Hi, everyone. My name is Ajala Mariah Poku. I am a senior software engineer and assistant program manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. And tonight we're going to talk about building high performance teams and accelerating innovation.So what I will walk through is I'm gonna touch on the components of a high performance team. But what I want you to walk away with at the end of this is a way to feel empowered, talking about diversity and incorporating it onto your projects at your organization so that you can realize high performing teams as well. A little bit about me. I have a bachelor's in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. I've also got a master's in comp sci as well as engineering management from Johns Hopkins University for my career. I've got a little over a decade in full stack software engineering, both web and mobile development.

I've got project management experience and I very recently have started in the world of uh program management as far as my involvement with diversity and inclusion. Uh My uh involvement has formalized within the past five years. I've been involved at the sector level at my organization uh leading uh a lot of the intern coordinating efforts. And within my group, I have been the intern hiring manager for about five years as well. So we're gonna go ahead and get started the makings of high performance teams. I really like this graphic because it shows the layered aspect of having a high performance team. I'm gonna use this graphic and I want you to also uh note the colors because I try to map them throughout some of the other slides to show how everything ties together. But at the core, there's a concept of psychological safety around that is diversity and around that is innovation. And then if you get everything right, you can have uh the makings of a very high performing team. So we're gonna walk through the concepts uh one by one and then bring them all together. So for high performance teams, that's a group of people with a specific roles, they complement each other, they tend to be aligned with a common purpose.

And when they work, they're consistently showing very high levels of collaboration and innovation and they're producing superior results. What does it feel like or look like when you have a high performance team? If you have been on one, you're very lucky. Uh It is like nothing else uh that if you were to compare it to just being on a team that just operates in a normal fashion, but what you'll tend to see is participative leadership, decision making is very effective. Communication is open and clear. You can feel that diversity is valued, there's mutual trust and conflicts are managed efficiently. There are very clear goals, people know their roles and responsibilities and the atmosphere is just overly very positive. I've highlighted some of the terms orange, those are the ones that tend to fall in the psychological safety category. We'll talk on those in just a little bit. Um And then you can see uh diversity is keyed out in green as well. Innovation. That is what we're striving for uh as part of this process of having a high performance team. This is a buzzword. People tend to have a lot of their own definitions, which is fine. But if you distill it down to the core uh essence, it's basically a new method product or idea. And you'll tend to see that there's a focus on newness improvement and broad reach. You're having really big impact for psychological safety.

This is a state where humans where we feel safe and protected. And when we're in a state like that, we're able to perform at our best, you'll tend to see that there's a lot of trust, mutual respect and interest in each other as humans. We're, we're talking to each other as individuals, not just employee I DS and somebody that you're tasking to take care of something for you. You're really interested on uh interacting on a human level researcher out in Stanford, Doctor De La Zona, she has come up with a framework called the Five CS to help you create a psychologically safe environment. Um So there's choice which is how you uh choose to respond thoughtfully rather than reacting with knee jerk uh in knee jerk ways that make people feel uncomfortable. Uh co elevating having a team mindset, you're always rewarding a collective success behavior. Curiosity is focusing more on solution than blame when you encounter conflict and having courage. That's where you're able to be vulnerable, transparent and honest. Uh You don't always have to know everything. Uh And your team will really respect and value leaders who are able to uh show their transparency and vulnerability. And then lastly is this notion of commitment and that's having discipline and an intention to create a psychologically safe environment.

Diversity is something that a lot of us were very intimately familiar with. Uh We, we typically talk about race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, but there are many other aspects of diversity that are important to incorporate into a project team. Uh There are things like one's education where they live um in organism. What is their job function? What is their seniority and then even their worldview, what is their outlook on life? The benefits go without saying you get varied perspectives, you have better problem solving and you have larger reach as you're incorporating all of these different facets of diversity, you're able to relate with more and more people. So what happens when you bring all of this together?

Um A researcher out in Harvard, Doctor Amy Edmondson, she and her team came up with a way to uh show, show all this information. If you look on the X axis at diversity and on the Y axis, psychological safety, you can start to play around with these concepts when you don't have a lot of diversity and you don't have a safe environment, you tend to have the same ideas and people don't feel comfortable offering up anything new.

