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Evaluating Cultural Fit + Culturesmithing: Everyone Influences...

Evaluating Cultural Fit + Culturesmithing: Everyone Influences...

by Casey Watts

The video titled "Evaluating Cultural Fit + Culturesmithing: Everyone Influences Culture" features Casey Watts discussing the critical issue of workplace culture in the context of "The Great Resignation." The talk aims to help individuals assess their current organizational culture and provide actionable strategies to improve it.

Key Points Discussed:

  • Understanding Cultural Fit: Watts emphasizes the importance of evaluating whether a company’s culture aligns with personal happiness and job satisfaction. Key components include financial compensation, social connection, and learning opportunities.
  • Framework for Evaluation: He introduces the Japanese concept of ikigai, which illustrates finding purpose through four elements: doing what you love, being skilled at it, meeting a need in the world, and being compensated for it.
  • Cultural Toxicity: The speaker highlights toxic workplace traits, referring to a study from MIT Sloan that identifies disrespect, non-inclusiveness, unethical behavior, and cutthroat environments as major factors driving employee resignation.
  • Tools for Assessment: Attendees are encouraged to create a personal list of job preferences, rate their happiness on a scale, and cultivate options for changing their work situation beyond simply leaving for another job.
  • Culture Smithing: The second part of the presentation focuses on how to actively contribute to a healthier workplace culture. Watts provides 30 concrete actions for individuals to foster cultural improvements, including encouraging social movement in the office, correcting microaggressions, and experimenting with new practices.
  • Gradual Change: Watts stresses that cultural change is often slow and requires persistence. He introduces concepts such as social pressure, education, and gradual reforms to create lasting improvements in organizational culture.
  • Important Takeaways: Participants should view themselves as active agents of change within their organizations. They are encouraged to give themselves permission to initiate cultural shifts, seek allies for support, and embrace a collaborative approach to implement changes effectively.

Conclusion:

In summary, Casey Watts' talk provides valuable frameworks and actionable techniques for individuals looking to assess and improve workplace culture, addressing the escalating trend of employee dissatisfaction and departure. By understanding both personal needs and company culture dynamics, employees can advocate for a more inclusive and fulfilling work environment.

Evaluating Cultural Fit + Culturesmithing: Everyone Influences Culture
Casey Watts

“Toxic culture” is, by far, the number one reason that people are quitting their jobs. People are no longer willing to work at organizations where they don’t feel valued, respected, and included. Economists have dubbed this “The Great Resignation.” In this talk you will learn how this situation applies to you and what you can do to make things better. You will learn a framework for evaluating whether an organization’s culture meets your personal needs, and you will learn 20 immediately implementable techniques to improve this culture.

RailsConf 2022

00:00:00.900 foreign
00:00:12.179 Casey thanks for coming good to meet you all
00:00:18.180 uh let me tell you who I am a little bit real quick I wrote a book it came out a year ago
00:00:24.180 debugging your brain you might like it I have some copies um I'm carrying some of those and
00:00:29.699 stickers and Bubbles it's a good Icebreaker if you want to say hi to me I like singing and dancing and blowing
00:00:35.579 bubbles that's kind of the person I am I play a lot of instruments I have a full rainbow of instruments and I can play
00:00:40.739 Bad Romance on all of them you might know my voice from the greater
00:00:46.079 than code podcast I'm one of the co-hosts on that if not you might like that podcast it's pretty good
00:00:51.899 you might know me from Ruby for good if you've gone to any of our events like we did the diaper Bank event yesterday
00:00:57.000 volunteering it's a lot of fun if not you might like it sign up to the mailing list to hear about our Summer Event there might be one in July
00:01:05.100 I co-founded the online community and event series empathy and Tech just
00:01:10.380 another thing y'all might like and I've done all these roles I've been an engineer ux designer product manager
00:01:15.720 engineering manager now I'm a consultant I work for my own company happy and effective I every team I've worked with has became
00:01:22.500 like the Happy team and the most effective team at the company and I do it by doing like organizational
