Tribal Leadership with Lian Li

Carmen: Hello and welcome to another episode of the DevRel Book Club. I'm Carmen and I'm joined today by a very special co-host, Kristof. Hello, how are you?

Kristof: Very good. I'm really excited to be here, Carmen. It, it's something we've talked a long time about and finally it's happening. So really, really happy to be here.

Carmen: I'm super happy too. This is a conversation I've been really excited about. And before we bring in our guest and tell you about what book we'll be reading about today, just want to give a quick thank you to our sponsor, common room. Go to commonroom.io, that's one word, common room.io to check them out. And before further ado, let me bring in our guest Lian Li. Hey Lian, how are you?

Lian: Hey, I'm doing very well, thank you. How are you guys?

Carmen: All fine here. Thank you so much.

Kristof: Likewise. So we really happy to have you come and talk about this book and we're really excited that somebody else also got so excited about this book because it's been an inspiration for a very long time talk about. So I'm curious to hear what are your key takeaways and where you've been applying it very much looking forward?

Carmen: Well, let's not beat around the bush here, Lian, why don't you tell us please a little bit about yourself and what book you've brought for us today.

Lian: Excited to do that. So my name is Lian Lee and I am currently a developer advocate as I think most people are who will be tuning into this. I work for a company named Loft Labs. We are building developer tooling for Kubernetes, and I have brought the book, I don't have it with me because I only have a digital version. It's called Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan and other people who, I don't actually know who else is authoring that book, but I guess I'm sure we'll find that out later. And I was first introduced to this book when I was still working as a consultant, also doing cloud native transformation stuff about let's say maybe five years ago or something. And the book completely changed my life and my outlook on a lot of things both professionally and also in my private life. So yeah, it's one of my favourite books.

Carmen: That's wonderful, thank you. Since this is a special occasion where Kristof, you'll be helping me and you're also super excited about this book. I'd also love to hear from you how you came across this book and then how it's affected you.

Kristof: It's many years ago that I found this book and it became a really big influence both in how I work with groups of peoples, with the teams that I work with in the day-to-day with customers, and also how I can express some of the things that go wrong and things that before I was like, yeah, this doesn't feel right and then now I have words for it and that was really useful. But also, and this is probably related deral, I think really, really important is how it helps to express how communities can be different. And that is I think a really huge one because we are community builders and doing so in a healthy way that's creates space for more people to feel like they belong and that they can feel good I think is really important and this book gives the language for expressing that. So yeah, that's why I'm so excited about it.

Carmen: So for folks who haven't read this book yet and are keen on doing, so the big, correct me if I'm wrong, the big chunk of what this book is trying to tell us is that there are five big stages of culture and this is within a team or a leadership group, but as you hint at yourself, there's this also applicable to community, which kind of blew my mind coming into this conversation. Ian, could you tell us a little bit about what those five stages are and a little bit about them?

Lian: Yeah, sure. This is one of the great things about the book. I think just to add onto what Kristof was saying earlier, that it gives us a language to talk about the specific cultural stage that these groups are in. And it also, that's what changed things for me, especially as a consultant. It gives us a way to move people along those stages and to change things for them and for the better. I guess we'll talk about this, they're basically the five stages. They don't really have names, but the stages are defined by the atmosphere, the vibe, the main way that people feel I would say, and it goes from the first stage would be people whose outlook on life is just that life sucks and it's just life in general is just terrible. I would rather not engage with this because it just completely sucks.

The stage one, it's a fairly small group of the population and it's mostly pretty extreme circumstances. The example that they've given the book is people who are imprisoned, so they don't see any kind of way for them to escape the situation that they're in right now. The next stage, stage number two is dominated by the thought of my life sucks. So it's slightly different in as much that my life might suck, but I can see that the lives of other people don't suck. There's a slight difference in, okay, there is another life, it's just not mine. I think that is quite a bigger portion of the population. You can see it a lot with people in dead end jobs, maybe especially people who hate their jobs, who can see that their bosses have great lives, but it's just that their own lives are not what they would want it to be. Then the third stage, that's probably maybe the biggest group of people that is dominated by the thought that I am great.

