S01E03 - The Future of Work is Choice with Lisette Sutherland

FH - Hello, Lisette. Welcome to the show.

LS - Thanks for having me.

FH - Oh, great. My first question is always to people like, where are you now physically located in this world?

LS - I am located one floor above you in The Hague in the Netherlands.

FH - That is correct, because I am one floor located lower than you. Indeed. And today I'm not interviewing you because you're my wife, although I find it fascinating. I'm interviewing you because you are the director of Collaboration Superpowers. And for those who don't know Collaboration Superpowers, can you take minutes to explain in a few sentences? What is this that you do?

LS - So our mission is to provide individuals, teams and managers with a roadmap for how to work better together remotely. So we teach people how to work together anywhere. That's how we do it. And we do it through workshops. We do it through podcasts and a number of events and resources that we have, but mainly workshops.

FH - And how did that came about? When did you find that this was your mission? How did it work for you?

LS - Well, the mission was never necessarily to give workshops. That is just what the product that emerged that was sellable. The mission originally was to get people working together to solve the problem of aging. So the goal was to not die. And so I was working for a guy who wanted to get rid of aging and make it so that people didn't die. And I started getting inspired, thinking, well, what else could we do if we could get the right people working together that weren't in the same location? And the way that was coming about was the guy who didn't want to die was trying to get longevity scientists working together in an online project management tool that he was building. So that's how I was working for him, helping build this online project management tool. I saw why he was doing it, and it just got me thinking. So I started interviewing other people who were also working online, trying to solve a variety of different problems. And it got me started thinking about what are the great things that remote teams do and why we need remote teams. So that's how it started, and it turned into a number of different products.

FH - Okay, just to recap your motive, work together anywhere. Right. And you're facilitating people to learn them to help them learn how to work remotely together. Is it just remote or also hybrid? Also in person? How does that work?

LS - It's less in person, although I would say the same principles apply, and it is definitely hybrid because if you want to work successfully in a hybrid way, you have to set up your business with remote first principles so that the office just becomes one of many places that people go to get their work done. So if you want to set up a true thriving hybrid workforce, you have to make it so that people can get their work done from anywhere. So the same principles apply. It's just a little bit more coordination. Or I would say it's a lot more coordination with hybrid.

FH - Right. And I remember one of your slogans was stories about remote things doing stories about remote teams doing great things. If I so one of the great things that you could do is the longevity science. If you got remote teams of longevity scientists who work together on the problem of eliminating aging or dying altogether, that is one example of a remote team doing great things. So where does that slogan come from?

LS - Man, I think I was trying to in the very beginning, I was trying to narrow down my focus on what group of remote was I going to work on? Because early on, I learned from the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast that you really want to be in your niche. And so I was trying to figure out what exactly is my niche? And so I talk about remote work, but actually remote work has a lot more niches to it than people maybe realize. Like, there's the digital nomad niche. There's the people working in global companies niche. There's the solopreneur niche. Which niche was I in? And so I had to decide I wanted to talk about remote teams who were doing great things together. So I wasn't talking about the solopreneurs, I wasn't talking about the digital nomads. I was talking about teams working together from anywhere and the doing great things. Well, I was thinking, well, it doesn't matter to me what they're doing, like whether it be aging or developing a new hyperloop transportation system or just putting together some good software that somebody had an idea for, right? Those are all great things. Or maybe you're just working remotely and it's just a job. And the great thing is you're taking care of your family, right? So everybody's great thing is different. That's why it's so broad. But it came down to what is it that people want to do? And a lot of things can only be done if you get the right people together. And those right people are very rarely in the same place.

FH - Also seems like the search of what exactly? How can you narrow down your target audience? Almost like you talked about, it's not the solo entrepreneur. It's not the guy on the beach with a laptop. It's really the remote teams. Weren't you afraid then that you were going too narrow? Eventually you want to build a business around it, right?

