 All right, well welcome everyone. You probably already worked this out, but we're here for talking about growing great teams. How many of us feel like at some point in time you have been on a great team sometime in your life, sometime in your career? Awesome, that's good, okay? So for the internet viewing folks that was about every hand in the room, how many of us feel like we have been on the greatest team, a team that could not possibly be improved because it was so incredibly amazing? So, all right, good, all right. Awesome, so all of us have things that we know that we can do to make our own teams better, even if we're on a great team right now. We're together here at DrupalCon to use this week to explore new ideas, challenge ourselves, learn, improve, et cetera, and my challenge to all of us, myself included, is to take the things I'm talking about here for this next hour and use it, take at least one thing back to your teams and make your own teams greater. If we all do that, we will make Drupal stronger, we'll make Drupal better, and we're gonna help the open web win. So, let's get to it. My name's Drew Gordon. I'm the director of developer relations at Pantheon. If you're not familiar with Pantheon, it is the best place to run and manage a Drupal website on the planet. We have a booth downstairs, we have demos, we have all kinds of smart people ready to answer questions, feel free to come by and try to stump us and pick up a free t-shirt in the process. So, over the last 15 years though, my role has really been about leading web teams. So, I started off as a web developer way back in the day, in the late 90s, eventually went independent and then had enough work, so I started getting more people, and eventually what I realized was I don't need to get better at coding, I don't need to get better at project management, I don't need to get better at sales, I don't need to get better at finances, although I did, all of those things. The most important skill I could teach myself and try to refine and improve was that of making my teams better, growing great teams. And so, what I'm presenting is a lot of stuff that I've spent time reading and blogs and books and webinars and other things, and is my own school of hard-knock stuff. I'm trying to distill 15-ish years of lessons learned into all sorts of things. These slides are online, I link to a number of different articles that I think are really good, there's some books and other things. If you go to the conference website, you can follow along right now, they're already posted, but again, this is kind of like the Cliffs Notes version. So, in addition to being a developer, see other things, you know, I've been a teacher, I've been a camp counselor, all kinds of teams have shaped this different thinking. The path today, the way that this is structured, I'm gonna start by talking about four traits of great teams. I'm gonna talk about how to grow a team and not lose that greatness, what it takes to manage a great team for those of us who manage or aspire to manage a great team someday, what does that mean, what do you do? And how do you deserve it yourself? If it were true that you had been to 10 different jobs in the last 10 years and the teams always sucked, you might be the problem. So, all of us need to do things to merit a good team, a great team. So, let's get going with four traits. The number one trait a great team needs is a shared purpose. Everyone on the team needs to know why the team exists, what you can do better than anyone else. And the bigger and more audacious you make this, the riskier it may seem and the more grandiose it may seem, but the more success you will get out of it. There's a concept called the Big Harry Audacious Goal. This came from one of the business authors, James Collins, in a book probably about 10, 15 years ago. They talk about it as a B-hag, and so that's some business jargon for those of you who are not familiar with it. Talk about a B-hag, it's kind of like, I know my business things. It's aim for something big and great and beyond yourself. By way of illustration here, I want to take us back about 100 years. So, about 100 years ago, the big frontier of technology and design and engineering and the problem to solve was that of powered flight. That was where technology was at. This was where innovation, if it could happen, this was gonna be an amazing thing, but it wasn't an assumed thing. It wasn't, people didn't, at the time, just assume it was just a matter of a year, two or three or four or five. There were a lot of people just saying, it's not gonna happen. Power flight, start on the ground, use an engine or something, get going forward and then take off into the air. That's a really bad way to spend your time and money and other things. It wasn't universally respected as a legitimate pursuit, but nevertheless there were a lot of people working on it. Two of them, two of the teams working on them, one of them was led by Samuel Pierpont Langley. Has anyone here ever heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley? All right, so the two other people have watched Simon Sinek's talk, I think. So, Samuel Pierpont Langley was the head of the Smithsonian