#12 – Recruitment EP1 – One of the biggest mistakes when building any organization is to…

Summary

We want to start with the top piece of our pyramid and build downwards instead. Why?

We are looking for the top stone of the Great Pyramid. We are talking about a CPO/CEO, or just simply, a Great leader.

Today we explore what qualities are the most important to become a Great Leader?

Transcript

[00:00:01] Oh, hi. Didn’t see you there while reading this history book in this book. It says that 300 years ago, if you had anything from malaria to just feeling a bit down to depression to hurt your knee, you should eat a boiled egg with pepper and some beer. Now, that’s obviously pretty shitty advice when it comes to medicine, but I think that when we look at how we do recruitment today, future generations are going to laugh at us just as we are laughing to those poor peasants. 400 years ago, in the year of two thousand two hundred and twenty three, a super intelligent a I would find you the perfect partner and a perfect leader for your company. But for now, we do see the things as podcasting. So if you listen to this episode, you will understand how me and Eric, the founder of Great, are trying to found a leader. And it’s going to be quite obvious. We are not quite sure what we are seeing.

[00:01:19] Oh, right. Good morning, Eric. How are you today? Good morning. Well, today I still have this rushing sensation in my body from going Thai boxing yesterday.

[00:01:32] I haven’t been there in a long time, so it’s always a bit scary to go back. And of course, I’m sparring fighting on Tuesday evenings and I’ve been quite good the last times I’ve been there. And the main reason for that is that most of the really good guys who beat the crap out of me haven’t been there. And I was hoping that would happen yesterday. And I came first as an opener and the first big guy came second in the third. And it turned out that everyone who came were better than me.

[00:01:59] So now I feel a little bit like, you know, if you’re watching a show with David Attenborough, these planet Earth for things and there are always these male animals in whatever species fighting each other for a female or whatever.

[00:02:16] And then one guy loses and he has to walk away with his tail behind his legs and in much, much pain.

[00:02:24] That’s the way I am today, much happier than those animals because I survived. Jesus, I have my woman at home already, so I’m settled.

[00:02:34] What? You could have been a walrus. I saw that Edinburgh show. They have to fight every day for like three months. And then the winner the last month’s time. It gets all the women like 40 women.

[00:02:45] So that has to be a walrus. Yeah. I didn’t have to fight for three months. And and I got one woman’s I’d say that’s a win.

[00:02:53] So it’s all right. What kind of animal are you today? Today, I think like a fish that just lives in water, it doesn’t really have to do anything. I’m just floating. I’m feeling really great. Actually, I’m I’m 92 percent. I’m a blue sky. Shift in us. And not a blue sky.

[00:03:14] Efficient.

[00:03:15] The blue sky, a fish and a blue sky. That is right now. When I was a kid, I played a computer game that was really awesome. Me and my brother played it all the time. It was called the Great Pyramid of Giza. Now, in this game, your job was to build the Great Pyramid. And to do that, you had you started from scratch, right? You had to get simple things like plan. You need to get some alliances. A lot of rock, 10000 slaves, just the basic things. And then to start building the pyramid from scratch. And in the end of that game, you were gonna place the final top piece. And this one was special. It was made of limestone and gold. Just a brilliant piece shining all over Egypt. And that’s how you built the pyramid and bad game, apparently. Now, we had great that kind building a pyramid, too, but since we are kind of an upside company, we are going to start with the limestone with the top piece. Would you explain this in normal words or what direction here?

[00:04:31] You paint a really good picture for me. I can see the top piece. It’s it’s actually striped for me. I don’t know why. It’s kind of shining out of it like that pyramid in Las Vegas. You know, the the big light just going straight up the house. I guess it was a cool game to try and turn what you just said into understandable English.

[00:04:52] Our goal right now, which we spoke about in Episode 9 of this podcast, as well as to find a great leader, someone who will help us build everything, a man or a woman we don’t know, but someone that will help build everything. And that’s the top piece of the pyramid. But we want to start with that person, because we want that person to help develop the strategy, to help hiring everything, to make things in the way that he or she wants it to be. It’s perfectly aligned with with that golden piece. And I would start with him. So that’s what we’re doing right now.

[00:05:25] Awesome. And I’m going to get back to you in a moment with why we want to start with actual topics. But this episode is going to be about recruitment and it’s gonna be kind of obvious that there are things we don’t know when it comes to recruitment and we want to learn together. But why do we want to do this episode right now?

[00:05:48] Yes.

[00:05:48] As you said, we don’t know these things, but we also realize this, that we have the most fun when we do this podcasts and they become the most interesting when we don’t know. So we’re here to explore these things and basically understand how to recruit a person like this.

[00:06:04] What is it that we’re looking for? What skill sets, what qualities and how do we determine if a person has these qualities? Because you can’t always see that on a CV and it might be hard to read someone in person what kind of qualities they have as their personality. So that’s what we’re trying to to determine today. And that’s the purpose of this. Mm hmm.

[00:06:27] And starting from top up is obviously a bit different than something that you haven’t tried before. And I guess the reason or I know that a recent you want to try something new is because I’ve tried other things in the past and then you have run into trouble. So what is your kind of experience with recruitment so far?

