Balancing Empowerment & Direction

2025-05-16T13:26:37-04:00

It’s critical to be transparent about what you expect of your teammates, and what they can expect of you. In this talk, Lara Hogan talks about how to balance being empowering and being directive as a leader, and how to know when to switch up your approach. She covers: - Tactical strategies for giving strong direction (without being a jerk) - A deeper understanding of the risks and tradeoffs of being too empowering, and too directive - Practice choosing empowerment or directive skills in different contexts - A template for framing difficult conversations

Navigating Conflict

2021-09-10T13:27:47-04:00

In this workshop, we’ll demystify the difference between healthy vs unhealthy conflict and provide tools for navigating either kind. Attendees walk away with easy methods to remember what steps to take in conflict and disagreements, how to prepare for a conflict conversation when you can, and how to respond in real-time if you’re caught off guard by one, and how to ensure your needs are met without trampling over those of others. Created in collaboration with Paloma Medina.

What Humans Need at Work

2021-02-02T19:13:40-05:00

Social scientists, anthropologists and neurologists have been studying the modern workplace, and found that there are six core needs that we need, beyond the needs for physical safety, food, shelter, etc. In this talk, Lara Hogan walks through the tools you can use to leverage these core needs to enact positive change, gain alignment, and give feedback to each other. We'll also make sure that you have what you need to be successful at work.

Influence Without Authority

2020-05-04T13:51:56-04:00

This workshop is designed for employees at all levels who are interested in creating positive change in their work environment or whose role requires them to gain buy-in from others, including people in power, direct reports and cross-functional teams. Created in collaboration with Paloma Medina.

Optimising for team health: Tools and techniques of supportive teams who build successful products

2019-06-28T15:14:47-04:00

To build and maintain great products now and in the future, we need to work smarter: to be more efficient, inclusive, considered and collaborative. And to do this, we need to build and maintain team health. As former VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and Engineering Director at Etsy, and now coach, consultant and trainer for managers and leaders across the tech industry, Lara Hogan has spent over a decade growing emerging leaders and developing healthy teams. In this talk, Lara will draw on her experiences to explore the powerful, but all-too-often overlooked tools we have available to us as we work with and support our teammates, those who report to us, and those we report to. Whether you’re feeling some friction with your co-workers, wrestling with some feedback you need to give, or you’re just trying to weather a season of change within your organisation, this talk will help you feel more equipped to navigate whatever you’re facing when you get back to work, to help you and your team succeed, and your users reap the benefits.

Management 101

2019-05-10T13:53:03-04:00

Delivering (and requesting) feedback workshop

2018-07-09T17:29:23-04:00

There will absolutely be times when you need to give actionable, specific feedback to your teammates. And there will definitely be times that you need to hear some feedback, too. But humans are mostly bad at giving feedback, and we’re also really bad at preparing ourselves to receive it. This is true no matter the situation - hearing that we do something at home that drives our partner crazy, or our coworker, or our boss. In this workshop, we’ll practice turning real-world stuff into specific, actionable feedback that has a good chance of landing. Attendees will even get to practice delivering it, to see how it feels and how to prepare for saying those words - they’ll leave this workshop ready to deliver specific, actionable, and easy-to-digest feedback.

Dealing with surprising human emotions - workshop

2018-07-09T13:49:09-04:00

Your teammates are guaranteed to have surprising reactions to things that happen in your work environment. How do you navigate it, understand it, and best support your teammate? In this workshop, we’ll talk through humans’ six core needs in the workplace, what’s happening in our brains when we have surprising emotions, and how to recognize when your teammate is feeling some resistance or doubt. We’ll practice methods to unearth what might be behind those emotions, and we’ll cap it off by working through how to recover when you’ve triggered someone. Attendees will leave with tools and techniques to easily share with others so they, too, can know how to navigate these sticky moments.

Mentoring, Coaching, and Sponsoring Workshop

2018-05-31T11:25:45-04:00

As a manager, it’s important to balance your style between advice-giving mode (mentorship), active listening and curiosity mode (coaching), and empowering mode (sponsorship). In this workshop, we will define and practice each of these styles, and talk about how to know when to employ one over the other - especially when you’re managing people who work really differently than you do.

Setting Expectations as a Manager

2018-05-12T20:14:56-04:00

One simple way to create predictability and stability for your team is to be transparent about what you expect of your teammates, and what they can expect of you. All kinds of organizational expectations (quarterly goals, job descriptions, team mission statements, etc.) will evolve based on company context, scale over time, leadership changes, you name it. As our environments change, managers need to flex HOW they set expectations, to set their teammates up for success. In this workshop, we talk about how to balance being empowering and being directive as a leader, and how to know when to switch up your approach. We’ll also work on helping managers identify their default approach, so that they can see when it's most useful, and when they might need to adapt it based on what their team or company needs, what the challenge is, how much urgency there is.

