a people leader as you are. Uh, are in that role that you're in today, and I will cap it off with saying it is a journey. You are not gonna go from where you are to then, a quarter or two or even a year later, being your boss? You're not. There is an evolution, and so continuous improvement is what it's all about, and just continuing to elevate your skills and grow right. Be someone that people want to work for.

Whitney Faires:

So I appreciate you having me, I will stick around. You can always find me at whitneyferriscom Tons of information about all the services that I offer, and you can reach out to me there as well, and, of course, on LinkedIn. I'd love for you to follow me and see some of the content I'm putting out around leadership and being at your best.

Josh Matthews:

Fantastic. Thanks so much for being on the show. Definitely connect with Whitney. Go ahead and hit her up. You can follow her or connect with her on LinkedIn. Be sure to do that. And we're going to now dive into Salesforce Spring Release Notes, and this is not going to be a fully comprehensive thing, but merely just a couple things that Josh found very helpful. Josh LaQuire, it's going to be a little weird with two Joshes up here.

Josh LeQuire:

Fair enough, but I think you need nicknames Josh.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, right, well, you can have a nickname. I'm going to keep mine. Sorry, buddy, go for it Josh. What's going on with Salesforce Spring Release 25?

Josh LeQuire:

Goodness, I remember when release notes used to be I don't know nearly 100 pages. This one was about 880 pages long, I think, in the PDF. So lots to cover. The general themes are more AI, more agents, more Einstein capabilities.

Josh LeQuire:

If you haven't heard yet, this is a big push by Salesforce is to use generative AI LLMs as part of workflows. I think what was most interesting and this will translate a little bit in a minute to the AI corner is we're seeing more AI in the setup functions of Salesforce. So not just for sales agents and service agents to summarize and transcribe calls, to complete a set of actions to be able to assist customers better, but now we're seeing better capabilities for administrators and developers to be able to go in and actually build applications on Salesforce. So some of those things include probably one of the bigger features is especially for admins, who are probably really like this is you can actually use natural language prompts to generate flows. I think that's a pretty big game changer.

Josh LeQuire:

Flows I've seen a lot of flows. I've seen a lot of really bad flows. I think that's a pretty big game changer. Flows I've seen a lot of flows. I've seen a lot of really bad flows. I've seen a lot of things that don't quite work. I actually think this could be super helpful for, especially for companies that don't have developers on staff, or maybe the admin is the superhero of the organization.

Josh Matthews:

That's pretty powerful, and I will say, we had a wonderful episode on the Josh force channel and you can also find it on our, you know, on the podcast, whether you're listening on Apple or Spotify or whatever your favorite platform, is all about Salesforce flows and I remember Stacey Whitaker, who was our guest of that day, talked about. You know, sometimes some like big flows that might be an 80 hour project, it might be a hundred 120 hour project, and now with the, the LLMs uh, the LLM layer, um, or the generative AI chat layer, involves I mean you can, you can push things out really fast and I think during AI spotlight I'll even give a little example it's not on Salesforce, but stay tuned and we will give a little bit of an example how this guy me, the non-developer actually was able to develop something. So what else is going on there? So we've got flows and can I ask you, josh, do like, how is this going to impact SIs in general?

Josh Matthews:

Right, if building things are faster, we all know clients are getting slower to sign contracts. We've all seen that, right, and when they finally sign, they always want everything right now, because they've been sitting on their thumbs for two months, three months or six months longer. It's like it used to just be sign, let's go, post COVID, let's go, we're going to go, come on. And now it's like hurry up and wait for months, sometimes a year, I mean. I get these calls from my clients all the time. So how is, how is this layer going to help SIs deliver? You know awesome applications and what's that. You know what are the changes that they might need to adapt to because of this?

Josh LeQuire:

Well, how much time do you have, josh, because we could talk about this and then we're going to ask something else.

Josh Matthews:

30 seconds yeah.

