What transitioning from male to female taught me about leadership
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EuroPython 2022104 / 112
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DatenverwaltungBitMereologieEntscheidungstheorieVorlesung/Konferenz
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Rechter WinkelVorlesung/Konferenz
Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:06
OK, so hi, everyone. And welcome to my talk. So I wanted to talk a bit about making decisions.
00:21
Because I think, like, how many of you are maybe leaders? Like, yeah, team leads and managers. But actually, all of you are probably leaders because you actually have to lead yourself, at least. So that's something that is important. A great part of leadership is making decisions.
00:43
And some of the decisions have a fairly limited risk. Like, what is the next project that we should start working on in the next spring? That's a decision that we'll make.
01:00
We don't even put so much effort into it because it's a low-risk decision. There is not much damage if we make the wrong choice. And then there are higher-risk decisions. Like, for example, should we enter a new market?
01:23
And usually, these higher-impact decisions are made higher up in the org. Someone like a CTO or at least a head of engineering would make these high-stakes decisions. But even for a team, there can be some high-stakes decisions
01:41
that you get involved with. But high-stakes decisions also come in our personal lives. Like, for example, should you buy a house or should you rent one? How many of you had to make that decision in your life? Right? And it's not easy because there are a lot of things
02:03
that you have to consider. Am I going to live in that same city for a long time? When is the investment going to have a return on it? Stuff like that. So all these decisions are there, and we make them.
02:23
But how do we make them? You usually think about a couple of things, right? Well, one big one is that when you make a decision, it should consider the return on investment. You think about, what is it that I put into this decision
02:42
or into this option? For example, when you buy a house, you are spending a lot of money upfront that you could be using in the next couple of years for something else. But you get something in return, which is the safety of knowing that you will have a house even when you don't have a salary, right?
03:04
So you consider these pros and cons. You also think of the risks. So say you feel like your relationship is not working out anymore and you want to break up,
03:21
but you feel like there is the risk of not finding someone else or someone better or whatever. And then how do you think about that risk? How do you mitigate the risk of feeling like you made a mistake there?
03:42
Just a second. I want to get rid of that. So these are two very important things. And then there is a third thing that is fairly important with decision and that they should be done timely, in a timely manner, right? You shouldn't spend years and years thinking about a choice
04:04
that you really should be making now because the wrong decision is always better than no decision at all. At least that's something that leadership gurus tend to say. So we'll come back to that.
04:23
So a couple of years ago, actually, already four or five years ago, I had a big, big personal decision to make. And it was a very hard decision indeed that had profound effects on my personal life and on my professional life as well.
04:44
So that was a pretty hard period. But before I talk in more detail about that, how many of you know the matrix, the movement matrix? Just put your hands up.
05:01
Yeah, most of you. And there is this really famous red pill or blue pill scene. Let me play it for you. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something.
05:21
What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.
05:43
Like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. And this sentence is something that really stuck with me because it's such a great representation of what gender dysphoria feels like. There is this sense that you don't really know what it is.
06:03
You couldn't explain it, but you know that it's there. It's just unexplainable and still there. And fun fact, the creators of Matrix, the Bachevsky brothers, oh, sorry,
06:22
the Bachevsky sisters are trans. And retrospectively, like, they actually, I think Lily has talked about this in an interview not long ago, that they weren't consciously creating Matrix as a metaphor for being transgender,
06:44
but their experiences heavily influenced the script. So this is one of those moments. And it's one of the, yeah, and probably that's why it spoke to me so much.
07:03
So there is this moment where I have to choose, right? Either I decide to keep things as they are and struggle with these continuous cycles of depression and stay with my wife, with whom we
07:25
were planning to have kids. And also, like, I already had a lot of talks and conferences and a YouTube channel and a workshop that I've been running all around the world. By that point, I think we had about 30 different countries
07:42
where my workshop was running. So I already had some amount of followership, in a sense, or I don't know. And I would have to come out to all of those people, right? And suddenly, I was risking losing not just my wife,
08:03
because she clearly said that she supports me. But if I transition, then she's supporting me as a friend, which is fine, fair enough, I guess. But also, like, my career, do I get to keep my job?
