 Nothing like just standing there while you're getting into it. That's not awkward at all. Probably should have done a more grand entrance, maybe. Anyways, hey, this talk is called Leading When You're Not In Charge. My name is Scott Lesser, as I mentioned, senior developer at Life Church. You might be curious about what does a church developer do, or some of you might be like boo, don't care, keep going, and that's totally fine. But just to clear the air, I'm not responsible for any of those super sick church flash websites. I wish that's what I did, but I don't have those skills. I'm going to give you just a quick background of what we do at Life Church. So we have 25 different engineers across three different teams, and I lead one of those engineering teams. And my team is specifically focused on building software that we give away to other churches. So my leadership journey has been a little bit bumpy, a little bit rough. This gift kind of captured it, sort of just kind of falling backwards into it. A few years ago, I was in kind of a holding pattern in my career. So I had been developing, I was still growing as a developer, but I was wanting more responsibility. I wasn't really sure the best way to go about getting it, was it like to pester my boss, was it just to kick butt at my job? And I was also, part of the culture at Life Church is really wanting to grow as a leader, and I was like, yeah, I want to do that, but I didn't really know what that meant totally. And I honestly thought, yeah, once I land in a position of leadership, like running a team, I'll figure out how to do those things. So fast forward to now, leading a small team of engineers, leading so, so strong. And this is a lot of what my leadership looked like. It's like, hey guys, let's go. And it's like, no one's following me because I'm not doing a good job. And so we'll come back to kind of how that change happened of like wanting to grow as a leader and wanting more responsibility and actually getting it. But now that I'm in this spot that I'm in, looking back, I realized that I really could have been doing all of these things the entire time. So I didn't need to be in a position of leadership to be leading well. And instead of like wanting more influence, I should have been using my existing influence just to do more. And so you can kind of think of me as like the ghost of Christmas past. Like I'm up here just jangling my old bones and chains and kind of trying to like get through to you guys about like, hey, if you don't change your ways, you're never gonna get anywhere. So my hope for today is that there's a lot of awkward laughs like that. We have some fun and that you pick one of these topics that stands out to you and focus on that and work on that. So what is leadership? So thanks to confirmation bias, I was able to Google and find a quote that lines up with exactly how I feel about it. Katie Christie says, leadership should be the humble authentic expression of your unique personality in pursuit of bettering whatever environment you are in. You might be thinking, hmm, I kind of had more of a like general patent type leadership image in my mind, right? Like a strong command inspiring vision that could like lead you into battle. And so what we're gonna talk a little bit about is like there's the older models of leadership theory which are like you're born a leader and you're not developed as a leader. There's this set of attributes like, you know, it's like a general patent type that you either try to emulate or you just, you know, you're born with it. But in the newer models of leadership it's really about finding out what is unique about you. What are your strengths and weaknesses and leading from those strengths? And one of those newer leadership models is the three levels of leadership model. And this might look like something you saw in sex ed in like middle school, but there are three different levels to this. As the name says, there's personal leadership, private and public. So personal leadership is learning to lead yourself. Private leadership is peer leadership, leading co-workers one-on-one. And in public leadership is leading teams of like two or more. And so we're gonna stay in that middle circle in there, the personal leadership. So we're not gonna focus on private or public leadership but just really learning to be a better leader where you are currently. And so, which is fine. Some of you might be thinking like, dull, I do not want public leadership. Like the last thing I want is to run a team. I just want, I just wanna feel like I'm being heard and I wanna leave like right where I'm at. And that's perfect. Like that's exactly where you can be and you can stay there. If you're getting better as a leader your team and your organization is getting better. One more quick thing. So we're gonna be using Yahoo Answers. It's kind of like a learning aid slash segue between topics. If you don't know what Yahoo Answers is, it's a place where you can go in and ask questions and it's pretty much like catnip for internet trolls. And so, actually this slide isn't totally accurate because Verizon recently announced they were gonna rename Yahoo as Altaba. And then while I was working on this talk then they announced again that they're actually renaming AOL and Yahoo as Oath. So I guess maybe it's gonna