 At the end of the session, you will have identified one change to put in place right now to increase your impact and satisfaction. What can you see? I bet if we were in a big conference room, I would hear some of you saying a smile because it's the incredible capability of our brain to recognize patterns. This is with a smile that I started my day. I was thinking of really positive things and it brings a smile on my face. Can we do it right now? Can you try to remember positive events? I had also planned to tell you, face your neighbor, make eye contact and smile as much as you can because it is a really exciting way to experiment with the mirroring effect. Can we do that in front of our screens? So taking matters into my own hands. At the end of the session, you will have identified one change to put in place right now to increase your impact and satisfaction. One change. Mick Prani. She's a software engineer. She felt so good when she took that job. Everything sounded so great. She felt it was exactly the right spot for her. Now she struggles in her job. All things always seem to fall apart and in endless fire fighting sessions. She tried to find a way. Nothing worked. She feels she's just a small piece of wood carried by the floor of a rapid river until she finds that thing to change. I'm Alex Simonville. I'm on the EME leadership team at Red Hat. And the story I will tell you today is a prequel to the one of my second book. I'm a software engineer and I'm in charge. The book I wrote with Michael Doyle. The story will enable you to identify one thing to change to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. For Prani, it happened when she attended a conference. She found that one thing that changed everything. That day, one of the presenters asked a simple question. How will you measure your life? Prani took note of the question and she started to think about it. During the following days, she returned to the question and drafted what she thought her life should be to call it a success. She explored all the different areas of life, of course, not only the professional aspects. She started to have a satisfying picture in mind of what it should be. But now, how to get there? The question reminded her of what another presenter mentioned. You have as much influence that you think you have. And to support its claim, the presenter drew a first circle meant to represent what you can really act upon. He then drew a second circle outside the first one, showing what you could really influence. But outside of that, what can you do? The soup is what is outside the second circle. The soup analogy is useful because as the two first circles of what we can act upon and what we can influence are well known. This simple knowledge tends to make us powerless. It is learned helplessness. The soup idea pushes us to find a way to influence even slightly what we thought we could not affect. So if you don't want a cold and untested soup, take the big pot of soup and put it on the stove. And what happens? Nothing. Nothing immediately. But after some time, a long time, something happens. A small bubble pops up at the surface, a first shared idea that changed the soup. You can change the soup, make it a little bit hotter, add salt and paper to make it slightly tastier. The soup analogy is there to push ourselves to expand our circles. Pranay knows that to accomplish anything of value, she would need allies. And she found a great way to get to know the other people in the book from Portia Tang, the dream team nightmare. It's a technique to meet one-on-one using a straightforward structure that Pranay represented on small post-it notes that she brings with her for one-on-ones. Of course, now that we all work from home, Pranay has a trailer board to do that. And you can find how it works following that link. To introduce the practice Pranay just told her teammate, hey, I found something that we could use to onboard the next newcomers in our team. Would you want to try it with me to assess if it could work? And here they go. Overcoming the first impression is hard. We have to avoid the temptation to use our intellect to confirm our first impression. Making the effort to overcome your first impression is the way to create peace in the world. Pranay knows now that to increase our impact and satisfaction, it starts with her, but it is just the beginning. So yes, it starts with you. It starts with self-reflection. And then it continues with expanding our circles, overcoming learned helplessness. Brian Tracy told the story that represents well how it affects us. When elephant trainers catch a baby elephant, they tie one of its legs to a post with rope. And the baby elephant struggles and struggles, but it can't get free. For days, the elephant pulls and strains at the rope. Gradually, it learns that struggle is useless, and it keeps up. When the elephant grows, the trainer keeps it tied to the same rope in the same way. And even so, it can now break the rope and get away. It stands passively and waits for the trainer to come and get it. It has developed what is called learned helplessness. It has learned that the struggle is useless, and as a result of repeated failure experiences earlier in life, the elephant has learned the self-imposed imitation. So yes, it starts with you. It starts with extending your circle. And it continues with getting to know others and building the relationships. The struggle does not go away magically. Prané looked for a way to focus her energy on what is really important for her goal. And she found a technique called impact mapping in a book from Go Eco-Edge. It works like this. Start with four simple columns. Why, who, how, what? Why are we doing this? This is the goal we are trying to achieve. The why here is we want to have a fantastic picnic. Who? With our partner, of course. The who is who can produce the desired effect? Who can obstruct it? Who are the consumers or the users of our product? Who will be impacted by it? These are the actors who can influence the outcome. But it could be annoying if there were mosquitoes coming. How should our actors' behavioural change? How can they help us to achieve the goal? How can they obstruct or prevent us from succeeding? These are the impacts that we are trying to create. One thing could be that they don't show up. And we can imagine a lot of what the force column to solve that. Fix the watering system to avoid growing new mosquitoes, grow repulsive plants by annoying high frequencies on devices. What can we do as an organisation or a delivery team to support the required impacts? These are the deliverables, the software features and organisational