Ep 45: Aiste Juknaite
on the importance of values & rituals, how to build trust in multi-national teams, and lessons from scaling Europe's fastest unicorn
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.
CLICK one of the links below to listen to the episode
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
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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