Josh LeQuire:

I think the short version is this is going to make us work faster and better. The platform is getting broader and broader, deeper and deeper. I don't think generative AI development capabilities are going to eliminate jobs, but make us do more in shorter periods of times. It will make the nature of changes we deploy to the business more iterative and agile. I think things that used to take us two or three weeks will now take us minutes, and you're going to see the pace of change just go through the roof, which I think is going to make, honestly, developers and admins more valuable. There's a lot of mixed opinions, josh. You've talked to people. We talked about it this week.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, I'm going to jump in on this real quick, because it's definitely a mixed bag. I mean, the reality is I ran some deep seek research and I really dove into what's going to happen to careers due to AI in the next three years, and then I narrowed that search. This was all on perplexity, using the deep seek model and, by the way, I just bought learnperplexityai, so I don't know, maybe I'm going to do something with that. I couldn't believe it was available. I got it for 12 bucks, so it's not why I'm pitching it. I'm pitching it because I think it's the best research tool that anyone can get for about 240 bucks a year. It's pretty amazing. I did this big research and eventually created a decent sized blog about it. We're going to go over all of those results from that search four weeks from today. Two weeks from now, we've got an AI company. We're going to go over all of those results from that search four weeks from today. Two weeks from now, we've got an AI company that's going to be joining us, sensha, with the two Davids, and it'll be two Davids and two Joshes. And then, four weeks from now, we're going to really go over what impact AI is going to have on careers, and I have to tell people because I feel like if I sit on it for a full month like I'm doing everyone a disservice. I want full transparency. So let me just be really clear. If you are not getting involved in AI in any capacity right now, this does not mean you need to learn agent force. But if you are stumbling around and messing around with GP a little bit but not actually learning how to use it, you will be left in the dust. The numbers are absolutely threatening for those who don't adapt. We're talking about somewhere between a 20 and 35% reduction in forces for those who don't get on the bandwagon and anywhere from like a 20 to 40% increase in compensation for the early adopters who get involved in it.

Josh Matthews:

Now, learn this. Now. You want to know how to do it. Get on perplexity or GPT and ask it. Tell them what you do, tell them your job right and and say I need help. Can you structure some training for me so I can really get my arms around all the LLMs, how I can use it in my job and so forth? Do it today and you will be shocked. I I think everyone knows that about. I think it was four weeks ago or two weeks. I think it was two weeks ago, I can't even remember, but I committed to spending 20 hours of AI through the month of AI learning.

Josh Matthews:

Guess what, by the way, we're in spring release notes slash AI spotlight right. Thank you, josh. So much for that right. So much for planning. But I have to get this message across If you guys take one thing from anything that I say on this show, there's a lot to take from Josh and from Whitney today. If you're going to take one thing from Josh Matthews today, it's this Get on the AI bandwagon or die, and I'm not even freaking, joking. We're not talking about three years. Your job might be threatened. We're talking about a massive reduction in the next 12 months. Next 12 months. Get on it today and don't wait. Okay, that's my soapbox and we can go back. Do you guys want to say anything about that? Again, we're going to have a whole show on it.

Josh LeQuire:

You know actually, Whitney, since you're here, what are implications for leaders with AI and leadership. I would love your take on that, because this is a hot topic in our world right now.

Whitney Faires:

Yeah, it's a hot topic in my world for sure, and when I launched my company and transitioned out of corporate, everyone was like you got to use AI. And so I actually found this guy who came and recommended to me that could teach me how to create personas in chat, gpt, how to use it, the different AI tools and without a doubt, it has been a massive accelerator in my business. But for leaders, the ability to brainstorm different things in chat, gpt or look up things, research things in perplexity, it's real value added. It's something like you could just do it on your phone in the moment. You know it doesn't have to be this big, like you set aside a time and do it. It's like, hey, I need, I need a. You know three steps to coach an employee. Or, you know, I don't know if you always want to go, how would you handle it, because you never know what you're going to get but there's a lot you can do.

Josh Matthews:

Leaning on it it gets you thinking, for sure, definitely. And I think people should go check out Mark Good. Mark Good and I are going to be catching up, I think tomorrow or in a couple of days, but he runs AI Force and he can teach you through some of his courses. You know how to use GPT, you know as it relates to a Salesforce professional. By the way, guys, we're not paid for advertising here. We really try and keep it clean and just tell you, like where you can go to get some help. Right, we spend money here on this show. We don't make money, so you know so, but definitely do something to serve, to serve yourself and you're, and be kind to your future self by doing something for yourself with ai today.

