00:00:02

Congratulations, you're a change agent, and all of a sudden you've inherited legacy team. They have interesting technologies and practices. You probably don't understand most of what they're talking about. And you're wondering, am I being punished for something? And I'm here to tell you, yes, it's going to be challenging, but it's also going to be rewarding. In fact, some of my most favorite memories ever are working with those early stage teams as they start their transformational journey. But it could be too much of a good thing and hang in there. Okay, so we have a, a manager that leaves all of a sudden, I in here at this SAP systems engineering team, very German, very old. It dawns on me. I haven't worn, uh, I haven't logged on to the system for more than 10 years. So, uh, first things first, your new team, they're individuals. They're not resources. And as individuals, they have hopes, dreams, fears, ideas, maybe a touch of imposter syndrome. So your, your job is to have one-on-ones very quickly. So about walking one-on-ones, I like these because they're, uh, a way to, uh, breed intimacy. And they're not nearly as intent to sitting, uh, face to face across the, the table

00:01:16

On your walking one-On-ones, it's okay to jot down notes of things that you don't want to forget, but it's not okay to be walking with your phone. Nothing is going to signal to the other person that you don't care what they're talking about more than staring at your screen, you should be trying to seek first to understand. So that's, um, open-ended questions. You know, really having a question in mind, what's working well? What's not working well? What can we do better? What should we start, stop, or continue? What are your ideas to improve things? Just because you have old technology doesn't mean it's necessarily bad.

00:01:54

You should have empathy for the systems that have been built, and you should, uh, really try and understand how that has been put together. PS to B 52 is gonna fly for almost a hundred years when it's done. So as you're being curious, really trying to understand, uh, why the system was built in a certain way and really, um, assume best intent of those architects of your, they were trying to solve the problem that they had in front of them. So you need to establish two-way trust with your team if you want to establish, uh, if you wanna have success. And the fact is, you're gonna have to trust the team before they will trust you. It's just the way it is. And blockchain is not gonna solve that problem for you, unfortunately, <laugh>.

00:02:35

So as you're trusting the crew and you're, uh, really being vulnerable and you're putting yourself out there and you're trying to understand how the crew works, one of the most inspiring examples I have is turn the ship around. And that's exactly what they did in the book, and we've heard it a couple times at this conference. So you should be focusing on outcomes. And that outcome should not be, I need to implement a DevOps stat. That is not the outcome. The outcome should be. I need to learn more about my domain. I want to get a little bit, uh, faster. And in our case, since we're heavily interrupted, we needed to understand how work came in. So you've established some trust with the team, you've tried to understand what they're working on. Now you can set, uh, some ground rules and some reinforcement for what you think needs to happen.

00:03:18

My kid, uh, thinks that mil, uh, multitasking is definitely possible. So except for our friend here, or maybe the MythBusters, I would say to you that knowledge work is fundamentally different from task switching and you can't really think about two different things at the same time. So, uh, we're creatures of habit. One thing that you can do with your, your new team is to challenge the team to work on some new habits together as you're trying to break through and work differently. And I can tell you, you're tying your shoes wrong, and you can talk to me after the conference. So when we talk about habit forming, it's all about cue routine and reward. And really what you want to do is start to, uh, look at those cues differently. And your legacy team probably can't control the cues that they're operating in. And you may have external teams that are breaking the rules and coming in the side door and being rewarded for things.

00:04:04

So luckily we can help expose the work and we wanna expose the work because we wanna see how it comes in, how it is managed, how it's prioritized, and ultimately how it's executed and delivered back to the team. And look how happy they are. They're super happy. Um, in terms of moving forward, you may have to let past sins go and work differently with your, your stakeholders. And so one of those new habits that we need to form is we are not gonna blame other teams. And we're gonna provide open, honest, and reliable feedback to this team so we can all get better together. And your team is an expert at how their systems are put together and how that work needs to be delivered. We want to empower them to experiment. We want them empowered to, uh, to take, uh, small, uh, changes to see if it, uh, delivers to work better. So, uh, focus on outcomes. You've got this. And, uh, be empathetic with your team as as you're moving in a new direction. Thank you.