TeamDev Summit Conference at Google

Source: TED.com

I recently spent three days at Google's Los Angeles office where 75+ Googlers, TeamDev Consultants, and Facilitators all gathered from around the world for a global summit meeting. It was a once-in-a-long-while opportunity to hone our skills, craft our strategies, and connect with other Googlers which share core values and deep passions.

Developing Psychological Safety

Day One started at 2pm with a workshop lead by Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. That workshop focused on psychological safety: (a) how it is critical for effective team dynamics where there is a high level of uncertainty and interdependence, and (b) how to cultivate it on your teams.

Her workshop started with a case study of error rates in the delivery of medical care at a children's hospital. You can see a short version of Amy's themes in her TEDx talk in which she shares her research about medical errors at other hospitals.

A key feature of that children's hospital's process was doing a thorough but blameless root cause analysis whenever errors were discovered. Foundational to any such analysis was the assumption that everyone involved in delivering care had good intent. No one on the teams were deliberately trying to deliver poor medical care.

I got to chat with Amy at our "happy hour" afterwards. A couple of other Googlers and I chatted over drinks about team dynamics and recent books we've read. (I was thrilled to learn that I'd read almost all of the books that were mentioned. I'm reading the right stuff!)

I mentioned to Amy that Google also practices blameless root cause analysis. We call them "blameless postmortems" (which is an unfortunate term in light of the workshop's focus on a children's hospital) and they are a cornerstone of Google SRE culture. Later on, I sent Amy a link to Chapter 15: Postmortem Culture of Site Reliability Engineering (2015, O'Reilly).

Advanced Facilitation Skills

Tuesday at the TeamDev Summit featured a day-long advanced facilitation workshop by Nelli Noakes of Community at Work. The workshop was based on Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2014, Jossey-Bass).

Among the facilitator's skills that I learned at that TeamDev workshop were stacking (page 101) and basic chartwriting (Chapter 5). I jumped at every opportunity to practice facilitating and chartwriting. Yes, it was uncomfortable, but if I stay in my comfort zone,  I won't be in my growth zone.

That all-day workshop was too short. It was an abbreviated and compressed version of Nelli's three-day workshop. As soon as I'm done with my coach training, I want see what it will take to attend that three-day version.

Finding My Tribe

Thursday, the final day of the summit meeting, was a mishmash of breakout sessions and working groups. We brainstormed. We connected. We envisioned ways to scale TeamDev's effectiveness as Google continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.

I was amazed at how much talent was in the room: marketers, attorneys, engineering managers, PeopleOps Partners, program managers and others from all corners of Google. I do wish we had a way to catalog all that expertise so we could look up who to call for expertise.

By the end of Thursday, I was worn out and filled to the brim.

One thing was clear: I had found my tribe.

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Can I help your teams grown and evolve? Let's chat: bkh@briankhaney.com.