JOINING a Remote Team - 3 of 4
- Mark Stacey
- Nov 13, 2020
- 9 min read
This post is part of a series (3 of 4) on constructing a fully-remote and high-performance team.
Thoughts on Joining a Remote Team
Everyone wants to work from home and several are getting the opportunity now. I may be the first to tell you the grass isn’t always greener. I started working from home over 9 years ago (my wife has as well). There are obvious life-benefits (more time with family, no commuting, localized support when children are in the house, etc.) The benefits are abundant but so are the drawbacks. Don’t be naïve accepting a work-remote job. They are inherently different and should be approached with expectations of what is needed. Hopefully, this new opportunity is full of other all-stars; those sprinting ahead who don't need in-person oversight. Below is my advice on what to consider when joining a remote and high-performance team.
What to Bring
Contribute your Style
Join the team or company with the understanding you were hired because of your knowledge but also because of your culture match. Be professional and respectful but don't shy away from your own style. Do the research to identify the culture of the team prior to joining. Put in the effort to understand the strategic direction of the team and company. After you understand these to some degree, don’t hold back contributing your own culture. If people talk about holidays they celebrate, talk about those you celebrate. If people talk about kids/hobbies/etc. and you are comfortable talking about the same, do so. Share whatever you are comfortable sharing - it will help you be received as a fellow human vs a remote AI.
Time Zones Matter
Do not forget that people live in different time zones and accommodate the person(s) you are working with. Always identify what timezone you are speaking about in communications. If you schedule times for a meeting with someone else, propose times in their timezone and specify as much. If there are multiple different timezones, propose times according to the Headquartered office.
Sound basic? It isn’t and is often overlooked. Every email with times, internal and external to the company should specify timezones. The 3 letters will help avoid unprofessional mistakes and if you start accommodating others (especially those international), they will likely follow suit. It is disappointing and unprofessional when someone overlooks a remote workforce and schedules a meeting at 0500 or 2030 without acknowledging the impact on others.
Be Agile and Adapt
Understand for growing teams and or organizations, your duties and contributions may change. This is often a point of frustration (“I wasn’t hired for that”) but should rather be considered an opportunity. Joining a fast-growing team means that there is a lot to do and priorities may be dynamic. Find those tasks you are passionate about and add value. If you do well, you’ll likely get to do more of those types of tasks and have opportunities to build your ideal-job within the company. Approach this with balance – there will always be work that is fun and work that needs to be done. These two won’t always align.
Hit the Ground Running
Don't assume what you can contribute has already been done or doesn't add value. Ensure you understand how the organization communicates and works...and then contribute immediately. If you have an idea, email it to your supervisor. If you think the onboarding process was lacking, offer to improve it based on your own experience (this can be done the first week addressing the boring interview question of 'success in the first 30/60/90 days'). You were hired for a reason - convince the organization they were right sooner rather than later.
One consideration worth mentioning: Don't be arrogant thinking you have all the answers. A solution at a previous workplace may not be the solution for your new employer. Realize there isn't a right or wrong answer when building a team and instead, adapt what you know to where you are.
What to be Aware of
Work will Always be There
Especially for many government employees (prior to COVID-19), once you leave work, you are done working for the day. Working from home is very different. Your job is always down the hall or, worse yet, in your pocket on your phone.
I recall working for a national lab when there was a discussion about moving to a remote work-option. The proposal was one day per week. The initial drive was less energy used, carbon footprint from commuting, etc. During the massive staff meeting, limitations were placed that Friday and Monday’s were not options. The idea was people would turn each weekend into 3 days. I disagreed with the messaging completely - suggesting the organization didn’t consider their employees adults with professional judgment. This employer kicked off the program by degrading the workforce so most didn't want to participate.
Multiple studies before COVID found employees actually work more hours when remote and provide higher individual productivity. If anything, burnout is a higher potential given the job is so close.
I have heard many approaches for providing separation of work/life -
Drive around the block before starting your day
Only use your home office for work and never work outside of your home office
Dress in formal attire even though you are alone
There are much more - some more aggressive than others
What works for me and my spouse? Mutual respect and adaptability. If one of us has an important call, we support the other one. We balance and share all duties and schedule as much as we can. We each realize things will pop up last minute or be one-sided at times. That's fine as long as the balance is returned. Of course with COVID and homeschooling, we have felt pressure but the approach has prepared us well and been effective.
Expect Change
As mentioned above, expect things, including even the job description and scope, to change. This can be viewed as a negative and point of stress but if entering the job with proper expectations, it should be seen as the ideal allure of joining a team during rapid growth. Your influence and opportunities are largely limited on yourself and not on the job description. Find out what the hard problems are, design solutions, and drive the change vs being reactive to it. Being proactive will greatly enhance your career while being reactive to the change will be frustrating and potentially cause you to leave the company.
Your Growth Plan Will be Delayed
Anticipate the level of effort needed by yourself to create your own career. I firmly believe it is not your manager’s job to make you successful. If that were the case, he/she/they could claim credit for your success when it comes. I believe a manager’s job is instead to ensure you are pointed in the right direction and remove barriers to your own success. Regardless of what you are hired into, the promotion schedule, next job title, or salary band may all be unknown. If you are motivated by knowing definitively what is needed for the next business card, a start-up or young team may not be a good fit. These things will come, but it may take longer than you like. Consider they are ‘overhead’ to the organization when there is immediate customer work required to ensure the company survives. (Your HR and leadership team is building their own plane while in flight.)
