Podcast appearances and mentions of paloma medina

Nesta edição do podcast do Caixa, Weslley Fonseca recebe Paloma Medina, que vem pela primeira vez no programa, relembra seu envolvimento com a música, ressalta a importância do comprometimento musical e muito mais. Confere aí! O Caixa de Música é exibido na TV Novo Tempo de segunda a quinta às 18h e, aos sábados, meio-dia. Curta e siga o Caixa de Música nas redes sociais: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caixademusica/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CaixadeMusica/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/caixademusica

What do you do when your needs aren't being met or your boundaries are getting trampled? On today's episode, Jen and Sara walk listeners through ways to advocate for yourself at work—without justifying your existence, begging for your boundaries to be respected, or feeling like a failure if it doesn't work. You'll come away with a few scripts you can try in your own workplace—and our very sincere permission to drop some of those balls you keep juggling. Links:Textio: “The truth about bias in performance feedback”Paloma Medina's BICEPS modelSet Boundaries, Find PeaceThe Book of BoundariesGot a work situation eating away at you? Send it to us! Submit your dilemma at PMLEshow.com.

Steph has a baby update and thoughts on movies, plus a question for Chris related to migrating Test Unit tests to RSpec. Chris watched a video from Google I/O where Chrome devs talked about a new feature called Page Transitions. He's also been working with a tool called Customer.io, an omnichannel communication whiz-bang adventure! Page transitions Overview (https://youtu.be/JCJUPJ_zDQ4) Using yield_self for composable ActiveRecord relations (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/using-yieldself-for-composable-activerecord-relations) A Case for Query Objects in Rails (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/a-case-for-query-objects-in-rails) Customer.io (https://customer.io/) Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza | Confluent (https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/) Datomic (https://www.datomic.com/) About CRDTs • Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (https://crdt.tech/) Apache Kafka (https://kafka.apache.org/) Resilient Management | A book for new managers in tech (https://resilient-management.com/) Mixpanel: Product Analytics for Mobile, Web, & More (https://mixpanel.com/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Golden roads are golden. Okay, everybody's got golden roads. You have golden roads, yes? That is what we're -- STEPH: Oh, I have golden roads, yes. [laughter] CHRIS: You might should inform that you've got golden roads, yeah. STEPH: Yeah, I don't know if I say might should as much but might could. I have been called out for that one a lot; I might could do that. CHRIS: [laughs] STEPH: That one just feels so natural to me than normal. Anytime someone calls it out, I'm like, yeah, what about it? [laughter] CHRIS: Do you want to fight? STEPH: Yeah, are we going to fight? CHRIS: I might could fight you. STEPH: I might could. I might should. [laughter] CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. I have a couple of fun updates. I have a baby Viccari update, so little baby weighs about two pounds now, two pounds. I'm 25 weeks along. So not that I actually know the exact weight, I'm using all those apps that estimate based on how far along you are, so around two pounds, which is novel. Oh, and then the other thing I'm excited to tell you about...I'm not sure how I should feel that I just got more excited about this other thing. I'm very excited about baby Viccari. But the other thing is there's a new Jurassic Park movie coming out, and I'm very excited. I think it's June 10th is when it comes out. And given how much we have sung that theme song to each other and make references to what a clever girl, I needed to share that with you. Maybe you already know, maybe you're already in the loop, but if you don't, it's coming. CHRIS: Yeah, the internet likes to yell things like that. Have you watched all of the most recent ones? There are like two, and I think this will be the third in the revisiting or whatever, the Jurassic World version or something like that. But have you watched the others? STEPH: I haven't seen all of them. So I've, of course, seen the first one. I saw the one that Chris Pratt was in, and now he's in the latest one. But I think I've missed...maybe there's like two in the middle there. I have not watched those. CHRIS: There are three in the original trilogy, and then there are three now in the new trilogy, which now it's ending, and they got everybody. STEPH: Oh, I'm behind. CHRIS: They got people from the first one, and they got the people from the second trilogy. They just got everybody, and that's exciting. You know, it's that thing where they tap into nostalgia, and they take advantage of us via it. But I'm fine. I'm here for it. STEPH: I'm here for it, especially for Jurassic Park. But then there's also a new Top Gun movie coming out, which, I'll be honest, I'm totally going to watch. But I really didn't remember the first one. I don't know that I've really ever watched the first Top Gun. So Tim, my partner, and I watched that recently, and it's such a bad movie. I'm going to say it; [laughs] it's a bad movie. CHRIS: I mean, I don't want to disagree, but the volleyball scene, come on, come on, the volleyball scene. [laughter] STEPH: I mean, I totally had a good time watching the movie. But the one part that I finally kept complaining about is because every time they showed the lead female character, I can't think of her character name or the actress's name, but they kept playing that song, Take My Breath Away. And I was like, can we just get past the song? [laughs] Because if you go back and watch that movie, I swear they play it like six different times. It was a lot. It was too much. So I moved it into bad movie category but bad movie totally worth watching, whatever category that is. CHRIS: Now I kind of want to revisit it. I feel like the drinking game writes itself. But at a minimum, anytime Take My Breath Away plays, yeah. Well, all right, good to know. [laughs] STEPH: Well, if you do that, let me know how many shots or beers you drink because I think it will be a fair amount. I think it will be more than five. CHRIS: Yeah, it involves a delicate calibration to get that right. I don't think it's the sort of thing you just freehand. It writes itself but also, you want someone who's tried it before you so that you're not like, oh no, it's every time they show a jet. That was too many. You can't drink that much while watching this movie. STEPH: Yeah, that would be death by Top Gun. CHRIS: But not the normal way, the different, indirect death by Top Gun. STEPH: I don't know what the normal way is. [laughs] CHRIS: Like getting shot down by a Top Gun pilot. [laughter] STEPH: Yeah, that makes sense. [laughs] CHRIS: You know, the dogfighting in the plane. STEPH: The actual, yeah, going to war away. Just sitting on your couch and you drink too much poison away, yeah, that one. All right, that got weird. Moving on, [laughs] there's a new Jurassic Park movie. We're going to land on that note. And in the more technical world, I've got a couple of things on my mind. One of them is I have a question for you. I'm very excited to run this by you because I could use a friend in helping me decide what to do. So I am still on that journey where I am migrating Test::Unit test over to RSpec. And as I'm going through, it's going pretty well, but it's a little complicated because some of the Test::Unit tests have different setup than, say, the RSpec do. They might run different scripts beforehand where they're loading data. That's perhaps a different topic, but that's happening. And so that has changed a few things. But then overall, I've just been really just porting everything over, like, hey, if it exists in the Test::Unit, let's just bring it to RSpec, and then I'm going to change these asserts to expects and really not make any changes from there. But as I'm doing that, I'm seeing areas that I want to improve and things that I want to clear up, even if it's just extracting a variable name. Or, as I'm moving some of these over in Test::Unit, it's not clear to me exactly what the test is about. Like, it looks more like a method name in the way that the test is being described, but the actual behavior isn't clear to me as if I were writing this in RSpec, I think it would have more of a clear description. Maybe that's not specific to the actual testing framework. That might just be how these tests are set up. But I'm at that point where I'm questioning should I keep going in terms of where I am just copying everything over from Test::Unit and then moving it over to RSpec? Because ultimately, that is the goal, to migrate over. Or should I also include some time to then go back and clean up and try to add some clarity, maybe extract some variable names, see if I can reduce some lets, maybe even reduce some of the test helpers that I'm bringing over? How much cleanup should be involved, zero, lots? I don't know. I don't know what that...[laughs] I'm sure there's a middle ground in there somewhere. But I'm having trouble discerning for myself what's the right amount because this feels like one of those areas where if I don't do any cleanup, I'm not coming back to it, like, that's just the truth. So it's either now, or I have no idea when and maybe never. CHRIS: I'll be honest, the first thing that came to mind in this most recent time that you mentioned this is, did we consider just deleting these tests entirely? Is that on...like, there are very few of them, right? Like, are they even providing enough value? So that was question one, which let me pause to see what your thoughts there were. [chuckles] STEPH: I don't know if we specifically talked about that on the mic, but yes, that has been considered. And the team that owns those tests has said, "No, please don't delete them. We do get value from them." So we can port them over to RSpec, but we don't have time to port them over to RSpec. So we just need to keep letting them go on. But yet, not porting them conflicts with my goal of then trying to speed up CI. And so it'd be nice to collapse these Test::Unit tests over to RSpec because then that would bring our CI build down by several meaningful minutes. And also, it would reduce some of the complexity in the CI setup. CHRIS: Gotcha. Okay, so now, having set that aside, I always ask the first question of like, can you just put Derek Prior's phone number on the webpage and call it an app? Is that the MVP of this app? No? Okay, all right, we have to build more. But yeah, I think to answer it and in a general way of trying to answer a broader set of questions here... I think this falls into a category of like if you find yourself having to move around some code, if that code is just comfortably running and the main thing you need to do is just to get it ported over to RSpec, I would probably do as little other work as possible. With the one consideration that if you find yourself needing to deeply load up the context of these tests like actually understand them in order to do the porting, then I would probably take advantage of that context because it's hard to get your head into a given piece of code, test or otherwise. And so if you're in there and you're like, well, now that I'm here, I can definitely see that we could rearrange some stuff and just definitively make it better, if you get to that place, I would consider it. But if this ends up being mostly a pretty rote transformation like you said, asserts become expects, and lets get switched around, you know, that sort of stuff, if it's a very mechanical process of getting done, I would probably say very minimal. But again, if there is that, like, you know what? I had to understand the test in order to port them anyway, so while I'm here, let me take advantage of that, that's probably the thing that I would consider. But if not that, then I would say even though it's messy and whatnot and your inclination would be to clean it, I would say leave it roughly as is. That's my guess or how I would approach it. STEPH: Yeah, I love that. I love how you pointed out, like, did you build up the context? Because you're right, in a lot of these test cases, I'm not, or I'm trying really hard to not build up context. I'm trying very hard to just move them over and, if I have to, mainly to find test descriptions. That's the main area I'm struggling to...how can I more explicitly state what this test does so the next person reading this will have more comprehension than I do? But otherwise, I'm trying hard to not have any real context around it. And that's such a good point because that's often...when someone else is in the middle of something, and they're deciding whether to include that cleanup or refactor or improvement, one of my suggestions is like, hey, we've got the context now. Let's go with it. But if you've built up very little context, then that's not a really good catalyst or reason to then dig in deeper and apply that cleanup. That's super helpful. Thank you. That will help reinforce what I'm going to do, which is exactly let's migrate RSpec and not worry about cleanup, which feels terrible; I'm just going to say that into the world. But it also feels like the right thing to do. CHRIS: Well, I'm happy to have helped. And I share the like, and it feels terrible. I want to do the right thing, but sometimes you got to pick a battle sort of thing. STEPH: Cool. Well, that's a huge help to me. What's going on in your world? CHRIS: What's going on in my world? I watched a great video the other day from the Google I/O. I think it's an event; I'm not actually sure, conference or something like that. But it was some Google Chrome developers talking about a new feature that's coming to the platform called Page Transitions. And I've kept an eye on this for a while, but it seems like it's more real. Like, I think they put out an RFC or an initial sort of set of ideas a while back. And the web community was like, "Oh, that's not going to work out so well." So they went back to the drawing board, revisited. I've actually implemented in Chrome Canary a version of the API. And then, in the video that I watched, which we'll include a show notes link to, they demoed the functionality of the Page Transitions API and showed what you can do. And it's super cool. It allows for the sort of animations that you see in a lot of native mobile apps where you're looking at a ListView, you click on one of the items, and it grows to fill the whole screen. And now you're