Leading, Managing, and Succeeding Remotely

uh mike today will be speaking with us on leading managing and succeeding remotely at this time i would like to turn the presentation over to mike murray mike thank you for joining us well thanks for having me i'm uh i'm incredibly excited to be here today it's always fun to get to to talk about new things and you know i haven't done most of this material before because there hasn't really been a reason to even though many of us have worked remotely before the obviously the changes of the last uh six months have have created a new opportunity for us all to um to be in a remote situation at work and i know that part of this

is that we're all tired you know and and i think that one of the things that is pushing everyone right now is the additional stress that comes from the time that we're in and so you know everything that we've done to be moving remote has been done not in the kind of context that we may have originally wanted to be remote you know in the old days the old days being like a year ago remote in remote work was a was an exciting thing was a thing that was an opportunity for people now we're all forced to be remote and we're living in this place where the additional stress that comes from the world at large is challenging so

the world that we live in now is not the kind of remote work that maybe we are used to um you know at least google images thinks that if you look up security and hackers that uh that we're pretty good at remote things and you know being in the basement by ourselves and that's true in a lot of ways you know we've always had the opportunity to be more effective remotely than say you know somebody who is on the front lines you know at a grocery store in retail or at a restaurant and so we've always had some advantages but the remote that we've had to this point is very different than the remote that

we have now and i think that we don't talk enough about this if you google remote work you're going to get a lot of really trite advice that that worked out really well in the old days you know and and we're we're all in organizations that have had some amount of remote people always if you think about global sales organizations almost always you have sales people that live in regions that don't have offices you have support that's been outsourced or offshored to places that aren't the same as your you know traditional headquarters we've always had tech people that were remote in some ways but we used to have all of these features that even if you were a remote employee

usually during your interview process at some point you flew somewhere or or went somewhere to sit in a room with the people that were interviewing you you had uh onboardings quite often on site with scope for example in on our early employees regardless of where they started all of them flew to new york for the first few days of their employment where they sat in a room with me and the rest of the team and and we built the culture that would sustain remotely in person similarly i've never been in an organization that didn't have at least once a year some sort of pull everybody together kind of meeting whether that's team based or organization based

we always did in-person things even for the remote uh employees and that's different now you know with with a lot of our companies saying that offices are going to be closed until sometime in 2021 um we're we're not in the same kind of world of remote that we used to be and that's causing a lot of challenges and and i don't think enough of us are really thinking about what that means because we're missing so much of what enabled us to build good culture first off and i'll talk about this a lot because i think it's a one of the big limiters video conferencing in this sort of world creates a kind of mental and cognitive

fatigue that sitting in a room face to face don't doesn't even as as the biggest introvert in the world um which i i often am and i'm i'm drained by face-to-face interaction i'm doubly drained by face-to-face interaction over zoom and so whereas i could sit in a room with someone for eight hours and have a conversation by about 90 minutes on zoom i'm ready to go have a nap similarly it's really hard to form social bonds over over video conference you know in the world that we have if you don't already have a social bond with someone if you haven't met them before and you don't have shared history it's hard to imagine making a friendship

from scratch over zoom and those social bonds are things that are really important in the workplace and we all decry politics a lot but lots of things get done because people can agree on where they're going and they can forge a shared future together similarly we lose a lot of the informal structures of information sharing and information gathering that it's it that happen at most companies the the colloquial version of calling them hallway conversations you don't have a hallway you don't have hallway conversations you don't have those those impromptu sort of interactions that really drive a lot of organizations and where they're going um and similarly without that face-to-face interaction you just don't get as rich a set of

information i mean if i'm if you're only looking at me from here up which you all are um and i'm not only that i have a microphone in my face it it's a different level of information you get than even if i'm standing on a stage in front of you you can't really see all of my body language and you can't see the things that allow me to be an effective influencer and allow you to know if your influence is working on me so we're in a situation where a lot of these challenges are lining up and we haven't restructured our organizations to figure out how to deal with them and so what i want to talk about today

