Forem: PlusPlus

Inclusion & Economic Efficiency Go Hand-in-Hand for Jen Gilbert, Tech Learning Manager at Lyft

Mary Thengvall — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 15:39:26 +0000

It’s no longer a question whether a diverse workplace is beneficial. Article after article has proven that a more diverse and inclusive team results in better products as well as a healthier work environment. But what if catering to a diverse audience is also economically efficient?

Jen Gilbert, Tech Learning Manager at Lyft, has spent the past year creating a strong onboarding program that sets their entire engineering team up for success.

“Often when I talk to people in the Learning & Development industry who are working with technical teams, they aren’t engineers themselves. I’m in a unique position, where I’m both an engineer and passionate about empowering engineers to teach, which means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve technical education for folks who are already working in technology roles.

“There’s a tendency to see quality education as less critical once you’re teaching experienced engineers, but from a diversity perspective, I don’t think your company can say that it cares about diversity if you don’t have a strong onboarding program. If your onboarding is just a series of talks, some people leave the session feeling confused and nervous about moving forward. In order to ensure that everyone has the same chance at success at your company, you need to check for comprehension throughout the onboarding, as well as gather feedback and collect metrics afterward.”

This data-first approach isn’t just a diversity initiative, however. It’s also a lesson in economic efficiency. It’s in every company’s best interest to get their new staff up-and-running as quickly as possible, and learning programs like the one Lyft has instituted allow for that. Gilbert’s goal is to make each course even more useful for the employees that are present:

“It’s really hard for me to see inefficient learning experiences. Early on, there were times when I could tell that half of the people in the room were tuned out and not paying attention to the instructor. Either they weren’t the right audience or we weren’t communicating the right information. Whatever the issue, it was our responsibility to fix the problem. It’s not cheap to have inefficient learning experiences, but they’re relatively easy to fix.”

Think of it as a spectrum: on one end, you have a (supposedly) one-size-fits-all program that’s quick and easy to design. On the other end, you have a completely personalized training experience which is time-consuming and difficult to create. As Gilbert describes, Lyft falls somewhere in the middle.

“We publish our entire catalog with a very discrete skills list and we rely on the manager to know which particular data query tools their team members will need to use or which dashboards are uniquely important. Each listed session includes a description of the exact skills that it covers so you know what you can expect your new hires to be able to accomplish at the end of the course.

“We’ve iterated over time as we gather feedback on what people find helpful. For instance, we’ve made a lot of adjustments to the list of courses for the hardware folks because they face very different challenges than most of our engineering staff.”

These iterations are based on qualitative as well as quantitative metrics. The team at Lyft starts by measuring the satisfaction of the employees who just completed a course — a simple gut check to see whether they feel like the session was worth their time. Feedback such as “I feel so comfortable now. I feel so much more prepared.” motivates the Tech Learning team to keep providing quality content. On the other hand, hearing about problem areas where new employees get confused or tripped up in a particular section allows the team to work with the instructor to provide additional information or context around a topic.

Quantitative metrics reveal problem areas as well. Is there a particular set of questions that seem to be particularly confusing? Is there a scenario that’s consistently being solved incorrectly? Following the patterns that pop up allows Gilbert and her team to fix documentation issues and improve the session for the next cohort.

Adjusting the variables of audience size or the length and depth of a session allows Gilbert to hone in on the perfect ratios as well. Some sessions do better with a smaller, niche audience, while others do better as a more general, intro-level topic.

“We listen to what people are telling us and leave room for that human experience element because we recognize that we can’t understand everything about the sessions based solely on the comprehension scores. But we ultimately try to translate the qualitative feedback into numbers in order to avoid bias or outside circumstances that might have impacted the employee during that particular session.”

This balance of qualitative feedback and quantitative measures driven by comprehension checks allows Gilbert and her team to build successful onboarding courses as well as ongoing learning experiences for the technical employees at Lyft. These courses, in addition to allowing new hires to get up-and-running quickly, also enable employees to drive their own learning experiences, which in turn encourages company-wide diversity and inclusion as well as job performance.

Originally published at plusplus.co on November 1, 2018.

3 Ways to Foster a Learning Environment in Your Engineering Team

Mary Thengvall — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 01:14:39 +0000

Learning is an essential part of any career path, but especially that of a software engineer. As people responsible for continually building something new, they need to enjoy and be motivated by the challenge of always learning on their feet.

Through the years, Ron Lichty has worked at well-known companies such as Apple, Berkeley Systems, Fujitsu, Charles Schwab, and more. At each of these companies, he observed that learning is not only a motivational tool for software engineers, but it’s one of the top reasons why engineers choose to stay at companies.

