 Should we get started? Yeah, I think so. Let's do it. All right. Travis, what do you think about our word cloud? Oh, this has been a very exciting endeavor. Collaborative is number one, which we love. Supportive, yeah. But also interesting where it's siloed and dysfunctional. Yeah. So we've got a good mix. If you are in an environment that is super collaborative and supportive, you can think about the stuff that we're talking about today as things that you can implement in a team that's already primed to do that. And if you're in maybe one of these siloed ones or unclear expectations, then you might have to do a little bit more work. And that's OK. OK. All right, so welcome to Playing as a Team, Strategies for Better Communication. Hopefully you're all in the right room. My wonderful colleague here is Travis Portia. He and I work together at Palantir.net on the same team. And he is a front end developer and has been with us for just about a year, right? A year. Yeah. And my lovely co-presenter over here, Corey Neslund. Everybody say hi, Corey. Hi. And uh-huh, yeah. She is a senior project manager and just an all-around swell gal, been with the company Palantir.net for about two years. Yes. That is correct. All right, so why are we here? So have we ever been in a team environment where communication, even if it's every now and then, felt like it was a little lacking? Yeah, a couple of nods. OK, everyone's fine. OK, cool, great. What about if we felt like we weren't psychologically safe 100% of the time? Yeah? Or even most of the time. Yeah, maybe most of the time, or maybe right now. We'll see. Or what if you feel, this is a big one, especially for me sometimes, if you feel like you don't have agency over the work that you do. They're just kind of like pushing the bottle down the line. Yeah? OK, cool, great. So this is kind of, we've noticed some of these trends, and we decided to put together a couple of resources. So we're going to talk about four topics and four things that we can do to kind of alleviate some of these risks and some of these stressors. So we've come up with a four-level system that is built on psychological safety. Four-level pyramid, excuse me. But it's not a pyramid scheme. It's not. That's going to be the next room next door. So psychological safety is going to be the framework of kind of what we're talking about, OK? So we're going to define psychological safety. And they're going to hit the leader-leader mindset and what that means 14. They're going to move on to nonviolent communication. And then Corey is going to take us home with radical candor. So lots of fun stuff. We're going to have a couple of audience QA, a little bit more QR codes to scan. Haven't scanned enough already. Yeah, we're going to get those going for you, OK? Yeah, it's important to know that everything we're going to talk about today is going to layer on top of each other, right? So psychological safety is going to be the foundation. Everything's going to come after that. It's sort of a self-reinforcing system once you get going. So it's important to look at it from the bottom up. And we're going to show you that right now. But before we get into what the foundation of psychological safety is, here are some absolutely staggering numbers about why you should care about this in the first place and why you should try and take some of this with you back to your home teams, even if you're in a super supportive and collaborative environment. Efforts in these areas will yield results. So these percentages are from a lot of well-respected research institutions like Harvard and Betterup. And a lot of them are done with large-scale surveys. So if we do some of the stuff in here that we're going to talk about, so inclusive leadership, agency, decision-making, which Travis already talked about, we can see a 140% increase in team engagement. If you're a business leader, this one is killer for me. 50% decrease in employee turnover. So I'm sure plenty of us have had teams where people just keep leaving. So this is what we're going to talk about today. So we have our first audience polling question. And for folks who haven't grabbed a seat, if you want to, there's quite a few scattered around. So feel free to take this break to grab one if you'd like. Also, can you hear us OK? We're good. Beautiful. I'm going to give it about 10 more seconds. This is very exciting. I didn't realize how excited I was to watch this work. I know, right? It's like watching a race. It did? It did. OK, great. Just a couple more seconds. Wow, 55 participants. Love that. OK, this is really great. A lot of you are saying yes and probably. So that is excellent. You may have a considerable portion of the foundation for psychological safety already within your team. What is it? Psychological safety is the belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Essentially, what we're talking about here is can you go to work as your professional self and be comfortable? Can you have hard conversations? Can you get work done? Do you feel like when you talk to someone, they're acknowledging you? You can work through problems. Are you safe, essentially? So this has actually been a main topic of the team that Travis and I have been on for about a year and a half. And through our work, we have identified that there are five keys to psychological safety. These are different areas within the team that if you foster positive, healthy behaviors, you are going to ultimately get to a place of psychological safety. So let's go through that. Social connection is exactly what it sounds like. It's the time that you get to spend together. It's important to remember that boundaries are respected in this model. So whatever you're comfortable with at work is what people are sticking to and no one is pushing that. Ways of working. So these are your