Transcript
Matthew Card: We’re going to talk about achieving culture that works: inclusive leadership that drives lasting success. Imagine a world where everyone in your team feels valued, heard, and empowered to contribute. Imagine that world where people aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo and great ideas emerge from unexpected places. Now imagine that world where toxic behaviors don’t just go unchecked, they don’t even have room to rise. Wouldn’t that be a great world? What happens when leadership tolerates the wrong behaviors? What happens when decision-making is shaped by exclusion, fear, and insecurity?
I work at the BBC. I’m an engineering manager at the BBC, which maps out to a head of software engineering or a mini head of software engineering. I look after a department called Core Data Platform that has about 52 engineers. That’s both contract and perm, both nearshore and people that live within the UK. I do a lot of work around diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’m a community leader. We created a network in the BBC called Retrace, which is for black folks in tech at the BBC. That now has about 56 people in there, actually. More people are joining every day. I’m a coach, and then a mentor, and I’m a public speaker.
Three Key Areas of How to Achieve Success
I’m going to talk about achieving success and inclusivity, but I’m going to do it from three areas. While I’m going through this, I want you all to think about this as well. I’m going to talk about three areas, that’s leadership, building trust, and then the nuts and bolts of resilience and motivation, which I think is key and underpins it all. I’m also going to look at it from the different types of lenses, and I want you all to do that as well. Think about how you can implement it in your work and your day-to-day, also in your lives as well. I’m going to do it as a leader, as an individual, and as a team.
Words to Lead By: Changing/Raising the Bar
First, these are words that I lead by. I’ve got many things and many frameworks that I use, but these hold true to me, and I really believe in these. You can ask my teams and my department, I literally say these all the time. How we make decisions shapes cultures, and culture is shaped by the worst behaviors tolerated. These are very key, and these are the foundation of building culture. How can we start? How can we do this? Does anybody know? I’ve got one framework that I use, and I realized this by talking to someone at my workplace. I said, I’m raising the bar. I’m trying to raise the bar. I’m always trying to raise the bar.
Then they said, but you’re also raising the ceiling. I was like, that’s true, because I was explaining to them how I go about doing things. You can do this with engineering excellence as well, but today, obviously, we’re going to be talking about inclusivity. It’s one of those things where I’m the leader, and I set the guardrails, set the guidelines, basically set the tone, set the expectations, and then I use my allies. We find who our allies are, and I work with them. I use them, and they use their knowledge and expertise as well to raise that bar and raise that ceiling. We’re continually moving the bar and the ceiling up.
Then what happens, if someone’s not working to those expectations, what I can do is I will work with them individually, or I’ll get my team leads to work with them individually, and we will start working on their resilience, on their motivation, find out what makes them tick, and really work with that person and bring them up. Then what happens is most of the time, you’ll find that people start floating more to the top, and then we can use them as allies as well, and they can help us continue to raise that bar and raise that ceiling, and that’s the way that I like to work.
I talk about raising the bar, but it’s not really raising the bar, when we’re talking about inclusivity, especially when we’re talking about inclusivity. It’s not about raising the bar. For me, it’s about changing the bar. It’s about widening that playing field. One of the things that I really like to do is encourage early careers talent to come through, because that challenges the folks who’ve got the longest tenure in the team, the principals, all those people that have got all that experience. It challenges them to think about different ways to explain things.
For me, it’s widening the playing field like, for example, encouraging diverse talent. You might hear some people say, we’re lowering the bar. We’re not lowering the bar, we’re changing the bar. There’s about 10,500 people that compete in the Olympics. It would be pretty boring if they all did the high jump. It’s about widening the playing field. There’s different ways that we can all contribute. There’s different ways that we can all succeed. There’s different ways that people can add to teams and to departments, and that’s what this is about. It’s about changing the bar. It’s not necessarily raising the bar. Other ways that we can change or raise the bar is by addressing bias and microaggressions.
As a leader, we need to lean into difficult situations, challenge our own biases, because I’m sure that we all have biases. We have to challenge them and ask ourselves some really difficult questions. Encourage continuous learning, and I’m not just talking about tech. I’m talking about learning about other people, learning to understand about other people. Where are they from? What region are they from? Learn about their cultures and stuff like that. That really does help.