activities. The behaviour we really don't want in that is that in case they show up, they don't bite. Or floating could work. And if you stick to the behavioural change you can free up the creativity of the team to find what and you can try several options. This is also the best way to define your goals. You can measure the impact you want to have without knowing yet what to do to get to the impact you want. This is the best way to define OKRs, objectives and care results. The why is the objective and the care result is the impact. No mosquito bite at the picnic. So Prabé created her own OKRs and she introduced her OKRs to her colleagues one by one. And some of them said, hey, I know how to help you with that one. Those interactions helped her refine the impact map and create better OKRs. She did not sell her perspective. She improved her goal thanks to the diversity of perspective in her team. And progressively it became team OKRs and they joined forces. Remember, as Christina Woodquist said during one of the episodes of the podcast, you've got to avoid the selection of the task. You need to really think about the outcome, the impact. This is the right time to tell you to listen to a low podcast on emerging leadership. You can find it everywhere. So it starts with you expanding your circles and building a relationship with others. It continues with defining goals using impact mapping and OKRs, which becomes shared OKRs with the team. And it does not have to start from the top. It can start with you. So because you know what are the things that are the most important, you want to focus your time on those things. What Pranay found is that there were really three types of time. Time for synchronization to make sure we are all on the same page. Synchronization time is when team members share their progress, challenges, learning, so they all can stay on the same page, aligned toward the same goal. During synchronization time, we can identify opportunities for activities that will fall into the two other types of time. It could be an opportunity of collaboration, understanding and solving an issue, or possibility of training in a specific area to take two examples. Collaboration time is when two or more people work together to accomplish a specific activity. The collaboration is key to benefit from the diversity of perspectives in the team. Collaboration to benefit from the instant feedback of other team members, like when you are engaged in peer programming or even mock programming, really working together, which is what a team can really do. And time for focalization with no interruptions, no notifications, so you don't waste any time switching context and coming back to your original task. Pranay and her team define a catcher who will deal with the interruptions for the rest of the team. For each of the focus sessions, the new catcher is defined and they are focusing on one thing at a time. To refine their use of time, the team put on paper their team agreement. You always need team agreement. Even when you are going to throw axes on wood targets, you need team agreement. And the fifth one applies to a lot of different contexts, by the way. Pranay found an efficient way to start drafting the team agreement or the team social contract by using the six questions Patrick Lentzian proposes in his book, The Advantage. Why do we exist? How do we behave? Like how we handle conflicts, for example, or how we use shared documents to enable asynchronous collaboration without the need for another meeting, which also enables the more introverts to contribute more efficiently. What do we do? How will we succeed? What is the most important right now? A good impact map here is important. Prioritizing the impact, the how is much easier than sorting an infinite list of what. Who must do what? This question addresses roles and responsibilities so that we can avoid the issues of false expectations. I believe that the manager should do another team member's job is to do Y and then the other ones don't think at all it's their duty. So, it starts with you expanding your circles and building a relationship with others. It continues with defining goals using impact mapping and OKRs, which become shared OKRs for the team. And finally, a strategic use of time defined in continuously updated team agreements. Updated after each retrospective, for example. About the use of time, they also agreed to use the speed emitting feature of their calendar. I know it will leave 5 minutes or 10 minutes as breaks. Some of them are even using those breaks for short meditation sessions. Probably also quickly discovered that there was a significant need for time to celebrate as a team their successes. So they added that to their team agreements and I hope you will too. Because as Pranay's team did this is how you increase your impact and satisfaction. It starts with you clear goals and a perfect use of time as a team. But where's Wally? You may have noticed that Pranay's manager is not mentioned in the story. Is the manager a lazy absentee or a brilliant genius? We don't know from the story. What do you think? What we know is that the manager understands how to let initiative happen in the team. Maybe the manager is encouraging for storing initiative from behind the scenes. How can you do something like that? Or influence something like that that happened? In coaching on mentoring sessions I use what I call the four BEPS axes of a leader. BEPS stands for business, execution, people and system. BEPS helps people realize when they don't invest at all in one or more of the axes. Execution is usually not the main problem. It can be a problem for managers when they are deep in execution. Defining the prices task that management should work on and going too deep they forgot the other axes. People ironing, growing, managing performance, self-improve could be more of a problem. Sometimes I feel people tend to passively delegate to the job of managers for the right work that has to happen on that axe. System is a big one and usually when that suffers from under investment the system formed by the people, the organization, the processes and tools remove the obstacles to great work. As WE Deming said a bad system will beat good people each time. Managers have usually more power to influence system changes and the under investment usually creates a complexity depth with layers of complexity piling up on each other. Simplify could be a good mentor and finally business. Understanding the business, the ecosystem the organization evolves in understanding why we provide solutions, products, features, services and formulate a clear vision. Are your activities balanced