CTOs and CIOs are facing relentless delivery pressure as teams shrink, AI accelerates expectations, and urgency becomes the default operating mode. In this episode, you will learn how constant exhaustion and apathy signal deeper leadership risk, why staying hands-on quietly destroys strategic capacity, and how small changes in delegation, prioritization, and ownership can help tech leaders move from reactive sprinting to sustainable executive leadership.

Key Takeaways

• Why rising delivery pressure is burning out even highly capable CTOs and CIOs

• How the hands-on fixer mindset breaks down at scale and increases risk

• The early warning signs of burnout most tech leaders ignore until it is too late

• How to delegate real ownership without losing control or accountability

• What sustainable, long-term tech leadership looks like in high-velocity environments

About Andrew

Andrew Hinkelman is a certified Executive Coach and recent CTO and COO. He has more than 25 years of experience in the Technology and Financial Services industries across roles in IT, Product Management, and Business Intelligence along with consulting and fractional roles.

Andrew helps high-achieving executives—CEOs, CTOs, and their teams—master the balance between operational demands and strategic growth. He uses an "inside-out" framework with his clients, meaning that we must understand self-leadership and self-improvement before we can effectively lead others.

Andrew has worked with global brands and high-growth companies like AWS, Sony, AirBnB, LinkedIn, Stripe, Coinbase, Reddit, Twitch, Tripadvisor, Hello Fresh, and Gilead, helping their leaders overcome challenges, foster collaboration, and elevate their impact.

Andrew lives in the Seattle area with his family where he spends an enormous amount of time on a bike or paddleboard and sneaking out to the mountains.

Chapters

00:00 What makes a Successful CTO

05:48 "I need to fix everything"

10:56 Delivery Expectations and Overwork

21:54 What Burnout Looks Like

26:40 When Standard Training Isn't Working

33:05 Bringing People into the Culture

37:54 TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF!

Podcast mentions

• Website: https://ctolunches.com/

Where to find Andrew

• Website: https://www.pri-1.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhinkelman/

My Socials

• Website: https://tairi.co

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwormgoor

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markwormgoor

Contact Us

• Business Email: team@tairi.co

The first thing people need to do is start seeing reality for what it is. And what I mean by that is if you come into Monday, already exhausted or if you you're off for a week and it does absolutely no good for you know, two days later, you're just as exhausted as before you left.

Something is happening. You shouldn't go through your week exhausted and becoming like, you know, a little bit apathetic and mad when someone doesn't respond to you right away.

Welcome to the CTO Compass podcast. I'm your host, Mark Wormgoor, tech strategist and executive coach. In every episode, we meet tech leaders from startup CTOs to enterprise CIOs to explore what it means to lead in tech today. They share their stories and their lessons so that you can navigate your own journey in tech. Let's dive into today's episode. Most CTOs that burn out don't do that because they're bad leaders. The delivery expectations in IT and tech, they're just higher than ever. Teams are smaller. AI is being dropped on top. The velocity of software development needs to go up and demands just keep getting more and budgets go down. For many CTOs, the instinct is just to do what they've always done. Stay close to the work, fix everything. Unblock, do code reviews, and just be on top of everything. They carry the load for the entire team, and we see that all the time. My guest today is Andrew Hinkelman. Welcome. And he's lived both sides. He spent years as a CTO, COO in these high-performing organizations until this fixture model, being on top of everything, nearly broke down with the burnouts. Today he coaches CTOs and tech leaders who are facing that exact same pressure and he's helping them shift from this hands-on job to being effective leaders that can scale. We're going to talk about all of that, why the model fails, why the pressure is increasing, how AI and the speed are making it all worse for us, and what to change if you really want to stay there and do that strategic role without the burnouts. If you like the conversation, I would really ask, if you're on YouTube, please subscribe below. If you're on Apple or Spotify, then please subscribe. Enjoy, rate our episode and give us a review as well. We'd love that. Andrew. Welcome to the episode.

So When you look back at your own early years, What was it that really made you a successful CTO in the beginning, those early years?

