And today, we are going to explore how inclusive leadership can transform diverse teams into high performing powerhouses in tech.We'll dig into what it takes to building the teams and leading them, and they are not just diverse on paper, but in actuality. Here's our road map, and it will not just be theory. We'll also be covering some practical tips and steps that you can take immediately to become a more inclusive, effective leader. While many organizations are focusing on diverse hiring, I believe it's just the first step. Why do I say that? It's because you can hire a 100 types of people, but if you expect all the 100 people to do the same kind of work, it's not diversity.

You are essentially killing the essence of why you have those 100 type of people. And that's why why would that happen is also because you're passing the message that someone has to perform a certain way, someone has to do as the work a certain way, and only then can they succeed in their own. And that means you're essentially trying and essentially going into the way of creating one kind of persona. Diversity is not about who's at the table, not only about who's at the table, but also about who gets to play. Based on a recent study by Deloitte, one thing that became very clear was companies that had inclusive cultures, not just diverse, were two times more likely to meet or exceed financial targets, three times more likely to be high performing, and six times more likely to be innovative and agile.

And guess the business outcomes. Eight times more likely. If that is the situation, I believe it's in every company's interest to have a diverse and inclusive teams. Please let me know if you disagree. Let me share what it would mean. It would mean that we need to go and make sure that we are not just hiring diverse, but we are creating inclusive teams. What I would ask here is for you to tell me what you think, and you can use the chat for this. What do you think would be the best practices that we should follow for having an inclusive environment for our team? People, I'm waiting. You can use your chat box if you want. Are you able to hear me? Yes. Thank you, Lucia. Yes, Charlene. Agreed. Thank you, Anita, for confirming.

I love all your answers. Amazing. This is pretty much what we want to do. This is pretty much what we want to be creating. Yes. Personalities are different, and we need to make sure that all of these are met. And we are creating a safe environment for our team. That one is a very difficult one to do and a very important one to do, Charlene, pushing back to the HR if you're only getting mail profiles. And you need to also make sure that when you're checking the CVs, you ask for all the CVs that they you ask how many of the CVs were rejected and to what percentage were there even women profiles in there. A lot of times, it's the kind of CV you receive that the HR is looking for just certain words and missing out on grade profiles. Yes. We need to show curiosity for different backgrounds. So I believe you people are already there. I believe we are already there as a group.

And let's, go through the points in a few details. One of the biggest things to get psychological safety, that is the biggest point here, is active listening. It means you need to be able to empathize with the person you're working with and be able to put yourself in their shoes, understand their situation, and try to understand where they're coming from. And that is only going to happen if you're actually listening to them, not just hearing them, but listening them. Self awareness and trying to mitigate your our own biases. We should be able to recognize what if we are responding to a situation because of our own inherent biases. As leaders, we can often do that. We have had a team of high performing individuals. We figured out, okay, this is the profile or these are the type of profiles that's working well in my team, that's doing well in my organization.

And then we end up expecting everyone to risk to try triage in the same way and get in the same situations and deal with the same stuff. Maybe not one profile. Maybe we are doing five different profiles, and we are stuck to those five profiles. And we need to acknowledge that not those five profiles should not be our own baseline for anyone else. We need to also think about how can we encourage people to think out loud, to collaborate more, and to be able to talk into each other. One very helpful situation for this is when you have junior members in the team, you can always ask them to also evaluate. And by junior members, I'm talking about people who are just joining the team, who have not had a previous experience in the team.

One of the things you can do is ask them for feedback. They are fresh eyes on the team. They have absolutely zero conveniences. They don't know anyone. They don't know you. They don't know the team. And when you ask them for genuine feedback on a week by week basis in their first three months, six months, you can find so many insights that you can implement in your team as well. What they thought was different, what they liked, what they didn't like, what should we continue to do, what should we stop. And when you start doing that, the person who's joining from the beginning, they feel like they're being listened to, and they're coming to a team where their opinions and values matter. When they have already joined the team, around this time, when you're doing group exercises, design reviews, we have a lot of design reviews, architectural reviews, product road map reviews.

Everyone should be at the table, and we should do round robin approaches. I'm assuming most of you have already heard of this and been implementing this a lot, but I'll talk about it again because it's very important for us to remember. Not everyone has the courage to go up and speak up. Not everyone will feel that they are the first person that should respond. And a lot of times, they are formulating that idea in their head to a perfection before they want to speak, and the time gets lost. So if we give them advanced notice, if we give our people advanced time that, oh, we are going into this discussion that will happen in twenty four hours, forty eight hours. Think about it. And then in that discussion, everyone will have to speak up. They can come prepared. And then we can go, okay. What do you think?