08:22
Do I face a lot of discrimination and end up not being able to sell my workshop anymore? So, yeah, and not just that, like, if you think about, like, one of the statistics that really stuck with me
08:40
is the sexual assault statistics. So for women, one in four women face some kind of sexual harassment. For trans women, it's a one in two. It's horrendous. Both statistics, by the way.
09:02
Even the one in four is horrendous. So, and all that for just this hope of maybe the dysphoria will fade and I will get to function better. And, I mean, going back to this idea of decisions,
09:21
as a leader, I was used to making decisions, right? So small decisions like, do we have a production issue and there is a bug fix? Should we wait for QA to test it or release it right away? Because what's the bigger risk?
09:41
If the bug stays in production for another hour or if I release it and maybe cause some other problem? You have to weigh the options there. Or do you keep your services a monolith or do you break it up? Or one of the hardest decisions I had to make, like I had someone who was underperforming
10:04
and do I let them go? And when do I let them go? Like that's a really hard decision, right? Because you like the person as a friend, or at least as a person, and you don't want to hurt them. You don't want to cause them pain. But at the same time, you see that their actions
10:23
are detrimental to the team. So we make all these decisions and basically the most important thing seems to be that we just make them in a timely manner. Or is it?
10:42
So with this particular case, with the gender transition part, I ran into an issue because all of these decisions that I mentioned, I would create a pro and con list. And maybe write down the risks and think about the mitigations.
11:01
But like in this case, like for example, I have two options, right? One, I transition and I lose my wife, which is probably going to be like pretty depressing. So I end up being depressed, not a great option. The other option is that I don't transition
11:22
and I keep on struggling with gender dysphoria, which leads to depression. So I will be depressed. Depression versus depression, which one do you choose? Like shooting your left or right leg? Also, there is no middle ground. And most importantly, I have a status quo
11:43
and if I change that status quo, it's really hard to go back. Like transitioning the first place, that's a really hard thing to do. And going back, like reversing all the medical interventions and coming out once again to people that,
12:02
oh, sorry, I thought about it again and maybe I'm a guy after all. No, that's like even harder, right? And you make yourself look even more ridiculous than before. So I really wanted to avoid that. And yet, I have to make a decision
12:23
because the wrong decision is better than no decision at all. This is such, this has been said by so many people. One of them tell the rules a lot. In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing.
12:41
The next best thing is the wrong thing. And the worst thing you can do is nothing. Like it's the same quote and people keep saying this, leadership groups keep saying this. So maybe that's true, but is it the whole picture?
13:01
So how do we make decisions in our work? And I think this is the part where this becomes a lot more interesting because if I think about it, what I usually do is I start from a hypothesis. Like I think that this action,
13:21
like creating this new service is the right thing to do. I have this hypothesis. And then what I do is I create metrics. How do I measure success? How do I know I'm there? And then I will act on it. And here is the beautiful thing about this approach.
13:40
When you have this hypothesis and you start acting on it and measuring the results, by the time you found out that it was the right decision, you have already acted upon it. You are already on your way to fulfilling it, which is great. Like it's the best kind of decision that you can have
14:02
where you can just start acting on it and see if it's the right thing. And what happens if it wasn't the right thing? Well then you just go back. Maybe it was about extracting a new service. Fine, it wasn't the right decision. So we are going to move it back where it was.
14:27
And basically this gives you the ability to constantly course correct and navigate around obstacles. And even if we fail,
14:41
like we learn something important in the process, right? We are one data point closer to the right decision. Now when does this break down? This breaks down in the situations where you don't have a way to act
15:02
without making the decision final and irreversible. This is the hard part. And there are business decisions like that. Like for example, and to be fair, you can create such business decisions by managing your team not so well.
15:23
So one example I would say is, remember Google Circles? When they released a huge thing at once, which was going to be the Facebook killer, and then it totally flopped.