And then that's not said but implied as, and you are not. So I'm sure these people who are very proud about what they have achieved and accomplished and while they brag about their own achievements, they might be putting down other people a little bit, sometimes intentional, sometimes not. It's just kind of the mindset that is what's in the foreground and the next stage, the fourth stage that is kind of where the authors are trying us to get us to that stage is we are great stage and again, kind of not sad, but implied is, and you are not. So this is kind of like the third stage but in a wider context where it's not just about me, it's about my group and my tribe and we are awesome. We're much better than this other company or this other country or whatever, which is a step up, but there's still a fifth stage, which is that life is great. So we're coming full circle to the first stage again where all life is horrible, but in stage five, all life is great. So the group that I'm in is not just my own tribe, it is the entirety of humanity and those would be the examples that they give in the book are social justice movements maybe, or the group that brought us to the moon where they represent the goal of moving humanity along and there is no real adversary. So yeah, that's I think the quick run through of the five stages.

Kristof: I think that I loved also, so these stages, they're really interesting, but what I loved also was that they were saying that people can be different in different stages depending on the context that they're in. So they might be in one place and they're behaving like someone whose life sucks and then they go to another place and they become somebody else. And that was really, really interesting because that shows that the context in which people are living influences them and can have a really big impact on how they're experiencing things. And then the other part was that it's all about language. It's about the language that we're using in those contexts and how that changes and affects us. And that's fascinating.

Lian: Language really shapes our reality and I think that is one of the key takeaways from the book is really how do you change the language that you use to describe your daily life and how do you talk to other people and that can already change a little bit of the mindset and move you to the next stage. My former boss always used to say, if you put an onion in a pickle jar, the onion gets pickled. And it's not that all the other already pickled onions get UNP pickled. So I think that's what you meant with if I'm in, I'm generally maybe a stage three person, but I go into a situation where all the people are stage two around me and then that will slowly suck me into this stage two mindset. I'm sure you've also experienced something similar when you go into this group of people who just have no hope, especially when I was a consultant, there were so many. Obviously as a consultant you go into dysfunctional teams most of the time and there's just this vibe of, oh, it doesn't matter if we change anything. You're the 50th consultant who's come through here trying to change stuff. And I mean I guess we'll play along, but in the end, all the plans that we make that just get shelved and that just really drags you down.

It's really difficult to maintain a stage three or stage four mindset if you are with this group of people for a long, long time.

Kristof: The other thing is that as a leader, if you're a leader in a group or as a consultant also is the giant responsibility you're carrying because the language that you're using with those people, if you go in this is typically what often happens with consultants is they'll be like, I know all the answers, I'm just, I'm going to tell you now what you're doing wrong. And basically what you're doing is I'm great, but all of you are not and you're basically perpetuating that situation.

Lian: So it was interesting to me, I was consulting for a German company for some time and my approach personally is to be more of a listener, to be more curious, to always listen more than I say. And interestingly, some of the people there, they were just really, they couldn't deal with that. They needed me as a consultant to come in and tell them this is how you do things that they expected. That and me asking so many questions, some of them were doubting, maybe I just don't know anything. Maybe I'm just not very good at what I do and that's why I'm asking so many questions. So yeah, that's very interesting. And I had to have this conversation with these people like, listen, I just want to know how this thing works for you so I can make the best recommendations based on what you're right now. I'm not going to come in and just change everything.

But that's kind what they expected. They wanted this kind of expert leader to rally around and not to, they didn't really want to do that themselves. They didn't want to become stage three themselves. They wanted a stage three leader to tell them what to do kind of.

Carmen: That's really interesting. And when you mentioned that you sort of adapt how you're at different stages depending on the context coupled with, for example, if you're doing something like consulting, you are diving into teams at different stages, how important it is to have that language to navigate it. And I'm curious to hear with something in a line of work where core skills are one of the cornerstones of what we do, like developer relations, how has reading this book affected your outlook in working in this field?

