Episode 53: Notice Each Person's Journey: The Path Is Where The Learning Happens With Adam Clater
No one has the answers to everything. We always learn as we go. For Adam Clater, the Chief Architect in Red Hat's North America Public Sector Organization, the learning happened along his own personal journey to finding the career that fits him. In this episode, he joins host Amy Vetter to share his journey from starting out in repairing computers to gaining the opportunities that have led to his success today. He talks about how he navigated through DC in the federal government, working from being a subject-matter expert in IT to managing people in his current company. Plus, Adam also discusses the role of having mentors, how he is handling the pandemic, and more.
—-
Watch the episode here:
Listen to the podcast here:
Notice Each Person's Journey: The Path Is Where The Learning Happens With Adam Clater
Welcome to this episode, where I interview Adam Clater, the Chief Architect at Red Hat’s North America Public Sector organization. He has worked internationally with federal agencies, integrators, and Red Hat partners to promote and define the use of enterprise open source solutions. He has experienced first-hand the evolving role that IT has played in the federal government for more than two decades, starting with his role as a systems administrator at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Prior to joining Red Hat, he was a senior architect, system administrator, and lead for a variety of commercial and government agencies, including Lockheed Martin, the National Education Association, RSA Security, and AOL Time Warner. During this interview, he shares his journey from starting out and repairing computers to gaining the opportunities that have led to his success. His journey is going to inspire. Be sure to share and like this episode so that others can learn from Adam's journey as well.
-—
I am with Adam Clater, the Chief Architect of Red Hat. Adam, did you want to give us a little introduction to yourself before we start?
I'm a Chief Architect of Red Hat’s North America Public Sector organization. I have the immense honor of working across the government, federal, state, local, and sometimes, internationally with governments to help them figure out how to use new Red Hat open-source type of technologies to move their mission forward.
I hope we get into that a little bit because I would love to hear more. Let's start off with a little bit of your background, your history as Adam Clater, not the chief architects. Where did you start? Where did you grow up?
I live in Northern Virginia with the exception of about six months that I lived in Germany when I was probably 20, 21. I have lived in the Northern Virginia area my whole life. I'm a rare native to this area where we see a lot of turnover of our population. You can imagine every four years we have an election cycle that brings new senators, Congresspeople, and administrations in. With them, they bring a lot of important people from where they were to the DC area as well as we've got the Pentagon and a variety of military bases around. There's that churn plus all of our industry that has grown up around that. It's a lot of churn in this area, not a lot of natives.
I'm a product of the Fairfax County Public School system. I graduated from high school. All during high school, I had worked a variety of jobs. I started at Taco Bell and worked for a couple of years. I went to work at a place called Computer Renaissance where I was building and selling computers. I did tech support for like dial-up internet access, answering the phone, and helping people solve their problems. It was the late ‘90s, rather than going to college, I went right into tech and started working. I was on a government contract. In those days, government contractors couldn't hire anyone because there was so much demand for tech people in startups. Even in the DC area that they couldn't find anyone and they would die for someone with a college degree, but they would take kids out of high school.
I was at deployment tech. I would take a computer out of a box. I would install Windows on it. I would get it set up for the environment. I'd put it on a cart. At that time, I was working at the Patent Trademark Office in Crystal City, that's where Amazon decided to put HQ2. It's a small city. It's a collection of 20 or 30 buildings that are spread across about 1.5 miles or 2 miles length between two main roads. The Patent and Trademark Office had offices all up and down that space. We would put those computers on carts and run them out to the people who needed them and get them on the network. I did that and then I went from that to a help desk there and then do a server admin role where I first started using Unix and then from there it took off. Many years later and I've been doing this for more than half of my life. That's how I got from A to B.
When you were younger, what you do was that something of interest in, or were you interested in something completely different when you were a little boy?
The first job that I was serious about having was apropos now. The forest service pays people to sit 200 feet in the air in a house, look out over the forest, and look for forest fires. I wanted to be a forest ranger doing that.
How come?
I loved the idea of being outside. I wasn't concerned with the solitude of it. I was like, “I'll read a book. I'll have a computer and a dog and whatever,” but that didn't concern me. I took a shop class where I wanted to be a welder for a while. During all of this time, computers were in the background to an extreme extent. I was doing lots of stuff with computers, but I also wanted to be a forest ranger and to be a welder.
