New leader or new team: Ya Xu

(upbeat music) - Ya Xu is an amazing woman. She has a PhD in statistics, she was formerly an applied researcher at Microsoft, and for the last six years, she has been right here at LinkedIn as one of our lead data scientists. How do you step into the leadership position of a team and build the trust of your team? (upbeat music) Another thing that I think is super, super core is trust. You could say, hey, this is my style, but if nobody trusts each other at the end of the day, I mean, that is the core part of it for you to accelerate your strategy, how fast you move, discussions, decisions, everything. Trust is so important. I would love to understand what your perspective is on trust. - Absolutely, I want to say trust is number one. Trust is the moment where you are able to push each other more, and that is a foundation to everything, that you can do it together, right? And I remember that Reid was the one who said trust is consistency over time. - Definitely. - And it definitely takes time to build trust. - A lot of time sometimes. - A lot of time, right. - And we want to shorten it. Didn't you have an idea of an algorithm that we could build? A machine algorithm that we could just build trust and it just happens? - That's right, that is right. I mean, totally, in terms of how we can build trust faster, there are, again going back to what we said earlier, which is like, a lot of this, you know, making sure that the folks understand each other's style. Not just me, they understand my style, I understand their style. At the same time just like spending the time and arguing with each other. I personally feel that every single time, and then it's not just me with my leads, but even me with my manager as well. When we disagree with each other on something and we spend time on it, and when we come out of it feeling so much more trusting. - Isn't that amazing? I think even when you go into that moment of disagreement or challenge... - Yeah. - You almost have a question of trust. Like, you know, do we have a good relationship? And it's actually working on it. - I know. - And then coming up with a different outcome you'll have actually the most trust. - Totally. - Going into a new team is really about listening. (upbeat music)