Building a Great Culture 15five’s David Hassell & Balloon’s Amanda Greenberg | E1221

Top Takeaways

• Put people in a situation where their strengths align with their goals (“zone of genius”). Employees should feel they are winning personally and on a winning team.
• Check-in with your people: David had a high performer in marketing. He asked her to write down all the things she was doing for the company and assess which ones gave her energy and which ones drained her of energy. 50% were in the ‘drain” category! She confided in him she was thinking of leaving the company. He was able to hire a marketing coordinator to take those responsibilities and she stayed for 5 more years!
• Leaders asking questions spurs learning and exchange of ideas, drives innovation, builds rapport and trust among team members, and mitigates business risk by uncovering potential hazards or false starts.
• You can’t have a functioning team without trust. Trust can break down when not working in a physical space together, leaders will need to be intentional when designing new ways of operating in a hybrid environment.

Guests:

David Hassell | @dhassell

• Founder & CEO, 15five (2011-Present)
• solutions to develop effective managers, highly engaged employees, and top-performing organizations
• 15five.com

Amanda Greenberg | @akgreenberg

• CEO, Balloon (2013-Present)
• a platform for collaboration and feedback to improve decision-making
• getballoon.com

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Listen to Episode 1221 on Apple Podcasts

The segment with David Hassell

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How to Build an Epic Culture at Scale

Goal: To build a human-centric, highly engaged, and high-performing company that cares about both people and performance

• Not just about having a place where people, like to work, but also about getting high results.
• It’s never too late to start improving a culture, there are examples of turnarounds of even large companies.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Proverb

Culture requires Design & Leadership

• Exec team and every person need to own the culture.
• You can’t control it, you can only influence it.
• Without design, culture will organically form from actions compounded over time.

3 Tips Before You Begin

1. Think of culture as a community
2. Make it transformational not transactional (even though the CEO is on a journey to create something, each employee is on their own hero’s journey to achieve their own hopes and dreams, your company is a stepping stone for them)
3. Design it to be the best place you could imagine working (think: aligned with your values)

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The Process for Building Culture

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1. Clarify the Foundation, set clear values
2. (Over) Communicate
3. Hire / Fire on WHY & Values, each new person reinforces the culture
4. Create habits, rituals, and practices (with core values and psychology in mind)
5. “Measure” and repeat from #1 (Culture-market fit with your employees, be ready to iterate and adjust over time)

Clarify The Foundation

• Mission & Vision (your WHY)
• Core Values (what you care about most)
• Operating Principles (how you execute)
• Cultural norms, habits, practices & rituals (interactions with other employees and leadership is how people experience culture)
• Fewer core values are better. It’s hard for people to remember more than a few.

Examples of 15five clarifying & distilling their core values

15Five’s Original Core Values

• Find the leverage
• Cultivate health & vitality
• Grant trust & be transparent
• Always be learning & growing
• Keep things simple
• Embrace freedom & flexibility
• Take responsibility
• Maximize our zone of genius
• Commit to customer success and delight
• Dare to dream

15Five’s Core Values Today

• Be and Become Your Best Self
• Cultivate Relational Mastery
• Do the Extraordinary
• Create Customer Transformation

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(Over) Communicate

• Values are lived, and they’re only lived if they’re are central every day. If values are not lived and reinforced, your culture will decline, and you will breed cynicism.
• You don’t want conformity — but you do want people who are inspired by and aligned with your values and who want to contribute.

Hire / Fire on WHY and Values

• Aim to hire people who want to work at your company, not just any company.
• Hire culture contributors; fire culture detractors.
• Culture contributors & values alignment, are not the same as culture fit. Avoid just creating conformity.
• You don’t want conformity, but you do want people who are inspired by and aligned with your values and who want to contribute.
• A larger organization does not have to mean a diluted culture. 15five has seen its culture strengthen as it’s grown from 30 to 70 to 200 employees.

Habits, Practices & Rituals (with Values & Psychology in Mind)

• Everyone is 100% disciplined to their current habits
• Put people in a situation where their strengths align with their goals (“zone of genius”). Employees should feel like, “I’m on a winning team. I feel good.”
• Create a culture of peer recognition (e.g. High Fives with #hash-tag-values)
• Create a culture of accountability (e.g. “go direct” and “truth with kindness”)

15five’s tactics: “Boosts,” Question Friday, Retreats

• Boosts = 15five’s all-hands meetings (where they share business metrics, new hires, and promotions, create space for special initiatives).
• Question Friday = Post-covid doesn’t have a water cooler activity so 15Five created a personal question session (opt-in) on Friday where people can have small group discussions to build bonds (ranging from light to deeper topics).
• Have values guide company retreats. Check-in and assess the pulse of how is the culture trending.

Good communication habits: Diagram from Radical Candor, at 15five they call it “Truth with kindness” you want clear communication where people care personally and challenge directly.

Tools to “Measure” and Repeat

• Conduct regular Engagement surveys
• Have Weekly check-ins / Pulse Checks
• Solicit feedback from all levels of the company
• Assess, re-clarify through new communication, habits, practices, and rituals

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The segment with Amanda Greenberg

About Amanda’s Company, Balloon

• The balloon is a platform that unlocks ideas and feedback from a group by eliminating groupthink from collaboration and amplifying unheard voices.
• Balloon uses research-tested questions to start discussions and ask questions, so leaders can be more informed and make better decisions.

The Importance of Place

• The place is a core component of a company’s culture (just like people and practices).
• The pandemic upended where we all work – it’s not about the physical place anymore. What “place” means is being completely redefined.

Hybrid work is here to stay (some survey results from Edelman Data x Intelligence)

• 67% of workers are craving more in-person time with their teams
• 73% of workers want flexible remote work options to continue
• 66% of leaders say their company is considering redesigning office space for hybrid work

Opportunities in a hybrid model

• Flexibility (especially for entrepreneurs!)
• Access to more (and more diverse) talent across the globe and with different schedule needs

Challenges in a hybrid model

• Maintaining and building a culture
• Group dynamics mixed across in-person and remote
• Missing spontaneous interactions
• Creating team trust
• Team cohesiveness and communication (leaders need to communicate more)

Hybrid Work Requires Being More Deliberate

• Leaders need to ask their teams more questions to make the best decisions and develop plans with employee buy-in.
• Asking questions spurs learning and exchange of ideas, drives innovation, builds rapport and trust among team members, and mitigates business risk by uncovering potential hazards or false starts.
• Asking questions naturally improves emotional intelligence, which improves the ability to ask the right questions (a virtuous cycle).
• Asking tough questions first can make people more willing to open up.
• Questioning is a skill that can be honed, and considering your own answers to questions can make conversations more productive.

How to make asking questions productive

1. Ask questions to understand how your employees are doing and what they need.
2. Codify the answers to these questions to formulate a plan to empower people for extreme flexibility.
3. Provide guidance to employees as they experiment and learn.

Questions to address the challenges of working in a hybrid model

Culture

• How can leaders set an example of maintaining a connection to colleagues?
• How will the implementation of hybrid work affect collaboration, leadership, and culture in our organization?
• What initiatives, efforts, or events could we explore to help enhance your personal and workplace connections with your colleagues?

Reference: Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, and Scott Kurnit, Founder and former CEO of About.com

Group Dynamics

• What protocols can we put in place to ensure that the team members in the office are in sync with those working remotely?
• What can leadership do to facilitate better hybrid group dynamics?

Reference: Scott Kurnit, Founder and former CEO of About.com

Spontaneous Interactions

Without coffee, lunch, and pre & post-meeting chatter, social connectivity and “magic” moments are decreased. This exercise can help find the value

• What is it about spontaneity that helps our business?
• How can we simulate only-in-person interactions and how can we create time to be spontaneous?

Reference: Scott Kurnit, Founder and former CEO of About.com

Trust

You can’t have a functioning team without trust. Trust can break down when not working in a physical space together.

• What must we do differently to build and maintain trust in this hybrid environment?
• How can we bring more empathy to our team? What are we doing that’s working/not working to understand each other’s needs and successes?

Reference: Frances Frei, Professor at Harvard Business School and former SVP of Leadership and Strategy at Uber Anne Morriss Thought leader, author, executive founder of The Leadership Consortium

Team Cohesiveness and Re-Entry

Have a retrospective discussion about remote work, identify what worked and what didn’t.

• When was the team working at its best?
• What are some of the old ways that didn’t work for you? What changes did you make during remote work?
• What were the best ways you worked with the team?
• What were the best ways you stayed in touch with your team?

Reference: Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist, Author, Professor

Structure

There is a lot of freedom to re-imagine how you operate as a team and company.

• What company-wide policies/procedures/KPIs need revisiting for hybrid work? How can we establish new routines and find ways to make sure everyone feels included and buys in?
• How can we better measure performance and output to make sure we’re not giving an advantage to people who work in the office?

Reference: Scott Kurnit, Founder and former CEO of About.com

Line of Business

Separate the new capabilities that should be brought forward post-pandemic from what were just workarounds. Identify how COVID changed team processes and what can be incorporated to a hybrid workflow.

• Marketing: How should we realign our benchmarks and KPIs to match the “new normal” of hybrid work and consider team member’s new needs?
• Sales: What new strategies did we implement in 2020 that positively impacted revenue? What learnings can we bring with us as we build this new phase of work?
• Engineering: What pros and cons do you see with employing a buddy system between individuals from engineering and other departments?

“Flexibility unlocks creativity and innovation. And, ultimately, it makes people feel more fulfilled and happy, because being able to exercise that autonomy feels really good.” —Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic

Q&A with Jason

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Coinbase and Basecamp banned politics at work. What are you doing?

“If you’re really impacted by something that’s happening in the news, you’re going to show up at work & it may be challenging … We have goals that are very clear. People are adults, they understand that they have to take care of their work sometimes they have to compartmentalize, but we also embrace the whole human being and have empathy for people’s situation outside of work.” – David Hassell

• Amanda noted that they focus on “principles over politics,” making sure people feel heard & execs acknowledge what’s happening.
• The balloon allows for the amplification of unheard voices in the workplace.
• David believes a company’s policies should reflect & align with its mission (and narrow & broaden discussions accordingly).

“For example, 15five’s mission is helping create really highly-engaged, high-performing organizations, by helping people become their best selves. And if there are certain things systemically that hinder some people from having the same opportunity to become their best self, well, that’s part of our mission.” – David Hassel

How should companies think about compensation in a hybrid world (especially in cities that have premiums like SF)?

• Both CEOs are figuring it out.

“If you’re going to a model where you don’t necessarily get the value of an office as an organization, and now the value of having that community in San Fransisco isn’t as strong for you, why pay more?” – David Hassell

• Ultimately moving toward a democratized workforce where compensation will be based on output.

Does it make sense to level the playing field by eliminating negotiation for salary? (done by Ellen Pao at Reddit and Brian Armstrong at Coinbase)

• Research does show women negotiate less, Amanda gave an anecdote of tech companies actually paying more because women were undervaluing their work.
• Having a clear guideline and sticking to it is a fair approach. If you are all over the place, it devolves to the “squeaky when gets the oil” which isn’t productive.
• Buffer gave a formula for their compensation.
• Jason recruits at an early stage where he can offer a career path for employees, rather than paying top dollar for existing talents.
• When you have an employee for years 3-5 they really can get in sync.

How do you think about building loyalty?

• Explicitly tell people you want them to come with you on this 5-year journey.
• Get people to operate in their “Zone of Genius” where they feel productive and effective.
• It’s better to work on their strengths than weaknesses.
• Reach out to 10 people in your network and ask what they see as your unique ability.
• StrengthsFinder by Gallup is a good tool.
• David had a high performer in marketing. He asked her to write down all the things she was doing for the company and assess which ones gave her energy and which ones drained her of energy. 50% were in the ‘drain” category! She confided in him she was thinking of leaving the company, he was able to hire a marketing coordinator to take those responsibilities and she stayed for 5 years!

What was something you have improved on overtime?

• Amanda: Improved her ability to delegate and trusting people to operate.
• “If I’m not a good delegator, I’m actually not clear myself on how to execute on this. I now have the confidence to say, this is how our investment firm works. These are the founders we’re looking for and give better instructions.” – Jason
• David progressed from delegating tasks to delegating outcomes, to delegating ownership.
• David: He used to be bad at dealing with conflict, now he delivers feedback quickly without stewing on it.
• Jason will rotate people through roles in the company so there is not a single point of failure. Also everything (processes are documented) in the company database (notion).

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