"Push your team daily; people thrive when trusted to handle challenges."
Carmen Lincolne Tweet
Carmen Lincolne is a seasoned business professional with over a decade of global experience in startups, business management and leadership, technology, international team management, and sales.
As the founder of Ivy Tech, Carmen is dedicated to connecting IT specialists from currently 11 different countries with growth-stage tech companies, ensuring high-quality, long-term partnerships. Ivy Tech specializes in recruiting, managing, and retaining software talent, enabling companies to focus on growth while saving time and resources. Ivy started out of a passion to provide ethical, well paid and stimulating employment to those who may not have access to a life in major cosmopolitan cities but want to be play their part in the tech boom.
Carmen also leverages her expertise to support early-stage founders with investor readiness, operational excellence, and growth strategies. Carmen lives in London with her young family which includes an entrepreurial husband and two little, very active boys.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company
Carmen Lincolne: Thanks for having me today!
First and foremost I am a wife and a proud mum of two little boys currently 2 and 4. We live in London as an Expat family to enjoy this fabulous city and grow our two companies, my husband and I run.
I am the founder of Ivy Tech and started the company back in 2018 in Ukraine to provide ethical, well paid and stimulating employment to young IT “nerds”. I am proud to say that we took part of creating Ukraine’s first true middle class, something that didn’t really exist up until a decade or so ago.
We now hire software engineers in several different countries remotely and also offer office solutions in some countries in Europe and Asia.
We work predominantly with Startups and Scaleups who have existing tech teams and want to bolt on a dedicated team to expedite their product roadmap.
We offer our clients an in-house employee experience (= loyalty, dedication and cultural alignment) and at the same time bring them the unbeatable benefits of outsourcing (= lower salary costs, quicker hiring and flexible contracts). The model works incredibly well!
Running Ivy has been one of the greatest honours of my life.
Can you share a time when your business faced a significant challenge? How did you navigate through it?
Carmen Lincolne: The biggest business and personal challenge I have faced to date was the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At that point, 100% of our software engineers were based in Ukraine, and on the week the invasion started, we had just completed high-end renovations of our brand new office space in Kharkiv.
We had also just signed off a big new client. I was in Australia in February 2022, visiting family and clients, when my team started messaging me that Ukraine was being attacked.
While we had plans in place for this scenario, nothing prepared us for the reality of it. Not many of our team members had left Ukraine at that point, even though this was something we made available to them. Initially I messaged each person individually, maybe 40 people at that time, to ask where and how they were.
My people were telling me about seeing and hearing bombs outside their windows and how scared they were. Others were not reachable at all. The next thing I did was get in contact with our clients in the US and UK. The response from our clients was mind-blowing.
Every one of them gave us time to sort things out and most of them offered additional finances to relocate who we could. To this day, all of these clients still work with our Ukrainian developers.
The loyalty on both sides has been one of the most moving experiences of my life. The early days and weeks of the war felt endless. I was the only manager outside of Ukraine and I barely slept in order to be available to my team.
A UK-based client partnered up with me to take the majority of the “Europe shift” to support people since I was still in Australia.
Within a day or two, we had an incredible support system going with daily check-ins each AM and PM and countless spreadsheets filled with the ever-changing locations of our people.
I fought a daily internal battle between wanting to break down, seeing a country I had fallen in love with being bombed to pieces, and my colleagues and friends so scared, and needing to keep a cool head to keep the business running.
I decided that the best thing I could do was focus on keeping Ivy stable so we could keep employing these people. We saw a lot of other IT companies making their teams redundant within days and weeks because they lost their clients as a consequence of the war.
Thanks to loyalty and professionalism for many years ahead of the war by our team members, we were able to retain 100% of our client base and software engineers.
After a few weeks of accepting our new reality and seeing team members back online, we turned to our business. How do we keep running this company? How will we find new clients and new talent?