15:42
So there they actually made a huge investment upfront. And once they made that investment, because they didn't plan on releasing this in small batches and testing if the market is at all interested in a Facebook killer, they just wanted to release the perfect product at the end.
16:01
What this resulted in is that they built something, they made a huge investment upfront, and once they released, there was no going back. Even though it turned out that the product was not interesting for the community, they already spent that money and that money was gone.
16:22
And of course, Google can survive a decision like that, but imagine a startup doing that, right? For a startup, this would be devastating. It would be the end of their existence. And like whenever your costs are incurred immediately,
16:42
and the benefits come later, that's usually one of the situations where you can't make this course-correcting approach that we usually have. So basically here, you cannot avoid the risk,
17:05
you cannot transfer it to someone else, you actually have to accept it, or maybe mitigate it a bit beforehand. And there could be other similar, like in business terms, like acquiring a company, that's also something that could be a decision like that
17:22
because you have to spend the money before you realize the benefits of having those companies together. And you actually have to buy the company and then you have to integrate things between the two companies in order to gain the benefits. So there are such decisions, but in these cases,
17:43
I don't think that this iterative course-correcting strategy works. But what works then? Well, I don't have a blueprint. I won't tell you the one definitive answer, but I will give you four strategies that you can use to help with decisions like this.
18:04
So the first strategy is think of advantages instead of the disadvantages. So that was one of the biggest mistakes that I made to begin with, is that I was focusing on,
18:20
either I lose my wife or I have to suffer from gender dysphoria all the rest of my life. But if I phrased it slightly differently, I could say that maybe I lose my wife, but on the other hand, I get to experience my life in a different perspective.
18:44
I get to live my true self. And on the other hand, like, yeah. So that was one aspect of just focusing on what could be better.
19:01
Sorry. And it lost connection as well. Great. All right. Yeah. The other thing is like leaning into your values
19:21
because what I found was that the decisions that are really hard are decisions where you have to choose between non-comparable things. Like for example, if you are thinking about your career choice, what do you value more?
19:44
If you, for example, I wanted to be a musician or a programmer. Both of them sounded really interesting, right? And then what do I look at as options? Like on one hand, I have a really good salary.
20:01
And on the other hand, I have the option to perform in front of crowds and get a lot of love and just following my passion of playing the guitar. But at that point when I had to choose,
20:22
like I valued financial stability more than standing on stage or wait. Maybe I found a way to compromise between the two. So this is kind of important
20:44
because what I find is that the decisions that you make and are not clear based on just, you cannot numerically compare two things and you still make a decision between those two things.
21:02
Those are the things that define your values. So if you think about it, when you make such a decision, people outside will see you based on your actions. They will judge you based on your actions. And you are basically living up to the values
21:20
based on which you made the decision. Or if you just make the decisions not based on your values, they become your values, at least from the outside. So another example I could give here is like the company I was working for at the time,
21:40
they were nice people in many respects. One respect wasn't that they weren't transphobic. And they basically made a choice between, like there was a situation where most of the company supported me as a trans woman. And there were a few people who didn't.
22:02
And then the company knowingly or unknowingly made a decision between are we going to stand up against those people who are transphobic or are we going to let Yvette leave? And maybe that wasn't a very conscious decision on their part, but in the end,
22:22
it defined that company's value, at least for me. So I think that just whenever you feel like there is a hard decision, just think about what you value and how that relates to it. Because in the end, it will define your values.
22:43
Trust the scientific method because it's awesome. We love the scientific method. So what I was talking about in the beginning is like acting on a hypothesis and then measuring if it was the right decision to make. That's a scientific method, but there you are actually using your decision
23:02
as an experiment. But that's not the only way you can experiment. You can also experiment by just designing some specific experiment that would prove your truth. And this is like when you want to acquire a company,
23:22
maybe you have a hypothesis about how the two products could interact and you don't have to go all the way and integrate the two things. You can have some kind of a meaning by the product that proves that the integration is at least possible.