Josh LeQuire:

Go ahead, josh yeah, and I'm going to get back to release notes and AI in a minute, but I want to also piggyback a little bit on some of the stuff Whitney was saying, because I can say for me, as a professional services provider, a consultant, a managed services provider, this has just transformed how I'm even able to enable my teams and build systems for my teams to succeed and our engagements, generating documents when we talk about requirements, user stories, solution, architecture, we talk about building backlogs, managing backlogs, stuff that honestly would take us 20, 40, 60, 80 hours we can now do within minutes. I mean, it is a game changer. And I think what's important for me, too is quality is kind of a hallmark of how we deliver for our clients. So a lot of you folks out there who work in consulting probably it's no secret your first consulting gig, or maybe even your 10th, whether it's a small company or a Capgemini, you get thrown into the wolves.

Josh LeQuire:

You may ask your boss what do I do? How do I do it? I don't know. You figure it out. Well, those days are over, because we now have agents we can deploy to help coach our team members. I have an architect agent, I have an analyst agent, I have a developer agent Now. Granted, how this is going to shape our careers and how this is going to shape our jobs is not that these things take over and do it. These things guide us. The word co-pilot is actually spot on right. These are not people who are doing the job, they're just helping us to do our job better. So these are tools for leaders, left and right, in my opinion, in any job, in any capacity.

Josh Matthews:

Definitely. And I was at the keynote when Benioff was introducing AgentForce at Dreamforce this last year and the thing that was I don't even remember what it said it was like agents helping humans or it was something like that. It was something about humans and agents or agents guided by humans and I thought, well, that's really smart, because no one wants to feel like they're going to be displaced. What's going to happen is someone's going to know this stuff and you don't. And if you don't, you will be, and that's the reality. But it's okay, you know. I mean, look, doctors aren't exactly doing, uh, taking appendix out the way they did on my dad's in 1965. Right, you know, by the time I had mine out, I guess it runs in the family and it was 1984 and I've got a scar this big. And now someone who gets it. The scar is this big, it's tiny, it's a pinhole you can't even see. So just adapt, don't make a big deal out of it, just get involved. That you've created all of these agents Like. I want to hang out with you more and you show me what you've done, like for real, because I need to do that for myself even more. But it's just learning. You know all these people who are like, what's the next cert I should get? I mean, yeah, you can go get your AI specialist if you want, like that's fine, or you could just spend 20 hours on something. Just get good at this stuff. It's just part of learning.

Josh Matthews:

No-transcript, right? Did you think it was going to be the same? I talked to a development company I'm helping out this one organization and they want to get this app built. And I talked to this one organization and it was like pulling teeth to get them to admit what kind of tech stacks they work with. I was not impressed. It's like this stuff's 25 years old. You don't have to do that. What about micro architecture? What about rust, like? What about a go gen and things like that. Like, come on, you know, stay with the times. And uh, I want to hear more about what you've got going on. But maybe we can wrap up release notes here. Yeah, just a few minutes, and then we'll dive into a tiny little bit more AI, something fun that I think people will think is really cool for the average listener, and then we'll wrap up the show and we'll be back in two weeks. So go for it.

Josh LeQuire:

Josh Sounds great and I promise at the end of the show I'll give folks listening some really good things you can do at home to accelerate your workflow and get some immediate value out of AI. So we'll parking lot that for a minute. I do want to talk about release notes a little bit. The pace of change from Salesforce is getting faster and faster. The number of features are getting larger and larger. It's amazing. I think.

Josh LeQuire:

One thing I'm really excited about in these releases and this is going to be the nerdy developer side of me and people I work with with is SLDS2, the lightning design system two. This is a fresh look for lightning at Salesforce. If you folks were watching the Dreamforce presentations and other presentations that Salesforce offers about product releases and updates, you probably noticed the UI looked a little different. I remember seeing this and thinking, man, where do I get my hands on that? Like, what is this? It's here and it's now available for testing. So not to pile on to the AI learning and keeping up with the latest and greatest, but if you are a front-end developer, if you want to create some beautiful experiences in Salesforce, check out SLDS2. Go to lightningdesignsystemcom. You'll see it there. It is beautiful and I'm excited about that. I think there's going to be some capabilities there. Generally speaking.

