Today’s my last day in Northern Ireland for 6 months.  For the past 5 years I’ve managed a highly motivated part of the Learning Pool team who are absent from our Derry mothership & who work from home in England and Scotland.  Tomorrow I become one of them.  This past couple of weeks I’ve been really mulling this over & wondering what it will mean for me.  I’m also slightly worried that I may not be the exemplary virtual team member that I imagine I will, a carbon copy of the perfect remote worker in the image I have in my mind’s eye.

In my view, these are the qualities & behaviours of a great virtual team member:

·         superb communicator – in both directions – giving & receiving information; this applies equally to customers & colleagues

·         highly organised in terms of managing appointments, follow ups, phone calls, CRM updates, keeping your online calendar bang up to date

·         ability to work efficiently on the hoof (on trains, in cafes, at airports, in the car)

·         knack to really bond with people you don’t see face to face much – other virtual colleagues but also the people in the powerhouse or mothership – the people you need to actually do things for you that you can’t do yourself

·         planning your schedule to get the most out of each day by combining appointments & using common sense

·         gift for really knowing what’s going on beneath the surface at HQ, think that comes about by really listening to what your colleagues say

·         makes the best use of the available technology & doesn’t get bogged down in constant technofail

·         books travel well in advance to get the best prices

·         effective collector & disseminator of customer information back to the mothership team

·         self starter with a lot of drive

·         ability to complete & finish things (this one is tricky for me) in a fast paced & constantly moving environment.

From time to time I’ve been critical of how other people do some or all of the above.  I guess I’ll know by this time next week how I’m doing myself.  Any hints and tips from you, my dear readers, will be most welcome as always.

So what am I going to miss most over the next 6 months when I’m London based.  Folks – there’s no competition on that score.  The photo of Paul was snapped yesterday at Stansted airport.  He’d just finished a conference call with our tech team & is posting something up on Twitter.  As usual, we had a few right old laughs yesterday – despite both of us having a 3.30am start, a tricky meeting at the Cabinet Office and the usual mixed bag of rushing around London for meetings, juggling stuff as we go.  Along the way, and starting at 5.30am, we also discussed everything that both of us are working on, we did some long term strategic planning, we both chatted to a number of colleagues, customers and partners, sketched out a couple of new products or markets for existing parts of the Learning Pool portfolio, swapped the usual load of gossip (mainly about other entrepreneurs or businesses), exchanged views on the content of business books we are both reading (cuts down on individual reading time if your business partner reads it & gives you a précis of course), managed to have both breakfast & lunch in the most random of places, went through some sort of time/space portal at Stansted airport, took two plane journeys & two long drives each, but were emailing again when we got to our respective homes last night.  The relationship anyone has (should have) with their business partner is pretty intense and full on.  I’ll refer you to a previous blog of mine if you’re interested in reading more about this – it’s here http://marymckenna.posterous.com/two-heads-are-better-than-one-10-pros-of-havi

We’ve been working together like this for 8 years, we rarely disagree and you couldn’t put a cigarette paper in between us.  I guess that’s what I’m going to miss most.

Yesterday Learning Pool hosted a visit from Northern Ireland Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Investment, Arlene Foster.  In case you missed it, at the end of 2011, Learning Pool was announced by Deloitte as the fastest growing technology company in Northern Ireland (as well as 6^th in Ireland, 26^th in the UK & 139^th in EMEA) based on revenue growth over the past 5 years.  They confirmed our growth to be a whopping 1,100% (gasp!).  The Minister expressed an interest in finding out more about the company so we invited her to call in.

We were a little apprehensive about her visit I guess.  As entrepreneurs we don’t have an awful lot to do with politicians (although maybe that needs fixing).  We didn’t really know what to expect from our allotted hour.

We needn’t have worried.  The Minister was friendly, personable, engaged & knowledgeable.  She spent the first half hour circulating around “Pool Heights” (our Derry HQ), chatting to our team and asking plenty of questions, her PA at her elbow jotting down a few notes.  The Learning Pool team are always keen to perform in front of an audience so they were in their element and there was a good bit of laughing and joking going on – especially when the Minister realised that we have two Americans on board (she asked them how come they live in the North West – you can guess the answer yourselves).  As we climbed through the floors of our building we watched members of the team showcase our new online finance training for government, demo some bespoke content and show the Minister a new set of graphics that are still work in progress.

Paul & I spent the last half hour in private conversation with the Minister while we all had a nice cup of tea (see photo).  Some of what we discussed was – the issues SMEs like us have in winning work with government, how we think procurement processes could be improved, some of the work we both do with Young Enterprise and our various digital interests (Paul with Digital Derry, me with Digital Circle), the role start ups play in creating a vibrant Northern Ireland economy and the work we both do with micro businesses, ideas around addressing the skills shortages we as a region are facing (we were glad the Minister brought that up and was well informed about the situation).

