Transcript
Natan Žabkar Nordberg: My name is Natan. I’m very excited to talk to you about creating some impactful teams across diverse work environments. I have a quick question for all of you. How did I manage to convince my Fitbit that I had a rigorous workout in the middle of the workday? It was not a treadmill desk, though I do have one of those at home. Also, not a trick. I did not put my Fitbit onto my cat and make her run around the apartment. It was actually quite a serious answer. It was a clash with a co-worker that made my heart rate go up to 140 beats per minute for over 30 minutes. That then triggered a notification from Fitbit thanking me for working out. This is how much of an impact one single direction can have. It can be a positive impact or a negative impact. Let’s ensure we have a positive impact on the people around us and on the culture around us.
Who am I? I’m a theoretical mathematician by study. I’m a self-taught software engineer who was lifted up by many people around me. I’m a manager and a team lead for about seven years now. I still very much like to code. Before that, I’ve also been a tutor and a teacher at my university. I’ve been an improv actor and a mentor for quite a few years on stage. I’ve also worked offstage in theater doing lights and music. I have been a freelancer and I have been an employee. I’ve worked in companies of 35 people and to big corporations of 1,000 people. I’ve worked in-office and I’ve worked remotely, both hybrid and fully remote. Why does that matter? There are two things I want to highlight. One, my experiences shape me, and your experiences shape you too. Two, you’re so much more than your job or your current title, and so is every one of your co-workers. We have to keep that in mind.
Outline
To help set expectations for this talk, here’s a high-level agenda. I want to set a little bit of time setting the tone, the why behind this talk, because I think it’s very difficult to talk about actionable things if we don’t know why we’re doing these actions. Then I’m going to move on to the more practical part about building and empowering teams. Then I’ll have some closing thoughts to help recap.
Why Talk About Culture?
Why are we even talking about culture? Culture is quite intangible. It is very difficult to measure. It is extremely impactful. It impacts essentially every single thing we do. It impacts how we feel. It impacts how we work. It impacts how we succeed. Culture is not built by a mission statement on a wall. It is built by what we do. Every interaction, every action, every day, every person, that’s how we actually build the culture around us. Culture always exists. It doesn’t matter if you ignore it or pay attention to it, it is there. The question for all of you is, do you want to just let it happen to you, or do you want to shape it intentionally? Let’s talk about it, or even better, let’s take ownership of it together.
Diversity and Inclusion
I want to start with something that’s very close to my heart, diversity and inclusion. The question is, what do these words mean to me personally? I want to start with what they don’t mean to me. Diversity and inclusion to me is not about institutional diversity policies like hiring quotas. It is not just about your gender or your race, though obviously that is important. Instead, I want to think about diversity in thinking, diversity in context, and diversity in lived experiences. Again, that does obviously not diminish the impact to your gender, or your race, or anything else has on you. It impacts all of these things, obviously. I don’t want to look at you as a token of representation. I want to look at you as you. Diversity isn’t just numbers. It actually impacts the products we build, and it actually impacts how we work together. There’s a bit of a reality check I want to make for a second. A lot of companies talk big about diversity. They talk big about inclusion. They talk big about being green.
Then when money is tight or the environment changes, they quickly shift their tone. This could be a reorg, could be a leadership change, could be a revenue downturn. Yes, morality absolutely matters, but ROI also matters. The problem is that if we don’t take the business case into account, we’re always just one bad quarter away from losing the progress we’ve made. Here’s a bit of a trick on thinking about things. Just for any decision or anything you want to push for, think about it in two perspectives.
The first one, you’re just saying, I’m a moral person, I want to do the right thing. The second one, you’re saying, I’m a soulless, profit-hungry corporation. Hopefully, you don’t work for any of those, but pretend you are for a moment. Now, what happens? If these two perspectives match, then most likely, we will have something long-term, something sustainable, something that’s actually going to keep running even in difficult times. If they don’t match, at least now we know where the conflict might come from.
I want to take a moment just to talk about a few real-world examples of diversity-helping products. There’s a lot you know. I’m hoping that these couple you don’t know about yet. First example. What is this? It’s a very simple function that just says, if you enter 1, you say, I have 1 chair. If you enter 2 or more, then it says, I have this many chairs. Very nice and simple, singular and plural. Let’s look at it in English and then some other languages and maybe see where the problem is.
