Building Social Trust in Remote Teams: Claire Lew of Know Your Team

How you build trust is actually going to be a little bit different, and you’ll have to be a lot more deliberate about it than in a in-person company.

Today we have Claire Lew on the show! Claire is the founder and CEO of Know Your Team, software that helps you become a better leader for your company. We talked about building trust and social connections in a remote team, how you can be a better facilitator as a leader, and the role of empathy in a distributed team.

Before the interview started, Claire “warned” me that these are topics she can go about for hours and hours. And they definitely are. By the end of the interview, because Claire is so knowledgeable, I still felt like asking more and more questions! You really get the feeling she can discuss this topic for another 5 or 6 hours if given the chance, but unfortunately, our time was limited.

I had a great chat with Claire, so I hope you enjoyed this episode and learned a thing or two from it.

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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:

• 03:00 — The 3 pillars of good leadership and how Claire codified these
• 08:40 — Attributes of a good remote team leader
• 10:05 — The importance of “affective trust” in a team
• 16:10 — Can empathy be trained?
• 19:40 — Asking the right questions as a leader
• 29:50 — Claire’s thoughts on hybrid teams (half remote, half co-located)
• 34:11 — How can employees “manage up” better?

Mentioned resources:

• Know Your Team
• The Heartbeat Podcast
• How To Build Social Connection in a remote team
• Basecamp
• The Watercooler
• Zapier
• Wade Foster
• MeetEdgar

Full transcript:

Jovian: Hello world. Welcome to the second episode of Outside The Valley, a podcast where we interview remote startup leaders, workers, remote work advocates and companies who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. Outside The Valley’s presented by Arc, the only one remote hiring platform that helps companies to hire great remote software engineers and teams anywhere in the world. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama.

Today we have Claire Lew on the show. Claire is the founder and CEO of Know Your Team, a software that helps you become a better leader for your company. We talked about building trust and social connections in remote team, how you can be a better facilitator as a leader, and the role of empathy in a distributed team.

Fun fact: before the interview started, Claire warned me that these are topics that she can go about for hours and hours, and it definitely is. By the end of the interview, I still felt like asking more and more questions, because Claire is so knowledgeable, and you really got this feeling that she can discuss about these topics for another five or six hours if given the chance.

But nevertheless, our time was limited. I had a very fun time with Claire, and hope you enjoy this episode, and learn a thing or two from it. Here we go.

Hi Claire, thanks for joining us.

Claire: Thanks so much for having me Jovian, I’m excited to be here.

Jovian: Awesome. So Claire, can you share a bit more about yourself and your company, Know Your Team?

Claire: Yeah, absolutely. Essentially what we do, the company that I run, it’s called Know Your Team. And we are a software company that helps managers avoid becoming a bad boss. So if you are a new manager, if you have been managing folks maybe for a few years and you just feel like you’ve never gotten formal training, or the only resources you seem to find are books on Amazon or watching a few video classes or taking a few workshops, well then, Know Your Team is perfect for you. Because what we essentially do is we take theory and we turn it into practice, for leaders.

So, we over the past almost five, or more now than five years, have gathered data from thousands and thousands of people, and provided now software tools to help you actually become better as a leader.

We give you educational content and guides and training to become a better leader, and then we give you an online community with over 1,000 people, or 1,000 managers all over the world to learn how to become better as well. So we give you tools, training and a community to be the leader you’ve always wanted to be.

Jovian: That sounds really awesome. So one of the things that I notice when I go to your homepage, there are these three big pillars of leadership skills. So you say like, develop the three skills that the best managers have.

Claire: Yes.

Jovian: So based on your research, there’re these three things that is most important for leaders in companies, which is trust, honesty and context. Can you elaborate more on, how did you codify these three aspects so to speak.

Claire: Yeah, absolutely. So when we were first starting out in running Know Your Team, we actually were a different company, we used to be called Know Your Company. So maybe three or four years ago. We were actually originally a spin-off of Base camp, which folks who are listening might be familiar with Basecamp. So they make one of the world’s most popular, excuse me, project management tools. And yeah, and we’re a spin-off company of them.