How did you learn about forest ranger? Where was your first encounter?
I got a lot of ideas from reading magazines. My mom, we didn't have a ton of money, but we always had a subscription to National Geographic. In Nat Geo or a similar type of magazine, I read something like that and that caught my eye is what I was interested in doing.
Was it not an environmental concern? Why were you worried about forest fires?
I wanted to sit up there all day.
Do you like being in isolation?
Yes. You sit up there and you do your thing. I wanted to be a smokejumper as well. I wanted it to be one of those guys who jump into a forest fire and helps put the forest fire out. That was all interesting to twelve-year-old Adam or whichever iteration, but I also was like, “I'm going to have my laptop so I can do things.”
Where Learning Happens: We find the right mentors at the right time in our life when we are most ready for what they have to teach.
There probably wasn't a laptop at the time. You worked at Taco Bell. How did you get the opportunity with the computer store?
Coming up in my sophomore year of high school, we had these vocational classes and the other not well-kept secret desire is I was a horrible student. When I was in class, you could teach me anything. I would learn it. I could take the test. I would be the first one done with the test but back then, they used to assign a lot of homework and your homework was 25% of your grade. If you did none of the homework, you would get a C at best. That was also for people who may not be doing well. They could lift their grade up and they could get a B, but I was like, “I'm not doing this. I'm not interested in doing homework. I got other things going on.” I would get Cs and Ds through high school.
I got pushed into some vocational types of activities. They're like, “You like welding, there's a vocational class. Why don't you go check that out?” I went to the school and I knew guys who were there because some of the guys I knew from my shop class, they went into it. I went there to check out the program and the guys took me aside and were like, “You don't have to do anything. We hang out in the back of the class, smoke, get high, whatever. Nobody knows because we're burning stuff and nobody knows anything.” I was like, “I don't know that this takes me anywhere.”
The bonus was you got to leave your school and go to another school for a day to tour the vocational stuff. Free day off of school. “Why wouldn't you want to do such a thing?” They were like, “We've got this other vocational thing. You could go check out.” I went and they had this thing they called studies in microcomputer repair. I was like, “What in the world is this?” It was a basic electronics and computer theory. The goal was that people would assemble computers. People would donate their old computers like businesses and would donate them to Fairfax County. They all ended up going to this one class and then we were supposed to rehab, refurbish, and sell them. That happened next to never, but I got to learn a lot. There was a lot of classroom instruction about computers and all that. I parlayed that into the gig at the computer store helping to build and sell.
Did you never went to college?
No, I took a couple of classes at the community college what would have been my freshman year, but that I was like, “I'm going to work. I'm going to get stabilized like get an apartment with some guys and do all that stuff.” Once I got to that point, it was like, “I feel good. I'm going to go and try to take some classes at NOVA, the local community college,” but I was working so much and I was cheap. That was the other thing. They were like, “Adam, you want to work overtime?” I was like, “I want to work overtime. Give me all of it.” I would work many hours that for the first time in my life, I was falling asleep in class. I was like, “I'm not going to pay to sit in a class and fall asleep.” I was lucky to have a lot of amazing mentors throughout my life. I always had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. I would always find people who saw themselves.
Give me some examples of people during that time that helped you.
Going all the way back to the Patent and Trademark Office, a guy who I still stay in touch with Dave Presch. He ran the Unix admin team. He called down to the help desk and was like, “I heard you've got a kid down there. It was good and maybe cheap. I want to turn him into a Unix admin.” He hired me on to his team and he paired me up with a guy, next mentor, Whitney Winston. Whitney was amazing. He had a double Master's from MIT, one in Electrical Engineering and one in Computer Science or ECE. He came to PTO because he wanted to be a patent examiner, so he could go to law school through PTO and then go join a firm.