processes, the way that you actually interact with each other. What are your ceremonies? How do you talk to each other? If someone makes a mistake, do people say, oh, Bob, that was your fault? It's always Bob's fault. It's always Bob's fault. Is Bob here? Bob, it is not your fault, right? Not this time, not this time. Or is it more of like a team thing? Like, hey, what could we have done better? Facilitated growth. For the team members, are their goals, their aspirations for their career considered when they're working, I guess? Like, do they have access to professional development and opportunities that are what they want? Or someone pushing an agenda on them? Like, oh, well, you're a friend and developer, so we're only gonna pay for things if it's directly in that. And you're like, hey, I'd like to public speak at DrupalCon sometime, just like my friends, Cory and Travis, I would really like to take a course on that. Transferrity leadership. Pretty self-explanatory. Do you trust the people who are making leadership-level decisions? And do they treat you with respect? And then decision-making power. Do you have agency and decision-making power that is appropriate to your level of expertise in your day-to-day life? So someone who's been working in Drupal for 10 years probably doesn't need someone to tell you how to log on to Drupal, right? Like, that's not a thing that you need directions for. Five. When we foster all five, we inevitably get to a point of psychological safety. So maybe your next question is, well, what is my level of psychological safety? I have no idea where my team is sitting at right now. Well, lucky you. There is a seven-question assessment made by Amy Edmondson that's backed by years of research. She's the one who coined the term psychological safety in 1999. And she has set up a list of seven that test different parts of psychological safety. So it's important that you kind of just go with what the research says is the right questions to have. You can find the instructions here, but don't worry, at the end, we have a list of resources, so if you don't catch this now, it's gonna be on the list. And it's repeatable. So let's say you identify do you have an issue in a particular part of psychological safety? You guys implement a new process. You can test again in six months and see, hey, did that number go up? So here's our first example. Ooh, a play. Exciting. All right, Clark's team has had three members quit in the last six months. In exit interviews, HR was told that Clark is demanding and unsupported. When given the feedback, he says, well, John and Samantha don't have a problem with me. They just didn't want to be social. They never think they have the hour. And I shouldn't have to hold their hand. They were hard to figure it out. I don't wanna work for Clark. I don't know about you guys. He does not sound great. What could Clark have done differently? A lot, right? We see a lot of assumptions here. We don't know John and Samantha. Maybe they aren't actually okay with it. They just don't say anything. They don't have to worry about it. A lot of assumptions. Oh, I don't wanna be social. Oh, I shouldn't have to hold their hand. Well, that's great, man, it's been excellent. Okay, it's happened. So what could help? Well, Clark could have developed relationships with everyone. I know that sounds really basic and a lot of people are like, hey, of course you should have developed relationships with everyone. But I think sometimes we forget to go back to the basics. Are we covering the basics of having a healthy relationship with our teammate? So we could have not just said, well, John and Samantha are great. We could have had teams for ideas outside of happy hour. What happens if there are parents who cannot stay an extra hour? He's excluding them from either conscious or unconscious bias. We've got bias here. He needs to assess whether or not he has it. He probably does. And he could have taken frequently when two members took on new tasks or responsibilities. Management is obviously not just give someone the task and let them just let them figure it out. You need to give them some support. So if Clark had done is his situation would have had more trustworthy leadership and he would have fostered a better social connection with his team. That's what we want. So now we have our next polling question. Oh, yes, next question. Do you have ownership and decision-making power in your work? Give folks about 20 seconds. Yep. There goes that race again. Okay. A good majority. That's really good. Oh, I love this. We should just leave. Y'all don't need us. No. Yep. All right. So 12% say no. We're almost at the number. All right. Yeah. Sweet. All right. So it's awesome that the majority of folks in here feel like they have agency over the work that they do. But what if you don't? Or, you know, what happens if there's a moment that you feel that you need to express that you need a little bit more agency that you need to have a little bit more ownership of the work that you do. We've all been there. This is where the leader-leader mindset comes in. So do we need a different mindset? So in this topic, we're going to kind of juxtapose command and control versus leader-leader. So then command and control kind of work space is kind of what we're used to maybe before coming into tech, right? So progress relies on a person and their ability or somebody to delegate what the work is going to be, right? So I have a manager. He tells me what to do. He tells me how fast and when I need to get the thing done. This is great for manual labor. Again, the bottle factory that I've been working in, I guess. If all I need to do is screw the cap on the bottle and keep them moving until I hit my cold ad at five o'clock, this is great. It doesn't require a lot of cognitive thinking. Decision making is only at