But I give you this context because what we were focused on about three to four years ago was, helping CEOs get feedback about their companies. What we would do is, we had written and researched and tested hundreds and hundreds of questions about figuring out how to get the best feedback from leaders.

And what we found is that when you actually looked at the data from these questions, of either which questions led to the most revealing and interesting responses, which questions help CEOs actually make changes in the business, which questions folks in the rest of the company ended up benefiting from.

What we found is that there were usually three different areas that leaders tended to be deficient in.

And you would kind of cross-correlate different things and triangulate and it really came down to three different buckets at the end of the day based on all the questions that we were asking. And the first was that especially if you were a new manager, the number one thing that you have to be focused on is building trust. You have to establish some sort of confidence, mutual confidence in one another. That what I’m saying is true, what you are saying is true, I believe it to be true. And then I have faith that you will follow through on those things, because that’s essentially what trust really is, at the end of the day. It’s not necessarily rapport, that’s actually a different kind of trust, it’s called affective trust. But the most powerful form of trust, it’s called cognitive trust, which is the belief in someone’s competence.

So trust, it’s your intentions matching your behavior.

So that was really one of the first sort of big commonalities and discoveries that we made in the research is that, this lack of trust, without it, actually then you don’t get good feedback. And that the companies who perform the best, that managers who were getting the most out of Know Your Team were ones who were asking questions actually helped develop trust.

So that was the first bucket of things we identified. The second was around honesty. So to be an effective leader, you have to communicate honestly. And the reason for this is, as you can imagine, right? I mean, it’s intuitive in so many senses. It’s like, well, if I don’t know what’s going on… or if I don’t know the truth of things, if I’m the last to know about problems, if people don’t feel comfortable telling me what’s on their mind and they’re not honest, then of course things aren’t going to go well.

But we objectively saw this, when we started running Know Your Company, and that all the questions that we gathered revealed how, wow, the majority of folks in a company feel like they… there’s something that isn’t talked about in the company that they would like to know. Or that the majority of the company feels like there’s feedback that they have, that they’ve chosen not to share. And so what we noticed is companies that had greater on [inaudible 00:06:55], managers who were able to fill us to facilitate that better were leading to better outcomes. So that was a second observation based off all that research.

And then the third was around context. So again, really intuitive. Context being, what’s going on. Like, what’s actually going on in the team? Do I know who’s working on what? Do I know where we’re headed, like our vision and our direction as a company? And again, really intuitive. You read so much management literature and the idea of vision and direction and maybe goals, comes up. But what was really interesting, and the reason we call it context, is because through all the questions that we would ask these thousands and thousands of managers, oftentimes a big insight that would come up in terms of a problem would be, I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the team, or I only know what’s going on with the two folks that I work really closely with.

Here’s one question that we asked, if you had to describe the vision of the company in a sentence, would a clear answer come to mind?

And the majority of people who were asked this question through Know Your Company, because thousands and thousands and thousands of people said, “No. I couldn’t tell you what a clear vision would be.”

So again, just really indicative of how important that context is, and how much we often will act that. So that’s sort of a short version of how we really took the questions through Know Your Company of… that’s originally what we were called as a company, took those questions and a dove into understanding what are the patterns, what are the recurring scenes, what does the data tell us in terms of the biggest holes that managers are often missing, and what leads to their success.

Jovian: Got it. Yeah, especially in remote companies, like these three things, trust, honesty and context, in my mind, it’s even harder to convey. Just because you’re not… I mean it’s already hard already, if you’re-

Claire: It’s already hard, yeah.

Jovian: Then especially when it comes to remote company, people are not in the same place, then put some more extra effort on that. So my next question will be based on your experience, I [inaudible 00:09:10] you’ve also worked with remote leaders out there.

Claire: Yes.

Jovian: You see some kind of difference between the leaders of the remote companies made CEOs or managers. Do you see them as somehow stronger at conveying these three points compared to non remote companies, if that makes sense?

