Interviews 2.0: Strengthening Remote Teams with Sebastian Schicke

Welcome to building better developers, the developer 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 where we are doing interviews again. We're calling this interviews 2.0. At this point, we are subtly in the middle of a discussion with Sebastian Schicke and talking about remote teams and strengthening them and giving the members a feel of being a team. We left off last time talking about motivators and how individuals have their own motivations and even into cultures and things like that that help drive somebody. These are things that people look for when they are going to be essentially happy at work. We were right in the middle of that conversation and we were going to start this one right where we left off. We're going to talk with Sebastian about how you utilize those things and how his organization assesses for such things so that you can do a better job of managing and growing your team. Here we go back into our conversation. I think when you dig a little deeper into motivators and some of the things that really are truly a personality assessment, I think even you'll learn a lot of stuff about yourself in a lot of cases, particularly when you're young. I was wondering, that's the next question, do you see that as being part of that groundswell as they're going through the challenges and going through the week? Where it's not only that they're understanding the team better, but they're also understanding themselves better. Definitely. I mean, we don't learn this at school. No one teaches us about personality. No one teaches us why we behave in a certain way or explains us where is this coming from? No one tells us what is motivating us. I mean, yeah, you can ask your gut feeling and say, yeah, but there's no process. There's no, I don't want to say formal education because I hate this word formal education, but there's no real education on these topics. So what people get when they engage in this conversation is really this aha moment saying, hey, this is why I behave like that. This is why I sometimes feel discouraged when I talk to this person, because hey, we are in a completely different wavelength and we don't know how to really talk to each other. I mean, especially you can also take this home to your partner. Often you have different personalities and then you have these fights and many of these fights can be avoided when people get each other to know in a better way. So this is why I think this is fascinating and it's helping everyone understanding yourself. And also as a leader, I mean, come on, as a leader, you go first. You have to live by the values and you have to, of course, know yourself first of all in order to lead others. So for leaders, it's even more important to understand themselves. And we often go another level. We have 360 degree leadership assessments where the team or at least members of the team and the leader itself, they give a value and analyze leadership capabilities. Because this is, of course, also important. It's not only the team's fault, so to say. It's never a fault, but often the leader is one reason why a team is working well or not working well. Yeah, that's something. It's always amazing how many times you'll run into stories about CEOs and leaders that have like an aha moment where they do something like that, where they do a 360 evaluation and they realize that the things that they're doing are not having the same effect that they thought they are. I think it does go to, it goes back to that, the golden rule versus the platinum rule is that sometimes you have leaders that very much are intentional and care about their teams, but the way they treat their team is how they want to be motivated and how they would want to be treated. And it's that disconnect and it becomes quite, it's rather eye opening for them when they suddenly are presented with the fact that, hey, not everybody thinks the same way you do. And so in some cases, even where you think it is a positive motivator for your team, it's actually a demotivator. It's something that is actually completely opposite of what they want to do. Exactly. I'm a high D, I'm driven, okay, I'm an entrepreneur, but I can't expect every employee behaving the same way I do, you know? So I have to sometimes step back and slow down and really, okay, this person needs more information, this person needs more time, which is perfectly right. So this is not a, it's not an evaluation, it's not bad or good. It's just that we are all different and we have to accept and also appreciate that we are different. But otherwise life would be boring. And by knowing that we are different and learning how to communicate with each other, learning how to treat the person the way they want to be treated, we can improve a lot of relationships. But I mean, in the business context, also improve the results, you know? I mean, many CEOs, they only care about the results. And I say, okay, this is not a fluffy thing, you know, that hey, we meet and all like each other and whatever, you know? I mean, it's a serious business. These are serious tools to create a functioning organization, to create a functioning team, a high performance team, which delivers results, but also gives an environment for the people where they can thrive and where they can grow. Because coming back to your question in the beginning, why do people leave? Well, many people leave because they don't grow anymore, you know, they're stuck. Yeah, they don't develop new skills and then they