Demystifying Management

2018-04-18T17:03:32-04:00

When you switch from an individual contributor role to a manager role, you might find yourself floating in a sea of uncertainty. What does success look like as a manager? How can you know if you’re doing a good job or not, with such a long feedback loop between your actions and their outcome? In this workshop, we’ll start to demystify management by talking tactics, articulating what you uniquely bring to management, and demonstrating how you can best support your direct reports. We’ll cover: - Coaching, mentoring and sponsoring, and when to use each as a manager - Identifying your management philosophy and expectations for your team - Growing your teammates through feedback - Navigating your team through uncertainty and surprising emotions - Developing an internal barometer of success, and a network you can lean on as you grow During each stage of the workshop, Lara leads the attendees through group exercises to practice skills like coaching, giving feedback, and goal-setting. Lara will also provide worksheets and plenty of resources for attendees to continue to grow and learn after the workshop.

Revitalizing a cross-functional product organization

2018-04-23T22:45:03-04:00

The product and engineering teams at every company size have the same goals: positive team health, high-velocity shipping, and strategic execution. Yet we often get in our own way -- from ill-defined roles and responsibilities to toxic communication patterns, to well-meaning but under-equipped managers. Lara Hogan and Deepa Subramaniam of Wherewithall will candidly share the approaches they took to revitalizing a cross-functional product organization in 9 months. As Engineering and Product leaders, they worked together to diagnose and treat issues holding back design, engineering and product management teams in order to ensure communication flowed better, inter and intra-team dynamics improved and the organization shipped more (and better!) software. As two VP’s who faced these specific challenges and more, Lara and Deepa will cover evidence-based tactics for improving the overall health of your product organization when time is of the essence.

Facilitating Awesome Meetings

2018-04-10T12:38:15-04:00

Links to resources and more here! Meeting facilitation is a critical leadership skill that’s often overlooked. Excellent meeting facilitation means that the attendees know why they’re there, they get equal participation time, and your meeting’s goal or deliverable is achieved in a timely and productive way.

Navigating Team Friction

2018-03-19T15:22:16-04:00

Resources and links: http://larahogan.me/team-friction/ Friction is a common, and necessary, part of team growth—but when left unchecked, team friction is unhealthy for you, your coworkers, your company, and ultimately your end users. In this presentation, I draw on my experiences at organizations large and small to illuminate the sources of team tension, how you can better understand and manage unexpected teammate reactions, and the best ways to give actionable feedback without escalating drama. Your coworkers, your organization, your users, and you will reap the benefits.

Mentorship and Sponsorship

2017-09-26T16:40:50-04:00

To grow our technical leadership skills, it’s critical to lean on one’s network of support. We often find mentors: people who can give us helpful advice. But what can be even more valuable is finding “sponsors”, who help us find new opportunities and improve the visibility of our work. As sponsorship is especially important for members of underrepresented groups in tech, we’ll walk through tactics you can employ today to be a sponsor for those around you, too. Read more: https://larahogan.me/blog/what-sponsorship-looks-like/

Empathy and Web Performance

2017-01-17T19:59:24-05:00

Website performance issues can disproportionately affect low-income households, folks with disabilities, rural and elderly populations. What can we do about it? Studies from this talk (mostly PDFs):

Center for Media Justice: #righttoconnect, Media Action Grassroots Network (2015)

Statistics New Zealand: Household Use of Information and Communication Technology (2012)

World Internet Project: New Zealand (2015)

Center for Media Justice: Cell Phones and the Digital Divide (2014)

Technical resources:

Using blur to reduce JPEG file size

Creating performance videos

What Does My Site Cost?

All additional resources and links can be found at: designingforperformance.com

One weird trick to get better at public speaking

2017-02-06T12:32:57-05:00

Leverage feedback during a practice run to get better at giving talks! Buy the book with all of this info and plenty more: https://abookapart.com/products/demystifying-public-speaking

Demystifying Public Speaking

2016-10-31T11:41:21-04:00

In our work, we each have moments of being in a spotlight - whether it's during team standups, giving a presentation to a client, or pitching your promotion to your boss - and yet we all have different fears about those moments. This talk aims to help you identify your public speaking fears and learn tactics to address them, so you can feel prepared when that spotlight happens. The book, which has all this content and MUCH more! https://abookapart.com/products/demystifying-public-speaking