Welcome to Frauke's journey.

Month: July 2020

Leadership Skillset

Five Essential Habits For Remote Meetings

No matter whether it’s due to the pandemic or because you already had an established remote team – if there’s one thing that we can all agree on, it’s that remote meetings just don’t feel the same as meetings in person. That may be in a good or in a bad way, and it is definitely something that also depends on your personal preferences. While some of us love meeting remotely, some others will always find it somehow inconvenient. However, you may not have the choice. And while your team members have the freedom to just hate it, you as their team leader will always have two hearts in your chest: Your personal preference, which might be one way or the other, and the necessity to make it work and get the most out of it.

Data Science & Technology / Thoughts on...

The Human Quality Paradox

Since I started working as a machine translation specialist, one of the most complex and interesting questions that impacted my daily work was this one: How can machine translation achieve human quality? This article is not a technical description of the numerous options you have to measure human quality, like BLEU score or other evaluation methods. No, in this post, I want to discuss a much more complicated question: What is human quality? Spoiler Alert: Human quality should be called Schrödinger’s quality instead, because it always has different states that are only distinguishable once they are in the past. I will present three reasons for this behavior.

Leadership Skillset / The Digital Age

Challenges For Establishing A Virtual Team

If your company worked fine during the pandemic-induces lockdown, you now have a very strong counter-argument for your My team cannot work remotely speech. Additionally, just forcing everybody back to the office of course would be possible, but is a misuse of your power which at least some of your team members will not forgive easily. It’s up to you whether you think that you want to go down that route…

Leadership Skillset

You Have To Trust Me!

Close your eyes and think of someone you really, truly trust. I bet it’s neither your boss, nor a colleague, right? It may be your spouse, your parent, your best friend, or your child. If you’re spiritual, it could be your God. However, you will most often hear this sentence from your boss or colleague. Let’s figure out why.

Leadership Skillset / The Digital Age

Working With Remote Team Members

Have you closed your company or department during the Corona pandemic? I bet you didn’t. I bet, suddenly, it was possible to work from home. If you didn’t close your company, if your whole team (or a high percentage of your team) worked from home during the lockdown, you just created the strongest counterargument against yourself – congrats, and welcome to 2020!

Leadership Skillset

Pride and Prejudice as a Team Leader

When discussing bias and prejudices with colleagues, I have more than once heard the sentence: This is not a problem for me. For others, yes, but I am free of bias… I think. Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: No one on this planet (and to my knowledge in the whole universe) is free from bias. There is a pretty simple explanation for this: Because we all have a brain. As a team leader, our most important job is to be aware of this fact, accept it, and act as independent from it as possible.