For a time. I'm gonna get us started. Uh Welcome everyone. I'm glad to have a couple of you here and looking forward to talking to you today.I'm here to share things with you that I've learned from navigating change in my career so far to help you do as a leader. I've learned from career changes from world transitions and from building and leading teams during crises like the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, as well as hypergrowth environments. We'll go over frameworks and tools to help you lead with confidence in change and practical things that you can apply in your work just starting tomorrow if you would like to. So change is really at the core of what we'll talk about today. And it's at the core of many modern organizations work and at the core of our work as leaders, we grow teams, no matter if in start ups or in hyper growth mode or in corporations change is often the default. It's our state of being and the operational mode, managers or technical leaders are building structures for the organizations that they are at the same time as they're expanding and planning for the future organization they want to become when we talk about depop culture, which is at the heart of software engineering.

For many teams, we fundamentally talk about making change easier. Des culture is about reducing friction and improving our ability to change and change continuously in order to get advantages for our business and our customers. And as leaders in modern software engineering organizations like the one that I work with, we choose continuous improvement. We choose continuous change over being satisfied with the status quo. And we do so for the benefit of our customers, our business and our teams, the change can also be hard sometimes like the last year and many leaders have told me it's been really difficult for them and for their teams and yet change for us as leaders isn't just an annoying side effect of what we do change is the work initiating and responding to change.

That's what we do every single day and that requires us to create drive and be resilient to change. And it requires that we show up as leaders no matter if you're driving change or if we're just responding to it. And in this part, I find it important to talk about what leadership actually means. Management is one, a role can be about coping with complexity whereas leadership I believe is about coping with ambiguity and change. That's it. Sorry about that. So management is about complexity and handling it and leadership is an approach. It's behaviors and skills that everyone can exhibit. Anyone can be a leader, no matter what your role is, what your title is, or which level you're working at. Leadership traits are. For example, being able to handle and work through ambiguity, embracing change, or even driving it, taking ownership over solving problems, driving alignment, making decisions, thinking at the systems level or growing and supporting others around you. So taking the lead and showing up can mean very different examples from my career. So far in 2014, I've been consulting for some friends who've been working towards founding a start up. And one day after lunch, one of those friends said, hey, I think you should become a co-founder and CEO for us. You've been doing all this work for us.

Anyway, three months later, my four co-founders and I sat in the notaries office, signed some papers and then we were co-founders into a group photo nearby and the picture you're seeing here as the German Bundestag or Federal Chancellor in the back right after this appointment or in 2014, my co-founder calls me and says that he found a project for our newly founded Boots Chef Company when he ran into a guy in the co-working space who said they needed help with some engineering work to support the Ebola outbreak response.

A couple of months later, I'm in Sierra Leone to work with some of our local teams on site. These were all moments when I decided to take a leap into the unknown and show up as a leader for my team and later on many other teams. So what does it mean for you to show up as a leader in times of change? We want to look at leadership skills for this moment and specifically what it means to show up for yourself as well as to show up for your team and your organization. I believe that the journey to being a good leader is ultimately highly personal leaders are looked at for answers. They're often the first person that people turn to. And most of all leaders are constantly put into situations that we haven't been in before or to do things that we haven't done before and we can train read, learn, practice roleplay, and those are all really important skills, but it always depends on how we treat what's in front of us.

In the end, our strengths, our thought patterns and our responses. So in order to be able to show up for others, we have to start by being able to show up for ourselves. And an important part of that are our values. I've gone through many changes in my career and many times I've asked myself, what kind of leader do I want to be? That's often been the case when I was confronted with big disagreements and the question of what I would stand for, my values have evolved over time, but especially in times of change, they've been really crucial and they continue and guidepost for me. So be clear on your values.

Hold them close and it's really good if you haven't done this yet, spend some time identifying what your values are and how you're living them in your work and manage your energy. So structure your time around what drains versus what, what energized you a practical way to do this is look at your calendar, identify in your day what drains or energizes you and why is there this one meeting every week that you always straight? And that always ends up not being a great meeting and structure your workday around balancing things that energize versus that drain you and manage your energy level. Take dance breaks, look out the window between meetings or walk your dog and manage your time as a leader, you need to prioritize ruthlessly, always be clear on what the most important thing is that you could be focusing on and what impact and outcomes you look to deliver. And this the priorities can change or change over time. So make sure that you always check in on whether the priorities as you understand the are actually is still current, expand your operational horizon to another part of showing up for yourself. The human brain is programmed to narrow its focus in the face of a threat and change is perceived as a threat by our brains. That's an evolutionary survival mechanism.