It took us a few months to figure this out, but we eventually set up a global hiring model where we were able to engage software engineers in most countries, and this is how we support existing and new clients now.
We still hire in Ukraine as well, by the way 🙂 How did I navigate through this time? My husband is just as passionate about Ukraine as me, so emotionally going through it together was really helpful. I prayed a lot and found meaning and purpose in running a company in Ukraine.
Ultimately, I changed my mindset, recognising a privilege to continuously offer support and employment. While many of my friends in Europe felt helpless during the breakout of the war, I felt like I was doing my bit.
And in the end, I put one foot in front of the other, received help from advisors and board members and stayed in constant communication with the team and the clients.
How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for later success?
Carmen Lincolne: My biggest failures have both times been bad hires. Each time, I had a strange gut feeling and saw low performance. I was way too impressionable and had this inner false dialogue that the company wouldn’t survive without these managers.
It turned out the opposite was true. Once I finally made the cut, the company flourished in both circumstances, as a result. I sometimes wonder where Ivy would be now if I had parted ways with these team members earlier.
My learnings from this?
- Do reference checks on everyone or at least key people I am hiring
- Listen to my gut
- Use frameworks to assess performance.
We now work with OKRs (objectives & key results), which allows every person to show us what they do to drive Ivy forward 4) No one is irreplaceable
How do you build a resilient team? What qualities do you look for in your team members?
Carmen Lincolne: A good question and still one I am grappling with. My interview questions are usually experience-based, e.g. “Tell me about a situation where you faced a true challenge. How did you overcome this?” or “Tell me about the most recent time when you pushed yourself outside your comfort zone”.
It’s a bit more tricky with younger people, who often don’t have as much life experience and haven’t had a chance to “toughen up”. My COO and I push our internal team through tasks that are often slightly above their skill set or comfort zone to see how they handle it and what they come up with.
If we see someone pushing back with “all the problems” they encounter, we consider that a red flag. And vice versa, if they can adopt a problem-solving mindset, even if the solution isn’t perfect, we are hopeful.
We are also kind but firm with our feedback and we want to see team members who take feedback well in order to grow themselves and our company. I can say that the most resilient people I have worked with to date have usually been through some very challenging circumstances at some point at some point in their life.
How do you maintain your personal resilience during tough times?
Carmen Lincolne: I’ve made peace with the fact that not everything has to happen all at once. Good things take time. Like an ageing wine or even a fresh coffee from the local hipster coffee shop 😉
So, I take challenges and setbacks with a less panicky mindset than I did in the early years of running Ivy.
What I’ve learned is that most things we fear in our minds are never actually that bad in reality. I am still strengthening that muscle but I have become stronger in recent years.
Neither difficult shareholders who have frozen my company’s bank accounts (long story!) nor really poor hires or even the war have been able to break Ivy.
I chose the name Ivy Tech because it represents resilience. Ivy is one of the most resilient and ever-green plants growing in almost every country.
A global and “hard to kill” operation has always been my mission, and that’s what we’re aiming for at Ivy Tech!
What strategies do you use to manage stress and maintain focus during a crisis?
Carmen Lincolne: I have been learning to understand the facts about a certain challenging situation without getting too emotionally involved.
And I’ve been striving to stop dreaming up the worst-case scenario in my mind before anything even happened. I prefer to process externally, so I do find it helpful to either communicate scenarios and situations to my COO or the advisory board or even write it all down in Google Docs.
Putting thoughts on paper really helps to make things look less scary and overwhelming. Focus is a big word for us right now at Ivy because we are growing quite rapidly, and it would be easy to get distracted. A few practical tips that have helped with this:
- Clear responsibilities for everyone in the org. Obviously, sometimes they shift, but when they do, make them clear and write them down in an updated job description, for example.
- Quickly whip up a crisis project plan and ideally with help of others move through the crisis like a project.
