 All right, I'm going to be handing you over to the audience who are all waiting very eagerly for your presentation. So everyone presenting Megan Bird, Suniki from the Google open source programs office. Thank you. Is that my intro to take over? Okay, great. I can't see anyone, so let me just start by saying how grateful I am to be included in today's program and to be able to dial in Berkeley. I'm wishing everyone great health and happiness and hopefully I will be with you all at your next event. And today I want to spend some time and talk about leadership and open source and there is no better time than now to learn how we can all be leaders, especially during these times of ambiguity. So let me just dive in since we don't have a lot of time. And my main question is, how many of you have thought I wish someone would just lead? Just pick a direction or just fix something, get people working better together? I know I have. I've definitely had those thoughts and those feelings before and it can be really frustrating. But I want to use this time to let you know that you can be the leader that we all need. And today I'd like to share some of Google's leadership resources so that you can learn a little bit about what leadership is. But before I go too far, I just first want to thank everyone for making time today to learn about leadership skills. Because when we become stronger leaders, our communities become more healthy and our projects become more sustainable. So with this talk I want to cover three things. One is leadership, how you can strengthen your leadership skills, and I want to provide some tips that you can take away today to start applying in your projects if you work with others. So hopefully that sounds good and I'm going to assume it is and let's just keep going. And I want to talk about leadership by illustrating it through a story that I picked up along the way in my last 10 years working in open source. So I was helping a project improve their contributor experience and we did this by interviewing a lot of contributors and there was one story in particular that stood out to me and it was someone who was a new contributor and they really wanted to participate in a project but they were looking around in the forums and the issues and they felt really overwhelmed. They felt that it was like a brand new language, they felt that the interactions especially with newcomers were challenging and they got nervous. They were intimidated and they just stayed away and they watched from afar for an entire year and then they realized okay this is not working and I really want to do this. So they made a decision to get help and they reached out to a mentor and said hey I really would like to contribute. I have this vision for myself that I can be part of this project but would you walk me through the steps and this person was inspired, they donated time and they helped this person who could finally go from being fearful to actually making their first contribution which is great but it also you know is unfortunate they had taken an entire year. This person though as they worked with the mentor they had a real great learning mindset and they really made sure they understood the steps so after they contributed the first time they did it again and again and again and today this person is a top contributor for this open source project. I think it's just a phenomenal story and this person really persevered in order to accomplish this but it's also really unfortunate that this person had such a hard experience at the beginning and you know I wonder how many contributions were lost because this person waited an entire year or a hundred commits a year and I also wonder how many contributions were lost because people did not push through they walked away it was like a contributor bounce rate and the answer is just too many we don't know but it's just too many so it doesn't matter what this project is it's really so many projects that I've talked to that have this challenge and it's a real shame because the story didn't have to be this way because you know open source is all about giving and helping people want to do the right thing it's just that sometimes when we step into help we are actually stepping up into leadership roles and we don't know it we don't realize it and we don't realize that we're in those roles that we're having an impact on people the way we talk models the culture that we're seeing this project should have and how we should treat each other and we might have an impact on someone just through our own interactions and it's unfortunate because in open source we don't have training we might have mentors that teaches how to contribute but we don't actually have training of core skills like leadership which is really unfortunate and it's also one of the reasons why I like to get this talk just to start to shine a light on that we need to focus on the core skills as well as the technical skills when we're working in open source so I'd like to just start to use this story to unpack what leadership is and let's start with who were the leaders in this story there were quite a few leaders one was the former moderator of the people in the issue queues that were interacting with others in those different channels and they may not have done the best job they might have the best intentions but it may not have been the best leadership skills being used there which is what made that person feel intimidated to begin the mentor was a leader they heard someone say will you help me and they said I have expertise and I will take time and I will help you which is wonderful and then there was another leader in this which might be a little surprising but that's the contributor the individual who was able to lead themselves to get from fear into action and impact and I want to talk a little bit more about what that means to be a leader in open source as an individual