00:01:28.200 assessment interviews surveys coaching workshops anyway enough about me I don't want to talk about that so much today
00:01:34.020 there's two parts of this talk you might have noticed the plus sign in the title
00:01:39.780 um the first half is evaluating cultural fit which is like what makes a company or a position of the company good for me
00:01:45.180 in particular and should I stay where I am or switch companies the second half is about culture
00:01:51.240 smithing if I do want to stay or if I change a company or new on how do I change that culture to make it better
00:01:56.939 more effective and healthier I have a lot of Concepts this is going
00:02:02.040 to be a dense talk there's a lot of reading assignments and homework I'm literally assigning
00:02:07.799 homework if you're here it won't be graded though the reference stock at the bottom right has every
00:02:13.440 reference in this like every image every article that I'm referencing and all the homework so that's at the bottom of
00:02:19.739 every slide feel free to take a picture if you want it looks like this it's just a Google doc
00:02:25.440 homework slides look like this I'll flash by them because they're all written in the Google Doc but I'm just saying like and you could think about
00:02:31.080 this more later in This Promise You could also use the homework as like dinner conversation prompts and you'll
00:02:37.140 see examples you'll be like oh I guess I could ask that over dinner all right into the first half evaluating
00:02:44.879 cultural fit for this I want to start out what makes you happy at work
00:02:51.840 it varies by person it's not the same answer for everyone but there are some themes like here is a concept ikigai a Japanese
00:02:58.800 concept for a reason for being and the common diagrams of it have these four bubbles Venn diagrams
00:03:05.040 if you can do a job that you love to do and you're good at and the world needs it and you get paid for it that's awesome I hope you all work somewhere
00:03:11.879 like that or you can get there soon um but what it goes into happiness for
00:03:17.580 you it could be those four but there's probably a lot of other little different nuanced things if you had to explain it
00:03:22.620 over dinner what would you say to someone else for me it's something like I need enough money and I want to make a
00:03:28.019 good impact and social connection to my teammates like good culture I want to be learning things still I want to have
00:03:33.060 support and when I did this like a year or two ago before I started a consultancy I was asking myself these
00:03:38.220 questions and that's my list you might have a similar one homework one figure out your list what's
00:03:45.180 important to you in a job what has made you happy before what's made you unhappy before and what would the ideal job look
00:03:51.120 like all right I'm gonna assume now we're fast forwarding you figured that out
00:03:57.540 good job you've talked about it with friends you you've gotten the process now you know what you like in a job
00:04:02.580 there's a couple other Concepts I want to point out about what makes a company a good cultural fit for you or not one
00:04:07.620 is I want to distinguish between cultural fit and cultural superiority there are literally
00:04:14.040 um some cultures at work are literally more effective they get more done people are happier there but I'm not trying to
00:04:19.500 be moralistic about like what is good or bad I want to work at somewhere that is more effective so that's the right
00:04:25.380 column on this one the performance oriented not a power oriented or or rural oriented culture
00:04:33.240 um and these three categories you can read more about the Western organizational culture types it's in the
00:04:38.280 notes if you want to read more about that some people might not mind being a rule-oriented work environment if that's
00:04:43.320 you that's fine there's nothing wrong with that you don't have to be in the third column that's not where you want
00:04:48.600 to be and when I say cultural fit people often
00:04:54.000 ask me um like what do you mean fit because a lot of times it's used from the one side the company interviewing
00:05:00.120 the employee Financial employee but you are also reverse interviewing the company you want to make sure wherever
00:05:05.340 you work is a good call profit for you so if you like the rural oriented environment you might like the working for the government you might not want to
00:05:11.340 work for a startup where it's more chaotic or vice versa of course
00:05:17.280 all right next concept there are some toxic traits that probably no one likes
00:05:23.880 here's the top big five from MIT Sloan the five toxic traits of teams are if you're somewhere that's disrespectful