the top levels and enables a high output of product when tasks are repetitive. But as we all know, we work in tech. We are in some way in Drupal and we're here. So we need to use more of our cognitive brains. That's where the leader-leader mindset comes in. Progress relies on the team's collaborative skills and their ability to communicate. It's effective for cognitive work using our brains. Decision making occurs at every level, not just at the top, and then facilitates individual skill growth through practice, okay? So I'm getting better at my job. I'm having more agency in the work that I'm doing. I'm being able to contribute more. I'm able to think a little bit more. So, second play of the day. So James is a product owner. He expects strict obedience and rarely seeks input from his team. They feel stifled, limited, and unmotivated. James does the following. He assigns work without considering his team's strengths or preferences, dismisses any suggestion or idea that doesn't align with his own thinking, and rarely recognizes the contributions of his team. So imagine if you are working and we're building a model, or we have a sprint that we have to complete. And we're in a team of designers, developers, engineers. Is James's thought process conducive to collaboration and agency? No, we don't like James. We ain't trying to work for James, no. Also sorry, James. No, if James is here and Bob is here, I'm so sorry, this wasn't, we didn't know. What could James have done in this situation to foster more of a collaborative environment? James could instead have his teammates select the work that they would like to do based on the skill or desire for learning opportunity, which is the big one. We all come from different backgrounds. We work in a team where a couple of us are front-end developers, a couple of us are engineers. So we all have different skill sets that we bring to the table, and I personally am trying to expand that skill set. And I do that by the work that I pick up. I can't do that in the first iteration of James's scenario. Have brainstorming meetings to make space for others to share ideas, thereby embracing diversity and thinking. And he can recognize his team members contributing publicly and privately. I don't know, I love praise. Tell me I'm doing great, tell me I'm pretty, tell me whatever, just praise me. Because that motivates me, right? So this helps with decision-making, power, and new ways of working when it comes down to psychological safety. All right, next section. Does your team handle conflict and disagreements well? Uh-oh. Immediate verbal response. Oh, this might be good. Finally, an area where we can contribute. It's still positive. Yeah. All right, we like this. All right, 10 more seconds. Get your votes in. 67, 69, what? That's crazy. Love it, thank you for that. Okay, cool, all right. All right. So we've all been in situations that are a little sticky, right? We've all been in situations where we have to give feedback or we feel a certain type of way. Supervisor may have done something you didn't like, co-worker may not have contributed to a group project the way you feel that they should have. How do you handle these situations non-violently? Well, that's where non-violent communication comes in. The answer, don't be a jerk. Your words matter. So we're gonna do like we did before and kind of juxtapose violent communication versus non-violent communication. So I'm gonna like paint two pictures and Cori's gonna help me. So in the violent communication spectrum, a person is trying to give, didn't communicate using, you are statements. So, Cori? Oh no. You are lazy, you don't contribute and you have so much more you can improve on to make this team better. How do you think that makes Cori feel? Yeah, nah, she don't like that. So in a non-violent communicative way, I can express the same feelings by using I am statements and I feel statements. So sharing personal experience and needs and it's gonna inspire compassion and it's also internal, okay? I'm not judging Cori, I'm not judging her as a person. I'm simply labeling the situation and hopefully resolving it in an objective way. Here we go again. So Cori? Yes, Travis? I feel that in the last sprint, we didn't deliver in the time that we said we were gonna deliver. Can we collaborate on different ways to get the project going a little bit faster? Is there anything I can do to contribute? Can we, do you have any ideas? How do you feel about that? Great. Yeah? Yay. And then me and Cori a little bit closer. That's the difference between these two. Yep. So in that sense, even the way you phrase, I can be, I can have the exact same feelings. I can be saying the exact same thing. I'm just phrasing things in a different, more psychologically safe way, which brings us to- No, I don't want that. The clicker. What are you gonna say for me? I don't need a second microphone. I'm loud enough. I didn't need this one. Okay, Cori. Violent communication. I feel. Okay, so now we're at the top of the pyramid. We are talking about radical candor. Some people may already be familiar with this concept. We'll get into it if you're not. But this is around giving praise and giving criticism and how to do that in a way that doesn't cause additional harm to the person. It's okay to feel bad when you get criticism, right? But we're not trying to stick the knife in, okay? So radical candor is basically, welcome to fifth grade math, I guess. It's a quadrant system with an x, y-axis. On the y-axis, we have care personally. So do I care personally about you? This doesn't mean that we're best friends. This doesn't mean that I wanna go to your birthday party. I mean, I might, because I like birthday parties. But it's about, do I care about Travis as well-being? Do I care about him as a member of my team? Or not? And then on the x-axis, we have