 All right, so thank you for joining us My name is Jonathan de Rojas. I work at Bluehost. I am a full-time work as core contributor And I'm here to moderate a discussion with Josepha Hayden Chomposy, did you say it? Chomposy. Okay. So that's how you say that fancy word that fancy name I prefer this mic. She prefers to hold the mic and That's great. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do day-to-day? Yes. Well, I Recently became the executive director of the WordPress project Which is most of my day-to-day right now Your project is gigantic. There are like 200,000 of you and 150 word camps a year. I don't go to all of them although I wish I could But before I started doing that what I did a lot of and what I still do now is kind of help people Learn how to communicate better and work together better And so I think that I'm well suited to the WordPress space because of that. Awesome. All right so The topic of this discussion is fostering collaboration across cultures Has anybody read the blog post? Anybody? A couple people. Okay So we'll kind of get into it a little bit what it's about and we are here to take your questions as well So you open up by describing how brains are our prediction machines, but they're influenced by a lot of things such as your stereotypes past experiences and These things often end up being communication barriers, especially in a global project like WordPress So talk about that a little bit Specifically about stereotypes or about Our brains are affected by different things and how that affects how we communicate with people So I have found I've worked with a lot of large teams And now that I'm working with this global project and the teams that I work with are also all over the the planet I've found that That all of the experience that we've had with people that are like you like everyone I've ever met like Sheila and like I have an idea of how this conversation is going to go regardless of whether I want to have that idea or not because your brain is constantly Inundated with information, you know, and so it has a coping mechanism It just pulls together all the information it knows about people who look like Birgit or who look like Angela or or have the same experience that I understand of them and just like Define what that patterns most likely going to be like and and yeah, I found that those stereotypes for the most part are the things that cause us to Not meet people where they are right there. Those are the things that make us Decide that we know who those people are before we even hear about their actual Experiences or the struggles that they've had as they've gone through the work that they're doing with us and with each other And so yeah Brains are great and also like super smart in some ways and super dumb in other ways And so the stereotypes is the super dumb part of your brain. It's the dumb dumb part that part Yes, get rid of that part in case I've never talked to any of you about what how I call the regions of the brain There's the dumb dumb part of the brain that just tries to figure out whether you're going to be killed or not by the person next to you And then the smart dumb smart part of the brain that works a little slower and is like And then the smart smart brain that is super duper slow and handles language and interactions and communication and stuff And it is the last one to get there with us all the time So the first thing that your brain does is it's like she are you with me or against me and then later It's like Sheila is not gonna hurt you. Everything's fine. I keep pointing out people in the audience There are like ten of you and I know many names. We might get to all of you at some point Just making examples Well great, and that's another part of what makes All the different cultures and backgrounds of that contribute to WordPress great is that everybody has different experiences that don't fit into These stereotypes, so it's important to ignore those dumb dumb brain Ignore your dumb dumb brain, but not really because it actually does keep you alive. Yes. Yes. Stay alive, but ignore it so you also talk about something called the negotiation of meaning and Basically, it's would you mind Defining that in your words not at all. How many of you are familiar with the concept of the negotiation of meaning? Wonderful, I love this. Okay, so the negotiation of meaning Is a basic part of communication practices where once you have gathered all the information together The two people or multiple people who are participating in the conversation Make sure that they understand each other so For instance If if I have arrived here and I say to you Jonathan We're gonna have a fireside chat today and your concept of fireside chat is like we're gonna go have individual Conversations with everybody at the table, but my concept is this we have to do that part where it's like, okay So what is my role? What is your role? What is the objective and just making sure that everybody has the same pieces of information and the same pieces of language to communicate about The process or the project that you're taking on so that's a very broad concept of the negotiation of meaning And how does jargon complicate that things that were comfortable saying that not everybody understands Yeah, if any of you have ever seen any of my talks about the project or community or people or working with people So literally anything I ever talk about you've heard me talk about jargon and how it's a bad thing In the WordPress project as a whole we really try to stay away from jargon where we can because for one