be Oath answers soon but I'm just gonna refer to it as Yahoo Answers. So what can you expect to find on Yahoo Answers? Something a little bit like this maybe. I need a word that begins with J. Not jelly, I know that's the first thing that everybody was like, oh easy jelly. Nope, she doesn't need that one, she's got it. We need a few more. So you can get some pretty succinct lists like this one going, classic J words like jurisprudence and jojoba. And he got bored and just tapped out there. All right, so leading yourself is the first topic we're gonna talk about. Before you can expect to be given the responsibility of leading others you need to be able to lead yourself well. And so kind of take a look at what that looks like. Some of these things are super basic stuff. Showing up to work on time. Like I said, pick something that you say, oh I can work on that. If showing up to work on time is yours you're like I could do that better then cool you can like head out of here you got your thing you're done. Getting your work done and not just getting your work done but done on time done when you said it would be done without having to be reminded three times. Be prepared. So if your team does a daily stand up and you start every stand up with oh give me a minute I'm not sure what I'm doing today. Be more prepared. Add two minutes of margin to your morning so you can be ready for stand up. Be a self starter. This is something important. If you're a leader you wanna be able to motivate individuals and if you cannot motivate yourself to get things done then you're probably gonna be able to motivate other people. And I bolded this one don't be complicated because I love this one. This is like a really easy filter to like run decisions you're making through. Don't be complicated. Are you making your boss's job harder? Are you a distraction? Are you hard to lead? Don't be complicated. 100 leadership qualities. Can I get a list please? First of all, 100 leadership qualities. That's a pretty lengthy list. I don't think that I think at a certain point you're just describing like human beings like breathing and has eyes. But I do like the update I like but more of lists, details are unnecessary. And why'd you say that? Because this guy nailed it with this diatribe on leadership. And the reason I love it and I had to actually crop out the top like two thirds of it because I wanted to get the sources in there. Me and my dad as the sources is gold because it's super easy to validate those and follow up on them if you wanna learn more. Leading up, I'm sure a lot of you may have seen this kind of mentioned in the outline of the talk and curious about what is leading up. So John Maxwell, leadership author describes it as if you take the approach of wanting to add value to those above you, you have the best chance of influencing them. So leading up is not bossing your boss. This is not a Dilbert comic. This is real life. Don't boss your boss. Leading up is however supporting your leader. It is adding value to the organization and it is distinguishing yourself by working with excellence. So a few things to keep in mind if you're wanting to lead up well and this stuff is just straight up ripped from the Craig Grishel leadership podcast. So if you're looking for a place to like sharpen your leadership skills, it's a great place to start. I can't take credit for any of this stuff. Honor Matters. So he says honor publicly in, who lost it? Honor publicly results in influence privately. So if you want to be over people you need to learn to be under people. You need to learn to be led. If you're constantly undermining your leader like you're not going to gain equity with them. Timing Matters. So respect the timing of just like if your boss is having a super busy day, don't spend 40 minutes telling him how you solved the problem. Like just let him know that you solved it. If you want to take some of their time, like hey can I get 30 minutes of your time? Be prepared when you come to that conversation. Like have notes about what you want to talk about. Don't just kind of show up and kind of wing it a little bit. Motive Matters. So if you're leading up Motive Matters the right motivation is adding value to the organization or to your team. It is not about making yourself look good. It is not about making others look stupid. Initiative Matters. So find something that needs to get done and do it. Like lighten your leader's load. So ask her hey what's something I could be doing today to make your day easier? What's something I could be doing to add value to this team that I'm not seeing right now? And truth matters. Don't be a yes man. Like you're going to lose credibility very quickly if every time you're pitched an idea and asked for feedback you'll just jolly about it and you love it. And then you go talk to the rest of your team like that idea was terrible. I hope we never have to work on that. Moral questions on y'all who answers are guaranteed to get the answer you're looking for. Moral questions should I accept bribed to change eBay feedback? Hell yes. I think they are more than making up for their mistake by offering a hundred dollars. Take it, change the feedback and say awesome A plus. And I wish Catherine had closed that with and send me $10 to keep my mouth shut. Accepting in parentheses eBay feedback. A