Elisabeth Hendrickson

Hi, my name's Elisabeth Hendrickson, and welcome to my office.

This is a little bit weird. Usually, instead of talking into a camera alone and hoping that my neighbor's leaf blowers don't go off, I would be in the same room with you, and I would be able to see you, and you would be able to see each other. But what about 2020 hasn't been weird?

So it occurred to me, though, as I was preparing this talk, that maybe this actually works out just as well. Because this particular topic about power and authority and influence, it's a very personal topic. And so maybe it's just as well that it's just us here.

Before we start, let me acknowledge that you're not going to remember any of the words that I use, and that's fine. But if I'm very lucky, you are going to remember how I made you feel. So, to that end, I have a hope.

Here's my hope. My hope is that by the end of this talk, you're going to feel like you have a sense of agency. That regardless of the position you hold, regardless of your title, regardless of whatever formal authority you may or may not have in your organization, that you are going to feel like you can be a catalyst for change. Because you can.

Every day that you show up at work, regardless of your title, you are a leader. Just by showing up and the way that you engage at work, you are leading people. Even if you don't know it, even if you don't realize it. And I'm hoping that you will learn how to tap into that.

So, this topic, let's talk about it. What does it mean? What does it even mean that influence is more important than authority?

So I remember early in my career being very frustrated with the leadership at the time, actually in more than one organization. "Hey, if I am so new in my career and I can see all these things that are messed up, where is my leadership? Why aren't they stepping in to fix this? They're the ones who have the power. They could fix this if they would just step in. Where are they?"

But then as I grew in my responsibilities and stepped into larger roles, I realized that it's not that simple. And ultimately, as an executive, I had all of the power and authority that anybody should theoretically need. I had budget authority. I could hire people. I had the ability to set policy, to determine what would get somebody promoted, and to reorganize my group, so all of the authority that I might need.

And yet, I realized that the skills that I was using every day to affect change in my organization, yes, all those things were levers, but they were not the things that caused change. And I remember listening to an executive who was frustrated in his organization. "I told them what to do," he said, "but they're not doing it." Well, yeah, because it doesn't work that way.

So the way influence works is every single day you are engaging to win hearts and minds. And that is the set of skills that you have the ability to use even if you don't have all of those levers that go with authority.

So it is important to acknowledge that authority brings with it a greater set of levers that you can tweak. You could promote somebody or fire somebody, but those are just levers, and what you do with them is what matters. And you have levers that you can use regardless of your level or title, even if you have zero budget, there are things that you can do. So we're going to talk about that today.

There are five things that we're going to talk about. The first is feeding the stuff that you want to see grow in your organizations. The second is how to make the problem that you see so clearly that you want to solve, make that visible. The third is using your ability to set an example, to be the change that you want to see in the organization. We're going to talk about amplifying other people's voices. And then finally, we are going to talk about having difficult conversations because that is ultimately at the heart of a lot of change that needs to happen.

So what kind of change might you be aiming for? You might be aiming to implement some of the ideas that you get from this conference. You might be a developer who's trying to convince other developers to invest more in unit testing or to fix those flaky tests. You might be trying to tighten feedback cycles, and you might be trying to figure out how to get your leadership to stop over-committing the team. Whatever kind of change it is that you want to make, you can apply these five techniques.

01Feed That Which You Want to See Grow

So let's start by talking about feeding that which you want to see grow. It was a revelation to me when I realized that positive feedback in an organization is actually a more powerful force for change than criticism. So instead of trying to extinguish the stuff that you don't want, just feeding the stuff that you do want, it will eventually crowd out the stuff that you don't want. And I'll give you a concrete example from a time when I was a leader, and I did have levers available at my disposal.

But I was trying to grow collaboration within a group. Historically, the group had been very individualistic. Developers were rewarded for their individual contributions, and collaboration wasn't nearly as important for getting promoted as proving your brilliance.

I wanted to bring in a culture where the team was the agent of work, teams collectively owned responsibility for outcomes, and everyone on the team would have each other's backs and collectively figure out how to work together. A much more collaborative kind of environment. That is a very difficult transition to make.

Now, I was stepping in in a leadership role, and as it happens, this never happens by the way, finance came to me and said, "We have money left over. How would you like to spend it?" And this is why I say this never happens. Finance never shows up at your doorstep and says, "Here, have some money."

It was a small enough amount that it wasn't going to be life-changing to anybody, but it was a large enough amount that I was able to set up a little bonus program. And instead of my personally going around and rewarding people who I personally perceived as being collaborative, which is fraught with any number of dangers. If I had wanted to do that, that was a terrible idea.