since we're a Global project it makes it really hard to translate stuff, which you wouldn't think would be real, but it is But it's simple regular phrases are difficult simple regular phrases. So Our designers at the company that I work for I work for automatic refer to like minor changes and and icons and stuff as sprinkles and Every time they say that to me. I'm like, I hear you speaking English. I'm also speaking English But you're on a different planet and so like jargon doesn't even Just adhere to like we're talking about Servers and cloud hosting like it's not even just that it can be as basic as Your current definition based on what we're talking about is not my current definition Sprinkles for me are always on cupcakes sprinkles for our designers are our minor changes that make a delightful experience for users You know rainbow or chocolate sprinkles Rainbow all the time Jimmy's we call him Jimmy's in New England. Yeah, I've learned so much about New England last Come on everybody come visit in a few minutes now So when you're working with different cultures and different languages That's magnified How talk about you were talking with me yesterday about colors and how colors can Are even simple colors like we might think white is white, but another culture white might be something different Yeah, I've talked about that. That was really interesting More show of hands is anyone familiar with the what is it global color survey? What world color survey? Okay, this couple people so in the 1970s there was this survey, which it the methodology was heavily flawed, so it has been Researched in in current times, but in the 1970s there was this research that was done about Colors and how different cultures name them and how they arrive at the names And in general there are apparently 11 to 12 different motifs where people derive the names for colors that they Have and there was a theory and it's harder to track that all colors In are introduced in languages in roughly the same order and that some colors are not Universal concepts like green blue is not a universal concept and and as we were talking about yesterday like white Depending on your concept of what creates a color is either a subtractive or an additive process And so even something as basic as colors where we feel like you know for the most part we understand it But that whole thing with color blindness like I I love talking to people with With differing abilities from mine about their experiences because like I have the luxury of the full depth of my entire Knowledge of being a human who exists as I exist and so like when I talk to people who are colorblind I'm always like I don't I do not understand how I like I can't even comprehend how that looks and and So having those interesting conversations with things that seem super real and universal and integrated in our lives Is always interesting and I think that that's a Specific and really interesting example of that. Yeah, so the example. I gave was well white is the presence of all colors But she said well if you're a painter white is the absence of all other colors And I've never thought of that It's cuz he's in technology and so you add all the colors together and boom you have white But if you had all the colors together as an artist you have murky colors Browns and blacks and yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not not nice colors lovely colors So another thing that you detail is and we'll trade my this is trademarked But the Joseph is five five and five for the fur Five and five for fostering collaborative culture. Yeah. Yeah, so I didn't actually trademark the phrase five But I have been using it for ten years in my presentations practically yours So let's let's go through each one real quick and we'll kind of talk about What your your points are on each so the first one is team tension. Oh Man, this is my favorite thing. So I like to when giving advice to people I like to offer my like subversive advice that people are going to pretend isn't real So when we talk about Integrating teams or working across cultures no matter what your culture is defined as like if you're talking about Americas versus Europe or versus Asia. That's a type of culture But also the example that I use in that blog post is our designers versus our developers When people are talking about how to how to integrate teams and make cultures work better together there's sometimes this idea that That means that everyone has to get along perfectly and everything should be fine and everyone needs to agree And I don't think that's true. I think that if everyone agreed on everything all of the time then diversity wouldn't be an important thing that we have to work on and When we find people who are visually diverse from us but have the exact same life experiences I think that we run into the same problems as we would have run into if we had all of the same looking people You know, and so my subversive piece of advice is that any time that you want a diverse group and interesting Perspective perspectives on things you have to be prepared to have some tension and I don't think that that's a bad thing I Just was in so I'm a singer and I was just in a rehearsal on Monday where our conductor was like I don't want to say tension because tension is a bad word and the thing that I say in that blog post is It doesn't matter like tension is needed if you're going to have diversity It's just that you have to find a way to take that and make it into jazz as opposed to discordant noise That resonates for wordpressers because we super love jazz If