And it's not a bad thing, but the trap can be that it narrows our field of vision to the immediate foreground. So we lose sight of the bigger picture. As leaders, we need to navigate different horizons all the time. We need to be able to make sure the present is being managed. And at the same time anticipate what's next week, next month, next year. So we can prepare for the changes ahead. A practical way you can do. This is by always making time for strategic thinking, even if it just means that you sit down for 10 minutes at the start of your birthday every day. That's what I do and think about strategy. Ask yourself, do I understand it? Do the people around me understand it? Where are, where are gaps? Is everyone on the same page about what we're trying to do longer term and then address those and weave it into your practical work every day. And thus you always invest in your learning and growth leaders that learn research shows are leaders that will ultimately succeed. So always learn and don't just maintain your status quo. Look to leaders around you, identify what makes them successful or what makes them fail.

This learning mindset is really foundational for your success as a leader and you're here today. So that's a really good sign. And if you don't have time for learning, make this time because if you don't prioritize your learning and growth. Chances are that no one else will do this for you. So we've just looked at how to show up for ourselves as leaders. And now let's look at how we show up for our teams and organizations and a basic pillar for this is understanding our teams and organizations needs. This picture shows a sound engineer who is trying to record sounds of a puffin, which I think is really adorable. So for us as leaders, we need to understand what our teams and organizations need from us. And we do so by asking good questions, listening, observing and then taking note of what motivates our teammates. It's the foundation to do our work well and especially in times of high change, maintaining this connection is really important. So continuously checking in making sure that those things are still up to date because motivations and driving forces may also change for people over time.

Also check in for feedback re regularly if you haven't done so this week yet, it's only Thursday. So there's still time. This is the foundation for any relationship and really your success as a leader. I also believe that one of the important, most important parts of our work as leaders is to grow leaders around us. We need to build teams that can learn, adapt, grow and stick together along the way. It's our job to bring up people around and with us and identify aspiring leaders, people with high potential do succession planning and then invest in those folks. Delegation is one of the best tools for you to do that to grow these leadership leadership traits and others, as well as helping them understand ambiguity and handle it better through this delegation. So involve them in higher level, more ambiguous discussions. If you're exposed to that those kinds of topics. Another way you can grow leaders is through clear expectation setting. If you lead through giving context instead of controlling, you're allowing people to get exposed to higher degrees of ambiguity, which means that they can learn how to handle those and how to actually turn them into more manageable chunks of work.

So when you're delegating set direction, share the vision, the bigger picture, the values and the outcomes that you're looking for don't focus on approaches, don't make people do things the way that you would do them because then you could just do it yourself instead focus on the outcomes and let people get creative with how they want to solve the problems that are in front of them or get to the outcomes that you're looking for.

Another important part of growing leaders is transparency. I also believe it's a really core leadership trait for the people around. You always maintain sight of the vision and of factors that are going into how you may be adapting and reacting and driving this condition shift. The last year.

For example, presented a lot of rapidly changing conditions. For many teams, keep people up to date with what's going on and why plans may be changing and remind folks that things will be imperfect. There's rarely any perfect solutions because the world is complex and change adds to that complexity. So instead convey uncertainty and ask people to join you for the journey and help you try things out and learn along the way. This makes it a much more joint experience and gets people bought in. I've mentioned vision and purpose a couple of times already be relentless about communicating vision and strategy. Always assume that people don't know and that they will have to hear them many times. And when you're tired of saying it as a leader, assume that 60 to 80% of people have heard it. This kind of connectedness with goals and vision. It keeps team members unified and reinforces the common goals. It also connects people's daily work with the bigger picture which helps assign meaning to it. That's a major factor in helping build resilience on teams. It also helps them understand how their work at the individual level has impact for the larger goals of the company. A practical way to do. This is to just set yourself reminders for example, monthly and then communicate about about it. Another way to do it is to have a regular weekly email that you're sending to your teams to check in. I've been doing this for many years.

And it's a really good way to stay connected with this and then communication in general the dolphin. This is an example by David Feeney who is an mirrors professor of Information Management at Oxford. So dolphins can only take in really small amounts of air. And as a result, they have to surface very frequently every 15 minutes to breathe. Whereas whales can take in much larger amounts of air and so they stay submerged for around 90 minutes at a time. So communicate like a dolphin, especially when you communicate change. It's much better to pop your head up very frequently to talk about little change. This helps a lot with avoiding surprises for your team. It also positions you as a leadership constance on your team in the presence and it maintains transparency, use the same frequency also to ask for feedback and check in. So you can stay in touch with how people are feeling and thinking about changes. So being a dolphin also means that don't try to make a big splash. We've just looked at that and then only sleep with half your brain. We're not going to cover details on that today. And then one point that is really important when leading through change is being a realistic cheerleader. So change can be hard on teams sometimes. And again, many changes like over the last year have been difficult for teams. This is something that I've been working on myself.

