Gitte Klitgaard
Gitte Klitgaard is an agile coach, trainer, advisor and mentor focusing on helping organizations implement psychological safety, responsibility, and accountability.
Stockholm, Sweden
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Gitte is authentic, she will cut to the chase, and help people become themselves thereby reaching success. Her community contributions include organizing coach camps, and speaking at conferences, where she highlights and makes topics like mental health and psychological safety accessible. She creates safe and respectful environments at work and outside. She listens to and engages the more silent voices and minority groups.
As a woman with her own company working in tech, Gitte has had her fair share of people underestimating her; there is a reason she has a tattoo symbolizing the goddess Freja – a strong woman in a man’s world. As a friend said “you do not take any shit”. She has been called an activist in her fight for equity for all. In her spare time, Gitte collects LEGO and Yodas and keeps in touch with friends from all over the globe including some, she considers her second family. Gitte is owner of Native Wired and has lead change at companies like IBM, LEGO, and Spotify.
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The secret life of your manager
Being a great manager is hard. It requires skills, experience, and empathy. Gone are the days of Don Draper, when managers had their own floor, office, and whiskey. Management has moved from telling people what to do, to a job that requires a broader skill-set. Managers have to deal with situations they never imagined. Either they were not told about them, or no-one saw the situations coming.
Join this session to hear about the difference that great managers make in an organization, and what it takes to get there.
Jakob and Gitte will share stories about some of the hard decisions that middle managers face. You will get insights into the challenges in management, what managers do when you are not looking, and how you can become more successful by helping your manager. Come learn what great managers excel at and be inspired to pick up the leadership baton yourself
Autonomous teams require great technical leaders
Autonomous teams are like unicorns; everyone talks about them, some know a bit about them, and some believe they have wings. Others are so sure they will issue unicorn certificates.
What conditions are necessary for a team to be successfully autonomous? They need the right environment, the right framing, and the right leadership. This leadership comes from managers, senior developers, and architects working with the team.
In this talk, Jakob and Gitte will share experiences of autonomous teams enabled by great leaders and stories of where autonomy was damaging because of lacking conditions. They will talk about what to expect of managers, architects, staff engineers, and senior engineers to enable autonomy.
Autonomous teams require great managers
Autonomous teams are like unicorns; everyone talks about them, some know a bit about them, and some believe they have wings. Others are so sure they will issue unicorn certificates.
What is an autonomous team? Self-driven teams, autonomous teams, self-organised teams; the phenomenon has had many names since we began talking about it in the 1980s. Do we all mean the same thing, when this type of team is mentioned?
And what are the conditions for these teams to work? They need the right environment, the right framing, and the right leadership. Actually good leaders are not enough, you also need great managers.
In this talk Jakob and Gitte will share experiences of autonomous teams enabled by great managers, and share stories of where autonomy was damaging, and management did not live up to their task. They will talk about what to expect of a manager, and when to leave a team, when the manager does not live up to expectations.
Agile Coach meets Manager
A manager today has many parts to the job like being a coach, a leader, and sometimes creating the culture. These are all elements that agile coaches have been working with for a long time; of course, some more than others depending the type of agile coach.
If we take these experiences to the managers, we can help them become better managers as well as helping with creating better working environments and good engineering culture.
In this talk, Gitte will talk about some of the differences and similarities with the two roles, and about some of the barriers she sees for the industry to have really good leadership. She draws upon many years’ experience as an agile coach and a few years as a manager.
"You're not like other girls" - Redefining leadership by using the soft sides
Close your eyes and imagine a strong leader.
Imagine someone is in charge, taking action.
What did you see?
Chances are high it’s not a young woman in ponytail and a dress.
Traditionally, leadership traits have been strongly connected to masculinity: strength, decisiveness, confidence, and ambition while kindness, empathy, and other softer skills have been seen as traits that make you less proficient as a leader. Women rising to leadership positions have often been people showing the more traditional leadership traits, both personality-wise and in how they choose to present themselves via clothes, language and posture. At the same time, women that show those traditional leadership traits are seen in a less positive manner than men with the same type of personality, successfully creating the so called glass ceiling. So. What do women do? They tell themselves they are not like other girls, and they shove the pink dresses into a drawer somewhere.
After talking online for a time, Gitte and Lena met at a café in Stockholm 2018. While talking about our lives we realized that we had a lot of similar experience and had tackled them in similar ways.
We would like to share our stories from being women in the IT-industry for more than 15 years and how we have gone from suppressing our softer sides to embracing them and making them a part of an ever stronger leadership style. We will share examples of problems we have encountered, how we tried to solve them by shutting out parts of ourselves and how we managed to finally accept them, glitter and unicorns included.
Gitte Klitgaard
Gitte Klitgaard is an agile coach, trainer, advisor and mentor focusing on helping organizations implement psychological safety, responsibility, and accountability.
Stockholm, Sweden
Links
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