So you end up with a lot of groupthink if you have more diversity, but you still don't have a safe environment. People probably have a lot of great ideas but they don't feel comfortable sharing them. So you have a lot of self censor censorship. You wanna be in that upper right quadrant where you have a lot of diversity and a very safe environment. That is where the magic happens. You start to have really nice performance zone and you will start to innovate in uh more and more ways. So I bring back that graphic of the uh the Concentric Rings and, and here you can see psychological safety at the center around that is diversity. And depending on how you work that your innovation abilities will grow. And uh if you get it, all right, you're going to end up with a high performing team. So how do you make this applicable to what you might be encountering in your own or organization. I wanna circle back to project management and I want to apply these concepts to the phases of any project life cycle. So at initiation um planning execution and close out at any one of those phases, you definitely should be applying those five CS to uh achieve a psychologically safe environment.

And then when it comes to diversity, if you wanna have a compass and distill it down to one key thing that you wanna do um at the initiation stage, you certainly want to value diversity at the planning stage. Be intentional about diversity at the execution stage, leverage that diversity that you hopefully planned in uh into your project. And then at close out, you want to celebrate diversity. This is where you're able to have a feedback loop and share with others what the benefits of having a diversity on your team is all about. And from that, they can learn and start to apply these concepts as well too. So the case study that I would like to use, so you can see how we did it on one of our projects is a project called Thread aware. And uh that is something that uh I was a co-lead of last year with our sector's chief of staff. And our challenge was we have about 1000 staff and a very multidisciplinary sector. We've got engineers, mathematicians, scientists, very stem heavy and uh we were tasked or challenged to influence these staff to become more threat, aware, more innovative and collaborative around the threat and the organization in which I work threats like cyber attacks, um nation states that are trying to influence our political elections with fake news, climate change.

Those are all things that we are constantly thinking about. So our, our leadership wanted uh staff to be more aware of these types of threats as we come up with innovations, uh We were also challenged to leverage an existing machine learning platform that a lot of money had been invested in two years prior. Uh And we've received an initial 250 K funding in one year to execute our sector head. Uh aligned this effort to one of her annual strategic goals. So this was a fairly uh highly visible effort and we certainly wanted to be successful um in achieving uh our, our, our missions. So you'll see a blue diagram. I'm gonna use that graphic through the next few slides as we move through the different phases, I'll highlight where we are with pink. So, you know, where we are. So at the initiation stage, um what we did, uh our commitment for creating a psychologically safe environment was we knew we were going to have an unwavering strategy to build a balanced team both from the diversity aspect, as well as the expertise going into this.

We knew that our stakeholders had different approaches. We had to make sure that we uh had transparent and respectful conversations as well as focusing on stakeholder win wins in order to get socialization and buy in. Uh as we started to move forward with this effort, things you would want to avoid limited tunnel vision. You don't at this early stage, you don't wanna just pick one idea and run with it and you also don't want to uh let seniority or other organizational biases sway your decision making. As I mentioned, I was co-lead with chief of staff. He certainly outranked me, but at no point was my opinion any less important than his. It was a very shared um decision making process and that was important for us as far as di diversity, we valued it heavily. We prioritized recruitment of a diverse team from the beginning.

Moving into the planning stage, our commitment was to have a strategically flexible roadmap, keeping the strengths of a diverse team in mind. Um Again, we had to work with other teams at this stage. I mentioned the machine learning platform team. So they had their own road map and we had ours, they did not always align. Uh We had to again have the very solution focused. So keep that curiosity, that was very important. And again, focusing on the team, uh the team's success. What is the win, win situation for everybody who's a stakeholder at this planning stage, you wanna avoid alienating any stakeholder stakeholders are your end users, your leadership, people that are contributing to the infrastructure, there are a lot of people that contribute to this effort.

You wanna make sure that you have all of their concerns and goals out on uh out, out and exposed so that it can go into your planning efforts as far as diversity. We were very intentional at this stage. Uh We consulted our sector's diversity and resource team for recommendations of strong technical leaders and we are also monitoring what our team was looking like. Uh uh Our recruitment at one time, we ended up with all females, which goes counter to having a diverse team. And so we were very intentional, intentional about making sure our team remained diverse. Moving into execution here, you'll see all five CS appear. So this is where all of the action is happening. You're working through your plan. Uh All of the team members are working together.