at the time and he had been, he was well educated, well connected person, well funded person working on solving powered flight. And essentially he didn't, so I've got their effective approximate mission statements on the board. They didn't write these things exactly, but if you look at their letters and the things they said to others and the things that were recorded about them, it's pretty clear that these were the motivating factors. Samuel Pierpont Langley, at age of 50, after having a pretty good successful career as an astronomer, realized he was never going to be Hubble or any other great astronomy. He was never going to be one of the top five, and he wasn't going to be Aristotle of astronomy. So he decided his best chance to be famous, earned that spot in the history books, so that little kids would learn about him, was to jump over to something else, kind of calculatingly said, all right, powered flight, that's the one, if I figure that out, I'll definitely be famous. And it was a risky move and such. And as a result, if you were back in the day, following this sort of process that was happening out there, you would probably put your money on Samuel Pierpont Langley winning this race. He was well-funded, he had contracts from the Department of Defense, he had all the right connections, all the right education, all the right people and such. Not that far away, there were the Wright brothers, whom we have heard about. The Wright brothers, if you look at what they were reading and writing and thinking about and talking to and sharing as they were going through this process, is very clear that they were motivated by something very long lines of, this is impossible and it is possible. We can do it. And doing so is going to change the world. Now, obviously, we know the Wright brothers won. And as a sign that sort of Mr. Langley was kind of motivated by not the excitement of this, he kind of just packed up his bags, moved on, like, dang it, he didn't get that one, try something else. But from the perspective of a big, hairy, audacious goal, I wanna just show of hands, how many people think it would be more engaging to work with the Wright brothers than Mr. Langley? Show of hands. Yeah, that's pretty much every hand in the room. Does anybody, well, I won't force anyone to disagree to that. This crazy, audacious goal motivated them and the people working for them to an amazing success. So, shared purpose, have a big why, why does your organization do, why does your team exist? What are you doing that's beyond yourselves that you're helping power forward? Great teams have a known and shared purpose. The second trait I wanna share about successful great dreams is that of distributed power. So, command and control structures. So, org charts, when I say org chart, how many people think of an org chart as a thing where there's a box at the top and three box below that and five box below that and 17 box below that? Show of hands, how many people think of that as org charts? Less, most hands, those are terrible metaphors. It's a horrible way of thinking of organizations that are involved in solving creative problems, which is what all of us do. By virtue of being in this room, we solve unknown problems, we try to tackle them from, figure out where the unknowns are, come up with creative solutions, et cetera. The metaphor where the CEO says, go do this, and then it says that to the manager, the manager says, go do that, and then they say to the workers, just go do that. That works for people who are in a factory setting and they need to just pick up two things and put them over here and then turn around and grab that and these other things. Successful organizations that are in the creative industry, I should say, the industries of now, what we do and in the future increasingly, flip this. And they may not recognize it in their org charts exactly, they might still have an org chart that looks traditional, but they realize that actually the role of management and leaders in those organizations is to clear roadblocks for the people on the front lines. People actually interfacing with the customers, other ones who need the power to make decisions, to get things done, and everyone else should be thought of as below them and supporting them, kind of like roots in a tree. Important but not managing things like point and click. So reverse the org chart and if you're interested in reading more about this, this is a good article, there's another concept called holocracy, which is actually pretty awesome along these lines as well. So successful teams, great teams, distribute power. Another trait of great teams is diversity. And this is something we hear about a lot in tech and I think, you know, a lot of us maybe, I'm actually gonna go with this. The reason diversity is important, I'm gonna say a statement, I wanted to see how many people think that this is like the main reason diversity is important. The reason that diversity is important is because when a lot of people come together from a lot of different backgrounds, there naturally are more good ideas at the table and therefore better ideas can win. How many people have that as a working definition, like why diversity