Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. Find details about the book here, or check out the Kindle and the audiobook version.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback, on Kindle, and as an audiobook.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback and audiobook.
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback and audiobook.

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Catherine Teitelbaum, Head of Family Trust at Amazon, is a former educator and industry veteran with 25 years of experience in the fields of online safety, product policy, educational technology, and developing trustworthy digital products. For more than a decade, Catherine held senior positions within Yahoo!, leading the award-winning Yahooligans and Yahoo! Education products as well as global policy initiatives. Catherine was the Chief Trust & Safety Officer at ASKFm, leading the safety turnaround of the teen Q&A app, and has consulted for a variety of popular social media apps. Most recently Catherine led Trust & Safety for Twitch, Amazon’s popular live-streaming service.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is innovating leadership, co creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in that mission today is Catherine Teitelbaum, head of family trust at Amazon. We’ll be talking about what it means to be a leader in the field of trust and safety.

Catherine, we’re really glad that you’re here with us today. Thank you, Maureen. I’m very excited to be here. Let’s jump in and talk about what is your role at Amazon. What is the field of trust and safety?

Catherine: Sure. I’ve been with Amazon for just over six years. It’s an amazing job. I’m head of family trust for Amazon kids.

What that means is I get to advise on a wide variety of projects to help kids learn and create and grow. It’s very rewarding for me in particular, as I am a former teacher and I am a parent. So I love talking to parents and helping them understand how our products [00:01:00] from Kindles to Fire TV to Echoes are built on a foundation of trust and safety so that they can be really comfortable using them in their homes and with their families.

Maureen: This is the field you chose to work in after being a teacher. Why is trust so important for leaders and for you

Catherine: personally? It is the foundation, I believe, in building any relationship, including a relationship between a technology product and individuals. I believe with trust, you can leverage that foundation for all kinds of creativity and expression.

For example, we have many devices in many homes, and every time you open a Kindle, it turns on quickly, and there is a library of books that are curated for you. When it comes to kids, That curation through Amazon Kids Plus is almost a limitless number of books that would be age appropriate and interesting.

[00:02:00] Every time you open it, you build trust.

Maureen: One of the things that strikes me is how long it takes of consistent positive behavior to build trust and how fragile it can be. And so your work with trust and safety seems so crucial.

Catherine: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. There’s a metaphor that I’ve used many times in training my trust and safety teams.

Brene Brown has a metaphor of a jar and in that jar every time you have an interaction with someone that’s positive it’s That goes the way you would expect it to. That’s not necessarily predictable, but also not surprising in any way. You put a marble in the jar, each time you put one marble in, you are building incremental trust each time that you do something that’s either unexpected or disconcerting a marble comes out, especially when you are working on a product or for a company that’s as large as Amazon, it is really important that [00:03:00] every interaction, while it may be just one interaction, Every time you open the Kindle, every time you turn on your fire TV, does it work the way you expected?

Well, we built some trust in our products there for me with Amazon kids. Every time that your child asks Alexa for a story and it’s an age appropriate story, we have put another marble in the jar of building trust with our families. And it is crucial for the success of our business. And, you know, we are also in the business of creating delightful experiences for children.

And so we’re meeting that metric as well.

Maureen: My assumption is one bad situation. So the Kindle doesn’t come on. That’s unfortunate. If Alexa shares a news story about something very inappropriate for children to hear, that’s more than one marble that comes out of the jar. That’s the jar just got crushed on the floor.

Catherine: That would be. And that’s why we actually have an Alexa for kids experience. And it’s a way [00:04:00] for children to interact with the Echo devices, ask questions. We have programmed it so that it will have safety in mind and it’s contextually relevant, for example, during COVID. You could ask for a pretty scary question about COVID and what’s happening.

And when it was a child, it would respond with things like, well, the number one thing you can do is wash your hands, wear a mask, but wash your hands that they would give it a wash your hands song. We have really robust guardrails built in, and there are also an integrated parent dashboard so that the parents, knowing their child, Not just age, but knowing what is appropriate for a child can set some limits on the device and customize it for where they’re comfortable in their family.

