[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":795},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/crucial-conversations":3,"navigation-en-us":39,"banner-en-us":439,"footer-en-us":449,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Samantha Lee":691,"blog-related-posts-en-us-crucial-conversations":705,"assessment-promotions-en-us":746,"next-steps-en-us":785},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":26,"isFeatured":12,"meta":27,"navigation":28,"path":29,"publishedDate":20,"seo":30,"stem":34,"tagSlugs":35,"__hash__":38},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/crucial-conversations.yml","Crucial Conversations",[7],"samantha-lee",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"crucial-conversations",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Having crucial conversations on an all-remote team","Exploring crucial conversations and the way they fit into our values here at GitLab.",[18],"Samantha Lee","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","2021-02-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nLast week, I attended the [Crucial Conversations training](https://www.vitalsmarts.com/crucial-conversations-training/). Since joining the GitLab Learning and Development team back in October of 2020, requests for support in having difficult conversations with team members have been a recurring theme from people leaders. I completed this training as the first step in a two-part training that will enable myself and other members of the Learning and Development team to be certified to train the GitLab team in having crucial conversations.\n\nIn this post, I'll outline a few key takeaways from the course, share how crucial conversations look in an all-remote work environment, and explain how crucial conversations connect to our [CREDIT values](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/).\n\n### What are crucial conversations?\n\nWhen a conversation turns crucial, emotions and stressors are running high. Crucial conversations can occur any day, at any time, with any person. They can be planned or they can come out of a casual conversation.\n\nCrucial conversations usually address one of three topics, but it's not abnormal for a crucial conversation to touch multiple topics!\n\n1. **Content**: This could be a crucial conversation about a one-time issue, like a missed deadline, forgotten appointment, or an aggrivating comment. Content conversations address what happened and how to move forward from it.\n\n2. **Pattern**: When topics of content conversations happen time after time, they become a pattern conversation. Crucial conversations to address patterns could be centered around multiple missed responsibilities or repetitive comments that impact a team's ability to work together efficiently. At home, maybe your requests to your partner to take their phone calls in another room to keep a quiet workspace have been repeatedly ignored. Or at work, your direct report has missed the end of month reporting deadline for 3 months in a row. It's important to address pattern conversation early to get to the root cause, which is likely a content issue.\n\n**A quick note about pattern conversations:** At the time of writing this blog post, our world has just hit the one-year mark of life during the Covid-19 pandemic. While addressing patterns is important, it's equally as important to treat each other with kindess and understand that pandemic-induced stress might show itself in problematic patterns. All the more reason to have a conversation about it!\n\n3. **Relationship**: Here's when things get sticky. Content and pattern conversations are about the action happening (or not happening). But relationship conversations are about the _people having the conversation_. These crucial conversations could be about a lack of trust or mutual respect in a relationship, differing communication styles, or lack of agreement on a project or plan of action. It's also important to remember that conversations intended to be content or pattern-focused can turn into relationship conversations quickly, especially when the person feels an emotional tie to the work or action being discussed.\n\nUnderstanding what crucial conversations **are** is as important as understanding what crucial conversations **are not**. Crucial conversations are **not** synonymous with conflict. This was one of the first things we addressed in the training and I think it's one of the most important factors. When we enter crucial conversations prepared for conflict, we're already approaching fight or flight. We're ready to defend ourselves, to act in protection mode. The goal of crucial conversations is not to fight or protect ourselves, but rather to collaborate on desired results.\n\nTake a second to think about the last time you were part of a crucial conversation - a conversation where you perhaps felt stressed, overwhelmed, or nervous about the topic being discussed. How did your body react? Did your heart rate increase? Did you fall silent? Maybe instead your voice was raised. We each respond to crucial conversations in different ways that detract from the main goal of arriving at a solution that works for all parties.\n\nWe've likely all been part of a crucial conversation in the past, whether it be at work or home. Once we know how to identify these conversations, we can move on to strategies for having them effectively.