Alexis Monville from the Red Hat Engineering Leadership team joins me to talk about his experiences leading, developing and changing teams. He’s also the author of a new book: Changing Your Team From The Inside.
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Conversation Highlights
- Alexis helps engineering teams at Red Hat be more efficient in systematic ways
- Alexis’ passion for open source software development and how it ties into his work
- Team members often know something needs to change, but they rarely think it’s them that needs to change
- Teams are often really good at “resisting” so being told to change by an outside party rarely works
- Using “visioning” in retrospectives
- Positive ways to turn retrospective discussions into real change
- The importance of assigning specific owners to a new team processes or responsibilities
- The value of checklists
- How to engage people in games or activities they don’t want to participate in
- The importance of believing in what you are doing as a leader
- The tension between what people want and what they think is possible
- How large a team can be and still effectively change
- The percentage of times large scale change works vs. fails
- Every member of the team is responsible for changing things
- Asking “how?” instead of “why?” leads to more progress
- Addressing the “dysfunctions of teams” in remote (geographically disbursed) contexts
- Helping people come together as a team vs. a “group of individuals”
- Getting personal with each other
- The value of empathy
- Success using empathy maps
- Helps to create a three dimensional avatar or persona
- A very constructive way to draw out disparity across a team’s perspectives
- Waterfall software development
- Our natural inclination to think in terms that are too black and white (polarization)
- Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday and how it relates to changing teams from the inside
- Creating better self-awareness for ourselves
- Not getting in the way of our own progress
- Self-awareness is a very key aspect to initiating change
- Start enacting change now with small experiments
- Alexis’ parting challenge
- Pick one thing
- Start and do something now to invest in yourself or your team
Suggested Books
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
- Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan
- Changing Your Team From The Inside by Alexis Monville
Contact Alexis Monville
- Linkedin: Alexis Monville
- Twitter: @alexismonville
Credits
All songs licensed under Creative Commons
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