Instead, I invited everyone in the organization to submit their nominations for their colleagues who they believed had gone above and beyond in collaborating and being collaborative. And I got such heartwarming stories. So with the nomination, you gave a name, but then you also had to tell a story. And the stories I got were just wonderful. They were all about people who had taken one for the team, who had gone above and beyond.

And so what I did with those stories was, I chose the winners who were getting a bonus, and then I made that public. I told the stories of great examples of going above and beyond. And, in doing so, I was using that lever that I had to give bonuses to its absolute maximum effectiveness because not only did people get rewarded for the behavior that I wanted to see happen over and over and over again in this organization, I telegraphed to everyone else, both through the nomination process and through the way that I announced the winners, telegraphed that I, as a relatively new leader coming into this organization, that I valued collaboration and that people would be rewarded for collaboration.

So as you think about feeding that which you want to see grow, finding ways to give positive feedback is a really good way of doing that. You don't have to have a budget, though. Dale Emery tweeted not that long ago about how, after he had spent time and effort to create good commit messages, how when a colleague recognized him and appreciated him for his really clear commit messages, it made him want to write more good, clear commit messages. So just the simple act of expressing appreciation to a colleague can be enough to feed the thing that you want to see grow.

02Make Problems Visible

All right. Number two, let's talk about making problems visible. So you look around your organization and you see problems, and you wonder, "Why does nobody else see this thing?"

Visibility is not something that I would expect anyone who is listening to this video to be unfamiliar with. Chances are you have a CI system that gives you a dashboard, or maybe you've got an operations system where you can see what's going on. So visibility is a very common thing.

The thing, though, that can be really interesting is how do you create visibility around problems? Now, my favorite story about this, I originally read it in "Switch" by Chip and Dan Heath. It's the story of how John Stegner started a billion-dollar savings initiative by dumping a bunch of gloves on a table. The story is told in more detail in the book "Heart of Change," where there's a little wonderful sidebar by John Stegner himself.

So at the time of this, he had come into a large manufacturing company, and one that was fairly decentralized. There wasn't a central purchasing initiative. Each factory got to do their own purchasing. And just as one simple example of a place where John saw inefficiency in the purchasing system, every factory had their own suppliers, their own vendors for gloves, something that there were a lot of.

So he got a student to go around and get a sample of every single one of those 424 styles and types of gloves from across all of the different divisions. And then he booked a conference room and took all of those gloves with the price tags stapled to them and dumped them all out on the table. And then he invited in the division presidents to look.

And of course, they saw the gloves that were used in their factory alongside gloves that were used in another factory where they looked identical but had wildly different prices. And they were on board with the changes that John wanted to make with respect to centralizing purchasing in order to be more efficient. They weren't before that. Before that, they would've said, "We don't have a problem that needs to be solved."

So one of my favorite questions to ask as I am trying to work through problems in an organization is, what is my equivalent of a box of gloves that I could dump on the table?

So let's bring that back to software, and I'll give you an example from when we were struggling to ship software. We were also struggling with flaky tests. And we had some controversy within the group. Some people just really didn't feel like the flaky tests were a big deal. "What's the big deal?" they said. "You just kick it again, and it'll be fine."

Now, the big, hairy problem, though, that we all acknowledged was that we were struggling with long feedback cycles and difficulty in shipping software. So at the time, I want you to imagine that we're all gathered in my office around a whiteboard, and I wrote up on my whiteboard the cycle time. We knew that the cycle time for getting a change out was somewhere between an hour and a week. There were actually cases where we struggled to get a build that passed all the tests for weeks on end. But in general, somewhere between an hour and a week. That is a huge span.

So I asked questions, and then collectively, we wrote up and diagramed on the board all the steps to get from change: is this good enough to ship? Change has to go through all these steps. The qualification tests, and those weren't that big a deal, five to 10 minutes. The functional tests, those, it turns out, could take 10 to 30 minutes, give or take. The environment tests, now this is where we did the fan-out, and this is for shipping software, not for software as a service, and so we had to test across a wide variety of different environments. And it turned out that it could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 48 hours for that to complete or utterly fail out. And the difference in time was in large part because we had some constraints on environments. There were some that we just couldn't spin up as many as we wanted to, so there was a lock mechanism, and the build had to acquire a lock for that environment before the tests could run. And that could take time waiting for that lock. And then finally, upgrade tests, those weren't that big a deal.

And so we look at those two sections in the middle, though, where we've got a fair bit of variability. Huh, that's interesting. Now, of course, whenever it failed out, we ended up all the way back at start. And that meant that it wasn't just how long does it take to go through once, but how long does it take then to go back and through again, or back and fix the problem that was found and go through again.

And it turned out, for the most part, when we analyzed, well, why does it fail? Why do we end up having to go through this loop multiple times? The biggest culprit wasn't bugs. Here's what we found out. The biggest culprit for the environment tests was contention in those environments, as I mentioned, and flakes. And the biggest culprit for functional tests, flakes.