[00:06:53] Yes, such it’s touch upon them. I’ve run into quite a bit of problems with recruitment before. I think recruitment is very hard. So in my previous company, Catina Medium, unlike online marketing company that we grew very quickly, what we started doing was hiring a lot of junior people. And what I m to do there was hiring people that were similar to me because I kind of like me and that was good in some ways and it really, really shitty in some ways. One of the things with hiring people like me is that I. I struggle when kind of getting a new person telling me what to do, who I don’t consider experienced enough.

[00:07:34] So it was fine when I was in charge of everything. But when we grew too quickly, we wanted other managers to come in who didn’t really who didn’t think the team should be built in exactly that way. And these people didn’t quite want that kind of manager. And it became tricky because it wasn’t the perfect alignment with things. So this time I would much rather start with the manager and let him or her to decide on how the team should look like and take it from there rather than the other way around trying to get the team and then the manager to work along with the team.

[00:08:07] So that’s part of the experience that I haven’t before. And the reason why we want to start with a with a top piece.

[00:08:15] What I’ve also done so I have fairly limited experience when it comes to recruiting.

[00:08:23] I’ve recruited a lot of people, but not for so much things that I don’t know, mainly for things that I do know and this time I won’t. We are going to recruit someone who is a lot more experienced than I am in recruiting and for example, someone who will be able to build a team. Someone is a much more Experis leader than I am, someone who knows a lot more things than I do, which makes it hard for me to know what questions to ask. Hard to know how to determine the skill sets of this person and hard to do that. The only thing I’ve come close to that before is when I hired a financial manager back in 2000 and 14. I think it was. So I need to hire highly experienced finance person and I know nothing about that. They had all of these different abbreviations on their CV for all their educations and stuff, and I didn’t know what they even meant. So back then I got a friend who is really experiencing finances, hit them with all the interviews. Kind of helped me determine and I tried to figure out the qualities and personality skills and then my friend got to determine b the skill sets. That’s kind of my experience within recruitment, right?

[00:09:36] So you focus on the qualities of the person and your friend focused on skills. Under any questions back then that you wish you wouldn’t ask that you didn’t ask. That kind of backfired.

[00:09:54] What I wished I would have done would have gotten more experience and more patience before recruitment in general, so I was always in a rush. I just wanted to get it done. I didn’t like recruitment, which meant that I just saw it as a problem that needed to be solved. So whenever I was in an interview, I really wanted to hire this person so I could kind of take it up my to do list and move on with my day. And that’s not a good place to come from when recruitment, when recruiting, because it made me hire people that a lot of times it wasn’t really a good fit, especially not in the long term, because I just really wanted it done. So I’d say more about that and more about the patients rather than a specific question I would have asked.

[00:10:44] So how do you feel about that today? I’m a great because for us it’s a real it’s a real bottleneck to get going to find this this leader. And at the same time, you want to be patient. So how do you handle that situation?

[00:11:00] Not well. I think I handle it better than I’ve done in the past at least, but that’s I’m very torn between those things. I really want to get started and I don’t want to rush things. I think the biggest difference now and back then is that I know of the mistakes that I did in the past. I know about the consequences of hiring the wrong person for the wrong job.

[00:11:28] And that makes me more patient today. And.

[00:11:34] I still don’t have the the really experience to hire these people, so that’s I’m expecting to learn doing things like this and during the entire process and hopefully. End up being much better at recruiting and once. This is none.

[00:11:51] Imagine you are in a situation where you really need someone quick and you have a bunch of candidates and you’re not really sure if and if these are really good. You tried to pick the best one that you can. Do you think in general you should just go for the best one you find, or should you be really patient because there would be more problems in the future?

[00:12:13] Maybe have a story or something that is we haven’t prepared a lot of the time.

[00:12:18] I would say be patient. And yes, wait, because it’s if we have this common mistake that I did was I had 10 candidates and I picked the best one that I could figure out, which doesn’t necessarily mean I pick one that was good enough. I might just have 10 candidates where none was a good enough fit. And a lot of the times. Well, I wouldn’t say a lot of it, but some a few times with very important people, very important roles. That didn’t work out well. And it set us back six months or half a year, six months or half a year. Good, Eric. Six months or a year in and in the entire process, because getting the wrong person in one place actually causes more harm than it does any good.

[00:13:05] And.

[00:13:07] For me, when it comes to recruitment and especially letting people go the other side of recruitment, I’ve been procrastinating that a lot, so I might have seen, OK, this person wasn’t a good fit. Let’s see what happens. I don’t want to do something about it. And then it goes another six months and it just haven’t been breaking out all the time.

[00:13:27] It’s kind of like being in an not so great relationship and still postponing, breaking up for six months, which is something I’ve done and something I imagine that a lot of other people can relate to as well.

[00:13:44] Yeah, I can totally see that. So now you’re when you’re in that into you, you are most looking at the qualities of the person, because I guess that is what you understand the best, especially if you’re hiring a person from economics. So what do you think is the most important then, out of skills or out of I mean, skills out of. The qualities, the personality traits that the person has.

[00:14:11] I think that they are. In many ways, I would say they’re equally important. All right.

