So thank you, everyone, for joining me. I'm super excited to be talking today and sharing my experience and also learning a little bit of you about yours.As I mentioned, we have a disengagement tool, Manti. It makes the conversation more interactive and let us go back and forth in an interesting way. So hopefully, you can join. There's a link. There's a QR. Okay. This is the agenda. And let's start with the who am I and who made me God, can who made me allowed to speak about this? I started my career, when I was 18 in the Israeli army where I learned how to be a software developer. And after a very intense six months course, I started I took I joined the leadership team, the leadership and instruction team.

So I was leading people since the age of 18. And eight years after, I joined a startup company and again took over a leadership of, two teams. That company was kind enough to move me to help me move to The US, where I am today in New York. Then I got my MBA from Columbia. I joined Google in 2014 where I spent nine years, there and also created these lovely creatures. They are older today than they are in this picture. And about six months ago, I joined Uber where I am an engineering director, for the GR consumer experience. So if you buy groceries or retail through the Uber app, thank you very much for your business and tell me if there are any problems with it. Okay. So the first question we already went through so we can go on.

Did you know that, parents, rank childcare number 16 in pleasurability after exercising, after, housework, after preparing food and many other things? So to me, the the interesting nuance here is that there's what we consider fun, and then there's the other thing that we consider joy. And fun and joy are not the same thing. Joy is what you get out of fulfillment of usually helping people, grow, you know, for kids and also as a manager and maybe other things. But I guess the main point is doing this work is not fun, but it is fulfilling. And if you can't find fulfillment in there, I would discourage you from becoming a parent or becoming a manager because it's gonna be a pretty miserable ride for you and for the others.

So let's start with the story. It was 02/2014. My husband and I, just came back from this is the last part of our honeymoon in Thailand. We started to work on baby number one. And then about two or three months after, the final the happy day came. And I, you know, I had the the, pregnancy test and it showed the plus sign. I'm like, yes. We have a proof of concept. You know, as an engineering leader, feasibility is very important for us. I am capable of conceiving. We call their friends. We call their family. And then at that moment, I realized that everything changed. This was no longer about me. I stopped being the focal point of anything. I was eating, breathing, exercising, resting. Everything was in service of my not yet even born baby. I was trying to maximize their potential. And it's there where the first analogy hit me.

It wasn't about me as a manager and as a parent, it's not about you. It's about them and your success is defined by their success. And if you think that your success is defined by your success, again, you're gonna be you're gonna have a pretty miserable journey. This picture is from my second delivery where I was waiting to get epidural and I was still in contraction. I have consented, because the commutation is important, but it illustrate the kind of sacrifice and suffering, that we have to go to as managers and as parents in order to enable their success. So the framing and the premise for this talk is quarantine and management can and should inform and strengthen one another. Right? We should be able to take tools from one discipline to the other and vice versa. The job is the same.

The job is to make your dependent independent by coaching, by mentoring, by teaching, educating, exercising, practicing, everything that you can. And my claim is that once you define the objective and goals as a parent in the family or as a manager in an organization, then you can unlock more tools for both jobs. And, you know, and there are short goals. I can I can share with you an example of my goal as a parent, took me multiple years to realize that, obviously, this is not an easy thing? I'd I, want my kids to be happy, confident, and have as many options as I can open for them so they can have a choice. And for that, I invest time in praising and letting them and empowering them, letting them cook with me, letting them try things that might make me uncomfortable and sweaty, but it's important for them and for their journey in order to to to to realize what works and what doesn't and to gain confidence as human beings.

Let's go to the night to the first story. I was on a plane. It was, night. We were about to embark on an eleven hour red flight red eye flight, to Israel. The plan was already an hour and a half delayed. My son who was a little bit under two years old, was not feeling well. He was coughing a lot. I was already pregnant with my second kid. And then I was holding my son and he started coughing, coughing, coughing, and then he threw up on me right here, and the debris started going down between, my shirt and my skin. And my first question to you is what how would you react in that situation? Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. So your child throws up on you before an eleven hour flight. What do you do? I'll shoot off the plane, run to the bathroom, comfort baby, scream in despair.