on the BEPS axes? Is it possible for your team? Sometimes people tell me it could work in a startup but for organization it's not really possible. So just imagine that you are sick. You have an appointment with a medical doctor so let me introduce the doctor's stock photo here. Would you be fine with an answer from our deal doctor like you're sick it's bad. Let me call your parents and I will tell them that they have to start from scratch. Not really a satisfying answer right? The only reasonable answer is change. I wish that you picked one change from today, even a small one. It could be the self-reflection journaling practice or maybe the one on one getting to know each other. One of the people who tried that told me that after 30 minutes he felt he was speaking to an old friend. So it's really a good one. One change. Okay so we have few pre-submitted questions. Maybe this one also relates to one of the keynotes we had last year it was about psychological safety. So a team is capable to express difficulties to his manager if it feels psychologically safe. And only a leader capable of showing this vulnerability can increase his team's psychological safety. How a leader can show this vulnerability without the grading his stress from the team. Sorry. It's a challenging one. The question comes with a lot of assumptions. One of the assumptions that we can see in the question is the leader is there because he's great so if he's showing vulnerability then he's not great so he's not the leader. That's the kind of environment when you are fostering that me I'm there because I'm great and you're there because you're not. So if you foster that kind of environment rewarding that kind of behavior that's more me than we in the team. So it's a little bit difficult. But to change that if the leader shows some vulnerability it's quite easy to find mistakes that you are making and really be clear about you made the mistake. You don't blame anybody else for that mistake. You can just say it maybe the first time it hurts a little bit the ego but you don't want to let the ego on the way of creating great team. So I think how to show it just pick the mistakes that you are making. By the way everybody can see them so don't think that if you don't say it will be okay everybody will miss them and don't believe that because you're showing vulnerability people will not trust you. I think it's totally the opposite being transparent on your struggles I think will help people to appreciate better what is going on and probably trust you more. Thanks another one. How do you handle diversity in a team? It depends a little bit on how it works. So there's one aspect of diversity that is really interesting is we all have different personality profiles and there's one thing that you need to really be aware of we like people that are like us so I've seen teams with nearly all the people with the same personality profile which is really interesting you say look at that you say wow how they do that but it's really easy they are your people they like so they don't hire people for particular skills or competencies all what they will tell you about that is PS because they just pick the people they like in interviews and they make their decision in the 15 first seconds that's what we are doing all the time that when we met people we know that there's something good with that person we like that person immediately or the opposite so that's the first thing to know is we have really big biases so we need to fight our biases so if we want to build diversity in the team we need first to recognize that we have biases and we need to study that and to put in place hiring practices and panels that will help us get the different perspective in the team and if our team is already not diverse enough we need to get help from other people outside of 14 and to build diversity the good thing is by having diversity then we will force people, push people, push ourselves to work with people we don't like at first though that means we will benefit from the diversity of them thank you so maybe another one so there is like this strength that of self-leading teams and you mentioned that we're like building your own OKRs etc what if there are people who don't desire to be leaders what if they want to be told what to do that's a very good point and it happens often that in an environment where your other boss is already in command and control is telling you all what to do in a way your life sucks but that's your life that's your life at work you do what you have been asked and you are rewarded to do because you do it it's in a way really comfortable but is it really what you were hoping at the beginning so that's why I'm thinking that you can push a little bit more the envelope and change a little bit the dynamic of course there are people that will not want to change either the manager will not want to change or they don't want to change but when you are in a team like that and you can see that the manager could potentially change and you can work with the others to try to go a little bit further to change a little bit the dynamic because there are all self fulfilling prophecies if you believe that the manager wants command and control the manager will see no initiative will see no initiative from the team member so he will think that he needs to do all that he cannot delegate but when he sees initiative maybe at some point he will realize that he don't need to so that's an interesting thing sometimes you ask the managers why are you doing that this way because the people don't want and when you ask the people why are you not taking initiative because the manager don't want and when one of them change suddenly you can change everything so that would be interesting to try and to help other people that maybe you think they don't want to be led but maybe they won't and sometimes they don't want to take initiative because for them it's unclear what needs to be done it's unclear if there's a clear there's no clear direction there's no clear strategy that's there's a big space out there we need to do things but how are they today connect with the goals of the company we don't really know and when there's too much uncertainty about that it doesn't work so you need to have clear goals clear strategy to be able to do something and take initiatives thank you for that we have a question from the audience so how do you deal with people that don't perform as good in team maybe consistently this is a challenging one once again it comes with a few assumptions that's how do you assess the performance and how do you assess it's good or not there's something that is important to