Lian: So one thing in the book that's highlighted a lot of times is that if you are a tribal leader, you don't just speak the language of the tribe you're in, you speak the language of all the tribes you need to. And that's also why you can't jump from stage one to stage four. You have to go through all the stages, you have to own all the stages. You need to be able to really understand and have the confidence of that prior stage. And then once you feel like I've got this down, I own it now, then you are ready to move onto the next one. To me really, I think this is something that we can talk more about in depth later, is that I've noticed with different communities that I interact as a developer advocate also, it's really important to understand what the pain is of people because in the end you're just trying to help them and you have to be very careful not to be dismissive of their problem. A lot of people, they are kind of scared to tell you about a setup that they're not proud of. Like, oh, I know we shouldn't be doing it like this, so they're just going to sugarcoat it or something.

So you need to be able to build that trust and then show them, I understand what you're saying, I've been through that, it's not your fault. It's just a lot of things that come together that kind of keep people in this stage or in this mindset. So that's something that really helped me understand why it's so important to speak that particular language, even though sometimes it's really uncomfortable. I don't want to go back to the times when I felt like a stage two or stage one, maybe even. But yeah, now with the book I feel like I know there's a way out, there's some techniques and tools to get out of there. So it's only temporary. You only have temporary, you have to go into stage two.

Kristof: I dunno if you've also experienced this, probably I need to go back to the book because it's a long time ago that I read it, but I've been in places where I'm talking to someone and I'm talking from the we're great kind of position, but they're totally not there. My life sucks. And then they actually get upset with you. They get really, really angry when you're trying to come on, pull out, we're going to be okay. No, it's not going to be okay. Life sucks. And have you actually been able to do this talking in the appropriate language level to help to lift them up? Have you actually been able to do that?

Lian: I mean, I tell myself that I don't think I've managed to pull someone from stage three to stage four at my clients, but I would venture to say that I managed to create a stage three kind of culture with its individual teams. So that would start just to give more of a context, one of the things that we built was A-C-I-C-D platform for this really big company that have been, it's like banking it. So they have really old legacy software that no one wanted to touch. And this was a huge project where they were asked to rebuild their entire thing in microservices. It is a very, very challenging task actually. And there were a bunch of people in there who were stage three who were maybe experienced or just really excited about doing this and they really believed in themselves, yeah, we can do this. And then there were some people who were like, this is the 20th transformation that I'm part of and I just don't see how it's actually helping me. It's just more work because now I have to do all this and in the end it's just stuff that doesn't really help me at all.

So I think through, first of all exactly what you said. If you tell someone like that, oh no, we're great, let's do it. They won't trust you, they will hate you, they will not talk to you again. So the first thing was to try and find an in, and the easiest way to do that is to go to after work things, maybe you have a drink and then you just start the B word about all the stuff that's terrible at work and the bosses and just let them rant for a bit. Just give them some space to really express their frustrations. And then you can ask questions, maybe don't push them too much. I think that's the most important thing. It's the best way to get people to move to the next stage is for them to have the epiphany, right?

The epiphany is something that they talk about in this book a lot and just show them. So when you go from stage two to stage three that there's a couple of coaching tips how you can coach people from one stage to the next would be to show them how they can be great themselves, show them some people who are great, give them some resources to learn, but let them come to you. Don't tell them, oh, you need to do these things and then you'll be great. But more like you can see that there are other people that are out there who are great and you could do that if you wanted to and I'm here to help you, but if you don't want that help, we can also just continue complaining about stuff.

Carmen: That kind of reminds me how when practising mentorship for someone especially that resonates a lot with how important it is just to listen. A lot of the time these folks just need someone to listen to their after work banter, their after work misgivings and just have a platform so they can let it all out. And then this isn't to condescend anyone mind you just to be like, Hey, wow, okay, now that I'm saying it out loud, I think I know how to fix this.

