Finding Balance in the Midst of Constant Change
A Conversation with Ashley Hunsberger, Director of Developer Advocacy, Blackboard
This week’s conversation is with Ashley Hunsberger, Director of Developer Advocacy at Blackboard. In addition to holding a leadership role, Ashley is also a mom and a grad student. We spoke about navigating change, developing feedback loops, and finding balance as a leader.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
When I saw your tweet back in January I knew I wanted to have you on the series. I also know you're in grad school. I wanted to know the story behind this unique situation.
There's so much. So as you know, I also started grad school on top of all this for industry and organizational psychology (I/O psychology). And this week we've been reading about motivation theory and job characteristic theory. And one of the things that stood out to me was job variety is like, well, I've definitely got variety in what I do also.
You do! Did you end up changing your title?
I did not. It honestly became one of the lower priority things. We've also been going through a merger at work. So I've also been reorienting myself to a new boss and teaching him about what I do and him getting acquainted with my team's work and my work. The title thing for me is how do I characterize my work? How do I describe my work? How do I encompass all that I do, even if it feels like I'm doing a lot of different things, that's actually fine because I really love variety in what I do.
It's not like I have to go do these things every day at the same time, but I love the ability to put on a different hat and work with my analytics team and work with my work in advocacy and helping spread ideas and influence people. They actually all tie together. I also use the data team to understand what we need to change by the data that we get from the engineering teams and how can I help you promote those ideas. The way that they all tie together is really fun for me to make those connections, but it's really hard to come up with a title.
I'm not so hung up on the title so much as I am, do I have the right position for what I do and the tasks that I take on and the things that in my abilities or do I really care so much about, am I just married to this one particular team when I always find my scope always growing or whatever that looks like and it's always going to change.
Well, yeah. What interested me about that tweet was what was underneath it. It made me wonder was about the organizational piece that was underlying, that you're speaking to. How did this unique conglomeration come about?
I started in DevOps. I began my career as a tester, one day my boss was like, "I think we need release engineering. We need somebody that can help us think about code as infrastructure. How are we testing this if we make a change in even our infrastructure, how are we building a paved road as we look at micro service-oriented architecture? I know you've been a test architect, I know you've done these things. I think you should lead this team as a director." So I went from being an architect to a Director of a team I'd never worked with before and straight into management.
So I made that lateral move from architect to a director position, which was terrifying, but I found I really loved the people management aspect. I cared less about the actual tech and architect. That's why I had architects. That's why I had all these amazing DevOps engineers on my team. So the release engineering came about from a company reorg. But I was still doing a lot of advocacy, speaking about testing in the industry. I also care about Agile development. Not right for everybody, but I think in our context it works. And I really love talking about those concepts with people. I had been a product owner and we were looking at my strengths. We had done a Clifton strengths assessment and I love this piece, we just did it for school too.
I'm a certified strengths coach, I used to work for Gallup.
Wow. That's incredible. So in my top five, I have Empathy, Relator, and Intellection. I love to think deeply about all these things. Also Positivity and Developer. My top five strengths are just meant for advocacy. What we shifted into was how do we advocate this need to scale agile across our organization? How do I help influence and advocate for these concepts we want to talk about and bring the company along with us? We chose to go with a scaled agile framework. It was what best suited our needs.
So then I went from directing, I think, a team of around 15 or so at the time back to being an individual contributor, we just never really changed my title because the idea was that it was going to grow back again to a group. I got back into advocacy, started working on how do I think about influencing, engaging within the company. Also continuing my work external to the company, especially in testing. At the same time, we were thinking about how to get data behind our transformation initiatives. While I can learn these things, it would be really helpful if I could hire somebody that is truly a data analyst, truly knows how to develop surveys. That was my first hire last year in July and we were taking a look at it all right, how is this transformation going? How do we take a look at engagement? What is adoption and how do we measure these things and create surveys so that we can gather data around that, get the right sample size. How do we validate and trust what we're finding in these surveys, and do analysis on that?
What we were able to prove from that was we can get this information from people that this is happening to, we can find correlations and do actual analytics on this and take that back to the leaders to say, this is what we're finding, this is what we might recommend based on what we are seeing. But what we were able to do is change the course of their roadmap for the next year based on what we found in the analytics behind it.
