Lead Dev 2016 London: Rebooting culture

• Camille Fournier
• founder @ stealth

see http://theprofoundprogrammer.com/

How to move from a culture of fear to a culture of trust ?

Speed

• Developpers want to release code a lot, deploy faster (at least once a day). Enginneers like to ship.
• Favor autonony over coordination.
• Be impatient (with tasks, not people)

Structure

Learning/Transparency:

• helps you get context quicly
• learning from failure
• learning reviews (go to root causes). Interrogate the structure around failure. Structures are about what to do, not about how to do (otherwise this is micro managing)

Relatedness

The feeling of belonging, of being part of a group.

Expose vulnerability (we are not in a culture of fear). You can fail, go beyond failure and learn. You have to feel safe within a team: admit guilt and move on (do it before it becomes shame).

Do 1 on 1s:

• really important
• don’t do an “all business” 1 on 1
• get to know them as human beings (but you don’t need to become their friends)

Conflict

• Some like it, some fear it.
• Be really specific about a criticism (even without a solution)
• Replace conflict with curiosity. Ask questions (why?) instead of saying “no”.
• If you have boring meeting, you don’t have enough conflicts.
• Empathy is a learnable skill. Feel your feels.