Lian: I percent,

Carmen: Yeah, of course that applies differently to different stages, but already figuring out a way that, like you said, Lian and I really like this, how to give someone the space so that they can figure out how to be great and then go from there because then you get to a stage where you're like, I'm great, I want others to be great too. I mean we call that paying it forward in more informal contexts. It's really interesting how this book sort of structures all of those so that you can have that framework too, navigate

Lian: That. And I think also in my private life, I apply kind of the same principles now where, because sometimes it's so painful if someone you care about just has a bad goes through this stage, everything is just terrible or everything that's happens to me is so terrible and you don't know what to do or what to say to them. You don't know how to help them. So that is really, I think that's why I love the book so much. It's like, no, there are things that you can do and eventually you have to trust the process. I think that's kind of just trust the process and people will get there. Yeah. Have I mentioned that I love this book so much.

Kristof: I think for me, one of the hardest parts was this life is great. It's kind of like the ultimate thing that has been projected as we thought that we were done, that we're great. And then suddenly there's like, oh look, there's new data. There's these weird people that are even more performance and they're talking still different. What's going on here? And it's like, oh, there's a whole new category that we hadn't even thought about that exists. But when you read that and then you're like, okay, how can I bring the teams that I work with or the communities that I work with, how can I get them there or how can we go there? And then the realisation, or at least for me this realisation came that this is about having abundance, that to be able to talk in the life is great stage or life is great language.

I think people need to feel that there is an abundance and there is no more competition. People, you don't need to be worried about the other groups that are going to come and take your business away or that are going to compete with you and your company was going to go down. Your stock is going to be away. It is. You can just blissfully be productive and be part of community and everything is just awesome and joyful, but there's preconditions language alone is not going to get you there. And that's the hard part because they talk about it how teams would like yo-yo between, oh things is amazing, nothing to worry about. Everything is awesome. And then, okay, we're in competition now we're great, but they're not.

Lian: I think they also say in the book that stage five is nothing that you will have for a long period of time. It's more like event-based something some transcending goal that you're working towards. And once you achieve that goal, it goes away. You go back to stage four

Carmen: As soon said to say something. Yeah, sorry. As soon as you said event-based, that immediately clicked to DevRel experience of mine, which is when you're at a conference and it's going really well or it ends really well, there's that sort of euphoric, we did it everybody, this event was a success and that I was about to ask if you've had any Sage five experiences in your dev work, but would it be safe to assume that we've all had that with say, a really good event like a conference?

Lian: I guess you could say that. Do you remember when we did global diversity CFP day? I think that was a stage five experience because it was all the people all around the world. It was actually global and we didn't think about, oh, we are better than this other workshop or whatever. It was just, we are doing great things for all of humanity, all of the tech industry. I think that felt really great. We should probably add that global diversity CFB day is the one day workshop to help underrepresented folks get into public speaking, do their first technical talk just for context.

Carmen: Thank

Kristof: You. I think also in open source communities, I think it's more likely to happen because I, I've had the experience where, well, I'm a business owner, so to some extent I represent a group that is competing with other groups and I need to be thinking about are they going to take our business away? Or by the way, we had this in the Drupal community, we had this for years where it's just share everything you've got. It's awesome here together and we're just lifting the tide that lifts all the boats. And I think that open source where people, as long as it doesn't become competition or tool for competition, it can be this thing that is a cultural goods for all of humanity, and then people really believe that and that's amazing and that gives this, that's my stage five experience I think, or a lot of it has been in those kinds of communities.

Lian: I

Kristof: Agree. We're just welcome.

Lian: Yeah, I do think stage five is very, very hard to get to and I've never planned for it. It just happens. It's not that you can, well, I can't manufacture all the things that need to happen for it to be a stage five experience, but I think when you work towards when the value you are creating together as a group is not monetized in any way, it's really just for the betterment of the community. It's really all about giving back. I think that's the closest that we can get to creating the circumstances. I do hope we get to spend a little bit more time to just talk about stage three and stage four because I feel like that is where most of the work we can do, especially as developer advocates. I feel like stage four, just stage five, that's really, really difficult.

