Sacramento Women Leaders Association Chapter Meeting: Leading from Afar

[Music] So, Jania, can you turn on your camera and say hello? Hello. It's nice to be here. Yes. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. All right. So as you pull up your slides, can you give us a self introduction? Sure. So as part of my talk, I will be sharing a lot about my career, but just very briefly, um I want to say that I'm super happy to be here because I live in the Sacramento area. I've lived here for a long time and I feel like sometimes we are viewed as sort of the little sister in the shadow of the Bay Area, but I don't think that's true. I think Sacramento is awesome and we have a lot lot of awesome leadership and women doing amazing things. So, super happy to connect to all of you. Um, currently I am working at Edward Jones um, as a remote employee and I'll be today talking a lot more about what I do now and my leadership style. Oh, we are excited to have you. So, just put it in slideshow view and take it away. Yeah, it is not letting me view. Oh, there you go. There you go. I usually go to V. Yeah, I usually go to my Zoom My helpful Zoom thing is in the way. There we go. That's why. Come on. All right, we practice it. We practice this before. We promise. Yeah. All right, I'm going to stop. You know what? Do that. Click the I was gonna say click that X. Maybe that was Yeah. Or Yeah, just start and start over again. I'm sure it's fine. Yeah. I don't know. It won't let me share that. Oh, there it is. Perfect. It's great. Yay. Okay. All right. Well, take it away. Okay. So, today this is what I'm going to cover. I'm going to start by just why am I giving this talk? Like what are my experiences? and hopefully some of of you will see yourselves in situations that I've either been in or am in in terms of leadership. Um then we'll just talk a little bit about what makes a good leader and then thinking about the complexity of being a good leader in the remote working situation. Um, my big message, spoiler, is going to be about being very intentional about your actions, even more than when you're in person. And then I'll just have some final takeaways. So, um, my journey leadership so far, hopefully it will continue. Um, I started my career at Sandia National Labs. There's two main locations. I was in Liverour. The big location was in Albuquerque. Um, I'll age myself and say that this was before there were really good video conferences. It was very pixelated. It actually helped me to be a female because people could recognize even in the pixelated um version of myself that I had long hair and it was a lot of um men that were from the military. So, they had tended to have very short haircuts. So, it was it was a funny situation to talk to each other remotely, but this um job had a lot of things about it that required me to be in person. There were some labs. There were um computer systems that I was working on that could that I couldn't leave the area, but I did have to work back and forth with people in Albuquerque and I was in Liverour, so there was some time on planes. So that was interesting, but it was really more of that traditional workspace and my leader was with me in Liverour and then others that I worked with were in Albuquerque. From there, I went to Intel. A lot of people on this call might be familiar with Intel. I was assigned to the Falsam location, but everyone I worked with was in the Oregon location, my entire team. So, I could go into the Falsam location um to get any help I wanted to see people, to go to lunches, to attend seminars, anything I needed in person. But if I wanted to meet my team in person, I would go to Oregon. And a cool thing about Intel is that they have their own planes. So, it was an easy way for me to just go up there for the day, work with my team, and then come back. Um, it was also my first experience with working with people outside the country. And as I grew into a leadership role there, having to take into account that I had some um team that I worked with some teams that were in other countries was something I had to think about. However, they were not on my team. Um I didn't lead anyone directly. We were just working with each other. So, Intel was a place that we weren't all in the same office, but we were very closely connected to one another and that there were ways that we could easily get to one another quickly. Um, my next role was at Salesforce, which was truly an international company. I led a team of 16 people. I had someone in Israel. I had someone in Sydney. I had someone in Tokyo. I had people all over the United States and Canada. So even before COVID, we were really spread all over. If we said, "Okay, we're all going in the office today. We would all be in different offices. Um so we had a lot of time zones and other things to deal with." Um and then while I was at Salesforce, COVID hit and then um had to deal with the same COVID situations that everyone dealt with. But on top of it, we were dealing with uh COVID restrictions that were different from country to country, even from state to state. I'm sure a lot of you experienced that California was very different than uh other states in terms of restrictions and what people could do and that was certainly the case um even more for people in other countries. Um, we also dealt with a number of things like um my the my report that worked in London lived in a very very small flat with her partner and um she had to be in a closet if we were having a private conversation or if her partner was on a call that where he was speaking about things that shouldn't be heard. So it was it was a very interesting time for sure. Um about a year and a half ago I joined Edward Jones and it's really been a huge mixture of everything. Uh Jones is based in St. Louis. They were fully in office until 2020 and then in 2020 um they started they sent everyone home and they realized oh we could actually do this um having some remote people. So, they