Remote Career Development: Michael Gardon Of Rejoin Media On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With David Liu

Building rapport is probably the most difficult in a fully remote setting, so we do video 1 on 1’s and have dedicated slack channels to highlight personal accomplishments or milestones for the team to chime in on. I also always encourage our team to be lighthearted and funny on our communication channels which helps us bring our own personalities and creates a culture where no one is assuming the worst intent on any issue.

Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaboration with others, and knowing yourself well enough to be able to continually assess your strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging enough when you work in an office, but what if you work remotely? How does remote work affect your career development? How do you nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues? How can you help your employees do this? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely”. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Gardon.

Michael Gardon is a former derivatives trader turned investor and entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Rejoin Media, a holding company for digital brands and businesses. Mike is also the Executive Editor and Host of the acclaimed Careercloud Radio podcast on Careercloud.com. Mike is an advocate of remote work and intentional work-life integration. You can see Mike’s writing and media mentions on investing, startups, life and work across the internet on these sites: The Simple Dollar, Reviews.com, The Huffington Post, Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo News, GoBankingRates, Ask Men, Cosmopolitan, Discover Financial, The Penny Hoarder and Good Financial Cents.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

I was always interested in markets and investing, so I started my career out of college as a derivatives trader. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but did well enough to eek out a career in my early 20’s. I then got involved in entrepreneurship, putting my first investment round together at the age of 27, was part of another internet content company that was acquired, worked in corporate innovation consulting, and after a few years of boredom there I founded my current company, Rejoin Media where I acquire digital businesses and grow/hold them as a portfolio.

I’ve always been interested in how people forge their own career paths, and since my career path has been anything but ordinary, I have a passion for helping people understand how they can invest in themselves and get more intentional about building their work-lives.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

My first company created intellectual property and software/hardware designs that were used in electronics. I had no experience in this industry and frankly didn’t understand even how our product worked. However, I was just naive enough to start. I put our funding round together, and I ended up making our first sale by basically stumbling into content marketing. That sale was to an engineering firm working on deploying the largest satellite constellation (at the time). So, while our company is no longer running, our product is up in space onboard approximately 86 satellites orbiting the earth.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

So, I put this content marketing piece together for a very technical online publication that tons of our target market engineers read. The technical co-founders on my team literally told me that when we publish this we’ll have thousands of inbound inquiries from all over the world. We published, and all we got was a ton of critical comments about how our patented approach wasn’t novel, or yeah “we can do that here, too”. Being young, I was devastated and thought our company was over. I learned 2 lessons from this: first, no one cares about what you are doing. You have to tell people, then tell them again, then show them and basically keep talking about your product until you’re sick of it, and only then will people start to get it. And, second I learned that it only takes 1 person to say yes. A couple months later our first customer contacted us (from reading that original article) and we got a deal in place to put our technology up in space.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

There are three:

• “Don’t be overheard complaining, even to yourself.” — Marcus Aurelius

Sometimes you just have to get something off your chest, but complaining is negativity, and negativity drains energy instead of creating energy to solve the problem. The most detrimental person to complain about is yourself, so don’t do that. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt.

• “What hurts, instructs.” — Benjamin Franklin

This quote isn’t that you have to endure pain all the time, but rather that to grow, you have to constantly be pushing your limits, and when you do you will sometimes get burned. But that is how we learn best. I don’t learn well from instruction, I learn best from doing and I have to accept that sometimes I will feel pain, but that helps me learn.

• “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” This is a saying that Navy SEAL teams use.

This quote is also about learning. When you’re new at something you need to start slow. When you practice slow, you can make your movements smooth and do them faster and faster. To go slow when you want to go fast requires patience, and I think patience is the biggest lesson I’ve learned to this point in my career.

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

I use a phrase with my employees that goes like this: “Resilience is brilliance.” What that means is that we all need to build resilience into our systems and into our lives. Resilient systems may not be the fastest or most “optimized” but they will endure the longest. So I try to work with my team to set realistic goals that don’t rely on a person going 110% full time. We like to operate at 85% capacity. My team is fully remote and we don’t have set hours or time off policies. They are empowered to do great work and they get an understanding of flexibility.

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

I’ve worked remotely most of my career, and I built my current company to be fully remote well before the pandemic hit. The main benefit of remote work is, in a sense, freedom, and I think in order to maximize your happiness and longevity as a human, you need to optimize for freedom. So, remote work often allows you to live (or travel) where you want to. You can move to a lower cost of living area and still have access to great job opportunities. You also have more freedom to choose your work schedule — this is a godsend for working parents who used to feel bad about missing out on their kids’ activities because they felt they had to be in the office. Finally, most people who enjoy working remotely report that there are less distractions and they are more productive at getting actual work done in a timely manner.

Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?