Kristof: But I think that the communities we create, we really should not settle for. I'm great and this is the thing that we try to do with speakers where we say, please, this is not a pissing contest. You're not supposed to go in and compete with others. We are all great here together and we're here to do something amazing together. And then hopefully sometimes you bump into the life is great part. And I think that's for me, that's for Deral where it's so, so important how we coach speakers when we do events so that they're not, I'm so much better than you and I know all this stuff that you don't know and that kind of stuff where it's like, let's see. Or are you also great? Let's see then, yeah,

Lian: But I mean that's also stage three. If you think you're great and you meet another guy who thinks he's great and maybe you think he's great as well, that doesn't mean that we are great together. It just means that we are two people who think they're great. And I think that there's a very nice example in the book where there it's like three doctors talking to each other and then one guy's like, oh, I did these many operations or whatever the next guy is, oh, while you were doing your operations, I was teaching the minds of the next generation of amazing doctors. And then the third one is, oh, while you were doing this, I was doing some groundbreaking and research and they all were laughing and patting each other on the shoulder and it's like they each respect each other for their stage three isms, right? They're not great together as a group, it's just that I'm better than you and you say you're better than me. And then that person says these better than both of us and we're all kind of like, right? We can all give each other the feeling of yeah, we're all better than each other.

It still works out because that's kind of the paradigm on which we, I guess value our work. Everyone can be the best in their own thing I guess. And I think that maybe it is about time to break into the juicy part of community work and stage three and developer advocacy in stage three. Okay. I don't know. I'm just going to stoke the fire Now. I do feel in the past couple of months, and I've not been a developer advocate for very long, I've been doing it for about a year. I would argue that I have been working with the community and giving talks and doing educational stuff for a long, long time before that, but officially the title.

I've been doing that for about a year and what I've seen, and I don't know if maybe this is not lately, maybe this has always been like this, there's a lot of people out there as developer advocates who operate solely on I'm great and you're not. It's solely about self-branding and creating content that is marginally helpful. It's not helpful. It's just that the focus is clearly not on helping. It's more about on saying, I know everything. I'm the expert on this topic and you should do exactly what I tell you to do, otherwise you're idiot, whatever. So that is, as I said before, some people really want that. Some people like it when someone just tells them how it goes, but that again, doesn't bring them forward.

A person who gets told what to do doesn't learn and can't adapt and become better really. So the question really is how do we get ourselves as the derail community to move on? Because we're in many ways, we are the role models, we are the tribal leaders. We speak for others, we speak to others, we have authority in what we say, so how do we make sure or how do we keep others? I'm not quite sure if we can do that, but how do we make sure that the message we spread is like, Hey, we're in this together. Everything I create is based on what people give me, right? I'm not coming up with all my ideas just out of my own brain, but it's influenced by what other people tell me and what I've learned from other people.

Kristof: Very good stuff. I think some of the best ways is participative creating a place for other people's voices. So when you do an non-conference, when you create space for everybody to have a voice and where you encourage them and say, you're okay, what you were saying about the RFP, the diversity, RFB, that is about creating more space for more people to have more voice. It's creating more power for people and so that everybody can feel powerful because I think that's what's under the hood here is that my life sucks means I feel powerless and I'm great means I have power over you because I know more than you. And so I think that that's trying to create more power in the group and create power within and with the Mary Parker full good stuff. That is I think the path that can do that and setting think the expectation if you do an event, say, we are here to learn together. It's not to listen to some godheads that know everything where you also know stuff and even if you only have questions, you have questions. And those are probably more valuable than any answers.

And yeah, I think that's the path.

