Next speaker is a former classroom teacher who made a career transition into tech in 2016. She is currently holding a role of an engineering manager at Altus, an adtech company and she is a professional Scrum master passionate about building healthy high performing teams by supporting people over processes.

She will take you on the 20 minute journey where you will get an understanding of what team self management means and some of its benefits, the importance of transparency and how it builds trust amongst team members and how created a sense of psychological safety promotes a high performance team.

Welcome on this stage, Anna, welcome on this stage, Anna girl's team values to promote the build high performance teams. Hi, Anna. Super excited to have you with us

today. Good morning. Thank you again for having me.

Absolutely our pleasure. Let's say hi in the chat to Anna and you are ready to go. The stage is all yours?

Perfect. Yeah. So um like Anna said, my name is Anna Goldstein. I'm an engineering manager at Otis, which is an educational technology company. Looking forward to talking a little bit more about Otis at the end of this presentation, I'm coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee.

I made a career transition from teaching in elementary schools to software engineering in 2016. And I've since become extremely interested in learning how to promote high performing teams, higher productivity work, workplace fulfillment in teams. So thank you for joining this session and allowing me to share some of what I have learned with you. Now, high performing teams don't form by chance. There are principles that we can understand that support the foundations of these teams. And my goal for the next 18 or so minutes is for everyone to just come away with one thing that maybe you learned or you're thinking about a little bit differently or one thing that you want to apply right away in your work, supporting your team. So I'd like to talk about three areas. We have psychological safety and belonging. We have promoting team self management and creating a culture of transparency. All of them build on top of each other. And let's just go right ahead and jump into the first one, psychological safety and belonging. So you've probably seen this before. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Any textbook that talks about organizational behavior or psychology will probably present this the idea that if your most basic needs aren't met, if you don't have food, water, warmth thrust, you won't be able to do anything else because you will be busy attempting to improve your circumstances to get those needs met will be what motivates behavior.

So we have our basic physiological needs and also in basic needs, we have our need for safety and psychological safety is included in. This doesn't only refer to the physical safety of our bodies. It refers to feeling secure in our place in the various groups of people. We are part of psychological safety at work is just something we don't want to leave hanging and we wanna pay special attention to it, especially because it's really foundational to sorry about that. I didn't navigate. It's fine. It's foundational to some of these other needs.

We have belonging, friendship, feeling accomplished and fulfillment. Psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking in the workplace. Psychologically looks like team members feeling safe to express their ideas, question things, try different approaches to solving problems and to take risks without fear of negative consequences, like retaliation or judgment harm, done to their self image or harm, done to their career.

Some benefits of psychological safety, the organization will benefit from hearing a diversity of ideas being expressed. Team members will feel safer to experiment with new ideas, to solve complex problems and employees will be more engaged. Of course, there's many other benefits.

These are just a few of them ways that we can promote psychological safety. We can create a culture of being appreciative of bad news as well as good news. We can personally adopt this mindset of there's no failure except failure without learning. We can model asking for help, we can model asking dumb questions, which this has really helped me to try, try to sort of get over this hurdle of being afraid to do that. And now I just sort of unapologetically will do that and just kind of get over that hurdle of not wanting to ask stupid questions, um admitting errors. Um We can proactively ask questions of team members or our teammates. What's on your mind? What are you seeing? What concerns do you have open attended nonthreatening questions? And we don't want to just assume that teammates know that we're available to talk if they ever have a concern. We wanna make sure that we are asking these questions, not just one time but continually, we wanna make it more difficult for people to remain silent than to share any concerns. So psychological safety focuses on feeling safe, to speak up and vocalize ideas without fear. And now I would like to talk about belonging. So belonging is about feeling connected to others as well as accepted for who you are.

There's some words associated with a high sense of belonging in addition to feeling safe to express ourselves in a group, humans need to feel included and accepted, feeling like we matter to the group and that we are supported and worthwhile. And then there's some words that are associated with a low sense of belonging, a person may feel isolated, they may be withdrawn in different disconnected. There was a great session earlier today by Rachel Shield that talked about some of the impacts COVID has had on women, especially uh their sense of belonging. So I would highly recommend going back and watching her talk if you haven't already and I just move on. So why should we care about belonging? We shouldn't require there to be a business case for promoting a high level of belonging on our teams. But there are many benefits that our teams and organization will experience. If employees have a strong sense of belonging, team members show increased job performance and are less likely to leave their jobs. Employees are more likely to recommend their company to others. Promoting their organization as a desirable place to work. Team members are also more likely to give more effort to accomplishing team goals instead of only towards individual goals. There's some links, some resources in my slides as well. But I'm gonna share my slides at the end of this presentation in the chat.