LS - Yeah, indeed, I was afraid. And then that was definitely on my mind. But I didn't relate to the digital nomads because I've done digital nomadism, but I didn't relate to it because I didn't like it. I don't like the endless traveling. I like to have a home base and come back to it. So for me, it was I couldn't speak to that audience because I didn't like that lifestyle. So that narrowed it. That made it easy solopreneurs. I thought, okay, but what am I going to teach people about solopreneurring? Like, I was just learning myself. But remote teams, that's something I could relate to. I've worked on teams. I've done a lot of remote, so I could really target that. And to be honest, those were probably the first customers, also agile software teams. They were the first to adopt this remote style of working.

FH - Right. And what is your personal preference when it comes to working? What's your ideally, this is how I work.

LS - For me, I'm a solopreneur through and through or a solo worker. I love being around people for short periods of time. I'll say it that way. So what I like to do is I like to get together ideate brainstorm together, and then I like to go off and do work on my own and then get back together and check in with people and then go off and do work on my own. But I need space and time to think. I can't just produce on the spot. So that's my idea.

FH - But you could do that in an office, right?

LS - I could do it in an office, but my surroundings are surprisingly important to me, so I could do it in an office. But my home office is tuned to exactly what I like. I've got my flowers and my beautiful walls and my photos and all my books and my sticky notes. Right. I've got just everything. And it's warm. It's the exact temperature that I like it. I've got all my favorite monitors and lighting. Yeah, I could it's just a preference. I mean, there's nothing saying that I couldn't go into the office. I totally could. I just prefer not to. My idea was if I can design my life in a way in which I don't have to do that, but I can still make money. My goal is not to be the richest person in the world. My goal is to live like this.

FH - Right.

LS - So I just need to make enough to live like this and save for the future.

FH - Right. It seems that in your search of how do I work best, you found your way, which is work from home in the comfort of your own environment. And would you then let's use word stimulate. Would you stimulate others to work like you as well?

LS - I think everybody has their own personal productivity, so what works for me is not going to work for others. We see that in our relationship, especially like, you really dislike working from home. You really prefer being around other people in another place. And so I think that the future of work is choice. I think that people shouldn't be able to choose how they want to work. For those of us that really do better on our own or think better like this, then we can do this. And for those that really want to be in person, I think that's great. I think some teams culturally should be in person. Just not everybody.

FH - The future of work is choice. That's a quite profound statement. I think we got a few of these slogans like the future of work is choice and remote things doing great things. Remote teams doing great things. I have to say correctly. How do you support that? Yeah, completely. What do you do for the world?

LS - We give individuals and managers so teams and managers really we give them a roadmap inspiration for how to work better remotely. A lot of people are used to working in person. That's how we've done it for a long period of time. When you transition from the physical into the virtual world, our way of working, it's a new medium of work. Right? You need new instruments, new tools, sort of a new way of thinking. And for instance, by nature things become more of a documentation culture when you go remote because we can't see each other. So you have to make things explicit in another way. And right now documentation is how people are doing that. But once you become a documentation culture, it then becomes an information management problem. Right? Then we have to figure out how do we store our information? So these are the kind of things that most people don't think through when we talk about going remote, we think a lot about our home office and working in our pajamas. But actually the entire workflow of an organization changes. So we don't actually take people through the change that change. But that's what coaches are for because you need to do that in small increments over time. I feel what we do is we inspire people to recognize the change and to understand how they're working now needs to change in order to match the new medium of work. They need to come up with it for themselves. So we give them the principles behind it that they may not have thought about and then they take those principles and apply it to their own ways of working.

FH - So right. You're not helping people go to Ikea and pick up their favorite desk. That's all infrastructure. People can figure it out themselves. But it's more like how do you work to get it productively if you can't see it? How do you establish a level of trust in people and how do you manage those people?