challenge directly. So do I talk to Travis directly or do I talk not at him? Maybe to other people or not at all? So depending on where we are, this is a model of per se where does our behavior sit? This is not a label for people. You are not a radically candid person. You're not an obnoxiously aggressive person. The behavior that you're doing falls here. Somewhere in here, depending on where you fall in the x-axis. So what are they? Radical candor is being kind, clear, direct and sincere, okay? The best kind of communication. Ruinous empathy, right here, is where you care personally about someone, but you're not willing to challenge them directly. The most common example of where we see this is like you are work friends and you're afraid that if you say something, they're gonna be mad at you. So you don't wanna share it because you don't wanna damage that relationship. But the person is not getting the information that they need. Exactly. On the diagonal from here is a noxious aggression. If you've ever heard someone say, I'm not mean, I'm just being honest, they are probably right here. You said that this morning. I did. That's a joke, that's a joke. So this is the person who's challenging directly. They're gonna say directly to you like, hey, I don't like what you're doing or whatever. But they don't care about the impact of their words. So their words are gonna be probably meaner, partial than they should be. What's interesting is that most people would prefer to have this than this. And the reason is that they got the information. They actually got the feedback. They were told the thing that they needed to improve on, even though it was done in a fruitful way. It doesn't even wanna be here. It's just challenging directly is really important. And if we don't do either of these, we don't care and we don't challenge directly. We're in minute 11, 13, 30. This is, I say nothing because I get a benefit if you fail. This is backend gossip. So if you have a team where there's a lot of DMs going around in the background, some things are getting panning, that's manipulated with the theory. Let's do this by me testing it out on Travis. He's just gonna do the fun part. Here come the faces. Oh, not yet. Next slide. So almost, almost. So Corey, me, a senior engineer, and Travis, him, a junior engineer, are on the same project team. Team members have noticed that Travis is not commenting his code. They are frustrated and frequently bad channel about it. Corey here, me, about this problem during a round of QI. There are the faces. So there's the faces. And here everyone has empathy. Oh, Travis, you're doing such a good job. Like, no, you don't need to change anything. Like, I just love working with you. It's so great. You just bring so much awesome stuff to our team. And yeah, you have, you're great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Was that awful to Travis at all? No. Okay, minute 11 sincerity. It looks like this. And sing. If you don't comment your code, I swear I'm gonna come over there and make you do it. And we work remotely, so I can't go anywhere. But you get the point. Radical candor. Hey, Travis. Hi, Corey. So I got some feedback from the teams saying that in this last round of QA, there weren't any comments on the code. I was wondering if you wanted to set up a meeting with me for maybe like 30 minutes where we could go over our code commenting standards and I could talk to you about like why it's so important that we do that. Because you didn't do it this time, it's making it a lot harder for the folks to do QA. So I just wanted to let you know. Thank you, Corey, for speaking to me non-violently. See what we did there? We tied it together. We all tied it together. At least within psychological safety. And obviously that last one was the helpful one, right? I cared about him. I cared about how he was gonna receive the information. I told him what the problem was and what the consequences of that issue is. Like why am I talking to you about this in the first place? And it may take you a hot minute to figure that out and that's okay. You're not always gonna be in radical candor and that's okay, we're all humans. We're trying to aim for this, right? But everybody's gonna be everywhere sometime. So just accept it and kind of like do your best. The last bit that we wanted to talk about from a serious nature around the concepts that we're talking about today, which maybe some of you, it's not too much of an issue. There are risks to doing any of these things where you are trying to be truthful to someone who has structural power. If you have a manager or leadership is not receptive to maybe hearing criticism, if you don't have any structural power, any protection, that's gonna be risky for you. So if you do have structural power, you wanna keep that in mind. If you're a team leader, you're a business leader or whatever leadership position you hold, understand it when someone comes to you and they don't have that protection. You need to treat that with a lot of respect. And then I think Travis just talked about that. So this is definitely a risk for marginalized groups. So persons of color, LGBTQIA, women, folks with disabilities, seeking psychological safety, like Corey said, speaking up may feel different in a work environment where you are marginalized. So how do we remediate this? Well, it's really up to folks who are in power in the power structure to acknowledge that these risks exist, period, okay? That discrimination exists, racism exists, sexism, homophobia, all the things. And acknowledging that and then educating the team, fostering an environment of inclusion and diversity, et cetera. That in itself is a huge, huge, huge important start to fostering psychological safety and diversity for everybody in the work group. Because if I'm doing well, the group is doing