contributor so let's start by asking what is leadership now there's many definitions out there so there's there's not really one to point to but this one happens to be my favorite leadership is a process of social influence which maximizes the efforts of others towards the achievement of a goal and this is by Kevin Cruz is a leadership expert and the reason I like this is because it is about influence you can lead from anywhere it's not about authority in the role or position that you have and it's about working with others and influencing others towards a common goal that you both want to achieve together and sometimes to understand what something is it's good to see what it is not so leadership as I said it's not a title it's not a role it's also not a specific personality type it's not all the extroverts out there you can be an introvert and also be a leader it's also important to note that leadership is not management it is not about making sure people do things on time and on budget that's management and leadership is not about power it is not about commanding that people do things it is about influencing that's where real transformational change happens and there are three types of leadership there's the kind that we know the most leading organizations whether it's a CEO or a BDFL of a community or maybe it's the board and the executive director of an open source foundation another type of leadership is leading others so this might be a product manager at a company that's working across many functions marketing and sales engineering lots of different functions to create and push a product out to market in open source it might be managing a bunch of mentors working in a group of tech writers etc etc and then the third one is leading yourself and this is what that contributor did in the story that I told they led themselves they were able to manage their emotions and work with others to create an outcome that they wanted to create and what's important about these three levels is that you can't lead others until you can lead yourself and that's because the higher up you go the more people you start leading the more responsibilities you take on with your leadership the more stress you take on and the more responsibility and you have to stay calm and centered and be able to make decisions in hard times so that people feel confident and can follow you want to follow you and you know where to send them you know how to point them in the right direction and get them working and focused and that takes self leadership to do that really knowing how to control those emotions I'm gonna spend a lot of time on this level the leading yourself aspect today so as we're leading what do leaders do well you'll see it was very much illustrated in the story they shape a vision they translate that vision into strategy they get others to help them you know work towards that vision we have measurable results we know what success looks like and they focus on that and as the working they foster innovation and learning and they lead themselves while they do all of this and that's exactly what the individual contributor did in my story their vision was I want to contribute and they came up with a strategy I'm going to ask a mentor to help me I'm going to get out of this whole frozen state that I'm in and they recruited the mentor and that mentor said yes I will help you I will be part of your team and they had a very measurable result one contribution right and this contributor had that learning mindset you learn how to make that one contribution and then he did it again and again and again to make him now a top contributor in this project and he did all of this by leading himself he knew he was scared and he knew he was stuck and he did he managed those emotions and came up with a strategy to move forward so he achieved his vision and so as leaders do what they do they have to use skills and these are some leadership skills that are identified from research from the Harvard Business Review and so you'll see a lot of it is inspire and motivate display integrity and honesty drive results communicate collaborate build relationships and lots more in what I find interesting about this list is it's not about the technical skills that you have it is about your skills your ability to work with others and additional research looked into this and found that two-thirds of leadership is dependent on emotional intelligence which is really interesting because we don't talk about emotional intelligence very much an open source we actually don't even talk about it much in society as a whole which is a whole other problem what we focus on a lot are our cognitive abilities and that's because we are really good at solving problems we even celebrate it but if we want to be leaders in open source at any level we clearly need to focus on emotional intelligence if we want to be better leaders in open source and clearly we should want good emotional intelligence because according to Dan Goldman who wrote the book on emotional intelligence he said that it's emotional intelligence that makes its top performers and it makes our contribution stronger to our project when we have emotional intelligence and so he says that it's actually the difference between what makes you a good contributor and a great contributor like 90% of that difference is emotional intelligence and the best way to explain this is if there were two people in the audience that had the same cognitive abilities but the person on the right mental intelligence they're going to make a stronger impact in the project and that's because they're going to know how to work with others and set that vision and influence others to rally around that vision and make it happen and when you work with others you make a stronger impact than when you work alone so while our cognitive abilities are great in open source and we solve so many hard problems