Carmen: Yeah, this is a concern that's been in my head a lot too, especially lately when working around, I've been spending some of my free time working with emerging developers or people who are interested in joining developer relations as a field and how to navigate that to put it mildly double-edged sordid nature of hero worship that we tend to see in developer communities because at its core, like this book describes having, especially when you're starting out and you don't know where to go, having somebody to lead you in the right path, but without doing so in an overhanded, no heavy handed way, not as if being passive, but rather saying like, listen, these are your options. This is what worked for me in my context, given my position of privilege and all that. Keep that in mind as you move forward. I'm here for questions if you ever need me, for example. But at the same time, I know that I've been guilty perhaps when working, say with people who are getting started with public speak and honestly even one of my favourite, going back to global diversity CFP day, one of my favourite experiences I learned from giving a presentation there two years ago was to realise that no matter how long you've been doing this, this being public speaking, text, speaking rather that you still get nervous in your own way relative to going up on stage. I always like to say that mine's like a tent graph, like a tangent graph, stress, stress, stress, stress. And then I'm in another plane of existence as I speak. And to realise that no matter how long you've been doing this, your nervousness or excitement, depending on how you want to frame it, by the way, that framing is super important.

Not to go too much off topic here, my point is how good it feels to be cheered on by someone else when you're starting out how good it feels to. For example, one thing I sometimes do to a conference don't do it, always wish I did it more was when somebody goes up on stage just to run around and take pictures from different angles, and I do that again, not to condescend it, but also to give them that good feeling of like, you're doing this, this is awesome. How can we mitigate that turning into, I don't even know what the term is, but you know what I mean.

Kristof: I think the problem is do you see yourself as a saviour that is going to help the other person that is such person such,

Carmen: Yeah.

Kristof: So I think that the key is that you cannot help someone without being transformed yourself. So if you really truly want to help somebody, you have to help yourself also in the process, it has to be a mutual exchange of transformation. That's the only way that this works. And yeah, there's other books about that part, but that's maybe another one.

Lian: There's two things about the, there's one thing I find super good about the book is when they describe how you can coach someone from stage three to stage four, it's to show them why they can move ahead. So a lot of stage three people, and if you are in stage three, if you're exhibiting behaviour of stage three, you're not supposed to say you are in stage three because we're not labelling people like this. But while I was rereading this book for this podcast, I also realised that I was firmly stuck kind in stage three behaviour while thinking, I'm so awesome because I'm stage four, which is already exactly what stage three is about. So one of the things that a lot of people who are in stage three kind of feel is, I work so hard and everyone else is just not as good as I am. They can't pick up my slack. I'm just doing everything for everyone and I just can't move further. I can't be more successful no matter how hard I try. And I kind of coming to this weird cap and the way that you're supposed to coach them is to tell them like, Hey, you're amazing.

Look at all these things you've done. It's fantastic. But to move to the next level to be more successful, you now have to look at the bigger picture. Now it's about empowering other people. One of the things that they describe that you should encourage people to do is moving from diadic relationships. So it's just the two of us. So I need something done. I'm just going to go to you.

I'm just going to talk to you directly because in stage three, everything's about information, power, information, those are the currencies, and they're limited. If I give you power, my power is gone. If I give you information, I'm not as valuable anymore because now you have the information. Whereas in stage four, power is an infinite resource. The more power I give to you, the more you give to me. One of the things that I love about it was described in the book, and since then I've heard of it happening is you, you're supposed to create tdic relationships, I think so three person relationships. So instead of me going to you, I'll connect to people I've been doing this for since I read the book pretty much all the time when I go to events, I will always, I know that you like this and I know another person who likes this, so I'm going to go through hell to get the two of you together so you can get to know each other. And in the book they say, when you do this and you leave, the first thing they will do is talk about how great you are.

You don't even have to be the stage three person of telling everyone how great you are because people will tell each other, and I don't want to pat too much on my own shoulder, but I did a livestream with Nancy from the Women in Cloud native group, and she was telling me that she knew of me because at DevRelCon in Prague, which I unfortunately missed, apparently people were talking about me not being there because you were doing karaoke and people were like, oh, it's so sad that it's here. And I was like, oh my God, it's happening. This is so great. So yeah, if you want to move to the next stage, just don't focus on yourself, focus on others and the space that you created for others.