Our commitment here was to maintain a fun and safe environment for big idea thinking. Um You're going to have a lot of different personalities at play. And if it's a brand new team of folks you've not worked with before a leader is going to have to be a very active listener, uh to manage conflict and solicit ideas. Uh Again, when you encounter challenges and conflict remain solution focused, avoid getting into blame and getting stuck, trying to point fingers. Um You wanna keep the ball moving, win, win. How can the team move forward together at this stage? You wanna um avoid a approaching ideas with narrow thinking? Um What I mean by that is sometimes you'll, you'll need to come up with a solution. Some individuals tend to be narrow and think of ways in which, why an idea could not work or why you shouldn't pursue a path, try expanding your mind and thinking more along the lines of what if, what if we considered these other ideas that we haven't thought of before? What does that allow us to do? What if we considered working with a, a different um uh technology uh for a particular use case. So remain curious and, and, and try to avoid getting pigeonholed into, to automatically thinking why something can't be done. Also avoid mistrust.

You've built a highly capable team, lean into them and allow them and uh to be empowered and, and execute strong at this stage for diversity. We leveraged that diverse team that we intentionally built. We had monthly team team meetings to engage uh our full team, we would do round robin updates. Introverts were given uh time to, to talk about what they have been working on just as much as extroverts. Uh We used sub teams to leverage the individual strings that you'll probably start to notice on your team. And then lastly, we used uh design thinking which is an innovative technique to come up with new ideas. So think beyond just brainstorming, uh find ways to get all of your diverse team members together, working collaborative, collaboratively to come up with ideas. Now, close out, hopefully at this stage, you're moving towards a successful finish. Uh At this stage. For us, our commitment was to finish the effort, strong, celebrate the team's courage, innovation and boldness. Now, of course, we did hit roadblocks along the way. We did not want to remain focused on those. We wanted to keep, keep our team morale up. So we focused on team wins. Uh Any of the roadblocks that we did encounter, we didn't uh sweep them under the rug. We captured them as lessons learned and that's very important.

And then as leaders, we had had to be courageous and have honest uh constructive feedback for those that we were collaborating and working with at this stage. Uh what you want to avoid is ignoring what went wrong, capture them as lessons learned, reflect on them that only makes you all better for the next project that you work on. Not to celebrating team success is another thing to avoid. Again, keeping the morale up. And then you want to take the opportunity to talk about uh how diversity was of benefit to your effort. So you have a great opportunity to share with others how diversity worked for you. Uh What we did in terms of celebrating diversity is again, my cole was the chief of staff and then in my own role, we were very intentional about creating opportunities for our individual contributors to showcase their work to parents and leadership. And the interesting thing is when I list out all of the folks that we uh had opportunities for it, it looks, it, it might look intentionally diverse, but because we built the team to be diverse, it was very easy to have a showcase of diverse success. Um And again, the other thing that we did is we briefed leadership and our peers uh on how uh diversity facilitated our project success. So how did we do uh what were our high performance results after a year?

Thread aware, ended up being a unified system for enterprise staff to Berewa via um daily email digest, a gamified website and an integrated chat platform. We were able to achieve achieve threat awareness at scale. So about 1000 of our staff members were able to access and receive information from this platform. Some of our sector leadership actively reads our daily emails particularly around COVID-19 inform uh news and cyber security awareness. Uh We facil facilitated a lot of internal research uh on this integrated chat platform. So those are some of the things that we were able to do and we were able to do it within budget, which was a surprise to a lot of people that we pulled that off. So why I want you to uh walk away with is uh this pyramid diagram. And here I've identified some of the uh successes that we did for both psychological safety, diversity and innovation. But when you approach your next project, what I would uh challenge or offer you do you to do is go into it with this type of a framework in mind and think of how you can um in integrate psychological safety and diversity along all of those various uh phases of a project life cycle.

And from there, uh nothing but magic, I, I promise you is, is what you'll start to uh experience. And on the, when you come to the end of the project, it is such a cool feeling to either build or be on a high performing team. So with that, that brings us to the end. I thank you for your time. Uh You can contact me at my email, Adua dot Poku at jhuapl.edu and I highly recommend uh if you're interested to check out these resources on psychological safety. Uh Doctor Laura DEA Zona from Stanford and Doctor Amy Edmondson, what I shared just scratched the surface. There's so much more good information out there.