Karolina Wicksén Jackson-Ward
Transcript
So, my name's Carolina Jackson-Ward.
I'm going to talk to you about leadership today.
And we will also get briefly into why I talk about leadership particularly. I work for a company called PlamU with a product called ProdiPlace, primarily. And I've worked there for a long time, for about 15 years, just over.
We've gone from being a quite small company to a medium-sized company.
And I've had a variety of roles, so my title really isn't that important. It varies. What I do stays pretty much the same.
But this is what I'm going to talk about today.
Something about me and about the company that I work for, because the reason I talk about leadership is a combination of me and the company that I work for. And then motivation, shaping behaviors. A little bit about metrics and the role of the leader.
So why do I talk about leadership?
Because leadership matters, first of all. It's a success factor both for people personally, for organizations, for societies, and for the world.
Leaders matter so much that for an individual team, what leader there is matters more than what method you use, what tool you use, or any individual in that team. And it's not the leader, it's the leadership. It's how you lead, what matters and how you work with it.
We have had at Project Place a leadership program that made it very easy to be a leader. You got the right tools, you got the right support to be able to progress and become a great leader. Because leadership is a skill, it's not something that you are necessarily born with. It is something that you acquire like any other skill. So how many here are leaders?
Those of you who did not raise your hand, why do you think you are not leaders?
Because it's not your formal title or because you do not influence other people.
I hope that at least you have leadership in some aspect of your life.
So.
You're a leader if you're a parent. You're a leader if you have a pet. You're a leader if you have a group of people who connect with you and listen to what you say.
You're also a leader if somewhere in your title there is the word coach, there is the word manager,
There is the word director, executive. Any of those words are an indication that you have a formal leadership position.
So that's one reason I talk about leadership, is that we have had the opportunity at Project Place to be able to develop leadership, our own leadership skills.
Also, I personally went through a really bad divorce about seven years ago.
And like any crisis, it's an opportunity for self-development. It's an opportunity to take a look at yourself and the choices you make and the reasons you make those choices. And that is also leadership. And during that time, I trained to be a coach, which is another type of leadership. And I realized that what I learned in my personal life was very applicable in my professional life and vice versa.
So that's the reason I talk about leadership.
I'm going to talk just briefly about the company.
We were founded in 1998 as one of the first software as a service companies, before software as a service was invented as a term, or the cloud.
We started in Sweden. And we've always looked at how people come together.
and perform things that are bigger than what an individual can do by themselves, and how we can use technology to aid that.
We've had, this is some of our key metrics, 221,000 projects run in the service. Average service uptime, always important when your data's in the cloud.
1.2 million registered users. I took those figures off the website today. And since about two years, two and a half years, we're part of a bigger company called PlanView, and we have four different softwares, all within work and project management.
And this is what we do at Project Place. We make people, we make teams come together and perform something beautiful. And hopefully, which I think these people do, have fun.
So we have three basic things. It's project management and execution, team and task collaboration, and document collaboration.
And I talk a lot about lean and agile to people who do not know a lot about lean and agile. I assume that you know a lot about lean and agile, probably more than I do.
But one thing I always say is that it has to start with the leadership.
that working this way is changing your mindset. It's not necessarily about the tools or the methods that you use to perform. It's about embracing change, and it's about having a different type of control. It's about having a different type of leadership.
It needs to have a leadership that's operational. So gone are the days where, as a manager, you could lock yourself into the corner office and expect somebody to come running with reports.
So it needs to be operational because it needs to be on the floor and clarify the goals and work with the behaviours.
For me, leadership is really two things.
It's about creating the possibility for people to be motivated. And it's about shaping behaviours. How do we know if the people around us are motivated?
If I look at you, how can I see that you're motivated? I can't. So the only way we can tell if people are motivated, if people are on the same team, if they want to do the same things as us, is by judging their behavior. We have no insight into other people other than what they do.
So we have to work with behavior.
The leadership has to be coaching. If we are going to let people decide more, to let the teams have ultimate planning power, which we need to do to have the speed and the learning, then the leadership role moves very close to a coaching role to encourage people to understand what they need to do to develop. Ask questions, manage conflict so that the team works smoothly and enable learning. Have a strategy for how we learn.
It needs to be visionary. You need to be able to fuel the masses.