[00:14:20] But I believe that skills is something that you can learn so you can develop those more easily than you can develop personal traits.

[00:14:31] So if someone doesn’t know enough finance for a role, but they have the perfect qualities as a person for this role and one of those qualities might be curiosity, then I wouldn’t worry as much about that. They are slightly underqualified from a skillset perspective because the curiosity and the determination will solve that. However, if it’s the other way round, they might know the perfect. They might have the perfect skill sets, but they are not trustworthy or they’re are not emotionally intelligent or perhaps empathetic. Those are things that should you can probably learn them if you really put your mind to it. But it’s a lot trickier to learn. So I would say that they are equally important in many ways, but one is harder to learn than the other.

[00:15:26] What do you think about this? What would you say? I agree with that. And I think in similar ways.

[00:15:34] And when it comes to. Great. I’m more torn because, yes, of course, we want the right personality traits, but then again, this is a person that needs to be able to go in and have the skill set to start building a product right away. I mean, understanding that, right? Yes. So here are the skill sets are very necessary. So are you thinking in similar ways for this great leader that we’re looking to hire? In similars, I don’t understand the question as to why you define it before, before you so that you can develop skills, but you. It’s harder to develop two personality traits.

[00:16:10] Yeah. I’m still on the same here where qualities will outweigh skills. In many ways, those skills are still very important. It’s not like just because the qualities, the danger with that is that I’ve been in interviews where I really like the person and really want to hire that person because it’s a cool dude and there might not be qualified. And I’ve done mistakes like that in the past as well. Hiring of likeability rather than than anything else which just make is even harder to move on from that break up that relationship. So to say later on. So yet, I mean, we really want to find someone who’s got both. So it’s not the one or the other. But if I have to pick one or the other, I would go with qualities over skillsets because I believe it scales better if this person is has great qualities. They will hopefully be good at recruiting people with the right skill sets down the line. And if they are not good with people, they will not be able to build a team that can master whatever the tasks might be down the line as well. So we might lose a bit of pace of not getting started straight away. But since we have this really long term horizon, we want to build this company over 50 years rather than one year. Then I believe that the qualities will last a lot longer.

[00:17:35] Skills will be able to you will be able to build a skills on the way.

[00:17:40] What kind of timeframe? That makes a lot more sense. Now, I want to go in to talk about what qualities we’re talking about and what skills we’re talking about. But first, I want to highlight that the reason we’re doing this episode is, yeah, you do have a lot of experience and you’re talking from experience now. But we want to highlight that. We’re actually trying to map out what we don’t know about recruitment and that is quite a bit. So we’re going to be speculating from moving forward here about how can you fight? Ask questions on how you find out if a person have these kind of qualities. But if you are listening right now, maybe if you are even the one looking for this role, please help us out. We would love an email to podcast upgrade of com and help us become more enlightened in the area of recruitment. So what would you say?

[00:18:38] I love what you say there about asking the specific candidates to help us. I actually did that. Yes, yes. Yesterday. So we have a few candidates that I’m talking to about this role and we haven’t even got an interview face with those.

[00:18:52] But we’re starting and I’ve actually asked this exact same question. Hey, I’m. I believe you know more about recruitment than I do. And I know it’s weird to ask a candidate these kinds of questions, but do you mind if I do? And he’s like, yeah, sure, go ahead. So send a long list of questions like how to recruit for this. What how would you recruit for this kind of role? What qualities would you be looking for? What skills would you be looking for?

[00:19:16] What kind of questions would you ask to determine if the person have these qualities or skills? So I’m actually in a reverse interview. If this were the person doing this and I realized that that’s another upside down thing, but I guess the Great Pyramid works that way.

[00:19:38] All right, so we are in this episode, we’re mapping out kind of well, we don’t know yet. And then in the weeks moving forward, I know you have a lot of meetings planned with people who have done similar recruitments before. So we’re looking to do a follow up episode on this episode where hopefully we’d be a bit more enlightened in this area.

[00:19:59] But what would you say are the main things that you are not aware of at this point when it comes to recruitment?

[00:20:10] My biggest challenge with this role is that we want someone who’s very technically skilled and I am not technically skilled, so I have a very hard time determining what do we actually need in terms of skill sets to to make this happen. So that’s something I have another meeting today with a friend who is very profound in terms of building products. And that’s the thing. I want to understand this. Like what? I don’t even know what questions to ask. I’m very, very basic in terms of my technical skill level. I cannot code. I cannot do anything fairly fancy. I I do know how to blow in the game before I put it down in my Nintendo 64.

[00:21:00] That’s pretty much the limitations of my technical skills, which means it’s really hard to hire someone who I’m hoping to be amazing at these things and trying to determine that.

[00:21:12] So that’s where I am.

[00:21:13] Whereas struggle the most say and I’m not sure how to do that other than than asking people so wealthy.

[00:21:24] I might have other friends sitting in on this interviews as well and helping you figure it out and just asking whoever I can for help with whatever it might be.

[00:21:35] So this is an area that we’re asking for. Help becomes very important. And also having a network in place, which which I know we focus a lot on.

[00:21:44] Yeah, I think asking for help this is essential in more or less every aspect of life.