is good? It's about halfish the hands and maybe like nervous that I'm gonna say something else. I'm gonna say something else. That is true, that is in fact true. However, it's actually studied and studyable. The more powerful factor of diversity is one that happens internally. When we know that we are presenting to working with, sharing ideas with a group of people who are not the same as me, whatever that is, it's been studied to all kinds of things. So gender, race, religion, we know all those things. If I'm a big sports fan and I like sports team A and I know I'm presenting to people on sports team B, same thing happens. You force yourself to work harder. You challenge your own assumptions. When you go into a room expecting, all these people think like me, they probably already know it's a good idea, we get lazy. When you go into a situation and you realize, people are different from me, I don't know what they think of this idea. You question your own assumptions and you come up with better results. And this effect is incredibly powerful and it dwarfs the other effect and this is studyable. One of the really interesting studies of this, of Credit Suisse is a large financial organization. They have about $900 billion of assets. That's a lot of money. They invest in companies all over the world and their job is to make more money. That's what they wanna do. All of this money that they've invested, they spend time trying to analyze like, which companies are gonna actually be more successful for us, which investments are gonna pay off? Because if I can get 5% over here and 2% over here and 10% over there, I would like to pick 10%, right? So they munched through all of their data and shared a lot of it with the world back in like 2012, 2013. And they found that one causal factor for higher profits was having a single, one or more women on the board of directors. That's incredible. I wanna say that again. So more profitable simply by the act of having a woman in a position of power to ask questions of the company leadership. The company leadership then prepares their stuff a little bit tighter and thinking through things more and it was a causal predictor of profit. And this is credit Swiss, $900 billion in assets. If their study had come back and said, actually, we need to eliminate all the drum circles in the world, they'd probably figure out a way to invest and do that. They're not motivated by altruistic big idea, or I shouldn't probably put that on them. I don't know anyone who works for credit Swiss. If you work for credit Swiss, I'm sure you're a nice person. But they're motivated by money. And this is a very, that's an amazing result. So again, great teams have a diverse component and it is of course gender and race and religion and other things, but it's all kinds of things. And so the more people you can get on your team who are a little bit different than you, a lot different than you, the better your results will be. The last trade I wanna share about great teams is the concept of the right people in the right seats. So this is another business book term that came out of Good to Great, which is one of the classic business books. It's the idea that all people have skills and all roles require skills, different skills. If I'm a really creative, energetic, fun person that loves to come up with new ideas and paint directions, but I kinda just hate making lists and doing stuff, I should not be a project manager, right? And vice versa. There are people that can be amazing at certain things and terrible at others. And we all kinda know that, obviously, like we sort of self-identify and know these things, but being really clear about the roles your organization needs and matching those to the right people who fill those roles perfectly, like wear them like the second skin. If you can get the right people in the right seats, your organization, your team will have far greater results. So those are the four traits I just wanna share. What a great team is. So if you've got a shared purpose, you've got distributed power, you have diversity, and you have the right people in the right seats. If you can have all of those things running, you will have a great team, you will have great results. And one of the things that happens then, probably, is your team grows. Has anyone ever been on a great team? You're gonna show off hands. That was great until it got bigger or something kinda changed and it was like, wow, there was a fast hand there. There was a very emphatic hand. Like, oh, maybe 10%, not that many people, actually. I would have expected more hands. But I think this is a story that maybe many of us have heard and maybe more of us have lived through than we're sharing. Growth, change, can mess with great teams. So how can you grow? Like, keep that greatness, grow, make it even better. So if you need to grow as a team, I strongly recommend you do these things. Ask the team what are we doing right now that we can let go of? As well as what are we missing right now? And then go around and ask each person, what are you personally? What are you doing that you kinda don't love anymore, like to give somebody else? And what do you wanna do more of? And by