In English, we just say, I have 1 chair. I have 2 chairs. I have 3 chairs. Nice and simple. Works exactly as expected. Now let’s look at it in my native language, Slovenian. It would go, Imam 1 stol. Imam 2 stola. Imam 3 stole. Imam 4 stole. Imam 5 stolov. Imam 6 stolov. Then it continues. Some languages go beyond singular and plural. Slovenian has singular, has dual, has plural, and then a weird second plural. Our function was very incomplete. Or if you work in FinTech, you’ve probably seen this one. We obviously cannot store money in floats because floats are not precise. What do we do? We say we’ll turn the major unit, like a euro, into a minor unit, like a cent. We’ll multiply it by 100, turn into an integer, and save it that way. Great. We have two functions, one that turns it from major units to minor units, and the other way around. This works great until it doesn’t.
For example, in Bahrain, 1 dinar is 1,000 fils instead of 100. In Japan, 1 yen is simply 1 yen. They do not have minor units. The weirdest one I could find, in Madagascar, 1 ariary is 5 iraimbilanja, so 1 to 5, not 1 to 100. Again, we have a problem. One last example. Who can tell me what’s wrong with this picture? No, it’s not just the fact that I don’t particularly like coffee, so it should be tea. I’m going to ask you all to mimic something with me. You grab a pot with your right hand, and you try and pour it. Pretend you’re grabbing the same pot with your left hand and pour it, and remember, you have to pour in the same direction. Suddenly, you’re pouring like this. It’s quite awkward. It’s awkward if you’re left-handed. Remember, 10% of people are left-handed. This might seem like a very silly example. Who cares about pouring coffee? Let’s think of a more serious one.
For example, in every factory, there’s a stop-everything button next to a dangerous machine. Where is that button positioned? Will left-handed people hit it as easily as right-handed people? In that case, there’s a lot more severity to the consequences than just pouring coffee. What’s the point of this? Hopefully, the examples were a little bit interesting, but there’s another point to them. None of these examples were taught to me in any organized way. All of them come from either my own personal lived experiences or from the lived experiences of a colleague. This is how diversity can help us.
Going through a few other common examples that you probably already know about. There’s left-to-right versus right-to-left languages. We need to make sure we’re confident in our UIs. We might say things like, let’s deploy on the weekend. It’s safe to deploy on the weekend, but what is the weekend? Different countries have different weekends. A Saturday-Sunday, Friday-Sunday, or just Saturday, for instance? Color vision deficiency affects 1 in 12 men. That’s a lot of people who cannot tell red from green reliably. Diversity does impact the products we create. Let’s think about this in the two ways I mentioned a little bit.
As a good moral person, you just say, I get to work with a variety of people and create really inclusive products, so that’s good for me. As a soulless corporation seeking only profits, I’ll probably say something along the lines of, we have unlocked additional earning potential with these groups that are not usually catered to. What does that tell us if you think about it? It means that as long as the group is big enough to be profitable, we’re likely going to account for them.
As soon as the group is small enough to not be directly profitable, we might have a conflict. Why should you care about culture? Obviously, you’re all very good moral people, I hope. Why should you care, apart from that? Because there might be no absolute right or wrong culture, but there is a right or wrong culture for you specifically. Do you want an environment that pushes everybody, or a more relaxed one? Do you find that encouraging or do you find it stressful? Do you want an environment with clear roles and progression or a more open approach? Do you find that clarity comforting or do you find it stifling? Is the chaos of openness empowering or is it just annoying? This is the question you all have to ask yourself, what matters to you specifically? I cannot answer that for you. Instead, I’ll give you my own answer to give an example.
The right culture for me is one that values unity and fairness for everybody, be it your workers, be it your clients, be it just random people coming to an office. It is a culture that embraces diversity and real connection between people, because I would much rather talk to somebody very different from me and learn from them than talk to my clone. It balances work and life while still encouraging growth.
Obviously, as a new dad, work-life balance is very important to me, but I still want to grow. It improves speed through genuine change, not overtime, because I don’t believe that’s sustainable in the long term. It lets me be myself. I think I spend way too much time with work to not be myself. What do I mean by that? My answer is I want to make some friends at work. I want to meet some people I like. I want to be able to be a little bit silly sometimes. I want to be able to talk a lot because I talk a lot. That’s about it. Obviously, there’s more things that go into it, but just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Empowering Teams
I wanted to set the scene first. What is this talk about? The title is Creating Impactful Teams Across Diverse Work Environments. There are two parts I want to highlight here. The first one is impactful teams. It’s quite an obvious one. We all want our teams to have an impact. The second one is diverse work environments. The word diverse plays a double role here. The first one is what I already mentioned, the diversity of the people. The second one is the diversity of the environment itself. It could be a startup. It could be a large corporation. It could be in-office. It could be remote. We probably have to ask ourselves, what makes a team impactful? There’s an absolutely ton of research done on that that I’m sure you’ve seen before.
