Show Notes
This week, Dan and Lara kick off by talking about building trust and influence at work with some real examples of active listening (mmm, uh-huh), what it looks like when people get dysregulated (because EVERYONE HAS EMOTIONS even if you don't want to), lots of details about Paloma Medina's BICEPS framework, and then just for fun, a discussion about what to do when the person you need to influence at work is... Claude. Lara Hogan is an author, public speaker, and coach for managers and leaders across the tech industry. She has led teams and emerging leaders as the VP of Engineering at Fly.io and Kickstarter, and as an Engineering Director at Etsy. As a founder of Wherewithall, Lara and her team run workshops, roundtables, and trainings on core management skills like delivering great feedback and setting clear expectations. She champions management as a practice, building fast websites, and celebrating your achievements with donuts (and sometimes sushi). Her latest book, Resilient Management, is here to help those who find themselves responsible for supporting a team of people.
00:00 Welcome and Setup 00:49 Meet Lara Hogan 02:02 Dan's Career Backstory 04:41 Lara's Winding Path 08:29 Why Listening Builds Trust 10:04 Active Listening Tools 18:01 Trust and Workplace Goals 23:04 Dysregulation and Safety 26:37 Amygdala Hijack Patterns 34:39 BICEPS Core Needs 39:04 Logic vs Emotions in Tech 41:16 Agile Tension and Priorities 43:34 Modernization Priorities 44:12 Trust Before Tradeoffs 45:26 AI Changes Collaboration 47:41 Claude At The Table 50:06 Active Listening Breakdown 51:55 Influence Vs Manipulation 55:16 RACI And Autonomy 01:03:30 Workshops Over Playbooks 01:11:54 Asking For Training Budget 01:16:09 Compassion And North Star 01:18:08 Final Reflections And Wrap
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WARNING: This episode has spoilers for Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.
Dan chats with Bluesky devrel lead Jim Ray about relationships and trust in developer relations. Which makes sense, because the word "relations" is in there. There's a whole bit where we talk about and tie back the role of empathy in understanding peoples' different needs, goals, and incentives, and how to get good at the role you've got to be an expert at creating useful clarity. And THEN we have a whole conversation about what's happening with AI coding agents and the role of human-to-human relationships there. Which is to say that it's an important one! Jim Ray has spent a career being a web developer person inside of media organizations like the Chicago Tribune, msnbc.com, and NBC News before transitioning to being a media-minded person at a few design and tech companies. At Slack he discovered he could finally eradicate that bicameral situation with a job on the Developer Relations team, and after a bit too much time of that, became a founding member of the DevRel team at Bluesky. He lives with his family in the southern Appalachians, wishing he made more time to cook and read.
Dan chats with Hillary Hartley about horizontal leadership in government: users, outcomes, trust, and working in the open. Hillary gets to explain horizontal leadership, and how you need to rely on persuasion, coalition-building, the concept of doing reconnaissance, so that you can move decisions closer to the people doing the work. Also a bonus conversations on how to effectively use LLMs by providing specific context to preserve (and increase!) your agency. Hillary Hartley has spent nearly three decades helping government be simpler, faster, and better for the people who rely on it. She started out working with 30 state governments at NIC Inc., then went inside as a Presidential Innovation Fellow and co-founder of 18F, the first digital services team in the U.S. government. She later became Ontario's first Chief Digital and Data Officer, where she built the Ontario Digital Service and wrote the Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act. She was also CEO of U.S. Digital Response, a nonpartisan nonprofit helping state and local governments strengthen their tech capacity. She founded OpenPublic to coach public sector leaders and make transformation stick, and she co-chairs the FWD50 conference. She lives in Toronto with her family, their dog, and a veritable zoo of stuffed animals.
Dan chats with Michele who has Strong Opinions about how designers work (and could work better) with other people. What're those Strong Opinions? How about the failure to apply user-centered design and systems thinking to how your organization works. Oh, and how critical it is to build trust right from the bvery beginning, a brief detour into the early days of Archive of Our Own, and then capping it off with Salesforce's V2MOM prioritization system (Dan becomes a big fan!) and One Great Tip to deal with people bringing AI prototypes to a knife fight.
Dan and Anna have a catchup and absolutely do not talk about cats with thumbs or omniscient butter gods. What they do talk about is how Anna develops voice and tone guidelines with writing teams and what that means for selling work internally. They talk about three Cs of Context, Content, and Conversation (which they'll come back to a lot), code switching, making sure you have a good understanding of what managers and executive leaders want (and need), and what to do when someone asks you to make something "more fun". Anna Pickard is a writer who does more talking about writing than writing. She mainly works as a consultant in Voice and Tone, helping companies sound human, and helping writing teams get their work done. After training in theatre, she worked in journalism, advertising and games, before stumbling into tech. From 2014, she was responsible for moulding, evolving and shaping the voice of Slack, and since leaving in 2020, has worked with Apple, Airbnb, Atlassian and a bunch of other companies that don't begin with A.