understand there assuming that we have an agreement on what means a good performance we need to make sure that the people knows that this is they are aware of that agreement they understand what good performance means we need also to understand why it's happening sometimes people are really trying but they don't have something they lack something to be able to perform it could be something related to the job or that could be an external factor that will prevent them to work at a specific moment in time and you have different choices you can help them and that's where collaboration is really important it's incredible what you can learn in a pair programming session that learn from each other sometimes there's someone that is more advanced than the other but both of them will learn that's like in a mentoring session mentees usually are mentor and I'm always smiling about that because usually in mentoring session I learn a lot when I'm the mentor I learn a lot when I'm the mentee so it's a really social learning experiment so you need to think about that low performance in the way of assessing that are we clear about what is the level of performance expected and try to find the root cause of why that low performance happens and when you really try to do that sincerely you can understand if it's something that can be fixable or not sometimes it's not fixable there are some people that are taking jobs that they should not take okay we have another one and that's how do you deal with a manager who is micromanaging his employees or her employees and maybe I'll add another one to that how do you deal with conflicts in the team oh yes that's so the micromanaging I touch on it with the execution so you have a manager that is focused on execution but does not trust the people to know what to do there could be several reasons about that usually people don't know what to do because because they don't know what is the strategy, what are the goals what is expected from them so as they don't know that they cannot take initiative so the manager is giving them exact task to do something it's annoying because basically you are not doing your job you are just doing part of it you don't think about all the rest, you are focused only on execution and it's a little bit frustrating to be in that situation so if you are the manager you should think twice before doing that because you are losing your time you are losing the energy of the people working with you and why do you, I already bright people if you don't want to use their brightness you are basically destroying them day after day their capability of initiative if you are in the other position you can probably have that conversation with your manager saying okay I think I understand what I have to do there can you tell me more about why we are doing that can you tell me more about what is the impact that we want to reach can you give me a little bit more of the context and why that will help me that can help me next time to be able to define the next task that needs to be done to achieve that impact and in doing that I will really view from part of what you are doing for me and I think I can handle that so having that conversation it will not work with the first conversation because usually those managers that are defining the precise task are used to do that this way and they forget to share the context they are not used to share the context the impact goals that's not something they are used to do so they will be a little bit surprised and not necessarily able to do it but progressively you can probably handle that you need to train your manager a little bit thank you the second question about conflict is a fun one for a lot of time I thought about conflict in a way that was basically there is a conflict conflict is because I am right and the other is wrong I am doing things in the right way so I need to fix them and they don't want to change so now if you change your perspective and you go around the table you take the position of the other person you realize that suddenly you agree on something you both think the other is wrong you both think the other is not doing the right thing so that's where you have a conflict so the usual ways of solving conflict in an organization like that when you stay on your position is to escalate the conflict to higher level managers that will help you with their big wisdom to solve the conflict have you seen that working? probably not really often so the other way is to try to understand the perspective of the other person try to understand why do they think this is a good idea because how do you know your opinion is right sometimes we have really strong opinions about things but how do we know we are right so investigating a little bit more about different perspective not necessarily going to the person that you are in conflict with looking at with your peers saying okay I think it's blue it says it's red I don't want you to take side I want you to help me understand how we assess colors and where I have where I have something that I'm missing it will give you the other arguments the other point of data of information you need to look for to try to understand what is going on and sometimes you will realize that that's not one that is right that is wrong that you are probably both wrong but there's no way to know what is right so you will need to make a choice at least you can make a step in the direction of the other person with more to share and more to learn and that can probably solve the conflict so thank you Alexis and thank you everyone for joining us today we're very close to the end of our time slot so what about one final message Alexis one final message it could be one final message pick the one change you want to make pick the one small thing you want to make and be kind with yourself if you don't succeed the first day try again the other day that's not really a problem usually we think we lack the willpower because it's just a vicious circle when we think we lack the willpower we try something and we give up and this is decreasing our amount of willpower so we need to build that willpower step by step day by day and that just being kind with ourselves we try something that didn't work let's try the next day that's like the work out you don't do it one day the next day you don't do it and six months have passed and you never went to the gym you know how it works with the gyms that's how it works rebuild your willpower and connect with others and I would love if you can take and change and if you have more questions connect with me on LinkedIn maybe it's the easiest way and I will answer maybe not immediately but I will answer