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Picard Day

By In IT Culture, Leadership

There have been many great and memorable fictional leaders in my life: Kathryn Janeway, Kermit the Frog, and Jedediah Bartlett are instantly called to my mind. People (and frogs) like these are figures I can look to for inspiration. Their character, values, and managerial styles all contain qualities to which we can all aspire. But one mythical leader towers above all others in my admiration: Jean-Luc Picard.

I am not alone in my love of this nerd icon. Blog posts abound with the tales of his heroic deeds, suave manner, and gleaming, sexy head.The giants of the business publishing world fill column inches with click-baity “top ten” lists about Picard’s management philosophies. There is also some pretty strange fanfiction out there. 

So there’s no reason for me not to jump on the bandwagon in celebrating June 16th as Picard Day! I will do this in the great Internet tradition of writing a list (because it’s easy), and telling you six things about Captain Jean-Luc; three things you should know and three things that are entirely unnecessary. 

1. What is Picard Day?

In Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG for short), Season 7, Episode 12 (S07E12) titled “The Pegasus,” all the children on the Enterprise (the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D to be specific, and Enterprise-D for short) throw a celebration in honor of the captain. Deanna Troi explains that this is because the children look up to him as a role model. Fair enough. 

I believe that the teachers do this because they know it annoys Picard, and they know that one of his few faults is his distaste for children. Picard is an idealized figure and must come across as fairly uptight to those not under his direct supervision. I’m surprised that there are not more events like this in the show, where there are subtle attempts to force cracks in the steely veneer of principles and high cheekbones. 

Picard Day in the show is written as a cute, humanizing scene before the episode plunges into a story about espionage, death, disloyalty, and how creepy the dad from That 70’s Show can be… but that’s another blog. 

Outside of the show, Picard Day is when TNG fans celebrate the greatest fictional commander in all of literary history (yeah, I said it!) at  least in this sector of the galaxy. 

2. Picard’s Power Base

Star Trek TNG was written to be set in a more utopian human future than its predecessor. That means less curse words like “dammit” and “hell,” and the addition of even loftier ideals. That put a lot of pressure on the captain character to be an exemplary human being who still ran a tight ship. Fortunately, the writers of TNG knew a thing or two about power bases. Picard leads through both referent power and expert power. Referent power comes from being trusted and respected, whereas expert power comes from skills or knowledge. Leaders who are able to display both can be extremely effective. Jean-Luc clearly has the respect of the crew due to fairness and consistency, but we sometimes forget how well he understands the technical details of his ship. In “Disaster” (S05E05), we get to watch Jean-Luc save a group of children, stranded in a turbo-life, using his intimate knowledge of the wiring schematics of minor ship subsystems. We are also reminded of how much he dislikes children. 

3. The Picard Maneuver

Many nerds will talk of the Picard Maneuver being a tactic where you aim your ship directly at another ship and then engage your highest level of warp so that it briefly appears that you are in two places at once. The real Picard Maneuver, however, is the motion of adjusting your shirt after you stand up so that it’s not all bunchy on the bottom.

4. He leads through trust

“You have the bridge” might be used second only to “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” in Captain Picard’s dialog. Jean-Luc hands over command to his crew frequently and with absolute confidence. He has built an amazing culture of trust among his officers. Trust is something very difficult to articulate, but there are two dimensions of trust that TNG gets right. 

The first dimension is “Trust in Principles.” The crew of the Enterprise-D are on the same page when it comes to their mission and their intentions. Captain Picard has modeled how to show respect to his fellow officers, how to engage in task conflict, how to praise and reward members of his crew, and how to stand up for what is right. In one of my favorite scenes in all of Star Trek (S07E04 – Gambit, Part 1), Data is temporarily made captain while Worf becomes his first officer. Tensions rise and Data and Worf argue about how to settle disagreements on the bridge. However, the dispute is rapidly resolved when they both agree how Picard and Riker would handle the same situation, modeled for them hundreds of times by experienced leaders. 

“Performance Trust” is the second pillar of trust. This is the concept that you need to be able to know that your team will be able to accomplish the actual tasks they are given. Performance trust is probably much simpler in a world of standardized starship equipment, promotions and ranks, and Starfleet academy testing. That said, Picard encourages mutual and ongoing performance trust among his crew by being consistent and fair in his praise and feedback of their duties. He keeps an open door policy to his ready room, and actually makes changes when his staff come to him with concerns. 