are really three phases of how you create culture and your your sort of touch points about how you create teams and what this new world is doing to the each of those phases and how we deal with them and and obviously the first place to start is interviewing you know before you even get to the company your interaction with that organization and the people in it often shape your your opinions on a whether you want the job and be whether they want you to have the job but also the the impressions you get of the people in the interview process become things that you build upon later on as you become an employee and in the world that we have we now

have challenges with that and so what you know one of the very beginning things in the interview process is candidate experience if you talk to hr people or recruiters they'll talk a ton about candidate experience and in my experience most organizations don't do candidate experience particularly well but in this world it's even worse because in a lot of cases and i've certainly seen this in my past and and certainly been able to to deal with this at different organizations even if you have an hr department and a recruiting team that doesn't do a good job of running the interview process effectively you can usually as a as a hiring manager or as a member of the team that's doing the

interviewing overcome that that challenge just by the personal relationship you create with the candidate you know i've i've certainly had lots of opportunities where and lots of experiences on the other side where the process runs terribly they don't seem to have their act together but i have such a strong bond with the person who is interviewing me and the people who i'm meeting that i'm not as worried about the challenges with the structure now here's the problem in this world where everything is basically me staring at a video camera like i'm talking now my ability to create that interpersonal bond to overcome the challenges of my interview process is really limited and so this is a time where as a hiring manager

and by the way you should be looking for everything i'm talking about today you should be looking for these things as a candidate they will tell you a lot about the organization that you're you're interviewing to join um as a hiring manager my ability to overcome the challenges of my interview process is incredibly limited and so now i have to start being more rigorous um and and it's really funny that i'm sitting here saying this as a as the founder of uh what's currently a seven or eight person startup um because we are rigor in an interview process for a tiny company is not exactly something that's easy and and we struggle with this i'm struggling

with this personally even as i was writing this slide i was struggling because i know that this is hard but i also know that this is my only option if i cannot convince the candidate that the company is great just because we have a great relationship and that will overcome it then we have to replace that trust by being more rigorous and so that's both a question of you know your hr team and your recruiting team but also just how the candidate is experienced by the team and you know do we show up on time for interviews do we seem to have um ourselves organized do we know what questions we want to ask you know these are all things that

create an impression of the company and of you as a leader and and as a team lead um if you have those things together the candidate will will believe in you and if you don't you can't just rely on your ability to create a relationship anymore because unfortunately that's really limited over zoom and so we have to really change the format um not just to be rigorous in terms of the the way that the process runs but realizing that a lot of our interview processes are completely outdated and just don't live in this format you know most or many companies that i've interviewed with love to do the let's put eight back-to-back or ten back-to-back

interviews in a single day you know the candidate sits in a room and every 30 minutes somebody new comes in and if you're keeping that same sort of interview style over zoom by by about hour six i think the candidate is going to be so so mentally exhausted that they're going to be barely able to form a sentence and at least i would be and so the idea of doing things the way we were doing them six months ago it just can't work or you're just gonna you're just going to by the end of that day the the people who are interviewing that candidate are just gonna be like why are we talking to this person you know it

doesn't it doesn't allow the candidate to show themselves it doesn't allow the candidate to get a good sense of the company there's so many things you can't do with that so now we have to break up the interviews over many days one of the things that i've noticed is our interviews are nowhere near as effective as they used to be so you know if i could get if i knew in an hour i could get a certain set of information in a an in an in-person interview now that takes 90 minutes so and and even better it's it would be far better if i did um two 45-minute interviews than a one 90-minute interview in terms of that so we've added steps to

the process we've also started breaking up the process and and inserting days um we're also exploring the idea of how do we bring in multiple media to replicate the the person's experience of the job with us so we're we're trying to figure out how to do interviews over slack for example because you know i don't know about all of you but i spend a lot of time slacking my team today and and living in slack and email and co-written documents um where we may have just been like you know hey let's go to that whiteboard over there let's go let's go sit in that room and work on this problem now we're slacking each other and so can