For the purpose of this presentation, I will limit it to a very simple statement. I believe that a diverse and empowered team is an impactful team. How do we encourage a team to be diverse and empowered? I will hopefully answer that. Before that I want to do one small thing. Some of you here might not be managers and you might be thinking, I’m not a manager, how much of an impact can I have? You might have different opportunities but they’re no less important. People tend to be mostly affected or primarily affected by two things at work.
The first thing is the company performance and leadership, especially when it’s doing badly. The second thing is their immediate team, the people they work with every single day or at least every single week. Even if you cannot impact the first one because maybe you work in a big corporation, you can absolutely impact the second one because we all can. You have more influence than you think. I want to share a quick story about one of my direct reports. This is an engineer, an IC, who was just absolutely incredible, best engineer I worked with. Delivered incredibly fast, everything was well tested, thoroughly documented. He was nice to people around him. He was great.
When it came to performance reviews, there was always one consistent argument from the other managers. They may be good, but they only work solo. You cannot exceed expectations like that. The implication being they have no impact on the people around them. Yes, this person might not have been comfortable standing in front of the whole company and speaking to 700 engineers. They might not have been an official mentor to anybody.
Let’s look at a few things that people said to me after they worked with them. They said things like, “I cannot believe they built all this so quickly”. Or they said, “This PR review was so in-depth, I learned so much from it”. Or they might have said, “I want to be more like this person”. Does this really sound like somebody without an impact on people around them? Because I don’t believe so. A reminder, they were very much not interested in management. I have a management here, an IC here, he was like out that door. Very much not interested in management. He still inspired people, and so can you.
Going back to the question. How do we encourage that, that being a diverse and empowered team? I’m going to split it into two parts, a quick one and a slightly longer one. The quick one being people that have not joined the company yet. Obviously, the interview process shapes who joins the company, but it goes way beyond just who you say yes or no to. For example, who applies? Did you know that depending on the specific words you use in your job ad, different kinds of people apply.
Specifically using more male-oriented word tends to have less women applying. Weirdly enough, using more female-oriented words does not seem to have the same impact on men. Who thrives? Are you creating an environment where everybody is measured fairly and consistently? Who accepts an offer? I’m sure you’ve all had an interview after which you were really excited to work for a company, and I’m sure you all had an interview after which you were like, no, this is not for me. Don’t forget, interviews go both ways. Also, what is your company’s perception? People write about their interview experiences online. There are whole websites specifically for that. If your interview experience is bad, people might not want to apply.
With that in mind, I wanted to share my personal approach to interviewing, just to show how I’m thinking about it related to my culture. The intent behind it is quite simple. I want to look for knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I want to see people at their best, not at their worst. I believe that interviews are a learning and growth opportunity for both sides. How do I actually run my interview? I start by interviewing for the expected level, whatever that level is. Let’s say senior.
If things go really well, I increase the level expectations by one, because we might need to hire this person at a higher level. They might be just really good. It’s unfair to hire them at a low level then, if they’re better than that. If things are not going well, I instead decrease the level by one. We might still want to hire them, just not quite at the level we originally thought. If things are still not going well, I forget about actually assessing them and I focus on the candidate experience.
This last part is really important to me because everybody deserves to be treated fairly and nicely and well, no matter if they’re meeting your expectations or not. Who knows, I’ve actually had a case where somebody was really inspired and really liked the interview process and they took the feedback, became a lot better in a year, came back and passed the interview. We still got a really good employee afterwards. Or they might invite a good friend of theirs to apply because they had a really good experience, so we still get to hire somebody.
Trust as a Foundation
The interview is over, what about now? Now we focus on the second part, which is the people in the company. We hired some great people. How do we ensure we empower them in tapping their strengths? I believe it starts with something very simple and at the same time quite complicated, trust. There’s a bit of a controversial statement incoming, so bear with me, please. I believe that trust cannot be earned unless it is given first. What I mean by that is that it’s going to be very difficult for somebody to prove that they can be trusted if you never give them the chance to prove they can be trusted. You have to give your trust first before they can prove they can be trusted. How do we do that? How do we really give trust to people? It’s very “easy”. Just say it out loud. You say, I trust you, and then you just trust them. Done, we can move on.
Now, obviously, saying I trust you out loud, it is important. It does set the tone. What actually matters is what you do, not what you say. Very often, we say we trust people, what we actually do is we just delegate to them with a whole set of expectations and a whole set of like, do things exactly the way I would have done them. That’s not the right way to trust people. What do you want to do? You do not want to micromanage them. You do want to respect the agreed boundaries you agree to together. You definitely don’t want to step in to help them just in case. Let people come to you instead. This is a little bit of a tip.