5. The Picard Facepalm

The facepalm that spawned a thousand memes comes from TNG S03E13, “Déjà Q.” The facepalm in the actual footage is as fleeting as the movement of Muhammad Ali’s fist over Sonny Liston’s semiconcious body. In both situations, the image has become massively more powerful than the video. In the episode, Picard is simply exasperated and a little annoyed that Q, a godlike being and constant annoyance, has been made human and sent to the Enterprise-D. That’s pretty much it.

6. Leadership Through Clarity

Picard and his writers understood the most important thing about leadership: Clarity. Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Temptations of a CEO” is required reading for anyone in a position of power, and the book’s arguably most important “temptation” is “Clarity over Certainty.” This describes the tendency of executives to focus on being sure about a decision, rather than clearly understanding and articulating why they are making a decision. Captain Picard is a leader with an almost superhuman reservoir of clarity. He is able to passionately articulate the reasons WHY any command has been given at any point. He can speak to the philosophy behind a value that led to the mission that informed the decision that enabled the command just given. His clear understanding of his own convictions and values, as well as those of The Federation in general, make him the leader that he is. Just watch the Captain (in “The First Duty“ S05E19) explain to the eternally annoying Wesley Crusher how the first duty of an officer is always to the truth.

Star Trek can be very silly sometimes. Fans can be even sillier when they idolize the show and its characters to an unhealthy degree. But we should still remember that Star Trek TNG at its core is not a science fiction show; it’s a morality drama. Jean-Luc Picard sits at the head of this modern morality play as a vessel for the most aspirational ideals of not just leadership, but almost every type of human value the writers could pour into him. Star Trek is nerdy and silly, sure —  but from an inspirational perspective, Gene Roddenberry can outwrite Peter Drucker any day.
Finally, if anyone out there is inspired by this post to watch the show Star Trek: Picard on Paramount+, please, please, please don’t. It is a sloppy, meaningless, morally bankrupt mess, and is mainly about explosions and ninjas (yes, I’m serious). I would rewatch a thousand episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise while being forced to say, “I see five lights” when I can clearly see four, before I ever subject myself to one more minute of Star Trek: Picard.

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality. CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck. Author of Herding Cats and Coders. Fan of squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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Keeping Culture Alive During Covidland

In IT Culture, Workplace

It’s been almost a year now since we closed our office and sent everyone home. The first few months were filled with uncertainty, change, and a fair dose of anxiety, but we got through it. It made us a stronger and a closer group of people in many ways. But working together is not just about doing the day-to-day tasks and surviving the occasional pandemic challenge. There are a million little things that we miss when we are not physically in the same space.

One of the most interesting lessons from the past year has been learning what we take for granted when working in an office. I personally miss lunches with a table full of smart, funny, interesting people. I miss the group dynamics around a physical whiteboard where the ideas are coming faster than we can write them down. But what I miss most are those tiny interactions; the conversations in hallways, doorways, and around the fish tank (we don’t really have a water cooler).

These small moments are what elevate work relationships into friendships. They are where we humanize our coworkers, build empathy, and learn that they are full 3D people with 3D lives and 3D dreams. You walk out of a conference room with someone talking about their kids. You don’t just hang up your Zoom call with them and go back to your email.

I think that these moments, as small as they may seem, are extremely important in a workplace. My work is not just a job, and my coworkers are not just some random group of people with whom I accomplish tasks. To me, work is about creating shared meaning and sharing a mission. While you can work cooperatively with a group of strangers to achieve a goal, it will not be as fulfilling as working with a group of friends to completely blow a goal out of the water. I wake up every day partly for the work, but mainly for the people.

So if these small moments in-between “work” are so important in strengthening the bonds between colleagues, how do we make sure they are not entirely lost during long periods of remote work?

The truth is that I don’t really know, but I can tell you what we have tried. I think that Sourcetoad has one of the best company cultures I’ve ever seen, and so it’s worth sharing some of the successful changes we’ve made.