And one way of doing that is to work with shared values. Shared values create a fence within which you can let people roam fairly free.
It needs to work with the motivation and it needs to be transparent. If you expect people to be transparent towards you and if we can agree that knowing what's going on is a better way to have control than sitting down and working with rules, then we need to be transparent, to encourage transparency and understand what happens. It's a great way of doing that, and that's communication.
I say that as a leader, it's hard to over-communicate.
So, this is a question I normally have.
Now, I would say about 60% of you raised your hand when I asked who was a leader. So how many hours a week do you spend on your leadership skills? On doing the leadership job.
20%?
40%?
60%?
8%?
Good. 2%?
I would say as a leader, not taking the time to develop your leadership skills, is waste. You're not doing what you... How do you expect your team to set aside time for learning if you do not set aside time for developing your own leadership skills, for learning what it is that you need to do to become a better leader?
motivation
Okay, have you seen this? Dan Pink, how many have read Dan Pink? Great. Drive?
This is the concise YouTube animated film. For those of you who haven't, I recommend looking at it. It's a great thing. And it talks a lot about the difference between the motivation that comes from the outside in the form of bonuses, for instance. Or other types of outside encouragement and the motivation that comes from inside. And what it is that we can do as organizations and as leaders to form a platform. For building the intrinsic or the motivation that comes from the inside that will be more efficient, especially when we talk about knowledge work, which is what most of us are going to be doing. Yeah, what most of our teams are going to be doing.
So the things, there are three factors.
Autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Autonomy means that you can decide how you perform your work. It can be different to different people. For some people it's very important to have flexible working hours. For some people it's about how you organize your desk or your workstation. But autonomy means that you have influence over your own situation. The opposite of autonomy is micromanagement. Micromanagement is not deciding what people do. That is part of your job as a leader. Micromanagement is deciding for them how they need to do it. So if you're a conductor and you go to your harpist and tell them how to put their fingers on their harp, that is micromanagement. If you go to them and say, I would like you to play this part of the music softer, that is not micromanagement, that is leadership. There is a difference and often we confuse the two.
One of the things that you do as a leader is decide things.
But you don't decide exactly how people are going to perform their work. Because you have good people on your team. Even if you don't think so, I guarantee that you have good people on your team. And you need to let them be the best they can be. That means they will fail, they will learn, and they will do better. But they need to have the room to fail also. They need to have autonomy.
Mastery is getting better at something.
How many of you have a hobby? One of the things that you do as a leader is decide things. But you don't decide exactly how people are going to perform their work. Because you have good people on your team. Even if you don't think so, I guarantee that you have good people on your team. And you need to let them be the best they can be. That means they will fail, They will learn and they will do better. But they need to have the room to fail also. They need to have autonomy. Mastery is getting better at something.
that you get paid for.
You're a good guy.
I'm going to talk to you afterwards.
Now, typically, most people have some sort of a hobby that involves getting better at something without getting paid at it. A lot of people have hobbies that are close to their profession. That also develop their professional skills, but they do it after hours without getting paid. Typically, developers fall into this.
How many developers do we know that spend all day at work coding one thing and then go home and code something else for free? Yeah, we all know them. But that is a great human drive to get better at something, to develop your skill. So developing your people will not only give the company or the organization more value, it will also make them more motivated.
And purpose is simply, how is this work meaningful for someone other than myself?
Yeah? So as a leader, you need to be able to tell your team,
the better place.
How is collaborative work management software, making the world a better place.
And it should be clear. And it might not solve world peace. But it should be making someone's life better, easier, nicer, somehow. You all have a customer that consumes the value of what you produce, that maybe pays you for it, maybe someone else pays for it, but the customer who consumes the value
Does your team understand how that value matters to them?
Does it give them purpose?
So, motivation killers. We talked about micromanagement, or I talked about micromanagement.
Mistrust. So not giving people the freedom to fail. Not trusting that what they give you is their best.
Not letting them understand how they can do better. Obscurity, what's the target, what we're being measured on, what's the objective, what's the goal, what's the purpose of what we do.
It can be insecurity about whether or not what I'm doing is good.
It can be insecurity about whether or not I have a job next month. But any type of insecurity kills trust, kills motivation.
And the most common is lack of feedback.