with them ultimately we need to focus on emotional intelligence our cognitive skills will only get us so far but our emotional intelligence can grow and that's the great thing is that we actually can grow our emotional intelligence skills by practicing it so I want to dive in a little bit into well what is this emotional intelligence that makes us better leaders and simply put it's being able to understand your emotions and the effect on others as well as your ability to understand and influence the emotion of others and this is all comes from Dan Goldman's book emotional intelligence and he brings emotional intelligence down into five pillars self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation which are all related to managing your emotion the other two pillars are empathy and having social skills and this is about influencing the emotions of others and you really need to have strength in all five pillars to be really strong and emotional intelligence but we don't have enough time to get into all of this I'm just going to focus on self-awareness and self-regulation because really they are two sides of the same point and what research shows is that when you strengthen these two pillars you have created a foundation to unlock and strengthen the others so you have to start here anyhow so self-awareness is the ability to recognize your feelings and the effect on others and people with self-awareness have more confidence they have a more realistic assessment of themselves and probably for that reason people with more self-awareness are able to laugh at themselves they can accept that they're human and what they're good at what they're not good at and that is an element of self-awareness to focus on where self-regulation is the ability to control and shift your emotion you can have a positive interaction with someone else and people who can self-regulate are more comfortable with ambiguity and change they can definitely see that there's something happening and they can control those emotions and they can figure out how to respond versus react which we'll get into later so you can see the self-awareness and self-regulation that those two work hand in hand and the contributor was definitely self-aware enough to realize he was stuck he was emotionally frozen and then he used self-regulation to work through his fear and ask for help and convince someone or I should say influence someone to donate a few hours of their time to help him with this goal but that is areas we really want to focus on if we want to grow our emotional intelligence so before we talk about how to do that I just want to I won't be able to see you so we'll just kind of use a little trust here so how would you rate yourself awareness you can think about that a bit maybe you want to raise your hand if you have if you think you rate high with self-awareness like if you think you have strong self-awareness well I can't see what the room is doing but if you don't have a lot of people raising their hands that's okay because according to Dan Goldman's research only 36% of people identify as having strong self-awareness so that is rather curious it explains a lot about interactions in general and why we sometimes have conflicts as humans and but the nice thing is that we can raise that number through practice and interestingly the best way to improve self-awareness self-regulation and therefore emotional intelligence is through mindfulness which I was rather surprised with when I started doing this research myself and when someone told me to practice mindfulness they recommended journaling meditating yoga and I'm thinking well I want to be a bit leader but I don't want to just you know sit quietly or do these things like I want to do I want to be I'm very action-oriented I want to do something and so I had a really hard time with this concept and I kind of dug in a little bit more and Google has done a lot of research in this area and they have actually embraced mindfulness because they have found the impacts from a neural neuroscientific perspective and how calming the limbic system with mindfulness allows you to control your emotions much better and therefore be a better leader in times of chaos and change and ambiguity and as I was looking into this research and I'm thinking I don't know like this isn't for me I'm not going to practice mindfulness to be a leader like I get the logic but like to actually change my behavior that's a lot harder and I needed to have a stronger why to get me to change and I wanted to share that with you in case that just hearing like oh just do some yoga you'll be a better leader isn't resonating with you either so let me share a little bit about Dan Siegel so he is a psychiatrist and a leader in interpersonal neurobiology and he has a whole way of explaining how the brain works how mindfulness works and how it can make you a better leader and he does it with this simple hand demonstration so I'll do this but I also have the picture available in case you can't see me very well so he illustrates the brain using a hand and the arm and the wrist is your spinal cord going into the base of your skull and your thumb is your limb system and that's your fight like breeze and your hand and the four fingers that is your cortex and then the fingernails where the fingers are touching the thumb that's your prefrontal cortex this cortex the prefrontal cortex refers to as the upstairs brain and the thumb the limbic system as the downstairs brain and when you have this integrated brain you have a system that's really working well and giving you emotional intelligence because when the prefrontal cortex is connected to the limbic system you have positive feedback loop so all day long you are getting triggered and signals are going into your brain and they go into your limbic system and they say oh my gosh oh my gosh something's happening but you're upstairs it's okay