(upbeat music)
- Hi, my name is Rachel Vincent,
and I work at the Recurse Center,
which is formerly known as Hacker School.
We're a retreat for computer programmers.
I'm excited to talk to all of you today
about strategies for building good
communication patterns on small teams.
I'll be using examples that are specific
to my workplace and past experiences.
I'll also be suggesting ways that you all
might be able to
incorporate these strategies
into your own workplaces and communities.
I'm assuming that all
of you have worked on,
do work on, or will work on small teams,
whether that's at your job
or in community organizing,
or somewhere else.
Disclaimer time.
The ideas that I'm about to discuss
probably won't work well or
fix a very toxic environment.
They're best implemented in an environment
where folks have a basic level
of respect for one another,
or in a new environment
when a company or community
starts or experiences a bunch of growth.
You need a solid foundation
of trust and respect
for these rules to work.
I'm really lucky to genuinely
like all of my coworkers.
Sometimes that's not the case.
In that case, sometimes it's
best to get out of Dodge.
How does good communication go bad?
We develop unique communication patterns
with anybody that we
spend a lot of time with.
These patterns can include productive
and destructive behaviors all at once.
Maybe you have a friend
who you're particularly
self-deprecating with or a coworker
who gives you useful feedback in a way
that comes across as an attack.
It can be hard to
recognize when a suddenly
destructive behavior
pattern starts to emerge,
which is why it's good to
set ground rules early on.
Step zero.
Outline a shared vocabulary
and expectations.
This is a step you'll need to repeat
and check in on constantly.
Humans are messy and human relationships
are always works in progress.
This talk is full of
examples of shared vocabulary
and expectations and I'm
sure that if you reflect
in your own relationships
you'll find more.
Speaking of those examples
today I'm going to talk
about three categories of fairly common
problematic behaviors and ways
to address them proactively.
I'm going to talk about RC's social rules,
about interrupting,
and about giving and
receiving direct feedback.
Example number one,
as I mentioned earlier I
work at the Recurse Center
and we are known for our social rules.
So we have four of them.
We use them and we stick to them
because we have batches of new folks
starting every six weeks.
So we onboard 30 people every six weeks.
Keeping our working environment productive
is very, very important to us.
So to that end we have
named and identified
common negative behaviors
that tend to emerge
in technical communities.
We also give folks a way to call them out
in a lightweight sort of manner.
The four social rules,
no well-actuallys,
no feigning surprise,
no backseat driving,
no subtle-isms.
I'll go into all of those in a moment.
But first, the meta rule.
In order for the social rules to work,
there's a meta rule that has
to be implemented as well.
If you're called out for
breaking a social rule,
or you are the person you make
the correction and carry on.
You recognize that they cared
and respected you enough
to tell you something tough.
It's not their job to educate you too.
I have some cats to help me
with the first three of these.
(chuckles)
Number one is no well-actuallys.
This is a behavior that is
joked about quite a bit.
In technical communities it's
also known as being pedantic.
No well-actuallys was
the first social rule
that was implemented at RC
because two of the founders
were well-actualling each other so much
they found it hard to work together.
It was hurting their
ability to communicate
on a day-to-day basis.
So well-actualling someone
looks kind of like this.
Person A: Ada Lovelace's
notes on Babbage's analytical
engine were lettered A to G,
and in Note F she described
what is considered
the first computer program, an algorithm.
Person B: Well, it was actually Note G
in which she described the algorithm.
This is a classic well-actually.
Person B interrupted
Person A to add a fact
that didn't substantively
add to the conversation
and turned the focus to them.
Many, many people do this.
It can feel good to correct someone,
especially if you're right on
some sort Archaean tiny fact.
The key here is to reflect on
whether you're contributing
or picking on something that's tangential
to the conversation and derails it.
Number two, no feigning surprise.
(laughter)
This is my favorite one.
(chuckles)
Feigning surprise is when
you express surprise,
real or not, at someone
not knowing someone.
It looks like this and also like this.
Person A: Hey, what's Erlang?
Person B: What?! How have
you never heard of Erlang?
