Description
Watch this talk from Meri Williams (Chief Technology Officer at Pleo) as she walks through 5 lessons to take on board to implement cultural changes that last.
Meri discusses:
- The importance of human communication
- How to create conditions for success for high performing teams
- The importance of inflection points
- Why observability matters more than testing
- Why culture add matters more than culture fit when adding members to your teams
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Transcript
Really excited to bring you the next talk, from the fabulous Mary Williams who is going to be talking to us about how to make cultural change real and stick in our businesses. So, without any further ado, Mary, I'll let you take it away. Thanks very much.
Is this working? Just about there we go. Cool.
So hi. I'm Mary. I'm, originally South African, and I grew up as a hardware hacker.
But, these days, I'm more on the software side of things. CTO Plio, and I'm also the chair of the lead dev conference, which is a a leadership conference disguised as a tech conference.
But today I've got five lessons for you about making cultural change real. The first is that dry doesn't work for human communication.
Don't repeat yourself as a great programming principle, and I'm from a Python background, so it's, one of my favorites.
But it's a terrible human communication principle. Research shows we have to things up to seven times before people really hear them.
And so they also don't know what they don't know, right? And so it's about helping people realize what they don't know, helping them hear the message over and over again, because the only thing that developers produce more of than code is conspiracy see theories in the absence of information.
To be clear, be consistent, and remember that you need to be bored with what you're saying before people will even vaguely heard it for the first time.
And remember that the standard we walk past is the standard we accept if you see things going wrong and you don't call it out, it's going to make things worse time and time again.
And remember not just to communicate in the present. I'm a big fan of architectural decision records because they're communicating with the future about why we did what we did at a given time. If you've not come across ADRs before, there's some great stuff written online, about how to use them really well. But essentially, what you want is for when your system is legacy because it will become legacy, one day, maybe sooner than you hope, you need people to be able to understand why you made the decisions you made and what you were thinking at the time so that they can figure out whether they can change that decision or not. I've worked on systems me. I've worked on systems so legacy they were vintage, and I wished so much that somebody had told me what the hell they were thinking when they made that decision thirty years ago, in order to be able to to decide to change it.
The second thing I've learned about cultural change that high performing teams need you to create conditions for success.
I remember becoming a manager. I was definitely somebody who was better suited for saying an IC in a visual contributor.
But I remember becoming a manager and knowing that I hated bad bosses, you know, pointy head boss in dilbert's funny because it's so relatable. Right?
We think of bad bosses as clueless, empty suits, pointless. They practice the seagull style of management fly in, shouted everybody, shit on everything, fly away again.
And so my, my base response was, oh, that's very sad. This is the best cat gif on the internet, but sadly it doesn't seem to be working today, but essentially decided that if I had to be a manager, I refused to be bad at it. And so I went looking for what good management looked like. I like this from Katarina Fake that at minimum, try to be the bullshit umbrella, don't the bullshit funnel who chooses who they like least and concentrates it all on them. And don't be the bullshit fan just spreads it all around indiscriminately.
And so because I'm a nerd, I like research. And so I went looking for research about what made high performing teams. And this is my favorite management book, which I appreciate makes me a real nerd.
But it's my favorite because it's immensely database. They interviewed eighty thousand different managers. They looked at four hundred different companies, and they went looking for what made team high performing, not what made them happy.
And they found that there were these twelve questions that predicted high performance. Now I know my reaction to a slide that terrible is great. Now I'm drowning in information I can't use. So let's zoom out for a second. Has anybody read Drive?
Dan Pink's book about motivation.
In that, he basically says that we need three things to be motivated. We need purpose, autonomy, and mastery.
We need to believe in why have a say in what and be proud of how. And then you take away any negative factors that attract. If you have the worst, commute in the world, maybe it won't be made up for by these these three things.