you replicate that in the interview to see how that candidate is going to interact with you and i know that there's all kinds of ableist concerns around this and i'm that's a whole other talk but but realizing that um we are if the candidate is going to live in a particular world right we're going to live on zoom we're going to live in slack we're going to live in google docs uh or office 365 or whatever your particular platforms are um how do we make the interview format um replicate that so we can see what the real uh experience of both sides will be um and and so you know the real challenge from where i sit is

most of my interviews have involved white boards over the years you know i i think the best way to get a sense of candidates especially when you're so when you're checking tech skills and things like that is let's solve a problem together let's do something collaborative and almost always it involves a whiteboard and i don't you know go to webinar and zoomer interesting platforms but co-whiteboarding on zoom is still not not at all the same and not something i do on a daily basis so what we've realized is we have to figure out how to take that white boarding problem solving uh setup and move that into a into a bit of a new world so

um and especially to do so in a way that's somewhat rigorous right you you want each candidate to be able to have a very similar experience and for you to be able to assess them side by side so we've started adding in a bunch of stuff we've started adding in actual written assessments and online tests or and in some cases it's literally just some questions that we throw into linkedin before the candidate applies for the job um similarly we've started adding in real-time collaboration stuff at least for for code and for architecture you know we can we can do you know a shared lucidchart dock and we can both add things to uh to a an architecture doc or we can share

that we can both be looking at it have that conversation um design you know co-designing in things in products like figma for wireframes and ux um shared product specs things like that um and also there's a bunch of services that have popped up to do you know uh online pair programming which i think are is a particularly interesting one when we're hiring coders um also we've really doubled down on on auditions and homework um and i think that that traditionally we did a lot of homework we you know at various places that i've been we've always had a an assignment especially if we're hiring technical people here reverse engineer this app and tell us you know why it's malicious or why

it's not that was something we did when i was at lookout and that was always great but i think the more important thing now as is not just the technical skill because you would have the technical person do all this technical work and then they come you'd sit in front of you and you'd end up writing some stuff on the whiteboard now we've moved to a real audition type framework and that audition at the end of the interview process takes is sort of a dual format there's a take-home work part of the process and also a presentation piece and the presentation is usually done to all the relevant stakeholders in the company where where to

go back and forth with what they're presenting so that it really it doesn't replicate the whiteboard experience but at least starts to and so we've been moving in this way and an important thing to realize is the balance between work and presentation really depends on who you're hiring if you're hiring a salesperson i mean the work might be here's here's our sales presentation come present it to us you know they're not doing a ton of work if you're hiring a technical i see a threat hunter it's you know go do here's a piece of malware tell us all about it or here's an actor tell us attribution and everything that there is to know about that actor

and most of that is the technical work and the presentation is a small amount whereas the technical word is large if you're talking about executives or sales people or things like that you you end up flipping that over right the presentation becomes a lot more important or at least as important as the work given so that's really a lot of the things that we've done and that i've you know talked with a lot of friends who are doing some something similar around how to change the hiring process to really respect the world that we're living in and i know i'm i'm putting a lot of information here i'm hoping that this is pretty dense but

at the same time um these are all things that we all have to be thinking about if we're hiring but also if you're being hired you know if if you're being pulled into an eight-hour all-day interview that tells you something about the company and how they're thinking about hiring and experience and especially how potentially how the remote experience for the next you know six to nine months is likely to be when you're there so once the interview process is over you have the job and this starts to be an entirely new set of challenges right if you every job pretty much i've ever been at the onboarding process is you go to the office and on day one

you you know the ceo or somebody comes in and talks to you and they give you a laptop and it helps you set it up and hr helps you set up finance and all of the benefits and all of that stuff and you sit in that room for anywhere between the first day of your employment to the entire first week of your employment and i i don't for me those have never really been that productive anyway but if someone wants me to sit on 40 hours of zoom meetings to do onboarding i think that that's probably the point at which my brain is going to explode and i i think we've we've lost the ability to