First person, second person, and we go around the table. We make sure everyone speaks up. We make sure we note down the points. If there are action items coming out of the meetings, let's make sure we note down the action items and then go and solve them. That's how you make sure that you're bringing safety to the team. They can speak up, and their ideas are not taken as some sort of, argument to blame them, but more that this is the action I can take from your idea. Let's do it. If there is a criticism, we take it positively as an improvement, and we show people that if there is a criticism, it's always for improvement, not for telling you that this is a failure or you need to change something.

Another thing that will happen is when you're trying to balance your team. You want the team to be a jazz band that has each person bringing their own rhythm rather than a solo guitarist or a singer, just not without a band. Because imagine how how weird it would be. Right? You don't want just a team that is only doing one thing and not bringing their own flare to the band. In this situation, in the tech landscape, we have also the same kind of situation. You don't want a team only of project managers or only product managers or only developers of a certain kind. You want developers who think in different ways as well. And that's one of the reasons you need to show your team that not everyone is alike.

One situation I faced was when, I remember in my very first experience as a manager, there was a team member who would keep coming and complaining about another person in the team. And they were complaining about their practices about a certain kind of structure in the code. And it was not even about the person not respecting the boundaries or doing good work. It was simply about something in the way they wrote it. Now that can feel very conflicting for both the parties. And how do you solve that situation? I was, in that moment, caught off guard. However, since I had had my own previous experiences as a developer, I could count upon that. What I would recommend here is to go and be able to tell the people to talk to each other, first of all.

And if that doesn't resolve anything, then think about, is it really the battle that they want to be involved in? Do they want to focus on how a certain line or a certain sentence looks like, or do they want to focus on the bigger picture of are we getting the right product that can scale, that can lay like, what are the key milestones we are trying to achieve, and what are the standards we need to meet to achieve that?

Once we align on that as a team, we will stop focusing on the small nitpicks or the small things that can be, for both parties, the correct way of doing it. But, overall, it does not change the impact on your code or on your overall project. And that means that we need to make sure that we have transparent communication within the team. It shouldn't be that everyone goes through the manager or everyone goes through the product manager. They should be talking to each other. How can we implement that? How can we make sure that people are doing that? Is when they come to you, the first thing you do is ask them if they spoke to each other. If they did and they are not able to align, then you can step in as a manager and help. But if they are able to align, great.

If they're not able to align, you don't go and mentor them. That's I don't know if you know the difference between mentoring and coaching. Anyone who wants to use that and talk about it? Okay. In this case, I would say you would want to coach your team. You would want to ask them questions. You would want them to clarify why they are doing what they're doing or why they have an issue that they have. How would they have solved it? And what problems would it cause the other person? You need to ask them to think about that. And when you start asking questions instead of giving answers, they will come to an answer themselves, and that is how they will solve their own problem. Coaching works a lot better in situation when you're the manager than when, you're not. Because coaching wise, you know the strengths of your team.

You know who's suffering from what in terms of issues with the team, in terms of overall project statuses, what is going on, and you have an eye on everyone. So you can actually think from their their side, and you can encourage your team to start doing that by asking leading questions. In more broader context, when you have senior people, you don't even need to ask leading questions. You just ask questions. You ask more generic ones to let them figure it out. And that way, they can be enabled to talk to each other in a different way. Second thing you can do is set up peer mentoring structures where you have a senior and a junior engineer paired together, and they work together for a certain amount of time. Then you rotate, and you get a different set of people to be working together. This way, they get used to each other's working styles. Lastly, psychological safety step checks.

Why do we talk about psychological safety checks as, item at that is last is because you are the one who's enabling it at the highest level, and then you're trying to get your people to start understanding it at a lower level. Here, the goal is to make that make sure that we check beyond everything that has happened. And one of the approaches that I have been applying and I have always applied to my teams is doing weekly check ins. So we go in. We replace one of our start ups. So we have instead of three times a day the start ups, we three times a week, we have twice a week our startups. And then last day of the week, we use that time just for a team check-in. No product, no program, no whatever, just the team.

No one is doing anything but being a team to get today. There is no product managers. There's no SD. There's no PM. Everyone is a team, and they talk talk about their own feelings. Are they going into the weekend stressed about something? Is something bothering them so much that they can't have a nice evening? And we discuss that, and then we see how the team can help them solve that. This is helping the team to come together and help each other out, and they are also creating a space where people can collaborate, ask for help, and not feel judged about it. A lot of the times, in the beginning, we used to have a lot of discussions around topics, and now we have come to the point that these meetings are more knowledge exchange. We only discuss what are the CRs we are doing, what are the new things we want to learn about, because all of these things are being taken up during the week.

