A cuppa with Allison McMillan and an easy sweet potato and miso soup
What’s been happening?
Mental Health First Aid certification
Earlier this month, Elle, Nicola, and Lachlan attended a Mental Health First Aid course. The course teaches participants how to provide initial support to another adult who may be experiencing a mental health problem or mental health crisis, until professional help is received or the crisis resolves.
Talks
Earlier this month Lachlan led a discussion at the Melbourne Agile and Scrum User meetup, asking them What Good Really Looks Like. Conversation was vibrant and a lot of fun.
Elle is speaking at the next Tech Leading Ladies meetup, on August 21st. Details on the meetup are available at https://www.meetup.com/tech-leading-ladies/events/302451686/
Workshop updates
We've been very busy with corporate workshops recently, and thus decided to change the cadence of our public workshops. From now on, we plan to run our public workshops twice a year. So the next Empowering Individuals for Team Success workshop is scheduled for October, and Leading Engineering Teams workshop is scheduled for November. Which means, early bird tickets are still available for both workshops.
What are we reading?
- Why do remote meetings suck so much? — a spoiler alert, the solution is not about the meeting's medium at all.
- Against innovation tokens — innovation tokens are now part of the vernacular but it might also be a reactionary thinking. A better way to think about the problem of managing operational overhead is, rather than “innovation tokens”, consider “boundary tokens”. And consistency ought to apply at each layer of the stack.
- Elephants Call Each Other by Name Across the Savanna — did you know that female elephants address one another with individualised rumbles?
- Code review anxiety workbook — feeling anxious about giving and receiving code reviews is a common, widely-documented experience for software developers. The workbook's purpose is to equip software practitioners who regularly participate in code reviews with the tools they need to mitigate and manage their code review anxiety so that they can focus their time, energy and emotion on the thing they love best: crafting and shipping code.
- Beyond metrics — We love to measure stuff, don’t we? Maybe it’s human nature, but we seem to have a strong desire to make the intangible tangible. But metrics can be misleading. So where does that leave us between the qualitative and quantitative?
A cuppa with Allison McMillan
1. What do you do? And what do you like about your work?
My official title is Engineering Leadership Consultant, but that means a whole lot of different things! Primarily, I either work as a fractional VP of Engineering for earlier stage startups (series B and below) or I work with engineering-heavy teams of companies to plan excellent, engaging, productive offsites (onsites/retreats) and team gatherings. What I love most about my work is being able to move teams from where they are to where they want to be. In both of the services I offer, people come to me because they’re good but want to be great or because something just isn’t clicking quite like they want it to. In either scenario,I work really collaboratively with the leadership and team individuals to determine what’s going on and then help them move past that, through that, and beyond that. The solutions always look a little different and how we get there is never the same (because no two teams are the same!) but the goals and desires are pretty similar.
2. What aspect of your work do you find most challenging?
In order to do my job well, I need people to be able to trust me so I spend a lot of time at the beginning (even for shorter engagements where I’m maybe just running a team gathering or retrospective) getting to know people and helping them understand and get to know me a little bit, so that we can really do great work together. Sometimes, however, if there have been a lot of examples of broken trust in the past, or if we’re delving into an area that feels more vulnerable for folks, it can take a little longer to overcome that barrier.
3. What are you passionate about?
I am passionate about bringing people together in meaningful ways. I’ve been involved as a board member in Ruby Central for many years now, helping to run RubyConf and RailsConf. Beyond that, I’ve been planning team and other kinds of gatherings for over 20 years. As attendees, we know that many of these gatherings vary greatly in quality and purpose. Some of them blow me away with how much I get out of them and others really feel like time wasted. My goal is for people to always walk away from anything I’ve helped plan with a sense that they’re taking something away, that they learned something (a concept potentially but also about themselves or about their teammates) and that they feel like it was a good use of time. So maybe I should rephrase and say that I’m passionate about using time wisely, which is done through bringing people together in meaningful ways!
4. What are recent accomplishments you are happy with?
While I’ve been facilitating offsites and team gatherings for decades, I recently received my official Georgetown Facilitation Certification through a continuing education program at the Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. Through this course, I deepened my knowledge of methods and modalities to use during group facilitation but also learned even more about group dynamics, facilitating through conflict, and a whole variety of skills while also connecting with other expert practitioners.
5. How do you manage stress?
I try to take one thing at a time and prioritise ruthlessly. While I usually keep my to do list virtually, when I have a lot to do and am feeling particularly stressed, I move to pen and paper. Something about writing instead of typing helps to organise my brain and what I have to get done and then I also feel more in control to be able to take things one thing at a time.
6. What is the best advice you can give?
You make the best decisions you can with the information you have. Accepting that is helpful in figuring out what the next step could be.
7. What one thing would you change about our society?
What a big question, and one that we talk about a lot at our dinner table!! I would change people’s access to their basic needs like housing, healthcare, and food. Living in America, so little is provided as a safety net. Homelessness, hunger, folks who need help with mental illness and other medical issues are all on the rise and individuals don’t have enough support or social services available to them.
8. What are your goals or aspirations for 2024?
My aspirations for 2024 are to continue to grow and expand my business, helping more companies accomplish their goals in a variety of ways, and to support and encourage my family and friends to help them accomplish their goals as well!
What are we cooking?
Sweet potato and miso soup
Ingredients
- A little bit of oil
- 1 onion, chopped
- 4 garlic cloves
- Ginger, grated
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 900g sweet potato
- 900g veggie broth
- 400g coconut milk (1 can), or almond milk
- Miso paste, to taste
- Salt and pepper, to taste
- Almonds or hazel nuts, for garnish
Instructions
- Heat oil in a big pot, then add the onion, garlic, and ginger, and fry for a few minutes. Add a touch of water to prevent them from sticking to the pot or burning.
- Add the carrots and sweet potato and continue to cook for a couple more minutes. Then add the veggie broth, milk, and miso paste. Turn the heat up and cover the pot.
- Bring to the boil and then lower the heat. Simmer for 15-20 minutes.
- Turn the heat off and et the soup cool for a few minutes before processing into a smooth consistency.
- Season to taste and and garnish with almonds or hazel nuts.
And we’re out
Thank you for showing an interest in our newsletter and we hope that you enjoyed the read. Feel free to contact us if you have any feedback, a burning question, or just a recipe that you would like to share.
Until next time, keep learning!
Everyone at Blackmill