recent study found that 46% of newly hired employees will fail within 18 months. Of those that fail 26% do so because they can't accept feedback. So I want to talk about accepting feedback well and I want to acknowledge that getting negative feedback sucks and can be brutal. And I'm not talking about like obviously like accepting positive feedback is super easy. Just oh go on, I wish I could hear more. Tell me more about how I'm awesome. So if you're getting critical feedback here are some things that can help you accept it, help you process it. Don't justify in the moment. So if you're getting feedback about hey you're doing, you're never getting your work done on time and or your job performance isn't where I need it to be. Don't try to give excuses in the moment because it's not gonna go well honestly and it's not really gonna, you're gonna get your point across in that moment. Seek clarity. So there's two reasons to do this. First is if you hear that your job performance isn't where they would desire it to be and you don't know what the next steps are, you're not gonna get any better. So ask for examples, ask for practical ways that you could be getting better. But also if you feel yourself getting a little bit heated up in the moment, this is a good way to buy yourself some time. So just say hey maybe can you unpack that a little more for me. Can you tell me more about that? And then just like cool out and don't focus on like wanting to punch somebody. Say thank you. This is really hard to do but if someone gives you feedback and you blow up and you give them the middle finger, guess what? You're not gonna get feedback anymore and you may say cool, I don't want that kind of feedback but you're not gonna get any better at your job or get any better as a leader if you don't do a good job accepting feedback and then seeking feedback. So say thank you because honestly it's hard to give feedback. Like especially I'm not a person that likes confrontation so if I have to go give critical feedback I've gotta go like hype up, go puke, listen to some like rap music getting to the eight mile zone and I'm like I'm ready to tell them they were late today. So that's serious. Process offline. So allow yourself to hey take the feedback. You don't have to start processing through it right then in that moment of like oh my gosh man I'm doing terrible, am I getting fired? Like give yourself some time to think through it. You may honestly think like oh man I don't believe any of what I just heard like that's all false and that's totally fine but give yourself time to like there probably is some truth in there and they may just be terrible at giving feedback and you just need time to kind of think about it. Application is key is the last one so I see it a lot. You've probably worked with somebody that's like has been told eight or nine times about something and they're never getting any better but they're always like man I appreciate you telling me love the feedback not gonna do it. So application is key. Can I hire someone to do vape tricks at my son's birthday party? It's a minion theme party. It's important to know that. So you'll need to have a minion's vape pin. I can provide one if you don't have one already. I won't even, we're gonna go over the answers to that one because the answer is yes you can totally hire someone to do that. That would be a rocking birthday party. Seeking self-awareness. Self-awareness is conscious knowledge of one's own character, feelings, motives and desires as defined by the World Wide Web. I think I just Googled self-awareness and was like copy paste let's go. So self-awareness gives us a clear picture of our strengths our weaknesses and potential blind spots. These are a lot of tools. These are just tools that I'm aware of. There's a lot of them out there to help you become more self-aware. And so I kind of mentioned the older models of leadership of like hey here's what a leader looks like and either you are born that way or you spend all of your energy trying to model your leadership style after that. And the newer models it's really about like finding that self-awareness, figuring out like okay what are my strengths and leading from that place? You're gonna be a lot more effective if you do that. So Myers-Briggs is a personality test that you can take. I'll have some links at the end for all of these on different assessments and books that you can read. Strengths Finder is a book by Gallup. They're a research institute around like employee performance and leadership. And so these two things I did whenever I first started at Life Church and Strengths Finder essentially there's like 35 or 40 different themes of talent and they threw an assessment and tell you what your top five are. And so I did both of these and then afterwards I found out that I was an ESFP so the F in that stands for a feeler which means I use emotions to make decisions. And then three of my top five strengths were harmony, positivity and included. So on paper I looked a lot like an original care bear. And I was kind of like at first like I'm humiliated. This is embarrassing. But what I've kind of learned is like I'm just actually like a super relational person that is for an extrovert. And so like I love connecting with Mike, the guys that I lead. I know the strengths and weaknesses. I