The Pursuit of Scrappiness #45 The importance of values & rituals, how to build trust in multi-national teams, and lessons from scaling Europe's fastest unicorn with Aiste Juknaite (Gorillas, ex-Uber)
Aiste Juknaite is the Director of Growth at Gorillas - Europe’s fastest unicorn and an instant grocery delivery giant out of Berlin. Before Gorillas, Aiste held several growth and customer service related roles at Uber.
In this episode we talk about Aiste's journey working for global unicorn companies, with a focus on scaling global teams, building trust, implementing values and rituals. Finally we talk about what challenges first-time managers of global teams face as well as the workload and work-life balance management.
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[01:35] - INTRODUCTION AND AISTE’S JOURNEY IN GLOBAL TECH
- Pushing into global tech companies from the Baltics
- Leveraging Linkedin to push your career
- Working within a truly global team at Uber
[07:25] - ON JOINING GORILLAS AND SCALING FAST GROWING ORGANIZATIONS
- Jumping into the Gorillas rocketship
- Scaling culture
- Importance of company values
- Building a team remotely
[13:10] - ON VALUES AND RITUALS IN DAILY BUSINESS
- Building team spirit remotely with rituals
- Working as a sole remote team member
- Homogeneous vs. diverse teams
- Introducing sub-team values
- Assuming others have positive-intent by default
[23:45] - ON BUILDING TRUST WITHIN TEAMS
- Building trust fast
- Authenticity, logic and empathy
- Responsibility of people managers to build trust between their team members
- The importance of 1:1 with ample time allocation
- Team personality tests together
- Start building trust from hiring
[32:10] - ON CHALLENGES FOR A FIRST-TIME MANAGER OF A GLOBAL TEAM
- Getting used to people being in control of when they respond
- Cultural differences between countries and nations worldwide
[37:55] - ON UNICORN WORKLOAD & SETTING PERSONAL BOUNDARIES
- No illusions on 9-to-5, working more intensely by choice
- Passion for building a business
- Setting boundaries when physically possible
- Setting strict personal life requirements
- Distinguishing between manager days and maker days
- Prioritise things you truly care about, sacrifice everything else
To reach out to Aiste use: Linkedin
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
Support for this episode comes from Venetor > https://www.venetor.co/
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