on the detail screen for that item that you were looking at. But there was this very continuous animated transition that allows you to keep context in your head and all of those sorts of nice things. And this just really helps to bridge that gap between, like, the web often lags behind the native mobile platforms in terms of the experiences that we can build. So it was really interesting to see what they've been able to pull off. The demo is a pretty short video, but it shows a couple of different variations of what you can build with it. And I was like, yeah, these look like cool native app transitions, really nifty. One thing that's very interesting is the actual implementation of this. So it's like you have one version of the page, and then you transition to a new version of the page, and in doing so, you want to animate between them. And the way that they do it is they have the first version of the page. They take a screenshot of it like the browser engine takes a screenshot of it. And then they put that picture on top of the actual browser page. Then they do the same thing with the next version of the page that they're going to transition to. And then they crossfade, like, change the opacity and size and whatnot between the two different images, and then you're there. And in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm sorry, what now? You did which? I'm like, is this the genius solution that actually makes this work and is performant? And I wonder if there are trade-offs. Like, do you lose interactivity between those because you've got some images that are just on the screen? And what is that like? But as they were going through it, I was just like, wait, I'm sorry, you did what? This is either the best idea I've ever heard, or I'm not so sure about this. STEPH: That's fascinating. You had me with the first part in terms of they take a screenshot of the page that you're leaving. I'm like, yeah, that's a great idea. And then talking about taking a picture of the other page because then you have to load it but not show it to the user that it's loaded. And then take a picture of it, and then show them the picture of the loaded page. But then actually, like you said, then crossfade and then bring in the real functionality. I am...what am I? [laughter] CHRIS: What am I actually? STEPH: [laughs] What am I? I'm shocked. I'm surprised that that is so performant. Because yeah, I also wouldn't have thought of that, or I would have immediately have thought like, there's no way that's going to be performant enough. But that's fascinating. CHRIS: For me, performance seems more manageable, but it's the like, what are you trading off for that? Because that sounds like a hack. That sounds like the sort of thing I would recommend if we need to get an MVP out next week. And I'm like, what if we just tried this? Listen, it's got some trade-offs. So I'm really interested to see are those trade-offs present? Because it's the browser engine. It's, you know, the low-level platform that's actually managing this. And there are some nice hooks that allow you to control it. And at a CSS level, you can manage it and use keyframe animations to control the transition more directly. There's a JavaScript API to instrument the sequencing of things. And so it's giving you the right primitives and the right hooks. And the fact that the implementation happens to use pictures or screenshots, to use a slightly different word, it's like, okey dokey, that's what we're doing. Sounds fun. So I'm super interested because the functionality is deeply, deeply interesting to me. Svelte actually has a version of this, the crossfade utility, but you have to still really think about how do you sequence between the two pages and how do you do the connective tissue there? And then Svelte will manage it for you if you do all the right stuff. But the wiring up is somewhat complicated. So having this in the browser engine is really interesting to me. But yeah, pictures. STEPH: This is one of those ideas where I can't decide if this was someone who is very new to the team and new to the idea and was like, "Have we considered screenshots? Have we considered pictures?" Or if this is like the uber senior person on the team that was like, "Yeah, this will totally work with screenshots." I can't decide where in that range this idea falls, which I think makes me love it even more. Because it's very straightforward of like, hey, what if we just tried this? And it's working, so cool, cool, cool. CHRIS: There's a fantastic meme that's been making the rounds where it's a bell curve, and it's like, early in your career, middle of your career, late in your career. And so early in your career, you're like, everything in one file, all lines of code that's just where they go. And then in the middle of your career, you're like, no, no, no, we need different concerns, and files, and organizational structures. And then end of your career...and this was coming up in reference to the TypeScript team seems to have just thrown everything into one file. And it's the thing that they've migrated to over time. And so they have this many, many line file that is basically the TypeScript engine all in one file. And so it was a joke of like, they definitely know what they're doing with programming. They're not just starting last week sort of thing. And so it's this funny arc that certain things can go through. So I think that's an excellent summary there [laughs] of like, I think it was folks who have thought about this really hard. But I kind of hope it was someone who was just like, "I'm new here. But have we thought about pictures? What about pictures?" I also am a little worried that I just deeply misunderstood [laughs] the representation but glossed over it in the video, and I'm like, that sounds interesting. So hopefully, I'm not just wildly off base here. [laughs] But nonetheless, the functionality looks very interesting. STEPH: That would be a hilarious tweet. You know, I've been waiting for that moment where I've said something that I understood into the mic and someone on Twitter just being like, well, good try, but... [laughs] CHRIS: We had a couple of minutes where we tried to figure out what the opposite of ranting was, and we came up with pranting and made up a word instead of going with praising or raving. No, that's what it is, raving. [laughs] STEPH: No, raving. I will never forget now, raving. [laughs] CHRIS: So, I mean, we've done this before. STEPH: That's true. Although they were nice, I don't think they tweeted. I think they sent in an email. They were like, "Hey, friends." [laughter] CHRIS: Actually, we got a handful of emails on that. [laughter] STEPH: Did you know the English language? CHRIS: Thank you, kind Bikeshed audience, for not shaming us in public. I mean, feel free if you feel like it. [laughs] But one other thing that came up in this video, though, is the speaker was describing single-page apps are very common, and you want to have animated transitions and this and that. And I was like, single-page app, okay, fine. I don't like the terminology but whatever. I would like us to call it the client-side app or client-side routing or something else. But the fact that it's a single page is just a technical consideration that no user would call it that. Users are like; I go to the web app. I like that it has URLs. Those seem different to me. Anyway, this is my hill. I'm going to die on it. But then the speaker in the video, in contrast to single-page app referenced multi-page app, and I was like, oh, come on, come on. I get it. Like, yes, there are just balls of JavaScript that you can download on the internet and have a dynamic graphics editor. But I think almost all good things on the web should have URLs, and that's what I would call the multiple pages. But again, that's just me griping about some stuff. And to name it, I don't think I'm just griping for griping sake. Like, again, I like to think about things from the user perspective, and the URL being so important. And having worked with plenty of apps that are implemented in JavaScript and don't take the URL or the idea that we can have different routable resources seriously and everything is just one URL, that's a failure mode in my mind. We missed an opportunity here. So I think I'm saying a useful thing here and not just complaining on the internet. But with that, I will stop complaining on the internet and send it back over to you. What else is new in your world, Steph? STEPH: I do remember the first time that you griped about it, and you were griping about URLs. And there was a part of me that was like, what is he talking about? [laughter] And then over time, I was like, oh, I get it now as I started actually working more in that world. But it took me a little bit to really appreciate that gripe and where you're coming from. And I agree; I think you're coming from a reasonable place, not that I'm biased at all as your co-host, but you know. CHRIS: I really like the honest summary that you're giving of, like, honestly, the first time you said this, I let you go for a while, but I did not know what you were talking about. [laughs] And I was like, okay, good data point. I'm going to store that one away and think about it a bunch. But that's fine. I'm glad you're now hanging out with me still. [laughter] STEPH: Don't do that. Don't think about it a bunch. [laughs] Let's see, oh, something else that's going on in my world. I had a really fun pairing session with another thoughtboter where we were digging into query objects and essentially extracting some logic out of an ActiveRecord model and then giving that behavior its own space and elevated namespace in a query object. And one of the questions or one of the things that came up that we needed to incorporate was optional filters. So say if you are searching for a pizza place that's nearby and you provide a city, but you don't provide what's the optional zip code, then we want to make sure that we don't apply the zip code in the where clause because then you would return all the pizza places that have a nil zip code, and that's just not what you want. So we need to respect the fact that not all the filters need to be applied. And there are a couple of ways to go about it. And it was a fun journey to see the different ways that we could structure it. So one of the really good starting points is captured in a blog post by Derek Prior, which we'll include a link to in the show notes, and it's using yield_self for composable ActiveRecord relations. But essentially, it starts out with an example where it shows that you're assigning a value to then the result of an if statement. So it's like, hey, if the zip code is present, then let's filter by zip code; if not, then just give us back the original relation. And then you can just keep building on it from there. And then there's a really nice implementation that Derek built on that then uses yield_self to pass the relation through, which then provides a really nice readability for as you are then stepping through each filter and which one should and shouldn't be applied. And now there's another blog post, and this one's written by Thiago Silva, A Case for Query Objects in Rails. And this one highlighted an approach that I haven't used before. And I initially had some mixed feelings about it. But this approach uses the extending method, which is a method that's on ActiveRecord query methods. And it's used to extend the scope with additional methods. You can either do this by providing the name of a module or by providing a block. It's only going to apply to that instance or to that specific scope when you're using it. So it's not going to be like you're running an include or something like that where all instances are going to now have access to these methods. So by using that method, extending, then you can create a module that says, "Hey, I want to create this by zip code filter that will then check if we have a zip code, let's apply it, if not, return the relation. And it also creates a really pretty chaining experience of like, here's my original class name. Let's extend with these specific scopes, and then we can say by zip code, by pizza topping, whatever else it is that we're looking to filter by. And I was initially...I saw the extending, and it made me nervous because I was like, oh, what all does this apply to? And is it going to impact anything outside of this class? But the more I've looked at it, the more I really like it. So I think you've seen this blog post too. And I'm curious, what are your thoughts about this? CHRIS: I did see this blog post come through. I follow that thoughtbot blog real close because it turns out some of the best writing on the internet is on there. But I saw this...also, as an aside, I like that we've got two Derek Prior references in one episode. Let's see if we can go for three before the end. But one thing that did stand out to me in it is I have historically avoided scopes using scope like ActiveRecord macro thing. It's a class method, but like, it's magic. It does magic. And a while ago, class methods and scopes became roughly equivalent, not exactly equivalent, but close enough. And for me, I want to use methods because I know stuff about methods. I know about default arguments. And I know about all of these different subtleties because they're just methods at the end of the day, whereas scopes are special; they have certain behavior. And I've never really known of the behavior beyond the fact that they get implemented in a different way. And so I was never really sold on them. And they're different enough from methods, and I know methods well. So I'm like, let's use the normal stuff where we can. The one thing that's really interesting, though, is the returning nil that was mentioned in this blog post. If you return nil in a scope, it will handle that for you. Whereas all of my query objects have a like, well, if this thing applies, then scope dot or relation dot where blah, blah, blah, else return relation unchanged. And the fact that that natively exists within scope is interesting enough to make me reconsider my stance on scopes versus class methods. I think I'm still doing class method. But it is an interesting consideration that I was unaware of before. STEPH: Yeah, it's an interesting point. I hadn't really considered as much whether I'm defining a class-level method versus a scope in this particular case. And I also didn't realize that scopes handle that nil case for you. That was one of the other things that I learned by reading through this blog post. I was like, oh, that is a nicety. Like, that is something that I get for free. So I agree. I think this is one of those things that I like enough that I'd really like to try