[00:21:53] And it’s a skill that I’ve realized that I’ve had and that I’m very proud of. And I’ve also realized that asking for help is actually paying someone a compliment. It’s it says that I value your opinion. You’re important to me. And that’s a beautiful way of paying someone a compliment. So, yeah, I’m asking a lot of people for help and I’m very happy that I do.

[00:22:17] Asking for help is paying someone a compliment. I like that way of looking at things. Yeah, good quote. So quote me on this one. I feel ready to move on to talk about what kind of qualities we’re looking for. Or do want to add something on the previous topic or read to me one now.

[00:22:36] I think that we’ve touched upon everything I had in mind and a few other things. So yeah, please tell me what what would you say are the most important quality for for a leader?

[00:22:50] To me, the first one that comes to mind is trustworthiness.

[00:22:56] Yeah, that’s an important one.

[00:22:59] Yeah. So I know we spoke about this earlier this week and you actually questioned the trustworthiness of me as a leader. Would you want to share that part?

[00:23:11] Just let me think about the story.

[00:23:18] Right. So before you, Eric, had made a promise to our team that you would donate a million euros every year to great until great can make one million euros in profits and.

[00:23:42] About two weeks ago, you realized that you had lost a lot of money on the stock market. You had lost about 40 million euros, which is about half half your net worth. And that was really tough on you. I could tell.

[00:23:57] And at the same time, you were looking to buy a house and you didn’t know if you wanted to buy that house.

[00:24:03] So there two days you first told me and Spirit, another guy that is working out great and said, guys, I’m not gonna be able to I’m not going to want to keep the promise of one million euros. So instead we’re gonna make a smaller donation or it would be that I’m matching the donations of the team somehow. So you took back something you said that you would do. And when it came to the house, because the idea was that you were gonna buy a house and then, um, I was gonna rent it together with a friend. And you said, we’re talking about how this would work in my so far in Stockholm. And we were sitting there, candles lit, talking about the future. And you said, what? I want the house. I’m gonna. Well, I’m gonna buy the house regardless of what the prices say, if it becomes 1 million or 1.2 or 1.4. It doesn’t matter if I want it. I’m gonna get it. And two days later, you. There was an auction for the house and some. You bet. 1.1 million. And someone bid 1.3 or something. 1.2. I mean, she got outbid. And I know that you actually didn’t really want this house because it had to be. The house was in bad shape, so everything would have to be redone. And you didn’t want the hassle. So when do you get outbid? An unexpectedly. That was a recent for you to get up buying this house. And those two things happens kind of in the same time. And so now you said you were going to donate the million. Now you’re taken aback. You said the words, I would buy the house regardless of the price.

[00:26:03] And then two days later, you’re saying, well, someone bid too much money, I’m not going to buy a house.

[00:26:09] And then to me, everything you say regarding money makes no sense anymore. So, for example, I know you have told me many times that. Most of the money that I have will be donated to charity at some point. So, for example, I’m donating 10 percent of my salary to great right now while I’m taking less salaries and.

[00:26:40] State great is donating that will go to charity. But right now, great is not donating. So that money is basically going to you, the richest person that I know. And that has been okay because you have said I would donate most of my money at some point anyway. But now I’m here. Okay. Does that even make any sense right now? And does anything Erick says come when it comes to money, how much does that mean? And I can just it just hurts me to see how much those two promises just undermined my trust to you. And I brought this up to you yesterday, not as a employee. One thing security. Or I could totally understand why you did all of these things. I would have done the same. But for someone that is going to get into a leadership role, the kind of leader I would want to see you become, I think your word needs to be worth its weight in gold. What you say is going to happen needs to happen. And if it’s if you don’t know, it will happen 100 percent. There needs to be some kind of here. I would donate 1 million euros unless this happens.

[00:28:00] I’ve been ranting for a long time and listen. We’ve talked about this yesterday.

[00:28:07] Yeah, and I agree with everything that you said. It does hurt my trustworthiness and it also highlights the importance of it. If I’m not trustworthy, it undermines the entire organization and the entire purpose. Everything. And. I completely agree with you this. I didn’t handle either of these situations well, and it makes me realize the importance of thinking before I speak. A lot of the time. And it makes me realize the importance of that the person we hire is trustworthy and at the same time it makes me realize that I’m not perfect. I can’t expect someone we hire to be perfect in this aspect. It’s like they need to be as trustworthy as possible. But they’re not going to be perfect. So I completely agree that trustworthy will be a very essential part of this role, especially since it will be remote, so we will not be working in the same office, which means that we really need to trust that this person does the best they can and fill up their promises without even meeting more than maybe once a year. So it’s going to be a completely different dynamic that that as well.

[00:29:31] Yeah, you made me. And I appreciate and I think when hiring someone external, it really highlights the importance of having your word be gold. Because now I. I when this happened, these things happen. I didn’t have a strong emotional reaction to it. I could feel like something was off. But it didn’t really hurt me because I know you and I know the intentions.

[00:29:57] Why? You said and did these things and I knew there were. I know you have good intentions behind what you do. So it didn’t hurt me. But I was thinking, OK, let’s say I’m a new person coming. Integrate. Let’s say I’ve only been here for two weeks. Which would be the same situation as if we hire a leader now, and I only know that leader for two weeks and then I see that mismatch in congruency.