Hi, Mark. Thanks for having me. I think one of the big things for me was having some adversity early on in my career.

So I say this to, you know, a lot of people say, well, who do you coach and what's a great coachable type of person right now? And a lot of times I'll say someone who's been kicked in the teeth.

I mean, it's true. We need a little adversity and I needed that.

You know, I was, I kind of thought I walked on water. I thought all my answers were correct. I was a bit of a brilliant jerk for a while. In my thirties and then things slowed down, the promotion slowed down. The cool projects went away, all of that. And I had to kind of retool and look at, the relationships that I was building and not building.

You know, a little adversity early on in your career is, I think, a great Yeah, at the time I was actually at Microsoft and it was Microsoft itself was going through a giant transition thing.

Tell me about what was your adversity.

I mean, you said a little bit about it. Can you elaborate a bit more?

It was during the Steve Ballmer years, which kind of dates me a little bit, I think. But it was a difficult time for the company. For me personally, You know, I didn't necessarily have a super clear grasp on where I was going. And what I wanted. And I just knew, you know, my organization that I was in was, you Kind of all over the place. We were doing a lot of projects that got killed, that got canceled. And, you know, it was just hard to get my footing. And I couldn't, you know, I looked around internally and there was just nothing going on. And I wound up leaving the company, which at the time was not what I was expecting. But it was a path to find something different.

Those weren't probably the best days. I remember myself to Steve Ballmer days. I think they really picked up when... Satya took over the helm, but I think that was after you left.

So what did you do next? Where did you go after Microsoft?

Yeah. After Microsoft, I went to a company that was called Cobalt, and they were a small, and when I say small, like 700-person company. Web developer for the auto industry.

So basically I was doing analytics and BI. I was doing, we were doing a lot of tracking of website visitors, pathing sources, all of that sort of in-depth sort of web marketing related analytics. And that was a tough company too.

Like the model of selling websites was kind of dying out at the time. And, you know, that was a place where I was at for about two, three years. And loved it. Loved the small, smaller company. Loved being able to know who all the players were, you know, so that really turned me on to smaller companies and being able to have a bigger impact.

Cool, is that there's a lot of mindset with CTOs that, everything happens, I'm just going to step in and I'll fix it, right? And that's the natural, I'd say, for any leader almost, but especially in tech. The natural mindset. How do you feel about that one?

That's a tough one. Because it's hard to get out of. Right. You're responsible.

Right? Fingers get pointed at you. You get chewed out. People look at your organization if there's an issue, an outage. And you're looking at risk in terms of a personal sort of like How does it reflect on me? How is it going to come back to me? And so it's a deadly one. I got caught up in it pretty deeply, like most people do. But so it's, No, it's a puzzle. And you have to figure out what the right level is. You need to make sure that you're slowly building trust with the people on your team. When you're in it, man, it's hard. It's tough when you're in law.

So what do you do? Well, here's what I advise people to do, right? A couple of things. Stop taking every single thing personally. Right. That's and that can be easier said than done with some people.

Some people are able to kind of, you know, park the responsibility and go home and shut off their laptop. Some are not. But The other thing really is starting with small levels of risk. And I think a lot of us do this organically. You're not always thinking about it, but a way to build the trust with your team and spread things out, spread responsibility, ownership. And to give autonomy is to start small. Right. You're not going to give away pieces of responsibility or too much autonomy until it's earned.

So I think you have to keep an eye on the level of risk as you're handing off autonomy for people.

So start delegating a bit more of those issues with limit of risk, small risk that the people can actually take Hello you.

Yeah.

And still, right? I mean, I've been in that position for years as well, where everything just Well, things go wrong, everything lands on your shoulders. I don't think that that's a thing that we can ever get away from.

I mean, if all hell breaks loose, it's on us. Anyway.

So what's a different way to, is there a different way to think about that or is that just... Part of the job.

Sometimes it's helpful to kind of think, you know, this is my job description, right? So how do I handle it?

So You know, stress resilience is a huge piece of this. For a lot of people, it's understanding what makes you strong. Day in, day out.