know what their personal goals are and I know what their goals are in the workplace to make sure that they align with where our team is headed. And so that is a strength for me. Now I'm not gonna be like, you know I'm not a general patent type leader. But I can either expend all my energy being a super average leader that was modeled out of that leadership or be an excellent relational leader. Emotional intelligence also known as like EQ. This is kind of like a more recent field of study but emotional intelligence is the ability to identify your emotions and the emotions of others. And what they've actually come to find is that EQ is a better indicator of potential success and leadership than IQ is. And then 360 assessments. So I have a link at the end where you can take one of these but essentially how it works is you answer a set of like 20 questions. And then those same questions are sent to some of your peers, some of your coworkers and some of your leaders. And if you lead a team, there's some of the people that you lead. And then you're able to compare your results with their results of what they think and be able to figure out, hey, where's a spot where I think that I'm doing well but I'm not actually doing well. And like I said, there's tons of tools out there that you can use to seek self-awareness. You can take a Facebook quiz to figure out if you're what house you're in in Hogwarts. I don't think you want to model leadership off of like being in Hufflepuff necessarily, but you can. If you take the Myers-Briggs, you can find out which Star Wars character you are. Shout out to my Ewoks. We rowdy. What animal is Sonic the Hedgehog? Short answer. Don't get crazy with it. Hedgehog sources, Sonic the Hedgehog. So I mentioned that 360 feedback tool. I actually, so I did that assessment a couple years back and the biggest disparity between like something I thought I was doing well that others thought I was doing poorly was communication. And initially I was like, okay, this test is bogus because I'm killer at communication. And then I kind of started like leaning into that and seeking feedback from my leader. And when I figured out was I'm fine at talking. So I'm an extrovert and I love to talk. I love to chit and chat about the old ball game, but I'm terrible at communication. And so I started researching like, well, what's the difference between communication and talking? So it looks like communication is not as simple as I might've thought it was. This is a communication model. What you have here, you have a source, that's me. I'm wanting to encode a message to send to a receiver. It goes through a channel, maybe that's Slack, maybe that's in person, maybe that's email or a phone call and they decode what they think they are hearing from me and now they have understanding. And as you can see, there's a lot of things that can interrupt that message. There's noise, literal environment noise. There's noise coming from the person wondering like, why are they telling me this? Or, you know, what's the motivation behind this? And then there's also just context of, there's language barriers or, you know, there's possibly like just the background of how they were raised. And so as I started, like looking at this, sort of figuring out like, oh my gosh, like there's a ton into communication. Like I don't really know what's the best way to communicate well. And so I just want to talk about just some ways to have more effective communication. The first one, know your audience. So this one is very tough for developers because sometimes we're not self-aware and if we're talking above someone who's non-technicals head and sometimes we love to talk above someone who's non-technicals head, right? So we love to spice up things with jargon and make it sound important and make it sound difficult. But know your audience if you're trying to deliver a message, know if you're talking to a junior dev versus a senior dev, know what information is key to that person to understand. Do it in person if possible. I know this is tough if you're a remote employee, but try to avoid having critical conversations or if there's a piece of information that's super important, doing it in Slack may not be the best place, especially for feedback type conversations, follow up. So this was probably the one that made the biggest difference for me. I'm actually both these, the final two made a big difference for me about following up. So if you're having a conversation with someone and you're in the conversation with the question, are we good or do you understand? Does that make sense? So communication is the, I saw a definition that it is described as the transfer of meaning and understanding. So if I say, hey, did you get it? And he's like, yep, I'm good. I have no idea what that person got from my conversation. Like I have no idea how they understood what I just told them or how they've interpreted it. And so follow up, ask, okay, cool. So what are you gonna do next after we just had that talk? If you say, hey, we need to deploy that to production today. And it's like, cool, I got it. It was like, good, what are you gonna go do? And they're like, I'm not gonna run the test. Number one, that's for sure. I'm just gonna YOLO deploy it. I'm not worried about migrations. It's like, okay. So it's, you know what I mean? They