\n\nAt GitLab, this means having effective, results-driven crucial conversations on Zoom with people from all over the world, which brings its own set of unique challenges.\n\n### Having crucial conversations is hard, and an all-remote team brings its own challenges.\n\nIn an office setting, you might pass by a manager or colleague who asks to discuss a challenge or frustration they're having with your work. Or at home, you might spend time after dinner discussing household responsibilities with your children or roommates. During these crucial conversations, we feed off of body language, tone, and energy in the room to recognize if someone feels [psychologically unsafe](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/emotional-intelligence/psychological-safety/).\n\nBut on Zoom, when your teammate might be in their home office across town or across the globe, we need to use different cues to [build safety and trust](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/building-trust/).\n\nSome ways we do that at GitLab include:\n\n1. We meet regularly with our people leaders in [1:1 meetings](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/). These regular sessions give space for team members to raise crucial conversations often and address challenges and blockers early.\n1. We keep [1:1 agendas](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/#the-1-1-agenda) to get a heads up on what will be discussed and to document action items and takeaways from synchronous conversations.\n1. We watch for the [body language cues](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/crucial-conversations/#having-crucial-conversations-on-an-all-remote-team) that we can see on a video call or in a person's tone of voice. This includes checking if someone turns their camera off mid-call, becomes silent or unresponsive to the conversation, or sounds choked up or angry.\n1. We create intentional [space for pause](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/crucial-conversations/#having-crucial-conversations-on-an-all-remote-team). There can be a sense of pressure to fill every minute during any conversation. During video or phone conversations, silence might feel more uncomfortable. We ask for and respect requests for a minute to think before responding right away.\n\nThese strategies aren't exclusive to an all-remote team - I'm sure they can have a positive impact on in-person crucial conversations, too! But when working on a remote team, it's important to recognize what's missing from in-person connection and be mindful to make the space as safe as possible.\n\nI've explained what crucial conversations are and how they show up in an all-remote work environment, but most importantly, I need to explain the **why**.\n\n### Why do crucial conversations matter?\n\nCrucial conversations enable our team to live our [CREDIT values](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/crucial-conversations/#how-crucial-conversations-align-with-gitlab-values). In our [values hierarchy](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#hierarchy), we prioritize results. What I love most about crucial conversations is that they also prioritize results.\n\nHere's an example:\n\nImagine you're an individual contributor at GitLab. You're feeling overwhelmed with the number of projects on your plate this quarter.\n\nIf you wanted, you could commit to each project, knowing the deadlines were probably unrealistic. You could show up to work each day feeling stressed and overwhelmed. You might snap one day, saying something out of frustration to your team, and regret the comment later on.\n\nOr, you could decide to address the issue with your manager in your 1:1. You can:\n1. Collect your facts. In this case, it's your list of projects all due in the quarter.\n1. Share your story. Express how the workload feels unattainable and you know you can't complete your best work in the given time frame)\n1. Come to a conclusion together. Perhaps you decide to prioritize projects, breaking each project down into specific tasks and moving long-term priorities to the next quarter.\n\nThis second scenario is completely based on results. This crucial conversation has enabled you to set yourself up for success in completing every project with your highest quality of work. The company benefits from your high-quality output. Your team benefits from having a team member who isn't totally stressed out. You benefit from feeling safe and confident in the work you're doing. Every outcome from the conversation can be traced back to a key result for yourself, your team, and the company.\n\nWith such a focus on results, our GitLab team should be having crucial conversations every day!\n\nI see crucial conversations map back to the rest of our values as well. You can read more about the [alignment of GitLab values to crucial conversations in our handbook](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/crucial-conversations/#how-crucial-conversations-align-with-gitlab-values).\n\n### Getting started having crucial conversations\n\nIf you've read through this post and want to give crucial conversations a try, here are a few ways to get started:\n\n1. Read our [Crucial Conversations handbook page](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/crucial-conversations/).\n1. Read our [Psychological Safety handbook page](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/emotional-intelligence/psychological-safety/). Creating safe space to have crucial conversations is essential.