Leaders of remote teams need both hard and soft skills but demonstrating those soft skills must be very intentional given the absence of body cues and language we rely in the physical workplace. In this episode, Dr. Kathy Ritchie in the School of Business at Northcentral University is joined by Kim Shepherd, former CEO of Decision Toolbox, and board member of Working Wardrobes and Habitat for Humanity of Orange County, CA. She is the author of three books; Remote Work (2021)' Get Scrappy - business insights to make your company more agile (2015); The Bite Me School of Management - taking a bite out of conventional thinking (2010). Kim and Kathy discuss practical strategies to develop and demonstrate soft skills to successfully lead a virtual team.
Leaders of remote teams need both hard and soft skills but demonstrating those soft skills must be very intentional given the absence of body cues and language we rely in the physical workplace. In this episode, Dr. Kathy Ritchie in the School of Business at Northcentral University is joined by Kim Shepherd, former CEO of Decision Toolbox, and board member of Working Wardrobes and Habitat for Humanity of Orange County, CA. She is the author of three books; Remote Work (2021)' Get Scrappy - business insights to make your company more agile (2015); The Bite Me School of Management - taking a bite out of conventional thinking (2010). Kim and Kathy discuss practical strategies to develop and demonstrate soft skills to successfully lead a virtual team.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 0:02
Welcome to the Center for advancement of virtual organizations, podcast, soft skills virtual leaders need most. I'm Kathy Richie associate professor at North Central University. And today we're joined by Kim Shepherd, former CEO of decision toolbox, and board member of working wardrobes, and Habitat for Humanity of Orange County, California.
Kim is the author of three books, remote work, redesign processes, practices, and strategies to engage a remote workforce. The second book is get scrappy business insights to make your company more agile. And the third book Kim has authored is the bite me School of Management, taking a bite out of conventional thinking. So it is my pleasure to introduce Kim shepherd. And thank you for being with us today.
Kim Shepherd 0:58
Thank you so much. It's so nice to be here.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 1:01
So Kim as a way of getting started, how would you define soft skills? And why are they important?
Kim Shepherd 1:07
So soft skills to me and I've been talking to this for forever, is the real stuff that we really measure things to, um, specially a few if you look at just a hiring of an employee, we vet to the hard skills, do you have this degree Do you have, you know, six years experience Have you worked in this environment, but we hire, we reward re recruit, and we retain to the soft skills and the soft skills are who we are our communication skills, our work ethic, our compatibility, our morals, you know, the, our ethics in general? And those are the things that really make us us.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 1:51
Thank you. So how would you see soft skills, skim, that are exhibited differently, when we think about the virtual workplace?
Kim Shepherd 2:01
Yeah, so it's, they're kind of harder to see, aren't they, um, the, you know, when you're in a sticks and bricks environment, you've got the water cooler, and you've got this snappy dresser, you know, with the new outfit, and you've got the people that that are, you know, in probably in sales and the upbeat personalities, and you've, you've got the the accountant types, and you can kind of see where people fall. But in a remote environment, it's a lot harder. And based on our communication skills, it can be more difficult to discern the personality and we as people, we crave knowledge of the person that we're interacting with their personality.
And so in a, in an effective remote environment, you create hubs and places for personality to shine. For example, in my work in my company, we would have a virtual water cooler, as I just mentioned, we'd have every Thursday night, people can get together and watch a movie, a collective movie, now they were all in different time zones, so they would have to sync up, and then they could could, they would stay in that in that chat room, you know, I'm having a margarita with some guacamole, or I'm good, and personalities could could emerge from that.
And we would also do funny things like ugly sweater contests and, you know, dress your pet up for the holidays kind of thing. And personalities could come out that way. And it was really important to if you're focused on building a healthy culture for your company in a remote environment, you've got to find a way to display the soft skills and that personality
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 3:41
in the very interesting concepts and thoughts that you've gone through Kim, how would you think that the pandemic has kind of broaden that concept of helping that culture come through remotely and and to emphasize on those soft skills so the leaders are somewhat focused on what what the change has been through the pandemic?