Claire: Yeah, no, that’s a really interesting question. I do get the question a lot Jovian about, what are the biggest differences between running a remote company and running a non-remote company, especially for leaders who are about to make that transition. And it’s fascinating because at the end of the day, running a team, whether it’s in-person and you’re all in the same room, or you’re in completely different time zones all over the world, the fundamentals are the same. To your point, trust, honesty, context, you know, important.

Jovian: Yes.

Claire: Whether you are in the same place or not. But here’s the difference, which is the emphasis, and the process for which you’re able to fulfill each of those functional areas. And so what happens is when you are a leader of a remote team, you just have different points of emphasis.

So for example, how you build trust is actually going to be a little bit different, and you’ll have to be a lot more deliberate about it than in a in-person company.

For example, the way that most in-person companies and leaders will sort of rely on for building what I was mentioning earlier, affective trust, which is a sense of trust that’s built upon interpersonal bond and relationships. So that kind of trust, you usually build that by taking someone out to lunch. Or swing in by their desk and catching up on their weekend.

And when you’re in a remote company, you still need that affective trust, you still need that sense of social connection, which as studies have shown has led to decreased stress, longevity even in life, lower turnover, you still need that.

But then the question becomes, well, how do you do it? So very tactically as a remote leader, the point of emphasis becomes around, how do you actually create those kinds of channels and systems? So you have to do video chat, for example.

So there’s a lot of remote companies who have the best practice of sort of video always on, in a remote company, to help just even give that facial recognition. Or setting up time to have video chats. To drink beer, or have a tea or some companies will do monthly book clubs over video chat, or one company does something called Fikas, which are a Swedish coffee break. And they randomly assign folks over video chat to do that.

So you just have to be a lot more intentional about building that trust, that affective trust in particular.

And so the point of emphasis is different. So that’s true for trust, and it’s true particularly for context. So if you can imagine understanding what’s going on in the company, how that’s done in in-person companies is fairly straightforward. You have meetings, right?

Jovian: Yes.

Claire: You have meetings. So then the primary way that most in-person companies for the most part and this has changed, I feel like in the past few years, is meetings and emails. and then with the advent of Slack, even in an in-person company, it’s become more prominent. And here’s the thing, most of it is synchronous communication, in-person, that’s how you’re communicating in context in particular. The direction, the goals you’re trying to hit, what’s going on in the rest of the company, that’s how you do it in an in-person company.

When you’re in a remote company, calling meetings… if you can imagine like, let’s say you’ve got someone in Prague, and someone in Denver, that’s just not going to fly. Let alone just the logistics of video chat, et cetera. So all of a sudden that synchronous communication doesn’t fit anymore.

So the point of emphasis and change here in process for remote leaders, is they have to be excellent at writing and written communication. And then they have to be exceptional at asynchronous communication. So a huge emphasis on writing up reasons for why they make a decision.

Writing up a CEO address once a week, for example. Writing up and really codifying sort of a company’s values or creed or writing up, here’s a summary of actually what’s going on in the organization.

So again, different points of emphasis. And in both examples here, a ton of intentionality that has to be brought as a remote leader, just to make sure that you’re doing those things well. So it’s not so much that you’re doing things drastically different, it’s the points of emphasis.

Jovian: It’s also interesting that you mentioned about leaders that want to transition to remote teams. It’s actually not an easy task. Just like you mentioned-

Claire: No, it’s not.

Jovian: Just like you mentioned just now, if we want to transition into a good remote [inaudible 00:14:35], these are the things that you have to do. Like you mentioned, be better at writing and be better at facilitating. So it seems like as a leader, you have to facilitate more, especially in the transition position. So, how can I establish the communication channels or processes?

Claire: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think even I would go a step further. I would say that you actually just have to be a lot better at those three things than the normal and average CEO, honestly, very frankly. And part of this, I think some folks may be like, “Well Claire, you run a remote team…” I’m the CEO of a remote company. So perhaps this is a backhand compliment to myself in some weird way. But that is not the intention.

All that is to be said, is because you have some sort of seemingly obvious logistical challenges to overcome that, there’s a little bit more discipline and rigor and process that has to be applied to communication. It doesn’t automatically make you a better CEO, my goodness. It just means that you actually have to do a little bit more work, and because you’re doing a little bit more work in order to make it work, more than likely then, you’re probably doing a little bit of a better job.