He hated being a patent examiner. He jumped over to the Unix admin team and I got the opportunity to work with him. There are people like Alan Kraft, who's still at PTO. People who had been in that world for so long. They saw something that they wanted, an eagerness to learn maybe a little bit of themselves in me or me on themselves. I was fortunate to have people like that. Another one I worked in the telecom industry for a little while. I worked with a guy named Wayne Turner. He was another phenomenal mentor. I worked for a guy named Tim Miller and he has been a phenomenal mentor to me. Tim is a guy who went into the military. He came out started doing contracting and work like that. I learned more about people and managing people indirectly or directly from Tim than anyone else. I seem to find the right mentors at the right time in my life when I'm most ready for what they have to teach me, which is important as well.
The whole thing with mentorship, a lot of companies try to force mentorship, but what you're talking about is a natural selection process. From a mentee point of view, why do you think they wanted to mentor you? I know they saw themselves in yourself. What did you provide them that made it beneficial for them to mentor you?
I was a funny guy. A lot of people tell me this and I have good friends as well who sometimes feel like, “Why do you hang out with that guy?” It's weird. They're like, “He makes me laugh.” I have to assume first is that I brought a little bit of levity and humor. Also, there was a lot of work that had to be done. I was an eager worker, whatever had to be done. I would learn things quickly back then. I’m not a master, but I get enough knowledge around something to be able to be effective at it quickly. They could throw problems at me and solve them. The early ones like Whitney, Dave, and Alan, they're at the Patent and Trademark Office. They were amazing human beings. There was no other real value that I think I was driving other than, “Here's another guy in the on-call rotation. You can call out him at 3:00 in the morning. He'll get up, come in and fix the problem.”
I think is it that you're willing to work hard? You want to keep those people that work hard and have the work ethic, and you get excited that you have people that work for you like that. They want to grow and so forth. Where have you seen yourself mentor people?
It's something that I've become more acutely aware of in many years while I've been at Red Hat. There's been my career progression and then the mentoring aspect. At Red Hat, I work in a sales organization. I'm on the technical arm of the sales organization. We have the salespeople in addition to us as the sales engineering organization. I ended up mentoring some of our salespeople and on my team with my boss, Tim Miller, we have a gentleman who was a salesperson who came over to manage part of our organization.
For me, it's bringing some of those new ideas about how we shape and craft our organization. Move it forward and not take the standard way of approaching things. When we said we were going to bring this guy in to be a manager, people like, “What are you talking about? That's crazy.” This guy has a better relationship with his direct employees and he's one of the best recruiters that you could have of talent. It's phenomenal. I've also had the opportunity to mentor some peers. Some of the art of managing up a little bit and how you do that. That stuff that I learned directly from my boss and watching him affect change and building a consensus across an organization before you dive in and start throwing fists about the changes that you want to make. When the eventual fray happens, you've got a lot of people on your side are like, “We've already talked about this. This is what we want to do.” That's all virtual. No real fist being thrown.
I see you've had jobs where you've done Lockheed Martin, National Education Association and AOL. It sounds like you've been through some major corporations. How did you work your way into those?
What's interesting about the DC area especially is that we've got a couple of major industries. Government is one of them. You can work for associations, like the NEA, it's the teacher's union and a lobbying organization. They have lots of those types of organizations here. There are lots of government contractors. Lockheed Martin, for example, is headquartered here can help pandemic and all of those guys are around here. We had a big telecom industry like Sprint, T-Mobile, Nextel, and AOL. We're all here because this is where the internet started and where the major backbone for the internet. When you talk about Amazon having availability zones, Amazon East and Amazon West, Amazon East is here in Northern Virginia because that's where the big fat internet connections are.
There was a lot of diversity of opportunity here, which made it easy, especially for a young guy who got hired into some roles probably cheap. I had to bounce a little bit to get my salary up to a livable Northern Virginia wage. In that process, I had the opportunity to see how a lot of things were done in a lot of different ways. I was able to learn a lot from that. In Lockheed Martin, I started as a contractor there working on a contract for the Army. In AOL, I started as a contractor there and then went on as a permanent employee for a few years. In one of the infamous AOL layoffs, there's legislation in Virginia about layoffs because of AOL. I got picked up in one of their layoffs and then went somewhere else. It was an amazing time because you could find a job at the drop of a hat. It was nothing to get tired of what you were doing and go find the next one.
Where Learning Happens: The path is where a lot of the learning happens.