Kim Shepherd 4:06
Yeah, so COVID kind of put culture in the blender and ship it up. And because you know, literally, an entire organizations were sending their people home on Monday and expecting functionality on Tuesday the employees didn't know what they were doing management didn't know what they were doing. You know, the C suite didn't know what was going on. You still had this root behavior from from management and leadership saying if I can't see you, I can't manage you know, so you really had a Helter Skelter going on and on. And the good organizations realize that and deployed leadership, troops immediately to say, let's create platforms for communication, let's but when you go remote overnight, you don't even know what to do with your meetings.
Everybody knows that zoom but does every meeting have to be on zoom should could could an hour long meeting really take place in 20 minutes? How do I measure my their key performance indicators? How do I set those? How do I measure so everything when you literally do it overnight, goes out the window. And then when the dust settles and you figure out working norms and you know this Betty have a home office space that she can work from, and and you know, getting that nailed down, then you can start to deploy cornerstones to get your culture in place.
And you have to really ask yourself in a remote environment, what do we want our culture to be? When I first took my company virtual, which was in 2002, so I had no models to follow, and I had to make it up, you know, I went virtual on the back of 911, my industry stopped. And at the time, I only had 37 employees. But my number one goal was to keep all 37 of those employees. In order to do it financially, I had to get rid of everything else. So that was the impetus on me going remote.
And then I had to re ask, I had to ask myself, given what just happened. Now, what do I want my culture to be. And one of the things that I hung on to is, I wanted a culture of individual the quest for individual excellence. So I had to trust that I had the right people at the helm. And that their quest for continually being better as a remote employee better as an employee, better at work life balance better at being a human being, you know, all those things I thought would keep my my team aligned, and that became our culture.
But a lot of real quick a lot organizations are going to make the key mistake of thinking that in a remote environment, the old culture just naturally transfers over to, you know, continues on in a remote environment more often than not, it will not.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 7:02
So Kim, you just raised a really important point. I think resilience is is a really key factor. But you also mentioned better at a lot of different categories of things. How if you were, let's just say a leader, hiring, how would you be able to kind of look for some of those characteristics and attributes in the hiring process?
Kim Shepherd 7:25
Okay, I love that question. So this is where I get a little goofy Kathy, um, I look for what I call jet eyes. If anybody's ever heard of Star Wars, they know that a Jedi is kind of those cool people you want on your team. They're leaders, they make things happen, they've got a little MacGyver in them, you know, in the jet eyes. To me, we were used to saying we want to hire a players. And that phrase has always bugged me a little bit.
Because what is that an A player probably means that you were either really good at your last job, or you're really good at your current job. But that tells me nothing about going the soft skills, how you would react in a in a change of environment, in a catastrophe in a pandemic, you know, can you can you get yourself out of bed, get yourself sooner and get into the game, Jen is can. So in the very first company about 150 years ago, when I was assembling my first recruitment team, I didn't want my recruiters to follow any of the recruiting norms set to date. So I wanted to teach them the type of recruiting I wanted them to do. And they didn't have to have any recruiting experience.
And in fact, I didn't hire anyone with recruiting experience. And what I did was I went looking for Geminis. Gen X are those people, you're sitting in a restaurant, and there's five waiters or waitresses, and one of them is on it. They're just all over it. They are just a cut above Jedi. You go to your pharmacy, and there's five people behind the counter. And one of them's just got going on Jedi, I was looking for those types of people.
So one thing that I would encourage and again, you vet the hard skills. So if you're in a leadership role, and you're looking for a civil engineer, you know, it's it's well defined, good qualifications that person has to have, but in making the hire, look for the Jedi look for the way and now how do you know that you've got a Jedi? Ask them? If I was to ask you, I'm looking for jet eyes. Do you know what they are? And they say yes. And I'll say, Are you one? And if so tell me why? a jet I will have an answer and a non jet. I usually won't.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 9:44
So you use that as as kind of a differentiating question during the interview process. Correct. So if you think about going forward, and you've hired the deadeye and you just mentioned different platforms for Communication? Can you share with us some of the other forms of communication that you think accentuate soft skills in the remote workplace?