way of illustration, for example, let's just say that you work on a web team and you are noticing that you're all really busy and there seems to be a problem in your front end development discipline. Like, that's kinda where things are falling behind and you realize projects are starting to not be delivered on time or on budget or something because we just don't have enough front ends work happening. You might, at a high level, say, okay, well, we got the budget, we got the work. One more front end developer, bam. And that could solve a problem. However, I would suggest that this is a much better way to solve the problem. To say, okay, what are we doing right now that we can let go of? You might talk to that team and realize, the thing that's really holding us back is some of the processes that we have to check in and check out code and really understand how we actually should be building this because our documentation is like, this is, that's where the frustration is. And yes, I know it's causing problems with front end things. And we're just really missing a clean check-in that actually probably needs to go all the way back to the client. Like some of those decisions that we're getting are unclear to us as we try to implement some of this stuff. And then you go around to each of the team members and you might talk to one of the back end developers and they might say, you know, I actually am really interested in doing more JavaScript. I kind of like this stuff, it's cool. I've done a little bit on this project. I've been playing around with it at night a little bit. You know, I know we're kind of behind over there. What if I did like 25% of this and such? And maybe, maybe not, whatever. But, oh, that's really interesting. And realize that maybe they can let go of something else. You could, through this process, realize actually what we need is a change that involves maybe more project management. Maybe that's the role that we need. Or something, there's account management or something else. And by adding a person in this matter, like both of those, let's just say both of those solve the problem. Like you go back to the numbers, cool, projects delivered on time, you know, front end developer. This method is gonna provide career growth. It's gonna provide opportunities for people to get further specialized, try new things, evolve in their careers. Has anyone ever been in a situation where like, all right, teams growing, they create a new role. You look at the role and you're like, that is an amazing job. Why am I stuck in this one? Is that, does that anyone, I've got some nods and smiles and such. This prevents that. The people who are already on your team should have the opportunity to have the awesome role. And maybe it's some hybrid of things. So I would suggest that this is a much better way to go ahead and figure out what it is that your team needs to be doing more of, what roles you actually need to be designing. The next thing you need to do when adding someone new to a team is you need to filter for values. You need to figure out what your values are as an organization, if you don't have that, do that. And by values I mean things like customer service or teamwork or passion. Those happen to be values of Pantheon. But if you know that you, these are your values. Early, almost like first, second questions, first, second sort of filters with anyone needs to be questions that get to that. So if customer service is the thing, for example, start asking questions early about like, oh so tell me about a time when you maybe had to trouble with the customer on something. And if you hear back from a candidate that yeah well they say customers are always right except for woo boy you and I know they're both not. You know like, and you hear a consistent storyline which is out of whack with your values, whatever they are, do not hire that person, period. Doesn't matter what else is on their resume. There is another opportunity in the world for them. It is not yours. You will not be happy, they will not be happy, it will not be a long term fit. It could poison the culture you've already got. It's a bad idea. Filter for values. When you get to the point of interviewing someone, I encourage you to follow a structured process. Ask, there are four different kinds of questions that you can ask people. And I would encourage us all, you need to have some factual questions. Do you know JavaScript? Are you, do you have a master's degree? Do you like sort of back box check kind of questions? Spend a little time, figure that out. Maybe even just get it off the resume. Skill assessment. Show me how you manage a project. Show them diagram for me what happens when a browser gets to a URL. Whatever the thing, just tell me what these things are. Get a little sense for skill assessment. But spend your time figuring out behavioral and situational kinds of things. A lot of us focus a lot in factual and skill assessment. Behavioral and situational questions really can tell you a lot more about what the person's potential is. And also prevent unconscious bias in a pretty strong way. And also have a way of evening playing fields. Just because you've done this for seven years, there