it out more and then see how it goes and start to incorporate it into my process. Because this feels like one of those common areas of where I get to it, and I'm like, how do I do this again? And yield_self was just complicated enough in terms of then using the fancy method method to then be able to call the method that I want that I was like, I don't remember how to do this. I had to look it up each time. But including this module with extending and then being able to use scopes that way feels like something that would be intuitive for me that then I could just pick up and run with each time. CHRIS: If it helps, you can use then instead of yield_self because we did upgrade our Ruby a while back to have that change. But I don't think that actually solves the thing that you're describing. I'd have liked the ampersand method and then simple method name magic incantation that is part of the thing that Derek wrote up. I do use it when I write query objects, but I have to think about it or look it up each time and be like, how do I do that? All right, that's how I do that. STEPH: Yeah, that's one of the things that I really appreciate is how often folks will go back and update blog posts, or they will add an addition to them to say, "Hey, there's something new that came out that then is still relevant to this topic." So then you can read through it and see the latest and the greatest. It's a really nice touch to a number of our blog posts. But yeah, that's what was on my mind regarding query objects. What else is going on in your world? CHRIS: I have this growing feeling that I don't quite know what to do with. I think I've talked about it across some of our conversations in the world of observability. But broadly, I'm starting to like...I feel like my brain has shifted, and I now see the world slightly differently, and I can't go back. But I also don't know how to stick the landing and complete this transition in my brain. So it's basically everything's an event stream; this feels true. That's life. The arrow of time goes in one direction as far as I understand it. And I'm now starting to see it manifest in the code that we're writing. Like, we have code to log things, and we have places where we want to log more intentionally. Then occasionally, we send stuff off to Sentry. And Sentry tells us when there are errors, that's great. But in a lot of places, we have both. Like, we will warn about something happening, and we'll send that to the logs because we want to have that in the logs, which is basically the whole history of what's happened. But we also have it in Sentry, but Sentry's version is just this expanded version that has a bunch more data about the user, and things, and the browser that they were in. But they're two variations on the same event. And then similarly, analytics is this, like, third leg of well, this thing happened, and we want to know about it in the context. And what's been really interesting is we're working with a tool called Customer.io, which is an omnichannel communication whiz-bang adventure. For us, it does email, SMS, and push notifications. And it's integrated into our segment pipeline, so events flow in, events and users essentially. So we have those two different primitives within it. And then within it, we can say like, when a user does X, then send them an email with this copy. As an aside, Customer.io is a fantastic platform. I'm super-duper impressed. We went through a search for a tool like it, and we ended up on a lot of sales demos with folks that were like, hey, so yeah, starting point is $25,000 per year. And, you know, we can talk about it, but it's only going to go up from there when we talk about it, just to be clear. And it's a year minimum contract, and you're going to love it. And we're like, you do have impressive platforms, but okay, that's a bunch. And then, we found Customer.io, and it's month-by-month pricing. And it had a surprisingly complete feature set. So overall, I've been super impressed with Customer.io and everything that they've afforded. But now that I'm seeing it, I kind of want to move everything into that world where like, Customer.io allows non-engineer team members to interact with that event stream and then make things happen. And that's what we're doing all the time. But I'm at that point where I think I see the thing that I want, but I have no idea how to get there. And it might not even be tractable either. There's the wonderful Turning the Database Inside Out talk, which describes how everything is an event stream. And what if we actually were to structure things that way and do materialized views on top of it? And the actual UI that you're looking at is a materialized view on top of the database, which is a materialized view on top of that event stream. So I'm mostly in this, like, I want to figure this out. I want to start to unify all this stuff. And analytics pipes to one tool that gets a version of this event stream, and our logs are just another, and our error system is another variation on it. But they're all sort of sampling from that one event stream. But I have no idea how to do that. And then when you have a database, then you're like, well, that's also just a static representation of a point in time, which is the opposite of an event stream. So what do you do there? So there are folks out there that are doing good thinking on this. So I'm going to keep my ear to the ground and try and see what's everybody thinking on this front? But I can't shake the feeling that there's something here that I'm missing that I want to stitch together. STEPH: I'm intrigued on how to take this further because everything you're saying resonates in terms of having these event streams that you're working with. But yet, I can't mentally replace that with the existing model that I have in my mind of where there are still certain ideas of records or things that exist in the world. And I want to encapsulate the data and store that in the database. And maybe I look it up based on when it happens; maybe I don't. Maybe I'm looking it up by something completely different. So yeah, I'm also intrigued by your thoughts, but I'm also not sure where to take it. Who are some of the folks that are doing some of the thinking in this area that you're interested in, or where might you look next? CHRIS: There's the Kafka world of we have an event log, and then we're processing on top of that, and we're building stream processing engines as the core. They seem to be closest to the Turning the Database Inside Out talk that I was thinking or that I mentioned earlier. There's also the idea of CRDTs, which are Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, which are really interesting. I see them used particularly in real-time application. So it's this other tool, but they are basically event logs. And then you can communicate them well and have two different people working on something collaboratively. And these event logs then have a natural way to come together and produce a common version of the document on either end. That's at least my loose understanding of it, but it seems like a variation on this theme. So I've been looking at that a little bit. But again, I can't see how to map that to like, but I know how to make a Rails app with a Postgres database. And I think I'm reasonably capable at it, or at least I've been able to produce things that are useful to humans using it. And so it feels like there is this pretty large gap. Because what makes sense in my head is if you follow this all the way, it fundamentally re-architects everything. And so that's A, scary, and B; I have no idea how to get there, but I am intrigued. Like, I feel like there's something there. There's also Datomic is the other thing that comes to mind, which is a database engine in the Clojure world that stores the versions of things over time; that idea of the user is active. It's like, well, yeah, but when were they not? That's an event. That transition is an event that Postgres does not maintain at this point. And so, all I know is that the user is active. Maybe I store a timestamp because I'm thinking proactively about this. But Datomic is like no, no, fundamentally, as a primitive in this database; that's how we organize and think about stuff. And I know I've talked about Datomic on here before. So I've circled around these ideas before. And I'm pretty sure I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes circling and then stop because I have no idea how to connect the dots. [laughs] But I want to figure this out. STEPH: I have not worked with Kafka. But one of the main benefits I understand with Kafka is that by storing everything as a stream, you're never going to lose like a message. So if you are sending a message to another system and then that message gets lost in transit, you don't actually know if it got acknowledged or what happened with it, and replaying is really hard. Where do you pick up again? While using something like Kafka, you know exactly what you sent last, and then you're not going to have that uncertainty as to what messages went through and which ones didn't. And then the ability to replay is so important. I'm curious, as you continue to explore this, do you have a particular pain point in mind that you'd like to see improve? Or is it more just like, this seems like a really cool, novel idea; how can I incorporate more of this into my world? CHRIS: I think it's the latter. But I think the thing that I keep feeling is we keep going back and re-instrumenting versions of this. We're adding more logging or more analytics events over the wire or other things. But then, as I send these analytics events over the wire, we have Mixpanel downstream as an analytics visualization and workflow tool or Customer.io. At this point, those applications, I think, have a richer understanding of our users than our core Rails app. And something about that feels wrong to me. We're also streaming everything that goes through segment to S3 because I had a realization of this a while back. I'm like, that event stream is very interesting. I don't want to lose it. I'm going to put it somewhere that I get to keep it. So even if we move off of either Mixpanel or Customer.io or any of those other platforms, we still have our data. That's our data, and we're going to hold on to it. But interestingly, Customer.io, when it sends a message, will push an event back into segments. So it's like doubly connected to segment, which is managing this sort of event bus of data. And so Mixpanel then gets an even richer set there, and the Rails app is like, I'm cool. I'm still hanging out, and I'm doing stuff; it's fine. But the fact that the Rails app is fundamentally less aware of the things that have happened is really interesting to me. And I am not running into issues with it, but I do feel odd about it. STEPH: That touched on a theme that is interesting to me, the idea that I hadn't really considered it in those terms. But yeah, our application provides the tool in which people can interact with. But then we outsource the behavior analysis of our users and understanding what that flow is and what they're going through. I hadn't really thought about those concrete terms and where someone else owns the behavior of our users, but yet we own all the interaction points. And then we really need both to then make decisions about features and things that we're building next. But that also feels like building a whole new product, that behavior analysis portion of it, so it's interesting. My consulting brain is going wild at the moment between like, yeah, it would be great to own that. But that the other time if there's this other service that has already built that product and they're doing it super well, then let's keep letting them manage that portion of our business until we really need to bring it in-house. Because then we need to incorporate it more into our application itself so then we can surface things to the user. That's the part where then I get really interested, or that's the pain point that I could see is if we wanted more of that behavior analysis, that then we want to surface that in the app, then always having to go to a third-party would start to feel tedious or could feel more brittle. CHRIS: Yeah, I'm definitely 100% on not rebuilding Mixpanel in our app and being okay with the fact that we're sending that. Again, the thing that I did to make myself feel better about this is stream the data to S3 so that I have a version of it. And if we want to rebuild the data warehouse down the road to build some sort of machine learning data pipeline thing, we've got some raw data to work with. But I'm noticing lots of places where we're transforming a side effect, a behavior that we have in the system to dispatching an event. And so right now, we have a bunch of stuff that we pipe over to Slack to inform our admin team, hey, this thing happened. You should probably intervene. But I'm looking at that, and we're doing it directly because we can control the message in Slack a little bit better. But I had this thought in the back of my mind; it's like, could we just send that as an event, and then some downstream tool can configure messages and alerts into Slack? Because then the admin team could actually instrument this themselves. And they could be like; we are no longer interested in this event. Users seem fine on that front. But we do care about this new event. And all we need to do as the engineering team is properly instrument all of that event stream tapping. Every event just needs to get piped over. And then lots of powerful tools downstream from that that can allow different consumers of that data to do things, and broadly, that dispatch events, consume them on the other side, do fun stuff. That's the story. That's the dream. But I don't know; I can't connect all the dots. It's probably going to take me a couple of weeks to connect all these dots, or maybe years, or maybe my entire career, something like that. But, I don't know, I'm going to keep trying. STEPH: This feels like a fun startup narrative, though, where you start by building the thing that people can interact with. As more people start to interact with it, how do we start giving more of our team the ability to then manage the product that then all of these users are interacting with? And then that's the part that you start optimizing for. So there are always different interesting bits when you talk about the different stages of Sagewell, and like, what's the thing you're optimizing for? And I'm sure it's still heavily users. But now there's also this addition of we are also optimizing for our team to now manage the product. CHRIS: Yes, you're 100%. You're spot on there. We have definitely joked internally