But those questions that we, looked at briefly a second ago fit very well into that. You know, you proud of the mission or purpose of the organization that you're a part of. Do you feel like your opinion counts? Like, you can shape the work that you're doing. But then a huge number of these questions are about mastery, about feeling like you've got what you need do your job well, feeling like you get to do what you do best every single day, that somebody cares about you at work that there's these, opportunities for you to to learn and grow, that you feel like your colleagues are care about doing quality work, even. Right?
But there's a few questions missing. In the last seven days, have I received back or recognition for good work.
Does my supervisor, it's very nineties, right? Not my supervisor.
Does my supervisor or somebody at work seem to care about me as a person? And do I have a best friend at work? I like this last question because it's a master's last cultural differences.
In America, apparently, that's a perfectly okay question. In Northern Europe, the responses like fuck you. The company doesn't get to choose my best friend can be.
So I will translate the last question for all of us who are more Northern European.
It's, is there somebody at work who even if company isn't paying, I will willingly spend time with. Okay? That's how you gotta gotta hear it. And this is really about being respected and rewarded.
So Camille Forneier refers to this as community. I I call it inclusion.
And so the predictors of high performance essentially add up to these four categories. Purpose, leaving in why, autonomy, having a say in what, mastery being proud of how and then inclusion, feeling like you belong.
And my based premises that our job as leaders and certainly everybody who's managers, their job is to create the space in which that work can happen really well.
Because every person and every role is capable of virtuality, I genuinely don't believe wake up in the morning thinking, today I'm aiming for just south of mediocre.
And if it can fuck up everybody else's day along the way, my day will be perfect. Like assholes exist, but I don't think they're very common.
The third lesson I've got is that inflection points really matter. Sema and exclusion said Altoad Verouand is Latin for always in the shit just the depth varies.
Which, you know, one day I'll get tattooed on myself.
And different things come for free at different inflection points. I do a huge amount of work with startups and scale ups, and they find, a lot of time they're trying to look at Google or Amazon or Salesforce or, you know, these huge companies and copy them. And I'm like, you're like fifty people in a room together. There's no way that their problems are the same as your problems.
And so be aware of the actual problems you're facing, and try to find companies and people and groups that are twelve to eighteen months ahead of you. Try to find people who are just that little step ahead of you in the cultural change that they're making in the ways of working changes that they're making and learn from them. Rather than looking too far ahead and trying to optimize for something that isn't even your problem yet.
Help yourself realize when you need to make the next tiny step rather than trying to to go too far too fast.
And focus on the right problems at the right time. If you just starting to get CICD working in your organization, then your your real problem is getting people to let go of their very closely held change approval board, I imagine. I love the boards. They are, they're the equivalent of scar tissue for organizations.
The change approval board list tells you every major incident that has happened in the history of that company or in the experience of people who wrote the lists, past past world.
My fourth, lesson or, in Obsability matters a lot more than testing. It's really difficult to test people changes ahead of time. Sometimes you can achieve it by doing a small pilot or trying to, figure out if you can, you know, change one team at a time or, see whether you can, you can make some some change in just a a limited way. But however well you plan, however hard you try, sometimes the impact you have might not match your intent.
And so regularly check whether what you were trying to do matches up to what actually happens.
Retros are a really good way doing this. I'm, I'm sure that you've all been exposed to different, types of retro. If you've only ever been exposed to one type of retro, please for love of God watch this talk. It's from Jesse Link. She's a senior director at Google now. She was a VP of injured, Twitter before, and it's a really nice look at different retro formats that you use to help manage whether your help, keep track of whether your team is changing in the way that you want it to, whether the process changes and people change you're making are having the impact that you want them to.
There's also things like Spotify's squad health checklist that you can use to keep track of whether the the changes that you're making are are happening in the way that that you want along the way.
The list down the left hand side is obviously just the the things that Spotify cared about a time. If you ask them today, it's a very different list, although they still use something quite similar to the squad health check model.