So that was our first foray. So we think about research, data analysis, how we apply that, and share that in an easily consumable way for people to understand they don't need to go take a course in statistics to understand what we're doing.
Right.
The company said, "Actually, we want more data." Our CPO at the time said, "I really would like to understand what is the impact of my investment on time to value." So we had to define, what time means to value in this context. It can mean different things to different people. And then, what does your investment mean? So in that context, it was how many teams are we adding, and are we making a good decision? Are we making an over-investment? Are we under-investing based on that? I've found I've enjoyed this aspect of my role. So being able to build out this velocity lab of sorts, understand the data behind our decisions, or help inform decisions, even if they choose not to pursue that has been interesting for me to learn and grow.
So that's kind of how I've gotten to the, went from IC to director in DevOps now to this swing in the advocacy, and now bringing in the data behind it to help advocate for the things that we can and maybe should be doing.
What a great journey to understand how people get where they are, and your role I think is so unique. How many folks are on your team now?
Two.
What does Blackboard do?
Blackboard is an education technology company. We recently merged with Anthology. We think about how to bring education to people anywhere. How do we give people the tools to continue learning. Think about what happened with COVID. I've never been prouder to work somewhere when we could bring education to people that could not make it into schools, that could not make it into universities, that couldn't even make it into K12, especially with my children going through their own learning journey. How do we bring learning back into the home with teachers? It was such a prideful moment to think I'm part of this in some small way. It's such a noble mission in software development, it's so easy to identify, which brings us a huge sense of commitment to the work that we do.
I bet. How big is the company now?
We're about 3,000 give or take.
Who do you report to?
I report to a senior vice president in engineering who oversees our learning tools and analytics tools and shared services. He reports to the CTO.
You’re doing a lot at work. You're also a mom.
Yes. Two kids too. Two very active girls, nine and 12 in third and sixth grade. We've hit middle school.
You also recently went back to school.
I did. A lot of what I have been doing is focusing on teams and humans in the workplace. My whole mission for my team is how do we understand and discover, how do we amplify and improve how we work, and our well-being in engineering. I think there's this interesting gap in I/O psychology, which is all about humans in the workplace, psychology in the workplace, and tech. So how do we help improve our tech culture by looking at the psychology of humans?
I got really interested in it and part of just how I work. As you know, as an Intellection I'm not the person that wants to just go read a blog post and go try something or experiment. I want to understand deeply why we do what we do and the science behind it. So I decided to go back to school for industrial and organizational psychology. I'm getting a master's in applied I/O psych, and I'm really, really loving it.
That's awesome. My degree is in social psychology but I studied a ton of I/O. It's a very interesting field. I feel like people outside of psychology don't always know that term very well.
I came across it when I was looking at Dr. Amy Edmondson's work in psychological safety. I was looking at how to help promote psychological safety in my workplace. I wanted to go beyond the Ted talk, so I started reading her actual articles and looking at the surveys she sent out and the data and science behind it. I thought this is so interesting. What field did she study? I'd never heard of I/O psych before. And I was like, oh, this is me to a T, and then throw in the piece about data analytics and data science and all of the things that I need to do for research methods.
Now I get to do this incredible deep dive on research methods, on applied data analytics and I'll be learning Python in my upcoming courses and so I'll be able to help, I think, more effectively guide my velocity lab team because they are data engineers. It's incredible to me what this field brings. It was actually classified as a STEM field this year, which is really exciting.
It was? That's so great.
Yeah. A lot of people think psychology, oh, it's just humanities. Well, yes. And because of all the analysis, because of the coding, because of the research and scientific approach we take to it, it is now a stem field and I'm super excited about that.
How long have you been in that program?
I just started in January and I cried through my first two weeks of it. What did I do? It was so hard.
What was hardest about it? Was it the classwork, was it balancing everything?
It was a new balance. I think with change comes a lot of fear. I realized that I learn differently now than when I was an undergrad, to read and to find the time to sit down and do the amount of reading that requires this coursework, really hard to find that time as a full-time worker and parent. It was so challenging to find that balance. I had to make a few adjustments. I had to think about it as learning skills that help me in my day-to-day. I thought about how I can apply what I’m learning to the company. I very much believe in building and learning time in your workday. I also shifted to a four-day workweek, 10 hour days, which gives me Friday to catch up on assignments.
How was it getting a four-day workweek?