started hiring remote people. Weird thing about that, I found out a couple days ago that they actually refer to us as pandas, which is very strange, but it's short for pandemic hires. And um so, in my current leadership role, I have a number of people and my leadership team, my peers, they're mostly in St. Louis, but then I have a few other people that are scattered around the country. I have someone down in the LA area and I do have someone also on the East Coast. Um, so it's kind of a mix of everything that I've learned about being remote throughout my career. So those are the thing those are the my experiences and where what I'm going to talk to you about comes from. So for a minute, think about think about your favorite leader and think about what made that person a good leader. For me, it was actually one of my leaders at Sandia. I'll always remember him. And the thing I loved about him is he really demonstrated the full balance of his work life and his home life. and he always figured out how to really get great work done, but also always be there for certain family things that he wanted or needed to be there for. Um, but think about that. Um, I just grabbed a picture that kind of put some words together that might have come into your mind and then check through with the Gartner research. The top three qualities of a good leader are that they're authentic, empathetic, and adaptable. So, think about if you agree with those or not, or if your top three would be different, but certainly everyone knows what they feel would make a good leader or has read a book or gone to a class where different characteristics have resonated with them about leadership. So the the questions that I want to challenge you with are first of all how do you develop the qualities of a good leader in yourself and then secondly how do you demonstrate those qualities to others. So those are like the two really important things. So, it's one thing to develop the qualities, but it's another thing to demonstrate them and, you know, sort of develop that trust with others that you know what you're doing and you that they would benefit from following your leadership and your slides are not advancing on our side. Oh, they aren't. I'm sorry. I don't I they're advancing on my side. I don't know what to do. Okay. Are you on a slide that says mix in disperate geography? Okay. All right. So now that we the next thing you have to do because leadership isn't challenging enough on its own, let's mix in desperate geography. And the biggest thing to remember is that when you are remote from either your leaders or remote from those you're leading, things don't happen organically. In fact, you must make them happen. So, you have to be intentional. And the way I like to think about this is you really need to be over intentional. So, just in the way people will say, "Oh, the way you solve this is to overcommunicate." What how I think about this is you just really need to be over intentional. So, let's um talk about what that means. So, one of the things that I do when I start working with someone new or start um a new position is I ask a lot of questions about people's preferred work style. This is like something you probably could learn by working next to them every day. But if you like lay it on the table out front, I think it makes for a better working relationship. So, I talk about what's your preferred communication. Um, some people like email. Some people like Teams or Slack. Some people like a text or or um a me another sort of instant message. Some people like a phone call. It just depends. So, I like to talk about that. I like to talk about time boxing preferences. Um, I have one person that once they get to the office, this person goes into the office and she says her drive is really stressful and she needs like 15 minutes to breathe before she can work. So, I know what time to expect. I have other people that I know, oh, when my child gets home at 3:00 p.m., I take 30 minutes to talk to him about his homework. So, like, do you have any time boxing things? Um, how do you like to collaborate? Are there tools that we don't have that make it easier for you to collaborate? Um, and or are there things that we do have that you want to learn how to use? And then also a really big one is what are your Zoom preferences? Some people really hate being on camera. Um, some people really hate Zooms. Um, and would rather do a call. Um, so just talking through those kinds of things and figuring out like, okay, how how might we limit you being on camera or how might we make sure that we get what we need to? Um, then beyond work style, also ask them personal questions like if you're working at an office with somebody and you're going down to lunch with them, you learn their lunch routine pretty quick, like do they buy, do they bring, um, what do they like to eat, things like that. So I always say, "Hey, what are you having for lunch today?" Or like I'm a meal prepper, so I talk about, "Oh, my meal prepping for this week was this." So you'll be seeing me eat this every day at lunch if you see me. Um, we've also done things like take a picture of your office setup and um, show, you know, hey, this is to give you an idea of this is where I'm sitting. just so you can envision cuz if you were in their office you would see lots of things like what do they have on their desk and you don't get that when they're at home. Um also just finding out like oh what's your favorite coffee or drink or other beverage? just like getting a little bit more of that personal connection that are things that you learn organically when you're physically next to somebody, but that you might not learn if you were um remote from them. Then once you do this once, always revisit, revisit, revisit. You can't you can't revisit too often. So, I like to debrief on working styles after an important meeting or the completion of a project or even when a year is ending or starting um and we're setting up things for