K. I'm gonna get started because twenty minutes is going to go pretty quick. It's not you. It's me. That infamous line.I'm sure some of you have had it said to them. Perhaps you've said it to someone else. Have you ever considered it in terms of your teams? What if the team are not the problem when it comes to achieving high performance? What if you're the problem? I'm Lauren Akroyd, and I too have been the problem in the past. So hello, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon from wherever you are. I'm Lauren, an agile coach and currently a managing consultant at Capgemini Invent. I've had various agile delivery roles since 2014. I've been a scrum master, delivery lead, agile coach. I have also been line managing, mentoring, and coaching others for the past eight years. I'm a proud member of the Agile Yorkshire Steering Board.

We are an agile delivery community of practice, and we meet every month in Leeds. Outside of work, I have a six year old son, a very large cat. He's a Maine coon, and I love to garden and collect rare houseplants. My passion is coaching. It's a skill I've been working on for many years and I'll continue for many more years to come. I've delivered coaching training to aspiring coaches, line managers, and leaders as I truly believe coaching is a highly transferable skill. I love helping others to develop too. I hope you can all take something away from my talk today. So what do I actually want to talk to you about? I want to talk to you about how in any lead role, whether that's delivery, product analysis, engineering, or something else, in many cases, our focus is on improving our teams.

How we can change them, how we can experiment with them, how we can make them more efficient whilst delivering more value, and whether you could make a bigger impact by changing that focus. I'd like to understand what different roles we have in the audience today. Please could you share in the chat what your current role is? Got senior SDE. Don't be shy. Partnerships manager. Delivery manager. Hi, Lauren. K. So we've got a variety of roles. Planning manager, CEO and cofounder. Thank you very much for sharing. I personally work in the agile delivery space where we are actively encouraged and recruited to focus on improving the teams we work with. I've reviewed some of the current job descriptions for open delivery roles to see where the focus of these roles would be, and these are some of the requirements asked. Delivery manager, drive continuous improvement in agile processes. Scrum master, foster high performing self organizing team environment, project managers, support development team in staying organized, focused, and efficient.

Nearly every desired skill or attribute I came across focused outwards, the focus being on you improving the functioning of the delivery team. Now in the words of Taylor Swift, it's me. Hi. I'm the problem. It's me. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but have you considered your own ways of working rather than just looking at your team? Yes. You are part of the team. I'm not disputing this. But over the past twelve years, I've seen time and again leaders, delivery professionals, agileists focusing solely on improvements, excuse me, that can be made to their team and also frustration when this doesn't have the desired outcome. What I wanna question is, what would be the impact if you changed your approach? What if instead of putting change upon your teams, you changed your way of working?

What if with a little more self awareness, you can have a bigger impact on your team? Would you consider yourself self aware? What even is self awareness? Doctor Tasha Urich says it's the ability to see ourselves clearly, to understand who we are, how others see us, and how we fit into the world. Self awareness gives us power. This covers the two main categories of self awareness, internal, being able to see ourselves clearly, and then external, being able to understand ourselves from the outside in. I'd like to ask you to take a guess. As a percentage, how many people in uric's research thought they were already self aware? Put a number in the chat, please. 60 to 70. 60. Any more? 40? I get one more guess. Don't be shy. Okay.

The data revealed that about 95 of people believe they are already self aware, but the real number is 12 to 15%. That means on a good day, about 80% of people are lying about themselves to themselves. Good news. Self awareness is a developable skill. Now Eurek does caution that introspection doesn't always improve self awareness, not because it's ineffective, but it isn't done right. You are likely to ask why questions. Research has shown, though, that we simply do not have access to many of the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives that we're searching for. Why questions can be very negative, and they suggest a judgment when asked. Excuse me. Why questions draw us to our limitations. What questions help us see our potential? Therefore, it is better to ask what questions. I've created a self awareness toolkit listing tools and techniques I've personally used to share with you. Self reflection.