Catching Up
When I left the government and joined the private industry, the pace was shocking. Peers and colleagues that made the same transition said it took around ~6 months to acclimate. Work may not be driven by project plans, approved budgeting, or charge codes. It may not have approvals understood or even consensus on what the work is.
When I made the sector move, I lived in Washington State and worked for a company based in Reston, Virginia. I was around the 5th member of a remote team. Every morning I woke up to the feeling I was 3 hours behind everyone else on the East Coast, the pace of the team was shocking, and everything seems frantic and disorganized. Every morning I took 2 hours to catch up. Every weekend I had to learn what people did during the week. I was always behind.
It took me about a year to feel comfortable in this environment. Part of my comfort came from speaking with other newer hires and hearing each say similar feelings. The entire team was concerned they were just ‘keeping up’ and worried about being fired. I was not alone.
I used to keep a folder on my desktop called “To Learn” where I would put forensic scripts, tools, emails, how-to’s, GitHub caches, etc. I thought one day I would go through this folder and learn everything I had missed. I finally learned this was not practical and deleted the folder. I started using "Mark all as read" for Skype channels in the morning. I started pursuing what I saw as the hard problems and collaborating with others working towards the same. I stopped worrying about everything else going on and it was liberating. I had successes but they did not come until I learned to manage myself in the environment.
Interviewing Notes
Of course, this is another topic with an abundance of information already available – Andrew LaCivita is a great resource and has free content on YouTube. I’d highly recommend all of his videos.
Learn Quickly
What I look for and try to present in interviews can be boiled down to one high-level skill: the ability to learn quickly. This involves a lot under the surface – the motivation to gain knowledge, the ability to identify what is important through the noise, and deciding how that knowledge is applied based on the problem.
For technical work in cybersecurity, I consider 3 buckets of knowledge; host, network, and reverse engineering. I’ve known very few experts in all three areas. Generally, a person is focused on one and proficient in the other two. One area isn’t better than the others and I don’t have recommendations on where to start your career – once you get far enough into one specialty, you will have awareness and experience in the others. Tools, methods, and technologies change. In reference to my "To Learn" folder on the desktop, I eventually realized I likely wouldn’t use many of the tools, and learning each would be a waste of my time. New resources are contributed to cybersecurity every day and using the same tools to answer every question will eventually limit effectiveness.
In regards to leadership, the faster you can identify personality styles and potential motivations, the easier you'll build rapport with your staff. Filtering through details to make a decision and justify it to the team is a skill. Your efficiency in doing this will make you a better decision-maker.
Learn how to approach a problem and have a clear understanding of what the solution may look like. Prioritize what knowledge is needed to properly answer the question at hand and focus on gathering that knowledge (and only that knowledge). Then, answer the question and move on. You learn experience through this process even if you forget the specifics around tools or methods used.
One of the fastest ways to gain experience in a technical field is consulting – every week you will face new networks, new challenges, new priorities, new personalities, different required deliverables, need succinct communication of technical concepts, etc. Through consulting, you’ll learn skills that will facilitate any other job. The ambiguity is a stress point but also the primary strength if you can find your footing.
Experience vs Memory
I am not a fan of asking about specific commands or tools during technical interviews. I instead prefer scenario questions that show the candidate’s thought process. Challenge the person's experience vs their long or short-term memory.
For example – when interviewing for IR in ICS, asking about EnCase commands isn’t nearly as useful as asking how someone would perform forensics on a device they’ve never seen before. If the candidate jumps in with FTK, Volatility, or host logs, it indicates they are familiar with common tools. I would much rather prefer the candidate talk through considerations interacting with the device, acknowledging volatile data may be destroyed if they start plugging cables in. The candidate should try to identify where data of interest can be found and reference the vendor documentation. (EnCase and Volatility may be useless.) This answer shows they can make decisions based on the situation and apply real experience vs defaulting to tools they have used before.
Similar to what Mr. LaCivita teaches, this also tells a story vs a short answer that can be determined as simply right or wrong.
Ambitious vs Hero
Heroics are good in moderation. They can’t be avoided in rapidly-growing teams and some people are highly motivated by completing these efforts and the recognition that follows. The ultimate goal of the team lead, however, is to limit heroics. More value lies in documenting how the work was done and creating processes and procedures to ensure those that come after you don’t need to do the same heroics. During an interview, avoid the temptation to focus on the heavy-lift you did alone if the story ends there. I look for people that are able to anticipate issues and foresee problems and then solve them to prevent heroics. These may sound similar but are not the same things.
Ask Questions
Very simple here – if you don’t ask questions, I don’t feel like you are interviewing us as a company. This tells me you don’t have your choice of where you work next which indicates your marketability is limited. Even if we are your first and only choice, ask educated questions.
The next post (part 4) in this series is focused on preparing to Scale a remote team and high-performance team.
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