\n1. Check out the [Crucial Conversations training](https://www.vitalsmarts.com/crucial-conversations-training/) from VitalSmarts. GitLab team members might consider using our [Growth and Development benefit](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/benefits/general-and-entity-benefits/#growth-and-development-benefit) to take the training themselves.\n1. Try it out! Practicing crucial conversations is the key to getting better at the skills, so give it a try at work, at home, or even with yourself!\n1. GitLab team members - keep an eye out for internal Crucial Conversations training coming in Q2/Q3 of this year as the Learning and Development team gets certified to deliver the training!\n\n### Looking for more Learning and Development material from GitLab?\n\nIf you want to learn more about what the Learning and Development team at GitLab is up to, check out our [handbook page](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/learning-and-development/) or read our past newsletters. 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Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[711],"Jacie Bandur","2021-05-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\nHi! I’m Jacie Bandur. I completed GitLab’s CEO Shadow program from 2021-04-26 through 2021-05-07. It was a really enlightening experience. I generally work in Learning and Development and consider myself a lifelong learner. I can’t even explain how much I learned in such a short about of time. I learned a lot about the business. I learned a lot about the product. But learned even more about the importance of iteration in everything we do.\n\n### Qualifications to Participate\n\nI wanted to start this off with touching on qualifications to participate in the program.\n\nI am the type of person that has gone through most of my life thinking I’m not qualified for things. I’m not qualified for that job, that promotion, that program. The list goes on and on.\n\nWhen I saw the [CEO Shadow program](/blog/ceo-shadow-impressions-takeaways/) kick off in 2019, I really wanted to participate. I was a little intimidated. Who wouldn’t be, spending 2 weeks with the CEO of any company? But time passed and all the sudden it was 2021 and I had not taken any steps to participating in the program.\n\nIf you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that you are qualified to participate in this program, I’m not big on giving “pep talks,” but here’s me telling you - You are qualified for this program. There’s never going to be a good or perfect time to do it. Tell your manager you want to do the CEO Shadow program. Stop waiting. Sign up today.\n\nNote: Take a look at the [eligibility](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/#eligibility) section of the CEO Shadow page for more information on signing up.\n\n### Pre-Program Tips\n\nThere are many things recommended for shadows to do pre-program outlined on the CEO Shadow handbook page. As I was going through the program there were things that I thought helped me (or would have helped me).\n\nHere are my top 6 recommendations:\n\n1. Make sure your team knows you will be unavailable for 2 weeks. This isn’t a program that can or should be done alongside your normal day to day work. I found catching up from the 2 weeks away kind of difficult because I was trying to keep up on what was going on and I had a bunch of half done things.\n1. Talk with people who have done the shadow program - schedule at least 3 coffee chats with CEO Shadow Alumni.\n1. Have food that is easy to eat quickly. Sid’s meetings are back to back most days, so you will have small amounts of time to eat throughout the day. Sid does eat during calls, which you are welcome to do, too, but if you are taking notes, it is difficult to eat. And this will make you realize why speedy meetings are so important!\n1. Listen to the [Executive Leadership LinkedIn Learning course](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/executive-leadership/).\n1. Be prepared to ask questions. When doing the program virtually, there isn’t a ton of time for asking questions, so when one would come up, I would add it to a note on my computer and ask if there was ever time with just the shadows and Sid.\n1. Take at least 1 day off after the program. Take even a couple of days off if you can! This is recommended on the handbook page, but I can’t stress this enough.\n\n\n### Takeaways\n\n**Group Conversations**\n\nI’ve been at GitLab for almost 4 years. When I joined, I made it a point to attend as many GC’s as I could. I had gotten out of the habit of attending Group Conversations. After attending them again for 2 weeks, I realized how important they are to understand better what is going on across the business. Everything in the organization is so intertwined. It’s helpful to understand what other teams are working on and succeeding in.\n\n**Feedback**\n\nWe should all be giving and receiving feedback often. We have a whole [handbook page on giving and receiving feedback](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/guidance-on-feedback/). Read the handbook page and watch the videos, as well. Practice giving feedback. I recommend using the [1-1 agenda](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format/) Sid uses, because Feedback is an essential piece of that agenda, and it makes feedback more of a routine thing.