One of the things I’ve said with one of my colleagues is, there’s different demographics. Go and learn about the demographic that is furthest away from yourself and then work your way back in over time, and you will start to see you build up a better understanding about people because you understand their stories, you understand their history. A really good saying from one person was that stories humanize people. If you understand people’s stories, then you will start to respect them as well because it’s all about respect. Fostering flexibility and adaptability. We’ll talk more about that later on as well. Creating support networks. Like the community that I created for black folks in tech, there’s going to be loads of different employee networks out there that you can create. If there’s one missing from your organization, create one.
My line manager, Joe Sparrow, they actually said, “Matt, do you want to create a black excellence network?” I was like, “Can I do that?” “Yes, of course you can”. Two years later, it’s got 56 people in there. That’s how we challenge things. I always lead with an inclusive first mindset. I’m a black man. There’s not that many black folks over in my department. Not many black folks here. There are a few, but we’re growing in numbers. What I tend to do, I have my own experience and I then go out and I learn about other people, and I wrap those experiences around my own, and then I feel like I can lead better that way by understanding more types of people.
The Role of Leadership in Shaping Culture
The role of leadership in shaping culture. You’ve got to be courageous. As I said, you’ve got to lean into situations. You’ve got to challenge microaggressions, challenge bias. You’ve got to have emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a massive topic and we could be talking about it for ages, but you have to have these types of things. You can build them. They’re all skills. How I do things, I have clear values and cornerstones that guide my decisions. I try to be courageous, but not reckless.
For example, there was a point when I could push through a decision, like I wanted to push through a technical decision, but I took a step back and I thought, no, how we make decisions shapes our culture. I thought, let’s make the decision as a department. It’s taken a little bit longer, but that’s how we shape the culture. I’m trying to lead by example there. I try to be authentic. I think most people who know me, know me as authentic. I’m straight up. I’m a kind person, but I do tell the truth as well. I try to be authentic as much as possible, and people will lean into that. The reason why you need those things before, you will be challenged. You will be asked why. You will doubt yourself. You need those things to hold on to. Challenging existing behaviors and creating spaces for good behaviors to thrive while reducing the gaps where toxic behaviors can fester. Someone said that to me. They said, “Matt, this is what you’re doing”. I was like, “That’s fantastic. Thank you very much”. It’s just by trying to make the right decisions.
One of my talks a while ago, was about making good decisions. I say the right decision, but you can only make the decision with the knowledge that you have at the time. You’ve got to keep making decisions. The decisions that we make, they matter, whether it’s technical choices, how we lead, or what we choose to tolerate. Again, the role of the leadership. As an individual, we can lead others. We can all be leaders and we can lead others in our team as well. I’m a big Simon Sinek fan. Does everybody know Simon Sinek? He’s got a talk where he talks about anyone can be a leader, no matter what role, rank, or title, as long as you’re looking after the person to the left or to the right of you, trying to make sure that they come in and that they enjoy their role, you’re a leader. Then that can start building up to psychological safety once we have these types of things in place.
Building Trust
Before psychological safety, we have to start building trust. Trust doesn’t start with the team, it starts with the leader. It’s about creating those good habits. When I talk about trust, I’ve read a lot of self-help books, self-development books. The first chapter is always about you, isn’t it? Always goes back to you. That’s why we need that. We need to build a trust with ourselves as well. Going back to what I was saying, you need to build the trust internally as well, in yourself, because you will be questioned. You will question yourself. It’s a hard road, but it’s a rewarding road. Good habits. What are good habits? This is a really good one.
As a tech person, an engineer, applying your attention to detail to a new evolving process that fits the problem. As opposed to saying, I’ve done this like this for 8 years, so I’m just going to apply my attention to detail to the same process. It’s being willing to try different approaches, different processes, and applying your attention to detail to that. Leadership isn’t about control, it’s about creating alignment. This is really interesting. We have an assessment center at the BBC where we get folks to come in, we assess their skills, assess their capabilities, and then when they pass, we can select them to join our teams.
