15x4 Munich Interview with Viktoria Korzhova
On 21.03.20, we sat down with the Viktoria Korzhova — city coordinator of 15x4 Munich and asked her about her personal life, 15x4 Munich, and the current pandemic. Here’s what she has to say:
So how are you dealing with social distancing?
I was working from home even before this. In the past 10 months, I’ve been working remotely. Even if I’m traveling, it has been mostly solo. Secondly, I am an introverted person. So that’s something I initially liked about my current job position. Working from home is pretty good for me. I mean, there are some difficulties such as not being able to just go to your colleagues when there is an issue, and so on, but I do not miss the casual chit chat because it actually tires me a lot.
So, it’s actually better for my work performance if I am alone. I do feel that what changed with quarantine is what I do after work. Before I would occasionally go out, meet with friends, go to the cinema but now I can’t. When this whole thing started, I was pretty stressed out thinking that all of a sudden all the plans suddenly changed. I was supposed to be in Paris this week and I was supposed to go to Bonn next week, and so on. The difficulty for me is the uncertainty — it’s now really hard to make any predictions. We all hope it will get better by summer but what exactly does it mean? Will the quarantine be just less strict? Or which countries one can eventually travel?
Do you have any advice to people who are feeling the same way about the pandemic and social distancing?
Well, as a scientist, I first would say that it’s normal that you’re super upset or feeling angry or experiencing some mood swings or really just feeling low because we are in a stressful situation. I think it’s very important to give space to these feelings, accept that you’re going through this, and allow yourself to feel this, even though you can always say there are people who are in the worst situation. For me, it was important to spend a couple of days just being super sad and stressed out and not trying to only look at the positive stuff. It’s very dangerous to hide your negative feelings.
The next step is to understand that it’s a good time to think about what you can do to help yourself. It’s important to take care of your health, e.g. your physical feelings like getting enough sleep and trying to eat well, even though it might be limited to what you can cook. Doing some exercises is also very good. I started to do more of this because exercise does help to relieve stress — maybe not from the first try but if you do it for like three days, there is a high probability that you’ll feel much better.
Thirdly, doing something that makes you feel nice like taking a bath or whatever feels nice to you. Fourth is to think about how you can keep the important connections in your life. Online chat with some of your friends whom you regularly met. Also, try to talk about something which is not coronavirus related because it can be stressful. If you are in some circles where people are only discussing the virus, it’s also okay to distance yourself. Rather, indulge in things you like and enjoy doing like hobbies or movies or video games.
You answered by saying “as a scientist”. This begs the question, what are your educational background and your research focus?
I am a neurobiologist so my doctoral research was very different from viruses. It was about Alzheimer's disease and the pathology of neurons during Alzheimer's.
What was it like working on such a challenging task?
They are different things which are difficult or complex and certainly working with Alzheimer’s has some very complex stuff. For example, we know about its existence for so many years yet we are unable to find out what is the cause of it. Working in any medical-related field, specifically, diseases have this additional feature that you feel a sense of responsibility: On one hand, you can really help people, but on the other hand, there is never a promise and you can never be sure that you will be able to do anything about it even after working for decades.
The other thing is that working with diseases like cancer or neurodegenerative diseases e.g. dementia, there is a lot of funding available which is understandable because this is where people want to have fast progress. But big funding attracts many people who may have big egos. And then it is often that you see how people make more effort for recognition rather than for knowledge.
For me, working in the disease-related turned out to be pretty hard. I know that there are some scientists who are motivated just from the fact that they are doing something significant even though in most cases it might not work. Wasn’t really the case for me, I have to say. I worked in the disease field for almost all my scientific career and I was very tired of it, by the end. I was thinking if I’m staying in academic research, I will do something different like some more basic science rather than disease.
Give us one take-away from your doctorate.
It is certainly a very special experience that you cannot get otherwise. On one hand, it destroyed some delusions I had about science and the researchers. I learned that they are also people and so, sometimes they do irrational things or things which are not in the best interest of science.
On the other hand, it is still pretty incredible how scientists manage to discover new things. What I learned is that humanity is strong as a society, as a group of people. We’re not strong on our own because we all have some flaws inherent by nature or by social conditioning and so we can be wrong sometimes. But as a group, we are actually very strong. In science, with time, most of the wrong ideas are eliminated and good ideas are developed. I think that going through a PhD helped me appreciate that it’s really so important to collaborate with others.
Tell us about your work experience.
My current job is very interesting and I’m learning a lot. I’m currently working in sales and a bit of marketing in a company that sells equipment for neurobiological experiments on mice. Here, my PhD experience is applicable because I did the same methods which our customers do and it’s very valuable that I have this experience. At the same time, my role is very different from what I have ever done before: I need to find potential customers and communicate with them. I also support our existing customers, i.e. how to do what they want to do. Since we are a small company, everyone is at some stage involved with everything. So I also take part in product development and strategic planning, I also get to give suggestions so it’s very interesting. This is something I think I wouldn’t be getting in a big company and is what I enjoy the most right now.
And what are your future career plans?
At the moment, I don’t plan to come back to academia because, after my PhD, I also worked a bit more in the scientific management, which was still in academia but a non-research job. Even though it was nice I felt it’s very restricted. The potential to grow is not that high, and personally, that’s not fitting me so well. From my experience now in the commercial sector, I think that fits me more. Ideally, I see myself working in product and team management direction which I do in 15x4 Munich now because actually that’s very fun.
Speaking of 15x4 Munich, what are your responsibilities as a 15x4 Munich team member?
