Building Better Developers, Episode 12

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of interviews and we are continuing our interview with Sebastian Schicke. And we left off sort of a definitely a cliffhanger last time with a question about how do you treat people or I guess really make people feel like they're part of a team when they are all dispersed, when they are remote workers, when they have limited ways that they connect with each other. You know, they don't hang out at the water cooler. There is no company kitchen that they may hang out and grab a coffee in or something like that. So how do you make a team feel like a team? And that is where we're going to pick up in our part two of this. And we're going to get a really good diving into of Sebastian and what his company does. And some of the things they've done to, you know, part of even the why of why he is focused on trying to make teams better and try to find a way to get high performing teams even and in his case, especially when they are remote. But he says it better than me. So let's get back to our discussion with Sebastian. I mean, in the end, it really comes down to how do you treat these people? I mean, if you have a local team member, this person can also leave from today, basically. And so there's no difference. I don't I don't believe there's a difference that people feel more connected to business just because they come to an office. I mean, I've seen local employees being a nightmare for the company or they can also go, you know, so there's no difference. Yeah. I mean, it always depends. How do you how do you handle these people? How do you lead them? What kind of leader skills do you have? And and of course, people who are remote, they need more. They need even more empathy. They need more intentional gestures, intentional conversations. So when you walk around the office and you go to a kitchen and you meet someone, you have a chat. I mean, this happens naturally, but this doesn't happen when you work with someone over Zoom. So you basically have to really intentional schedule time with these employees. You have to ask them how they feel. You have to really show show empathy and you have to show them that you care. And this is very important because they are on the other end of the world sometimes. And they might have fears like everyone else. They might have doubts. They might have uncertainty. And your job as a leader is to eliminate these doubts, eliminate the uncertainty and show them that you are there and that they are part of an organization and then they will stay if you treat them well. And if you handle them the same way as you handle your local employees, then then I don't see a reason why they should go. I mean, there are plenty of reasons why people leave, but you can reduce this risk by being the leader they deserve. And I mean, it also depends on how do you build a team. So what we do when we hire people or when I work with my clients, we don't rely on gut feelings, especially when you hire someone you never meet. You know, you have a you don't have a when you meet someone in a room, there's a there's a different way of getting someone to know you. You have different senses you can use when you only do this or a video call, then it's very limited. So what are we doing is and this is this works amazingly well using assessments, using assessments to to analyze basically three dimensions. One dimension is behavioral tendencies. So how do they how do they behave? I mean, there are four types of I mean, this is called a disk model. And there are people imagine, for example, you have a CEO as very direct, fast paced. He wants to get stuff done. He has no time to to mess around. You have to you always have to be on the point when you explain him something. So those people, they tend to have a very high I very high very high D. Sorry, very direct. But on the other hand, you have people who need a lot of information before they make a decision. People who need more time, you know, people who need the extra pat on the back when they they when you ask them to do something. And it is so important to understand these behavioral tendencies, because when you know what kind of personality this person has, then you know how to how to deal with them, know how to communicate with them, because there's this golden rule of communication, always treat people in a way you want to be treated. But honestly, that's that's that's that's not 100 percent right, because you don't want to be treated in a way I want to be treated, you know, most likely not. So there's a platinum rule which says treat others in the way they want to be treated. And in order to do this, you need to understand their personality as what is the first dimension. And this is very important when you build teams, when you see when you have different characters and you see, okay, why there may be tensions in the team. And if you run this assessment over the whole team, you see, okay, there are some different personality types and maybe they should learn to talk to each other. In the end, it's just basic communication. But no one really tells us tells us, you know, how to communicate. So this is one dimension. The other dimension is motivators. So there are seven motivators, seven areas. And it is, of course, important to to know what is motivating a person. First of all, you want to know what is motivating yourself and you get up in the morning. So why are you doing this? But also as a leader, you should be you should know, is this person someone who needs power? So I might need to put them in a management position. Or is this just the other way around? You know, then maybe this guy needs more information, more, more, more theory, rather high theoretical So he might he might need to dig deeper into certain topics to really understand what it's all about. It also helps by doing tasks you don't like, you know, when you have a high, high level of high, high level of theoretical motivation, then when you do a task which doesn't interest you, at least you can tell yourself, yeah, you know, I don't like doing this, but hey, I learned something. This is great. So I I fulfill my need for for knowledge. And knowing what these motivators are for each person and also for yourself is very helpful to lead your team and to know what what they really want. And then last but not least, we can also measure pinking patterns, you know what? I mean, there's a there's an assessment called the Hartman value profile and basically analyzes your value stack. And because every decision is based on a thought, right? So if you have. If you think in a certain way, then your decision will end up being in a certain way. And knowing these these decision patterns, especially when you hire people, it's very important to have it as one element to make