Maureen: I remember trying to watch Murder, She Wrote, which is about as bland a show as one can watch. It’s on Hallmark Channel. It’s not a violent show. And my mother [00:05:00] wouldn’t let me watch that with my nephew around. And yet my brother and my nephew watch zombie shows all the time. And so what one parent thinks is appropriate could be entirely different than another parent, even in the same household.

So the dashboard seems fairly crucial to make the distinction because I’m sure my mother would have been horrified sitting around watching them watch zombie shows. To her, that would have been quite inappropriate.

Catherine: Parenting is very personal. Add on top of that, safety is very personal. To your point, what one family thinks is safe is not necessarily what another family does.

And really there’s nothing more personal than your children. That is why we do put so much effort in establishing our guardrails on the Amazon Kids Plus content. It is. all curated for age appropriateness. And then it can be further curated by the parent using the parent dashboard. There is no [00:06:00] one size fits all.

And so one of the first things when you purchase an Amazon Kids Fire tablet, one of the first things we ask you to consider is setting up the parent dashboard and thinking about what’s important. Horton, whether it is a bedtime for the device, the maturity of the content, you know, a three year old does not need to read chapter books.

And to your point, even I think they would call murder, she wrote a cozy mystery now. You’re right. It’s not explicit. It wouldn’t be rated R. But that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. The themes might be mature for some children. So parents can also alter that as well. It gives them a lot of options when introducing technology and media to their children.

Maureen: Thank you. So that leads into, in my mind, a question about what do parents need to be thinking about. Regarding technology and media, it’s a tough question in the home and out of the home. What if your kids go to the library? Anytime the kids leave the house, they have different access than they have on [00:07:00] your dashboard, on your Alexa, in your house.

Catherine: I appreciate that question so much. It comes to me to the core of thinking about media literacy with our families. We need to set up lifelong skills. Someone said to me when my son was young is that I tend to be a little protective. They said to me. You are raising a future adult. So just like with learning to cross the road, the most basic example, we don’t just tell them what to do and then expect that they know how to do it.

We first walk, cross the road with them, holding their hand tightly, and we are there, we’re providing oversight. Then eventually we get comfortable enough that they can walk side by side with us or they’re holding on to. another stroller or a leash or something like that, a dog leash. And eventually you let them cross the road independently.

And even farther along, you don’t think about it anymore because you know they have built all the skills. Technology is the same. When we start with [00:08:00] devices, you need to have, when you bring it into your home and you’re setting up that parent dashboard on your tablet, that is the time to have a conversation with your child, even young children.

I am giving you this device. This device is something special. You will learn to protect it. Ours come with bumpers and a two year worry free guarantee that it can be tossed. But, you know, the first thing you probably should teach your child is not to toss it, because eventually they won’t be a worry free guarantee.

You teach your children the rules that you’re comfortable with as a family and you repeat those. Year over year, and eventually your child gets progressively more mature content and more independence because eventually you have a teenager and a young adult and they do need to go out into the world and be able to handle not just the library, but anywhere.

Maureen: Katherine, we’ve talked about your role at Amazon. You’re a senior leader in a huge, highly respected [00:09:00] organization. Tell us a little bit about what that career trajectory was like for you. And what I would love for our listeners to be able to hear is we often see somebody in a big role and we just assume they had this in depth experience.

Easy path. What is the superpower that helped you navigate the challenges?

Catherine: I could not have planned this career. I was an elementary school teacher. There were a series of, now when I look back, fortuitous events. And if I have a superpower, I think looking through the string of events, I was open to opportunity and I wasn’t afraid of change.

When I started teaching, there were a glut of teachers and not very many jobs. So I took the job that was available to me and it happened to be in Redwood City in Silicon Valley in the 90s. And there was a lot of innovation happening, and this school had a technology grant. Within a few short years, I had [00:10:00] had so much invested in me, I became a leader in technology, because I was willing to use the technology of the day in my classroom.

