STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Test Leadership
Wednesday, April 28
Achievement Unlocked: How Gamification Drives Organizational Culture Change
Do you track your steps each day to see if you can hit your goal? Do you count the number of “Likes” associated with a recent LinkedIn post and compare it to others? Or do you just keep track of how many tasks you moved to done on your personal Kanban Board? These are all examples of games we use in our daily lives to influence and change our behaviors (both consciously and subconsciously). If we use games to influence how we think and act as individuals, why not use games to influence how we think and act as organizations? This interactive session explores how gamification in the...
The F Word: Great Feedback in Dev Teams
After presenting my session “Eight Ways to Ruin Your 1-on-1s” at Stareast and SQuADCon in 2019, attendees told me one particular area of discussion needed more attention: feedback. This session will be the session everyone knows they should attend but would like to avoid! Providing feedback is a necessary skill for individuals, teams, and organizations to grow, yet studies suggest 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees and 37% of business leaders are afraid to give performance feedback. Although these numbers only address managers, we all need to show...
Psychological Safety: Bad News Does Not Smell Good with Time!
We have lived through the traditional Command and Control culture where leaders used to “shoot the messenger”. Leaders would say, “Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions!”. If leaders cannot handle the truth nobody will tell them the truth. High-Performance Teams build complex business solutions with high quality. Most often they are successful on their first try but sometimes they need to learn from experimentation. In these cases, it is better to deliver bad news than bad product. For team members to share bad news they must feel safe to share reality. If Organizational Culture does...