Learning isn’t just about picking up new skills or even being trained on a particular piece of software; it’s also learning from mistakes and victories alike. It’s gathering as a team and recounting what happened so that you (collectively) can make changes that will help move the whole company, as well as the customer experience, forward.

So how do you, as a manager, go about building an environment that encourages this at your company?

1) Be a Guide.

Like most things, there’s a “dark side” to learning. In this case, the dark side of the force is the potential to get distracted by all of the shiny new technologies that can pop up.

As Lichty says, “You want to keep your team on the path of discovery while encouraging them to not step in the woods and get caught up in the poison oak.”

Lichty’s co-author, Mickey W. Mantle, puts it this way in their book Managing the Unmanageable:

“Ensure that your staff is not seduced by the allure of new ‘shiny things.’ …New technologies are the ‘dark side of the force’ for programmers, who will spend countless hours exploring unproved technologies rife with potential to introduce risk if embraced before broad acceptance, extensive field testing, and guaranteed support by those promoting the technologies.”

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to foster an environment that encourages learning in a focused and systematic way. Limiting your engineers too much might keep them from discovering an out-of-the-box, creative solution, but it’s important to keep their focus on finding the best solution for your customers.

2) Practice Agile Principles.

Agile has been an undercurrent for several decades now, but this movement only seems to pick up steam, and for good reason. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that agile is much more than practices. By implementing the values and principles, you become a more agile team creating a more agile product, better able to serve your community of customers.

One way to do this is through holding regular retrospectives. Lichty explains:

“One of the aspects of every agile practice is breaking large projects down into short iterations or sprints. At the end of each sprint, we hold a retrospective. The point of doing them frequently is obviously not to set long-term objectives, but to solidify what we learned from the past two weeks that could inform a change.

“Then we can experiment over the next two or four weeks to see whether this change improves our quality, productivity, performance, or teamwork and collaboration. It might also improve our ability to bring the customer into the picture more.

“The end-goal might change every sprint, but these frequent check-ins allow us to focus on one specific experiment over the period, with the result that we’re making constant incremental improvements.”

A team that is successfully learning is not just learning about new open source projects, new programming languages, or even new solutions. They’re also learning and growing as a team; figuring out which processes work for them, which projects went well and which didn’t, and how they can either improve upon or change the effectiveness of their work in the future.

3) Foster teamwork rather than independence.

When presented with a new problem, it’s easy for a team to approach it from many different angles in an attempt to find a solution quickly. In reality, a more holistic solution is often found when the team is willing to work together, integrating multiple viewpoints from across the company.

Lichty makes this critical point about who should make up these teams:

“Agile is fundamentally about values and principles, which include valuing customers, bringing delight to customers, and solving hard problems collaboratively, as a team. The team reaches beyond the programmers — it’s the programmers, product owner, QA folks, and the Ops team. Ideally, this team includes the customer as well. Before the team pushes the solution to production, the product owner should bring key customers into the team’s environment to offer feedback and insight into what will delight them.

“This emphasis on teamwork is driven by customer empathy. Instead of finding a piece of code that will solve one problem, let’s dig into what’s going to truly delight our customers. It’s possible that one line of code will be part of the solution, but it’s equally possible that if we focus on the root of the problem, we’ll find a completely different issue at hand. At Apple, where user experience constitutes the crown jewels, I learned to hire not just for stellar C++ coding ability, but for customer empathy as well. Whether we’re looking at Apple’s at that time or how companies are operating these days, delighting customers is what keeps us in business.”

These basic principles are the building blocks of an effective team focused on providing value for their customers. By implementing these principles, you’ll not only build a stronger team but enable your engineers to take on more significant challenges in the future.

To understand why fostering this learning environment is so essential to maintaining a successful and long-lasting engineering team, read our previous interview with Ron Lichty.

Originally published at plusplus.co on October 24, 2018.

Why is Creating a Learning Environment Essential for Technical Teams?

Mary Thengvall — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 04:58:00 +0000

Companies are shifting away from hiring for specific programming skills and know-how in lieu of finding candidates who are adaptable and quick to learn on their feet. But once you find these individuals, it’s crucial that you maintain that learning environment, for the sake of the software engineer as well as the company.

Ron Lichty, consultant and co-author of Managing the Unmanageable, has decades of experience in this area. From leading Apple’s Finder and Applications group — the team developing the Macintosh’s user interface, which some say is what set Apple apart from their competition — to building the first investor tools at Charles Schwab, he’s seen just how much learning opportunities can motivate and empower software engineers.