One of my team leads actually declined on a person. I think I went on holiday, but when I came back, I saw that they declined on this person, and I was like, I want to hire this person, because I was optimizing for different things. I was optimizing for communication as one of the things, and this person came back as a really good communicator. I was like, I really want to get this person in. What I did, I went and spoke to my team lead, and I said, “I really want to walk back that decision”, and I explained why. We had a conversation, and they agreed. I said, “Is that ok?” They were like, “Yes, that’s ok, but the next time I go to make a decision, I’ll check with you first”. I was like, “No, please don’t do that. Let’s not do that. Let’s work on alignment. Let’s have more conversations so that we can align, and then we can make decisions, or you can make decisions without me and I can make decisions without you. We both understand where we’re coming from”. That’s me getting out of the way. I don’t want to be a blocker. I actually want to make myself obsolete.
Then, making those team decisions. I think I mentioned it before, but there’s a technical decision that we’re actually trying to make right now. I could have pushed that through, but I wanted to make that decision as a team. I want it to be based on sound technical reasoning, so I’ve stepped back, and I’ve asked the team to do certain things, and we’re moving that forward. We’ve got somebody who did a demo about using that tech, and it’s really good. It’s a really good way of making sure that the team is all bought in. We’re not always going to agree, but at least somebody has pushed an idea forward, and we’ve had time to talk about it. We’ve had time to discuss that. Those are good habits.
As a leader, trusting yourself is key, because feedback is slow. Sometimes you don’t even get feedback, because how do you know your team is doing well? It probably takes two years before you know your team is doing well, especially when you’re head of department or something like that, because your team is 50-something people. My one is four teams with two project teams as well, so you have to start building internal resilience, and that will really help you.
Psych Safety
Then we can move on to psychological safety. As I said, I believe that it’s one up from just trusting. Jit has done the talk at QCon before. Jit is a BBC colleague who characterizes it as a shared belief within a group that individuals can take interpersonal risk, such as speaking up, asking the questions, challenging ideas without the fear of punishment or humiliation. How do we do that again? It’s the same things. It’s promoting open communication, encouraging honest discussions without fear of judgment.
Then, as I said before, culture is defined by the worst behaviors that you tolerate. If someone is shutting someone down, if someone is talking over somebody, those are the times when you have to step in. Then, if they continue to do it, remember my slide, when the people are below the bar, that’s when you have to have a conversation or change the conversation. We’ve got to recognize and celebrate positive contributions. Don’t just promote or celebrate the work that was done. Celebrate trying. Celebrate the fact that that person took the time out, did the investigation as well, because those are the key things that we need to work on, trying. Curiosity, humility, and empathy. Empathy is a part of emotional intelligence. These are the key things that keep coming through. They’re rolling through this whole talk here. That’s a bit about psychological safety.
The Importance of Resilience and Motivation: Leader, Individual, and Team
Now on to the big topic here, resilience and motivation. Remember to think about it as a leader, leading through change and ambiguity. As individuals, how do you handle adversity? As a team, how teams come together and support and uplift each other. There’s the definitions of resilience. Resilience for me is the ability to bounce back. It’s the ability to handle adversity and then work your way to coming back. It’s not always about being up. Let’s remember that. I made that mistake once. I thought, I’ve got to always be up because I’m known as the energy guy. I use the fire emoji on Slack all the time, about 50 times a day. I was going to go into work one day and I was like, I haven’t got the energy. I said, I can’t go into work like this. I had to say, “Matthew, remember, you don’t always have to be up. It’s about coming back. It’s about bouncing back”.
How do we do this? How do we start doing this? How do we start building resilience within ourselves and within our teams? I love this. I’ve got this key framework, and I believe this works for life and it works in your work life as well. I’ve used this and this is how I’ve got to where I am today. It’s quite simple: energy, communication, and knowledge. I think energy is the foundation of this all. There’s different types of energy. It’s not always about, as I said, being up. It’s not always about being the loudest person in the room. You can have different types of energy. Momentum is an energy. Passion is an energy. Emotional intelligence for me is an energy. Exposure is a different type of energy. When you’re exposing people to different scenarios, different environments. If you want to get into leadership, for example, and you have a mentor or someone that takes you underneath their wing, they’re going to expose you to different scenarios that you can then go and learn. How would I go about doing that? That’s what I mean about energy. Energy is in different forms. There are different forms of energy. Communication is a type of energy, for me. Communication is a skill, and that you really need that. I can explain this.
