 I'm not going to share my screen because we would just be looking at the handbook. I will talk around a couple of things. So make sure everybody has the great. Okay. All right. I see the numbers picking up. I'm going to go ahead and get started. I think we're on recording. Great. Okay. So I'm following along our agenda. We've added to the handbook a management development series. Section in the leadership portion of the handbook and I'm following on along Monday, June 26. Abby and I will be working together to create hopefully a very valuable series for all of our managers. New as well as managers who have lots of experience. So we're going to run the gamut and really include everyone in the conversation. It's our job to facilitate a hopefully a quite a valuable discussion and then put together learning opportunities for you. But it's also our expectation that all managers will take accountability for creating meetings and attending meetings and completing the assignments that we're putting out because these are all things that will work together with you on down the road. This not just for, you know, a one time event, the a few housekeeping rules. We will record all of our sessions in case that people can't attend, they can join and we'll attach the link to the recordings in the agenda. So we'll be updating the agenda, excuse me as we go along. And I'll ask because of that that we don't share any confidential information. If you have a particular example that you want to go over for anything that we've covered, please contact Abby or myself and we can certainly have those discussions outside of this forum. We're going to be creating relationship opportunities for management. There are at least three ways that we're going to start off with. We're going to create management or we actually have already finished creating management cohorts right now they're called groups a b and see they need better names than that. I will share those with you. Let me share the link and I will put that in chat. The workbook has already been shared with you so you can go ahead and jump in that workbook. If you can, if not, you can jump in it later and I will be sending an email to follow up with everyone so that everyone's well aware of what your management cohort is and what your mentor and mentee pairs are. Well, what does this mean. We've divided you based on the profile that you filled out for us. We divided you into three management cohorts right now called group a b and c. And your first assignment for homework will be as a cohort get together and come up with a creative name for your cohort. I'll follow up with that in that email to make sure everybody is aware that that's homework do before the next time we get together. So hopefully some natural leadership will come out. You will have lots of creative ideas and you'll come back with a professional appropriate exciting and engaging leadership cohort name. You've been assigned to a cohort based on your years of management experience. So those in the profile with the lowest amount of experience in management have been assigned to group a Group B was the mid group and group C and you can see here by the color code. We have a lot of group C's. So we have a lot of managers with a good deal of management experience, which is awesome because they can help us with this curriculum. You've also been assigned mentor and mentee pair relationships based on those years of experience and a few other things that Abby and I talked about along the way. So this workbook will give you those assignments and your second homework assignment is to connect with your mentor and or mentee. Some of you, as you can see, have to assignments. If you were kind of a mid level manager as far as experience goes, then we assigned you both as a mentor and a mentee. If that gets too busy for you. Let me know. And as we were missing a couple of people. So we still have a couple of other mentor opportunities that we can assign, but there was some overlap. So I gave some of you double duty. In your in your roles again in that mentor mentee relationship. I asked that you get together over the next couple of weeks. Introduce yourselves, talk a little bit about your management experience, talk a little bit about the the profile and and what you bring to the table and what ideas you might have and what challenges you have and your and your mentor or mentee share that back and forth and hopefully you'll come up with some great ideas for us as we go forward. I said those interrupt you. Some of us joined in later because we had a meeting that overrun and we don't have the link available. Okay, no problem. That is in the it's in the chat, you know, it is the it's called manager team assignments. Thanks. Richard and Sarah shared it. Yep. So you in the chat you have two links just to recap quickly you have the leadership page in the handbook and now I've added this management team assignments your cohort assignment your mentor and your mentee assignments are in here. They are creative, but they are within the assignments of the experience levels that you have so You can't change them. All right. Let's see any questions on the management cohorts your homework for creating a an exciting engaging energetic name for your management cohort and the homework to meet up with your mentor and or mentee partner over the next couple of weeks. Joan, do you mind if I write the homework and I Google Doc that I share with everybody on the one hand. We'll be able to take notes, but on the other hand, I might be duplicating what's already in the handbook and spreadsheet. I did not add that piece. I will add that right after the meeting earned to the agenda in the handbook so that that was my intention. I just didn't get that in there and I apologize. The rest of the homework is here. I will add it directly underneath so you can either take it in a Google sheet, but it's going to be here as soon as we you know by the end of my day it will be added to the to the handbook. My intention is that the handbook will have all of our assignments and all of our our