So if you come in to Tuesday, Wednesday, and you're already sleep deprived, you're already pissed off, you know, things are already kind of going sideways and your calendar's getting wiped out, you're not going to be great when you have to, you know, show up Thursday or Friday. So it Making sure that you're the best you can be is a great way to be able to shoulder the load. If you can't you know, if you can't hand it off or delegate a lot of the responsibility, And you're going to be shouldering it. You're going to need to be strong and able to do that.

Yeah, I learned that one the hard way as well. For me, it was, I mean, it's a little self-care as well. For me, it was running. Running was for me the way to get rid of the stress or at least to deal with the stress and find a way to...

Yeah, to survive the week, at least. So that's one way. But I think there's a need self-care. Sleep is something you said. There's a lot there. As well.

It's a lot of, I talked to a lot of CTOs who are runners. I don't know if that's your experience too, but it doesn't surprise me at all when I hear about people running.

I do actually. And I think, well, the reason for me is that it's the easiest sport that you can do, right? And that was the reason for me. It's if you want to, if you're, Playing a team sport, it's hard, right? Because you've got to plan that. There's this night in the week that you lose or this weekend. Running, even a gym, it just takes half an hour to get there, to change, pack, get there.

And then afterwards, running, you put on your shoes, you change, and you walk out the door. Five minutes, you're out the door. You can run 45 minutes, get back, take a shower, and almost within the hour, you're back.

So for me, that was... The main reason behind running and I think that's what's almost the easiest thing to do for a lot of people that are in stressful jobs but my personal opinion so I don't have a I have made a lot of met a lot of CTOs that are runners indeed so but you can work from home and I think that depends on the company but it absolutely is Yeah, for sure.

Great way to break up the day too if you can do that over lunch or something if.

And what I'm seeing is that over the years, the delivery expectations, it just seems to be getting worse and worse. I mean, you started for Microsoft and then went to Kobold and they have websites, but there's so much more that's being added right now, like AI, but the speed of delivery, where we used to have six months or a year for a project. And now I was speaking to somebody yesterday who said everything has to be done in six weeks. How do you see that pressure that just continues to... Mount Bearded.

Yeah, it's interesting that we've had all of these pendulum swings. You know, it's like we went through a little bit of phase, maybe it was post-COVID, where People thought, well, maybe companies are going to become a little like more human oriented and be a little bit more lenient. And now it seems to be slamming back like really hard. And, This one feels like it's not going away. You know, sometimes finding the right position, the right role and the right jobs a little bit like throwing jello at the wall.

I mean, There are a lot of toxic cultures and a lot of people I coach in clearly toxic cultures. Where people are self-selecting, there's, you know, they, some people fit in and can make it work and others can't and they leave. And if it's a pace thing, that fits for you And you can live with that and you've figured it out. Maybe you're not in a highly regulated industry. Maybe the risk Profile is a little lower. Maybe it's okay, but you have to find the place that fits for you. And I want people to be really careful about thinking every company has to ship everything in six weeks. There are companies that are a little bit more you know, cognizant of human nature. Aspect to things and what's realistic over the long term.

Like there are companies out there like that.

So if you are in a toxic culture, maybe it's worth the consideration if you should stay. And maybe that is, for some people, like you said, that is the right place. And for others, maybe it's not.

And then it is time. I mean, it's part of self-care, right? It is sometimes time to move on.

Yeah. And don't be a hero, right?

Like if you realize that it's not working, you know, and for your work style, maybe you have five kids that are under the age of 12, right? You If it doesn't work for you don't need to feel.

Stuck. And at some point, you yourself, I think you've talked about this quite a bit, hit a wall in your work as well. Tell us about that one. What happened and How did you deal with that once?