look for something else. But when you create this environment as a leader where people can thrive, people can become better and develop more capabilities. Hey, why should they go, you know? Why should they lead? Well, that's an interesting thing too. It's sort of almost a buzzword that we want, you know, diversity and we need to diversify. And you'll see people that a lot of times you'll see a job posting, we want somebody that can think outside of the box. And then you look at their processes and they put them right into a box. It's like, we want you to be this, you know, this free thinker. This free thinker. But you've got to be exactly in this, like, you know, like we sort of chain you down to your desk or, you know, it says, but here's how you have to think. And it's, again, it's one of those, it's, it could be, and that's, I think, the most frustrating thing is when you bring people into a team and you say, we want this, we want to embrace your different point of view, your different perspective. And then you don't allow it where you say, well, you know, we're not going to, we're not going to look at it. Or you treat them in a way that assumes that they're in the same point you are. You know, I always think of it as to me, it's more like a, it's a perspective thing. It's like, if you're on one side of a building and you're looking at it and somebody's on the other side and they're looking at it differently, it helps in so many ways to realize that what you see is not what they see because that alone, and from the communication alone, when you think of how much time is spent in business and communication through emails and meetings and all of these things that we're just trying to get thoughts from one person to another or to share it across the team. And if you don't understand where that person's coming from, it can take you a long time. And especially if you go into personal relationships, it can take a long time to clarify your message and to understand, you know, to actually communicate the ideas back and forth. If you don't realize that you're not even on the, you may not be on the same page, maybe not even in the same book. Yeah. I mean, you said clarify. I mean, we in our trainings, we use a methodology clarify and verify. So clarify that you have really understood what or clarify that you communicated in the right way, clarify that you understood it, but also verify what it really means, you know, and then this is a two-way thing. And often we forget this. Yeah. We tell someone something and we expect that this person understood what we said, but often it's not the case. And then we worry why we don't get the results we want. Yeah. And this all together costs companies a lot of money and it causes a lot of frustration, frustration among the team and between the leader and the team. And this is why I think it's so important to reinvest in your people. And it's, I mean, for me it's essential. It's you cannot lead a team without investing in a team, without helping these people to grow, to develop skills, to become better communicators, because in the end it will bite you. It will cost you money. And in the worst case, it costs you your company. Yeah. It's sort of like the software security business in particular, where you lock everything down and it's sort of that, it's not quite a threat, but it's like, you don't want to be that person that's on the front, that company that's on the front page of every newspaper because you had a security breach and lost billions of dollars or data. It's not as, I guess, splashy to be that company that brought a bunch of people in and wasted a bunch of time trying to communicate ideas. And you ended up, you know, had business deals fall apart or you had a lot of people leave, but it's still the same. And maybe it very much is it's real costs. You know, if you bring people in and you go find, especially you spend all that time, you know, starting back to where we started, you go to find those people that are the ones that can do the job, find the people that have the skills and the knowledge and the experience and you bring them in and you do everything and you bring them in and then you turn around and treat them in a way where they want to leave. Then, you know, all of that was a waste of everybody's time, really everybody's time and resource. Exactly. Exactly. And then I see this too often, too often that people hire too quick and not really look at these people and not really think about how do they want to, what kind of team they want to create, you know, what kind of, also diversity. I mean, you need different perspectives, you need different cultures, I would say. I mean, this is why working with a board team is sometimes so helpful because, yeah, you suddenly you have people from all over the world working for you. And so you have diversity, you have a different culture and then it's amazing how to, what you can learn from these people as well. I agree. Oh, go ahead. No, I want to say it's something you really have to be intentional about in choosing the right people and building a functioning team which, yeah, delivers and is a good place to work. So using that as you're getting into, as you're building a team and using these assessments and getting essentially a picture of the team that you want to build, how do you, I guess there's two things is how do you direct them to utilize that kind of information, like the assessments as part of hiring. And then also what happens if you've got, you know, if you assess your team and you have a