about spinning out a small company to build this analytics alerting tool [laughs] but obviously not going to do that because that's a distraction. And it is interesting, like, we want to build for the users the best thing that we can and where the admin team fits within that. To me, they're very much customers of engineering. Our job is to build the thing for the users but also, to be honest, we have to build a thing for the admins to support the users and exactly where that falls. Like, you and I have talked a handful of times about maybe the admin isn't as polished in design as other things. But it's definitely tested because that's a critical part of how this application works. Maybe not directly for a user but one step removed for a user, so it matters. Absolutely we're writing tests to cover that behavior. And so yeah, those trade-offs are always interesting to me and exploring that space. But 100%: our admin team are core customers of the work that we're doing in engineering. And we try and stay very close and very friendly with them. STEPH: Yeah, I really appreciate how you're framing that. And I very much agree and believe with you that our admin users are incredibly important. CHRIS: Well, thank you. Yeah, we're trying over here. But yeah, I think I can wrap up that segment of me rambling about ideas that are half-formed in my mind but hopefully are directionally important. Anyway, what else is up with you? STEPH: So, not that long ago, I asked you a question around how the heck to manage themes that I have going on. So we've talked about lots of fun productivity things around managing to-dos, and emails, and all that stuff. And my latest one is thinking about, like, I have a theme that I want to focus on, maybe it's this week, maybe it's for a couple of months. And how do I capture that and surface it to myself and see that I'm making progress on that? And I don't have an answer to that. But I do have a theme that I wanted to share. And the one that I'm currently focused on is building up management skills and team lead skills. That is something that I'm focused on at the moment and partially because I was inspired to read the book Resilient Management written by Lara Hogan. And so I think that is what has really set the idea. But as I picked up the book, I was like, this is a really great book, and I'd really like to share some of this. And then so that grew into like, well, let's just go ahead and make this a theme where I'm learning this, and I'm sharing this with everyone else. So along that note, I figured I would share that here. So we use Basecamp at thoughtbot. And so, I've been sharing some Basecamp posts around what I'm learning in each chapter. But to bring some of that knowledge here as well, some of the cool stuff that I have learned so far...and this is just still very early on in the book. There are a couple of different topics that Laura covers in the first chapter, and one of them is humans' core needs at work. And then there's also the concept of meeting your team, some really good questions that you can ask during your first one-on-one to get to know the person that then you're going to be managing. The part that really resonated with me and something that I would like to then coach myself to try is helping the team get to know you. So as a manager, not only are you going out of your way to really get to know that person, but how are you then helping them get to know you as well? Because then that's really going to help set that relationship in regards of they know what kind of things that you're optimizing for. Maybe you're optimizing for a deadline, or for business goals, or maybe it's for transparency, or maybe it would be helpful to communicate to someone that you're managing to say, "Hey, I'm trying some new management techniques. Let me know how this goes." [chuckles] So there's a healthier relationship of not only are you learning them, but they're also learning you. So some of the questions that Laura includes as examples as something that you can share with your team is what do you optimize for in your role? So is it that you're optimizing for specific financial goals or building up teammates? Or maybe it's collaboration, so you're really looking for opportunities for people to pair together. What do you want your teammates to lean on you for? I really liked that question. Like, what are some of the areas that bring you joy or something that you feel really skilled in that then you want people to come to you for? Because that's something that before I was a manager...but it's just as you are growing as a developer, that's such a great question of like, what do you want to be known for? What do you want to be that thing that when people think of, they're like, oh, you should go see Chris about this, or you should go see Steph about this? And two other good questions include what are your work styles and preferences? And what management skills are you currently working on learning or improving? So I really like this concept of how can I share more of myself? And the great thing about this book that I'm learning too is while it is geared towards people that are managers, I think it's so wonderful for people who are non-managers or aspiring managers to read this as well because then it can help you manage whoever's managing you. So then that way, you can have some upward management. So we had recent conversations around when you are new to a team and getting used to a manager, or maybe if you're a junior, you have to take a lot of self-advocacy into your role to make sure things are going well. And I think this book does a really good job for people that are looking to not only manage others but also manage themselves and manage upward. So that's some of the journeys from the first chapter. I'll keep you posted on the other chapters as I'm learning more. And yeah, if anybody hasn't read this book or if you're interested, I highly recommend it. I'll make sure to include a link in the show notes. CHRIS: That was just the first chapter? STEPH: Yeah, that was just the first chapter. CHRIS: My goodness. STEPH: And I shortened it drastically. [laughs] CHRIS: Okay. All right, off to the races. But I think the summary that you gave there, particularly these are true when you're managing folks but also to manage yourself and to manage up, like, this is relevant to everyone in some capacity in some shape or form. And so that feels very true. STEPH: I will include one more fun aspect from the book, and that's circling back to the humans' core needs at work. And she references Paloma Medina, a coach, and trainer who came up with this acronym. The acronym is BICEPS, and it stands for belonging, improvement, choice, equality, predictability, and significance. And then details how each of those are important to us in our work and how when one of those feels threatened, then that can lead to some problems at work or just even in our personal life. But the fun example that she gave was not when there's a huge restructuring of the organization and things like that are going on as being the most concerning in terms of how many of these needs are going to be threatened or become vulnerable. But changing where someone sits at work can actually hit all of these, and it can threaten each of these needs. And it made me think, oh, cool, plus-one for being remote because we can sit wherever we want. [laughs] But that was a really fun example of how someone's needs at work, I mean, just moving their desk, which resonates, too, because I've heard that from other people. Some of the friends that I have that work in more of a People Ops role talk about when they had to shift people around how that caused so much grief. And they were just shocked that it caused so much grief. And this explains why that can be such a big deal. So that was a fun example to read through. CHRIS: I'm now having flashbacks to times where I was like, oh, I love my spot in the office. I love the people I'm sitting with. And then there was that day, and I had to move. Yeah, no, those were days. This is true. STEPH: It triggered all the core BICEPS, all the things that you need to work. It threatened all of them. Or it could have improved them; who knows? CHRIS: There were definitely those as well, yeah. Although I think it's harder to know that it's going to be great on the way in, so it's mostly negative. I think it has that weird bias because you're like, this was a thing, I knew it. I at least understood it. And then you're in a new space, and you're like, I don't know, is this going to be terrible or great? I mean, hopefully, it's only great because you work with great people, and it's a great office. [laughs] But, like, the unknown, you're moving into the unknown, and so I think it has an inherent at least questioning bias to it. STEPH: Agreed. On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

What does shelter look like outside of monocultures?

Paloma Medina is a speaker, coach, and entrepreneur specializing in organizational performance improvement. She approaches her work in leadership, equity, and inclusion through the lens of psychology and systems thinking. In 2019, Paloma challenged the model of diversity in the workplace through her TEDxPortland talk. In this episode, she'll expand on the ideas she introduced in the talk and explore ways to make hiring processes more equitable.Highlights from our conversation include:How she became interested in systems thinking (1:32)The genesis of her TEDx talk (3:50)Why “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are not synonyms (6:16)How Paloma would update the talk for our current context (7:22)The psychology of bias and how it shows up in hiring (11:15)How leaders can evaluate bias in their own processes (15:24)The outsized impact of the pandemic on women and BIPOC talent (21:22)Visit HowIHire.com for transcripts and more on this episode.Follow Roy Notowitz and Noto Group Executive Search on LinkedIn for updates and featured career opportunities.Subscribe to How I Hire:AppleSpotifyAmazonGoogleKeywords: Leadership, executive search, hiring, talent, recruiting, entrepreneurship, business, culture, systems, systems thinking, diversity, equity, inclusion, executive recruiting, workplace, HR, remote work, TED, bias, psychology, neurology

On this episode of Humanizing Tech, we're join by Paloma Medina for a discussion on how her love of all things systems and her own personal upbringing have shaped her resiliency throughout her career and in Tech. By way of anarchism, healthcare, and the Tech communities Paloma proves the road you choose  may not always be a straight path, but the journey will shape you.  Tune in to learn about the 6 core needs we all have and go to www.palomamedina.com/biceps.

What if spending a few minutes each day touching a plant or staring into space could change your life? Paloma Medina has seen it happen—and tells us why it's the first step toward radical, equitable change. Paloma Medina is a management trainer, public speaker, coach, and entrepreneur who uses neuropsychology to help leaders develop more inclusive and equitable practices. She joins us to talk about trading cortisol addiction for life-affirming productivity, the power of tracking equity metrics on your team, and why she recommends everyone spend 5 minutes a day doing nothing.Inclusion is a sense of belonging. It is how we pick up signals from others that we are valued, liked, that we belong. That we have friends, that we've got people on our side. A ton of the work that I did in the beginning in researching equity and inclusion and how it intersected with the kind of manager trainer I could be was realizing there is all this neuropsychological research that shows that belonging is this absolute core need. Humans are wired to scan for it, protect it, and freak out fully if there's any threat to their inclusion.—Paloma Medina, management trainerWe talk about:How the neuropsychology of productivity relates to equity and inclusionHow to transition away from hustle culture and into life-affirming productivityThe difference between equity and inclusion How leadership can use the three E's of professional development to combat bias in the workplace: education, exposure, and experience How closing down Paloma's retail store,  11:11 Supply, helped her find a renewed sense of self-worth in the midst of uncertaintyThe power and protest of doing nothingThe BICEPS model of core needsPlus: in this week's You've Got This, Sara shares a post from Desiree Adaway on the connection between overwork and white supremacy: “White supremacy knows that when we're exhausted, we remain obedient. And when we're overworked, we tend to stay quiet.” For more on this topic, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.Links:Paloma MedinaThe BICEPS modelThe Insight AllianceSense of Urgency Keeps Us DisconnectedActive Voice

EP017 with Paloma Medina (she/her), about the windy path of following your passions and interest, how to evaluate risks in big life pivots, depression, getting back on your feet with a brain that doesn't want to, and what identity has to do with it.Taboo Topics We Cover:• Depression• Creating space for self-reflection • Self-sabotage• How to identify your internal wisdom • Hungry vs. Thirsty energy (don't be thirsty)• How DEI culture is failing us• Intersectionality and how we can self-define the impact of our identitiesMore on BICEPS (core needs framework)Watch her amazing TedX talkMore about Paloma (in her own words): Paloma Medina is a Lifelong entrepreneur obsessed with the science of how to make life and work better, and with rethinking antiquated systems and blending together tools and ideas for better, more life-affirming solutions to everyday problems. This obsession has led me to careers across a weird spectrum: from managing homeless community clinics to being a public speaker and executive coach in the tech world, and most recently to launching The Notebook Bar.________________________________________ Love the show? You can join our Bold Bitch Mafia for free access to bonuses, updates, and more. Remember to  RATE & REVIEW. Instagram @theboldbitchpodcast #OneBoldBitch More About The Show: In the BOLD BITCH Podcast we dive deep into taboo topics. Each week award-winning creative powerhouse and compulsively curious host Gia Goodrich talks to badass visionaries and brazen game-changers with bold visions and strong opinions. Diving below the surface of subjects we're socialized not to talk about, we learn, lift the veil, and shift perspectives on the lightning rod issues impacting us every day. It might ruffle a few feathers, but it takes honesty to inspire change and remind us that the boldest version of ourselves is exactly what the world needs.