23:40
So trusting the scientific method, creating your hypothesis and trying to create, even if you can't test everything and you can't know for sure, mitigate the risk by testing the things that you can test.
24:01
So run localized low risk experiments. That's probably how I should phrase it. And then finally, know when it's time to make up your mind. Because it's really hard. And give yourself a deadline. Because, so there is a problem here.
24:22
You have a status quo. And we as humans love the status quo. We don't want to leave the status quo because it's well known, it's cozy, it's friendly. And maybe it's horrible, but still, it's the pain that I know, right?
24:42
And when you have this kind of decision of, I have the status quo and I want to change the status quo, should I do it? It's even more prone to this status quo bias. Because then you can delay the decision indefinitely
25:02
and still keep the decision open for a long time until you actually make the change. And that's really risky in this sense. And you can lose a lot of time like that. And again, a few examples from the business world,
25:21
an underperforming person, should you let them go, you are very likely to drag your feet on that, right? Dropping a confusing power feature that you know that a couple of your customers are really fond of, and if you drop that feature, they might leave, even if they say
25:42
they are definitely going to leave, it's still just a might. And another one is like staying in a relationship. You know that it's not the right relationship for you. But still, it's like cozy, it's one sense of you know, you don't want to hurt another person, you know that. So it makes it hard, really hard.
26:02
So decisions when you have to move away from the status quo, and it's not like you go one or the other way at some point, but you can indefinitely drag your feet on it. Those are really dangerous decisions in this sense.
26:22
Okay, so these are the four strategies that I wanted to talk. But I also wanted to talk a bit about how I use them, just as examples. So looking on the bright side, I kind of touched on that. But like losing her or leaving my truths,
26:44
or not leaving my truths, that was one point where I really had to consider how this plays out. But also like, I was really worried that I would lose my friends, right?
27:01
But what if I phrased it differently? What if I say, I might lose some friends, but this is a really good way to test friendships, right? Whoever is my real friend will stick by my side. And good news, most did, almost everyone.
27:22
I did have a hunch that that particular company wouldn't be very keen on making sure that the trans person feels like they belong at that company, but I really hope that it will work out. But there was a chance that I would lose my job,
27:42
or I would have to quit. And in the end, I did, and it was a pretty bad situation. I will touch on that in a moment. But maybe it was time to move on. Like I've been at the company for seven years.
28:01
Maybe it's time to try something new, find a company that is more welcoming. And in fact, the country that is more welcoming, yeah, I moved from Hungary to Berlin. There are reasons. Then about leaning into my values.
28:23
So just as I was pondering this option of doing this transition, our boss at that company died. And he was a very, like a very important person
28:42
for the company, and we all really liked him. And when I was at his funeral, I was thinking, what if I died? Like he was 40 years old. And it's like out of the blue, right?
29:02
What if I died? Would I want to look back at my life and say, yeah, that was a thing that I didn't do that I really should have. There is something I regret because I didn't do it.
29:20
And is it really like living up to social expectations that I wanna do, or is it living my truth that I wanna do? And I think living my truth was a more important value for me. Experiments, like this one I love.
29:41
So I didn't know how this would play out, right? And like I knew that I have this sense that I should be presenting as a female, but how do I know if that's really the thing? Like I can start HRT, but once I started,
30:02
then it's hard to go back. So is there a way to test that? And there is, like you can learn to do really good makeup. I don't have makeup on anymore. But when I started out, I used a shit ton of makeup because if you are good at doing makeup,
30:22
you can actually get to a point where in a bar in the evening after a couple of beers, people don't notice. And that's what I did. I did learn how to do feminizing makeup, dressed up as a woman, and went to a bar
30:42
with a couple of friends to whom I already came out. And after that, I realized that it was fine. It worked out, okay, what's next? Let's go to Pride. And then I went to Pride as a woman. And all these experiences helped me understand that yes, this does feel much better,
31:01
does feel much more natural. And in fact, the last time when I went out like that, it was a festival, a cigarette festival, some of you may know from Budapest, there is this big music festival, and I was going there as a volunteer for an NGO.