[00:30:23] Then it would be a much harder uphill battle to build trust from there.

[00:30:29] So since I know it wasn’t a problem, but if I didn’t know you, it would have been quite a bit big problem.

[00:30:37] For sure. Something just happened to your own you, by the way, I’m not sure if that’s. Yes.

[00:30:41] Don’t assume if there is someone drilling something outside that’s been going on the entire call and I can’t do anything about it.

[00:30:48] So it’s been annoying me. Well, we’ll deal with it.

[00:30:52] It’s been annoying me for quite some time. Sorry about that. But that’s been bothering you the entire call. I will.

[00:30:59] We don’t hear the drilling. It’s something with a technical thing. OK. Let’s let’s move on. I would yell.

[00:31:05] What what other what other skill qualities would you say are important for this?

[00:31:11] I think one thing that has been highlighted just in this example is the importance of admitting mistakes. And we talked about this yesterday and ju. This is not a story that makes you look good at all and look like you do look like shit. And to me, that is building trust. And someone that didn’t want this to be seen, especially in a transparent organization, that would be a problem, some of the really struggling to admit mistakes that they made. I don’t think that would be a good match for an organization that wants to put up everything like. Should you allow me to tell the story is a big, big strength? I think.

[00:31:59] I didn’t want to view them in an interview that if if we’re trying to determine if a person is owning up to their their mistakes. Would you say a good question then would be can’t please tell me about a mistake that you did that you are ashamed over and what the consequences were for that vote?

[00:32:21] Yeah.

[00:32:24] Would you say it’s good to add the art that you’re ashamed over, is that taking it too far?

[00:32:29] I like that. I want to highlight. I don’t know what I’m doing.

[00:32:35] I don’t know to be curious. And if I ask that question, if that person would be able to, yes, I did this horrible thing or if they would try to put a cordon around it and make it fluffy.

[00:32:50] I make it. Oh, but it wasn’t that bad. I know I did this because of this and everything after that, because it’s bullshit. So in the way you’re asking the question, you can see how how much can they stand in the pain of a mistake?

[00:33:05] Yeah, I like that.

[00:33:07] So if the person who are listening to this interview is going to this conversation. If you’re listening, I’m gonna fly for the job. Get prepared for some tricky questions. I think my main mistake I would make in India is that I wouldn’t be tricky or.

[00:33:27] I want to find the right verdict. On Sunday. Where’s that?

[00:33:34] Bestowal compli, complicated, annoying, tricky to deal with. I wouldn’t do that enough. Oh, I’m too. Yeah, that’s part of I’m too sweet. I would have liked to been more more vinegar.

[00:33:48] I mean, to you, I want to touch about this a bit more when we later on in the episode and talking about whether or not it’s the right call to go with a call interview or a text based interview. Let’s hope our time for that one. I want to move on and touch upon some other qualities you’ve been thinking about that’s important.

[00:34:08] One, you and I have a big interest for his emotional intelligence in general.

[00:34:14] So. How do you think Hockey Mashadani, the leader?

[00:34:24] Emotional intelligence is tricky. What would you say? Emotional intelligence. It’s.

[00:34:35] I think that’s a collective word for a lot of different scale sexually. So I’m finding it hard to pinpoint it right now. But I guess the ability and the willingness to put oneself in another person’s shoes and then understand what their best interest is and then take that interest as your interest.

[00:34:58] Yeah, I agree with that. I know Dale Carnegie and how to make friends and influence people. An amazing book, by the way. He speaks about just that as an important part of life in general. If you think it stayed somewhere in the book, like if you’re only going to take one thing from this book, take this and there is a sentence, a quote saying like be able to put yourself in in some other one’s shoes and. I can see this is something that I’ve struggled with, with as a leader before, I remember we had a really, really shitty situation in my previous company back in Two Thousand and Fifty. And I think where we changed our employment agreements because we were going to the stock exchange, we needed to change the terminology them and they actually became fairer and better for the employees. I would say but there was one quote in it that got really misunderstood and it was something in the line of everything that you do during your employment is owned by Catina Media. And this means that everything that we are paying someone to do is owned by us. It does not mean everything you do outside of the office we own, but since it says during your employment, people, a lot of the people in the team misunderstood this and we sent this out, agreements out on a Friday afternoon to be signed on a Monday and wait.

[00:36:28] So you said they think then that if they create a pot in their pottery class on a Saturday, that’s my pot.

[00:36:41] Exactly. That’s what happened.

[00:36:43] And I couldn’t even imagine this going on. So we sent them out on a Friday. Expect them to sign them on a Monday with just a lot of employees.

[00:36:52] Got really anger of this over the weekend talking about each other. One guy was writing a book because, like, they’re going to own this and another guy had some Web sites on the site.