I ever find something where I can like make a quotable nugget about barbecue y'all will be the first to know But until then you have me with jazz. Hopefully it comes with samples Yes Music is is actually a very common background for developers and designers. I find A lot of musicians and wordpress. Yeah, we do. It's this I think it's similar. There's a lot of structure to both and There's different methodologies and it kind of translates well I'm gonna tell you another subversive thing y'all get to today most of the time people just get one I think that development is a creative process Languages so science and math and music. I think is all in the same basic part of the brain It's then the language and processing part of the brain because all of these things are semantic Like it's all trying to say something but putting something together in a particular language so that it communicates the end product Whatever that end product might be infinite possibilities with it. Yeah. Yeah, so when I hear people are like, oh, I'm a musician I can't be in technology like I don't agree with them at all Matt Mullenwijk the founder of the co-founder of wordpress is a musician. I'm a musician We're just wandering around doing these things. I think it's totally normal to have a music background here. Yes Okay, the next one was respect and accountability. Oh, so this This is for this was from the team lead section You have to treat others with respect but hold yourself personally accountable I think it totally makes sense to say treat others with respect, but that other part for leaders sometimes is really hard I don't believe in the concept of being vulnerable for vulnerability's sake But I do believe that all of our leaders should be vulnerable, especially when it comes to hey Micah I said this thing that I assumed about you and I was wrong. I'm really sorry about that I'll do better in the future like that's it If you identify that you're because we're human beings and we can't be perfect But I think that the only way that leaders can can move through that and create a Sense of belonging and safety with the people that they're working with is to say I Offended you and I didn't realize it and I'm sorry I'll do better and I don't think there's anything wrong with holding yourself personally accountable for those things So I didn't offend Micah. He's I don't think No, he's just okay He didn't get up and leave so that's good. Not today The next one was having a North Star. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I talk about this a lot so For many of you who did not know that I currently am the executive director of things You probably did not read my leadership post because it totally didn't matter to you It was just like random news and you're like, okay, great But I talked about it there and I talked about it in the last The thing that I did in London, so it comes up for me a lot and I think it's important. I Really feel like if we don't know where we share our common understanding understandings of things for instance in the middle of negotiation of meaning and you don't say and that's our end goal And here's why What you end up doing is just like micromanaging people all the way to some unknown Destination and you get tired and fatigued and they get tired and fatigued and like Small iterative cycles like that makes sense in some spaces But I think and anyone who's worked with me closely knows that I'm always like that is our end goal This is the general story arc of how we're gonna get there As long as you're kind of going that way like I mostly don't care how you get there except for like There's this thing that's super wrong. Don't do that everything else like figure it out that way And I think that's really important. Otherwise people don't know How to row together and where they're rowing to I'm just gonna use a lot of metaphors in here We kind of talked about this a little bit, but jargon free is the way to be What you have anything to add to that? No, okay. Yes, I do Just it's just There there are things that when you speak specifically in jargon you're trying to accomplish one of the things that You try to accomplish is to prove how much smarter you are than other people And I when I was a teenager definitely wanted to be the smartest person in the room all the time and Thankfully I stopped that because like it's great to be the smartest person in the room I guess but like if you're the smartest know it all person and no one understands you and no one wants to work With you then it doesn't matter what you can do because no one will do it with you, you know Yeah And it's more of that meeting people where they are like there's no point in trying to prove that you're smarter than everybody And there's also no point in trying to distance yourself and make it clear that there's an us versus them like It's really easy to get into into camps because all people want to know that they fit somewhere Right and we want to know that we belong yeah And so the us versus them a little bit turns into like this is my us And I don't care who the them is like this is my us and just making it super clear that you Don't want other people to belong with you doesn't make any sense to me And so that's why I always fight for no jargon in the WordPress space And I know that people really want it and you know some things we have to and so we're we're working on a Glossary for the WordPress.org site so that everyone will know what we're talking about all the time And I'm so excited. I love it And then the last one proximity aids familiarity Yes How many