Human on the Inside with Valhalla’s Eli Harrell
Maxme: We’re big believers in the power of human skills. But don’t just take our word for it – the evidence for excellence powered by human (‘soft’) skills are everywhere! In this engaging, ever-enlightening series, we speak with industry leaders, innovators, and game-changers to learn a little about their personal career journeys, and how human-led strategies, philosophies, and cultures are proving a force for good in their working worlds …
Welcome Eli, and thanks for stepping into the #SuccessIsHuman Spotlight!
You’re the Co-Founder and Chief of Strategy at Valhalla – an IT consultancy that works with founders and product owners of purpose-driven tech companies to ensure they are constantly heading in the right direction, building the right product with the right team, and processes-optimised via data driven product decisions.
In 1 sentence (ok, we’ll give you 3), what does your job/work entail?
Eli Harrell: I consider myself most responsible for making sure that Valhalla is heading in the direction of our major purpose, which is to accelerate innovation toward a sustainable future by amplifying the impact of purpose-driven tech companies.
A large part of that is building deep relationships with the right kinds of partners and stakeholders inside of these innovative companies; building community for them, and trying to deeply understand them in order to find ways to improve products and services to make them better.
One of my biggest responsibilities is also to assist in strategic decision making on a week by week basis, and especially, to ensure that the culture we’ve built is continuing to go in the right direction – taking care of people, who take care of the people, who take care of our customers.
M: In parallel to your work at Valhalla, you’re the host and producer of Products with Purpose – a popular podcast series which tells the stories of Founders putting everything on the line and going ‘all-in’ to create real impact via products and services with a laser-focus on solving meaningful problems.
Prior to all this, your eclectic career has included some initial project management roles in architecture/building, before shifting to the world of IT services where you held roles with firms such as engageSPARK, CAP BADGE Cyber Security and JobYoDA Inc. In recent years you also did some part time work with Southwestern University PHINMA in the Philippines, where you’re still based today.
How does all this work speak to your personal purpose and what drives you as an individual?
EH: All of this experience has led me to realise that my personal purpose is really around helping others to take ownership of their own growth, and leverage more of their potential.
I think all of that experience across many industries, and experiences in many different cultures as well, led me to realise sometime in 2017 or 2018, that while I’d spent a lot of time and energy seeking success in business, I hadn’t been prioritising enough partnerships with people who have alignment in worldview and values hierarchy.
This broad range of experience has led me to realise that if I want to feel like I’m doing something truly meaningful, the only way that I’ll achieve significant impact is through partnering with people that see business similarly to me.
Business is a tool that humans have created for solving problems, not necessarily something designed to create wealth for individuals.
And in order to create impact through business, or any other type of model, we must prioritise taking care of people.
Once I realised this, I started a company with people who see things that way. We built Valhalla with pure alignment on worldview and values. And this time I started with a clearer purpose and we chose our values very carefully from the beginning and built everything around them.
M: Tell us a little about your personal education pathway/s – what led you to where you are now? How closely do your formal qualifications match your current career?
EH: I have a very different take on education than most people. My parents did something very unorthodox in the 1980s. I’m the eldest of eight kids, and we were all homeschooled while my parents were entrepreneurs at the same time.
My mom is very intelligent and driven, and a kind of rule breaker, so she was ahead of the curve on homeschooling. My parents didn’t set me on a path of education to employment, where diplomas and degrees were the focus, but I got real life experience working with them in their businesses in my teen years.
From there, I think I just turned into a self teacher, so anything I was curious about I would learn and fortunately the Internet came online right around that time. I’ve been mostly just learning through experience, learning through trial and error and from other people, and so my path has not been formally education-driven at all.
I’m an advocate of innovating and evolving the way humans learn because I believe that our systems that we still rely on are a bit archaic and don’t always serve people. I’m happy that both my children and I are very competent self teachers. I believe learning is much more fun when it’s voluntary, rather than pushed upon us.
M: If you could share one piece of career advice to your 21-year-old self it would be …
EH: I’m not the first person who said that if I had a chance to give my 21 year old self advice, I probably wouldn’t because I think the journey has been the way it’s supposed to have been.
But if I did decide to take the risk of doing that, I would say; be more intentional right now about who you’re surrounding yourself with so that you can decide who you want to become.
I spent my 20s just focusing on the ‘doing’ and the having aspects of success – what I wanted to happen, and what I needed to do to achieve it. But I wasn’t at all asking myself “Who do I want to become?”, “How do I decide that, and once I do decide that, how do I do it?”
I’ve since realised that the key to all of that is simply deciding who are the people you respect the most. Why do you respect them? How did they get to be who they are, and just basically, surround your brain with their ideas as much as you possibly can through books or YouTube or through your personal circle. People are much more willing to give you feedback and mentoring than you imagine if they see that you’re someone who invests in yourself.
M: Maximising the potential of individuals, communities, and businesses through the power of human skills is the reason Maxme exists. Can you tell us a little about the role and/or value of human skills in the work/workplaces you’re involved with right now?
EH: I think every industry is heading in the same direction; where any skills that aren’t human skills are probably mostly going to become obsolete. So the ability to understand what the world needs is going to be based on your ability to understand how humans work. Ultimately, the way the world works is based on how humans work, and the best way to learn how humans work is to understand yourself better.
