Today’s guest is Lisette Sutherland, host of the Collaboration Superpowers podcast, a show about people doing great things remotely. (And she was also Pilar’s first co-host on the 21st Century Work Life podcast, back in 2014!)
Did you know that if Lisette hadn’t agreed to co-host the 21st Century Work Life podcast, Pilar might not have gone ahead with it?
Lisette Sutherland is the host of Collaboration Superpowers, where she interviews remote workers. She is also the Big Cheese in the CS company – well, the Director… She is also the author of Work Together Anywhere, a handbook forwarding remotely successfully for individuals, teams and managers.
She started the podcast in 2014, a show all about people doing great things remotely. When she first started podcasting, she saw it as a networking tool, an easy way to meet interesting people as everybody wants to be interviewed. But now she uses it mainly to stay in the know of what’s going on in the world of remote and stay rooted in reality. She incorporates some of what she learns into her presentations, workshops and courses. (This resonates with Pilar, who also uses the podcast to invite a bit of real life into her little bubble.)
Actually, the reason why Lisette started podcasting was slightly different to why she continued. She wanted to check out the competition. She started doing this through video interviews on Google Hangouts, but people started asking whether she could create audio versions of the videos. She turned her interviews into the podcast with the help of Nick the Podcast Monster, her editor who’s still working with her.
Lisette first met Pilar in 2014 when she saw she’d also endorsed a book on virtual teams (thanks, Hassan Osman!). Pilar was interviewed by Lisette and well, the rest is history. (You can listen to it still, (and watch!) it’s episode 4 of the Collaboration Superpowers podcast.)
Thinking it was a good idea to write a book on remote work based on the interviews, Lisette put up a pre-order and found that people were interested in it. After she had 50 episodes, she printed out the transcripts and marked out the bits she thought were interesting. She then cut them up, put them on the floor and categorised them.
Eventually Lisette asked a friend of hers, who was an editor, to help her structure the information in a coherent way. Eventually, she released Work Together Anywhere.
Writing the book was like going to university, researching, talking about the subject… At the beginning the book was going to be a collection of case studies, but as Lisette’s knowledge of remote work increased, the book became a handbook for those wanting to work remotely.
Many people approach Lisette to guest on the podcast, and she has a good relationship with some PR companies that send great guests through. But she keeps and eye out on social media to see who is out there doing interesting things, and then approaches them.
She now looks for people who are not selling something, or who want to paint a rosy picture of remote. She wants to hear the “war stories”, what’s working and what isn’t, etc. She looks for people willing to talk about the hard parts (which people selling a product often aren’t). Pilar also finds that people pitching their product on a show sound like they’re selling and they don’t sound great – and it’s our responsibility to make guests sound good, as Lisette mentions.
Lisette researches her guests, including their values and personal views, before they come onto the show. She avoids controversial guests. We need a level of comfort when talking to our guests, but we need to balance it with inviting a range of opinions to offer different ways of seeing the world. Luckily for Lisette there aren’t many people in the remote space with controversial views, but if she does encounter them she approaches the interview in the spirit of curiosity. It’s also about respecting the guest’s views. Pilar reckons that, at the end of the day, our audience has got to know us as hosts and our values, so it’s ok to stick to them.
22.00 mins
Every now and then, Lisette creates solo episodes when she has something specific she wants to cover, or if she has a resource she wants to promote, but she wonders whether these resources will continue to be popular when now we can ask AI for advice.
Lisette has kept more or less the same format since the show started, and always starts with the question
“What does your virtual office look like?” This brings the audience straight into the guest’s world, and tells us what kind of remote worker they are. The other thing she continues to do is a “one minute tip” at the beginning of her episodes, highlighting an aspect of the interview. She usually spots these during the conversation with her guest.
Lisette has a 10 minute conversation with the guest to warm up, and officially starts the interview with the question about what their virtual office looks like. (Pilar doesn’t like small talk, so she often dives straight in!) Everyone has different ways of approaching how they start the interviews, and Pilar recommends you listen to the interview with J Thorn for a different approach, in episode 27.
Of course, many times guests say the best things once we’ve stopped recording! This happens because people relax after the recording has stopped. With the new platforms recording locally, it’s more difficult to leave the recordings on to the end of the conversation, as they need to be uploaded before the guest leaves.
Lisette also creates compilation episodes every now and then, when she hits a milestone, or when she finds a set of memorable moments with guests. She does her own show notes to go through the material and learn from it, as she’s not really absorbing the material as she’s recording.
Her recent sponsorship from Miro makes perfect sense, they’re a great match and she uses the tool all the time. They’re experimenting with the partnership at the moment, and Lisette is enjoying the process too.
Through her podcasting she’s learned there’s a real art to interviewing, and she’s realised how important preparation is for her, and how much she enjoys it. She also likes her formula, it makes things easier. What she’s learned from her guests is humility and inspiration.
Here’s the supercard Lisette showed Pilar at the end of the recording:
You can find out everything about Lisette on the Collaboration Superpowers website and her personal site.
Get in touch if you would like some coaching and advice yourself or connect on Twitter @Inpodcasting
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