Carmen: I really like that because I think that also extends into our technical dev rail work that we do of being like, oh, I know somebody who's working, who you could collaborate with to work on solution X, y, Z. Do you want to take a small opportunity to say, Nancy is awesome, so I'm going to do that here on the podcast. She's amazing. Yeah, and I think that that sort of very innate deral nature of connecting people to solutions, to collaborations, to opportunities is something that really is important. And then perhaps as a, not to get too meta here, but as a DevRel community takes us to a potential higher stage.

Lian: Stage four is all about values. You're committing to the values of the tribe rather than your own values or your own goal. And I actually gave a talk about this, about community building and diversity, and if you haven't seen it, I'm going to give it again in Vancouver at Open Source Summit. So if you're there, check it out. And then one of the examples I give there is that I used to, I still am one of the organisers of serverless days, Amsterdam, and when I started more or less, I was doing it by myself and it was really tough. And it's exactly what I said. It's working so hard and no one's helping me. And if someone's helping me, they're doing it all wrong and everything.

And then after a while, there were more and more people interested in helping, and I switched the way that I went about it by just putting all the information out there but not restricting anyone to what they can or allowed to do. It's just like, here's all you need. Here's some runbooks, here are the credentials to social media. Let's discuss. Let's say these are all three values, and then what can we do to make sure that they are incorporated in what we do? And I really noticed, okay, the thing that you get to at the end might not be exactly what you imagined, but it is so much better because there are so many people with better ideas than you could ever have by yourself. And it's really just this letting go and trust the process, trust the values, trust the people that you work with, and you just get to somewhere much better than you could have gone to by yourself. And it's also not as much work.

Carmen: I really appreciate that whole point about how that diversity of perspective is also really significant towards getting you to that stage where you're just like, look, the values can coincide, but they're also not going to be all of the values that I brought to the table, all of the, and they

Lian: Shouldn't be because it's not the community. Right?

Carmen: Absolutely. Well, folks, as we are coming up to perhaps winding down this conversation, I'd love to check, do either of you have anything else from the book that you feel like really needs to be talked about or that we might've missed?

Lian: Well, I think we didn't talk super, super much about stage four itself, more about how do we get people into that stage and how do we get people out of the stage two, stage five. I think most of us in tech, I mean, are somewhere between stage three and stage four most of the time, I think. And that's great. I think that the gospel of stage four community work mainly, I think that's how we know about it the most. We just have to be very careful to create a space where people are welcome to do it, but they're not overworking themselves, they're not pouring too much of themselves into that because right now it's shortly before Q Con and I am basically working two full-time jobs. One is my regular job and the other one is community work. And I feel so responsible for creating a great experience for the community. I'm a local in Amsterdam, so when the CNCF calls me like, Hey, do you have some recommendations?

Yes, a hundred percent. If I have information that could help someone else, I feel obligated to give them that information. Right? I don't like sitting on it, but it's also, I guess it is not in the book, but I feel like we have to be very careful not to burn out, burn each other out by placing that high of a value on community work and giving back. You can only give if you have something. I don't know if you have any opinions on that.

Carmen: Oh, absolutely. I think I have two thoughts that come to mind. I think first of all, one thing that I learned quite strongly when I had my burnout back in 2018 is the quality of what I can offer is only as good as I'm capable of giving it. So if I'm taking on too much, the quality of what I will offer to my community work, et cetera, will suffer first. Second, if I'm doing my job of being a community member and climbing those stages of culture correctly, then I would be able to delegate or connect, say, you know what? I really can't think about a good suggestion for local stuff here, but I do know this other person who's really into this stuff, who has some time cool to connect you to. And I feel like doing those sorts of things, and as we were talking about before, not removing myself from the picture per se, but playing that role of connecting, I feel like that's a good indication of a healthy

Kristof: Culture. I think that's when you go in martyr hoods modes and you're the single saviour who needs to solve all the problems alone, basically, you're in my life sucks because I'm the only one who can do this stuff. And you're working really hard to try to convince yourself that actually you're great because you, you're able to do this stuff. So you're basically just vibrating between actually bad place. So I think learning to listen and to hear the language and to recognise when you are taking too much of the space, and I have this a lot that I'm talking too much and recognising is like okay, and trying to reduce it and trying to create more space for others, I think. But that's a long journey. It takes a long time to learn this stuff.

