Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
We are living in a time where technology is accelerating faster than ever before. AI is transforming how we work, how we build, and how we make decisions. But while systems are getting smarter, people aren’t necessarily feeling more connected or trusted. My guest today is Bala Muthaya. Bala has spent over two decades in engineering and leadership, but his focus is different. He asks, what happens if we build technology but forget to build people? My conversation with Bala today explores why trust, community and human centered leadership matter more than ever. My promise to you in this episode is that we’re going to talk about why trust is the foundation of human progress, how to evolve from technical thinking to people centered leadership, why leadership must extend beyond organizations into communities, and how to build leaders who expand the pie for everyone. I know that’s a lot to cover in 30 minutes, but we’re going to do that.
Bernie Borges [00:01:11]:
Bhala, welcome to the Life Fulfilled podcast. Thanks for being with me today.
Bala Muthiah [00:01:15]:
Thank you. Thanks, Bernie. I’m very excited to be here.
Bernie Borges [00:01:18]:
Terrific. Well, Bala, you are a leadership coach, you’re a systems thinker, and you are the head of engineering at a technology company in Silicon Valley, California. And I’m excited for our conversation today because when I heard your backstory, it really helped connect the dots on how you got to where you are and the way you think about leadership today. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to begin with your backstory because it’s very relevant to our conversation.
Bala Muthiah [00:01:46]:
Sure, definitely. We’ll start from there. As you mentioned, I’m in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, where everything is happening. My roots are from India, so I was born, brought up, went to school there, grew up in a family where education and community was biggest factor for us. Like we didn’t have a lot to go with, but we were able to meet ends. And my parents and my community always made sure that we kids had the most important thing, which is trust and community, support and education. So that built my foundation. Then right out of college, I had an opportunity to right away start in a tech job.
Bala Muthiah [00:02:27]:
This is 2006 and then going through the first recession, right. 2008, then 2009 brought me to Silicon Valley. Then I continued my journey there around 10 years ago, like around 2000, 15, 16ish time is when I started transition to management and leadership role. And here I am 10 years into that journey. It’s a very exciting lot of change happening through this time journey, but I would say more curious now and more learning than ever before.
Bernie Borges [00:02:56]:
Now what I know about you though is that you have a Big focus on the human impact. And I find that, first of all, I find that very refreshing. And of course it aligns completely with who I am at Fulfill the Work Academy and the host of the Life Fulfilled podcast. But it’s not something that’s very common in the engineering world. So how did you go from just thinking about engineering output to the human impact?
Bala Muthiah [00:03:25]:
Yes, true, true. I would say in the engineering world in a way, actually it is subtly is the undercurrent in engineering, like trust and human things are undercurrent in engineering. But often it doesn’t come out, often it doesn’t show up because purely from a technical standpoint, engineering is considered as problem solving, like going and building things, going and fixing things and going and figuring out something. Right. A solution for a problem. But if you boil down, it comes and talks a lot about how everything is connected, how everything works with each other, right? What is the part that is not working and how do we go attempt to change that? If you now scale that and apply to humanity, if you apply that to the world we live in, it’s the same like the world is, I would say engineered, right? It’s engineered to be in a certain way. And we humans were part of this big machinery. So we work with each other, like how humanity evolved.
Bala Muthiah [00:04:25]:
We’ll talk more about it. It’s all very, very fundamental. But the job has come so far with code and everything that we forgot, like we along the way that, oh, this is all built on that same fabric that humanity is built on. But we get so hung up on the nuances and the machinery versus the actual thing that underlies.
Bernie Borges [00:04:45]:
And I know, Bala, that you also have some experience as a volunteer teaching kids about technology. And I’d like to know what, what impact has that had on you? What role has that played on your perspective of the human impact and leadership, you know, from a human lens?
Bala Muthiah [00:05:06]:
Oh, that is one of the life changing thing for me. I went to teach, but I got out learning so much. This was a volunteering activity, like you mentioned. It was for a primary school here where I live nearby and it was underfunded. Unfortunately the school doesn’t exist anymore because government couldn’t fund it any longer and they had to shut it down and move the kids around. But the two years I went and taught there, like Wednesdays and Friday mornings I used to go there. That actually gave me my career path forward to become a manager. Like I was an engineer when I was doing this, and then when I did that, seeing the kids learning, seeing the kids growing, that gave me a lot of gratification, like a satisfaction of going and doing this.
