Learnings from Lead Dev London

After an inspiring couple of days at the Lead Developer conference last week, I wanted to share some of my learnings from a few of my favourite talks.

The Hardest Scaling Challenge of All — Yourself

Christian McCarrick

1. As a leader, you need to prioritise where you spend your time. Obsess about the things that matter and acknowledge where “good enough” is okay.
2. Not delegating is one of the biggest anti-patterns for not scaling. Ask yourself “how can this task/decision/goal get done?” not “how can I get this done?”
3. Multi-tasking is a scaling anti-pattern. Focus, block time in your calendar for routine tasks e.g. email and time at the end of meetings to wrap up loose ends.
4. Leadership is lonely. It was reassuring to hear Christian say he too experiences emotional paralyses which is the enemy of progress — it’s easy to think others have it all sorted but in reality scaling is not a one-time task but a lifetime effort.
5. Make yourself a priority. If athletes get injured, they sit on the bench, mental fatigue, burnout, is an issue that affects us more than we might think. Learn to recognise when you’re tired and take a break.

Points don’t mean prizes

Adrian Howard

Customers and clients don’t care about our stories, they care about value. Ask value-based questions to ensure you’re building the work that delivers the most value the quickest.

Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?

Nickolas Means

The three-mile island accident was the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. Nickolas explains why on face value it looked like this accident was the result of human error, but a closer examination of the decisions and the context around those decisions changed the focus from “who” to “what” caused the accident. There’s always a second story, it’s our jobs as leaders to look for the root cause.

1. Human error is never the cause

• it’s always caused by underlying systems
• blaming a human prevents us from examining this
• ask what is responsible, not who
• understand why what people did made sense at the time.

2. Seek forward accountability, not backward

• they’ve already beat themselves up, they don’t need your help with it. Ask what they will do differently next time.

3. There’s always a second story — seek it out. Work from the participant’s reality, assume positive intent and that everyone involved made the best decisions they could with the knowledge they had.

Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers

Melinda Seckington

Goal-setting is one of the most important things you can do as a manager. Melinda covered four key areas to extract a team member’s ambitions, skills and talents in a way which is less daunting than the “where do you see yourself in five years” type approach.

• values — ask questions to get someone to reflect and think about who they are and how they do things e.g. how would you describe yourself in 5 words?
• future — imagine you’re retiring and looking back at your life: what do you want to have achieved?
• current role— how have last few weeks/months been?
• current skills — what do you do better than others? what do others see as your strengths? are there any gaps in your knowledge or experiences?

Using Agile Techniques to Build a More Inclusive Team

Kevin Goldsmith

• Form a joint working agreement with people you manage so that you know what you can expect from each other.
• Walks provide a great space for 1:1, especially if people are not sharing in a more traditional setting, it feels more natural and with not having to give eye contact may encourage people to be more honest.
• Avoid filling uncomfortable silences, don’t rob your team member the opportunity to gather their thoughts before responding more fully to questions.

Practical tips on making team decisions

Polling — make it clear to your team that you’re seeking their opinion, but you’re going to be the one making the decision

• give people the freedom to express their opinion but it’s consequence-free
• you are accountable, not them.

How to poll

Ask people to use their hands, with a fist = I hate this and five fingers = I love it.

Voting — make it clear that this is a decision based on team consensus, i.e. you’ll support the group’s decision.

• you absolutely must support and defend that position no matter how much you disagree.

How to vote

• count to three, everyone does thumbs up or down.

Building inclusive teams

Try adding an ‘observer role’ to meetings to provide a health-check on your meetings to check their inclusive as they could be. This participant can be active or passive, i.e. call out un-inclusive behaviour as they see it in the meeting or passive, write it down and share at the end of the meeting. The observer role should be looking for things like:

• people interrupting each other
• people repeating ideas without giving credit
• certain people speaking too much
• exclusionary language.

Lastly, above all else remember:

“You set the tone and conduct for your team based on your actions and how you respond to others”

It’s your job to call people out when you witness toxic behaviour “we don’t do that here”. If you don’t call it out, other team members will think that behaviour is acceptable in the future and it’ll erode their trust and respect in you as a leader.

Thanks to White October Events and Meri Williams for once again curating a brilliantly inspiring conference for those leading and developing teams.

I’d also like to thank Phil Potter for writing such comprehensive notes which came in very useful when writing this post.