Lian: I love what you said, Carmen. I think now that after you said it, I realised that yeah, this is typical stage three behaviour. It is like someone asks you for help and you're immediately jumping on it and trying to do it by yourself, stressing yourself out, maybe even going, why can't they ask what else to do it? That is so classical stage three, instead of connecting with the right people, just facilitating, creating the space for someone else to do it, maybe someone else shine for a while. That is a very, very good point. I'm going to call the CNF now and tell. No, I'm kidding.

Carmen: I'm sorry. CNCF.

Lian: No. Yeah. That's really great. I love this conversation. I love how this book is so great that while we're talking about, I'm still learning new stuff and new perspectives to look at the stages. It's not like everything that's in the book is a hundred percent exactly how the world works, but it gives us, as you said, a framework to talk about these things and we can disagree and that's fine.

Kristof: It is a model and every model is wrong, no matter.

Lian: Some are useful,

Kristof: Yes. But this one is actually pretty useful.

Lian: Yes. I also, if I may, I would like to recommend some other books that are kind of in a similar vein that really helped me. So one is team Topologies, which is maybe more interesting for really tech people or people who are very interested in tech organisations. It's more, I don't know, more, I guess it's less philosophical. The other one is, okay, it's one of the Bri Brown books and Bri Brown is an amazing speaker and author talking about vulnerable leadership. It's called Dare to Lead. I think that's the one that I mean, and yeah, it's fantastic and it also adds to this, one of the things that I really like about this book is it gives you a rational reason why working in a group and helping others is good, period. It's better, it makes more sense economically makes more sense if you just want to grow.

And yeah, I think these other two books that I mentioned are a good addition to kind of expand on that idea.

Carmen: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Unless I've missed anything, I'm going to start saying thank you both so much for joining me today. This has been really, really eyeopening. I love a conversation where I get called out on my stuff, so I was like, yeah, I'm learning stuff. It's cool. Thank you. Thank you both.

I want to give Lian and then Kristof the opportunity. If folks want to get in touch with you, what would be the best way for them to do so?

Lian: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter or Mastodon or LinkedIn or Instagram. I dunno, it's Leanne makes things so LIAN, that's my name and then makes things, that's one word. The one thing I would like to plug is if you are at Q Con pretty much exactly a month, we're going to have an amazing karaoke party on the Wednesday and you can check it out at Roki Love. So that's like Kubernetes and then Okie like karaoke love, check it out. I would be so happy to see you there.

Kristof: Thank you. So people can find me as K on Tomo, which is the first letter of my name, my first name, and then my family name with a double M on the regular platforms. Mostly active on LinkedIn nowadays, still peeking in on Twitter. I have a model on accounts, but the transition hasn't happened yet. So a little bit in between platforms at the moment, but that's where you can find me.

Carmen: Super fair. Well, once again, thank you both so much. This is

Lian: Carmen. Where can we find you?

Carmen: I'm hola soy milk on pretty much most of everything. Hanging out on LinkedIn, Twitter, that sort of thing. Yeah, I'm having a good time doing some learning initiatives. Just taking it a little easy as well. It's good, it's good. So thank you both so much. Really love this conversation folks. If you're listening, if you want to join us with a book that you've read that has affected your DevRel career, please do feel free to get in touch.

And I will say, have a wonderful rest of your day everybody.

Lian: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you. Have a great day. Thanks.