We say we have a flexible work schedule, I don't know a lot of leaders that employ it. We tend to look at the individual contributors that might employ it, but I was like, well, what if we led by doing and encouraging people to think about it in this way. So I talked to my boss and I was like, "I'm drowning. I could use a day instead of using PTO, how can I condense my work week so that we can take a look at this?" It was terrifying because while I have worked with my boss in other aspects, he had not been my boss before. So now you're learning a whole new dimension. Do I bring this up? I've always had this philosophy well, they can't say no if I don't ask, but they can't say yes either.
He was supportive. And while he didn't mention the four-day workweek specifically he said, "How can we support you in any way? How can we help with this time transition? Let's get creative in ways that we can do that." So this is the first thing we're trying. The first few weeks were successful for me, then I got sick. And so we'll see, I start back work next week, we'll see how that goes with my energy levels. Then if I can sustain a 10 hour day, but it was doable.
What were the things that you talked about in terms of having Fridays away and your role?
Yeah, of course, if there's something critical, please, by all means, write me. This is not a, I'm off the books completely. I think in any director or leadership role, there's always going to be something that comes up that you're going to get pinged about. But very early on in my leadership journey, I learned to set boundaries. It was the best piece of advice I ever got. And for a few years now, I've had meeting-free Fridays on my calendar.
I had meeting-free Fridays when I was a COO too. It was so important.
Yeah. I instituted for myself and my direct reports if they chose to, obviously the caveat being, there's always going to be something critical that might pop up, let's not be, nope, can't meet it's Friday, but let's see if it makes sense to try to do it on a Friday if a request comes in. Everything is within reason. My former team still has meeting-free Fridays and it gives them time to sit down and do work.
I started it because it was the only time I could figure out how to sit and have a significant chunk of time for strategic thinking and planning and goal setting and administration that we all have to do as leaders. I could take care of all of these things that just pile up and get pushed to the end of the week.
I had this chunk of time so it made it an easy transition. And then I worked with my team and enabled them and empowered them to say, hey, unless you really, really need me, you are absolutely empowered to facilitate whatever you need on Friday or to make decisions. And I trust you, I hired you because I trust you to do this job and you know your job better than I do. It's just been a really easy transition.
Boundary setting is so important. So Fridays used to be your deep thinking time, but now where's your deep thinking time?
I also did some time defragging my calendar. Whether it’s people management, strategy thinking, I color-code my tasks. I look at my calendar and then I also think, what are my energy levels for each of these things? Where do I do the best in my day? Now I block off-time mornings because they are by far my best creative thinking time for me. Towards the end of the day, I am completely drained. I am an introvert. Once I've had a million calls, the last thing I want to do is think deeply about something.
I'm the person that would rather wake up from seven o'clock to 9:00 AM every morning and do the strategic thinking, do that deep creative thinking that I need to do, and then I can get into my calls for the day. What are the conversations I need to have? And to me, a call is not just like a meeting, it is something that is very active collaboration typically with people. I really try not to just be at a meeting for the meeting's sake. I'm super protective of my time. If I don't see a need for me to be on the call, I'm not going to go.
Or I will ask you to clarify what is it that I bring of value to this call, or is it something that my direct report is probably going to be honestly better at answering for you? I'll be there to help back up my staff if needed, but I'm learning to be really protective of that space. I've managed to somehow cut my meetings in almost half, which was a game-changer for me.
It sounds like you're very conscious about where should I be, what should I be doing, when should I be doing it, and who should be doing this? It's easy for leaders to take on too much responsibility themselves and their schedules get out of control.
As an individual contributor, yeah, you are actively working on these things yourself a lot of the time. When you make that transition to being a director, you may be responsible but you’re not the one doing the work. So being able to decouple that thinking and being able to delegate and having the right people in place that can help facilitate those discussions. It takes this load and burden off of you as a leader, when you can think, all right, do I need to be there? Am I the right person for this? Do I have the skillset for it? And if not, do I have the right people on my staff to do it? And how can I entrust? You to have that trust in them. Otherwise, you are going to be completely overburdened if you don't trust that your team can handle this.
I see folks go into management and leadership and they go down into the work rather than guiding and influencing at an organizational level. It's a hard transition.