\n\n**Biggest Takeaway**\n\nWe have an incredible team here at GitLab, from Engineering to Product to Sales to People and all the groups in between. There are so many great ideas. I observed the constant reinforcement by Sid to start with something small and build on it. You can ALWAYS make something more complex. It’s hard to go back to something more simple when you start with something complex.\n\nA couple of quotes that I heard from Sid during the program that reinforced this point:\n\n- “Every complex system evolves from a simple system that worked.”\n- “It’s very clear what is the simple solution. We can always make it more complicated as we go on.”\n\nI know they are very similar, but they happened in different meetings on different days, so the point was reinforced repeatedly.\n\nDuring the program, I reflected on the projects that I’am working on. How many of them am I trying to do too much on before releasing. Probably all of them. When I’m working on projects in the future, I will break them down into smaller, more doable chunks. Iteration is hard - it’s a skill to be practicing constantly.\n\n\n### Overall\n\nOverall, the program was really insightful and impactful. If you haven’t participated in it yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so!\n",{"slug":715,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":717,"config":729},{"title":718,"description":719,"authors":720,"heroImage":722,"date":723,"body":724,"category":9,"tags":725},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[721],"Austin Regnery","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679501/Blog/Hero%20Images/new-feature.png","2021-05-11","It was mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, and I had 10 minutes in between meetings. So I decided to try and solve a pain point of mine.\nYou see, I had to memorize this HTML snippet to create a collapsible section in GitLab Issue descriptions and comments, but I kept forgetting it. Was it `summary` or `section`? I could never remember.\n```html\n\u003Cdetails>\n\u003Csummary>Insert Title\u003C/summary>\nHidden content\n\u003C/details>\n```\nEven though it is not vanilla Markdown, GitLab knows how to interpret some HTML. I used this formatting trick fairly often since full-page screenshots can occupy a lot of screen space, which leads to excessive scrolling.\nSo I decided to poke around our codebase to see how the other Markdown shortcuts worked. To my surprise, it was pretty straightforward. Each shortcut had a simple text input that mapped to each button. This implementation was simple to replicate since I just needed to copy/paste and replace a few words.\n![Image of Vue and Haml files with editor shortcuts](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/vue-haml.png){: .shadow}\nThe Vue and Haml files with the new shortcut\n\nI started a branch and began hacking away at the code. Now, I would never call myself a Software Engineer, but I like to try and make things from time to time. I was able to add a new shortcut to the toolbar to insert this code snippet for me in less than 10 minutes. No more memorizing! Making contributions like this is what makes working at GitLab so special.\nNow, it wasn't ready for production, but I at least had something that worked. I shared it with my UX colleagues in Slack, and it started to gain traction with several up-votes and few constructive comments on how to make it better.\nWith the functionality flushed out, a few other designers helped me get a better icon added to our SVG library. Using clear iconography is critical for communicating information more clearly.\n| Initial Icon | Final Icon |\n| - | - |\n| ![SVG of chevron right icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/chevron-right.svg) | ![SVG of details block icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/details-block.svg) |\n\nThe last thing to do was resolve my failing tests, and I had several teammates help me do that.\n![Gif of the shortcut being used](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/demo.gif)\n\nToday [this change](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/54938) merged! Now I solved a pain point for me and others. It took a few months to go from idea to production, but the effort was super low. I'd say the return on my initial investment, 10 minutes, is super high.\n> Having a direct impact on a product was never an option for me before joining GitLab.\n\n![Image of participants in the Merge Request](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/participants.png)\n\n\nThank you to everyone that helped me deploy this\n",[726,727,728],"UX","product","AWS",{"slug":730,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":732,"config":744},{"title":733,"description":734,"authors":735,"heroImage":737,"date":723,"body":738,"category":9,"tags":739},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[736],"Sam Beckham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679507/Blog/Hero%20Images/ci-cd.png","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHave you ever pressed the close door button on the elevator, in the hope that you'll save a few precious seconds?\nOr got frustrated at the person stood next to you at the cross-walk, neglecting to press the button?\nWell, maybe they know something you don't, or perhaps you know this already.\nMany buttons in our society lie to us.\n[David McRaney](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/10/placebo-buttons/) dubbed these, \"Placebo buttons\" and they're everywhere.\nThose elevator doors won't close any faster and the cross-walk button has no effect on the lights.