Recorded 04/07/21
This is a panel presentation featuring Angela Riggs, Ashley Hunsberger, and Lena Pejgan Wiberg.
Times are tough right now. At all levels, people are struggling to find their way through the challenges of a pandemic. People are balancing home and work life in ways they never imagined. Some people don’t have the energy to think about self-care, and some don’t think they have the space or permission to.
As leaders in tech, it’s our job to support and protect our people – but how do we do that when we’re struggling just as much as they are?
One of the best ways to help others is to set an example by helping ourselves. We can normalize the need for self-care by taking time off and making sure it’s visible on our calendars, whether it’s an extended lunch and workout, reduced work hours, or actual vacation days. We can make it easier for people to ask for help by expressing our own anxiety or fatigue or stress, so people don’t feel like they have to hide those experiences. We can remind people to eat lunch simply by making sure we post our lunch breaks in team chat channels.
It sounds simple and obvious when written down, doesn’t it? So how come it’s so hard to do? Let’s explore how stress affects us, the importance of reflective practices, and how a modern take on leadership might help.
Webinar Takeaways:
- Reflective practices so you can understand when you need self-care
- The effects of stress and how to recognize them
- Strategies for self-care
- How to lead others through self-care
- The importance and impact of self-care
Ashley Hunsberger – Director of DevOps Engineering, Blackboard
Ashley Hunsberger is the Director of DevOps Engineering at Blackboard, Inc., and co-founder of Quality Element. She’s passionate about making an impact in education and loves coaching team members in product and client-focused quality practices. Most recently, she has focused on test strategy implementation and training, development process efficiencies, and preaching Test Driven Development to anyone that will listen. In her downtime, she loves to travel, read, quilt, hike, and spend time with her family.
Speaker Details:
Joining from Cary, North Carolina
Twitter: @aahunsberger
LinkedIn: Ashley Hunsberger
Speaking Experience: STPCon
Angela Riggs – Quality Advocate
Angela believes that compassion and curiosity are driving forces of quality. The hiker’s mantra “leave it better than you found it” inspires her approach as work, whether it’s people, process, or the organization as a whole. She nerds out on process improvement and has strong feelings about change management. As a Quality Advocate, Angela loves her job the most when she gets to take on challenges that allow her to learn and grow, and when she’s supporting teams to do their best work.
Angela tweets at @AngelaRiggs_ and blogs at AngelaRiggs.github.io. In her free time she enjoys loom weaving & embroidery, baking, and reading food memoirs (recent books include Consider the Oyster and The Cooking Gene).
Speaker Details:
Joining from Portland, Oregon
Twitter: @AngelaRiggs_
LinkedIn: Angela Riggs
Blog: AngelaRiggs.Github.io
Speaking Experience: STPCon, CAST, TestBash, PNSQC, TSQA, Mabl webinar, Refactr
Lena Pejgan Wiberg – Engineering Manager, Mentimeter
Lena has been in IT since 1999 when she started out as a bright-eyed developer. After a decade of code, she found her calling in testing and has since then worked in most testing-related roles, from being a tester on a team to building and leading testing organizations. She believes continuous improvement is something we should all strive for by keeping up to date and always challenge ourselves, our assumptions, and the way things are done. Since 2017 she works as a manager and finds that the skills that make her a good tester also work wonders when making people, teams, and organizations grow.
She is an avid blogger, speaker, and workshop facilitator as well as the creator of “Would heu-risk it?” – a risk-based deck of cards. Lena lives outside of Stockholm and shares her house with her family, loads of gaming stuff, and books. She is currently working as an Engineering Manager at Mentimeter.
Speaker Details:
Joining from Vasterhaninge, Sweden
Twitter: @lenapejgan
LinkedIn: Lena Pejgan Wiberg
Website: Pejgan.se
Blog: Blog.Pejgan.se
Speaking Experience: ATD, TestBash, Romanian Testing Conf, SAST, CAST, Leetspeak, Online Test Conf