Speaker Spotlight Q&A: Wendy Geller, PhD - Division Director, Data Management & Analysis, Vermont Agency of Education

Answer: I get to work with some of the smartest, most altruistic, caring, and innovative people I’ve ever met. The people in my Division are second to none. There is alchemy in the work they do together and how they do it. They are fearless, determined, and humble. Out of nothing and no way, they make a way. They inspire me.

Answer: I think Simon Sinek said something once like “a team isn’t a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.”  I think he’s right about that.

To trust one another in a unit, you must have psychological safety, a shared sense of purpose, and at least a modicum of collectively held identity.  In my Division, we try to build those things by practicing humility in our work, affording one another and our outside partners with transparency, and being fully and openly dedicated to continuous improvement.

No one has all the answers. Not me, not my Data Leadership Team, not anyone. But we can find some pretty great approaches to hard problems if we pool our ideas, scrum on it, don’t be afraid of failing, and, as we like to say, “just try it.”

If the approach doesn’t work, fine, try something else. If you make a mistake, own it and ask for help. Everyone makes mistakes. I make them all the time and I try to model what it looks like to be honest, look for feedback, and follow through on making an adjustment so I can do better next time.

That’s why we practice iteration in everything we do, we define all work as the team’s work, not individual people’s work, and we practice peer review on everything we do before it goes into final production. No one works from start to finish on a product alone. We succeed and we fail, together. This helps us support and learn from one another as well as to address issues through examining the process, not the person. This provides safety, security, and thus builds our trust in each other. We codify this through our practice of before-action and after-action sessions. Before-action sessions are where we prep for a workflow based on what we know we need to do, and then once we’re done, in after-action sessions, we reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and what we’re going to do going forward.

Iteration, and the open expectation of failure with view to making something better, together, makes collaboration an everyday activity. It’s expected. There are no rockstars in DMAD.  There is only an exceptional team.

Answer: We have a poster in the office where we used to work before the pandemic. I had it made in a local print shop downtown and I taped it up on the wall.  It says, “We can do hard things.” It’s next to another poster from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that says, “Don’t Panic.” I realize those posters say two things, but I think they really mean one: We can do it.

I think the principle behind a sentiment like “We can do it” is belief. We believe we can do things in DMAD. We believe that we can make systems, processes, and products better every single day. We believe that we can harness technology and data in service to public education and our people in Vermont. We believe that.

People say you have to see things to believe them. In DMAD, we think it’s the opposite. You have to believe in them before you can see them. That’s how you make them happen, especially if they’ve never been done in your environment before.

Answer: We’ve got to be flexible. The old way of working wasn’t working anyway. Think about what your staffing looked like, who applied to what roles, who stayed, who left, what your retention might have looked like and think about the possibilities that remote work can offer now.

Think about the talent that didn’t apply to the jobs of the past because the commute wouldn’t work for them. Who were we totally missing out on? We don’t have to miss out on them now. What a win for the public!

Government is the perfect industry for remote work.  We require documentation, often our work is cyclical in nature, and when it isn’t, there’s still the need for documentation and or concrete deliverables.  You can’t fake those.  This is the totally no-brainer industry for remote and flexible work for most, if not all, of our non-front line service roles.  We’ve proven that over the last 2+ years.

Moreover, public sector wages will never be able to compete with private sector wages, so we’ve got to be able to offer something else that will provide the kind of life that talented people want to have.

With questions around the sustainability of pension programs and the fact that today’s workforce doesn’t stay with an employer for 30 years anyway, government HAS to be able to compete on quality of life or we’ll lose the “talent war” for good with the private sector.