What feigning surprise
does here is make Person B
feel superior to Person
A for happening to know
something Person A currently does not.
But realistically everyone
has gaps in their knowledge.
By Person B focusing on the gap,
makes Person A probably
less likely to express
ignorance or ask questions
around Person B in the future.
That seriously hampers the likelihood
that they'll learn from each
other or work together well.
Number three is no backseat driving.
Proud to have found a cat
on the internet for this.
Backseat driving is
perhaps one of the subtlest
of the social rules.
When someone overhears two or more people
working on something and
lobs advice or an opinion
across the room without
engaging fully in conversation.
This can lead to that person
giving less useful advice,
or to the initial conversation
being completely derailed.
Sometimes people want to work
through something on their own
and by half listening to a conversation,
it's likely the backseat
driver doesn't have all
the information they need to really help.
Rather they're projecting
mastery of a subject
while not really daring to
engage with the people involved.
It looks kind of like this.
Person A is talking to Person B:
Oh, you're right, the
module expects unicode.
Person B: Ah, okay, I
Person C: You should just use Python 3!
Person A: Hey, you're backseat
driving a little bit there!
So backseat driving, as you can see here,
it's not terrifically horrible.
But over the long term what it does
is sort of make people A and B feel like
Person C doesn't care
enough to actually work
with them and talk to them about
whatever they're working on
and just wants to lob some shots in there.
So finally, no subtle-isms,
fourth social rule.
I don't have a cat here
because it's not cute.
Subtle-isms are subtle
expressions of racism,
sexism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia,
and other kinds of oppression.
It's not when someone
says women can't program.
That's overt sexism.
Subtle-isms look more like boxing out
the only woman at white-boarding session
or conversation or saying something like,
"Psh, the iPhone is so easy to use,
"my grandmother could use it."
Or asking where somebody is really from
based on their perceived
ethnic background,
or assuming that someone isn't an engineer
because of their ethnic
background of gender presentation.
Cool, so the social rules.
If you'd like to
implement the social rules
in your own workplace or community
here's one way to do it.
Explain the why of each rule.
So why are these behaviors damaging?
Get explicit buy-in
from everyone involved.
Be committed to calling folks out.
So model good behavior.
And finally, remember the meta-rule.
Everyone, when being called
out, apologize and move on.
Number two, interrupting.
For many folks interrupting
is a huge issue
in the workplace.
It's even worse for people
who identify as women.
There are many studies about
this too that I'm citing here.
Showed that men interrupt
women 33% more often
than they interrupt men in conversation.
A study of transcripts from 12 years
of Supreme Court hearings found that
male justices interrupt female justices
three times more often that they interrupt
other male justices.
Being interrupted makes it hard to speak.
This is very important to recognize.
We all have different
communication styles,
and some people interrupt more than others
in casual conversation and
in workplaces situations.
But for folks who marginalize groups,
interrupting is often used as
and feels like a power play.
There are two common
types of interrupting,
affirmative interrupting
and derailing interrupting.
Affirmative interrupting
is when someone says
"Oh yes, mm hmm"
as someone else is talking.
Derailing interrupting is when someone
cuts someone else off to
interject with a thought,
a roadblock, or question.
Affirmative interrupting is less damaging,
but it still slows things down.
For spoken conversations
one thing we've adopted
or seek is the finger waggle.
This comes from the Occupy
Wall Street organizers.
It looks like this.
So if somebody is saying
something that I agree with
I do this.
It's meant to signal agreement silently.
Think about gestures all
members of your team or group
can do to signal agreement
without vocalizing
and stopping the person who's speaking.
For written conversations
we use a thumbs up
or thumbs down emoji
and a scale of plus one
to minus one signaling
agreement on a scale
from strongly agree to disagree and block.
The reason that we do this is to cut down
on conversational clutter
and keep the issue
that's being discussed centered.
Derailing interrupting, in
my opinion, is much worse.
That can be also harder
to call out and fix.
For me personally being
interrupted during a meeting
makes me pretty angry and
it also makes me freeze up.
At worst I use the thread
of what I was saying,
and I almost never register
what the other person just said
because I'm trying to adjust.
