How to build a resilient engineering culture

Culture, as Peter Drucker famously said, “eats strategy for breakfast.” The benefits of a strong culture can include:

• Facilitating communication and collaboration
• Motivating people to increase productivity
• Mitigating burnout even in times of high stress

However, trying to develop or manage a good culture is difficult because, first, what is “good”? The culture that works in one organization may completely fail in another. Second, culture is as fluid, unbounded, and intangible as air. No one “owns” it and it’s constantly evolving.

Faced with such ambiguity, how are we as engineering leaders to act? How can we ensure that our actions are contributing to a “good” culture for our teams, the engineering org, and the company as a whole? If culture change is inevitable, how do we lead our teams and ourselves to adapt to such changes?

We’ll talk specifically about questions like:

• What are the pros/cons of culture-fit versus culture-add?
• How do you guard against hiring someone that is actually bad for culture? How might you respond if you realize this after they’ve joined and are having a negative impact on the team or organization?
• How do you build a culture that accommodates a diversity of life experiences, world perspectives, and work styles, especially where they seem to be polar opposites?

About the speaker
Meri Williams is an experienced CTO (currently Pleo, formerly Healx, Monzo Bank, MOO, Marks & Spencer online) known for building and scaling technology organizations across a wide range of industries, countries, and sizes from small startups to companies with thousands of people. Meri is an author, international speaker, and Chair of The Lead Dev Conference. They are passionate about helping develop technical leaders.

Agenda for the session

• 30 min – Presentation and Q&A (this part will be recorded & shared later)
• 30 min – Discussion in small groups, where you can chat with peers about your own challenges and learnings (this part won't be recorded)

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