00:05:29.820 yeah no we would all want to work there non-inclusive is uh negative unethical
00:05:35.100 Cutthroat abusive you can read more about how they came up with this list of five it's a empirically based in the notes if you'd
00:05:41.520 like but if you have if those resonate with you for your current job company physician team
00:05:47.340 I hope you can get out of there you deserve better than that you don't you don't deserve to work in a team with these traits
00:05:55.259 um toxic culture the 10.4 here the top big red bar is the biggest predictor of people leaving also the great
00:06:01.380 resignation there was a big big study which factors affected the most toxic culture is the biggest one
00:06:07.560 this is another great paper in the notes take a breath I've thrown a lot at you
00:06:13.440 you got a lot of reading to do um next up change over time I like to think about how my work happiness has
00:06:19.979 changed at each company and in the company how it's ebbed and flowed here I started somewhere I was like pretty high
00:06:25.500 like seven eight and then covet hit and went down of course for a lot of us I got a new manager Maybe
00:06:31.500 and it went up it was great oh but it didn't change the entire culture of the whole org so it was like a short-lived glimmer of
00:06:37.740 hope you might have a similar story where it's going up and down I like to split these into three zones there's the
00:06:43.740 I'm totally staying here I love it the top green area there's if it goes below a threshold You're Gonna Leave You need
00:06:49.380 to leave you don't want to stay there anymore but a lot of us when we're thinking about it and if you're here for this talk you might be in the Blue Zone
00:06:55.039 I don't know it could be better it could be worse and it's kind of hard been having it
00:07:03.539 all right some some tools to help you navigate that in the homework you can put on a scale of one to ten like I did
00:07:09.180 how happy you are with your current job boom this scale of ranges of jobs you could ever imagine
00:07:14.699 score them and see how it changed over time what things could change it
00:07:21.360 next I like to go through this with people and you can brainstorm your options it's more than just leave to another company a b c d like all those
00:07:28.020 companies I'm interviewing at you can also stay at your company and try to change the team you're on or do an internal transfer there's more options
00:07:34.380 than you might be thinking if you think more widely
00:07:41.099 um and then here's a workshop I do with both people and teams where I like come up with all the criteria as columns and
00:07:46.860 then all of the options as rows and I put numbers to all of them and then I like compute it it's not a Magic 8 Ball
00:07:52.319 it doesn't tell me what to do but this does help me be sure what I like about this job versus that one and how
00:07:58.020 important these things are this is a spreadsheet template linked to in the notes too if you want to try to do your own
00:08:06.120 all right that was fast okay that was a great crash course how to decide where to work got it
00:08:12.120 part two by the way we do have questions at the end if you want to have a question for
00:08:17.940 that first part you can bat at the end culture smithing so let's say you're at a company and you are interested in
00:08:24.539 changing the culture for the better I'm going to go through some high level principles and then I've got a list of
00:08:30.300 30 concrete actions which might have been the thing that caught your attention I know it caught mine when I was giving my description myself I was
00:08:35.820 like oh 30 things I want that it's at 20. I ended up with 40 working nearer to 30 now
00:08:41.580 you can read the full list in the dark too all right I'm going to give you some
00:08:46.860 examples of culture change here and it's also something you might want to do on your own later is to think about it the
00:08:52.200 ones I think about is I worked somewhere where no one had lunch together no one ate together it was silent people ate at
00:08:57.779 their desk every day and when I was like I'm gonna go in the lunchroom they were like really yeah and you're invited if you get over
00:09:05.700 it I don't know it's called cultural change eventually people had lunch more often but not everyone so I like nudged
00:09:11.700 the culture that way um correcting microaggressions I like to work in places where it's easy and
00:09:17.519 comfortable for if someone makes a microaggression if they say something that hurts someone else even if it seems like a minor thing then they can be
00:09:23.820 corrected and there's no hurt feelings you're like oh I won't say that anymore recently I think I said um driving the
00:09:29.399 snakes from Ireland and someone said oh that's it's not great for reasons that I've had a good discussion about it I