you've been here before using all the logic reasoning and it knows how to soothe itself and when you have this connection with a prefrontal cortex the front part it is able to provide all of your emotional intelligence your self-awareness your self-regulation empathy and it allows you to do it with the world around you in a really mindful responsive way instead of a reactive way but this stimulus it might be that it might be that you have kids at home really hard it could be that response and eventually this whole integrated brain and there's always just that one thing that flipped your leg today for me was the dog parking because we have a lot more activity going on in our house right now and I flipped my leg take a break and it can take up to 20 minutes for your body and to get that integrated brain and so I went on in the brain and that when we can be kind of when we flip our leg turn to this link this integrated brain a lot faster and we can regain that emotional intelligence and be able to be more self-aware self-regulated empathetic as we work with people who are able to respond versus react and that is what mindfulness does to our brain and why we need a mindfulness practice so that we aren't flipping our lids all the time because so often we're just going to the day like this totally run by emotion and that is not helpful to anyone but there's the flip your leg and in open source we really need to know how to keep this integrated brain and avoid flipping the lid because we work in an asynchronous and online environment and unfortunately that is going to make us flip our leg more because there's a lot of things that happen to our brain when we aren't interacting with someone in person so whether we're working on github or Slack or Twitter or email and all these online channels we're really at a disadvantage because we are suffering from something called online and in addition effect so our brains that cortex is always looking for cues social cues when we're talking to people so that we can self-regulate so if someone looks a little upset or they're really happy we know how to respond and it's what our brain is constantly looking for and we get that a bit with video which is good but when we are on email and Twitter we don't have it and our brains have a really hard time functioning and we try emoticons but that is not what the brain needs to stay the integrated brain so there's a lot of things that happen as we're working asynchronously and online and a few that I want to point out from this disinhibition effect is first of all lack of eye contact reduces our empathy for the person that we're engaging with and so because of that we are already engaging with people with less understanding of where they're coming from we're a little bit more worried about our response and what we're getting out of the communications than what they're saying so we have this lowered empathy when we're engaging with each other the other thing is there's this weird thing we do but we project a voice onto others so if someone's emailing you or there's a tweet research shows that 9 out of 10 times we are ascribing a more negative voice to that message than they intended so we're not empathetic and we don't really have full trust of their intentions and those are some big headwinds to work with with online communication and then there's a third thing that happens which is as we're working with each other and we're going back and forth let's say it's Twitter there's something that happens where the brain flips the lid and you are just run by your emotions and suddenly your argument on Twitter is really about survival in terms of how the brain functions and thinks and so survival means winning the argument at all costs and you've seen this it's a very strange and unfortunate phenomenon called flame wars but that's what's happening to win it's really hard to stop that and that is when we get to the worst great interactions with each other and this is where we need a mindfulness practice this is where we really need to be self aware of each other we have all these headwinds around empathy and trusting people's intentions in their communication and we need to make sure we're not flipping our lid all the time and we need to build up a practice to keep that integrated brain as we're working together and so mindfulness in itself is a good practice and you know we don't have a lot of time to go into that mindfulness is what once you're in a calm state people on the course project you also need strategies for how to collaborate well we don't get a lot of training on and so my pro tips are that you want to reset if something's triggered you and you have to be self aware if something has triggered you and so there are ways to calm down so that you can kind of put that integrated brain and some simple ones are a count of ten I think we've all heard this another one is take some deep breaths and there's a lot of science coming out around how breathing can really help especially if you take a shorter breath in and a longer breath out and sometimes things that just make you flip your lid so great you need more than ten seconds and you should maybe take a walk around the block and then my favorite is the hot tea and the reason for this is that when you have hot tea you are so focused on the moment of not burning your mouth that you slow everything down and just focus on that and you kind of forget for a minute that you had another issue and sometimes that's all your brain needs so I like that one a lot and another pro tip is once you've kind of calmed everything down you've taken that break you've reset then you want to make sure you respond logically you're not reacting like this idea I like this proposal I wish it had more in this week both study and self and another practice that I like to use online and verbally but I don't have a good listening skills so when someone gives a proposal