well, correct? Yeah. That is my soapbox. Check your bias. Check the bias. That's the byline. Okay, so how do you start? And Travis, I have a great question. How do you start if you don't hold a formal leadership role? So if I don't hold a formal leadership role, if I am just entry level, day one, what can I do to foster psychological safety and implement any of the four tiers that we talked about? Well, first, assess your team is actually safe. Can I get feedback? Can I get feedback? Is there a collaboration? Do I have resources? Get knowledgeable. You're here, so number two is a given. There's so many resources. You'll see those at the end of our presentation. So many books, podcasts on how to foster psychological safety in the work environment. Try it out. Talk to folk. Ask people questions. Hey, how does this make, when XYZ said this to you, how does this make you feel? What do you think if I implemented feedback loops? Things of that nature, but always, always talk to people around you. And then aim for continuous improvement. You'll be surprised at even just communicating risks and communicating ways you wanna be psychologically safe makes work just that much better and that much safer. All right, what if you do hold a formal leadership role? Okay, so there is more of responsibility on you. Period and a sentence. It's your job to drive this forward, to at least start it, especially if the environment needs you to start it. Step one, assess the level of psychological safety. I talked about that seven question assessment. Put that out there. Administrate it the way that the instructions say so that it's anonymous so that people feel willing to answer it. It's very short. It's not a huge deal. Next is step two. This is your I'm trustworthy phase. So you're gonna start that with asking for feedback. You are going to go out to people and say, hey, what am I doing well? What am I not doing well? How can I change? And when you hear actionable feedback that is legitimate, you must do something about it. Don't go ask for feedback. Hear legitimate things and then do nothing because you will make it worse. It is better to not ask for feedback at all than to ask for feedback and then not action on it. But this is really important. You may not be aware of where your blind spots are, which is normal and that's okay. Once you've asked for feedback and you've actioned on it publicly so people know you can say like, for example me, hey, Corey, you talk a lot. Yes, I do. That's accurate. That was me yesterday. Yes, it was several times. Yep. If he says that, right, and then I do nothing about it, there's a problem, but if he says that and then I say, hey, in this next meeting, I am only going to talk maximum for five minutes. If I go over that, I would like you to stop me. I'm telling you, I want to be held accountable to that standard that I'm agreeing to. So we've done that. Now we can do separate sharing, praise and criticism. You want to start with praise. So now you have assessed the psychological safety of the environment. You have asked for feedback. You're starting to mark yourself as trustworthy. And now you're like, hey, I'm going to give you kind, clear, direct, and sincere praise. Don't just say, hey, Travis, you're great. We know that already, but be specific. And once you've done that, you can share criticism. We showed you some examples of that already. Corey, is that radical candor? That is radical. Oh my. Oh, like tie together. Like it's like a thing together. Wow. It's weird. Smart. And then once you've done that, you can assess and refine. So the questionnaire is repeatable. You will have done your best to try and address some of it. You go back to the team and you say, hey, does it feel different? Do you feel safer? Are you, I don't know, feeling better about whatever? And then there you go. So thank you so much. All right. This concludes our little play. Yes. So we have a bitly link right here. So the bitly link is going to be a list of resources that Corey is talking about, all the resources, and then some of what kind of got this nice little presentation together. Also, it's our contact information. If you want to kind of shout us out or say, oh my God, this is terrible. Let us know. We love feedback. Yeah, there's a survey. Absolutely. And there's an anonymous survey. But thank you all so much for coming and partying with us at 9 a.m. Enjoy the rest of Drupalcon. Well, wait. Never mind, don't enjoy the rest of Drupalcon. I think we have a question. Wait, keep going. Yeah, so now if you have any questions, we would be happy to answer them. Yeah, cue it. Yeah, go ahead. Questions, comments. That's a good question. What is your, what's your work structure? Is it flat? Is it hierarchical? Like, who do you, who? Hierarch. Definitely a tricky situation. Hybrid work environments are very, they're quite different, right? Because you're trying to cater to two different sets of people. I will say I am not personally like super qualified to answer how to like apply these directly in a hybrid work environment. But one thing that I have noticed and are working by, which is 100% remote, is that even if you start in one spot, it will ultimate, it will start to kind of like ripple out. It's kind of like a spider web where if you start to pull like one string, you see a bunch of other strings that go with it. If there's a piece that seems particularly manageable or that the team is like gung-ho about trying, you could just start in that one space and see what happened. Because one change might be enough to get the ball rolling. It's just hard to tell and it's very dependent on who is in your team. Right. And are you able to get and get feedback from management? Like from the power structure? Are you, that's a question. Like are you able, yeah, it's fine. Is that your manager? It's okay. Like are you able to give that? I mean that in itself helps like Corey says. Like you're not gonna be able to solve hierarchical issues all the one day. But at least being able to give more feedback and bringing the resources saying, hey, I went to this talk in DrupalCon and I saw these actionable steps. It was like, is there one of these weeks, one of these we can implement. Well, can you? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's only, I mean, in granted, we work in a flat structure. So it's like, it's way more democratic and we're able to contribute a lot more of like how we feel. But, you know, absolutely, this is definitely appropriate stuff. Like all the research that we have is based on professionals who, based on research on like actual work environment. So absolutely. The actual application to a hierarchical structure is the part where I'm saying like, I don't know exactly how you would go about doing that because it's so much more complicated than just one way or the other. But to your question, yes, bring, it's totally appropriate and my opinion. As a, you know, front and developer to bring these resources. Just start with the initial conversation. Be like, hey, I'm really interested in increasing our psychological safety. Can we have a book club where we read Radical Candor? You could literally just pick, we literally did that. We just did that. Turn the ship around, which is one of the resources on that list. And that really helped that we had people who were not in our team who joined that and we had really fruitful conversations. Some of those people are in this room, but I'm just saying you can start there. Of course. Yeah. Hey, I think it's really great that you guys work in a company where they support this kind of topic and give you the room to put this presentation together. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what led you guys to this topic. What were some of the challenges that Palantir that made you want to discuss it? Well, I wouldn't say it was like a challenge of Palantir. I would say we were in, I started in the team before Travis did. And some of those team members are in this room. And we wanted to figure out what our areas of issue were within psychological safety. And we've done a lot of work over the last year and a half to really talk to each other and have very transparent conversations and practice a lot of the things that are on here, like radical candor, giving feedback, giving people learning opportunities that they want. And through doing that, we kind of have resolved some of the things that I don't think we were aware of at the time. But it really just came from a desire for us to want to have a much healthier working relationship with each other. We all work remote. So creating a like social connection was like a big deal. It wasn't necessarily there in our specific team at the time when we kicked it off. And I kind of think that's where it was at. It was more just like, hey, I don't love necessarily the way that me and another person would relate to each other. So how do I fix that? How do I take ownership of that and say, instead of just saying it's an issue, let's ignore it. Let's say it's an issue and just solve it. And we really have like it's quite, it's a quite a different place in our specific team. And for me, it was just genuine curiosity because I come from the opposite, right? I come from the structure where I didn't have agency, where I was told what to do, where I didn't buy in to the work. So I'm coming to Palantir and it's totally democratic and it's for the most part. And I'm like, why do I enjoy this so much? And so it forced me to kind of force us to kind of research of like, oh, because we do foster psychological safety. We do encourage like, literally we have team charters that we literally sit and kind of make the rules. And granted, this is not bashing hierarchy. This is not bashing hierarchical structures. Like it's necessary in the context as necessary, but it's like, it's still having agency and being able, that is the key for me. So this was, for me, it was like, let's dive deeper and see like, what are some risks and what other professionals have to say about this, how people are dealing with it. We took the agency and accepted the responsibility that that came with, right? So with agency comes responsibility, we accepted it and handled it. And it was just like a long process of going through as much research as possible. It is not perfect, cause we are imperfect, but it is still great because at least we feel that we have more of a say in what we do, you know? Which can happen in any work, in any hierarchical, non-hierarchal, having agency in what you do really makes the work better. Which is why we're talking about teams, right? You probably can't change your entire organization, but it is possible that you could change your scrum team potentially, right? Like you're what, less than 10 people on average, like you can do that, that's doable. Good question. Even within the rules. Almost under yet. With ending with criticism, and it doesn't seem like you have that next piece of red at the bottom of the phrase, is there, what that is a deliberate choice, like does it work better in the process? Yeah, we recommend you do not use the feedback sandwich, it is terrible, and that's because everybody knows what's coming. So when they, and it doesn't feel sincere or direct, right? What you're doing with the feedback sandwich, which has a lot of other colloquial names, I'll let you Google on your own. What you're doing is you're basically like buffering yourself. You're buffering your emotions from the other person, and that's not direct or sincere. When I gave that example to Travis about, hey, this is why we need you to do it differently, right? He needs to know that, and I need to not be overly concerned