do that and so we have to change the format of onboarding onboarding whereas it used to have a single format and be largely monolithic now the only way to be able to allow people to assimilate and absorb that level of information and that level of uh content is to change the format you have to think about how you know switching up media switching up location switching up length and audience and switching you know information density so um you know perhaps some of the the um onboarding can be delivered via video some of it some of it will have zoom meetings whether large group zoom meetings or one-on-ones or small group interaction ideally you are shifting

more and more of your onboarding process to be documented and to be things that people can consume in an asynchronous way as they go you know i don't need someone necessarily to be on a group zoom to explain to me how to set up my email account and how to set up my uh laptop now there are lots of people who might need that but again that's a place where you could do on-demand one-on-ones and things of that nature um the entire onboarding process probably needs to be rethought because most of us have done our on-boardings in person over over the last 20 years and with that the inability to do that for the next

nine months is going to mean that either people come on board and it's really painful and it takes them longer to really integrate with the organization it takes them longer to know where information is it takes them longer to know things which means everything slows down or we're going to have to figure it out and you know one of the notes that i that i wanted to point out here is that things that we have assumed from prior onboardings may be different now and i mentioned the way that i always did onboarding for scope is to fly everybody to new york and we would sit down and and i would literally hand them a laptop

well now i have to make sure that laptop's delivered um so if we're going to have that configured by one of our engineers one of our it people that has to be sent to that person's house they have to do it and they have to send it to the new employee's house or do i drop ship them that laptop from you know apple or whoever we're buying the laptop from and then how do we figure out remote configuration simple logistics like send this person a laptop or send them a scope hoodie starts being a challenge that we've never had to think about before and so the onboarding process really needs to be reimagined in a lot of ways

because there are so many concerns now that to me is the easy part of the onboarding process the real onboarding process that is important from where i sit and we'll talk a lot about this through the rest of the conversation because it's true it's truly a big part of the culture is the social side of onboarding every on-boarding i've ever been to um at the coffee breaks at the first lunch um you know during the conversations i get to know the people that i'm going to be working with and especially the people that are starting on the same day and we start to create social bonds at that time um unfortunately with zoom um you know

the the zoom onboarding is me talking to the five people that have started that day and when we all get up for for a bio break or to fill our water glasses nobody can talk to each other nobody talks to each other during those breaks nobody talks really at lunch in the same way because there's not really the the ability to form those social bonds in that situation and so and and by the way that that is the easy part you know a lot of the onboarding process involves nightly dinners and happy hours with the executive team and and things like that these are all things that are about to go um really sideways and so how do we replace that

how do you replace the social integration of the onboarding process is something that i haven't seen a lot of people talk about or how they do it well you know the uh the idea of okay let's instead of a happy hour let's have a zoom happy hour um great but i don't know how many of you guys have done a lot of zoom happy hours they're not the same and a big part of the problem is that at at real social engagements um interactions are fluid you know i could get up and talk to the whole organizat you know the whole group that's in front of me at a physical happy hour and as soon as i stopped talking two people

over there might start talking to each other and two people over there might start talking to each other and i'm not in that conversation that doesn't happen at a zoom happy hour or and by the way i use zoom as just sort of like my it's like calling it kleenex so it could be teams could be anything could be discord but you don't have the easy breakout side conversations that allows you to start creating one-on-one social interactions so how do we create that um that set of relationships that may have evolved organically in the new people that are coming aboard in a way like how do we replace that and the answer is a it's hard um b it's gonna feel forced

and weird in a lot of ways right and i one of the things that i've started to do with with our team is to start pushing for um each of the people who is a key team member and you're gonna hear me talk a lot a bunch about this in a minute um each of those people force them to have one on ones force them to go sit for 30 minutes on a zoom and just talk with no agenda you know um okay new person hi i'm mike what do you want to talk about what what questions do you have what have you noticed what have you learned and that's where you can start forcing

the same thing but it feels forced and it kind of is forced the other thing as a leader that you can do is to really make social interaction you know make that an explicit part of the process tell everyone that's involved that they have to start socially interacting now why um the reason for me is that the social bonds of an organization ultimately when that organization are under stress is what allows you to succeed you know it's it's the built relationships that when all the systems have crashed and everyone wants to run around like chickens with their heads cut off that keep you from strangling each other and it's that stuff starts a it starts during the