Furthermore, he’s seen these learning opportunities not only make for a stronger team but a more robust product. In Managing the Unmanageable, Lichty and co-author Mickey W. Mantle explore Frederick Herzberg’s seminal work from the 1950s, which identified what people are motivated (and demotivated) by. Lichty and Mantle took this one step further and applied it to software engineers. Learning is second in the list for satisfaction and as they point out, is not only essential for keeping your software engineers happy, but for making your product successful.

There are two primary reasons why this principle is important:

1) To maintain client or customer advantage, we need our programming teams to find the best solutions.

2) To maintain stability (and with stable code, the ability to go fast), we need to identify and hone in on best practices.

Enabling your software engineering team to find the best solution possible while maintaining the stability of your product is key to a successful business. This can be facilitated a few different ways:

Inspire Exploration.

Let your engineering team know that their feedback is valued and that all opinions are welcome. Empowering them to bring different options to the table encourages a thirst for knowledge as well as an awareness of advances in their specific field of technology. This exploration should be balanced with making sure you don’t reinvent the wheel. Lichty explains:

“It’s really important not to solve problems that have already been solved. The Internet is a crucial tool for looking for and seeing if a solution already exists. One reason why programming is hard is that it’s hard to estimate whether we should be doing something new or simply reusing what’s already out there. If there’s a stable and reliable solution that already exists, our mission should be to find that solution, rather than create our own.”

Allow for Mistakes.

Blameless postmortems are an important part of DevOps and Agile cultures. This means you view mistakes and errors with a perspective of learning instead of liability. As John Allspaw, Founder of Adaptive Capacity Labs, says,

“Having a Just Culture means that you’re making effort to balance safety and accountability. It means that by investigating mistakes in a way that focuses on the situational aspects of a failure’s mechanism and the decision-making process of individuals proximate to the failure, an organization can come out safer than it would normally be if it had simply punished the actors involved as a remediation.”

Hire for Empathy.

Make sure that the problem you’re solving for addresses the root of the issue, not just the superficial complaint. By building a team of software engineers who are excited about solving problems for customers, you’ll not only be taking care of bugs but building out features and solutions that will facilitate further success for your customers.

The next question is, how do you, as a manager, foster this type of effective learning environment? Stay tuned for more advice from Ron Lichty and the team at PlusPlus, coming soon.

—

Originally published at plusplus.co on October 10, 2018.

How to spin up and scale up learning in your organization

Marko Gargenta — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 04:56:56 +0000

Learning as means to an end

First things first: We are not implementing learning opportunities solely for the sake of learning. Instead, we’re focused on enabling our people to do their best work. This is our promise to them. To that end, learning is a means to removing impediments and helping people have the right skills at the right time so they can get the job done.

Look for problems to solve

Great! Our job is to remove the obstacles and enable our people to do their work. But what are those barriers? There are a couple of ways to find out. You can look at the data but you also need to talk to the people.

The data

Many organizations run periodic pulse surveys where they ask their people general questions about how things are going. These surveys can be an excellent source of information about what is not working. The key is to read all the comments and look for the patterns. That’s where the insights are.

As you read through the comments and begin to notice patterns, categorize them. You’ll notice that the complaints fit into a few buckets, which can be explored more deeply in the next step: employee interviews.

The interviews

Pulse data is no substitute for good old-fashioned conversations with your actual people. By setting up one-on-one interviews and probing with questions, together you can find solutions to the problems your team is facing.

Who should you talk to? Look for a cross-section of various people:

Talk to new hires who recently went through the onboarding experience.
More experienced employees may share their concerns about being interrupted to share their knowledge.
Managers may have a different set of concerns when it comes to enabling their people.
Technical individual contributors will have their own secret wishes and challenges.

Schedule a short 20–30 minute conversation. You want to find out about the main issues they run into on a regular basis. You also want to ask them what the ideal future looks like in terms of learning and working. Not everyone will have a clear idea but it’s important to tap into that brainstorming and get them thinking about their future goals. Once you have established Point A (present) and Point B (idealized future), explore options for moving forward. What is the low-hanging fruit you could take on today?

Involve the experts

Once you understand the problems to be solved, reach out to people who are most likely able to help you solve them. These people may be the subject matter experts or managers of teams that own the problematic issue.

Note: Even if you know the specific person who is most likely to help with the identified obstacle, you will want to reach out to their manager as well. Their manager controls their time or at least their priority list and you’ll need their approval to move forward.