up your decision. I'm not saying that you shouldn't hire based on an assessment, no way. But it's important as one element when you hire someone to to look at these three dimensions. And then you can take it to the next level. We use this as the basis when you run team development events. So what we do when we go into an organization. And I say, OK, we want to we want to develop our team. We run these assessments with everyone. And then, I mean, having an IT background and tech background is good. Using data, use this data. And you you basically see we can also visualize it over the team. We see where people are and you see, as I mentioned before, where you might have points of conflicts. And then you can train the people to communicate better, communicate in a more efficient way. Because, hey, what does it cost all these businesses when people don't talk to each other or not talking, communicating each other in the right way? You know, we we doing we wasting so much energy and money in the end by not having aligned high performance teams. And this is our our mission. And I mean, I can talk about this for ages, but what I also want to say when we run these workshops, what I hate is this typical nine to five workshop. You know, this you go in in the morning. I mean, nowadays it's on on on Zoom, but you look in your computer for half a day or even a day and you get one lesson after another. And even you're just dead. And what I learned is that I applied a model called a challenge model when. I mean, it's probably primarily from the coaching industry, when they want to sell a product or service, they might people for a free challenge. I was every day for the course of a week or maybe seven days. They deliver some bite size contents, maybe for an hour. And and then they build up this momentum and they they really engage with everyone. And in the end, the people are so hyped up that they buy they buy the product or service or ticket. And I just thought, hey, why don't you use this this model to deliver content, not that they buy something in the end. What I want that they buy. The development plan, so they buy in, they buy into this topic that this is important. And so we designed this this this team challenge where we first we do this assessment, but we know exactly where the where the different characters and how do they fit together or maybe not. And then we develop this this challenge based on the data. And every day we have a different topic. So we meet online for, say, an hour or an hour and a half. And hey, everyone can spare an hour during day. Maybe you can use a lunch break for a week. And then we work with the team. We we have exercises. We have breakout rooms. And finally, you know, you I did a workshop of almost 200, 200 developers, and they never met each other. You know, they they've been scattered around countries. And this was the first time some people met in a company. And this is amazing. You see each other and you get each other to know. So we put it in the breakout rooms. We do exercises. We do homework. You know, everyone gets homework. And the next day they have to present their results or we basically continue with this topic. And over this course of the week, you build up this momentum and the engagement and you really get these people really inspired and and really keen on on developing themselves. And we often finish with a development plan, a personal development plan, they build up on the course of the week. And I think, I mean, this is working amazingly. And the feedback we get, you can look at our website and so on, is is really good. And it's a different approach. And I think that the time for this nine to five workshop, this is over, you know, we can't do this anymore. It's boring. You answer where people are bombarded with content for a day. Yeah, I think there's a lot of that that people are just it's overload. I think you get and it's too easy to check out when you're on a on a remote call and you're somebody's lecturing for hours. And there's not a whole lot. It's mostly you're just trying to drink it in. You try to process it. There's a certain point where I don't care who you are. There's a point where you just you're like, I'm done. I'm full. I have to like step away to be able to process it. And I think something like I think it's even more so when you're talking about personalities and things like that, because I this will lead into that next question is I think a lot of people don't really I think they have like a surface knowledge of personalities and even their own. And that is where we're going to pause this portion of our discussion. I sort of alluded to it, said that was the next question and the next question will come up in the next episode. This one was almost perfect. We got to spend a lot of time getting information, listening to Sebastian. I hope you had some notes. If not, you can always rewind and go back through. There was a lot of things that he brought up, particularly about assessments and facets of that. You know, what is it that what is it that like the way that people think and what are their motivators and what are the things that drive them? I don't know that we often enough think about that when we are interacting with team members, particularly if you're in a lead role of any sort or if you're any sort of a like a senior or a mentor of some kind, you know, not necessarily mentor, mentor, where you've got mentees and you've got classes, whatever. But where you are a senior or somebody that's looked up to on the team and you've got people that you have to interact with and they have some level of respect for your position and you need to have that level of respect for them and help them grow. That that's part of, you know, maybe not your official job responsibilities, but something that is sort of expected of you. And honestly, I think all of us, whatever our role is, that's something we should expect of ourselves, is that we are helping others be the best them that they can be. But don't worry, we are not done with our discussion with Sebastian. We will come back next episode. I will ask that question. And it is a little bit of a rambling start into the question. I apologize. But it's one of those that was sort of a good place to cut off. It just happened to be sort of in the middle of a little bit of a riff as we were going through our discussion here. That being said, I will let you get back to it so you can hurry on, get to your day and then come back next time and catch up on part three. But go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. You can enable us by simply saying, Alexa, enable Building Better Developers. And we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. Whether we are your favorite podcast or not, we would love to hear from you. So please leave a review on Amazon.