Chapter 1: Becoming Elite Manager with Crossover RemoteCamp for Managers

I’d like to share an unique professional and training experience. For those who don’t know me, I’m with Crossover since November 2015 and I enjoyed different roles here: Crossover Country General Manager for Romania, Crossover HyperLocal Manager (managing local operations for 9 countries — Romania, Russia, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, Argentina, Hungary, Belarus, and Ukraine), Integration VP, and (since January 2019) VP of Professional Services for Ignite Technologies (Ignite is part of Trilogy group).

Crossover is without any doubt an extremely challenging workplace with a very aggressive culture towards performance and business goals.

Since we’ve seen a lot of truly experienced managers failing Crossover culture, we decided to create an unique training program, namely Managers RemoteCamp, where for 4 weeks in a row one is exposed to all the frameworks a manager needs to master in order to be successful with us.

The cool thing about the training program is that all the frameworks have to be applied towards a real team, with real professionals. You get real business problems to solve, things that are happening now and you have to learn quick everything about the assigned team.

The truth of the matter is that I’ve followed many training programs during my professional career, even a MBA program, but never experienced and enjoyed something similar.

It’s a 4 weeks, full time program, where you are thought about Crossover Managers frameworks and you are required to deliver fast paced assignments demonstrating that you successfully acquired and applied the frameworks.

Enforce the quality bar, Check-in Chats, Rank and Review, Shrink to Grow, Deep dive, just to mention few frameworks, may seem not very well connected, but, as the program unveils, they are all fitting together in the most logical and coherent puzzle. On top, all the frameworks presented in the program aim the most important ingredient we look forward to having in Crossover: The Quality your team delivers!

It’s everything about quality, all the insights you get, all the decisions you make, all of them must generate timely deliveries and quality deliverables.

Coming back to RemoteCamp, I have to be honest and confess that I’m a little bit behind the schedule. But the 1st week will be always the most difficult one since you have to learn very quick your team, their business, the way they do business, their quality issues, and to understand where their quality issues come from. But you’ll see, the management frameworks you learn and apply, help you greatly to achieve your goals in this very fast paced environment.

However, the professional challenge is great, it inspires you and gives you the needed energy, so I’m fully confident I recover and deliver everything required by the RemoteCamp managers for this week.

What about me giving you the 1st week frameworks teaser? :)

Daily Check-in Chats with the team members keep you in close connection with the team you manage and drive the goal you are striving to achieve for the team (which is undoubtedly increasing quality).

Enforce the Quality Bar’ is the practice of evaluating every single unit your team produces against an objective and documented quality bar.

Gemba walk: Gemba is a Japanese term meaning ‘the real place’ — in our context, the ‘real place’ is where the work is done. The reason we believe in Gemba walks is because they provide an incredible amount of understanding of what your team members are doing. Really understanding what all the team members are doing is CRITICAL. Gemba walks are so important that without them, you are “managing blind”.

Last but not least, some words about Deep dive framework.

We deeply believe that ‘the answer is in the details’ — it’s why we do deep dives and it’s why we do Gemba Walks. An efficient leader in the company is constantly diving deep, interviewing the team members and looking for details.

So, I stop here, remember I need to recover since I’m a bit behind the schedule! :)

But please stay tuned, I’m going to share my RemoteCamp experience on each and every week!