Our founder and CEO Tim Schughart was recently a guest at “CEO Deep Dive” podcast and talked to moderator Jan Randy about motivation, among other things: What motivated him to found ProSec, how does he achieve a high level of employee motivation and how does he motivate other companies to become ProSec customers? You can find out Tim's answers to these questions here in the newsfeed.
In the podcast on Spotify, Tim also talks about the hurdles he had to overcome when starting the company, how he developed from a specialist to a manager and which book particularly influenced him. Feel free to listen!
Anyone who has ever dealt with the topic of starting a business knows exactly: it doesn't work without an extremely high level of motivation for the cause. For our founder Tim, this motivation came from his private passion for hacking.
On the one hand, he simply enjoyed the technical aspects of hacking. On the other hand, and from today's perspective this is the more decisive factor, he wants to protect companies from (evil) hackers and make them more secure. For this purpose, ProSec offers penetration tests, consulting and training in the area of IT security.
This high level of intrinsic motivation was necessary to successfully get through the difficult start-up period, as Tim reported in an interview with Jan Randy.
Tough start-up time: Tim talks about financial and content-related hurdles and how they were overcome in the first ProSec period.
Many managing directors talk about a shortage of skilled workers, but our CEO Tim sees it differently: In his view, the problem is not a lack of skilled workers, but the wrong mindset.
Choosing the “right” employees for exactly this company is a crucial factor in ensuring high employee motivation. Tim relies on what is commonly called “gut feeling”. He puts it more positively as “tacit knowledge” and explains that this knowledge is worth using as a resource.
When looking for new team members, Tim attaches particular importance to the right mindset and has put together a team of real specialist talents. You can hear why he doesn't like the term "professional idiot" in the following video excerpt from his conversation with Jan Randy!
From specialist to founder and manager – Tim talks about his personal development and that of his company ProSec.
After selecting the right team members, it's about maintaining and promoting the motivation provided by the right mindset.
Employee motivation depends on the fact that the employees themselves have “fire” for their tasks because they can understand management’s decisions, says Tim in the podcast. In this sense, he encourages members of ProSec management never to use “Tim said that…” as a reason for a work order. Instead, instructions and decisions should always be based on the content of the matter.
Trust is a two-way street - this wisdom also applies in a corporate context. In the podcast, Tim highlights an essential building block for mutual trust in his team: openness.
Through a personal crisis shortly after founding ProSec, Tim learned that a certain level of openness about one's own feelings is helpful in communicating with business partners and colleagues on a different level. In this way, a real exchange takes place and you receive support when you need it.
In Tim's experience, a personal relationship or even real friendships in the company do not lead to a loss of authority, but on the contrary make conflicts easier to resolve. For him, authority does not come from the exercise of power, but rather from qualitative results and one's own way of working.
Trust in your own team also includes giving career starters room for their own mistakes. Because you learn the most through mistakes, says Tim in the podcast.
The trust shown automatically has a positive effect on employee motivation, as they feel seen on a personal level and do not want to be driven by fear, but rather want to deliver good results on their own initiative.
For Tim, ProSec is not just a company with a number of employees, but rather a community that strengthens each other. For him, this also means supporting a team member in times of personal crisis. This security is an important basis for employee motivation ProSec family.
For Tim, community also means, for example, supporting Ukraine and the Ministry of Defense with our expertise. In this way, ProSec contributes to a broader community with shared values.
If we want to do our job well, not only do our own team members have to have the right motivation, but we also have to keep an eye on our customers' employee motivation. Tim emphasizes that his customers are always partners for him, because only together can they achieve the goal of more IT security for their respective companies.
When it comes to what motivates our partners to hire us, Tim says fear is the worst option. Because fear only has a short-term effect - good IT security is intrinsically motivated and must be designed for the long term and sustainably. The decisive factor is once again mutual trust, which is particularly relevant when it comes to IT security.
Tim therefore invites the listeners to actively engage with the topic of IT security, compare competitors and ultimately contact the IT security company where a common basis of trust is best established.
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