- I live by my calendar. My entire life, including all my family activities and to-do`s, is on my calendar. This means I can’t trick myself into thinking I have more time available than I actually do.So when a new task or opportunity comes along, I can look at my calendar, and if it looks pretty packed, I can either shift or delegate things or say no.
- I am slowly learning how to meditate in the hope that I can master the skill of being present in the moment. My mind races a lot, and I find it sad that often I play with my kids, and my mind is at work, and I’m at work, and my mind is with the kids. My goal is to be 100% in the situation my body and soul find themselves in at that moment. How hard can it be 🙂
- I try and not neglect my weekly exercise routine to do something for my mind and body that I can control, especially when work or life feels “out of control”
- And, of course, take 3 deep breaths when things are feeling overwhelming.
How do you communicate with your team during a crisis?
Carmen Lincolne: In short, I would communicate often and clearly.
In the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, for example, I spoke to each team member via message or call 1-2 times per day. Most of the time, I didn’t have an answer for them, but I showed up for them and that was important.
They saw me not being scared or hiding but being “in it” with them, and based on the feedback we received and the fact that 93% of these developers still work with us today shows that this kind of leadership is effective.
If there is another crisis or a challenge in Ivy Tech, I would get the relevant team members on a video call.
I take extra care to keep my voice low and slow to present to them that while this is a challenging situation, I am not panicking. I make pauses as I talk to let the words sink in and then open up for questions at the end if appropriate.
I usually then follow up in writing with clear next steps. I keep those short and clear. I think the temptation in a crisis is to overinflate the issue and freak people out.
What advice would you give to other CEOs on building resilience in their organizations?
Carmen Lincolne: Push your people in their small day-to-day tasks as a preparation for bigger challenges. Most people actually really enjoy being pushed and trusted that they can handle it.
Some ideas could be – Match them with a new team member that is different to them and watch them work it out – Throw them into some cold water by pulling them into a new project that may be “too big” for their seniority and ask for their input – Ask your people what would be something they could do over the next 3 months that would benefit the organisation whilst also pushing them outside their comfort zone.
Put them in the driver’s seat and let them show you what they are capable of. As a leader, I believe in authenticity and empathy. Be authentic with your story and battles, and be empathetic with your team in challenging times. Empathy is not the same as compassion since it doesn’t mean that we as leaders take on our team’s feelings as our own or do the work for them.
It just means levelling with them, taking “their world” seriously, and truly hearing them in that moment. And lastly, remind team members of the “why”. Why does this organisation exist and what is its mission?
If people really get it and stand behind it they will be able to walk through fire (figuratively speaking of course!)
How do you prepare your business for potential future crises?
Carmen Lincolne: It starts with the right people. And I know this for a fact because I had the wrong people in my business, and they brought us onto really risky territory.
In senior leadership, I now look for people who bring real enthusiasm and who ideally have had their own challenges in life or work, which 9 out of 10 times results in incredible resilience.
Our COO, Cameron, is a great example of that. He came from a charity finance background, which has nothing to do with tech, recruitment or startups. But from the first interview, I saw enthusiasm and resilience in him.
It’s needless to say, he grasped our business model and industry very quickly, but most importantly, he has been an incredibly trustworthy, positive and strategic partner for Ivy when it comes to the “tricky stuff”. I have only ever seen a “can do” attitude from him. This has made a huge impact on Ivy’s business model, surviving the years since the invasion of Ukraine and a big reason why we are currently expanding and growing.
Otherwise, I do believe in a clear and easy-to-use financial model. If a crisis hits and it may have a financial impact, I want to know where we stand to take action.
As a team we can practise staying calm even in the smaller challenges that arise.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about leadership in times of crisis?
Carmen Lincolne: Sounds cliché, but staying calm and not making rash decisions is the key.
Talk scenarios out with a trusted advisor or mentor before making a move. Stay connected to your team, show up for them and never ever hide!
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Carmen Lincolne for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Carmen Lincolne or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
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