[00:37:00] They’re gonna own this and these kind of things. And they got really, really angry over this. And on Monday, half of our team wanted to quit. And it was I had a very heart mean to me. This was just silly. So I don’t think I connected very well with people because at the end of the day, it was a misunderstanding and they were scared. And I didn’t put myself in their position to see how would it feel if I thought that someone would take away my life, work, my book, my Web sites that I’m doing. Instead, I. I probably just question is a stupid and like, hey, this is not what it means rather than kind of embody their aspect of this, and we’re actually ended up having seven people resign in after this. I think all of them understood that this wasn’t about the contract, it wasn’t about these things. So they they understood that this clause wasn’t what it said. But it became so many battles about this that I. People ended up resigning. And it was actually the people who were the closest to me. The people had worked with the longest my closest friends in the company. Some of them resigned during this. And I realized looking back that. The main reason was probably how badly I dealt with it, that I didn’t manage to put myself in their shoes and take their perspective and see what’s in their best interest and thinking of that. I was only sitting on my high horse or whatever saying, but you’re wrong. And that created a lot of friction and. Yeah, we say that during my entire business career. That those two, three weeks, whatever it was. Was the worst. I suffered through that and I can see how much they suffered through that and I didn’t manage to to understand them at the time. And I’ve lost I still I’m still not really friends with these people who haven’t managed to repair this. And that’s four years later, just starting from the fact that I couldn’t embody their situation in this.

[00:39:24] I haven’t heard his story before. And it’s very interesting because.

[00:39:30] So clearly highlights that it’s not about making mistakes, cause mistakes obviously will be made. And this is sort of sounds like a pretty silly mistake. But the fact that you didn’t have the skill set of emotion and intent intelligence at that point caused the mistake to become maybe a hundred times bigger than if you would have been able to.

[00:39:55] Deal with that in a different way.

[00:39:58] Yeah. Yeah. Everything could have been avoided. If you start with just, hey, this is the agreement, everybody, let’s sit down for an hour and go through what it actually needs and take questions. That would have been easily avoided everything. Or it could be avoided with me actually embodying their perspective of things rather than saying that they’re wrong.

[00:40:17] I would have been married too, if I was in your situation here.

[00:40:22] Yeah. Yeah. With chaos. Yeah. So emotional intelligence and the perspective of embodying is also very important.

[00:40:31] Do you think that situation would have been different if there was more trust in the company before that incident?

[00:40:40] It’s a very good point. There were there were probably not enough trust to start with and the lack of trust or the fact that the trust wasn’t high enough, them made people question the intentions. So if they would have known that the agreement came with the intention. This is in your best interest. They wouldn’t have misunderstood it like that. Or they would just ask instead of getting angry and just assuming that this was something we did to control them were to steal from them. So definitely trust is a big part. Abutments interest. Hammerton.

[00:41:15] But that was you said something that made me think. Now you’re talking about the intentions and I know the intention that great have is to do as much good as possible. So how important do you think it is that this person we’re looking for is embodying that intention? And if you do or she we would love for it to be Oshie. How can we know that that is that is something real and this is important.

[00:41:52] I believe that everyone embodies this intention as a child. I think that we were born into one thing the best for everyone around. Children are born selfish because they have to be, otherwise they wouldn’t survive. They have to be OK with waking their parents up in the middle of the night because they hungry. But I believe that everyone has an innate good intention and then for how the world has been treating them or conditioning them. People are less aware of this. So I think that’s a quality that everyone has. It might just be less apparent and some people depending on their upbringing and so forth. So I think it’s very important that at the same time, I think that a lot of people have it. I’d say that it’s important that it’s not too hidden away.

[00:42:44] It’s important that it’s apparent.

[00:42:48] It’s it’s not important that it’s like shining out there. I don’t think there’s someone who needs to come from a charity organization or need to be Mother Teresa. But it’s important that it’s not the devil either or someone who is too much in this for the money or too much in this for pride. Because I think that will be tricky to deal with. I don’t know. I think it’s an essential part. And at the same time, I think that everyone has it. And I might be wrong. I don’t know. Yeah.

[00:43:24] So what other qualities do you think is important personality traits?

[00:43:33] I think that.

[00:43:36] But it’s very important that someone is a doer, just dust things and make things happen. I’m not sure if that’s really a quality or a skill set.

[00:43:43] To be honest, I think that’s more of a quality than a skill that whenever they are. In touchwood, someone, when they get something in front of them, they they just start doing as things start happening and things are flying all over. Because. Once again, it goes with the trust sense. So if we are separated, we’re not sitting in the same location and someone is a doer. I can be pretty sure that a lot of things will happen regardless if I’m there being in touch with them or not. And if they’re not a doer, they might do the things they’re supposed to do. And when they run out of tasks to do, nothing else happens because they just don’t do that. It’s not in their natural state to come up with new things to just make them happen.

[00:44:38] I don’t know how to test that. How well, what kind of question would you ask if you wanted to find out? Dammit, I was going to test it. Gotcha. It’s hard. Yeah.

[00:44:53] I don’t have a good answer to this one, so I’m just going to refrain from mansplaining.

[00:45:00] Ok, so I’ll try and exploit then. I think that.

[00:45:05] This is kind of a question that might work best without an explanation of why, why I’m asking it. So if I’m saying my intention with this question is to find out if you are doer, then it might be counter productive. But if instead I say. Tell me about some projects you’ve been doing in your life. You can probably get a sense of someone if they have a million stories, so if they have one and if they are excited about projects they’ve been doing or if they’re not.