with protecting myself from giving him that feedback. It's not helpful, it, there's lots of research on it. I highly recommend you don't do it. Yeah, but I guess you removed that. I try not to do it at all. I try not to do it at all. In my example, it might have sounded like I was starting with praise. I can't remember what I said now off the top of my head. I remember the feedback I gave him, but I would not do it at all. In here, it's a little bit different, right? Because we're like practicing a skit. If I was just talking to Travis, like I normally talk to Travis, it wouldn't sound as like stilted, I guess. If that helps. Just to keep that conversation going, so Lee and the three I have such a negotiated and wrote that book, never split the difference. So good. And at least where they have to break news, bad news to people often, like heartbreaking news. And one of the tips he gave is just go for the bad news. Don't ask them how they are, you know how they're going to be. So it's just about being considerate about someone else's emotion when you know that it's probably not going to be a positive response immediately because you don't want to create that state news just for yourself, like news that's not moving for the other person. 100%. And Kim Scott, her books even talks about like, yes, like delivering the information, but in a compassionate way. And not an empathetic, like empathy, but like more compassion where it's like, yes, I have to deliver something that may be uncomfortable, but doing it in a compassionate way is key. I really like how you rephrase that, right? Because one of the quadrants in Radical Candor is ruinous empathy. Empathy when it goes too far is now your enemy. It's not helping you at that point. And you can use Radical Candor with your families and stuff, right? But at work, we are not all best friends. We have a goal, presumably we have a specific job and we're trying to go for that, that particular goal. We need to give people the information that they need in order to be successful. I think, I saw it back there. I just saw it back there, physically. And so when you go into this conversation. It was really good. No, we talked about this yesterday, remember? It's like, you kind of have to meet people where they are, you know? It's like, the way Corey will talk to me is not the way Corey will talk to Adela or Jew. Just to random people's name, I don't know them. Yeah, we don't know them at all. But you know what I'm saying? It's like, you can't, you can't attack. And the attack's not the right word. But it's like, you can't, you have to deal with people and meet people where they might be in life, you know? Maybe that you're not getting and seeing whether or not you can pare that down to the very bare minimum and then just dealing with that first and then allowing the situation to somewhat resolve itself before continuing on. So I'm thinking of team members who are experiencing burnout or who are close to burnout, right? If I really only need one thing from them, that I would like to have five, then when I talk to them, I'm only gonna talk about the one thing. And in six months, when they're doing better, maybe we start talking about the five. And I mean, as a project manager, I might be able to facilitate figuring out how we pick up those other four. It's what I'm getting is a lot of practicing. Like, I know there's struggling, so I say, how can I help you and they're like, oh, you said something you can do? So like, I'm really, like, I find this hard because you don't have places too much and you also feel like they feel like nothing extra. So like, I don't know. All right. Wow. But you can only do the best you can, you know? It's like... You feel a lot, and not because we don't wanna help people, but because sometimes I think in our desire to help, we offer more solutions than really is needed for the situation. So I've kind of, and I've done that before, 100%. So I think I was really helped by looking at myself and saying like, I just really wanna be helpful. And, but is me wanting to be helpful, helpful for my team right now or not? And in some cases it's no, and in some cases it's yes. And then Dan, I totally saw your hand. I don't know him either. Mm-hmm. So you talked about how speaking of can be hard for marginalized parties and it's important for leadership to acknowledge us into which... Give us like maybe a little bit of an intro to that. Like, where did that acknowledgement come from? An intro? Is that like something I should say each morning? No, it's this. It's literally acknowledging, let's say, Cory and I are standing next to each other and Cory may present an issue, right? Cory may say that I'm feeling the way scrub means are going. I'm feeling that they're taking, we're not being as productive. I'm feeling like we're not being, I don't know, we're just not being as collaborative as we can be. And how she's being received by management and me can say the same thing as a person of color and acknowledging that I'm being perceived subconsciously or not differently. So it's like Cory said it very plainly. It's like just checking the bias if you are in a position of power and knowing that like, okay, I'm feeling this way when somebody approaches me with an issue, is that their fault or is that they're doing or is this something that I mindset that I can change, you know? It's a broad topic, you know? And it's a thing that's like, as somebody who I feel like I'm an umbrella and I know multiple modernized groups, it's something that is hard to articulate without the fear of like repercussion, right? So it's like, this is just a friend reminder where it's like, if you don't fall under this umbrella or if you also have this kind of power, it's your responsibility to say, hey, this is what my team looks like, you know? And I need to educate myself on