The Power of Learning from Peers, with Dev Baldwin

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:06)
Hey, it's Dave from Coaching for Leaders. Today, I'm bringing you a quick chat about the power of learning from and through our peers. I sat down recently with one of our Academy graduates, Dev Baldwin, to talk about how he leveraged peer relationships to move forward as a leader. Here's our conversation.
I'm here today talking with Dev Baldwin. Dev is one of our graduates of the Coaching for Leaders Academy, has also been a long time listener to the podcast. Dev, so wonderful to have you on.

**Dev Baldwin** (0:37)
Thanks for having me, Dave. I'm really excited to be on. I've listened to this podcast for about 12 years now.

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:44)
I know.

**Dev Baldwin** (0:45)
Very serene being on it.

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:47)
It's so much fun to have you on because we've known each other for so long, we've had so many conversations, and I'm just feeling so joyful about getting to share a little bit of your story with our broader community. How did you come across the podcast originally? Do you recall 12, 13 years ago?

**Dev Baldwin** (1:08)
So yes, I was in a role where I was slightly frustrated, and I knew that I needed to be the change. And I was looking around for leadership podcasts. This would have been around about 2014 or so.
And I found your podcast. At the time, I found one of your earlier podcasts, episode 49 I looked it up. Six ways to lead people without a formal title.

**Dave Stachowiak** (1:37)
Oh wow, that was a while ago.

**Dev Baldwin** (1:39)
Yeah. In those days, the leaders weren't born, they weren't made either. That part of the intro wasn't there.
It was you chatting away about six different ways that people could shape their leadership style. And there was no guest, which massive respect talking for 30 minutes on that. It was really a good podcast and led me into the rest of your library. And from there, yeah, contacting you to ask just for advice.

**Dave Stachowiak** (2:11)
Yeah, which is a great lead into where we're going to start this conversation too. Tell me a little bit about your more recent work and yourself and just what's been happening professionally.

**Dev Baldwin** (2:23)
So recently, I was the Director of Technology at a company called Letterfest. And I came into the business when the technical stack needed some attention.
The previous owners had built a really good solid business from kitchen table up to a large business, but needed to scale it. And the problem there was technology needed to be scalable.
So the CEO brought me in to do that task. And I led that work for the last three years. And we helped that business scale. It became what was a technical problem, became a marketing issue. And that transformation was absolutely fantastic professionally.

**Dave Stachowiak** (3:16)
So many things that were involved in the season of, as you mentioned, it started with a technical question, but so many aspects of marketing and people and growth. And I know some of that is what led you to consider the Academy. And you did decide to reach out to me and apply to the Academy. What did you hope to gain from this experience when you were considering it originally?

**Dev Baldwin** (3:42)
So what I was looking for was some other professionals to talk to and learn from throughout my career, having worked with some really incredible people, most recently at Lettifest, some incredible people there. I realized that learning from peers is such a powerful tool. And what's more, I think more helpful about the Academy is those peers aren't necessarily in your sector. In fact, you do purposely make it so that they're not. And from there, everything becomes like a management issue rather than like necessarily a technology or sort of ways of building something. It is all about everybody having these common threads throughout their leadership journey, which is, I have this problem, how can we solve it?
That's been incredible.

**Dave Stachowiak** (4:45)
I'm so glad. And I remember when you and I talked originally of Usain, it would be really helpful to get out of just these great group of peers, as you mentioned, and all these wonderful people who have supported me. And it would be helpful to get out of just the organization, even the industry, to get additional perspective.
And you said something really big a moment ago. I think of like gaining new peers. Tell me more about that. What was driving your desire to want to have more of those relationships in your professional work?

**Dev Baldwin** (5:19)
I worked for myself for a long time at the start of my career. And I was responsible for a lot of the networking. So that was going to networking events and talking to people. And I started to make some really good professional friends there who you could chat to.