What do you consider the highlight of your career?
I am a doer by personality and that’s why every choice I made in my career (with a few exceptions to confirm the rule) has always been the highlight at that precise moment. When a particular job stops being the highlight, I always go for the next challenge.
What do you regret spending your money on?
Impulse shopping or buyer’s remorse are quite unfamiliar to me as I am a calculated person. All the things I buy are after careful documentation or based on clear preferences I have.
What can relax you the most?
Cooking can always help me unwind after a hectic day. It’s one of my biggest hobbies. I am a certified pastry chef actually and I am still fascinated by the magic that can be made with the right amount and blend of ingredients. What's on your professional bucket list? I think at this very moment, an international career would be at the very top of the list.
Who has taught you the most so far?
I am lucky enough to learn a bit of everything from my colleagues every day. One of the silver linings of these last two years is the fact that even though we’ve seen each other a lot less, we score better in terms of internal communication, and we value more the time we spend together as it’s scarce. Therefore, each interaction with them, whether is face-to-face or via a device, is an opportunity for me to learn more about the human mind. But if I had to name one person, I would go back to the very beginning of my career – I learned a lot from Eric Kish, the founder of Smartree, one of my first employers.
How do you motivate your colleagues?
I think that by the example. The easiest way to disseminate any message at an organizational level is for me to be the first person to adopt it. It’s a matter of time until the teams follows and it’s, at the same time, an assurance for them that it’s okay to embrace it. Also, we have transparent culture and that plays a huge role in motivating the team – it empowers people, it builds trust like no other thing, and it gives them a reason to believe when they understand how their work directly impacts the business results.
Which profession would you like to try?
I would switch jobs at any time with a barista – I am an absolute fan of specialty coffee, I even studied it in depth and now I’m a certified barista. Also, owning a pizza restaurant or pastry shop sometime in the future is something that sounds exciting for me in the distant future.
What do you regret spending your time on?
At this very moment, time is one of the most valuable resources for me and that’s why I’m quite careful with how I spend it. But, looking back on my career, I admit that maybe there were some projects in which I invested too much time and energy and maybe it would have been wiser for the team to just let them go. Now I know better and, fortunately enough, the team has no problem either with letting go ideas that prove to be less valuable than on paper. We’ve all become masters of adaptability over these past couple of years, right?
What kind of voluntary work would you do?
I admit that giving back is something that I find very fulfilling and rewarding. The most natural form of volunteering for me would be cooking for kids or elderly.
Thank you for the answer to Bogdan Badea, the CEO of eJobs Romania!
