Be The Leader You Need in Open Source
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Thank you. If we can quickly re-welcome Megan with a huge round of applause. I'm gonna use this, and I got this, no feedback. Wonderful, well, I am Megan, and I am so excited to be here today to talk to you about leadership.
00:21
And as I was preparing this, I was wondering, have any of you ever been working in open source and just thought to yourself, oh my gosh, I wish someone would just lead, just point us in the right direction, or just can you get us all working better together? Does that sound familiar at all?
00:41
Yeah? I know I have felt that way too, and it can be really frustrating. But what if you could be the leader you need in open source? Well, today I'm gonna tell you how you can start doing that. But first, I do wanna thank you for being here. Excuse me. I think leadership's a really important topic,
01:01
and if we can all increase our leadership skills, we have the opportunity to make our communities more healthy and our projects much more sustainable. So I'm gonna use this time to talk about what leadership is, and go into a few tips of how to strengthen your skills,
01:22
and tell you some techniques that you can use starting today. And so, does that sound good to you? All right. Oh, sure. Thank you. Absolutely. Okay, good. So, then why don't we start with a story? This is a open source leadership story
01:45
that I ran across while working with a project that wanted to improve their contributor experience. And what we did is we interviewed a lot of contributors to understand how we could make it better for them. And one story in particular stood out for me. And it was a contributor
02:01
who really wanted to make their first contribution. And they looked in the forums, and they looked in the issues, and they looked around all the different communication channels, and they felt really intimidated. And they felt that people were talking in ways that made it a little scary to step in and ask for help.
02:20
And they waited an entire year before they finally made their first contribution. And what they ended up doing was reaching out to a mentor and asking someone, would you please help me? And that person took the time and walked them through the steps so that they could finally make their first contribution.
02:41
And fortunately, this person had a learning mindset. And they learned the process, and they practiced again and again. And now today, this person is one of the top contributors of their project, which is really amazing. But it's also really unfortunate. It makes me wonder, how many contributions did we miss
03:03
because this person was intimidated by the way people were interacting in the communication channels of this project? And the answer is actually about 400 commits a year. And then I wonder about how many people didn't persevere like this person did and walked away from the project and never even made a contribution.
03:23
And the answer to that is just too many. Now, as a community, as an industry, we have gotten so much better and so much more aware of how we need to communicate with each other, which is great, but we still have work to do because what happens in open source is we all want to help.
03:41
That's how open source works. But when you step into help, often you are stepping up into a leadership role and you don't realize it. And let's face it, is anyone getting training in open source, especially in soft skills? No, probably not. And so that's one of the reasons why I like to give this talk, just to start raising awareness
04:01
on the topic of leadership. So I think that we have a lot that we can be doing together and to learn these leadership skills. So I want to unpack this a little bit for us. So the first question is, who were leaders in this story?
04:22
Anyone? That's okay, I'm gonna tell ya. So the people in the forums, especially people moderating, they're leaders. They didn't realize it, they're just stepping into help. There are people in the issues that are reviewing them, they are also leaders. The mentor who stepped up and helped this person is a leader.
04:42
And actually the individual contributor is a leader too, or at least displaying leadership traits. And I'm gonna unpack that a lot more later on because we don't normally think of an individual as a leader, but I think we all need to start seeing ourselves as a leader and understand how we can start having leadership skills.
05:05
And what is leadership? There's actually no one definition, but they're all generally about the same. This happens to be my favorite from a leadership expert by the name of Kevin Cruz, and his leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others
05:23
towards the achievement of a goal. And what is so important about this, it's about influence. It's about influencing others. You can't make someone do something, especially in open source. It is all about influence. And it is also about bringing people together and interacting with them to achieve a common goal.
05:40
And sometimes to understand what something is, it's easy to define what it is not. So leadership is not a title or a role, right? Anyone can lead from any position. And it's not a personality type. You don't have to be some extrovert. There are lots of great leaders that are introverts too.
06:02
And it is not management. It is not about people getting jobs done on time, on budget. It is also very much not about power. It is about influence. And there are three types of leadership. And the first one is leading organizations.
