Monthly Archives: January 2019

Slava Khristich: Communicating with Global Teams



Joanie interviews Slava Khristich, CEO of Tateeda. Tateeda provides clients with software development resources in the USA and internationally to extend teams, complete complex projects and solve challenging tasks.  Their model provides, among other things, improved communications between technical and non-technical people.  You can see why he’s a perfect guest for Reinventing Nerds.

Highlights:

Q: What is your background?

“My education is in economics and mechanical engineering. I got to the US in 1991 and I was heavily involved in the biotech field.  I used to work at the Salk Institute, in the research facility, and this is where I got introduced to computers. I started writing small code here and there and learned how computers operated and communicated. I fell in love and have been doing this for twenty years.”

Q: Where are you from originally?

“I am from Ukraine.  I came over with my family during the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Q: Where do you have offices and what’s the advantage of being international?

“We have resources in San Diego and in Ukraine. Instead of trying to stretch time, we try to shrink time and squeeze in as much productivity as possible in a single day instead of stretching it across multiple days.”

Q: What communication challenges do you run into?

“When you’re dealing with technical people, you’re speaking the same language.  When you’re dealing with business people, there’s a gap in communication and expectations of what the final product should be. We have constant communication daily with the client and with the team. That way we can address any question or any issue that is discovered daily.”

Q: How do you assemble a team of people who have communication skills?

“We tend to hire senior people who have experience.  We have them go through a series of interviews—technical and personality.  We do everything possible to keep our people.  Our turnover is really low.”

Q: What challenges come up with cross-cultural communication?

“Usually it’s a misunderstanding.  When a client gives us too much freedom, we try to do as much work as we think is relative to the problem, and sometimes we think it’s our way but it’s really a different way.  Those are due to cultural differences and experiences.”

Q: How did you decide to be a leader of programmers instead of writing the code yourself?

“I couldn’t scale what I wanted to do and that was my passion.  In being a developer or team lead, I could only work with a little team and one client at a time.  I wanted to introduce it to many, to almost make a movement.  When you outsource something, the outsource professional should be doing it better than you can.  When I hire a lawyer, I want to assume he’s doing a great job.  It’s the same with software.”

For Slava’s best tips on global communication and words of inspiration to entrepreneurs, listen to the episode…

Words of Wisdom:

“Poor communication leads to poor responses, poor performance, and a lot of money wasted.”

“It all comes back to communication.”

“If you cannot trust us, you cannot work with us.”

Contact Slava Khristich:

Website: Tateeda.com

Phone:      619-630-7568


Rebecca Johannsen: Acting Emotionally Intelligent



Joanie Interviews Rebecca Johannsen, a people expert.  Rebecca is a corporate trainer who has a Ph.D. in theater.  She writes and directs plays and, of course, she’s a skilled actor.  She’s taken her knowledge and skills in acting to teach executives soft skills.  It’s a really interesting approach and I highly encourage you to listen to this episode.  It’s truly unique and very informative.

Highlights:

Q: How did you start doing executive development?

“About ten years ago, I put together a course called ‘Acting for Executives’ at the Rady School of Management at UCSD.  I’ve since developed several different courses in soft skills areas using techniques that actors use in the theater for training their voices, understanding their bodies, thinking quickly on their feet, overcoming fear and nerves, and communicating effectively. I focus largely on emotional intelligence.”

Q: On Reinventing Nerds, we talk about how people communicate in a way that’s authentic.  How do you handle authenticity with your acting approach?

“One of the things we learn early on in actor training is that acting is really about tapping into authenticity and truth and finding your own truth within a character that may be different from you… We can tell when somebody is being fake.  The best actors find that truth within themselves.”

Q: How does emotional intelligence come into play?

“One of the key skills for any performer is the ability to listen, the ability to listen actively and to read how somebody is responding to you emotionally. That’s one of the foundations of emotional intelligence.  We break it down into four different areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.

“The self part is having an awareness that I’m having an emotion.  Once you have that awareness, what do you do with that emotion?  Is that a useful emotion for me to be having now?  If not, how do I adjust? The social part is being able to recognize that someone is having an emotional response to what I’m saying and how do I adjust?”

Q: What comes up for the nerds that you work with?

“I’ve learned with many of the nerds I work with that, because they are so focused on solving a problem by working at a computer, they oftentimes are not that connected to their body language or how they are coming across to other people and oftentimes have challenges with eye contact.”

To hear Rebecca’s solutions, listen to the episode.

Words of Wisdom:

“Ninety-three percent of our message that we’re trying to communicate with people is nonverbal.”

“The people who are more emotionally intelligent are in more subordinate positions.”

“Research shows men and women have a different biological makeup of their brains that impacts communication breakdowns.”