Yeah, you know, like most people, you... Well, I, you know, as more responsibility and more meetings and more deliverables and all those things kept piling up, my response was to work more. Not necessarily to work smarter. Right. It was really just brute effort and brute force. Start earlier in the day, work later. Work weekends and all of that. And, you know, I didn't have anybody saying, Hey, look, this is too much. You need to push stuff down. You need to build trust with, you know, all the things we just talked about. No one was talking to me about that. Right. And I probably wouldn't have listened. Right. Because we kind of have, You know, in your 40s or, you know, 20, you know, 15, 20 years in your career, you can handle anything. You're Superman or Superwoman.

So... I really kind of said yes to everything. And found myself in a state where I was starting to care too much about everything else.

Like, how come no one asked my opinion? How come someone's taking some of my budget? How come I wasn't in that meeting? And that's a little bit of a death spiral. I think when you start caring about things that are out of your control and, Go right into that.

It wasn't just adding more yourself, but then on top of that, caring more, let's say, and feeling left out sometimes. So wanting more. Taking on more and almost wanting even more as well.

You know, it's sort of a classic, you know, ego-driven kind of thing.

So what... And you didn't have anyone to talk to. I know that you, I mean, you work with a lot of CTOs, you coach. Is that something you would advise? How would you use for somebody else? But you said you wouldn't listen. For somebody else that's maybe in that same position, they're just... Overwhelmed, it's too much, what's the advice you would give them?

Yeah. Yeah. I coach a lot of people on this topic. And the first thing people need to do is start seeing reality for what it is. And what I mean by that is if you come into Monday... Already exhausted Or if you you're off for a week. And it does absolutely no good for you.

You know, two days later, you're just as exhausted as before you left. Something is happening. Right. You shouldn't go through your week exhausted and becoming like, you know, a little bit apathetic and mad when someone doesn't respond to you right away. The best leaders in big companies are typically happy people. And I... I... See that over. And a lot of people like to disagree on this topic. But over and over again, what I see is, and a lot of times they're CEOs, the people at the top of the company are typically happy. And it's not, because they have a great title and they're getting paid a ton of money.

You know, that might be part of it, but a lot of it is they figured out how to run the marathon. So when we're coming into like a CTO, CIO role, we're sprinters. You need to think about you know, using this running analogy, How do you sustain it? For the long term. Burn yourself out, you're done. You're not going to be able to handle a marathon.

So true. I'll tell you my story about the marathon. I came from consulting, right? And I worked for Accenture. I worked 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And I always thought that was really tough, right? These big projects, lots of responsibilities that you're working on. And I went to this director of operations role, which was on the other side. And I figured this is going to be so much easier. I'm going to work on the client side. It's going to be one job. And it's exactly what you said. When I was in consulting, there were these projects, right? But they had an end to them. But there were six months or two years or three years, doesn't matter. There's an end and then there's like a break and then you restart and it starts easy, right? And it gets worse toward the end. If you're in these leadership roles, it just, there are so many different things. There's 10 or 20 or 30 different projects all over the place that you always need to worry about. And it never stops.

Yeah, fully resonates that marathon. It's like running a marathon. Never thought about it that way. How do you adjust there? How do you make that happen?

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's hard, right? Like you can't tell someone about this. Right. And that's what I mean. If someone had told me, I wouldn't have listened.

You know, you need, this is, Kind of going back to my comment earlier about getting kicked in the teeth. You have to live these things, try things. You need to take action. You can't just go read blogs and watch YouTube videos about these things and think that they're going to help. You need to have some experiments, right? What happens if I'm not the first one to respond on Slack or Teams?

Right? Who's going to die?

Right? Are we saving babies or are we just trying to look good to our internal business stakeholders? Right.

Like, Run some experiments. What if I hand this off to someone else? What if I got better? As being a manager and telling someone truly what it means to own this application or this platform.

You know, if I could tell them and make sure I kind of enforced it. What would that free me up to do? Because here's the other thing about this, Mark. When we're sprinting around, keeping all the balls up in the air. There's for sure some strategic work that we're supposed to be doing that we're not doing. If you're not saving some of your time every morning or every day to have your own roadmaps, your own plans, your own strategies, your own ideas... You're not doing sea level... Or even a VP level role.

True. But it's hard, right?

