Elizabeth Churchill on creating culture, leading teams, loving challenges

Changing Academic Life

Dr Elizabeth Churchill is a Senior Director at Google. We recorded this interview while we were both at a conference, where she was awarded a SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. In this conversation she shares insights and experiences around building good team cultures, managing diversity, onboarding for global teams, and some management frameworks that she has found useful. She also shares her journey from a psychology background to working in big tech and from research to now delivering technical infrastructures, what she was looking for in moving between companies, and the red threads of her love of people, of being challenged and continually learning.

“In a team, you don't need to know everything. Yes, it's actually a collective.”

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Overview (times approximate):

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life.

0:30 Intro to the episode

02:18 The joy of in-person conferences

04:09 Elizabeth introduces herself and her current operating systems work

09:12 Team culture and diversity

15:18 Negotiating tensions and conflicts

23:15 Culture of software engineering environments

27:48 Onboarding for a global team

31:37 Frameworks for management of teams

39:35 Her fascination with people that took her from psychology to large scale tech companies

43:08 The pragmatics that led her to industry positions and from industry research to platform

47:39 The motivations around the moves to different companies

53:02 Love of learning and taking on new challenges

56:02 Her Interactions magazine article on imposterism & being comfortable not knowing everything

01:02:11 Final exhortation find your community

01:06:05 End

Related links:

Elizabeth at LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Twitter

SIGCHI Lifetime service award

CHI2023 conference

[Book] Lee Vinsel & Andrew Russell, 2020, The innovation delusion, Penguin Random House.

[People] Steve Benford, Nottingham Uni

[Team management frameworks:]

Cynefin Framework (Dave Snowden, 1999)

Polarity Management (Barry Johnson, 1996)

[Article] Elizabeth F. Churchill. 2019. Impostor syndrome and burnout: some reflections. interactions 26, 3 (May - June 2019), 20–21.

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