Right now, I’m a city coordinator — meaning I’m coordinating the whole team of 15x4 Munich. I am in touch with all the groups and individuals, trying to make sure that everyone is doing what they should be doing to ensure that our regular events are happening. If there are problems coming up or there are some unclarities, then I clarify them and provide everyone the access to the information they need. When the time allows, I also try to help us develop and think about the strategic vision for the next months and years, like with whom we can collaborate for our benefit, from where we can learn.
As a city coordinator of 15x4 Munich, what is the vision for your role? Do you see your role evolving in the coming years? Do you see yourself being in this role in the future?
First of all, the city coordinator role has to always exist. There should always be someone who is coordinating and being like a central node for communication. This role should not be confused with a strict decision-making role. I’m also trying not to make any decisions myself and to not work in the hierarchical way that I give the orders but rather facilitate decision-making in the team. Ideally, this role should be exchangeable because, first, It can be a pretty stressful and tiring role, so one person should not do it for years and years. Secondly, new people bring new ideas. Moreover, I think it’s important that this role stays as a facilitator role but not the role of the ruler of the organization. So if anyone stays too long at this role, they will more or less inevitably develop into this. I hope I will not get to that stage. My vision for myself in a couple of years is to actually make sure we have an understandable workflow within the teams and that I train someone else for this role and hand it over.
As you mentioned, it can be a pretty stressful role, what is your motivation to continue volunteering for 15x4Munich?
It’s fun also! It’s not only hard and stressful, but it’s also very rewarding when you see things actually happen. It is super rewarding seeing things happen when I did not actually help much and people knew how to do things and they figured out how to overcome all the difficulties and this means my initial help was good for them to start. There is a lot of growth for me personally, since to facilitate this teamwork (project management and team management), I have to learn how to actually do this because I never had special training.
Can you give some examples of skills you have learned from being part of 15x4 Munich?
One skill that comes to mind is moderating a discussion. This is not trivial especially if you have to combine the role of a moderator and being a meaningful part of the discussion.
Another thing I learned, and I’m still learning, is how to listen to other people especially when I don’t like the idea and my inner self tells me that’s just nonsense that we shouldn’t be doing. I try to understand: Why did this idea come up? What’s behind it? How can we do something based on this which will be actually good for us? Basically, what is good in any idea, is the kind of question I’m trying to ask myself. There have been things about which I was initially against, but we implemented it and it worked fine, so I changed my mind. I guess this can be counted as a skill too: listening, listening to others is a big skill which I have learned.
And I learned not only skills but also lessons. One lesson is that however good you are and however good you try to be, there will always be people with whom you’re not able to work and then there is no other solution but to just let it go. It’s good if it happens mutually between the two parties and they agree in a nice discussion that it is not working. Sometimes though, it can happen in a pretty nasty way which is inevitable and you have to accept it and not take it personally.
A two-part question now: I) why do you think people should attend our events, II) why do you think people should join our team?
I think people should attend our events because they will learn a lot of new things, they will actually understand the things that we talk about, and they will meet people with whom they can have really meaningful discussions. These like-minded people can be our guests, our volunteers, and our speakers.
Why should people join the team? Because you can learn so much about working in the team, project management, and specialized skills like social media or event organization. But most importantly, you will learn these skills from people with very high work ethics. I do think that everyone in the current team has a really high work ethic, otherwise, people wouldn’t stay in the team. Even when sometimes we don’t necessarily know how to do a certain thing, we are proactive in finding a way to work together, which I think is something not so easy to find in the commercial sector.
How did you feel when we decided to cancel our next few events?
I was super sad. At first, I did not want to cancel so I was actually the one who was pushing for not canceling because I really thought that it would not affect us as much as it is affecting us right now. So I really thought there is not much danger and we still can resume normal activities for the majority of the time. I also felt that it would be pretty difficult for the team if we cancel events because then the problem is, what do we do in between? What about the speakers and speaker preparation team who already invested the time for the March event?
Then, I think what is always stressful is this uncertainty and I was scared to be in this position because now we don’t know if the May event will happen, we don’t really know what then happens in summer and we don’t know what to do with all the people like with whom we already agreed for talks. Because of all these factors that are all unpleasant, I really didn’t want to do cancellations. But at some point, it felt like that’s the safest option actually. So when we canceled, even though I was sad, I also was relieved because looking at how the infection was developing in Italy, it was very likely that Germany would follow and it was quite clear that there was no other option.
We keep monitoring the situation and, to be honest, it is still pretty hard to predict when we will be able to resume our regular events. So we are currently working on two things: 1) finding a way to engage our guests while everyone is staying at home, and 2) bringing our events online for the time being. Let’s see how it works out!
Is there any book you’re reading these days or any book that comes to your mind right now?
I am reading several books at a time. One of them is Holacracy by Brian J. Robertson which I am reading for 15x4 purposes. I was thinking about organizational structure and then I got to know about this book. Funny thing is that in many ways, we already do what the book suggests. We have already managed to implement an organizational structure that apparently has a fancy name! Another book I started reading more recently, was recommended by my boss at work, it is about negotiations. It’s called Never Split the Difference by Chriss Voss which talks about how to build the conversation in a way that you will get what you want and the other person will still feel good about themselves.
Finally, we will leave you with the question, what is your favorite art form?
If I am on the receiving side of the art form, I think it’s definitely theater and television, in different ways. I like dramatic theater. I also like films and series but actually series more. If I’m on the performing side, I love singing especially in a choir. I studied in a music school where I sang in a choir and it was really a lot of fun!
We hope you enjoyed this interview and will come back for more storied about 15x4 Munich team!
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