of you are familiar with the meme of the get-along shirt? Great another thing I get to teach you today. So there's this meme out there Or these two children are there they're put in a one giant shirt Because they've been fighting and so their parents method for getting them to stop fighting is to put them in one big Shirt and they have to cooperate on everything for the whole day and it says get along on it That's that's terrible don't recommend that to any I don't recommend that to parents probably You can find a nicer way to do it but I have found over the course of my career leading people and and helping to mentor leaders that when you have people who Are saying I don't like working with this person. I don't like working with designers I don't like working with developers We don't get better at that by just like Wishing for it to change like we all are people and we have to practice those things And so I have found the best way to get people to like figure out that they actually don't hate each other's be like Hey, I know you don't quite get along But there's this really important project and you unite them around the process and around the project and convince them to kind of put their egos aside for a second and do something that is productive toward the same space and I With some notable exceptions found that that was really helpful for them for me, too The notable exceptions were definitely not in wordpress. It's all fine. Okay. Those are all the notes I had from reading your blog post Fantastic, what else would you like to add? Well, um, so we want to get to everybody's questions. Yeah, I think we're right on something I think we could open it up for some questions I I know we're not live streaming But if you all want to share with Twitter that people can share their questions And I have a colleague down here to help us get them from Twitter in case they show up You can of course tweet with the hashtag WC ATL But also the hashtag sassy pickle so that we can find you slash I can find you later to answer the questions on Twitter except I was told yesterday that I didn't answer one from Miami and I have to go back and answer that totally gonna do it You might have to find her in six months and tell her to answer your uh, yeah Yeah, my annuals like three months ago. Okay sassy pickle not bad. Yes Let's take some questions about about leader not leadership. What are we talking about fostering? Collaboration and then I'll tell you about why I'm a sassy pickle So is there any questions? Quite like we would have these phone calls at all hours and and this was really You just said that because I had in my mind like what my role was in it, you know, what different countries And I've never considered like we could have collaborated better and yeah It's something that we like knew that wasn't even thought of. Yeah, just that was really fascinating But I'm not sure I got what five and five. Oh, okay I'll explain both those things first off five and five refers to Just a structure of my presentations that I give where I give five pieces of advice on One side of a coin and five pieces of advice on another side of the coin And so the sides of the coin in this case were people who are leading from the front versus people who are leading from within And so that's all that that was about It's not like a product. It's just a thing I say So the quest the other question was about That first piece of advice that I gave to leaders where you have to expect some tension in teams where you're where you're Fostering collaboration. I wanted to call to everyone's attention this fantastic resource called the cultural atlas And the URL is culturalatlas.sbs.com.au It was pulled together by Sbs which is an Australian basically public broadcasting system like we have here And it specifically is geared toward their primary migrant cultures and they did a lot of excellent research and it's kind of a living resource for them, but Yeah, so especially when you're working in in a global space and you have all of these cultures The difficulty is that we hardly know where those cross cultures Cross-cultural connections are happening because At this point with WordPress for sure, but probably with your group also like every collection of my of majorities that you have is made up in any number of minority groups, right and so finding a way to Respectfully get people to to give you the information that you need is really important finding out like if if I'm working with Primarily Dutch company. What is the best way for me to manage the overall negotiation process and their methods of communication and and like how How funny you're allowed to be or whatever it is? And and doing your best to meet people where they are it doesn't work As far as like expect some tension to just be like everyone get in there and hope Hope it all works out like you've got to do some of the advanced work as a leader to say Hey, it sounds like we have some miscommunication here when you said this thing is this what you meant over there? And then you have to facilitate that negotiation of meaning section sometimes It would be wonderful if the negotiation of meaning meeting Meaning happened at the beginning of things and lasted forever, but it's kind of a cycle You negotiate the meaning and then you discover that there's this new cross-cultural space And then you have to negotiate some more meaning in there just kind of over and over as a cycle Does that answer the question a bit? Yeah Hi, we have we had a mic coming around. I think we lost it. I am the mic Well, we'll just try to repeat the