didn't mention some of those things. Okay, there's maybe a difference in understanding because how I encoded it was based on how I understood it. And I've deployed tons of times. I know all the steps that go into it. And maybe this individual didn't. Be proactive. This one was a game changer for me also because if I was behind on a task and my leader wasn't asking about it, I wasn't telling him. And just hoping maybe I got it done in time and could be like, oh yeah, that was totally the expectation. So be proactive. Don't wait to be asked about something. If you're behind on a task like that example, let your leader know, let your boss know. Hey, I'm a little bit behind where I thought I was. I'm struggling with this piece of it. I think I'm almost through it. I'll update you this afternoon. This is something that I'm involved in often is maybe our servers are having problems and my boss wants to know what's going on. And I can either wait for every time he emails me during that situation and say, oh hey, nope, it's still out, we're looking into it. But the thing is he's probably having to communicate to people above him and to outside the organization about expectations and what's happening. And I'm not really equipping him for those conversations. So yes, he obviously knows there's a problem. So he's saying, yeah, cool, we know there's a problem, isn't helpful. So let him know, what is it you think might be the problem and the solution that you're investigating? You don't have to know all the answers but just have a hunch of where you're hunting and let them know when you're gonna talk, hey, you know what, and by two o'clock I'll let you know and at two o'clock, email him back. Don't wait until like, shoot, we still don't have it. Maybe forgot I was gonna email him at two. Just go ahead and be proactive about it. How do I get a job if I'm too attractive? With my physical build, this is a constant problem so I'm glad I got asked. But the answer is even better. I'd like to see what too attractive looks like. I'm serious, I really wanna know. So keeping it real took it a little bit creepy but that's y'all who answers. You gotta love that stuff. Humility, so what is humility? Humility is modest opinion or estimate of one's importance, rank or talent. True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less. Get a quick drink of water. So, why are we talking about humility? So for me, this I think is the secret sauce, the key ingredient to great leadership. I mentioned that I was kind of stagnant in my career. I was feeling like I was thinking maybe it's time to switch jobs, go somewhere where I wasn't feeling like I was being heard. And so I just decided like to the heck with it I'm just gonna make this team be the best team that it can be. I'm gonna just put the team first, put the organization first and get crap done. And kind of the motto that I had was like I'm just gonna instead of like trying to mold my leader into like, hey, he should be leading this way, our team should be doing these things. I just decided like I'm gonna be that guy, I'm gonna be the leader that I would follow. And honestly that humility and that initiative was noticed. And that's when I was asked to step into that senior developer role. Leaders Eat Last is a book by Simon Sinek about this. And so the title comes from In the Marines. If you go to a mess hall the more senior officers are in the back of the line. And the reason for that is we think about leadership being about rank and power. And for them leadership is the responsibility of other human beings. And so it's kind of a mind shift of like servant leadership and not about, I saw a quote that being a manager is about being important, being a leader is about making others feel important. And so it's like trying to have that posture when you're having conversations with people of like making them feel important and not about like, oh yeah let me one up you, let me tell you about a thing that I did. Like this quote, in every encounter we either give life or we drain it. There is no neutral exchange. So are you adding value where you work? Are you adding value to the relationships that you're in? Do you contribute or consume where you're at? And so if you leave this talk and you don't pick something and you don't get any better then you're actually taking away from yourself, from your team, from your organization. So pick one, pick just one of these things that any of us could get better. So pick one of these that you felt like really stood out to you and start somewhere. And don't wait to be given more influence where you are but start using your existing influence to do more. So I jumped into Yahoo Answers cause I was like, man I need help I gotta figure out how to close this thing out. And I got some like weak answers like this like nod your head, acknowledge the applause walk off the stairs in case you forget. Thanks mom. But Not Ned came through in the clutch jump off into the crowd allowing them to serve me to the concession stand where I buy a round of tequila shots for my adoring fans. I'm sure that Not Ned, I'm not sure that Not Ned has been to a conference I don't know if we have a concession stand here and if it sells tequila shots but if you find me at the concession stand and they have tequila shots they're on me. Thank you guys.