It is. And I think one thing that really helped me was being a product owner before I started this journey because I was able to get the big picture, be able to articulate what it is that we needed to build and do without having to care so much about how did we build it. Here are the things that we need to do. Here's what I want to see. I'm not going to articulate how you go build this thing because I trust you as the architect. I trust you as a developer, I trust you as the test engineer to go do it. And you tell me the best way to do this thing. They had autonomy.
And then that helped me be able to step back, have that big picture, but not feel like I have to be in the weeds to go build that thing. Which is a terrifying feeling sometimes. But I have to get comfortable with that ambiguity, knowing that we're still driving towards something we want to build, but knowing I'm not a developer, I'm not an architect. I don't have the skillset anywhere to go design these things. But I trust my team, the team that I've built to go do it.
What's been hardest for you about leadership?
The challenges come in when you have organizational change. Because now not only are you working towards goals still, those goals might change because of the change in the organization. You're now also dealing with the psychology and emotions of change in the workplace, and how do you help navigate people through that? You have to be able to give them their space they need to understand it's okay to have these feelings. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be upset. That's fine. Let's talk about that. And let's now articulate what is it that we're going to work through today to get through this.
Organizations change. That's just the fact of life. Are we organized the way we need to be organized to deliver value? If you have a company that's not changing over five, 10 years, they're not probably doing their jobs. It's easy to get stagnant that way.
Of course, it’s not always easy. I think the biggest challenges I've had is when my job has changed year after year for several straight years, because it's not just, okay, learn your job and get good at it. You learn it and now we're going to throw this curveball out. You need to go learn another thing. Now you need to go learn another thing. It’s a great feeling, but it can feel overwhelming too. And so I have to get to a place of what is important? What are my goals? How do I identify with them? So that I still deem them important and motivated to work towards them.
That takes a lot of self-reflection as a leader. The challenges are really, to me about that change, that constant change that sometimes we feel as leaders, we sometimes try to protect our staff from it, so how do we navigate that ourselves as leaders?
People don't talk about this enough. Organizations are living, breathing entities that are constantly changing. I don’t think people don't talk enough about navigating change when you're in a leadership role. How did you personally get better at dealing with and navigating the constant change?
It's hard. I would like to say that I'm good at it, but at this point, it's something that became necessary. I do a lot of reflecting. I have worksheets where I ask myself questions: How do I feel today about this? How did I navigate something like this in the past? What did I feel about it then? How do I feel about it today? These worksheets are something that my kids can do and they like doing it. We did something together through COVID, just trying to help them navigate the change of being at home learning versus being in a school setting. And it was just these cute little worksheets that I did with my kids. And it kind of helped me, like they're going through a lot too.
Navigating change takes a lot of perspective, a lot of reflecting to get through that. I still get upset when there’s change, but I quickly think, “Alright, I'm not sending somebody to Mars, so pressure off. I am not creating life support systems, pressure off.” But I am responsible for human beings at work. And so that is heavy for me because I take such a humanistic approach in my leadership style. And sometimes I have to decouple like, all right, I'm not their therapist, but I can be there to listen. I'm not responsible for their well-being, but I can give them tools as their leader.
I think for me navigating that change and getting used to it, I always quickly reflect what is that emotion I'm feeling? How am I feeling about it? Have I encountered a similar change in the past? And how did I navigate it? What did I learn from that if I didn't handle it so well? I overreact sometimes. At the end of the day it's perspective and what do I want out of it. What helps me get through it quickly is establishing even proximal goals that help me drive towards something when maybe I have more distal goals. So do I have something near term I can work towards and identify with and help kind of bring me out of this, versus the longer-term goals that feel so far in the future, especially in a state of uncertainty on, is this even a goal anymore, like after a merger/acquisition?
I think about what I can do day to day that helps me get through and reward myself. I reward myself for meeting even the smallest thing. Self-care, as a leader, we don't do it enough and we don't talk about it enough and gosh, and as leaders, we don't get a lot of the recognition we should. I like to recognize my team for the job that they did. And that's apart, I think of the job that sometimes we don't think about when you go from being an IC to a director. It's not this individual reward system anymore necessarily, especially when one of your core needs in the workplace is Significance, which is one of mine. So how do I feel significant when I achieve a goal or my team achieves something I have this sense of pride and I want to celebrate it. It's coming up with these little small things, even if they're internal reward systems for you, that helps me.
I also hear structures for a reflection, making sure you have those structures. Did you develop those worksheets? How did those worksheets happen?
