InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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Curiosity and Self-Awareness are Must-Haves for Handling Conflict
When you're in a team, collaborating with others, it's crucial to embrace diverse opinions and dissent; you need to have good conflicts. Conflicts have bad reputations, but with curiosity you can harvest more positive outcomes and build trust and psychological safety. Self-awareness of your emotions and reactions can help prevent saying or doing something that you might regret later.
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How Open-Source Maintainers Can Deal with Toxic Behavior
Three toxic behaviors that open-source maintainers experience are entitlement, people venting their frustration, and outright attacks. Growing a thick skin and ignoring the behavior can lead to a negative spiral of angriness and sadness. Instead, we should call out the behavior and remind people that open source means collaboration and cooperation.
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Leading in Hybrid and Remote Environments: Skills to Develop and Tools That Can Help
Leading in hybrid and remote environments requires that managers develop new skills like coaching, facilitation, and being able to do difficult conversations remotely. With digital tools, we can include less dominant and more reflective people to get wider reflections from different brains and personalities. This can result in more diverse and inclusive working environments.
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Learnings from Measuring Psychological Safety
Asking people how they feel about taking certain types of risks can give insight into the level of psychological safety and help uncover issues. Discussing the answers can strengthen the level of safety of more mature teams and help less mature teams to understand how they could improve.
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How the Hybrid and Remote Working Revolution Impacts Maintaining Mental Health
Whether working remotely or in a hybrid environment, the way in which we work with one another is changing, and can impact mental health and well-being. Personality characteristics can influence how we respond to remote or hybrid working environments. Organizations can foster psychological safety by focusing on culture, transparency, clarity, learning from failure, and supportive leadership.
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Creating Environments High in Psychological Safety with a Combined Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach
Leadership is critical for making psychological safety happen, but they need to lead by example and show that it’s safe for people to take interpersonal risks. Complementing leadership with team workshops in communication skills can enable people to speak up and feel safe to fail.
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Creating Great Psychologically Safe Teams with Sandy Mamoli
Sandy Mamoli, author and coach at Nomad8, recently appeared on the No Nonsense Agile Podcast to discuss her experience in creating safe, high-performing and self-selected teams. Keith Ferrazzi, author of Competing in the New World of Work, also recently wrote about his experience with using empowering social contracts to cultivate great teams. Both emphasized safety and candour.
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Learnings from Applying Psychological Safety across Teams
Applying ideas from psychological safety can enable people to speak up in teams about what they don't know, don't understand, or mistakes they have made. Trust and creating safe spaces are essential, but more is needed. People need to feel that they will not be punished or embarrassed if they take interpersonal risks.
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Kent Beck: Software Design is an Exercise in Human Relationships
In the closing keynote at QCon SF, Kent Beck spoke about how software design is an exercise in human relationships, why iterative and incremental development is the most cost effective way to build software, and how the overall cost of a software system is directly related to the cost of coupling and decoupling and the jackpot changes which result in cascaded coupling.
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Accelerate Your Growth and Build Better-Connected Teams at QCon San Francisco Oct 24-28, 2022
Teams attend QCon to get together, get answers to technical challenges, and get clarity on software decisions, workflows, and roadmaps. QCon San Francisco (Oct 24-28), powered by InfoQ, brings together the world's most innovative senior software engineers, architects, and team leads across multiple domains to share their real-world implementation of emerging trends and practices.
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Getting Feedback When Your Colleagues Are Also Your Customers
Getting and using feedback from colleagues who are also customers using your product can improve the quality of the product and help to improve the way of working. In this situation, it’s easier to receive feedback, but you can get overloaded by it.
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Trivago’s Journey from PHP+Melody to Next.js and Typescript
Trivago’s platform was built using PHP and their Melody framework. A small number of engineers at Trivago maintained Melody, which was a continuity risk. Melody’s documentation and examples could not be as rich as desired due to a lack of capacity, making engineer onboarding and support much more difficult. Trivago then decided to rewrite its platform on Typescript using Next.js.
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How Getting Feedback from Angry Users Helps to Develop Better Products
Every time you change something in your product, angry users can show up. These users are engaged and they care about your product. Listening to them can help you find golden nuggets of user insight to improve your product.
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The Path to a Staff-Plus Engineer Role: from Management Back to Tech
When working in tech, a managerial career may not be for you. Fabiane Bizinella Nardon went from being a manager back to tech, becoming a staff plus engineer and creating a staff plus friendly company. She presented A CTO That Still Codes: My Tortuous Path to the Staff Plus Engineer Role at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Becoming an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer
To increase your effectiveness as a staff-plus engineer, it can help to develop your communication, listening, technical strategy, and networking skills. Blanca Garcia Gil presented Five Behaviours to Become an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.