[00:45:36] So if someone starts telling about, gee, I did this as a child, then this does this.

[00:45:40] And then I started this thing and I tried this and this and that and this, then I believe that that could tell you that you are you just want to do things. And I don’t know if this is the right answer. I’m coming up with it as we speak. But I think I think Duer would give an answer like that.

[00:46:01] It’s like, what are you excited about? And if they’re excited about doing a lot of things, I think says quite a bit, maybe something that has maybe some women have a high level of.

[00:46:15] Well, industriousness and that is very structured in the way that they do things. Could that be a part of something that.

[00:46:28] Her friend, who, when he has his headphones like just small in, had headphones every time he has used them, he’s tied him up to a nice little knots. Does that quality have something to do with the dishwasher is arranged, the knives and forks. I do that. Oh, you’re a doer. So how do you how do you use this fortune? Right.

[00:46:52] If the dishwasher. I sort them like this because I believe it saves me time. However, with the headphones, I do not. So I’m somewhere in between. But yeah, I agree with you. That’s it says quite a bit. Ah, if he’s people are. Maybe that explains if someone is.

[00:47:12] Church and maybe not necessarily a doer, but structure is is the sister of a doer, I would say nothing that you can do.

[00:47:22] A lot of things without being structured at all and you can be super structured without getting anything done. But if they if you are a structure doer, that’s probably the best part of this.

[00:47:32] The best of two worlds. I agree that evil trash car is outside again making noise. I’ve promised to troll tomatoes added later. And Joe. But for now, I think it’s better if you go on a rant and talk about what kind of skillsets we’re looking for and how you would test them today.

[00:47:50] Yes. I don’t have good questions for how we will test them, that’s what I’m trying to understand.

[00:47:55] But as I mentioned before, high technical knowledge will be essential. I have no idea how to test this. That’s something I I need to learn. So that’s what I’m having meetings about in the next couple of days. Like, OK, I’m looking for a person with technical skills. What am I looking for? What is technical skills? I don’t know. I’m looking for someone who is really good in written communication because I believe that there’s a remote organization. That’s something that will be essential. All communication, more or less, at least the mewhich of it will be in slack or in email. So if they are if it’s easy to understand them when they’re writing, everything is gonna be easy. If it’s hard to understand me, writing live is not going to work.

[00:48:38] So that’s gonna be a key part of this that I would never have thought about when I hired in an Catina, for example. I wouldn’t consider looking at how they write an email. And now that’s gonna be a very essential part.

[00:48:54] He’s been great at prioritizing. We are working with Okayama. Now we’ve had spoken about that in another podcast. And in our weekly calls, which is objectives and key results, a way of measuring goals over three months and finding out which of these goals are the most important, said someone who needs to be very good at prioritizing and understanding these things. What actually makes a difference which aligns with being strategic? If if there is strategic, they understand.

[00:49:24] How does this adding to the bigger picture? I would say.

[00:49:31] Yeah, I think I have better questions for that one, or I think that one aligns a bit with the being structured as you spoke about with the headphones on and these things, but also. Just seeing asking about how would you structure a project like this? What kind of goals would you set? This is what we want to do. How would you paint that roadmap like whereas whereas the next quarter, where is this quarter? What are the thirsted thing we’re doing? And someone who is good at explaining that would probably be good at prioritizing that. And I believe I would be good at prioritizing this. I could probably understand the answers that given. And another skill set that.

[00:50:17] That I would never have considered in the past, and that is something that I’ve learned a lot from you and from Spirit and a great team and a lot from this process that we’re doing with the podcast.

[00:50:27] Is giving and receiving feedback.

[00:50:32] Because how you gave me feedback yesterday of of that you don’t actually trust me right now or I’ve done things that hurt your trust to me. It’s super important for me to know. And it’s so valuable. At the same time, it’s very hard for someone to give and it’s often very hard to receive it. To hear that I’ve damaged your trust is one of the. Worse things, I can’t imagine you telling me actually, because trust is so important to me. And still, it becomes so essential that you say it. And this is not something that I’ve ever looked for in anyone. I haven’t tried to understand this before. I didn’t know the value of this before. We guys started growing this together and doing public speaking. We’re feedback is very essential. So that’s I would say that’s a skill that you definitely can learn and something that we have learned together and that we’re looking for in this role as well, which is. And all the scale. It’s not something that’s spoken about. At least I’ve never spoken about it before. So they are these are all skill sets that can be learned that we need someone to have and some of them I have somewhat of an idea of how to find out if if the candidate has and some of them I have no idea.

[00:52:03] So it’s. Yeah. Am I missing some skills here? Something you. You’re thinking about.

[00:52:11] Well, I think we covered most of the important things for for this episodes. So. I think I want to wrap up the skill sets and equalities here and move start wrapping up this episode. Do you have something you want to add before that?

[00:52:30] Mm hmm.

[00:52:32] Yeah, I’d like to. What? We spoke about this the other day, like what do you see as the downside of having an episode like this? Mm hmm. Well, I’m a.

