 Good morning everyone. I'd like to thank all of you for coming this morning before we get started with my talk I'd like to take just a moment to Thank and appreciate all of the folks who have put so much hard work and dedication Into creating dev comps easy this year so that we can all be together. So could we please give them a round of applause? Thank you. So as Roddick mentioned, my name is Leslie Hawthorne. I am a Senior principal technical program manager fancy pants in the office open-source program office in the office of the CTO Most of my day-to-day work focuses on helping our customers understand the business value of open-source and to help them architect their open-source software strategies Today I'm going to talk to you about the process for creating high-performing teams some common barriers to groups that make them much less successful and We're going to leave today learning some lessons that what each of us as individuals be we individual contributors Team leads or just natural leaders or managers can do to create really effective and high-performing teams You have got to be joking Remember when I told you my AV always fails. What magic did you do? Okay, thank you. You're lovely. I appreciate that I'm not going to touch anything except this All right So to frame our remarks today and give you folks a little bit of context for the discussion I'd like to talk to you a little bit about Google's project Aristotle So in 2015 Google decided to launch a study out of their people operations department. That's what they call their HR folks to try to determine What features in the individuals and a team meant that the team would be incredibly successful would ship products that customers loved that would gain new users and The executive leadership and the human resources department had a lot of theories About what would create high-performing teams these ranged from we have to get all the introverts together on a single team We have to get people from elite universities all together on the same team etc etc and They were very surprised when they reported the results of this study Which included in-depth interviews with 200 people and surveys of more than 180 teams To discover that all of those theories were completely wrong The most important Elements to having a high-performing team are those that you see here before you Psychological safety which we'll talk about in depth today The dependability so you know that if your team says someone on your team says they're gonna do something They're gonna do it structure and clarity. I know what is expected of me and I know how to do it meaning so my work personally matters to me and Impact my work matters to the wider world beyond what I do each and every day so the key aspect They found of all of these features was in fact psychological safety And in fact all of the other factors were impossible to create if that team was not operating in an environment of psychological safety So and again, like I said all of the study Makers were extremely surprised by these results I was not surprised by these results because once upon a time I used to work at Google and I certainly didn't feel like I was operating in an environment of psychological safety Although at the time I didn't have those words to talk about it But I definitely felt like I wasn't one of the cool kids, right? Like I had an English literature degree It is not very fancy to have an English literature degree, right? I I went to the wrong university many people at Google go to Stanford and I attended Google's arch rival University the University of California at Berkeley, right? I was a woman working in the engineering department. There weren't a lot of us, right? So there were there are all these ways that I kind of felt like I didn't fit in And it wasn't really safe to be vulnerable, right? Like I felt like every mistake I made Counted a lot more than maybe some of the mistakes that other people made Now what was really strange to me was You know moving on and getting really, you know cool job at places like Red Hat and Then talking to my friends who were still working at Google who were in the engineering department and hearing from them that they had similar experiences that They felt like if they weren't the smartest person in the room, they shouldn't speak up and share their ideas That they weren't that they weren't smart enough to contribute that they often held back Their ideas because they feared that if it wasn't a good enough idea They would get made fun of or people would you know decide that they weren't very intelligent, right? so Again just to sort of frame the idea of psychological safety right operating in an environment where you know if you make mistakes It's okay So to bring it back to all of you folks. How many of you have had jobs where you felt like it wasn't okay to make a mistake? Please keep your hands raised. How many of you found a new job as quickly as you could? Haven't seen and didn't see a single hand go down How many of you have your most brilliant thoughts and Ideas when you're with people you know love and care about you and I'm the same way, right? I I find that I have Very good interactions, and I feel very intelligent, and I have very good ideas when I'm with people who Respect me and who think that I matter and if I'm in a conversation with someone who I think Doesn't have a lot of respect for me. I just can't say the right thing no matter how hard I try, right? so Now that we have a grounding in what psychological safety is and it's important. I'm gonna talk a little bit about common barriers to psychological safety that exist in companies and Again, like I said at the end we'll talk about a few ways that we can overcome these barriers and contribute to our mutual success So I believe if I am pronouncing this correctly my check friends call this animal a crush Did I get it even close to correct close? All right? I win So in English we call this animal a hippopotamus or a hippo. We just shorten it to hippo so in environments that Are not conducive to psychological safety one thing that all happens frequently is hippo wing So the highest paid person's opinion is the only one that matters, right? I've also seen this referred to as the highest prestige Person is the only one that matters. So the rock star engineer in the room is the only one that people will listen to and This is incredibly damaging because even the smartest person in the room Or the highest paid person in the room is not always going to have the right idea and If you're in an environment where everyone is simply waiting for the right person To bless you all with their amazing thoughts. What does that do to the other people in the room? They disengage They don't even try to come up with ideas because their ideas aren't going to matter. They're not