might be a newer candidate actually who's done a little bit less of it that actually has a little bit more potential. And so asking things like, tell me about a time when you had an interaction with a customer and it didn't go well. I just want to hear about it and dig into that and explore that together. Situational, what would you do if something, and you can actually use this sort of forecast the problem you might have in your organization? What would you do if a senior vice president of blah blah blah came in and said, your ideas are terrible? Or what, you know, like, that's a bad example. But come up with things and just see how they would react and get a sense for them as a human being and how they process challenges. And whether or not that's gonna be a fit for your organization. What that seat is, once you have that great candidate, when you reach out to them, it's really important that you understand motivation. This is Daniel Pink. He has a, there's a really great book called Drive. And there's a link in here. And again, these slides are on the conference website. So please go, you know, you're welcome to take notes. I see a lot of people taking notes and pictures and things. But this is the URL. This is like a 15 minute thing as well with watching. The short version of it is that he describes a social experiment that's been replicated many, many times. And it's basically, you give two groups of people a puzzle. So let's say we've got 100 people, you're gonna hit 50 people a puzzle. And you say, hey, I want you to solve this puzzle. We're timing you, we wanna just figure out how long it takes the average person to figure this out. And you take the other 50 people. You say the same thing. Hey, you got a puzzle, we're timing you. See how long it takes people. And by the way, if you're faster, in the top 25% faster, we'll give you some money. We'll give you 20 bucks. And by the way, if you're fastest, we'll give you even more money. We'll give you 50 bucks. Does anybody wanna mention so? So there's two groups, get measurements. There's been repeated a bazillion times. I see some smiles, some people have seen this one before. Anyone wanna guess which group is faster on average? Across all cultures and demographics? The super counterintuitive for those of us who've been raised with capitalistic kinds of like pay more, get more, is it is always the group that's doing it for fun. When you pay for the rewards on creative problems, it negatively corresponds to results. And this has been studied a gazillion times by economists all over the world. Tons and tons of articles on this. He's got a great talk that links to further things and the book is even better. But it is real and it is totally ignored by structures that say, do this, get money. So, and it turns out actually, what people want, and if you think about this for yourself, I mean all of us, so money is a reason, money and benefits are reasons to leave jobs, it turns out. But not really reasons to join jobs. It's like, yeah, that's nice, but I wanna know some other things first. I wanna know some other stuff. And the things that motivate all of us are autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is the chance to identify problems and work on them. If you can show your candidates, hey, this is how you will have autonomy in this role and this is how you're gonna have an autonomous function within this team working, working, that's very motivating. Mastery is the concept of being able to get better at your skills. Yes, today I'm a level this developer. I see over time, if I'm able to do this, I'm gonna get better at these skills or project manager or designer or whatever the discipline is. Give people a path to mastery and it's a very powerful motivator and connect it all to that bigger purpose. And those are the things, if you are making an offer to someone and you want someone to join your team, make sure you have these things figured out for them, how that's gonna work for them and they will slot right in, they've got your values, they're in the right seat and you will be firing in all cylinders. So that's again, how we add people to a great team without killing it. Identify the seats, I would suggest those four questions are the best way to do that. Filter for your values. Do not compromise on your values. Interview with a structured process, again, situational and behavioral questions are powerful tools for that and provide autonomy, mastery and purpose for anyone new coming in. For those of us who, so I'm gonna talk about managing a great team. For those of us who manage teams now or someday aspire to, we have a number of responsibilities. So managers really need to seek the thorny issues. The nastiest, ugliest, hairiest, yuckiest problem in the room is the one you own, right? If the team is struggling with something very big and yucky and it's like our work processes or flows are wrong, the front end is a blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, the ugliest one is yours. Don't dodge it. That's your responsibility. If you wanna manage a team and have it be great, you also need to get out of the middle. The more communications and problems and decisions that run