Jovian: Regarding this, I also noticed in your previous writing you mentioned, or you emphasize about empathy a lot. When it comes to leadership, that’s a number one thing. It seems like when transitioning to be a remote team, a distributed team, if you’re a leader, you basically have to have a little bit more of empathy to put in the extra work to establish the whole thing from processes and whatnot. I personally think it doesn’t seem that easy. My question will be, can empathy be trained in your opinion?

Claire: Hmm, what a great question. I think we have to believe it can-

Jovian: Okay.

Claire: Yeah, and there’s a lot of studies that show that your exposure to people who are of a different background than you, the more time that you spend with them, the more affinity you gain for them.

Your affinity increases with the amount of time spent in person with people who are different from you. So there’s a lot of different studies around empathy that show that it can be learned.

I mean even studies aside though, I think we just even from sort of a philosophical standpoint, have to believe it can be learned, or else we’re kind of all screwed. Like if we can’t learn it, I mean we as humans, we are inherently selfish. There’s nothing that is ever going to rid us of the fact that in our genes it’s built in that we just propagate what is in our own self interest.

And yet what’s so interesting about a team environment and what the role of a leader is, the sole function of a team is to be able to accomplish something that you wouldn’t be able to accomplish on your own.

So now all of a sudden the orientation to your point can’t be as so self interested, it has to be a little bit bigger than that. And that’s incredibly unnatural. And so it’s definitely why I think empathy is something that comes up a through my writing. It’s interesting though, Jovian, I think the definition of empathy has been very much skewed though. So I think a lot of times-

Jovian: Yeah, absolutely-

Claire: …yeah, when we think about empathy, and it’s why even when I hear the word I’m like… yeah, so I don’t even like to call it empathy sometimes. Because the problem with empathy, or that term, is that that most people think empathy means I’m going to treat people the way I want to be treated. That’s what most people think is empathy. And when you actually take a minute to really marinate on that thread, that concept, I’m going to treat people the way I want to be treated.

That’s actually a really shallow version of empathy, because true empathy isn’t treating people the way you want to be treated. True empathy is treating people the way they want to be treated.

Huge difference, right?

Jovian: Right.

Claire: It’s the consideration of an individual’s preferences starting with the other person’s perspective, and not your own. And so I would say, when you think about, okay, well how do we train people to be more empathetic? I think the first step is, you can’t start with your own perspective. You can’t say, this is what I would do. You have to really understand where the other person is coming from and start with their perspective.

Figure out what are their preferences, what are their inclinations, what is their experience, what have their interactions been? What’s the personal dynamic maybe that’s affecting them? Starting with them instead of starting with you.

Jovian: That’s fascinating, because just like you mentioned that, empathy starts from understanding what the other people want. And it seems like in remote companies, the only way to understand what your employees want, is creating a channel to understand that, a way of social connection. So it’s kind of all tied up together, the whole-

Claire: Oh, totally. And even more than social connection, I mean, it’s questions. It’s creating an environment for people to be honest, and then you have to ask the right questions. For example, asking, “Oh, what feedback do you have?” Or, “How’s it going?” Or, “What do you think?” Those questions don’t work. Those questions don’t work. They’re too open-ended. They’re too broad. They’re too vague. People go, “Oh, everything, no, everything’s fine.” “Oh no, I don’t have any feedback right now, it’s all good.” Right?

Jovian: Right, right.

Claire: Versus asking questions like, “What’s something that frustrated you in the last week?” Or, “Is there anyone in the company you’d like to apprentice under?” Or, “Are we behind the curve on anything in particular?” Those are so much more sort of meatier, deeper questions. And so that’s really the core of… a big part of Know Your Team, is helping a leader both create that environment so people can feel comfortable answering those questions, and then we give you the questions.

