What I learned at the Lead Dev Conf London 2019

(Excluding the fact that it always rains in London). I mean, seriously, it was pouring rain all the time, all they say about London weather is pretty much true.

The positive impact of diversity and inclusion

There were multiple talks at the conference that were oscillating around the subject of diversity and inclusion. To be honest, at some point in the past I started treating a combination of both as inseparable and forming a sort of a slogan about tolerance and embracing differences between people and didn’t really bother digging deeper into it. At the conference, I did make up for it and finally realized the difference between the two and it’s now clearer than ever. As quoted by Dora Militanu during her talk, diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.

This quote is what flipped the switch in my brain. While you can start building diverse teams by improving your recruitment, making people feel included is really a matter of organization (and team) culture. There’s a need for understanding that embracing differences between one another can have a positive impact — the more points of view the more complete the team can be.

One powerful piece of knowledge I learned was at the talk of Bethan Vincent, head of marketing at Netsells — she explained why lengthy homework tasks during recruitment are not really inclusive — there’s a lot of talented people who simply cannot afford on spending the entire weekend on coding, including single parents, caretakers of people with disabilities and people working in more than one workplace. So simple, yet eye-opening.

The most powerful form of feedback is a well-asked question

The opening talk of the conference was given by Lara Hogan, a co-founder of Wherewithall.com and former VP of engineering at Kickstarter. Her talk was devoted to explaining how the teams are transitioning between the different states of their lifecycle (forming, storming, norming, performing) and how core needs of team members play a key role in that process, but what was a key piece of information I learned from this talk was an idea on how to give feedback in the most effective way. There are three steps to giving feedback according to that particular method:

1. Mention the behavior you have observed on a person you’re giving your feedback to (needs to be factual, restrain from assumptions)
2. Summarize the impact that this specific behavior had (e.g. on the team or yourself)
3. Instead of forming a request, try asking a question regarding behavior and its impact.

From what I understand, the power of this method is based on self-reflection of the person the feedback is directed to, which is encouraged by asking a question at the end. I like this method as somehow it proves that Inception’s Dom Cobb was right and the most powerful inspiration always comes from within your own mind. The role of the person that is giving feedback is only to pass it in the most honest and leave the conclusions to the person that receives the feedback (I assume it’s still OK to help form these conclusions if needed).

A good leader is not a shit umbrella, but rather a heat shield

My favorite talk at the conference was given by Nickolas Means, Senior Engineering Manager at GitHub. He told a beautiful story of Eiffel Tower and how it took Gustav Eiffel a lot of time spent on negotiations and political plays to be able to even start building the famous Parisian landmark. I would never assume I could be so fascinated that much by a half-an-hour history talk — it was a great pleasure to listen to it.

The whole talk pivoted at the end — the Eiffel tower story was drawn to prove that every organization is political because politics is how we share power and make decisions. Instead of trying to avoid politics, we should make amends with the fact that it’s something inevitable for team leaders and learn how to work with it.

The biggest lesson I learned at this talk was that leaders should not act like shit umbrellas (as they are sometimes called because of protecting their teams from all of the semi-exciting information on the managerial level like pressure on deadlines etc.) but rather like heat shields — heat shields do protect from the heat, but they also allow a glimpse of heat to get inside so that you can get a taste of what’s happening behind it. Great leaders are a shield protecting their teams from noise, but they are transparent and clear about what the company mission is and what the team is expected to deliver.

One of the keys to being a great leader is time management

Sounds obvious, but really, I could be so much better at it. Is there anyone that has no room for improvement in their time management skills? During a talk about self-organizing teams, Rebeca Hill mentioned that very often as team leaders we end up in a state of “I have a lot of things on my plate now, but it will change soon when I’m done with some of them”. It turns out the time when we have less on our plate is not going to come itself. You have to remove things from your plate yourself to gain more time.

A good example of something that could be shifted to someone else is scrum master duties. Running retros, gathering meeting notes, making sure the team is tracking their goals — all these responsibilities can be shared by the entire team or assigned to specific team members. I am a fan of rotations. If you allow your team members to be scum masters from sprint to sprint, they can learn a ton about the process.

One more crucial thing mentioned by Rebecca was showing how proud you are of your team whenever you have a chance to show it outside. It’s really important as the more recognition from outside the team gets, the more motivation team members have towards being better and better at what they do.

Plus at this talk, I learned what steamrolling is. Super useful.

Machine learning is everywhere

Even at the conference about leadership, there were multiple talks about machine learning. I guess there’s no escaping from it at this point. I did enjoy the 10-minute presentation about Tensorflow.js by Asim Hussain though. The presentation of a Slackbot he built is surely one of the funniest moments of the entire conference. How cool is it to have a slack bot that, whenever someone posts a photo, it recognizes the emotions on the faces of that photo and swaps them for emojis expressing the same emotion?

To sum up…

It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. It was well-run and I felt a lot of positive vibes going on. I brought home a lot of information (and I am yet to process most of it). I do intend to discover a lot more about being a team leader and thanks to Lead Dev London, I have a lot more ideas on my next steps.

Last minute feedback

The coffee and wi-fi could have been a bit better though. And that weather…