Set up some regular check-ins, weekly check-ins, let’s say, one-on-ones, because this gives them a great chance to come and talk to you, ask for help, or get your opinions on something. You can still support them without having to jump in and swooping in to support them and help them when they don’t want it. You might be thinking something like this, “But I know how to do it better, I can help them”. You very well might. I don’t disbelieve you on that.
Think about this, is you helping them worth the impact it’s going to have on their relationship with you and on the trust you have just broken. My personal rule about this is the 25% rule. Unless the thing I want to jump in and help will impact the product they’re working on or whatever they’re working on and improve it by at least 25%, I will hold my tongue and not say anything unless they ask me about it, or I might offer help but actually listen to them saying no. Obviously, there’s no way to measure that, but at least it gives me a bit of an indication so I don’t always jump in when I feel like, “I can help them. I can support them”.
Here’s a personal example. I switched companies. I went from one company to another company, and I felt my previous team worked really well together. I just came in like a bull in a china shop, saying, we’re going to work the exact same way. It’s going to be great. It wasn’t great. It failed. Why did it fail? I’m hoping the idea wasn’t bad, but these were new people. This was a new context. This was a new team. We didn’t have the same experiences. What I believe was, I was bringing some value by sowing some problems. They didn’t see the same problems, so they didn’t see the value in it. They just saw somebody, like an outsider, coming in telling them exactly what to do, which they did not appreciate at all, which I understand.
Possibly most importantly, trust hasn’t been built up yet. Without trust, even really good ideas really struggle to take root. What did I do in that case? I decided to stop pushing. I paused. I said, ok, let’s not push for change like this. I did push for one thing, which is, I forced regular retros on them because they weren’t doing them, because I felt we need some kind of way to discuss things. Instead of pushing for things, I introduced the idea of an experiment.
Let’s work with experiments and test things out. With that, I was trying to create a space for collaboration instead of a space where I push things on them. I think this was the beginning of a really powerful team habit we used. What do I mean when I say experiment? How do we run them? Create something time-boxed, let’s say four weeks. That was the most common one we had. Because it needs to be something that is long enough that you can feel an impact, but short enough that it feels ok to people. You need a clear owner that ensures that we’re actually doing the thing we said we’re going to do, because if we’re not doing the thing, you’re not actually testing it.
At the end, we had a retro and a vote. We could vote for dropping it, we could vote for keeping it, or we could vote for changing it. Probably the most important part, the default was that unless we have a clear consensus at the end, we go back to what we used to do. I think this really helped set people up with the expectation that this is an actual test. It is not just a sneaky way to bring something in, call it temporary, and then actually just having it non-temporary.
What were the results? What happened with this team? Ironically, we landed almost exactly where I wanted to be in the beginning. It was a little bit different, and now it was ours instead of mine. This process of going through this together, through shaping it, refining it together, meant that we built a lot of shared ownership, which built trust, and built a lot of psychological safety. Even though we ended in a similar place, we got there together. The team really thrived going forward. We were much better equipped to solve problems in the future. T
his story stayed with me because it taught me that the path can matter just as much as destination, if not more. Here’s a little bit of a warning. This is a slightly paraphrased quote from the philosopher Nietzsche, “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I cannot believe you”, or maybe I cannot trust you. Trust really is won in inches and lost in miles. Be very careful. You don’t want to lose a lot of hard work based on a very short-term frustration.
Quick callout, retros. I hope you’re all doing retros. If you aren’t yet, please start doing them now. Why is that important? People have a very strong emotional recency bias, and it skews how we feel. You might have a great quarter, but if the last three, four weeks are bad, you will feel bad. A retro helps us stay grounded and look at a broader picture. Even though the name implies we’re looking backwards, it also looks forwards, and it helps us shape a better future going forward. A couple tips and tricks. Some retros will turn into venting sessions, and that is completely healthy. People sometimes just need to vent. Be careful and don’t let it spiral, because if week after week we just vent and vent and vent, we just create an echo chamber where we just talk about how things are terrible.
Instead, focus on actions, and optimally small actions, because a small win you actually do is a lot better than giant plans that never get done. Optimally, every retro has at least one action you complete, so people can see things going upwards and that recency bias can work in your favor. Run experiments. Obviously, I just talked about those. I think they’re a really powerful way of improving a team. Rotate facilitators, because every single person brings a unique perspective, and it also helps build ownership and it helps build engagement. When you run a meeting, you’re a lot more engaged to other people running it.