Most of the challenges of working remotely extend from the flipside of freedom — responsibility. First, you have to be much more self-motivated to sit down and do work when your boss or colleagues aren’t over your shoulder. Second, Many remote employees struggle with time management and focus, especially if they work exclusively from home because there are always personal projects and endless chores to distract during the work day. Third, is that communication is often a challenge. It’s very hard to rapidly collaborate over slack or even zoom, so sometimes for highly collaborative roles, progress can take longer in a remote setting. The fourth challenge is building rapport with colleagues and bosses. The fifth main challenge that often gets reported is a feeling of isolation, especially when people have their offices exclusively in their homes.

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

1. It’s hard to “fix” self-motivation, but what you can do is to get very honest about how you work in order to take advantage of patterns in time, environment, and context where you do your best work. For example, I’m not a super-efficient worker. I’m constantly context switching and moving multiple things ahead. For years I’ve chastised myself that I need to become more efficient and focus better. I’ve tried every productivity app and system out there. I started tracking how I spend my time and my energy and built my typical day around that instead of tasks. So now I’m way more productive because I’m doing hard work in my high energy times, and have outsourced things that drain my energy so that those tasks don’t rely on my willpower to get done.
2. For focus and time management, you just have to develop the capacity to compartmentalize. My wife, who works in a hospital, lightheartedly pokes fun at me when she comes home and the house is a mess even though I’ve been working “at home” all day. When she works from home for a few hours she’s doing household chores as well, but that doesn’t work for me. I developed the capacity to walk past a mess because I’m focused on a more important work task, and I can pick up the mess later. Focus and time management is all about prioritization and sticking to that prioritization.
3. Communication can suck in a remote team. Here’s how I deal with it. First, we build written communication into our hiring process but conduct email interview tests. Second, here’s my communication hierarchy rules Email if you don’t need a response until tomorrow (include all relevant context in an email that is needed to respond without referencing other emails), slack if you need a response today, call if something is needed urgently. Large zoom meetings with more than 3 people generally don’t work for us, and no Zoom meetings get scheduled for more than 45 minutes. This forces our teams to only include people that need to be there and to have a solid agenda with clear action items.
4. Building rapport is probably the most difficult in a fully remote setting, so we do video 1 on 1’s and have dedicated slack channels to highlight personal accomplishments or milestones for the team to chime in on. I also always encourage our team to be lighthearted and funny on our communication channels which helps us bring our own personalities and creates a culture where no one is assuming the worst intent on any issue.
5. I try to get around the isolation feeling by getting out of my home office daily for at least a few hours. I have a number of coffee shops that I frequent, and I know many people at these different places so I get some social interaction.

Let’s talk about Career Development. Can you share a few ideas about how you can nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues?

1. Always be networking. Relationships are the key to advancement and choice. Just because you’re not in the office doesn’t mean you can’t find ways to connect with others. Zoom happy hours, or 30-minute networking sessions work great.
2. Communication is key — your boss needs to have visibility into your progress, and you need accountability to stay motivated. I created a one-page progress sheet that I’d share with stakeholders in my consulting days. It was a template and I’d update metrics and add commentary that was easily digestible. Bosses love this kind of stuff because they don’t have to worry that you have ownership over your work, and when the next project or promotion comes up, you’ll be top of mind. Nobody does this kind of thing. The bar is low.
3. Walk the walk. If you’re taking advantage of remote work to live a very fulfilling and balanced life, find a way to help others who may be struggling with it. This can get you noticed and further advance remote culture into your organization.

Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?

There is a lot of talk about a labor shortage right now. This “great resignation” is largely driven by employees not feeling respected and valued at their organizations. As a manager, I’ve always looked at my role as a coach, where I’m trying to develop the best of the people that I work with. I think that’s an important mindset shift to make. Making the move from taskmaster-manager to coach-manager means taking time to understand your employees’ unique strengths, motivations, and aspirations then connecting them with learning opportunities or responsibility opportunities that they can succeed in. Work with the individual to create a development path. Let them choose, and your role as the manager is to provide resources to help them advance on that path. Perhaps that means creating a mentorship program, paying for skills training or just giving someone a chance to step up.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

If I could make a T-shirt or a billboard it would say “U choose U.” I wish more people would bet on themselves earlier in their lives and take more small risks to help them build quality lives. I think the timing is right for this in that we’re at this inflection point where people are realizing there’s more to life, and we can set up our work-lives better to achieve more with less struggle. We have this 7 billion person hive mind on this planet, and we’ll see the most progress when every single one of us is experimenting, learning and pursuing a great life.

It took me into my late 30’s to really, fully bet on myself. I intentionally took 2 years to set up my life the way it is now, optimizing for freedom and balance. I would love to help people do this even earlier, and I hope I can pass on these lessons to my kids.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Subscribe to my podcast by visiting: https://www.careercloud.com/careercloud-radio

Subscribe to our Careercloud Newsletter at careercloud.com

Follow me on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgardon/

Check out my latest side project inspired by my family: https://quotebookjournal.com/

Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success.