I don't understand how this matters. And we're going to talk more about feedback because feedback is easy, but we make it hard.
So, motivation enhances self-organizing teams, autonomy, people who can decide how they want to work together, what their process should look like, clear and communicated targets,
purpose and intermittent positive reinforcement. Anybody heard that term before?
Other than Sophie.
We'll talk about that. It's a psychology thing. One of my hobbies is psychology. So I read and listen to a lot about psychology and cognitive things. You've all seen a Kanban board before.
It contains all the parts of motivation.
Hopefully you have some sort of purpose that's described on here, either overriding what the deliverables, we can call them a story. It should contain the purpose of the work that you're performing.
The team, the self-organizing team, can decide what the process looks like and work on improving it to become better. So it has a lot of the components that we need to get motivation.
But we have a group that's often forgotten in these kinds of situations that also need to have motivation, trust.
And that's the stakeholders. How do we get them involved? How do we get their motivation? If we want to have good agile development, good processes, we need to work with our stakeholders also, get them involved and get them committed.
We do that by tying our Kanban boards to a Gantt chart, which is easier for our stakeholders to consume, because it's a visualization that they understand straight away.
So, shaping behaviors.
What does it mean?
That's one aspect, certainly, absolutely, to be an example.
Shaping behaviours means really getting other people to do what you want.
And you can do that for good purposes, or you can do it for bad purposes. But it's shaping behaviors, and it's something that people are born with, to be shaped, to be part of a social system. We all have biological... Triggers that adapts us to the social situations that we are in.
And as leaders, we can use these mechanisms to get people to do what we want.
So a simple example.
Is teaching a dog a trick. That is getting the dog to do something that we want. It's shaping a behavior. I got a dog.
And when she was a puppy, I took her to a puppy course because I read that that's what you're supposed to do when you get your first dog. And I started with clicker training. This is all the rage in dog training, horse training, cat training. And it's so powerful because it works and it seems to work on all social mammals. Even animals that we have traditionally not been able to train, we can train with clicker. And what the clicker is, is positive intermittent reinforcement.
It is triggering a cocktail of feel-good hormones. In the dog's brain when it performs the desired behavior, increasing the chance that the behavior will reoccur.
It will do the same thing again. And the best way to train a dog to not do something is by teaching it to do something else that we wanted to do instead. Action is much easier to train than inaction. So to stop bad behavior, it's best to focus on doing good behavior. And this works for yourself as well. Have you ever tried stopping doing something? Smoking, drinking, taking drugs, shouting at your children?
It's really hard, right? Stopping doing something, even if it's not like a physical dependency, even if it's just a bad behavior, I want to stop shouting at my children. It is not a physical dependency, but it's something that I do too much, and I want to stop doing that. And that's really hard.
It's really hard to stop a behavior. But it's much, much easier to find the trigger and do something different, learn to do something different.
This is the basis of CBT, cognitive behavior therapy. Finding the trigger and putting a different behavior in instead. And we do this with dogs. We don't call it CBT. We call it clicker training. So if your dog barks when somebody rings the doorbell and you want it to stop barking, you teach it to do something else. It's simple. So instead of barking, it comes to you and you give it a treat.
And the way you do it is with clicker training. And how do we start to clicker train with a dog? Does anybody know?
We take the dog, sit it down. We take a handful of really yummy treats. And we take the clicker. And then we go click, treat, click, treat, click, treat, click, treat, click, treat, click, treat. And we do this for a week, several times a day. And what happens is that we create a physical reaction in the dog when it hears the click that triggers this cocktail of feel-good hormones in the dog when it hears the clicker. And we do this for a dog because dogs and people do not communicate very well. Dogs communicate primarily with our bodies, and people communicate primarily with words. And we mean different things, and the dog doesn't understand this. When we say good doggy, we can mean any kind of thing for the dog. It doesn't understand. So we need to have the clicker to be clear to the dog. With people, we don't need clickers. Because we already talk the same language. Which is why clicker training for people will never catch on.
But we have the same function, the same biological function that triggers a cocktail of feel-good hormones when we get positive feedback. There's a big social network called Facebook that's implemented this function. It has a clicker. It's the like button.
It's the exact same thing. And we are helpless. Whether we know it or not, it still works. It still feels good to get 100 likes on your post.