Jovian: Yeah. So it’s interesting because it feels like, talking to you now, I’ve just got this idea that especially in remote team, that leaders has to be facilitator, like with a capital F. That sounds a bit weird. But yes, you have to be a big facilitator on this. So kind of moving on to the practical way on how to do that, like the-

Claire: Yes, exactly-

Jovian: …social connection things. How can a leader in remote companies assist with creating this social connection? What practical ways they can do, or practices, you mentioned about, schedule a time to get a beer, anything else?

Claire: Oh my gosh, so much. I’m so glad you asked this question too, because at the end of the day, the theory and the concepts behind it help make things salient, but it’s what you actually do and how you change your behavior, that’s the only way you actually see results. So here’s the thing, if you want to… and these are two different questions, by the way, Jovian.

There’s two parts to this. So there’s one part which is, how do you actually create a sense of social connection in a remote team? That’s one question. The second question is, how do you create an environment where people actually will give you honest feedback?

Those are-

Jovian: Exactly-

Claire: …actually two different things. They’re sort of related, but they’re two different things. So I’ll sort of tackle them separately.

So the first, which is around social connection. And it’s funny, I know you had mentioned this prior to the call. I just published a piece, just like yesterday on this, and essentially I looked at data from the… and by the way on our blog, so for folks listening, you can go to knowyourteam.com\blog. You can pull up the piece. And then what I did though is I pulled data from our online Watercooler Community.

It’s our online leadership community, we have over 1,000 managers from all over the world. Because most of them, a lot of them are remote. And we talk a lot about, what are best practices for folks staying connected? So pulled a lot from that, pulled a lot from the interviews. I have a podcast as you know as well, put a lot from the interviews that we’ve done over the past years with remote leaders.

And yeah, there are about seven things that came up extremely consistently. So a few that are obvious that I’ll start off with. So most folks who are listening to this would say something like, oh, you should have a Slack channel, or some sort of synchronous channel that’s devoted to something non-work-related. Okay, pretty obvious.

What was really interesting though in the research that we did, we actually ran a study with almost 30%, or sorry, almost 300 people, remote managers and employees on this, is just how many remote companies do this. And they really rely on synchronous chat in particular. So that was one. Another one that’s quite obvious are, you do have to get together in person at some points. So doing team and company retreats.

But what was really interesting about this, was again, just widespread. How doing them at least once a year, and doing them maybe two or three times a year is important, and that it’s not just about all strategic conversations. But at the same time, it’s not all social. There’s times to just work next to each other, there’s so many best practices around running company retreats.

The other thing that was interesting is most of the companies that we surveyed, they end up spending and investing in these retreats. So they spend anywhere, the most common response was about 1,000 to $5,000 per employee, per year for in-person meetups. So it’s a bit more of an investment versus say, in-person companies. Which you would probably guess is a lot less. When we did the survey for in-person folks, it was a lot less.

So those are some obvious things. Some more counterintuitive things, and this is what I really loved, was the prevalence of video chat. Like that was huge. And scheduling these video chats. So doing them once a month and calling it something right. Theming the conversation, pairing people across the company, doing this with regularity and intention was so, so key.

The second thing that came up, which I thought was really interesting, was onboarding. And the importance of the onboarding process in creating social connections. So for example, uh, there’s a company called Zapier, they are about a 200 person remote company. We’ve interviewed their CEO, Wade, who’s awesome on our podcast. And they do something called Airbnb onboarding. Where they will actually fly their new person in for about a week, and that helps create a sense of rapport.

But a buddy system is huge. That was another thing. It’s related to the onboarding, but having some sort of buddy system. So when we ran our survey, about half of all remote managers and employees who applied said that their company uses a buddy system. And for in-person companies, it was a lot less. So definitely less than half. But yeah, those are a few examples of some of the tactics on social connection.

Jovian: Yeah. I can imagine there are some listeners out there that’s looking, “Okay, I want to build a remote company…” and they see all these things that they have to prepare. “Oh man, do I really need to do this?”

Claire: Well, what’s funny, I think when you think about, or you talk to folks… I mean, even our conversation here, I’m like, “Oh, you have to be intentional, it’s more work…” Et cetera, et cetera. Here’s the fascinating thing, Jovian. So if you look at the research that’s been done around social isolation in companies.