00:09:34.740 might not use that anymore you might want to read about why if you're curious about that particular one
00:09:40.440 but in the culture of being comfortable correcting microaggressions I want that culture and I want to steer us toward that
00:09:46.200 another hot topic for developers is you should never Deploy on Friday unless it's actually safe to do it and we
00:09:51.779 should get over that because that was an old rule when it was a morbital deployment scheme
00:09:57.779 um and having a backup person if you go on vacation for a month is going to do your job we should have backups for everyone that's a cultural norm at some
00:10:04.680 companies I've worked we had that and some we didn't I want to encourage that Norm to happen
00:10:10.860 all right as we um we're working on these things it does take a lot of energy so to cover Energy
00:10:17.580 Management a little bit I'm assuming for all of these 30 examples and all of these ideas that you
00:10:23.100 have time and energy but at times you will not have the time or the energy to work on this and that's okay
00:10:28.260 you have to moderate your own energy spending how much you're investing in this and set boundaries for yourself that's totally okay I'm not going to
00:10:35.160 harp on this too much more I hope but everything I say of course there's an asterisk like if you have time and
00:10:41.040 energy another big idea is to focus on what's
00:10:46.800 possible you don't have a lot of control but you have some control and you can use that control if all of you everyone
00:10:52.920 at your company uses your control that's a huge Force kind of like unions but you don't have to like unionize to have the
00:10:58.680 social kind of effect to make this cultural change happen
00:11:03.899 another thing energy related is power dynamics so if you're in a lower level position like an individual contributor
00:11:10.380 or engineer then making changes like widespread for the team are probably harder because you don't have that kind of positional authority to do this but
00:11:17.220 you have more context you know what the pain points of that team are and you know what your teammates are saying more
00:11:22.380 than the VP of engineering might know if they're not like on the ground talking to everyone all the time vice versa if you're in
00:11:28.620 higher position higher power position you have more ability to make change but less context so how do you get that
00:11:33.660 context make sure you're making good decisions um the thing that excites me most about
00:11:39.720 this talk is inspiring a lot of people to realize you do have power to change the culture where you're working you do
00:11:46.320 as an IC and you do as a leader too a lot of my examples here anyone can do and I'm like focused on the IC cases
00:11:52.860 individual contributor cases another big concept give yourself
00:11:59.040 permission have you done this yet do you have permission to change the culture of your company have you given it to yourself
00:12:04.860 all right take a breath foreign I have permission I've granted it to myself and you know I don't know you
00:12:10.800 might get yelled at if you're in a toxic company but you have permission to try to change it and it's a good Valiant
00:12:16.440 kind of thing to do I like this Mantra a lot ask for forgiveness but not permission because if you ask up front oh what do you what
00:12:23.880 do you think everyone in charge and if you all don't say yes I won't do it it's really hard to make change if
00:12:30.120 you're in that kind of mindset you really want explicit buy-in
00:12:36.120 um here's a big old diagram that I think about a lot there's two different spectrums that I go to when it comes to
00:12:42.060 permission is the vertical one the explicit implicit like how is it a written rule or is it like what we
00:12:48.180 happen to do and no one talks about it and then on the x-axis um it could be something explicitly
00:12:53.220 forbidden or implicitly forbidden it could be permitted like you're allowed to but I don't care if you do it or not
00:12:58.260 or it could be encouraged like we actively want you to do it you can go further and say it's required but for a lot of a lot of the context this is the
00:13:04.800 range that I'm thinking so here's an example a for no deploys on Fridays that's the example it might have
00:13:11.579 used to been explicitly forbidden to deploy on Fridays and over time maybe it became less explicit it wasn't written
00:13:17.220 in all the docs for all the new apps and stuff like that and it's gradually changing then it's permitted and some teams do it and some teams don't and
00:13:23.700 then maybe it's a courage eventually and that's a huge cultural shift if you gotten to that point
