Dossiers of Awesome Get Folks the Recognition They Deserve Hello, everyone. As strong women, we often hear that we should be lifting one another up. But how? Part of the answer is to help our teammates get the visiiblity and recognition they've earned. The topic of this talk, "Dossiers of Awesome," is one way to do so. It's not a complete answer, it's not a recipe, and it's not a universal prescription. It's simply one way to frame the question of how to support our colleagues. I hope there's an idea in here that's useful for you, but even more than that, I hope that tonights's discussion will spark lots of other ideas from you. 

Erin Dees Principal Software Engineer Stitch Fix
 https://erindees.me My name is Erin Dees. I joined Stitch Fix as a Principal Software Engineer about two months ago. I love taking on big, thorny systems problems—the kind where you have to reach across teams, learn from one another, gather knowledge from the industry, and then package up all that learning and bring it home to your team. That's my jam! It's why I also coach athletes, racewalkers specifically. It's why I write books on programming. (It's not why I have goats. Goats are just great. They're good listeners.) 

How do I catch these things happening around me? People aren’t going to harass with others around. The practice I'm talking about, "Dossiers of Awesome," grew organically out of a conversation I had a few years ago with a former colleague, Liz Abinante, and a challenge that she gave me. We were lamenting all the recent stories we'd read about prominent women in the tech industry, many of them our friends, leaving their posts due to harassment or being denied opportunities. I told Liz, "I need to improve my observation skills, so that I can catch these things if they happen around me." She replied, "People aren’t going to harass with others around," because harassers isolate their victims. They don't harass in front of witnesses, and they don't harass everyone— this can lead to victims doubting their own experiences. 

How can I support the other women on my team, then? Help them get the recognition they’ve earned. I felt powerless. I'm an individual contributor. I don't have the authority to hire, fire, or promote. If I can't change the culture, and I'm not likely to witness mistreatment, and I can't formally recognize talent through promotion, what can I do? "Most of my teammates are women," I said. "How can I keep them from being driven out of their jobs?” “Help them get the visibility and recognition they've earned," was the answer. Before we get into the next part of the story, I want to acknowledge that a lot of the people in this room are already doing a lot of emotional labor for their teams. If this were only a talk about lifting up others, it would still be useful. But I want to make the case that the practice we're talking about can help *you* as well. It's all about giving good feedback. 


 Feedback How many of you are in a role where you're expected to give feedback on your colleagues at regular intervals? How many of you dread those times of year, when you have to come up with something original to say about each engineer? It's easy to stay in generalities, isn't it? "So-and-so has done a great job building features for us. I'd like to see them continue to grow their software skills." I mean, that could be anyone on our teams. Not only that, but it seems to take forever to compile all this info each time. At Stitch Fix, we place a high degree of emphasis on feedback (they even train us formally in how to do it!). The heartbeat of the process is the Collect and Reflect cycle, where we share detailed feedback with our peers. 

Feedback should be… Lightweight Regular Actionable To get better at giving feedback, we need to find habits that are lightweight, regular, and actionable. Whatever we decide to do should save us time and hassle at review time. It has to be easy enough to do so that we'll actually do it regularly. And ideally, we'd like to provide feedback that our colleagues can actually use. So, back to that challenge from Liz to find ways to recognize achievements.... I found an idea that had been right in front of me: my engineering journal. 

Months prior, I'd started keeping a near-daily work journal for myself. I was on a newly-formed team, and there was so much learning in that process that it was important to document what I worked on. Journaling takes no fancy tools or software. If you have a computer, you have a calendar. You can schedule a regular appointment with yourself to write. If you have a computer, you also have a text editor. You can use it to keep a running file with each day's accomplishments. It doesn't need to be much; just two or three bullet points summarizing what you worked on. That said, I do use a dedicated journaling app for work, because that's what I was accustomed to. I'd been using the same app for years for my personal journal. 

Every day at 4:30pm, just before the end of the workday, a little window opens on my computer: "It's time to write in your journal!" I spend just a few seconds typing in the main events of the day. Incidentally, as a mother this reminds me of something we used to do when our kids were younger. At bedtime, everyone would take turns answering three questions: 1. What was your favorite thing that happened today? 2. Did anything make you mad or sad today? 3. What are you looking forward to tomorrow? I don't succeed at writing a journal entry every day; sometimes I'm rushed or feeling lazy or miss the reminder. But even journaling half the time is enough to take a pulse, and that's all we need. 

So, if I'm already writing down what _I'm_ doing, the new twist was to also write down the things my colleagues were doing. Some of my entries already mentioned stuff my teammates had achieved, but now I was going to do this systematically. Hashtags and everything. Typing this in takes just seconds each day. And at the end of the review cycle, you have a wealth of raw material that you can use to give meaningful feedback. That's when you put the dossier to use. Here's how I do that. 

First, find all the journal entries that are related to a specific teammate. With a text file, you can use good ol' search. In this app, you'd click on the teammate's name to filter the list of journal entries. 

Rearrange the items based on the patterns you saw… 

…then add section headers and a summary. (More on the summary in a moment.) What you do next depends on your particular feedback environment. When I was in a workplace where we wrote self-reviews quarterly, I would paste all this stuff into an email to our manager and cc my teammate. 

If you have a good level of trust with your manager, they now have raw material for a future promotion pitch. And your teammate has some data to use when they write their self-review. (There's a lot of culture pressure on us to be self-effacing. But this isn't bragging; it's data.) 

The bullet points are useful data, but the summary is where your feedback really shines. What can your teammate do to build on what they've accomplished? For instance, do you see a spark of leadership potential? Suggest a project they can run. See them getting enthusiastic about a useful new technology? Maybe they'd enjoy learning it and then sharing what they've learned. 

Marginalization So... this is a women's conference, and the conversation that sparked this talk was about how women can lift one another up. I'd like to add a brief reminder that a lot of our teammates are dealing with other marginalized identities, too. As I think about the middle-class background and other privileges that helped me establish this career, I realize that it's up to me to help marginalized teammates who may be feeling vulnerable. 

Impact I ended up keeping these dossiers for everyone on my team. It didn't cost any extra effort to make the daily journal entries, and it ended up being maybe 15 minutes or so per person to compile the finished version at review time. 

Thank you! •Liz for the conversation •Lila and Miriam for the feedback Before I sign off, I'd like to thank Liz for the conversation that kicked off this idea, and Lila and Miriam for their thoughtful review and (appropriately enough) useful feedback. As we enter networking time, I'd like us all to own what we're skilled at. When you introduce yourself to the people across your table or the people around the room, I invite you to share something that you're awesome at---work-related or non-work-related, it doesn't matter. If that's a bridge too far, consider asking someone else what they're awesome at. (They'll probably ask you the same question after giving their answer, so heads up!) 

Thank you! •Folders Image: Melissa Venable • Flickr/CC •Liz’s Avatar: @feministy •My Avatar: @staceyabidi As we enter networking time, I'd like us all to own what we're skilled at. When you introduce yourself to the people across your table or the people around the room, I invite you to share something that you're awesome at—work-related or non-work-related, it doesn't matter. If that's a bridge too far, consider asking someone else what they're awesome at. (They'll probably ask you the same question after giving their answer, so heads up!) I look forward to meeting some of you, hearing what you're awesome at, and hearing your ideas about how we can learn to lift one another up through meaningful feedback. Cheers!