K. We clearly have a runner here. Okay. All of you are much better than I, clearly. For me, but the first thing the first thing that I did was I thought, how could he, baby, do this to me? Right? And as I'm, like, trying to process my shock as if, you know, we're ready for any of this. My husband takes the baby and comfort him. Right? Like, oh, poor baby. You must be suffering a lot, and that's why you throw up. And I I realized my I realized two things. First of all, I have much more empathy to develop. My journey is long. And secondly, I have mistaken my baby to an intentful human being who is in control of their actions, which clearly they were not at that age.

So my question for you is, what is an equivalent management experience here? What is the equivalent situation at work to a baby, who who is not in control? Like, we expect them something and he's not in control. Yeah. And here's the mentee. Sorry. Here are the options. I believe in okay. Yes. Empathy for a second employee, definitely. Yes. K. Fifty fifty. K. Yes. Also, sometimes we're getting unprofessional peers. Definitely unprofessional maybe. Okay. That's great. So so yes. What I realized is that, a as I said, I need to develop my empathy. But, I remember that actually I made the same mistake. I the first time I hired a manager under me at Google, that person had zero managerial experience. I knew they had zero managerial experience. They onboarded the team, they started making contributions, and then I appointed them. I declare you manager, and now I expect you to be my clone.

And that person obviously was not my clone. I had thirteen years of management over him, and I forgot to normalize the expectations to my beginning of the journey. Right? Which was so far away that I would forgot. So we we make these mistakes. We think general employees need to act as seniors. We think, junior managers should behave as directors, etcetera. And this is a very common, pitfall, and I encourage you to, to reset the expectations and remember where were you at the beginning of your journey. The next story. So after, you know, I'm a I'm a feminist and I I my husband and I are equal partners to the extent that we can, and we used to alternate mornings and alternate evening routines. Right? So every other morning, he would wake up. Every other morning, I would put the kids to bed.

And after a few years of doing that and suffering through that, we landed at shifts. I own the morning shift, so I need to, like, feed the kids, dress them, get them out to school, and land them there. And my husband's job is to do bedtime, story time, first, second, and third dinner, and all the excuses that kids come up with in order to avoid going to sleep. So I was already two years into my shift. For two years, I'm taking them, I'm waking them up. I'm telling them what to do. I'm yelling orders, put your socks, put your shoes, take your plate off, etcetera. And I've seen zero to no learnings at all. And my first, question for you, have you ever seen a repeat you know, have you ever repeated the same activity for two years or a long period of time in your eyes and have seen no learnings?

Did this ever happen to you? Okay. I see we have a lot of camaraderie here. So, sorry. Tell me told you the answer. I called my sister in despair, and I'm like, Inbal, I have failed as a parent for two years. I'm doing the same thing, and either I am a fool or my kids are malfunctioning, but I cannot, for the life of me, make them realize what they need to do in the morning even though it's persistent. And, like, every morning is the same, and the activities make sense. In order to leave the house, you do need a jacket. Like, you know, even a three year old knows that, by now. And my sister told me, Chibi, have you thought about the checklist? And I'm like, of course, a checklist. It's a visual thing that the kids can see. They can have a sense of progress, clear, clear priorities and all of that.

I know this works at work. Why wouldn't it work at home? So I went home and excitingly, I created this. I downloaded something from the Internet. I used MSPAN because I'm very bad with, graphic tools. And I created this list. I printed it out, and I'm like, next morning is gonna be amazing. The kids are just gonna go through everything, and it's gonna be, self explanatory because it's pictures. So what do you think? Did it work? And you don't have there's no poll now, so you can shout on chat. K. Everyone is mostly right. Maybe a bit. Right? So ish. What happened is, first, they went to, bring a pencil. Did not account for that. Then between every task, they wanted to stop and check off the thing, which actually made it everything longer. But I did not give up.

What I've done is I tried, you know, I showed persistence. I kept on trying. I collected feedback from them. Some of the order of the list was not right. I tried different versions. This is, I think a summer version when we apply sunscreen. You see on the other side of maybe later your version. So I kept on iterating and trying different things. And eventually, I mean, I can tell you that now the age of eight and 10 and even at seven and nine, I my visitors that stay at my house say that the kids, basically take themselves to school, which is a magic magic experience, but it doesn't happen every day. But there's still learnings here. So my question is which management techniques were employed here? By taking it from, you know, trying to do something for two years then taking it into a checklist. What are the things that I've tried to employ?