through you as a manager, the bigger, the less productive everybody else is. You might feel important, but actually you're just slowing everyone down. Figure out how to get out of the middle. Management's goal is to clear roadblocks for people. If you're the roadblock, you're like the inverse of good management. If everything routes through you, that's not good. Figure out how to get out of the middle. As a concrete, an example of this, for example, my team, every week we have a weekly meeting, takes 50 minutes, no more, ends after five zero minutes, no matter what. And what we do is we all, through the week, we just have a board, it happens to be an Asana, which is project management, it's kind of like a trailer or whatever. Everybody just adds things that they're thinking about or noticing or things, issues that they think the team needs to hear about or ask questions about or hey, we need to get on the same page. We just drop those things in. Every Monday, we run through that list. We have two roles in the meeting. One person is the person leading the meeting. One person is the person taking notes. The person taking notes in ours is actually the person who shows a blast. It's a good motivator for punctuality. And all of the roles rotate, or the person who's leading it rotates. And the way we run the meeting is that person says, okay, we have these things prioritized, high, medium, low. They start at the top, they look at the board and they say, okay, first item. I see Tessa, you're concerned about something here having to do with terminus, or there's something happening at an event, or something like that. All right, let's talk about it. And the person leading says, Tessa, tell us. Team discusses, decides. Acts right then, makes a decision right then, or sometimes they get turned into tasks, like, okay, cool, somebody wanna pick this up, go on. Next item, boom, ah, that's John, ah, okay, great. Tell us, go, Andrew, yes, good. We talk, we move, move on. After 15 minutes, we're almost, we generally finish ahead of schedule. Sometimes there's a lot of stuff, though. We're done when we're done. We're done at that 15 minute mark. We move on, get our week done. The only thing left, sometimes, from week to week is some low priority items, which can just wait, or move to email, or whatever. That structure works whether or not I'm there. My team travels a lot. We take notes, we go to events a lot, so we keep notes for each other, and it works just fine if I'm out of the picture. The only thing that blocks people is if I put something in that I think needs to get discussed, but everything else can proceed. So the power has been distributed, I'm out of the middle. Again, I'm not a perfect manager, but it's an example. If you manage a great team, you need to celebrate success and failure, and do it appropriately and accordingly. So if things are going well on your team, that's your team. That's your team executing like they're supposed to. And yes, you might have to take some credit for that, because, well, if things are going well. But primarily, that's your team. If things are going poorly, that's you, because what you're supposed to do is make your team efficient. You need to own those things. Praise publicly and address issues privately. Be generous with your praise, and if you see something wrong, take someone aside and talk to them. And this last one I really want to highlight, actually, is celebrating both success and failure. So as human beings, we all fail. If you think about your own career, certainly as I think about mine, the things I remember most powerfully and the lessons I learned most strongly are the times when I fell on my face. Does anybody else feel like, like, yep, a little show of hands? Yeah, that's pretty much all hands. If you can celebrate failure and learn from it, you can really have a whole team get better while you do it. And actually, I was at a presentation on Monday from Schnitzel, Michael Schmidt of Amazing, and he was saying one of the things that they do in their culture to do this, which I thought was amazing, is they have something called fail cake. So when they do something, he had an example of a server cluster that he typed something bad, brought down the server cluster. As soon as that happened, whole team gets online, starts doing it. One of the first questions, oh, who's got the cake? Or maybe the person who did it is like, hey, everybody, fail cake. It'll be chocolate meringue. I don't even know that's the thing. Everybody gets together, and there adds, it's no less urgency to solving the problem, but it's a way now for the team to acknowledge blame as it exists, but also immediately provide, it's okay. I'm apologizing by providing this. I'm gonna give, I'm gonna put something into this. The apology will be accepted. People will eat the cake. And at the whole retro going through, how do we prevent this again? There's a levity to this. And there's a powerful team building thing that brings people together. And there's one of the things he was sharing, that there's a little side conversation, Slack saying, this feels like lemon cream, and there's maybe a Boston. There's an unhelpful little side channel, he was saying, that