00:13:29.700 that's just one path it could go through lots of different paths I can imagine this is a pretty common one to make it
00:13:34.860 less explicit and then you change it and then it's explicit the other the new way but you can like teleport across like if
00:13:40.680 there's a top-down rule change mandate maybe you just flip to the other side all of a sudden that does happen too
00:13:49.440 more homework for you or dinner conversation think about a change you've tried to make it work like I gave you
00:13:55.860 the four of mine what's a change that you've tried to make happen and how did it go did it work or not and then where did it start on the
00:14:02.220 permission Spectrum these two scales where did it end up so for my Deploy on Fridays I told you
00:14:08.820 what started here and it didn't stop the other one kind of to be usually fun for me
00:14:17.279 all right next big concept what are some levers of change if you know you want to make a change you want deploys to happen
00:14:23.160 on Fridays maybe um how how do you even start what are the types of things you can do
00:14:29.220 I love this model I don't expect you to read this whole thing it's in the notes if you want to read the original science paper from
00:14:35.519 like agriculture science is where I pulled this from but there's five categories at the
00:14:41.040 bottom those circles are what I'm going to go into this is the reset model of setting incentives and getting people's behavior
00:14:47.519 to change if you see five categories and generally anything that motivates people can fit into these five categories I
00:14:53.579 think that it's a really like neat structured framework for this kind of thing so the five art rules education social
00:15:00.899 pressure economics and tools and processes when I'm trying to change culture I often end up naturally
00:15:06.660 thinking about one of these like rules oh we need to change the rules they're playing on Friday oh it's a rule change
00:15:11.940 we have to change it but if I remember to think more broadly I can come up with a whole bunch of things like education
00:15:18.180 oh people need to know it's okay sometimes if um if the CI is solid you're doing blue
00:15:24.600 green you can do a great rollback like education showing YouTube videos sharing articles of the team like socializing
00:15:29.760 idea um social pressure we can have people talk about it and some people are
00:15:34.920 advocates for it and then you can help them share it more it doesn't just have to be the rule flipping the rule on
00:15:41.279 there's a lot of a lot of these tools
00:15:48.420 all right next concept is gradual change so a lot of changes are really gradual but it's not often just a light switch
00:15:55.920 I think about this curve a lot I had an iPod Touch which did you know
00:16:02.100 is discontinued but I'm making it anymore so sad I had that before the iPhone was popular so I was like an in
00:16:07.620 on the innovator the Leading Edge I could check my calendar on that little things I was so cool I loved it but my mom's
00:16:15.240 best friend an older woman still has a flip phone and she loves it and she's not planning to get a smartphone so she's on the laggard end
00:16:20.880 and then there's a big block of people like a lot of people got the iPhone like smartphones in general across the span of a few years
00:16:28.260 uh let me go back in but anyway like this is another option life cycle curve
00:16:33.959 I want to show you this one first actually here is same-sex marriage and how it happened over time
00:16:39.779 you'll notice it's kind of flat for a lot of this that's kind of the like the inflection point of the curve the other one looked
00:16:45.180 a lot rounder than happens in real life a lot if you're trying to change something at
00:16:50.519 your company you might be a Vermont or Massachusetts you're one of the first people to make the change
00:16:56.040 and you might not see feel like much change is happening and even if you get one more person on your side it might not feel like that much progress and
00:17:01.920 it's true and it might not be that much part it might revert it might go flat fly down if possible but a lot of
00:17:08.280 changes gradual like this and if you keep pushing for it and you're persistent they can get through eventually
00:17:18.240 right so um here's a recipe for making change happen you do something once and then you do it again and then do it a
00:17:23.699 whole bunch more and then eventually after maybe several decades in the case of same-sex marriage it becomes like The
00:17:30.059 New Normal it's the way we do things and that's a powerful powerful change like it's huge
00:17:36.360 kind of like um refactoring oh what was it the Keynote
00:17:43.679 the auto load yeah refactoring Auto load like that was a long Saga and he kept persisting toward it