I mean, if you spend those There's never, I mean, in these roles, there's no free time. It's very hard, and I think that's what you said, to create the free time to sit down and think about stuff, think about the longer term, about the strategy, about the plans.

So, yeah. And you're saying delegation or at least delegating some of that work, some of those decisions, application ownership is probably the best key to success. To freeing up some of that time to making more happen.

So you can do the strategic stuff.

Yeah, and you've probably seen this yourself where it's like, Delegation is not just saying, hey, can you handle this? It's making sure someone really truly understands like, no, you're going to, you need to own the vendor relationship. You need to own the requirements that are coming into your team. You need to own it and take responsibility over, you know, uptime or whatever the metrics are. Kick it to the curb and tell somebody to take it. There's a way of doing effective delegations. That was another thing that I had no real... Flew about. I would just kind of, you know, forward an email to.

People. Yeah. Share tasks and not responsibilities. In a lot of cases. I think it's the most natural way of delegating, but it's what people do.

Yeah, because we're sprinting. Right.

So, and in the end, I think for you, this had even led to burnout, What? I think you said, right, just getting to work exhausted. What did that look like? And how did you recover from there? Because that's That is quite a big thing.

Yeah, I'm pretty stubborn. And at the time, like I said, I was, you know, you know, there's a lot of ego and, you know, rub some dirt in it kind of stuff. The most important part of this is that you don't, you may not necessarily know where you are.

Like burning out is a spectrum. It doesn't just happen on one day. You're sort of inching closer and maybe you come back and you're inching a little closer and maybe you sort of, you go through a phase where things are a little bit better or But I got to the point of being exhausted all the time. There was a lot of apathy where like, you know, normally if your boss, whoever you report to emails you try to respond quickly because you care.

So I got to a point where, you know, I would just sit on it and ignore it. But what wound up happening was I woke up. Got out of bed one day and my back was completely a hundred percent thrown out. And, for no reason. Other than, you know, in my world at the moment, there was no reason for it. And it got worse and worse to the point where I couldn't walk. One of my legs was fully numb. I was about to get surgery and I had to go like really fast. Do the self-care. Physical therapy multiple doctors, all those kinds of things. And that was the thing where I was like. Maybe this isn't working.

So that's, that was what it took for me. Hopefully most people don't need to get to that point, but my body sort of said, "Hello, it's not working.

I'm giving up.

I need to send you a signal because you're not getting any signals here. So how about this one?

Wow. That's a very direct signal, I would say.

I mean, I've seen it with people, like you said before, the apathy and the exhaustion and yeah. I think in the end, if you keep going, this is just going to happen. It's going to be that physical signal. How long did it actually take you to Feel like you got on top or at least okay to continue again.

Well, that process took about three months. Roughly until I was sort of like back up.

I mean, I had to You know, I couldn't even drive. So I was working from home and when no one else is working from home, So this was way before COVID or before COVID. And the thing that happened was I realized that I was kind of bored and I was done. And I didn't really want to figure out like, how to master this role. I'd been in it for eight years. I was done. I was ready to do something else.

So that was where I decided I was going to leave that role. So about nine months later, I left this CTO role and went right in to get my certification for executive coaching. And started my business.

Cool. So nice.

So what is it exactly that you do now? And what do you work with CTOs, tech leaders on?

Yeah, it was really important for me to have some continuity from running engineering teams to working with technologists and engineers. So now I do mostly executive coaching and that looks like one-on-one executive coaching, team coaching or group coaching. Mostly, I'm typically hired by like a tech CEO or founder or a CTO to work with them and their teams.

So it may be that, you know, you hire me and you want to build your bench of leaders among your direct reports. So that might look like some team works, one-on-one work. I find that assessments 60 feedback. Those are super powerful. And, You know, I do a little bit of consulting, but it's mostly around executive coaching.

Cool. Nice. Let's get into that a bit more because you had some, I read some comments about standard HR training, right? And how standard training really doesn't do it for you or maybe even for tech as a wider group. Tell me more.