31:21
And I went as a woman, and then I went home, and I was supposed to dress back as a male and go work the next day. And I felt like I was shutting the jail cell on myself,
31:41
like going back to the jail and shutting it and throwing the key away. And I was like, yo, I don't wanna do this anymore. Not one more time, and that's when I finally decided. So experiments are really, really important.
32:01
And then setting a deadline, like there will always be unknowns. And I knew that at some point I will have to make a decision. So I kind of, actually I made the decision like two or three weeks earlier than the deadline that I set myself. But it was really important to have that deadline,
32:22
because that kind of pressed me on to do more experiments, to put myself out there, get a bit more information. Because I knew that if I didn't get whatever information I don't get until that deadline, I will regret not getting.
32:41
Because when you make a decision like that, you wanna be sure that you got everything, done everything that you can to make sure that you're doing the right thing. So a year later, once I made up my mind, so like there were still uncertainties, right?
33:03
When I made the decision, I still didn't know what would happen. And even before that, like I still don't know if I had communicated differently with my ex-wife, would have that changed anything, right?
33:23
Probably not, but like it will always be with me. And I wouldn't say that it's regret, I don't regret anything, because it was the right decision. But at the same time, there is still this sense of what if,
33:40
but we'll never know, and it's fine. You have to be fine with that. And there were a lot of things that I didn't expect, right? I didn't expect that one day I will be walking out of the HR's office knowing that someone is complaining about me using the women's room, apparently,
34:04
and not knowing who, because they denied me that knowledge. And then you walk into a room full of your colleagues, and you feel like there is someone here stabbing me in the back, not even having the courage to tell it to my face,
34:22
and I don't know who that is. How do you going, how would you feel? Like would you feel like you belong here? No, right? So these kinds of unexpected things happen, and whatever you do,
34:41
you won't be able to mitigate that up front. Like, I didn't know that the Hungarian government feel completely out loud and out low changing your gender. So on paper, I'm still male, yay.
35:01
And despite winning four consecutive court cases, I'm still male, in paper. So what I'm trying to say is that I didn't know that things will be worse than I expected in certain areas. But at the same time,
35:23
I did every piece of research I could, and I still feel that I made the right decision. Even if something came up that would change my mind, all of this didn't change my mind, by the way. I would still make the same decision if I knew it up front.
35:41
But even if something came up that would change my mind, I know that I did everything that I could to make sure that I'm making the right decision. And then there is no reason to regret it, right? Yeah, so I learned a lot, and during this process,
36:04
sorry, again, I thought I turned off this thing to go to sleep, but it seems like it didn't work.
36:22
But I'm close to the end, so come on. All right, so yeah, a couple of things that I learned, and I really wanted to highlight these because these are not necessarily connected to decisions, but not sharing information up front,
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that's something that erodes trust, that was a painful learning, and that kind of goes back to professional side as well, right, when you have someone who you want to give feedback to give it as soon as possible because if you give it later, then that person will feel like
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you've been keeping something from them, right? Lack of inclusion at a workplace, much worse than I expected. It's just, yeah, you want to work in a place where you feel home, and if that's not true, then it's not working.
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Like, doing activism at work, like, I'm an activist, and I've been doing activism basically ever since I started my transition. At some point, I was, like, before the government banned legal gender recognition in Hungary, I was the campaign face of a campaign organized
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by Amnesty International against that law, and I've been giving interviews like four times a day and stuff like that, it was crazy period. But, like, doing activism is fine.
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Doing it at your work is not. That's a really important learning because once that sweeps into your work, you start feeling like you're not going to get your work done, and because of that, I have a rule that whoever wants to talk about trans issues, I'm happy to do that
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over a beer after work. And that's really important, and that's why we need allies. So at work, don't expect the minorities to be the activists. Be their voice. If you are not a part of a minority, or at least not that minority, try to be their voice,
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and make sure that it's not them who keep repeating the same answers to the same questions. And finally, I kind of learned the most important lesson of all, and that most important lesson is that the wrong risk-mitigated decision is better than no decision at all.