Show Notes Lara Hogan : @lara_hogan  Website: WhereWithAll.com Lara Hogan's Book - Resilient Management Black owned DEI Consultants taking on more work; Manager Voltron Bingo(PDF) LeadDev Together 2020 (Training for Engineering Managers) Project Include BICEPS Model Rough Transcript (via otter.ai )George Stocker  0:00  Welcome to the build better software podcast, the podcast for software leaders who want to enable their teams to build better software. I'm your host, George Stocker. And today I am joined by guest, Laura Hogan, to talk about resilient management. Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm so excited. I'm really excited. Now, for folks that who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit about who you are and what you do?Lara Hogan  0:24  Yeah, these days, I coach managers and leaders, fortunately, all over the world. Before I was doing this, I worked as the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter. And before that, I was an engineering director at sea and before that many other small startups in the tech space. I started out as a self taught front end developer and then figured out that management was definitely the place for me.George Stocker  0:48  Yeah, so you've worked at large companies, you've worked at startups, and they're, those are typically differently paced. So I want to go into that deeper. But after you after you did that, you've now started your own company.Lara Hogan  1:07  Yeah, it's called WhereWithAll . So I realized I had read this study eons ago now about firefighters and how they develop expertise. It turns out, you know, it was it was still basic expertise, but in this study, it was trying to figure out, okay, comparing firefighters in urban areas to firefighters in rural areas, which are the deeper experts just kind of controlling for number of fires and years experience. And the study showed that firefighters in this case in urban areas were deeper experts because of the diversity of fires. So different buildings, sizes, different materials, different you know, just like different kinds of population densities, it was diversity of experience kind of led to expertise building and I realized, I really wanted to get some more expertise in lots of different kinds of companies. And so now that I run my own business against a pretty managers and leaders of all kinds, different levels, also different kinds of organizations, ancient Organizations organizations with lots of hierarchy organizations with no hierarchy, distributed organizations co located you know, it's just the the diversity of organizations that get to support right now is is pretty cool. I'm definitely learning a lot very rapidly and it's been lovely.George Stocker  2:14  Okay, and what sort of offerings Do you have to help out leaders?Lara Hogan  2:18  So I kind of split my time between one on one coaching and group coaching and training. So I either go into companies and provide workshops or I offer like ticketed workshops which you have actually attended one of my in person workshops at the time now it's of course all remote. But it's it's been amazing to be able to go in and support all of these different heads leaders, both hands on application, skill based training for mentors because I don't know about you, but I didn't get any training when I became a manager.George Stocker  2:44  No, the only reason I ever had any managerial training was through the army which is a bit unlike everything else. Yeah. But there are 200 year organization and they do they have a an entire they've books upon books and manuals. about leadership and about running teams, and there's a lot that we could learn from it, but it is a completely different space.Lara Hogan  3:07  So many fields have actually developed management training curriculum, tech, I mean, classic engineers, like we get to, we're like, oh, we're gonna figure this out for ourselves, like, we know, we can reinvent. Yeah, precisely. It's been fascinating to try to support tech leaders, specifically, because I'm sure you've experienced this, like people are just so hungry to do right by their teams. And so it's been lovely to bring in not just management experience, but also, you know, I've done a lot of studying on how to be a good trainer, a good a good educator, a good facilitator. And that's also a whole new discipline. And so it's been really, it's been really nice to try to bring in these skills to tech organizations to try to help people out.George Stocker  3:45  You you run a at least the workshop I went to it was a one day workshop, I think might have been to at the lead dev conference. Now, if people who don't know the lead dev conferences, it's a conference for as it says on the tin lead developers, so it talks about so groups that are useful to tech leads, software managers and the like. And I, I loved it, I can't recommend it enough.Lara Hogan  4:07  And they're doing online right now. So they've got a whole bunch of amazing, they've got like a seven part series starting in this fall. It's all like three hour online events. It's gonna be just there. They're doing such great workGeorge Stocker  4:20  and supporting so many people. I'm going to drop that in the show notes, because I think everybody can still hear about that.Lara Hogan  4:27  And I'm actually co hosting the first ones. The first one if folks are interested in this is all about how do we support our teammates as they grow? What are the skills that we need to use as lead devs to help our other teammates grow and develop?George Stocker  4:39  So I don't want to spoil the subject, but what are skills that we need to help our our teammates grow?Lara Hogan  4:45  So the thing that I've learned in doing this job for a while is that as knowledge workers, we're taught that the best way we can help our teammates is by teaching them pair programming or sharing with someone how we would do a thing They're working on mentoring them providing our perspective and our advice. And a bunch of research shows that those skill sets like the teaching, the mentoring skill sets, the advising skills, skill sets are really only helpful and getting someone unblocked or helping someone on board. That's it. If we actually want to help people grow, we need to use this whole other set of skills, which most of us are not equipped to use. And we've never been taught that they're important. Like, again, we've been taught that the best thing we can do is give our knowledge to other people, but actually not help people grow. So the three skills I really like to focus on, I'm missing like a broken record to you here is coaching. So helping people connect their own dots, introspect, reflect. This is when someone's like, Huh, like, what's important to you about this? What's hard about this? If you could change one thing right now what would you change those kinds of open questions really prompt like lightbulb moments in someone you know, it's it's so powerful to like, connect your own dots and be like, Oh, I know what I'm going to do next. And most of us have that in us already. So coaching is one big skill set. sponsoring is another big skill set. So sponsoring has to do with fighting to get someone to the next level by putting putting your name on the line for them your reputation on the line for them, giving them access to visible stretch projects, developmental assignments, putting the name in their name in the ring for a big leadership opportunities being in a company meeting time someone's manager that they're doing a great job. So sponsorship is, is the is the skill set that's most directly correlated to growth and career trajectory. So again, we never talked about this thing, but there's a huge power in this. And then the last one is feedback, which we already all know about. But most of us are pretty scared of doing. So I focus on that a lot.George Stocker  6:35  Yeah, so the the common or most common approach I've seen the feedback is what we like to think of is the feedback sandwich which is they did a good thing. Here's the bad thing you did, and I'm going to close with a good thing and at least personally for me, I never listened to the good parts. Once I realized that that feedback sandwich is coming backLara Hogan  6:55  coming.George Stocker  6:56  Yeah, it will feel terrible for this. Today we'll focus only on the negative because I feel Like the good part was, it wasn't a lie. But it wasn't. It wasn't genuine, because it's set at a moment where they want to couch bad feet. Exactly.Lara Hogan  7:10  It wasn't designed to help you grow. It was designed to help soften the blow. So we're not going to like listen to the good stuff. If, if it's not there to help us learn. It's just there to help us hear the bad stuff. Yeah, it's awful. I mean, I think we've all done it, like no shame, I get it. This is a normal part of human behavior. But it really comes back to the to the six corners that humans have at work. There's these six core needs the acronym for which is biceps that I also love talking about, because these corneas are all about what are our brains need to feel safe and secure, like our fight or flight response will kick in, if any of these expressions are not met. So part of that feedback, the compliment sandwich, is to try to make sure that this person's amygdala doesn't come online or fight or flight responses and come online and in doing so, we actually totally activate that person's amygdala. It's just it's infuriating and frustrating.George Stocker  7:59  Yeah, so If we weren't doing the feedback sandwich what what should we do?Lara Hogan  8:04  So the way that I like to frame this is kind of like three parts here. It does a little bit from SBI situation behavior impact. The first part is observation. So what are just the facts? Again, just talk about just the facts, not your assumptions, not your judgments that helps keep someone's prefrontal cortex the rational, logical part of the brain online. Because you're like, Yeah, yes, I did speak for 20 minutes in the meeting last week, or yes, I do care about this project getting off the ground or whatever the facts are about this. It helps us sometimes they can still sense that feedback is coming into their amygdala still might come on but if you start out with assumptions like I think you're doing this because or judgments like man that email that you sent, it was super It was too short like that's what you know, those are not things are going to help someone's prefrontal cortex stay online are going to activate that fight or flight response. So we want to stay factory. So that's the first thing observations fact basedGeorge Stocker  8:57  and one of the things that you said in the workshop At least and then I've kind of stuck with is, you think of it like if there's a camera looking at this event, and there was there's no people interpreting but just a camera recorded sound recorded video and this is what it saw. What would it say?Lara Hogan  9:14  Precisely? I do like to caveat every time I send it out to cabinet by being like, please don't record your co workers just because it feels important. Exactly like what could what could a video camera record?George Stocker  9:25  Yeah, precisely. And so what's the next step?Lara Hogan  9:28  It's impact. So one of the weird parts about feedback is that we often describe why why we want someone else to change their behavior, like what's the impact to me, like, I care about this because it's ruining my day, or I care about this because it's disrupting our team meeting or I care about what could be anything. We're so rarely ever prompted to think about why should this feedback recipient care about this? And the thing is, every one of us cares about really different things. Like if I say to you, like, you should really care about this because this gonna really help you know your promotion. But you don't care about getting promoted, you're not going to care about this feedback. So what we've got to start to do is stop is remove our assumptions, remove our own reasons why we care. Instead, take a step back and say, what does this person care about? Maybe we do care about a promotion, maybe you care about being liked on the team. Maybe you care about getting his project done on time, it could be anything. So taking a step back saying what does this person care about just generally, and then reframing or translating the feedback into that thing that they care about? Usually, any behavior is going to have lots of different impacts to choose from. So just pick the one that feels it's going to resonate the most with this person. It doesn't have to be all about you the feedback giver, it should be about this feedback recipient and why they would be motivated to change this behavior.George Stocker  10:44  So as an example, during your presentation, it feels like you were nervous and stuttered. Yeah, the impact was I'm not sure people heard the really important idea that you gaveLara Hogan  11:00  Yeah, yeah. Well, so And the thing is,it feels like you're nervous is an assumption. Oh,George Stocker  11:09  help me, make me better. How can we do that better?Lara Hogan  11:11  So like, if someone's stuttered, first of all, does this person have a stutter? That's probably something that they are already thinking about working on. Like, I'm not sure how this feedback is gonna make them better. But let's say they, let's say, they tripped over their words constantly. So for either for the duration of the of the talk, the presentation, the trigger for their words, I would say, Hey, I was posting an impact, like, Hey, I know you care about getting this to land with your audience, whatever the thing is, like, I know you care about getting practice delivering skills. I would like to start with an impact here. Then I'd be like, one thing I noticed is that at times, like it was, there were a lot of words that came out at once, or you started in stop sentences repeatedly. So like, again, I'm just like just fact base as much as I humanly can Then I would cap it off with a question. So, again, we've all been taught to, like, offer requests, like, therefore, could you please stop tripping over your words, it's like not a thing that's gonna be helpful to this person. And again, usually if you've, if you've gotten the observation, right, it's just fact based. And you've gotten the impact, right? Like, it's something they already care about at this stage in the game, they're already there. They know what they want to do, they're already motivated to change. So you think therefore, could you