And people are already talking and discussing with the team and asking for their inputs early on and not waiting for that Friday to check-in. Your team might not want it Friday. Maybe it's a Thursday thing or something else. But this approach has it's a tested one, so I can definitely say it you can use it as well in your time. And lastly, diverse work styles. I believe everyone would have heard of MBTI. Can you please confirm if you have? Yes. So how many of you actually get your team to discuss MBTI in their in their regular work? Like, maybe once in a quarter or once in a year. Have you had your team sit together and discuss their MBTIs? Oh, that's very nice to know, Fiona. Thank you so much. Discovery insights is also quite good. Yes.

Thank you, Shirley, for sharing. So MBTI, other such systems, there's also something called culture map. And, you can use there's a book called culture map as well. And what has what we do is we every quarter, we do a check-in together with the team, quarter or half year depending on if there were a lot of changes in the team or not. Yes. So definitely recommend reading culture map if, if you haven't. And, using their online tools, that's quite good as well. Otherwise, you can just go for a free test that's called 16 personalities. And what we did is, as a team, we went and we did the test together, and we came back with our results, and we talked about how we felt. And we found that most women in the team, either, in my current role, my previous roles, most women in the team were the people who needed to be told even when they were doing some things right.

While for a lot of people who were more extroverts or mostly men, they wanted to know if something went wrong. When something was going good, they assumed it was going good, and that's why there was no noise. However, there is another diversity here. Introverts also would like to know when they are doing something well. They would like to be told either ways. So I'm generalizing here, and I'm creating a small bias. I will write the name here. And in this situation, we found people who needed to be told both ways, and we found people who needed to be told only one way or the other. And this became our strength. It became the reason why the team sticks with each other and helps each other out.

And that's one of the reasons why I recommend doing this. And another thing that I do is share my own challenges. A lot of times, the team might feel like I'm not sharing anything. Or if I feel that no one in the team is sharing anything, I take my own challenges out and talk to them about it. I explain what I'm feeling, what I'm facing, where I can benefit from their help or maybe my peers' help and I'm asking. And it leads to them knowing how I'm interacting with my peers, how I'm balancing balancing equations in my sphere as well. That goes and that brings us to leading with empathy.

Now that we know how are the diverse team is built together, how the teams are working together, and what are our biggest tools that we are using, we can empathize better. We can understand our teams better. We already heard from them. We listened to them. And with this, we created a team that understands that empathy is not a weakness. We ensure that they build things with trust, and they are safe in that environment. And with all of the things we just did, we ensured that the team has trust, has safety in built in their mind, and it's increasing retention. It's increasing engagement for us overall. So for us, it's in our benefit to continue doing. At this point, I will definitely recommend reading culture map. I would also recommend reading something that is called my MBTI preferences.

I would say I do I do have a mix of all kinds of MBTI in my team today. However, my own kind of transition between, between the profiles, depending on which quarter I'm doing my test in. And I believe it is a possibility for most of you as well. I don't know if you've if there are people in the team who have done it, multiple times and found two different results. Are there is there anyone who's done that? No one has taken their MBTI twice and found different results? For me, it happens a lot. And, yeah, you should check different phases. You might have different MBTI preferences. For me, one of the biggest thing was in terms of the introvert and, extrovert criteria.

It keeps changing for me. Depending on which phase of my life I'm in, my introvert and extrovert changes a lot. Oh, nice. I have another person who does the same. Great to know. I'm not alone. And similarly for the feeling and thinking part, that changes as well. The very insightful or important one that is that my mentors had a difficulty to understand was my detail orientedness and high level thinking, which is the SNN. And here, we had a big debate on, is it even possible for someone to be able to look at the details and still think about, you know, a picture or a vision that is more high level? So, yeah, it it's, it's a curious case, and, I found that there are more people who do this and who have had this difference. So I make sure my team knows that doing this on a regular basis is not that something they already know about.

It's more that they also get to learn what phase they are in of their life. Moving on to mental health and motivation. So we did discuss that we do meet men, weekly check ins. Thank you, Shirley. That is quite insightful, and thank you for sharing that. I did not know that, there's a big shift shift in development around thirty. But that's good to know. I'll add that to my list of things now. I the not list of things that I know now. So weekly check ins. What do we do? What the do these weekly check ins mean? You can have one to one check ins. So you just check with the people how they're doing, how their personal life is going. Sometimes people don't share personal lives. You can ask if it's okay to ask about.