All of the things that we are doing in pretty much any type of work is for the purpose of creating value for humans. So the better we understand ourselves and other people, the better we’re going to be able to make decisions, ask the right questions, and solve problems in ways that actually are meaningful and achieve their purpose.
Getting things done without understanding humans often leads to inefficiencies and effectiveness. And of course, there’s also interacting with people, communicating and negotiation etc. where obviously, if we have value within us, we have deep understanding, but then we can’t communicate it well, we can’t interact with people successfully.
We will run into problems triggering each other and feeling separate from each other and being offended or offending others then we’re just going to reduce the ability that we have to deliver that value to humans. So I look at technical skills as kind of secondary to be honest because they’re undeliverable without a deeper understanding of how humans work.
M: Self Awareness sets the critical foundation for all Maxme learning experiences. With that said … what’s your strongest trait/personal superpower?
EH: You got my brain on self awareness! Self awareness is something that I didn’t have much of before, and I’ve really worked on it intentionally for a long time and it’s actually one of the core values of our company.
The ability to see one’s self more accurately is critical and being able to do it somewhat in real time is even better. So noticing the words that are coming out of your mouth, the tone that you’re using, what’s going on in the back of your head, thoughts that are looping and emotions that are coming up … it’s just so foundational to everything because you really can’t do a good job of showing up the way you want to show up if you can’t even see how you’re currently showing up. And then there’s also the external side of self awareness where we need other people’s perspective. We need feedback.
I do think this is something I’ve gotten really strong in, and I’m proud of the fact that I can now truly desire feedback from anyone and I want to know even if they think I’m really terrible at something, or I just want people to tell me super directly and it doesn’t really hurt anymore, almost never. I just really want that data so I can think about and decide how I want to use it…
M: And on the flip side, what’s one human/‘soft’ skill you’ve had to really work on improving over the course of your career?
EH: One of the most challenging ‘soft skills’ for me has been projecting my emotional tone accurately. I don’t have a lot of warmth in my voice naturally. So it’s been very challenging to learn how to speak to people’s crocodile brains and show them that it’s safe to have a conversation with me. And you know, I’m your friend and I’m on your side of the table. I’m always friendly technically speaking, but I haven’t always been immediately seen by others as friendly when it comes to the parts of communication that are unspoken like body language, tone of voice and facial expressions. Humans respond involuntarily.
M: If you could share one piece of career advice with recent Uni graduates or candidates keen to work with a firm like Valhalla, what would it be?
EH: I just had a conversation with one of the founders of Humanitix and he recommended something that I’ve frequently talked about which I first heard from Tom Belyeu, the founder of Quest Nutrition and Impact Theory. There are such amazing companies on this planet with unbelievable cultures – we’re doing incredible things, and you can find them through your network by asking people – what’s the most amazing culture of any company? If you wanted to learn really fast, what would it take to have impact on this planet or something you really care about who’s doing it? Companies like, say… Maxme!
And if you literally just went to that company and you said “I’ve been studying you guys for the last several weeks, I think what you’re doing is freaking amazing. I have no idea if what I know how to do right now would ever be able to bring value to you but I’m really intent on seeing if I can find a way. Would you let me just volunteer for two weeks or a month?” You can possibly afford to do it if you just graduated. You can if you could do that. Go ask them if you could literally just volunteer in their company for a month. Be willing to take out the trash or document processes, or call customers or whatever they need you to do. And just go put everything you’ve got into being valuable and understanding what’s going on, ask questions!
You’ll learn a ton and you might just find that you’ll end up getting an offer from that company. So my biggest suggestion is don’t go apply through job ads. You can be much more intentional than that. You can find a company where you can learn. You can find ways even if there isn’t a role open in that company that fits what you studied. I would argue it’s just way more rewarding and you learn so much more, just figure out where you want to work and go find a way to work there. Instead of just applying somewhere based on salary and CV fit.
M: You’ve been granted approval to add one University graduate to your team, but have 100 applicants, all with outstanding academic results. How do you find your perfect candidate – what are you looking for?
EH: One of the first things I would look for would be a growth mindset – someone who sees mistakes as data and not meaning anything negative about themselves as people. They don’t feel embarrassed by not knowing something or not being good at something, YET. They just ask themselves “What do I need to learn to get better? If you want to know more about growth mindset read Mindset by Carol Dweck.
Second thing I would look for would be openness to new data, not being rigid. We really like to look for people that are willing to challenge the way that they see the world and have strong beliefs, but hold them loosely enough to look at new data.
And we look for people that want to help others and who are not trying to prove themselves. People who don’t carry an ego, and are very comfortable collaborating with others.
M: In the words of John Dewey, “education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” What’s next on your #learning agenda?
EH: I would like to learn how to write books more effectively and efficiently.
I’m also very interested in studying distributed autonomous organisations, and how they might help us in solving major problems through different organisational structures in the future.
And I’m very interested to learn what it takes to be a great board member.
And to reference again to Humanitex, I’m supremely fascinated to learn more about how they built a tech charity. Really what it is to me is a business with no shareholders. A truly profitable, successful, fast-growing company that has an amazing product and is disrupting an industry. But it isn’t capitalism. It’s charity. And I’m freaking fascinated by it!
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