Josh LeQuire:

To summarize the rest of what you need to know a lot of data cloud updates, a lot of Einstein updates, a lot of agent force capabilities for the industries Whether you're looking at health cloud, communications cloud and the other ones really take a look at those. If you watch Salesforce's admin release note videos, you'll see a lot about list views a lot of great capabilities there. I've seen some good discussions on LinkedIn about the power of using simple solutions like list views. Those are all spot on. You don't need to over-engineer a solution if a ListView can do the job. And updates to creating custom reports or at least doing custom report types. You know it's a little bit nicer interface to build, so too many features to talk about. Those were a few things that stood out. I'll publish a blog post. Share it out if you want to look later. And Josh, I think you're on mute.

Josh Matthews:

Oh god, I'm learning this stream yard thing, man, like we. You know, when you podcast for four years and all of a sudden you have to be on camera, usually I'm sitting back in my chair with a cigar, you know, in a t-shirt, barefoot, with my feet up. This is a totally different thing. It's I got to shave and is my hair okay, so whatever. But I've got an idea for people that we can jump into. It's kind of tied to release notes and I think that they might be kind of stoked to see it. So here's what I'm going to do Now. If you're listening to the podcast, you won't be able to see it. So I'm just going to talk us through really, really quickly.

Josh Matthews:

It's kind of a bit of a follow-up to when Whitney and I were talking a little bit about finding a mentor, and so I'm going to present a blank perplexity screen and on this screen you join perplexity. It's twice. You can do a few things for free, but you can jump in here to perplexity and click create a space, and then you can go ahead and drop in custom instructions. So this, these are, this is where you would put all your, all of your specific instructions right, act as if an expert on whatever. Whatever you're going to upload and communicate in this style and then, once you've created that space, you can go to you click on your space.

Josh Matthews:

I've got one for YouTube shorts descriptions and I've got one for NPC writing and so on. Youtube shorts descriptions and I've got one for NPC writing and so on. But you can just go ahead and create a new thread inside that space and click attach file and then you can upload. You can go ahead and upload the release notes if it's in PDF 800 pages and then you can ask that agent anything that you want about those release notes. Pretty amazing. What do you guys think? Something that you might do someday?

Josh LeQuire:

I did it already for these notes.

Josh Matthews:

I love it.

Josh LeQuire:

It's easier than reading 880 pages, although I did skim through and look at the table of contents and clicked into some of the headlines. But at the end of the day, this is another productivity game. Why sit down, whitney? You talked about leaders constructing agendas for meetings and putting together presentations. Man, I'll tell you, I can't remember the last time I had I actually sat down and spent 10 hours going, slide by slide, to figure out what bullet comes here, what bullet goes next. I've been using AI to do this stuff for a long time and it does a pretty good. It's not flawless I played more of the role of editor and change things that it spits out, but, man, it just takes me a lot less time and I love it.

Whitney Faires:

Yeah. The efficiency gains are tremendous and I totally agree. You throw something big in there and you ask the questions, you get the summary and I mean it saves you so much time and you're able to pull in different perspectives. If you're I mean I get the releases I'm taking a different approach, like if you throw a couple of things in there and you have it summarize key themes, like you can draw on some great information with a fraction of the investment of time.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, absolutely. Guys, can I show you something fun Again? I already alluded to it at the start. I've already created a separate video. It wasn't on the podcast, but I think it'd be kind of fun for our audience, at least those that are re-watching this on LinkedIn Live the event, which you can check it out. You can follow me, follow Josh, follow Whitney, and I definitely recommend following Josh for us.

Josh Matthews:

Honestly, I don't love my channel too much. We're going to change the thumbnails. We're going to reorganize it. I've got people working on it right now.