One thing to be careful when it comes to self reflection is not to spend too long focusing on the negative. Ulrich's research also showed that this could actually damage self awareness, so do think of positive and proactive actions to drive you forward. The two tools I've suggested are actionable and forward thinking, and I always base my coaching conversations using what questions. You might wanna try Rolf et al's 2,001 reflective model. What? So what? Now what? Sounds simple. Right? But you're asking yourself some very powerful questions. The first step is to consider what. This question could be, what is the problem? What is the situation? What did you learn? What was good and bad? The second step, so what? Some examples of what does this tell me? So what could you have done differently? The third and final step is now what?

Now what do I need to do to improve the situation or problem? Now what might be the impact and my next step? This is the action you're going to take. Another tool for self reflection, especially if you're in the agile space, is the agile coaching p I. It's a free tool from comparative agility where you self assess against agile coaching wheel, and you can track your progress over a period of time. You answer, set survey questions, receive your results, and it includes recommendations too. Feedback is another great way to improve your self awareness. It's great because it helps you to reveal your blind spots. Three sixty degree feedback is probably the one we're all most familiar with, gathering feedback from those around you, subordinates, peers, superiors.

You might actually wanna consider adding in a self assessment here too. It's been my experience though that people struggle to give constructive feedback. So if you're finding that you're receiving superficial feedback or feedback that isn't going to allow you to grow, try capturing it in a different way. Could you ask a line manager to gather it for you? Could you ask for face to face feedback from your team? Could you ask people to complete a form with anonymous feedback? Now the best feedback is actionable, so consider the questions that you're asking too. Don't just ask, what am I doing well? Your questions need to be specific. Example, what went well in my women in tech talk today? What could have made it better for you in the audience if I'd done differently?

New version is to include feedback circles and extends this model to include external parties who interact with individual. Personality and psychometric tests, there are hundreds if you do a quick Google. They'll indicate how you work within a team as well as your strengths and weaknesses. The first two I've listed do have an associated cost. One of the more famous tests is the Melbourne team rules, where there are nine defined team rules. Melbourne states that to build high performing teams, we need to represent each of the nine Melbourne team role behaviors at appropriate times. And that through using Melbourne team roles, it will give you self aware individuals who can adapt their behaviors according to the situation or business need. It's worth considering that your profile is likely to change over time.

So if you've taken it years ago or have been through a period of growth and development, I recommend taking it again. Now 16 personalities is a free tool. I use this in a leadership workshop, and one of our principal engineers actually said that the test knew them better than they knew himself. So definitely worth giving that one a try. It's free. Observations is a way of reviewing your behavior in context, what you actually do rather than what you think you do. Journaling is a tool you can use for this. What are you learning about yourself in a given situation? Do you have any self limiting beliefs? What do you want to change? What positive impact are you having? You do need to make sure you're doing it right to have an impact on your self awareness, so don't focus on the negative like I said before.

But one thing I found interesting is that you don't actually need to do it every day for it to take effect. Self observation might be something you wanna try. Witnessing your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, habits, behaviors. Can you watch back a meeting you participated in or facilitated? Can you run a retrospective on yourself? I'd love to challenge you all here to choose one of the tools I've shared that you will give a go tomorrow. Is there any that stand out to anyone that you think you'd like to give a go? The sweet spot for developing self awareness is internal insight plus external feedback plus observable behavior. So I've listed out the methods, what it tells you, but also importantly, the risk if you use it alone. So make sure you add all the elements together.

Over the past twelve years, I've worked with in line managed delivery professionals and have observed many of the same traits. This extends to those in senior and leadership roles that interact with delivery teams too. I spent time coaching scrum masters, delivery managers, and leaders to consider their approach. Who here is presented with a problem by a team member, line report, a colleague, maybe even a friend outside of work, and you immediately respond with fix it mode. I can solve your problem for you even though you didn't ask me to. You see something not working quite right, so you offer a solution even when you haven't been asked for one. You struggle with the silence in meetings, and you offer an opinion just to fill the space. Have you considered that maybe that's a problem? Please stop it.