please speak more slowly or whatever? It's gonna short circuit, this whole process. This should be like a dialogue, not like a one way brain dump. So ask an open question. And I don't mean a question. It's like, what if you tried blob because it's still a request? Asking an open question means what are you genuinely curious about with this person? Like I might say? What do you want the audience to know? When they're done watching your talk? Like, again, like, what's the one number one takeaway you want to have? Or what's what's the number one skill that you want to be practicing For this because I genuinely do want to know is it? Is it word choice is a body language? Is it how much you're presenting? You're like speaking at volume, it could be anything. These kinds of genuinely open questions that start with the word What? really help make this feel less like a like a, like a feedback issue and more like okay, we're gonna build this together we're gonna we're gonna help change this behavior together.George Stocker  13:21  Oh, now, yeah, no, I'm I'm almost embarrassed because I wish I had I had known about that, you know, when I was started to be a manager A long time ago. Yeah, yeah.Lara Hogan  13:36  Because if you're eating right, reflecting back you're like, Oh, man.George Stocker  13:39  Oh, sorry. Edie reported me I'm really sorry.Lara Hogan  13:43  Yeah, yeah, I we also have like, wait like long term to go. Like we even even I still it's so hard to break out of the old feedback patterns. It's hard to remember this shouldn't be just like a big dump of information. This should feel like a two way dialogue and you should be framing it in terms of what this person cares, that's really easy to forget, because we're so driven to give us feedback. We're like, I know why I care about this. I bet they care about it, too.George Stocker  14:09  Yeah, I'm gonna make an assumption here, but it and it's just a connection I just made at this moment. But this sounds like this could be also good for teams in a retrospective format that are doing something like ScrumLara Hogan  14:22  100%, the questions part in particular. So I think it's totally cool to say facts, like in a retrospective like, here's a fact based thing that happened is much better than here's what I'm assuming is happening, or here's my judgment about what's happening. So again, keep those keep those illegals offline, keep the prefrontal cortex online. But then questions are really really powerful, like, Hey, what's our number one a shared goal here? Or, if I could wave a magic wand and change one thing? What would it be? It could be anything any of these open questions can help to prompt that intersection help someone connect their own dots and figure out together a path forwardGeorge Stocker  15:01  Now, you've just finished writing a book,Unknown Speaker  15:03  haven't you? Yeah, resilient management? Yeah.Unknown Speaker  15:06  Tell us about it.Lara Hogan  15:09  This was like the culmination of so many hours of coaching and training. You know, I, I found that the same topics were coming up consistently. And the managers that I was working with at all levels, like, this is a book, not just for people who are brand new or curious about management work, but people who've been doing it for a long time. Because there's stuff in here that just even senior leaders struggle with like, why is Why is no one getting on board with our new Okay, our process? Why is this person I try to keep delegating things to not picking up the slack. Like all of these are topics that we all have in common, regardless of level. And there's a lot in here in the book too, about adapting your leadership approach when things aren't working, because I think as managers we all kind of default to what to what we know or what's worked for us in the past or what we wish we had in a manager and we don't get a lot of practice. using other kinds of leadership styles or approaches, and it's really I think, as leaders, it's so critical for us to know how to use different kinds of styles, leadership styles and approaches more direct, more empowering, based on the context and what the people around us need and not just what we need.George Stocker  16:13  Hmm. Now in the army, they had they listed three and again, being in the army, they'd release things into you. So years later, I can still mention what they had three styles of leadership there was directing, effectively a dictator, there was delegation, where you have other people do it, you say, hey, go do X, they do x. And then there's participatory, where you work with the team to make things happen. Now, that's definitely a different words, maybe for the same thing, maybe for different things that you talk about resilience management. So let's talk about the ark of leadership that you bring up in your book.Lara Hogan  16:46  Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting, because when you said delegating, I was trying to piece together like how does that how is that distinctive from the other two styles because you could delegate in a directive way or you could delegate an opinion separatory away.George Stocker  17:01  That's true. That's true. I don't think that they I don't think that they ever made that distinction at least once. But you're right.Lara Hogan  17:09  It's interesting. So I kind of think about it as like a spectrum between two endpoints, which actually sounds mirrors that a little bit one is directive, like being really directive. You know, being really firm, blunt, clear, just setting the path forward. empowerment is the other end that I usually think about. And it sounds like that's probably closer to the participatory style that you mentioned, like coaching style and sponsoring style are totally on the empowerment end of the spectrum, like helping someone connect their own dots, bringing people along for the ride, not just telling them what to do. And strong leaders, I think, kind of bounce around the spectrum based on what the situation calls for. So like, we all have a default. Mind by default, is empowering. Like I'm just like, if I could coach all day, I would. But there's failure modes to either end like there will absolutely the circumstances in which they are defaults isn't useful. Like if I had if I was onboarding someone When new to my team, and they had no idea what to do, if I just ask them questions like what's important to you? They'd be so stressed out, they'd like to tell me, can you tell me what this job is supposed to keep the home supposed to talk to? You know? So there's, there's times you need to answer. And same on the directive side, if I constantly just telling people what to do, there'd be no growth, there'd be no learning, there'd be no stretching. So it's really important as leaders for us and as managers to kind of figure out what the situation calls for and get practice using not just each end of the spectrum, but all the spots in between toGeorge Stocker  18:32  Okay, and you mentioned, sponsoring and coaching on the empowering end of the spectrum. Yeah, and coaching is asking people open ended questions.Lara Hogan  18:44  Yes. Bingo. Yeah, exactly. Asking people open ended questions again, helping them to kind of track their own dots and not telling them so not mentoring right, not advising but instead, reflecting back what you're hearing them say giving them time and space to introspect and asking them those beautiful open questions to help like process That kind of introspection,George Stocker  19:01  and once that most useful, you know, what was it success mode? I guess?Lara Hogan  19:06  Yeah, it's most useful when you're trying to help someone develop a new skill or just grow just in general grow as a human as coaching is the most powerful one to use them. So basically all the time, but the caveat like, I'm talking like 50 to 80% of the time coaching is the mode that we all should be and there's like a subset of cases in which you know, mentoring is going to be helpful, but otherwise coaching is coaching.George Stocker  19:32  Do you have Do you have any imagery that will help say, hey, an example of who'd coaches Well,Lara Hogan  19:37  yeah, other questions so I would say if you see someone at work, who's like hey, here's the outline of a project that I need I need help with it my my go to example for this is a blend of sponsorship that like giving someone a stretch goal and also coaching them through it. And coaching which was my boss was like, Hey, I don't I've got too much on my plate. If you're a director, I know you've never worked with corporate budgets before. But can you figure out the engineering budget for education? Like training, travel all this stuff? I was like, okay, where do I start? And he was like, Well, here's probably the people you need to talk to, here's the end outcome that I'm looking for. But like, it's totally up to you to figure out what that is that that sponsorship, like that's giving me the outline is the delegation. So here's a stretch project, I think you can be supportive with what I was missing was, hey, let's figure out where like, let me ask you some questions. Laura, what feels scariest about this for you? Where do you think you want to start? Who do you already know who's good at this you can rely on like those kinds of questions that prompt the intersection that would have been a beautiful coaching moment, if only I mean, I had a great coach the whole time was like actually a train coach. She was really helpful. But that's it kind of brings up the point that one person can't be your everything. Your manager is not going to be good at all these things. I think it's really important to build out a network of support that, you know, I like to call a manager Tron.George Stocker  21:01  You do talk about that in the workshop go deeper into that.Lara Hogan  21:04  Yeah. So I think I learned this the hard way. I think we've all learned this the hard way, like your managers, it is a subset of skills, you know, need more than just one person. So I started to think about this as like a group of people, a diverse group of people that I lean on as I grow as a as a, as a manager, as leader as a human. And they're each going to have different skills are each gonna have different defaults on that spectrum. they're each going to have different experiences and perspectives. Some people I lean on have like completely opposite leadership styles to me, some have way more experience in me in a completely different field than I do. So people are great at giving feedback. Some people are great at coaching, you know, it could be any of these set of skills actually have a bingo card. I don't know if we can link to stuff in the show notes at all, but like great, beautiful so you can link to the bingo card to help you kind of brainstorm who's already in your network of support for these kinds of skills and where are the gaps like where should you be adding people to your Voltron to help you grow?George Stocker  21:57  One of the issues I'm I struggle with is asking for help. We all need a manager. How do you like, if you're like me? How do you how do you get to that next step, which is asking for help.Lara Hogan  22:13  Right? And it's like the only advice out there is like, go out and network. Like, what does that even mean? It's not clear, especially though, right? It's absolutely like we're where everybody's so underwater. So even if you could find, let's say, a Slack channel to go find and meet some people in everybody's drowning. So, the best way I've seen to add people, to your Voltron is like someone in your extended network. It could be someone inside your company but kind of outside of your normal field of work like someone in a different department. It could be outside like, you know, friend of a friend, manager of a manager style. But once you kind of have an inkling that there's someone in your network that you already have a connection to. It can be the tiniest little connection in the world. I recommend coming up with like figuring out all of all the problems that you have What's one that this person can help with either provide their experience on, or maybe be a good coach to you for give you feedback, something specific, choose a specific skill that you would like them to use. And then reach out to them and ask them for that specific help. So the way that this first happened to me, and I really realized it for the first time was the former CTO of meetup event Pasqua she, I had, like, met her at something randomly. You know, we connected on LinkedIn or something. And she she reached out and said, Hey, I know that you run an infrastructure team at Etsy. I'm a, I'm currently thinking of reorganizing my infrastructure team, do you have any opinions on like, how how to do or how not to do rewards? And sure, it was a shot in the dark, but like, do I have opinions on reorg of infrastructure? So like, I was, like, immediately wrote back and was like, yeah, let's, in this case, it was in the before times, and I was like, let's get coffee. And it was, it was so it was such a beautiful example of what when you ask someone to give their opinion. And something that they may care about deeply, it's so easy to form that connection and genuinely get their help. And she she didn't make up that problem that was actually a thing that she was thinking about. And so it was it turned into a lovely two or three hour meeting in which we talked about so many things. And that was her way of adding me to her Voltron crew. And it goes both ways. Like now I lean on her for all sorts of things. And I have, you know, the honor of supporting her through a bunch of stuff too. And it's it I've seen this happen time and time again, if you just reach out to one person that you have, like a distant connection to ask them for specific help on a topic that they may be jazzed to share their knowledge, expertise on, it can lead to beautiful things.George Stocker  24:36  One of the things I don't want to skip it because it's, it's very interesting, but we almost skipped it is sponsorship. So you're coaching. Now, let's talk about sponsorship. What does that mean and what does that entail?Lara Hogan  24:50  So sponsorship, if you think about the times in your life and you as a person who have grown, like if you think about the times when you had a manager who really skyrocketed your growth And you think about what skill sets they used or what they did to help you with that growth. Nine times out of 10. It was not giving you advice. It was maybe giving you feedback, but