talking points. Okay. All right. Awesome. Let's see. I'll also add now. Let me let me note here that I've only shared the manager or the manager team assignment workbook to specifically the managers. The workbooks that we're going to share with you are not going to be shared with everyone in get lab with a link because there will be some specific information this one not so much but I'm keeping it consistent across the board. So I would like to put a link in the handbook to this but not everyone will then be able to get to adjust the managers just you as managers. I don't know if that'll create confusion. Give me feedback if you want on that if it's better just to share these you know these spreadsheets outside of the handbook I'm okay with that too. I was just trying to make it accessible so that everybody would have it but again people on the outside and individual contributors won't be able to click on these and get to them. Okay. Let's see. Coffee breaks asking again this the idea of these the series is to provide you with as much valuable information as we can in the limited time that we have the hour that we have together once a week sometimes every other week depending on the schedule over the summer. But I need what we'll need then is we'll give you information and we'd really like for individual groups to pick up if if a management cohort wants to get together. That's fine if mentor mentee pair wants to get together. That's great. And then if you want to go outside of your cohort. Now you have a list of people who are in the different stages into the different experience levels. You can reach out to someone else and ask them study assignments that we'll be giving will have the open for you to see what other managers are inputting. You can always reach out to another manager who has a similar challenge that you do or that doesn't seem to have that challenge and you want some advice so coffee breaks are encouraged as part of this process. Our next agenda item performance reviews. We will be switching up the performance review process for 2017 for the performance year 2017. We're going to go with a semi annual review process. We are going to build out and push out to you in the month of July a review for the first half of 2017 and then in January you'll complete you as well as the individual will complete a performance review for the second half of 2017. I'm using that cadence because I'm trying not to overwhelm everyone with administrative responsibilities, but as you all well know those of you who've done annual reviews before. We tend if we do an annual review to forget what happened in the first half of the year, whether it was really great or or whether it was really bad. Probably more likely that you'll remember something that happened that wasn't so great and the second half and overlook something that was that would offset it or that was great in the first half. So I want to be sure that we're looking at a lesser amount of time. They'll have the same set of questions for both and then we'll have an overall summary at the very end. So you'll have the same amount of effort in both reviews and then we'll have a very small summary that will either be attached the second half or will be an individual of its own. I'm working with lattice. We will continue to work with lattice for performance management performance reviews and I'm working with with lattice right now to build this out so that we can get it rolled out at the very beginning of July. You'll have about the first three weeks in July to get those done for the first half of the year and then we'll store them away but you will have them at your fingertips for reviewing for the second half of the year as well. So again they'll be there for you to look over the history before you add the second half. We'll also be adding 360 feedback. Many people gave that as a had a question why weren't we doing 360 when we did the 2016 reviews and there was a couple of reasons we didn't we didn't have nearly the number of people in the organization participate because of their eligibility for the 2016 review. So I held off on having the 360 in addition to the fact that we pushed it out really quickly so we could get the merit process. Managed and out of the way and and this way we'll introduce it. Everyone will have plenty of time. I don't have all the options selected on this yet or I don't have it built out thoroughly yet so I'll be rolling this out and on our next meeting the week of July 10th. You'll either have it already or it will be just coming out so we'll talk about it again then if anybody has any questions along the way. The ratings that we create in first half and second half and the overall ratings will be part of the 2018 merit process which will happen in the first quarter of 2018. I anticipate the schedule looking like you'll complete the second half performance review in January and the overall rating with that along with that and then in February we'll run through the merit review process for an effective date at the end of the quarter. Any questions on the performance review overview. Okay. Let's talk about homework. I've already given you two assignments. Might as well give you a few more. We have a team development discussion coming up on July 10th. I skipped the the week of July 4th for those managers who would not be available that week. I was having trouble finding availability so just went ahead and skipped to July 10th. I haven't sent that in that invite out yet I want to talk about that a little bit as well to make sure that I'm being considerate of everyone because we have a large rather large group there are 32 at this point managers and you're spread across the globe and building out global invites it can become difficult so I want to talk about that before we close off the call. But the homework assignment. We are going to step into a team development model. It's a rather aged model or the beginning of the model was was in 1965 actually I've given you some some resources that you can look over here. The model is and I'm sure that most of you have heard the terms forming storming norming and performing there are additional Stages that were added later we'll talk about those in our July 10 meeting but we're going to focus on these first four so that we can decide where our teams are and how we can get everyone to the performing Stage as quickly as we can but understand that as we add new team members we may slide back and we want to help with that process Abbie and I will use the the exercise To have ongoing dialogue as we meet with our managers Abbie and I meet with most managers. Hopefully you're all on a schedule of at least a bi-weekly meeting with us. And this is one of the many things that will be an ongoing dialogue for us to continue to help you evolve your teams. So team development is our first theme. We're going to provide a workbook to you right after this meeting. I think let's see if I can Give you a peek at that. I think Abbie has it mostly done and Abbie I added everybody in for Access so I put that in the chat and if you want to jump in there. I believe you all have access now. Let's take a quick look at it and then you can ask any questions that you might have before we adjourn for homework Let everybody take a second to go in if you want There are a number of infographics that you can pull and Abbie found a really what I consider to be one of the best ones to explain each of the four stages. She's also built in a really neat progress graph for us. So what we're going to ask you to do is we're going to ask you to fill in the blanks for your tab. Please don't work in. I'm actually open mine to Michael's tab pay attention at the bottom. The tabs are labeled with your last name comma first name find your tab after a bit of research after logging into Grovo and taking the manager 161 develop your team. Grovo course, which is a manager course that's about 30 minutes long. And after taking a look at these resources that I have here for you Bruce Tuckman stages of team development which is in Wikipedia. It was a really good explanation as well as another infographic that we liked that's the tasks for each stage after you've taken a look at those define your current stage for your team. And we were adding a second a second request, not just a stage can be really long. It can be something you skip through really quickly. It can be something you say okay we're past that. But if you were in a stage like storming sometimes it can take a while to get past that. Norming is one of the longest stages. So what we've put in here is a progress bar. And we want to know whether you think you're at the beginning, the middle, or if you're ready to advance and move out of that current stage that you're in. So from one to three you'll list your progress here. And then if you would answer the four questions that we have under action plan. Once you define your stage and the progress we'd like to know what is holding you back from moving forward. What do you think is holding your team back. What steps should you take to move your team forward and if you're not sure then you can put here's what I think but I'm really not sure. I'd like to know if our environment encourages healthy team development and if you have suggestions. So if you think not then make suggestions as to what we can do to encourage team development more than we do today or what teams individually can do to encourage development. That's the homework assignment for our our first piece of curriculum, which is on team development. Again, this is Hayden. When we're talking about teams we're talking about our own teams that we manage or we're talking about cohort teams. Ah, great question. Excellent. Thank you. Your own team. So you're the team of people that you manage. Yep. Thank you. Perfect. That was excellent. I know I probably confused you with being on too many teams now you have all these team assignments. As I said that once you complete this exercise, we're going to create a bit of a summary to talk about on July 10 and you will all have access to each of the tabs. So you can, as I said, find people that have a similar progress rate as you do or you can take a look and find someone who's having a challenge and help them through that challenge with things that you've done that have been successful. That's the idea is to put put people together that can help each other move forward. So that is the essentially the time that I wanted to or the curriculum that we had prepared for today, because there are things that we want you to do and we want you to get together as your your cohorts. But I also wanted to leave plenty of time in this particular meeting for questions, thoughts and ideas. If you've had a chance, if you've been a part of another manager cohort in the past, if you've been a part of a manager or management development program leadership development program. Please feel free to give us feedback and thoughts and ideas. You just got the handbook update so you might want to take a look at what we have planned. As you can see, it's not all well flushed out like the next couple of weeks we wanted to get the first couple out of the way to see how it went and then we can roll from there. Well, let me open the floor and see if anybody has any conversation that will be helpful to us. Hey, Joan, thanks for that. I've got a general question. I assume it's relevant to other people in my group as well because most of the people in my group manage development teams. I think of a lot of the development teams as, you know, not really separate teams that work together but as groups of people who work with another team a lot of the time. So for instance, someone from my team might work with someone from Jacob's team or someone from Dower's team might work with someone from Tim's team. And they'll often do that more closely than the people who are reporting to the same manager as them. That's just the way we structure our work. So I was just wondering how we sort of define those stages in terms of a team that doesn't necessarily work alongside each other as much as other teams. That's an excellent question, Sean, and maybe not unique to GitLab and certainly not unique to engineering, right, when you work across teams. My suggestion is I'm looking for us to start within your team and to take a look at the group of people as to how they build out how they're functioning as a group within your team. And then we'll cross, we'll do cross-functional or cross-team development as well. Does that get you started or do we need to flesh this out a little bit further? Am I not? I think, I mean, as the H has added something as well, I think I might need to flesh that out a bit more. Maybe because I don't have the experience, but just because if I could pick pairs of people on my team who really don't work together that often at all, and if I'm trying to pick a rating for the team as a whole, it's kind of hard because how am I considering that as a group if they're not necessarily interacting with each other that closely day to day? That's a really, and I'm reading the chat that Hayden has said, yep, that might be the same for sales and that's an interesting dynamic to bring into play here. Let me think about it. I'll certainly open the floor for anybody who has any other thoughts or ideas. This is under development. I want to create the right exercises in the right environment, the right learning environment for GitLab. Honestly, I really didn't think of it that way. I didn't think of it as so much that the individual teams don't actually work together as much as they do outside or cross-functionally. Maybe we redesign and come up with a cross-functional exercise as well. Other thoughts or ideas on this? Yeah, maybe we can make it a bit more actionable. I've been thinking about a few things while we were talking here. So we could maybe go over, I just based some ideas in chat. So, Shawna, how to give good feedback, how to do a one-on-one, how to talk about promotions, how to organize meetings, how to give performance feedback, bonuses, assign people to projects, collaborate with other teams, identify underperformance, actions on underperformance, reward achievements. Would that be helpful to go more specific? I see some of those were mentioned sort of further down the chain in this series. But yeah, definitely those are the sort of things I'm looking to get out of this. Absolutely. And that's why if you do look at the agenda, those are all there. Those are all topics that we're going over. I think, Sean, are you speaking specifically about the first assignment, the team development assignment? Yeah, absolutely. So just for this team development assignment, I don't really think of my team as like, hey, let's all get together and work on something type team. Right. It's like, you go and work with this person, you go and work with this person and then I sort of check in on you and see how things are going. And maybe they work, you know, for instance, one of my teams working quite closely with Dower at the moment, because he's working on a project that's related to Dower's team. So Dower and I will sort of swap developers quite often for things like that as well. So let's say, yeah, no, no, this is great. This is perfect because this is again, we've created the, that's why I've created the management cohorts by experience so that people can share experience. With, with exactly the things that you've put in here, Sid, are all again covered. And those are our, you know, we can certainly move those up a little bit. But let me, maybe we redefine the, and it's not a definitive as to your direct reports. Maybe we look at this on a more holistic level. If you do not have a team of direct reports that works very tightly, so people ops, we work as a team. And I can probably do this exercise really well just for that, for that group of people. But in your case and in all of engineering and maybe it's better for sales. Maybe we look at this as at a higher level. How do you believe we as a team function? Where are we? And what can we do to continue? So this still, you can do this on any size. You can do this on the organization level. You don't have to have it on your direct reports. So I'd probably say this can be really valuable from both perspectives. Those people who work directly with their team and can actually apply the stage to your specific team do the exercise that way. If you want to look at this on a wider scale, there are certainly areas I believe. I don't know that I do not believe that we could all say, hey, we're as GitLab, we're in the performing stage. I think we could probably be a little more realistic and say as a team, I think we are storming and here's why. And that would be valuable. So as long as you're looking at this as a group of people that makes sense, you could call that team anything, any size group or any group of people that you wanted to define that as. The goal here is that we find out where we can make improvements and that we help you get the right resources or make the right decisions or we start programs that are specific to where our challenges are. Does that make more sense maybe? Yeah, assuming I've understood it correctly, you're saying that I could treat this as answering for the development team as a whole, even though only a section of the development team reports to me and then other people who also lead development teams could do the same. Absolutely. Or provide our own input on how we see the development team. Absolutely. Again, this is just a quick exercise. This is just one of the series of 10 meetings that we're going to go through. So we're not going to spend a lot of time on this. It's not the whole basis of the program. It's just one piece that we wanted to start out with so that we could begin to see where teams were maybe having trouble getting past that forming or that storming stage. So please take a look at it from your perspective. There's no law here that says you have to do it on your direct reports. Make it make sense to you if you want to get together as an engineering team. Feel free to do that. Take a few minutes and go through it if you want to put your own thoughts down and then we come back together. This is again going to be something that Abby and I refer to each manager. This is really for us to help you down the road. Does that make sense to everybody? That sounds great. Thanks, John. Yeah, I was going to say I had similar questions to Sean. So thanks for asking Sean. But I think what you're just saying, John makes all the sense, because for example, in the norming phase, it says begins to work to optimize team process. But in the development side of things, processes are more between teams than inside the team because as Sean said, people inside my team don't work together all that much. So this process is more so applies to, you know, collaboration between back end and front end, the build team, production team, etc. So I think that really helps. Awesome. So the way I'm hearing it then, whatever teams, let's see, let's say the back and front end work, you know, collaborate on things. Maybe this is about that team as a whole, right? And if you have concerns about we're really tripping over something, we're not able to really perform at the level that we want to. So that's what this is supposed to be about finding finding those areas of strength to share with the company and, you know, to help get other people past challenges or raising a flag and saying we're really having some challenges here. And if we don't raise the flag, we're probably going to end up with bigger problems down the road. So hopefully the investment on this is a couple of hours as far as thinking through it and filling out those questions and looking at the resources that we've given you. And feel free to reach, I know most of you meet with Abby on a bi-weekly basis. If you are going to have that meeting in between, she can also guide you. And if you're having challenges, nobody's going to make an announcement if, you know, you didn't answer a question. It's okay. You know, this is really for us. It's for our development. Hey, Joan, Lee here, just a quick question. Sure. On the team development stages spreadsheet, there's the current stage where you choose and then progress. I assume that means progress within that stage on a scale of one to three. Okay. Yep. Sorry, Lee. I had explained that and maybe some people arrived because it's gone pretty quickly. Yes. Define the stage that you believe that team of people that you're talking about is in and what progress one to three are they in that particular stage because the stage can be pretty long. It can be, you know, we can get over it quickly or we can hang out there for a while. Got it. Thanks. Perfect. Yeah. Other questions, other thoughts. Abby, I want to make sure that we check off all the boxes that that's it's brought up. I believe they're all in the agenda. If not, they're on our list of things to talk about. But we'll make sure that we incorporate all of these things because again, the idea of this this time together is that we give you valuable information, give you some exercises, and we begin an interactive process across the multiple experience levels that we have and the very valuable experience that many of you bring to the table. If no further questions, then we'll get together the week of that. Oh, no, sorry, can't let you go yet. I said I would ask you. This is the best time I could find you know that that kind of 1230 to 130 I can do 12 to one to to fit the global team. We've taken 11 and 1130 with the fgs and the team call. So I was trying to find the next possible decent time for the gamut that we have is there. I don't want to ask, you know, everybody to concede all the time and have to be you know with their dinner hour. What else can we do. Are we okay with with approximately the 1212 30. I'm sorry, I'm using Eastern standard. So the the nine nine 30 PST the later afternoon 5530 on the may aside. Are we okay running with that since it's middle of the of the road for a little while and we can catch up with the recordings. I'm also. Oh, go ahead. Sorry, and I just put in a suggestion. Time wise, it's good for me. But for me personally Tuesdays would be better because Mondays I do one to one with my team. I think Marin's also said the same thing. Let me ask the question I could make it a little earlier it looks like on Fridays because Fridays we don't have the fgs and the team call. Would anybody be interested in maybe a little bit earlier time on a Friday. I know for some it'll be the end of your day on a Friday and do you want to spend you know am I holding you up from from closing out your week talking about the exciting topics of management. Okay. All right, Dowell likes really really likes is no meeting zone Fridays. No problem. All right, well then I'm going to go for for well I was I was headed for the 10th. But I can certainly look around. I don't expect everybody to be able to make it and that's okay that's why we're going to record I hope you can make it to as many as you can. Well, we'll start from there and if we need to tweak it we certainly can I was going to plan like two or three out so you had them on your calendar because I know summers get really busy. Maybe maybe like idea is because it seems that it will be hard for everyone to find a slot so maybe this time should be rotating that last week is on Tuesday next week is I don't know on first day or the other way just to try to balance. I am that's a great idea come here I like that I won't I won't do Fridays. All right, I've got I got the general consensus that nobody wants it on a Friday I'm also that's fine by me I just that was the only other time I found. Okay, well let me look around. I'll take the most for the for the week of the 10th I'll take the most available I'll find the most available and then we'll maybe rotate from there and again catch up in the recordings. Please feel free to invite Abby or I to any of your cohort meetings where you want to have a few minutes of our time. Feel free to create a cross cohort meeting. That's the ideas that we're putting resources together so this is kind of an open invitation to share information. And we'll see you the week of the 10th. Thanks a bunch. Thanks John.