the following year. Talk about, hey, what worked? What didn't? Would you like an email update at this time instead of this time? Do you want to check in in this way instead? Um, so making sure that that working style still works. Um, also when years are starting and ending, new things, new personal things might be starting up for people like they might be joining a new group or their kid might be in a new school. So this helps just like set the guard rails on work. So we can understand, hey, these are the times I'm really productive and this is a time where I need time to myself. The other thing is is I always try and start out calls to show interest without like crying like keep the topics kind of light like hey it's raining here today know to this morning it's snowing a little bit in St. Louis so you know we to kind of give a feeling like of those things that are going on. Um, pets. I mean, even when we got on this call, we talked about, oh, you know, Ginger said, "Oh, can you hear my dog?" And you'll see people's pets on Zoom, but just like some pets and even like Zoom backgrounds, changing things around, just, you know, little things that show um that you're interested. Like I know where people live and if I see like a news a news headline, I might ask them about, "Oh, what was this thing?" just to get a better idea. And then the other huge thing to think about is replacing that face to face. Um so be really thoughtful about virtual replacements of inerson meetings. Um a lot of times particularly in my current role meetings are mixed. So, like there could be 10 people in one room and me on my Zoom and someone else on their Zoom. And so, making sure this works and being really thoughtful about making sure that everyone feels included, that the side conversations in the room don't ruin the meeting, things like that. Um, use mail to send things ahead. And I don't mean email, I mean snail mail. Um some of the things that worked best when I was at Salesforce is if we set something up where each person had um what they needed in front of them at home. So like for example we did during COVID we did an activity where we were um doing a service project and all those materials were sent to me so that then I could be doing the service project at my desk next to my coworker who was doing the service project at his desk and we had the same materials. Um always think about time zones when planning meals or breaks. I have to push this all the time because so many people are in St. Louis in the central time zone. They're always like, "Oh, we're gonna have a lunch break at noon, their noon, which is 10:00 my time, which I'm not ready for lunch." So then at the end, if that we don't have another break until the end of their day, I'm going to be pretty hungry. So like trying to just be conscientious about that. And the other thing I really like to take advantage of is the breakout room features because that allows you to have those little conversations that you might have on the side with people in the room. Um, like I mentioned, ensure that there's equality between those in the office and those at home. Make sure you get input from everyone. Don't leave anyone out. arrange similar events like if the team is going out for lunch and you're you know that's it's a treat on the company send a gift card to the person at home so they can join you. Um things like that or if there's an event in St. Louis maybe they would arrange an event in Sacramento and anyone that I worked with here could join me. So um trying to make sure that it feels equitable and everyone feels included regardless of location is important. Um, another thing, an experiment that someone I know did which is is amazing is that they put the remote employees in the shoes of the in office and vice versa. Like the people in the office went home for the week and they had the people at home in the office for the week so that everyone could kind of like feel what it feels like to be in the other shoes. And everyone always thinks, "Oh, the grass is always greener on the other side. it's so much easier for you, but then when you're actually in someone else's shoes, um then you have a chance to learn like, oh, that might be hard for them. Okay. So, summarize. I've I've said a lot of things and hopefully um you guys can add some of your own tips. But really, what I'm thinking of um when you're leading, you need to think about what are the virtual equivalents to running into someone in the hall, taking lunch or coffee break together, or even just like observing behavior and learning how to interact. What how can you do that virtually? It's not always obvious. And this is where you have to be really overintentional to make sure that um you get that kind of interaction. So be intentional. Make sure you you know for everyone you always have the career conversations but make it you know be even more intentional with those that are remote from you. Learn if they want to stay where they are geographically. um and then how you can help them um build their career knowing that make sure that you empower remote people and delegate even though they're not in front of you. This has definitely happened to me where oh yeah, we forgot cuz you were at home and I just grabbed the person sitting in front of me. So, um be really intentional. Um like I said, be overly intentional. Ask some of those questions that would be really weird to ask if you were in person, but that really will set you up for success in your working relationship, like what ask about working style preferences and set up very regular connections, just like, oh, I would always run into you in the hall. And then a big thing is find really appropriate replacements for any re any interaction you would have in real life. Zoom is not the solution for everything. You can't just say, "Oh, well, we'll just bring them in on Zoom." Sometimes you can be a lot more creative than that. Um, Zoom is really not the only solution. There's other things we