[00:52:43] My background is in professional poker, and I’ll tell you, if you show your cards when you’re playing, it would be very difficult to win unless you have two aces, right. And that is kind of what we’re doing here. And I think that is a good thing in many ways. But the downside, of course, is that if we want to test someone for which we talked earlier about owning their mistakes and we have. OK, so tell us about a mistake you’ve done and we can see our day just putting that out there in a vulnerable way. Or are they trying to tighten in common? So if someone know status or we’re looking for and they had bad intentions or not even bad intention, but they can use that as a way to get an upper hand and make them seem more qualified than they are again, then then that is someone that has done their homework, which is probably means they’re a doer. But yeah, it could be like playing poker with open cards.

[00:53:49] Yeah, that’s definitely a risk we’re telling someone specifically what we’re looking for is it’s easier to give the correct answers. And so what’s the upside, would you say?

[00:54:06] One big upside that I see is that we are mapping out what we don’t know here. So we are inviting help from the outside in becoming better at this. Descending more upside the downsides.

[00:54:23] I mean, what you’re seeing in the first one is that we’re opening your hands and we’re telling people what we’re looking there. And that’s a downside in a sense that someone will know what to tell us. At the same time, I think it’s an upside because someone will know what to tell us. And it will make it easier for someone to feel OK. This is why they’re asking a tricky question about trustworthiness that I don’t really want to answer. But it comes from these intentions. It comes from this experience and it makes sense. So I believe that it’s something that will be valuable to see and we’ll make people give give better answers. And I touched upon this before earlier in this part and in this episode about text based versus call based interviews. So I believe text is essential and I think questions like this deserves some time to think about it. So if we are in an interview and I’m asking you about a time you did, you lied to someone, you made a mistake and you didn’t own up to it and someone else got to suffer. If you have 20 minutes to think about that, you will probably come up with a good story. You would be able to explain it in a clear way. You will be able to to get to what actually happened with us. But if I’m telling you on the spot, it might not be something you have closed in your mind and you might not be able to share it in a good way, or you might not be able to understand the intention of it. But if I give you a lot of time to write me an e-mail about these things, you might be able to give a better answer and it might be more honest answer. At the same time, you will have the chance to come up with a better answer, which might be the downside.

[00:56:05] And so it’s it’s tricky with these things. But I believe that in in real life, in business, it’s very rarely we get put on a spot and have to come up with the best possible solution like this.

[00:56:20] We almost always have 20 minutes, at least short. Not always, but almost always.

[00:56:25] So I think it’s fair to do that in text when it’s these kind of questions as well. And then have part of it interview based face to face. So previously when I wrote that it’s probably within 10 percent text, which is the CV and these kind of things in 90 percent interview face to face. And I believe that the other way around, or maybe 70, 30 in the other in text based father would be an interesting approach to this, both as in a remote organization but also in general.

[00:56:59] Well, I think the same question that serves its service a completely different purpose and text or in in person. So.

[00:57:11] Do you have something, Dad? Before I ask you the final question.

[00:57:16] Yes. I’m going to steal the final question for you because I feel I’ve been talking the most. So I’m going to ask you.

[00:57:22] What have you learned today? So that evil truck is gone? So now I can relax. I’ve been thinking about it the entire episode. You learn that you want to throw tomatoes at the Jets. Backtrack. Well, the main thing I learned is from your story about the Aseel walkout, because I hadn’t heard that before. And it’s become very obvious how annoying, inconvenient and expensive things can become if you haven’t practiced the skill of emotional intelligence. And if you haven’t built the trust within the organization. So trust and that kind of intelligence is more important to me now.

[00:58:03] After this episode. Yeah, I really believe it is.

[00:58:13] Think about was my my key takeaway. I think my key takeaway is that this is the pot. The episode of record that I’ve enjoyed the most and the one that we actually prepared for the least because we went into it with curiosity and had no idea what to say. And there is so many questions in this that pop up. So I really like doing it this way and playing around with something to explore. Time has been going by really quickly, so I really like that. That’s my my key takeaway. And if I just summarize a little bit more of what with we’ve been through, we’ve touched upon the trustworthiness and the emotional intelligence that you just you said how important those things are and that they might you might not really be able to learn them. It’s something that’s conditioned and taught during childhood.

[00:59:12] I don’t know, but that’s a quality rather than a skill set. While the skill sets can probably be learned easier and I think that’s something. Quality versus skill is something that. Previously, when I recruited up, almost only looked at skills, very little qualities. If I would when I’m doing it now, it’s all off the other way around.

[00:59:34] Very much qualities and less on skills.

[00:59:39] So that’s something that I’m learning. I haven’t put those things into words before this episode. I probably knew it before I started this, but it’s it becomes very clear to me that that’s how I’m actually thinking about this.

[00:59:53] All right, so let’s wrap this up. And if you are listening and you have any perspectives that could be useful for us, any feedback on the podcast, good or bad, or maybe you are the one that we are looking for. Please send us an e-mail to podcast at great dot com. And I’ll see you next week.

[01:00:15] And one more little teeny tiny thing. Please go and listen to episode number nine where we’re talking about this role more if you have something that interests you.

[01:00:24] Stick around. There will be another another episode about a buttercup.

[01:00:30] Bye bye. Thank you.