Finally, it is ok to bring an agenda sometimes. If you have a specific thing you want to solve, choose a retro format that works with it. Run this retro and highlight the problem, but highlight the problem, not the solution. Then, listen to what people say. Don’t make my mistake, please. Learn from my mistakes.
Team Autonomy/Guided Autonomy
If trust is the foundation, what comes next? I believe that the next thing is autonomy. Obviously, we cannot always be there for our teams, so we need them to be autonomous. It’s a great way to have a ripple impact or a wider impact. I want you to think about the following with me. I mentioned I have a history in improv theater. Imagine a situation. You’re just pushed on stage at an improv show, no preparation, and you’re told, do whatever you feel is right. Great, you have so many options. You’re now on stage, you’re alone. There’s lights on you. There’s people in the audience. What do you do? I don’t know about you, but most people freeze, and they do nothing. Why? You were given perfect autonomy. You could do whatever you wanted. So many options. Why did you freeze?
Instead of autonomy, I want to talk about guided autonomy. What I mean by guided autonomy is introducing some limitations and some context. With our current example of being on stage at an improv show, what happens when we introduce some limitations? We say, you’re only allowed to eat ice cream. Everything you say has to be a question. Every sentence has to be exactly five words long, and you’re really hungry. These are some extreme limitations. We’re limited how many things they can say. Something magical happens. People suddenly are so preoccupied with the limitations, they start a scene. They say things like, do you have ice cream? Or, can I have ice cream? Or they probably go like, do you have ice cream? At least they start, suddenly they’re talking. Why am I talking about improv? Because the same thing happens at work.
For example, let’s say we want a team or a person to go and speed up our marketing team. We can tell them, go speed up our marketing team. Then we don’t say anything else because we don’t want to trample on their autonomy. Or we can say, go speed up our marketing team, and here are some limitations, here’s some context. For example, ad management is working great. We don’t need to work on that. Anything that spends more than $10,000 a month has to be manually approved, you cannot automate it. We didn’t reduce their autonomy. We helped guide them. Within these limitations, they still have full autonomy to do what they want to do. That’s how we can empower them to actually be able to make some choices. To recap, autonomy does not mean no limitations. Not all limitations are bad.
Taking Initiative
If guided autonomy opened the door, how do we step through it? Initiative. Especially for the managers around you, you might have heard something like this before. Some people are just better at taking initiative than others. There is obviously a grain of truth to that. Instead, I want to think about how many people would be good at taking initiative under the right circumstances. Another example from my career. There’s a project coming up. Would you like to lead it? That is how I used to present opportunities to my direct reports. I felt it was quite like an obvious call to action. I felt it was easy to say yes to. I felt it wasn’t too pushy. It worked great until it didn’t, like usual. One of my direct reports was not taking much initiative, even though they said they want to take it. I was offering opportunities and nothing happened. I decided to talk to them. It turns out, I was using the wrong words. Instead of saying, “There’s a project coming up. Would you like to lead it?” I had to say, “There’s a project coming up. I would like you to lead it”. To somebody, this might feel quite prescriptive.
To somebody else, like to this person, it felt like an actual honest invitation. While the previous, would you like to lead it, felt like me just being polite. Asking them politely, would you like to do this, but I don’t actually trust you to do that. The problem wasn’t initiative. The problem was actually communication. Communication between people is a very complicated problem to solve. It is sometimes confusing, or often confusing, maybe. There’s one very important rule you have to remember, what you say matters a lot less than what people hear. Yes, that can feel unfair, and sometimes it absolutely will be unfair. It doesn’t change that fact. This is a very common example.
We hear somebody say, I’ll be very direct with you now. What they often mean is, I’ll be very direct from my brain to my mouth and say things directly the way I think about them. Is that direct communication, or it’s just direct talking? For example, let’s imagine I’m trying to give some constructive criticism to somebody. If I just directly say exactly what I’m thinking, they might close down, they might stop listening to me, they might start defending themselves. Actually, being less direct in my talking might lead to more direct communication because they actually hear what I want to say.
How do we handle that? We need to learn how the person communicates. That’s the best way to be able to communicate with them. I want to introduce a concept here called session 0. Does anybody here play D&D? I also play D&D, it’s really cool. It’s a tabletop role-playing game, but there’s something really interesting about it. It’s that one player creates the world and what we’re going to do in it, and the other players play in that world. There’s no real instructions of what you want to do, which makes something like a session 0. If you haven’t had a session 0 when you played D&D, have one. The question is, what do we want to get out of the rest of the sessions? For instance, when you play D&D, do you care about fighting enemies or about role-playing? Are there certain topics you do not want to discuss or get into? Do you want to have a very serious game or a more funny one? Do you want to follow the rules really strictly or do you want to apply the rule of cool, which just means, if it’s cool, you get to do it?
