Why Inclusion is the Secret to High-Performance Teams
In this episode of The Tech Leader's Playbook, Avetis Antaplyan sits down with Jossie Haines—executive coach, fractional engineering leader, and former engineering leader at Apple, Zynga, Tile, and Life360—to unpack how great leaders build inclusive, high-performing teams and adopt AI with intention. Jossie shares pivotal moments from leading Siri teams at Apple (including award-winning Apple TV work) and scaling engineering at Tile, where she helped double the org and architect a culture people still miss. She gets candid about imposter syndrome, why inclusion (not box-checking diversity) drives psychological safety and product quality, and how to communicate in CEO/CFO language: business outcomes, trade-offs, and crisp “yes—and” solutions. You’ll also hear her playbook for leaders using AI to reclaim strategic time, from code-base ramp-ups to custom GPTs that coach junior PMs and engineers. Plus: lessons from Zynga’s two-week company-wide pivot, the value of age diversity in teams, and why “slow productivity” beats 80-hour grinds. A masterclass in defining success on your own terms—and leading with clarity, courage, and measurable impact.
Takeaways
Inclusion and psychological safety are prerequisites for high performance.
Focus on mechanics (meetings, feedback, promotions) before chasing diversity metrics.
Communicate in outcomes and trade-offs; lead with business impact.
Use “yes, and” to surface constraints without being the “no” person.
Leaders should model effective AI use to raise adoption quality.
Treat AI as an 80–90% draft; humans add accuracy and context.
Deploy AI where it frees strategy time: research, ramp-ups, admin loops.
Build leverage by shipping tangible alternatives quickly.
Age diversity strengthens execution and pattern recognition.
Replace hustle myths with sustainable “slow productivity.”
Senior leaders must self-generate confidence signals; feedback gets rarer.
Define success on your terms and make clear, bold asks.
Chapters
00:00 Intro & Guest Setup
02:00 Apple & Tile: Wins, Burnout, and Imposter Syndrome
05:00 Designing Roles and Cultures People Miss
08:30 Why Senior Leaders Feel Isolated
10:40 Inclusion → Psychological Safety → Performance
13:10 Operationalizing Inclusion (Meetings, Feedback, Promotions)
16:50 Hiring Panels, Representation, and Real Accountability
18:55 Keeping Eyes on Outcomes, Not Optics
21:50 The Overlooked Advantage of Age Diversity
26:20 Boundaries, Peak Hours, and Sustainable Work
28:40 Leaders & AI: Modeling Quality and Guardrails
33:00 AI as Draft Partner: Seniors vs. Juniors
36:30 Practical AI Workflows (Ramp-Ups, Custom Assistants)
40:15 Speaking CFO/CEO: Outcomes, Trade-offs, “Yes, and”
46:50 Shipping Fast for Negotiation Leverage
51:10 Trust Yourself, Ask Boldly, Create Roles
54:30 Closing & Book Recommendations
Jossie Haines’s Social Media Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jossiemann/
Jossie Haines’s Websites:
Resources and Links:
