 Okay, dope. Hello and welcome to Decode and Reload, Personality Gaps in the Workplace. We are the last session of the day here, so thank you for showing up. We will try to not go over time and further lengthen your day. Okay, I am Shama Cabe. I am the CTO at Acromedia. And also Commerce Guys, we bought them. Part of them, it's very confusing that it has no relevance to this presentation. I've been a contributor to Drupal for almost 10 years now, getting a lot more into contrib as of late, but we've been working on it for quite a long time. I've also been a team leader for about six years. I started as a junior dev and I worked my way all the way up to leading a team, leading a group of teams and then up to CTO now. A little bit about me, I actually don't mind public speaking. I actually quite like public speaking. I just don't really like people, or speaking to them. So if I could speak to a panel of robots, that would actually be lovely. But I'll do my best here. Oh yeah, and a little bit else. This was helpfully written by one of my coworkers. They're apparently, I tend to cut people off mid-sentence when they're wrong and tell them they're right, which wouldn't be a problem if they were right sooner. Josh, who's speaking with me, would introduce himself now. Okay, I'm Josh. I'm gonna push that, just sorry for that. Okay. Josh Miller, senior developer, team lead of Acromedia, Commerce Guys North America. I've been contributing to Drupal since Drupal 6 for about eight years. I've been doing that. I'm new to team leadership. So leadership tends to kind of amplify some of the issues that we're talking about in this presentation. So that as I was going through that process about three, four months ago, and I was trying to get my guys to get some energy and that kind of thing, I just saw a bunch of my own flaws reflected back at me. And so being new to team leadership is partly why I suggested to Sean we do this presentation. Also, I really don't like it when things are quiet. Somehow along the way, I started attributing the fact that you guys are quiet. If I'm in a conversation with you and there's silence, I immediately start thinking you hate me or you hate what I'm talking about or something to that effect. So presentations are great for me because I can just fill the silence. I'm always friendly to your face. This is again, written by a coworker of mine. I'm friendly to your face, but I'm very direct. That's a nice way of putting it. I come off as mean and bullish when I'm behind the keyboard. So that's something a little bit about me. What this talk is about is decoding, basically trying to understand what we use at Acromedia and our place of business to help everyone understand each other and help ourselves understand the kinds of things that are going on in our minds. It's very hard to get a third person perspective. It's very hard to create a culture where we're all talking about how we feel, especially for some people and other people, it's really hard to get them to be quiet about how they feel. And that's kind of the whole point is to try to understand where everyone falls on a spectrum. And then we're gonna go over reloading, which is where Sean and I will bear our souls, hopefully to your amusement and also a little bit of education for everyone involved. Show you kind of what kind of issues we deal with and what kind of issues or what kind of ways we constructively deal with them. So a big part of the part of decoding is communication. You've probably found yourself ever since you could talk, trying to send messages and hoping for reception. One of the best communication examples I can remember learning in college was just a really simple diagram where a message is only a message if a person sends it and there was an arrow pointing to another person and then that person receives it and tells that other person that they've received it. If there's no communication on the other end of the piece of that, then it's completely failed. And so communication is a big part of why we're talking about decoding. It's not necessarily what we're going to use to decode what you're doing, but we're definitely, what we're trying to do is smooth out, I think our goal is to smooth out all communications, not just along internal lines with people you work, not just with your family, though that's actually really important too, but with clients and customers and even helping our clients understand their customers. It just has these bigger ramifications as you start talking about the various communication pieces. So the first step in decoding is to profile. That evil, ugly word that you're not supposed to do to people. Let's do that. And then we're going to go into an annual assessment and then we talk about setting goals and that little black arrow talks about coming right back around and doing that annual assessment, thus it's every year. So we're going to jump into profiling. One of the tools, this is one that we do to profile, is a process called disk and really, really small text. We're sourcing this from Taking Flight by Merrick Rosenberg and Daniel Silver. A lot of these ideas are not ours in this presentation. They're just ideas that we use that work really, really well for us. Some people will go straight to the profiling that has the like, oh man, I'm trying to remember what it's called now because I had it in my speaker notes, that's the problem. That's it, Myers-Briggs, thank you Becky. See, she's going to be there for us. Becky is probably partially influencing because she spoke up to us. She was comfortable speaking in front of a crowd, possibly dominating because she wanted to control the control of the talk, but everyone falls into one of these corners, according to the disk profiling method. You don't necessarily fall directly into a quadrant. You fall somewhere either between two of them or really in the corner of one of them. I myself, after going through a disk profiling method, I found myself, I was an I. I thought I was an S or a C, a support or a caution, but I'm an I. D stands for dominance, which accomplishes results. The bottom line, they really want confidence. I is influencing, openness, relationships. A lot of people that I think that our eyes don't know their eyes. They think they're something else, that's my opinion. S is for support, which focuses on cooperation, sincerity, and dependability, and C is for caution, quality, and accuracy, expertise, and competency. If you're interested in what letter you are, there are free disk profiling tools. All you have to do is Google it, and there's a couple there, and those results. Your results may vary, but it's just interesting how just trying to set some sort of standard by which you're measuring yourself so that you can see progression as you're going through there, because you don't really know what you are until you have some sort of measurement in place. So the big piece to profiling, and the thing that we use this disk profile to do is to really take a long look at who we are. And I went through that disk profile process at AcroMedia about eight or nine months ago. And I read through it, I was interested in it, and then I just kind of set it down and didn't think about it. And then about four months later, I moved into more of a leadership role, and I found, like I said at the very beginning, I found that all of these issues that my eye influencer profile said I struggled with in communication and some of the things I worked through started getting reflected back to me and my team members, and they aren't eyes. And I think part of it is people are seeing kind of how you work in a shop, and the kind of workflow that you're going through, and they respond to that. So I recommend, if you're really interested in profiling yourself, try to get yourself into some sort of leadership, and it can be a small process or a big process, but that can typically help with understanding who you are. Also just knowing yourself is not the goal. You're never gonna know everything about yourself. It's a constantly changing thing. Obviously what you're learning now is going to influence how you're gonna react later. So the trick is really just being able to list a couple of your personality flaws at a moment's notice, being aware of what it is that you're struggling through. And even this morning, Sean and I were trying to, trying to really dig deep and make sure we had the personality flaws that were gonna be useful to share to you, and it's hard to do. It's just hard to do. We're not there yet. I'm not there yet. And knowing myself is really at least a third of the battle. So that's profiling, and we can talk a little bit more about that in the Q and A section, and we can talk, and if you guys have other tools that you guys are interested in hearing about them, next we're gonna talk about annual assessments. First of all, I just wanna touch on, Josh was describing that circle of communication. That's TCP is actually the protocol that we're using there. It's not a UDP election. Come on, that was funny. Programmer, Joe, come on, okay? There. Okay, we're gonna talk about the BAT triangle. The robots would have laughed at that, by the way. So, which is three parts to your behavior, and it's dealing with them in different ways without trying to reflect poorly on yourself too much and segment what you can do to improve. The first thing is behavior, and so that is actually what you do. So that's your actions, whether you check in with people, whether you follow up, whether you meet deadlines and stuff like that. That's the actions that you do. It's not necessarily how you do or what you do, it's that you do them. Next one is technique. So that would be the how you do them. So behavior is you go in, you write comments in your code. You actually do that. You do proper formatting. Those are tasks that you can do. Technique, then, is that you're a good programmer, and you can program something that is logical and well-written. And the third one being attitude, and that's the one that can even be the hardest and probably what we're gonna focus on the most here, because that's just kind of you. That's your personality, and so that's what happens when you do those things. Are you snarky? Are you helpful? Are you calm? Are you nurturing anything that can split around and affect those other two? And sometimes we mix those all together and you think if you have good technique and you do your behaviors, your attitude doesn't matter or something like that, and all three of them actually matter. This mic is terrible. Okay, so we're gonna get into them in a little more detail here, which is mostly what I described here. Behavior, the actions or reactions of someone under specific circumstances. So like I said, what you do. Someone tells you to do something. Do you tell them to go away? Do you do it? Do you tell them you can do it later? It's actually what you do. So here, like we see, prepares and organizes for a client meeting. That's an action you can do. Attitude, your outlook on that. So even like I said in that example, if someone comes up and asks you to do something and it's how you respond to them. If you say piss off, I don't wanna do that. Or if you say I'm sorry, I'm busy right now, different things like that. So yeah, like it says here, that's take ownership or blame others. That kind of stuff can be attitude. And thirdly technique, which is the actual work strategies, tactics, personal presence. So that's what you use. I talked about it in a bit of a programming example because lots of us are programmers, but also in what you use. Do you ask people questions? Do you just tell them what to do, the actual strategies you're using when you're talking and you're doing management? So that's why they say like win-win scenarios and stuff. A win-win scenario is only so-so because if I'm right, then we'll just go with that one. But sorry, I'm trying to give you a clear view of my personality in case that wasn't obvious. Okay, next thing is how to set goals. We've also put some memes in here for some cheap laughs. So enjoy those. Employee Development Plan, which is what Josh was talking about going through since he joined our company. It's actually a newer thing we've been doing, which we try to go through at least once a year and then follow up on at least quarterly, which says, hey, what are you good at? What are you bad at? And what can you improve on? And actually having usually a couple goals, we usually only do about two or three, giving someone 10 things to work on. They will do none of them because it's too hard. So it's only a couple of things. And those can be really varied. They can be technical things, but oftentimes they can be, hey, you're working with your team, but they find you really boss them around a ton and they wish you would help them a little more. So what are some things that we're gonna do to work on in that where you can still, I mean, obviously you're a leader and sometimes you have to boss them around, but how can they buy into that a little more or how can they feel that you're helping them versus just making them do tasks that they can't accomplish? And then it's actually following up to make sure, okay, did you achieve that goal? Did you do the behaviors that you were supposed to do? Were you nice to them? Or did you ask them if they needed assistance? Were you nice when you asked them? When you were training them, did you actually train them efficiently? It's all that stuff we talked about before. And then if you didn't, why not? What was the problem? What can we do? And then you just continue to iterate on that and you basically loop that over and over and over until you're a perfect specimen of a human being. Okay, that was sort of our initial overview of what we are going to talk about or of what our presentation is and then we're gonna deal with some sort of personal stories from Josh and I of what that is. So I think Josh is gonna go first here. I am. Oh, this feels really weird because normally I'm up here talking about something other than me and that feels, I don't know. I didn't expect to feel kind of weird about that but I guess I do. So my story is I've been a developer since, I think it was in middle school where I started using Paint, like a pixel-oriented program to create interfaces for various hypercards. Does anybody remember hypercards? So I've identified with computers pretty much my whole life and I think I've done that partially because they're a lot easier to deal with than people. And up until about a year ago, I didn't really realize why I had so much trouble communicating with people because I have a really friendly personality and I think I've developed that over the years because I tend to come off in almost every other circumstance as exactly the opposite of that. One of the key points that came up in my annual assessment this year was that I'm aggressive and I found that really enlightening and strange and like I'm not aggressive, I'm roll with the punches guy, come on, that's what I do. But I get really aggressive when you or me or all of us are unprepared and I apparently lash out and I can think of dozens of examples, literally. It's funny, when you know it's right, it's when all these light bulbs pop up in your head and when I'm confronted with unpreparedness, I lash out and I become very unpredictable. So like the worst thing you can do to me is throw me in a client meeting that I didn't know about. I'll try to save face, but I will be extremely upset at the end of it. So that's no good. You couple that with my second one, which is non-confrontation or passive aggressiveness is the more common way of putting it. I will, at the cost of honesty, of efficiency, self-deprecation. I want everyone to be happy. I want everyone to get along. I am, I don't know if you've ever heard of it before, I'm the synovial fluids. That's the stuff that are in your joints that keep your joints from hurting. That's the stuff you lose as you get older. Which means I over-promise and under-deliver to a fault. And you can clearly see how that's probably not a good quality to have. It's also hard for me to admit it because I often will try to do the opposite. I'm a people pleaser. I want to feel connected and we'll choose, okay, yeah. I want to, I would much rather talk to someone specifically than do my tasks. And that was something about my personality profile, the disc profile about influencers. They like relationships. I didn't know I liked relationships. I would have never said that about myself. But when I took a moment and actually defined myself against some set standard, those things kind of came out. And I was surprised by that, but it has helped me recently and we'll get into that. Finally, one gap I have is being blunt. And I take all of that friendly personality that I've developed my whole life and I completely remove it and become angry Josh when I'm on Mattermost or Slack or IRC or email. And basically anything where I'm typing, I become matter of fact and in your face. And I have apparently no concept of how people would take what I'm saying to them. So I can call out various coworkers for being silly or I think kind of unprepared for something and not think anything of it. And then I hear later that I've really hurt someone. And that's very surprising to me because if I had done it to your face, you would have loved it. But if I put it in an email, you don't like that. So how I address my gaps. So that's kind of the issues I deal with and that's an ever-evolving list. My technique currently through lots of introspection is that I try to make people, I try to take my biggest strength and I try to put you guys first. I try to put people in front of me and I also, it's very hard for me to do this, but I try to understand my emotions and dial them back when I'm on the phone and dial them up when I'm on email or in chat communication to make sure you feel like one word that a lot of my coworkers use is soften. I try to soften the blow by asking you about your day and then telling you that this meeting is kind of pointless and then saying, thank you for your time. Yeah, so that's the technique. I'm trying to perfect, it's going well but it definitely takes a lot of effort. Following kind of the three steps that we talked about at first, I do try to consistently, I found this to be actually kind of hard to collect feedback. I actually send emails or right before I send an email and I'll tell the rest of the story later, but right before I send an email, I'll ask for feedback before I send it from someone that knows that I struggle with like softening the blow and that can be really enlightening. I try to create an action plan. Whoever put mostly outside on my slide here, you're crazy. I stay inside all the time outside of the office. Oh, okay, I guess I'm a remote worker so maybe that's what. Action one, I pick up the phone and I stay off, I am an email. I actually hate talking on the phone, which is funny because I'm really cordial when I'm on the phone, but my coworkers and everybody else really benefits when I'm in a meeting and I'm actually talking to them. It's a much different Josh than when I'm on Mattermost and telling you what needs to happen or asking about how things are going. I have to admit to myself that I favor a hyper detailed timeline, which means all the project managers that deal with me, I try to get them to give me the agenda ahead of time and make sure that the meetings have purpose and understanding and they send me back all the call notes and that kind of thing and that just really smooths out the process for me. It actually mellows out my emotional state too, which is very helpful for me. And three, I'm really terrible at this. I try to ask for help. Not always, but I do try. And of course, you just start over. You start over and you open yourself to feedback. It gets easier every time you do that, but it's not always the easiest thing to do. So given that I'm standing in front of you here having done this and tried to be open to feedback, I just want to tell you a story. So I was told on two occasions where comments of mine were considered bullying and I was bullied as a kid and in school, at home, all kinds of people were bullying me. I felt like I was bullied a lot and I think I've picked up some of those personality traits without ever trying. So if somebody told me I was bullying, I was just dumb fat. I didn't realize that I was gonna be bullied. Me, I don't wanna make anyone feel like that. So I apologized to the people that I thought I needed to. And as I mentioned earlier, when I feel like I'm about to bully someone, I'm starting to try to pay attention to that. I send an email to my supervisor, who's the person who had to point that out to me and I say, hey, this email that I'm writing right now is just mean, I know it's mean, I know it's terse and I don't know how to soften that blow. And I have at least three emails now where he has completely helped me rewrite that. And I'm starting to use those kind of as templates now to help communicate what needs to be communicated in a way that people will actually receive it as opposed to just immediately turn it off and say, well, you don't know what it's like to deal with angry Josh. So basically the email story is about the self realization that I can be a bully, accepting that I can be a bully and then trying to, as well as I can, change that aspect of my personality before it hits mainstream, before it gets sent to people. And now it's Sean's turn. I can't believe you guys laughed at the physiology joke and not at the programming joke, okay? Like, what type of conference is this? Okay, so my story is, mine's gonna be a little bit more extreme too. I have a fairly abrasive personality, so we have a number of points here, some of which my coworkers have hopefully contributed. I have no empathy. We did a empathy test, or like we did a big personality test at work. I scored zero. That's borderline impossible. So... Care and Sean, we have no empathy problem. Oh, well, remember when my problem was interrupting people, Josh? And, like we said, no empathy. I really just wanna get things done. How you feel isn't important to that. What you do is important to me, that you get it done and that you get it done correctly. If that bothers you, I don't care. We're working on that. I care a little bit now, but most work, like if anyone, I'm the CTO at Acre, like I said. So I'm sort of the big dog in the production department. And so if anyone does any work, I care if they do it badly. If they do it well, well, that's just fine. That's what we pay them for, is to do it well. So I'm not very good at giving compliments for that. It's like you did an acceptable job. That was okay, even if it was really great or whatever, because I expect them to do it really great all the time. So anything that's not that is not acceptable. So I actually am pretty one-sided on the emotional spectrum, or at least I was a few years ago. I can do anger, I can do disappointment. I can't really do sadness or empathy. And that's actually pretty serious, and that affects me a lot in the work that I do, and in dealing with others, because that really means that I don't have any empathy for anyone I don't. And I don't mean that in a good way, like I'm immune to sadness or something like that. I mean that in a way that your grandfather dies and you don't feel anything. It actually kind of sucks. I'm working on that, I'm getting better. But it really makes me only have half of the emotional spectrum for people. So if someone is angry with someone, I can empathize with them and I can also be angry. Which people need, you know, you want lots of people to be angry with you, like if you're forming a mob or something. It's less useful in the workplace. And one last little thing that sort of explains why I'm weird, I guess, is I don't understand why people take pictures or keep pictures of things. They serve no purpose to me. You need to remember something that you did before, I guess, I don't know. This makes people really upset, by the way. Not understanding pictures is like, I don't know, it's like liking dessert or it's things that make you like a subhuman monster. So I just, we'll go with that and I'll touch on that a little bit more. But I don't think it's a big deal, but it really weirds the hell out of people. So my wife, thankfully, isn't that way, so our house is like covered with pictures, but they're all put up by her. I have one picture frame in my office and it has the stock picture that came with it in it still. I think it's of a bear, and it's just meant to be a novelty photo, but it means a lot to me. A little bit to end this off is, this oftentimes can come off, even worse than it already sounds, of programmers can oftentimes be really bad in they have to be right, and they have to get in arguments with that and they have huge egos and being right is more important than sort of being correct and people have to know that you were right and know that you were smart. That's not too much of a thing for me, but I have to make sure that we are doing the correct thing and that is very important to me. And so that oftentimes comes off as kind of the same thing because if you're doing something wrong, I have to sort of burst in and tell you that it's wrong and then here's another way we could do it. And I'm not very good at doing that in a nurturing way and more in a way that somehow conveys the message that you're the dumbest person I've ever met and why would you ever think this idea? So you guys are all very smart though. Yeah, so how I address my gaps is mostly with some hippie bullshit that is mostly how I term it. So we debated on using the word bullshit here, but we're gonna go with it. So the first thing is, is I am really terrible at knowing this about myself, but I think I'm just being straightforward and just telling people some useful feedback and they take it very, try to control yourself, Becky, please. That was useful feedback right there. And I don't necessarily know when I'm being blunt, I think I'm just new and normal. And they're gonna be like, Sean was a huge dick to me. And it was like, well, sorry. So, but I can at least be told that by others and I can take that as feedback. And so I try to work on that a lot. One of the things I actually do is I've been through cognitive behavioral therapy for a while and that has to do with a lot. I actually, because I'm not good at the other half of the emotions, I build that up into anxiety and just generally being mean to other people and stuff like that. And so that has actually been immensely helpful. I know it sounds therapy, kind of wishy-washy. It's very science-y, it's very fact-based. It has like really clear action steps. It's actually really awesome. So I would, if you struggle with any of that, I also have actually social anxiety, which I'm medicated for. And so that's why I do that as well. So I just thought I'd add that out there that I'm, it's also like chemical science in my brain helping me right now. So the second thing I do is I use checklists. So these are gonna sound a little lame, but I have checklists like make sure to compliment one person a day and things like that and try to make the compliments be sincere. You can tell if I'm not sincerely complimenting you, I can't really lie. So it sounds like, oh, that was great. Or things like that, so, which people can read as not a compliment. So do those. I try to make sure to check in with people. Ask questions I don't care about, like how was their day or how was their weekend? Or what did they do? And I'm actually getting better at it. I actually kind of do care about those things now that I'm getting better into the empathy thing. The empathy thing as if it was like a fad or something. We'll keep on time. I'm a rambler too, so I will attempt to move quickly here. And then questioning, asking, oh, are you having a problem with something? Are you being stressed out by something and try to ask questions? I just tend to tell people solutions. It's like, oh, you're feeling bad. You should feel less bad, or you should stop doing that. So asking, working on that. Actually, step three, I actually do yoga. Not for the fitness part of it, but for the keep my brain organized part of it, which helps a lot. And again, like I said, it's a little hippie-ish, but it works pretty well. And the fourth thing is I actually was supposed to watch, I have to watch lots of sad movies, so that I can feel that other half of the emotional spectrum, which actually works pretty well. Although you have to watch a bunch of them, you just sort of brute force yourself into feeling sad, which is a highly unpleasant experience, but it works all right. If you've ever watched the movie Marley and Me, I don't feel emotion towards humans very well, but I do lots of dog fostering and stuff like that, so I'm better with dogs. That movie is immensely sad, and so I got that. I'm working on feeling sadness for humans, too. We'll get there. So I'm glad we have a dog in the audience, at least to make me feel better, so. And then, like Josh said, you just have to do this over and over and over again. I've been working on it for at least a few years now. All my coworkers say it's a lot better, so we'll see, we'll go into outcomes here. Self-evaluated outcome. So this is a bit of a metaphor that comes from therapy, but I basically have more capacity, so I have a lot more bandwidth to be understanding of people and be calm and be mentoring and stuff because things don't stress me out because I can sort of let them go, kind of thing, in a good sort of way. Instead of keeping it all in and not having that, I can experience those things, and then they don't bother me anymore. And that my social anxiety is also pretty much under control, as you can see by the fact that I am speaking in front of all of you, and I had another talk earlier, and I have actually done many talks. So, but the pictures thing is still out, so we're gonna wait on that, but maybe it'll come round or whatever. I'll probably keep the bear still, but maybe I'll get some other photos. Leadership. So I have moved up the old leadership tree. You know, like I said, I started as a junior programmer, I've moved all the way up to CTO, and our company's also gotten a lot bigger in that time. And that was important because I'm a really good programmer, so that part of it was fine, but you know, there's only certain levels that you can go up when you're a really good programmer and people find you immensely unpleasant to deal with. So that has allowed me to be much better in my role. You know, people would actually come to me, treat me as a mentor. There's still work to be done there, obviously, but I'm doing a lot better in that sense, and it has really helped my career and to do things like public speaking, like I'm doing right here. Yeah, when I get lots of work, I do multiple mentorings for the local college and the university. I do speaking things for them. I've spoken at other conferences and stuff, so I get quite a lot of that stuff. And then yeah, I've been moving into, you know, being a community leader and working more. We work on Drupal commerce a lot, so moving into that space and being a core dev and stuff and helping mentor things along instead of just commuting patches. And then feedback is apparently I'm much more approachable now. I'm just a big fuzzy teddy bear now. No one has ever described me that way, actually. But and I'm just more calm. I'm easier to get along with, or easier to get along with. Let's not go too far here. I see my coworkers all like laughing at me, so anyways, Josh, you wanna, we're gonna wrap up the last little bit here. Yeah, sure. So I guess in summary is your team is only as good as you are. We tried really hard to come up with a good summary statement and I think in general, it's important to recognize who you are as a big part of the process of becoming a better person. Because if you can't set that line and keep continuing to come back to that line, you're not gonna see progression. You may progress and you may not even know you're progressing. You may be progressing in totally the wrong area too. Some of the outcomes you can try is, just consider doing a personality profile. Myers-Briggs, the disc profile, whatever is interesting to you, use that and use that as a tool. Follow up with a peer-assisted measuring stick. That's the BAT triangle that we were talking about. And when I say peer-assisted, we as a company, and Sean didn't really get into that, we use this BAT triangle, we have like 50 questions for the behavior, the attitude and the technique. And I fill it out and my supervisor fills it out for me. Which means, oh and I think a peer does that too. So our peers are asked to take a couple of those questions and identify certain trends. And as the whole company is being asked to measure someone else with the same stick that you're gonna be measured with later, that really helps kind of focus, especially new employees, but even employees that have been there for a long time on the behaviors and the attitudes and the techniques that are actually successful. And things that are favorable versus being angry about bare pictures. Creating realistic goals that address the weaknesses. When we check in in three months on your goals, it's not because we wanna see that you haven't met them, it's because we wanna celebrate with you when you have. And if you set goals that you can't ever reach, then you're never gonna get that experience that you're actually progressing. So it's not just important to set a goal, but set a goal that you can reach and check it off and set a new goal and that way you can keep moving forward. And finally, recognize where the gaps are. And I know it seems easy because we're up here talking about it, but talking about them openly is probably the hardest part and trying to get your coworkers to do the same probably starts with you trying it out first. So that's the talk. We would love to hear some reviews be as blunt and honest as you can because that's the only way we get better. We're taking questions and answers for the next, looks like 15 minutes or so. Hi, I'm curious how long, I mean, in the talk you talked about these as annual, but how long has this process been going on with your group? Like how long have you, Sean, been going through this that you've reached these improvements? We've actually only done this internally at Acro for a couple of years. So we've been doing it for probably about two and a half years. Now we rolled it out with some of our staff and then we moved it on to everyone and we've been doing it with everyone for about a year. Now it took us a bit to get the process down and figure out when to do follow-ups and how to get the best feedback from people and stuff. My stuff started a little earlier because I started a separate panic attacks. So mine comes before the Acro stuff, but that's sort of how we've been doing it within Acro. Question is for Sean. First of all, congratulations guys for doing an awesome presentation and thank you so much for opening yourselves. So Sean, you started off as a junior developer and you work your way up all the way to CTO. So you've definitely been doing a lot of things right. Do you think that for other younger developers who also aim to get to the same level as you, is there a specific personality that they have to, that can help them get there? I'm saying like, perhaps you were very matter-of-fact or very to the point. Do you think that some of that help you like accelerate in your career to become to the person you are now? Yeah, so the sort of matter-of-fact, the bluntness, I also am to be blunt or honest or bragging, really smart. So that helped a lot at the start. But then you start to kind of cap out on you can only get so far by being really smart because you can be really smart by yourself but you can't be really smart leading a group. Being really smart by yourself doesn't help them be better or whatever, so that's where I had to work on the personality stuff to understand, to mentor. It was things where even if I am really good at something people would be too nervous to actually ask me about it. So it's working on those personality things of being approachable, doing mentoring, having that kind of personality stuff to sort of compliment, like my bluntness hasn't gone away or any of that. So it's just getting the mesh of both. So you can do great one way but then you kind of cap out. You can even be like a really senior developer but if you want to lead a team, it doesn't really work. You'll burn your people out. Even if they like you and they sort of work for you, you'll stress them out, you won't get the best performance out of them. So does that sort of answer the question there? Yeah, so I'm hearing from you that it's best to maintain a balance. So definitely reading, educating yourself to be an expert on a subject and in addition to that being able to connect with people will work. Yeah, so don't just like be really good at programming. Like use that sort of knowledge and skill to read up about working with people. If you have personality flaws, they're very sciencey. You can just read up instructions of how to fix them basically. It's a lot more straightforward than you would imagine. So it's just don't neglect that part of the growth as well. Like you don't have to not be you or anything. You just have to have those pieces and everyone thinks so technical. Like if I'm just the best technical person, then I'll go rise right to the top and that won't work, so. Thank you. I'm really encouraged to hear the progress you guys are making. So one thing I found, and I've heard it from some others like offhand here and there. After a little bit of focusing on self development, it sort of becomes so meta that I'm just like constantly second guessing myself and I can't get any objectivity in how I'm growing anymore, right? So I'm wondering if you've heard that from anybody or if you've felt it yourself and how maybe you've dealt with it. I've personally found that the best reality check you can get is to get some of your closest friends or your closest coworkers or both to have them tell you your flaws. That's honestly, it's a big fat slap in the face sometimes. Sometimes it's not as bad as you think it is and you might be surprised by that too. Like maybe everyone really does like you for you but there's that one annoying thing you do. So I think it's the self realization that's hard that you're talking about and I guess my recommendation is try to get others involved in that and don't just do it on your own because that's what helps me the most. I'll just add into that a little bit. I am so crap at figuring it out myself that it is almost always like outside feedback loop that you just roll around in and I don't get too worried about what I'm doing in my own head or something like that. I just still be me and then I just get the feedback and then I think of little things I can improve but I used to stress about that quite a bit and you try to think, am I saying this right? Is this okay? Am I being too harsh? Am I not being too harsh? And after a while I sort of got over that a little bit and I mostly just be me and then all the other activities that I do and stuff like that. When I check in on people, I'm like, how am I doing? They're like, oh, it's way better and I don't, because I didn't sort of see the growth. I'm like, I'm like the same person or whatever and people are like, you're the completely, you're barely recognizable as like the same person from like, like I'm the same person. Obviously I have the same personality and stuff like that but it's the way I handle conversations and being calm and empathetic and stuff like that can be way better. So it's just all outside feedback. You can't measure yourself. It's like a quantum thing. You guys laughed at that science joke. All right, with that, I think we're done. Enjoy the rest of the con.