Weekly All-Hands

The first change that we implemented was moving to a weekly all-hands meeting. In the before times, Sourcetoad had a monthly “Sandwich Day,” which was an hour and a half, fully-catered company extravaganza with animated slides, company updates, silly jokes, educational segments, and trivia games with prizes.

We still hold these longer form all-hands meetings once a month, but we discovered that we needed something shorter between Sandwich Days to stay in touch with each other. I actually started out with a weekly company-wide email, but it was too impersonal and never really worked.

We now have a weekly, 30-minute meeting with a few quick updates and a little extra silliness. We try and dedicate about a third of the time to an open Q&A session and address any questions raised in a dedicated Slack channel throughout the week.

Fika

Many American workplaces have adopted the Swedish idea of fika — a simple daily (or twice daily) coffee or tea break with the purpose of slowing down and taking a real intermission from work, even if just for a few minutes. At Sourcetoad, we have started two different fikas (or is it fiki?).

  1. A weekly, optional fika for anyone in the company to drop in on and chat.
  2. A rotating fika for new hires to slowly work their way through the entire organization. These are small fika groups where new team members meet with groups of two or three employees to have a 20 minutes coffee break and get to know each other.

Work From Home Challenges

One of our most successful initiatives has been our #WFH-challenge Slack channel. Many companies have been doing these, but we took to it like a fish to water. The challenges were almost daily at first: take a photo of your work area, list your top ten favorite movies, show us something in your house with green thread, etc. They kept everyone engaged but also allowed us a view into each other’s personal spaces and lives.

The number of challenges per week we are doing has decreased as time has gone on. We have gotten more and more used to working remotely. Sometimes we’ve even missed weeks. But they are one of my favorite additions to our work culture. Here are some of my favorites:

  • Guess who is in these childhood photos.
  • Post the oldest photo or selfie you have on your phone.
  • Tell us what has been the most surprising distraction while working from home?
  • Wear a crazy hat competition.
  • Draw your own island using this tool.
  • Post your favorite COVID meme.
  • Find something within arms reach, take a photo, and tell us something about it (why you have it, where you got it, etc.)
  • Post a link to a website, blog, or subreddit that you’ve spent a lot of time on during quarantine. (Safe for work only!)
  • Wear formal clothes to the all-hands.
  • Describe the show you’re binge-watching in the most boring way possible.
  • Post a photo of your favorite spot to take a walk.
  • Change your Zoom background in our all-hands meeting to your ideal fantasy world.
  • Tell us what is your favorite play/musical, and why? Bonus points if you sing/act out the play.
  • Post your favorite recipe that you’ve discovered during lock-down.
  • Caption this photo competitions, the most popular being:

Movie Night

Sourcetoad has always hosted movie nights, so moving them online was important to keep our culture alive. Our team went through dozens of solutions for everyone to watch movies together. From home-built Plex servers to experimental chat systems, they tried it all. In the end, we settled on two solutions:

  1. Youtube movies and the Youtube Party browser extension.
  2. Netflix movies and the Teleparty browser extension.

Combine these with headphones and an open Zoom call, and you have something approximating an in-person movie night!

Game Night and Happy Hour

Game Night and Happy Hour used to be another Sourcetoad ritual. Every Friday night, as developers started logging, product managers sent their last status report, and the marketing team finished doing whatever it is they do — we would kick off an informal party. Generally, this involved opening a beer and one of the drawers in the office that holds one of thirty classic game consoles. We would then argue about IPAs over lager and Atari over NES.

Thus, the sacred tradition of Game Night had to also move online. However, our team has adapted extremely well (as us nerds could be expected to). The most popular method has been to connect a Jackbox account as a Zoom participant and have everyone join via their phones.

The other games that have gone down the best have been:

  • Codenames – A game where you try and get your team to guess the right words.
  • Skribbl.io – An online Pictionary-style free-for-all.
  • JigsawPuzzle.io – As the name implies, online group jigsaw puzzles.
  • Jackbox – I’ll add it again here because it’s so good!

Conclusion

Hopefully, this list of ideas and thoughts gives you some hope for the future of work and some ideas to implement today in the remote world. I’m personally looking forward to those small interactions in the hallways between meetings again. Still, at least for now, I’m able to enjoy a cocktail and a terrible Nicolas Cage movie with some of my favorite people online.