sometimes crops up before the issue's totally solved, but it adds some humor and something cool to their culture, which I thought was pretty amazing. So celebrate your successes and your failures. If you aspire to manage a great team, you really need to be able to do, model the behaviors that you want. So you may not be a great project manager, or designer, or developer, or customer service person, or other things, but you need to at least attempt the things that you're asking of others, and the behaviors that you want to see, so that you can understand what you're asking, and how much stress or effort that may or may not involve. People will watch what you're doing all the time. It's kind of like open source. I don't know, we've probably, for those of us, been working in open source for a long time. Maybe some level of, yep, I know that things I'm doing are always being reviewed, but it's doubly true when you're a manager. Your team is looking to you in some way to say, like, do I trust this person? Is this credible? Does this person know what they're doing? Are they doing the things that they're asking, is it like, what's this, the thing you don't want to hear from your parents? Don't do what I say, do what I do, or however that goes. Don't manage like that. Do what I do, or say, do thing. That. The last thing I want to share about being a great manager is to cleanly separate people problems from policies. So, I once had a client, I've got two examples here, maybe. Actually, how are we doing for time? I'll give one example. I'll give a positive example of this, and if we want to dig into it further, we can. So, at Pantheon, for example, we have a policy, which is a vacation policy, which is take vacation, you need it. It's not three weeks, and if you work here for another year, you get another day. And when I first joined Pantheon, I was a little suspicious of that. It's like a passive aggressive way of telling me I don't get to take vacation. Turns out it's not, which is good. But the reason it works is because we understand that if someone abuses this thing, this privilege that we have, they'll be talked to. And people take vacation all the time. We have people who go like bike route 66 and like spend a month in Thailand and do really cool things and take time off next week because they're kind of just burnt out, whatever. If you have an issue with a person, don't, a client that had an issue with a person who is behaving incorrectly in the workplace, the solution, the way that that organization addressed it was they added several pages to the handbook. And then three months later when that person came up for review, they said, well, I see on page 17 of the handbook, you are not in compliance with our things. Like that is a terrible way to address a people problem. Don't wait three months, don't write it down first as like gotcha, ha ha, you thought you were gonna have a good review. Turns out I inserted some stuff in the handbook. You didn't watch the change log in the handbook. Wow. Address people problems immediately. If you need to write down a policy thing to clarify something, of course do that. But understand the difference between policies and people. Don't try to solve a people problem with a policy, a person problem with a policy. So that's my advice to managers. Seek out the thorny issues, get out of the middle, praise and blame appropriately, strive to be a better person, and understand the difference between policies and people. Last thing I wanna talk about is just what all of us need to do to deserve a great team. So you've got the traits of the great team going, you know how to grow the team, you've got great management inside. What everybody needs to do at all layers of this to deserve a great team are just a few things. So all of us, if you wanna be on a great team, have a growth mindset. Not a fixed mindset, not a closed mindset. We're all growing, none of us is done. I used to live in Japan when I was there. I studied martial art quite extensively. This is a saying my sensei shared with me. We're all growing, none of us is done. It applies to the little kids who are taking the classes. It applies to the adults who are still coming along, and learning, none of us is done. This is, there's a great book. It's actually in the bibliography, and I forget who the author is. It's called Growth Mindset, and it really digs into this. Don't think, if you self-describe as I'm not a blank person, or I'm not, I don't do this. I don't, like, if you negatively close off and define yourself by what you're not, and sort of think that I've just got this much talent, and that's how much I've got. I've got this much smarts, and that's how much I've got. You're closing the door for your future in a big way. It's way more powerful, and we'll get you better results, all the way through to say, I have this now. The world is ahead of me. My life is ahead of me. I have lots of options. I could go this way. I could improve these things. I could improve these things. Do you really want to be just as good as you are right now today for the rest of your life? No. Like, we all want to get better all the time. So, have a growth mindset. Another thing that