Agenda
December 6

Their position isn’t great and they feel left alone. It’s likely they’ll leave your company at some point. And yet, they’re also afraid to come to you, their boss. Instead they turn to coaches and peers for help. But being external, a coach can only offer so much help, and a peer’s recommendation could be to either sit things out or to find a new place to work. That can only mean one thing: you need to start going to them. You need to spend more time listening to them, helping them grow, providing them with all the context, perspective, and support they need. Put on your manager’s hat and come along. Together we’ll explore the key themes that hold your middle managers back. Then we’ll talk about how you can do a better job supporting them.

This CTO is focused internally, that one externally. That one insists that staying hands-on-keyboard technical has been essential to their success, whereas this one hasn’t touched code directly in years but still does well. If you aspire to being a CTO one day (or becoming a better one now!) this can be frustrating and confusing. In this talk, experienced CTO Meri Williams will help you explore the different flavours of competencies & capabilities for CTOs, how to develop in each, and how to mix & match. You’ll leave better equipped to define your own professional development plan, and judge opportunities as they arise in terms of whether they will broaden or specialise you as a leader in technology.

These are the shortcuts we take in management, which could come back to haunt us later – a bit like how tech debt works. Sometimes, these decisions seem reasonable, but they can add up to trouble over time.

In this session, we'll delve into management debt – the collection of inefficiencies, unresolved issues, and missed opportunities in how we manage teams. Just like its technical counterpart, management debt accumulates, quietly impacting the organization over time. Drawing insights from real-life scenarios in managing engineering managers, I'll uncover various forms of management debt. From lacking a performance management or employee feedback process to having unbalanced teams and inflated titles and compensation, we'll explore practical ways to tackle these challenges. Throughout the talk, I'll share personal stories that highlight the vital importance of addressing management debt.

Together, we'll work through actionable solutions to confront and manage this debt. It's time to monitor, account for, and start paying down our management debt, ensuring we don't go management bankrupt and keep our organization healthy.

It’s not the raw data out of last quarter’s engagement survey. It’s not the slide deck presented after lunch at an onboarding session. So how can you, as a senior leader, know your place in and influence the actual culture of your company? Let’s talk about how to uncover the real culture at your company and how you can make a genuine lasting impact on it.

We’re all aware that the health of any organisation depends to a very large degree on the health of the leadership, but we give surprisingly little thought to how we can foster healthy leadership teams. Without that cohesion, an organisation’s growth can slow and ultimately fail to deliver on its goals.

As leaders, we tend to focus solely on the teams we support – ensuring their success, accountability, and career growth. But when we don’t pour that same level of rigour into building healthy leadership teams, we’re laying the grounds for an unstable organisation.

The foundations of a high performing leadership team are built on strong relationships that are rooted in mutual trust and common goals. In this talk, we’ll discuss practical ways to create a cohesive and supportive peer group that role models the behaviours you want to foster in your organisation.

Join us for a 20-minute tech talk that explores the key principles and practical strategies for "Unlocking Lean Efficiency: Turning Knots Where it Matters in Tech Leadership."

In this talk, we will dive into the critical concepts that empower leaders to drive pace and build highly effective engineering teams when expanding the headcount isn't always an option. We will explore the following key ideas:

Aligning on Direction: Learn how to align your team in a clear direction by translating vision, mission, and strategy into actionable goals. Discover techniques for ensuring everyone is moving in the same direction, even when resources are limited.

The Power of Focus: Understand the importance of focusing on what truly matters. Differentiate between essential tasks, nice-to-haves, distractions, and noise. Discover how to channel your team's energy into high-impact activities.

Repeatable Use Cases: Explore the concept of building repeatable processes and use cases. Find out how this approach can streamline your operations, reduce redundancy, and enhance productivity, even in a resource-constrained environment.

Effective leadership development programs ensure a continuous flow of skilled leaders who can drive the company forward, embrace change, and navigate the challenges and opportunities of your industry.

This session will dive into strategies on how to grow the next generation of leaders in your organization so you can build a stronger foundation for driving the long-term success of your business.

As a senior leader, you are often the in-between person who is matching the business needs, product execution, and the team’s talent. That work requires you to communicate proficiently to ensure everyone understands the needs and the status of progress. In this talk, we’ll cover the basic communication paths to be successful as a senior engineering leader and dive into two of the most difficult parts of it: forward planning and driving accountability in your teams.

In particular, you need to collaborate and switch between four contexts: the inward/self context, the managing up context, the horizontal/peer context, and the department context. You must be proactive and reactive as you switch between these contexts, and your runway may be short. So what can you do? How can you prepare now, so you have less cognitive load with all this later? In this session we will explore these contexts and share strategies with each other using an interactive format.

The shift from manager to leader isn't a step forward, it's a leap. As an engineering leader, you need to scale your impact: broadening the scope of your vision and honing your efforts on actions that will provide the greatest results. 

Your peers change, your focus shifts from team to the larger organization, and you take on more of your own career development. To have true impact as a senior leader, you’ll need to scale yourself, shift your management style, navigate organizational friction, and develop productive feedback loops.

In this full-day workshop, we’ll focus on:

• Understanding your value and success criteria as a senior engineering leader
• The skills you need to have impact and enact change
• The difference between managing ICs and managing managers 
• How to build strong relationships with your reports, cross-functional team, and wider org
• Tools for navigating organizational friction as a leader
• How to create feedback loops to get productive feedback for self-improvement. 

During the day, you’ll participate in interactive exercises that will allow you to convert the day’s learnings into practical actions. You’ll leave the day with new knowledge, resources, suggestions for self-improvement, and the ability to start implementing your learnings immediately in your role.