06:22
So the most common one might be the CEO leading a company. In open source, that might be someone like an executive director who's running a nonprofit. It could even be the BDFL that's running the entire project and the entire community.
06:40
Another type is leading others. So that might be a product manager in a company that's working with all kinds of functions to get a product out the door and promoted. In open source, that might be that mentor that's helping people learn how to contribute. And then the last one is leading yourself. And this is very much what that contributor was.
07:02
He was showing a leadership type of leading himself. And that means that you know how to manage your emotions and be able to control and shift them as needed so that you can have a productive outcome by working with someone else. And the reality is is you can't lead others until you can lead yourself.
07:22
Because as you take on more and more responsibility and more people are looking to you for direction, you have a lot of stress to manage. And you need to be able to control those emotions so that you can make everyone feel calm and confident so they follow you down the right path to achieve something together.
07:44
So what do leaders do? Well, research from Harvard Business Review shows that leaders do several things as they're working with groups. They shape a vision. They translate that vision to a clear strategy. They bring teams together and reward them and motivate them.
08:02
And they also focus on measurable results so there is a clear outcome they're all working towards. They foster innovation in learning. And they are leading themselves while they do all of this. And this is exactly what that individual contributor did actually. This person had a vision to make a contribution.
08:20
And he had a new strategy. Instead of just watching and waiting, he actually asked for help from a mentor. He recruited that mentor. They became a team. And together, they wanted to achieve that one goal, that one commit. And of course, he did foster innovation in learning, got really good at the process, really good at understanding the project.
08:41
That's how he became a top contributor. And the whole time, he led himself through that whole journey so that he could achieve that. So while leaders do what they do, what kind of skills do they have to use? Does anyone know? Anyone want to call out a leadership skill? Communication's a good one. Any others?
09:02
Yeah, negotiation's a great one, too. Well, research shows that there's a lot. Why are you laughing? Because there's so many. Well, what's interesting about this is you inspire and motivate others. You display integrity and honesty, communicate, collaborate. And when you look at this, what you realize
09:21
is that whether you are running a company or you are working in open source, to lead means you're not really relying on those technical skills that you have and all those amazing cognitive abilities. You're actually relying on soft skills. And research shows that there are
09:40
a lot of people that are involved with soft skills. Research is showing that 2 thirds of leadership is actually reliant on emotional intelligence. And that's something we don't talk about very much in open source. Actually, we don't talk about it much in the world at all, which is a bigger problem. But if you think about it, we talk a lot more about our cognitive abilities, how smart we are.
10:03
And we are really smart. We solve incredibly hard problems. But we need to start embracing emotional intelligence in our work because it's clearly the key to being good leaders in open source. So I want to take some time to explore what emotional intelligence is
10:21
because we should really want this. It makes us better at our work as contributors. Dan Goleman, who literally wrote the book on emotional intelligence, it's called Emotional Intelligence, he said that the difference between good and great, 90% of good to great,
10:40
is based on having emotional intelligence skills. And what that means is that if these two people in front of me have the same cognitive abilities, but this person on this side has more emotional intelligence, they're going to be able to be a stronger, or a top performer, stronger contributor in the community.
11:01
And primarily that's because they will have the ability to set a vision with others and influence others to work towards a goal and you can make a much bigger impact as a group than you can by yourself. So what is emotional intelligence? Well, simply put, it's really learning
11:22
how to manage your own emotions, getting really in tune with yourself, and also understanding how to attune with others in influencing their emotions and motivating them so that you will work together towards that common goal. And Dan Goleman broke it down into five pillars,
11:42
and of course we do not have time to unpack all of these but you should know that self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation are all about managing your own emotions. And empathy and social skills, these are about controlling your emotions
12:01
and then being able to influence the emotions of others. We're just going to focus on self-awareness and self-regulation. They're two sides of the same coin and actually when you strengthen these two pillars, you create a strong foundation and strengthen the other pillars at the same time.
12:23
So let's dive in just a little bit into what this is. Self-awareness. So self-awareness is just really being in tune with yourself in any given moment, knowing how you feel, knowing how your emotions can affect others.