And a lot of times when you do remember what they talked about last time and you bring it up again, they will share more. And it's they're quite happy to discuss those things. You can have, discussions on your regular personal interest. You can have discussions on your professional topics. But what I do recommend is making sure people separate project updates to their manager to regular just discussions they would like to have. And this way, your project check ins, which is start ups, you're already getting all of the details about the tasks, the projects. There might be something that is required which was not very clear during the start up, and you can have a small ten, twenty minute meeting about it. But the one to ones, they should be dedicated to the person and what they would like to talk about.

Once you make that clear, they will bring in topics that are bothering them outside of their tasks. They will bring bring up their career progression. They'll discuss what's happening in their mind, what they want to do, what are they trying to accomplish but have not managed to. And this way, you can foster another round of check ins, which allows for people to talk about what is the priority in their mind and not what they think is the priority for you. This keeps the communication also quite transparent. And what I have also encouraged my team to do is to not feel like they have to hide certain aspects from one another or from me. This has made sure that during our team meetings, we also discuss a lot of topics that might not be directly our team related, and we discuss how we can benefit from it or how we can improve ourselves to get benefit of certain things as well as a team.

And then when I'm facing challenges in terms of team management or in terms of my time crunch, I do ask my team to help and to support me during those phases. For example, last month, I had three back to back business trips that required certain kind of, balancing act between my team and my trips, and my team stepped in and stepped up to help out. So if I had not asked for that help, I would have overworked. And this would have been a situation because we have all faced this, and we keep facing this called as imposter syndrome. I found this very nice, picture from Among Us. Have you played the game? Has anyone played Among Us during? It was a big, big thing during COVID. I don't know if people have. Thank you, Kirsten. Sorry. I said your name right. Right? It's Kirsten. Okay. Good to know.

So, usually, when I was playing this game, I felt very, very stressed. My biggest stress factor was coming from I should not be the imposter. I don't want to be the imposter. I want to be a crewmate. And if I'm an imposter, then I was very stressed about how do I make sure that I can keep hiding. And that led to a discovery that I don't want to be an imposter in any situation. But if I use it to my benefit, I can actually win. What does that mean? Well, if I feel like an imposter, I will make extra efforts to do something good. I will make sure my I learn more and more. And what I did is instead of taking this as a disadvantage for myself, I started making maps.

And with this map, what I did is, what am I doing that is something I would like to see in my leaders? What am I doing that I would not like to see in my leaders? And then cross checking with my team. What do they want in their leader? What are they missing? And this created a map for me on which areas I was doing well, which areas I was missing. And not just relying on my own perception of things, but my team, my leadership, people around me, and how they perceived me as well. One very interesting finding around this or one very interesting sharing session from someone I saw was, we our brains tries to find evidences of what we think. If we think we are an imposter, our brain will try and find all of the evidences to show that we are.

And if we think we are not importers, we are good at something, the brain will try to justify it, finding evidences of that. So when you go and talk to other people and ask their ideas, what do you think is your improvement area, you might end up with some noise in there, but you can find consistent data around something from multiple people. You can usually take that as this is where I stand and this is the benefit I bring and does I am doing better in these areas. And use this feeling of not being enough to channel it and focus on making sure that you're doing better, you're learning more, and you're improving, but not to counteract, not to put yourself below something, but to let elevate yourself above a certain threshold you had. What that means is also staying sharp in tech. A lot of times, managers in tech can feel like they are not just managers, actually, even individual contributors in tech can feel like they're not technical enough or they can't do something or they are probably gate going through and having their way through something.

You can create your personal reading list. And with AI, it's become really easy. You can just ask AI that, oh, I want to keep updated with trends in and the topics that you value more, the topics that your team is interacting with on a regular basis, you can ask and be reading their chat GPT has been amazing for that. I have also been using a few of the internal tools that we have at the company, and this has really helped to make sure I stay updated. You don't need certifications. What you do need is to learn and to keep in touch. Sometimes you can just ask your team members because they come up with new things, they learn new things, and you can just have, hey. Let's do a session and use our, weekly team meeting to do this.

And a lot of times, they come up with very nice presentations, making it really easy to grasp the concept, and the whole team can benefit from it. So here, you're not just learning for yourself. You're also getting the team to learn with you. We do organize monthly, round tables with tech leads. So we are a group of few people who would get together and talk about what they saw different, how they are managing their teams, what practices they're bringing in, and, technically, what are their main, priorities for that month or for that quarter. This also helps to see if we are on the right track, if we are doing everything we're expected to do, and can help you stay ahead by not feeling like you're doing something less than what you should be doing and can help with the imposter part of it as well. Because you're making sure you have a baseline and you're checking against that baseline. And then schedule sharpening each week. This is because you want to put blocks of time for yourself, and you want to make sure that that time that you have dedicated for yourself, you achieve what you wanted that week.