LS - Yeah, the leadership is for sure probably the biggest challenge in the hybrid work field right now. The employees have figured it out. Everybody understands what their personal productivity is at this point or they're in the process of figuring it out because it is an ongoing process. It's leaders who are recognizing that they could have people back at the office, but the people don't necessarily all want to come back full time. So then it's how do we know what people are doing and how do we move from a time oriented way of working to a results oriented way of working? That's a real shift in how we work together and how we measure output and performance in people. So that's something that leaders really need to think through. So yeah, all of that gets addressed in the workshop and we may not solve it for people, but we at least point people in the right direction.

FH - Right. So you say that we have to move from a time oriented to a results oriented. I can imagine that. Usually someone works 8 hours a day and they clock in at 09:00, out at five. And now you're saying we need to go to a results oriented process. What would that look like?

LS - Well, you can't tell how example job.

FH - So let's say someone's in customer support, right? You used to expect them to come in at nine, go out at five. So what does it look like for someone who works in customer support to be results oriented?

LS - Well, in certain jobs like customer support, you could say that that one is actually a time oriented. For instance, you need to man the emails, or you need to be watching over the emails between the hours of nine to five so that you need to make sure that the emails have been answered between the hours of nine to five. So that could be something. However, if it were not a time oriented customer service, you might want to say, okay, well then we need to have a 95% customer satisfaction rate over the course of X or the questions need to be answered within a certain amount of time.

FH - As a manager, you need to state much more the outcomes of what you.

LS - Want to achieve 100%.

FH - Right.

LS - How people get there. And that's a real shift in leadership. Right. The shift is, instead of being this topped out approach, what I believe is that managers need to define what success looks like clearly, what is the definition of done, where are we going? And then move out of the way and let our people take us there and then focus on the roadblocks along the way. And then of course, there's the accountability piece. Are we getting to where we need to go? We need to check in along the way. There's a whole management philosophy that I've been learning about called tight loose, tight. So you give the instructions in the beginning in a tight way so you know exactly what success looks like, then you're loose. You let people have the autonomy that they need in order to go there and then you're tight again in terms of coming back with the accountability piece and following up with did the work get done? Is it high quality? That kind of a thing. So it's a loose framework but it can be applied in every situation and that's what I like about it. And with remote it's really important that managers recognize that you can't micromanage in this medium.

FH - You seem quite passionate about the topic. I can also see you the podcast is audio but I can see the video as well and can you describe a little bit where does that passion come from? There's almost sort of.

LS - I guess it's.

FH - Sort of a frustration in the need, I almost feel.

LS - Yeah. So the first thing that comes to mind is I want to bust people out of day prison. And I think it maybe just comes from the fact that I used to be prison.

FH - What's the day prison?

LS - It's a cubicle, like the cubicle jobs where people are forced to come into a building between a certain amount of time. I used to have to be at work between 09:00 A.m. And 06:00 p.m.. Monday through Friday. I love the job but it's absurd to force people into that time box because the job often didn't require it. Sometimes we had to be out like it was an environmental cleanup job so we had to be up at like five in the morning and out in the field dollars by 07:00 A.m. So we had to drive 2 hours just to get to a site that we were going to and then all of a sudden then it's not nine to five anywhere, then you're already working in this alternative sort of way. So from the very get go I wanted the freedom to not be time boxed into this rigid set of hours when it didn't work for me. So I think that's where the passion comes from. It's just recognizing that it's an absurd way of working that doesn't fit the modern times.

FH - Right? So when you talk about the modern time we have to disclose a little bit about our age, right? We're in the 40s, right?

LS - Late 40s. Late 40s.

FH - Late 40s. Not 50 yet. Late 40s. There are a lot of youngsters like 23, 24 going into the workforce now. How do you feel that? I think about it, I think that.