At work, it is a, how do we work together effectively session? It’s a session designed to talk about let’s work together better. Here are some example questions you can discuss in this session. What is your natural communication style? Do you prefer a strictly organized or a more organic approach? How do you want to be praised, publicly or privately? How much support do you want from me and in what way? How can we be on the lookout for opportunities together? These are very important questions that are usually never asked directly. We just assume them. When we make assumptions, we make the wrong assumptions.
Here’s a couple of tips and tricks for running an effective session 0. Come prepared with your own answers. People are not used to these questions, so the most common response you get is, I’m not really sure, can you tell me how you work? Be prepared with your own answers and be prepared to share them. Two, almost every single person I talked to said they really like people being direct with them, and then a lot of them really struggle with it. I’m Slovenian, I tend to be quite direct. This is no fault of their own. It doesn’t mean they lie to you or anything like this. It just means that we’re not used to this. Just with everything, but especially with directness, check in with people. Just ensure they’re still ok a couple of weeks in. Clarify your roles in the relationship. We all play different roles to each other. At some point, I might be a manager. At some point, I might be a team lead. At some point, I might be an engineer.
At some point, I might even be the less experienced more junior engineer, even if it’s for only one specific topic. Those roles heavily impact how we interact with each other. Follow up to confirm a shared understanding. This session is only useful if we actually know what we talked about. The worst thing you can do is talk about things, assume you know what they meant, and leave. Follow up, ask a question, give your own example, and say, is this what you meant? A reminder, this is not just a manager thing. I had conversations like this with my direct reports, obviously, but also had them with my own managers. I also had them with my peers, both technical and non-technical peers. Remember what I started with? That clash with a co-worker.
After taking a bit of time to cool down and reflect, I actually reached out and we had a very raw and very honest session 0 style conversation. We talked about what went wrong. We talked about how we communicate. We talked about what we expect out of each other. We clarified things. We also apologized to each other. We actually built a great working relationship, actually much better than a lot of other people that I never had a clash with. Tough moments can lead somewhere good. Things will get messy, there will be clashes, but you can turn it around as long as you’re intentional about it.
Challenges and Solutions Related to Communication
Here’s a couple of team-based examples of challenges and solutions related to communication. The first one is we wanted to have different levels of depth in the stand-up. Some people wanted it to be like a really quick sync where we just talk about our progress and we move on, and some people want to go into a lot of depth and talk about every single topic. It was obviously causing a clash because people wanted different things. What did we do? We ran an experiment, obviously. This experiment was to add an additional second part to the stand-up. Now we had a stand-up, which was that short sync, and we had an optional after-party. Another 15 minutes, we could go into depth. We also added an ELMO rule, which stands for Enough, Let’s Move On. This was a nice way for us to remind ourselves if we get into a lot of depth, no, let’s move on, this is an after-party topic.
Obviously, ELMO is also a toy, which was quite nice, because it meant that if you didn’t want to rudely interrupt people, you could just bring a little toy and be like, hello. Which was especially great for remote co-workers, because they found it more difficult to jump in because of the delay that comes with video conferencing. This was a very nice and gentle way to remind us to move to an after-party. We actually introduced that to every single company I worked with afterwards, because every single person loved it, so try it out.
Second one, some people really struggle to create retro cards in real time. Some people just don’t think they’re best in meetings, or they simply prefer to reflect and think about things on their own time. Don’t forget also that while the meeting might be at a perfect time for you, it might be a really awkward time for somebody else, either because their lifestyle is different, or because they’re in a different time zone. What did we do? Very obvious thing. We started sharing the retro board in advance. This way people could add all the tickets throughout the whole sprint. It’s actually led to two really great benefits.
The first one is that we captured a lot more thoughtful input, because people would actually add cards as they thought about them. We captured a lot more, and it was in more depth and more thoughtful. The second part was that if suddenly you fell sick on the day, your tickets were already there. You would still contribute to the retro, even if you couldn’t be there yourself. Obviously, this was such an obvious solution, we did extend it to a lot of other meetings too, and it really helped us out.
