Weekly 14 - Trust before tactics

What if building trust didn't start with words, but with silence? On the 14th petals weekly, I dive into the signals that build team confidence, the tools that speed up our pipeline, and why a low productivity score isn't necessarily a bad thing. This is the 14th Petals Weekly with me side jobbling and in interest of keeping the momentum going, I'm back with some more updates on what's been going on with the petals project, a little insights into some of my working habits, and also a few lessons learned from some recent material. Before we get into all the details, let's do those scores and then we'll go from there. So productivity is 3, enjoyment is 5, teamwork is 5, learning is 4 and serenity is 4, bringing out an average of 4.2, which is up 1.4. Nice big increase. So it might not have looked like the most productive week, hence the three. But all the other teamwork stuff, enjoyment, learning has definitely pulled us all back into a good overall average. And I'm feeling like we are getting into a good rhythm now on a delivery perspective as well. Obviously we missed our goal date of shipping this in Q1. These things happen. We are definitely ramping up though, and because I've got my new setup and all the tools working and I'll talk a little bit about the process in a bit, I think we're getting to a good place now. So on the last Friday we did have our weekly touch points. Now, not fortnightly weekly, obviously not everyone's always available, but we are trying to keep up that regular cadence again and it actually aligns quite nicely with me doing these weekly updates as well. We ended up mobbing on some challenges that we're facing, some missing logic that we noticed. So we just did some live debugging and fixing in the environment that we were in. It gave me a chance to flex my muscles, let's say, with the brand new tech. So I knew that it was all working well again. It was nice to just check that is the pipeline working properly on a fresh install? Is my setup right as well? And we did capture a few little takeaways that I will share at some point, but I'll probably do that as part of the demo. But it was great. We got some fantastic energy from the room, just the virtual room to kind of get everyone together. It was really good fun just fixing bugs together and it just proves, you know you can have great fun even if you're not necessarily smashing out all the work you committed to. We are still planning for the end of this month to get the next version live. We are getting there and I'm really pleased with how the designs are coming together now. The design framework and language that we're using is coming together nicely as well. We've noticed a few little extra features we'd like to add, but I'm pushing them back until they're absolutely required and we can add them onto, like, the next version once we go live in April. We are also mindful that we have a lot of school holidays coming up and we're all dads, so we're making sure that we are allowing that flexibility to be parents for a bit, take some downtime, especially with Easter approaching, but it also gives us a little bit of downtime and we've all got a little bit of capacity in our evenings, let's say, to do some work. So I'm going to be using my regular evenings to catch up. I also had great fun getting my Cursor app set up properly on cursor.com. this is quite a new tool that's coming out from an AI perspective. It's basically enhancing the VS code environment with artificial intelligence. What I really like about it is the fact that it's got the context. You can provide the context as part of your AI chat and just use natural language to say, help me. And what I really like is when it comes to pipeline issues or build issues, you can say what's going wrong? And it will literally go step by step and solve it for you. It's really nice to have that kind of inline context aware help without jumping between browsers and all that sort of stuff, finding the right thread and stack overflow or GitHub or wherever. And I highly recommend giving it a go, if you haven't already. I also had a really useful workshop this morning. I caught up with the organizers of June's workshop that we'll be doing in person in Milton Keynes. I've got some ideas about what I wanted to do, but I wanted to flesh out the ideas with them, understand the context a bit better as well, like where it's located, what's the environment like, what the audience is like, what kind of demographic are they? We've kind of got some ideas. I'm not going to give too much away because I don't want to spoil it, but there's definitely going to be a more interactive element. We're definitely going to get that engagement in there and it's not going to be just about Petals. Petals is going to kind of complement the workshop. We've got two hours in an evening, so I'm mindful of that as well. It's going to be end of day, so we want to make sure that we're getting the energy going and everyone's going home with something to try. So really happy with the progress on that. We've got plenty of time to really give it some solid substance, but at least now I could probably go in with like the title, the working title and the maybe the simple takeaways that everyone will get from it. So yeah, make sure that you're following along on all this content and the newsletter and I will definitely announce that on the newsletter when it's ready to sign up. So let's go back to that opening teaser about trust. I've recently started working with a lot more teams and I don't necessarily have the context of who these teams are. I've got some insights from elsewhere, but I've not got any first hand evidence. So I'm going to go with the benefit of the doubt with a fresh canvas and sort of get to know the teams my own way. So for me, I need to build trust with these teams. I don't want to go in there with any preconceived opinions and I want to make sure that I'm providing good leadership to everyone involved, even those people I'm not directly managing, but those people that are supporting members of the team and, you know, giving that environment the right space. These teams are already using petals as part of their typical retrospectives, but I don't think they're using it to its full potential yet. So what I'm trying to do at the moment is just kind of establish relationships with the individuals in the team. Maybe not all of them, but some key members understand, you know, what their background's like, what their personality types are like, and really get to grips with, like, who they are before we start making any suggestions and improvements. So recently I was listening to A Blink about the book Trust Works by Ken Blanchard, Cynthia Olmsted and Martha Lawrence. They talk about the ABC model of trust. I don't want to give too much away. You need to go and do your own reading. But what I did get from this is the levels and different lenses you need to use when you're kind of establishing trust with individuals and teams. I'm going through it, I'm just trying to work out how I'm going to apply it if I am. And there's plenty more kind of research behind trust models that work. But again, it was just me trying to dive into some content that was relevant to how I'm actually growing myself at the moment, my circumstances and seeing what's relevant and it gives me a nice way to get that L up in my petal scores as well. But learning new things and also making sure that it's applied and I can got the opportunity to try it in the mode. So there we go. Hopefully a few takeaways for you, a little bit of an update and progress with the app and what's coming up and then hopefully by the end of this month we'll have the app ready for you all to register and get access to this. I'm really excited about launching this. I don't know if it's coming across properly in this communication, but I am really ready to get this out there. Start shouting at about it a lot more and get people doing petals and just find out how people are using it and whether it helps them improve their teams. Make sure you reach out. If you are following this journey, I want to know a little bit more. I'd love to get some of the voices on this content as well. Not necessarily just me talking at you lot, but at the same time I really want to get some nice little stories to share and maybe some Q and A or clinic mode where you just bring your challenges and we try and work it out together, follow along and like and all that good stuff on the YouTube, Spotify and all the other channels. Reach out on the socials. I'm around most of them and I'll be back next week with another petals weekly. Take care of your teams and each other.