I just joined the company and now, how do I introduce myself?

5 min readSep 6, 2020

Good morning, how are you? I just joined the company to work together and I would like to introduce myself quickly, can I?

My name is Ricardo, I am Brazilian (born and raised in Rio de Janeiro) but I have lived in Lisbon (Portugal) since December and 2018 with my wife but most of my friends and family are in Brazil (Father, Mother, Aunts and Cousins ). Ah, I also have an older brother who is married, has 2 beautiful children and has lived in Chicago (USA) since 2017.

Team: Ricardo, why did you come to live in Lisbon, can you tell? Of course, but let me go back in time quickly to give context …

I graduated in Systems Analysis and I have 20 years of experience in technology and I started assembling computers, I became a developer (.NET), I moved to team coordination, project management but since 2016 I have been working with agility. Throughout this journey, I worked for several legal and well-known companies and I gained knowledge through practice but also through some certifications that I obtained over time.

It turns out that when I worked at the Rio 2016 Olympics, one of my personal goals for working and living in Brazil became more latent, so after I left the committee I dedicated myself to that goal and after 2 years preparing and looking for the right opportunity, I can make this dream come true and here I am living and working.

Although I came to live in Lisbon and here we speak Portuguese, knowing other languages helped to win this position because here we have several people and companies from other nationalities, so it is important to be prepared to communicate well.

In addition to this goal of having an international experience, I also have others such as:

Travel and see the world;
Grow your family:
Study and learn about some topics that are in my backlog;
Donate my time contributing and helping the agile community with the knowledge and experience I have;
Helping the agile community by donating my time and knowledge

Team: Cool Ricardo, do you have anything else you want to share?

Yes, people! It’s quick, I promise.
In my spare time I love to cook, watch Netflix, listen to music, go to the beach, travel and read.

Furthermore, I am a very transparent, resistant and courageous person.

Thank you for having me on the team and count on me to help in whatever way possible to achieve our goals. And if you want to talk more about some connection and common ground, I am available.

So, what did you think of this form of presentation? Do you know what it is? It is called Personal Map, created by Jurgen Appelo, taught in Management 3.0 classes and we can apply it in several possible ways.

I particularly like the way my friend (and mentor) Tadeu Marinho applies the Personal Map, so much so that I adopted this model in the Management 3.0 classes that I teach and in the teams that I work with when I’m acting as an Agile Expert on a client. You can read Tadeu’s article on how to apply Personal Map.

And how can Personal Map help?

Self knowledge;
It reduces the mental distance between people:
Create connections;
It generates empathy;
You know people better;
Team building tool;
Hiring people (ask the candidate to create and present their Personal Map)
Etc…

Personal Map is a very powerful tool and practice that helps people get to know each other better, better and create connections between them, because normally in a corporate environment we don’t go into personal details when we introduce ourselves because they may think it is “unprofessional” to say that I love to cook , for example. And if there are more people who also like it and together, we schedule a weekend to prepare and eat something delicious? Have you ever thought about it?

Instead of presenting the tool to you in this article, I introduced myself using my Personal Map and I believe that some of you may have created some connection with me or at least knew me a little more than what normally would happen (I would speak only of the professional, certificates and experience, correct?).

Running the Personal Map in a Management 3.0 class that I gave in July 2018 helped a lot in a delegation poker dynamic that I ran with the class because people already knew better. If you want to know more about that, you can read the article on Delegation Poker.

To conclude, I strongly believe in the “power” of Personal Map because as I said, it has helped a lot in the classes I have given but mainly in the work of Agile Expert to help the teams get to know each other and continue on the path to be high performance teams that have confidence and integration between them. #teamBuilding

That’s it guys, I hope you enjoyed it and that you run a Personal Map with yourselves and your teams.

Please check some photos with a Team creating their Personal Map here in Lisbon.