There are two more general tips and tricks I wanted to share, and they don’t quite fit with any of the previous stuff I talked about. The first one is about non-work in social time. At work, we’re usually focused on just that, work. Let’s work together. Social time gives us a lot of benefits. It gives us insights into how people think, into not just what they do, but also how they think. It gives us insights into their style of humor, gives us insights into their thought patterns, and also teaches us a lot about people. People have hobbies, they have other skills, and this actually helps us work together better. Social time builds a really strong connection, which is important because trust doesn’t tend to come from finishing tickets together, at least not as much. It comes from connection between people. Creating that connection takes intent. How do we intentionally build that connection? We make space for it. I’m going to split this between co-located and remote, because I think they’re quite different.
In a co-located space, you could, for instance, go and grab some lunch together. Everybody loves food, especially if it’s free. Check, you might have a budget for it. Most companies do. Go grab some lunch together and talk about non-work stuff. Forcibly, do not talk about work stuff. You might want to do an escape room. I know it’s very stereotypical, but it does teach you a lot about how people solve problems, especially when those problems are outside of their usual expertise. When you’re co-located, there’s a lot of opportunities for these water cooler moments. I don’t think anybody really still has water coolers, but the idea is that you have these natural opportunities to chat to each other.
This could be, for instance, grabbing some coffee or tea together, or it could be when you’re walking to a meeting room, you just chat a little bit, or just coming in on Monday morning and talking about the weekend. There’s a more difficult or trickier one, which is, what about remote teams? It is more tricky, I’m not going to lie, but it’s not impossible. It just means you have to be even more intentional. Yes, I do mean make it an actual meeting. It might feel counterintuitive to make non-work time an actual meeting in your calendar, but I promise you it works. What could you do there? You could play some online games. There’s, for instance, skribbl.io, where you draw things, people have to guess, or Codenames, which is all about associations.
Again, it helps you see how people associate things. It helps you see how people think. Something very different, you could do a remote cooking chat, where everybody gets to cook together. Not only will you learn who’s the best chef, you might discover some delicious delicacies from local cuisines. An hour or two every two weeks is not a big time investment, but it does have an impact, because it brings people closer together. Yes, it absolutely feels like forced fun in the beginning, and that’s not fun, but it does become fun afterwards. If people actually contribute to it, it does become fun.
The second part I wanted to mention is what I’m calling shared silliness. You should go listen to Holly and Trisha’s talk, which goes a lot more in-depth. Inside jokes make us laugh, and they make us belong. They make us feel like we’re a part of something. That means that silliness can also lead to closeness. Again, closeness is important. It leads to people sticking together, especially when times get tough. We’re a lot more likely to assume the best in each other, and to protect each other, and defend each other if we are close. Next time somebody tells you you’re being silly, correct them and tell them you’re being strategic instead. Obviously, I cannot talk about silliness without giving a couple of examples. “Always a pleasure”, this is how one of my PMs finished a meeting one time. Nobody knows why, but everybody found it incredibly funny, including that PM.
Suddenly that spread, and every single meeting now started finishing with, always a pleasure. It even spread to other teams, still don’t really know how or why, but suddenly you had a company of 50 people saying, always a pleasure to each other all the time. Was extremely silly, but also quite funny. Good morning, dobro jutro, and Guten Morgen. Learning how to say good morning in all the languages in your team can be a really simple way to make people feel seen. It’s also quite funny when people try and mispronounce things in your language, but as long as you’re laughing with them, not at them.
Of course, custom memes and emojis. I’m sure you’ve all seen those. Not only do they create a shared team language, they also make simple events go down in history and never be forgotten about. I’m going to do something slightly stupid of me, potentially. I’m going to share some of those memes and emojis about me, but I will not comment on them. I’ll just let you make up your own stories. Beautiful things. Obviously, my personal favorite is the strawberry face.
Diverse Cultures
There’s one last point I want to make, and it is a slightly more serious one. Your culture might not match your company’s culture. Remember, everybody has a culture that’s right for them, so does your company. Some companies will simply not change. Or perhaps they have changed, but they changed in a way that you cannot follow. Or perhaps it was you who has changed. All of those things are ok. Culture evolves, companies evolve, leadership changes, strategies pivot. It is not a betrayal of their workers. There will always be gaps in culture. So far, this talk has been all about bridging those gaps. Sometimes those gaps are just too wide. That is, again, ok. We cannot bridge every single gap. It is not failure. It isn’t giving up. It’s just life. With that in mind, sometimes the right move is moving on.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Culture deeply impacts you and your team. This impact can be a positive or a negative one. Culture constantly evolves. There is no one-size-fits-all. What is right for you might not be right for somebody else. What is right for you today might not be right for you in three months’ time. Culture evolves with time, with context, and with people. Small, intentional daily actions are what really shapes culture. You don’t need big, sweeping gestures. You just need to be consistent. Every action, every interaction, every day is what changes culture. Diversity drives better and faster outcomes. Diverse teams don’t just feel more inclusive, they actually perform better. Everyone plays a role. You play a role. I play a role. It is not somebody else’s job. Again, it belongs to us all. Culture belongs to us all. We each help shape it every day, so be an active participant.