And then you don't have to take any of these tools. You can sit with your team and articulate what matters to you just one on one. This is from called people are weird and I'm weird, by a guy called Sam Sam Barnes. And it's all about every single retro every one to two weeks, checking in with the team about whether the things that mattered to them were really happening or not.
Probably the most important thing that I want you to take away today is that culture ad matters a lot more than culture fit. We talk a lot about culture fit. And when you're hiring, when you're bringing people into your team, when you're trying to figure out whether you who you promote and who you don't, it can be really tempting to look for the people who are just the same as what you've got. But we know from huge amounts of research from, a lot of real life examples too, that homogenous teams don't went They're not as innovative, they're not as profitable, they're not as high performing. And so we need difference. We need to get the most out of difference.
And we forget, I think, a lot, that the unit of delivery is the team. It's the team that achieves something together not very often just solo individuals.
I think a lot about that question in the twelve questions earlier do I have the opportunity to do I do what I do best every day?
You imagine a world where everybody in your team could say yes to this question. You were using everybody for what they were really brilliant at. And maybe that's possible. Maybe the spikes that we have individually can be really well leveraged. And by our powers combined, we can be a brilliant team with all of the skills that are needed.
We need to stop leveling people out to be consistently mediocre. It takes a lot of effort to go from bad at something to okay at something.
That time and effort is possibly better spent going from okay to brilliant or good to amazing.
If you can spend your time going from good to world class, that's probably than going from shit to okay. And instead of trying to where away differences trying to smooth everybody out to be exactly the same profile. Maybe we can view difference as a feature rather than a bug.
We need this sort of shifting perspective.
I really like, this one if you haven't seen it before We're not interchangeable resource units.
And I tell engineers that if they're called resources by their managers, they should refer to them as overhead until they stop it.
Where colors or flavors were better in compliment or in concert with each other. I would watch the hell out of a seven Hulks movie, but the avengers are good, are are cool as superheroes because they're different from each other, because they have different skills. You cannot send the hulk Black Widow's mission.
I mean, it would be hilarious, but you cannot send the Hulk on Black Widow's mission. Right?
And so What if we think of this rather than trying to get individual perfect employees or try to be individually perfect employees? What do we think of it as like roles and casting, who's best suited for the particular strength that you need, and how do those strengths combined add up to amazing performance at the team level.
How do we assemble a great team with complementary abilities?
I'm a massive fan of this, this movie. I don't know if you've all seen it. I got very upset at, like, man babies on the internet being, being, like, shitty about women being in ghostbusters back in twenty sixteen. I saw this in cinema eleven times, and I took a hundred people with me. There are somehow, there is an Odian data scientist somewhere in the country who still doesn't quite know why Lesa Square ran ghostbusters for fifteen weeks in a row, but turns out if you fill the cinema once keeps going.
But again, another team that is genuinely better for being different from each other.
In terms of how to actually craft environments in which people can be themselves, and be successful in which you can have the sense of belonging and inclusion.
I could probably talk for another day about how to do that, but try to keep it relatively short.
I think people are asking themselves these three questions, whether consciously subconsciously.
When they're deciding whether to join, whether to stay, whether to say yes to a promotion, people do say no to promotion sometimes.
They're asking, am I expected here? Is someone like me even expected to be in this place? What does your company website say about the kinds of people who are and aren't expected.
I've got a physical disability. I'm I'm able to walk today, some days I'm on crutches, some days I'm in a wheelchair. I've never interviewed any wear, where I knew ahead of the interview, whether I'd be able to get into the room if I was on crutches or in a wheelchair that day.
People with disabilities are not expected in most workplaces. We're not accommodated for, we're not planned for. And if your team picture is all white or all dudes or anything that is just one set of people, you're sending a message whether you want to or not that other people aren't expected.
Am I respected here is about this thing I've a couple of times, whether my differences are seen as a feature or a bug.
And, like, I'm hyper aware of this. I'm the one the daily mail warns you about.
I'm a I'm a foreigner with a job, which I think is worse than living off the state, but I've gotta kinda check the headlines regularly to be sure.