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And I think that risk mitigation is really important. And once we add that in there, I can kind of agree with this sentiment. Yeah, just one more second. Yeah, so make your decision timely, but mitigate the risk.
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Have an escape strategy if you can. If you have difficult decisions, and you can't have an escape strategy, then think about what are the options. How are they comparable? If they are not comparable, lean into your values,
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and dissect the problem, and use the scientific methods on the parts that you can use it on. And remember that these decisions that are hard decisions, where you have non-comparable things, and no way back, these decisions define you.
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These are the decisions you will always remember, and these are the decisions you should never regret. Thank you, thank you.
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And just note, that is my YouTube channel, if you wanna check it out, a couple of good, and LeanPoker is my workshop. It's a really nice workshop for delivering value early enough. Okay, any questions?
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If somebody have any questions, please walk by the mic. Thank you so much. It's really appreciate you share all this experience and all this decision making methods with us. For me, I really want to know,
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like sometimes everybody make life decisions, and if you make a decision, and it's like kind of, those kind of big decision, there's no turning back, like how do you kind of find peace within yourself? Sometimes you will have that feeling, right? Sometimes it's like, oh, what if, right? Like, did I do the right thing?
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Like, how do you find peace that like, actually it's fine, it's gonna be fine, this decision will work out, even you doubt it. Yeah, so for me, and I think that's something that's very personal to every person, and maybe you need other strategies, but my strategy is that I make damn sure
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that I did everything I could before the decision to know that it's the right decision, and then I accept that if it wasn't the right decision, then I won't regret it because I just understand that at that point, with the information that I had,
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that was the right decision. Even if it's not the right decision anymore, at that point, I couldn't have made any other decision because all the data supported what I did. And I think that's the only thing that I need, and maybe it's not the only thing that others need.
42:26
Any other questions? So Greta, thank you very much for sharing. You said about how to make the decision,
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like the time you decide for the deadline, so I want to know how do you decide when it's time, or if you have any tip about it. What should be your deadline? Yeah, that's tough. So I think, I don't have a recipe to start with. One thing that I did was to think about,
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okay, what are the experiments that I would want to run? Okay, these are the ones that I have in mind now. Then I just made an estimate of how much time do I need for making those experiments, and added like 50%,
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just in case I have new ideas for experiments in the future, and that was it. And if you're interested in timeline, I think it was about in 2018, February, that I decided that I need to make a decision, and I made the decision early August,
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and my deadline was September. Thank you very much for the, there we go. Thank you very much, I found that not only inspiring, but also very informative. I think it's really nice to have advice
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that's concrete and practical. So I liked your kind of suggestions, the scientific method. A lot of the time, what makes that, can make that difficult is how good your information is. So like, you can use metrics to measure things,
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but sometimes those metrics are misleading, or they're not actually representative of what you're trying to get at. Do you have any kind of experiences or advice in trying to improve that information to inform your decision? So first of all, let me say this.
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An imperfect metric is better than no metric. So even if you know that it's not the right metric, if you have a metric, or if you have a couple of metrics, it's much better than having nothing. Even if it's just a lagging metric, or even if it's just, you know that it's correlated with the thing usually, or even you just have a hunch
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that it's correlated, that's better than nothing. And then also, you have to consider, again, the return on investment. Maybe if you put in more effort, you might get a better metric, but once you hit a point where, you know,
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we made an investment, it does provide some stability or some certainty, the rest is fine. We accept the rest of the risk. And as far as improving, I think there, I don't have like a good one advice
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other than read books on it. I think there are like hundreds of strategies that you can use to make your metrics better, and probably it should be a separate talk to talk about that. Yeah, so any more questions?
46:02
No, right. So yeah, thanks, Yvette, for this amazing talk. Thank you. Thank you.