Kim Shepherd 10:10
Well, you know, I'd kind of like a backup for a minute and touch on meetings, because meetings are our core platform for communication within an organization or on a remote platform. And a lot of leaders don't realize that the creation of the appropriate and then the proper meeting for what it is you're hoping to accomplish, there's a lot of different kinds of meetings, do you mind if I walked through a couple of them?
Okay, so you have your eye up, speak to some of the meetings that I had created. And again, again, an appropriate leader will create them their own set of meetings, they can steal my concepts, or they can create their own, but the trick is to wrap it around the outcome that you're looking for whatever that outcome happens to be. So because we were instantly remote, in a world where no one was remote back in 2002, I felt it necessary for my people to feel like they were part of a small family.
So I created pod meetings. And that was, I would take three or four people in different now at the time, I had people in 34 states in six countries. So we were across pretty much all the time zones, I would create pods of three or four people, they would get together for a half hour first thing Monday morning, depending on if it was your morning or afternoon basement time zone. And their job was to help kill each other's cockroaches. And what that means is we always have some kind of a problem that we can't seem to solve on our own. So we throw it to our collective pod group and say, Have you ever had this cockroach meeting a problem or an issue? How have you killed it, or what what has worked and hasn't worked for you, and they just kind of chew on on the thing.
They're bonding, they're communicating, they're forming, they're deepening their bond, and they're helping to solve problems. So that's, that's a pod pod meeting. And that was connectivity with an outcome of helping collective mind solve a problem that the individual can't solve on their own Tiger team meeting, that's where I would get usually once a quarter, there would be a topic of some climb, and I would get maybe five or six people, usually we would do this in some kind of an actual face to face meeting venue. And a tiger meeting is a problem. Imagine there's a tiger in your bathroom, and you need assistance, figuring out how to get the tiger out. And so it's bigger than a cockroach problem. It's a it's a there's a tiger in your bathroom. And so the format is, is you free flow on ideas, you capture all the ideas, no ideas silly. And then at the end, you come up with the best ideas to get that Tiger out of the room to get the to solve that Tiger size problem. In a real, I'll just touch on one more, but then I'll rattle off some names of others. Another one that I particularly was fond of is I wanted to get my people thinking outside of their head that you know, needs to hear outside of the box. But truly outside of your head, I want you thinking about things that haven't happened yet, because that exercises a different part of your brain.
So I would create every quarter a tsunami meeting. And a tsunami meeting is imagine you can see off in the distance a tsunami is coming. It hasn't hit you yet. It may not hit you you don't know. But you're going to plan how you would tackle that tsunami. So some topics might be I get hit by a bus and I'm the CEO of the company. What do you do? Another topic might be half of our clients go away overnight. What do we do? Another might be twice as many we double our revenue in a no, in a weekend. What do we do? And then we blueprint, the answers to that. And those answers go into a binder or tsunami binder.
And over the course of 18 years, there were four or five times where a tsunami did hit. And we had already blueprinted 80% of the solution. We just went to the box. And as the tsunami is coming, we're putting you know, a virtual life preservers on the business and on people because we had the solution sitting in a binder and then other meetings could be a cockroach, I'm sorry, an ostrich meeting where your heads buried in the sand you need help because you can't you don't know what you don't know. There's all these kinds of meetings that I designed and I and I regularly used about six of them and it's all the playing soft skills and it's all meant to to create a particular outcome and they can vary from you know bonding to solution driven to business operations. It Doesn't matter what it is, the thing is, is you need to create your own wrapped around your own set of priorities.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 15:05
So with those particular priorities, I'm assuming that that's a moving target, in a sense to when it comes to some of the tsunami building and preparation. Did you ever have any negative blockages or obstacles? And how did you get around that by using the in accentuating soft skills?