Often, people raise problems when they already have a solution in mind. They just want validation or a sounding board. By you filling that space with your own solutions, you take away their autonomy and their power. Instead, give the other person space. As you develop your self awareness, I imagine you will observe yourself displaying some, if not all, of these traits. Even now, I imagine you're considering when you've done this right now as I'm speaking. I've displayed every single one. And as someone with ADHD, silence is often so painful to me. I think as a woman, we're also, you know, under pressure to speak, to show our value, and justify being in the room. However, silence often speaks louder.

Don't just speak for the sake of speaking. I've coached many a tech lead on this, and I'm often sent Slack messages saying, Lauren, I'm counting down to 10 before I speak. So the next time you're struggling with silence, try counting in your head. I bet you'll actually be surprised how little time has passed before you start to feel uncomfortable. When we're busy focusing on a solution as someone is telling us their problem, I guarantee you are not actually listening to what you're being told. There are three levels of listening as defined by Whitworth et al. Level one is internal listening. At this level, you're focused on yourself within a conversation, interpreting what you're hearing as to how it affects you. Level two, focused listening.

This level, you are conscious of what's happening in the speaker, repeating back, using speaker's language, asking clarifying questions. You are connected. Level three is global listening. At this level, you are still connected with the speaker, but you're aware of what's happening around you both. Some examples are speakers' tone of voice, facial expressions. Sometimes when I ask a spicy question, eyebrows get raised or crossed arms, comes as a defensive body language. We want to get to the position of level three. I'd like you to think of a recent conversation, maybe work or personal. Do you have conversation where you're mostly, a, listening to understand, or, b, waiting for your turn to speak? Pop it in the chat, a or b. A, Diana, well done. Carrie, well done. If you were b, there's no shame in that. What was distracting your listening? Yes, Diana. It is really hard.

It's very hard to do. Now if we're in person, I'd have you try an exercise to bring this to life. I have run this with teams and with leadership. It's a great way to highlight how unusual it is to be truly listened to and how hard it is to truly listen. Have you worked in pairs? Person a speaks to person b about a topic such as their first holiday. Person b, not allowed to speak. You give them two minutes for this exercise. When it's finished, ask them how long they thought the activity was. Ask them who struggled to keep quiet, who struggled to speak for two minutes without being interrupted. You could also try asking how and what questions. See how many you can ask before the other person gets curious. How and what questions force you to stay curious and not jump to conclusions. Avoid those why questions. Stay in the what.

It's my belief that to be successful, we need to have a growth mindset. I also believe to have a growth mindset, you need to be self aware. Growth mindset is defined by the Harvard Business Review as individuals who believe their talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and input from others. They attempt to achieve more than those with a fixed mindset because they worry less about looking smart and put more energy into learning. When a tight companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed, and they receive greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation. Now at the start of this talk, I shared some of the requirements on open job adverts for delivery managers, scrum masters, and project managers. I asked Copilot to find job adverts for these roles in The UK that asked for a growth mindset. It found one role.

Not a single role was found to mention self awareness. If you're willing to learn something new and adapt your approach, then you have a growth mindset. Becoming self aware is and identifying areas for growth is so important. This is the reason I'm always looking for team members who have a strong growth mindset, especially when I'm hiring. I list it in the job description, and one of my favorite interview questions is, what are you currently learning? Investing in yourself is only going to help those around you too, so make the time to do it. I also said at the start, I believe changing your focus could have a greater impact on your teams.

To have self aware teams who are more effective, they need a leader to model the way. I believe that is your role. If you are able to identify any self limiting beliefs and how your behavior impacts others, you can make changes to your approach, which should have a positive impact on your teams, whether this is by giving them their autonomy that you didn't realize you're taking from them, by increasing their psychological safety that you didn't realize was hindered, or giving them the opportunity to offer solutions to a process without you doing it for them.

Help give your team their power. If you leave today and decide to invest time in increasing your self awareness, try approaching things differently.