question for the for the people on the video and I'll repeat it for the video We're getting a thumbs up We did it Thank you One of the things that I do when I'm starting a new group Developing mentors to work with newbies. I make the mentors Do an exercise in listening skill? Yes, and so they sit chairs back-to-back So they're facing opposite directions and I give them interesting characters I buy online in one year. I used Arabic letters Because Americans don't know Arabic letters and one person has to describe it. The other person has to draw it Wow And then the exercise is reversed so they get both sides and then there's a general conversation Difficult that was and how what they said was not translated into the drawing And so I think that the conversation About starting early is really part of my commitment to doing that right from the get-go You know that when the team comes together exercises like that could be a great way for saying We've got to find the common ground We've got to use language that we all will agree to you So I just think that what you've shared today is really priceless information I'll put it in recording. This was a lovely compliment. It's all up there Yeah, I'm not very good at Pictionary for the record John John fail getting people to guess it So so this was this was kind of a A Kind of talking about team team Connections and team building exercises a little bit. Yeah An interesting thing that I noticed recently about team building I think by the way that as a as a collective group of human beings We are about to move into a newer More modern concept of leadership that is not about like scare everyone and hope they do what you need them to do Like I'm that's we're past that now and I'm glad of it Because I remember in my first number of team building experience as I ever had it basically was like put them in a dire situation So they feel bonded by the fear like why would you do that? They're like put them in a giant tree and make them zip line down and like that was how we did team building And hearing about this exercise. This was a listening exercise for anyone who did not hear where you give Up to a pair one of them describes in this case an Arabic alphabet Character and the other one has to draw it and then they switch So that everyone kind of has that shared experience of we don't all communicate the same way And we don't all visualize things the same way and yeah, absolutely I love hearing new team building exercises that are based on like uncovering our basic Understandings as human beings as opposed to our basic understandings as things that want to not die in our dumb dumb brains See it was really useful. I told everyone about my dumb dumb brain smart smart brain. You know it would come in handy Anybody else any other questions? Yes Trying to get to know somebody from another culture That is a fantastic question the question is if you're getting to know someone from a new culture What are like the top three things you can ask? To make sure that you get to know them better in an office setting in a working together setting I think that the things that are important in my mind to know are One like how literal are you going to take things? How how much can I use humor to soften the blow? How direct do I have to be or can I be? The other thing that I think is always important to know is whether whether Whether they primarily want the relationship to be transactional or if they do want to have the opportunity to get to know you as a person there are varying scales of that like Work spaces are by nature transactional, but if you're working in Distributed spaces like I do and like most WordPress volunteers do at least when they're volunteering you have to know like Do you want me to have small talk before I have conversations with you? and then generally asking people how they how they Best take direction for themselves like they will know whether it's best if you write it down ahead of time and give it to them And then they can ask questions or if you can just show up to the meeting and be like hey I've got this new task here all the things so they can ask questions then So just asking them how they need the information. There is this thing that I use With my teams It's called I call it Personal operating manual and so everyone on my team and I don't I don't have these anymore because I don't have lots of direct reports Like this now, but when I had When I was managing teams every person had their own notebook Where I wrote down like what motivated them and how they preferred to get information and how they preferred to participate in Meetings and if they needed things ahead of time so that they had time to like Think through it and research it and so like I knew for each of my team my team members What it was that that made them want to continue to come to work and how I could meet them Where they were as far as how they needed to be communicated with and how they needed to take feedback and how I Could best set them up for personal success with the work that I was asking them to do so personal operating manual That is a thing that is is google-able everyone knows about it But I loved it so and some of those things are things you might have to find out Through working with someone you might not be able to directly say how direct do you want me to be right? But you might have to experiment a little bit and what's the best way for you to figure that out from people? Yeah, for sure good point Yes Yeah Same this this was a follow-on comment to a couple of the last questions we had which was saying Go to