And I always forget to open the Mentimeter. So yes. And this is a free form, so you can write whatever it is you want. Can are you writing? Is everyone thinking? Is it locked? Didn't update the cycles. Okay. Sorry, Frankie, and thank you for your feedback. Yes. Repetition, setting expectations. Change management. Sure. Practicing. Yes. Delegation. So moving it from my responsibility for them to be responsible for that. Yes. Making them autonomous. Training. Yep. Close, close feedback loop. Yes. And iterating based on feedback. Yes. All of these are great dancers. So, so yeah. The way I think about it is, the first thing, and I said it before, task visibility and the sense of progress that works that always makes wonders that work and definitely is home. Right? Like, we kind of assume that everyone are in our head.

And if we have clarity in our head, then then the other people have, but it's not usually like that. The second thing, which I think is is is an interesting point, visual communication is a tool that we really have seen in the last years of of my work. People really underutilize it. We talk, we wave hands, we write, but we don't do a great job with visual communication and a picture is worth a thousand words. So I really would encourage you to use more visual communication. You will see that the conversation will become more concrete and more deep. And the last part, which I took from Agile and and Scrum, persistence and adjustment. My rule is to try something three times, then collect the feedback, then change the process if needed or as needed. So yep.

And this is, by the way, this is a board, this is the scrum board that I had at Google. I know even though we have all of the technology tool technological tools, we use the physical board, which was a delight to use because you can always add things very easily and move things around. Okay. The last story. So, many years ago, even before I had a I had a kid, I, read this really, really interesting article called How I Made My 12 Kids Pay for Their Own College. And it was about this guy. I think he works at, General Motors or something. He was like an engineer, and he said, and this is one of the quotes from this article.

He said, a three year old does not clean toilets very well, but by the time he is four, it's a reasonably good job. And the point is that, the point is that we often kinda like ignore opportunities to try to try these things from an early age. And I'm gonna jump to the Mentimeter because I feel like I'm about to tell you the answer, and I want you to think about, you know, what is the analogy of, like, a three year old, starting to clean bathroom so they can get better when they're four year olds. How does this translate to work? And, Frankie, tell me if it does not move to the slide even though I can't do anything except for waiting. Please say no. So what does it remind you? Does it remind you? Internship, training, delegation, collaboration, conflict resolution, incentives, mentorship. K. Yep. Yes. To all of the things. Maybe just a point on delegation while we're making this. The delegation part is, like, if they are cleaning the bathroom, you can do other things.

An employee that does a a job, but maybe 80% as good as you will, enables you to do other jobs that you could not unlock before they were doing that. Yes. Thank you. So here are my kids, at very early ages. On the right, you see my daughter, emptying her, potty after using the potty. And obviously, the beginning there was debris and stuff, but, like, at least she's doing the work and she's learning this is something that she needs to do. I can always clean up after. Here's my son who clogged the bathroom, and now he's unclogging. And I can tell you that since the age of eight, since the age of eight, he unclogs on his own, and we mostly don't have to intervene when when this happens. This is them, helping the nanny do the laundry. It's also very empowering for them because kids wanna be adults and they wanna be helpful and capable.

So, you know, I think we often do this thing where we prevent them. We we don't teach kids and employees. We we prevent others from, learning how to do the activities because it will take us longer and they will do a worse job. But but but, you know, we're basically leaving money on the table because this makes sure that, like, we have to do that work. And then we wake up years after and say, why can't they figure this out? Because we never let them gave them the time to learn how to do that. So in this essence of time, I'm gonna skip this hack it out version. I'm gonna jump to advices. So first, as I said before, this is not about you. It's about them. I think it's key to understanding and having happiness in that job. I strongly believe in happy parent, happy kid.

So spend time, you know, what common mistake that we do is, we sacrifice ourselves and we don't take time to refill our energy tanks, and then we become these bitter either managers or parents. So take time to figure out what makes you happy, and you'll find yourself much happier when you interact with the kids and the kids will be much happier. This is a thankless job. There are rare moments of appreciation, and you have to to do it to do a good job. You have to drive joy and fulfillment from helping others grow and investing in their development. Here are the key takeaways. I did a pre run of this at Uber two days ago, and this was, I think a really, really good summary. So delegate early and often clarity and progress motivate, motivates, visuals matter. I can't stress this point enough and empathy and normalization.

And if you want there, I added links to a really good the first book I quoted was Ultra No Fun, if you wanna read that, and then the article with the 12 kids and the checklist, that you can download. And I'm happy to take any questions through the chat in the time that we have allotted. And thank you for listening, of course.