Bala Muthiah [00:05:52]:
And I asked myself, huh, how do I do this for my living? Like, how do I get paid for this? So then that’s pretty much what my job’s natural career progression was. That really changed. The biggest insight was the time we spend with the future generations building future leaders are very, very little. Like, we focus a lot on current, what we have done, a lot about the past and history, those are good. But future is where things lie. And we have to be very intentional in building that leadership because they are going to determine what the world is going to look like. And we have to not only leave it in a better place, but equip them so they can make it even better.
Bernie Borges [00:06:38]:
Exactly, exactly. I love your point about how, you know, you went there to teach, but you learned so much from that. And so that’s terrific. And it doesn’t surprise me. Now let’s get back to the world that you’re in because again, in your quote unquote day job, you, you’re the head of engineering at a technology company, but you mentioned that your upbringing from India and that whole foundation, trust was a big part of that. So how has trust, the, the element of trust become part of a leadership foundation for you?
Bala Muthiah [00:07:16]:
Yeah, trust, the concept in itself has existed. And I should say, rather, we as humans exist today because of trust existed. Right. If you look at the whole animal kingdom or anything, humans are the only species that evolve so much. Right. And there is a reason for that. And I personally believe that reason is trust. Because we started trusting each other, we started building communities, we started building tribes.
Bala Muthiah [00:07:44]:
So we know, hey, I do my part here in this tribe and community, and you do the other part on the other side. And collectively we were able to join hands, join resources, multiply them and grow and make it more expansive. If that trust did not exist, we wouldn’t have evolved like we would have still trade as tribes or probably more primitive than we are today. So the trust from that angle is our existential thing. Like it made us who we are today. So now bringing all the way back, growing up, another thing, a big factor I talked about community is the little things, right? How people there trusted each other. Like, we would come back from school, mom and dad both had to go to work, but they would just trust us to be at our neighbors. They would trust us to be on the streets, they would trust us to we do our thing and then they come back and take care of household stuff.
Bala Muthiah [00:08:39]:
And kind of help us with our homework and things. A lot of trust growing up and then getting a job right. Again, it’s trust. And as we go as leaders, leaders are not the ones who are doing everything or who knows everything. So now you bring people who you trust, that job can be done with them, through them, and that becomes more and more foundational. There’s a famous book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. They talk a lot about trust too. If trust is not there, teams won’t work.
Bala Muthiah [00:09:08]:
Organizations cannot flourish or cherish. And that’s very true now in the modern world, as technology evolves and trust keeps coming to me in different forms and shapes, every time I go and try to, as an engineer, try to debug something, the bottom line is trust. It always ends there. If trust was there, so many things would have been much more different. Even today’s world, in outside of a company, outside of technology, it plays a lot of significant role. And a lack of trust is one of the downsides of things that are not happening in the way we want it to happen.
Bernie Borges [00:09:45]:
You said a lot there and I want to unpack a couple of aspects of it. Bala, you said that we’re evolving. Just the human species has been evolving over the many, many centuries. And if you look at the world that we’re living in today, we can look at history. But if you look at where we are today, we’ve got corporations evolving into a new season where AI is becoming more the norm than the exception. And so I wonder, what is the role of trust in a business climate where a lot of companies are, are increasing the use of AI and a lot of people are wondering what’s their role? So how does trust fit into that world?
Bala Muthiah [00:10:36]:
Yes, very true. Things are happening now in a very fast pace, like really fast than before. That’s why it is important for leaders to pay even more close attention. Because what would have taken months or years now would have like, that would not be the case anymore. So things are happening so fast. Unless the foundation is there, unless the trust network is there, things are not going to be productive in the way we want. So to narrow that down, we talk about the economy today, right? End of the day, companies exist to contribute to economy and then they are the circles and our whole economy is built on top of jobs that we have. And then with AI, there is this big sentiment or there is a conversation happening, like what will happen to jobs? What will happen to these jobs? As we know today, when tools and systems and AI can really do a lot of the things that jobs exist today for.
Bala Muthiah [00:11:37]:
And trust is another thing where the systems we are building, like we can go all day about talking trust in AI world. In the context of AI, right? What does it mean to let a system decide something? Do you trust it? What kind of guardrails you put in? That’s a different conversation. Now you have people who are using those systems, so how do you trust them? Because now they are more powerful. With power comes responsibility. We know that. So that’s even more powerful. That’s the next layer, right? Hey, A, you trust the tools, B, you trust the people who use the tools. And then now as a leader, don’t just think vertically, don’t just think for your own company because you cannot leave the community, you cannot leave the economy as is and just grow as a company.
Bala Muthiah [00:12:21]:
A company cannot thrive if every end user directly or indirectly benefiting from the company is trusting and contributing to it. Nobody could be left out. Otherwise this growth or this hype will be short lived.