I would say that we all need to do if we want to be on a great team is pay attention to our own language. Language, thought, and action are all closely related. If you're on a great team and you are constantly referring to them as they, the rest of the team, as they, that's probably a problem. Are you not a part of that team? Do you not belong? Do you not think that the team represents your values? Do you not think that the team is somehow including you? Somewhere in there, there's a problem. Starts talking about it as we, and if you need to make a change, make a change. Language is the easiest place to start. Language, thought, and action all closely mattered, or closely, closely related. The team you're on is the we team, not the they team. And the last bit of advice I have for all of us who want to be on a great team is to be the change that you want. If you're unhappy with a pattern, change it. If you see something happening out there on your team that isn't great, talk to the person, whatever, think about what you're doing to enable it. Make the change that's needed, start with yourself. Realize that you may have a role in the thing that you don't like. Take that on, own it. So, those are the three pieces that I advise for all of us to have a growth mindset. Pay attention to the language you use, especially as it relates to the team you're on, and be the change you want to see. And that's really what I wanted to cover today. So, four trades of great teams, what it means, how to successfully grow a team, how to manage the team, and how to belong and deserve on one. And with that, thank you. So I believe we have time, a little time for questions, not actually positive, 345, I think we have maybe 15 minutes or so for questions. So, if anyone has questions, certainly we'll take questions until somebody kicks us out and it looks like they know what they're doing. Until then, please feel free to come up to the mic and ask questions, or I'm happy to talk later after the session or tonight and whatnot. Oh, the slide, oh, I'm sorry, also just like a couple house cleaning things. Sorry, before people roll. You're welcome to step up though. The slides as well as the evaluation for this session. So please evaluate this session and all of the other ones you've been to. It really helps the organizers. It helps me, it helps everybody have good sessions. So please take a moment, go out, rate the session. This is just the website for the con. I mentioned, and then that's where the slides are too. I mentioned I had a couple books that's right in here as well. Contribution sprints too for the folks who are not aware of this Friday. Contribution sprints for everybody. Mentored core sprint, a gentle sprint. First time sprinter workshop. Some crazy awesome mentors will be there, probably one of them named Kathy, let me by guess. Are you mentoring? No way. No way. No way. But there's a great team of people. Awesome, Kathy is often mentors, but anyway. So yes, this is where the slides are, sorry. Thank you all. Do you have any tips on bringing your manager into the team? So I started managing a team with us last year. We built up an Isolaret. We've got a new manager above me. Our CIO came in. Obviously we didn't have anything to do with the recruitment process or kind of know we can ask him his values. But obviously he's now got values. He's trying to sort of change my team. You know, it's starting to feel a bit uncomfortable. Wow, yeah. That's a problem. And I don't have a solution for you immediately other than, so all right, so I'll rephrase what I think is going on and have a pretty strong reaction. So someone who's hired who doesn't have the values that you think, yeah, exactly. Someone hired above you who doesn't have the values that your team has either explicitly or implicitly lived by for some period of time and which you personally believe in and think are the right things to be doing. And this person's coming in and saying, no, instead of customer service, actually what we're trying to do is really poke customers to give us money at every last, like Nickel and Dime customers or something, something that you think is a problem for one of the values live with. Yeah, you need to either outlast that person or move and you can look at both options, right? So have a conversation with the people above and articulate it. These are the values that we believe, our team has been using these values to guide our work. Is this wrong? Okay, this is what I'm hearing from, new person is not this item, is very strong. Is that, who's correct here? And you may be able to expose something to upper management that makes them say yikes. Oops, we made a mistake. But if not, world's a big place, lots of options, good luck. Oh, I should also mention that I look out and I see Alexis in the audience. Alexis say hi, so this is Alexis. Alexis with Pantheon, Pantheon's hiring, we have a great team. We have all sorts of great positions. So if you wanna talk to somebody about the kinds of things that we do and the kinds of opportunities we might have, talk to Alexis. Anybody else have questions? It's either really good or really bad. Awesome, well thank you all very much. Thank you. Awesome.