Julia Whitney is an executive coach. She helps Design, Product and Tech leaders iterate to leadership excellence. Her current client list includes leaders and leadership teams from Kickstarter, Tesco, YunoJuno, Capital One, the Financial Times, Adaptive Lab, ?WhatIf!, Clearleft and NewsUK. Julia brings her own experience as a board level leader to her coaching practice. She’s led design teams at the intersection of media and digital for more than 20 years, in both the U.S and the UK, most recently as General Manager and Executive Creative Director for the BBC’s 150 person strong UX&D department. Julia is a Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation, is an accredited MBTI and JCA Emotional Intelligence Profile practitioner, and holds additional coaching certificates in Coaching Teams to High Performance (ITS) and Systemic Team Coaching (AoEC). Her coaching style is both insight- and action-oriented; energetic and reflective; supportive and productively challenging.

“…bamboo, bent even to the ground, will spring upright after the passage of the storm.”

Japanese proverb

Life, as a design leader, can be stressful. Juggling demands from multiple stakeholders with conflicting needs. Looking after a team that’s full of humans who need care and attention. Battling with peers to keep the user at the forefront of your decision making. The list goes on.

And sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to. You lose the argument. You lose the employee. You lose points with your boss. You lose customers, despite your best efforts. Maybe you even lose your job.

How do you bounce back from these losses, both big and small? How do you sustain your energy? How do you, like the bamboo in the proverb, spring upright again once the storm has passed?

You can’t make life less stressful, but you can learn to manage your energy and perspective, and to bounce back more readily. In this talk we’ll look at 5 angles:

meaning and purpose; self-awareness; the mental; the physical; and the emotional sides of resilience. You’ll see how each of these impacts bounce-back-ability, and learn small changes you can make to grow more resilient.

Is your team's performance sabotaged by in-fighting and personal attacks? Or are all of you too polite, only saying what you really think once you've left the room? These are just a couple of examples of what being bad at conflict looks like. And being bad at conflict is a major obstacle to high team performance. In this workshop you’ll learn what being good at conflict looks like, and how to cultivate conflict competence in your team to fuel high performance, instead of derail it. By the end of the workshop you’ll be able to:

• Understand when conflict is productive and when it’s destructive in team working

• Use an analysis process to deal with conflict before it becomes personal

• Recognise 5 distinct conflict styles

• Use these conflict styles in practice by

o Identifying your individual conflict style preferences, and understanding those of your team

o Learning what style would be best for different conflict scenarios, and what skills you need to apply

o Developing greater range in the conflict styles you use

• Apply a scalable conflict management process back at the office

• Develop your team’s ability to mine conflict for it’s gems and avoid it’s dangers.

Target audience: Design Leaders, both new and experienced