Bernie Borges [00:12:36]:
So is trust an undercurrent in the current work climate or is it a topic of conversation? Is it open discussion about trust or is it just again, sort of an undercurrent?
Bala Muthiah [00:12:52]:
I would say it has to be open. We have to explicitly talk about trust more and more than before because by default, when things are going slow, it is okay for it to be an undercurrent. It is okay for it to be in the background. You don’t have to every day come in and talk about trust. Now when things are going really fast, you have to talk about this in front and center. So it’s on top of everyone’s mind. So it is becoming a conversation topic. Leaders are really thinking about this as the most important thing because they know this is going to be a differentiator.
Bala Muthiah [00:13:25]:
When you’re hiring, when you’re scaling your teams or when you’re going into new business. This is getting more and more important than before.
Bernie Borges [00:13:33]:
Okay now, now in your environment where you’re leading engineers, what are those conversations like? Do you talk to engineers about leadership, about empowering them to build trust, to cultivate an environment where trust is inherent? What are those conversations like?
Bala Muthiah [00:13:55]:
Yes, it’s more and more now people are able to, not just engineers like across the functions, people can do more. Now when I say more, it’s not about the quantity of work that they can do, which is a different conversation, but it’s more about things that they were not able to do before the functions. Like, hey, before, an engineer can only code, a designer can only Design like researchers can only research. But those things are blurring now. So anybody starting from an engineer can do more types of things than they were used to or they were asked to do before. So this is a power of like, this is a form of empowerment because now you can take care of end to end product, end to end solutions, that you can take it to a customer and before you trust that an expert who’s doing research is doing their best and giving it to you. So that’s like by default you attribute that work with the trust because hey, this is done by an expert who is specializing in that field. Now AI has made it easier for anyone to do a lot of different things.
Bala Muthiah [00:15:02]:
So now where does trust belong? Because yes, you can trust the AI systems. They are getting better, they are evolving as we speak every day. This is where now you need to trust other faxes like what are you doing this for? And what guardrails you have as an engineer. So they are more empowered, but in a way they are giving power to these systems a lot. So they have to trust those systems and put in proper guardrails or proper metrics so they know when it goes sideways, when it goes off rails, you know where to intervene and do. And you as a leader, trust your people to do the right thing. Like you are no longer going to be hiring for the job profiles. You are no longer going to be hiring for that engineer who’s doing back end or that engineer who is doing in a mobile application.
Bala Muthiah [00:15:49]:
You are hiring people who are looking at the system holistically. So there has to be more trust within embedded in the organizations.
Bernie Borges [00:15:58]:
So you remind me of something that I talk about a lot in my work, teaching leaders what I call fulfillment centric leadership. Bala and part of what I talk about is that we’re all leaders. Some of us lead people from an organizational standpoint, meaning we have people reporting to us and we lead those people. And then those that are individual contributors, their leadership role is self leadership. Would you agree that self leadership is even more prevalent today because of the trust factor? Meaning that you are now in an environment where people like you said are more empowered, they can do more. So there is an element of self leadership that, that they need to embrace, which again connects directly to that Trust factor?
Bala Muthiah [00:16:46]:
Yes, 100%. Now we talked about this like now we are more responsible, everyone is more responsible. Like when you have the keys, you are more powerful and you need to be very intentional about everything that you do. And the traditional world of power and authority and resourcing everything Sitting in the center with the leader is now getting to the edge where individuals are, they can quickly look at an information and act on it. They have the agency to deploy things to go solve a problem. So it’s getting more, I would say, deeper and to the edge where problems are actually happening and has to happen very fast. So it is becoming even more relevant, more important and more decentralized now.
Bernie Borges [00:17:38]:
And so we still need leaders though, whether it’s leading a team or even leading themselves. So in your view, Bala, how has the leadership model evolved? Like, how do we develop leaders today versus just a few years ago when it was a very different world?
Bala Muthiah [00:17:58]:
True leadership has been evolving, especially with the advent of tech, it has changed a lot. Like before in the industrial world, you have levels, you have layers, you have corner office. Technology, in a way broke a lot of things. Different layers evolved, but it became more and more accessible within the company. So now what is happening is the new what kind of leader do we want? Like, if I’m hiring a leader today, what do I want? I don’t want someone who’s gonna just have a growth mindset, right? Vertically growing, oh, I have a team, I’m going to grow them from 10 to 20. That is not the kind of leader we want. Traditional leadership or conventional leadership that you talked about has always incentivized growth as a competition. Right.