interview process but really it starts during your onboarding and as you start to become a member of the team as you become embedded in that team those social interactions create a web that allows you to to handle stress as an organization well if we don't do that in our in our onboarding process if our onboarding process goes from something that fosters social interaction to something that's just basically here's how you set up benefits here's how you set up your laptop here's your github account buy then we're not going to have the resilience as an organization to handle that later on and so with that moving on to later on right it's not just about when you bring people aboard

to do those things those social interactions and those social networks are really the strength of an organization in the long term and you know the those things often foster organically if you have a lunchroom right if i walk in and everybody's sitting at a table and having lunch i just sit down next to them you know as long as i'm feeling extroverted and feeling you know not not asocial and just the silly conversations that you have over pizza or over lunch or or by you know doing a lunch and learn with everyone and you know ordering pizza or a team meeting or or whatever those are the things that carry you forward well okay now we can't do that i actually i

had a long conversation with a friend the other day i thought about having a a pizza party for the whole team like how do i you know effectively replicate what's on screen right i i was thinking let's do a lunch meeting and order everybody pizza and i realized we're less than 10 people and the complexity of how do i order pizza to everyone's house was daunting and so even the simple things that i could have done in an office start to become really difficult and so i think one of the things that we have to really consider is the format of how we structure this because i said it earlier and i think it's very

true with zoom you know video conference fatigue um as a real thing that becomes a finite resource you know it's not really a finite resource in most organizations to sit in a room with people and so if i can sit in a room with everybody for you know 10 12 hours and not be uh not be you know bleary-eyed that's one environment in which i can i can load up on meetings and if that meeting is you know is a waste of everyone's time yeah they're going to complain about it but it doesn't impact the other meetings now every meeting that i schedule that actually involves video conference interaction ultimately limits the the total number of those sorts of

meetings that i can create and so now we have to actually be ruthless within our organizations about the idea of you know this this meeting could have been an email or this meeting could have been a slack conversation or this meeting could have been a shared google doc because meetings now become a finite resource and meetings as a finite resource is something that most organizations especially big ones like when when i was at ge um people scheduled meetings to ask about what meeting they should schedule and you know it's sort of a flip joke like the whole dilbert world is kind of kind of flip but when every meeting you have exhausts you a little more than it used

to suddenly we can't just willy-nilly have meetings all over the place so we have to start being more ruthless about that and especially because the only way that we can really build those social interactions is by having those meetings you know if the only way that i can create the social bonds amongst my team is to have zoom stuff i have to create space for them to do that and so because of that um we have to be very intentional a about what we waste our zoom time on but also about ensuring that our people do that because you know when you're in an office environment when you're in an actual like uh face-to-face place as i said those those social bonds

are important because they allow you to um to overcome stressful situations but also those social bonds happen impromptu they happen you know when you're walking by each other in the hallway or when you sit down at a table to have lunch or when someone says hey do you want to grab coffee these are things that happen naturally and organically when you're physically in proximity if you're not physically in proximity those things can't happen without you intentionally doing them and now the interesting thing for me as a leader is that that's always been viewed as not work time right and and if i especially if you went back 50 years um spending too much time at you know

going and getting coffee would be viewed as goofing off um and and certainly when i had my first job the the whole idea of if i just got on you know went and sat on a video conference and shot the breeze for an hour with one of my with one of my teammates very few of them would say that that was working but realizing when we can't rely on the organic setup of social interaction we have to intentionally schedule that and as a leader i actually even have to hold that hold my teams accountable for that right so this this becomes a conversation that as a manager you need to start having with your teams

think through so you know for one of my engineers who is the most important person for that engineer's success well it's probably other engineers on the team maybe it's the product manager for their product maybe it's somebody in product marketing you know i'm making some of these things up um but if i sit down and i think okay who are all these people now how do i encourage that engineer to create social time with each of those people right and and the best way to do it is simply to schedule one-on-ones i i think i think one of the things in remote organizations is we need to have a lot more one-on-ones with people at peer

