 Hello everyone, my name is Zoha, I work at Red Hat and I'm going to talk about leadership. Okay, so it's a great thing to get into DevConf but then I realized that I actually need to talk about leadership. So I went online, I googled it, providing leadership as an individual contributor and the first page of the results was amazing. I had some really great articles there. It shows the top three for you, you can go ahead and check them out online. I really encourage you to read them because they had really great stuff. Like they talk about lead by example and how you should take on project management and widen your influence and great practices that you can do to develop your own leadership as an individual contributor. But I guess that's not what you came here for, right? I mean, if you're in this talk, maybe you're an individual contributor, you're definitely interested in leadership and you're probably intelligent if you came here to see me and I don't take for granted people spending time to see me talk but if you're intelligent you can probably Google it on your own and read the articles on your own. You don't need me for that. So I thought to myself, what can I give you? What is my added value? So let me take a day-to-day situation you probably all know. You get tagged to review something, to look into something in Slack and GitHub or anything and you get tagged with a bunch of people. What do you do? Do you take it on yourself or maybe wait for one of the other guys to take it? We'll get back to that. I want to take you 22 years ago when I was young and handsome. I was an officer in the Israeli army and in officers training, I remember we had this week. It was week number seven. They took us all out of the base to this place and we had all these team building activities and leadership activities and one of the activities was called self-improvement group where you sit around in a circle, the entire team, like 15 people sit around in a circle and you go by one by one and when it's your turn, everyone goes and gives you feedback. They tell you stuff, things to keep about your leadership, things to improve. Like you're a good listener, you're not assertive enough and stuff like that. So we went around everyone by their turn and when it was my turn people said some stuff but no one had anything that I can improve and that was really bombing for me. I really wanted to learn, I really wanted to find stuff to improve and no one had anything like meaningful to tell me. So I went ahead outside of this activity and then this one guy from my team came and maybe he was shy to speak in front of everyone, I don't know. And then he came and he told me this sentence. He said, people see you as a leader, they wait for you to lead but you just don't take it. And that sentence really changed my perspective about leadership. Leadership is not something that someone can assign to you. No one can tell you, okay, you're the leader and that makes you the leader. Doesn't work like that. And it's also not part of a role. It's not like if they make you manager or they make you team lead, you're all of a sudden the leader. And it's something that you have to take on yourself and develop on yourself. And what helps me to take on leadership is to always ask myself, what if there was no one else? So if we go back to that first slide where I showed you tagging of a lot of people, you want to ask yourself, okay, what if there's no one else? And then you're the one taking it. Let's look into a different situation. So let's say you're a leader, you're working with a bunch of teams on a project and it's a complex project with multiple teams involved. And a lot of integration and stuff like that. And you know, things happen. It doesn't always go as planned. Maybe one team didn't deliver on time. Maybe one team had too many bugs. Maybe the integration didn't go as you expected. So the first thing we would do is ask ourselves, okay, who is responsible? But what you really mean is whose fault is this? And I want to talk about the effects of complaining. So complaining has great benefits. I mean, if you're complaining or blaming someone else, then you take the heat off of yourself. And you can get off the hook one or two times. But eventually people don't like to hear other people complain. And another thing about complaining is that people have a wrong perception of complaining. So people think that this is the equation. Like if you don't have the result, but you can complain about it or you have good excuses or good reasons, that equals having the result. But life doesn't work like that. In life, if you don't deliver, your customers will leave. And they will leave even if you had the best reasons not to deliver. So what can you do? So you remember that question, who is responsible? There is always one answer to that. I'm responsible. Responsibility, same as leadership, can't be assigned. No one can tell you you're the one responsible. You have to take it. And if I am 100% responsible, then I'm not looking at what happened up until now. I'm looking at what can be done from here on to advance us. And what actions can I take and who can I ask to assist me with those actions? So this talk is about individual contributors. And the key difference between an individual contributor and a manager in terms of leadership is the authority. So when you're a manager and you have people report to you, then you have the authority. You can make them or motivate them to do stuff because you control their salary, their advancement at work, promotion. And that's one way to motivate people that individual contributors don't have. So what do individual contributors have? What individual contributors can have is inspiration. You want to inspire the people around you to follow you, to take the actions. How do you do that? The way to do that, like one way to do that is to ask yourself what is my added value? Same way I did when I went into that presentation. I could have given you the links to Google to go with yourself. But then I asked myself, okay, what can I give you? What is my added value? And another thing to look at is who is my role model? Because all of us, we have someone that we look up to as a leader. Whether it's someone we work with or work with or used to be our manager. It's the person that we go to when we need help. When we want them to review our presentations or our work or anything. And I always ask myself, what would that person do? And I try to apply it on myself. So you're a leader now. And the next step for you is allowing new leaders to grow around you. That's another aspect of leadership. And let's take that first slide where I get tagged with another bunch of people. Let's say one of those people is David. So I can take doing the code review on myself. Or I can give David the opportunity to grow. And I can tell him, hey David, you mind taking a look at this? And I'll be there to mentor him and support him with whatever he needs. That allows other leaders to grow. Before I give you time to questions, I want to leave you with some questions. And those are questions that if you ask yourself can be the key to develop your own leadership. You want to ask yourself at every situation, what if there was no one else? What can be done from here on? What is my added value? And how can I help other leaders grow? That's all for me. I'll take questions now. Yes, please. So I'll repeat the question. The question was, where do you draw the line? In the example I gave with offering David to take the review. Where do you draw the line between asking David specifically to do it, like mandating him? Or giving him the opportunity, right? Is that the question? So that's what I was talking about authority. If I was David's manager, I could have told him, go ahead, do that. I don't know if that's the managerial approach I'd like to take as a manager, but I always like to give people the opportunity because I really see that as an opportunity and I would present it as an opportunity for him. Another way to present it as an opportunity is to walk with him hand by hand. So you mind taking a look at this? I'm going to be there reviewing it with you. If you have questions, I'm here to answer. And that presents it more like an opportunity than as a duty. Yes, please. How do you avoid landing in the zone of leadership without authority so that how do you prevent yourself from becoming a scapegoat? Because it's very nice in products that succeed, but there are products that don't. And if the product was expensive enough and it failed, there will be someone who tries to blame someone. So what do you do so that you are not the one? I'll try to repeat the question because it was a long question. But in summary, the question was, how much time do we have? Two minutes. The question was where you work in a project that has a lot of teams involved and there's a tendency to look for someone that's their fault who's a scapegoat. How do you avoid being the scapegoat or how do you protect yourself from being the scapegoat? You can't. If someone wants to pinpoint you, they will. But again, what you want to ask yourself is, what do I do from here? Do I whine about it, about them blaming me, or do I look forward and take this as the opportunity to grow, as the opportunity to see how can I advance this project? Because you can be scapegoat once. They're going to put it all on you once. But if you're going to be whining about it, they're going to put it on you twice. But if you're going to say, okay, you know what? Okay, I'm taking this and I'm moving on. You're not going to be the victim again. Do we have time? Yeah, maybe. Short question. Anyone else? Okay, thanks everyone.