Megan Cook: recommendation

Transcript context

…I have a lot of things I want to chat about. I've heard about many things that you're extremely good at as a leader, as a product leader, and so I'm just going to poke around a bunch of different areas. I wanted to start with something that I hear you're just a big advocate of and really good at, which is creating space for play on teams and also just creating a lot of psychological safety, something that you find really important that helps your teams be as successful as they are. Can you just talk about why this is important to you, why creating play and psychological safety are so important to you, and then just how you do this, maybe an example or two of how you actually apply this on your teams? Yeah, absolutely. I think especially recently in the tech industry, it almost feels like we're going through a bit of a wake-up call at the moment. We were in this time of plenty, and everyone was hiring like crazy, and then COVID hit and suddenly people's behaviors had to really change. People couldn't travel; they had to work from home. There's a whole bunch of industries that got highly impacted by that, and it created this time of high ambiguity. Before that, or to the start of that, I was noticing within my team just some little indicators where people weren't all comfortable to speak up when we'd had really open discussions with the most junior person, where the most senior person were happy to talk about anything. There was more anonymity in feedback. Every time things were coming to leadership to give feedback on, it was just sort of painfully polished. And I think once it gets to that level, that's a really bad time to give feedback, because it probably means that a whole ton of work has gone into it, and you might waste a whole bunch of work if you have to correct direction or make significant changes. And so, I was looking at my team and thinking, "Yeah, something doesn't feel quite right here." And then I went to this leadership outside, and one of the speakers there was Ben Crowe. He's an expert in having the right mindset. So he works with Olympic gold medalists, and Ash Barty is another one, who's a tennis player. She's the number one tennis player in the entire world. So these athletes who have to really perform under a lot of pressure, in front of a lot of people. And he talked about how to be in that state of flow, where everything is going really well and new ideas are coming and you're making progress, you've got great momentum. And he talked about how to be in that flow state. There needs to be this sense of play and that things are fun. Your mind's open to new ideas, you feel really present. You're not stressing out and thinking about a ton of other different things. And it's funny because when I thought about play where my mind went to the opposite of play is work. We often hear work and play as opposites together, but his point was actually that the opposite of play is fear. And I realized I think that's what I was seeing a lot of in my team and that's why the ideas were getting more incremental. So took that decision and went, okay, we need to look at psychological safety in that team or we're never going to get to some of these bigger, bolder, more innovative ideas. And so brought my group, product managers together, and we sat around and discussed it and all together came up with some ideas that we've implemented since then, which has had a really good impact. So I'll give you a couple. Yeah, please.…

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