You have a unique path with your work experience versus going the college route. You've worked for people that went to MIT. Have you ever thought about you should have gone to college? Have you found it's gotten in your way at all? Has it been something that makes you unique?
Early on, it was super difficult. For early to mid-career person, I had people come up to me and say, “Where did you get your Master’s from?” I say, “I don't have a Master's. I didn't go to college.” He says, “That's impossible. You can't do this job without a college degree.” I was like, “If that's the case, why are you always here asking me what to do for your job?” There was a lot of pressure from a variety of perspectives. The way that a lot of government contracting works is that a four-year degree counts as four years of experience from a billability perspective. If you had somebody with a college degree and two years of experience, that’s six years of experience in total they could be billable for.
That represents a unit of value to that company. A person with two years of experience under their belt, they’re like, “We can't put you in this slot to pay you what you think you deserve.” The math doesn't work because you don't have the experience. That was difficult. That was a lot of the motivation for early on where I would work in the government for a while, go work in commercial, go back to a government contract, and then go back to commercial. Back and forth there. It was a different time too. It's a little more accepted now. I could be like, “Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard so as Mark Zuckerberg.” They're like, “You're no Bill Gates kid. Get out of here.”
It's hard to point to those examples where you have the person who's found success without going the traditional route. I'm fortunate at Red Hat where I do know a lot of those people, I can identify them, and I can say, “This guy's a vice president. This guy's running an entire product or this girl is doing that.” Ginni Rometty, the President of the board of IBM has said, “We've got this new cadre of workers in technology where tech natives are going directly into the workforce skipping traditional education. That's okay. We need to go and find more of those people.” There could be a whole other show on my views of the education system and how that sets people up for success or failure. I don't think it's fair to tell an eighteen-year-old to spend $100,000 making a decision about what they're going to do for the rest of their life. They're not equipped. I don't think anybody's equipped to make that decision. That's a strange place to put a kid at eighteen.
A lot of times too if you're being educated on the things you need for working later to whatever vocation.
I was lucky to have combined vocational learning in high school with job experience. It built over the course of years a portfolio of experience and knowledge that in many ways still serves me.
How do you think it changed your view as a leader growing into that? There's a big difference between being a good subject matter expert, working your butt off to get where you are, shifting into managing people, and how you view them as well as their experience and background. How has it affected your belief systems as a leader?
I'm open to people of a variety of diverse backgrounds. I respect and can acknowledge that there's a lot of paths to get us to where we are. The path is where a lot of the learning happens. That has been a big part of it. I would like to think that I'm open to bringing people with me on the journey, that can be difficult at times as well, out of the nature of promotion and moving forward. There's a competitive angle to all of that. In the first apartment that I got with 2 or 3 other people, we were hyper-competitive and we all did the same thing. We all went to the same high school. We left high school. We had all worked at the same dial-up internet provider. We started getting jobs and we would pull everybody forward with us.
I got a job at the Patent and Trademark Office working at the helpdesk. I pulled all those guys forward. They started working the night shift at the Patent and Trademark Office. Somebody else would move somewhere and pull a bunch of people with them to Bell Atlantic, for example, with a bunch of people went to. Within that, there was that calm comradery of pulling everybody together with us to the different places, but we were competitive over salary because there was an open book. It was like, “I got $10,000 more. I'm going to go for $12,000.” That was this constant competitive thing. That stayed with me as well. That competitive spirit of the career world.
You talk about bringing your group with you because I often talk to women's groups and compare with men, bring their packs and women don't do that. They come individually to an opportunity in a job. Men know who their pack is that'll help them be successful. Did it give you more confidence as you went into each job that you weren't going in there alone?
It's been a while since I've taken a pack with those. We all scattered to the winds after a certain amount of time. It's important no matter where you are to build your pack. I can identify the people at Red Hat immediately within my organization, who I rely on. It's a large diverse group of people. A lot of my closest confidants across Red Hat are women in my organization. Those are some of the people I enjoy mentoring the most and I feel less competitive towards women. Not that they are not competitive to me, but I'm a little more open to helping them up a little bit.
It can be personality types, like going back to your competitive nature with other men. They're not bringing that same energy. You're pushing them to take those steps versus them like, “I'm going to beat you.”