\nThe only lights they control are the lights on the buttons themselves.\nThey give you the feedback you crave, but that's all they're doing.\n\nThese placebos aren't constrained to the physical world, they're prevalent in [UI design](/blog/the-evolution-of-ux-at-gitlab/) too.\nFrom literal placebo buttons like [YouTube's downvote](https://www.quora.com/Does-downvoting-a-comment-on-YouTube-even-do-anything), to more subtle effects like Instagram always [pretending to work](https://www.fastcompany.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed), or progress bars that have a [fixed animation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/).\nThey're everywhere if you know where to look.\n\nAt GitLab, we created a placebo of our own in one of our core features; the pipeline graph.\n\nThose of you who have used our pipeline graph, will be familiar with its appearance.\nThere's a series of jobs, grouped by stages, connected by a series of lines depicting the relationships between the jobs.\nBut these lines might be lying to you.\nThese lines are indiscriminately drawn between each job in a stage, regardless of their relationship.\nThese lines are placebos.\n\n![The old pipeline rendering with lines connecting every job in a stage](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_old-graph.png)\n\nThis wasn't a problem to begin with.\nA basic pipeline has several jobs across a handful of stages.\nJobs in each stage would run parallel to each other, but each stage would run sequentially.\nIn the image shown above, all the jobs in the test stage would trigger at the same time. Once those jobs had finished, all the jobs in the build stage would trigger.\nWe used rudimentary CSS to draw lines connecting each job in one stage to each job in the next.\nThese lines weren't calculated based on their connections, but still reflected the story they were telling.\n\nSince the introduction of `needs` relationships in [v12.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/47063), pipelines got a bit more complicated.\nNow you could configure a job in a later stage to trigger as soon as a job in an earlier stage completed.\nLooking at our old example, we could set the API deployment to run as soon as our spec tests passed.\nThis skips the remaining tests and the entire build stage, turning our lines into pretty little liars.\n\nWe had many internal discussions about these lines, and how to show the relationships between jobs.\nThere's the [`needs` visualization](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/#needs-visualization), which does an excellent job of displaying these relationships, but the main pipeline graph was still inaccurate.\nFor the past few months, we've been [refactoring the pipeline graph](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/276949), giving it a new lease of life and fixing some of its issues along the way.\nOne of those issues were the faked lines.\nIn the new version, we can accurately draw lines between jobs.\nLines that actually depict the relationships jobs have with each other.\nNow the lines no-longer lie!\n\n![The newer pipeline graph showing the correct needs links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_new-graph.png)\n\nThe above image shows an unreleased version of the pipeline graph.\nYou can see the lines drawn between the jobs to show that the `deploy:API` job can start as soon as the `rspec` job is successful.\nSomething the old lines (shown earlier in this post) would have been unable to depict.\n\nOne unfortunate downside of this is that these lines can be quite expensive to calculate.\nThey're actual DOM nodes, drawn deliberately and placed precisely.\nOn smaller graphs this isn't a problem, but some of our initial tests have found pipelines with a potential 8000+ job connections.\nThat kind of calculation would grind the browser to a halt, and nobody wants that.\n\nAt GitLab, we believe in boring solutions.\nWe make the simple change that sets us on the path towards where we want to be.\nShip it, get feedback, and iterate.\nSo that's what we did.\nIn the first phase of this rollout, we shipped the new pipeline graph with no lines connecting the jobs.\nWe don't have to worry about the expensive calculations, and we still get to roll out the refactored pipeline graph.\n\n![The current (v13.11) pipeline graph showing no links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_current-graph.png)\n\nWe know some of you will miss them, but fear not.\nBoring solutions are just technical debt if you don't iterate on them.\nSo the [improved lines are coming](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4509) in a future release, along with several other improvements to the pipeline graph.\nWe're already starting to roll out the new [Job Dependencies](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/298973) view which shows the jobs in a (much closer to) execution order.\nStay tuned for more updates, and watch [Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EKqKjB7OQ) for the technical side of this effort and a deeper dive into some of the decisions we made.\n",[740,741,742,743],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":745,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":747},[748,762,773],{"id":749,"categories":750,"header":752,"text":753,"button":754,"image":759},"ai-modernization",[751],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":755,"config":756},"Get your AI maturity 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