If you were willing to use the technology, you had a master teacher. And as a, as a new teacher, That sounded great to me, having somebody else in the room that knew what to do. I became, like I said, an expert in technology and education and later a technology coordinator. I think about five years of doing that.

I brought my middle school kids to Silicon Valley for the day. We went to the tech museum and we ended the day at Yahoo, which was a startup at the time. I had become very intrigued. By the way, that technology empowered my students, the way the internet connected them to people and ideas outside of their real world circles.

So while my students were in the purple conference room eating treats, I was being pulled out and being questioned by employees about what we would now call content appropriateness. A quick [00:11:00] conversation ran something like this. Like, can we share major league baseball stats from the official major league baseball site?

And I went, sure, why not? Kids like stats. And then they followed up with a question about advertising. There’s an advertising top bottom center on those sites. And it’s the same type of advertising that might be on television. So, beer. I had a moment of realization that this was going to be a little bit more complicated.

And we kept talking and by the next school year, I had a job offer to do just that. to explore that conversation about content appropriateness, which is the core of what is now called trust and safety.

Maureen: Fascinating how your career path evolved as the world evolved, because trust and safety in technology probably didn’t exist in the 90s.

It did not.

Catherine: I do remember having a conversation with my grandmother saying that I was going to do this and her response was, but you have tenure. And I [00:12:00] was going also to what is, was a startup. Basically, it sounded fun. It sounded energizing. And I was very aware that if I was able to make decisions and have a positive impact at this scale, This internet company, it was in one year going to be more than I would have an impact on, hopefully positively, in my entire career in teaching.

But yes, I, this job has evolved as the world has evolved and technology continues to evolve. One of the things I love about trust and safety is no two days are the same. Every day is different. And so as

Maureen: you think about impact, what you had at Yahoo, you As a startup. And now what you have at Amazon as a much more mature company has to be again, exponentially higher.

Catherine: Yes. And that’s humbling when you say that, you know, we don’t want to necessarily want to think about that every day, but it’s amazing also to think that I get to work on a product that. Tens of [00:13:00] millions of parents and kids tell us that they love. We get to help more families and we get to take this. We have 10 years now with Amazon kids of putting safety first and listening to our customers.

And so now we get to apply it to a whole new wave of emerging technology and experiences. And that’s also very exciting and empowering.

Maureen: How did you learn to lead? Because as a classroom teacher, how you led in your classroom, much different than you lead a much larger team of people at Amazon. Where did those skills come from?

Catherine: I would argue that teaching is a fantastic training ground for management, and I have hired many, many teachers over the last 20 years. I think it comes from the core of how I think about people management, and that is, I think about it as mentorship. I look at the [00:14:00] opportunities I have to teach. I look for opportunities where I have to grow someone else’s career, just like I grew someone else’s academic skills.

And there’s nothing that makes me happier or more proud than seeing people who I have hired early in their career now become leaders across the industry. That

Maureen: does sound incredibly rewarding. And I love the link between where you started and where you are now and how you’re able to carry those deeply held beliefs and skills.

Catherine: I didn’t really have a choice. When I left teaching and came to Yahoo, I came as a teacher on a field trip. It was a small enough company. When I was hired, everybody knew I was that teacher. It came with some biases I had to overcome, such as they thought I was constantly being told I was very patient, and you must be very nice.

And while I think I am relatively nice and I am [00:15:00] relatively patient, I’m also curious. I’m also smart. I’m also ambitious. I’m all the things everybody else in the room was. And so I think when I’ve tried to be something that I’m not, it doesn’t work as well. I did look around the room and see a lot of MBAs and think, Oh, well, they’re using big business terms.

I can use those too. I did also try to come less as. My, I don’t know, my personality, my personality is still that teacher, I guess, or the teacher was the personality. I was less effective that way. When you’re a non technical person, you can’t imitate that you’re a technical person. As a person without an MBA, I can’t pretend to have an MBA.