In your typical company environment, You know, let's say as soon as you get to this sort of, let's call it a mid-market, mid-size company, you start to have a further, more developed HR team. You know, as soon as they have like, Maybe four or five people, they start thinking about trainings for the company and inevitably they're focused at like a very generic business person archetype.

So, you know, you send your engineers or they require people to go through it. Maybe it's new manager training or whatever. And it's completely devoured from everything you and I just talked about. The life of someone in technology, right? It's completely irrelevant.

So what happens? People treat it as, you know, a day off or, you know, like a field trip where you're just kind of phoning, you know, you're phoning it in, right? I think that's incredibly tragic for most technologists and engineers. And they're incredibly underserved by these technologies. Generic trainings.

So You know... I've been in this world where there's an outage at 9 p.m., we're going to be up all probably through at least part of the night. We're going to get on the bridge call. We have to rally somebody. We can't find somebody. Who's next? Who's their backup?

You know, there's things that you can't describe to people if you haven't lived it. So, Taking that into account really is what I'm talking about as I go through a lot of the work I do now.

Yeah.

And I was smiling as you said it because I've been in so many of those situations. Days off, I would say, like the vacation days training. And you're absolutely right.

Still, it feels like a lot of that of I mean, I've led teams in the past and it feels like all of this training, or even when you have a discussion with somebody about their feedback and their next steps, that all of this training needs to be about content, right? It needs to be about, I don't know, agile or safe, or it needs to be about ISO or I don't know, right? But It seems that even in tech, 90% of the training is just around technology concepts, whether it's process or technology, and very little around, let's say, the software skills, the leadership. What do we need to do to change that?

I think we need to incorporate how your typical engineer, engineering leader learns. And You know, the typical person who thrives as an engineer is into very cerebral things.

You know, sort of mentally focused activities. And of course I'm stereotyping here, right?

Yeah, but you got in that space.

To spend time.

We're not walking around talking about our emotions and we're not walking around typically, you know, talking about how, you know, we want to go take a nap because, you know, we want to be better rested in the afternoon. It's really not that way. And I don't think it's going to be that way anytime in the near future.

So... You know, one of the things that becomes really important is understanding that to break into people and kind of break down that shell, they need some, probably it's going to be one-on-one, a lot of private conversations. Work. I find one-on-one coaching is incredibly powerful and useful with people. Because, you know, there's not a group, right? In the group, a lot of times you have people that are kind of watching to see how everyone else reacts and everyone else responds and stuff. One-on-one, you can build a real relationship with someone and typically they'll open up. And you can talk about real things that are affecting them.

They do some one-on-one coaching. You said you do some team coaching. Do you do some trainings like more leadership, soft skill trainings as well sometimes?

Yeah, well, pretty much all of it is around leadership skills. So communication is a huge part to building, you know, becoming comfortable building relationships. And those things, they don't really matter what level you're at. We all have the things we're good or not good at, no matter what level we're at. But a lot of the team stuff is because you know, how it is as a leader in an organization, a lot of times your direct report's They they're kind of silos, right? And so.

Like if you have one person running InfoSec and another person doing AppDev, chances are the app dev guy and his directs, are you know, Maybe bad mouthing the security guys like, they're the bottleneck. They're the ones getting in our way.

You know, we were everything was on track until InfoSec got involved, you know. So then you basically have a bunch of silos and they're not going to work together until they start to trust each other.

So a lot of team coaching is around establishing like your team. As a team and building trust there.

And I'm smiling here as well because you were just describing my previous team, In a lot of detail. So that was, yeah. But I mean, I think it's the same everywhere, right? It's the one team doesn't talk to the other team and they can't see eye to eye and we have our goals, they have their goals and, Right. We're going to work on our goals and they're holding us back. And I think that's it's such a. Common discussion unfortunately

Yeah and you know At the end of the day, hopefully there's some sort of shared goal, like you should be working towards some sort of company strategy. So you need to get in line around those. - So then.

Maybe give me a story of an organization that you worked with or a team that you worked with where this really turned around? What happened? When did you come in and what happened along the way to change that?