sort of a picture of what your team should look like, you assess your team and it's different from the picture. How do you work with them to either, you know, massage it into either moving people out that don't belong or bringing people in or finding a way to work with the people that you already have, just say, you know, utilizing that diversity and say, well, hey, this isn't a, like you said, it's not a positive and a negative that you're this way or that way, but it's more this is who you are, so this is how we work with you. And how do you sort of address those questions and those concerns as those results come back? That's a good question. I mean, yes, when you analyze, I mean, I had a case where I had a finance department and we running these assessments and we looking at the data and then there was one guy, you know, it was always different, you know, always 180 degrees basically on the other side. And I said, wow, you know, what's happening there? Yeah. I'm really curious to meet the team to understand is there a lot of friction or, so I met the team and I run my workshop and then I learned that this person also he was in this finance team, which people are very conscientious, they're very data-driven and so on. And he was more like a a manager. He was a very engaging director and I learned that he is the person who is doing the communication to the other departments. So he was kind of the spokesperson of this finance team. And I was like, yes, I mean, this makes sense. Yeah. It's a perfect match. So, I mean, of course, when you have a team and there are really problems which you cannot fix. And of course, sometimes the decision is maybe to move someone out. But this is not the primary intention. The primary intention is to build a team which is working and to think about maybe different job roles or where can this person add value to the team? And when you discuss this openly, then sometimes you have amazing results where people said, yeah, I don't like talking to these people. I like doing my data and I like sitting here and working on my Excel spreadsheet. But if you go and present our results to the sales department, then please off you go. I'm happy. And then you solve this problem. And then you, but some really sometimes you find or you appreciate the difference when you know that someone is different, then you can appreciate this sometimes. I mean, if you don't know that someone is different, then you think how he's odd, maybe, or why is he behaving that way? And why is this not working? And you have tension, but then you know that this is a different personality and he's just like this. Then maybe you utilize this knowledge in a way that you treat this person differently. You appreciate the difference, the diversity and utilize this for the team. And when it comes to hiring, of course, I mean, there you really want to make sure that you hire the right people. Yeah. Because it's not good for the employees, not good for the company when you bring someone on board and realize after two months, hey, this doesn't work. So when we run this assessment and we see, hey, there are some red flags, then it doesn't mean that this person shouldn't be hired. No, but we look at these red flags individually and see, okay, it doesn't matter for this team or for this organization. Is this topic really a problem? Because not everything applies to the role. And if it applies, then we can drill deeper and we can ask certain questions in an interview and ask this person, okay, how would you behave in a situation? What would you do? So you can really analyze this more, and then you can make your decision. But at least you can make your decision based on facts, on data, and not just on your gut feeling or on a few conversations you have. And that seems a great spot for us to stop and pause. I think there's a lot to digest. It's a lot of information that Sebastian has shared with us already. We have one more episode. We'll come back and wrap that up. And we will continue looking at assessments and how you can use that to craft the correct team. I don't want to leave though without noting that while some people could look at these assessments and matches as ways to exclude people or say, hey, we need to be this really tight, very similar team, that is not at all what Sebastian is looking at. And actually, as we've gone through this discussion, hopefully it's been brought out that sometimes the strength of the teams comes from the differences amongst the members. You need to have different skills and different focuses and different motivators, even I think, to meld together and to blend those into a team that can handle all of these that can handle all of the different situations that it will run into. That being said, I think this is a good time, as I said, to wrap this on up. So I'm going to let you get back to your day and we will come back next time to wrap up our conversation with Sebastian. But until then, 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-Nor 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. Here we go. He's dying to head to Italy. With Tim, Ian, Ben, Beck and Tom. Where he can stare at the stars all day long. He can eat that pasta till he passes out. Oh, well I love you all but the pasta is gone. Oh, well I love you Rob, I think there ain't a shadow of doubt. Come on, so I said give it up for Rob, he's my new best friend. I think I love you and we haven't even met. I want to say thank you for having me on your show. Cause this friendship of ours is one that can only grow.