Contact Rebecca Johannsen:

Website: rebeccajohannsen.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-johannsen-56622a7/


Agnieszka Vestal: People Solutions for Telecommuters



Joanie interviews Agnieszka Vestal, a software engineer at Grasstree Engineering who focuses on embedded software.  An MIT graduate with an MBA in her pocket, Agnieszka adds global experience and a business perspective to her programming expertise.  She’s also a long-time telecommuter and shares advice on how to make telecommuting more satisfying and productive.

Highlights:

Q: When working from home, how do you get the people interactions you need?

“I have to work at it, for sure.  That’s one of the harder things about moving, for example.  It’s one thing to integrate into a new job and with new people.  It’s another thing to integrate into a local professional community without having a local job.”

Q: Where is your community?

“I keep in touch with people I work with a lot, all day, through instant messaging.  But I also make an effort locally to meet people by going to events, to talks and such, and I volunteer.”

Q: What have been the challenges with telecommuting?

“Getting to know the people I work with.  You have to know the people.  With telecommuting, if you can meet the people you work with, it makes an enormous difference.  Dealing with time differences is another one.”

Q: How did your company set up a face-to-face meeting for your team to get to know each other?

“It wasn’t on-boarding.  It was after, and that was better because we weren’t trying to assimilate the work and the people at the same time.  We could make progress on the work, then get to know the people.”

Q: How does meeting the team members face-to-face help your work?

“Every time you start a technical conversation with someone, even if you exchange a few pleasantries, you don’t know how to read them.  Once you’ve met them, you hear their voice.  It makes it much more personal.  You feel like you’re talking to the actual person.  It’s just a lot more pleasant.  At the end of the day, you need to enjoy work.  What most of us enjoy is the interaction with people.

For more insights on the people side of telecommuting, listen to the episode…

Words of Wisdom:

“Getting to know your team members makes work a lot more pleasant.”

“If you’re working completely opposite hours as your team, you’re not communicating enough.”

“Ask yourself: do you want to have a collaborative relationship or a transactional one?”

Contact Agneszkia:

Email: arv@grasstreeeng.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agnieszkavestal/

 


Duncan Davidson: Managing an Empathy Wobble



Joanie interviews Duncan Davidson, CTO In Residence at Microsoft, Berlin.  He provides service to and is a liaison between Microsoft and the CTOs at start-up companies that Microsoft supports through the ScaleUp accelerator program at Microsoft for Startups.

What’s great about this interview is that Duncan shares his own experience with what he calls an “empathy wobble” when his company was acquired.  He shares insights into how it happened, what the impact was, and what he needed to change within himself to grow as a leader.  This is an incredibly impactful episode.  Duncan is candid and authentic.

Highlights:

Q: What kinds of things do you do as CTO In Residence at Microsoft?

“I provide tools for the technical people who are in or end up in the CTO role.  It’s everything from what are three reasonable architectures for running a in cloud computing, to how do you scale up from two people to twenty to 200, and how do you act as a technical leader in these situations?”

Q: Where were you before Microsoft?

“I was at hired at Wunderlist as senior developer on staff underneath the CTO/VP Engineering.  I was there to influence where we were going from a technical standpoint…  We were able to launch our product without a hiccup.  It was the most boring launch I’ve ever done.  Then we got acquired.”

“We had to go through due diligence for the acquisition.  Microsoft’s risks were much larger than ours because, if we brought in a bug, we could cost Microsoft billions.  We went through the process for six or seven months.  We went from having thousands of issues to a hundred to none.  In the end, we were pretty satisfied.  We thought the hard part was done.”

Q: [Ominous music] What happened once you were acquired?

“My goal was to have a successful integration, one where our team was seen as successfully contributing to the new company so we could buy our way into being relevant to the new company.  If we could guide the group through a transition like that, then we could write the rest of our story within Microsoft.”

Q: How did the integration go?

“What made sense to us from a logical perspective wasn’t something that a large number of people on our staff wanted to do.  Our team was made up of open source Linux geeks running microservices in different development languages and they were badasses at that. Microsoft had big enterprise things that had been around for twenty years, like Exchange, which were almost anathema to the people on our team.  We found that we didn’t have the alignment we needed in the organization.  As we went through this, we had a lot of friction in the organization.”

Q: How did you manage the friction?

“I found that I had an empathy wobble.  I picked up the term from a TED Talk by Frances Frei on how empathy wobbles can destroy trust.  Here’s where I ran into something interesting.  The logical side of where I came from was never a problem.  My authenticity seems to do pretty well.  But where I had the wobble was in empathy, being able to motivate people to get on board during the integration. I didn’t think I had a problem in this arena, but…”

Listen to the episode to hear Duncan’s gripping story of his empathy wobble…

Words of Wisdom:

“An empathy wobble impacts trust.  The decisions you make seem arbitrary to the people on the other side.”

“Culture is not defined by what you put on a piece of paper.  It’s the behaviors you tolerate in an organization.”

“We postponed a lot of things we should have acted on.  It’s in those kinds of situations where you find you’re not the good guy.”

Contact Duncan Davidson:

Email: duncand@microsoft.com

Website: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/advocates/duncan-davidson