they share their ideas I want to make sure I really understand them before I respond so I usually say oh what I hear you say is and I will repeat something and it gives them a chance to correct me if I didn't get something right and then I can build off of that to make sure we have a shared understanding before I make any suggestions it's really important to know when to switch to video or voice you know there are just times when online communication isn't going to work whether it's talking about strategy or it's trying to be a little repeated you really just have to know when's the right time to say hey let's shift to video and talk this through so I just covered a lot of stuff I know that was all covered in a short amount of time so I wanted to do a quick recap just to cover the main points that I went through today and that is now more than ever we need everyone to be leaders and open source and you absolutely can you can lead from any position to be leaders until you can lead yourself so it's important to start there and leading yourself means that you need to grow your emotional intelligence if you feel that's an area you're lacking in and the first places to start and building emotional intelligence is self-awareness and self-regulation and you can grow these areas through a mindfulness practice because it's going to change the neuroscience of your brain it's going to keep it integrated so you're not always being led by emotions and reacting and you can be responding and it's also important to not just be mindful and keep that calm integrated brain you need strategies at your fingertips so that you know how to respond and so I recommend you practice ways that are being triggered and use some of those communication strategies to help you respond and so that you know those are some simple steps I'm happy to be available for questions afterwards or beyond this because there's a lot to this and it's not a topic we discuss much in open source because it matters remember new contributors are watching you they're watching how you choose to interact with each other they're watching how you treat people because that's setting the tone and the culture of the project and they are going to mimic that they're going to model that and you could be making the difference gaining the next top contributor of your project or losing someone completely so I hope you choose to lead and be the leader we all need so thank you very much for your time today we can hear us questions from anyone alright in that case I will attempt to paraphrase a very long question from Mario to clarify can you hear me oh can you hear me a little bit it's a little muffled but I can hear you so Mario's question is about the role of leadership in open source and particularly Google's role in it in dealing with the coronavirus crisis that we find ourselves in the middle of and it has a sort of different character to most of what we deal with when we're really dying is there so apart from the sort of here are practical things that we can do as individuals to develop our capacity as leaders is there any relevant thing you would comment on on COVID and is there anything in particular that's relevant in Google's context on dealing with the ability to lead on responses to COVID I've been very impressed with our CEO's communication internally helping us understand and helping us understand how to navigate this as humans and employees and in terms of the outside world there are many initiatives going on and we've been putting out a lot of messaging around this and I'm actually not properly briefed to tell you all the details and I wouldn't want to do it you know I wouldn't do it justice by going into all the ways that we're helping I know that there's a lot of resources a lot of collaboration that we're doing we're offering our services for free such as Enterprise G Suite now is being offered so everyone can connect and from where I said it's easier for me to speak to this where I said in the open source programs office we fully believe that open source needs to be sustainable and we need to be the best citizens we can be especially during times like this we are reaching out to the projects that we use the foundations that support them we're reaching out to the industry organizations like open source initiative and outreach and we're finding out what the needs are so that we can make sure that we're there to support them as you know with event cancellation a lot of these groups have reliance on event revenue and they use that revenue to support their projects and we want to make sure that we and in partnership with lots of other organizations that want to be good citizens are coming to help them and make sure that they get through this and we are also participating in something that's starting up right now called FOSS Responders FOSSResponders.org and what we want to do with this group is create a central page to aggregate people's needs projects needs and amplify those needs so that others other companies individuals can see how they can help other people in open source there's going to be a lot of fundraising going on and there's a lot of ways to contribute to these people in need projects in need both financially and in kind through challenge and other kinds of contributions one of the things that FOSS Responders is doing is starting a open collective fund we use to support those that are kind of falling between the cracks that may not be part of a project getting money or may not be a maintainer that's well known that has been impacted there's going to be a lot of people that fall through the cracks of some traditional funding that happens in open source so we want to make sure we have a way to help them choose we've created this fund so those are the things that Google open source programs office is working on currently well that's brilliant thank you very much a round of applause for me again