It will still create... An incentive for us to perform the same action again, to share another picture of my cute baby.
Cute babies, dogs, kittens, many likes. Pictures create more likes than words, so people post more pictures.
So we have the same mechanism and we can also be trained by it.
And this is shaping behavior.
So a way to work with it is to have the common values, because then we have the framework for what we can work with, and our language becomes easier. It becomes easier to talk about what it is that we want and what it is that we don't want.
Positive reinforcement. And also to work with positive reinforcement rather than punishing bad behaviors creates trust. When you tell people nice things, they tend to like you. If you tell them bad things, they tend to not like you. And one of our defense mechanisms is that people we don't like, we don't trust, we don't listen to. So as a leader, it's important to be liked by the people you lead, otherwise they won't listen to your feedback. So to have trust and to be liked, to give lots of positive feedback, is a great foundation when you need to talk about the difficult things.
So common values. Just going to see.
It's a combination of where we are now, so understanding what is it that we do now as a group, and where do we want to be, and make it concrete please, because a lot of organisations use organisational values to just
Talk about nothing.
Say, we are customer focused. What does that mean? How does that matter to the guy that's coding your software? What does it mean in daily situations? So make them more than words on a piece of paper. Make them mean something. And you have to give concrete examples of when it happens and when it doesn't happen. And understand what it means for the organization. If we are customer focused, our products are going to look a different way from if we want to design the best looking products.
So we need to understand the consequences of the values that we choose. We talked about positive reinforcement.
Work with it, but like anything else, not with 15 different behaviours at once. Pick one, work with that until you've shifted it to where you want it to be, and then move on to the next one.
And talk about what are the behaviours. Is it a problem? Everybody is late for meetings, for instance. The common problem in organization, it wastes a lot of time.
So then identify the behavior that you want. You want people to be on time. Give them public recognition. Often little public and in conjunction to the behavior that you want. It's not difficult, really.
And think clicker, but don't use a clicker.
So negative feedback. We talked about building a foundation of trust. And use the values that you have as a sort of fence around the behavior so that people understand what it is that's not working.
Typical feedback is in the form of when you do X, where X is the behavior. Recognition. Often little public and in conjunction to the behavior that you want. It's not difficult really.
And think clicker, but don't use a clicker.
So negative feedback. I talked about building a foundation of trust. And use the values that you have as a sort of fence around the behavior so that people understand what it is that's not working.
Typical feedback is in the form of when you do X, where X is the behavior.
Y happens to Z. There is a consequence for someone. This goes for positive feedback and negative feedback. So when you are in time for meeting, it makes my day more efficient. Thank you.
It's easy and it's the same for negative feedback. But with negative feedback, because negative feedback will always take out from the trust account. It's like a bank account. You need to deposit some trust before you can take some out. And negative feedback will always be a withdrawal.
So make sure that you have some trust in there, otherwise you might as well go home and talk to someone else about it. Yeah? And choose your fights.
Decide why you want to give this negative feedback. Make sure it's not about you, and it's not about the other person, but it's about a behavior. And that the reason you give this feedback is to get a different behavior in the future. It's all about shaping behavior. It's not about... What happened? Whose fault was it? What were the circumstances? It's about, can I have another behavior in the future, please? Next time. Can I have a different behavior, please? And timing is really important. I've written halt.
That means don't do it if you're hungry, angry, lonely or tired.
So just do a quick inventory before you go and give somebody some feedback and say, am I hungry, angry, lonely or tired? Or is the other person?
Because stress can come from either way. And when you're in stress, you are less likely to give constructive feedback.
If the other person is stressed, they will definitely not receive it. So it's pointless.
Because the stress reality is this.
If we break stress down into four basic levels, where zero, level zero, is no stress at all. We're floating in karma land. Everything is cool. There, we have 100% of our cognitive, emotional capabilities available to us. As soon as we experience any kind of stress, that goes down to about 80%.
If we're at stress level two, that is where we're multitasking more than and maybe five, six, seven things at once, we have about 50% of our capabilities available to us. It increases dramatically the risk of making mistakes, of making the wrong decisions, of getting into conflict.
At stress level two, you start to see other people as problems.
Stress level three, you start to see other people as enemies.