In-person companies almost equally suffer from social isolation… or their employees suffer from social isolation as remote companies. It’s not exclusive to remote companies.

And this is because in an age where we do have Slack and chat, in an age where even in an open office plan, people don’t necessarily get to know each other one-on-one, there are still studies that have shown… CNN published something really interesting on this, I want to say last year or the year before where social loneliness in companies is widespread. And it’s not just in remote companies.

And that actually also proved to be true in our own small survey that we ran with about 300 and some people. The remote managers and employees said that… most of them said they occasionally feel socially isolated. Literally almost the exact same percentage of folks who worked in-person said the same thing. So I guess that highlights… it’s just one data point.

But one thing that I would say to folks who are like, “Oh, it sounds like more work.” It’s like, it is more work because you’re trying to avoid the negative effects that you’re worried about in a remote team.

But the truth of it is that these problems still persist, whether or not you’re remote or in-person, you just tend to do more work in a remote setting to be proactive about it. And in an in-person company, you kind of wait to let the problem kick you in the butt.

Jovian: Right. It’s interesting you mentioned because this issue is actually not exclusive to remote teams. And I realize that it’s also not only this, a lot of things, even very practical thing. For example, last time I talked to the CEO of TaxJar Mark Faggiano. So they’re fully distributed. And he talked about how in his team, they’re trying to improve this, sometimes a new team member cannot find where things are. They use Basecamp, it’s hard for them to navigate. And I told him, so we here, we are a hybrid team. Some of us are co-locators, some of us are remote. And I told Mark, that’s not exclusive to remote. We also, even though these people are-

Claire: Exactly-

Jovian: …in the same room, I cannot find things, where is this document? So yeah.

Claire: Yeah, no, I think the problems just seem a little more obvious. Or they’re a little more top of mind at a remote company, because you’re like, wait, I can’t find things, that makes sense that I can’t find it because we’re not in the same place. So I need to find some processes or ways to do that better. Versus when you’re in an in-person company, you sort of rely on the things that used to work, and then as you get bigger, or as things get more complex, the problems sort of sneak up on you.

So I love that anecdote. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, Jovian, about how trust, context, honesty, those things still matter, whether you are in-person or you are a remote CEO, doesn’t matter, they matter.

Jovian: Still talking about social connections, so what are your thoughts on hybrid teams? Because it can be tricky, if half of the team is co-located, and half of them are not, and then how should a leader think about this? Like what [crosstalk 00:30:03]-

Claire: Totally. Another fantastic question. So this comes up a lot in the Watercooler Community as well that we have, because so many of-

Jovian: Oh, I see-

Claire: …the teams there are also hybrid teams. And the teams that have done this successfully talk about first and foremost, it’s a mindset thing. So to actually think about your remote employees not as second class citizens, not as remote employees, but as their own… just on an equal footing. And so as a result, communication and the processes for communication flow accordingly, meaning that, everyone’s still in using the synchronous chat.

Everyone, even if you are in the office, you do a Zoom meeting, you don’t do an in-person meeting. And of course there are different exceptions to make to that. But the idea is to type up notes and share them with the rest of the team just as you would if you personally were remote. So there’s a communication sort of standard that’s established, across the team, whether or not you are in-person or remote. So that’s one thing.

The other part that gets talked about though, is like you were mentioning around social connection. So let’s say you have folks who are going to go out for lunch, when they’re all in the office. Oh man, what about for the folks who don’t though? Is that unfair? Like how do you do that? So some companies, they’ll actually send a pizza to…

Jovian: Oh, interesting.

Claire: Yeah, or a gift card, to folks who are remote. Some will, again, this is where the video chats come in handy. Some will do like an adventure day, actually. There’s one company I think MeetEdgar they do this, where they send their remote team on just like a fun scavenger hunt that they’ve created for the day. Like actually proactively creating fun experiences for their remote employees, proactively as a way to sort of just balance things out a bit. So it’s not just the in-person folks that are sort of getting all the fun in-person activities.