Maureen: We start our leadership training in every program for the leaders to self discover vision and values. So really playing on what you’re talking about. Who am I being so then I can do the doing but if I don’t know who I am and if I’m not being [00:16:00] Authentic to myself and that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t wear a suit because I prefer to wear yoga clothes There are times that I don’t get to be authentic.

So there is a balance there but coming from knowing What my values are that trustworthiness and giving back and impact You are crucial and I don’t take on opportunities that will compromise those. And so listening to your focus on authenticity, knowing who you were and experimenting with trying to be different and returning to this is who I am and what makes me special, I think is a really important lesson for our emerging leaders and many of our senior leaders because we’ve been told that leadership looks like this.

Catherine: When I was early in my technology career, I was conscious of the fact that I didn’t understand how the technology was [00:17:00] built. I was learning that. I had big ideas and I was a young product manager and I wanted to do interesting things. I would come prepared to my meetings. trying to show how smart I was and how prepared I was and that I was a good problem solver.

So I came with technical solutions. Now we’ve already established I’m not a technical person. So those suggestions kind of landed with a thud as you might predict. I think I was several months into repeating a pattern of these not going very well, me getting frustrated, my team getting frustrated, but also not making progress, when a very senior engineer took me aside, said, you’re not an engineer, you don’t understand engineers.

And if you don’t understand engineers, you’re never going to be successful. I think I was wide eyed. Humbled. Also, I said, well, what do I need to do differently? And he said, engineers like to solve problems. And the [00:18:00] larger the problem, the more complicated a problem you can bring to us, the happier we’re going to be and the harder we’re going to work for you.

Give us a goal and we will meet it. I have not forgotten that example. I was not trained to solve those problems, but they were. And as technology has changed, as I’ve changed companies, and as you say, I’m in a very large company now, it is amazing to see the size of the problems that we bring to engineers.

And that’s still true. They get very excited when they get to solve a big problem like that.

Maureen: What I’m hearing is a couple of things. Put the work where it belongs. Yes. Let people do what they’re really brilliant at. And yet we come in with this sense of imposter syndrome or some story in our head about what it means to be a good leader.

For me, it’s I’ve got to work longer hours and what that ends up being is I’m in the way and I’m tired the next day and less effective. So it’s hard to extricate that story of what good looks like. [00:19:00] from my behavior and I have fought some of that my entire career. As I listened to you, your willingness to take mentoring, coaching, whatever word you put to it, to do the work, to change your behavior.

Catherine: Yeah. You know, if you think about my realizing what I wasn’t there to offer the technical skills, I was there to offer the vision. I was there to be the person in the room as I am today, representing the interests of families, kids, and children, our customers, while everybody at Amazon Kids is in charge of safety.

I am the person in the room to remind everybody about what this experience looks like in the family. We aren’t just building parental controls, for example, that have lots of settings because lots of settings is a goal. We are building a customizable tool because As we said earlier, parenting is personal, and safety is also personal, and you know, parents want to be able to [00:20:00] customize for their families.

So lots of settings make sense.

Maureen: Katherine, you’re a trailblazer in a field that is so crucial, focusing on the safety and trust for families. For a global enterprise where the impact of your work is visible around the world, what’s it like to sit in your chair? Sorry, it sounds like I’m now trying to terrify you, but this is a big role and you are one of the people who is creating.

What will be an evolving field for the next generation?

Catherine: Yes. And it can be scary if you focus on the scale, but when you focus on the day to day, I have a few key lessons I have learned in almost 25 years in trust and safety. The first is that I believe that trust and safety is about balancing art with science.

The art is the very human part of our jobs. We think about our values. We think about our ethics. [00:21:00] We have our gut feelings about what is right or wrong. It’s an innate human ability to look around corners. When I started in trust and safety, it was all art. What are our values? What are our visions? What’s our gut feelings?

And if we look forward, What can we do to make things better? Then the industry got better at science. That’s the technology. It’s all the data. And now there’s regulations, there were none when I started. In a lot of ways, the technology has made our work, the human element, much easier. The tools we use to do our work are better than I could have ever imagined.