Kim Shepherd 15:29
Sure, um, early on, there were, quite honestly, maybe three, four or five months after we went virtual, there were a handful of people that just weren't cut out for virtual. And being a culture of, you know, my culture and my company was drink the Kool Aid Kumbaya, we're big love fest, you know, sitting around a virtual campfire and loving on each other. And so it made it that culture makes it very difficult when you simply have the wrong people in the wrong setting.
And in that particular case, it was these people were not cut out for remote work. And back then it was a pandemic driven, so they didn't have to stay in a remote environment. And I had to help them walk through their thought process that perhaps there's a better home for you. Um, also on on soft skills, meaning Jedi skills. When you create an environment of continual self improvement, and self excellent, some people aren't excellent, some people aren't generous.
And so you have to have those hard conversations with them. And you certainly can't say, Look, you're not a Jedi. So you're off the team, we have to walk them through the logic that perhaps the environment I've created, it's not the right environment for you. That kind of ties to the ability to not work remote, but it pays really more to, you know, maybe there be players and there's nothing wrong with B players. But a B player sticks out like a sore thumb and in a environment.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 17:05
So when you think about an environment, which you've worked in and built yourself for a long time, and how so many leaders are just now adapting to this, you know, related to the pandemic, what would you see as some of the silver linings that have come out of this kind of Breath of new awareness?
Kim Shepherd 17:27
Well, I think there's a lot of great question heavy, I think there's a lot of self awareness that has come out of the pandemic. I mean, think about the biggest one, that that's kind of nearest and dearest to my heart. And that is for my entire work lifetime, which has been a very long time. Everybody I know myself included, have been looking for work life balance, suddenly you get sent home, you know, unknowingly and you're putting away the dishwasher you know, the dishes in the dishwasher during a phone call, you're running a wrote a load of laundry that's going while you're cleaning up your emails, or you're doing your your, you know, your KPIs or key performance indicators on so suddenly there's a taste for work life balance, and for some, not for all but for many.
And now, if the decision is made without great thought going into it by organizations, when the pandemic starts to lift, to randomly bring everyone back and think that it can miraculously be the way it was two years ago is not going to work in many circumstances. Because the we have changed we we have found work life balance, and we like it think think if you want to stay home, you want to stay remote, your productivity is enhanced by 35%. You've got a true life balance thing going on.
And your employer says you need to come back to the office. And when you say why they say because that's just a decision that we've made and they have to come back. Now they work an eight hour day, they get home, they get in their car, they commute home, after commuting in the morning, eight hour day commute home, and guess what's waiting for them the laundry and the dishwasher and they're going to be acutely aware of that and be very unhappy. And in the world of recruitment and retention of people as far as talent acquisition goes there's companies are going to be a very like if I was was still in the game, I will be broadcasting that I have created this utopian remote environment where if you want to work remote, you can forever and I'll wrap the tools around you to make you perform better than you would in a work environment. Your I'm going to recruit you out of companies all day long. And so what I'm Who am I going to get I'm going to get the Jetta because Jen is can work from home they've got the tools.
And let's of course you know I always say if you're making wine you need to be in the vineyard. And if you're making jetski need to be in the hangar. But if you're not making, you know, if you're making internet, if you're making financial services, if you're making legal if you're making all these other things, there's absolutely no reason to be in the office.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 20:13
Interesting. So obviously, we have to find ways to fight that attrition that could certainly be rampant or widespread or more accentuated as we're kind of reading in, in, in general now. So what would your suggestion be for leaders to kind of reinvent themselves or reinvent their business model to preserve their culture, but also to accommodate to some of those soft skills and some of that new workplace environment that people have adjusted to by remote work,
Kim Shepherd 20:45
right? Well, anyone who's listening to this podcast can ascertain that I'm a bit scrappy. And in fact, my second book was called get scrappy. And the energy that I put into all of these crazy things that I've shared so far, my meeting styles and in the observations and, you know, the Kumbaya and all that stuff, is one thing that made my company extremely successful. It's that I and my leadership team realized that we were inventing back then what was an unheard of garden, and that we had to really strategically decide what we're planting in that garden, how we're cultivating that garden.