00:17:49.380 um and like now we just have the new model of course we have we've never had to think about Auto load that's what we'll say in five years it's never been
00:17:55.559 a thing all right so that's um how gradual it is
00:18:01.679 and when you're in the like Vermont Massachusetts part of a cultural change it can feel like you're not making
00:18:07.260 progress and I don't know I encourage you to get support get people to talk to about it who understand what you're
00:18:12.480 going for and you can consider whether to keep going or not like that is a hard spot to be in
00:18:17.520 when you don't see the progress happening but if it's valuable and you really believe in it and you are persistent you
00:18:24.539 can often get it through all right uh next big concept I've
00:18:30.120 worked with some Consultants who are really good at making the change happen while they're there and then they leave and it just reverts
00:18:36.660 right back because it wasn't a cultural change it was like a they just did things that way and it was great it was really powerful and it showed it could
00:18:42.539 be done that's actually a nudge toward changing the cultural norm but it wasn't like permanently changed
00:18:48.299 so how can you make it stick one metrics for this is you can do the thing once so you can do it a couple
00:18:53.820 times and then share those results so if you're not just doing it and getting the results and you're like we
00:18:59.100 know it works you're also telling everybody look at this story here is a story we did this thing and it worked
00:19:04.200 and it was great you have to repeat it a lot for people to really understand it and remember it and start Deli into each
00:19:09.240 other it's amazing how repetitive it can be when you're trying to change a cultural issue of a company I end up saying the
00:19:14.520 same thing over and over and over and over and I feel like a broken record for the people people don't mind that often like they're like oh that's true and
00:19:21.000 like maybe they start saying it eventually and a huge victory for me is when somebody ends up saying to me the
00:19:26.400 idea I've been trying to incept for six months and they said it as if it's their idea that's great good job I'm so glad
00:19:31.740 they're thinking that way they did get to that conclusion too eventually they didn't just take my word for it that is awesome
00:19:39.000 another trick is if you have a track record if you can get a change to go through that popular that people like a
00:19:44.580 lot that can end up giving you a lot more freedom to try different things
00:19:51.360 celebrating things along the way how do you celebrate your achievements right now when you do a cool change at work
00:19:56.580 who do you tell and when and how often it's a lot of ways you could
00:20:02.400 yeah my big question is always I want long-term change how can I get it to stick what do I need to do to get it
00:20:08.400 this day often it's getting other people to do the things or to understand the things or believe them or advocate for them it's not just me if I just did it
00:20:14.460 alone the change wouldn't last when I left all right so many concrete actions I'm
00:20:22.140 going to try to go really quickly through these and then still leave time for questions I'm not going to get
00:20:27.720 through all of them but they're in the dock and I'll try to get to like the high level Concepts behind each one at least I'll probably end up reading just
00:20:33.720 one example from each slide and if that's interesting you'll probably like the others in that slide check them out later
00:20:42.179 when I was practicing I tried to count the song to go with these it's like improving to myself but not
00:20:47.460 confidently enough to do it right now maybe later ask me at karaoke
00:20:52.799 um you can be actively friendly to new people on the team that's just been huge when there's one person welcoming you to the new team actively just because they
00:20:59.100 wanted to it changed how the whole team felt and I did it too and then cultural change happens
00:21:05.460 you can increase how much people talk to each other like the water cooler effect if you want to read the psychology of it
00:21:10.679 propinquity is a good term that's Linked In the notes you can make social chat rooms like hashtag High where you can
00:21:16.320 only say hi only h i enter nothing else it's also I feel really close to the
00:21:23.100 people who say hi before and after me and like it's really cool how it really works I've got a cool Twitter thread in
00:21:29.400 the notes that links describes 20 different fun like slack Discord team channels
00:21:35.220 I dare you to make one that's like the easiest one on this list go ahead and make a chat room and invite your five friends and like maybe you'll get more