Explain to this person that you’ve identified a problem in the organization that is an impediment to many people doing their best work and you think that a short workshop could help empower people. This is a high impact opportunity that helps others with relevant skills and also lowers the support cost for the team that owns the issue.

Build the one-pager

Now that you have a problem identified and have sold the idea to the expert who can help solve it, you want to build a minimum viable offering to see if it resonates.

In-person workshops tend to be the easiest way to get started. Before you work with the internal expert to create the content, you’ll want to gauge the company interest.

Schedule a short meeting with the expert to create a single page course description. Pick a date about a month in the future and promote the opportunity throughout the company. This timeframe gives you enough leeway to co-create the content with the expert if there proves to be enough demand for the topic.

Great, people are signing up!

It’s time to co-create the workshop with your experts. Some experts will need more hand-holding than others, but don’t worry about polishing the content too much. The goal is to enable others to have the right skills to do their best work. The slides don’t have to be perfect! You can iterate with feedback (more on that in a moment).

Keep the workshop relatively short — about an hour or two. That’s typically enough time to explain a concept that is incremental knowledge. For completely new concepts, people may need a few days to learn the ropes, which you’ll want to break down into smaller segments.

Think of these workshops as an opportunity to whiteboard how a system works or walk the participants through some code examples. This is an effective and easy to kick off a new topic which may spur other discoveries down the road.

Start and Iterate

Now that you’ve done your research, found your expert, and drummed up some interest, give it a try. Keep track of how things are going. Gather feedback. Then double down on successes and eliminate efforts that aren’t resonating with your people.

As always, keep in mind the true goal of these workshops: Enabling your people to do their best work.

Originally published at plusplus.co on October 17, 2018.

A new approach to leadership development

Marko Gargenta — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 21:58:00 +0000

In an ever-changing business environment, leadership development is more important than ever. Victoria Sevilla is responsible for Leadership Development on the Global People Development team at cloud infrastructure and business mobility software company VMware. She describes how her team is changing the way that leadership development is carried out, and the success of their award-winning Genius Maker program.

The Genius Maker program

Many companies do not focus on training for the people manager. There’s emphasis on leadership development for the executive level. There’s emphasis on development for new hires. But the people who are and have been doing most of the work — the Manager, Senior Manager, Director, and Senior Director — are not always the beneficiary of incredible training programs. At VMware, it’s different.

VMware’s Genius Maker program is a two-and-a-half-day training program that focuses entirely on people managers. Managers get skills on managing themselves, their teams, and their brand. It’s an entirely different training experience.

“Genius Maker was named after a concept in Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers,” said Sevilla. It’s about leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the capabilities of the people around them; they hold the space for the brilliance of others and utilize their own native genius in the process.”

Training has traditionally been a top-down, one-way presentation of knowledge and information, and that’s hardly engaging for the participant. The Genius Maker program, however, is much more experiential, with participants moving about and speaking to each other throughout the training.

Sevilla said, “Essentially, we present employees with information on leadership effectiveness and we back it up with evidentiary support through research findings in applied positive psychology, neuroscience, communication theory and leadership effectiveness research in general. We follow Martin Buber’s philosophy of being an unfolder of knowledge rather than an imposer. We say: These are the ‘tools’ that you can use to create and sustain a highly productive and cohesive team. Try them out in the way that’s best for your team.”

Sevilla thinks this open and interactive approach is a significant part of what makes the program so successful. “Individuals will always have different training and development needs, and it’s crucial that they are engaged in understanding the material and take an active lead in applying it to their own situations. This is so much more effective than participants being told that they all have to lead in the exact same way.”

“I don’t think development and training has to be about changing your whole entire mindset and viewpoint in one experience — that’s so overwhelming. It’s about understanding that small steps, small changes in behavior, can make a big impact. Remember, you can win a race by 1/100th of a second. So, you can approach a L&D experience by asking yourself ‘what’s the change you’re going to make, or the one thing that you’re going to implement that will give you that leading edge?’”

A new approach

Sevilla identified three parts of the training:

Manage Yourself — we want people to first become more aware of how to shape their own behaviors, beliefs and thinking to drive greater results, increase influence, and build more trust with others. Gandhi knew that you must first ‘be the change you want to see in the world.’

Manage Your Team — then we focus on the team, and introduce VMware’s key management practices that are connected to our company values.

Manage Your Brand — lastly, we have participants take everything they’ve learned and apply it to the creation of their brand. We use the VIA character strengths assessment to help people find their ‘power zone’ — the place where talents/skills and signature character strengths are used together to fully realize and utilize your native genius.

