Schedule

Trust is a challenge – hard to gain, easy to lose. How do we gain trust?

●  By letting go, empowering, and supporting;

●  By being there, walking side-by-side, and getting our hands dirty;

●  By being authentic, real, and honest;

●  By being bold, taking a stand, and standing up for one’s values.

Notice that trust requires an intriguing balance of stepping back and forward at the same time.

True Servant Leadership requires the same – courage to step back “I lead by serving” and the courage to step forward “I serve by leading”.

Yet most leaders misunderstand and misapply servant leadership using only half of the framework.

This talk explores these misunderstandings and helps leaders to better balance their leadership presence.

The idea of a lone developer coding in their basement without social interaction is a thing of the past. These days, technical solutions are often developed by cross-functional teams whose participants have a range of technical experience. Now, more than ever, good communication skills are an essential part of being a software developer.

In this talk, Scott will share immediately actionable communication principles that will help you get buy-in for your ideas, reduce conflict and tension, increase productivity, be liked and respected. If you’re looking to take your career to the next level, this is one talk you won’t want to miss.

“Communication is just as Important as Code” is one of our core values at Corgibytes, a software dev shop exclusively focused on modernizing existing software applications.

At Corgibytes, we eliminate the binary belief that people are “technical” or “non-technical.” Everyone is expected to be both. Folks who come from a computer science background participate in sales calls and help with blog posts, and everyone, no matter their role, is expected to learn how to code.

To preserve a culture of autonomy, motivate our members to do their best work, and enable fluid communication, we have thought extensively about optimizing the balance between asynchronous communication, routine synchronous communication, and even developed our own framework to reduce context switching that allows people the most scheduling flexibility.

Evolutionary design has the power to drastically improve the moment-to-moment work of programmers. Employers want features sooner, which we can do better if we over-invest less in up-front design, waste less time yelling about design decisions in meetings, and reduce individual knowledge bottlenecks. “Traditional” architects or other technical leaders often find themselves in a dilemma: relinquishing control and delegating design decisions opens up the possibility of delivering features sooner, but it also carries significant risks to both external and internal quality. This leads to a class Responsibility Virus struggle, whose resolutions create so much chaos that it’s generally preferable to remain locked in the struggle without a resolution! This impasse puts technical leaders in the difficult position of lobbying against practicing evolutionary design in order to protect the project.

So what can we do?

Many programmers get stuck when they try to learn evolutionary design, particularly the refactoring part of it. It never seems to get easier, it never seems to go faster, and so it always seems safer to rip things apart and write them again. If these programmers refined their refactoring skills, they’d be able to produce better results, work with less stress, and earn the trust of the technical leaders and architects. This could resolve the architect’s dilemma in a beneficial way and unleash the group’s untapped capacity to deliver features while protecting the internal quality of the code. Everyone would seem to win. So… how do we make that happen? This talk presents one plan that just might work.

One of the most compelling definitions of “Responsibility” is the ownership of one’s response to a given situation that implies empowerment, freedom, and choice.

As humans, we go through a series of emotions when confronted with a challenging situation but may not realize how those emotions can paralyze or disempower us. True servant leadership needs us to convert these challenges to opportunities to “serve” our team/division/organization.

This session explores Christopher Avery’s Responsibility Model, global leaders who have leveraged this model unconsciously perhaps, scenario-specific challenges for managers, product owners, scrum masters, individuals, and teams that can be converted to opportunities to get on the path of true Servant Leadership.

The role of the leader changes 180 degrees in the agile organization: Leaders exist to support the “athletes” in the organization, the role of the agile leader is to create the structure and environment to help their athletes realize their potential.

This presentation combines practical experience leading the agile transformation at Africa’s largest bank with simple analogies from the world of marathon running to explain the role of the agile leader, the importance of trust, and what happens when leaders fail their athletes.

The presentation includes three quick leadership “tests” and concludes with a powerful illustration of what servant leadership truly is – and isn’t.

Outcomes:

• Understanding the role and purpose of the agile leader
• Simple techniques for leaders to assess where they are in applying the agile mindset
• Simple techniques to get leaders to apply the agile mindset.

In the early 1960s, America was racing the Soviet Union to the moon. Christopher Kraft was charged with building NASA’s Mission Control in Houston which would eventually shepherd all Apollo missions. How did he do it? We will explore Kraft’s leadership style and tactics… which centered on Trust… not of his controller’s (whose average age was 28) trust in him, but of his absolute trust in them and identify the lessons that still apply today.

Write down those last few thoughts about what you’ve heard this morning. Make notes about some of the people you may have connected with. And don’t forget to grab some lunch.

To help you decompress, we’ve provided links to some American cartoons. These should be safe for work, and may even make you giggle a little.

The key to a learning organization that intrinsically continuously improves is that everyone expects to get better. That is, they are dissatisfied with how things are now – and they know they can do something about it. This requires a two-way bond of trust between leaders and workers, where even when things are going ok they all expect they can do better. How do we build a culture where people feel comfortable with not just raising issues but even stopping work in order to address them? What about when things are going badly, and everyone is stressed? Can people still speak up? How are “complainers” dealt with in your organization?

Does your team have ‘trust issues’? Heroes, anti-heroes, and invisible people are three, common team member types that may set a team up for more ‘learning’ than it is prepared to accept. Tim will share how to leverage heroes while enabling team success.

When the Agile Manifesto was written, user experience (UX) was not a part of that world. What do we do with these folks? How do they fit into our sprints? How do we work with them? This talk will introduce agilists to the principles and aspects of UX that they always want to know but were afraid to ask.

Building trust is a complex, delicate, and time-intensive endeavor. While it is a worthy investment, the reality is that time isn’t usually on our side. So how can we start building a foundation of trust from our first impression? Simple answer: it’s rapport.

You may know what rapport means, but do you know how to build it? Once you’ve built it, do you know how to use it?

Learning Outcomes:

• Explain the difference between Trust and Rapport
• Describe and recognize two rapport-building techniques
• Discuss how to use rapport to influence others

Imagine trying to develop trust only by talking to someone a few minutes a day/week. Now imagine the parallel universe of Mob Programming where servants leaders/coaches work directly with their teams daily. Misunderstandings fade away. Empathy and trust grow rapidly. Join us to not only see it described but also to see mobbing demonstrated live with a real software team.

Patterned after the popular “Eight Stances of a Scrum Master,” this session introduces the eight stances – “mental or emotional positions adopted with respect to something” – of leaders at all levels who want to enable high-performing people, teams, and organizations.