And there we have about, we have lost about 80% of our capabilities, our cognitive and our emotional capabilities. We start forgetting things that are important, like our keys, like our passport when we're going traveling. Then that's an indication that we're at 80%. loss. And then we have stress level four, which is fight, flight or die. We do not function at all. We are in a war zone, whether or not we are technically in a war zone. In our minds, we are in a war zone. And these are the only responses we have.
But like you see, even at level one, when you probably don't experience a lot of stress, we have still lost a lot of our capabilities. So it's important to look at the situation you're in.
We're going to move away to measuring. How many have seen this wonderful? Oh, it's a great example here. I'm actually in France now. This is a French guy. And he talks, he has an example in this video. That is about the French and the American relay team at one Olympics. I'm terrible. I should not give examples other than for myself because I can't remember the details.
But it talks about these two relay teams. That's four by 100 meters. And on paper, the American team is the better team. They have the two best runners in the world and the other two are not half bad either. But still the French team wins. And why? Because they picked the right KPI. Because in a relay race, the speed of the individual runner is not the most important thing to measure. The most important thing to measure is how quickly you can get the baton from start to finish line. And this is a problem we have when we look at KPIs. We look at the wrong thing.
So one problem is that you measure the wrong thing. Another is that you measure too many things.
And this has got to do with motivation. If there's no direct link between what you're doing and what you're being measured on, then it's really hard to find the motivation to shift it. Even if it's important to the organization or the customer, if you can't see the link between what you do and what you're being measured on, then it's hard to understand. And for many, many, many, many, many, many people, They have no idea. They have no clue whether or not they're being measured on something and in that case what it is. If you're lucky, you have an annual review where your manager desperately tries to put together something of what you've done in the last two or three days to present some sort of feedback to you.
A solution then is to pick a measurement that is under your control and make the connection to your target obvious. See, I do some training and one of the things that is important is that you know what it is that you want to achieve with your specific training. What KPI is it that you want to shift with this particular training session? Because you can't work at speed, strength, endurance at the same time. Your body will break. And it's the same with your team, with your work. Pick one at a time and shift that. And decide when you're there. So you know when to bring out the champagne or the cake or whatever it is that you use to make sure that everybody knows that we've achieved something. And visualize. So if you have to pick a measurement, what should you pick? Has anybody seen this example? It's called 50 pounds of clay.
Okay, so the example is there's a pottery class. At the beginning of the year, the teacher divides the class into two groups. And he says, I'm going to measure you differently. So the first group is going to be measured on quality. They have to produce, they just have to give me their best piece of work at the end of the year and I will grade them on that one piece of work. You can take all the time you need, you can work the whole year on this one piece. The other one, you will be measured on quantity. If you give me 50 pounds, of pottery at the end of the year, you will get an A. If you give me 40, you will get a B, and so on.
So, quantity, quality.
Which group had the better work at the end of the year?
You?
I know the story.
You know the story. Well, it's going to be the quantity team. Why? Because they learned. Because they made mistakes and they learned. So if you have to choose between a quantitative KPI and a qualitative KPI, I would always go with a quantitative because it gives you speed, it gives you flow, it gives you more learning. And it goes for you as well. When you want to shift your leadership, pick quantity. If you want to improve giving feedback, do it. Give yourself a target. I'm going to give my team.
20, each person is going to have 20 instances of feedback from me in the next month. And then go out and do it. It doesn't have to be complicated. And each time you're going to learn something.
And I think this is one of the reasons we're so obsessed with speed. Because speed of delivery is speed of learning.
And the more we deliver, the more we learn, the better we have the chance to become.
Oh, I forgot to give my disclaimer, I'm sorry. This presentation contains religious imagery. I hope no one is offended.
But these are examples of successful leaders.
And they had all these qualities. They were, by all the documentation that we have, great teachers.
They taught, they exemplified, they made concrete examples of their teachings. Great teachers. They were also great listeners. People came to them and told them their problems.
They were great coaches. They helped people find the solutions.
And they created calm around them. They created an environment, an inviting environment where people wanted to be.
They were also charismatic, and charisma is another skill that you can work on as a leader. Charisma is largely about being present. Which means shutting down your devices when you meet other people, looking them in the eye, paying attention,
So charisma is a skill that you can learn and you can work on. But creating calm around you, inviting people in, shielding your team,
aspects of leadership.