the resources that exist the consulate for the country if you're going to be doing a lot of work in that space and Yeah Foreign chambers of commerce. Yes, excellent And You know so they're going to have to get prepared if they are an American person and now they're going to be interviewed by a panel of Chinese Professionals to see whether or not they qualify to go on to the competition in China Somebody somewhere needs to be able to say hello I Say Colby KOLB assessment Yeah, yeah, it's a print assessment. What was the second one a print assessment? We have about 15 minutes left that what those that was a note that you can add additional Testing into your hiring process with the Colby something and the print assessment operating. Yeah to the personal operating manual I think we have time for one more question, and I think it's Birgit American clients and so we were talking about all the different options and then There was this comment from the client. Okay. Well, let's do it this way And this was for me is a German decision. Yes, that is written with a capital B. Yeah So that's where we move forward So but that was not understood at the American India was just kind of all one of the options And let's try and play around with it for a bit, but I kind of And then of course And then what happened was that the decision was reverse. Yeah, so kind of okay So and then I read up about it that that's kind of Germans right decision of the capital D and Americans right of those quality. Yeah, and there's also a lot of cultures out there A lot of cultures How do you navigate that kind of thing So I wish I had a clear answer the question is how do you navigate? How do you navigate? Situations where the expectation around what you have done are different. So in this example, it was a decision Forever versus like I think this is the decision I think we should explore this as our option like how how concrete something is I wish I had an answer for like how you manage it because That would be excellent, but I've not actually explored how I got to the point where I am with that So I've been working with global teams for gosh almost a decade now I Don't feel old you feel old And and I know that when I started doing that I ran into problems like that all the time where I would say something Confidently because like confidence is a thing we value in America And the confidence came across as oh well I guess we're doing that from this person who's definitely not in a decision-making capacity You know and the people would do things because I'd been so confident and then I was like, ah, no I can't make final choices. Don't do that. I have learned Over time how to manage that better, but I don't know if it's so much like This is how I learned how to do it as as much as it was at some point I learned that The voice that I have is not inconsequential and it hasn't been in inconsequential for a long time And so learning to be more careful with the way that I Manage discussions and the way that I contextualize like this is something that I'm interested in discussing I don't have the all the answers yet Help me figure out where I could be wrong about it like learning to be Aware of the fact that that with a big voice comes To sound straight big responsibilities, you know like we have a number of people in the WordPress community across our entire ecosystem who are who people look to as like trendsetters and Sometimes when they are not aware of that like they can make off-handed remarks about something that's happening or not happening and change the course of an entire career on accident and so I learned that in a really Not as as high-stakes space as as the work that I do now And I'm glad that I did because I think that a lot of people don't have the luxury of like The only error that I made was to make someone make a set of charts that took them 10 hours And now I feel like a jerk like that that was the biggest extent of of my Errors that helped me learn that but like if I think about Had I tried to do that learning from this stage, you know from this stage in my career like how awful I Could have made some people's lives. It's it's humbling and also sometimes terrifying But I don't have a quick answer other than like go make some Non-consequential mistakes, which is not useful advice We kind of see that a lot in work as core too No, I do when a ticket might get open and then I might brain dump into the ticket But someone will take it as direction and then three hours later There's a patch and it's a big patch. You know, we still have to think about things before we write code So it's even a problem with that. It's very hard to communicate emotion and text and intent Yeah, and you'll notice that in in any post that I put up where it's not a final decision Like I put it in the title. I'm like discussion the first thing so that's what comes up in people's RSS feeds It comes up in their emails It comes up as they're reading it unless they don't read the title which that's true for some people and I can't make them People don't read the post but they still comment. Yeah, also that also that but yeah contextualizing what you expect out of the conversation is Feels cumbersome when you start doing it. It feels uncomfortable, but I think it's really valuable To avoid, you know, exactly things like that people who are like well Jonathan said it so now we must Do we have time for a quick So here we'll do we'll wrap up and we'll Jonathan and I will be out there and you all can come and ask us additional questions Thank you so much for having me today everyone Thank you