So some ways that we can promote belonging again, check in with team members on both a professional level and a personal level. Going along with the word supported being in that list, being associated with belonging. We want to support team members and their daily work as well as their growth as humans and in their career. Be an ally, celebrate people being themselves. This is something we really give a lot of attention to at Otis. Um team members should always feel like they have an ally in us and that we, you know, treat everyone fairly notice if someone is having a difficult time getting a word in, in a meeting and make sure to call on them. And then finally, we have grow as a leader, work to gather a diverse range of perspectives from lots of different kinds of people and use those perspectives to help us grow as leaders or as team members. So, and just being open to talking about our experiences in that growth. So I think we can really work to sort of build a bridge towards greater inclusion for everyone. So now we've talked about psychological safety and belonging. And the final topic I would like to go over.

Actually, it's not the final topic. The second topic I would like to go over. The second to last is self management of teams. Agile development has popularized this idea of self managing teams. It's defined in the scrum guide as team members internally decide who does what when and how it looks like a group of people working together towards a common goal. As a former teacher, I learned that when experiencing classroom management challenges, I first needed to ask myself why the students were not engaged. And often this may have been because they didn't understand the purpose behind what they were learning or they didn't feel invested in the bows and the way to dissipate these issues wasn't to enforce stricter authority on them or to manage the students even more. It was to increase the student's level of engagement. So in the workplace, if we have clear goals that are shared and everyone understands what we're working towards, then everyone can be involved in deciding the how, how to get there. Continue talking about team self management.

Some things that we can do to promote team self management, facilitate conversations that ensure goals are understood by everyone. Everyone underneath everyone needs to understand the vision and the why behind the goals, you can also have team members be part of defining the vision.

We can allow team members to define their own processes and how they want to organize their work. This can look like once a project kicks off, team members are collectively responsible for some management activities such as assigning daily work and the team will be able to continually improve in their ability to manage themselves and organize their own work if they're continually reflecting on how they're doing, learning from mistakes.

So you can see why this is a big reason why psychological safety needs to be strong in order to have a team that is able to self manage and reflect on how things are truly going. It benefits of team self management. Team members are able to adapt quickly when needed. They're not needing to wait for permission to be able to do something or wait for a manager to tell them how to do it. They're able to just adapt quickly based on their learnings, promoting self management and employees has the effect of promoting engagements. Self management also promotes a culture of accountability. I know that when I've been involved in making a decision, I feel more invested in the outcome of the decision and I feel like I have assumed more control over how it goes. And also you'll see team members be interested in the outcome of of the work and a little less interested in sort of who gets credit, et cetera. OK. We talk about creating a culture of transparency. So this is the last topic that I would like to talk about is transparency. One definition of the word transparent is characterized by visibility or accessibility of information. Everyone has the same facts.

If we're looking at something, if we're inspecting it, we want to make sure that we are inspecting the right thing that we're inspecting the true state of something, we'll continue talking about transparency some ways to promote. So as we get ready to wrap up, we can promote transparency by promoting psychological safety. If you have a low level of transparency, you might see team members keeping information sort of internal and not sharing opinions openly. Maybe just with one other person who they do feel safe with, we should focus on creating an environment where making changes is valued and failing and learning is accepted also that concerns our voice before things become an issue. So going back to checking in with team members, you know, just making sure that even the potential risk for an issue is identified, it not something doesn't need to be a really big problem before we can voice. It. Also making work visible is really important for transparency.

One sign that transparency could be better is if team members are afraid to show their work in its current state before they feel it gets finished and polished, we don't want that we want work to be visible at all stages so that we can know how things are going and adapt if we need to.

So that's something that we can support team members to that end and we can model that for them and um encourage them to just make their work visible throughout all stages of of a process. And then finally, we have spent time with teammates, which sounds self evident. I always think of if people are in a room together, everyone is able to tell how hot or cold the room is, everyone is able to feel the temperature of the room and you know, because they are in the room together. And so um as a leader as a teammate, if you want transparency, you will want to spend as much time in the room with your team as you can spend as much time uh with your team so that you have the same facts as everyone else, you know, the temperature in the room just like everyone else.

Yeah. So yeah, I just wanted to say thank you again for joining this session. I hope it helped you to grow in your understanding of these principles. And I would like to encourage you to think of one area that you would like to come away with one concrete way. You would like to promote one of these values in your team. Keeping in mind that psychological safety and belonging are the foundations for everything else.