Thanks for coming by Minister, your new friends at Learning Pool are all fans!

I flew back from Los Angeles to London last week in economy class.  Whilst the British Airways flight was like hell on earth, it does only last 10 hours and you save a lot of money by flying economy.  However, amongst all the screaming & fidgeting & general bad behaviour that was taking place in front of me and behind me, my neighbour in the window seat (I was in the middle seat of three) was the exemplary travel companion and a joy to sit next to.  Why was this?

I’ll tell you why. 

She got onto the plane, was polite & said hello and then she got into her seat, got her pillow out, switched the tv on, put her headphones in & went to sleep.

We exchanged a few words during the night when the toddler in the seat in front of us was jumping on his seat facing us & screaming (his mother was watching a film – I guess she’d probably gone beyond the end of her tether & was doing her best) but apart from that we had no conversation until 20 minutes before the plane landed in London after we’d both been down to the bathrooms for a wash & a spruce up.

We’d passed trays & got up to let each other in & out but that was the extent of our interaction for 9½ of our 10 hours together.

Once we got chatting, it was nice to talk.  She was very pleasant & I’m sure we had a lot in common.  However, I’d rather be wishing I’d talked to my travel companion more having missed the opportunity than wishing I could move seats from someone I really don’t want to talk to for a 10 hour stretch.

I notice Dutch airline KLM launched their “Meet and Seat” app in December.  This will allow passengers to select seating neighbours having browsed their Facebook profiles.  I know what I’d be looking for.  Interested to hear what everyone else thinks on this topic.  I’ve heard fabulous Sir Ken Robinson mention his views and I know they are similar to mine – but maybe some of you like to find a chatterbox.  Funny long haul flight stories encouraged!

It’s a dog eat dog world out there, especially if you’re on the hunt for a job.  I’ve written a number of blogs over the past couple of years offering advice to people looking for new employment opportunities or getting ready to attend interviews and I always encourage people to be as proactive as they can.  This means being alert to opportunities as they come up, using your networks, sending carefully crafted emails or letters & cvs to organisations you want to work for, etc.  As we all know, a large percentage of jobs are never advertised – so it’s important that you get yourself on the radar.

However, you can go too far.  When that happens you can be in danger of either being disqualified for canvassing or you can just annoy someone so much that they put you on the “no thanks” list before you even get a chance to shine.

Recently I’ve started to receive large numbers of Linked In requests from people I don’t know.  Many of them are people that are looking for work.  Guys – this isn’t going to do you any favours.  First of all, I only connect with people on Linked In that I have met in real life & know and like.  I joked when David Cameron joined Linked In that he needn’t bother sending me a request as I wouldn’t accept it.  It’s the truth.  In my mind, it’s pointless being professionally “connected” with hundreds of people that I don’t know.  Twitter’s the place for that.

Sometimes, before I click the “ignore” option, I do take a look at the person’s Linked In profile.  Call that what you like – nosiness, curiosity, even politeness.  I live in Northern Ireland so if it’s a name I half recognise or someone that I think I may have met, I look at the profile to find out more information.  Surely that’s the point of having profiles.

I don’t then expect that person to send me a public tweet thanking me for looking at their Linked In profile & saying they hope Learning Pool will be in touch with them shortly. 

This is so wrong on so many levels:

1.       If we’ve advertised job vacancies, we’re in a process and using social media in this way to promote yourself to people in the company could be construed by some to be canvassing, and that can result in your application being disqualified from the process.  In Northern Ireland we work within very strict recruitment guidelines in order to meet legislation around equal opportunities in employment.

2.       I might sit in on interviews from time to time and I might meet people before we offer them a job, but it will be our team leads that are driving the recruitment process at Learning Pool not me.  If you contact me outside of the process, I am unlikely to know anything about the particular process you are in (we advertised 10 vacancies in the press on 27 December) and even if I was interested in your experience and skillset, I’m unlikely to mention you to one of our team leads – they’ll pick it up themselves as part of their shortlisting activity.

If you’re looking for a job & want to work at Learning Pool, spend time & effort instead improving your cv (most of the ones I see are dire) and writing a decent covering letter.  Or spend time getting onto our radar before we actually go out to recruitment – so that we already know you.  There are many ways you can do this – intelligent commenting on our forums, writing an interesting personal blog & making us aware of that, conducting interactions with us on Twitter or coming along to our events & chatting to us.

I know that many of you will have opinions or questions about this topic and I hope we can have some debate in the comments section.  As always, love to have your input.