LS - This way of working is different at different points in one's career. I think early on we need a lot more social contact and a lot more social interaction. So if there are younger people who really like working remotely then they also need to take responsibility for getting the social interaction that they need whether it be through work or through their own personal lives. And I think that's just it is really hard, like when you're in your twenty s to know what you need and go out there and get it yourself. So that structure that we have set up where people go to college and then you go to get a job or you go to the office. It's almost kind of a good structure to sort of get people into society and working productively. And then once you know yourself and you know how you work and you know how you collaborate, then going more remote is no problem at all. But I can imagine that it's difficult for that reason alone, just that we don't know ourselves at that age as well as we do when we're in our late 40s.

FH - Right, but you also mentioned that when you were doing the environmental jobs, that was your mid late finish, that you really craved the freedom to design your own day as you wanted. And I still see that with the current young people and the but you also mentioned that there's a component of social interaction that is necessary and structure and accountability. So as a manager who is now in his mid late 40s, early 50s, who is managing that new generation of workforce, what are the two or three advices that you would give him?

LS - So one is if I were leading a team now, so I say I'm in my late 40s, which I am, and I'm leading a team and there's people that are younger. What I would really do is try to understand who's on my team and what they need in order to feel connected to that team. So it just takes a lot of research and you can do it. It's not like you have one session and you understand this is a way of managing, of just understanding your people. So the way that we do that is by getting to know them. You can do that through virtual icebreakers or just one on one calls understanding why they come to work, their intrinsic motivations. Like there's all kinds of exercises that we can do to understand our team and asking them what they need in order to feel connected. So what I, as a manager would do is give people the freedom that they need and then also build an environment that's conducive to my specific team. And it takes a lot more time and effort because as managers, you also have other stuff to do. But part of it is also knowing your team. So I guess if I were managing now, I'd invest a lot more in understanding my team and what they need.

FH - Is that a different skill then from working with people in the office, like co located?

LS - I don't think it's a different skill, but the way we build relationships virtually is different than in person. In person we just spend time together. You're already there, you're already in the office. I hate to say, but it's kind of analogous to an arranged marriage in a way. Like you're together, you're sort of in this forced situation. And when you're remote, you're not in that forced situation. There's a lot more choice involved when you're remote and so you have to really consciously make the choice. So I think that's the difference. But no, the principles are still the same. You're right.

FH - It's just that in a remote situation where you don't see each other and the only interaction you have is activity based, like we have a meeting about X now. You don't see the camaraderie that you would normally have in the office. You have to create that more remote. Of course.

LS - Yeah. You have no micro interactions online.

FH - Exactly. What do you want to achieve? Like in three, four years time, you have achieved what you wanted to achieve with collaborative superpowers and you can close shop. What would that one thing be? What would you wish in the world that you could help the world with?

LS - I would like that remote teams really are doing great things. That people are working together to cure cancer and to stop the wars and to clean up the environmental problems. That's ultimately what I would really like. I would like for us to be able to solve big problems together.

FH - And what do you need to achieve that? Well, how can my listeners, all 3000 of them, how can they help you in your mission accomplish that? Everyone needs more. You want to sell workshops, right? That's basically a business model. So you're open for workshop participants, for how what does it look like? What are other ways of people can help you?

LS - If people really want to sort of get involved in this causes, one is indeed upskill yourself in the remote medium and just come and take one of the workshops. It doesn't have to be with me. It can be one of the many facilitators that also give workshops. So just check out a workshop. We also have e courses now, by the way. The other way is if you're a trainer or a coach or a leader or a manager, then consider becoming a facilitator and teaching the materials to your customers and clients yourself. I think that either one of those avenues is a good way to do it. But just to educate oneself that remote is not the same as in person. It's a new medium of work. It requires a new skill set. And just recognizing that it does, it's not umbrella drinks and pajama bottoms like everybody likes to think it is. It is actually a new way of working. So just a matter of training. It's interesting because I think about the interview that I did with the astronaut about remote collaboration and I asked him about their communication and he said they train the surprise out of you. So they train with the two second delay and they train, he says, with all of that, once you get used to it, it becomes second nature. So I believe the same is true for remote. Once we get used to it, it's just going to be second nature we're not going to be talking about in the future, I guess ultimately, we're not going to talk about is it a remote job or not? It's going to just be a job.