00:21:40.860 people eventually all right spreading awareness of what your team's doing
00:21:46.740 if you aren't participating in a demo day at your work or even if you are did you know you could just make your own
00:21:52.799 even as an engineer as an individual contributor you can just put it on the calendar invite people and say I'm going to talk about this thing that you might
00:21:58.620 want to know about people will probably show up I dare you to try it you can even do it the opposite and get another team to give a
00:22:05.039 demo of their stuff for your team you have the power it's true
00:22:11.100 unless you're in a toxic work environment and they like hoard power and stuff like that caveats I hope that's not where you're at if you do
00:22:16.919 maybe leave like the first half of the talk we'll say um you all of the individual
00:22:22.559 contributors can ask for one-on-ones with anyone with your manager that's a pretty common one with your boss's boss
00:22:28.020 and if you say it's a skip level they'll say oh that's that's a concept that I'm now familiar with and I guess I'll do
00:22:34.140 thank you yes yes like the name gives it a lot of power
00:22:39.900 um you can have one-on-ones with your teammates even if you work with them you might not get to talk to them you can have one-on-ones people in the same role
00:22:45.720 on another team and that's pretty valuable too for cross-team communication um you can do random ones with an app
00:22:51.600 like donut that just pairs people and this is all really good for like information flow you could model inflammation flow in your company and
00:22:58.200 all these connections like connect the nodes and it's just more resilient it's more effective it's proven very helpful
00:23:04.440 one-on-ones are proven effective and you all should do them you can ask for support maybe in the
00:23:11.220 one-on-ones maybe otherwise from all those different people that we're talking about you can offer support to them if you're
00:23:17.700 uncomfortable asking for support maybe you're starting the support exchange by offering it's a good place to start
00:23:24.179 hey what's on your mind what's hard lately oh tell me about that that's an example introduction to giving support
00:23:30.480 to someone where do you celebrate things
00:23:37.080 um I like sharing release notes in English that other teams can understand and people say that's cool you did that
00:23:42.299 thing and I know what it means an engineer could write that too you can
00:23:49.140 um when someone's sharing something and maybe hesitating you can encourage them to share more by like providing them a
00:23:54.600 little being curious oh tell me more about that that's a really good phrase here say it after me tell me more about
00:24:00.539 that it's amazing how well it works it sounds awkward maybe it's like I would never
00:24:06.720 say that and then I did and people loved it and they told me more and now I can't stop saying it's good Icebreaker in the hallway too
00:24:13.740 all right um your manager probably doesn't get as much feedback as they'd like and if you ask them they'll probably say
00:24:20.039 you know that's true because all the studies are like 70 80 people don't get enough
00:24:25.080 um it's true most people don't and then if you can talk to them about that you can like upward coach your manager to
00:24:30.299 get more feedback from the team including you if you just help prod there and fan their curiosity
00:24:37.860 if the company is too focused on rules you can frame things as experiments oh we're just going to try it just this once we'll just see how it goes don't
00:24:44.220 worry about it and enough Persistence of that I've gotten clients to change to try some
00:24:49.919 things it's very gradual it feels like I'm Massachusetts sometimes but getting it to go
00:24:56.520 uh for inclusion ideas like avoiding microaggressions having one-on-one discussions are really powerful because
00:25:02.100 people can really talk about it freely with one person that they can't do on a larger team having a discussion as a
00:25:07.620 team is really powerful that sets the norms for the team about the behavior you can also request training from people who do this
00:25:15.659 there are a lot of social rules on your team that might not be well defined if you can get them to be defined that's a step forward toward changing them like
00:25:22.500 tell me about this why do we do this this way and like just keep asking maybe you can get it written down even
00:25:28.200 another drink communication modeling curiosity is very powerful if we don't cover that a little
00:25:34.620 bit have you ever been on a project where you get called in too late and all the decisions are made and you're like
00:25:40.559 this doesn't make sense and now it's too late to change and they won't let me you can you can figure out how to get in