12:41
And the other side is self-regulation. That's being able to control those emotions, being able to shift them so that you can have a more productive outcome while working with others. So in the example of the story earlier, the contributor was stuck with fear
13:01
and he knew he was stuck. And so he shifted his emotion so that he could be more proactive. And then he reached out to someone and shared his request and his need and his vision and motivated them to help him. And that person donated time that they didn't have to do. So that's self-awareness and self-regulation.
13:22
Now let me ask, how many of you think you have strong self-awareness? Raise your hand. Yeah? All right. Well, you are right in line with the research. This is a problem, it's not an us problem, it's a humanity problem.
13:41
And research found that 36% of people are able to identify their emotions. And well, that is just kind of shocking, but it's okay because we can work on this together. And we want to because when you're born with cognitive skills,
14:01
they're only gonna grow so much, right? And that where we are in like our open source careers, we might be learning more from each other, but it's really gonna be diminishing returns at some point. And if we really wanna go the next mile, we're going to want to lean into that emotional intelligence and becoming more self-aware, being able to self-regulate is the place to start.
14:22
So let's talk a little bit about how we can do this. This is kind of an interesting thing. The answer for improving emotional intelligence is mindfulness. And Google's done a lot of research in this area and has started a program called Search Inside Yourself
14:41
that helps teach leaders how to use mindfulness so they can be better leaders. And if you don't know mindfulness, it's really all about being present in the now, having a calm nervous system. And it really is something that sounds easy to attain, whether it's meditation or yoga or journaling.
15:01
But I don't know about you, but when someone's like, oh, you wanna be a better leader, just meditate. I was like, I'm not doing that. It's just not something that you naturally do. It's a practice you have to build. And with any kind of change, you have to know why. And for me, I needed to know why I needed to meditate, how it was making me a better leader,
15:21
how it was changing something in my brain so that I was doing something that I wasn't doing before. And I got my why from Dan Siegel, and he is a interpersonal neurobiologist, a psychiatrist with a specialty. And he has this great way of illustrating how mindfulness helps the brain.
15:42
Now, if I switch to this mic, you can't hear me, can you? That doesn't work? It does work? All right. If I put this down, is this gonna get that annoying? Okay. I'm gonna try to demonstrate. For those like the first three rows that can see me, the rest of you can look at the screen. It's a very simple demonstration of how the brain works.
16:03
But simply put, you have the spinal cord here going up into the brain stem, and then you have your downstairs brain, as he calls it. It's your limbic system. It's all of your emotions, a fight, flight, freeze. And then the four fingers are your cortex
16:23
and your prefrontal cortex. That's your upstairs brain. This is your logic, your reasoning. And what you want is to have an integrated brain where the upstairs brain is working with the downstairs brain. Because all day long, you are getting stressors, and they are coming up the spinal cord into the brain,
16:42
and your body's going, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. And then the upstairs brain is saying, it's okay. We've been here before. We know what to do. We can stay calm. And when you have this integrated brain, what you get here in the prefrontal cortex is emotional intelligence.
17:01
This is where you get your awareness. This is where you get your self-regulation, your empathy. Everything happens here because of this connection. But you're going all day long, and you're getting stressors. And this connection is not a very strong connection, unfortunately. And eventually, you get that one email
17:21
or that pull request or that tweet, and you lose it, and you flip your lid. And that is how he describes what is happening to your brain all day long. And it can take a good 20 minutes for that to come back down so that you can re-engage and have the capacity of emotional intelligence again.
17:43
And so that helped me really understand why mindfulness is important because it starts to really strengthen the bonds and helps you keep that upstairs, downstairs brain together while you're dealing with stressful situations. And you especially need that in open source
18:01
because the environment in which we work in is more apt to make you flip your lid. And that's because we're using asynchronous communications. And what social neuroscience has found is that we are wired, our brains are wired for face-to-face communication, not asynchronous.
18:22
We are constantly looking for social cues and body language to help us regulate how we interact with each other. And when we don't have that and we're working in asynchronous communication like GitHub and Slack and Twitter, we are at a disadvantage. And yes, we have emoticons,
18:41
but it doesn't close the gap to what our brain needs. And so research found that there's a couple things that happen where we're working in asynchronous communication that you really need just to be aware of. And the first one is that when we don't have eye contact, we have less empathy for the person we're working with.