So where we had had all of this controversy in the group about was it important to fix the flakes, and it turns out the answer is yes. And now we could see why. We could see that the reason that we were struggling to ship, the primary driver of that was flakes that caused us to have to go through this incredibly painful loop multiple times.

Worse, it turned out, and we could now see, if you were in the context, you would have the context to be able to tell that the fact that flakes caused us to have to go through the loop multiple times actually multiplied the problem with contention, because now we had to do more test runs on a very limited resource, that set of environments.

So now we could tackle the real problem because people could see it, and we got buy-in for fixing flakes and for taking fairly, I'll say, draconian stances around not just kicking the build again, but instead kicking the problem back to the team that owned whatever test was causing the false failures.

So that was visualizing, making a problem visible. Now let's talk about setting an example.

03Set an Example

So we're on the third thing that you can do to influence change. And when we look at setting an example, frankly, you set an example every day you walk into the office. Or sorry, these days, every day you show up on Zoom or Slack or whatever. Just by showing up, you set an example in how you engage with the rest of the organization.

It turns out that if there are things that you want to be true in the organization, if you think carefully about how you show up, you will find opportunities to really be the change that you want to see in the organization.

I'll give you an example from my own personal history that was not something that I actually intended to drive through the organization, but it certainly gave me an awareness of the power of demonstrating behavior. So I was invited to a meeting. It was a meeting of many people, kind of like this one. And I got the invitation, and I wondered, "Should I go?"

At the time, my role was a leadership role in the organization, and here was my concern. If I didn't go, was I saying that I didn't think this was an important topic? I didn't want to do that. It was actually a very important topic. So even though I had misgivings about whether or not I was the right person to be in the room, I went.

But as they were setting the context in the meeting and talking about the agenda and talking about what the meeting was supposed to accomplish, I realized it was actually a very bad thing for me to be there. Because the work that needed to be done, the right people were already in the room. They were the people closest to the work, closest to the decisions that needed to get made. And if I weighed in with an opinion, it could sway the meeting because of my level of authority in the organization. But I wasn't close enough to the work to have valid opinions about that. So I would have to just stay silent the entire time, and this didn't seem like it was good for anybody.

So when they finished the introductions, I stuck my hand up and I said, "I feel like this is a very, very important meeting. I am really glad that you are having this meeting. I also really feel like it's not the right thing for me to stay, and I'm going to invoke the law of mobility from Open Space that says, if you can neither give value in a space, in a session, or get value, then not only do you have the right to go somewhere else, you have the responsibility to go somewhere where you can give value, get value, or both." And so I explained all of that, and then I got up and left.

And as I was closing the door, somebody else was actually, she stopped the door, and she came out right after me on my heels, and she said, "That was amazing." And I was feeling really nervous. Did I telegraph that I didn't care? Because I cared. I cared deeply. I wanted that meeting to happen, just didn't want it to be with me. And she said, "That was brilliant. I never realized that I could do that."

So I had been thinking about showing and telling in terms of showing up to this meeting to show that I cared, and what this person helped me understand was the choice that I made to leave the meeting actually gave her permission to do something that she thought was the right thing for her. She also, in that meeting, invoked the law of mobility. The meeting happened, the right people were in the room, decisions got made at the right level, and it was a really important lesson for me and I think for the other people involved in that meeting.

So as you think about how you show up in your organization every day, think about how you can set an example for others, in terms of the behavior that you want others to bring to the table.

04Amplify Someone Else's Voice

All right. Number four, amplifying someone else's voice.

Now, to be a good ally, certainly, if you're in a meeting and somebody gets talked over, one of the techniques for being a good ally is to bring attention back to that person, and make sure that not only does their point get made, but that they get credit for their point.

This can also be an incredibly powerful technique for helping to ensure that it's not just your voice. So let's say that you are striving to make a change in the culture with respect to the way that the engineers think about unit testing or feedback cycles or something, and somebody makes an important point. If you feel like that point didn't get heard loudly enough, it's a totally valid thing to say, "Hey, Cody, you made a great point. Could you say that again? I want to make sure everybody hears that point."

And so amplifying that person's voice will ensure that you now have an ally in the change that you're trying to make, that other people hear the message from more than just you.

You can also do this in other ways. If you happen to have authority in the organization, like I did at one point when there was someone who was pulling in all the right directions, and I had the ability to put them into a position where they had a little bit more formal authority to drive things in the direction that we both wanted the organization to go. So if you happen to have formal authority in an organization, you can make sure that you are amplifying voices that are pulling in the direction that you want them to grow. This is a little bit like feeding that which you want to see grow, but find opportunities to create space for others' voices that are pulling in the same direction that you want to go. So hand them the microphone.