Jovian: Yeah. And a lot of this, going back to empathy, when you’re co-located sometimes, like for the team members that are in the same office, you don’t really feel the pain of those remote team members, until one day you realize… so this is my own personal anecdote, I’m always in the remote meetings.

I usually stay in the office, most of the time. But there are some times where I joined meetings remotely, and this like huge meeting, all-hands meeting. And then I feel that kind of, hey, they’re laughing about a joke, but what’s the joke? Like I feel left out. So that’s kind of [crosstalk 00:32:38] at things. And you cannot feel that, when you’re not the remote team members on the team. So yeah, it’s kind of bad that you have to feel the pain. Like you mentioned, I feel like companies should proactively try to attack the pain on there before it comes out.

Claire: Right, and I think a big part of this too, and it comes back to communication, is asking your employees what they would prefer. Because some remote employees actually don’t mind missing out on the social stuff. It’s actually one of their favorite parts of working remotely, is they don’t have to do that happy hours or the [inaudible 00:33:15] and whatever.

Because everyone is different, and this goes back to really understanding what true empathy is, instead of our own sort of inflated sense of empathy. Is that if we’re really trying to be empathetic as leaders, then we’re going to want to first start with the other person’s perspective, which is what do they prefer? And the way you figure that out is, you ask them. You ask-

Jovian: Yes.

Claire: “What’s your orientation around social activities? Or would you enjoy receiving a fun dinner out with your family? Or would you prefer some sort of activity or a stipend?”

Giving options, so that’s another part of it, providing choice. And again, coming from the other person’s perspective instead of just assuming, “Oh, they’re fine.” Or, “Oh, they want…” x, y and z.

Jovian: Right. Interesting. So Claire, we’ve talked about leadership in remote teams, and in general a little bit. So for the next question, I want to flip it on the head a little bit. So from the employee perspective, for the non leaders yet, how can an employee be a better employee, as in managing up? Like how to direct our leaders in our company to be better? Should I give subtle hints? Or is there any best practices that… I want to tell them, “Hey, this part is actually not working so well-

Claire: Yup-

Jovian: …if I do this.” Or… yeah.

Claire: Yep. No, this is such a wonderful consideration. Wonderful question. So to be the best employee possible, there’s sort of a few things, and to manage up well, there’s a few things you have to do.

So first is personal accountability. You have to walk the walk, or rather walk the talk I suppose is actually how the phrase goes. But you have to start with yourself.

So if you feel like there’s something that should be different in the company, you want the leadership team to be more transparent, you should consider, well, how transparent am I? About my work?

If you are wanting the company culture to be a little bit more friendly, more welcoming, well, to what extent have you spent time personally with the new hires in the team? And gone out of your way to invite them to lunch, et cetera.

So just starting with yourself and that personal accountability is first and foremost, where to be.

The second thing to keep in mind is that as hard as it is to obviously share opinions without a concern of retribution or, hey, how’s this going to affect the way people think of me? At the end of the day, dissent is a responsibility, as an employee. Meaning that truly if you do feel like something could be better, and you feel like you’re in a position to say something, this is barring that you have a terrible boss who might actually fire you or something.

I understand that there are some really terrible situations folks can find themselves in, but given that you, let’s say, are in a situation where you do feel strongly about something, and you’re just wondering whether or not it’s worth your time to share it.

The thing we have to keep in mind as colleagues, is the other person is never going to know unless you say something.

Jovian: Yes.

Claire: So if you want any possibility of something to be different, you have to say something. So descent is very much a responsibility. So that’s a second piece. A third piece is to give a little grace.

So when we’re working in teams, we often don’t know the full story. And it’s not to let people off the hook, but to give a sense of respect and like I said, grace, that maybe there’s something you don’t know. Assuming positive intent.

Maybe your boss… and again, this isn’t to excuse any misbehavior or poor treatment, it’s merely to almost give yourself a sense of patience. And seeing the outcomes through. So have a little grace in waiting for those things to be true.

Claire: And then the fourth thing is, and this was really interesting, so this came from a big survey that we ran last fall around sharing information in teams. And we asked managers, what’s the number one thing that employees should be sharing with their managers? And the number one thing that they said is progress.