19:01
And also we have this weird thing that we do where we project a tone or a voice on someone's tweet or email or whatever the communication channel is. And nine out of 10 times, it's more negative than what they intended. So we are really setting ourselves up to flip our lids
19:20
way more than we should. And so this is happening all the time. And if we could practice on staying calm, using mindfulness techniques to be more present as we're communicating, more aware of what we're dealing with as we're communicating, we will be in a much better situation because when we don't, what happens is we are all just communicating
19:41
with our pure emotions. We have flipped our lids. And when it starts to get really bad, like in Twitter, when we are just really arguing our point, suddenly our brain just flips a switch and we are fighting for survival because being right suddenly becomes a form of survival. And that's when you see flame wars. And we all know those are terrible.
20:01
And we do not need to go there. We just stay a little bit more present with our online communications. So mindfulness obviously is something that can just help set the brain. It's a practice that we can use to have more resilience in our brain, but it is truly not enough.
20:21
You need strategies. You need strategies that you can use in the moment when you need to reset, when you start seeing things getting a little heated or you start getting that message that really kind of makes you a little unhappy. And so some ways that you can reset are some, count to 10. Just count to 10 and give yourself some space.
20:42
You can also take some deep breaths. And there's more science coming out exactly how breathing helps calm the limbic system. You can take a walk. Maybe you need more than a breath. Maybe you have to go for a walk around the block before you sit down and decide how you want to communicate. And my favorite is sip hot tea.
21:00
There's a great practice of taking hot tea and trying not to burn yourself. You suddenly become very present when you don't want to burn yourself. It's amazing. It's a great little hack. So you want to reset yourself, but you also need strategies so that you respond. You respond logically.
21:21
You respond with the intent for productive interaction. You don't want to be reacting just from your limbic system, purely from emotion. And there's a lot of techniques that you can do to improve the way we communicate to each other. One that I like is yes and. I think you've probably have heard this in improv, that you build off of each other.
21:40
You don't have to agree. Someone might give a proposal and you don't really agree with it. You could just say, yes, and I also think we should consider this, right? You're not going right at them and you're not starting that whole I need to be right issue. The other approach that I like is a design approach of I like, I wish, I wonder.
22:02
So if someone has a proposal or someone has submitted something for review, you can say, I like this, but I wish you would also consider that and I wonder if we could explore this as we talk about this topic, right? And it just helps frame it in a more constructive way.
22:23
I also encourage people to explore nonviolent communication. That's a lot to unpack, but there's some great communication techniques that you can use. And I also encourage you to use active listening skills. I use this all the time. It's a great opportunity to repeat what someone just said.
22:42
So I'll say, oh, what I hear you saying is, and it gives that person a chance to hear what I've understood and correct it so that we can have a shared understanding as we go on and keep discussing. Also, the last one is when things start getting tough in online communication,
23:00
it's up to you to know when it's just time to go back to that face-to-face communication. It's up to you to call someone, go on video, and just pull it out of the online communication because sometimes our brain just really does need all the social cues. So that was a lot. That's a lot to learn about a whole new way
23:22
of managing yourself and managing others while working in open source. So I just wanna do a quick recap that leadership, you can lead from any position, and every time you're trying to help in open source, you are stepping into a leadership role. Just no one's told you that. And remember that you can't lead others
23:42
until you can lead yourself. So you really need to work on that self-awareness, self-management, and also, you can strengthen self-awareness regulation, all those emotional intelligence skills by starting a mindfulness practice
24:00
because it's going to change the way your brain functions and make it much more resilient as we're working online in this asynchronous communication. And again, you wanna learn what these strategies are to reset and to make sure you're responding and not reacting. And I hope you do because we have a huge opportunity.
24:21
Remember, you have new community members joining you and they're looking to you. They're looking for cues of how safe it is in your community or how they should behave. And you have the opportunity to choose how you're going to interact. And it might make the difference of scaring them away or inspiring them to be your next top contributor.
24:42
So I hope you choose to lead and be the leader that we all need. So thank you very much.