Action Items
To try and keep this as actionable as possible, I want to leave you with a little bit of homework, five actions you can try. No budgets needed. No permission needed. One, define the culture you want. Sit down, 10, 15 minutes, write it down. You cannot work towards something if you don’t know what it is. Two, have a session 0 with somebody. Either be with somebody new or with somebody you’ve worked with for a long time. Three, explicitly give your trust. Remember, say, I trust you, and then trust them. Nice and easy. Bonus points if you can actually take a step back from your current role and tell people, I will support you in doing something that’s within my role. Include a remote co-worker. Remote inclusion rarely happens by accident, so be intentional about it. Highlight something they said. Ask them a question or just chat to them socially. Five, next time you’re stuck in an endless discussion in a retro, propose an experiment instead.
Questions and Answers
Participant 1: We have trouble that on our retros, we have like six, seven people on the team, and only like two, three people are invested in the retro, so not everybody speaks. Do you have some maybe ideas on how we can increase the engagement?
Natan Žabkar Nordberg: I think this is a question that could be answered two ways. Are people not speaking because they’re not comfortable, or they just cannot think of things, or because they just don’t care about the retro? One is, let people enter their tickets in advance. Maybe they just cannot think of things in the meeting itself. The second one is, rotate the facilitators. If somebody’s running the retro, they have to care about it, because if nothing else, they have to care about actually running the meeting. Once you run it yourself, you realize, there is something there. Those would probably be my two main recommendations.
Participant 2: We in our team a few years ago stopped doing retros, because it turned into an exercise where you’d have this conversation, you’d vent, you’d come up with action items, but then those action items are never executed effectively. Then you end up with a backlog of action items that are just repeated every two to three weeks, and turns into a bit of a time waste. I know you propose experiments as a way to combat that, but is there any other ways that you could bring action to?
Natan Žabkar Nordberg: It again depends on why you’re not doing those actions. Are they actions within your control or not? Because if they’re not, then you don’t really have much agency on them anyway. If the actions are within your control, are you not doing them because you forgot about them, or you’re not doing them because you just don’t actually care? If you don’t actually care, then it shouldn’t be an action. If you do care and just forgetting about them, you could add them to your sprint as an actual ticket to remind people, this is an actual thing we want to do. We want to set time aside for it.
If you focus on actions you and your team can actually do, and you make them small enough you can actually complete them in a week, and you give yourself the time needed for that by making a ticket, give it a couple story points or whatever, then you will start seeing progress. Also, assuming, let’s say, you’re the team lead or somebody who cares about this, you need somebody to push for it. You need a cheerleader usually. That reminds people, have we done this action yet or not?
For instance, I actually put all of our retro actions in our sprint planning document. Every time we go to sprint planning, we read through all the actions, and we say, do we want to create tickets for them? I think you just need to keep pushing until people actually start committing to it, because then when they commit to it, they see value. When they see value, they start doing it themselves.
Participant 3: At the end, you spoke a bit about the gap between company culture and your culture, and that it may not always be reconcilable. Obviously, you don’t want to jump ship the moment you find you’ve got some conflict there. Do you have any tips for ways of maybe bringing a company around, trying to get a bit of alignment, particularly where you’re maybe managing a team and the rest of the company is maybe acting counter to what you’re trying to build?
Natan Žabkar Nordberg: Think about how you’re presenting things to the company. You care about it because you’re impacted by it, but why does the company care? If you have some proof that tells people are being unhappy, they’re being less productive, that can help. If you have some proof to say, these more productive people are going to increase your velocity or your throughput or whatever, that can help again. I found sometimes that even just literally talking to people and getting some quotes for them, and then saying, it’s not just me, here’s like seven people saying the same thing, here’s some quotes for them, can make the higher-up managers look at it and go like, “Yes, I’m going to give you a little bit of space to do something”.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t always work. Jumping ship is not the wrong thing necessarily. An example is, I have a friend who really loves startups and he’s great in startups. The problem with a good startup is that it stops being a startup. He goes through this like, “I love my work, I love my work, I love my work, I hate my work”. What he learned is that’s fine, you’re just going to jump ship to a new startup because that’s what he cares about. He helps the company and they part on good terms. He can say, “Great, we worked together for a couple of years. It was great for both of us”, and they move on.
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