One of the mistakes that a lot of new engineers make is they come in and they think they have to have all the knowledge. We’ve been there. We’ve all been there. We always think we have to have the knowledge. If you have the energy and the communication, you can then extract tech knowledge from the seniors, from the more experienced folk. If you have the good communication skills, you can then share that with other people. Then you could be the go-to person because, let’s face it, not a lot of people like speaking in this kind of settings. If you can give people the credit, you can then go and do the communication for them. Energy is the key for me.
Has anybody read “Drive” by Daniel Pink? This is one way that I motivate people and I look to how to motivate people. It’s about giving autonomy. Large companies, you need aligned autonomy. You can’t just give everybody autonomy to go and build everything they want to do. You have to have some aligned autonomy. That goes back to the guidelines and the guardrails. I try to look to give people a chance for mastery. What makes them tick? What’s the domain area that they are looking to excel in? I try to find experience and scenarios and pieces of work where they can really dig into. Then I always try to push them as well. Then, purpose. Purpose is going to come up again later on. If you can see that little map there, what I try to do is give them the tools to find their own purpose, their own self-purpose as well. That’s really key.
That should equal motivation. How do we start going to that deeper level of resilience? I learned this a long time ago, and it’s really changed my life. I really like this breakdown of the components of resilience. If you all remember C.A.P.S., you’re going to be good. C.A.P.S. stands for confidence, adaptability, purposefulness, and social support. These are four components of resilience. There are different ways that you can characterize resilience, but this is what I really like. It really makes it easy for me to understand. You’ve got confidence, adaptability, purposefulness, and social support. You’ve got adaptability. Adaptability is being able to adapt to different situations, being flexible. You’ve got purposefulness. That was mentioned before in motivation. It’s about being purposeful. A part of purposefulness is passion as well. I’m very passionate. I keep saying I’m going to change the world. I don’t know if I have, I don’t know if I will. I’ve got a purpose and that’s what I’m setting myself out to do. I’m going to help change the BBC. Hopefully, I’m doing that right now.
Hopefully, I’ve changed the lives of people or changed the working lives of people, and that’s what I will continue to go out and do. Then you’ve got social support. I can safely say that folks from my demographic or my culture, family is a massive part of who I am. When I moved up to Manchester with the BBC, I moved away from everybody. I moved away from my social support. When times got a little bit hard, it got really hard. Then what I did, I managed to build relationships at work. I managed to build relationships with my friends, with my team, and things got a bit better.
Then there’s confidence. Confidence is a massive topic. I think what we can start to do, we can start to reframe some of these words. We can start to reframe confidence. We can reframe the meaning of confidence. Here’s what I mean. Confidence isn’t the 100% assuredness that the thing that you’re going to try or the thing that you’re going to do is going to work out. It’s the willingness to try it. That goes back to individually, that goes back to the team. Remember, I said we celebrate people for trying things as well. It’s not the 100% assuredness that the thing that you’re going to try or do is going to work out. It’s the willingness to try it. I always say that you can tell how confident you are based on the time it takes you to go from thought to action.
If you start cutting down the time it takes you to go from thought to action, you can actually tell how confident you actually are. This is after you do your due diligence, after you’ve asked your friends, your social support, after you’ve done your Googling, your research, how long does it take you to actually do that thing that you said, I’m going to go and do that? That’s the same with your teams as well. When you’re building or making a technical decision, how are you going to then take it from the decision that you’ve made to implementation? While we’re talking around confidence, because confidence is a massive subject, here are some other words that we should try to reframe. Fear. How do you feel when you’re fearful? What are the symptoms that you feel when you’re fearful?
Participant: Nervous.
Matthew Card: You’re nervous.
Participant: Sweating.
Matthew Card: Sweating.
Participant: Heart beating.
Matthew Card: Heart beating.
Participant: Stomach.
Matthew Card: Stomach.
Participant: Shrinking.