all that encompasses that, you know? Which is significant. It's a significant body of work. You know? Cause I know personally, like there have been times where I wanted to speak up, but I felt like I couldn't because I didn't want to be perceived as the angry black person, you know? Like seriously, like that's not my bias, but that is something that we, that I have been trained and ingrained to think. So it's like, what that is, if you are in power, you know, recognize that this is something that other people struggle with and help, it is your job to foster the community of saying, no, keep the playing field even, you know? And it is, you know, it's not an exhaustive list of things that you can do, but just acknowledging that risk for other people, you know, for marginalized groups are there, you know? That's- And listen, if you're not a member of a marginalized group or even a specific one, listen to what they have to say. If they say, hey, I'm a disabled person, person with disabilities, and this is my experience, don't be like, well, it's not lying. I don't care. That's not what they're saying, right? So we just want to listen to other people and make it more inclusive for everyone. Brittany? Oh, sorry, Madam. Thank you. Thanks for that question. Kind sir. All right, we have a couple of anonymous questions. We have a couple of minutes, we'll try to get to them real quick. All right. Anonymous person A, we'll call her Samantha. Samantha from the first example, she's here, okay. Are there strategies for anonymously assessing psychological safety for small teams, like two to three people? Your direct relationship that you're fostering intentionally that will give you that, I don't know, spidey sense of like how they feel about you, right? You could go ahead and do the anonymous survey, but with two or three people, like what, here's my response in your response, like great. I would highly recommend just getting to know that person. Again, you don't have to be best friends, but have checking questions, talk to them randomly throughout the day, ask them what their goals are, how can you help them? You can ask them to help you, support you weirdly enough, asking someone to help you increases their opinion of you. Apparently, Ali Vander Hamilton used to do this all the time by asking people who hated him to let him learn a book. And then that like made people like him better, because apparently we only do favors for people we like. So it's like a little brain trick to get in there. You can do that. And then like with being anonymous, as a project manager, we have like resources that you use to essentially get our feedback anonymously. Like there's so much tech for small teams, big teams, like if you want to like literally ask, how do you feel about the way we're managing? Like there are definitely things that they can do online, anonymously, like forms they can fill out, servers they can fill out. You can also ask someone in another team who is arms wide away from you to do that. We're actually doing that ourselves. We have another project manager who's not on our team who's gonna run an assessment for us. She's the one who's gonna collect all the answers. And so it's never gonna go through me. It's never gonna go through anyone in our team. And so by putting that arms length person in there, you do create some space, some emotional space for people. But again, surveys for only two people is like kind of hard. You could ask similarly if you could ask someone else who's outside of your team to have conversations with people, but that's like could be quite a time investment. So it would depend on what you're asking. Yeah, cool, we're at 9.50, I got one more question. Yeah, go for it. So second question, we'll call her Samantha too. What about when your team contains external contractors developers? Any suggestions? I feel like it is our house. You coming into our house, you know what I'm saying? Like this is like seriously, you're a guest. Like we have a framework set up of rules on psychological safety practices. It's like if you're in like set those from the get-go, you know, this is how we communicate. We do daily scrums, we're democratic. Like, you know, depends on how, I guess, how much they're involved in, you know, if you're meeting with them every month, if you're meeting with them every day, depends if it's, you know, how much involvement that they have. 100%, that seems like it could be particularly thorny depending on where the contractors are sitting or what exactly you're talking about in that scenario. I will say though that none of these options are like precluded by the people not being within your team. I have one client where we are, we have very high psychological safety throughout the whole like project team and their entire team. And so it's very easy for them to say, hey, like we needed to get this point and it looks like it's slowing down. Can you like just fix it please or deal with it? But that's not true for everyone, right? But it doesn't, you're not precluded from having that kind of relationship with them. If it's like a, I don't know, guest contractor, like someone who's coming into your team to help supplement your team, don't exclude them. You know, when you have chartering, when you have scrums or whatever, put them in there. Consider them as part of the team. There's no reason to say like, oh yeah, we're one team, but you, Bob, sorry, Bob, go sit over here by yourself. That's not how it's staring. But whether or not it's like, can you like enforce radical candor on a client team that works with your team? That one, you know, you would need some consultation on that with the people that you work with leadership-wise. And I think we're at time. And with that, we're at time. Thank you all so much for stopping by. Enjoy the rest of DrupalCon. Please leave feedback.