So creating fun for the team and myself bringing some silliness, bringing some lightness, sharing the latest cute animal video I found on tiktok. Like those things don't have to be much or large. It doesn't always have to be the big team socializing, but make it intentional and I've gotten feedback, but it's been a really nice touch for my teams. So bring some lightness, lightheartedness and also watch out for the way that you talk about changes. I don't think there's a need to gloss over difficulties, but at the same time, we don't want to just be sad collectively all the time either. And I also don't think that's fair warranted. So watch out for your framing, you know, say things like it'll be a lift but we can do it or I know this is difficult right now. But here are the things that are on the horizon that are looking positive and there's good changes waiting for us. So balancing and being acknowledging the ambivalence and ambiguity that many changes bring and taking your the teams, the people on your team along for the ride is really important. Sympathize with difficulties people are facing, but reiterate that you believe that they have what it takes to turn their situation around.

This kind of realistic cheerleading also invites others to join the journey and it helps them understand what the journey is and then don't forget to celebrate wins and celebrate them early. These easily get lost, especially when there's a lot of change going on. So really make a point of doing that. So we've looked at different variables of what makes a good leader. Leadership isn't just one action and done and moving on and everyone who's here today who is a leader knows that that's, it's just a journey that we're all on. There are no heroes and we're all always just becoming better leaders for our teams and we're leading with our teams. So we've looked so far at how to show up for ourselves as leaders by holding our values close and using them to guide us through difficult times by managing our energy and priorities. So looking at what energizes us versus what drains our energy and making sure that we always ruthlessly prioritize because our time is valuable. We also looked at operational horizons and how to expand it. So making sure that as leaders, we always maintain a good line of sight with the long term with the big picture and help our teams connect, be connected with that too and then investing in our growth as leaders.

So making sure that we show up for ourselves by making sure that we spend that time learning and growing, developing our skills. And we looked at how to show up for our teams and organizations by understanding our needs here. We may remember the Puffin picture. So listening, building relationships being open to feedback. So we can continuously learn and adapt in any changes that we're making. We also looked at growing leaders around us. So bringing people up with us, helping them learn and grow their leadership skills by exposing them to larger degrees of ambiguity, delegating bigger projects to them, giving them growth opportunities and then setting clear expectations is also a really useful tool to do that.

I talked a bit about transparency which I believe is a really important leadership value, making sure that people understand what's going on the context for decisions in so far as it's possible to share them, then maintaining this vision connection for everyone relentlessly communicating strategy and being a dolphin.

So communicating changes frequently rather keeping the cha the communication small instead of trying to make a big splash like a whale and then being a realistic cheerleader, of course. So bringing people along with us acknowledging difficulties while also motivating them to work through it and ensuring them that they have the skills to solve the problems ahead of them. And before I go, I would like to leave you with one last notion on change and moving into the unknown. And if any of you have any questions you'd like to discuss, feel free to put it in the chat and maybe we have a minute or so that we can talk about it. So the musher, so that's the human driver of a dog sled team. A Blair Braverman is her name, she wrote about what her sled dogs taught her about planning for the unknown for the New York Times last year. And she wrote about how to prepare for an unseen ending by basically front loading rest. And she writes, and I quote, here's the thing about sled dogs, they never know how far they're going to run. Working with dogs in the wilderness means negotiating counter shifting variables, snow and wind, wild animals, open water, broken equipment, each dog's needs and changing mood.

I learned that plans when I made them were nothing but a sketch. The only thing I needed to count on was that the dogs and I would make decisions along the way. What this means for people for us is that we can't just plan to take care of ourselves later because if you don't know how far you're going, you need to act like you're going forever planning for forever is essentially impossible, which can actually be freeing it brings you back into the present.

So change for us as leaders changes the work, it's what we do and any change poses a defining moment for us and an opportunity for us as leaders, you may not know right now, how far you are going, how far your team is going and you may need to act like you're going forever planning for forever is essentially impossible.

So in this defining defining moment, how will you show up as a leader? Thank you very much for having me today. So it's really great. And I see there is one question or one note actually from Anita learn to be that let it go and that advice can be misunderstood as direct suggestions that will limit your team's best potential, allow your people to shine. I think that's a really good point, especially thank you Anita for sharing that, especially for bringing up leaders, making sure that people have that space to shine is a really good way to again bring up other leaders around us. The I love it. Thank you, sharing, for sharing, Alita.