Good afternoon ladies and uh hope you already enjoyed a couple of sessions from the previous uh events which was happening in the tech conference. I also attended a few of them and was quite nice.So in this session, uh I will be talking a bit about self organized teams and you as a leader. How can you support your journey for your teams to be self organized? And at the end of the session, I'll be sharing you a couple of tools which you can use to help your teams. So let me start with a quick introduction of myself. Uh I am Arna and I am working as an agile coach for sixth, which is a global mobility provider. I am settled in Munich Germany. I started my career as a software developer in 2006 and I am into coaching teams and individuals. I strongly believe that will help people to become a better version of themselves. I am mother of a lovely three year old girl who keeps me busy most of the time. And I'm a lifelong learner in my free time. I love to read books, do some art and crafts, do some baking and the principle I strongly believe is be yourself and believe in your strengths. You're not engaged by others judgment, but by your own action.

So uh with this, let's uh start our session with a quick poll. It would be really great if you can join me in slido.com and answer this question. What does self organized teams mean for you? So you can use the code 87974 and then give your answers. Efficiency. Mhm self-sufficient. Cool. All right. Then let me move on with a short story about my association with self organized teams here. So I started uh back in 2014, I was a manager with team members reporting to me. So the way of working was like, yeah, the individuals come to office, do their daily work, go back home. Many of them didn't even know who their customer is, what product is and team members even many, many times when we have our team events and all they used to stay away, right? And most importantly, I used to dictate them what to do. I remember being in my holidays or vacation where I constantly check that email and see. OK, will they do it? Should I do a follow up? Right? So the results of the team was not that great, which is why we leaders are along with the management, we try a different approach agile. So as a part of it, I was moved to the role of a Scrum master.

So those of you who are not knowing what agile is. Scrum master means a servant leader. So uh we explored the topic and uh realized that self organized teams are the core of a job, right? So, coming from a traditional management mindset, I was really puzzled by this. I was not ready to believe. OK. Is it even possible to make a team motivated ownership? I was not ready to believe it at that point of time. So then we slowly started exploring the concept, there was a mindset mindset shift and six months down the lane, we slowly started seeing the changes in the team. The team morale went up. Individuals are more happy, right? And even all the people like irrespective of their levels started equally contributing for their product to build an awesome product. Most importantly, there was trust and humor to human connection. So this may help me realize the fact that there is a way to lead, OK, without hierarchy, without command and control, yet achieve best results out of the team. So this was an eye opener for me personally. So now if you are thinking, right, how can I make my team self organized? Isn't it good? Right. So I'm not sure. Uh uh if anybody has heard about this 1 60 30 10 rule. OK.

So this is actually originating from, based on the research done by one of the pioneers Richard Hunt. A Harvard producer who was doing a lot of research in about the dynamics. And interesting part is what he came up with is 60% of the team effectiveness comes from the way a team is being designed. So when you design a team, you have to first, do you really have a compelling purpose? Do we really need a team in first place to get this done? Ok. And 30% comes when you launch the team, when you breathe some life into a team and the next 10% each comes from team coaching. So which means once the team is formed and what you're trying to do, like your daily processes and you're seeing that way of working, et cetera. So when I actually read about this data, I was pretty surprised because in most of the organization, what happens, we spent, we, we, we just create the team and then we try at the 10% each part, we try to make them awesome. So now why did I give this statistics? It's because you as a leader, this is where you can influence the starting of a team.

When you set up a team, when you launch a team, this is exactly where you can influence this is where you can help them to start their journey towards self organization. So team effectiveness, it is important to start, right? I would like to give a quote here, like well begin is half done. So to start a team effectively, team agreements play an important role. Imagine, um, you sharing your space with your partner or having a shared accommodation and you have this person who leaves the plates in the sink doesn't share the work or even in your team, those that one team member who comes to meeting every time late. Right? How do you feel? You might feel annoyed, frustrated, right? You don't know how to initiate that communication. That is hard, which is why team agreements are really important and you as a leader, it is your responsibility to create the right boundaries for the team so that they take ownership and they take or organize themselves to grow. Otherwise they are just a bunch of individuals working together, they are no longer a team, right? So which is why I will help to share. This is one of the cool J team canvass.

So this is something which you can use with your team when you initially get started. And this is not just for the it teams. So you can use this with non it teams as well to understand what is the purpose of the team? What are their strengths? What is the weakness and how do you organize the rules and activity part? Right. So here your main job is kind of a facilitator, facilitate such discussions in the team. And this is nn not just in the beginning, right to revisit this every six months because team changes constantly, our environment changes, constantly, expectation changes constantly, right? And is it even aligned with the personal growth goals of the individuals? So having a right start is very for to start self organized teams. So another interesting topic here, the big elephant in the room, right? We we go through this in a day to day book environment and at times, we never talk about it. That is why we just elephant in the room. So the conflict management. So conflicts are normal. We we we are individuals. So right now, if you see the teams, the people are from different geographical locations, different backgrounds. I remember last year, I was working with a team that we had around eight nationalities, eight nationalities and eight member team with eight different nationalities. And it was quite fun working with them, right? So conflicts are healthy, it initiates ideas.