As an employee, if you are wanting more leverage around a project, if you are wanting anything sort of different to happen, one of the best ways to do this is actually to be extremely proactive about sharing your own progress. It’s the number one thing your manager wants to know about.

So the more you can do that, and pull back the curtain on your work, and show what’s happening, why it’s happening, et cetera, the better position you’ll be in, for different things to change, for people to listen.

So I hope for folks who are listening, those are some good places to start for managing up.

Jovian: Yeah, I feel like, if you’d come back to the three main skills, that three pillars, trust, honesty and context. From my experience, if you’re an employee and like you mentioned, barring you have a terrible boss, I think, really great to practice conveying context.

Claire: Yes.

Jovian: Like why you do what you do. Because trust and honesty, I will assume that if you’re a great company, then you trust your leaders, and you believe that your leaders are honest. And also vice versa, you know that you are honest and you can be trusted. But the context can fall short because probably, I don’t know how to convey progress well.

Claire: Right. It’s hard.

Jovian: Yeah, it’s actually not easy.

Claire: It’s super… it’s actually another big reason we built Know Your Team, quite frankly. We have something called a Heartbeat question, which helps keep everyone on the same page and it’s to help also eliminate any… having too many meetings, and doing too many daily stand ups.

But no, we built it for that exact same reason, which is that it is actually surprisingly difficult, the bigger that you get, the more complex things become, to figure out, wait, what is the person next to me working on? What’s the CEO working on? I have no idea how she or he spends their day. And you used to sort of do it well, maybe in a four-person company, but then you hit 40, maybe you’re at a 100, 400, et cetera. And it just gets harder the bigger you get.

Jovian: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Claire, I can continue on and on for this conversation for like hours. I mean, it’s really awesome, talking to you now. But apparently I don’t want to waste a lot of your time. So where can listeners find you online?

Claire: Great question as well. And by the way, it’s been a pleasure, and I-

Jovian: [inaudible 00:40:30].

Claire: Yeah, no, it’s been a pleasure to be on here, Jovian, you’ve been asking some really wonderful questions. So yeah-

Jovian: Well, thank you-

Claire: …so obviously if you’ve been interested in any of the stuff that we’ve been talking about, and actually taking action and implementing them, how do you build trust, create context and honesty, obviously we’d love to have you visit knowyourteam.com, sign up for a free trial. Give our product a spin. You can see The Watercooler, you can see our guides, you can see our tools.

The second thing, if you’re thinking, you know what, I’m not really ready yet to have tools and training, but the community, that’s really interesting. I just kind of want to learn as I go. So we do offer membership just to the community as well. It’s 20 bucks a month. And so if you go to The watercooler.io, you can check that out.

If you’re thinking, okay, that’s even too much for me, Claire, I just really want to read some stuff on occasion. So two great places to do that. So we’ve got our blog, knowyourteam.com\blog. You can follow me on Twitter. And then we’ve got a podcast. So if you don’t like to read, you can listen to us. And it’s called The Heartbeat, and you can find us on Apple Podcast, pretty much everything and on our website as well.

Jovian: All right, awesome. So yeah, for our listeners out there, I would highly recommend checking out Claire’s podcast, blog posts, whatever it is. Even months ago before we started this podcast, we’ve been passing around Claire’s article on our company like hot potatoes, “Hey, this is really good, this is really good.” And when I tell my coworkers that, “Hey, we’ll have Claire Lew on our podcast.” And they’ll be like, “Really? Can I join?” Like, “How-

Claire: I’m flattered, thank you.

Jovian: …so, no, I’ll just give you the recording.” So yeah. Claire, thank you so much for your time today.

Claire: Jovian, thank you so much. It’s been truly a treat. Thank you-

Jovian: Thank you so much. Enjoy your day.

Jovian: And that’s it for another episode of Outside The Valley brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with the hope that in each episode, you can learn something new from other remote startup people. So if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jovian@arc.dev. It’s, J-O-V-I-A-N at A-R-C dot D-E-V. Or you can find us on Twitter @arcdotdev. See you next week with another episode of Outside the Valley, and ciao.

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