It took a very long time
for me to say something
to my coworkers, but I was happy I did,
because we all set about
fixing it as a team.
So naming the behavior
worked really well for me.
I was able to go from feeling
like the cat on the left
who is screaming which was me internally.
I named the behavior,
admitted I did it too,
and gave my coworkers
direct feedback about it.
So we've all been more
conscious of it since,
and now I feel a bit more
like the cat on the right
who's very happy and
smiling come meeting time.
So cool.
This brings me to my
final class of behaviors,
direct feedback, which is
very, very difficult to foster.
For me, it's kind of like the pinnacle
of great team communication
is when you can
give and receive direct
feedback pretty seamlessly.
There are a ton of
different power dynamics
that may or may not be
present in situations
where direct feedback is needed.
So it's important to recognize those,
figure out what they
are in your situation,
your mileage may vary very, very much.
I don't have a lot of time so I can't run
through a lot of those
different permutations.
But I'm sure if you'll reflect you'll see
what they are in your case.
One cool thing, one weird trick,
is that by implementing social rules
or a no interrupting scheme
you've already started
giving direct feedback to your coworkers
in a regular lightweight way.
So it will be easier hypothetically
to give them feedback in a
more direct heavyweight way.
I've seen direct feedback done very well
in two different places in my life.
In writing workshops and
martial arts classes.
In the best writing workshops I've taken
I found that when
there's a clear moderator
or teacher and everyone number one,
wants and expects to
get and receive feedback
on their work and number two,
respects the ground rules
of giving one positive note
for every negative note,
the feedback that's given is
usually helpful and thoughtful.
On a team you can, perhaps, add a rule
about having a constructive
note along with a negative note.
Or designate someone as
a meeting facilitator
for tougher conversations.
Martial arts classes are pretty different
from writing workshops and
hopefully most work environments.
But I've seen a lot of parallels.
One big parallel is you expect feedback
and there's, again, a
teacher-student dynamic.
In the best boxing classes I've taken
the instructor thoughtfully
explained the technique,
offers corrections, and watches
until you get them right.
I think the most important part of this
type of practice is that
the point of direct feedback
here is to catch incorrect
form and instincts early
and then reinforce proper
form so you don't get hurt.
On a team this translates to being able
to call out when behaviors and processes
are bothering you before
they become insidious.
We're trying to make direct
feedback a more integral
and regular part of our
workplace right now.
It's still a work in progress.
One hurdle we recognize,
which you may have also noticed,
is that when people try to
give feedback in writing
it can come across as
super, sort of, negative,
and attacky and very serious,
whereas if you're talking
to someone one-on-one
it's much easier to come
across in a casual way,
and to remember that you're friends.
This was happening to us a lot.
We communicate on Zulip,
which is like Slack.
It's an internal chat platform.
So we decided to do
something kind of silly,
which we add a small silly emoji dinosaur,
there are three choices,
before we give anybody
direct constructive feedback.
Something that might come
across as a personal attack
is mitigated a little bit
and it's sort of a reminder
for everyone that hey, we love you,
but this thing is really bothering me
and let's work on it together.
I used a dinosaur when I called
out the interrupting thing
being something that
was really bothering me,
and it helped me call it
out in the first place.
As I mentioned earlier direct feedback
can be a thorny thing to
implement and maintain.
Setting a foundation is important here.
So be clear, but it's important that folks
are able to learn from one another,
and give each other feedback
when something is wrong.
Model good communication
aggressively for the first few months
you're adopting these
policies so that folks
feel comfortable following suit.
And start by introducing smaller systems,
like the social rules
or the finger waggle,
to get people used to giving and receiving
feedback from one another.
The hopeful results of good
communication patterns.
Hopefully you are shifting
the work of reducing
harmful behaviors from
individuals to the group.
You're setting clear shared
baseline expectations
for behavior for everyone.
You're shifting the education burden off
of the people who usually bear it.
And ideally everyone can better
focus on working together.
That's all I have.
I don't think I have time for questions
because I'm exactly at 15 minutes.
But I'm happy to chat with anybody later
or take questions if you have them.
Thank you.
(audience applause)
(upbeat music)