levels than has ever been the case in the organizations that we have when everyone's sitting in an open open office plan within you know 10 yards of each other because those things aren't going to happen naturally similarly each of us has to think that way as well right um whether you know the ceo of the company all the way down to the most junior engineer should be thinking okay who are the people that that my relationship with will determine my success long term and again it's probably people on your team it's probably your manager which your manager should already be having weekly one-on-ones with you i i ranted about that at b-sides las vegas two years ago

um i'm not going to go into that rant but you should be thinking about who are the people who with whom a relationship is important for me to succeed and then you should be getting on their calendar with no agenda for those meetings right the the agenda for that meeting should be to get to know each other because if you're not going to be able to do that just by saying hey let's go get coffee for the next nine months to a year the only way to create those social bonds is to actually force them to happen and yes i know it's forced and it's going to feel forced it feels weird to create a one-on-one with no

agenda because you feel like you're wasting the other person's time and you know you feel like it's not an important meeting i i get all of the concerns about that and all of the weirdness right this is this is the weirdest environment in which any of us have ever lived and so these things probably will feel uncomfortable and strange but um to me they're the only way to replicate the things that allowed us to be successful before so with that and i i intended this for 35 minutes and i'm pretty much right on time because i wanted to leave lots of room for questions and comments and i knew i probably was saying some things that

are going to make some people uncomfortable and probably a little counterintuitive at times um i really want to just sort of summarize by saying look the the fatigue of this time and the isolation of this time are real and and we're all experiencing it um and that doesn't allow us unfortunately to just stop right i you know i started this startup nine months ago i tell everyone it's the weirdest time in history to start a company especially to start a company focused on healthcare security because you know that's been an interesting environment but whether i'm tired or not whether we are forced to be isolated or not i have to find a way to build a culture to

make this company successful and that means that we have to find a way around the the you know zoom fatigue it means we have to find a way for for people to have self-care and most importantly it means we have to find a way for people who are coming into an organization without social bonds to those people to create the same kind of culture and same kind of social bonds that they would have had if they were sitting in an office at the same time and so it really requires that we are intentional across the three phases of the creation of that organization and culture and especially about how do we get you know how do we get the information that

we wouldn't have had and and how do i convey the kind of information i would have conveyed when i don't have the same abilities um how do we replicate that you know the ability to create that sort of intentional work stream together and that's a whole other conversation and how do we create the social bonds that make us able to succeed as an organization in the long term when the stressful days happen and so with that i'm gonna turn it over to questions um that's my info feel free to drop me an email feel free to hit me up on twitter on linkedin anytime i'm happy to chat about this or anything you know careers in general i've i've

talked a lot about all a lot of things over the years so happy to do any of that but uh with that let's turn it over to questions and i have not been tracking discord as we've been sorry but we're not for you good good good glad to hear yeah as as as mike just indicated if you do have any questions that you would like to ask during this presentation please use the active trend free in the thick of it um after this presentation um any questions could be uh placed on the track three breakup mike we have a couple of questions here for you um this one comes from barking seal how are you handling the changing of old

habits holding folks to accounts such as making sure they understand and implement new tools and recognize change is necessary yeah it's hard i mean uh handling habit change is difficult and i i encourage everyone who wants to understand habit change and and the way that people learn to to look up bj fogg's work um he did some incredible work on what he called the fog behavior model many years ago that um that i think is probably the best description of how we change people's behavior that i've ever seen and what it basically comes down to is changing people's behavior is hard and so you have to do it slowly and over long periods of time and

especially when they're under cognitive load already you know it's this time adds stress to everyone and people don't learn and change very well when they're under stress so i think the the answer is not easily um you know it's not easy to to affect change in good times it's especially hard now and so lots of patience lots of repetition and whatever you can do to eliminate the barriers to habit change if it if it's hard people won't do it and especially when they're already under stress if it's hard they don't have the the amount of motivation required to get them over the hump of difficulty when they're already under load is is really difficult so you know if