Bala Muthiah [00:18:45]:
I need to go after a share that I don’t have today. I need to go after, and that is usually with somebody else. Because as tribes, we talked about going and conquering other tribes, we talked about kingdoms, right, how it got built. The leadership philosophy is if you go and break down a lot of fundamental academic leadership concepts, a lot of things depends on being competitive, being more. And winning. We talk a lot about winning in leadership. So if you talk about winning, there’s also losing. There’s another side that is the mindset that’s not going to work.
Bala Muthiah [00:19:19]:
There’s no winning and losing here. Like, everyone has to grow and it’s more expensive than a growth vertical mindset. So that is the conventional leadership wisdom that has to change. Because you are not the only one with power now. Everyone has the power. Now we still need leaders for this very same reason. Because now everyone all of a sudden is more powerful, more resourceful. As a leader, how do you connect them? How do you keep the community going? How do you create an environment where everyone can operate individually at the same time, everyone operates for this common good, for the central fabric that we have.
Bala Muthiah [00:19:59]:
That is only achievable if we have leaders who can connect these people and create a shared purpose and make sure everyone operates with that purpose.
Bernie Borges [00:20:10]:
So that leads me to the concept of culture. As you know, Bala, culture has been around forever. And so like everything else we’ve been discussing in this conversation, that’s been evolving. What’s the role of culture? How has culture now evolved in the workplace? As you know, in the context of this conversation.
Bala Muthiah [00:20:31]:
So sometimes we tend to use the word culture very broadly to define certain principles or how we do. But culture is beyond that. Culture is the environment, like culture is what you have that will help people grow and help people thrive. Right. In this new world. This is, think of it like a garden bed, right? Like culture is not just a soil, right? Culture is everything. The air, the water that it gets, the sun, it gets everything together. That is culture.
Bala Muthiah [00:21:01]:
Not purely that one soil where this plant is growing. Because that’s where traditional world has been just focusing on the soil aspect. Now it is all people need. Culture is about what are you going after as a company? That is culture, which was never part of the culture before. Before, a company focuses a lot on profit. Now it’s a lot about purpose, a lot about community. So from company and profit model to community and purpose model. So that is the culture we create because you can’t afford to leave anyone behind, right? You could be a great supply chain company and have a great technology that will take care of this.
Bala Muthiah [00:21:42]:
But why do you exist? End of the day, a person has to walk out of their house to go get a cup of coffee. And if that person is not able to afford that cup of coffee, your wonderful great supply chain technology is irrelevant. It’s not going to do anything. Who are we leaving behind? That is the culture. What kind of diverse people are we bringing in? That is the culture. Because with AI, we are going to solve new set of problems. The problems that we either thought, oh, it’s okay to have that problem and live on, or it could be, oh, like cancer we never thought we could solve. But now more things are getting accessible and solvable.
Bala Muthiah [00:22:20]:
So this is the culture where the mindset is not going after small problems only and winning, but going after problems that haven’t been solved before, but for a bigger common good.
Bernie Borges [00:22:33]:
Really intrigued by those thoughts for the following reason. Paula, you live and work in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is where things happen fast. Technology advances at just breakneck, not only speed, but at marveling advancements and it’s very competitive. So I’m really intrigued by all the characteristics that are attributed and well known, associated with Silicon Valley, but yet you used the word community. You said that culture needs, everybody needs to be growing and community needs to be a part of that. So how do those align? How do they actually work together?
Bala Muthiah [00:23:22]:
Yes, right now the PCs are funding a certain kind of founders, right? Like, it’s always okay, go, win, and it’s going to be. Every startup starts with a mission. I say this only jokingly, maybe half jokingly. Every startup has a mission until they get funded, right? There are. This is not to pick on anything or anybody in general. That’s how the world is. We are incentivized and monetized for rewards that are directly attributed to growth in form of money. So you start good and then you slowly creep into the boundary, and then you don’t know who you are.
Bala Muthiah [00:23:59]:
This is where leaders again come in, like to keep the community being in Silicon Valley. Yes, it is a big bubble, right? Like, it’s a big bubble where we are insulated a lot, but we don’t have to look outside the bubble a lot. There are so many things even within Silicon Valley that will expose where things are broken in the community. When you walk down the streets of a downtown, you know, it’s on your face like, you cannot leave that. That’s a great example. Like, you cannot take a train to your office, ignoring every single thing and just go build your greatest startup ever. And when you walk out, you still have to walk the street safely and make sure everyone gets a piece of that. Like, and this is why going outside of our traditional societies, like, we have this situation with our prison systems, correctional facilities, education, like so many areas, those are the future populations too.