And they were great communicators. I mean, we have verbatim quotes from them living on. So, it all starts with you to create this.
And developing your leadership.
I guarantee will make a change not just in your professional life but also in your personal life.
I use a lot of this with my children, not enough, because unfortunately in your personal relationships there is an emotional component that makes you behave in ways you don't want to.
But that's also something to work on. And one thing that I've had to work on a lot is forgiving myself enough so that I can learn and do something different next time.
Instead of being stuck in the mistake that I made.
But learn and practice coaching skills. Coaching is a skill set. You can go and look online or anywhere. There's a number of questions that you can learn by heart. And just when somebody comes to you for a coaching situation, you just go through question by question. And the great thing about coaching is you don't have to have any answers. It's enough to know the questions and the other person is supposed to provide the answers. If they don't have the answers, they can go and learn.
It's a quite nice skill to have.
is essential and learning is hard. Learning takes motivation and energy. And having a strategy for learning for yourself, all of you leaders in here who do not set aside time for your own development, start doing that now.
Even if it's just an hour a month.
Take your learning seriously.
To make sure that you also take your team's learning seriously. It doesn't have to be that much, it doesn't have to be that hard. 4% improvement, week by week by week, makes a lot of difference, and it's a very small step. All change is incremental.
So learn to learn. And usually as a leader or as a manager, you're quite lonely, especially in middle management. You know, you have pressure from above, you have pressure from the team, everybody's wanting a bite of you, and you don't have enough people in your own support system. So in your organization, can you create a network? Where there's a lovely Swedish expression called cow warmth. It is, you know, when it's cold outside and all the cows huddle together and they share the warmth. Create that in your leadership team. Some cow worms. Some other people. that you can have a discussion with.
Or is there a mentor, a coach, or a leader that you admire? Send them an email. Contact them on LinkedIn and say, hey, I really like the stuff you do. Do you have 15 minutes for me where we can talk about some questions that I have around my own leadership?
Understand who you are. What are your challenges? Because you will never be greater than your own obstacles. So find out what they are. Do something that helps you learn about yourself, your own triggers, your own behavior. What are your obstacles? Why can't you work with certain types of people? Why do they grind you the wrong way? It's definitely something that's within you. Now, every emotion that you have is about you. Unless somebody's hitting you over the head with a stick, in which case it's okay to just walk away. But, you know, if it's just, I get the feeling that I can't work with this person because, yeah, that's about you. Find out what it is and what you can do to move away from it.
And be gentle with yourself. Test, learn and adapt is not just about work processes or about flow. It's also about what happens in you. So if you test something, and it doesn't work, that's okay. You know, move on and test something different. Because if you keep doing the same thing, if you try quitting smoking the same way, you're probably gonna get the same result.
Yeah, so you need to do something different.
I will give you my best tips afterwards.
And when it comes to tools, there's so many tools out there.
There is not one tool, there's not one method that will sort this for you. You have to do it yourselves.
But when you do look at tools, choose leadership over management. That means something that supports communication, something that supports goal setting, something that supports visualizing KPIs and workflows, and transparency.
So what I want you to take away from here is that you are all leaders, even if it's just for yourself.
So, and leaders are more important than we think. They are a key success factor in every aspect of life.
About a year and a half ago, I went to a seminar. There were two women. They've written a book about successful female leaders. And they interviewed 20 very successful women.
And they couldn't find a single common factor aside from the fact that they had all been super picky about who was their manager, who their direct manager was. So the key success factor that could be identified across all these 20 women were that they had a tendency to pick really great leaders. Because really great leaders make people grow. And people are most organizations, most expensive, most valuable, and only asset that increases in value over time. So people are important. Leadership is...
Even so, more so.
And leading is about encouraging motivation and shaping behaviours. It's as simple and as difficult as that.
And it's important to measure because otherwise we don't know if we're moving in the right direction. So we have to measure something, pick the right thing.
And if you do what you've always done, you're going to end up with what you always got. You have to do something different. And that goes for your leadership as well, for your personal development as well. If you keep doing the same thing, you cannot expect a different result.
So take your leadership seriously. You're important.
And your leadership is going to be a key success factor. And the right tool will not fix it, but it should at least not stand in your way. It should make your life more easy.