“We hear people who have been at other strong, wonderful companies tell us, ‘I haven’t had a training this incredible at any company I’ve ever worked at.’ Managers tell us that Genius Maker changed them as a leader, as a manager, as a spouse, and as a person. That’s how deep the changes can go. Why? Because we engage them as individuals — we ask deep questions and we don’t give them right/wrong or canned answers. We let them explore their own answers with others in the room. They run the experience because of their own background. They are the geniuses in the room, and we make sure they feel that right away. We want them to take that feeling back to their teams.”

Leading from every chair

Sevilla further discussed what happened following the introduction of the Genius Maker program. “As the new take on management training took off, we became inundated with requests for whole teams, not just managers, to take the course. Managers wanted their teams to know what they knew. They wanted their teams to share a nomenclature and be armed with the same knowledge that could foster success and well-being. Managers came to realize that their job wasn’t to be a sole source of motivation; their job was to help unlock passion and potential so that their team members could be intrinsically motivated. And we know that is the kind of motivation that has staying power.

“The more our business transformed, the more we needed that ability to be communicatively adaptable. A computer scientist and programmer, named Melvin Conway coined a phrase that is referred to as Conway’s Law in 1967. Basically, Conway’s Law recognizes this truth: organizational structure-and the way people communicate within it-mimics the product. If you want interoperable products, you must have communicably interoperable people. So, let’s increase communication effectiveness through education. Let’s make the tools that can be applied to anyone of any title available to individual contributors. And that’s when I created the individual contributor version of Genius Maker…Original Genius (O.G.). It’s designed for empowerment. We often say that our customers use the power of software to create new possibilities. If this is what we do for our customers- empower them to create new possibilities- let’s do that for our employees through knowledge/tools.

Estee Lauder had that saying, ‘lead from every chair’. Everybody can lead, everyone’s influential in their own way. Sometimes the individual contributor, or the principal engineer — who is not a people manager — is the most influential; the manager is not necessarily always the ‘leader.’ We want to give people the freedom to hold the reigns of their career, while we provide them with the cart, the horse, and a map.”

Going beyond the training program

After people have gone through the Genius Maker course, they are given the option to have four executive coaching sessions, with coaches who have a background in the skills that are taught about managing oneself, one’s team, and one’s brand. The coaches can take the concepts that people have been exposed to and bring in the individual’s goals and expectations. Sevilla said, “It’s as if you’re going from content to context. You’ve just learned this strong and personal content, and then you go back to your desk, stacked high with urgent to-do’s. Coaching allows Genius Maker alums to incorporate the strong learnings into their actual work.

How effective could four hours of coaching be following the two-and-a-half-day training? In the first coaching session, the managers bring up their toughest work challenges and report how they are doing on those challenges. In the fourth and last coaching session, they report that they have improved their progress on their toughest work challenges by over 50% — in just four hours of coaching.
Sevilla summaries the coaching experience is unanimously successful. “People love the deeper dive follow-up coaching gives them. And I think that’s where things are going in L&D programs — high-touch, personal, one-to-one coaching. We know that this approach really helps participants retain the knowledge they gained from the course. We often hear about how excited participants felt during and right after the program, but the real transformation came after, with the coaching.”

After the program, the participants are also encouraged to stay in touch with each other, sustaining the relationships that they have formed in the class.

“Leadership development is vulnerable work. Leadership development is self-development, Sevilla said. Participants are looking at themselves and asking, ‘What can I do better?’ When I look at what people are asking for help on, even the most data-driven people, it’s communication skills, adaptability, and leadership presence; as well as mindfulness, managing stress, how to become responsive and not reactive, and how to manage your personal brand.”

Impressive results

It can be hard to measure the results of these types of programs, and usually such programs would resort to qualitative metrics rather than quantitative data. However, there is certainly evidence that backs up Sevilla and her team’s approach.

In the company’s annual survey, there was a 50% increase in manager effectiveness as rated by employees reporting to a manager who had gone through the Genius Maker program, versus employees with a manager who had not. The alumni of Genius Maker also voted for the program to win a global award.

“The concepts that we introduce in Genius Maker are now being used in other programs throughout our company, and that’s an accomplishment, because now we’re looking at leadership differently,” said Sevilla. “It’s a shift from command-and-control to principle-based organizations, moving from silos to integration with the cultivation of social capital. We’re humbled to have had the impact that we’re hearing this program has, and we hope we can continue to energize people managers. They’re important to us.”

Based on an interview between Victoria Sevilla and Marko Gargenta.
This post originally appeared on PlusPlus Ideas