most likely it was giving you the stretch opportunity. Like for some reason, this person trusted in me. They gave me this project, I didn't know how to do it. And that helped me grow so much. That's sponsorship. And again, it's so much more powerful than any of the other skills when it comes to actual career trajectory. There's a bunch of studies on this. And whenever I talk about sponsorship, I also like to bring up that members of minority groups are often over mentored but under sponsored which means that white people in my case actually white women are often get lots of unsolicited advice, but very rarely opportunities look sponsorship people going out of their way to provide those stretch goals and and support through meeting those stretch goals. So this is true for people of color. This is People with disabilities, trans folks, non binary people, there's just so many folks out there who really deserve sponsorship. But because of something called in group bias, the way that we network as humans often means that we are referring to people and referring people, for the people who we think about first, they are really similar to us in a variety of ways. And until I started learning about this, frankly, most of the people who I sponsored, were white cisgendered women like me. And so it just takes a lot of hard work to combat these very natural instincts of how we network and support each other to kind of break out of that shell and sponsor people with different backgrounds, different experiences, went to different colleges, you know, all the all that stuff, all the normal in group stuff to break out of that.George Stocker  26:42  Yeah, and I don't have to tell you that, you know, diverse teams will build better software all the time. 100% and we just have to sponsor and give people the chances that they might have otherwise gotten, I think thenLara Hogan  26:56  yeah, and the prime support to do so. You know too often we see people be like, here, person here's a huge stretch opportunity. Good luck I believe in you and then providing no extra support and they're gonna fail, you know. So yeah, I think that it's it's definitely needs it takes intention and then hard work to support those people and succeeding.George Stocker  27:15  Yeah. When you were bringing up sponsorship I remember the times where I've grown the fastest in my career have been when somebody sponsored me but didn't let me go out there on my own. Like they were they weren't, you know, they were behind the curtain. And they were helping me to pick up any pieces that I might have dropped, but they weren't visible to other people. And it's so so to other people. It was me. And when I look back, it was them.Lara Hogan  27:44  powerful is that Yeah. And like that, it's that that behind the curtain part is the critical part. Like we can't be sponsoring for ally ship cookies, right. That's like, that doesn't that's not what sponsorship. We need to be behind the curtain. We need to be allowing this person To be to really succeed in the in the spotlight. And I love what you just said. And it actually makes me think of the other skill that you mentioned about the army training, which is the delegation skill. And a good delegator is one that doesn't micromanage doesn't doesn't tell you what to do. But gives you the like, illustrates the end goal, like, here's the problem that we're here to solve, and then tells you how they can lean on you for support. So like, are you calling on them for support, rather, so like, you know, I expect that you'll want to get on the executive team agenda. Reach out to me when you're ready for that, and I'll help you get on there. Or I'm super happy to provide you feedback on any of your drafts before this goes live. Like just be really clear about the ways in which you want to support them so that they're not like worried about reaching out to you when it's time for some help.George Stocker  28:43  Yeah. And the funny thing is, is of course, the armies are focused on on fighting and winning wars, but there are there are takeaways. One of them, just like what you just said, is something called the commander's intent. So whenever there is a, hey, we need to take this hill for example. They started The battle plan with the commander's intent is by the end of this, whatever the outcome is, and that starts it, that ends it. And if at any point there is no communication or you know, the fog of war happens, then everybody every unit down to the individual platoons they know what was the commander's intent, what is the ultimate, you know, outcome that we are looking for. And so that allows for platoons and for companies that are outside of communication or when things break down, which they invariably do that allows them to take initiative on their own and get to the right outcome that they were looking for in the beginning.Lara Hogan  29:38  Yeah, it's almost like at the end of this what do we cross check? What do we what do we like triple check to make sure that we met the God at the intent? Yeah, yeah. I love that.George Stocker  29:48  I actually think I would be talking about the Army Today at all. So you right now with, as as we as we record, this show, live 14, California, Florida and Texas are on the rise. Other states are either on the rise slightly or a lot or holding steady at best. This is a tough time for even even if you have nothing else going on, this is a tough time. What is your advice for managers of teams at this time?Lara Hogan  30:24  It's just, it's just the worst. It's just it's really illustrating, illustrating what a lack of leadership looks like. Which means that it's in many ways falling two leaders with less power and less privilege to try to pick up the slack. So in the internal to a company sense, this means that lots of managers need to figure out how to support their teams, and their individual teammates, all of whom are dealing with different circumstances. One of the one of the pitfalls that I see happening a lot right now is managers and team leads are trying to create support in ways that they personally would benefit from them. They're projecting their own needs on to the rest of the team, like the beginning of corn times, I saw a lot of managers be like, let's create 6pm happy hours every day. So we can also feel connected and like, maybe that helped one person, most of us would have been like, I got these other I need to go take care of these other things. I cannot be on zoom any longer, you know, got three kids. Right, exactly, exactly. So I see a lot of managers falling into this very normal natural trap of like, let me do all that I can to help people and just take shots in the dark about what's going to be most helpful rather than taking a step back and listening. Asking, I don't recommend the What do you need right now question first. I recommend that later. I definitely recommend a few things for managers start with first tell them what you're optimizing for right now. I am optimizing for making sure psychological safety is happening on the team or I'm I'm optimizing for making sure everybody Has the energy that they need to get through this project, or I'm optimizing for making sure everybody has the information and clarity that they need, whatever the thing is, be really clear constantly about what's the number one goal for you, as a manager, the thing that you're optimizing for right now, that's a good example of like one way communication, which I'm going to emphasize a lot like, anytime you require there to be a two way communication, it requires synchronous communication, or even if it's async, you require a response to something makes it really hard for people to like, find the time and the energy to do so. So over index on doing lots of one way communication. In one on ones, though, be really clear about how you're planning to support people or how you're trying to support people say, Hey, here's a few things that I've realized we could use in the team. What are your thoughts on that? And that's when you can say, what else would be helpful to you right now? Like, it's only after you've gotten through this initial like, here's what I here's what I'm optimizing for. And here's the things that I'm trying in case they're helpful. What else do you need, kind of opens the door for people to be specific about what they might need. And then it's kind of circles back to something I mentioned at the top which is the six core needs that humans have At work, those things that are amygdalas are trying to, you know, keep us safe with they're all threatened right now. I mean, when we think about it, and they include things like how we belong to a group anytime you feel others are alienated or left behind, are muggles going to feel threatened?George Stocker  33:16  And is that they haven't biceps?Lara Hogan  33:18  That's the visa. Yes, yeah, biceps is the acronym. Thank you coined by Paula Medina. So blogging is the first one. improvement and progress is the eye. So we want to feel like we're making a sense of progress and forward motion or lives. And anytime we feel stagnant or like we're taking steps back, that cornea is going to feel friend, it's really obvious that's happening right now with the numbers that we're looking at. The cc stands for choice. So how much autonomy Do we have right now there's so we're being forced inside or being. I mean, as much as anybody else. I don't like wearing a mask, it's really important to do so. But for many people I'm seeing their need for choices is kind of showing up in that in the area of equality and fairness is the ease so we want to As humans, we want to believe that everybody's been doing Fairly and as they should be, and obviously a number of populations are being over impacted by this horrible pandemic. And it's a bunch of communities that need extra support right now, it's just unfair. Also, at the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement is really again shining yet another light on the lack of equality and fairness in our, in our communities. It's just, it's obviously a corny that we were taking to the streets over predictability is the P, we want to have some sense of the future, what's going to happen, so certainty. And then last, but not least, is significance, which is effectively status, like where am I in this informal or formal hierarchy. So when I think about the people that I support, as a manager, every single person's going to have a different combination of these core needs at play. And the trap that we need to not fall into is projecting our own core needs onto everybody else, like my core need right now is instability. I need it. I have a little, a little post it note. You can't see it, but George can on my laptop. This is predictability. Just to remind myself, hey, when you wake up in the morning, create as much stability as you can. So this is the corny that your amygdala your limbic Big system needs the most right now. Everybody's is going to be different. I can't project my need for predictability onto everybody around me I need to start to listen ask questions to figure out which of these their core needs is being threatened. on the blog, we can link to it on the blog, I've got a bunch of open ended questions that you can use with your teammates to kind of check in and how they're coordinating. They're doing to make sure that you're, you're correctly supporting them in the ways that they need.George Stocker  35:22  It's funny. We've talked about success and failure modes, and it feels like a failure mode of our current political system is, you know, of federalism is the fact that you have a large pandemic that affects the entire nation. And you can't like you have to have that leadership that strong leadership at the top which our system of federalism at least practiced by the current administration, administration. They're, you know, they're trying to practice that I think, but it is a failure mode right now. It's not going to help us succeed, and which is, unfortunately is devastating like, this has really Life consequences. And that's what we should remember whenever we're trying to vote for new leaders. Yeah. Now, who do you recommend? As far as you know, who do you lean on for? I don't want to say diversity inclusion, because it just puts, that puts like a label on something, it's so much more important, you know, making sure that the biceps model works for everyone in our organization, who do you lean on to understand how that can help with people of color? You know, with minorities? You know, who do you lean on? Who is your, your go to for more information on that?Lara Hogan  36:36  Totally. So there's a bunch of I mean, just everyday, there's a bunch of new resources out in the world that are being developed. There's this amazing spreadsheet that's going around that I can provide a link for in the show notes for black owned di consultants that are currently taking on new work, which is just incredible what an incredible like, group people that we can continue to invest in the support as they do this amazing work for Me personally, I've been leaning a lot on existing resources from project included when it comes to like tech workplaces and how we can continue to make our workplaces more inclusive. They got a bunch of good research and a bunch of really important frameworks that we can kind of lean on for all aspects of our business. And then the creator of the of the biceps core needs acronym Paloma Medina, she also has a bunch of resources on our website that have a lot to do with equity and inclusion work that I find myself often citing for lots of different parts of whether it's the hiring process, or the retention process promotion processes, just to really try to triple check and look at the research again, not just try to make it up like as we engineers are want to do, actually look at the studies and say okay, what works and what doesn't like there's a bunch of studies that show that different styles of unconscious bias training, make things worse, look better. So it's actually taking a look at like what works what's, what's real, what works and applying those things.George Stocker  37:56  Wonderful. Yeah, we only have a little while. left. But you know for a team that doesn't have psychological safety or maybe has less psychological safety then you know they need to be productive what you know what are the first steps you know for them is how do you figure out what you don't have a psychological safety into? How do you get yourself out of it?Lara Hogan  38:22  It's this