MARIA: Hello and congratulations.
You are a lead developer, or maybe soon to be.
In most cases, these are the things that you have signed up more.
So, at a technical level, you are expected to provide technical guidance and strategic
direction to your team.
As a manager, you need to make sure your team delivers quality and valuable work, and that
they continue improving and growing.
As a leader, of the business, you should have a good understanding of the business domain
so that you can prioritise successfully and motivate your team.
Yeah!
[Laughter].
It's not an easy feat.
Hopefully, everybody is still here!
Thankfully, we are lucky to be part of an industry overall pretty comfortable sharing
experiences and information so we can learn from each other.
There are incredible incredible resources online.
Plenty of books to read, companies and experts writing blogs and sharing their opinions daily
in Twitter or Facebook.
There are many conferences like this one where communities share their opinions.
The overwhelming amount of information shared can be a curse if we don't manage it properly.
If we could work 24 hours a day, we could manage to take all this in, but hey, there
are other little things like family, friends, hobbies - sleeping - I like to do that - and
exercise that we should also be prioritising.
Trying to absorb all this information, we end up with hundreds of tabs open in our browser
with posts we say we will read, or with dozens of Slack channels we can't stop checking.
All we are doing with these behaviours is constantly reminding ourselves that we are
not up to the job because we can't tick all those boxes or simply keep up.
What is left to do?
Now and then, we freak out, or worse.
If you take it too far, you will burn out trying to take it all in.
Both you and your team will suffer if this happens.
Do we still want to do this?
I do hope so, because, in this position, we can truly become that multiplier that has
a profound impact in the business, our customers, and our colleagues.
We just need a little bit of focus and a little bit of planning.
At work, we use frameworks frame words like OKR, Agile perhaps, to set focus and reflect
progress.
How many of us take time to plan our personal development and career goals?
Oh, my goodness!
Nobody!
Before we get into details, I want to highlight the most important rule: You only your personal
development -- you own your personal development.
Not your company or your manager.
You.
This is the most important thing you can do for your career.
It belongs to you and should be portable.
Don't let it become a box-ticking exercise.
Your manager is there to support you and help you you are uncover paths that you haven't
considered and provide some resources.
A great manager will become an ally and champion or sponsor should you wish to share your plans
with them, but it is not their job to map out your future and ambitions for you.
So let's talk of specification.
I take one day a year to reflect on this.
I make sure to have one whole day of quiet time to write down and think of my goals.
Earlier, this year, my husband took my little boy for the weekend to visit grandparents
to do this.
When I was travelling more for work and didn't want to miss weekends with my family, I used
my nine-hour flight from Washington, DC to work on this.
I used a notebook to write it down.
You only need a pen and paper to do this.
I start the day with a nice cup of tea.
I live in Scotland, after all!
I think about what I really want to achieve and why.
So you might focus on something more immediate like wanting to get better at your new role
and fulfil the requirements of that position.
That was my focus a year and a half ago when I took this new role.
Or you might want to learn a new skill that will open new opportunities for you and your
current company, or another desired employer.
Or maybe you want to make a specific impact on a cause.
Once I'm clear about what I want to achieve, I take stock of my current situation.
To inform what areas I should be focusing on, I look through my role profile, other
role profiles at companies I admire, or gather feedback from either my manager, colleagues,
friends or other people in my network where I respect their opinion.
So, from that list, I choose a limited number of areas I want to improve.
I follow four rules: I try to find the balance between technical, management and business-related
topics.
I make a point to continue working on my strengths, first because I enjoy more, but also because
I enjoy consolidating my position in my area of expertise.
You should also think about those areas that I expected to get better at to fulfil the
expectation of your role.
If you got feedback from your manager you need to improve on something, make sure you
prioritise that as well.
You should also think about time-bound learning opportunities.
That is very important because we could miss out a lot.
For example, my company went recently through an IPO, so I was conscious this was a unique
opportunity for me to learn that won't likely repeat itself often if ever at all.
So I spent a lot of time trying to get the most of that situation.
Once I come up with a list, I score where I am at and where I want to be.
There will be things that don't make it to the list that are important.
You need to delegate or ask for help for those things.
We can't learn all the things at once.
We need to focus on a few things to make progress.
So the next step, once we have that curated list, is thinking carefully about how am I
going to get from here to there, from A to B?
I don't have a lot of spare time, so I try to build learning opportunities as much as
possible in my day-to-day work and commuting time.
How does that look like?
I listen to management, audio books driving to work, one and a half hours every day that
otherwise, wasted.
Or make the time to go to lunch or set up time with colleague.
I catch up with our CFO to find out about the IPO submission document.
You need to learn and build up those relationships.
I take part on reviews of parts of systems I want to learn more about even though I might
not be able to contribute an awful lot.
Or I will invite guests to our company or ask a colleague to talk about something I
want to learn about.
The bonus point there is that everybody in your team will benefit from that as well.
Little by little, you will help build a culture of continuous learning within your team if
you do those things.
I try to schedule and restrict my time in social media or reading blogs, and to me,
that's very important.
Kind of endless amounts of byte-sized information and content-switching from one thing to another
is not conducive to long-term retention of information.
I only follow specific sources and try to focus on recommendations from my network.
Having a group of peers, having that network that is internal at your work or external,
with people you've worked with in the past or want to meet in other industries, is in
valuable for you to continue learning.
I put effort to make that network as diverse as possible because I rely on them to flag
things I should be checking out, and I want to make sure different opinions and experiences
are represented.
That is very important.
So we've gone through all this effort.
Now what?
How do I know this is working?
Every Sunday, I spend 15 minutes looking over the progress I've made through the week and
planning ahead for the following one.
Once a month, I will spend a little bit longer going over my overall goals and priorities
and making sure those are still relevant.
One of the things that has made the biggest difference to me is starting to reflect every
night about my day, just for five minutes.
So I find when I do that, I become more aware and explicit about what I do, and I learn
quicker my mistakes.
This is now something I do with my little boy, Ethan at bedtime after we've read the
stories and switch off the lights.
We talk about what made us happy and sad during the day, and we ask each other what have you
learned today?
It is an amazing way to get him to open up and pay attention to his life and emotions,
and, if you have kids, I really highly recommend you do this with them.
Trust me, you don't want to be the one in those conversations that doesn't have anything
to talk about!
Also, it forces you to explain concepts in an extremely easy way to understand and in
a is the best way for us to learn and internalise those concepts as well.
So, once you start achieving those milestones, don't skip celebrating, okay!
Acknowledging those accomplishments will give you the encouragement needed to continue pushing
yourself and to keep that focus.
So, so summarise: take a day for yourself.
Find your goals and motivations.
Evaluate your strengths and skills.
Prioritise the work to be done, always looking out for opportunities.
Then make learning part of your day-to-day at the same time nurturing colleagues.
Never, never ever forget to celebrate.
We all have different learning styles, but, with a little bit of thought and planning,
you can make sure that you focus on what is more important to you.
That includes finding a way to fit it in with your normal schedule in a sustainable way.
In the last seven years, I've gone from being a first-time manager to lead ing large global
teams, to being part of the team of a company going through a successful IPO, while raising
a family and making the most of my time with them and friends.
Being intentional about what I do makes me feel more in control and gives me permission
to stop worrying irrational ly at all hours of the day.
It gives me confidence and clarity to do my job, and it allows me to free up and enjoy
better that important time with my family and friends.
Thank you.
[Applause].