Technology can predict, it can prioritize, it can do some of the repetitive tasks really, really well. But the art of trust and safety is still as necessary as ever. Our human judgments are uniquely complex. And as you mentioned, Maureen, it’s the playing field is constantly changing. So therefore, the fact that our creativity and [00:22:00] problem solving is unlimited, that is critical.

The other thing that is important when you’re thinking about trust and safety is, is that when you look around corners, irregardless of the technology, there’s really nothing new under the sun. At my parents house in Maine, there’s a very large box of t shirts in the cellar. There’s probably 50 t shirts covering the span of my career.

Silicon Valley was very good, especially at the early days of giving t shirts out for every launch, every party. And it’s funny because it’s been so long that I’ve been in this career that my now 18 year old found a few that were retro cool enough for him to wear. My favorite one is the one that I didn’t save, oddly, but I don’t forget it.

I think it was created by the Paranoids team at Yahoo. It has been a consistent truism across my career. And it is, if we build it, they will abuse it. It’s not that it’s necessary to think, Oh, all [00:23:00] the bad things that are going to happen, but it is so liberating to remember, misuse is expected. Children are going to toss a tablet.

Somebody’s going to say, Hey, you know, how can I do this? With whatever technology for me, it’s a great reminder not to panic. It’s possible to have a sense of humor, to remember the toddler throwing or testing when I approached my work and humor is part of resilience and longevity. I

Maureen: hear you being very positive, but I also hear the realism of risk management.

The juxtaposition of, I know that people do stupid stuff. Some of them do stupid stuff just because they’re tired and hungry. Others because they are really intentionally pushing limits. And building a system that has, in some cases, soft guardrails. But in other cases, you’ve got cement walls, bad things should not happen to children.

And we [00:24:00] need a hard guardrails to ensure that they are protected and being able to balance nuance and free speech and all of that with. Safety and protection feels to me like the job can be incredibly complex. The job is

Catherine: incredibly complex because people are complex and we are dealing with tools that people use in all the variety of ways that people are going to.

I guess my second superpower would be resiliency. There are limitless ways that you could focus on the negatives that people do or the way that they experience life, the way they comment. We could just focus on that and say, wow, you know, everyone’s bad. But instead, and this is one of the things I love.

Working on a product that’s for kids with such guardrails is that we’re thinking about, okay, how do we teach people a future generation and how do we ensure for [00:25:00] families that they are bringing technologies into their home that they are Feeling safe and like we said, have small everyday trust building experiences with these technologies so that we have a generation that can feel like, Oh, I can create using these tools and I can share it because I have learned from my parents.

and the products I’ve been using, how to do that in a safe and responsible manner, I believe that unleashes more creativity and more positivity.

Maureen: Well, I’m just thinking of the word psychologically safe or psychological safety, that you’re creating a space that is safe for them to learn and grow. And in unsafe spaces, we’re less inclined to be creative and experimental because it’s not safe.

Catherine: And that is why having thoughtful trust and safety is core to having a successful product because it doesn’t matter how exciting it is if it’s not safe. You are right. [00:26:00]

Maureen: Thank you for being the person you are and just exuding positiveness and solid judgment. Both. Thank you. Because you sound like. Most people are trustworthy and I’m maybe on the more pessimistic side.

A lot of people are trustworthy and they still do things that we wish they wouldn’t. We need to manage for that. And it seems like you have a beautiful balance of both of those and it pervades everything that happens with Amazon Kids. How would say I’m a young professional and I want to learn about you or even the field of trust and safety.

Catherine: Well, fortunately, we have launched a digital wellbeing hub. On about Amazon and you can learn all about family trust and our products there. If you want to find me, I’m on LinkedIn at Catherine Bath.

Maureen: Thank you very much. This has just been a delightful [00:27:00] conversation and I appreciate you sharing more of who you are because as we think about what makes good leaders, if the who is good.

Then the behavior is going to be effective. If the who is bad, it doesn’t matter how technically effective the behavior is, the outcome’s still bad. So thank you for all that you’re doing to make a positive impact.

Catherine: Thank you very much for having me. This has been a wonderful conversation.