going to be heard and They really stop caring about the work that they're doing because they can't feel personally connected to it, right? It's not it's not something that they're participating in. It's something that's happening to them so Just a really quick tip if this is something that's happening in your environment I highly support getting like cool little pins for hippos and just start saying no hippo wing eventually it'll catch on I've done it before Another thing that I freak much more frequently see in startups But it happens also in big organizations is this concept of hero culture How many people have heard the term hero culture? Okay, I see quite a few hands The other way that I hear this referred to is firefighter culture. Is that also familiar? Okay, excellent. So for those who may be less familiar with this terms the idea of hero culture or a firefighting culture is one in which rather than attempting to Fix the root cause of particular problems The solution to problems is simply move faster and throw more human effort at the problem Right. Why take time to address technical debt? If you know that you have a team who will be on call 24 hours a day seven days a week whether they are home or away to fix whatever is broken, right and Hero culture is incredibly destructive to psychological safety for a number of reasons, right? First of all, if you are working 24 hours a day seven days a week And you have far too much to do. There's no way to replenish yourself, right? You're tending towards burnout and obviously someone who is is constantly stressed is not going to feel psychologically safe and then the other place where this erodes psychological safety is In being in an environment where you can talk about how to address problems, right? If the culture of your organization is that we are all very cool and awesome people Because we fix stuff when it's broken all the time being able to bring thoughts like Maybe we should fix it so it doesn't break and that will take us an extra three weeks And it might delay a release, but then we don't have to worry about it as much Those thoughts aren't really welcome, right? They're contrary to the culture that says we are successful When we fix things that are broken and unfortunately People get burned out. They can't keep performing at this optimum level all the time. It's just not sustainable and Unfortunately, you lose people either because they get burned out and they leave Or they get burned out and they stay Which is potentially worse for your organization again something that I see really frequently within startups cultural norms of a company that actually Exclude people and these are often really hard to see, right? So if you read a typical job advertisement for a startup in Silicon Valley It will regale you with a long list of all of the perks the employees get for working there, right? We will serve you breakfast lunch and dinner Every night after work, we will all go out to the pub and have a drink together before we go back to the office On on Thursdays at 4 p.m We have the office foothball tournament and the winner of the office foothball tournament will be I don't know given an extra beer from the keg in the kitchen, right? Now all of these things don't sound so bad, right? I mean I want to drink a beer. I want to have breakfast I'm not a foothball player, but you know this doesn't sound so bad until you kind of start unpacking the layers of What those cultural norms mean, right? A company that serves you breakfast lunch and dinner is Setting the expectation that you're going to be in the office from breakfast until dinner time a Company that has a keg in the office kitchen is setting the expectation that alcohol consumption throughout your workday is normal a company that you know has a foothball tournament every Thursday at 4 o'clock and that's the social focus Of the company and the place where people bond Well, I'm kind of out. I don't play foothball. I guess I like to watch it, but you know, maybe not every Thursday And when these cultural these cultural norms just simply sit within the organization It's very difficult for people to sometimes realize like these sorts of things send a message For example, if you're if you're a parent or you have family commitments, or you even just want to have a social life After work if the company serves dinner and you say I got to go home I got to feed kid lit, right? The message that you are sending in that environment is I am not nearly as dedicated to my job as the rest of you Who are willing to stay here through dinner and late into the night? If you choose not to go to the pub with your colleagues because you don't you don't like to drink alcohol You are sending the message that you are not Cool, you're not part of the team. You're not there to be a friend to your colleagues, right? So again when we're when we're looking at how we set up our organizations and our cultural norms We have to think about what each cultural norm says to To everyone right not just to the people who are like cool. I totally want a beer. So We talked a little bit about a few common barriers just to set the stage So let's talk about how we actually create psychological safety and how we go about the process of building trust So the feeling of safety 100% absolutely starts with trust and you can only really Change yourself and the way that you interact in a given situation. So a lot of this Sage advice is focused on what we as single persons can do To create trust in our environment. So I know red hat is very big on talking about our values of transparency But I cannot stress enough how important it is to to be transparent in your communications with other people and to be really clear about what your needs are and why you need these things and And make and ask people to help you right just be very very clear about it And when you're having those discussions It's not enough to be to be really aware of your own needs and clear about what your needs are If you're going to ask someone for help if you're going to ask someone to collaborate with you You need to understand their needs and you need to help them reach those needs and That's not always going to work But you all and in those cases you just need to be willing to compromise right and you're not always going to get The best outcome for you what you're striving for is the best overall outcome for everyone Some days it's gonna be great for you some days Maybe not so great, but if you want to create a psychologically safe environment that has to be okay with you Last but not least and probably I think the most important Aspect of this is be a real person Like it is possible to be a professional human being and to really be yourself I don't say everything I think when I'm at work, but I'm still me when I'm at work, you know