That's an amazing place to be, unlike any other place I'll ever work. When you get that, you want to hold onto it as long as he can.
What do you think as you've moved through your career are the traits or changes you've made in your life that you think to affect others in a positive way?
I've tried to become much more gracious as I've aged. I don't think you would be friends with me of 20 or 25. That's part of the maturation process. One of the things that I've learned is a little bit of patience. There was someone at one point in my career path who told me, “Everybody's temporary. Either you'll make the decision to leave or they'll make the decision to leave, they'll move on, this will happen or that will happen.” You can't look at these situations like, “Everybody's static. This is the way it's going to be forever.” I understood what they were saying immediately. It's taken many years for that to become part of my real ethos of understanding people and incorporate that sense of patients a little bit into how I look at things, understand things, watched organizations evolve, people move within them, and how all of that plays. Having a little more patience around that has helped me and has helped others as well. Something I coach people a lot is that this is all changing. To be quite honest in a sales organization, it's probably the most change that you'll see in a variety of organizations. We've got a cyclical annual change.
The end of the fiscal year is coming and everything changes. That change I call it the horse-trading season because sales reps are jockeying for different territories. I try to coach people that like, “This is an opportunity and nothing's done from all of this change that you're hearing about until the end of the first quarter.” Everything's in flux. You have to know what you have and what you can influence. As the technical person in a sales team, you don't have a lot of influence over what customers you sell to or what territories you're covering. Sit back for a moment, watch, and observe and know that at the end of the day, it's not going to matter too much. I do try to counsel some of the patience, which can be helpful. That's had a big impact on me. It's been a big change for me.
We met through your coffee talk. What made you develop that?
Where Learning Happens: Everybody's temporary. Either you'll make the decision to leave, or they'll make the decision to leave, they'll move on, this will happen, or that will happen.
That was an opportunity that was driven by somebody on my team, on our marketing organization named Lisa. She is the brains behind the Red Hat Coffee Hours as well as the producer. She sent me to a booking website. She was like, “Look for interesting people on here and tell me what you think what you were talking to them about.” I went through and picked out the people, you included. These are the things I would like to talk to these people about. I saw where it was going. I wrote an abstract for each one of them and I say, “These are the things I would talk about.” She said, “Let's start scheduling them, talking to them, and going from there.” We did that.
It's been an amazing experience, but it's also helped me realize a little bit that it's not too different from what I would do in my everyday job either because I am sitting having a conversation, getting someone to talk about themselves, about their life experience, and instead of asking them about their life, I'm asking them about their work like, “Tell me about the problems that you're having with your systems or what Red Hat can do to help?” There's a lot of similarities. It's a lot of the same skills. Given that we can't have as much face-to-face interaction with our customers, it's a nice substitute for that dopamine rush from having a successful sales name.
I have a couple of rapid-fire questions I want to ask you, but I want to make sure before I do that, anything that we haven't talked about that you would want to make sure people understand from our conversation?
Taking the opportunity to be present in the things that you're doing. The biggest takeaway from that was how acutely other people can tune in to your presence at the moment. I have an awareness of moments where I'm all darty-eyed, looking all over the place, or trying to see what else is going on. I've got something else on my mind and I'm not at that moment. One of the most valuable things you can do is be present in the moments that you're in. That was huge. I appreciate you for pointing that out the way that you did it, helped get through. Thank you.
You pick a category, family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Let's do family and friends.
What are the things or actions I don't have that I want with my family and friends?
Not enough interaction. We're all isolated and solo and we have lost the organic aspect. I missed the organic face-to-face humanity.
What are the things or actions I do have that I want?
It's my fiancé, her son, and myself living at our house. I feel like we have a calm, peaceful, and healthy existence. I don't know that I had experienced that in my past, the idea of being quarantined with another person or people for this amount of time. I'm quite happy with how we're doing things and looking forward to what that means for the future.
Where Learning Happens: One of the most valuable things you can do is be present in the moments that you're in.
What are the things or actions that I don't have that I don't want?
There’s no yelling, crying, and anger. Things are chill.
What are the things or actions I do have that I don't want?
The COVID-19, not the sickness, but the weight gain. The lack of activity has not boded well and I need to get back on the rowing machine and started fighting back against this thing.