Josh Matthews:

But what I do want to share is this pretty dope thing called lovable, lovabledev, and let me go ahead and share my screen real quick. First I'm going to. The first thing I'm going to share is what I actually built, and what I built was a little app called mayonnaisecom, as in John Mayer mayonnaise, and this is an app for my son, who, john Mayer. He plays guitar and drums and a little bit of piano. John Mayer's his favorite artist and my friend, mike Wakuna, told me about lovabledev, and so I jumped on and I just said, hey, I want to build this app and this is what it can do. And it just said great, let's start building it and and started going off, and so in here you can jump to all of the different albums.

Josh Matthews:

You can go to your favorite songs, you can pop out the chords and you can even go, you know, you can click a button to go directly to a different page of the lyrics. You can pop out the scales. It tells you the scales and the key that it's in. There's a night mode, which is great, and then you can sort it however you want, by title or by albums, all albums and so forth. So it's not a very robust app, but for someone who just wants to like, imagine you're a busker and you just need to remember what the key changes are, it's kind of of cool. So I wanted to share that and I did that inside of, uh, lovable dot dev, which is, I mean, here I'll show you real quick because it's pretty, it's pretty dope present. Here we go.

Josh LeQuire:

I think that's really awesome, josh, and you reminded me I need to go book my dead and company uh shows at the sphere before they.

Josh Matthews:

they stopped playing there, yeah man All he actually went to that. I think it was this summer. He went out and saw, saw the dead and friends. So here I've scrolled it to the very top and I just said can you create a guitar tab app that is just for one musician, john Mayer and it said yeah, I can do it. Features for the first version design elements. And here it is. And now I'm just saying like, okay, tabs didn't populate, let's do this instead. I'm barely talking to it. Great, add 20 more songs, remove the text about looking for full lyrics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's just building it the whole time. So check out lovabledev.

Josh Matthews:

Give yourself look as a very good friend of mine. I was talking to him yesterday. He was in Dubai, so I got to talk to my friend in Tel Aviv. I got to talk to my buddy in Dubai and we were talking about other development projects and he's like Josh, you're not a web developer or you're not a developer. Like, have fun with it, but like, don't kill yourself. But our audience is you guys make stuff, you know, and personally I found it to be as fun as like getting hooked on a Harry Potter video game or something like it was like, oh, this is fun, I'm going to go like keep rolling Right, so check that out. Any thoughts or comments before we wrap up? We are at the hour, whitney. Last words.

Whitney Faires:

Well, I was going to say I'm going to need AI to teach me how to play the guitar so I can use your app. All know can do that. Well, the last thing I'd say is my motto for a very long time has been dream the dream, build the plan and bet on yourself in big ways. So, whatever it is AI or leadership, whatever it is I'd say go chase it, but do it with intentionality.

Josh Matthews:

I love it. Thank you, very right.

Josh LeQuire:

That dream, the dream, bet on yourself.

Josh Matthews:

And yeah, that's a massive motto. I love that thing. What about you, Josh? Again, welcome to your first episode as co-host. I hope you had fun.

Josh LeQuire:

Oh, I had a blast. We could geek out on this stuff all day long. I love the topic of leadership. Thank you, whitney. Your insights have been incredibly valuable. I've written down a lot of notes and you've reminded me to think of some things I need to think of in terms of listening a bit more and being able to develop people a little more.

Josh LeQuire:

I have a problem, especially as a small business owner, doing way too much. That's a persistent challenge of mine. A small business owner doing way too much. That's a persistent challenge of mine. So thank you for helping me to work through that. So I think the last thing I'll say, josh, what you did with Mayor Nays is the direction companies are going. This is why it's important to understand AI. For example, if you're a marketer, the old school approach is run an ad to landing page, capture some leads and hope it works, or send an email blast out to a segment of your database. You know what it's going to be tomorrow Creating an interactive experience, deploying a website click, click, done. So the times are changing. You know there's a lot of this going on. I love seeing you do what you did. I hope it inspires people.

Josh Matthews:

I love it. You do what you did. I hope it inspires people. I love it. Guys, thank you for listening to the Salesforce Career Show. We'll be back in two weeks with Sencha the two Davids from Sencha and be sure to like and subscribe. Thank you, whitney Farris. You've been awesome. Thank you, joshua Quire. We'll see you guys soon. Bye for now.

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Josh Matthews

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