Yeah, well, there have been a few of those. One of the... Most dramatic ones has been exactly what I was talking about. Where Pretty much everyone would show up in the room and smile and act like we were a team and everything.

And then they would go away and actively... You know, block each other. And the way that with the way that really looks is, you know, those people go away, your directs go away and they act like their directs are the most important people versus, you know, their peer.

So a lot of that peers versus your directs is where this happens. But what I came in and did was we actually talked directly about culture, which can seem a little hard to get your head around. But we talked directly about culture and taking people through the actual current state. Here's what we are today and getting everyone's feedback. And so we spent two days going through what exactly is the culture we're living in. And what do we want? And what are the steps to get there? And so, you know, it's a long process. It takes time, takes checking in. You have to keep some attention on that. But that's an example of an organization that is turning the corner. After years and years of basically infighting.

And where are they now? Or... What was the end result?

You know, I wouldn't even call it an end result. I think it's like incremental progress, right?

So teams working more directly together, the ability to have kind of like what you might call a V team or a cross-sectional team where you can take people from, you know, more of an agile concept to where you're going to have people from, you know, let's say a cloud engineer and an app dev guy and maybe a security person and put them together and they can actually work on something that one of the business teams needs. So, You know, I'm not going to pretend that it's like a wave, the magic wand kind of thing. It's hard. It's hard work. To get to those levels and break down silos. You have to enforce behavior. It has to come from the.

Top. And do you think, because I mean, coaching, training, these are, I mean, the standard LinkedIn training doesn't cost much, right? Or giving someone access to LinkedIn, Udemy, Coursera, whatever.

I mean, one-on-one personal training or coaching is a little more expensive. Do you think there was a... Return on investment from what you did there and how did that show?

Yeah, the ROI with a lot of this is that, you know, you have to be able to see where people are making changes, making different decisions, trickling actions down into their behavior. So, yeah, I'll do surveys, a lot of surveys to kind of get the before and the after. That's one thing that we'll do.

Sometimes we'll look at like, Project. Efficacy, project timelines, those kinds of things as well. And one of the other ways of really measuring how things are going is to survey your stakeholders. The same way... That You might do a 360. I'm going to get feedback on how they're doing that with the organizations that are your key stakeholders.

So, yeah, I think, There is definitely ROI there. And I think with a lot of teams, they start to see it internally pretty.

Quickly. I like that idea.

So like a team 360, doing a 360 as a team, getting your outside-in view, getting your, you know, upside down view. Of the team.

Yeah. I never thought of that.

Yeah. And it fits in well with this thing we've been talking about, like being ready to run the marathon, not the sprint. Right. You want to be tuned into how your business stakeholders perceive your organizations.

And make absolutely sure that you're fit to run the marathon. Yes, exactly. It's like a health check.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so if someone's listening right now, and we've spoken for, let's say, 35, almost 40 minutes, and they feel they're stretched, they're exactly in the situation that you talked about, they're thin, they're constantly being pulled back into the weeds, there's no time for strategy, they start Monday, Tuesday, exhausted. What's the first thing that they should do?

They need to start focusing on Taking care of the things that matter to them. And when I say that, what I mean is it your health? And your well-being. Do you need to exercise more? Do you need to pay attention to your sleep, what you're eating?

You know, what the balance is. Are you neglecting your family? One of the... One of the biggest things for a lot of people is they or walking through every day feeling guilty for missing their family and their kids' events and all things, you know, having that on your shoulders every day is going to stress you out.

So, you know, not feeling guilty about doing things for yourself. You know, because we, You know how it is, Mark. We get into these roles and we give ourselves away. Most people that are stuck or they're fried are giving too much of themselves away. Your leaders, the CEO of your company does not want you going through the day depleted. They didn't hire you. They didn't put a job description out and recruit you so you could be tired and exhausted and depleted.

I think that CEO would be a little happier if you went through the day fully energized, motivated. Right and ready to take on or the feeling to ready to take on everything instead of just depleted and exhausted I think he would agree or she.