00:25:46.620 earlier on the next project it's work it is time and energy but you can figure out how to do it like ask are there any
00:25:52.380 projects coming up I should know about oh is that project happening yet oh can you invite me to that meeting and I'm like sure yes because that's weird we
00:25:59.820 don't do that here but okay and then you can start that Norm you can be the Massachusetts and get it going
00:26:06.480 Empower yourself and you can Empower others that helps make longer lasting or widespread change
00:26:12.179 encourage your teammates to do all of these things too all right outro you can hire me to work
00:26:18.900 with company to do things like this I'm also offering a free workshop for your company just because you're here not too
00:26:25.679 many I don't have that much bandwidth to do all this free stuff but some I have uh I also do community groups like local
00:26:32.039 meetups if you're in one I'd be happy to talk there I do two a month for that some of my popular workshops are feeling
00:26:37.380 understood getting people to really communicate like oh I know how that feels and they say oh I feel so
00:26:42.539 understood people love that it's a really powerful skill
00:26:50.220 yeah enough on that time for questions do you want to clap go ahead thank you
00:27:07.020 by the way I'll start a thread in open chat if you want to discuss the content of this asynchronously and I'll put the
00:27:12.840 link in that after I'm off stage all right any questions it could be about evaluating cultural
00:27:19.679 fit that first half or culture smithing yeah there's a whole slide I buzzed by
00:27:29.059 oh thank you I need that the question was in a hybrid work environment where you don't have a water
00:27:34.559 cooler to have the water cooler effect then what can you do to make people have these conductions um
00:27:40.980 here's a few ideas the social chat room like hi is one you can have online social events I really like gather.com
00:27:46.860 you're like a little Pokemon character running around and you talk to people who are near you it feels so much different than a zoom call you've got to
00:27:52.799 try it if you haven't jackbox games people like that a lot like online games
00:27:57.900 um anything to get people talking and sharing about themselves Affinity groups is another trick you can have like smaller segments so like all the people
00:28:04.860 who are into video games if they just meet and talk that's another way to get people connected and information following Beyond video games too of
00:28:11.400 course um yeah a whole lot of things remote teams I've felt more socially connected on
00:28:17.700 many remote teams than I did in the office where we didn't have lunch together like being in person helps but
00:28:23.460 being deliberate helps in either situation way more than just naturally having some great question
00:28:30.299 the question was you've shared a lot of ideas about what to do and but what about things not to do
00:28:37.200 good question if you're pushing too hard for cultural change too fast you're going to get resistance that's the
00:28:43.020 biggest pitfall um so you might want to be more of a Massachusetts Vermont like slow or just
00:28:48.840 get a little bit get some people on your side you can start with the supporters start people you know who will support your idea which is counterintuitive
00:28:54.659 because I often think if I want to change something change the most extreme people first it doesn't work though starting with the people who are your
00:29:00.720 supporters and like activating them and encouraging them to also share that like spreads and network effects
00:29:06.000 gets changed happening that's like two ideas yeah don't start with your opposition maybe
00:29:12.419 not the most effective place to start often that's great the question was I'm in a
00:29:18.419 position where I need more feedback from people how do I encourage that um one-on-ones is maybe the easiest way
00:29:24.179 and there's a certain structure you can make your one-on-ones there's a lot written about it I give workshops on how to do that well too
00:29:30.600 um like a certain structure can help people open up but if the environment isn't safe anyway if it's like a toxic
00:29:36.380 non-sychologically safe is another term you might want to look up and work environment it's hard to get people that don't know it's really hard and how do
00:29:42.419 you help them be safe is a big it's a gnarly question but even just making the space is often
00:29:48.960 like I don't know more than half the time making Space is really effective and then the more complex topics I don't think I
00:29:55.799 have a short answer for him it's hard if you want to talk to me later you can ask me for bubbles