It brings in a lot of ideas to explore and your role as a leader here is to manage the conflict step in than needed to equip your team, how to handle this conflict and never take sides or judge anybody. All are individuals. It's ok. Right. So one of the model here again, TK I model. So this is again another famous model which you could use with your to equip your individuals to handle these conflicts. So in this, you can define a different personality structure of the conflict and you can help your team to understand and how to navigate through the conflict. Another important aspect is, are you feeling able to talk about your conflict? Are you able to convey it? How do you say it in your team? Which is why next important topic which I would like to cover is psychological safety. So here, as you can see, this is a picture of a Boeing 737 mass. So I'm not sure if you have already know about this story. Uh But those of who, who doesn't know, I'll, I'll talk about it. So in March 2019, all Boeing 737 max flights were grounded worldwide. Why? Because there were around 350 people who died from two crashes. Uh One happened in Indonesia and another one in Ethiopia. So there was a lot of investigation uh which has happened around this and what the researchers have figured out that in November 2018, there was an automated flight control system which was launched by Boeing and many employees who were working for Boeing at that point of time had serious concerns over the safety, but they didn't talk about it.

They didn't feel comfortable. There were a lot of employee interviews which has happened around this one. So they were fear of losing their jobs because of project pressure and they didn't feel safe to talk about it, which is why psychological safety in teams are really important, right?

So what is psychological safety? Psychological safety means absence of interpersonal fear, employees should feel safe to talk in that team. What is their opinion in the team? And it is hard to achieve, it is hard to achieve. It is not an easy thing. And what you as a leader can do is lead. By example, how many of you here are feeling comfortable, right? Going to your team and say, ok, I'm, I'm 10 minutes late for the meeting because I overslept that level of openness. No, it, it takes time to build it. Have a human to human connection with your teammates. Have coffee breaks, have one on one here as well. I remember in 2006 when I started my career, I used to have interaction with my manager probably twice in a year, just twice in a year. So one could be like or twice or let's take three. So one could be like, ok, when, if I want a vacation, I might send an email if he doesn't respond. I go to his room and managers used to sit in this glass rooms and uh you have to really be, I used to scared to go there at that point of time. But if I see now I have one on one sessions with my manager every week.

So he, he takes, we talk about almost 45 minutes every week and to even one hour. And it is not just about work. And this helps in creating that trust. This helps in creating that connection and welcome curiosity and ideas. That is another important aspect and normalize failure.

It's ok to fail, it's ok to fail. And what is important is what you learn from it. What you can adopt if you search an internet when I was doing, preparing the slide, I find out an interesting fact. So Google X is having an annual event where they talk about projects which are failed. Right? Interesting. right? And companies like for example, Spotify, they have even have a wall in the office wall of failure. So these kind of things are some things you can adopt in your environment and encourage the people to talk about having a good feedback. Also people should feel free to open up, ask for help in such environments and as a leader, listen and observe. These are the two key skills you should have to enhance the psychological safety. And a leader is not the person who talks more in the room. So those of you who follow Simon seek would know a leader is the person who observes, who listens and talk at the end, give others opportunity to talk, try to understand them not to put forward your ideas and put on them, right? And another cool tool which I would like to introduce is the person manual. So this is one thing which you can do in your team. So this is like a manual for uh anything you buy. So help individual come up with these things.

What is the best way to communicate with me? How would I like to receive a feedback? What are the things I love would prefer a face to face communication or a communication via email? Right? I will be guiding you with the team canvas as well as the user manual in my dropbox and the link. I will be sharing it in the chat soon so you can access it. So human behaviors are not shifted overnight. It is a journey. You cannot just go back and tell the team that OK, start it right away. You know, it takes time, it takes time. So start your journey today and help your team to become a better version of themselves and be that leader who supports the people, right? So with this, I would really like to conclude my session, although this topic is really vast and there are so many things. But yeah, we have just 20 minutes. Um If you have questions, please feel free to connect with me in linkedin or via email, I will be happy to support you which you could and last but not the least. It would be really great. If you provide me feedback for the session, it will help me to understand and help me to learn from feedback. And uh with this, I would, yeah, we are just left with one more minute. Thank you everybody for joining the session.

And I will be sharing the dropbox link in the chat. Have a wonderful day and uh enjoy the rest of the session in the tech conference. Bye bye.