Yeah, for sure. For sure.

So what do you need? And start taking care of it.

I mean, you got to have some discipline. You got to honor the things that make you stronger and more focused. Rather than giving more and more of yourself away.

Yeah, I like that. Nice. And with that, Yeah, I think there's a lot more room to take care of.

Yeah, next, I had something written down about taking care of like the continuously increasing pressure because it feels to me, and I've been here for 30 years, that is just it going faster every day there's just more going on every day there's more applications the landscape is growing the technology is going faster the releases are coming like so much faster today is like it's almost feeling like it's impossible to keep up so And I guess your advice is then pretty similar to keeping up with all of that, right? To keep it manageable for yourself.

And there are a lot of people going through the same thing. So, you know, if you don't have, you know, two very trusted mentors. And you don't even need to ask them to be a mentor. It's just someone that is, you know... Probably a level higher than you, maybe a few years older, that you can talk to or a network.

I mean, a great one that people should be a part of that's free is called CTO Lunches. And it's based on CTOs in a city getting together for lunch once a month. But it's become a very highly... Used email lists where people are asking questions all the time.

I mean, there's community, there's people to bounce ideas off of. So my point really is, You're not alone. Right. Go talk to people. Find some peers, find some people that have been through it.

Nice. The CTO lunches, I never heard of it.

So this is a first for me as well. Yeah, you've got to give me the URL so we can put it on the podcast. Is that mostly in the US or do you know if that exists outside of the US as well?

Yeah. And by the way, it's not mine. I'm just putting in, I'm just putting a promo out there for a great organization, which I I'm impressed with myself and I lurk on the email list. Yeah, I think it's mostly U.S. Based, but the value that I see in it is the community.

So it kind of doesn't matter where you're located. The email, it gets all sorts of questions in there about, you know, everything from AI to training to technology. What people are doing with interns right now. I love.

That. That's definitely going to go. We'll figure it out at the link and we'll put it in the show notes for sure.

So you can look it up there. To wrap things up a little, So if you had to give people, I mean, it's all going so fast right now. The developments are going so fast. What's the single piece of advice that you would give to anyone listening, whether they're exhausted or not? To just deal with the madness that's going on.

Prioritization might sound a little simplistic. But If you can find the things that matter, what's the one thing that you can do that's going to make other things easier? Rather than looking at every single thing as this giant mountain of things that I have to do or my team has to do, what are the things that matter? What is the thing? If we can get this right... It's going to make all these other things easier. A lot of times it's called a keystone goal or a keystone priority. It's the thing, if you can get it done, is going to make everything else easier. Move a lot faster, a lot easier. Try to focus on the right thing at the right time and make sure it's something that's going to help your other work move more quickly.

Okay, so prioritize top three, top five, top one or even two things to work on. That's going to make everything better. Simplify.

So if people want to find you, where can they find you? Where do they go? Where do they reach out?

Yeah, a great way to find me is just on LinkedIn. Just search Andrew Hinkelman. You'll find me. Send me a connection request. I'll accept it. And underneath my name on my LinkedIn page is a link to, you know, it says something like book a discovery call. I encourage your audience, you know, set up a time we can meet, say hello. It's not a sales call. It's an introductory call. And what I do a lot of times is just, you know, offer people coaching. If you're curious, what is executive coaching? What is leadership coaching? And, bring a topic and we can just kind of work through it it's just something i do with a lot of people.

Nice. Okay, Andrew, it was incredible having you on. I loved your story. I loved your advice. I hope that more people take you up on that. And thank you very much.

Thanks, Mark. Great to be here.

As we wrap up another episode of the CTO Compass, thank you for taking the time to invest in you. The speed at which tech and AI develop is increasing. Demanding a new era of leaders in tech. Leaders that can juggle team and culture, code and infra, cyber and compliance. All whilst working closely with board members and stakeholders. We're here to help you learn from others, set your own goals and navigate your own journey. And until next time. Keep learning. Keep pushing and never stop growing.