stuff is so hard and there's so there's so much research on it. Amy Edmondson, if people are looking interested in doing a lot more on this, Amy Edmondson, has written so much about this. I'm far from an expert in it. When I start to think about this, this topic and trying to just figure out from the start, do we have it on our team? I start to pay attention to not just things like body language, but also how many questions are being asked in team meetings? Are people pushing back? When people push back? How does everybody else react? You know, how is that as how safe is it to be wrong? But how safe is it to ask questions? To provide other solutions, or just to say that something feels bad or wrong. If none of those things are happening, you don't have psychological safety on your team. A failure mode would be to think everything's fine because no one's saying anything. The opposite is true. So when I think about this stuff, I think a lot about using coaching skills and active listening skills to provide a sense of like, Hey, I'm listening, I want to I want to make things better here. I want to support you, as you grow as a person. And try to understand people as individuals, and then the most important thing for me as a manager is following through and they commit to, for me that like, you can't ask for trust, you got to like demonstrate that you deserve Trust has a lot to do with saying is doing the things that you say you're going to do. And for me, that's a huge core piece of creating psychological safety on a team.George Stocker  39:47  Nice. Now that, you know, it's not always good news. As a manager and leader, you know, how can I either How can I deliver that's a great news through their mind Boss or my team? And you know, what does that look like? What do you recommend?Lara Hogan  40:03  Yeah, so there's so many different ways to go about this for me, I just see so many failure modes here about trying to dance around a problem, or trying to over explain, there's a lot of a lot of things that I see when it comes to people leave managers being nervous, deliver bad news, as much as humanly possible. Bottom line, the news that you're that you're trying to deliver meaning in one sentence, what's the point? Then you can also add more context, especially if you give people time to ask questions. But I would say get practiced and bottom lining and being really, really clear. I don't mean being a dictator. I mean, just stating a fact or stating what the thing is happening. If you've got bad news delivered to your team, it's coming down from above you. It's really important to not just bottom line, what that news is, but also provide some context that's yours. So like, Okay, listen, here's the deal. layoffs are coming. My personal On this is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that might be, here's what I think is going to happen or what's not going to happen, which is risky to say that might be, here's what I'm going to be doing to support you each as we move forward. That might be, hey, here's what I'm going to follow up on next to get some more clarity information on this, whatever, whatever the thing might be, give it give your perspective or your I'm not gonna say spin, because that's that means like making it false. But how are you feeling about this? Or what are you seeing about this, try not to make it at all about your feelings, because that's going to feel very weird. But the final thing to close with is when Can people hear from you next on this and in what medium? Mostly when people hear bad news, all they're doing every single day following that is waiting for the other shoe to drop. So letting people know hey, next Thursday, we'll have another update for you on this via slack or in our team meeting or whatever. Or hey, the next thing we'll do is talking one on ones about this. That's can be that can be so clarify and give people the certainty predictability they need about you know, in a very otherwise ambiguous, awful situation. One littlesliver of predictability going forward.George Stocker  41:59  You One of the things that we happens in tech in it, it feels like it happens in tech far more than other industries, although I have no data to back that up. His turnover is there's a lot of turnover in tech, from your perspective. And from the teams. You've worked with your Do you see that as a manager admin thing, are you so that's purely because of, you know, compensation and benefits, it's easier to get better if you jump? What does that mix look like from your perspective?Lara Hogan  42:28  You know, it's really interesting, the retention rate stuff, it's just mired a lot of complexity. Like I see some HR folks or executives bragging about how low turnover they have is actually I learned there's a healthy amount of turnover. If you've got too little turnover, it's actually unhealthy. So there's, there's like a, there's like a threshold. That's normal. I couldn't give you numbers on it, but like this, you got to ask yourself, Am I in the correct pressure, there should be some kind of healthy change internally. A lot. The folks that I coach, if they're leaving jobs, it's because they're perceiving things to be unfair. More often than not people who I coach are members of minoritized groups, and so they might be perceiving a wage gap or a promotion rate issue, when you look at minoritized groups compared to, you know, non minoritized groups. So it's been really interesting to support these folks, which is obviously a good niche of the population as they choose to change jobs because there's also a lot of risk involved. When you when you change organizations, that means you are introducing a bunch of numbers about how you're about to be treated and how fairly or not you're about to be approached. And so it's Yeah, it's, it's just layered in complexity. So I would say again, if you've got too little or too little turnover, take a little look at that, because probably it's time for some people to go. And you've got too much turnover if it feels like it's too much. Ask yourself, how do I know what can I look at to see See if this is a healthy amount, because the act of you believing is can be really healthy. So check triple check with yourself who's leaving? Is it kind of normalized across the board, there's an article that I wrote about wage equity and promotion equity that includes some tips on how to measure across different demographic groups, what your retention rates are and what your promotion rates are to triple check that nothing is, is wrongacross the board.George Stocker  44:27  The one of the things that I'll say to new managers is the first thing you should do as a manager from a numbers perspective is probably it's not the first thing you should do when you meet your team, at least my numbers perspective, you should see you should know what your people make, and you should make sure that you equalize it, you know, bring people up if they're not making what they should be making, try to bring them up immediately. Because that will, that will, that's a way of building trust. When you come in you say hey, look, this is what I see. I'm putting in for that. That's a fast way of building trust of showing them You care and of making sure that you do have justice, in equity and pay on your team, which we all want. We're in tech and one of the richest industries in the world. If we can't pay people what they're worth here, nobody can. And so we should be doing it. Yeah.Lara Hogan  45:17  It's amazing to me that the traps that people in mental traps if you volunteer around this, like they think there must be a reason why this person is being paid less. We default to like, what are the specific unique circumstances under which this person is being paid less rather than saying what you just said, which is, let me pay people equally first, and then we can figure out the rest later, which I think is going to save you a lot of heartache.George Stocker  45:39  Yeah. Maybe we maybe it's just a you know, a mental thing where we're like, Well, clearly they didn't do something right. And we'll I don't have enough information. So I shouldn't change things rather than wait a minute. These are my people. I'm responsible for them. I need to into your trust. I need to be their leader. And starting from there, which you might fail like, there might be Be a good reason why they're not being paid off. But that happens a lot less than, you know, all these assumptions that you talk about all these prejudices and these biases, that that stops someone from getting the money that they actually need and deserve, like,Lara Hogan  46:14  precisely. And if there's performance issues, you deal with that with performance management, do that with feedback. You don't deal with that with compensation, and inequity and compensation and so I maintain paying people the same for the same job is one of the most obvious things to me that still is causing a lot of issues in our industry.George Stocker  46:34  Yeah. Laura. So people, how can they find you on the internet? How can companies get in touch with you to do coaching and what do you want to leave us with?Lara Hogan  46:45  Yeah, Laura underscore Hogan on Twitter and we are wherewithall.com for all your coaching and training needs.George Stocker  46:52  Buy the book and schedule a coaching call with Laura. Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. I really It's been a pleasure having you.Lara Hogan  47:01  Thanks so much for having me.George Stocker  47:03  All right, folks. That's it for this week. We'll see you next time on the build better software podcast. ThanksTranscribed by https://otter.ai

Paloma Medina, performance coach, trainer, and owner of 11:11 Supply, discusses translating her brick & mortar store experience to an online shop, the themes around her coaching, design thinking, and how equity is linked to our long-term physical health. This episode of Giant Robots is sponsored by: PricingWire: Monetization & Pricing Strategy for Software & Technology Innovators Links & Show Notes 11:11 Supply CW Pencil Enterprise Paloma @ TEDx Portland Paloma on LinkedIn See open positions at thoughtbot! Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

Today on the podcast I am talking to Paloma Medina, a coach and owner of 11:11 Supply. Paloma wanted to combine her love of retail with her passion for psychology, neurology, and how those things can make our workplaces and our lives better. At her store 11:11 Supply in Portland, OR, Paloma curates office supplies and other organizational tools to help her customers boost productivity and happiness. The shop also hosts workshops that share knowledge not only about productivity, but also creativity, inclusivity, and more. 

In this episode of the DistantJob podcast, we talk to Nassim Kammah. Nassim works at MailChimp as their Engineering Manager, and is at the cutting edge of the conversation about remote leadership and working with a hybrid remote/co-located company.This episode touches on how the importance of treating remote employees just as if they were regular, co-located employees; how negative emotional states can be more prevalent during online communication and how to manage them; and on the best formula to get honest, actionable feedback from your team members. But that’s not all, of course - this is one of the wider-ranging DistantJob podcasts ever!And if you would like to receive the transcript of this episode and previous episodes to read, annotate and love forever and ever (creepy!), subscribe at https://distantjob.com/blog/category/podcast/Want to continue the conversation with Nassim? You can reach him by following him on Twitter ( www.twitter.com/kepioo ) or LinkedIn ( www.linkedin.com/in/nassim-kammah-b6033a2/ )Nassim’s recommendation for your remote office? The Webaround. ( www.thewebaround.com )And for more information on the leadership frameworks he mentioned, check out  Paloma Medina’s BICEPS model ( www.palomamedina.com/biceps/ ) and Lara Hogan’s work ( www.larahogan.me/blog/ )As always, if you enjoy the podcast, we humbly ask that you leave a review on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice – and if you could share it, that would be even better!Need that one incredible employee to bolster your team?  Get in touch at https://distantjob.com/contact/  and we’ll find you who you need.

Paloma Medina is the owner of a store called 11:11 Supply in Portland, OR. Her store is one of a kind. On plain sight, it sells curated stationeries. But truly, the products make up a beautiful Trojan Horse to make you think about happiness and goals. The very two things that we are all hungry for. In this episode, we talked about her experience growing up in the US as an 8-year-old Mexican immigrant. How she inherited her entrepreneurial spirit from both of her parents, and how she was able to cross off all her goals and start new ones.

Lara Callender Hogan is an engineering leader, coach, and consultant at Wherewithall. She is also the author of Designing for Performance (O’Reilly, 2014), Building a Device Lab (Five Simple Steps, 2015), and Demystifying Public Speaking (A Book Apart, 2016). Lara champions engineering management as a practice, having built and led engineering organizations as an Engineering Director at Etsy and VP of Engineering at Kickstarter. In her world tour to advocate performance to designers and developers alike, Lara has keynoted the Velocity Conference, presented at Google I/O, and given talks at companies like The New York Times to help shift them toward a culture of performance. While at Etsy, Lara co-created the initial physical device labs, and co-authored a tutorial and bookfor companies interested in building their own lab. To connect her passion for performance with her activism, Lara donates all of the proceeds from Designing for Performance to charities focused on supporting underrepresented people in tech. Lara also believes it’s important to celebrate career achievements with donuts. On today's episode we discuss proper expectation setting, mindful communication, Lara's new company and a surprise management challenge! Listen on to find out what it is!   Contact Info: Title: Co-Founder Company: Wherewithall Twitter: @lara_hogan Site: http://larahogan.me/ Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/lara  Show Notes: The Lead Developer Austin 2018 Workshop   Desk moves   Paloma Medina   Tuckman's Stages of Group Development   Etsy's Charter of Mindful Communication   The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change