Bala Muthiah [00:24:53]:
We can’t ignore them and just build in a silo and assume everyone is going to sit in front of a computer and do everything. It is not like a Wall E movie, right? We are not there yet. We won’t go there because there’s human involved and leaders will shape that.
Bernie Borges [00:25:11]:
So what I think I’m hearing you say is that leadership in business, and again, you being in Silicon Valley, I don’t mean to limit it to Silicon Valley, because of course, people listening and watching to this podcast can be literally anywhere in the world. When I look at my analytics, literally, it is a global audience. Some, there might be some people that don’t even know that Silicon Valley refers to Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Area. But what I’m hearing you say, Bala, is that there really needs to be this balance disintegration between commerce, building products that get sold for a Profit and the impact on society, contribution to society and along the way, developing people who are good humans. And a lot of capitalists would say, look, good humans has nothing to do with business. That’s what some capitalists would say. But what I’m hearing you say is that we need to integrate human humanity with corporate profit objectives and have an impact on the world. Is that right?
Bala Muthiah [00:26:19]:
Yes, very true statement. What you mentioned from a pure capitalist mindset. It is like, hey, it has nothing to do with people. It’s always about productivity and how much we can get done. But every capitalist will agree that end of the day there’s a customer. End of the day, you want your customer base to increase and you want every customer to be able to afford your product, right? You want to expand your. That’s the only way to expand your customer base. So we talk about this a lot in any traditional company growth mindset, right? Like it’s hey, customers, affordability, like able to go get more out of a customer.
Bala Muthiah [00:26:57]:
So you need more customers. Because you can only get more out of certain customers. But you need more customers. That means, as you mentioned, economy, government, company, education, these are four pillars. It cannot operate or go fast leaving one another. If one moves fast, leaving something else, it’s going to break. That will not be a successful system. The synergy of these four like economy, education, government and company, they have to coexist and go at the same pace.
Bernie Borges [00:27:28]:
That’s fascinating. Before we get to asking for where people can connect with you, Bala, give us a closing thought. Is there anything that we haven’t discussed in this conversation that you just want to add before we wrap it up?
Bala Muthiah [00:27:45]:
Yeah, we talked about learning a lot. Right? Like, one of the things I see more and more, even I have been going into this rabbit hole sometimes is we have certain assumptions in our life that made us who we are, that has created the biases that we have. Like what have really helped me is being more curious. That has really opened my mind. Like whether it is with technology, whether it is with people, like be more curious. Because AI has given us the power to solve problems faster. But AI is not going to give you the problem to solve. You need to go be curious and find the problem that’s going to make everything better.
Bala Muthiah [00:28:23]:
So be curious is one thought I want to live with. Because being curious will give you the problems that you are probably not noticing or the bigger problems that are there. But you never thought about it because now you have a most powerful tool that we have probably ever known in the history. But it is only going to solve the problem that you give it to. So be curious to have bigger, better problem that’s going to help all and then use the most powerful tool that’s been given and that’s continuing to grow.
Bernie Borges [00:28:55]:
That’s a great thought. What I would add to that, Bala, is that being curious also involves asking questions and asking not necessarily the right questions, because who defines what’s the right question and what’s the wrong question, but asking more and more questions and not putting any kind of limitation around that. Right. Asking questions that might take a thought in a different direction and allowing that whole thought process and whatever comes of the answer to that question to take you in some other direction that maybe you weren’t anticipating. And I think when we think of that in the workplace as well as outside the workplace, in community, like you said, in education, in technology and economy and government, when we’re curious and we’re asking a lot of questions and letting the output of those questions take us wherever it takes us, that’s where I think a lot of really exciting things can happen. And if you look at history, of course, inventions have happened that way, right? By people asking questions and kind of going down a rabbit hole and discovering something that ended up being an invention. So fabulous conversation. Well, I love this conversation, but we’re going to wrap it here.
Bernie Borges [00:30:10]:
Where can my listener connect with you and just learn more about what you’ve got going on?
Bala Muthiah [00:30:16]:
Yeah, great. Great conversation too. I always love these topics and what you do where folks can find me. My website is a great place to start. Balamutaya.com or they can find me on LinkedIn with the same name. So always love to have conversations. Again, being curious you do not know what you do not know, so keep your eyes and ears open.
Bernie Borges [00:30:38]:
Well, Bala, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Life Fulfilled podcast of three. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and look forward to sharing it with the world.
Bala Muthiah [00:30:47]:
Thank you. Thanks, Bernie. And yeah,
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