05Have Difficult Conversations

Finally, having that difficult conversation.

Throughout your career, you are going to end up having super awkward, difficult conversations because, well, let's be honest, work is made up of people, and people are hard. And I'm a people, so I'm hard, too. Having the difficult conversation means being willing to take a chance and have the courage, and I'll give you an example of when I screwed up as a leader.

I was struggling to figure out how to ensure that a team was focused on not necessarily so much the what they were working on, but how we were getting that work done, making sure that we were attending to all of the things that don't show up in a story card, things around quality. And so I had adopted a very terrible habit. I ended up showing up at standup a few times, too, thinking that this was about coordinating. It wasn't about coordinating, but thinking that it was about coordinating, I would show up at standup and throw out my things that I wanted people to be paying attention to throughout the day as they were doing their work.

And this really bothered some of the engineers, rightly so. They were right. And one of them in particular took me to task in standup, after this had happened a couple of times, said, "Elisabeth, can we talk right after this?" And I am so grateful to Abhi for having the courage to call me out on my behavior in front of other people. But then he and I sat down privately to talk through.

He expressed his concerns about the way that I was engaging the team. I expressed my concerns about what I was trying to do, and together we were able to negotiate some working agreements around how we could both get our concerns met. And again, it took such courage for him to do this, but it was so important, and he was so right. So there may be times when it's going to be the right thing for you to do, to find a way to call out your leadership for doing something that is distracting or disruptive.

As you think about having these difficult conversations, one of the things I used to say about myself is that I'm not nice. And then people would say, "Oh, yes you are. You're very nice." No, I'm not. I try very hard to be kind. And when I was saying this, Kim Scott's book hadn't even been published yet, but now that it has, I will just point out that Kim Scott says this way better than I did. She talks about these two dimensions of whether or not you care and whether or not you're willing to challenge directly. And so when I said I wasn't nice, what I really meant was that I'm not on the left side of these quadrants.

I am willing to challenge people directly, and I try very hard to be kind, to be in the upper right quadrant, where I am demonstrating that I care personally about the person that I am having this conversation with. It is absolutely possible to be kind and direct. It is also possible to be obnoxious, so try not to do that.

The key thing is if you're demonstrating that you care about the person, and it especially helps if you have developed that trust relationship. And I will also say that if you're willing to go out on a limb and have a conversation like this, and show that you care personally, that can help build that trust relationship. Abhi's and my relationship was far stronger after that conversation than before.

Now, I ended up developing some handy phrases for hard conversations, and I have to give credit to Matthew Coker because he's the reason I wrote them down at all. He and I were dealing with some organizational stuff at the time, and we were talking about how to have hard conversations. And I just started spewing phrases at him like, "Well, here's how I try to frame that conversation. Help me understand, and da, da, da." And as we discussed, I ended up writing this all down, and he's the one who actually took this picture, so that this list still persists.

But as you think about framing a hard conversation, these are handy cheat phrases that you can use. And again, you want to use them in a genuine, not manipulative kind of way. But help me understand. Help me understand your perspective. What is the problem that you're trying to solve? Here's the problem that I'm trying to solve. Oh, you have suggested this solution. Here is my concern with this solution. It violates this constraint or whatever. Let's reframe. Maybe there is a perspective from which both of us are right, both of our perspectives make sense. Here's what I heard you say. Let me reflect back to you what I think I heard you say, because maybe we are having a conflict because we're actually not communicating at all. And then most importantly of all, it's not about assessing blame. As I'm sure this community is well aware, it's all about what we're going to do differently moving forward after we have had this hard conversation.

06Closing

As you do all of these things, it's so important that you not be motivated by avoidance of things that you are afraid of. So I like to say fear is a lousy compass. Frank Herbert would say fear is the mind killer. But the key thing here is that you don't want to run away from the stuff that you are afraid of. Instead, focus on running towards what it is that you want.

If you focus on an intention, you are much more likely to get there. If you focus on avoiding the thing you're afraid of, you're much more likely to be all over the place.

And one of my early managers, Matthew McClure, taught me this very important concept, which is that the intelligence of an organization is a function of the number of connections in that organization. So as you go out and make friends and recruit allies, you are not just helping to move forward the change that you want to see happen, you are also making your organization more intelligent. So go make friends.

It may seem overwhelming, whatever change it is that you want to have happen. And so if you can find even just one tiny thing to move the needle a little bit, maybe it's writing that email to your leadership to try to get funding for a thing. Maybe it's convening that meeting to talk about your flaky tests or long feedback cycles or whatever it is. Take that first step, and then you're going to see the ripple effect.

So as you go forth and you find your ability to affect change in your organization, then there is something very important I want you to remember, which is that you have agency. You can do it. Thank you.