can do. Um, and aim for things where it can be kind of more seamless and that you could still do very professionally, but everyone doesn't have to be in the same space. So, those are those are just things to think about and to take away. So, thanks for your time. I'm happy to like take questions or other suggestions that people have. Um, I'm a huge person on that loves to connect with people on LinkedIn. So, and I'm easy to find thanks to my unique name. So, please connect with me on LinkedIn. And happy to take any questions or comments. Wonderful. Well, thank you. Well, I'll start with some of the questions that came into our website. And this one from Sophie says, um, "Do you think it's okay to allow team members to opt out of being on video? I feel it's really the only way we can connect as a team with remote workers and it's also required by our company. Maybe it also depends on the culture." So, as someone that's researched this, I can tell you that Zoom fatigue is real. So I would if for those people that I lead where there's um people on camera, we kind of set some ground rules. Um one thing if someone is sharing slides, a lot of times that's a bandwidth sucks. So people will go off camera or your faces are so small that it doesn't really matter. So maybe that's a time you could be off camera. Um, so the thing that I try and do is h with people that hate being on camera, have a discussion about when is an appropriate time that you could be off camera and not take away from the interaction and when is a time that you can be on camera and add to the interaction. And then for some people, if I have one-on- ons, in particular in my previous company, I had a phone with them and we would share, you know, we would say, "Okay, let's do a walking one-on-one today. I haven't gotten enough steps in. I've been sitting for too long." And so, we would make an agreement between us that that's how we would have our discussion. So, I think it's very important to be on camera for certain things, but I also think that you can arrange things in a way so that sometimes um you can have the option to not be on camera. That's great. All right, we've had two questions that kind of came were about the same thing. Um and it's talking about um the work style. That's what a fantastic idea. So Felicia's question was for the work style, do you have a set list of questions that you begin with? I do. I do. I have a what time zone do you work? Not just what time zone do you live in. Particularly when I worked with um people in India, they often worked closer to US times because their whole company did and their whole social life was based around people who were expected to work more closely to US times. So we that's like always my first question, not just what time zone are you in, but what time zone do you work? And then we talk about do you have you know then I have my full list but the the really important things are around the times that you work your favorite tools of interaction and your response time. Um particularly I've had engineers where they really like I need to lock in and focus and look at this for 3 hours and I'm not going to answer you. So on like Wednesday afternoons if you reach out to me you won't hear from me till the end of the day whereas other people they are like on it or their job means oh it's going my response time is going to be a half an hour and so if I have that in front of me then I know that oh I'm not going to call Joe right now cuz he's in his heads down time instead I'm going to call Steve because he's in his more quickly respond time. So, yeah, I do have a specific list of questions and some of it I tailor to the way that I have to do my own job and answer like what expectations are going to come to me from my leadership. Then I have like in front of me an idea of who I can get a hold of when and how. So, that's great. All right, this is a followup question from Sophia and she says, "Also, should you go through the work styles if you get a new boss who doesn't know your work style? And if so, do you include this early in your getting to know you one-on- ones?" I feel like my boss would have would have been kind of taken back hearing some of my musthaves. So, it's a like on on your level. So um I I am a lead what's called leader of leaders. So I not only report to somebody but have people that report to me and people that who report to them and in other times in my career of course just had people reporting to me. So I try and make it not so focused on me, but if I got a new boss, I would say to him or her, hey, this is kind of my working style of my whole team and like don't, you know, I understand what you're saying about the oh here, don't call me here, call me here, but if I can give them like make it in the form of here's kind of an overview of the working style of our team. you know, we meet at this time. This is a good time to catch up. Um, always if you need me, always feel like you can teams me and I usually respond within 30 minutes or hey, just so you know, I leave early on Wednesdays because I coach my son's track team or, you know, just those kinds of things. And I think if you make it that more about or even if you don't have anyone reporting to maybe your peers, if you make it more about, hey, this is the working style of the full team, then it can sound less aggressive but still get the points that you want across to your boss. That's great advice. Well, thank you so much for your time today. as before we move to Laurara's presentation, any final words of wisdom for our viewers today? I mean, I'm just going to repeat really be over intentional and just know that you can't pick things up organically. So, just ask questions. Just ask the questions. Even though it might sound cuckoo, people in the end, they'll be like really happy and it will show that you care. It will show that empathy. That's really important for a good leader. That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for having me.