So I was also leading a diversity equity inclusion workshop at the time that we were going through adaptive leadership training. Part of our adaptive leadership cohort was that we talked about change. We discussed a lot about what it is that we're thinking about through the change curve. Kübler-Ross Change Curve, it's a lot like how do we process grief? And through that, my intern helped me make these. I have them on GitHub. They're super printable.
Where did the questions come from?
I think we pulled them from APA or Psychology Today or something like that. So I'll take a look and it's just, yeah, it's even on a five-star rating, how am I doing today? We might be having a bad week, it might not even be about change, but just reflecting on how I'm doing today and why might that be?
That sounds like a really useful tool. Most leaders do not get enough reflection time because of the demands and all of that. But what I love is, is the structured approach. Great questions.
Thank you. Yeah, I wish I could take credit for developing this, but I can't take credit because I hired the person that did it.
What did you notice after you did that? How did things change?
I just felt better. I mean, I think for me being an introvert, being able to write down or at least just think about and process those things without having to necessarily go verbalize them to everybody all the time, I find that connection and energy source from thinking about it and being by myself. I found that that helped me in just even naming what it was that I was thinking about or feeling just helped me get on with my day.
Taking time to reflect lets you take back your amygdala, your initial fight or flight response. That gets us back into a place of logical thinking, and from there it just makes it easier to execute.
You're right about it getting us back into this rational place because we get emotional. Everybody has emotions. We’re humans, emotions are what makes us human. A lot of leaders carry around a lot of mental friction and stuff with them and it just eats away at their brains and they can't think as clearly, and they don't have as much time for strategic thinking. So I love about when you're reflecting and getting things, you have a conscious way of getting things out of your head.
Yeah. I have to. I do a lot of writing. As you saw, even just in my grad school, I have my Ashley Goes to Grad School blog, just so I can process it because it's a fast-paced environment. We're doing one course over eight weeks for the next few years. And eight weeks is not a lot of time to do that deep dive so I'm reading hundreds of pages every week between the textbook and the articles, and it's hard to just absorb it. I go back to old material and write about it. Writing about them helps me build those connections. That reflection time helps me think back, oh, okay, maybe this applies here as well when we're in a future area.
You’re pulling on another thread, which is how do we learn as leaders? The feedback loops change, we get less formal feedback. We have to figure out our own learning.
It's a lonely job. Isn't it? Leadership. I feel like when I was an IC, it was so easy. I knew what my job was. I had my backlog of things to work on. I had my feedback. I either knew something worked or it didn't, or I did well at something or I didn't, where they were... You always got that feedback as an IC.
As a leader, it's so much harder because I'm responsible for setting those goals. I try to always take a collaborative approach to it because I also feel there's power in having the team define what we do as if we all agree on the vision and setting that together. That helps us create a sense of identity towards what we want to work towards, but that's a hard job and it can be lonely if you don't do it in a collaborative manner. When I take a collaborative approach, I find that that's the feedback that maybe not be formal, but I'm getting it. You're getting it before it's too late and you're already down this path of working towards a goal that doesn't make sense to your staff.
I also recently did a workshop at work on public speaking at the company. I asked them what they think they’re good at. They also need to reach out to three peers and ask them to give you three words that they think about when it comes to you and your work. That's a great way to get feedback.
Feedback is everywhere. We have to figure out how to find the information.
Yeah, exactly. It's hard. Right? And I do that for my teams a lot. I also, don't wait for the annual review to get feedback, I'm constantly giving it to them. I always tell my staff, if your review is a surprise, I'm not doing my job well. So every week I give my team feedback, whether it's something I observe or whether it's feedback I've solicited from people that they have worked with because they're the ones in the meetings.
I go contact people and ask them, "Hey, what was it like working with this person on my team? And what was your experience? And not just did they deliver the thing that you wanted them to, but how did they make you feel? How was it collaborating with them?" Even if maybe there's room for improvement on what we delivered at the end of the day, I also care about the experience people have. We are a service-oriented team, so we are also in the business of customer service just with engineering teams. So how is that experience working with us? You can't improve if you aren't getting it in a timely manner. Feedback is useless if it's not timely.
It's hard, so you have to find that balance and what works for you and what is sustaining for you because it is time-intensive to go get the feedback sometimes that you need, but do it.
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