Matthew Card: Shrinking. That’s an interesting one. You get the point. Nervous. Someone said stomach. Someone said sweating. All these types of things. What happens when you’re excited about something? Do you see what I mean? It’s the same things. Who’s to say that you’re fearful of something? Who’s to say that you’re scared? Who’s to say that, I’m excited? It’s what we tell ourselves. You could just say, I’m excited. This goes for work as well. When we’re nervous about trying that thing, because we’re probably going to get it wrong the first time, we’re probably going to be stuck on that piece of work, or trying to get that piece of code to run. We could just be excited that we’re trying out something new. It’s about what we tell ourselves.
Then the other one, failure. We should turn that into learn. That’s an amazing one for me. I’ve got a saying, fail fast, fail early, fail often, but don’t feel stupid. The only way you can actually feel stupid is if you don’t learn from your mistakes, or you give up. Don’t get me wrong, giving up doesn’t mean making a conscious decision to stop something, and then we can go back to our teams. If we’ve done something, we’ve tried it out, and it’s not quite right, we can stop it. We can sunset it. These are words that we should reframe.
Go into another deeper level, D.O.S.E. We all have happy hormones within our body, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. How I’ve become really successful in what I’ve done, and what I do now, is I hack these every single morning before I leave my house. I get these going. You know people do exercise in the morning? They’re invoking or generating endorphins. For six years, I had a ridiculous routine, that I used to get up in the morning.
My partner used to hate me, because I used to just get up and go off and not even say morning for a while. These happy hormones in our bodies, we can hack them in the mornings, as I said, or anytime in the day. How I used to view it is, I used to view it as me putting on my shield ready for the day. People can take their shots at me. I can get things wrong. I could fail at something. I knew I was coming back home, and putting that shield on again to go out for the next day. This is what I talk to my folks about sometimes. When I can build that good relationship with my teams, I can get to talk to them on this level and ask them what makes them tick. Find out what makes them tick. Suggest certain things to them as well. Just to round up, these are the positive actions that you can take to start hacking some of those hormones.
Dopamine is the reward hormone. Oxytocin is the love hormone. You can get it from hugging people. I’m a big hugger. I’ll be down here waiting for some hugs. Serotonin is like the loyalty and the gratitude. I have a gratitude journal, I write into that every morning. I stopped doing it for a while, but I realized there was going to be some more big challenges in my life. I started doing that again. I listen to motivational speakers in the morning. You can find them all on YouTube anywhere. I’ve got a list of them and I share these with my folks. I share these with my team as well because I want them to become really resilient. These are the core fundamentals of how you become resilient, if you can build up these things over time. I exercise. You can eat good food. Eating good food releases dopamine. Another one is writing down a goal, is good for dopamine as well. Even completing a task or even writing down a task, it’s the anticipation of doing that releases dopamine and stuff like that.
Summary
I hope you can see how we’ve gone from the top level where we spoke about the world that we could create or the environment that we can create within our teams. We’ve talked about the role of leadership within those environments and the stuff that we have to do. We have to be resilient. We have to have empathy. We have to have emotional intelligence or build emotional intelligence. Then we’ve talked about good habits within the teams. We’ve talked about leading as an individual. Then we started to talk a little bit about psychological safety, building on from trust, is one up from trust. We’ve also spoken about motivation and how to motivate people. Then we’ve spoken about resilience on the lower levels, and how you can do these things, and how you build yourself up and build resilience within yourself. That’s how you start building a culture of inclusivity. It’s a long road. It’s not easy. I end with this quote, “Don’t judge each day by the harvest that you reap but by the seeds that you plant”.
Questions and Answers
Participant: You talked earlier on about bringing people along with decisions and aligning with them. Is there ever a risk of involving too many people in decision-making, and how can you try and find that balance to stop that happening?
Matthew Card: Decision-making. Are you talking about team decisions here?
Participant: It could be, yes, any level really.
Matthew Card: How have I done that? It’s setting the principles out early. What I try to do, as soon as I joined my department, I said, I’m going to have to make some decisions sometimes but I’d like us to make decisions together. If we can’t make a decision, I’m going to have to make that decision or we’re going to have to go with something. Have you heard about the two-way door decisions? Where basically if a decision is reversible and inconsequential, then you can make that decision because you can roll it back. If it’s irreversible and it’s consequential, then you should take a bit more time and deliberating about how you make your decisions as well. What I’m trying to push for as well is to decide which decisions are either/or, and then take an approach on that.
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