A woman working in tech I'm queer and autistic and physically disabled, and my wife is British. I'm over here stealing your women and your jobs.
That joke is growing on her after twenty years.
I don't often find people who are like a direct role model for me. There's not many people who are different in all exactly the same ways that I am.
But there are places that I've worked where my differences were a feature, and there were places that I've worked that my differences were definitely a bug.
And that shows, and it's very felt by people who are, who are different in any way what the attitude is by, by folks around And then this final question, can I be myself and be successful here? Stonewall did a piece of research about twenty five years ago now. That showed that people could be forty percent more productive if they could be themselves at work because it takes so much energy to pretend to be something that you're not. To pretend and act different and code switch or mask or, you know, whichever of the the term applies to you.
And so when you're thinking about whether your your environment is inclusive enough, think about these three questions. What messages send about who is expected.
The number of startups I talk with in London who are like, we just don't understand why we don't have any girl develop I'm like, you're calling them Girl developers is probably gonna answer number one, but the only benefits you have on your website is like beer, when say, and and foosball Tuesday, that's not very surprising, guys.
Am I respected here? Or my difference is gonna be seen as feature or is bugs? Is it going to be valuable or is it going to be something to ignore?
And then can I be myself and be successful? Is there evidence that people who successful in this company, in this team, in this organization are different from each other in any way shape or form. And so sometimes you can't have the full rainbow compliment of ideal leaders that that you would like to have, but something you can do is make them seem more human and share a bit more about who they are and how they've succeeded. And hopefully they've succeeded in ways that are different to each other.
That said, I've worked places where the leadership looked like they were wearing matching underwear to go with their matching ties and haircuts, so they isn't always possible. Right?
The funniest was a a group of guys, and they were all guys on the stage with matching ties and haircuts and everything else. And the company at the time had a big marketing campaign about doing things for the first time.
Going to be unfortunately easy to figure out who I'm talking about if you look at my LinkedIn, so don't do that.
And, they made the mistake of asking this set of leader what they were gonna do for the very first time in their lives.
And the first guy said, cook a meal for my family.
And that was sort of the reaction.
And then the second guy said, the laundry.
And there was more of a, like, grumble reaction.
And then they stopped asking because they realized this was going pretty badly.
And I I had to be sat next to the head of diversity and inclusion. I leaned over to her. I was like, so Tina, what I'm what I'm getting from this is it's a really good thing that I have a wife at home, which needs to stop with this designing hospitals bullshit, my wife's an architect, and stay home and, like, cook my meals and do my laundry, right? And she was just sat with a in her hands, like, cannot believe that they have said this.
But so even if you and and the other leaders around you are maybe quite similar to each other. Try to find the ways in which you're different. Try to show those ways. Don't hide them. Be really explicit about them.
In summary, making cultural change real is helped by these five things.
Don't repeat yourself sucks for human communication. You need to repeat yourself. You need to say the same thing consistently, clearly.
And over and over and over again. If you're not bored yet, probably there are people in the team who still haven't heard your message.
High performing teams need four things to be high performing. They need purpose, believing in why, they need autonomy, having SA in what, they need mastery, being proud of how, and they need inclusion, feeling that they belong.
And if you can make those four things happen, if you can find those four conditions for success, then you can make teams really successful Inflection points exist, so don't look for advice from companies that are way ahead of you on the journey. Look for the people who are twelve to eighteen months ahead of you and find out what they did when they were in your situation. They are the best sources of advice for you, not the people who are decades away.
With people, observability matters a lot more than testing, it's really hard to test people related changes. And so think about how gonna measure success, how you're gonna measure whether the process is effective, or the people are happier, or whatever the the outcome is you want.
And then remember that culture add matters a lot more than culture fit.
If you if you do one thing after this talk, if you say, every time you're adding someone to your team, how will they add to our culture as part of your interview process? Then I think you you'll have gotten something out of this.
Thank you very much.