you know that someone that you're trying to get to change your behavior is going to be stressed about something you have to make that behavior so easy to do that it becomes just the default choice and um unfortunately that's usually not an easy thing you know check if you've ever if you've ever tried to change like you know somebody non-technical from a mac to a pc or a pc to a mac you will understand what i'm saying like it takes time it takes a lot of motivation it takes a lot of repetition you end up answering the same question over and over again and you have to be patient because that's not an easy thing to do

and as a follow-up to that the attendee has a follow-up indicating uh do you or will you make exceptions such as let those that are more challenged with the adoption um you know the challenge regarding adoption or such as you know changing more time um i mean the question is are you prepared to go so far as this being a deal breaker uh letting them go once they've given the time to adopt but refuse to do so um this is one of those times when this format is hard i would have loved to ask for a little bit of clarification on what it is in that sentence what which behavior change are we talking about if we're talking about so for

example uh we use jira if somebody's just having trouble figuring out jira and um and wants to go back and use some other bug tracking system well that's not gonna work right they have to use the system that we all use right or if if they're like i hate slack let's go to microsoft teams i'm going to use microsoft teams the whole company can use slack i don't care that's not going to work right and so i will be patient and we will train and we will work with them but you know you can't just be like you guys are all on slack island i'm on microsoft teams like that's not how that works if it's if it's something where it's

like i'm i i mean my whole team and and me included is struggling with a lot of the things that i said in this in this presentation right it's it's hard to force yourself to do one-on-ones with someone and have nothing on your mind that's a really uncomfortable thing and i don't want to do it lots of days either and so you know i have to force myself to do some of these things and so yeah i'm i'm incred actually i'm i'm canadian and so i grew up patient and i apologize for everything already so so i'm already super patient but in this time you have to be patient with everybody i mean everybody's so stressed

out and everybody's living through so many challenges and especially like if they're working with kids at home and i'm amazed none of you met my cat today usually my cat's right here and you all would have met uh him during this meeting like we're all living through this really weird time that's stressing everybody out and i think we all have to be super patient with each other at work especially so and um so with the time that we have left for recording um i'm gonna pose you with one more question uh this also comes from the discord channel um any advice for a remote leader who manages an on-premises team oh man that's hard yeah i've i've

because because the interesting thing about that is you as the leader get left out of all the things i was talking about right you as the leader are left out of all of the social interactions and that's such a tough place to be because the culture forms you know sort of without you in it if you think of the culture of an organization as a web that's that's uh created largely by the social interactions between each person in that web if you are far away that web forms more strongly without you than certain than with than with you now that said you get you already know that right you know that's the case and so a

lot of the things that i was talking about in here about how to be intentional about creating those those interactions and how to make sure that um that you're creating those social connections to together um you have to be a lot more intentional about it like that that's a person and i don't know how big your organization is this advice is only going to work up to an organization of about 20. um but you know that's that's where i'm going to be extra hardcore about making sure i have one-on-ones with every one of my directs every week and i never miss them right i'm going to find ways to i mean if this was before

covid suppose we're not in the world we're in i would say you know expect to get on a plane at least once a month to go sit in that world right to go sit amongst that team um i i lived that i lived that very strongly when i was a at lookout which was my last role before i started scope i had a team in san francisco which is where i lived and i had a team in toronto and for the first two years i spent a week a month in toronto now that that tailed off as i had you know built a lot of those social relationships and i could i could not do that as much but in the

early time i had to spend that physical time with those people because that was how i was able to create the the social web that allowed me to be effective in the organization now if it's now um well if it's now you even the co-located team is probably remote so you can start you know you're in the same boat but if you know once we go back i think it's harder but you got to find a way to to intentionally create those connections absolutely well mike thank you very much for uh providing your time and for giving back to the community here at inside san antonio 2020 uh hate that we have to wrap up this way

but it has been an amazing day and we could not have ended on a better note with your presentation you hit uh the nail on the head with your content and while it is tough conversations for uh organizations to have their real conversations so thank you very much for your time

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