Superpowers, Psychological Safety & Empowering Your Team with Tia Caldwell #36

Tia Caldwell, former Director of Engineering @ Slack, shares different frameworks she’s used to motivate teams and unlock their superpowers! We cover methods to identify, maximize, & balance strengths on your team, how to shift your team’s mindset from drama to EMPOWERED so they can better confront adversity & challenges. Plus we share the explicit conversations you should be having in your first 1:1s to create greater psychological safety!

“You don't need to have this manager game face. I think there's this perception that when you're a manager, you're supposed to be the person who knows the answers to everything… And while a part of the execution piece is really necessary with being an effective manager, I think the other part is relationship building. You need to invest the time in understanding how people work. Because people will be more open and honest with you, it'll help out with retention for your team and overall happiness. But if you don't… it's not going to go well because you'll be treating people as resources and not humans.”

TIA CALDWELL, FORMER DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING @ SLACK

Tia led the Monetization Team at Slack, a leading global collaboration hub that makes people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. Over the past 15 years, she has led and managed engineering teams at Netflix and Microsoft, covering a breadth of projects such as Xbox, Office 365 and Streaming Content Delivery.

She serves as a facilitator in /dev/color and is the co-founder of Color Code (https://www.colorcode.org/), a scholarship fund dedicated to future leaders of color in tech. Tia studied computer science at Xavier University of Louisiana and spent her undergraduate years doing research for the Missile Defense Agency.

SHOWNOTES

• How do you motivate your team? Find their Superpower! (3:05)
• Tia’s Superpowers (8:02)
• Knowing your superpowers maximizes strengths & protects against your weaknesses (10:09)
• How superpower awareness & common language changes how you operate, make decisions, & structure teams (12:31)
• Why you should balance your team’s superpowers to increase collaboration and be more effective (17:06)
• “The Drama Triangle” (20:51)
• How to recognize what role you’re playing in “The Drama Triangle” (28:30)
• Shift your team’s mindset with “The Empowerment Triangle” (32:45)
• How to shift someone from “Victim” to “Creator” or from “Villain” to “Challenger” (34:27)
• Personal operating manuals & having explicit conversations to get the best from your team (39:06)
• “What’s your grumpiness level?” & other ways to create psychological safety in your 1:1’s (41:37)
• How to prompt self-reflection and identify how your team wants recognition & feedback (46:03)
• Why relationships & removing the “manager game face” are your most effective tool (49:20)
• Takeaways (50:52)

Find all the links & resources shared by Tia HERE: https://sfelc.com/podcasts/superpowers-psychological-safety-and-empowering-your-team-tia-caldwell

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com!