FH - Right. And we have to educate ourselves as people to work in that new reality. Right?

LS - Yeah.

FH - You said the word facilitators. What do you mean with facilitators? Can you explain that?

LS - Well, if you give workshops and trainings or coach people, then you're facilitating workshops, usually for a living in one way or another. And so if you need to add an additional workshop to your portfolio that talks about remote and hybrid working, then you can join us as a facilitator. We have a licensing program, and then you have access to all of our materials, and you can use those to teach.

FH - Right. So if I'm a teacher, I'm a coach, and I'm looking for new coaching and training material, I can go to you, Lizard, and I can say, hey, the training that you developed, I want to be able to deliver that training myself, too. And of course, there would be some sort of financial compensation for you because you create the training material.

LS - That's the short version of it. Right. There's a license fee, and then you get access to the material. And we even have university professors who are licensing the material and teaching it in their classes.

FH - Okay. And if I would be now the manager for a company, and I've got about 20 people in my company, and I listen to your story, I think indeed we need to do something with remote working. We go in either hybrid or we're already hybrid, forced by reasons, and we're not yelling for some reason, and I want to do something about it. So how would they go about it? Would I just send all my 20 people to you and then you figure.

LS - It out, or how yeah, just contact me. And I would all recommend a hybrid team collaboration or work together anywhere workshop for the team. And I'll set you up with a facilitator.

FH - Right. And would that be a workshop that is specific for me and my company?

LS - That's correct.

FH - Right?

LS - That's correct. So it's not only a workshop where you're learning together with people in your company, it's also a team building experience on top of that, because the workshop is partially learning and partially experiential. So the reason why I developed the workshop online is because I want people to feel what it's like to be on a high performing remote team. So by the end of the four sessions together, that we feel like a remote team together by the end. And I've set the workshop up on purpose to take people through the process of gelling as a team. So there's a lot more to the workshop than just the content. It's also the experience of it that really helps a team, I believe.

FH - Right. And later you could say, hey, we went to this workshop, and that's where we learned that. And that and people feel more free to experiment with things I learned in your workshop when they get back to their own desk, I guess.

LS - Exactly. Everybody walks away with a super action plan of ideas that they can try immediately.

FH - Then I get to my final question. That you have a podcast yourself. The collaboration superpowers podcast. What is it called?

LS - Yeah. The collaboration superpowers podcast. Stories of remote teams doing great things.

FH - Here we go. Stories of remote teams doing great things. Who is the one single guest or description of a guest that you would love to interview on your podcast? But so far it hasn't happened yet for reasons. Matt, how can the person who's listening now, how can you reach out? Who is it?

LS - It's Matt Mullenweg from Automatic.

FH - Matt Mullenweg, if you're listening from Automatic.

LS - Versus what is Automatic, they're the company that runs WordPress, amongst other things. They also do an app called everybody Knows WordPress. The whole Internet is based on WordPress, basically, and they also developed a meditation app called Calm. But Matt Mullenweg seems like, from everything that I know and have heard about him, seems like a really good egg and has always been one of the pioneers in remote working. He set up WordPress to be not 100% remote in the beginning. They had a San Francisco office, but they are 100% remote now and has just been a real pioneer in terms of the philosophy behind it. So, yeah, I'd love to have him on the podcast. I'm not a big enough fish. He has better things to do, but I think he's a wonderful person and people should really check out his stuff.

FH - Okay. Matt or someone can reach out who knows Matt. Lisette loves to ask him a few questions for her podcast. I guess that will also make him famous. So it's a win win, the same as it was a win win for me to have you on my podcast. Lizet, you were fantastic. I hope that the people listening enjoyed your podcast or this podcast episode and this interview. And if they have one, reach out. The show notes will give you the contact details for lisette. So definitely check that out. And thank you very much.

LS - Thanks. I'll see you online and in a few minutes.