Lisamarie Babik & Ted Layher: Are you a team player?

When: March 27, 2012

If you’ve ever been on a job interview, there’s one question you knew you were going to be asked. You may have even practiced your response.

Finally they asked, “Are you a team player?”

Did you tell the truth?

Experience shows that there is a wide chasm between SAYING you are a team player during an interview and actually BEING a team player in the workplace. Now that the interview is over, how do you help yourself – or others – close the gap?

It starts with the hard work of building TRUST and SELF-CONFIDENCE in your team, of eliminating the FEAR of MAKING MISTAKES.

And practice. Lots and lots of practice.

This session is based on hard-learned lessons from our embarrassingly long careers in the software industry. Come. Benefit from our mistakes. Learn how to make your own team better and maybe, just maybe, you can look your interviewer in the eye next time you answer, “Yes.”

About the speakers

Lisamarie Babik has traveled the USA, Canada, Panama, and Mexico speaking about Agile and its relationship with formal project management. Her presentation style has been described as “wise, honest, humorous, passionate, and knowledgeable,” all of which she consider important factors to a successful presentation. She has been working full-time with Agile teams for about a decade and has worked in the software industry for twenty-*cough*-four years. She holds the Project Management Professional (PMP) credential from the Project Management Institute and is active in several PMI chapters and special interest groups.

Ted Layher is currently a senior software developer at Menlo Innovations with 7 years experience in agile projects. His professional career started in the middle of the dot com bubble and has survived despite several company’s best efforts. Ted’s career began as a unix systems administrator working for a large automotive corporation and small local companies . He has enjoyed evolving into a software developer. Ted brings an interesting mix of operational, systems knowledge and Test Driven Development skills to the team. He influences the team through excellent coaching skills. Ted has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Eastern Michigan University.