The WomenTech Global Conference is one of the leading events to celebrate diversity and women’s success in technology and leadership across the world. This year, more than 100,000 people tuned in to get inspired, gain fresh perspectives from technologists and leaders in companies such as Amazon, Discovery, Disney, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft. We are honored that mindit.io has joined the ranks and couldn’t be more proud of our colleagues sharing ideas from the mindit.io vision and culture with the world. For us, it’s not new information, but it was a great opportunity to celebrate reaching a point of maturity and wisdom in our journey as a company, as the ideas that we have been building on since our inception are merging together in a cohesive, people-oriented and successful recipe for company-growth by putting people first.
The feedback around the idea of Caring as part of your business growth is encouraging us to develop this idea more and more and to share it with the business world in the hopes that others can successfully employ it in their companies, cultures, and even personal life. Let’s start by doing a recap of what happened at WomenTech Global Conference 2021:
Jun 8th, Keynote Speech - Lucia Stoicescu, CEO of mindit.io
The keynote, as our journey for building company culture, starts with one meaningful question: How do you measure a successful partnership?
Think of this question through the lenses of both your personal and professional life. Is it the duration of the partnership? The quality? Is it being there when the other needs you the most? What about the outcome? Or the number of challenges that we overcome together or the number of obstacles?
Over the years, we have tried answering that question through multiple lenses and even though the answer will never be a clear-cut, one-size-fits-all, for us, for our people, both in their jobs and personal lives, the answer is that the recipe for success is an altruistic one, a team recipe. It comes not just from what we contribute directly to the outcomes, but more from creating opportunities for others to grow.
And the way we do that is by caring. We care. Where people are, where they want to be, about their journey, their struggles, their ambitions and there is no one size fits all when it comes to people. This naturally applies to our colleagues, but more importantly, it applies to people in general and one key factor of our success is that we, as a company and as people, also apply the same principles with our business partners. We learned to build a culture of caring for more than the business we generate with our partners, but also about how they provide value in the world, about their struggles and their success, gaining a deep understanding of their business, their products, their people, their culture. In the end, there are tangible results, but also something that can not be measured. We frequently hear things such as “Keep doing what you are doing because this is what we need'' and we’re sure that this has a lot to do with building a strong people-to-people cultural fit with our partners, which adds up to mutual trust and growth.
Of course, hearing these ideas from Lucia is an insightful treat on its own, but one of the major benefits that we are experiencing with this new approach to growth is that it’s easy for everyone to align around the core principles of caring. We got an interesting deep-dive session on these ideas the following day, thanks to our amazing colleagues in Project Management, the ones that are probably most exposed to how caring can drive an impact in both internal and external relationships.
Jun 9th, Info Booth Session with Roxana Staneiu & Ioana Miron, Project Managers @ mindit.io
Ioana & Roxana kicked it off by laying out some simple ground rules:
However we look at business, we have to acknowledge that people are the most important part of our journey. And when it comes to people, there are a lot of things that can make a difference, from that short & sweet “hey, how are you?” in the morning to being there alongside them when they need it most.
The relationships we build with each other are the foundation of care and we already discussed that care is the main prerequisite for people-led growth. We need to make sure that our people know that they are never alone. We make sure that everyone feels at home, knows they are in the right place, with the right people, building something meaningful every day, which sooner or later, reveals and completes their purpose.
People-led growth is not only about caring for our colleagues, but also for our partners. We have found that genuinely caring, as a services company, is something that will always grant a business edge, but more importantly, is to understand why that is and how companies grow from that.
Caring starts with treating the people we work with exactly the same, regardless if they are a colleague, employee, or partner.
Then, we invest the time to know our partners as well as we can. Not only the business and the products but also the people, on a professional and personal level.
Last, but not least, it’s also about being flexible. Flexibility is a mindset - the way we think about doing things - development, management, working hours, etc. As a services company, you might think that this is just excellent customer service, but it’s actually much more than that - it’s about letting the person at the other end know that you’re there for them and that it’s more than just a business relationship. The beautiful thing about this is that it also generates the same attitude on the other end and your people will benefit from a client that shows the same flexibility in some situations.
When you start looking at how this mindset impacts projects, you realize that beautiful things start to happen when there is a cultural fit. It’s much easier to build a project when everyone believes in it. The success of the project is not just in the plan, but also in people sharing the same values and the same north star. We like to say that a project is like a rollercoaster ride - it has ups and downs, challenges and opportunities, big wins and also blockers. As an employer, we need to make sure that people enjoy every moment of the ride. We need to give them our trust and they need to feel they belong there.
Granting trust leads to building trust in the long run. If everyone shares the north's start and passion, with maximum trust from the people around them, then’s when we drive change and lead transformation. It even leads to blurring the lines between management and employee, provider and client. Ioana even noted that she and her team, after building out a relationship with a client in the remote world2020, got the feedback “I thought you were in the same office with us.” Partners usually refer to us as an extended team and because of our approach, we usually do get this double positioning, of vendor and team-mate, as external and internal, as a business partner and personal friend.
If you would look at it from an effort standpoint (which you shouldn’t), it does mean more time to approach relationships in this manner. But, more often than not, the results can’t be measured in numbers and not even easily put in words. There are not so many results as there are usually real impact. And the biggest side benefit to this is that when the project is over, we still have meaningful human relationships with amazing people that span way beyond the workspace.
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