But the most important thing we need to remember is that garden needed tending to daily, you do not to be effective when when changes around you, not just a new remote environment, but the pandemic. And all that comes with that, you know, trailing with the economy, and politics and all that stuff that comes along with the chaos that a pandemic can create, you've got to water that garden daily, and you have to pull out some flowers that aren't doing well put in other vegetation that perhaps is doing better, you really are the person for me as the CEO, I had to take on that responsibility, because I had to show my leadership team, how hard I was the attention to how hard I was working in the attention, I was given giving to the continual cultivation of my culture.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 22:21
So what things would you say that you've encountered that you'd be willing to pass along and say, don't do this, it might not work?
Kim Shepherd 22:34
Well, I'm God, I've tried so many things that have failed, but thankfully, I fail at them quickly. I have a couple of kind of broad brush, things that get warnings that I would give is that communication is a two way street. Um, be aware that what I mean by that is, you can do your annual reviews, or your quarterly reviews are whatever it is you do, but to be really effective, and to be a Jedi you're going to ask them to review you as your employees to review you as well. Or always, when you have a structured interaction with your employee or your team, always leave room and encourage them to ask questions of you communication must be a two way street, in in an effective culture.
The other thing would be trust you if you're the one that decides you're going to hire this person, and so often then leaders put them in the role and don't trust that they can, can do the job which to me says you don't trust your decision. Trust your decision. And you know, the the saying of hire slow and fire fast is really true. Hire slow, and fire, fire fast. The other thing real quick that I want to do and I'm not avoiding the potholes that I've stepped into, quite honestly, I don't retain them very often. It's because they're unpleasant. And I probably should. But I'm saying that I in the very beginning my my business partner and I created when we were starting the company in the very beginning was designed what you want, or deal with what you get, and strange how we came up with that in the year 2000. And it is more true today.
When you're looking at this the management of soft skills, which is a fairly new concept that soft skills are once you get the hard skills out of the way but soft skills are everything and CEOs used to call them squishy and unpleasant and Goofy and you know they're just squishy all around. Well, they're not they are they are the currency of human beings and on so design what you want or deal with what you get. It really traps to just about everything. You'll do in the Creation of your company in changes that you'll face whether you bring some people back in a hybrid model, just do not be in front of it, design it.
Now, it's kind of the same thing with culture. Speaking of squishy, I used to have a lot of seat fellow CEOs and I were I was in a roundtable with, and they'd say, you know, culture is just kind of squishy. And I'd say, Well, what is your culture? They're like, Oh, I don't know, you'd have to ask human resources. And I would look at them. And I'd say, let me tell you something. Every company has a culture. It's either been designed by you, or for you. And you definitely want the former.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 25:39
Very interesting. So, Kim, if you had additional pieces of advice, or wisdom to pass along, as a way of kind of closing today, what would you suggest,
Kim Shepherd 25:52
you know, I would say, stay very aware of have kind of tried to telegraph what's going on, on and and if you're not regularly tearing your business apart, and putting it back together, again, you're not designing what you want, you are dealing with what you get. And what I mean by that is some of the the teams that I mentioned, like the tiger team, and tsunami planning, those are really designed to, to look deep in and come up with solutions on in. And so often we create a operating model, and we don't read, evaluate it or revisit it for two or three years. I would revisit mine quarterly, just to make sure that it's running as optimal as it could.
Dr. Kathy Ritchie 26:43
Great suggestion. Thank you. So Kim, if we wanted to know more about where we could find your three books, could you tell us the best place? Yes, Amazon. Okay. So all three of your books, remote work, get scrappy, and the bite me School of Management are available on Amazon. Correct. Thank you. That's great. So I want to thank you for being here and supporting us at the center of advancement of virtual organizations. And we really appreciate your insights. And we know that our listeners will benefit from this experience. So thank you for being here today. Kim.
Kim Shepherd 27:22
This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.