After our kick-off event exploring Holacracy and a casual get-together to meet engineers and designers in the community, the Way We Work series focused its attention on teams this month.

The July event had four lightning talks followed by a Q&A session with all of the speakers. Below you’ll find a brief summary of each of the talks and a video recording of the event.

Jen Dennard

CEO & Founder, CultureBit, Inc.

Jen spoke on the importance of diversity and inclusion on teams.

Inputs matter. Jen outlined how starting with a diverse input leads to non-convergence, which ultimately leads to innovation. Without a diverse input, you’ll be left with convergence and the status quo.

What can I do? Jen also gave great advice on how to make a difference as an individual contributor. She focused on listening and outlined that you only need to ‘RASA’ — Receive, Appreciate, Summarize and Ask. She dove into the acronym and gave some great examples, one of the most memorable being the suggestion to consciously give micro-affirmations (appreciate) during conversations rather than only expressing the “yeahs” and “mm-hmms” unconsciously to people that are like yourself.

Katie Zhu

Engineer, Medium

Katie gave a talk on how she found her unique path to a hybrid role at Medium.

Strong interests. ❤ media, tech, storytelling. This has been the common theme with Katie since she graduated with a degree in journalism and computer science from Northwestern University, and it’s followed her throughout her tenure at Medium.

Starting as an engineer, Katie found that after a year at Medium she wanted to be more involved in the content and publishing efforts of the product. She knew she could make valuable contributions and have a lasting impact.

Ingredients. Katie lists support, passion, initiative and holacracy as the main ingredients that allowed her to form her own path. She found support in the people she’d built relationships with and identified what would make her happy with the help and insight of those around her. Realizing her draw to working on both engineering and product efforts, Katie researched where there was a need, and ultimately was her own advocate — outlining her case for the hybrid role she wanted and utilizing Holacracy to create it.

Dan Pupius

Head of Engineering, Medium

Dan’s talk on alternative management brought some clarity to the misconception that Holacracy has no managers.

What is a manager actually responsible for? Dan kicked off his talk challenging the notion that managers are an out of touch bureaucrat or an engineer who reluctantly takes on people duties. He explored what a manager actually does and shed light on the fact that managers are expected to do many things (too many things), which he argued are indeed important and relevant, even to startups. Here’s the list:

After talking about a few additional challenges, including the power dynamic associated with traditional managers, Dan outlined how eng split up this long list of manager responsibilities at Medium. We landed on the Group Lead (stable, long-term relationship focused on personal needs and professional development), Tech Lead (projects and effective product shipping) and Guilds (code and architecture) after examining our values and identifying how the splitting of responsibilities could work in our Holacratic organization. Our allocation of responsibilities to date:

Head of Eng (Dan) is responsible for red, green falls under the Group Leads and Tech Leads are responsible for items in blue.

Curious how to bring this strategy to your organization? Many other companies have landed on similar approaches, and you can too. Just focus on:

• distributing traditional manager responsibilities
• treating management as a support role, rather than a role of power
• derive structure from values

Grant Oladipo & Jon Crosby

Engineering, Medium

Grant and Jon ended the event with a light-hearted presentation on effective meetings.

I had a crazy dream last night. Opening their event with a comical example of a check-in round, Grant and Jon introduced the audience to how we start our meetings at Medium.

A unique perspective. After checking-in, they covered building an agenda and facilitation. Throughout the presentation, Jon gave real-life examples of how he implemented similar meeting tactics at his last company, Lift. The duo did a great job of talking about how we run meetings with Holacracy and then showing examples of how it’s possible to take the same constraints and adapt them to other types of organizations. Coming full circle, they closed the talk with a check-out round.

Video Recording of the Way We Work: Teams event

Medium HQ | July 29th, 2015