I tell people my honest thoughts and I try to do so lovingly and with respect But I don't you know I don't put on this like robotic professional face where we are all going to talk like this in a monotone So that we don't defend each other This is not a way to create psychological safety people feel like they are in a bad 60s movie So again bring your whole self to work Another way to create an environment of psychological safety and to build trust is through your own vulnerability Besides we needed a cat picture at this point in the presentation. So when I when I talk about Leading through vulnerability. I mean be willing to admit you're wrong Be willing to admit you have a poorly formed idea and you need help making that idea better right don't be afraid of Owning the fact that you're a flawed human being there's not a single person in this room who is perfect no matter How skilled they are as a programmer no matter how long they've been doing their job none of us are perfect And if we can just walk into situations Waiting to be Surprised waiting to be happy because we were wrong and someone else was right and that means we got closer to having a good answer That's really important. It's not just important for us It's important for other people because when we model the behavior That it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay to do something wrong We create that psychological safety for ourselves and for the other people that we're collaborating with because if you can make a mistake I can make a mistake and at the end we're all going to be better So How psychological safety fosters innovation? So one of the things that I promised I would talk about in this presentation was a little bit about how psychological safety is important for creating Healthy environment for diverse teams. So we're going to touch on that quickly So how many folks have read some of the studies that have come out about how having a diverse Team creates better results for the company. I see a few hands This particular study that I'm citing For McKinsey was written up in the Harvard Business Review and I encourage you to read both the article in the study But it has been very clearly demonstrated in a number of studies that the more diverse your team is The higher the financial returns for the company. So diversity isn't simply a Great goal for businesses to have because we want to be nicer to everyone diversity directly impacts the business bottom line, right? so diversity Having lots of different kinds of people contributing to a problem Added to psychological safety Creates inclusion. It is not enough to have different kinds of people on your team So that they can contribute to a better and different result They have to feel like they are included. They have to feel like they matter If there are people in your organization who are not like the dominant type like when I was in human resources It was all like young white ladies between the age of 24 and 27, right? Like we were all the same We had one dude working on our team. He was miserable. He just was like I don't understand why I'm here and you guys all like make me feel like I'm strange because I'm not talking about my shoes We bonded about how I didn't want to talk about my shoes either. So Without psychological safety the diverse participants of your team, they don't feel motivated to stay, right? You've invested so much time and energy into bringing someone into your organization To help them be successful there and if they don't feel like they're safe Because they feel different because they don't feel welcomed because they don't feel like their ideas matter they're going to leave and you're not only going to lose out on the opportunity to have a more innovative product because of that Diverse perspective. You're also losing out on the many dollars that you invested just bringing them into the company So I'm an American and we're emotional and I'm gonna overshare a little bit so I think it's really easy to stand up here and talk about being vulnerable and To talk about like psychological safety and you know what it means and it's all very like theoretical that Psychological safety for me means that I can be me at work every day How did the story be hard to tell so right after I had my daughter I had severe undiagnosed postpartum depression. I had no idea and It took about two years before I couldn't do stuff anymore and I took medical leave red hat was incredibly supportive and when I came back to work. I was so embarrassed Because I'm not the kind of person who says I can't do it Like if you hand me a problem, I will solve it. That's just who I am and I came back to work and I was kind of Closed in on myself a little bit because I was really I just didn't feel good. I thought I'd let the team down and I remember getting an email from a co-worker who's not here today. I wish he was I would thank him in person again When I said to him, you know, I felt really embarrassed. I felt like the team down. I let the team down Taking leave and he said to me Leslie we have missed you so much. We have been waiting for you to come back We have all been waiting for you to come back So that you could be here with us. We have missed what you bring to us We have missed the conversations we have with you. We have missed the way this team operates when you are here Psychological safety means to me that I can come to work every day and be who I am It means that if I say I have to go to daycare right now and pick up my kid. I'm gonna go on Mute nobody cares. No one judges me. No one thinks I'm less capable Right, it means to me that if I say I didn't get as much done today as I wanted to get done Because my back went out. No one thinks I'm any less capable, right? I can bring my whole self to work and I'm not afraid and that is so important so We've talked a lot about a lot of theoretical things. We've talked about my own experience So what are the three things each of us can do? Right now to create environments of psychological safety First of all be kind to yourself life is hard We are often our own worst critics if you find that you are Being unkind to your friend who is you because you really do need to be your own best friend I mean you live with you every day, right? then show yourself some compassion and Extend that compassion to others right if someone is having a bad day if someone's made a mistake if someone is You know just not up to par. They're not doing the things that they need to do. Let it slide. It's one day. It's not every day That's not who they are It's one mistake. It's one day And and last but not least we are all as I said before flawed human beings, right? None of us is perfect and I think that the most important thing that we can do together is make way better and Different mistakes every day Thank you