Make sure you start your week with, this is one thing I want to get done this week. And by getting done is not professionally, not delivering for the company, but for yourself. What do you want to deliver to yourself? Because you're prioritizing so many people. You're prioritizing so many things. You forget that you have take time for yourself as well. I do too, and it happens a lot. So because of that, I have started scheduling two hours in the week just for myself, trying to learn things, trying to catch up something, whatever I might have missed. Have you been using it, and have you really benefited from it? I see Shirley is already saying yes. Other people? Have you been scheduling time for yourself and making sure you have time that you use to your benefit? Okay.

Then then do one more thing if you haven't been doing it. Measure if you successfully managed to deliver to yourself as well. Start making sure that you start your week by, did I achieve what I wanted last week? And if I didn't, what caused it? How can I make sure I achieve it this week? So not just schedule it. Make sure you're succeeding on it, and you're making the best of it. Lastly, we'll do a very tiny case study. So I want you all to think about what you would do if you had a team that was just built, and this team had an you as the new manager. This team is growing. You've inherited a very, very diverse team on paper. You have 10 engineers. You from six different countries. They are wide range of experiences.

However, you don't see that the you found find as soon as you take over this team that products are being missed, the code quality is inconsistent, and the tape meeting is very, very quiet. It doesn't feel like people want to talk. And then you find out that two of your top performers are considering leaving. This is your challenge. What are the actions that you would do to solve this situation and make this team into a more inclusive team, a team that values each other and wants to stay and excel together? Any first steps? Anything that pops up, please feel free to use the chat. Yes. Definitely. One to one conversations are very important in this regard. Exactly. You would want to identify trust issues. That's a very nice formula. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Active listening is very important, and that will be the first step that we have to do. Yes. Coffee organization. That's very good one as well. Yes.

Trust is the biggest, biggest killer of the team. So what I would recommend for anyone in this situation is definitely start with talking, have one to one check ins, have coffee meetings, but start with the one to ones to try and understand exactly what is happening, why they are feeling the way they're feeling, why do they not share something.

Listen to them, identify the themes, and try to understand each team of each team, which ones are the most recurring ones, and try by solving them first. You would want to then organize coffee or, informal meetings to get team building activities. Maybe do a full day off-site. And what you would want to do is to facilitate people talking to each other more. Again, from team one to one meetings, you would try to you would start understanding if this is, if this is happening. Yes. Of course. Anonymously is very, very important. And what I had done for, one of my very early cases of management was to implement anonymous forms. So we had surveys, anonymous surveys where people could submit their items, ideas, whatever was bothering them.

But, also, in one to ones, whenever I was taking even one note with them, I will try to identify by guessing something and putting that down on paper and saying, okay. This is the action I'm planning to take on it. And when I did that, when I did the first action, people would go back and know that they can come with more, that there will be action. It's not going to be just listening and not doing anything about it. That is when you use the anonymous forms. Also, that is when you tell them, okay. If you don't want to discuss it and if you want to move to another team, I'll help you with that as well. Please tell me where what you would like to do, where you would like to go, because that also helps them know that you're looking out for them, not for yourself.

You really want to make sure that you're looking out for them, and you want that message to be passed along. And in this situation, if they're really just demotivated, don't want to stay with the team and want to leave, you should help them get that path. If they've made up their mind and nothing is going to change it, then you can help them make up that path. Sometimes this can also reverse how they're thinking about it. Yes. So you would want to go meet people and then try to understand what is bothering them, how what you can do as to build that trust and to identify this. There's a very good, way of learning this.

It's called, there was a principle there's a graph which talks about how if some someone falls in one quadrant or the other, you can approach that. I didn't want to cover that because we didn't have a lot of time. So then you would want to start doing more, getting also external mentors for some of the people because then they can also talk about how the other teams behave or work. And they have someone non, linked to the team talking to them. And then you would want to ensure you do culture share lunches, maybe get them together to talk about their cultures, why they work the way they work, who they are as a person instead of just focusing on projects or the timelines and those things. And, of course, continuous feedback anonymously is very important. So you need to implement anonymous continuous feedbacks. And for that, what we do is we have anonymous retro boards.

Oh, for this, what you can do is you can use polls. We were using a lot with, we were doing polls. And what I would do is I would phrase a question, and I would think of all of the options available and then write other in case I miss something, and then people will answer that poll. Based on the poll results, usually, one of the options was satisfying them, but there were cases when they we had other. And in case of other, I would try to guess again. So this showed people that I was really, really interested, and they came back for it.