Getting the Respect Your Work Deserves: A Live Workshop w/ Engineering Coach Lena Reinhard

**Lena Reinhard** (0:00)
Especially if you're someone, and we'll talk through that scenario, if you're someone who's looking to grow as a leader, managing perception and increasing your impact are really, really intertwined. And the perceived impact you have is very hard to detangle from the impact you're actually having.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:17)
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm Conor Bronsdon, Dev Interrupted executive producer and occasional guest host.
Today, I'm joined by Lena Reinhard. Lena, thank you so much for joining me.

**Lena Reinhard** (1:09)
Thank you for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:10)
So for those who don't know Lena in the audience, she's an acclaimed international keynote speaker and authority on topics like leadership, DevOps transformation and organizational scale. And she's worked with CEOs, team leads at startups and everyone in between, helping teams everywhere increase their effectiveness, scale for performance and achieve sustainable growth.
She's also the former VP of Product Engineering at CircleCI. And Lena, I'm really excited to have you on the show today.

**Lena Reinhard** (1:38)
I'm super excited to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:40)
Yeah, this episode is particularly fun for us because we've honestly never done anything like this before. You know, you are renowned for your ability to foster transformational change within teams. And when we were prepping for this episode and doing research in your approach and started to learn more about your process, we kind of figured, hey, let's get the full treatment. So for anyone listening, we're about to settle in to one of Lena's famous workshops. I'm going to be doing it from the perspective of an individual contributor who's just kind of leveled up to team lead at a scale up. It's important to note that this conversation will be applicable not just to devs or individual contributors, but also to VPs of engineering and even CTOs.
The way Lena conducts these exercises, they're more about breaking out of your preconceived notions than they are about prescribing to a title or to a specific organization.
So if you're a VP, director of engineering, founder, we encourage you to follow along as well and think about how you would answer these questions if Lena was sitting in her office or on the Zoom call right now. Lena, let's get started here. This is going to be fun.

**Lena Reinhard** (2:46)
Awesome. Let's do it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:47)
So I know you wanted to start off with perception and how to build a better perception of our work. That's the topic that our listeners voted on and you were really excited about it. But I want to give a little more background before we do that about who you are and what you do.
Can you give us maybe like a quick two-minute summary of your career? I know it's hard to fork everything in there, but I'd love for the listeners to get to know you a little more.

**Lena Reinhard** (3:11)
Yeah, of course. So I've been at it for almost 20 years at this point, and I have a cross-functional background. I've worked in finance, in media, in arts, and the majority of my time I've spent in tech, though, and I've sort of stuck with that and had a lot of fun on the journey. So I initially, honestly, had never pegged myself as someone starting to run teams, and let alone enjoying that, but here we are. And so the last decade, I've spent growing and running engineering teams across the globe and from NGOs to early stage startups to pre-IPO stage was basically anything in there.
I had my own software as a service startup for a while. I was a co-founder and CEO there, which was a really exciting time as well. We were bootstrapped at the time, so it's also a special experience, I'd say. And I've along the way basically discovered that I have this passion for people and helping people navigate systems.
And by systems, I mean both technical systems as well as systems within organizations, systems of people. And there's a lot of intricacies to that, and there's a lot that helps people be effective in their work and show up as leaders in particular. And now I get to do more of that, and I now do it in a few different functions, mostly in coaching, which we're going to do a little bit of today, which I'm very excited about. So I coach engineering executives and leaders, mostly more senior folks. And I also do consulting for a variety of teams, and I train management teams in topics like the one that we're going to cover today. So that's my work, and that system angle and helping people navigate those systems through the thing that I really care about.