Thank you for being a part of this show and lots of things to learned from your journey. You've had an interesting life and it should be a great example for people that school isn't always for everybody. Hard work, being smart, and finding your path is what's important.
There was a lot of luck. There was a lot of great fortune. One thing that's dawned on me in the past probably years or is to recognize that I've had a lot of fortune because of who I am. I've had a lot of people extend opportunities to me that may not have been extended to others. Identifying where there are some other people who may need some of those opportunities and how I can help.
I look forward to sharing our conversation.
Thank you.
-—
For our Mindful Moments in my segment with Adam Clater, which I found interesting. I love listening to each person's story because we all have a story. Adam's story is unique because of how he described himself as a child where he was a hard worker, smart, understood the work that he was doing in school and he didn't place importance on the homework part of it. It's such an example of people that might be put to the side because they're not following what's acceptable or what's expected, instead, noticing the amazing things about a person and what can help them. He talked about those people that guided him in his path that even figured out to put him in some of those vocational classes where he was much more interested because it was work at school, but also hands-on work where he was getting experienced and understood why he was doing what he was doing.
You can tell in his brain the other work that he was doing in school, he couldn't wrap his head around why he had to do homework when he already understood the content and so forth. He was being rated down for that. That teacher or that person who notice and saw that potential in him and gearing him in his pathway, think about how many times we overlook people that don't fit the mold and they don't get the opportunity that we could give them. It's an example of how each of us can step back and see someone that they've seen for the attributes that make them amazing. They're not ignored because they don't fit the acceptable norm and the potential that they have in the future.
He talked about how important mentors were in the life that took him under their wing and showed them the way. It was also because he was giving back in ways that they weren't used to seeing. Instead of valuing statistics on a resume, they valued the fact that he was eager to learn, that he had a great work ethic and those things can be harder to come by than anything else. It's a reminder that we often think we want certain things in our business or traits in our staff that we have in our business, but it may not be exactly what we need when we're honest about the people that we need working for us, and looking for those traits during an interview process or in the things that we ask them to do as challenges to see what their work ethic is and what is the most important thing.
When we look at the staff that we have, we are looking at, “What our most valued staff? Is it their resume or is it the type of attitude and work that they create?” Defining that when we're looking for people to fill roles so that we make sure we understand what we're looking for from the human side of every person that we bring in the door that we work with. It was important in his point about being open as a leader to diverse backgrounds and that we learn from one another and our differences. That's what grows from all of us. He also talked about how important comradery is as far as being successful as a team. When you talk about comradery, it's not that we're a team and it's teamwork. It's the human side of it that we enjoy working together. We appreciate the differences amongst each other and where we may have a weakness where someone else may have a strength. Not pigeonholing everyone into one position or one way of being that we acknowledge what we're good at and not good at so that everyone on the team is doing their best work and appreciated for it.
Lastly, his point around being more patient and present for people, in order to help one another, we have to understand that what we might see on the outside isn't necessarily what's going on the inside of somebody. If we don't get still, don't get present, and don't have the patience and understanding or compassion for another person, we might not get to the root of any issue that we're seeing and be able to solve it. It can sometimes get in our way of solving the issues when we're looking on the outside, but not taking the time to learn about a person. Take some of these lessons as we leave this episode and think about how you can be more present in the relationships that you have in a business or even at home to gain that patience and understanding in order to create the progress that you want to see not only for your work life but in yourself to feel more fulfilled in the work that you do.
Important Links:
Adam Clater - LinkedIn
@AClater - Twitter
@RedHatGov - Twitter
About Adam Clater
Adam Clater is a Chief Architect in Red Hat’s North America Public Sector organization. He has worked internationally with federal agencies, integrators and Red Hat partners & Communities to promote and define the use of enterprise open source solutions.
Adam has experienced first hand the evolving role that I.T. has played in the federal government for more than two decades, starting with his role as a Systems Administrator at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1997.
Prior to joining Red Hat, Adam was a senior architect, system administrator and lead for a variety of commercial and government agencies including:
Lockheed Martin - U.S. Army
The National Education Association
RSA Security
AOL/Time Warner
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join the Breaking Beliefs community today: